Ten Fumbles of the "Evolution 101" Web Pages

This is a year in which leading biology authorities have displayed astonishing incompetence about simple matters relating to the coronavirus. As discussed in my posts here and here, such authorities have been stumbling around all over the place in what we might call a comedy of errors, were not the results of their confusion so deadly. The latest twist this week is that the Center for Disease Control issued a statement finally describing coronavirus as airborne, causing many to say, "It's about bloody time." But then a few days later the CDC reversed their new position, saying it was an error. NBC News says, "The move is yet another misstep for the nation's leading public health agency, which recently reversed its guidance for the second time on testing asymptomatic people for the coronavirus." 

A year in which there have been so many huge errors by our biology authorities regarding elementary matters pertaining to coronavirus may be a good year for us to take a hard critical look at web sites in which biology authorities are boasting of their deep understanding of matters a thousand times more subtle and complex. So let's take a close look at the core of the very widely read “Understanding Evolution” web site, and some places that its treatment is inadequate, scrambled or misleading. The heart of the site is a group of pages  called “Evolution 101” which you can reach at this page  (the page here gives a Table of Contents for this "Evolution 101" set of web pages).  My comments below refer solely to the pages under this "Evolution 101" tab heading (the pages listed in the Table of Contents link just given), and when I refer below to "the site" or "the Evolution 101 site" I refer only to that set of pages. 

Fumble #1:  The Definition of Evolution Very Soon Replaced with a Vastly Different Definition

On an early page on the site, entitled “Introduction to Evolution,” there appears a definition of evolution. We are told “Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification.” Very strangely the site fails to explain what that term means. It will certainly not be obvious to the average reader what exactly is meant by “descent with modification.” Another site states, “Descent with modification refers to the passing on of traits from parent organisms to their offspring.” But that's biological inheritance, not evolution.

In fact, there are many different definitions of evolution. When someone refers to “evolution,” he may be referring to any of the following things:

• the mere vague idea that change occurs over time
• the more specific idea that gene pools change over time
• the idea that organisms inherit some random mutations that originated in their parents or an earlier ancestor
• the idea that small changes gradually occur in the physical characteristics of an organism because of changes in gene pools that are passed on
• the idea that dramatic new biological innovations such as eyes, ears, wings and complex brains have appeared from merely accidental effects such as random mutations and so-called natural selection
• common descent, the idea that all organisms are descended from a common ancestor

I may note that the last of these definitions of evolution is an unproven claim more than 1000 times harder to prove than the first two of these propositions.

What is very strange is that just after defining evolution in one way, the page then very quickly changes its definition. A few lines after saying, “Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification,” the page says, “The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor.” But that idea is an idea more than a thousand times harder to prove than the mere idea of “descent with modification.” You can believe in descent with modification without believing that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor.

So the “Evolution 101” site fumbles very early in the game, by changing its definition of evolution very quickly after it first offered a definition of evolution, changing from one definition of evolution to a vastly different definition. 

Fumble #2: The Super-skimpy “How We Know What Happened” Page

A crucial page of the site has the title “How We Know What Happened When.” The page is absurdly skimpy, offering only three lines mentioning (but not explaining) radiometric dating, stratigraphy, and molecular clocks. The topic of molecular clocks is quite controversial, with some of the molecular clocks disagreeing with the results from radiometric dating. There are also disagreements on how to calculate a molecular clock, or whether molecules even offer anything like a precise clock as to when or why things happened. Radiometric dating tells us about the age of fossils, but does nothing in itself to establish an ancestry of species. So from this page we are not at all assured that biologists "know what happened" millions of years ago. 

Fumble #3: The Giant Omission of the “Important Events in the History of Life” Page

The page here is supposed to educate us about important events in the history of life. What we have is a visual that allows us to point to various positions on a widget, and read some text. If you click around on the widget, you will be told the following timeline.

3800 million years ago: Replicating molecules (the precursors of DNA) form.

3500 million years ago: Unicellular life appears.

555 million years ago: Multi-cellular marine organisms are common.

500 million years ago: Fish-like vertebrates evolve, and invertebrates, such as trilobites...are common in the ocean.

The chronology does not consist only of scientific facts. There are very good reasons for rejecting all claims that unicellular life was preceded by self-replicating molecules.  A recent scientific study published in the journal Nature says that self-replicating RNA would require more than 40 chemical subunits arranged in just the right way, and concludes that we would not expect such a thing to happen by chance in the history of the observable universe. 

