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THE CREATION MYTH: ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED FRUIT FLIES

Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record—and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

Even if evolution were true, it wouldn’t disprove God. God has performed more spectacular feats than evolution. It’s not even a daunting challenge to a belief in God. If you want something that complicates a belief in God, try coming to terms with Michael Moore being one of God’s special creatures.

Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true. William Provine, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, calls Darwinism the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. His fellow Darwin disciple, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, famously said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”1 This is why there is mass panic on the left whenever someone mentions the vast and accumulating evidence against evolution.

The ACLU sued a school district in Cobb County, Georgia, merely for putting stickers in biology textbooks that urged students to study evolution “with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”2 According to the ACLU, an open mind violates the “separation of church and state,” which appears in the Constitution just after the abortion and sodomy clauses. In Lebec, California, parents represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued to prevent the school from even offering an elective philosophy class on intelligent design, creationism, and evolution.3 In Dover, Pennsylvania, a small group of parents backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued to prevent any discussion of intelligent design in a ninth-grade biology class.4 The judge ruled in their favor and ordered the school district to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees, which will probably exceed $1 million.

So that’s that. After Dover, no school district will dare breathe a word about “intelligent design,” unless they want to risk being bankrupted by ACLU lawsuits. The Darwinists have saved the secular sanctity of their temples: the public schools. They didn’t win on science, persuasion, or the evidence. They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter.

This isn’t science, it’s treating doubts about evolution as religious heresy. Darwinism, as philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski says, is “the last of the great 19th century mystery religions.” The only reason a lot of Christians reject evolution is that we are taught to abjure big fat lies. You can look it up—we have an entire commandment about the importance of not lying.

Just to clean the palate of a century of evolutionists’ browbeating everyone into saying evolution is a FACT and we’ll see you in court if you criticize the official state religion, we begin with a story from the late Colin Patterson, respected paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Like Diogenes searching for one honest man, Patterson was on a quest to find someone who could tell him—as he puts it—“anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true.” Patterson said, “I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time.”5

Not surprisingly, the Darwiniacs, as author and columnist Joe Sobran calls them, would apparently prefer to discuss anything but evolution, since they are always pretending evolution means something utterly uncontroversial, like “change over time.” Describing “evolution” as “change over time” is like describing abortion as “choice.” Aren’t we all for “choice”? Don’t animals change over time? The boring point that organisms “change over time” is not what the Darwiniacs are teaching schoolchildren, and that’s not what the fuss is about.

Darwin’s theory of evolution says life on Earth began with single-celled life forms, which evolved into multicelled life forms, which over countless aeons evolved into higher life forms, including man, all as the result of the chance process of random mutation followed by natural selection, without guidance or assistance from any intelligent entity like God or the Department of Agriculture. Which is to say, evolution is the eminently plausible theory that the human eye, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Ronald Reagan (among other things) all came into existence purely by accident.

To avoid discussing the theory of evolution, Darwiniacs keep slipping irrelevant little facts into the debate like spare parts, leaving the impression that to deny evolution is to deny that the sun rises in the east. So, to be clear, by “evolution,” I mean Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Evolution is not selective breeding, which produces thoroughbred horses, pedigreed dogs, colored cotton, and so on. Evolution is not the capacity of bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance, but which never evolves into anything but more bacteria. Evolution is not the phenomenon of an existing species changing over the course of many years—for example, of Frenchmen becoming shorter during the Napoleonic era or Asians becoming taller after immigrating to North America. In fact, evolution is not adaptive characteristics developing within a species at all. Darwin’s theory says we get a new species, not a taller version of the same species. Evolutionists call such adaptations “microevolution” only to confuse people. This would be like the Flat Earth Society referring to the Sahara Desert as a “micro-flat Earth,” as if they are halfway to proving their theory. Well it’s flat, isn’t it?

Evolution is not proved by genetic similarities among living things, the heritability of characteristics, or the age of the Earth. (Though the neurotic obsession of Darwiniacs to always claim their opponents must believe in a “young Earth” is so bizarre that if they raise it one more time, I’m demanding a full-fledged investigation into the Earth’s age.) Finally, one can believe evolution is not true without also believing that the Earth was created in six days by a man with a long white beard who lives in the clouds and looks eerily like Charlton Heston.

What the theory of evolution posits is an accidental, law-of-the-jungle, survival-of-the-fittest mechanism for creating new species—as indicated in the title of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species.

Leave aside the thornier issues, like how the accidental process that gave us opposable thumbs could produce a moral sense and consciousness of mortality. Let’s consider just the basic steps of evolution.

The “theory” of evolution is:

Random mutation of desirable attributes (highly implausible) Natural selection weeding out the “less fit” animals (pointless tautology) Leading to the creation of new species (no evidence after 150 years of looking)

Step One: Unless You Are a Bacterium, Random Mutation Can’t Produce Anything Worth Having

With a few exceptions, the higher organisms are not going to get anything good out of a single mutation. Most of the time, it takes more than one lousy mutation to create anything really useful, like an eye or poisonous fangs or a tail. In order to get to the final product, each one of the hundreds of mutations needed to create a functional wing or ear would itself have to make the mutant animal more fit, otherwise it wouldn’t survive, according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To the contrary, the first mutations toward a nose would just make you look funny and no one would want to reproduce with you. The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism. But evolution demands a whole parade of them that not only are individually advantageous, improving upon what existed before, but also lead to an all-new structure that is also better than what existed before.

