Jerry Coyne, in his new book entitled Why Evolution is True, conveniently circumvents any reference to the butterfly, as does Darwin-Discovering the Tree of Life by Niles Eldridge. The California State sponsored website, “Understanding Evolution,” website completely ignores the notorious nature of butterflies—metamorphosis.

So, why is the evolution industry silent on butterfly metamorphosis? The answer is simple—the same DNA is found in all four life cycles; egg, caterpillar (larva), cocoon (pupa) and butterfly (adult). Metamorphosis, to the theory of evolution, is an enigma.

For over 3,500 years, to the Egyptians, Chinese, and Greeks, the butterfly symbolism was derived from the unique butterfly life cycles. The egg first develops into the caterpillar before transitioning into the cocoon. Amazingly, inside the cocoon, the caterpillar is destroyed before developing into the stunningly colorful butterfly cycle.

According to the theory of evolution, the DNA (genotype) determines the form (phenotype). The fact that the metamorphosis of the butterfly uses the same DNA in all four cycles, contradicts the theory of evolution. 

With the same DNA producing different forms, the message is clear: DNA is not the blueprint controller of life. Genetic evidence from the butterfly undermines the Central Dogma of evolution—“one gene, one protein.”

The butterfly is not an isolated phenomenon. Italian geneticist Giuesppe Sermonti points out that “examples of highly divergent forms possessing one and the same DNA are so conspicuous and so numerous that the marvel is that they have attracted so little attention.”

Even more astounding in the case of the butterfly, Sermonti notes, “what we call metamorphosis is not really a change in form. Once the pupa, or chrysalis, stage is reached, the caterpillar starts emptying itself: its organs dissolve, and its outer covering is shed. Only certain groups of cells, called marginal disks, remain vital. From these cells develop all the structures of adult.”

The larva of the butterfly not only changes form, but actually dissolves before rebuilding into the structure of a butterfly—a new life-form. From the same DNA arises a completely different organism. According to Sermonti, the same DNA, then, can play different roles: “DNA may lend itself to such diverse forms, but it is not the DNA that imposes the blueprint.”

The presence of the same DNA in different life-forms has been given the term “genomic equivalence”. This means that control of the cell is beyond the DNA, or “epigenetic.”

Brian Goodman, Canadian developmental biologist and key founder of theoretical biology, focuses on the methods of mathematics and physics to understand processes in biology concludes –

While genes are responsible for determining which molecules an organism can produce, the molecular composition of organisms does not, in general, determine their form.

H. Frederik Nijhout of the Department of Biology at Duke University, a critic of Crick’s central dogma, came to the conclusion that “the only strictly correct view of the function of genes [DNA] is that they supply cells, and ultimately organisms, with chemical materials.”

The butterfly nightmare phenomena in evolution adherents are real, the result of the holding on to the belief: DNA mutation + natural selection = evolution—a theory not supported by evidence in nature.

State funded evolutionary education along with the high priests of evolution, Jerry Coyne, and Niles Eldridge, should now deliver a therapeutic service to humanity by addressing blatant contradictions between the theory of evolution and natural history.

No wonder French geneticist, discoverer of the Down syndrome, Jérôme Lejeune, cut to the chase – “There is no theory of evolution.”

This year, 2010, has not been a good year for the “out of Africa” evolutionary theory of human origins. The following is why.

In October 2009, Time Magazine recognized Ardipithecus ramidus, now known as “Ardi,” the number one of “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries” of 2009. The journal Science declared Ardi the “breakthrough of the year.”

Ardi, an nearly complete fossilized female skeleton, was discovered by Timothy Douglas White, an American Paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in the arid badlands near the Awash River in Ethiopia in 1994.

Examination and description of Ardi took nearly 15 years before releasing publication. Although it is not known whether Ardi’s offspring actually developed into Homo sapiens, the discovery was expected to be of great significance since Ardi is the oldest known hominid fossil. Ardi had been theorized to be an ancestor to Australopithecus afarensis, more commonly known as Lucy.

John Noble Wilford, science writer for the New York Times reported that David Pilbeam, a professor of human evolution at Harvard University said that the Ardi skeleton represents “a genus plausibly ancestral to Australopithecus [Lucy]” and began ‘to fill in the temporal and structural ‘space’ between the apelike common ancestor and Australopithecus.”

In the excitement, the Discovery Channel produced a series of articles and videos arguing how Ardi, not the chimpanzee, were the common ancestors to humans. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, developed an educational series in five separate publications on Ardi.

Since Ardi was discovered in east Africa, the finding gained further support for the popular “out of Africa” model first proposed by Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, Darwin hypothesized - 

In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere

Almost fifty years after the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin’s speculations seemed to be supported following the discovery of numerous hominid fossils in several areas of Africa. The “out of Africa” model continued to be the most widely recognized theory since the publication of the Descent of Man—until May 2010.

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany published in the journal Science in May 7, 2010, an article on the sequencing of the genome of the Neanderthal man entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome”.

According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., Svante Pääbo’s “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” Pääbo noted, “In some of us they live on, a little bit” with on major caveat – not in African descendants.

Mark Henderson, science writer for The Sunday Times, London, explains – “Human genomes from France, China, and Papua New Guinea showed Neanderthal signatures, but not those from West and Southern Africa.” The absence of Neanderthal genetic evidence in Africans has devastated Darwin’s treasured “out of Africa” theory pushing the relevance of Ardi as an ancestor to humans into extinction.

Genetics is not Ardi’s only problem with the “out of Africa” theory—so is the paleontological analysis. Time Magazine, and the journals Nature and Science, after more thoroughly examining the available data, has started slow process of recanting on the role of Ardi as an early ancestor to man.

In the Time article entitled “Ardi: The Human Ancestor Who Wasn’t” now highlight that “Two new articles being published in Science question some of the major conclusions of Ardi’s researchers, including whether this small, strange-looking creature is even a human ancestor at all.”  

The British science journal Nature reports: “Ardi may be more of an ape than human.” In the article, Esteban Sarmiento, a primatologist at the Human Evolution Foundation argues in the article Comment on the Paleobiology and Classification of Ardipithecus ramidus, that the Ardi could not be an evolutionary ancestor to humans:

[White] showed no evidence that Ardi is on the human lineage…. Those characteristics that he posited as relating exclusively to humans also exist in ape and ape fossils that we consider not to be in the human lineage.

With Ardi as the celebutante, the evolution industry, in desperation to connect the dots for a human evolution theory, has once again fallen into another humiliating about-face based on the inescapable scientific evidence.

As the “out of Africa” model undergoes extinction, scientists are beginning to investigate the “multiregional origin of humans” theory in which man is simply “a single, continuous human species”—a theory approaching the recorded biblical account for the origin of man.

The fruit fly is celebrating 100 years of research. Charles W. Woodworth at the University of California, Berkley, at the turn of the twentieth century, was the first to use the fruit fly as model in the study of genetics. Today, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, has become one of the most studied organisms in biological research, particularly in the field of genetics.

In 1910 following Woodworth’s footsteps, at Columbia University from the top floor of Schermerhorn Hall, now known as the Fly Room, Thomas Hunt Morgan confirmed and extended Gregor Mendel’s basic principles of genetics. A year later, Morgan published his findings in Science, establishing the foundation for the emerging neo-Darwinism movement.

Morgan, in the book entitled The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance (1915) demonstrated how mutations using radiation on two-winged fruit flies resulted in four-winged fruit flies. The four-winged fruit fly was widely heralded as the earliest evidence that the first evolutionary step to produce a new species was a mutation.

