Famous British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science on the supporting side simply declares “Feathers are modified reptilian scales.”

More than twenty species of dinosaur have been collected with preserve feathers.

While birds and dinosaurs share a range of common features such as feathers, hollow pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors, however, the sharing of features between different species is ubiquitous throughout nature. For example, while the eye of the octopus and human share common features, the octopus is not considered an ancestor to man.

Without fossil record evidence, ancestral relationship is simply speculative, at best. “Among the consensus that supports dinosaurian ancestry [of birds]”, WIKIPEDIA acknowledges, “the exact sequence of evolutionary events that gave rise to the early birds… is a hot topic.”

One of the major reasons for the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary contention centers on evidence from the fossil record for the dinosaur scale gradually evolving into the bird feather.

Study on the origin of birds began shortly after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Described as a nearly complete skeleton in 1863, a new fossil bird discovery was noted to have reptilian features, including clawed forelimbs and a long, bony tail−part bird and part reptile features.

The bird fossil was named Archaeopteryx lithography−Archaeopteryx meaning “ancient wing.” The Archaeopteryx feather is recognized as one of the most beautiful fossils ever unearthed.

Given the optimal fossil conditions in German limestone, even the finest detail structures of the feather have been preserved. Armed with a combination of dinosaur and bird features, the Archaeopteryx launched the dinosaur-to-bird controversy.  By the sixth edition of The Origin of Species in 1872, Darwin gave credence to the dinosaur-to bird theory -

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 Archeopteryx.

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.”

Analysis of the fine feather details has been central to studying the transitional status of the dinosaur-to-bird theory. The Archaeopteryx quickly became recognized one of the most famous fossils ever discovered.

By the late twentieth century, the verdict on the transitional status of Archaeopteryx was settled. Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974) weighed in –

How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.

Alan Feduccia, writing in the journal Science in 1979 , in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

John Ostrom in 1979 published a paper in the American Scientist, concluding that not only is the Archaeopteryx not a missing link, but that “No fossil evidence exists of any pro-avis. It is purely hypothetical.”

Harvard professor, known as Darwin’s 20^st-century bulldog, Ernest Mayr in 1982, even began to weigh in with caution, backpedaling by calling the Archaeopteryx discovery: “the almost perfect link between reptiles and birds.”

Paleontologist Larry Martin of the University of Kansas declared in 1985 that the “Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”

At the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson concluded that the Archaeopteryx was a bird capable of flight and published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly” – not a transitional dinosaur-to-bird transitional link.

Robert L. Carroll, professor of biology at McGill University, in 1997 concluded, “The geometry of the flight feathers of Archaeopteryx is identical with that of modern flying birds, whereas non-flying birds have symmetrical feathers. The way in which the feathers are arranged on the wing also falls within the range of modern birds.”

Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature, wrote in 1999 that the missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story.

So what is the truth about Archaeopteryx? Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, may have summed it up best in a letter to Luther Sunderland on April 10, 1979, writing, “such stories are not a part of science.”

Since the Archaeopteryx discovery in 1860, evolutionists have continued to flounder for feathers in the fossil record long after the evidence has been weighed.  No small wonder that WIKIPEDIA opened the discussion of the Origin of Birds with “The origin of birds is a contentious and central topic within evolutionary biology.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis with speculative evidence, now evolution is in crisis without scientific evidence.

The evolution industry continues with an addiction to old speculations, like the Archaeopteryx, long known to be scientifically bogus.

The Archaeopteryx feather story underscores why evolution is viewed today as only a philosophy, not science.

These are my top 10 highlights in 2011 presented on Darwin, Then and Now during the year with links to the original article.

• Dawn of the Deed. Australian paleontologist, John A. Long article entitled “Dawn of the Deed”, published in the January 2011 issue of Scientific America, new fish fossils inexplicably demonstrate sudden appearance of internal fertilization, rather than external fertilization of eggs−an evolution enigma.

• Collins “Junk DNA” Toss. Francis Collins in Language of Life contradicts his “junk DNA” evolutionary theory in Language of God, stating: “The discoveries of the past decade, little known to most of the public, have completely overturned much of what used to be taught in high school biology. If you thought the DNA molecule comprised thousands of genes but far more “junk DNA”, think again.

• Breivik, a Darwinist. After listing The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin as one of his most “important” books, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, proceeded to take natural selection in his own hands by bombing of government buildings in Oslo, causing eight deaths, and a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people

• Evolution, a Classroom Failure? In a New York Times article “On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan,” free-lance writer Nicholas Bakalar notes “that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology.” The failure of evolutionary scientists to develop a comprehensive theory of evolution over the past 150 years continues as the root of the evolution industry frustration.

• DNA Fails to Resolve Fossil Record Gaps. As Evan Lerner, the Science News Officer at the University of Pennsylvania explains, the “Cataloging the diversity of life on Earth is challenging enough, but when scientists attempt to draw a phylogeny — the branching family tree of a group of species over their evolutionary history — the challenge goes from merely difficult to potentially impossible.”

• Karabo Anti-Science Rhetoric. Donald Johanson paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University and founder of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of California, Berkley, commented on the latest Australopithecus sediba [Karabo] finding in South Africa, an alleged human ancestor: “The oldest Homo specimens are scrappy and enigmatic, leaving researchers unsure about the evolutionary steps between the australopithecines and Homo. … The transition to Homo continues to be almost totally confusing.”

• Neanderthal, Discovery Erodes Differences. John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, based on newly discovered genetic evidence told BBC News that “They’re us. We’re them.” Since the genetic evidence demonstrates the Neanderthal interbreed with humans, the Neanderthals and humans are one species−not a human ancestor. Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow in New York concluded that the “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.”

• Essential Elements of Darwin’s Theory. In an article published in BioEssays (2011) entitled “Why is it so difficult to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution?” Jacques Dubochet, professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, was amazed to discover that less than 20% of attendees to a celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday could “[w]rite down in a few words, the essential elements of Darwin’s theory of evolution”.

• Ancient Eel Defies Evolution. The scientific report of the finding, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society on-line in August headed by G. David Johnson of the Smithsonian Institute, was entitled A ‘living fossil’ eel (Anguilliformes: Protanguillidae, fam. nov.) from an undersea cave in Palau. The comparative morphology and genetic report notes the problem: “The analysis they have performed using morphology and genetics is brilliant and invites as many questions about eel evolution as it solves.”

• Anomalocaris, a Freak of Evolution. A team of scientists from Australia and Spain lead by John R. Paterson, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, extended even further Darwin’s dilemma in examining the Anomalocaris: “Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares”−a nightmare for the evolution industry since Anomalocaris appeared in Cambrian Explosion then disappeared suddenly. The sudden appearance contradicts the basic premises of evolution.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. Scientific evidence from 2011 further supports the contention that evolution only exists as a philosophy.

This week a team of scientists from Australia and Spain lead by John R. Paterson, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, extended even further Darwin’s dilemma.

The paper entitled “Acute vision in the giant Cambrian predator Anomalocaris and the origin of compound eyes” published in the December 8 edition of the journal Nature, a vanguard of evolution, amazingly unveiled the advanced and complex nature of the eyes in this arthropod. Unlike any other known counterpart, past or present, this underwater sea creature has bizarrely positioned eyes at the top of two stalks that extend bilaterally from the sides of the head. Anomalocaris, derived from the word anomaly, means abnormal or strange shrimp.

In a prepared statement, Paterson said that the “Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares”−a nightmare for the evolution industry. The problem is that the bizarre eyes appear in the Cambrian fossil record with no known ancestor−Darwin’s worst nightmare.

Not only is the position and shape of the stalk eyes an evolutionary enigma, so is the advanced nature of this large shrimp-like animal two pear-shaped eyes. According to Paterson’s report, each eye of this 3 to 6 foot long enigma contains at least 16,000 hexagonal lenses far exceeding the number of lenses in most modern groups with vision as keen as the sharpest insect alive today.

Contrary to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, there is no evidence for any simpler pre-Cambrian or Cambrian ancestor. Cambrian fossilized animals were highly complex and sophisticated. Evidence demonstrates that complex morphologies of the Anomalocaris appeared in Cambrian Explosion then disappeared suddenly.

The international team studied the fossil remains from a shale quarry discovered on Kangaroo Island, just off the southern coast of Australia. The shale formation, known as Emu Bay shale, is noted for stunning preservation of soft tissue, like the eyes, as well as skeletal remains. The first Anomalocaris was discovered by Charles Dolittle Watcott in 1909 in the famed Burgess Shale. Historically, the Anomalocaris had a cosmopolitan distribution in the Cambrian seas. Fossils of Anomalocaris have been discovered in Canada, China, and in Australia.