The evolutionist’s answer is Assume that each one of the hundreds of mutations necessary to create the final product is itself “fit” in ways we don’t understand but must accept on faith because it’s Holy Scripture. We haven’t even gotten to the second step, and evolutionists are already asking us to assume a miracle. That’s what they mean by “science, not faith.”

In Darwin’s day, it was only seemingly simple mechanisms like gills and eyes that had to be explained—and, by the way, natural selection couldn’t explain those. Darwin knew nothing of DNA and the vastly complex systems studied by molecular biologists, such as the information processing, storage, and retrieval in DNA. Now we do. If Darwinism sounded fishy (get it?) as a means to create the eye, it’s comical as an explanation for the intricacies of the cell. This isn’t a minor gap in the theory of evolution: it is the theory of evolution.

Until relatively recently, scientists didn’t know what the inside of a cell looked like. The cell was a mysterious “black box,” as Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe puts it. Darwiniacs prefer to ignore modern scientific knowledge so that they can pretend the cell is still a black box and tell us the mutation god created it. In his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, Behe used discoveries in microbiology to refute Darwinism on Darwin’s own terms. Darwin had set forth this extremely self-serving standard for himself: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

This is a fantastic formulation I intend to remember in case I ever need to defend one of my own crackpot theories. On one hand, Darwin makes what appears to be a sweeping concession that his theory might “absolutely break down.” But in the same breath, he says that will happen only if an impossible test is met: If it is demonstrated that his theory “could not possibly form” a complex organ. Would the Darwin believers take that standard as a scientific test for God? If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by God, my God theory would absolutely break down. If only traffic court judges would fall for that line of reasoning: “Your honor, can you prove that the photo of me running the red light wasn’t staged? Oh, you can’t? I move for an immediate dismissal so I can return to my home planet, Zircon.”

Nevertheless, Behe disproved evolution—unless evolution is simply a nondisprovable pseudoscience, like astrology. Behe produced various “irreducibly complex” mechanisms, of which there are thousands—complex cellular structures, blood-clotting mechanisms, and the eye, among others. A bacterial motor, called a flagellum, depends on the coordinated interaction of 30–40 complex protein parts. The absence of almost any one of the parts would render the flagellum useless. An animal cell’s whiplike oar, called a cilium, is composed of about 200 protein parts. Behe compared these cell parts to a simple mousetrap, with far fewer necessary components than a cilium or flagellum. Though there are only a few parts to a mousetrap, all of them have to be working together at one time for the contraption to serve any function whatsoever. If one of the parts is missing, Behe says, you don’t get a mousetrap that catches only half as many mice: you don’t get a mousetrap at all. Behe then demonstrated that it is a mathematical impossibility for all 30 parts of the flagellum (or 200 parts of the cilium) to have been brought together by the “numerous, successive, slight modifications” of natural selection. Life at the molecular level, he concluded, “is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design.”

Although clearly annoyed with him, many evolutionists were forced to concede Behe’s point. Evolutionary biologist Tom Cavalier-Smith, at the University of British Columbia, said, “For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity.” Yale molecular biologist Robert Dorit said, “In a narrow sense, Behe is correct when he argues that we do not yet fully understand the evolution of the flagellar motor or the blood clotting cascade.” But still they believed that evolution must be true. They’ll figure out how to prove it eventually.

But most of the cult reacted to Behe’s argument the way feminists do to the suggestion that men and women might possibly have different aptitudes for math and science—they got nasty, they cried, and they denied that anything had been proved. Darwin fundamentalist Richard Dawkins denounced Behe as “cowardly” for believing in God—before admitting he couldn’t answer Behe’s argument.6

You will begin to notice that the Darwiniacs’ answer to everything is to accuse their opponents of believing in God—and a flat Earth for good measure—even when responding to an argument based on biochemistry, physics, or mathematics.

Jerry Coyne, evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, said of Behe’s cell structures, “There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel…. [W]e may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways.” Or it could take hundreds of billions of years! But by then, maybe we’ll have evolved into a species that doesn’t exhibit anti-religious hysteria whenever anyone questions the theory of evolution. After having had several years to work on unraveling the complexity, Coyne wrote a 13,000-word jeremiad in the October 2005 New Republic magazine denouncing proponents of intelligent design as creationist nuts. But, curiously, Coyne never got around to addressing Behe’s argument for intelligent design—the centerpiece of the very subject Coyne claimed to be discussing.7

Coyne simply asserted that it was possible for irreducibly complex mechanisms to have arisen by natural selection. “We have realized for decades that natural selection can indeed produce systems that, over time, become integrated to the point where they appear to be irreducibly complex.” If it can, there is no evidence that it can.