The question, however, centered on whether the mutated four-winged fruit fly was a new species or an unsustainable aberrational freek. By 1963 after decades of research, the question could be answered definitively. Ernst Mayr, Charles Darwin’s twentieth century Bulldog, viewed the mutated four-winged fruit flies as “such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as ‘hopeless.’ They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination.” Mutation is not the gateway to evolution.

While mutations on the two-winged fruit fly served as a window to study theroretical evolutionary genetics for decades, mutations are now known not supply the raw materials for evolution. Italian geneticist Giueseppe Sermonti explains –

One spur to research on mutations was the hope that an accumulation of these might lead to a new species. But this never happened.

The fruit fly as a model for evolution via mutations gets even worse—there are no “slight, successive” genetic changes even between over 1,400 closely related Drosophila species.

The number of nucleotide base pairs Drosophila species ranges from 127 to 800 million. The probability of constructing a Tree of Life with “slight, successive” changes in nucleotide base pairs from species to species approaches the realm of impossible.

Each species of Drosophila appears to remain distinct and unique. The following table is the number of estimated genome sizes as measured by the number of nucleotide base pairs in several different Drosophila genomes.

Pierre-Paul Grassé, past-president of the French Academie des Sciences in the book entitked  Evolution of Living Organisms concludes – “The fruit fly [Drosophila melanogaster],the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotopical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times”—evolution never happened. 

No wonder genetic researchers at Bioinformatics Research Center, North Carolina State University now bring into question whether genes even play a role in evolution between related Drosophila species. Wen-Ping Hsieh and collegues published in Genetics -

An emerging issue in evolutionary genetics is whether it is possible to use gene expression profiling to identify genes that are associated with morphological, physiological, or behavioral divergence between species and whether these genes have undergone positive selection. (1)

Genetic researchers from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, similarly discovered that “no strong evidence” in gene selection exists between Drosophila species and the respective proteins produced, “divergent expression”. Between Drosophila species, changes in genes do not correllate with changes in proteins. Jeffrey M. Good and collegues in an article published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2006, conclude -

Overall, we found no strong evidence for an increase in the incidence of positive selection on protein-coding regions in genes with divergent expression in Drosophila (2)

Genomic research looking for the “slight, successive” genetic changes required by neo-Darwinism is no friend of evolution. The survivors of 100 years of lab torture continue just as fruit flies.

The genome of D. melanogaster was sequenced in 2000. Most surprisingly, nearly 75% of known human disease genes are now known to have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies, and 50% of fly protein sequences have mammalian homologs. Mutations are either neutral or lead to disease—not evolution.

Today, over 100 years later, Drosophila serves as a genetic model for several human diseases including the neurodegenerative disorders Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, spinocerebellar ataxia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Reflecting on the limits of genetics in establishing the validity of evolution, Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti weighs in –

Science has taken on the great wager … and lost.

1.  Wen-Ping Hsieh, Tzu-Ming Chu, Russell D. Wolfinger, and Greg Gibson. Mixed-Model Reanalysis of Primate Data Suggests Tissue and Species Biases in Oligonucleotide-Based Gene Expression Profiles. Genetics. 2003. 165: 747-757

2.  Jeffrey M. Good, Celine A. Hayden, and Travis J. Wheeler. Adaptive Protein Evolution and Regulatory Divergence in Drosophila. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2006, 23(6):1101-1103

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.  Charles Darwin

Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that evolution develops through the processes of natural laws, changing the simple into the complex, in ways analogous to the laws of gravity -

[W]hilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The chromosome is the organizational structure of DNA and proteins in cells. DNA contains the nucleotide sequences that form the genes. During the twentieth century, determining the number of chromosomes in species has been in the investigative forefront.

Since Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications”, according to the theory, chromosomes were expected to demonstrate evolution from the simple into the more complex via “slight, successive” changes.  

While the simplest known organism, Mycoplasma hominis, does have only one chromosome, Darwin’s simple to complex theory quickly breaks down. Unless the Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Cow, Guinea Pig, and Goldfish evolved from Humans, the simple to complex theory of evolution is simply incompatible with the scientific evidence.

If natural selection acts only, as Darwin suggests, by “slight, successive” changes and “must advance by the short and sure, through slow steps”, then scientific evidence from chromosomes clearly contradicts the Darwinian theory of evolution.

In the book Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne conveniently and completely overlooks the lack of evidence for “slight, successive” changes in chromosomes. Coyne never even listed the term “chromosome” the Index. Reason—chromosomal evidence destroys the theory of evolution.

Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History in his companion book Darwin – Discovering the Tree of Life for the Darwin exhibit never mentions that the “slight, successive” sequences of the chromosome never happened. Evolutionist avoid chromosome like the plague. Reason, again—chromosomal evidence destroys the theory of evolution.

The evolution of the chromosome parallels horse evolution tales. Swedish geneticist Heribert Nilsson pointed out as early as 1954 that the “family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks.”

In 1996, Stephen J. Gould used stronger words in his book Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato To Darwin, concluding that the “popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes… has long been known to be wrong.” Rather than “slight, successive” changes as envisioned by Darwin, “fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.”

Bemoaning the continued use of what he termed “misinformation,” such as horse evolution, Gould, in 2000, pined in a 2000 article that appeared in the journal Natural History – “Once ensconced in textbooks, misinformation becomes cocooned and effectively permanent, because … textbooks copy from previous texts.”

In the molecular world, biochemist Richard E. Dickerson at Cambridge University notes that the “more one approaches the molecular level in the study of living things, the more similar they appear, and the less important the differences between, for instance, a clam and horse become.”

Molecular biologist Michael Denton clarifies – “Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of the cell might have occurred, molecular biology has served only to emphasize the enormity of the gaps.”

Mounting scientific evidence continues to erode any known comprehensive theory of evolution. The evolution industry should heed Darwin’s warning that “[i]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” by starting to count chromosomes.

The Darwin’s were the Kennedy’s of the nineteenth century—a powerhouse of influence.

Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent and wealthy English physician. As a physician in Lichfield from 1756 to 1781, he acquired a reputation for being a great healer. He was so successful that King George III asked him to be his doctor, but Erasmus Darwin refused the appointment.

Erasmus was a noted naturalist, writer, poet, inventor, and founding member of the infamous Lunar Society. Lunar members were of influence, becoming the engine-driving force of the British Industrial Revolution.

As a writer, Erasmus authored several important works of poetry and science. His most important published work was a book entitled Zoönomia, Latin for “law of life,” published in 1794. In Zoönomia, Erasmus endorsed the basic emerging tenets of evolution, asking the question in the affirmative - 

Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament… continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation

At Edinburgh University, Darwin studied under Professor Robert Edmund Grant, a proponent of evolution. Grant was a student of Erasmus Darwin, quoting from Zoönomia in his doctoral thesis. In England, Erasmus ignited the evolution industry. 

Aboard the HMS Beagle, by British custom, the ship’s surgeon traditionally took the position of the official “naturalist.” Darwin’s role was to be a “gentleman’s naturalist” and assist Robert McKormick and Captain Robert FitzRoy. Ashore, though, it was Darwin and not McKormick that received the notoriety and invitations from dignitaries. McKormick was upstaged by Darwin.

Being sufficiently disgruntled, McKormick left the Beagle at Rio de Janeiro just months after sailing from the docks in Plymouth harbor in 1832. McKormick’s status was “invalided out” back to Britain. Darwin assumed McKormick’s naturalist duties. The fame of the Darwin name was widespread, even along the South America coastline.