The discovery and analysis of Anomalocaris eyes “confirms that it had superb vision to support its predatory lifestyle”, according to Paterson. “Such lens-rich compound eyes suggest Anomalocaris was a highly visual hunter. Its prey didn’t stand a chance.”

Pete Spotts, staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, noted in the article entitled “Jeepers, creepers, where did the Cambrian ocean’s top predator get those peepers?” the real evolutionary problem with the discovery:  “the presence of these eyes at this stage in the evolution of life on Earth indicates how quickly, in geologic time, novel features can emerge.” Stated nicely, this presents a serious theoretical conundrum for evolution.

“If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once,” according to Darwin, “the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection”. Clearly, the Anomalocaris is scientific evidence contradicting Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

In an interview, New Scientist quoted Paterson: “Very few modern animals, particularly arthropods, have eyes as sophisticated as this”. With at least 16,000 lenses on each eye, “This is a lot,” says Paterson. “The common housefly has only 3,200 and most ants have fewer than 1,000.”

Matt Kaplan, science writer for Nature News quoted Paterson commenting on the article in the Nature journal entitled “An eye-opening fossil. Ancient predators had vision sharper than modern insects” that while Dragonflies have up to 28,000 lenses in each eye they are “the freaks of the arthropods”.

Not only is the Anomalocaris a freak of arthropods, the Anomalocaris is a freak of evolution. Contrary to Darwin’s theory, the Anomalocaris suddenly appears then disappears in the Cambrian fossil record.  Rather than clarity, the resurrected Anomalocaris has delivered another insurrection within the disorganized ranks of the evolution industry.

Like the Archaeopteryx, the Anomalocaris highlights why evolution continues to be a theory in crisis. Today, theories of evolution continue only as a philosophy unsupported by scientific evidence. Robert Gaines, palaeobiologist at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who was not involved in the study understates the implications: “This could stir up a debate“.

The pristine condition of the Anomalocaris soft tissue, a freak of evolution, can best be explained by an act of creation that was instantaneously fossilized while still alive during the flood. The empirical scientific evidence from the Anomalocaris highlights even further why Darwin’s theory is increasingly irrelevant.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”. New Scientist ran the article: South African fossils halfway between ape and human.

To name the fossil, a competition was launched in South Africa. Omphemetse Keepile, a 17-year-old student from St. Mary’s School in Johannesburg. Keepile’s winning entry was selected from more than 15,000 submissions in a naming competition sponsored by Standard Bank and Palaeontological Scientific (PAST) in association with Wits University and the Department of Science and Technology. The winning name was Karabo that means “answer” in Setswana.

Once the excitement started settling, questions started circling. Does the fossil evidence really point to Karabo as an ancestor to humans?

In September, the Los Angeles Times hinted of an issue with the discovery with the title “Hominid fossils may shake up the human family tree”. Even the National Geographic response was guarded, weighing in with “Human Ancestor May Put Twist in Origin Story, New Studies Say”.

Paleontologists Timothy White of the University of California, Berkley, and Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution in Germany in an accompanying news article published in Science refuted the  claim that A. sediba represents a transitional species on the way up: “Given its late age and Australopithecus-grade anatomy, it contributes little to the understanding of the origin of genus Homo.” Picking up on the story, Time simply reported that “Tim White … believes A. Sediba bears no relationship to modern humans.”

Anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University noted, “Just because it shares a bit of anatomical morphology with Homo does not mean it is Homo or ancestral to Homo.”

Writing in The Telegraph (UK), science writer Tom Chivers entitled his article “Australopithecus sediba: can we stop calling it a ‘missing link?” concluding “What it is not, however, is a ‘missing link’.”

Within a week of publication, problems with the alleged fossil record gap resolution began to emerge. On top of the new problem list is the estimated dating of Karabo. Donald Johanson paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University and founder of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of California, Berkley, noted in The New York Times that the dating “places the origins of Homo firmly in eastern Africa… prior to the dating of A. sediba.” Presuming the dating is correct, then, this means that humans-like species came before Karabo, therefore the Karabo could not be an ancestor to humans.

Surprisingly, Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times picked up on the problem: “But the age of the fossils presents a problem. The researchers’ isotopic and magnetic dating showed the fossils were 1.977 million years old, about 300,000 years younger than a Homo habilis fossil that should have been their junior.”

Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University, Bernard Wood, concluded that the original reports are “a watershed in our understanding of human evolution, even if only to demonstrate that things are pretty complex”. Rather than clarifying human origins, Karabo complicates any presumed line of ancestral descent.

Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, resigned to the fact that the fossil evidence will never show the “leap to humans” because it happened “very suddenly”.

Sometimes, things never change. Eminent evolutionary paleontologist Steven Gould noted in The Panda’s Thumb: “The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

News for Karabo got even worse. Later in October, paleontologist Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published a critique on the Karabo fossil in the journal Nature.

Rejecting the contention that Karabo is a human ancestor, Spoor wrote that the “evidence seems at odds with the idea that A. sediba was involved in the first appearance of Homo… In spite of certain human-like characteristics – many of which are consistent with tree dwelling – the overwhelming evidence is that Au. sediba was a type of Australopithecine and thus an extinct ape rather than a human ancestor.” Karabo has now been unlinked as a human ancestor.

After more than 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, evidence for human ancestors in the fossil record continues to plague the evolution industry.

Like the Piltdown man, ascribing fossils to human ancestry has been tricky and, at times, even blatant fraud. With the technological advantages now available, the evolutionary value of Karabo has been clearly identified within a few weeks rather than years, or even decades. After promoted as evidence for evolution in the British Museum of Natural History in London, it took more than four decades to uncover that the Piltdown man fossil was simply a manufactured fraud sculptured from the skull of a man and a jaw of an orangutan.

Today, scientists are finding the words of D. V. Ager, past president of the Geological Association, to be even more in vogue: “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.’”

Since steroid hormones are known to perform sophisticated regulatory functions in microbes to man, the path of steroid evolution has entered center stage in the realm of investigative molecular biology.

Steroids hormones were first discovered in the mid-twentieth century by American chemist Edward Calvin Kendall while working at the Mayo Clinic. In 1950, Kendall and colleague Philip Hench, along with Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects.”

The action of steroids occurs by attaching to specific receptor sites. Steroids act like a socket wrench on a bolt−a wrench that is only useful when aligned on the right sized bolt.

Corticosteroids are a class of steroids found in vertebrates.  One of the corticosteroid classes are the glucocorticoids. Glucocorticoids (glucose + cortex + steroid) are essential for life, acting to regulate and support a range of important cardiovascular, metabolic, immunologic, and homeostatic functions.

This past June, evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll and colleagues in the journal PLoS Genetics published a paper entitled “Mechanisms for the Evolution of a Derived Function in the Ancestral Glucocorticoid Receptor”.

Using site-directed mutagenesis, X-ray crystallography, and computational analyses of protein stability to recapitulate and determine the effects of historical mutations, Carroll investigated a range of potential pathways for the evolution of ancestral steroid receptors by genetic mutations to the glucocorticoid receptor in vertebrates.

Carroll suggests that the evolution of the vertebrate glucocorticoid receptor from an ancestral receptor type likely required three specific genetic mutations. Surprisingly, two of the mutations, while maintaining function individually, actually inactivates the receptor. The third mutation simply neutralizes the inactivation effect of the two previous mutations.

“The combined effect of these mutations is so strong that a third mutation, apparently neutral in the ancestral background,” Carroll explains, “evolved to buffer their degenerative effects.”

Assuming these two dysfunctional mutation followed by a neutralizing genetic mutation did occur, what is the probability that this series of events occurred by chance alone?

In “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins contends that evolution proceeds blindly without direction−evolution is like a blind watchmaker. Dawkins wagers on chance.  Darwin disagrees: “Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents …, but this alone would never account for so habitual and large a degree of difference as that between the species of the same genus.”

The evidence, however, favors Darwin’s contention−not Dawkins.  Doug Axe, Director of the Biologic Institute, and molecular geneticist Ann Gauger in the paper “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzymes Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway” demonstrated that for the conversion of one functional molecule to another requires a minimum of seven genetic mutations.  Based on a realistic population genetics model, Axe and Gauger demonstrated that each mutation would require 10²⁷ years. That’s a ten followed by 27 zeros.

