WHAT IS EVOLUTION?

What does the term ‘evolution’ mean?

For the purpose of this site, evolution is taken as meaning the position that living things on earth, having somehow begun without a creator, gradually got more advanced, complicated and diverse through natural selection acting on numerous successive gradual changes. If you read Origin of Species carefully as I have done, you will see this is what Charles Darwin meant by evolution.

Beware the’bait and switch’ strategy

The claim that evolution simply means variation within a species (i.e. roses, carp or cats) or a shift in the frequency of particular extant genes in a population (both of which can be observed and are not controversial) is dishonest. Darwinian evolution is about how we humans came to be here-from our first common ancestor, presumably a self assembled bacterium. That is the proposition which I oppose here. It is vital to be clear about this because a trick used from Darwin to the present is to prove a small proposition, make a huge unjustified assertion from that proof, then accuse someone who challenges the huge assertion as being anti science because the first small proposition is clearly true. This is called the ‘bait and switch’ tactic.

Darwinian evolution claims that natural selection acting on naturally occurring variations in plants and animals led to all living things coming over millions of years from an original common ancestor, which was presumably a single celled organism. Darwin said nothing about where this supposed common ancestor came from. This is the basis of evolution as taught at school and set out in Darwin’s book. Basically, evolution is a way of explaining life without a Designer/Creator.

People who say that evolution is scientifically proven habitually accuse dissenters like me of not understanding it. They need to believe that or else they’d have to deal with arguments which frankly prove their assertions to be incorrect.

There is a joke about politicians’ honesty

Question ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying?
Answer–‘You can see their lips move!’ 

The idea of course being that whenever a politician speaks, you can assume they are lying. This is cynical but understandable given recent experience. In the same way, an evolutionist will tell anyone who questions evolution ‘You don’t understand evolution.’ How do they know? Simple, if you understood, you would agree!

Richard Dawkins says that anyone who disbelieves evolution is“insane, stupid, ignorant or wicked.”That is presumably his way of helping advance the ‘public understanding of science’ of which he was allegedly professor at Oxford. ‘Believe what we tell you, or we’ll call you rude names.’ is the message. Dawkins has also likened Darwin dissenters to child abusers, holocaust deniers and ‘a braying pack of ignoramuses.’ Should rational discourse about our origins and destiny be conducted in this manner? The kind of vitriolic abuse in frequent use today seems calculated to make sensitive and thoughtful people run away from the debate.

Before we can debate evolution, we have to agree what the word means. This is difficult because the word is used to mean many different things. A blog entry about two TV adverts and a radio trailer I wrote a few years back illustrates this point. 

>> Two items on the broadcast media over the last week illustrate this point. One was an advert for Mercedes cars, which had a voice over conversation between 2 men, presumably designers, as a car sped down the sort of beautiful, deserted mountain road that cars in adverts always speed down, the car turning into a shoal of fish and back at one point.

One man says to the other‘we evolve’, the other replies,‘I’ll see your idea and raise it’and the concluding phrase (in praise of the processes which have given rise to this marvellous car).‘That’s how real design works’. So which is it, evolution or design? Or can ‘evolution’ mean design, which is what seems to be implied here? OK, it’s ‘only’ a car advert-but these are the words used and I think it’s fair to suggest they reflect common usage and understanding.

The other example was a trailer on BBC radio 4 for a programme ‘Am I normal?’ which is on tonight (31st July 2007). The programme is about the human body. The man says, on exercise,‘our bodies are designed to work all day’, but he then says‘we evolved over millions of years’.Again, which is it, the action of natural selection on new structures which have arisen by chance mutations in animals which accidentally self assembled from sparks, dirty water and volcano belches, or something put together by an Intelligence? Both propositions cannot be true, yet here are 2 examples from TV and radio in the last week where the words design and evolve are used almost interchangeably.<<

Evolutionists routinely use the language of design

Another example viewed in September 2007 was of an electric guitar amplifier, the Vox AC30 Custom Classic, was described as being‘designed’ and also having ‘evolved‘. Again, this is no problem if we define evolution as simply change over time-but in this case, like the car advert, the change has been caused BY DESIGN (*). If we are talking about evolution in the Darwinian sense, there can be no question of design. These examples are not unusual, the terms evolution and design are used as if they overlapped- there is evidently some confusion! Is this misleading use of words due to ignorance, carelessness, sloppy thinking or is there a deliberate attempt to befuddle people? 

