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PROOF FOR HOW THE WALKMAN EVOLVED INTO THE iPOD BY RANDOM MUTATION

Darwiniacs do not have a single observable example of one species evolving into another by the Darwinian mechanism of variation and selection. All they have is a story. It is a story that inspires fanatical devotion from the cult simply because their story excludes a creator. They have seized upon something that looks like progress from primitive life forms to more complex life forms and invented a story to explain how the various categories of animals originated. But animal sequences do not prove that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection caused the similarities. It is just as likely that the similarities are proof of intelligent design, creationism, or the Giant Raccoon’s Flatulence theory. The animal-sequence drawings allegedly demonstrating evolution by showing, for example, a little runt horse gradually becoming a grand stallion, are just that: drawings.

Evolutionists act as if they were the first people on Earth to notice similarities among various species, but this wasn’t a new concept. Biologists had always grouped animals by what they looked like. No one disputes that a monkey looks like a human, especially in the case of Al Franken. Evolution fetishists then position the different species in a make-believe “tree of life” and announce that they have proved evolution. The capacity to draw a diagram and come up with a story about how things might have happened is not science. Janet Reno looks like Elton John. That is not proof that Janet Reno gave birth to Elton John.

The seductiveness of Darwinism resides in its confusion of similar structures with the engine of creation. The Darwinian sleight of hand consists of the claim that because a human hand, for example, is similar to a bat’s wing, there must be an ancestral relationship. Clearly apes look like us, but that doesn’t mean there is a lineal connection between us and the apes. It certainly does not establish the mechanism responsible for the differences.

Despite the cult members’ occasional calm assurances that this animal evolved into that, we have no idea whatsoever if one animal descended from another. Fossils do not reveal parent/descendant relationships. It’s all guesswork, requiring frequent revision in light of new fossil discoveries. The animal-sequence drawings in biology textbooks are presented as if they are hard fact, and then a few years later, new fossil discoveries require the sequence to be completely disassembled, rearranged, and put back together again. Then the all-new animal-sequence drawing is presented as if it were hard fact, and the existence of an earlier, completely different sequence drawing is flushed down the memory hole.

But every few years, the Darwiniacs find some odd creature that looks a little like another creature, and it is triumphantly announced that evolution has been “proved true.” Thus, for example, on April 6, 2006, the New York Times gave prime front-page, above-the-fold space to an article headlined “Fossil Called Missing Link from Sea to Land Animals.” The article quoted unnamed scientists as saying that this discovery “should undercut the argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind.” So they found an odd-looking fish with weird appendages and pronounced the missing link between fish and land animals. But only if evolution is assumed to be true is there any basis for assuming that the fish is related to fishes without appendages or to land animals—much less for assuming that each step was produced by a brutal battle of survival of the fittest. And there is no reason to assume evolution is true until, among other things, the Darwiniacs can produce a whole glut of transitional animals—i.e., a entirely new fossil record.

The successive appearance of more complex species does seem to show something that looks like progress. But that has nothing to do with the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. One also sees progress in the Wright brothers’ increasingly complex airplanes, a master’s paintings, and the advance from the peace pipe to Marlboro Lights—progressions all notable for being the product of “intelligent designers.” The appearance of progress hardly establishes mutation and natural selection as the engine of change. To the contrary, the similarities that so mesmerize Darwiniacs look more like the progress of a designed object than the result of a series of lucky accidents. Far from the fantastic competition of a dog-eat-dog struggle to survive, we see a fossil record that reveals a rather clean, well-organized sequence.

This is why Stephen Jay Gould referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the “trade secret” of paleontology. As a consolation prize to evolution’s lackeys who still wanted to believe the fossil record wasn’t a complete bust, Gould offered this hopeful spin: “Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”1 Transitional forms between larger groups means evolutionists can point to reptiles appearing in the fossil record, followed by mammal-like reptiles, followed by mammals. This, they say, proves the mammals came from the reptiles.

They have no idea if the reptiles are even related to the mammal-like reptiles, much less to the mammals. Again, fossils do not reveal a parent/descendant relationship. The cultists certainly don’t know whether any particular mammal descended from any particular reptile. But more important, the apparent progress from simple animals to more sophisticated higher animals—with no transitional species—looks a lot more like planned, deliberate progress than a series of random mutations.