The question is what is the chance of converting one functional molecule to another? Assuming that the estimated age of the universe is 13 billion years−that’s 13,000,000,000 (13 followed by 9 zeros), the time required to convert Carroll’s ancestral receptor to a vertebrate glucocorticoid receptor exceeds the time limits of the universe. Carroll, of course, did not consider time limitations. The probable role of chance, contrary to Dawkin’s earlier presumption, far exceeds the time limits of the universe.

These time constraints on evolution by genetic mutations are just one of the reasons why evolutionary scientists have largely abandoned the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution originally developed during the twentieth century following the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

The 2008 Altenberg Summit hosted by Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University and Gerd B Műller of University of Vienna. The sixteen evolutionary attendees of the summit, while dismissing the Modern Synthesis, proposed a series of new theoretical frameworks for evolution.

While Carroll’s approach to solving theoretical evolutionary problems was noble, evolution through genetic mutations is no longer the leading theory of evolution. Currently, the problem in evolution circles today is that disbanded Modern Synthesis theory of evolution has not been replaced by another unifying theory of evolution. Evolution, the Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press discusses alternatives to the Modern Synthesis.

Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti succinctly summed up the problem with evolution: “There never really has been a scientific theory of evolution.”

Currently, a cohesive theory of evolution does not exist. Carroll’s recent experiments further highlights why genetic mutations are no longer considered a viable mechanism for biological evolution.

“I hear your mom was asking about evolution,” Perry said. “That’s a theory that is out there — and it’s got some gaps in it.”

Writing in The Guardian, an original supported of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution starting in the nineteenth century, liberal commentator Paul Krugman in his column, The Observer, ran crazy with the comment in the article entitled “The Republicans are now the anti-science party, on climate change and evolution, the party’s presidential hopefuls are wilfully ignorant.”

“Mr Perry, the governor of Texas,” according to Krugman, “recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as just a theory’, one that has “got some gaps in it”, an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists.” Really?

Apparently, Krugman is “wilfully ignorant” about the “majority of biologists”. The book, Evolution-the Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press explains in detail why the “gaps” in evolution theory still persist.

The Evolution-the Extended Synthesis was written by sixteen leading scientists from around the world that met in Altenberg, Austria during the summer of 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to develop a new unifying and comprehensive theory of evolution to eliminate the “gaps” as mentioned by Perry. This meeting has been since been popularly called the Altenberg-16 Summit.

What emerged from the summit meeting, ironically, were sixteen different theories rather than a one unifying and comprehensive theory. Today, amazingly there are more “gaps” in the theory  of evolution than at any time since the publication of The Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859.

Kruger, apparently, is not aware of the controversies with the evolution of theories over the past 150 years, including Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. No theory, to date, has arisen as an adequate unifying candidate to account for presumed evolution. Today, the field of evolution not only has gaps”, evolution is simply a philosophy without a scientific theory.

Ann Coulter was quick to jump into the debate with the blog posted on Human Events. However, unlike Kruger, Coulter in the post entitled “Liberals’ View of Darwin Unable to Evolve” on August 31^st with substance rather than typical extinct rhetoric produced by the government financed evolution industry.

From the genetic evidence, Coulter points out that scientist now recognize that “the vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully  ignorant” that mutations, the foundation of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis theory, have been abandoned as a theoretical mechanism for evolution.

Damaged genetic data cannot pave a road to progressively greater complexity as once anticipated by genetic evolutionists during the twentieth century.

As Coulter notes, not only do evolutionists have a problem with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis theory, they have problem with the fossil record: “We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record — for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale,” “But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the ‘trade secret’ of paleontology.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully ignorant” that the fossil record is a problem, not a solution, for the evolution industry.

How did evolutionists end up with a problem rather than a viable theory? Coulter explains: “Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully ignorant” that starting with Darwin,
the evolution industry has long since abandoned the scientific method. After the sparring, the obvious fact emerges, Krugman, not the Republicans, represent news media “anti-science” journalism.

Never has a theory played such leverage in a national presidential election campaign. Perhaps, Coulter is wrong - the Krugman camp is evolving into extinction.

Go campaign 2012.

“It’s a theory hat’s out there,” Perry replied. “It’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution.” Perry went on to explain: “I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

The Washington Post wasted no time to launch a panel debate hosted by Sally Quinn entitled “On  evolution, can religion evolve?” The infamous atheist from the UK, Richard Dawkins, quickly joined the debate noting “There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office… Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters”. At stake is the challenge by non-evolutionist to of critical thinking in public schools.

Paula Kirby, a former Christian, is a Scottish writer specializing in freethinking and secular organizations joined the debate with the declaration: “Evolution is a simple fact.” In reference to The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Kirby argued, “Education is about overcoming ignorance – so the idea of allowing ignorance to set the school curriculum and to perpetuate itself by continuing to teach generation after generation information that for the last 150 years we have known to be false.”

“Creationism,” Kirby continued, “is a purely religious doctrine, with no scientific underpinning whatsoever. Indeed, all the evidence points very strongly to its being false… and any teacher who tries to teach faith-based dogma [creation] in a science class is clearly demonstrating her unsuitability for the role.”

Apparently, Kirby is unaware of that Darwin was an agnostic, not an atheist, and Darwin acknowledged and referred to the Creator numerous times in his books and letters. Even in the last paragraph of The Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator.”

Contrary to Kirby’s  opinion, Darwin promoted, although non-biblical, what she would recognize as a faith-based approach. By Kirby’s standards, then, even Darwin would be “unsuitable” for teaching the evolution versus creation sides of the controversy.

Kirby opposes the blending of evolution with creation. Kirby vividly explains why the blending of evolution with any notion of creation by a loving God, as embraced by theistic evolutionists, like Francis Collins and his BioLogos Foundation, is simply an exercise in insanity.

Kirby poignantly recognizes that “evolution is not pretty, is not gentle, is not kind, is not compassionate, is not loving. Evolution is blind, and brutal, and callous. It is not an aspiration or a blueprint to live up to (we have to create those for ourselves): it is simply what happens, the
blind, inexorable forces of nature at work. An omnipotent deity who chose evolution by natural selection as the means by which to bring about the array of living creatures that populate the Earth today would be many things – but loving would not be one of them. Nor perfect. Nor compassionate. Nor merciful. Evolution produces some wondrously beautiful results; but it happens at the cost of unimaginable suffering on the part of countless billions of individuals and, indeed, whole species, 99 percent of which have so far become extinct. It is irreconcilable with a god of love.”

A loving God did create a perfect world that was subsequently destroyed by one man−Adam. Redemption from Adam’s destruction is only through one loving man, the “Second Adam”−Jesus.

Evolution is heating up the 2012 election campaign. Candidates espousing to be Christians will be pushed to clarify their position. At the center of the evolution debate is the answer to the question, is God loving? How could a loving God ever use evolution as the means of creation?

Let creation be taught alongside evolution. Let the evidence speak. The evidence is the same, only the interpretation is different. Let the students decide. The exclusion of popular ideas in public education would tragically institutionalize totalitarianism.

The cracks in evolution are now too big to ignore. Even Kirby’s perspective on evolution in The Washington Post contradicts Dawkins.

While Kirby argued that evolution “is not an aspiration or a blueprint”, Dawkins countered Kirby with “interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something – in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine”. For some evolutionists, life arose from chaos, while for other evolutionists life is an expression of design, somehow without a designer.

Like The Washington Post confusion, and as the Altenburg Summit during the summer of 2008 highlighted, the evolution industry is in a deeply divided crisis.

In Evolution, the Extended Synthesis, published by MIT Press, Alan Love of the University of Minnesota notes that “a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.” As even evolutionary biologist of the State University of New York, Stony Brook Douglas Futuyma notes, “like most scientific theories, evolutionary theory is incomplete.”

The evolution industry does not want anyone to know that a comprehensive theory of evolution does not even exist. That is why evolutionists are shaken to the core with the prospect of engaging in an evolution versus creation debate.

Evolution in the 2012 election will likely be a refining season for the evolution debate and the nature of the candidates. Let the evidence alone through the Scientific Method speak. Let evolution become center stage. Let the 2012 campaign begin.

Fossils provide the only relevant evidence validate the history of life on Earth. Nicholas J Butterfield, of Cambridge University explains –

Fossils provide the only direct record of ancient life.

The fossil record documents what life was like over the life span of the Earth’s history. In fact, the “inconceivably great” number of connecting transitional links in the fossil record was the litmus test for Charles Darwin’s proposed theory of natural selection –

By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected…. So that the number of intermediates and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory is true, such have lived upon the earth.