To some people, ‘evolution’ means change within a species, as in dog or apple breeding, where you get many varieties, but they are still one species. Poodles and great Danes are very different, but they are still dogs. Hundreds of different dog varieties have been bred, but nobody has ever bred a cat from a dog. We know that there are over two hundred different breeds of dog, produced deliberately by dog breeders who decided which ones to breed from so they would get the features they wanted (long hair, short legs etc). Darwin wrote about this in ‘Origin of Species.’

Varieties, well marked varieties, incipienet species, or species?

That you can breed different dogs, up to a limit, is not in dispute-but can we call this evolution? Not at all, because they are all still dogs and never during the whole of human history has anyone bred a dog into anything but a dog. A poodle can still breed with a Great Dane, a Jack Russell with an Alsatian, but no mating between any 2 dogs will ever get a cat, rat or giraffe. Not even something that is a small step on the way. Always 100% dog. Similarly, there are over 6 thousand different apple varieties, I grow 70 or so apple varieties (seewww.fruitwise.net or look me up on YouTube where I post about my orchard) but none of them is a plum or cherry, or even a pear. We know that apples have been cross bred intensively during the whole of human history, but always remain apples. There is not a shred of evidence that apples have ever been anything other than apples.

Darwin’s sophistry

Darwin’s greatest trick was to show people that small changes within species could happen (as with breeding pigeons selecting for fan tails, dogs for long legs or roses for fragrance or colour) and then persuade people that far greater changes ‘could have…might have… MUST have’ happened in the very far distant past. He assumed that because you could breed various pigeon varieties from the ‘primitive’ rock dove, then all kinds of animal (like snakes, giraffes, sea lions and birds) could all come from a single celled animal given enough time. That, basically, is his theory, “Common ancestor + time +variation + natural selection = everything.”

Evolution: science or faith?

Darwin’s central argument was that the small changes we can see today imply far greater changes in the past. However, he did not see this, he imagined it. This does not fit with what we can see today, or in the past through the fossil record. It was not even good science then, since Darwin observed changes within species (e.g. dogs, pigeons, cattle) over just a few years with deliberate human breeding, whereas Darwin imagined his big changes in the distant past (where they could not be observed) since, if they happened at all, these supposed changes were too slow to measure. So Darwin’s conclusions were not justified by his evidence even in 1859. His great leap of faith was not supported by direct evidence at the time, or since. Evolution is assumed to be true despite the lack of evidence as the alternative is unthinkable to the secular mind.

Charles Darwin bred pigeons himself and wrote about them in his book ‘Origin of Species’ He believed that all different varieties of fancy pigeon came from the ‘original’ rock doves. Since they can all breed together, this is uncontroversial. He quotes several other banal examples from the world of animal breeding to show that intelligent breeders could increase or reduce certain desirable, or undesirable, characteristics by breeding from some stock and killing or at least not breeding from others.

This was hardly an original finding by Mr Darwin.

If a mother dog gives birth to a litter of puppies, they won’t all be identical, although they will usually be very similar. If the dog breeder wants a dog which is better at catching rabbits, he breeds from the best pair of rabbit catchers he can obtain. Elementary stuff, farmers and breeders had known this and made use of it for many centuries. Darwin believed that the results of artificial selection justified the assumption that nature, left to itself, would cause all living things to come from one first ‘simple’ living thing.

This was his one and only big idea-and it’s pure supposition.

Below is an extract taken from a web site on breeding bantam chickens which shows the sort of thing he was on about.

