The question was unavoidable, the elephant in the room, yet troubling since Darwin recognized that the fossil record could eventually either make or break his theory:   

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

“The distinctiveness of specific forms [fossil record],” Darwin acknowledged, “and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Gould in the book entitled The Panda’s Thumb reflecting on Darwin’s angst notes: “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

In the face poor evidence, even contradictory evidence, Darwin excused the problem reasoning that “only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored.” His reasoning kept hopes alive that further explorations would uncover the ever elusive “in innumerable transitional links.”

Things have not changed much in 150 years. “We need more fossils” Dawkins pleaded in his 2009 book entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. In turning from the fossil record Dawkins advances the concept of “comparative evidence”

“Comparative evidence has always, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, told even more compelling than fossil evidence”

Regardless of what the “comparative evidence” actually is, Dawkins did not say what it is−dumping the fossil record as essential evidence for Darwin’s theory -

“We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact.”

As far as Dawkins is concerned the fossil record should just be moved out of the picture, even one of the most notorious icons in the history of evolution−the Archaeopteryx. “To put up a single famous fossil like Archaeopteryx panders to a fallacy,” Dawkins declared The Greatest Show on Earth.

When Darwin was disparate for evidence to “innumerable transitional links,” he had quickly turned to the newly discovered Archaeopteryx discovered in Germany. For Darwin, the Archaeopteryx emerged as a kingpin transitional link between birds and reptiles -

“Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archaeopteryx.”

The dumping of the Archaeopteryx as a missing link between birds and reptiles by palaeontologists during the late twentieth century, however, was gaining solid support. According to Larry Martin, an American vertebrate paleontologist and curator of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, the

“Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”

Missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story according to Henry Gee a British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the prestigious journal  Nature.

Abandoning the Archaeopteryx as a transitional link was actually only a tip-of-the-iceberg of the larger fossil record problem for evolution. Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany in the book entitled The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, like Dawkins, candidly points to the fact that a “gradual series of intermediates in Darwin’s sense has never existed and hence will never exist.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. 

Without fossil record evidence of missing links, in Darwin’s own words, “my theory would absolutely break down.” The dumping of the fossil record by one of Darwin’s last remaining hard core advocates, signals the end of the  Darwinism era.

Biological evolution only exists as a fact in philosophy, not in science.

T

Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, embryology has played a pivotal role in the history of evolution. Charles Darwin noted that the “leading facts in embryology … [were] second to none in importance” in establishing his theory of evolution. That was then.

It was the embryo drawings by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel that gained Darwin’s attention. “[E]mbryology is to me,” Darwin eventually argued, “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory of evolution−not the fossil record.

Just two months, before the release of the first edition of The Origin of Species in September 1859, Darwin wrote to British geologist Charles Lyell in a letter “Embryology in Chapter VIII is one of my strongest points I think.”

Darwin was looking for supportive evidence for his theory beyond the fossil record. The “slight, successive” embryonic stages in Haeckel drawings illustrated his theory perfectly; the stages of the embryo seemed to play as a ‘silent movie’ of evolution.  

Haeckel ‘s drawings illustrated the early stages of all embryos starting identically followed by progressive “slight, successive” changes in the later stages with increasing complexity—the alleged retracing of evolution from microbe to man. To describe this process, Haeckel coined the phrase “ontology recapitulates phylogeny.”

Haeckel proposed through that embryological development (ontology) repeats (recapitulates) an imaginary evolutionary tree of life (phylogeny) from the microbe to man. Darwin was convinced by the drawings.

Darwin did not know at the time, however, that Haeckel’s drawings were forged. Decades after Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1882, Haeckel finally acknowledged that his drawings were a forgery in 1909. In response to unrelenting criticism from contemporary embryologists, his confession published in the Allegemeine Zeitung, a popular international German weekly publication -

“After this compromising confession of ‘forgery’ I should be obliged to consider.… The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises, and journals would incur in the same degree – the charge of ‘forgery,’ for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematised, and constructed.”

Haeckel’s justification was simple: ‘forgery’ was a wide-spread practice even “in the best textbooks… and journals.”  By the late eighteenth century scientific academies had largely abandoned the scientific method established by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century that had paved the way to the scientific revolution.

Late in the twentieth century, interest in Haeckel’s theory of “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” re-emerged following biotechnological advances in genetic research. This field of research has informally been called evo-devo, short for evolutionary developmental biology.

The unique anatomical features of the turtle shell have long been enigma for evolutionary scientists. Since earlier molecular research delivered ‘inconsistent findings,’ the goal of this international team was to determine the expected “slight, successive” genetic changes in the embryo during development, as envisioned by Darwin as evidence for evolution more than a century ago.

“[O]ur results indicated the close relationship of the turtles to the bird-crocodilian lineage,” the research team concluded. While the findings did “yield insight,” the evidence raised more problems than answers.  For example,

• “Our results suggest that turtle evolution was accompanied by an unexpectedly conservative vertebrate phylotypic period.” The problem for evolution is that the evidence points to conservation− not evolution.
  
• While the “turtle and chicken express many shared developmental genes,” the team also reported that the chicken has 9 genes the turtle has 532 genes. Humans have 61 genes. The problem for evolution is the lack of accounting for genes “shared” in accordance to number of genes available.

While there may be “close [genetic] relationship of the turtles to the bird-crocodilian lineage,” the paper presents no evidence to demonstrate the “slight successive” changes in embryonic gene expression from the simple to the more complex species−the evolution litmus test.  

As side from science, when was the last time you thought that the turtle was probably a close relative of the chicken and the a crocodile? Really?

The scientific evidence demonstrates a mosaic pattern of nature-not an evolutionary pattern.

Scientists have long argued that the evo-devo approach to gain an understanding of a yet unknown natural mechanism for driving evolution is a misguided pursuit. “Recapitulation,” according to British embryologist Gavin de Beer, “the pressing back of adult ancestral stages into early stages of development of descendants, does not take place.”

It “is now firmly established,” argued American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny.”

American evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, for the now obvious reasons, points out why re-trace evolution through the genetic changes in the embryo is a misguided pursuit -

“there’s no question that the development of an egg is not dependent solely on the genes”

Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History has lamented the problems with molecular biology and embryology -

“the past 50 years, advances in molecular and developmental biology have outstripped a truly integrated synthesis of evolutionary theory.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution through “slight, successive” changes is successively reaching extinction one genetic research paper at a time. The Joint International Turtle Genomes Consortium further demonstrates how advances in biotechnology, rather than supporting, continue to demolish the prospects for a comprehensive theory for evolution. The turtle remains an enigma, but only for the evolutionist.  

Alan C. Love of the University of Minnesota is of the opinion that the development of a comprehensive theory of evolution will never happen -

“My account also meshes with the recognition that a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.”

Evolution was once to theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without even a theory.

Biological evolution exists only as a fact in philosophy – not in science.

Natural selection soon emerged as the cornerstone law of evolution following the publication of the first edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in November 1859. Natural selection stands as the fundamental tenet of Darwin’s theory of evolution, popularly known as Darwinism. But, what in natural selection – really?

“I do believe,” Darwin argued, “that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.”

Darwin continued in The Origin of Species, “In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.” Even though Darwin attempted to explain how natural selection acts with illustrations, Darwin never articulated exactly what he meant by the term “natural selection.”

Amazingly, in the thirteen pages of the “Glossary of Scientific Terms” at the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin failed to include the most critical terms in the entire book – “natural selection.”

A large part of the reason may reside in the fact that even many of Darwin’s inner-circle, including Charles Lyell and Thomas Huxley, were completely unpersuaded by Darwin’s vague concept of natural selection. Huxley was definitely against the concept of evolution advancing “slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” For Huxley, evolution could be a fast process.

Considered one of the most important American botanist of the nineteenth century, Asa Gray, in a letter to Darwin noted -

“… personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant compared to the question of Creation or Modification.”

Despite the problems, natural selection eventually emerged as the philosophical justification for endorsing theory of evolution early in the twentieth century.

Evolutionary scientists, since then, have been searching to determine the biological significance of natural selection as a natural law of evolution.

The University of California Berkley “Understanding Evolution” website, while arguing that “Natural selection is one of the basic mechanisms of evolution,” never articulates what the term actually means.

With classic Darwinian imagination science, the website instructs the naïve,

“Darwin’s grand idea of evolution by natural selection is relatively simple but often misunderstood. To find out how it works, imagine a population of beetles.”

There are good reasons why Darwin could not define natural selection; natural selection is a simply an imaginary concept. Even Richard Dawkins, one of Darwin’s few remaining modern traditionalists, downplays the evolutionary role of natural selection –  

“For simplicity we speak of mutation as the first step in Darwinian process, natural selection as the second stage. But this is misleading if it suggests that natural selection hangs around for a mutation which is either rejected or snapped up and the waiting begins. It could have been like that: natural selection of that kind would probably work, and maybe does work somewhere in the universe. But as a matter of fact on this planet it usually isn’t like that.”

Natural selection has emerged as the dark matter of evolution.  Even evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago is quick to point out that -

“We must stop pretending we understand the course of natural selection.”

In turning to the dark side, Swedish cytogeneticist, Antonio Lima-de-Faria, suggests that natural selection granted biological justification for the popular, but controversial, expansion of English colonialism -

“Selection is a political not a scientific concept. At the time of Darwin it fitted perfectly the expanding colonialism of Victorian England.”

NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay in an interview with Suzan Mazur points to the problem with the elephant in the room -

“It would be great to have some way to detect natural selection, but we’re unlikely to be able to. We have a hard time detecting it here on Earth and showing that it’s occurring.”

National Medal of Science award winner by President Bill Clinton, Lynn Margulis

“Darwin was brilliant to make ‘natural selection’ a sort of godlike term, an expression that could replace ‘God’, who did it—created forms of life. However, what is natural selection’ really? It is the failure of the biotic potential to be reached. And it’s quantitative… Natural selection is intrinsically an elimination process.”

In the book Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong (2012), author Thomas Nagel from New York University published by Oxford University Press in addresses the significance of natural selection in the origin of life -

“It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.”

In the search for the significance of Darwin’s imaginary concept over the past 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, natural selection has emerged as no more than an elimination process−a natural law of extinction, not evolution.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophical fact, not a scientific fact.

The coelacanth, first described in 1839 by Louis Agassiz at Harvard University, has played a pivotal role in the history of evolution. Based on the early fossil evidence, the coelacanth had long been thought to be an extinct evolutionary link in the transition between the fish and amphibians, also known as tetrapods. The coelacanth was touted as a fin-to-limb transition link.

Nearly 100 years later, in 1938 in a catch off South African coast Marjorie Latimer is credited for announcing the discovery of the 120 pound “five foot long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots”−a live coelacanth. The genus was later named Latimeria in her honor. The discovery was considered one of the most notable zoological finds of the twentieth century.

The new genome evidence published in the article entitled “The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution” sponsored by the Broad Institute Coelacanth Genome Project further muddles with the once ubiquitous textbook darling of the evolution industry.

Rather than finding genetic “slight, successive” changes through natural selection as advocated by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, the evidence points to genetic stasis and to the mosaic uniqueness of the coelacanth.

Starting with the discovery of the live coelacanth in 1938, the evolutionary problems began emerging even long before the coelacanth genome could be investigated. Contrary to what had long appeared in the fossil record to be an intermediate between a fin and a limb, the coelacanth hind-fin turned –out to be simply a hind-fin and not the ever elusive fin-to-limb transitional link as predicted by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The discovery that coelacanth reproduction, unlike most fish, amphibians and reptiles, is through live-births and not through the fertilization of external, eggs further stymied efforts to align the scientific evidence to the standard theory of evolution through “slight, successive” changes.

Equally challenging for the evolution industry was the soft anatomy of the internal organs. In 1974, paleoichthyologist Barbara Stahl concluded in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, “The modern coelacanth shows no evidence of having internal organs preadapted for use in a terrestrial environment.”

Distinguished vertebrate paleontologist Edwin Harris Colbert, curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, in 1991 noted: “Despite these similarities, there is no evidence of any Paleozoic amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single common ancestor.”

By 1994, investigator James P. Bogart of the University of Guelph in Canada to uncover that the coelacanth had 48-chromosomes, unlike the of coelacanth’s closest relative, the lung-fish, with only 46-chromosomes. The coelacanth differs from the lungfish in terms of the number and the appearance of the chromosomes; the chromosomes are considered to be of a different karyotype.

Since humans have only 23-chromosomes, the evolutionary concept of increasing complexity between the coelacanth and humans with fewer chromosomes remains an evolutionary enigma.  

Even before Nature published the coelacanth genome data, most ardent Darwinists, including Jerry Coyne, had abandoned the coelacanth as an evolutionary “missing link.” In Why Evolution is True, Coyne never mentions the coelacanth.

The coelacanth genome project uncovered yet more problems. Analyses of genetic sequences demonstrate that the lungfish would be a better fin-to-limb candidate than the coelacanth. The lung-fishis a fresh-water fish only found in Africa, South America and Australia. According to Amemiya and Alföldi, “the lungfish is more closely related to tetrapods.”

In counting the number of coelacanth genes, Amemiya and Alföldi discovered that 50-genes in the coelacanth do not exist in any known tetrapod. Using an evolutionary paradigm, Amemiya and Alföldi simply explained that “they were lost in the tetrapod lineage.” The evidence was unexpected.

More perplexing, Amemiya and Alföldi discovered that the coelacanth “homeobox genes, which are responsible for the development of an organism’s basic body plan, show only slight differences between Latimeria, ray-finned fish and tetrapods; it would seem that the protein-coding portion of this gene family, along with several others and, have remained largely conserved.”

Even the non-coding genetic elements of the genome have been conserved, not evolved, and given the name “conserved non-coding elements” (CNE).

In fact, one CNE Amemiya and Alföldi discovered in the coelacanth, named HA14E1, “is more than 99% identical between mouse, human and all other sequenced mammals, and would therefore be considered to be an ultra-conserved element.”

The molecular evidence from the coelacanth, rather than compatible with Darwin’s “slight, successive” evolutionary changes giving rise to new species, undermines the theory. Molecular evidence demonstrates a mosaic pattern in the design of life, not an evolutionary pattern as expected from Darwin’s theory.  

The long sought after evidence by the evolution industry to find the molecular “missing links” continues to undermine rather than demonstrate scientific evidence for evolution.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis with diminishing supportive evidence.

Evolution only exists as a philosophy, not as a scientific fact.

The team produced data to advance the theory that amino acids can form proteins autonomously plus fold autonomously through some self-assembly process. Proteins function biologically only after their long chain of amino acids has been folded into a specific molecular structure. Fold-ability is essential for function.

While the team’s approach aligns with Charles Darwin’s “warm little pond” theory, Blaber’s evidence undermines the more popular “RNA-first” origin of life theory.

In a letter to Joseph D. Hooker in 1871, Darwin speculated that

“the first production of a living organism [stemmed from]… in a warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, −light, heat,, electricity, &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo more complex changes” 

The team results were published in the January 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Simplified protein design biased for prebiotic amino acids yields a foldable, halophilic protein.” The three-year study was built around investigative techniques developed over a period of more than 17 years. Halophiles are microorganisms living in extreme environments. 

In an April 14, 2013 interview with Doug Carlson of PhosOrg, “The current paradigm on the emergence of life is that RNA came first and in a high-temperature environment,” Blaber explained. “The data we are generating are much more in favor of a protein-first view in a halophile environment.” The halophile environment is characterized by temperatures over 30 degrees centigrade (over 86 degrees Fahrenheit) in very high concentrations of salt−concentrations 5-times greater than ocean water. 

This is presents a radical paradigm shift even for “Protein-first” origin of life theorists. “The halophile, or salt-loving, environment has typically been considered one that life adapted into, not started in,” Blaber said in the interview. “Our study of the prebiotic amino acids and protein design and folding suggests the opposite.”

In the “Protein-first” model, the folding of the long amino acid chains is critical for biological function. The folding of proteins into specific global shapes permits interaction with other molecules to perform specific chemical functions. “In other words,” Blaber explained, “they [proteins] have to be able to fold.”

Blaber is the first to demonstrate the fold-ability of selected amino acids in the infamous, but discredited, theoretical oxygen-free “cosmochemistry” environment originally proposed by Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey in 1952. Like the Stanley Miller experiment, an oxygen-free environment is essential. Oxygen-free environments are also known as reducing environments, or reducing atmospheres−the typical atmospheric environment found in space.

Of the 20 known human essential amino acids, in the laboratory Blaber has successfully demonstrated fold-ability with 12 amino acids using a technique called “top-down symmetric deconstruction.” Given these prerequisites, Blaber’s lab has been able to identify small peptide building blocks from these 12 amino acids with the potential to spontaneously assemble into specific folded protein-like structures.

“RNA-world” proponents are not likely to jump-ship for the “Protein-first” hypothesis due to the daunting list of lingering obstacles.

Before the “Protein-first” hypothesis gains mainstream traction, though, Blaber will need to resolve the oxygen-free environment problem. Just a year after Urey advocated the “cosmochemistry,” University of Chicago geochemist Harrison Brown was one of the first to suggest that either the Earth most have lost its original interstellar atmosphere or it never had a reducing atmosphere with no oxygen.

In the 1960s, Princeton University geochemist Heinrich Holland and Carnegie Institution geophysicist Philip Abelson agreed with Harrison Brown’s observation.Working independently, Holland and Abelson concluded that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere was not derived from reducing interstellar gases, but from oxidizing gases released by the Earth’s own volcanoes. From the available evidence, the Earth’s ancient and modern atmospheres are the same—oxidizing, not reducing.

In 1975, Belgium biochemist Marcel Florkin denounced the reducing atmosphere theory, stating, “the concept of a reducing primitive atmosphere has been abandoned,” and the Miller–Urey experiment is “not now considered geologically adequate.”

In 1982, British geologists Harry Clemmey and Nick Badham wrote in the journal of Geology that the evidence showed “from the time of the earliest dated rocks at 3.7 billion years [presumably], Earth had an oxygenic atmosphere.”

As Jon Cohen wrote in the journal Sciencein 1995, many origin-of-life researchers now dismiss the 1953 experiment because “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller–Urey simulation.”

Dustin Trail of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York reported in the prestigious journal Nature In 2011 based on molten rock (magmas), estimated to be 4,000 million years old, the presence of oxygen. The paper entitled “The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere,” co-authored by E. Bruce Watson and Nicholas D. Tailby, reported -

“We find that the melts have average oxygen fugacities [gas pressure] that are consistent with an oxidation state… similar to present-day conditions.”