While that was the theory, Darwin knew that the available evidence, at the time, did not demonstrate connecting transitional links in the fossil record and actually served as an argument against his theory. In Chapter 10 The Origin of Species, Darwin explains -

In the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.

At the time, Darwin listed in The Origin of Species two reasons why the fossil record evidence at the time did not support his theory, 1) “natural collections [fossils] have been imperfectly made”, and 2), only a “small portion of the surface of the Earth has been geologically explored.”

Since Darwin’s original observations in the nineteenth century, scientists have been stunned to discover the amazing quality of fossil preservation, even in Cambrian fossils. Nicholas J Butterfield in the paper entitled “Exceptional Fossil Preservation and the Cambrian Explosion” published in Integrative & Comparative Biology, 2003, contrary to Darwin’s argument, found that even Cambrian fossil are of “exceptional preservation”. Butterfield found that the Cambrian fossil “yield exceptionally fine paleobiological resolution.” An example of this level of preservation can be seen in the Leanchoilia superlata,  a Cambrian fossil specimen.

Since Darwin wagered the second argument, in the aftermath of circumventing the Earth for more than 150 years, the “innumerable transitional links” continue to be just as elusive. As David Raup of the University of Chicago explains -

Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin’s time.

Stephen J Gould of Harvard University, agrees -

The fossil record doesn’t show gradual change and every paleontologist has known that.

Amazingly, even Douglas Futuyma of State University of New York at Stony Brook, points out the obvious –

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.

In 1976 Derek Ager, past-president of the British Geological Association, in an opening statement at their annual meeting pined “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student… have now been ‘debunked.’” Niles Eldredge, paleontologist of the American Museum of Natural History, added, “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to [have] happened.”

Since Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory,” the question is would Darwin believe in his own theory today?

The fossil flight is airborne. However, none of Darwin’s missing transitional links are in the cargo-hold. The time for loading in the cargo has come and gone. The evolution industry worn-out strategy of promoting “new fossil finds with new insights” come too late—the flight is gone. The game is over. No wonder Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti and editor of the longest running biology journal in the world reflecting back on the history of evolution confidently clarifies the record -

There never really has been a scientific theory of evolution.

Bernard Kettlewell in the early 1950’s was the first to design an experiment to test Darwin’s “excellent example of natural selection” in two types of wooded areas in England—polluted and nonpolluted. Kettlewood demonstrated light colored peppered moths survived better than darker colored moths in areas where the tree trucks were of lighter color, and conversely— darker colored moths survived better than lighter colored moths in areas where the tree trucks were of darker color.

This phenomenon became known as industrial melanism. Kettlewell announced the experiment as “the most striking evolutionary change ever actually witnessed in any organism.” Kettlewell later published an article in Scientific American in 1959 entitled “Darwin’s Missing Evidence.”

By the early 1960’s, pictures of Kettlewell’s peppered moths on tree trunks emerged as the hottest ticket in biology textbooks to demonstrate the scientific evidence for evolution through natural selection.

Kettlewood repeated the same experiment in the wooded areas surrounding Dorset while being filmed by Niko Tinbergen who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. In 1975, British geneticist Philip. M. Sheppard called the phenomenon “the most spectacular evolutionary change ever witnessed and recorded by man.”

The first red flag over Kettlewell’s experiment was raised in 1975 by D. R. Lees and E. R. Creed when they repeated the experiment. After performing the experiment, Lee and Creed were drawn to conclude, “Either the predation experiments and tests of conspicuousness to humans are misleading, or some factor or factors in addition to selective predation are responsible for maintaining the high melanic frequencies.”

In 1984, Finnish zoologist Kauri Mikkola, discrediting textbook pictures of moths on tree trucks, stated in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society that normally the Peppered Moth rests on “horizontal branches”… “high up in the canopies” and not on tree trunks as “studied” by Kettlewell.

In the same year, Italian biologists Giuseppe Sermonti and Paola Catastini criticized Kettlewood’s daytime releases, declaring, “the evidence Darwin lacked, Kettlewood also lacked.”

In revisiting the issue in 1999, Japanese biologist Atuhiro Sibatani likewise concluded in the European journal Rivista di Biologia that the “story of industrial melanism must be shelved at least for the time being, as a paradigm of neo-Darwinian evolution.” American biologist Theodore Sargent and colleagues in 1998 contended in Evolutionary Biology “that there is little persuasive evidence, in the form of rigorous and replicated observations, to support this explanation at the present time.” The evidence is clear. Kettlewell had fraudulently engineered his study original study.

Commenting on Kettlewell’s moth example of natural selection at work, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, in 1998, wrote in Nature, “From time to time, evolutionists re-examine a classical experimental study and find, to their horror, that it is flawed or downright wrong.”

Coyne concluded that Kettlewood’s “prize horse of evolution in our stable of examples” of evolution “is in bad shape, and while not yet ready for the glue factory, needs serious attention.” Coyne painted a bigger picture: “We must stop pretending we understand the course of natural selection.”

In 2005, Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti encapsulated Kettlewell’s experiment in the book Why a Fly is not a Horse and took the stance that the “fairy tale of the peppered moth is plausible, but untrue.”

Kettlewell’s moths, along with Haeckel’s embryos, British Museum’s Piltdown man, and National Geographic’s Archaeoraptor, stands as textbook example of fraud used as evidence to promote the theory of evolution as a fact.

During his lifetime, Kettlewell was appointed Senior Research Officer at the University of Oxford in 1954, lead the 1958 Expedition to Brazil marking the centennial of Darwin’s Origin of Species, awarded the Darwin Medal (USSR) in 1959 and the Mendel Medal (Czechoslovakia) in 1965, and nominated as an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University. Kettlewell died of a drug overdose in 1979.

No wonder, natural selection has critics. Swedish geneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria views “Selection [as] a political not a scientific concept. At the time of Darwin it fitted perfectly the expanding colonialism of Victorian England.”

For geneticist Scott Gilbert at Swarthmore College, “natural selection alone cannot explain how butterflies got their wings. How the turtle got its shell.”

Carl Sagan’s wife and a member of the National Academy of Science since 1983, Lynn Margulis concludes, “Natural selection occurs all the time. But natural selection is an elimination process.”

Stuart Newman, professor at the New York Medical College and Altenberg Summit participant sees that “No natural law may suffice to describe the full evolution of the biosphere, human economy, and the human culture.”

Following decades of investigation on natural selection, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have been driven to conclude in What Darwin Got Wrong, “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed”. Not only is flawed, even the concept of natural selection is simply an “intensional fallacy”.

Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti has declared, “Science has taken on the wager… and lost.” Kettlewell’s peppered moths are yet another textbook example of fraud by the evolution industry in a disparate attempt to provide evidence for evolution.

While evolution in the twentieth century was considered a theory in crisis, now the theory of evolution is in crisis without evidence—the emperor without cloths.

References available upon request

If Dobzhansky’s assertion is true, “How is it, then”, Moroz asks, “that so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity?”

Ryan Gregory, a professor at the University of Guelph Department of Integrative Biology in Ontario, Canada, mirrors Moroz observations. In a 2009 survey of over 200 science graduate students, Gregory discovered that only 20 to 30 percent of the students could apply elementary basic principles of evolution—School House Chaos.

Gregory laments, “We’re looking at a subset of people who have spent at least four years, sometimes even six or seven years, in science and still don’t necessarily have a full working understanding of basic evolutionary principles or scientific terms like ‘theories.’”

“Indeed, it appears that evolutionary biology and biosystematics courses,” Moroz argues, “that which deal with the most fundamental concepts in biology, have quietly lost their place of eminence within the biomedical curriculum—‘outcompeted’ by escalating specialization and the increasingly technical nature of many biological sciences.”

Technology has indeed now outstripped Dobzhansky’s evolutionary tenet of biology: result—the devolution of evolution. Gregory points to the origin of the evolution problem, “Misconceptions about natural selection still exist, even at the most advanced level.”

The reason “misconceptions” stems from a lack of consensus on what the theory of evolution. Incredibly, even the National Science Teachers Association [NSTA] the vanguard of evolution in public education has now been forced to cautiously approach this now obvious reality -

There is considerable debate about how evolution has taken place.

How can a curriculum on the mechanisms of evolution be developed for a theory in the absence of a consistent theory? Developing a consensus on the theory of evolution is now at the center of the evolution debate.