Little wonder, Darwin was recommended by his Cambridge University professor, John Stevens Henslow to Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the HMS Beagle—an elite selection process comparable to a twenty-first century NASA space appointment. 

Just after returning from the HMS Beagle voyage in October 1836, Darwin’s influence amongst intellectuals rapidly spread. Just a few months after returning from 5 years abroad, in February 1837 Darwin was elected to the British Council of the Geographic Society.

Self-esteem issues were certainly not a problem. In his autobiography, Darwin gives a self-evaluation - 

I think that I am superior to the common run of men

In January 1839, Darwin was elected as a fellow to the most prestigious scientific organization in the world, the Royal Society. The Darwin legacy of influence and privilege long preceded the publication of The Origin of Species. 

On the day the first edition of The Origin of Species was released in 1859, all 1250 copies were sold. The book was an immediate success: the Harry Potter of the nineteenth Century.

Following in the legacy of Darwin influence and privilege, long before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the evolution industry was well developed in eager intellectual circles even though Darwin clearly acknowledged that the theory was not supported by the evidence -

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

The Darwin legacy of influence continues, sadly.

Myths have circulated that Charles Darwin recanted the theory of evolution while he was dying. Some of the stories read like this: “Shortly after Darwin’s death at seventy-four on April 19, 1882, the evangelistic widow of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Hope [Lady Hope] told a gathering of students at Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts that she had visited Darwin in his last hours and found him reading the Epistle to the Hebrews. Darwin, she said, announced that he wished he ‘had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done,’ and he also asked her to get some people together so he could speak to them of Jesus Christ and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savoring the heavenly anticipation of bliss.”

Darwin’s family all denied the story and campaigned against it. Darwin’s son Francis wrote in a letter in May 1918: “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father’s agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so.”

Darwin’s daughter Henrietta Litchfield also refuted the story, stating in the 1922 publication of The Christian: “I was present at his deathbed; Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case, she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A.… The whole story has no foundation what-so-ever.”

As an agnostic, Darwin was respected by his contemporaries, and even the Church of England. The Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, in a memorial sermon preached in the Abbey on the Sunday following the funeral, launched to bridge the agnostic-belief gap by stating -

I think that the interment of the remains of Mr. Darwin in Westminster Abbey is in accordance with the judgment of the wisest of his countrymen … It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr. Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God.

The bishop along with the Church of England could not have been more naive—Darwin unleashed the wave of atheism. In The Blind Watchmaker, leading atheist Richard Dawkins wrote –

although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Evolution now reigns as the explanation for the origins and meaning of life lead by the British zoologist, Richard Dawkins who explains –

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane.

The rise of atheism early in the twentieth century, rather than bringing an age of enlightenment, became the breeding fields for the bloodiest century in history—largely at the hands Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao. Contrary to Dawkins contention, the theory of evolution unleashed worldwide insanity—not peace.

Certainly, Darwin was critical of his own arguments for evolution in The Origin of Species. In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote,

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish

In the wake of 150 years of unprecedented scientific research on the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, and genetics, the theory of evolution remains as it started —“rubbish.” However, any recanting document prior to his deathbed experience in April 1882 continues to escape the reach of historians.

Since Darwin’s “innumerable” transitional species never existed on the Earth and natural selection never earned scientific vindication, today evolution continues more in crisis now than at any other time since the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Tragically, Darwin’s theory, supported by the likes of Harvey Goodwin in the church, blinded to the incompatibility of evolution with natural history following the abandonment of the Genesis account, continues to extract an immeasurable cost from humankind.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wove the eugenic philosophy of Plato into the theory of natural selection - 

extinction and natural selection go hand in hand

Ancient civilizations, including Rome, Athens, and Sparta, practiced what has become known as eugenics to ensure only the strongest survived.

Darwin uses “extinction” occurs 74 times in the sixth edition; “evolution” is not mentioned once. Encouraged by his brother, Erasmus, Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, an English political economist in 1838. Darwin recalls in his Autobiography the sentinel moments: 

In October 1838 … I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animal and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

The origin of natural selection theory was rooted in behaviors in the struggle for existence, a behavioral science. As Darwin explains, “This is the doctrine of Malthus … [that] many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and … consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence” was the foundation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection:

Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms… from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin after reading The Origin of Species, extended Darwin’s concept of natural selection. After sketching out his theory in the 1865 article “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Galton further elaborated in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius.

Galton reasoned, like Darwin, artificial selection in animals would produce similar results in humans. In the introduction to Hereditary Genius, Galton wrote -

to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

In 1883, Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ [Greek: εύ (eu) meaning ‘well’ and γένος (genos) meaning ‘kind’ or ‘offspring’] for the study of ways of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race.

Galton’s eugenics movement operationalized Darwin’s view to preserve favored races. 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 in the Struggle for Life.

Darwin endorsed Galton, referring to Galton no less than eleven times in The Descent of Man (1871). The practice of eugenics quickly became an institutionalized worldwide phenomenon.

Galton became a legend, receiving the Huxley Medal from the Anthropological Institute in 1901, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1902, the Darwin–Wallace Medal from the Linnaean Society in 1908, and honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Galton was knighted in 1909.

Adolf Hitler recognized Sparta as the first “Völkisch State.” Three International Eugenics Congresses were held in 1912, 1921, and 1932, with eugenics activists attending from Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mauritius, Kenya, and South Africa.

By 1913, one-third of the U.S. states had laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization. In Sweden, about sixty thousand were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, as did Norway and Canada.

Early during the Nazi regime in Germany, Hitler ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens with ‘undesirable’ handicaps, not just those held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent ‘contamination’ of Hitler’s ‘superior German race’ through intermarriage.

Later during the regime from 1938 to 1945, this surgical treatment of such ‘useless eaters’ was superseded by a more comprehensive solution—genocide. Hitler ordered the extermination of over eleven million people considered sub-human or unworthy of life. As authenticated and documented by the Nuremberg Trials records, the sub-humans included Jews, evangelical Christians, blacks, gypsies, and the physically and mentally handicapped.

Eugenics is Darwinism on steroids. 

The American Museum of Natural History, in the New York presentation of the Darwin exhibit organized by curator Niles Eldredge, declares

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection.

The exhibit explains – “Natural selection is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time.”

“Simple”, according the Answers.com means 1) having or composed of only one thing, element, or part, and 2) not involved or complicated, easy, a simple task. A common antonym of simple is difficult.

Perhaps, the zeal over evolution caused Eldredge to overlook what Charles Darwin actually wrote in The Origin of Species: the term simple was only used 56 times, while difficult was used 213 times. Darwin even entitled Chapter VI – “Difficulties of the Theory.” Chapter VI became an add-on chapter after the 1^st edition. There is no “simple” chapter.

Contrary to Eldredge’s contention, not only is the theory not simple, the theory of natural selection is laced with a litany of inconsistencies and contradictions, at least 15 contradictions on the proposed fundamentals of natural selection can be easily discovered with even a casual reading of The Origin of Species. 

Even Darwin was acutely aware of the contradictions. In a letter to Alfred Wallace in 1868, Darwin acknowledged -

Nevertheless, I myself to a certain extent contradict my own remarks.

As the “Year of Darwin” (2009) approached, the pop-culture ether concentration at the American Museum of Natural History must have caused Eldredge to staggering into Darwin’s natural selection minefield. In the end, Eldredge embraced Darwin’s contradictions in the exhibit acronym for natural selection: V.I.S.T.A. – Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time, and Adaptation.