Darwiniacs love to cite, for example, the progress from the reptile’s multiboned jaw to the jaw of mammal-like reptiles with fewer bones, leading inexorably to the single-boned mammal jawbone with two bones moving to the ear. The jawbone metamorphosis didn’t prove evolution, but here at last was one small part of the fossil record that was not wildly inconsistent with the theory of evolution—in contradistinction to the Cambrian period and the absence of transitional species, for example. That’s “proof” when it comes to the state religion: For not disproving evolution, the vertebrate jawbone is said to prove evolution. Michael Moore’s essence is consistent with the Flatulent Raccoon Theory for the origin of life. On Darwiniacs’ standard of proof for themselves, the Flatulent Raccoon Theory has thus been proved true.

In fact and to the contrary, the much-celebrated migration of the reptile jawbone raises more questions for the theory of evolution than it answers. How did that happen? How, that is, did those bones figure out just where to go? One would think that if they had perfect independence in migrating anywhere, the bones would have landed all over the place, but no, we have no evidence, over the course of the reptile-to-mammal transition, that those wandering bones had any other destination in mind than the one they ultimately found.

When asked for proof, all evolutionists can do is point to structural differences in broad categories of animals—the “larger groups” mentioned by Gould—as if the very thing they were trying to explain constituted an explanation. Yes, we know a lizard is different from a squirrel. Despite the claims of Darwin’s apostles, people knew that even before Darwin! The question is: Was it the process of natural selection that turned the lizard into the squirrel?

The evolutionists’ proof is their capacity to concoct a story. They say the whale “evolved” when a bear fell into the ocean. The bat “evolved” when squirrels developed flaps that helped them leap longer distances and fall to the ground more slowly. This isn’t a joke. Cult member Richard Dawkins writes in Climbing Mount Improbable:

To begin with, an ancestor like an ordinary squirrel, living up trees without any special gliding membrane, leaps across short gaps. [It could jump a bit farther with a flap of skin to provide resistance.] So natural selection favors individuals with slightly pouchy skin around the arm or leg joints, and this becomes the norm…. Now any individuals with an even larger skin web can leap a few inches further. So in later generations this extension of skin becomes the norm, and so on…. It is possible that true flying, as seen in bats, birds and pterosaurs, evolved from gliding ancestors like these. Most of these animals can control their direction and speed of their glide so as to land at a predetermined spot. It is easy to imagine true flapping flight evolving from repetition of the muscular movements used to control glide direction, so average time to landing is gradually postponed over evolutionary time.2

But unlike a squirrel, the bat has a complicated set of elongated bones to support powered wings and, most famously, a sophisticated form of sonar. How did all that evolve, without making the squirrel less fit? Elongated bones would help a bat fly, but it’s hard to see how they would make a squirrel more fit, rather than gangly, unsteady, and slow.

Needless to say, these hypothesized half-squirrel, half-bat animals do not appear anywhere in the fossil record. So however persuasive one finds the squirrel-falling-from-a-tree explanation for the evolution of the bat, there are no fossils to support it. To the contrary, the bat appears in the fossil record millions of years ago, fully formed and largely indistinguishable from today’s bats. But Darwiniacs have a squirrel and they have a bat and they have a story. Their idea of a “scientific theory” makes psychic readings look like a hard science.

Moreover, if all species evolved from the same single-celled organism beginning in the same little mud puddle, why hasn’t the earthworm made a little more progress? Was it never, ever desirable in any of the worm’s many dirt holes to mutate eyes or legs or wings or a brain? How could one clump of cells starting in the same little puddle become a human being while others never make it past the amoeba stage? Forget getting to humans, which liberals rank as the lowest form of life. Why hasn’t the earthworm evolved into a beagle? Just for being cute, a beagle can acquire a six-room coop apartment on Park Avenue, surely an evolutionary advantage.

The cult members are especially dazzled by the similar DNA in all living creatures. The human genome is 98.7 percent identical with the chimpanzee’s.3 On the basis of this intriguing fact, psychology professor Roger Fouts of Central Washington University argues that humans “are simply odd looking apes”4 in a book titled Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are.

Except the genome argument proves too much. The human genome is 35 percent identical to that of a daffodil. I think even a Darwiniac would admit humans are not 35 percent identical to a daffodil. Again, the cult’s smoking gun of evolutionary proof turns out to be an imaginary water pistol.

THE “mountains of evidence” for evolution we keep hearing about mostly consist of changes less impressive than those produced every day at the Bliss Spa in New York City. Now and then, nature gives some species a Botox shot, but it generally wears off and the basic model returns. Finches on the Galápagos Islands with deeper beaks begin to outnumber finches with shallower beaks during a drought—and then the population of shallow-beaked finches immediately rebounds after a rainy season. Bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics and viruses develop resistance to antiviral medication—but nothing new is ever created. A bacterium remains a bacterium, a virus remains a virus, a finch remains a finch. Even the evolution fetishists do not claim that a mutating AIDS virus is on its way up the tree of life, soon to be a kangaroo. If a rapidly mutating bacterium or virus were proof of “evolution,” then after 3 billion years of nonstop evolution, the only life forms we would have on Earth would be extremely sturdy bacteria and viruses. Humans develop a tolerance for alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, but no one imagines a high tolerance for alcohol will somehow lead to a new organ, like a tail or a pair of wings.