Oxygen on early Earth was similar to today−not a reducing atmosphere as Urey’s cosmochemistry theory had required.   

In an interview posted on The Daily Galaxy, Watson put into perspective the implications of the finding:

“We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere.”

The atmosphere is not alone in toppling Blaber’s theory, so is the unavailability of raw chemical resources for the formation of amino acids. According to Dean Kenyon, biology professor at San Francisco State University, there have never been enough resources on Earth to form even one protein molecule -

“If the association of amino acids were a completely random event… there would not be enough mass in the entire earth, assuming it was composed exclusively of amino acids, to make even one molecule of every possible sequence of… a low-molecular-weight protein.”

Even if there were enough resources, self-assembling and folding presents another. Self-assembly has limited capacity to generate increasingly complex functions. Self-assembly is inherently redundant. As Stephen Meyer in the book Signature in the Cell explains,

“Therefore, self-organizational forces of chemical necessity [self-assembly], which produce redundant order and preclude complexity, preclude the generation of specified complexity.”

In the book Life Itself, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick explains,

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now; could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which have to be satisfied to get it going.”

Why Blaber invested resources in a hypothesis long known to be physically impossible underscores the emerging recognition that origin of life research is now securely bound in a knot. 

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in a crisis without a theory.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophical fact, not a scientific fact.

Bart, along with Gregory McQueen, senior executive associate dean at Western University of Health Sciences in Arizona, published their results in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics.

“We’ve known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results,” explains Bart in an interview published by ScienceDaily this week. “Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors.”

Bart and McQueen found that male directors, who made up 75% of the survey sample, prefer to make decisions using rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business or getting along.

Female corporate directors are less constrained and more prepared to rock the boat than male director counterparts. Bart and McQueen found that female executives are significantly more inclined to make decisions by taking the interests of multiple stakeholders into account in order to arrive at a fair and moral decision by tending to use cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building more often – and more effectively – in order to make sound decisions than males. According to McQueen,

Women seem to be predisposed to be more inquisitive and to see more possible solutions. At the board level where directors are compelled to act in the best interest of the corporation while taking the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders into account, this quality makes them more effective corporate directors.

According to Charles Darwin, however, women do not match up to men. In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued -

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, than can a woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.

Darwin was influenced by the shadow of previous philosophies, not the scientific evidence. The theory of “higher eminence in whatever he takes up” stems from Greek philosophy. Greek philosopher Pythagoras (582 – 500 BC) from the island of Samos declared -

There is a good principle which created order, light and man, and a bad principle which created chaos, darkness and woman.

Following in the tradition of Greek philosophy, legendary second century Roman physician Galen (129– 216 AD), who influenced Western medicine for more than 1,300 years, asserted –

The female is more imperfect than the male… just as man is the most perfect of all animals, so also, within the human species, man is more perfect than woman.  The cause of this superiority is the [male's] superabundance of warmth, heat being the primary instrument of nature.

In contrast to the low esteem Charles Darwin granted to females, the Bible grants high esteem. Even the term “wisdom” is granted a feminine gender. Proverbs 1:20, declares -

Wisdom calls aloud outside;
She raises her voice in the open squares.

The “open square” now includes the corporate office suite. Standing at the pinnacle of God’s creation, scientific evidence demonstrates the value of females. Man is certainly not “more perfect than the woman,” as espoused by Darwin. Darwin was wrong, again.

Reporter Julia Thomson writing for McMaster University noted,

Bart’s and McQueen’s finding that women’s higher quality decision-making ability makes them more effective than their male counterparts

The low esteem Darwin grants to females stands as yet another example of why Darwin was far more wrong than right. A list of Darwin wrongs advocated includes the fossil record,  panspermia, blended inheritance, natural selection, uniformitarianism, his “warm little pond,” and embryology – his “strongest single class of facts”.

The embryological drawing Darwin applied as evidence for evolution was, decades later, acknowledged by the perpetrator, German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, to be a fraud.

Biological evolution exists as a fact in philosophy, not as a fact in science.

The radical reformation of the Royal Society became their ultimate mission. With persistence, the X Club members became the prominent and powerful key players in the new emerging scientific academia during the 1870s and 1880s. The X Club re-shaped the landscape of academic discipline of science.

Devoted to the philosophy of naturalism, at least one X Club member was eventually installed in the office of presidency in the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in the Royal College of Surgeons. With their mission complete, the last meeting was held unceremoniously in March 1893 with only two members attending.

One of the nine members was banker Sir John Lubbock, 1^st Baron Avebury. Although never elected as a president of a scientific organization, Lubbock is known for advancing archaeology as a scientific discipline. Lubbock was influential debater in nineteenth-century advancing Darwin’s theory of evolution.

As a young boy, Lubbock’s father brought home a “great piece of news”: their new neighbor in town was going to be Charles Darwin. Soon, the young Lubbock became a frequent visitor at the Downe house eventually becoming one of Darwin’s inner circle of younger friends.

Darwin mentored the young industrious Lubbock into adulthood. The Darwin Correspondence Project includes a chronicle of more than 150 correspondences between Darwin and Lubbock. As an elected Liberal Party member of Parliament, Lubbock was successful in the promotion of science in primary and secondary schools, and worked with John Evans in the establishment of the discipline of archaeology.

Darwin rented land, originally from Lubbock’s father, for the Sandwalk wood where he performed his daily exercise. In 1874, Darwin agreed to exchange pasture land for Lubbock’s Sandwalk wood property. Lubbock was within the Darwin’s inner circle of adult friends.

When Darwin died in 1882, it was Lubbock that organizing a letter campaign to the dean Reverend George Granville Bradley arguing that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey. Lubbock was one of Darwin’s pallbearers along with Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace.

Unfortunately, Lubbock severely tarnished his career by giving his stamp of approval on the “Science Fraud of the Century,” according to Eugene Windchy, U.S. Information Science Adviser, in the book The End of Darwinism−the Piltdown Man.

Lubbock was hoodwinked into authenticating a skull of a man and the jaw of an orangutan as a link evidence for the evolution of man from a monkey. Amazingly, three English scientists were knighted in connection with the Piltdown Man affair, even though the original creator of the fraud, Charles Dawson, was not.

The Piltdown Man debacle, according to Windchy, stands as “a striking example of how intense desire to prove a theory can produce a mass delusion among scientists.” One of the alleged Piltdown man forgers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

The emergence of mass delusion stems from Darwin’s non-scientific method, as illustrated in a letter to J. Scott in 1865.  In response to Scot’s inquiring about how to perform an investigation, Darwin advised, “I would suggest to you the advantage … let the theory guide your observations.”

Established by Francis Bacon, the scientific method demands the opposite approach: look for evidence, then let the observations guide the theory.

Nicolaus Copernicus is recognized as the first person to successfully discover a new natural using the scientific method. Copernicus unseated Aristotle’s long-standing geocentric theory using the scientific method−not by letting the theory guide observation. Use of the scientific method paved the way to the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, Lubbock’s endorsement permitted the placement of the fabricated skull and jaw as an exhibit at the British Museum of Natural History. For nearly four decades, the Pildown man served as evidence for the evolution of monkey to man. Not until 1953, when questions about the authenticity of the skull were taken seriously, was the fraud discovered and removed.

Scientists, even in the late twentieth century, have fallen prey to Darwin’s convoluted scientific method. In 1972 the term “junk DNA” was introduced in 1972 by evolutionary geneticist Susumu Ohno in the paper entitled “So Much ‘Junk’ in Our Genome” published in the book Evolution of Genetic Systems.

In a landmark book The Language of God (2006), the once darling of the theistic evolution movement,  Francis Collins while serving as director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, advanced Ohno’s concept that junk DNA gives “powerful support for Darwin‘s theory of evolution.”

Last September, when the long awaited findings of the ENCODE project were announced in a coordinated set of 30 papers published in multiple journals, the once popular junk DNA theory was shown to be mere junk. The publications, including six in Nature, six in Genome Biology and a special issue with 18 publications in Genome Research, revealed the stunning discovery that more than 80% of the human genome examined to date has a known biological function−not junk DNA.

Contrary to Ohno’s and Collins presumption of non-functional junk DNA, the scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that the “ancient repetitive elements” of DNA stemming from generations of genetic mutation and natural selection is not junk, but has known biological functions.

Lubbock’s Piltdown Man and Collin’s junk DNA serves to underscore why evidence for evolution continues to be undermined−carte blanche departure from the scientific method by the evolution industry.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophical fact− not a scientific fact.

While Darwin eventually proposed “natural selection” as a natural law for evolution in 1859 in the publication of The Origin of Species, Higgs proposed the existence of a new atomic particle now known as the Higgs boson or the Higgs particle as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics in the 1960’s.

The Higgs boson is thought to explain how atomic elements can exert mass−an effect that we commonly refer to as weight. In physics, mass is measured by resistance to acceleration in association with gravitational mass.

During the 19^th century, scientists began using the term “atom” to describe matter. Atom was derived from the ancient Greek word atomos which means “indivisible”−an irreducible chemical element.

Democritus (460–370 BC), thought to have been one of the most learned Greek philosopher of his time, theorized on the subjects of physics, mathematics, ethics, and music. Democritus is now largely credited for formulating the “atomic theory” of the universe that stems from a random combination of an infinite number of successive world orders in which there is law but not design, stating, “Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.”