Current theoretical options available for the evolution industry for a mechanism for evolution include Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, Modern Synthesis theory, or the Third-Wave of evolution, one of the emerging extended Modern Synthesis theories highlighted by Massimo Pigliucci 2010 book entitled Evolution-The Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press following the Altenberg-16 Summit in the summer of 2008.

Jerry Coyne, evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, has little time for “these notions [Extended Synthesis theories] haven’t forced us to change the neo-Darwinian paradigm.” The Altenberg-16 attendees clearly disagree, and accepted the invitational challenge -

[W]e are also grappling with the increasing feeling – for example as reflected by an almost comical proliferation of ‘-omics,’ that we just don’t have the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the bewildering diversity and complexity of living organisms.

In other words, evidence observed at the highest intellectual levels within the evolution industry understands that advanced technologies have undermined the basic tenets of evolution promoted by Dobzhansky and Coyne. The Altenberg-16 includes – John Beatty of the University of British Columbia, Werner Callebaut of the University of Hasselt, Sergey Gavrilets of the University of Tennessee, Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University, David Jablonski of the University of Chicago, Marc Kirschner of Harvard University, Alan Love of the University of Minnesota, Gerd Műller of the University of Vienna, Stuart Newman of the New York Medical College, John Odling-Smee of Oxford University, Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University, Michael Purugganan of New York University, Eors Szathmary of Collegium Budapest, Gunter Wagner of Yale University, David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, Greg Wray of Duke University

From the Alternberg-16, what consensus developed? The answer is none, except that neo-Darwinism and Modern Synthesis theories were not consistent with the scientific evidence. Albert Einstein captured the essence of evolution science problem –

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

The theory of evolution was once a theory in crisis, now the theory of evolution is without a theory. Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, the chief editor of Rivista di Biologica the longest-running biology journal in the world, cuts to the chase –

Science has taken on the wager… and lost.

No wonder even graduate university science majors score poorly in evolution, as lamented by Moroz and Gregory, since no one knows what to teach, no less what to test. Modern day teachers and scientists should recognize that evolution is founded on a philosophy, not science –

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science, Charles Darwin, 1957

Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are similar up to the point of the great divide.

Although born nearly 200 years apart, Newton and Darwin were both Englishmen born into wealthy families, Newton was the son of a wealthy farmer, and Darwin was the son of a wealth physician.

Newton and Darwin were abandoned by their mother early in life: Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband at the age of three and Darwin’s mother died when he was just eight years old. Neither Newton nor Darwin gained respect from their fathers.

Newton and Darwin rejected careers promoted by their families: Newton was pushed to be a farmer, Darwin to be a physician.

Newton and Darwin were both graduates of Cambridge University: Newton from Trinity College, and Darwin from Christ’s College. Although both were trained to enter the clergy, neither did.

Newton and Darwin were members of the Royal Society: Newton served as President and Darwin was elected as a Fellow and awarded the Copley Medal.

Newton and Darwin published books changing the way the world is perceived: Newton is mostly noted for Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Latin for “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”; usually called the Principia), and Darwin is most noted for On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Survival of the Species.

Late in life, Newton and Darwin experienced challenging health issues. Newton’s eccentric actions later in life thought to be due to the massive amounts of mercury discovered in his body. Shortly after returning from the HMS Beagle voyage, Darwin began to experience repeating episodes of incapacitating stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, palpitations, trembling, particularly during times of stress such as attending meetings or making social visits. All attempts at treatment had little success. The cause of Darwin’s illness remains unknown.

Newton and Darwin received the highest English honor, burial in Westminster Abbey, London, the burial place of dignitaries, kings, and queens, adjacent to each other in the Scientist’s Corner.

The great divide between Newton and Darwin centers on the validity of the Bible. For Newton, nature is a declaration of God’s sovereignty and power –

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

While the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton’s best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said –

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.

During his lifetime, Newton was known for his exposé work on the books of Daniel and Revelations with his book Observations on Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John [Revelations].

To embrace evolution, however, Darwin was forced to abandon his newly founded “Christ College” biblical worldview. This generated the great Newton Darwin divide. While Newton embraced, Darwin rejected the validity of the Bible. Shortly after returning from the HMS Beagle voyage, writing in his Autobiography, Darwin explains -

I had gradually come by this time… to see the Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the world… to disbelieve in Christianity

Not only does Darwin reject the historical accuracy, Darwin declares that Christians are misguided idiots -

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

This Newton Darwin divide has since delivered divergent societal effects. The laws of motion and gravity discovered by Newton allowed Neil Alden Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr to walk on the Moon in 1969.

Darwin’s presumed law of natural selection, even though deemed “fatally flawed”, promoted the concept of “survival of the fittest” in the “struggle for life”—foundational concepts operationalized by Adolf Hitler in Germany, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao Tse-tung in China.

Newton, not Darwin, remains the influential scientist of all time. In a 2005 survey of members of Britain’s Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein, Newton won, Darwin was not even in the running.

The “Bible is an obstacle to scientific discovery” assertion is simply rooted in either ignorance or deception. The scientific evidence underscores the validity of Genesis account of creation—evidence the anti-God evolution industry is spending millions on to re-interpret as some sort of a random, yet, directed event. Theories are cheap, but, the sun will never rise in the West.

For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

Darwin was very clear; natural selection was developed as an extension of a philosophical belief in evolution, not the result of scientific analysis of the evidence. Natural selection was not based on scientific observations since Darwin knew that even the fossil record evidence actually contradicted his theory –

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; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be argued against my theory.

Natural selection, amazingly, was simply developed from fabricated evidence. Darwin explains how this worked –

In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.

Darwin was forced to abandon the Scientific Method to propose natural selection as a natural law of evolution even though the Scientific Method had been established in academic circles for more than 200 years by Francis Bacon. Use of “imaginary illustrations” is only suitable for science fiction, not for scientific analysis.

Since the laws of nature are autonomous from human reasoning, the underlying tenet of the Scientific Method in the discovery of natural laws is inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. But, Darwin abandoned inductive reasoning. In a letter to Asa Gray at Harvard University, Darwin honestly set his record straight -

What you hint at generally is very, very true: that my work is grievously hypothetical, and large parts are by no means worthy of being called induction.

While Darwin was concerned about his hypothetical deductive approach, he garnered widespread support, anyway. Even his older brother, Erasmus, just a week before the publication of The Origin of Species, consoled Darwin in a letter –

In fact, the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me / that if the facts won’t fit, why so much the worse for the facts, in my feeling.

The Origin of Species was certainly not a scientific work based on scientific principles; amazingly, even Darwin makes this point very clear –

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

As a consequence, during the 20 years while working on The Origin of Species, Darwin developed a litany of contradictions and highlighted in Darwin, Then and Now. In the final analysis, even Darwin recognized fundamental problems with natural selection as a mechanism for evolution -

Natural selection… is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered.

Even Charles Lyell, Darwin’s good friend and originator of old earth uniformitarianism with the book Principles of Geology, never endorsed natural selection, much to the distain of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s 19^th century bulldog. Darwin and Lyell were not alone, 20^th century scientists agree. Conrad H Waddington, a renowned evolutionary paleontologist, spells it out -

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.

Natural selection is the big Black Box of evolution. No one knows what it is, where it came from, or how it even works. Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti agrees with Waddington -

Natural selection could perhaps be invoked as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life… can only leave one dumbstruck.

In the 2010 book entitled What Darwin Got Wrong, even “card-carrying” atheists, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Palmarini, came to the very same conclusion –

We have both spent effort and ink… to show that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.

In the book, The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, Suzan Mazar explores the mechanism of natural selection with “esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he [only] said, ‘Natural selection occurs.’”

During the interview with Mazar, Lewontin only described the mechanism of natural selection by means of the following capitalism analogy -

Well, that where Darwin got the idea from, that’s for sure… He read the stock market every day… How do you think he made a living?

Mazar, in an interview with Anthony Lima-de-Faria, the award winning Swedish cytogeneticist, posed the question – “You’ve called natural selection ‘the opium of the biologist for over 100 years.’ … So why are most biologists and textbooks and scientific academies still embracing natural selection?”

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

Bruce Runnegar, paleontologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, cuts to the chase -

Natural selection is not a mechanism.

Natural selection was then, as it is now, irrelevant to the origin on species and, more importantly, the origin of life.

At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the topic of evolution was “in the air”, according to Charles Darwin, all 1,250 printed copies of the book were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species delivered a state of evolution critique on other popular theories.