Darwin’s Galápagos finches are boldly cited as living proof of the creative power of natural selection. It is triumphantly stated that “now” there are thirteen finch species in the Galápagos Islands, which allegedly evolved from a single finch species. Yes, today there are thirteen species of finches on the Galápagos Islands. Guess how many there were when Darwin first discovered them in 1835? That’s right! Thirteen species. Darwin hypothesized that the thirteen species he found might have “evolved” from one species, just as evolutionists hypothesize that the bat might have “evolved” from a clumsy squirrel. The Galápagos finches are evidence of nothing but the evolutionists’ ability to make up stories.

If anything, the finches are a major blow to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Despite major changes in the environment on the Galápagos Islands, the formation of new species has never been observed there. There were thirteen species in 1835, and after more than 170 years of wild variation in the environment, mutation, and “natural selection,” there are still thirteen species. The finches’ beaks have moved back and forth in shape and nothing more.

In a 1991 Scientific American, Darwinist Peter Grant effused about the famous finches, saying that if droughts came only once a decade, natural selection “would transform one species into another within 200 years.” Well, it’s been 170 years since Darwin first saw them and we’re still waiting. If it rained this year, the Galápagos finch population would look exactly like the finch population Darwin first found there. If it was dry, it would look like the finch population he would have found a few years later.

Human breeders have not been able to produce one biologically novel structure in the laboratory—much less a new animal species—even under artificial conditions. No such demonstration exists; none has ever been provided. The fruit fly has been abused, mutilated, and stressed over the course of thousands and thousands of generations. The poor dumb creature remains what it has always been, a fruit fly in the first instance, dumb in the second. This negative result is perfectly consistent with the long history of breeding experiments, which demonstrate beyond question that species may be changed only within very narrow margins of variability. No practical breeder imagines, for example, that he will ever succeed in creating a chicken with antennae or a pig with a dorsal fin.

Amid this dismal record, there have been a few exciting developments for the Darwiniacs. There was the discovery of a manlike ape that looked like a transitional fossil between ape and man—the long-sought after “missing link.” There were drawings of embryos demonstrating that vertebrates all looked alike in the earliest stages of development. There was the peppered moth that became darker—allegedly to better camouflage itself from predatory birds—when industrial air pollution blackened the trees in England. It wasn’t terribly impressive in terms of “evidence,” but it filled out a few pages in biology textbooks claiming evolution was a FACT.

And then, one by one, each of these pillars of evidence for evolution was exposed as a fraud. (Ironically, each appeared to have been an intelligently designed prank.) It’s difficult to imagine that any other “scientific” theory has been beset with as many hoaxes as the theory of evolution—always a good sign of a serious scientific endeavor.

On April Fools’ Day, 2005, Scientific American magazine ran a mock editorial apologizing for accepting the “so-called theory of evolution.” (Scientific American also sneered at the “alleged” flights of the Wright brothers in 1906—two years after they had flown their first airplanes.) The magazine sarcastically apologized for its belief in the theory of evolution, saying scientists had “dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating, and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.”

The only time “radiocarbon dating” was used in connection with the theory of evolution was the time it was used to expose the Piltdown Man as a hoax being pawned off as proof of evolution. It was one of the greatest scientific frauds of all time, right up there with the Pepsi challenge and that commercial where ordinary laundry detergent gets red wine out of a white blouse. For half a century, Piltdown Man constituted a major piece of evidence for Darwin’s theory. After decades of being embarrassed by the fossil record’s stubborn refusal to come to Darwin’s aid, in 1912 the Piltdown Man miraculously appeared in a gravel pit in Sussex, England. Amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered a skull with a humanlike cranium and an apelike jaw in Piltdown quarry. It was a creature that was not quite ape, not quite man, but a transitional species between the two, rather like the actor Pauly Shore. This Pauly Shore– like fossil wouldn’t have proved evolution, but it would have given evolutionists a possible link between apes and man on their imaginary “tree of life.”

Like a doctor’s excuse note written to a seventh-grade teacher signed, “Timmy’s mommy,” it was almost uncanny how precisely Piltdown Man matched what prevailing scientific theory predicted the “missing link” would look like. The New York Times headline for the article on the Piltdown Man proclaimed, “Darwin Theory Is Proved True.” (My headline the day Clinton was impeached: “God Theory Is Proved True.”)