Democritus concepts were further developed by Epicurus of Sámos (341–270 BC) who suggested that life is continuous and progressively adapts through the selection of random changes.

In 1859, little was known about atomic elements. Darwin only uses the term “atom” twice in The Origin of Species, once in reference to erosion by water and another when discussing the coloration of the honeycomb.

Since the time of Greek philosophers, the atom had continued to be conceptualized as the smallest possible division of matter until British physicists Joseph J. Thomson discovered the electron through his work on cathode rays in 1897−more than 20 years after Darwin had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in 1872.  Thompson unleashed a scientific revolution by undermining the Greek philosophical concept that the atom is “indivisible.” Thomson received the Nobel Prize award in 1906.

Just three year later in 1909, New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered most of the mass and positive charge of an atom is concentrated in a very small fraction of its volume in the center.

Rutherford proposed a planetary model of the atom in which a cloud of low-mass electrons orbit a compacted higher-mass of a positively charged nucleus. Now recognized as the father of nuclear physics, Rutherford remains the only science Nobel Prize winner to have performed his most famous work after receiving the prize in 1908.

Using alpha radiation, in 1917 Rutherford became the first person to deliberately transmute one element into another−converting nitrogen into oxygen. Rutherford succeeded Thomson in 1919 as chairman of the now infamous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University−Charles Darwin’s alma mater.

While collaborating with Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1921, Rutherford proposed the existence of neutrons designed to compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons through attractive nuclear forces. Neutrons were envisioned to inhibit the nuclei from flying apart from repulsive positive forces between protons. The following year, Bohr was granted a Nobel Prize.

More than ten years elapsed before Rutherford and Bohr’s neutron theory was proved to be correct in 1932 by James Chadwick, their associate; by bombarding beryllium with alpha particles. The significance of the experiment won Chadwick a Nobel Prize in 1935.

Rutherford’s planetary standard model evolved over a period of over 20 years into what has become known as the standard model of particle physics, electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions.

Twentieth century physicists, including y Albert Einstein and Satyendra Bose, however, began to be increasingly recognized that the Rutherford’s standard model is inadequate as a complete theory for the universe.

The theory of general relativity, neutrino oscillations, dark energy, dark matter, and more abstract theoretical issues known as the strong CP problem and the hierarchy problem were thought to undermine the standard model.

In the 1960’s Peter W. Higgs proposed the existence of a new particle, now known as the Higgs boson to address these challenges to the standard model. Since then, this theoretical particle has been described as “the most sought-after particle in modern physics.”

By 1986, the existence of Higgs boson emerged as “the central problem today in particle physic.” To test Higgs theory along with competing theories, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) founded in 1954, started construction on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 1998.

The 17-mile circumference of the circular tunnel houses the collider nearly 600 feet below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. Ten years later use of the collider was ready.

While completion of initial construction in 2008 allowed the collider to go live in September 2008, the first solid useful data for analysis was not produced until 2012.  That July, Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and Technology, told The Telegraph reporters at a briefing in London: “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson.”

This month, CERN announced that the particle “looks even more like the Higgs boson.” The news was announced at the Moriond Conference in La Thuile, Italy, from a group of scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid experiments.

“The preliminary results [along] with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said in a statement to CNN reporter Elizabeth Landau.

“You can think of it as a kind of molasses-like bath that’s invisible, but yet we’re all immersed within it,” Brian Greene, theoretical physicist at Columbia University and NOVA host said. “And as particles like electrons try to move through the molasses-like bath, they experience a resistance. And that resistance is what we, in our big everyday world, think of as the mass of the electron.”

The electron would have no mass, Greene explained. If it were not for this “substance,” the field made of the Higgs boson.

The existence of the Higgs boson, however, does not solve the remaining mysteries of the universe. In an Associated Press interview with Rolf Heuer, the current CERN director, noted the bigger problem: the standard model only describes 5 % of the physics within the known universe.

The discovery of the long anticipated “God particle,” like the discovery of the electron, proton, and neutron, while confirming the expected physics of the atom, leaves the remaining 95% of the physics of the universe a still mystery. The existence of the universe stems from the existence of an infinite number of “God particles,” as Isaiah reflects -

“Who hath measured the waters in the hallow of his hand, and meter out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance… It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth” Isaiah 40

The origin of the universe by “chance and necessity” exists only as a philosophy, not as a science.

Evolutionary scientists, since then, however, have taken little ground in building a stronger case than Darwin. Now nearly 150 years later, the pursuit to resolve the unanswered origin of life riddle has now emerged to become a race within the evolution industry between Europe and the United States.

In Europe, while the major funding for origin of life research is currently centering on discovering the “god particle” with the Hadron Collider on the Swiss French border, research funding in the United States is primarily directed toward the study of astrobiology through NASA to find life in the universe beyond the Earth.

The term astrobiology is derived from the Greek terms ἄστρον, astron, “constellation, star”; βίος, bios, “life”; and -λογία, -logia, study. NASA interest in funding astrobiology started with the development of the U.S. Space Program in 1960.

In 1971, NASA launched funding for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to search radio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum for signals being transmitted by extraterrestrial life outside the Solar System. NASA’s Viking missions to Mars, launched in 1976, included three biology experiments designed to look for possible signs of present life on Mars. The Mars Pathfinder lander in 1997 carried a scientific payload intended to discover microbial fossils entombed in the Martian rocks−an unsuccessful attempt to verify evidence for ancient life on Mars.

Last September, after more than half a century of research, NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) awarded five-year grants totaling nearly $40 million to five research teams. These five teams joined ten other previously funded teams.

Just a month earlier in August, the NASA operated Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission landed their space rover named Curiosity in the Gale Crater on Mars. The cost of the MSL exploration is about $2.5 billion.

“The intellectual scope of astrobiology is breathtaking, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth’s harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life,” NAI Director Carl Pilcher said. “The new teams cover that breadth of astrobiology, and by coming together in the NAI, they will make the connections between disciplines and organizations that stimulate fundamental scientific advances.”

Although Germany contributed $3.1 million to the MSL project, Europe is in the search to uncover a more fundamental problem in evolutionary biology – the origin of matter.

Since the launching of the Hadron Collider concept in 1998, the cost of the instrument development has exceeded $9 billion – a cost nearly 4 times beyond the cost of NASA’s Curiosity.  The Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN to study particle physics..

Ten years later the Hadron Collider went live on September 2008. The collider has since survived numerous technical problems and two years later in October 2010, the first long sought after collisions took place. The collisions are designed to address some of the unresolved questions concerning the physics involved in the origin of matter.

The purpose of the Hadron Collider is to prove or disprove the existence of a theoretical particle known as the Higgs boson or Higgs particle. In the mainstream media, Higgs particle has become known as the “god particle” taken from a book on the topic in 1993 entitled The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? written by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi.

The Higgs particle was so named because the existence of the particle is “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive,” Lederman explained, but added “the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing.”

Higgs particle, a theoretical entity to explain the physics of how subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, may have ever formed, is thought to attract Higgs particles; the more they attract the bigger the mass.

The known laws of modern physics fail to explain the existence of molecules, like carbon. In an Associated Press interview in January published on Fox News with Rolf Heuer, the current CERN director, is confident that “towards the middle of the year, we will be there.” The news report was entitled “CERN chief sees certainty on ‘God particle’ by summer.”

The immediate challenge remains enormous, though. “Suppose the Higgs Boson [particle] is a special snowflake, so you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields,” Heuer said by way of analogy. “That is very difficult, you need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time.”

During the interview, Heuer noted the bigger problem: the standard model of particle physics can only describe 5 percent of the universe.

Europe and the United States are in the final race for the first real breakthrough on the origin of matter and life. Given the vast resources of time and money invested, any breakthrough is long overdue to resolve the issue evolutionary scientist have long agonized.

The new evolution race is entering the final turn. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, the discover of the DNA structure in the book Life Itself,

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now; could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle

Today, biological evolution continues to exist only as a philosophy, not a science.

“The most dramatic and rapid examples of evolution in action occur with microorganisms,” according to Donald R. Prothero in Evolution, What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, “especially viruses and bacteria.”

The reason for the popularity of microbe resistance including bacteria, viruses and fungi, is because microbes, in the words of Coyne, “can undergo a lot of evolution in a short time.” In practical terms, studying microbes was cheap and fast.

Today, while the prevalence of microbe resistance to antimicrobial agents today looms as a healthcare Armageddon, “in 1941, the drug (penicillin) could wipe out every strain of staph [Staphylococcus aureus] in the world,” according to Coyne. Coyne thinks microbes aren’t what they used to be.

“Doctors miss the ‘good old days,’” laments the University of California “Understanding Evolution” website, “when the antibiotics they prescribed consistently cured their patients.”

However, did penicillin really “wipe out every strain of staph” in 1941 and in the “good old days” did antibiotics “consistently” cure patients? The answer is a definitive no. Resistance of microbes to antimicrobial agents is not an evolutionary phenomenon. The signs came early.

Experimenting in 1952 with the antibiotic streptomycin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Joshua Lederberg, along with his graduate student Norton Zinder, demonstrated that bacteria never previously exposed to streptomycin was already resistant to the antibiotic.

A decade later, in 1962 the enzyme responsible for penicillin resistance, penicillinase, was detected in dormant Bacillus licheniformis endospores that had been revived from dried soil on the roots of plants and preserved since 1689 in the British Museum.Penicillinase is a specific type of enzyme known as a beta-lactamase. The resistance had obviously predated the production of commercial antibiotics in the twentieth century.

