Friday, May 23, 2008
The fairy tale evolution theory
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Tom Taylor
Taylor is retired from Norfolk Southern Corp. and resides in Roanoke. He is also nearing the completion of his fifth novel.
I propose a theory that at least some of the green frogs living today are descendants of a prince, zapped by a wicked witch many centuries ago.
Of course you could make all sorts of scientific arguments against my theory. Funny thing, your arguments would be much the same as those used by creationists when they argue against the fairy tale of evolution.
There is no known force or natural mechanism, you'd say, that could change a prince into a frog. And neither is there any that could change one species into another. Mutations couldn't possibly do it because they cannot add new genetic information as would be required for a new species; they can only shuffle or harm what is already there.
Geneticists over the last 60 years or so have attempted to show that mutations (could too!) produce evolution by bombarding hundreds of generations of fruit flies with radiation. The flies, which produce a new generation every 10 days, did indeed mutate. They changed in the color of their eyes, the number of bristles and the shape of their wings. But their DNA would simply not let them "evolve" into anything but fruit flies. Most important of all, when the radiation was stopped, the following generations went right back to the bristles, wings and eyes they had before. Those experiments proved mutation cannot produce evolution.
Next you would point out the "evidence" for my prince-to-frog story (the fact the frogs exist, some of them have fingers on their little hands, etc.) is evidence only to someone already committed to believing the story. And so it is with the "evidence" for evolution. The fossil layers, for example, contain nothing but fully formed, distinct kinds, just as you'd expect if they had been created that way, and later buried in layers of mud.
Evolutionists, however, continue to insist "links" are in there somewhere. In one typical example, a 1983 news headline trumpeted the discovery of a "missing link" between whales and their supposed land-mammal ancestors. The fossil find consisted of part of a cranium, fragments of a lower jaw and some teeth.
Because the fragments were found in a river delta layer, and the teeth resembled those of a land carnivore, the fossil became (presto) a link between land mammals and whales.
If a scientist laid those fragments out on a table and explained to the average person why such skimpy evidence represents a link in evolution, he would be laughed out of the room -- unless of course the room was filled with people already determined to believe it.
Darwin's disciples surely realize all of this. Yet they go on insisting evolution is the only "scientific" explanation of how we got here, and we all descended somehow from worms, fish and apes.
And I will go on insisting green frogs somehow came from a hapless prince.
But really, isn't it time we asked ourselves, deep down in our hearts, if we are being intellectually honest?