>>>As a way of pointing out breeds in domestic animals are quite often designed to represent facets of human desire I decided to create a breed of my own……………Chickens have an amazing array of genetic possibilities; they possess many types of physical variations with which to work with……..The goal or function: to make the perfect “pet chicken”: the designer pet of the 90’s, the way that miniature horses were in the 70’s and potbelly pigs were in the 80’s.

Each parent or breeding stock was selected for some particular feature that would be incorporated into the final bird. Unfortunately some of the most amazing features were recessive traits that were quickly lost when bred with a bird with conflicting genes. The White Crested Black Polish was chosen for its magnificent white hairdo, and the Silver Seabright for its delicate stature and finely flecked feathers. The offspring of these two birds however was a largish ungainly black chick with a funny Mohawk. A Black Silkie Bantam was selected for its beautiful fuzzy “fur” and the Light Brahma for its nice variations in feather patterns. Even after it was fully grown their offspring maintained all black, patchy fur-feather coats.    etc<<<

This is the sort of everyday example Darwin used to set out the case for his big idea that change in animals could be extrapolated back in time all the way to a supposed common ancestor. Google on bantam + breeding or varieties to find out more-bantams show huge genetic potential as far as body shape, feathers and colour is concerned, many varieties such as the Silkies, Black Polish, Light Brahma and Silver Seabright mentioned above have been deliberately bred by artificial selection, but THEY ALL REMAIN BANTAMS. What’s even worse for Darwin, if you put all your different chickens in a yard and let them breed as nature intended, they will ‘revert to the mean’ and you will end up with fewer varieties. The same is true for goldfish, apples and dogs etc. This is the observation, this is what we actually see-forgive me for labouring this point but it needs labouring due to the way that Darwinians keep claiming that small changes will over time add up to massive changes. They can belive that by faith if they choose, but it is NOT WHAT WE SEE IN REAL LIFE.

Animal breeding does NOT show evolution in any sense that supports the common ancestor story. Darwin’s assertion that natural selection would give much more dramatic results than intelligent human breeding (intelligent selection) in fact, is directly opposed to the observed evidence.

Bait and switch tactics central to evolutionist propaganda

Darwin and his followers today would, will, demonstrate a banal science fact, like cows grazing down tree seedlings preventing afforestation, or that birds with different beaks do better when certain types of food are more available. Having got your attention and trust with a banal science fact like this, the bait, they then switch to a massive leap of imagination that allegedly follows fom the banal observation, e.g. the assertion that humans descended from ape like ancestors. This is the classic bait and switch tactic and if you look you will see it is central to evolutionary ‘evidence’, which is not evidence but sophistry.

Science or propaganda? 

Calling dog or apple breeding, or the development of health policy or guitar amplifiers for that matter ‘evolution’ when the same word is used to describe the process whereby hydrogen atoms turned over time into you and I is an abuse of language that seems calculated to mislead. That is why I prefer to use the term Darwinian evolution or evolutionism rather than plain ‘evolution’. We cannot have a meaningful discussion about something unless we have a shared agreement about what the thing actually is. This is very basic, any decent scientific paper always begins by clearly defining the problem under discussion.

I will mention again that in ‘Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin pointedly refused to define the term ‘species’, leaving it vague. This was not, I submit, because we cannot reasonably well define a species but because of the way Darwin proposed to frame his theory to make it invulnerable to criticism. For his imagined universal descent from a simple common ancestor to be true, for rabbits to gradually evolve into leopards and jellyfish into people (or whatever the story is this week), there could not-must not- be impassable barriers separating species . But if we go by our direct observations rather than imaginations, there is such a barrier-the genomic envelope. This fits perfectly well with the Genesis account of God creating animals ‘according to their kinds’ with significant variation WITHIN species (e.g. dogs, grasses, horses etc) but no way of getting from one to another.

This is perhaps the most fundamental way in which the imaginary process of Darwinian evolution diverges from science. Darwin said that you could get from one species to another by ‘innumerable gradual small adaptations’ but nothing like this has ever been observed. It really is ‘all in the mind’.

(*) By the way, the term ‘Intelligent Design’ is perhaps unnecessary, since all design is by definition intelligent.