Evolutionist Robert Pennock said of Behe’s evidence, “I have not addressed the biochemical details of his real examples, but as we have noted, the evidence is not yet in on those questions.” The evidence isn’t in? According to Behe, many of the biochemical systems he cited “have been well understood for 40 years.” Much like George Bush’s alleged draft dodging, there are only two possible answers from the Darwiniacs: Either evolution is true or more research is needed.

The “science” writer for the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley, begins her attack on Behe’s argument by, in effect, confirming Larry Summers’s point about women lacking aptitude for the hard sciences. Begley says, “Even before Darwin, critics attacked the idea of biological evolution with one or another version of, ‘Evolve this!’ Whether they invoked a human, an eye, or the cell’s flagella that propel bacteria and sperm, the contention that natural processes of mutation and natural selection cannot explain the complexity of living things has been alive and well for 200 years.”8

First, no one was attacking the “idea of biological evolution” before Darwin because there wasn’t a lot to attack. “Evolution” before Darwin was just a teleological claim about the chain of life, having nothing to do with natural selection, which was Darwin’s contribution to the subject. Indeed, before Darwin, the accepted explanation for the chain of life was design.

Second, no one knew precisely what the flagellum was until around the late 1960s, when the flagellum was first discovered to be the bacterial cell’s tiny little outboard motor. So it would be difficult to make an argument for or against any particular method of the flagellum’s creation when no one knew what the flagellum was or what it did.

Third, the fact that the eye has been cited as an argument against natural selection for 200 years is true, but this is hardly an argument in favor of evolution. Despite having 200 years to work on it, evolutionists still don’t have an answer.

Darwin himself noted the difficulty of explaining the eye in The Origin of Species, admitting he could not do it—which science reporter Begley might have mentioned. Darwin hypothesized that the eye might have begun as a patch of light-sensitive cells upon which natural selection could then work its magic, making gradual improvements—creating an eye socket and slowly increasing focus and perspective and so on—until these special cells became light-sensitive pits and then a full-fledged eye. Apart from the fact that his explanation explained nothing—like all evolutionary myths, it was just a story about how something might have happened—even Darwin didn’t have a story for where these amazing “light-sensitive cells” came from. That’s the big enchilada.

Darwin catapulted over the whole problem to be solved by beginning his thought experiment at a point after the major characteristic to be evolved—light-sensitive cells—already existed. For light-sensitive cells to work, the cells would have to have the capacity to initiate an electric signal, a nerve capable of carrying the electric signal to a brain, and a brain capable of processing the signal and using it to emit other electric signals.

No one disputes that organisms can develop small improvements on something that already exists, otherwise there would be no health clubs. The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? (And for the record, Darwinism can’t explain that either.) The interesting question is: How did the “light-sensitive cells” come to exist in the first place? Darwin’s solution is like explaining how humans evolved by saying, “Assume Dennis Kucinich. Now, through slight improvements over a billion years, successive generations would eventually become taller, grow opposable thumbs, and generally become more humanlike until one day—wham!—you have yourself a human being.”

Even if they start with light-sensitive cells, Darwin’s apostles still can’t get to an eye. There have long been bald assertions by Darwiniacs of the existence of a computer simulation of the evolution of the eye. The webpage of the National Science Teachers Association baldly states, “Computer simulations of natural selection are common, such as the computer simulation of the evolution of the eye as described in [Richard] Dawkins.”9

In his book River Out of Eden, Dawkins blathers on and on about “computer models of evolving eyes.” But the computer simulation turned out to have as much basis in reality as the idea that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday. David Berlinski got to the bottom of the famed computer simulation, tracking down the scientists alleged to have performed this wondrous feat, and discovered—as described in a tour de force article in Commentary magazine—it didn’t exist.10

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bethell quotes Berlinski’s summary of the evidence:

This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim—Dan E. Nilsson—has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye’s development.11

In other words, River Out of Eden is the Darwiniacs’ version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Back to the Wall Street Journal’s “science reporter.” After demonstrating that she is an ignoramus, Begley accuses critics of evolution of having small minds for refusing to believe in evolution. She calls the Behe argument a variant on all arguments against evolution (which she’s apparently growing a little tired of): “the argument from personal incredulity.” This, Begley defines as “I can’t see how natural forces could produce this, so it must be the work of God.”

Begley’s argument is called the “argument from the counterintuitive,” which says, “It’s counterintuitive, so it must be true” (and I’ll sound really smart if I say so). “It’s the same compulsion that drives insecure adolescents to make counterintuitive, cryptic, and otherwise odd statements.” (“Play the game, don’t let the game play you.” Huh?) I’d be more impressed by Begley’s outré spirit if she took up smoking.

Taking its place among such giants as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, evolution is, indeed, counterintuitive. So it’s got the counterintuitive part down pat. What it doesn’t have, and what the theory of relativity, curved space, and black holes do, is any evidence that it is true.