In the nineteenth century, critiques on theories of evolution raged all the way into the chambers of the British Parliament. To resolve the debate the Parliament commissioned of the HMS Challenger, the largest international expedition ever convened, with the task of finding Darwin’s theoretical “innumerable” transitional links.

Ironically, Darwin was even a critic of his own theory. Based on the known fossil record evidence, in The Origin of Species Darwin argued: “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty”.

Embracing the debate, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger expedition, even though Darwin had ironically argued that the transitional links did not even exist in the known fossil record,

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; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be argued against my theory.

Arguments are honorable hallmarks, representative of the pursuit of truth. The Darwin legacy continued into the twenty-first century. During the summer of 2008, Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller convened 16 leading evolutionary scientists at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria to critique and “extended evolutionary synthesis”—an event now known as the Altenberg-16 Summit.

For Darwin, arguments against his theory were expected and accepted . “I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced,” Darwin noted in the Introduction to the 6^th Edition of The Origin of Species, “often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.”

Stuart Newman, one of the Alternberg-16 and open critic of Darwinism, in an interview with Suzan Mazur notes, notes that debate is essential: “Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is a risk of being sacrificed to the benefit of a dying theory.”

In the final analysis Newman concedes, “No natural law may suffice to describe the full evolution of the biosphere, human economy, and the human culture.” Newman advocates self-organization to explain the evolution of new species.

Newman’s theory is debatable, and the role of self-organization in evolution has not been widely accepted. Massimo Paittelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona and co-author of the book What Darwin Got Wrong disagrees with Newman:

Self-organization is of course important component, but not much has been discovered beyond generalities. The immense amount of intricate detail that geneticists and developmentalists have been discovering over the years dwarfs general metaphors like autoevolution and even self-organization.

The point is: debate continues a healthy Darwinian legacy. What are the mechanisms of evolution? No one knows. In the book Evolution-The Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press that summarizes the Altenberg discussions, Massimo Pigliucci highlights the current debate between competing theories of evolution.

While Darwin’s original theory of evolution died at the end of the 19^th century, the Darwin legacy of critique has continued, except within the extreme elements of the evolution industry.

In fact, extreme elements in the evolution industry are actively seeking to silence any challenge to Darwinian evolution. The latest is the firing of David Coppedge, system administrator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, for challenging Darwinian evolution. Intolerance raises the red flag of McCarthyism.

While the actions of NASA over the firing of David Coppedge are still under review, contact Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, to express your outrage over the firing of Coppedge at 202-358-1010 or send an email to charles.bolden@nasa.gov.

Intolerance of arguments by the extreme elements in the evolution industry are clearly anti-Darwinian and anti-science.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin describes the process of evolution: “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.”

Australian paleontologist, John A. Long article entitled “Dawn of the Deed”, published in the January 2011 issue of Scientific America, highlights his recent fossil fish findings in the grassy paddocks of the Gogo Station, a vast cattle ranch located in the heart of northwestern Australia.

Surprisingly, Long’s new findings, rather than demonstrating “slight, successive” changes, however, only stands to symbolize fossil record problem, a problem painfully known by Darwin, “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty”.

Long discovered that the armored fish, known as placoderms (plated skin), reproduced through internal fertilization, not spawning. Long explains, “The case was clear: we had found… an expectant mother fish and the oldest vertebrate embryo on record. We named the new fish Materpiscis attenboroughi.”

The fish presents an evolutionary problem, how could Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes give rise to internal fertilization and live births in the fish? The front-cover of Scientific America claims to have the answer—“How internal fertilization changed the course of evolution, the real sexual revolution.”

This front-cover statement set up for the article to describe how the “real sexual revolution” actually happened—but doesn’t. For Long, “[t]hese findings are casting new light on the origin of our own reproductive organs and other body parts.”

The “casting new light” phrase is a typical euphemistic tactic in the evolution industry when the scientific evidence contradicts the current theory of evolution. “It is hard not feel astonished,” Long explains, “when some major trait turns out to have evolved much earlier than was thought.” Long was “astonished” because the fossil fish finding contradicts Darwin’s theory.

What happened to Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes? Long explains, “Looking at the bigger evolutionary picture, my colleagues and I could not help but notice that the new timing for the origin of copulation dovetailed with the explosion of diversity in the arthrodire fishes—the first big species radiation of any jawed animal in the fossil record.”

In place of Darwinian “slight, successive” evolutionary changes, Long’s evidence points to an “explosion of diversity”—like a Cambrian explosion. Darwin recognized the Cambrian explosion only as a problem: “it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited… several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”

Evolutionary issues with the fossil record evidence as observed by Darwin, continue unchanged today, more than 150 years later. Critical of his own theory, Darwin writes -

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; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be argued against my theory.

Long’s fish fossil evidence, rather than supporting, contradicts and undermines the essential tenets of Darwinian evolution.

The “how internal fertilization changed the course of evolution, the real sexual revolution” front-cover set up is only answered by more questions. Long explains:

Many questions about the origin and evolution of internal fertilization in vertebrates remain

Scientists still do not know exactly how placoderms made the transition from spawning to internal fertilization.

Simply stated, Long’s article does not explain the “hows” of evolution as implied on the front-cover. Clearly, Scientific America is rooted in deceptive science tabloid journalism—like the Archaeoraptor saga in National Geographic. The history of evolution is a legacy of fraud.

The evolution industry only continues to exist on smoking-mirror scientific evidence. The problem is the theory of evolution. Small wonder why Swedish cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria came to the following conclusion -

There has never been a theory of evolution.

The “Dawn of the Deed” is “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—not a theory.

Stressing the importance of the fossil record to the theory of evolution Charles Darwin wrote – “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.”

Evidence for these “numerous, successive, slight modifications” in the fossil record remains a cornerstone to establish scientifically the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized, however, that the fossil record, “not being blended together by innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Since 1859, the unsuccessful search through the fossil record for the expected intermediate or transitional links has produced a legacy of fraud.

In the journal Science (December 24, 2010), in the article entitled “Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem”, Richard Stone highlights the current state of fossil fraud in China: “Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China. But Science has learned that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums. One paleontologist estimates that more than 80% of marine reptile specimens now on display in Chinese museums have been ‘altered or artificially combined to varying degrees.’”

Over the past century, the Darwinian theory of evolution has played a significant role in China. While China was largely isolated when The Origin of Species was published in 1859, forty years later, however, a man by the name of Yan Fu introduced Darwinian evolution into China.

Fu was convinced that China must become acquainted with the philosophy of Darwinism in order that the country might survive by its own power, not relying on uncontrollable events or “destiny”. Fu extended Darwin’s biological theory of evolution to include social evolution, a logical application—Social Darwinism.

Educated in England, Yen Fu eventually became the most famous Social Darwinist in China. His message was well received by the Chinese. The 1890’s were a period of reform for China, a time of scrutinizing philosophies. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, an influential spokesperson for the reform movement, began to promote Darwinian evolution.

Liang Ch’i-ch’ao fled China when the Manchu Empress Dowager attempted to subdue the reform movement; however, he continued to publish writings that were secretly imported to the people of China. Along with the philosophy of Karl Marx, the Chinese eventually revolted against the Manchu and the result was a constant warring of powers over the next 50 years—“survival of the fittest”.

Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson captured the essence of “survival of the fittest” in the now famous phrase—“Nature red in tooth and claw.”

The now infamous “Archaeoraptor” finding, published in the National Geographic Magazine, November 1999, was a product of China. The amazing fossil discovery, “Archaeoraptor”, a new species that appeared to be part dinosaur, part bird, was claimed to be the long sought after missing link between the two.

Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, and one of the scientists involved in the examination of Archaeoraptor for National Geographic, boasted:  “We’re looking at the first dinosaur that was capable of flying.”

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.”

Tragically, copies of the National Geographic November 1999 issue in libraries worldwide do not have the warning alert.

The “Archaeoraptor” illustrates the problem when the theory dominates a scientific investigation. Darwin touted this same approach in a letter to John Scott in 1863: “I would suggest to you the advantage … let the theory guide your observations.”

Since then, Darwinism has continued, as recommended by Darwin – let the theory guide the interpretation of the facts—an approach incompatible with the Scientific Method.

“Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem” by Richard Stone serves as reminder: China, along with the evolution industry, starting with the Piltdown man, has developed a profitable business of re-inventing and selling the “scientific” evidence they “discovered.”

The fossil record has been as a problem for evolution, then and now

Critical of his own work, in a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Charles Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.”

For Darwin, the origin of life was the result of spontaneous generation. The twenty-first century version is now more popularly referred to as abiogenesis, or self-organization.