In September 1990, scientists from the University of Alberta reported reviving bacteria from William Braine and John Hartnell of the historic “Franklin Expedition” who mysteriously perished in the Arctic nearly one-hundred and fifty years ago in 1845. Amazingly, the Alberta scientists were surprised to discover that the bacteria recovered from the intestines of the explorers had the same level of antibiotic resistance as modern bacteria.

In a 1990 headline story in the Canadian Sunday Herald entitled “Ancient Bacteria Revived,” Ed Struzik reported that not “only are the six strains of bacteria almost certainly the oldest ever revived … three of them also happen to be resistant to antibiotics. In this case, the antibiotics clindamycin and cefoxitin, both of which were developed more than a century after the men died, were among those used.”

Even more stunning, two reports published last week further support the emerging recognition among scientists that resistance has been a foundational inherent characteristic of microbes – from the beginning. Jose M. Sanchez-Ruiz and colleagues published in American Chemical Society in the first paper entitled “Resurrection of 3-billion-year-old antibiotic-resistance proteins.” Antibiotic resistance existed long before Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928. Financial support for the study was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, NASA Astrobiology Institute, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The finding undermines a cornerstone of the evolution industry.

The second research  paper entitled “Antibiotic Resistance Is Prevalent in an Isolated Cave Microbiome” supported by Canadian Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation headed by Kirandeep Bhullar of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and published in PLos ONE, found extensive antibiotic resistance in microbes recovered from the deep Lechuguilla Cave located in New Mexico, in a region of the cave that has been estimated to be isolated for over 4 million years.

“Resistance was detected to a wide range of structurally different antibiotics,” Bhullar reports, “including daptomycin, an antibiotic of last resort in the treatment of drug resistant Gram-positive pathogens.

More than 150 years later, a remnant of Darwin’s argument has survived. Laura Spinney writing for the Richard Dawkins Foundation in an article entitled “Five things Humans No Longer Need” (2007) claims

Vestigial organs are parts of the body that once had a function but are now more-or-less useless. Probably the most famous example is the appendix…

In Why Evolution is True (2009), Jerry Coyne professor at the University of Chicago Department of Ecology and Evolution advances Darwin’s argument notes

We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most popular is the appendix… our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but is of no real value to use.

On the University of California, Berkley website “Understanding Evolution, your one-stop source for information” (2013) teaches

Our awkward wisdom teeth and appendix are simply historical holdovers [vestiges] that evolution has not managed to rid us of.

Contrary to Darwin, Dawkins, Coyne, and the University of California, scientists have discovered that the appendix is not “use-less”, or “of no real value” or even an evolutionary “holdover.” The appendix plays an essential role in humans.

The appendix in infants has now been demonstrated to be responsible for a number of significant physiological functions. Shortly after birth, the appendix has been demonstrated to promote to the development of the large intestines.

Throughout life, the human the appendix releases mucus with high concentrations of IgA immunoglobulin that function to regulate essential bacteria in the gastrointestinal system is a medium known as a biofilm.

ScienceDaily in an article entitled “Appendix Isn’t Useless At All: It’s A Safe House For Good Bacteria,” William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of experimental surgery along with R. Randal Bollinger, M.D., Ph.D., Duke University professor emeritus noted—

Our studies have indicated that the immune system protects and nourishes the colonies of microbes living in the biofilm. By protecting these good microbes, the harmful microbes have no place to locate. We have also shown that biofilms are most pronounced in the appendix and their prevalence decreases moving away from it.

In addition to regulating intestinal bacteria, the appendix has been demonstrated to act as a systemic immune-modulator. The appendix early in life has been shown to produce and release not only IgA, but also IgM, and IgG immunoglobulins for the development of systemic immunity and for producing and distributing immunmodulating cells, known as lymphocytes, throughout the body for the development of live-long systemic immunity.

According to Rebecca Fisher trained at the Center for Functional Anatomy & Evolution at John Hopkins School of Medicine, the immune producing follicles of the appendix

do not actually appear as such in the appendix until two weeks after birth at the same time that colonization of the large bowel with bacteria which are safe to their host begins. The follicles increase steadily in number to a maximum of two hundred at about fifteen to twenty years of age and decline back to about one hundred by thirty years of age and decline further, even to disappearance, throughout the rest of life.

The findings of Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, agree with Fisher’s findings. Writing in an article for Scientific America -

Among adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions. Lymphoid tissue begins to accumulate in the appendix shortly after birth and reaches a peak between the second and third decades of life, decreasing rapidly thereafter and practically disappearing after the age of 60.

The appendix is far from “useless.”

Worse yet for Darwin’s theory of evolution proceeding through “slight, successive changes,” the appendix is not even found in many mammals advanced to be one of our ancestors.

The appendix is not present in any invertebrate. Among the vertebrates, it is absent in fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and most mammals. In fact, the appendix is only present in a few marsupials such as the wombat and South American opossum, a few rodents (rabbits and rats) and few primates (only the anthropoid apes and man). The monkey does not have an appendix.

The appendix, an evolution industry icon for more than 150 years, is no longer a serious contender except in the hands of willfully ignorant evolution propagandists, including Dawkins, Coyne, and the University of California−my alma mater. Darwin fails the appendix test

Biological evolution as a fact exists only as a philosophy, not as a scientific fact.

Amazingly, Darwin’s enigma has continued to remain unresolved for more than 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.

Last month, Princeton University convened the largest international conference of leading origin of life scientists at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS). Representatives from Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Mexico and Japan joined American colleagues to for the purpose of unraveling the seeming persistent plague on biological evolution−the origin of life.

Over a period of four days starting on the 21^st of January, twenty-seven institutions were represented at the conference with thirty-nine scheduled presentations contending to resolve the origin of life puzzle.

John Peters of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Montana State University (MSU) was the first on the agenda with the presentation entitled “The relationship between early metabolism and prebiotic mineral catalysis.” Montana State University is one of sixteen NASA Astrobiology Institutes (NAI) research teams headed by Carl Pilcher since 2006.

At MSU, Peters has been actively pursuing the discovery of the “prebiotic chemistry… [involved] in the translation between the non-living and the living world.” Of the twenty-six institutions presenting at the convention, eleven receive direct funding from NAI.

The Princeton conference was co-sponsored by the origin of life programs at NASA. In September, NASA had awarded $8 million to Carl Woese of the University of Illinois to resynthesize a new origin of life model. Woese was a National Medal of Science recipient in 2000.

John Sutherland of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, and the recipient of Harry Lonsdale’s 2012 “Origin of Life Challenge” presented “Origins of life chemistry – reconciling the iron-sulfur and the RNA Worlds.”  Another one of Lonsdale winners, Paul Higgs of McMaster University, presented “The origin of the RNA World.”

The RNA World paradigm was the featured origin of life theory at the conference.

Nilesh Vaidya, a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University reported succeeding to create spontaneously emerging self-reproducing autocatalytic sets from RNA fragments, making them replicate “at least three times.” A defense easily likened to Lance Armstrong’s drug use defense.

“[N]ot to pile on,” synthetic biologist Steve Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution said that increasing complexity can also be an inhibiting factor for any RNA World paradigm.  The conference did not play-out as an RNA World love feast.

The best defense for the RNA World theory was expected to be delivered by Dave Deamer of the University of California at Santa Cruz who was also a recipient of Harry Lonsdale’s 2012 “Origin of Life Challenge” grant. During the presentation, however, Deamer turned to deliver a commercial promotion for his latest invention: a machine to pull RNA through a nanopore.

Unfortunately, when Deamer mentioned that the machine has a 4% error rate, Andrew Pohorille of the NASA Ames Research Center countered that “a 4% error is terrible, absolutely horrible.” Deamer countered that he is trying to reduce the error rate to 1%. Responding, Pohorille said that was “still terrible.”

Sara Walker of Arizona State University, not an RNA World advocate gave the presentation entitled “The Algorithmic Origins of Life.”  Even though supported by NAI, in an interview with Suzan Mazur before the conference, pointed-out:

I think we need to move away from treating a strict RNA World scenario as the central accepted answer for the origin of life because most of the origin of life community don’t think that’s the definitive answer.

In the aftermath of this NAI funded conference, hopes for an RNA World theory for the origin of life emerged more remote than ever.  The long-hoped for consensus to begin unraveling the endless origin of life plague in the evolution industry have been dashed.

The PCTS would have been wise to have been invited American theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the University of Vermont. According to Kauffman,

It’s really unlikely that the earliest life on Earth used anything as complicated as contemporary DNA, RNA and protein, because the machinery by which our DNA gets translated into proteins is incredibly complicated… life could not have started out that complex

Kaufmann’s advice during the planning stages of the PCTS conference would have certainly played into a tax-payer’s advantage and possibly given the conference more credence.

In the end, a consensus on any issue origin of life issue was not reached. Amazingly, not a single national media correspondent attended or reported on the conference. The conference was a news media fiasco.

The PCTS origin of life conference may have been the last hurrah for the long-running and well-tattered RNA World theory.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now the evolution industry without a theory for biological evolution or even more essential – an origin of life model.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not as a science.

America was bracing for a civil war. England was on the verge of entering the Victorian era and the height of the Industrial Revolution with an unprecedented prosperity.

Lincoln was born in a one-room Kentucky log cabin. Darwin was born in a legendary estate – The Mount. Lincoln was destined to free the American slaves; Darwin was destined to intellectually free minds from a divine creation.

