Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.  Charles Darwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While evoking images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, this week J. Craig Venter of the Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md said,

We’re here to announce the first synthetic cell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA.

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

Neanderthals and modern humans were separate species.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx wrote back to Engels on December 19, 1860 -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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