In a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1871, Charles Darwin speculating on the concept of spontaneous generation of life, wrote that life may have begun in a “warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The underlying framework of the origin of life for Darwin was self-organization.

This self-organization concept can be traced to the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). For Aristotle, material can be transformed by the ‘spontaneous action of Nature’ into living animals.

The concept had had a long life. In the 18^th century, French evolutionist and elite member of The French Academy of Sciences, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, continued to espouse Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation.

Spontaneous generation was popular even in the 19^th century even though theory had been challenged by Italian scientists, Francesco Redi and Lazzaro Spallanzani. Thomas Huxley, best known as Darwin’s Bulldog, wrote “… if it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time… I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter.”

In 1859, Louis Pasteur entered a contest sponsored by The French Academy of Sciences to examine the now hotly contested spontaneous generation controversy, the same year as the publication of The Origin of Species. In the contest, Pasteur decisively undermined the concept of spontaneous generation.

Inspired by Louis Pasteur‘s new “germ theory” findings, to combat surgical infections, Joseph Lister in 1867 published in the paper entitled Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, introduced the principles of the modern antiseptic surgical method—the foundation of modern surgery.

Contrary to the scientific evidence, while the concept of “spontaneous generation” acquired some new names, self-organization and abiogenesis, spontaneous generation continues to be a foundational theory in the evolution industry. The Stanley Miller experiment in 1953 underscores the importance of Darwin’s self-organization framework.

Chrisantha Fernando and Eör Szathmáry, of the Altenberg-16 group, in the book entitled Evolution The Extended Synthesis (2010) edited by Massimo Pigliucci continues Darwin’s self-organization mantra: “Biology has its roots in chemistry”—chemistry gives rise to life.

While self-organization is certainly theoretical possibility, the question is whether self-organization can be considered a scientifically probable event. During the late 20^th century, scientists began to estimate the probability of self-organization based on the requirements of the simplest forms of life.

Since the simplest cell requires biologically active proteins made from amino-acid building blocks. Evidence from molecular biology during the late 20^th century has demonstrated that amino-acids must be arranged in specific sequences for the protein to be biologically functional.

Knowing that the known 20 biologically essential amino-acids must be in a specific sequence, the probability of amino-acids self-organizing into a biologically functional protein can be calculated.

Starting with the basics, we know that there are four ways to combine amino-acids A and B to make two-amino acid combinations (AB, BA, AA, and BB) and there are eight ways to make three-amino-acid combinations (AAA, AAB, ABB, ABA, BAA, BBA, BAB, BBB), and sixteen ways to make four-amino-acid combinations. The number of combinations grows geometrically, 2², 2³, 2⁴, and so on. The longer the string of amino acids the greater is the number of possible combinations.

Since 20 different types of amino-acid are typically incorporated into a protein molecule, there are 20², or 400 ways to make a two-amino-acid combination. Similarly, there are 20³, or 8,000, way to make a three-amino acid sequence, and 20⁴, or 160,000, ways to make a sequence four-amino-acids long protein, and so on. Since simple proteins typically have at least 150 amino acids, the number of ways to arrange a simple protein exponentially increases.

As the number of ways increases, the probability decreases. Stephen C Meyer in the book entitled Signature in the Cell (2009) estimates the probability for the self-organization of just one 150 amino-acid long protein molecule from the 20 essential amino-acids -

On the assumption that each site in a protein chain requires a particular amino acid, the probability of attaining a particular protein 150 amino acids long would be (1/20)¹⁵⁰, or roughly 1 chance in 10¹⁹⁵.

Meyers explains: “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 the odds of finding a single specified particle [protein] among all the particles in the universe.”

Since there are only 10⁸⁰ protons, neutrons, and electrons in the observable universe, the chance of self-organizing one protein with 150 amino acids far exceeds the resources in the universe. Dean Kenyon, biophysicist from Stanford University, places this observation into context –

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.

Since self-organization of a protein exceeds the scientific probability of 10⁸⁰ of the universe,  Darwin’s framework of self-organization will continue as a hot topic, but only as philosophical imperative of the evolution industry—not a scientific probability

B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

Surprisingly, along with the interest in the dinosaur-bird connection, more importantly, in the B-rex fossil fragments were found cells and tissues that have remained intact with flexibility and elasticity—a characteristic not thought to be possible after lying in the ground 68 million years.

The evidence is shaking up the paleontology world. “I am quite aware that according to conventional wisdom and models of fossilization, these structures aren’t supposed to be there, but there they are,” said Schweitzer in a newswise interview in 2005. “I was pretty shocked.”

Horner, expanding on Schweitzer’s comments said, “I see this as a really important discovery that will change our methods of collecting and study. We can truly begin asking biomolecular questions. The discovery also means that our preconceived ideas about preservation were wrong.”

Scientists are now facing the challenge that either fossil preservation of cells, also known as soft-tissue, for millions years is possible, or B-rex is only thousands of years old—not millions of years.

Since the medullary tissue in the bone marrow of B-rex is similar to birds, after interviewing Horner, Schweitzer and Carroll, Lesley Stahl declared that the “dinosaur-bird connection is largely settled now”—in other words, birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Charles Darwin addressed the dinosaur-bird evolution theory in The Origin of Species: “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.”

At the time, the newly discovered Archaeopteryx fossil in Germany fueled Darwin’s origin of bird speculation. The dinosaur-bird theory of evolution has been the center of research since the fourth edition of The Origin of Species in 1866,

In the book Historical Geology, Carl Dunbar wrote in 1961 that it would be difficult to find a more perfect link or “cogent proof” of the reptilian ancestry of the birds. To paleontologist Pat Shipman, the Archaeopteryx is “more than the world’s most beautiful fossil … [it is] an icon—a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself. It is the First Bird.”

As the scientific evidence continued to mount later in the twentieth century, however, the dinosaur-bird theory of evolution had faded into an evolutionary fable.

At the center of the missing link, status of the Archaeopteryx was feather. According to Darwin, natural selection acts only by “successive, slight modification.” The question is how did the reptile scale change by “slight, successive” changes into a feather?

By the early 1970s, paleontologists began to seriously question the “transitional link” status of the Archaeopteryx scale-feather. In the words of Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974): “How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.”

Alan Feduccia and colleagues, writing in the journal Science in 1979, in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the Archaeopteryx feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

From the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly”—not a transitional dinosaur-bird.

Since a dinosaur-bird paleontology, molecular biology, or genetic transitional link does not exist beyond the speculations of Horner, Schweitzer, and Carroll, had Lesley Stahl known the larger debate, the more logical declaration would have been, the “dinosaur-bird evolutionary theory continues to be largely disconnected from the evidence.”

The evolution industry continues scrambling to retrofit evidence into the ever elusive evolution paradigm—a philosophical imperative for the 60 Minute intellectual elite.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

In 2008, Russian archeologists working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia uncovered a small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, initially dubbed as the “X-woman”. A tooth had been previously unearthed in the same cave area.

Interest in the project began to develop momentum. In March of this year, Kate Wong in Scientific America published an article entitled “No Bones about It: Ancient DNA from Siberia Hints at Previously Unknown Human Relative”—hinting at an ancestral evolutionary relationship to humans. Early this year, expectations were running high that the pinky and tooth was eventually going to demonstrate a human evolution link simply by DNA analysis.

To demonstrate the molecular “slight, successive” link to humans, a team of scientists led by David Reich, Richard Green, Johannes Krause along with Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) extracted from the fragment.

The investigators were startled by the findings. Contrary to initial expectations, the report published in the December 23 issue of the journal Nature found that fossilized finger “was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians” and that the tooth was “distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans”.

“We thought it was a mistake when we first saw it,” Reich wrote. “But it’s real.”

Richard Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “The story [human evolution] now gets a bit more complicated.”

Evidence from the Denisova finger mtDNA, rather than pointing to “slight, successive” changes in human evolution, highlights a deeper evolutionary dilemma—there are no known “slight, successive” molecular changes accounting for human evolution.

At a news conference, Krause said that the lab, sequencing mtDNA from several samples, was startled to discover the unexpected. “The sequence was similar to humans, but very distinct from humans,” he said. After performing many tests to ensure the results were not an artifact, “I called Svante on his mobile [phone] and told him to sit down.”

Pääbo, who was in the U.S. at the time, said, “It was absolutely amazing. At first, I didn’t believe him. I thought he was pulling my leg…. This was some new creature that has not been on our radar screens so far.”