Begley imagines she has proved Behe wrong by announcing that some of the 200 parts of the animal cell’s motor have other functions. This is like explaining that the Mona Lisa is an accident of nature by saying paint has many other functions. There’s still that crucial step of assembling them all together, at one time, into the Mona Lisa. It doesn’t matter if 200 mutations happened at once or over a billion years. All 200 mutations would have to (1) occur, (2) be the “most fit,” (3) survive long enough to exist at the same time and place, in order to (4) assemble themselves into a working flagellum. The cell is as complicated a structure as the entire city of New York. Natural selection has never been demonstrated to change anything fancier than the shape of a bird’s beak.

The evolutionists’ response is Well, it’s possible. You can’t say it couldn’t “possibly” happen—and that was the test Darwin of Nazareth set for himself. It’s also possible that galactic ruler Xenu brought billions of people to Earth 75 million years ago, piled them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, sending their souls flying every which way until they landed on the bodies of living humans, where they still invisibly reside today—as Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard claimed. Yes, it’s possible.

On April 7, 2006—more than two years after Sharon Begley informed Wall Street Journal readers that the irreducible complexity argument had been solved eons ago and she was frankly bored with the subject—the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that researchers had finally produced a “counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.” This was under the headline “Study, in a First, Explains Evolution’s Molecular Advance.”12 At least we finally had a clear admission that the irreducible complexity argument had not been answered before this. But look at the allegedly “complex” mechanism that scientists asserted—not proved, asserted—might have arisen by natural selection: a two-part molecular mechanism, the hormone and its receptor. Two parts! Even a mousetrap—Behe’s simplest example of a complex mechanism—has three parts. And, of course, they still hadn’t shown that the hormone-receptor pair could be produced by natural selection, only that this simple two-part mechanism might be produced by natural selection. That’s front-page news for the state religion.

Evolutionists believe—purely as a matter of faith—that individual, unrelated mutations facilitated the production of all 200 necessary parts, completely by chance, and thus created the flagellum. And then they tell us they want to keep “faith” out of the classroom. Okay.

The late Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle and his collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe came to a similar conclusion as Behe while trying to explain the origin of life. Contrary to the image of evolution skeptics portrayed in the movie Inherit the Wind, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were not millenarian fundamentalists making moonshine by the river. In 1986, they were jointly awarded the International Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science. Hoyle has won the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific(1977), the Royal Medal (1974), the Bruce Medal (1970), and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1968).

Wickramasinghe holds the highest doctorate (Sc.D.) from the University of Cambridge and an honorary doctorate from the Soka University of Tokyo. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff University of Wales and director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology. Wickramasinghe was the first to propose the theory that dust in interstellar space and comets was mostly organic, a theory that has now been proved correct.

Finally, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were both atheists. Consequently, they had some odd ideas about the origin of life—but they knew enough about science to know Darwin’s theory of evolution for the creation of life was preposterous.

Hoyle ran the numbers to determine the mathematical probability of the basic enzymes of life arising by random processes. They concluded that the odds were 1 to 1 followed by 40,000 zeroes, or “so utterly minuscule” as to make Darwin’s theory of evolution absurd.13 Hoyle said a “common sense interpretation of the facts” is that “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” His calculations from the facts, he said, “seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

In order to explain the creation of the universe while carefully excluding God, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came up with a theory called “panspermia,” which holds that life began in space and spread to Earth by a steady influx of microscopic infectious agents delivered to Earth on comets. It’s sort of a galactic version of commercial air travel. It’s a little nutty but, unlike evolution, “panspermia” has the virtue of not being demonstrably false.

Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his codiscovery of DNA, also realized that the spontaneous evolution of life could not be reconciled with the facts. As he said, “The probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd.” Consequently, Crick hypothesized that highly intelligent extraterrestrials sent living cells to Earth on an unmanned spaceship, a theory he sets forth in his 1981 book, Life Itself. Thus was God narrowly averted!

While evolution fetishists turn themselves into modern-day phrenologists, real scientists are making important scientific discoveries about complex structures that keep making the random mutation part of evolution look increasingly silly.

(And that’s not to knock phrenology, which actually made some pretty good predictions. A 1921 article on phrenology, for example, observed, “The small-nose man can not have a judicial mind, whatever his other excellencies may be. And a man whose nose upturns can no more be expected to administer justice than a pug dog can be expected to act as a shepherd.”)

The evolutionists attack the idea of design in the universe, claiming it is a theory based on what we don’t know. The truth is exactly the reverse. The less you know about the physical world, the more plausible Darwinian evolution seems. Primitive people believed in sun gods, moon gods, and fertility gods. But as soon as humans understood the science of astronomy and reproduction (except C. Everett Koop, who still doesn’t understand that one), make-believe gods moving the sun and creating babies became a less persuasive explanation.

Similarly, the more we know about molecules, cells, and DNA, the less plausible Darwin’s theory of natural selection becomes. So the evolutionists bring lawsuits to prevent schoolchildren from being told that natural selection can’t begin to explain such complex parts as the flagellum. DNA is—as Bill Gates says—“like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”14 Darwiniacs want us to believe that DNA—something vastly more perfect and powerful and complex than Windows XP, a program that represents the culmination of tens of thousands of years of human progress—came to exist by means of nothing more than a series of random accidents starting in a puddle of prehistoric goo.

