After
the release of a startling new scientific study, it seems more
appropriate to ask a question there was already previous reason for
asking. The question is: have prevailing explanations in biology
flunked the genome tests?
The
new study was published in the scientific journal Human Evolution.
According to a news report on it,
“The
study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10
species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to
200,000 years ago.” The report quotes one of the authors as saying,
“"This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it
as hard as I could.” Given an age of more than four billion years for our planet, you can describe the paper as a "most species young" study, since 200,000 years is less than a ten thousandth of the Earth's age.
The
press story on the study does not tell us that this study's findings
are inconsistent with the claims of orthodox Darwinism, other than to
give us a section heading of “Darwin perplexed.” But it is rather
clear why such a study clashes with Darwinist orthodoxy.
Darwinism
has always maintained that species appear very gradually, because of
an accumulation of random mutations that occur over vast periods of
times. Almost all random mutations have no effect or a harmful
effect. A beneficial random mutation must be extremely rare. Useful
biological innovations would actually require combinations of random
mutations having a coordinated beneficial effect. Such things should
be as rare as monkeys typing out useful software subroutines by
randomly striking the keys of a keyboard. But we have been told that
such incredibly improbable combinations might occur given vast
eons of time.
Given
this situation, we can say that the plausibility of Darwinism as an
explanation of biological innovations is inversely proportional to
the speed at which such innovations occur. A Darwinist trying to
explain some large set of biological innovations occurring within a
span of a million years must make assertions 100 times less plausible
than the same person trying to explain these innovations occurring
over a time span of 100 million years. This is why the Cambrian
Explosion has always been a thorn in the side of evolutionary
biologists. During the Cambrian Explosion, most of the animal phyla
appeared within a relatively short period of time, only about 5 or 10 million years. It has seemed to many that such an
“organization explosion” could not have occurred so quickly under
Darwinian assumptions.
If
the new study is correct, we would have to assume that there was some
burst of biological innovation causing 90% of the world's species to
originate in the past 200,000 years. Such an “organization
explosion” would be as hard to explain as the Cambrian Explosion.
In terms of body plans, it would involve a smaller amount of
innovation, but the time period would be much shorter than that of
the Cambrian Explosion.
The
news report on the article attempts clumsily to suggest some things
that might explain this explosion of innovation. The report states
the following:
The
last statement is literally true, but it is a statement very prone
to give someone who hears it a very wrong idea. The chance of a
genetic innovation occurring by random mutations is not at all
affected by any of the things mentioned. But if by some miracle of
luck some useful genetic innovation had occurred, it might be more
likely to survive if, for example, there were fewer competitors.
Similarly, the chance of trees falling in a forest and forming by
chance into a log cabin will not at all be affected by whether there
are earthquakes or forest fires in the forest, but if such a miracle
of luck happens to occur, the chance of such a randomly-formed log
cabin surviving might be affected by the rate of earthquakes or forest fires. There are, in fact, no
environmental conditions that would ever make it more likely that
random mutations would be able to produce a burst of biological
innovation.
So
the finding of the study (that 90% of current species appeared in the
past 200,000 years) is in conflict with the claims of Darwinian
orthodoxy. As I stated before, the plausibility of Darwinian explanations is
inversely proportional to the speed at which biological innovations
occur. The more biological innovation occurring in a relatively
short time span, the less plausible Darwinism is. A phys.org article discussing a previous study has the headline “Not so fast:
researchers find that lasting evolutionary change takes about one million
years.” So how could so many species have originated in less than
200,000 years?
The
fact that incredibly improbable innovations by random mutations do
not become more probable after a mass extinction event is one
difficulty. Another difficulty is that we know of no mass extinction
event around 200,000 years ago. Geologists do not claim that the
earth's environment suddenly changed around that time. The event
that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs occurred millions of years
earlier. A look at a graph of temperature changes in the past million years will show nothing special between 50,000 BC and 300,000 BC.
One
of the study authors attempts to smooth things over so that readers
are not too shocked by the findings of his study. The news story
states the following:
“The
simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said
Stoeckle. "It is more likely that—at all times in
evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively
recently."
But that idea does not work, for it requires us to believe in biological innovation occurring at a rate gigantically more rapid than Darwinism can account for. Such an idea also is inconsistent with the fossil record, which does not show new species appearing at even a tenth of a rate so rapid (except for the Cambrian Explosion).