Not only is the theory not simple, Darwin even contradicts himself on the evidence for the theory of natural selection –  

Passing from these difficulties, the other great leading facts in paleontology agree admirably with the theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection.

Then, Darwin argues, the evidence from paleontology fails to support the theory of natural selection,

Existence of many links … does not yield the infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species required on the theory.

In the book Darwin, Discovering the Tree of Life, Niles Eldredge follows Darwin’s same pattern of contradictions -

 It [The Origin of Species] is a mature work in the best, and worst, senses of the term… allowing Darwin to hone his logic as he mustered his arguments.

How can Darwin’s arguments be “the best, and worst”? Is Darwin’s theory simple? In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, at least Darwin was honest enough to write -   

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish

Evolution continues as a theory in crisis. Based on 150 years of scientific investigation since the publication of The Origin of Species, David Conway of Cambridge University notes that the evidence –  

provides us with reasons for doubting that it is possible to account for existent life-forms in purely materialistic terms and without recourse to design.

Little wonder that Eldredge’s Darwin exhibit failed to attract any major corporate sponsorship for the proposed national tour. Nicholas Wapshott, prominent British journalist for the newspaper Telegraph, said –

The outbreak of corporate cold feet has shocked New York’s intellectuals…. They tried to find corporate sponsors, but everyone backed off.

A consensus on the theory of natural selection continues as a difficulty for the evolution industry. Natural selection is not a simple theory.

The Origin of Species changed the world. Joseph Carroll professor of English at the University of Missouri, explains in the introduction to a modern reprint of Charles Darwin’s work -

“The Origin of Species has special claims on our attention. It is one of the two or three most significant works of all time—one of those works that fundamentally and permanently altered our vision of the world… It is argued with a singularly rigorous consistency but it is also eloquent, imaginatively evocative, and rhetorically compelling.”

For evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala at the University of California, Irvine, Darwin gave the world “design without a designer.” For militant atheist Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In an interview with American pop-media journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that “among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.”

Darwin, however, was not as “certain” as Dawkins—even on the power of natural selection. In The Origin of Species,  Darwin flips his theory on the power of natural selection.

At times, the “power [is] incessantly ready for action.” Equating the actions of natural selection to that of a Deity, “It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity.” Darwin explains:

There is no limit to this power

Then, Darwin flips the argument – “Natural selection should not have preserved or rejected each little deviation.” Further contradicting the power of natural selection, Darwin writes -

Natural selection will be powerless in certain beneficial directions

While Darwin did change the world, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is now only of historical value, not of scientific merit. Flipping on the power issue illustrates one simple fact, Darwin failed to deliver a cohesive theory on the power of natural selection—the showcase of evolutionary theory for over 150 years.

Even Darwin knew the theory was flawed, acknowledging - “I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.” No wonder Darwin wrote that natural selection “is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered.”

“To suppose that the eye,” Darwin recognizes, “with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

In the 2010 book entitled, What Darwin Got Wrong, evolutionary scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini contend – “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.” They continue: “In fact, “ET [evolutionary theory] can offer no remotely plausible account of how filtering by natural selection might work.” These “card-carrying atheists” conclude,

We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not composing the melody.

In a presentation entitled “Evolutionary Theories” at the World Summit on Evolution held at the Galapagos Islands in June 2005, William Provine, from Cornell University, concluded that natural selection is not a mechanism for evolution – “Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all… It [natural selection] is not a mechanism [for evolution].”

Giuseppe Sermonti, chief editor of one of the longest-running biology journals in the world, Rivista di Biologica, in his book, Why a Fly is Not a Horse (2005), Sermonti pines,

The claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types of orders, can only leave us dumbstruck. Natural selection only eliminates, and it’s adoption as a mechanism of origin is like explaining ‘appearance’ by ‘disappearance.’

Joseph Carroll should examine comparative evolution literature along with 150 years of scientific evidence before attempting to rescue the old evolution industry storyline.

Faced with the failure of the Stanley-Urey model to explain the origin of life, evolutionary scientists have been exploring the RNA World theory. With only the four nucleic acids required to form RNA rather than the twenty amino acids to form a protein, the chance probability tipped the advantage to the RNA-first theory, but that is not all.

In The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Richard Dawkins explains

“This is the RNA World. To see how plausible it is, we need to look at why proteins are good at being enzymes but bad at being replicators; at why DNA is good at replicating but bad at being an enzyme; and finally why RNA might just be good enough at both roles to break out of the Catch-22.”

The RNA World theory solved the chicken-or-the-egg Catch-22 conundrum. At least that was the hope. Notice Dawkins use of the word “plausible.” Building proteins requires information from DNA, but information in DNA cannot be processed without protein enzymes—the Catch-22.

The Catch-22 conundrum dogged origin of life research for decades. Like DNA, since RNA contains information. The discovery that certain RNA molecules also have enzyme activity to self-replicate paved the way to solving the Catch-22 puzzle. RNA acts like a protein at times, and at times like DNA.

The RNA World theory has emerged as the most popular natural mechanism for the origin of life. The National Science Foundation (NSF) now actively promotes the RNA World theory. NSF is a United States government agency; its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health.  

In association with Harvard University, the NSF RNA World theory initiative now exists for “Synthesizing Darwinian Chemical Systems.” Under the direction of Jack Szostak from the Center for Computational & Integrative Biology, Gerald Joyce from The Scripps Research Institute, and Steven Benner from The Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution state -

“As both a storehouse of genetic information and a catalyst of metabolic reactions, RNA may have been the critical component that enabled the evolution of life”

The RNA World concept started in 1959 when Spanish Catalan biochemist Joan Oró synthesized adenine, a key component of RNA and DNA, from hydrogen cyanide, similar to a Miller–Urey experiment at high temperatures.

By the late in the twentieth century, origin of life researchers began to examine the RNA World theory. American physicist, biochemist, and molecular biology pioneer Walter Gilbert, in 1986, was the first to coin the term “RNA World” 

Gilbert envisioned a RNA-first model on primordial Earth. By the actions of natural selection on RNA, DNA and protein molecules theoretically formed with the DNA molecule evolving into an information role, the protein molecules evolving into a catalytic role.

Like the Miller–Urey experiment though, the lack of geological evidence for hydrogen cyanide in the fossil record emerged as a telltale sign. Even worse, hydrogen cyanide is a gas toxic to cellular metabolism. During the German Nazi regime, hydrogen cyanide was the gas-of-choice at Auschwitz.

To date, not one laboratory experiment with realistic early Earth elements and conditions has produced a single nucleic acid. In 1981, Francis Crick published Life Itself, a book critical of the RNA World theory. “It may turn out that we will eventually be able to see how this RNA world got started” Crick later wrote in 1993. “At present, the gap from the primal ’soup’ to the first RNA system capable of natural selection looks forbiddingly wide”

Scripps Research Institute biochemist Gerald Joyce states that the “most reasonable interpretation is that life did not start with RNA.” The origin of life is so difficult a problem that German researcher Klaus Dose stated in 1988 that the RNA theory is “a scheme of ignorance. Without fundamentally new insights in evolutionary processes … this ignorance is likely to persist.”

Origin of life scientist, Robert Shapiro from New York University, a RNA World critic, notes – “no nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark-discharge experiments or in the studies of meteorites.”