The Piltdown fossil was “peer-reviewed”—so we know it would pass muster with the editors of Scientific American, still flush with success after triumphantly exposing the “Ohio flight hoax.” Experts confirmed the age and origin of the bones. Indeed, the Piltdown Man received the approval of Arthur Smith Woodward, the leading geologist at the British Museum (Natural History). Eoanthropus dawsoni was born.

Dawson was showered with praise, fame, and awards. If only Vanity Fair had been around, Dawson could have been photographed in his Jaguar and hailed for “speaking truth to power.” He was made a fellow of the Geological Society and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. (He was even offered a position writing editorials for Scientific American.)

For more than forty years, the Piltdown Man was taught as scientific fact. Then, in 1953, it was exposed as a complete and utter fraud—in part through the process that so dazzles the editors of Scientific American: radiocarbon dating. (Note to Scientific American: Steer clear of any mention of “radiocarbon dating” when disparaging the critics of evolution as uneducated rubes.)

Yes, the same process that recently helped us pin down the exact year of Helen Thomas’s birth also determined that the Piltdown Man’s skull was from a thousand-year-old human fossil and the jaw from a modern orangutan. It wasn’t even a particularly good fake: The jaw had been stained with potassium bichromate and the teeth filed down to make them look more human. (Cher had a similar procedure done recently and she looks amazing.) Evolution’s Piltdown Man makes Scientology’s “e-meter” look like a particle accelerator at Los Alamos.

There was even a Piltdown bird, an incredible fossil that was half-dinosaur, half-bird—which, amazingly, was entirely composed of white meat, had four drumsticks, and was self-basting. “Archaeoraptor” made the cover of National Geographic with the sensational headline “Feathers for T. rex?” And then “Archaeoraptor” was exposed as a hoax, too.

On the empirical side of evolution there was the celebrated peppered moth. According to the peppered moth of legend, when pollution first began to blacken tree trunks in industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century, the once-pale moths turned black. It was theorized that light moths against sooty tree trunks were easily spotted by birds and eaten, while the dark moths evaded predators, and survived to reproduce. A new black peppered moth had “evolved”—just as Darwin said it would. Thus began the secular Left’s short-lived love affair with air pollution.

It wasn’t a particularly dazzling example of evolution. Black, white, or purple, they were still peppered moths. Nothing new was created. The moths didn’t become birds or grow opposable thumbs or develop a capacity for introspection. The miracle engine of natural selection had merely produced a minor variation within the species of animals known as “moths.” New Yorkers not only transform from pale to dark, but also from fat to skinny, during the annual summer migration to the Hamptons, and no one writes scientific articles about that. This is not the sort of metamorphosis that turns a mosquito into a German shepherd.

Still, it was something, and the Darwiniacs didn’t have much. Until the peppered moth, evolution fetishists had not been able to produce a single example of natural selection in real time. Here, at last, a light gray moth had been magically transformed into an altogether different and distinct life form—a slightly darker gray moth. Voilà! Evolutionists were so excited about the peppered moth’s changing hue, they couldn’t be bothered with testing the theory. It had to be true. The Darwiniacs happily announced that the peppered moth proved evolution and presumably went back to calling critics of evolution anti-science know-nothings.

It wasn’t until the early fifties that anyone thought to test the theory. Oxford biologist E. B. Ford sent his assistant out to capture hundreds of the moths and stage an experiment. For two years black moths were bused out of the inner-city areas to the suburbs, while white moths were bused into the inner-city areas. Then both groups were monitored to see how long each survived. (Is it just me, or does this scenario sound oddly familiar?) After two years of observation, Ford triumphantly announced that birds easily spotted light moths on black city trees and dark moths on the light country trees. There it was—evolution was proved.

For the next fifty years, the peppered moth experiment was a major part of the “mountains of evidence” for evolution referred to by Scientific American. Evolution fundamentalist Jerry Coyne called the peppered moth the “prize horse” of natural selection. Every schoolchild has seen the photo of the light peppered moth clearly visible on a black tree trunk next to a photo of the dark moth nearly invisible against the same tree trunk.

It was so logical, so intuitive, and so fake. Decades later, researchers who had not been informed by the editors of Scientific American or Judge John Jones III that questioning evolution was a hanging offense noticed some problems. American lepidopterist Ted Sargent and others pointed out that peppered moths do not rest on tree trunks, but on the undersides of high branches. Not only that, but the peppered moth sleeps during the day, coming out to fly only at night, when the birds are asleep.