This timeline almost entirely conceals the great truth of the Cambrian Explosion. The largest classification group of animals is called a phylum. The Cambrian Explosion was a relatively brief period of time during which almost all animal phyla appeared rather suddenly.  The fact of such a thing has always been a gigantic explanatory problem for Darwinism, because it contradicts the predictions of Darwinists. If biological innovations appear very gradually because of slow evolution caused by random mutations, then we would expect the animal phyla to have gradually appeared over many hundreds of millions of years. Instead, almost all of the animal phyla appeared within a Cambrian Explosion lasting no more than about 20 million years.

By failing to notify its readers about this issue, the "Evolution 101" site reads like a site that has no answer to such a difficulty, and a site that is trying to hide this huge difficulty from its readers. 

Fumble #4: The “Mechanisms of Change” Page Mentioning Only Superficial Color Changes

The “Evolution 101” web site has a page entitled “Mechanisms of Change.” It has the purpose of trying to explain for us some mechanism by which evolution could produce changes in organisms. Unfortunately, all of the examples given refer only to the most trivial type of microevolution: a change in the color of bugs. There are no examples explaining how any of these mechanisms could produce a complex change such as the appearance of a new protein, a new organ, a new appendage or a new organ system.

Fumble #5: The Misleading Page on Mutations

On the page here, the “Evolution 101” site tells us about mutations. It states, “Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism,” without telling us the important fact that virtually all mutations are harmful or neutral (which means neither helpful nor beneficial). In fact, it is all but impossible to imagine how a single genetic mutation could be beneficial.

You can get a good analogy by imagining a person who has carefully typed a computer program that accomplishes some particular task. Imagine the person has the text for that computer program in a text editor running on his computer. Now, suppose the person clicks on a random position on that text, and then closes his eyes, typing a random keystroke. That is a very good analogy for what a random mutation is. In this case, almost certainly the random keystroke or random mutation will have no benefit in the computer program, or produce a harmful effect (such as preventing the code from running successfully). Tremendous luck would be required for the random keystroke to actually improve the computer program that was being written. Similarly, the chance of a random mutation producing a beneficial effect is very many times smaller than the chance of a random mutation producing a harmful effect.

But the “Evolution 101” site has not told about this very important reality.

Fumble #6: The Misleading Page on Development

On the page here, the “Evolution 101” site clumsily describes development as “Development is the process through which an embryo becomes an adult organism and eventually dies” (strangely including death as part of development, unlike almost all writers). The page says, “Through development, an organism's genotype is expressed as a phenotype.” But a phenotype is not an expression of a genotype, and a genotype does not specify a phenotype. Nowhere in the genotype does it state that humans have one head, two eyes, two ears, one back, two legs and two arms. Nowhere in a genotype (DNA) do we have a specification of any of the organs or appendages of an organism. Nowhere in a genotype (DNA) do we have a specification of how to make any of the 200 cell types used by humans. The genotype does not even specify how to make the organelles that make up a cell.  As a recent article in The Scientist concisely puts it, "Genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy."

Type of information	Can it be specified in DNA?
Linear amino acid sequence of a protein molecule	Yes
Three-dimensional shape of a protein molecule	No
Exact location where a protein is located in body	No
Layout of a cell organelle	No
Layout of a cell	No
Layout of a tissue type	No
Layout of an organ	No
Layout of an organ system	No
Layout of a full body plan	No
Structure progression from simplest tiniest form to fully grown form	No
Dynamic behavior inside an organism during a particular month or year	No

By telling us that a phenotype of an organism is an expression of the genotype, the "Evolution 101" web site is repeating the Great DNA Myth,  the gigantic untruth that DNA is a specification of how to make a particular organism.  There are several ways in which this false myth can be told:

"DNA is a blueprint for an organism."
"DNA is a recipe for making an organism."

"DNA is a program for making an organism."
"A phenotype is an expression of a genotype."
"The genome has all the information needed for development."

All of these statements are false.  DNA is not a blueprint or a recipe for making an organism, and does not even specify how to make any of the cells of an organism.  While a phenotype (the observable characteristics of an organism) are influenced by a genotype (the DNA of an organism), such a phenotype is not at all an expression of a genotype because the genotype only specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level structural information. In the post here you can read quotes by more than 15 distinguished authorities (mostly PhD's) who say that DNA is neither a blueprint nor a recipe for making an organism. 

Why do some biologists keep telling us the untruth that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for making an organism? Because it's the misstatement they need to make, given their previous boasts. If DNA is not a recipe or blueprint for making an organism, then we cannot explain one species gradually changing into some vastly different species by imagining gradual changes in DNA, and there can be no genetic explanation for how large-scale macroevolution can naturally occur.