Stanley Miller, who performed the original Miller-Urey prebiotic simulation test points out problems with Oro’s simulation – “a high temperature origin of life involving these compounds [the RNA bases] therefore is unlikely.” The presumption of “bases, adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil were readily available on the early earth,” Miller continues, is “not supported by existing knowledge of the basic chemistry of these substances.”

At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Leslie Orgel in 1994 noted – “Because synthesizing nucleotides and achieving replication of RNA under plausible prebiotic conditions have proved so challenging, chemists are increasingly considering the possibility that RNA was not the first self replicating molecule…”.

NASA lost enthusiasm for the RNA world, as well. In the Final Report issued after the “Astrobiology Workshop” in 1996 at Ames Research Center, California, concluded –

“It has been postulated that there was a time in protobiological evolution when RNA played a dual role as both genetic material and a catalytic molecule (“the RNA world”). However, this appealing concept encounters significant difficulties. RNA is chemically fragile and difficult to synthesize abiotically. The known range of its catalytic activities is rather narrow, and the origin of an RNA synthetic apparatus is unclear.”

“It goes without saying that the emergence of this RNA world and the transition to a DNA world imply an impressive number of stages, each more improbable than the previous one”, noted the eminent François Jacob in 1997 

In 1998, Leslie Orgel, senior research fellow and research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directed the Chemical Evolution Laboratory, acknowledged that “we are very far from knowing whodunit” or what were the early environmental conditions on the Earth.

After 150 years running, how life spontaneously began, to which Darwin alluded, remains a mystery. The deputy editor of the journal Nature, and science writer, Nicholas Wade, reported in the New York Times in June 2000 “everything about the origin of life on the Earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzle gets.”

Nearly twenty years later after Gilbert introduced the RNA World theory, the role of RNA in the origin of life remains elusive, if not improbable. In 2007, commenting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on a paper by Phillipp Baaske, Eugene V. Koonin, Senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health noted -

“[RNA World] still is a hypothetical entity… the evolutionary path to the translation systems remains essentially uncharted.”

Richard Dawkins premise in The Ancestor’s Tale – “This is the RNA World. To see how plausible it is” – demonstrates how the common practice of word slighting in the evolution industry. The veiling of impossible as “plausible” reaches the edge of fraud—supported by US tax dollars.

Why Evolution is True, one of the best-selling books in support of evolution written by Jerry Coyne and endorsed by Richard Dawkins, conveniently fails to address one minor evolutionary issue—the origin of life. Reason: the origin of life problem is undermining the evolution industry.

The Stanley-Miller origin of life model was once the most popular theory, starting with the publication of The Planets: Their Origin and Development in 1952. Written by Harold Urey, the book speculates that life originated in early Earth’s atmosphere composed of ammonia, methane, and hydrogen—a reducing atmosphere without oxygen.

Harold Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for his work on isotopes. During World War II, Urey directed the Manhattan Project at Columbia University that lead to the development of the atomic bomb.

Urey’s model for the origin of life, however, was published without ever being tested. When challenged by his graduate student, Stanley Miller, they performed the now-famous Miller–Urey experiment.

After assembling a closed glass apparatus in Urey’s laboratory, Miller pumped out the air and replaced it with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water, creating a reducing atmosphere—without oxygen—a gas composition resembling the atmosphere of Jupiter. “By the end of the week,” Miller reported the water “was deep red and turbid.”

Just as Urey had predicted, chemical analysis of the resulting tar solution revealed several organic compounds, including glycine and alanine, the two simplest amino acids found in proteins—the building blocks of life. With amino acids spontaneously arising in early Earth’s atmosphere, the ensuing amino acid chance  interactions forming into proteins became recognized as the natural mechanism to explain for the origin of life.

Reference to the Miller–Urey experiment quickly found its way into almost every high school and college textbook starting in the mid-twentieth century as a natural explanation for the origin of life. According to Evolution 101, sponsored by the University of California, Berkley   

These experiments serve as ‘proofs of concept’ for hypotheses about steps in the origin of life — in other words, if a particular chemical reaction happens in a modern lab under conditions similar to those on early Earth, the same reaction could have happened on early Earth and could have played a role in the origin of life. The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, for example, simulated early Earth’s atmosphere with nothing more than water, hydrogen, ammonia, and methane and an electrical charge standing in for lightning, and produced complex organic compounds like amino acids.

Since 1953, however, extensive investigations have demonstrated that the Earth’s atmosphere was not composed of ammonia, methane, and hydrogen. Rather than the anticipated reducing atmosphere, the Earth’s atmosphere was the opposite—oxidizing, containing oxygen.

Evolution 101, acknowledging atmosphere problems with the Miller-Urey experiment, adds - 

Now, scientists have learned more about the environmental and atmospheric conditions on early Earth and no longer think that the conditions used by Miller and Urey were quite right… These experiments yielded similar results – complex molecules could have formed in the conditions on early Earth.

While the formation of amino acids in the early atmosphere of the Earth is generally not considered a valid theory, what is the probability of complex molecules arising by chance?

 Evolution 101 uses the word “could” to explain the potential development of complex molecules developing on Earth. The fundamental question, however, is beyond “could.” The question centers on the “probability” of complex protein molecules forming by chance alone from amino acids. Any event “could” happen, but not all events are “probable”.  

Proteins consist of amino acids linked by peptide bonds. Since amino acids have roughly a 50:50 chance of forming peptide bonds to another amino acid, the probability of 4 amino acids forming peptide bond together is ½ X ½ X ½ X ½ = 1/16, or (1/2)⁴.

Since a simple protein usually consists of a chain of 150 amino acids, then the probability of forming the chain is (1/2)¹⁵⁰, or roughly 1 chance in 10⁴⁵. That is the number 10 with 45 trailing zeros.

Given that each amino acid has a mirror image, there is one left-handed and right-handed version for each amino acid, the probability of forming one simple protein from 150 amino acids is 1 chance in 10⁹⁰.

One of the most important functional aspects of a protein is the sequence of the amino acids. Since there are 20 biologically active amino acids, the probability of amino acids occurring in a functional is (1/20)¹⁵⁰, or roughly 1 chance in 10¹⁹⁵.

Origin of life scientist, Stephen C Meyer, in Signature in the Cell, gives a perspective to the probability of finding one functional protein in the universe - 

Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than finding a specified particle among all the particles in the universe.

Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins discretely circumvent the origin of life issue since the event probability was not by chance. Meyer concludes, 

For this reason, it would be vastly more probable than not that a protein functional would not have arisen by chance.

The evidence contradicts the central tenet of the theory of evolution—life by chance. Meyer’s logical conclusion concurs with Albert Einstein’s famous dictum:

God does not play dice with the universe.

Genetic evidence now points to one ugly fact for the theory or evolution; Autism and Alzheimer’s disease are the result of genetic mutations.

ScienceDaily on May 3 reported that investigators at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, that new research has uncovered two additional genes involved with autism.

An estimated one in 110 U.S. children has autism, which negatively affects behavior, social skills, and communication.

The risk for the disorder can be now be considered an inherited genetic disease, based on a study performed by professors Daniel Notterman at Penn State, and Ning Lei at Princeton University.

Lei and colleagues analyzed data from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) on 943 families, most of whom had more than one child diagnosed with autism and had undergone genetic testing. Investigators compared the prevalence of 25 gene mutations in the AGRE families with a control group of 6,317 individuals without developmental or neuropsychiatric illness.

Mutations in four genes within the AGRE families were identified. Two of the genes previously were shown to be associated with autism and often are involved in forming or maintaining neural synapses — the point of connection between individual neurons.