Step Two: Survival of the Fittest Is a Tautology

The second prong of Darwin’s “theory” is generally nothing but a circular statement: Through the process of natural selection, the “fittest” survive. Who are the “fittest”? The ones who survive! Why look—it happens every time! The “survival of the fittest” would be a joke if it weren’t part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community.

The beauty of having a scientific theory that’s a tautology is that it can’t be disproved. Evolution cultists denounce “Creation Science” on the grounds that it’s not “science” because it can’t be observed or empirically tested in a laboratory. Guess what else can’t be observed or empirically tested? Evolution!

But, you say, there must be some characteristics that are inherently desirable without regard to whether or not the organism survived, such as intelligence, strength, or—to take something really obvious—a tendency to avoid eating poison. In one experiment attempting to prove evolution (and those are the only evolution experiments allowed by law), fruit flies were bred to avoid eating poison. One would think that if we could settle on one characteristic that is a priori “fit,” it would be: “Avoids eating poison.”

Alas, the fruit flies bred to avoid eating poison did not survive. They died out while the original dumb fruit flies with no aversion to eating poison survived to reproduce. Thus, the scientists concluded: Stupid is more fit. As the headline in the New Scientist put it, “Cleverness May Carry Survival Costs.” Yes, it’s been observed for centuries that it’s the truly stupid who are the most successful, live the longest, are the happiest, the wealthiest, the most desirable, and so on. Let’s face it: It’s the stupid who have the inside track in this world.

This is what’s known as “A Theory Incapable of Disproof.” (Or perhaps, “A Theory Born of Self-Interest.”) The fruit fly experiment is now cited as scientific proof of evolution. So whenever you hear about the “overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution,” remember that evolutionists have put the fruit fly poison-eating experiment in their “win” column.

Or consider the argument for evolution made in the New York Times Science section based on the human appendix. After describing how the appendix is a useless organ that can kill you, the author snidely remarks, “You sometimes hear people who say they reject evolution’s claim that our bodies show clear signs of being ‘intelligently designed.’ I wonder how many of them have had appendicitis.”

As I understand the concept behind survival of the fittest, the appendix doesn’t do much for the theory of evolution either. How does a survival-of-the-fittest regime evolve an organ that kills the host organism? Why hasn’t evolution evolved the appendix away? (Another sign that your scientific theory is in trouble: When your argument against an opposing theory also disproves your own.)

For those of you opposed to “faith” being taught in the classroom, reflect on the answer the Times gave:

Imagine a trait that helps an animal survive to adulthood, but that also has side effects that can cause trouble later in life. If, on balance, animals produce more offspring with the trait than without it, natural selection will favor it. [P]erhaps the appendix lifted the odds that our ancestors could resist childhood diseases and live to childbearing years. Even if it also caused deaths by appendicitis, the appendix might have been a net plus.15

So there it is: the theory of evolution is proved again. When the appendix’s use was a mystery, it proved evolution. When the appendix was thought to help humans resist childhood diseases—well, that proved evolution, too! Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have—and you’ve got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don’t accept the giant raccoon flatuence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat. That’s basically how the argument for evolution goes.

You will begin to notice that the evolution cultists’ answer to everything is the punchline to the joke about the economist. A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with one can of food but no can opener. The physicist says, “If we drop the can from 30 meters, the velocity plus the force will break the can open.” The chemist says, “We could heat the can to 101 degrees Celsius and the boiling reaction will burst the can.” The economist says, “Assume a can opener.”

That’s all you ever get from evolution cultists: Assume a can opener. Assume each one of the many, many mutations necessary to create a complicated structure—like a cell or an eye—is itself beneficial and somehow makes the organism more fit. Assume completely random mutations—all individually beneficial—could come together in 200 individual parts to form a perfectly functioning mechanism such as the flagellum. Assume the appendix is a cornucopia of unknown benefits (until it kills you). Assume eating poison is good for you. These people make L. Ron Hubbard look like Aristotle.

They ridicule us for saying, “The Bible is true because it says so right in the Bible”—which I’ve never said, by the way. Then they expect us to swallow their circular argument in support of Darwinism. To paraphrase Chico Marx, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your brilliantly designed eyes?”

Step Three: Creating a New Species Is Still on Evolution’s “To-Do” List

We haven’t even gotten to the third prong of Darwin’s theory of evolution—the point of the whole contraption—and we’ve already had to assume miracles and stifle giggles at the key definitional term “fittest.” The big payoff of the theory that must be taught as scientific fact to small schoolchildren throughout America is this: If we combine (1) absurd assumptions about random mutation with (2) a tautology (“survival of the fittest”), we get…a whole new species!

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published The Origin of Species, in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians but paleontologists. It was a nice yarn Darwin had spun, but there was absolutely nothing in the fossil record to support it. Far from showing gradual change with one species slowly giving way to another, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing (almost like there was a big flood or something).

Darwin’s response was to say: Start looking! He blamed the absence of fossil support for his theory on the “extreme imperfection of the geological record.” With a little elbow grease, he was sure, paleontologists would soon produce the necessary evidence. Well, we’ve been looking for 150 years now, we’ve found a lot of fossils, and what the fossil record shows is: New species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then suddenly disappearing.