Darwin is noted for writing On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life published in 1859.

The term “favoured races” has the obvious interpretation that some races are better than others. Some will see this as a positive; some will see this as a negative. Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in China saw this as a positive.

Darwin sent a complimentary copy of the book to Marx. Commenting on The Origin of Species in a letter to the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Marx, stated that although “it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

Darwin justified Marx’s “survival of the fittest”−at any cost, for any reason. Fully intellectually justified, the forthcoming 20^th century systematically stole freedom spawning the bloodiest century in recorded history driven at the hands of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

For Darwin, Christianity was simply a “damnable doctrine”:

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true…  This is a damnable doctrine.

Lincoln argued, in polar opposition to Darwin’s world at the 1864 Committee of Colored People, “I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man.”

During the inauguration of the first National Day of Thanksgiving in 1863, declared –

[T]o set apart and observe the last day of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens… [as] announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history

While viewed as evil by Darwin, Lincoln viewed God as “our beneficent Father” that has been proven by “the Holy Scriptures and all history.” Lincoln embraced the account of creation in Genesis as recorded by Moses.

There is a reason why the annual observance of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day continues as the most significant day in America running nearly 150 years later, while Darwinians are still disparately attempting to launch an observance of “Darwin Day.”

The same birthday – two opposing worlds

Darwin sought the emancipation of men from God, while Lincoln sought the emancipation of men from men. Darwin died in misery seeking death; Lincoln died a martyr seeking life.

Seek life.

In Liaoning Province located in north-east China, the team led by Godefroit in cooperation with a research team from the Jilin University Geological Museum in China undermines the pivotal position of Archaeopteryx – the bird that was once thought to be the original or “first bird.”

Archaeopteryx actually means the “ancient wing.”

The paper, entitled “Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China,” concludes that “these specimens have challenged the pivotal position of Archaeopteryx in bird phylogeny.” This new feathered-dinosaur has been named Eosinopteryx. Eosin is the Greek term for daybreak or dawn: Eosinopteryx is the dawn of birds.

Paleontologist and co-author of the paper, Gareth Dyke of the University of Southampton, UK, highlighted the evolutionary problem: the new 12 inch (30 cm) feathered dinosaur pre-dates bird-like dinosaurs that were thought to be their own ancestors – the cart before the horse.  That’s a problem.

“This discovery sheds further doubt on the theory that the famous fossil Archaeopteryx – or “first bird” as it is sometimes referred to — was pivotal in the evolution of modern birds,” says Dyke, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre, UK, in an interview published on the BBC.

“Our findings suggest that the origin of flight was much more complex than previously thought,” Dyke pointed-out in an interview published in ScienceDaily. Indeed.

For evolutionary paleontologists and ornithologists, Archaeopteryx‘s new status as just a dinosaur may cause hand-wringing because, for the past century and a half, it’s been loved as the grandfather of birds.

The Archaeopteryx, discovered in 1861 by German paleontologist Christian von Meyer, quickly gained saint-hood status shortly after the publication of the 1^st edition of The Origin of Species in 1859.

By the 4^th edition in 1866, after struggling to find fossil record evidence, Charles Darwin embraced the finding by declaring that “Hardly any recent discovery shows [evolution] more forcibly than this [Archaeopteryx].”

The Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin’s theory.  By the 6th edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin gave the following endorsement -

Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown … to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, one the one hand, by the ostrich and extinct Archeopteryx

Jumping ahead into the late twentieth century, the Archaeopteryx had gained recognition as one of most popular missing fossils ever discovered to support Darwin’s theory−a discovery to adorn biology textbooks for more than 100 years.

In the words of evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Archaeopteryx “may well be the most important natural history specimen in existence … Beyond doubt it is the most widely known and illustrated fossil.”

The Eosinopteryx, however, is not the first fossil discovery to shred the status of the Archaeopteryx. In 2011, the journal Nature published the discovery of another chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia had earlier undermined the “first bird” status of the Archaeopteryx. The title of the report wasted cut-to-the-chase−“Archaeopteryx no longer first bird.”

“For ornithologists, Archaeopteryx is an icon,” lamented Jack Dumbacher, Curator of Birds and Mammals at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, in an interview with Danielle Venton in 2011 commenting on the Xiaotingia. “It’s something that kids know from grade-school.”

Trouble with identifying the origin of birds, however, has been brewing for some time. “It may seem heretical to say that Archaeopteryx isn’t a bird, but this idea has surfaced occasionally since as far back as the 1940s,” said paleontologist Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University in a commentary. “Perhaps the time has come to finally accept that Archaeopteryx was just another small, feathered, bird-like theropod fluttering around in the Jurassic.”

With the Archaeopteryx, Xiaotingia and now the Eosinopteryx vying one the scene as the original transitional link between dinosaurs and birds, the rug has been pulled-out from Darwin’s theory. Nature, rather than displaying “slight, successive” transitional links, is best characterized as a mosaic.

In the book entitled “Evolution, what the fossils say and why it matters” geologist Donald R. Prothero of Occidental College explains the wide-spread mosaic pattern in nature: “in addition to the Archaeopteryx, there are now dozens of new transitional birds…, each of which shows a mosaic of evolutionary changes.” These mosaic patterns in nature, however, are not compatible with a blending pattern of “slight, successive” changes between species.

According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.” The mosaic pattern observed between the Archaeopteryx, Xiaotingia and Eosinopteryx illustrate the discrete differences between species, not “slight, successive” changes between species forming transitional links.

The recent discoveries of Xiaotingia, and Eosinopteryx further challenge, complicate, and contradict how birds might have evolved from dinosaurs based on any theory of bird evolution.

After more than 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, the anguishing words of Darwin still resonate: “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis; now evolution is in crisis without a theory. Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not as a scientific fact.

The prestigious journal Nature covered the paper in a report entitled “How life emerged from deep-sea rocks” by Ed Yong with the subtitle “The origin of ion-pumping proteins could explain how life began in, and escaped from, undersea thermal vents.”

NBCNEWS.com featured the story with the title “Theorists are pumped up about their new origin of life proposal” (3) by Tia Ghose. “A new theory proposes the primordial life-forms that gave rise to all life on Earth left deep-sea vents,” reported Ghose, “because of their ‘invention’ of a tiny pump.”

The authors of the paper in the journal Cell were Nick Lane of Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at the University College of London, and William F Martin of the Institute of Molecular Evolution at the Heinrich-Hein-Universitäts in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Lane and Martin had presented their work earlier at The Royal Society in November entitled “Energy transduction and genome function – an evolutionary synthesis.” Based on their research, these researchers have proposed that “living organisms are self-replicating, self-sustaining systems. Newly emerging insights… [are] driving an evolutionary synthesis that is rooted in thermodynamics.” Lane and Martin are origin of life researchers that ascribe to a self-organization model.

In the words of Lane, “It is possible to trace a coherent pathway leading from no more than rocks, water and carbon dioxide to the strange bioenergetic properties of all cells living today.” Lane envisions life arising from molecules.

The center of Lane and Martin hypothesis stems from the energy produced by deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the presence of rocks, water, and carbon dioxide resulting in life’s organic chemistry–specifically through the formation of proton gradients across cellular membranes -

Natural proton gradients acting across thin FeS [iron sulfide] walls within alkaline hydrothermal vents could drive carbon assimilation, leading to the emergence of protocells [primitive life] within vent pores.

By “harnessing energy” from the deep-sea hydrothermal vents, Lane and Martin propose that life emerged from the “deep-sea”−a theory for the origin of life dating back to antiquity. Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (640–545 BC) reasoned that water is the first principle of all things, and life originates from water. Anaximander of Miletusc (610–546 BC) taught that “life evolved from moisture.”

Lane and Martin, however, call their idea a “Hypothesis”−not a theory as reported by NBCNEWS.com.  The hypothesis is looking for scientific evidence–they had none.  Jan Amend, a researcher at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study, commenting on LiveScience noted –

Mimicking natural conditions in the lab is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Confidence in the survival of this deep-sea thermal vent origin of life hypothesis is not widely shared amongst origin of life researchers. Wolfgang Nitschke, a biochemist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille, noted in an interview with Nature one of the major problems with their theory: it is “In stark contrast to basically all other origin-of-life hypotheses.”

Other self-organization theorists like Stuart A. Newman, professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the New York Medical College, are working on completely different perspectives. For  Newman, self-organization develops through a process he calls “dynamical patterning modules”−not through deep-sea thermal vents.

For American theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the University of Vermont, self-organization develops through yet different mechanism−genetic regulatory networks.

What most origin of life researchers agree on is that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is irrelevant. Evidence for Darwin’s theory is not found in nature. Newman concluded that “Darwinian uniformitarianism would have predicted [the evidence] otherwise.” These theorists replace natural selection with self-organization. “I think self-organization,” argues Kauffman “is part of an alternative to natural selection.”

After 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, there is still no consensus on the origin of life or the origin of species. In the mid-twentieth century, evolution was a theory in crisis. Since then, recent scientific discoveries has divided rather than united the evolution industry. Now, evolution is in crisis without a theory.

Alan C Love of the University of Minnesota, a participant of the Altenberg Summit in 2008, lamenting the state of the evolution industry concluded:

My account also meshes with the recognition that a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophical imperative for athiests, not a scientific fact.