One of the new genes identified was neural cell adhesion molecule 2 (NCAM2). NCAM2 is expressed in the hippocampus of the human brain — a region previously associated with autism.

“While mutations in the NCAM2 gene were found in a small percentage of the children that we studied, it is fascinating that this finding continues a consistent story — that many of the genes associated with autism are involved with formation or function of the neural synapse,” Dr. Lei said. “Studies such as this provide evidence that autism is a genetically based disease that affects neural connectivity.”

According to Jerry Coyne in his widely acclaimed book entitled Why Evolution is True, evolution originates from mutations. Coyne explains,

The first is the idea of evolution itself. This simply means that a species undergoes genetic change over time. That is, over many generations a species can evolve into something quite different, and those differences are based on changes in DNA, which originate as mutations.

With Autism, however, the genetic change is certainly not beneficial. The same is true for the newly discovered genetic mutation associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

 In the June 10 online issue of the journal Cell, researchers from New York Universty’s Center of Excellence on Brain Aging and the Silberstein Alzheimer’s Institute, reported their findings that a mutation of a gene associated with early onset Alzheimer’s blocks a key recycling process necessary for brain cell survival.

The gene, presenilin 1 (PS1), performs a crucial house-cleaning service by helping brain cells digest unwanted, damaged and potentially toxic proteins. Once mutated, however, the gene fails to recycle and eliminate the potential toxins from causing cellular damage to brain cells resulting in Alzheimer’s disease.

“We believe we have identified the principal mechanism by which mutations of PS1 cause the most common genetic form of Alzheimer’s disease,” said study co-author Ralph A. Nixon, professor in the departments of psychiatry and cell biology as well as director at New York University.

Scientific evidence from Autism to Alzheimer’s disease, rather than supporting evolution as campaigned evolution militants like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, contradicts the theory of evolution.

Evolution is a theory in crisis. No small wonder, even ardent atheists Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were compelled to write “Why Evolution is Not True” (2010).  

“This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”

“It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study”, said Dr Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team. The fossil findings were released to the world at a press conference in New York, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) on May 19, 2009.

At the opening press conference, the fossil was described as the “missing link” in human evolution. “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates… It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years”, claimed the Ida investigative team. Ida was interpreted as our “human ancestor”—the first and only one known.

The fossil had even been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin’s 200th birthday year during 2009.  

The widely publicized Darwinius paper was released along with a book entitled The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, a DVD entitled The Link, This Changes Everything,  a History Channel documentary, and an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History. At a news conference attended by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the authors unveiled the nearly complete Darwinius masillae fossil found in Germany. The New York Daily News noted,

“The unveiling of the fossil came as part of an orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries.”

As the Darwinian celebrations were sinking into the sand by the end of 2009, however, so was the “missing link” status of Ida as scientists continued to analysis the fossil. By October 2009, the BBC retracted their position running ran an article entitled “Primate Fossil ‘Not an Ancestor’”, stating,

“The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as “Ida” is not a missing link as some have claimed.”

The sand-sinking fossil fiasco was finalized following the March 2010 article in the Journal of Human Evolution by paleontologists Blythe Williams, Richard Kay, Christopher Kirk, and Callum Ross confirming initial suspicions that the original description of Darwinius which appeared in the journal PLoS One was fatality flawed.

The updated analysis by Williams and team members painted a damning picture of the original Darwinius study. The team reports that the features of bones in the skull teeth, and limbs clearly demonstrate that Ida is not even a primate—certainly not a human ancestor.

In March 2010 news editor for the NewScientist, Rowan Hooper, published the article entitled Confirmed: Fossil Ida is Not a Human Ancestor stating – “About a year ago we were stunned in the New Scientist offices to learn of a beautiful, 47-million-year-old primate fossil which was being hyped as the ancestor to all humans. Nicknamed ‘Ida’, The Guardian newspaper hailed it as “the eighth wonder of the world… Now an independent team has examined the fossil in detail. In a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution they strongly argue that Darwinius is not one of our ancestors.”

The Ida fossil announcement in PLoS ONE followed the same pattern as the Archaeoraptor fossil disaster announcement in National Geographic magazine in 1999. This pattern follows a strict evolutionary paradigm approach where ideology drives the interpretation. Ida serves yet another example how the evolution paradigm distorts and stifles scientific investigation and undermines the credibility of the modern scientific establishment.

Ida and Archaeoraptor join a long line of fossil fiascos, including Archaeopteryx, Java Man, and the Piltdown man. Fossil fraud and deception by the evolution industry continues to pervade the history of evolutionary, perhaps because the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.

“No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long”, pines Niles Eldredge, evolutionary paleontologist, “It seems never to [have] happen[ed].”

Douglas Futuyma, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, editor of Evolution, abandoned Darwinism stating,

“The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.”

Ida fossil highlights again the reasons why evolution remains a theory in crisis—the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.  

I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.

Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography,

My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law

The chimp, since the nineteenth century, has been the poster-child missing link to humans. In twenty-first century terms, the mammalian Y chromosomes were expected to be similar, as speculated by Darwin. However, new evidence demonstrates Darwin’s speculation to be wrong—the chimp Y chromosome differs radically from humans.

The British journal Nature published a paper in January 2010 titled, “Chimpanzee and Human Y Chromosomes are Remarkably Divergent in Structure and Gene Content,” found that Y chromosomes in the chimp and humans “differ radically in sequence structure and gene content”. In fact,

More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome

Jennifer F. Hughes led the research team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, one of the world’s leading centers for genomic research, is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The research team concluded –

By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content

“By conducting the first comprehensive interspecies comparison of Y chromosomes,” ScienceDaily noted, “Whitehead Institute researchers have found considerable differences in the genetic sequences of the human and chimpanzee Ys… The results overturned the expectation that the chimp and human Y chromosomes would be highly similar. Instead, they differ remarkably in their structure and gene content.”

The original chimp genome sequencing completed in 2005 largely excluded the Y chromosome because its hundreds of repetitive sections had typically confound standard sequencing techniques. The chimp Y chromosome is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively sequenced.

 Wes Warren, Assistant Director of the Washington University Genome Center, noted

These findings demonstrate that our knowledge of the Y chromosome is still advancing.

Earlier comparative studies between the chimp and human genome had centered on DNA regions that only result in the production of proteins. In addition, not only is the chimp DNA 12% larger than human DNA, the Chimp has 23 chromosomes while humans have only 22 (excluding sex chromosomes in both species).

While the researchers advance the concept that “divergence” from the Chimp occurred 6 million years ago, the more logical explanation is that the chimp is simply a distinct species.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

We’re here to announce the first synthetic cell.

Venter told reporters that the new species — dubbed Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 — is similar to one found in nature, but each cell is controlled only by a single million-base pair chromosome assembled from the bio-computer laboratory. The research is reported in the May 20 issue of Science.

The new species, Venter said, started with researchers digitizing the genetic code for the new species on computers, and then assembling the nucleotides using “four bottles of chemicals” into sections of DNA. The DNA sections were assembled in yeast cells to form a synthetic chromosome, which was then transferred to a related species of bacteria, M. capricolum.

Late in March, the researchers told reporters, the modified cells began replicating and formed a “blue colony” of the new species. Venter said,

This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.

Indeed, he and his colleagues consistently used computer language to describe the work. The new chromosome is like an operating system, they said, and it reprograms the M. capricolum cells to become M. mycoides.