In 1979, David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, described the problem this way:

The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian [sic] natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. There were several problems, but the principal one was that the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution.16

Things have only gotten worse in the intervening twenty years. It was one thing for Darwin to rationalize the lack of fossil evidence on the grounds that “only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.” It’s another thing entirely for today’s biologists to be still clinging to the argument from ignorance. One hundred fifty years have passed with vast awards and accolades dangling before any paleontologist who could locate a fossil proving evolution.

Dr. Raup said:

[W]e are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian [sic] change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.17

Darwin’s disciples simply assert that evolution led from this species to that by the process of random mutation—with cruel nature striking down the genetic losers—and to hell with the fossil record’s showing nothing of the sort. At some point, it’s not even pseudoscience anymore, it’s just a crazy religious cult. If mutations are utterly random—as Darwinism claims—there ought to be an infinite variety of transitional animals with small mutations that eventually led to a magnificent new attribute like a wing or a lung. Unlike most high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory was correct. He said there would be “interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps.”18

But we don’t have “interminable varieties.” We don’t have fossils “connecting” the extinct to the extant. We don’t have the “finest graduated steps.” What the fossil record shows is sudden bursts of all manner of animals, modest change, and then sudden and total extinction. Dinosaurs appeared, lived for 150 million years, and then disappeared, only to be quickly replaced with mammals. Neither the creation nor the extinction of dinosaurs was accomplished by a gradual process of any sort.

You also never see the mutations that turned out to be clunkers, like the dog that mutated webbed feet or the fish that mutated fur. To the contrary, all the changes always seem to follow a straight line.

But if the mutations were really random, with Mother Nature ruthlessly striking down the genetic losers, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable. Otherwise, the mutations aren’t random, they are deliberate—and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about an “intelligent designer” and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races. But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for the vast quantity of hapless creatures that ought to have died out in a survival-of-the-fittest regime.

The evolution cultists hypothesize—since this is a real science, as opposed to intelligent design, which is just a bunch of crazy conjectures—that the bad mutations didn’t stick around long enough to leave fossils. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: the clunkier mutations simply never fossilized, and why are you asking so many questions?

Or they revert to Darwin’s excuse of 150 years ago about the paucity of the fossil record. If that explains anything, it only explains why we wouldn’t find one particular unfit mutation—say, if we went looking only for the dog with webbed feet. It doesn’t explain why we don’t find any bad mutations—a dog that mutated antennae, or gills, or a tail on its head. In order to mutate the good stuff, like a bird’s lung, there would have to be countless mutations that were at least better than what existed before. If each one of the incremental mutations is more “fit” than what preceded it—which it has to be in order to survive—those transitional mutations should have stayed around long enough to appear in the fossil record, before mutating their way to something even better. But in the course of millions and millions of years, all we see are slight variations on the final product.

There is no reason to expect, for example, that the first place our eyes ever appeared was on the front of our faces. Why don’t we have ancestors with eyes on the bottom of their feet, on their arms, or on the top of their heads? Eyes might be best positioned in the front of our heads, but eyes on the bottom of our feet are better than no eyes at all, and so should have stuck around at least for a while in the fossil record. But they’re not there.

We’re not talking about The Swan on NBC. This is evolution! This is the completely accidental process that created butterfly wings, bat radar, the human brain, and the millions of species alive today. The theory of evolution requires hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of mutations just to create an eye. (No one has any idea how many mutations would be required to create an eye.) A process that is supposed to have transformed an amoeba into Jerry Garcia by “random mutation” must have produced some spectacular failures. Why can’t we find any of the amusing ones?

The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould,19 one of evolution’s most passionate defenders, called the “extreme rarity” of transitional animals the “trade secret of paleontology.” He said, “The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of the branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” (Gould was also the guy who tried to disprove the idea of IQ and lost that debate, too. Poor Gould will go down in history as the Robert E. Lee of science, the last passionate defender of lost causes.) Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Robert Carroll admits, “Very few intermediates between groups are known from the fossil record.”20

For over a hundred years, evolutionists proudly pointed to the same sad birdlike animal, Archaeopteryx, as their lone transitional fossil linking dinosaurs and birds. Discovered a few years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Archaeopteryx was instantly hailed as the transitional species that proved Darwin’s theory. This unfortunate creature had wings, feathers, teeth, claws, and a long, bony tail. If it flew at all, it didn’t fly very well. Alas, it is now agreed that poor Archaeopteryx is no relation of modern birds. It’s just a dead end. It transitioned to nothing.

But could Archaeopteryx be our one example of bad mutations eliminated by natural selection? Archaeopteryx can’t fill that role either, because it seems to have no predecessors. The fossils that look like Archaeopteryx lived millions of years after Archaeopteryx, and the fossils that preceded Archaeopteryx look nothing at all like it. The bizarre bird is just an odd creation that came out of nowhere and went nowhere, much like Air America Radio.