In June, long-time straight-laced British Darwinian advocate Richard Dawkins launched an attack on Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson. Dawkins and Wilson stand at the pinnacle in the industry. Dawkins claims Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, is “downright perverse.”

Wilson is the senior biologist born in 1929 by more than a decade−Dawkins was born in 1941. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Wilson was awarded the President’s “National Medical of Science” award in 1976 by President Jimmy Carter and the “Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science” in 1994. Wilson has been the avant-garde within the evolution industry.

Richard Dawkins “attacks Wilson’s theory ‘as implausible and as unsupported by evidence,’” according to a report in The Guardian by Vanessa Thorpe entitled “Richard Dawkins in Furious Row with EO Wilson over Theory of Evolution.” This recent split between Dawkins and Wilson highlights the splits and cracks within the evolution industry in the pursuit to discover a verifiable natural law for originating new species−now more than 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859.

“I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution… but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory,” Dawkins writes.

Divisions between theorists are nothing new. Even Darwin was at odds with most of his inner circle, including Charles Lyle and Thomas Huxley; known as Darwin’s Bulldog. Neither Lyle nor Huxley endorsed Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Georgy Koentges of Warwick University in the UK weighed-in on the controversy between Dawkins and Wilson noting that both Dawkins and Wilson have become “straw men” in an interview with Thorpe.

“Dawkins has a lot of unnecessary rhetoric in his review,” Koentges explained. “He is usually on the spot, but it has to be said that some of his arguments are based on older models of calculating fitness. The difficulty is in assigning what Darwin called ‘fitness’ to a particular genetic feature. They are trying to set basic fitness conditions which they believe work over very long periods of time.

“This is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a good or bad gene. It doesn’t work that simply. Genes are used and re-used in different contexts, each of which might have a different overall fitness value for a given organism or a group.”

Like Dawkins, long-time straight-laced American Darwin advocate Jerry Coyne specializing in ecology and evolution launched an attack on evolutionary molecular biologist James A Shapiro−evolutionary colleagues at the University of Chicago. Apparently, however, Coyne and Shapiro are not often seen chatting over espresso at Starbucks.

Coyne does not approve of Shapiro’s new book entitled Evolution, a View from the 21^st Century (2012). Coyne’s website named after his latest book entitled Why Evolution is True, has posted a series of attacks against Shapiro entitled James Shapiro’s theory of evolution (March 2012), Jim Shapiro continues his misguided attack on neo-Darwinism (April 2012), Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian book gets panned (April 2012), James Shapiro goes after natural selection again (twice) on HuffPo (August 2012), Larry Moran reviews Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian book; and another new anti-evolution book is about to appear (August 2012), James Shapiro gets evolution wrong again (December 2012), and James Shapiro, in his attempts to forge a new evolutionary paradigm, is reduced to going after my commenters December 2012).

Coyne pulls the “science card” on Shapiro claiming that “It’s not a philosophical difference, it’s a scientific difference.” Coyne is a strict Darwinist, Shapiro is not.

Sidney Altman of Yale University, a Nobel Laureate of Chemistry, 1989, endorses Shapiro: “Shapiro has written a stimulating, innovative manuscript that surely Darwin would not have liked.”

In the words of Carl Woese of the University of Illinois awarded the National Medal of Science (2000) by President Bill Clinton, “Professor Shapiro’s offering is the best book on basic modern biology I have ever seen. As far as I can tell, the book is a game changer.”

The year 2012 followed quickly on the passing of evolutionary giant, yet controversial, Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts. Coyne lividly noted that “Margulis agrees with the creationists about the inefficacy of selection and of the neo-Darwinist’s paradigm.”

As the avant-garde within the evolution industry continue to struggle for survival, the hope for a consensus on a comprehensive theory of biological evolution fades into extinction.

In the mid-twentieth century, evolution was a theory in crisis. Since then, recent scientific discoveries has divided rather than united the evolution industry. Now, evolution is in crisis without a theory.

Alan C Love of the University of Minnesota, a participant of the Altenberg Summit in 2008, lamenting the state of the evolution industry concluded:

My account also meshes with the recognition that a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.

For good reasons, 2012 was yet another year evolutionists want to forget.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophical imperative, not a scientific fact.

In the first edition of The Origin of Species in 1859, while Darwin mentioned the “Galápagos Archipelago” seventeen times, “finches” were only mentioned twice. Darwin never used “Galápagos” and “finches” together in the same sentence−or even in the same paragraph.

During the nearly five-week stay in the Galápagos, Darwin focused primarily on the geology of the islands−not birds since Darwin was trained in geology, not ornithology (the study of birds). Most of the bird collecting was the work of his faithful servant, Syms Covington. A total of thirty-one Galápagos finches eventually landed on the shores of England.

Just a month after returning to England in 1836, Darwin presented some of his bird specimens at the January meeting of the Geological Society of London.  After the meeting, the bird specimens were given to British ornithologist John Gould after the meeting for further study.

The following week on the 10^th of January, Gould reported that the birds Darwin thought were blackbirds, “gross-bills” and finches were in fact “a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar” as to form “an entirely new group, containing 12 species”. Gould’s story received prominent newspaper exposure.

When Darwin published the first edition of the Journal of Researches in 1839, the publication also known as the Voyage of the Beagle, startling in retrospect, Darwin never even mentioned the Galápagos Island finches.

It was not until the second edition of Journal of Researches in 1845, nearly ten years after returning on the HMS Beagle, in did Darwin reticently acknowledge discovery of the Galápagos Island finches along the lingering finch issue: “Unfortunately, most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together.”

Contrary to some of the popular versions of the finch story, evolutionary paleontologist Niles Eldredge notes that Darwin’s scant interest in the finches “came long after Darwin sailed away from the Galápagos [in 1835], having paid these birds hardly any heed.” The Galápagos finches clearly played an insignificant role in originating his theory.

In 1837, Darwin donated the thirty-one finches he collected in 1835 to the Zoological Society of London. When the Zoological Society decided to close operations in 1855, the collection was offered for sale to the British Museum. Unfortunately, in the transaction only nineteen of Darwin’s original finches were relocated to the British Museum collection.

Today, according to Frank Sulloway of the University of California, Berkley, while the whereabouts of any of the nineteen finches are unknown, only one of the original tags known to still be in existence.

Puzzlingly, the British Museum has four mockingbird specimens Darwin did collect on the Galápagos Islands – birds Darwin never even mentioned the mockingbirds in The Origin of Species.

The irony of the Darwin finch story is that “Darwin was increasingly given credit after 1947 for finches he never saw and for observations and insights about them he never made,” according to Sulloway.

Despite Darwin’s lack of interest in the finches, yet driven by the popularity of the finches, Akie Sato of the Max-Planck-Institut für Biologie in Germany formulated a molecular research team to study the mtDNA, cytochrome C, and the genetic control region of the Galápagos finches.

The purpose of Sato’s study was to retrace Darwin’s theoretical “successive, slight” molecular changes between the finch species to unveil the evolutionary molecular “Tree of Life” of the Galápagos finches. The team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 1999, in a paper entitled “Phylogeny of Darwin’s finches as revealed by mtDNA sequences” -

Traditional classification of ground finches into six species and tree finches into five species is not reflected in the molecular data. In these two groups, ancestral polymorphisms have not, as yet, been sorted out among the cross-hybridizing species.

After re-examining the evidence, Sato headed another research team to study the same molecular markers. However, the results pointed to the same conclusions—the molecular evidence from the finches could not be arranged into Darwin’s “Tree of Life” scheme. In the article entitled “On the Origin of Darwin’s Finches,” published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2001, Sato concluded that in

The absence of a detailed and statistically well supported phylogeny of the genus Tiaris [finch species], we are currently unable to reconstruct their morphological evolution and distinguish between these possibilities.

What is known is that Darwin has proved to be ultimately wiser than Gould. After decades of research, the scientific evidence has finally unveiled the simple fact that Darwin’s Galápagos finches do not exemplify evidence for the Darwinian theory of evolution by “successive, slight” changes over long periods of time.

Like origin and fate of Darwin’s finches, the theory of evolution has slipped into extinction. Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

Biological evolution exists as a philosophy−only, not as a scientific fact.

The Origin of Species

The eventual buyer of this rare book should know at least 5 things The Origin of Species isn’t.

Scientific. The Origin of Species isn’t scientific. Darwin never claimed that his theory was founded on scientific principles. Not a single biological parameter to support his theory of “slight, successive modifications” was measured in the book in association with the evolution of a new species−the foundation of his theory.

For Darwin, The Origin of Species was simply built on logic−not science. In the opening statement of the final chapter, Darwin made this very clear: “As this whole volume is one long argument”−not a scientific treatise.

The Origin of Species isn’t a scientific textbook for biological evolution.

Evidence for Evolution. The Origin of Species does not include uncontested fossil record evidence to support Darwin’s theory. Darwin recognized that evidence from the geological fossil record largely contradicts his theory. In Darwin words -

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain [fossils]; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

To counter these “obvious and serious objection(s)”, Darwin argues that “only a small portion of the surface of the Earth has been geologically explored” and the preservation of the fossil record has been “imperfectly made.” With further exploration the “intermediate [missing] links”, Darwin hoped evidence would be found to support his theory.

The Origin of Species isn’t a compendium of fossil record evidence for biological evolution.

An Original Theory. The Origin of Species was not the first publication to introduce the concept of biological evolution−a fact conveniently overlooked in the first publication. After prodding by critics and personal anguish, Darwin conceded by acknowledging his predecessors in subsequent editions.