Professor Chris Stringer, human origins researcher at London‘s Natural History Museum and one of the leading proponents of the recent single-origin hypothesis, remarked: “This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia.”

Twenty-eight coauthors worked on the paper, including researchers from Germany, Spain, China, Russia, Canada, and the United States. This research was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Krekeler Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

This highly financed international evolution industry initiative, following in the legend of the HMS Challenger, once again only found new species—not “missing links”. The fossil, now known as Denisova hominin, is “very distinct from humans” and certainly not one of the “slight, successive” human ancestors as envisioned by Darwin.

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

Of all the alleged facts in The Origin of Species, for Charles Darwin embryology stands out as the most important “fact”. In a letter to Asa Gray in September 1860, Darwin wrote – “embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory.

Darwin was influenced by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the now-famous phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. In other words, in the embryo the ontology (development) of the new offspring retraces (recapitulates) all stages representing its alleged evolutionary ancestors (phylogeny) from the microbe to man. Haeckel called the theory the “biogenetic law”.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin gave credit for this theory to Haeckel. “Professor Haeckel in his “Generelle Morphologie” and in [other] works has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters [to establish evolutionary sequences].”

According to Haeckel, in the embryo is a silent movie of our alleged ancestral history—evolution in action. Through his polished and widely publicized drawings, Haeckel attempted to show that all embryos are identical in the earliest stages followed by progressive “slight, successive” changes of increasing differential complexity—the alleged retracing of evolution.

Much has happened since 1859, however. This week, ScienceDaily featured an article entitled “Similarities in the Embryonic Development of Various Animal Species Are Also Found at Molecular Level”. The article was referring two research papers published in the journal Nature, December. 9, 2010 by the Max Planck Institute that challenge the basic tenets of Haeckel’s theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

In these two studies headed by the Max Planck Institute scientists Alex T. Kalinka and Tomislav Domazet,  did not find progressive “slight, successive” changes of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” as proposed by Haeckel. Rather, at mid-point in development in a range of species studied, the embryos develop to be similar—not progressively different.

Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News ran the coverage of the two papers as “Embryos Show All Animals Share Ancient Genes” noting “embryos for humans and other animals often look alike at certain developmental stages” slamming, once again, Haeckel’s concept of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

These two groups of scientists, including researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics in Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, discovered similar morphological appearance and gene expression—rather than “slight, successive” evolutionary changes in the embryo.

In the range of different species studied, the researchers found that the same genes were expressed during the middle phase, known as the “phylotypic period,” producing a classic “hour-glass model” appearance in all the species investigated.

Haeckels’ theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” has always been a rocky road. As early as 1894,  embryologist Adam Sedgwick recognized that Haeckel’s theory was “not in accordance with the facts of development.” Sedgwick explained in 1909 – “The recapitulation theory originated as a deduction from the evolutionary theory and as a deduction it still remains.” In other words, in the world of evolution, the importance of the theory supersedes the evidence.

By 1909, with the handwriting on the wall, Haeckel made the following confession published as a letter in the Munchener Allegemeine Zeitung, an international weekly publication for the sciences and arts –

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.

For Haeckel, Darwin and the emerging evolution industry, the theory of evolution dominated the intereptation of the evidence—a fundamental violation of the Scientific Method. Eminent evolutionist Stephen Gould in the March 2000 issue of Natural History declared Haeckel’s drawings as “outright falsification”. Writing for Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True” blog, even Matthew Cobb professor at the University of Manchester even agrees.

The Max Planck Institute discovery slams the theroretical evolutionary concept of “slight, successive” changes—the evidence contradicts the theory. Evidence for evolution is not found in morphology or molecules. “At a molecular level,” Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton, explains, “there is no trace of the evolutionary transition from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal.”

“The more one approaches the molecular level in the study of living things,” Richard Dickerson, as director of molecular biology at the University of Minnesota pointed out, “the more similar they appear, and the less important the differences.”

As technological advances continue, the evolution industry is finding the relevance of the neo-Darwinian classic “slight, successive” genetic changes as an evolutionary mechanism pushed ever closer to the edge of extinction. A theoretical mechanism for evolution is more elusive in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth century.

The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by “slight, successive” changes occuring through mutation and natural selection is no longer sufficient. Incredibly, even the National Science Teachers Association [NSTA], the vanguard of evolution in public education, has now been forced to cautiously approach the now obvious reality –

There is considerable debate about how evolution has taken place.

Pushing the popular neo-Darwinian theory of evolution off the edge, cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria, decorated by the Swedish king as “Knight of the Order of the North Star” for his discoveries on the molecular organization of the chromosome, declared -

There has never been a theory of evolution.

Haeckel is slammed, once again, this time by the Max Planck Institute. Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without a theory. Evolution continues only a “fact” in the realm of philosophy.

Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin of life continues.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon (shown on the left), supported by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology (Exo/Evo) Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is a researcher working with programs to determining the evolution of genes, metabolic pathways, and microbial species on Earth in order to understand the potential for life on other worlds.

Wolfe-Simon’s pending announcement of a recent discovery was touted as the first time in the history of biology that an organism has been found to use a different element to build one of its most basic structures.

The announcement seized immediate media attention. The NASA media advisory on November 29 stated: “NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.”

The media expected an announcement for the discovery of extraterrestrial life—a decades long NASA goal. MSNBC primetime news claimed that scientists that have discovered “life as we do not know it”. The paper appeared in the December 2nd issue of “Science Express” and is slated for publication in the journal Science.

The Wall Street Journal reported that “[s]o great was the media stampede that even the White House and members of Congress were calling on NASA to clarify. Even a Nature news article suggests “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life.”

As it turned out, however, NASA was only talking about a study at Mono Lake, California, showing evidence for a microbe using arsenic in the DNA or RNA rather than phosphorus. Crazy enough, the news was not news. A 2004 paper published in Microbiology Ecology entitled, “The Microbial Arsenic Cycle in Mono Lake, California” by Ronald S. Oremland, et. al., had already detailed how microbes use arsenic and phosphorus.

At first, the controversy over NASA’s arsenic-loving bugs centered on whether the space agency had found astrobiological evidence for aliens. Since then, the debate has ping-ponged the other way, with scientists questioning whether the bacteria even love arsenic at all.

A sampling of opinions -

Premature - Scientific American‘s Alla Katsnelson says the findings NASA released last week were incomplete and at times contradictory. Dubious to begin with, the results of the study were “communicated to non-specialists” in a slapdash manner that suggested a “new chemistry of life” had been discovered, a claim that was “at best premature.” Katsnelson notes the study fails to identify any compounds containing arsenic, a glaring oversight considering “the team could have directly confirmed or disproved the presence of arsenic in the DNA or RNA using targeted mass spectrometry.” The researchers also ignore indications in their own data that, rather than building biomolecules, the bacteria is “simply absorbing and isolating arsenate while making use of the trace phosphates in its environments.”

Very Flawed – Carl Zimmer at Slate blames the researchers for failing to take “basic precautions to avoid misleading results … when the NASA scientists took the DNA out of the bacteria, for example, they ought to have taken extra steps to wash away any other kinds of molecules. Without these precautions, arsenic could have simply glommed to the DNA, like gum on a shoe.” The title of Zimmers article was “This Paper Should Not Have Been Published“.

Nonsense – University of British Columbia microbiology professor Rosie Redfield eviscerates the paper in a detailed review posted to her research blog. “Basically,” she writes, “[the paper] doesn’t present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule).” What it does offer is “lots of flim-flam … if this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back.”

Nothing New – Paul Davies of NASA and Arizona State University admits the bacterium is not a new life form: “It can grow with either phosphorous or arsenic. That makes it very peculiar, though it falls short of being some form of truly ‘alien’ life belonging to a different tree of life with a separate origin.” to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”

Media’s Fault – Discover‘s Jennifer Welsh blames the press for misrepresenting the nature of the study featuring the “incredibly misleading article” published on The Huffington Post entitled – “NASA Announcement LIVE: New Life Form Discovered (VIDEO)”.  

Plenty of Blame – The Guardian‘s Martin Robbins suggests, to treat the whole thing as a cautionary tale, “a story of everything that’s wrong about the relationship between science, peer review, the world of publishing, and the mainstream and independent branches of the media in 2010.”

The government supported evolution industry, driven by a dying paradigm in the disparate pursuit to find Darwin’s “little pond” for the origins of life, is found pressured into “shooting itself in the foot”, once again. NASA hallucinations on arsenic are reminiscent of England’s infamous Piltdown man fiasco circulated nearly 100 years ago.