The news story ends by mentioning another anomaly found by the study:
And
yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very
clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between."If
individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler.
"They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence
space."The absence of "in-between" species is
something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.
The problem in question is a gigantic one for orthodox Darwinian explanations. I have various Java programs that simulate something like random evolution. In one of these programs I start out with a group of simulated organisms consisting of a “DNA string” with 100 mainly random characters. The program makes random mutations on this “DNA,” and checks for the appearance of useful features. So, for example, if this DNA string contains the letters “two eyes” or “two ears” or “two legs” or “two arms” or “two lungs,” then the organism with such a DNA becomes more likely to reproduce (and the more such useful features, the more likely the simulated organism will be to reproduce). Under program conditions similar to that which might occur in the natural world, the program might run for 2000 simulated generations without any useful innovations appearing. But suppose I modify the program to make it much more easy for biological innovations to occur, making things less realistic. And suppose I start out with simulated organisms that have a few useful features. What I then find is that there occurs a very strong amount of what we may call species fragmentation.
So, for example, imagine I start out with a population of 10,000 simulated organisms that each have no useful features but “eyes” and “legs.” If I then run 2000 simulated generations, and “load the dice” so that biological innovations can occur way more easily, I will not end up with something like a new species with eyes, legs, and one or two other features. Instead I will get a situation in which the final population is rather “all over the map.” Maybe 1000 simulated organisms will have eyes and legs, another 1000 will have only eyes, another 1000 will have only legs, another 1000 will have eyes and ears but no legs, another 1000 will have only legs and arms but no eyes or ears, and so forth. This type of “species fragmentation” is exactly what should occur under random evolution whenever it is easy enough for innovation to occur relatively rapidly. But that is not what we see in nature. Instead, there are very few or no “in-between” species, and, as the study notes, species are like galaxies in space and the organisms of that species like stars of that galaxy, with no stars between the galaxies.
Then
there was another way in which the recent study suggested our
biology experts are not on the right track. The news report
states the following:
It
is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung
populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically
diverse over time. But is that true? "The answer is no,"
said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal
Human Evolution. For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million
house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is
about the same," he told AFP.
But how can this be if genetic diversity is caused by random mutations, as Darwinism claims? There are only a certain number of random mutations that occur per 100,000 organisms. So if genetic diversity was really caused by random mutations, we should inevitably expect that a species with billions of organisms should have many times more genetic diversity than a species with a small population. As this paper based on Darwinian principles states, “Genetic theory predicts that levels of genetic variation should increase with effective population size.” But according to the new Human Evolution study, that's not true. Instead, we have an anomaly that has been called Lewontin's paradox.
So for these reasons the new
Human Evolution study is a kind of trifecta of aggravation for the
mainstream biologist, something that may make such a person tear his or her hair out.
But at the Collective Evolution site, a writer is happy about the study, suggesting it may support the idea of extraterrestrial involvement with evolution.
The
recent study is not the first genetic study to confound Darwinian
predictions. An interesting series of studies has attempted to look
for evidence of what are called “classic sweeps” in the genomes
of human DNA. A classic sweep is what would occur if some useful new
feature were to occur because of one or more random mutations in the
DNA of one organism of a population, with the feature becoming more
and more common in the population, because of some benefit it
provided that increased the likelihood of survival and reproduction.
When the “classic sweep” has finished, the entire population has
the beneficial feature. It has long been an assumption of orthodox
Darwinists that most biological innovations appear through such
“classic sweeps,” also called “classic selective sweeps.” But
a 2011 study in the journal Science had the title “Classic
Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution.” By “recent
human evolution” the study meant the past 250,000 years.
Such
a result is very much at odds with the predictions of Darwinism. For
an orthodox Darwinist, if there was very few classic selective sweeps
in humans during the past 200,000 years, that's news as bad as it
would be for a UFO or SETI enthusiast if we were to find that
Earth-sized planets are rare in the habitable zone of other stars.
A
more recent scientific study in 2014 found there was virtually no
sign of adaptive evolution in the
human genome. The paper published in a mainstream science journal
looked for traces of natural selection by looking for something called
“fixed adaptive substitutions” in human DNA. The paper stated,
“Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive
substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately
0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies.” It's hard to imagine a bigger fail or flop for Darwinian explanations. If such explanations were correct, we would have expected to find such signs of adaptive evolution in a large fraction of the human genome, not a fifth of one percent.
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