The Washington Post defended the state religion by referring to evidence that does not exist—the countless bad mutations—in order to rationalize the apparent designed progression of the fossil record:

“This appearance of ‘perfect fit’ makes it seem as if organisms must have been the product of an intelligent force. But this appearance of perfection is deceiving. It gives no hint of the numberless evolutionary dead ends—lineages that, according to the fossil record, survived for a while but then died out, probably because changes in the environment made their once-perfect designs not so perfect anymore.”21

That would have been a creditable defense of the Darwiniacs’ crackpot religion in 1859. But if there were—as Darwin supposed and the Washington Post asserts 150 years later in defiance of the facts—“numberless evolutionary dead ends,” we ought to have found a whole bunch of them by now. In fact, we ought to have found more dead ends than evolutionary advances—a lot more.

Niles Eldredge, Gould’s collaborator, has devoted himself to reconciling evolutionary theory with the fossil record. But even Eldredge complained of the famous “evolutionary” horse sequence purporting to show diminutive horses “evolving” into modern stallions, saying the sequence is entirely “speculative” and yet is “presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook.” Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago claims it is “flat wrong” to say that the fossil record does not show “a smooth, unambiguous transitional series linking, let’s say, the first small horse to today’s horse.” Coyne ought to apply for a job at the American Museum of Natural History. Much to its embarrassment, the museum has had to rearrange its famous “horse sequence.”

The more advances paleontologists make in uncovering the fossil record, the more absurd the evolution fable becomes. Most nettlesome for evolutionists is the Cambrian period, showing a vast quantity of plants and animals appearing on the scene in the blink of an evolutionary eye more than 500 million years ago. In a period of less than 10 million years, there is a sudden explosion of nearly all the animal phyla we have today. As leading Darwin cultist Richard Dawkins describes the Cambrian fossils, “It is as though they were just planted there, without evolutionary history.” Darwin himself referred to the great difficulty of explaining the absence of “vast piles of strata rich in fossils” before the Cambrian explosion.

Origin of Species–thumpers prefer to ignore the Cambrian explosion and prattle instead about the “evolution” of “girl crushes”—as one article did in the New York Times Style section. (“Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively”22—and you know how cooperative we gals are.) This is where all the deep thinking about evolution is being done these days, in the “social sciences” and the Style section of the New York Times.

Or the Darwiniacs lie about the duration of the Cambrian period, as Jerry Coyne does to nerd public policy wonks reading the New Republic who don’t know any better. Referring to “the so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’”—as if even the name is a fraud—Coyne writes, “‘Short period’ here means geologically short, in this case 10 million to 30 million years.”23 This is both misleading and false (which isn’t easy!). The best estimate for the duration of the Cambrian explosion is not 10 to 30 million years, as evolutionists like Coyne often claim, but 5 to 10 million years. And that is the maximum length. When dealing with rocks half a billion years old, it’s impossible to resolve times to less than 5 to 10 million years (just as with a telescope it’s impossible to distinguish two faraway objects if they are close together). In other words, the explosion of animal life could have happened in an instant, but from our present perspective we can’t narrow it down to anything more precise than a window of about 5 to 10 million years. If intelligent design is a crackpot theory being hawked by religious nuts, why are its opponents the ones always caught telling big whoppers?

These great practitioners of the scientific method, dispassionately pursuing the evidence wherever it may lead, simply pretend the Cambrian explosion didn’t happen (the “so-called” Cambrian explosion, as Coyne says), and anyone who mentions it is a creationist nut. The New York Times will write honestly about Air America’s ratings before high school biology textbooks will tell the truth about the Cambrian explosion.

When forced to pony up an answer, Darwin’s disciples say, Assume a can opener. Assume that the creatures that preceded the Cambrian era failed to fossilize (as they said about the intermediate fossils that also aren’t there). Assume they were soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad, but leaving no record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies. Yes, that would explain it! The evolutionists had no evidence to support that assumption, but at least it couldn’t be disproved—so it was at least on a par with the Flatulent Raccoon Theory of life’s origins.

Alas, in 1984, Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era, and it turned out the pre-Cambrian creatures were extraordinarily well preserved.24 But instead of a glut of evolutionary ancestors, all we have at the outset of the Cambrian explosion are some sad little worms and sponges. The interesting thing about the pre-Cambrian organisms is that they are soft-bodied, microscopic creatures—precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence. But now it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, the pre-Cambrian beds were positively ideal for fossilization—better even than in the Cambrian period. And yet the only thing paleontologists found there was a few worms.

The Chinese fossil discovery was, as the New York Times put it, “among the most spectacular in this century.” Scientists were calling it “genesis material.” The discovery showed “that the dramatic transformation of life from primeval single-cell organisms to the complex multicellular precursors of modern fauna was more sudden, swift and widespread than scientists had thought.”25 For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a mere 5 to 10 million years—“as though they were just planted there.” Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian period was not “evolution,” it was “a revolution.”26

Even the famously difficult-to-evolve eye appeared at the beginning of the Cambrian period. And there were no light-sensitive pits. And yet, in 2005—or two decades after the discovery of the Chinese fossils—the New Scientist was still clinging to Darwin’s speculation that the first eyes “probably evolved from light-sensitive cells.”27 At least when Darwin invoked light-sensitive pits, it was merely question begging. The assertion of the “light-sensitive pits” hypothesis after the discovery of the Chinese fossils is a religious belief held in defiance of the facts.