Fumble #7: The Pages on Natural Selection

On the page here, the “Evolution 101” site discusses natural selection. We have some examples trying to describe how natural selection could occur. But all of the examples mention only superficial color changes.

The next page is called “Natural Selection at Work.” We are told “Any coffee table book about natural history will overwhelm you with full-page glossies depicting amazing adaptations produced by natural selection.” Now the site is attempting to convince us that very complex biological innovations have been produced by natural selection. But the site has not done anything to explain how that could occur. The examples on this page and the previous page only explained how superficial color changes in an organism might be helped along by natural selection. The page mentions two other cases: the darkening of moths called industrial melanism (another example of a mere superficial color change), and the variation of beaks in Galapagos finches. Neither of these is a case of an impressive biological innovation. The Galapagos finches already had beaks, and if so-called natural selection caused a variation in such beaks, that is not a case of a novel biological innovation that can be compared to innovations such as the appearance of wings and vision systems.

A later page on the site entitled “Adaption” talks about impressive biological innovations in nature such as echolocation, the kind of “radar” used by bats. No discussion is given about how such innovations could be produced by natural selection or evolution. Then on the next page, we read this: “Because natural selection can produce amazing adaptations, it's tempting to think of it as an all-powerful force.” But the site has done nothing whatsoever to show that natural selection can produce any adaptations other than superficial color changes. The site simply leaps from a discussion of trivial unimpressive adaptions to the claim that “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations,” without doing anything to explain how that could occur.

On the same page, we have a misstatement. We are told, “Natural selection is NOT random!” But natural selection as imagined by Darwinists certainly is random. When I do a Google search for "defintion of random,” I first get this definition: “made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.”  The Cambridge Dictionary defines random as "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan." Natural selection as imagined by Darwinists does match that definition, so it is indeed random. I may also note that since Darwinists do not actually believe that nature is consciously making a choice when natural selection occurs, the very term “natural selection” is a misleading term. Instead of using it, Darwinists should refer to “survival of the fittest” or “the superior reproduction rate of fitter organisms.”

Because Darwinists do not actually believe that nature makes conscious choices, they speak in a misleading way every single time they use the phrase "natural selection."  When Darwinists say things like "natural selection is not random," they are being doubly misleading in their speech, by: (1) referring to something that does not involve a choice as "selection," (2) referring to something they believe is not according to a plan as "not random." 

Fumble #8: The “Causes of Speciation” Page

The page here is entitled “Causes of Speciation.” Speciation is the appearance of new species. The page lists only two causes: geographic isolation and reduction of gene flow.

Geographic isolation does nothing to explain how new biological innovations could occur. As for “reduction of gene flow,” the page notes that such a thing “may or may not be sufficient to cause speciation,” which hardly sounds like confidence. To explain the origin of species with dramatic new biological innovations, we need to have an explanation for the appearance of new genes, and a burst of new biological information. That certainly isn't covered by “reduction of gene flow.”

We are left with the impression that our experts have no real explanation for the origin of new species.

Fumble #9: The Laughable Discussion of Macroevolution

On the page here, the “Evolution 101” site discussed macroevolution. Macroevolution means the appearance of dramatic new biological innovations such as eyes and wings, not just the superficial, unimpressive changes such as color changes (which are referred to as microevolution). The page does nothing to credibly explain how macroevolution can be produced. It merely states an equation:

"Mutation+Gene flow+genetic drift+natural selection+3.8 billion years = macroevolution"

But it does not at all follow that the things on the left of the “equal sign” in that equation should produce macroevolution. And the page does nothing to back up such a claim. Moreover, since almost all animal phyla appeared during the relatively short time span of the Cambrian Explosion (lasting no more than about 20 million years), it is quite laughable for the "Evolution 101" site to be giving some equation implying that macroevolution requires 3.8 billion years (a length of time 190 times longer than 20 million years). 

The page makes this statement:

"A process like mutation might seem too small-scale to influence a pattern as amazing as the beetle radiation, or as large as the difference between dogs and pine trees, but it's not. Life on Earth has been accumulating mutations and passing them through the filter of natural selection for 3.8 billion years — more than enough time for evolutionary processes to produce its grand history."

To explain macroevolution, and the appearance of dramatic new biological innovations, we need to explain mountainous amounts of organization. Organization is something entirely different from accumulation. The idea that you can accumulate your way to fantastically high levels of organization is utterly fallacious.