The result comes after 15 years of research — and some $40 million — aimed at finding what Venter has called the minimal genome: the smallest set of genes that can support a living creature. But it could quickly have spinoffs, the researchers said.

This process has enormous commercial potential, including new tools for developing future vaccines, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, biochemicals, and perhaps synthetic algae to cope with oil spills such as the one currently threatening the Gulf Coast of the U.S.

Describing the new species as “synthetic” may be going too far, according to some experts. It’s “synthetic in the sense that its DNA is synthesized, not in that a new life form has been created,” according to molecular biologist Jim Collins of Boston University writing in the Nature. “Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in.”

Mark Bedauv of Reed College in Portland, Ore., also writing in the Nature commentary called the new species “a normal bacterium with a prosthetic genome.”

The prosthetic genome had some problems, however. Venter and colleagues were stalled for several months because one of the pieces of DNA they painstakingly crafted had a typo – a single base-pair deletion – that means the whole chromosome could not function.

“So accuracy is essential,” Venter said. “There’s parts of the genome where it can’t tolerate even a single error and there’s parts where we can put in large blocks of DNA and it can tolerate all kinds of errors.”

Molecular geneticist Georgia Purdom from Ohio State University noted that this kind of genetic engineering is “like taking the hard drive of computer #1 and putting it into computer #2 that has had its own hard drive removed. So effectively computer #2 becomes computer #1.”

Regardless of the inference to molecules-to-man evolution, even Venter noted that they “didn’t create life from scratch.”

Frances Arnold, synthetic biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, emphasized “[w]e can write anything we want,” said Arnold. “The problem is that we don’t know what to write.”

This historical event highlights the fact that writing genetic information has an absolute requirement—intelligence with perfection.

Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute explains further what’s going on behind the headlines at Evolution News & Views:

In the wake of the article published in Science on May 7, 2010, entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome”, the Smithsonian Institute is definitely destined for a very busy summer updating the fiasco at the Human Origins exhibit.

The reason is the research team led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany that wrote the article has discovered that the Neanderthals are indistinguishable from humans—Neanderthals and humans are the same species. John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

Geneticist Gregory Hannon commenting on the historical event noted – the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” The evidence from “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome,” clearly contradicts the Human Origin exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute.

 The now evident fiascos at the Smithsonian Human Origin exhibit destined for updating include the following statements:

The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA.

These results confirmed the earlier study that showed that Neanderthals were unlikely to have contributed to the modern human genome.

Neanderthals and modern humans were separate species.

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

By definition, different species cannot develop interbreeding populations, therefore the Neanderthals can no longer be considered ancestral to humans – because they are simply humans.

Clearly, the Smithsonian exhibit had presented Neanderthals as a missing link to humans not on scientific evidence, but on an evolutionary paradigm—a saga that continues as a ubiquitous plague.

 In using logic rather than scientific evidence, the Smithsonian exhibit theorized that humans and Neanderthal represents the missing link to humans because they were not interbreeding populations—a gamble that was lost.

More glaring fiascos destined for updating at the Smithsonian include the following statements:

They did not find a match between derived alleles or gene forms in modern humans and those in Neanderthals, which is evidence against interbreeding.

The preliminary sequence shows no evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred.

Also, since studies show that Neanderthal mtDNA and Y chromosomes are very different, it is unlikely that Neanderthals and modern humans were interbreeding.

The exhibit exemplifies a greater fiasco to the evolutionary movement in which ideology has replaced science. With a long legacy of wrong theories and fraud, hopefully the Smithsonian will update the Human Origin exhibit based on scientific evidence—not an ideological agenda.

The immediate addressing of the Neanderthal fiasco will avoid the “fraud” label and not become the U.S. version of the Piltdown man.   

Just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, in 1856, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.  

In The Descent of Man, however, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were the ancestors to humans based on the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

“Nevertheless,” Darwin noted, “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious”—the skull was too large to be a human ancestor.

Darwin was right. The journal Science on May 7, 2010, published an article entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” confirming Darwin’s position that the Neanderthal could not be an ancestor to humans. According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” 

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany led the study team. “[Neanderthals] are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said. “In some of us they live on, a little bit.”

John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

This interbreeding finding is a monumental discovery since interbreeding is a defining factor for defining a species. Our current modern definition of species was developed by Ernst Mayr—Darwin’s Bulldog of the twentieth century.

In the 1942 book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr established the Biological Species Concept (BSC): species consist of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Since humans and Neanderthals are now known to be isolated reproductive populations, they represent a single species—”They’re us. We’re them.”

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is a landmark scientific achievement. The sequencing is a culmination of a four-year investigation led from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Use of efficient “high-throughput” technology allowed the numerous DNA sequences to be processed at the same time from the bones of three different Neanderthals found at Vindija Cave in Croatia.

A major obstacle overcome in the study was the retrieval of quality DNA material from remains Neanderthal DNA contaminated with vast quantities of bacterial and fungal DNA. Even, the Neanderthal DNA had broken down into very short segments and had changed chemically. Since the contamination, breaks, and chemical changes were thought to be of a predictable nature, the researchers developed a software program to estimate the original DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genes.

The DNA evidence from the Neanderthal clearly aligns with the biblical account—the Neanderthals are human, descendants of Adam and Eve. Worldwide dispersion after Babel followed by environmental pressures afterward resulted in people groups with different physical characteristics, including humans with “Neanderthal” Characteristics.

Cellular biologist, David DeWitt, noted that the research was an “amazing feat” of science that continues to demonstrate the validity of the biblical record. “Finding Neanderthal DNA in humans was not expected by evolutionists, but it was predicted from a creation standpoint because we have said all along that Neanderthals were fully human: descendants of Adam and Eve just like us”.

After a flurry of studying, in January of 1831, at the age of twenty-one, Charles Darwin passed his examination for the Bachelor of Arts in theology, Euclid, and the classics from the University of Cambridge—finishing tenth out of a field of 178.

Remaining at Cambridge for two more terms after passing the final examination, Darwin became obsessed with the desire to travel. As a stroke of fate, after returning from a geological surveying tour in Wales was a letter from Professor John Henslow, with the offer of a lifetime. Darwin wrote,

“On returning home from my short geological tour in N. Wales, I found a letter from Henslow, informing me that Captain Fitz-Roy was looking for any young man who would volunteer to go with him without pay as naturalist to the voyage of the Beagle.”

The voyage was a planned two-year expedition to chart the coastline of South America in December. When Darwin shared the letter, his father said, “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go I will give my consent.” Not knowing who to ask, on August 31, 1831, Darwin wrote a letter to Henslow reluctantly turning down the offer.

By pure coincidence on the next day, Josiah Wedgwood II, Darwin’s uncle, arrived to visit Darwin’s father. Since Josiah was considered “one of the most sensible men in the world” by his father, Darwin discussed the situation with Josiah, who immediately made the case for the expedition.

Sealing the deal, Josiah offered to pay Darwin’s cost for the planned two-year expedition—an expedition that would eventually stretch to nearly five years. The next day Darwin quickly left for Cambridge to meet with Henslow to intercept the letter he had just sent.

On September 5, 1831, Henslow introduced Darwin to FitzRoy in London. FitzRoy was a wealthy nobleman, a descendant of the Duke of Grafton, and the Marquis of Londonderry. He was widely admired for his tight reign on his men, but as Darwin was soon to discover, his commanding was accompanied by a fiery temper.

At the age of twenty-six, FitzRoy, not much older than Darwin was at first, FitzRoy was not impressed with Darwin. FitzRoy thought the shape of Darwin’s nose was too weak to take a lengthy sea voyage. Eventually, Captain FitzRoy was persuaded—Henslow’s recommendation was accepted.