By the third edition in 1861, Darwin included these names in a new “Historical Sketch” section. By the sixth edition and last edition in 1872, Darwin expanded the section to included forty-four of his predecessors that had developed similar concepts of biological evolution.

Darwin included Georges Buffon (1707-1788), Robert Chambers (1802-1871), the anonymous author of Vestiges of Creation, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire (1772-1844), Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874), his professor at Edinburgh University, Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) , Richard Owen (1804-1892), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), even Aristotle (284-322 BC),  the Greek philosopher.

The Origin of Species isn’t an original theory for biological evolution.

Consistent and Logical. The Origin of Species is loaded with problems and contradictions, even on the topic of natural selection. To address these problems, Darwin was forced to write successive editions to addresses the problems found by his critics. Just between the 5^th and 6^th edition, the last edition, approximately 29% of the sentences were re-written. After addressing these problems, Darwin still had at least fifteen contradictions on the actions of natural selection, alone, in the sixth edition.

On the topic of the power of natural selection, Darwin writes that the power of natural selection has “no limit” -

I can see no limit to this power, in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life.

Then, Darwin contradicts this “no limit” power theory by claiming natural selection can also be “powerless” -

If the numbers be wholly kept down by the causes just indicated, as will often have been the case, natural selection will be powerless in certain beneficial directions.

Along with a list of contradictions, scientists recognize that Darwin theory is a tautology−circular reasoning. In the words of the prestigious British evolutionary embryologist Conrad H Waddington -

There, you do come to what is, in effect, a vacuous statement: Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and you ask, which leave more offspring than others; and it is those that leave more offspring; and there is nothing more to it than that.

Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti sees natural selection as “perhaps… as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types and orders, can only leave one dumbstruck.”

In simple terms, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmariniin the book What Darwin Got Wrong conclude “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.”

The Origin of Species isn’t consistent and isn’t logical.

A Scientific Fact. In 1866 the renowned German botanist Robert Caspary interviewed Darwin on the 27^th of May on the question whether he thought that evolution would be either a fact or a hypothesis. Caspary reported the following about his interview with Darwin -

It is important for me to hear, from your own mouth, if he [Darwin] considered his doctrine of evolution of species to be a hypothesis or fact. I asked him if he considered that he had ever found a species anywhere for which it could be established through facts that it was derived from another by changes. − No! he answered very definitively. Thus you yourself consider that your doctrine of evolution of species is a hypothesis. – O yes! Was his decisive answer.

The buyer of Peter Harrington’s first edition copy of The Origin of Species should recognize that it isn’t scientific, evidence for evolution, original, consistent and logical, or a scientific fact.

The market strong market value of The Origin of Species is likely to remain strong due to its historical value−not scientific value.

The theory of biological evolution exists as a philosophy, not as a science.

Even though all 1,250 copies of the first printing of the book were sold on the first day, by Christmas Darwin “found himself disturbed, even haunted,” in the words of Rebecca Stott in the book Darwin’s Ghosts, the Secret History of Evolution.

With the Down House “garlanded with Christmas holly, ivy and mistletoe by his children, he braced himself every morning against the sound of the postman’s footsteps on the gravel outside his study window. The letters, he lamented to his wife Emma, came like swarms,” according to Stott.

While many delivered a measure of praise, most letters expressed criticism. Yet, even some bitter outrage−not Christmas cheer. Darwin’s enduring friend and colleague, Joseph D Hooker (1817 – 1911), expressed his gratitude to a pre-release complimentary copy on the 21^st of November 1859, “thank you for the glorious book. What a mass of close reasoning.” Even though he had only scanned the book.

Letters, like one from Reverend Baden Powell (1796-1860), while complimentary, spiked a critical stance that stunned Darwin. Powell was an English mathematician, Church of England priest and prominent liberal theologian. As the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford from 1827 to 1860, Powell advocated the concept of biological evolution long before 1859.

Powell “launched into a direct attack, criticizing Darwin not for being wrong, not for being an infidel, but for failing to acknowledge his predecessors. He even implied that Darwin had taken credit for a theory [natural selection] that had already been argued by others, notably himself,” in the words of Stott.

For years, Darwin claimed my theory: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown.”

The next day, three days before Christmas, as Darwin started a reply to Powell, the house butler announced the arrival of yet another mailing challenging Darwin’s claim for originating the concept of natural selection. Even though the children protested, as Emma was reading by the Christmas tree, Darwin slipped away to retrieve what turned out to be more than a letter – a parcel.

This time, the mailing was from one of his closest friends, Joseph D Hooker – who had finally read more of The Origin of Species and had received complaint against Darwin from French naturalist Joseph Decaisne. In the opinion of Decaisne, the concept of natural selection had been previously originated by French naturalist Charles Naudin in 1852.

In the parcel was an essay by Hooker and the paper by Naudin published in the French journal Revue Horticole.  The following morning, after studying Naudin’s paper Darwin replied to Hooker: “I cannot find one word like the Struggle for existence & Natural Selection.” Darwin argued that Naudin, like Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) was close, but missed the mark.

In response to emerging criticisms, by the 8^th of February Darwin completed the narrative on the history of biological evolutionary concepts.  Starting with a revised American version of the first edition, Darwin included this “Historical Sketch” of the progress of opinion on The Origin of Species, previously to the publication of the first edition of this work.”

While the first “Historical Sketch” in 1860 included eighteen names, the sketch expanded to forty-four retracing the concept of biological evolution by to Aristotle and Greek mythology.

The anguish Darwin experienced during Christmas 1860 to establish himself as the originator of his concept of natural selection, in hindsight, is now known to have been foolish. Darwin’s concept of natural selection since 1859 has not withstood the test of time. Since then, Darwin’s version of natural selection has undergone a slow, yet complete, process of extinction.

Even the most ardent militant advocate of evolution and atheism, Richard Dawkins, has been forced by the scientific evidence to undermine the central tenet of Darwin’s theory that evolution proceeds through “numerous, successive, slight modifications.”

In the book entitled Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) in addressing the proposed method of evolution of the long neck of the giraffe from the short neck of the okapi, Dawkins sides away from Darwin’s concept of “numerous, successive, slight modifications” with a sleight of hand –

The most conspicuous change is the elongation of the neck. Could this have once come about in a single, large mutation? I hasten to say that I am sure it didn’t. But that is another matter from saying that it couldn’t.

Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany in the book entitled “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe” (2011) points out the problems  with Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection: “

A gradual series of intermediates in Darwin’s sense has never existed and hence will never be found.

The theory of evolution was once a theory in crisis. Now the concept of biological evolution is in crisis without any consensus on any comprehensive theory of evolution within the realm of science. Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not a science.

Darwin could have avoided his anguish during the Christmas of 1859 by simply enjoying the reason for the season.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin argued “So under nature with the nascent giraffe, the individuals which were the highest browsers and were able during dearths [scarcity] to reach even an inch or two above the others, will often have been preserved.”

The process of preservation is a fundamental tenet of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. The complete title of The Origin of Species is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races.” The giraffe, according to Darwin’s reasoning, was preserved during times of food scarcity due to evolution of the elongated neck.

Even though evolutionary scientists have since distanced themselves from Darwin’s high “browsers” argument because we now know that’s not what giraffes do, and there is no fossil record evidence for giraffe transitional links, staunch Darwin fundamentalists, like Richard Dawkins, in an attempt to save Darwin’s dying theory, have resorted to deceptive fabrications.

In the book Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), with the illustration of a giraffe and an okapi (see illustration above) Dawkins defiantly declared -

Giraffes have evolved from an ancestor rather like a modern okapi.

In a book review by published in the Slate, evolution loving journalist John Horgan endorses Dawkins’ work –

Dawkins reminds us that natural selection produces such creatures through a series of incremental steps that “smear out” their improbability over long periods of time.

But, Horgan was hoodwinked; Dawkins’ illustration was a pure fabrication. Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany in the book entitled “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe” (2011) points out the problems with Dawkins illustration -

From Dawkins’ portrayal one gets the impression that the step form okapi to long-necked giraffe is slight, and the text reinforces this impression. The placement of the okapi above the giraffe in Dawkins’ books also makes it appear larger.

Dawkins’ illustration convincingly makes the okapi look like a probable transitional missing link. But, the okapi is proportionally significantly smaller in height and weight than Dawkins illustration. While the giraffe stands 16 to 20 feet with an average weight of 3,500 pounds, the okapi i typically only 6 to 8 feet tall weighing in at only400 to 700 pounds – less than half the size of the giraffes.  Dawkins’ illustration is purposely and blatantly deceptive.

Lönnig points out that “If an intelligent design proponent used such methods – what objections would be raised.”

This second illustration accurately demonstrates the actual relative giraffe and okapi sizes.

Dawkins’ giraffe example, like Darwin’s horse story, Lee Berger’s Karabo, Bernard Kettlewell’s peppered moths, and the National Geographic Archaeoraptor disaster, highlight the debased and disparate measures the evolution industry have embraced to promote evolution as a scientific fact.

Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most respected evolutionary biologists, in the essay entitled “The Tallest of Tales” published in the journal Natural History (1996) chided the continued use of the long necked giraffe as an illustration of evolution:

In the realms of ideas, current use of the giraffes neck as the classic case of Darwinian evolution… is both fatuous and unsupported.”

The theory of biological evolution only exists as a philosophy, not as a scientific fact.