Organization is something vastly more complicated and more hard-to-explain than accumulation. A snow drift next to your car is an example of accumulation; your car itself is an example of organization. As an evolutionary biologist confessed a while ago, referring to the “modern synthesis” that is Darwinism combined with genetics, “Indeed, the MS [modern synthesis] theory lacks a theory of organization that can account for the characteristic features of phenotypic evolution, such as novelty, modularity, homology, homoplasy or the origin of lineage-defining body plans.”

Protein image credit: RCSB Protein Data Bank.

In fact, we know of a very good reason why random mutations would never accumulate to become extremely complex functional innovations. The reason is that a random mutation is merely a tiny fragment of what is needed for a functional innovation.  Since a random mutation is such a tiny fragment of what is needed for a biological innovation, 99.9999% of such mutations should fail to produce any survival benefit. Far from accumulating in a gene pool, such not-yet-beneficial mutations should drift out of a gene pool, according to Darwin's principle that natural selection is always discarding what is not beneficial. 

On the page here, the “Evolution 101” site gives away that evolutionary biologists really have no understanding of how complex biological innovations can arise. The page lists four “questions that evolutionary biologists are trying to answer,” and one of these is “How does evolution produce new and complex features?” If evolutionary biologists do not currently understand how evolution can “produce new and complex features,” they have no business asserting claims that all organisms have a common ancestor, and no business asserting claims that humans are descended from any other organism.

Fumble #10: The Final Insult of “Looking at Complexity”

In the second to last page in the “Evolution 101” site, we have a page entitled “Looking at Complexity.” But nowhere does the "Evolution 101" set of web pages (referred to below as "the site") honestly discuss the mountainous complexity of living things. Most notably:

1. The site has had no mention of facts such as the fact that humans are built from more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each of which is a very complex innovation.
2. The site has had no mention of the incredible complexity of protein molecules, and how they only become functional when they have a very rare and hard-to-achieve state that allows protein folding to occur.
3. The site has no mention of the incredible complexity of cells, which are so complex that they have been compared to small cities or factories.
4. The site has no mention of the fact that human organisms require about 200 different types of cells, each different type a separate marvel of biological innovation. 
5. The site has had no mention of the incredibly fine-tuned complexity of complex systems such as the human vision system, the human reproduction system, and the human cardiovascular system.

The site has not even discussed the complexity of protein molecules. Most protein molecules in the human body consist of more than 300 amino acids arranged in the right way to acheive some specific functional effect. Each of these proteins is as complex an invention as a 60-line computer program, and a large fraction of these proteins are as complex as a 200-line computer program. We have in our bodies more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each of which  is a separate invention as complex (and unlikely to appear by chance) as a 60-line computer program that achieves a particular functional result. 

Biological organisms have mountainous levels of complexity and organization. A human being is a far more impressive piece of functional complexity than an aircraft carrier. We understand exactly how to put together an aircraft carrier piece-by-piece, but no one understands how to put together a human being atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule.  The human body is only one of countless such wonders of organization in the biological world. Atoms are organized into amino acids, which are organized into polypeptide chains, which are organized into protein molecules with three-dimensional shapes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into organisms. 

To explain such staggering marvels of hierarchical organization, you need a theory of organization. Darwinism is no such thing. Darwinism is a mere theory of accumulation that gets by through the use of a word trick (the misleading phrase "natural selection" to describe something that is not actually selection or choosing), and by making gigantically inaccurate claims that DNA is something like a blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism.  Because Darwinists do not really have any theory of biological organization, it is necessary for them to avoid speaking candidly about the vast amounts of organization and fine-tuning in living things. And so we have sites like the "Evolution 101" web site that never tell us about how complex organisms are.  

The credibility of Darwinism as an explanation for organisms is inversely proportional to the degree of organization and dynamic functional complexity in organisms. The richer the functional complexity and organization of organisms, the less credible Darwinism is as an explanation for such organisms. So the champions of Darwinism tend, in various ways, to engage in a kind of complexity concealment, in which the reader is not informed of supremely relevant facts that would allow him to correctly conclude that the organization and functional complexity of living organisms is greater than in anything humans have ever constructed with their hands. 

The "Evolution 101" website is currently almost unreadable by any but the most patient, because whenever you go to a page on it, you get an annoying pop-up nagging you to fill out some "short survey" that will be used to redesign the site (a survey that turns out to be a hassle to fill out). Given all the issues I have discussed, I understand why someone might feel a need to redesign the site. 

Postscript: Now in October 2020 the CDC is declaring COVID-19 can be transmitted by airborne transmission, correcting their previous "correction."