Darwin was appointed to be a “gentleman’s naturalist” and assist the “official” naturalist, surgeon Robert McKormick. As a paying passenger, Darwin was granted full use all the onboard facilities to perform research as a naturalist. Darwin was set to begin his life-long dream—exploring the tropics.

FitzRoy outlined the details of the voyage, including the impending sail date, October 10. Not wasting any time, Darwin took up residence at 17 Spring Gardens in London and began shopping and discussing the details of the voyage with FitzRoy; a dynamic relationship had just been launched.

Convinced “that he would find scientific proof that Genesis was literally true,” FitzRoy wanted a like-minded naturalist on board the Beagle to find the evidence. Darwin’s interest in William Paley’s perspective on nature made Darwin the perfect applicant. Paley’s book, Evidences of Christianity, espoused a divine design in nature.

Ironically, prior to leaving England, FitzRoy gave Darwin a copy of the just-released first volume of Charles Lyell’s new theory in the book entitled Principles of Geology, which argues in favor of only slight, successive changes in the earth. Lyell championed geological uniformitarianism. The tenet of uniformitarianism is that all the events over the history of the Earth are the same as today—catastrophic events on Earth, like The Flood and plate tetonics never happened.

Little did FitzRoy know that Principles of Geology would influence the impressions of Darwin to challenge rather than support the Genesis account. Although Darwin struggled to understand how the massive land movements along western coast of South America aligned with uniformitarianism, Darwin never abandoned Lyell’s theory.

The offer of a lifetime lead to the development of a lifetime pattern for Darwin—theory development contradicted by the evidence. Or as Charles Darwin’s brother, Erasmus, put it in a letter to Charles on November 23,1859, one day before the publication of The Origin of Species - “if the facts won’t fit, why so much the worse for the facts, in my feeling.”

Every fossil discovery has a unique story, and the story of the Archaeoraptor is no exception. In November 1999, a feature article in National Geographic titled “Feathers for T. Rex?” played out to be one of the worst debacles in the now storied history of the new fossil discoveries. The article claimed to provide “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”

Discovered at Xiasanjiazi in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province, the fossil named Archaeoraptor liaoningensis appeared to have the body of a bird with the teeth and tail of a small, terrestrial dinosaur. The “discovery” seemed to fit the missing link criteria by filling in the gap of the popular reptile/dinosaur-to-bird scheme. The Archaeoraptor was displayed to have a long, bony tail like that of dinosaurs along with the specialized shoulders and chest of birds.

The Associated Press was the first to notice the story, and soon the major news networks were reporting the discovery of the new missing link that looked like a “fierce turkey-sized animal with sharp claws and teeth.”

The celebration was on. Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, weighed in, proclaiming the Archaeoraptor to be the first dinosaur capable of flying. The story had barely broken before questions about the fossil started taking flight, leaving the National Geographic suddenly embroiled in one of the hottest scientific controversies in decades.

The questioning was started by Storrs Olson, the eminent curator of birds at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. In a letter to the National Geographic Society, Olson stated that the story reached “an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.”

Olson was on target, and the National Geographic found itself in the embarrassing position of having to retract the entire article because, as it turned out, the Archaeoraptor fossil was a fake—a neatly contrived composite of a bird and a dinosaur tail.

In reflecting on the incident, Olson laid blame for the fossil fiasco clearly on “zealous scientists” that have abandoned the scientific method to become “proselytizers of the faith” promoting “scientific hoaxes,” and “the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.”

Several months later in the March 2000 issue of National Geographic, the magazine published a letter to the editor from Xu Xing, one of the scientists who had first examined and discussed the fossil discovery. The letter stated, “After observing a new, feathered dromaeosaur specimen … [t]hough I do not want to believe it, Archaeoraptor appears to be composed of a dromaeosaur tail and a bird body.”

Seven months later in October 2000, National Geographic published a five-page article by veteran investigative reporter Lewis Simons describing how the hoax evolved. In the article “Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail,” Simons pined on the painful discovery: “An investigative reporter does some digging to unearth the truth behind a case of fossil fraud.”

Simons explained how farmers in China had developed a profitable hobby of selling the fossils they “discovered.” They doctored the fossils to follow basic market economics to increase the value of their “discoveries.” In the excitement, evolutionists were conveniently blinded by their belief in the theory. 

The Archaeoraptor illustrates the problem when the theory becomes more important than the evidence. Tragically, Charles Darwin touted this approach in a letter to John Scott in 1863: “I would suggest to you the advantage … let the theory guide your observations.”

Evolutionists continue in the Darwin tradition—let the theory mask the interpretation of the evidence.

Even in an era with unsurpassed technological advances, fraud in science continues to invade deep into the ranks of esteemed institutions. Storrs Olson, of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, in 2000 lamented that there “probably has never been a fossil with a sadder history than this one.”

Proof of the hoax was not long in coming. Later in March 2001, Nature published the results of the fossil investigation. Using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT), the investigators concurred that the fossil was a forgery built in three layers. Timothy Rowe concluded that Archaeoraptor represents two or more species and that it was assembled from at least two, and possibly five, separate specimens. If there is any light at the end of the tunnel, Rowe gave a positive spin in the Nature article on the Archaeoraptor forgery, saying that technology may prevent future forensic fraud.

The Archaeoraptor disaster follows a fraud legacy starting with Haeckel’s embryos that founded Darwin’s “most important” evidence for evolution. 

Darwin had a significant influence on Karl Marx. Struggle and survival are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The full title of The Origin is –

On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection and the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races.

Darwin’s premise on survival and struggle in nature paralleled Karl Marx premise on class struggle. Marx summarized the importance of “struggle” in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 -

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818. In 1843, Marx moved to France, but ordered to leave by the French authorities after participating in an assassination attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia in 1845. After a time in Belgium and Prussia, Marx and his new comrade, Friedrich Engels, finally settled in London, England in 1849.

By the time Marx had moved to London in 1849, Darwin had already moved his young family from London to the Down seven years earlier. Even though Down is located just sixteen miles from London, ironically they never met even though Darwin greatly influenced the works of Marx and Engels.

Marx and Engels immediately recognized the significance of Darwin’s theory. Within weeks of the publication of The Origin of Species in November 1859, Engels wrote to Marx -

“Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done…. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.”

Marx wrote back to Engels on December 19, 1860 -

“This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

The Origin of Species became the natural cause basis for Marx’s emerging class struggle movement. In a letter to comrade Ferdinand Lassalle, on January 16, 1861, Marx wrote -

“Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”

Marx inscribed “sincere admirer” in Darwin’s copy of Marx’s first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. The importance of the theory of evolution for Communism was critical. In Das Kapital, Marx wrote –

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention?”

To acknowledge Darwin’s influence, Marx asked to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. However, Darwin graciously replied -

“Dear sir; I thank you for the honor that you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital and I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, but understanding more of the deep and important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Charles Darwin.”

At Karl Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery in London, Engels spoke at Marx’s graveside March 1883 –

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history”

The American researcher Conway Zirckle explains why the founders of Communism immediately accepted Darwin’s theory -

“Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy.”

Darwin had an undeniable and profound influence on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the development of Communism. Although not intended by Darwin, the effect of the theory of evolution emerged as the single most significant social engineering movement of the twentieth century.

Speculations run wild on what the twentieth century would have looked like without the theory of evolution and Karl Marx. What’s your speculation?