Andrew Knoll, Harvard professor of natural history, described the importance of the Chinese fossils, saying, “Most of everything that was going to happen, all the ways of making invertebrate animals, had already happened by the mid-Cambrian. Now, it seems the new life forms were invented within the first few million years of the Cambrian.”28 Unable to keep using the excuse that they had no fossil evidence because their evidence failed to fossilize, the Darwiniacs quietly returned to pretending the Cambrian explosion never happened.

In 2005, Jerry Coyne was still trying to pass off the “hard to fossilize” argument to readers of the New Republic, writing, “We still do not understand why many groups originated in even this relatively short time, although it may reflect an artifact: the evolution of easily fossilized hard parts suddenly made organisms capable of being fossilized.” Twenty years after the Chinese fossils were discovered, Coyne was still pretending not to have heard of them.

The preposterous conceit that the fossil record has produced a beautiful mosaic of organisms consistent with evolution except for the occasional “gap” is absurd. Evolution is nothing but a gap. It’s a conjecture about how species might have arisen that is contradicted by the fossil record and by nearly everything we have learned about molecular biology since Darwin’s day.

Things do evolve, in a figurative sense. The fifth draft of a script is usually better than the first draft. People do get taller when there’s more protein in their diets. Ellen DeGeneres’s third TV show is better than her first two were. Okay, fine. The cult cites evidence that looks like Michelangelo’s studies for the Sistine Chapel and then claims it has proved the absence of a designer—and brings lawsuits to prevent anyone from saying otherwise.

Scientists in Communist China have more freedom of speech to discuss scientific facts bearing on evolution than we do in the United States. Chen Jun-Yuan, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, who performed the excavations, says that contrary to Darwin’s tree of life, which predicts a few primitive organisms gradually branching out into many others, the fossil record shows just the opposite. “The base is wide,” Dr. Chen says, “and gradually narrows.” Chen concluded, “Darwinism is maybe only telling a part of the story for evolution.” (Fortunately, Dr. Chen is not in Dover, Pennsylvania, or Judge John E. Jones III would have prohibited him from saying that.)

Meanwhile, when a high school biology teacher in America tries to tell his students about the Chinese fossils, he is banned from teaching biology. Roger DeHart used to teach biology at Burlington-Edison High School in Washington State, where he supplemented his curriculum with newspaper stories on the Chinese fossils from newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He never mentioned God.29 The ACLU threatened to sue and the school removed DeHart from his class, replacing him with a recent teachers’ college graduate who had majored in physical education. Thus were the students of Burlington-Edison High School saved from having to hear scientific facts that might cause them to question their faith in the official state religion. The liberal clergy prohibit students from hearing about a fossil bed described in the New York Times as “among the most spectacular in this century.” Then they say it’s because they want to keep faith out of the classroom.

The Cambrian period isn’t a small gap in the fossil record chock-full of evolutionary evidence. There is no evidence in the fossil record—only “ingenious excuses,” as Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson says.

Remarking on the discovery of the pre-Cambrian fossils in China, primitive-chordate specialist Nicholas Holland of San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said, “You just hardly know what order to put the material in now. I mean, you might as well just present the phyla alphabetically. It’s come to that.”30 As Gould admits when he says transitional forms “are generally lacking at the species level,” even the cult members can’t point to fossils showing the transition from one species to another, which I gather is the general point of the theory of evolution, subtly alluded to in the title of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species.

The sad state of the fossil record has led to a schism in the church of evolution. Both sets of Darwin’s disciples demand that we assume miracles to reconcile Darwinism with the fossil record, but the two branches disagree—passionately—about whose miracle is more convincing. As already mentioned, the “neo-Darwinists” respond to all problems in the fossil record by asking us to assume all the creatures we would expect to find if evolution was true and really did exist (really!)—but somehow never fossilized.

Their hated rivals, the Darwin revisionists, tend to reside at places like Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History and have too much intellectual pride to subscribe to a clunky, obvious miracle like “none of the animals that would support our theory fossilized.” Consequently, the revisionists have given up on trying to defend the fossil record as consistent with evolution. Instead, the revisionists concocted a more sophisticated supernatural occurrence. The miracle proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, is called “punctuated equilibrium.” The gist of “punctuated equilibrium” is: Evolution, but this time—let’s make it consistent with the fossil record!

Instead of gradual change occurring by random mutation and natural selection choosing the most “fit” to survive and reproduce—in other words, “Darwin’s theory of evolution”—Gould and Eldredge hypothesized that evolution could also happen really fast and then stop happening at all for 150 million years. Basically what happens is this: Your parents are slugs and then suddenly—but totally at random—you evolve into a gecko and your brother evolves into a shark and your sister evolves into a polar bear and the guy down the street evolves into a porpoise and so on—and then everyone relaxes by the pool for 150 million years, virtually unchanged.

The important thing is: This happened completely by chance. In other words, the most prominent apologist for evolution came up with a theory of evolution that’s not evolution, it’s a nontheological miracle.