It turned out Ford and his assistant had rigged the game by physically placing light moths on black tree trunks in the bright light of day—someplace the moths would never have been if left to their own devices. It was rather like testing the theory that birds developed wings to avoid sharks by dumping wingless birds into a shark tank and seeing if they survived. As described in the New York Times, “The most famous example of evolution in action must now become the most infamous.”5

But what about those photos? The famous photos of the peppered moths were staged, often by literally gluing dead moths to tree trunks. Their “proof” of evolution was suddenly reduced to a variation on Monty Python’s dead-parrot sketch. (“I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.”)

Now let’s examine how evolutionists responded—you know, the ones who claim to be slaves to the scientific method. Except for a thimbleful of serious scientists who admitted the jig was up, the cult members wholly ignored the truth about the peppered moth. They demonized Sargent, the lepidopterist who had exposed the fraud, marginalized his work, and attempted to ruin his career. To this day, evolutionists cite the peppered moths as proof that evolution is based on “science.” The staged photos still appear in biology textbooks, as detailed in Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution.

An article in the New Scientist on July 9, 2005, authoritatively stated, “Evolutionary biologists have long known that the process can happen rapidly—Charles Darwin himself pointed out the observable changes wrought by pigeon fanciers and dog breeders. A century later biologists showed that peppered moths in England’s industrial heartland had evolved darker colours to camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees.”

Maybe the new name for the New Scientist should be the 1950s Scientist. And I don’t think selective breeding directed by a human being goes in the “hidden hand of nature” column.

Also in 2005—three years after it had been acknowledged in the New York Times that the peppered moth example was a fraud—University of Rochester biology professor H. Allen Orr wrote an article in the New Yorker treating the peppered moth scandal as an open question: “[D]id the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?”6 (“And what role, if any, did the several empty cans of black spray paint found at the scene play in their evolutionary odyssey?”) Orr called the darkening of the peppered moth one of the “minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists” that had been inflated by skeptics of evolution.

Peppered moths sleep during the day; they fly at night; they do not normally alight upon tree trunks. These are observable facts, sort of like the Earth revolving around the sun. It would be as if a college professor had lightly dismissed the “minor squabble” among scientists about “whether it’s possible to sail off the edge of the Earth” and denounced critics of the flat Earth theory as “fanatical pro-elliptical orbists.” What is so peculiar about the Darwiniacs is that they perpetrate comical frauds in defense of their religion and then angrily accuse their opponents of being driven by religious zeal. They’re constantly acting like you’re the idiot for refusing to admit the fact that we’re living on the back of a giant turtle.

At least the evolutionists still had the embryo drawings. Almost every biology book for the past century has included pictures of vertebrate embryos made by German biologist and enthusiastic eugenicist Ernst Haeckel, purportedly demonstrating the amazing similarity of fish, chickens, and humans in the womb. Without the Darwinist priesthood to explain, it’s not clear what this proved in the first place. It seems that Haeckel believed the development of the embryo imitated an organism’s entire evolution as a species—a theory precisely as scientific as molding an animal out of Play-doh and claiming that you have just demonstrated how God made the animals. Haeckel’s other big contribution to science, by the way, was the scientific claim that “wooly-haired Negroes” were “psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans…[and therefore] we must…assign a totally different value to their lives.”

If Haeckel’s imaginative theory were true, then he could show what humans looked like 500 million years ago by pointing to a fertilized human egg. And he could show what humans looked like, say, 100 million years ago by showing a baby in the second trimester. And he could show what humans looked like 1 million years ago by pointing to James Carville. Finally and most important, if his wackadoodle theory were true, then Haeckel could “prove” all vertebrates evolved from a similar-looking organism 500 million years ago. (I note in passing, evolution would still not explain why some of us became humans and others never made it past the gecko stage.) You can see why the scientific community sat up and took notice at this point. The last scientific theory to generate this kind of buzz was alchemy.

Amazingly enough, according to Haeckel’s drawings, vertebrate embryos did look alike.

To give you a sense of the mountains and mountains of evidence supporting the theory of evolution, until Haeckel’s drawings turned out to be frauds, his crackpot theory constituted one of the main pieces of evidence in support of evolution. Charles Darwin himself said the “facts” in embryology were “second to none in importance”7 and “by far the strongest single class of facts” supporting his theory.8

And then, in the 1990s, British embryologist Michael Richardson was looking at vertebrate embryos through a microscope and noticed that they look nothing at all like Haeckel’s drawings. Richardson and his team of researchers examined vertebrate embryos and published actual photos of the embryos in the August 1997 issue of the journal Anatomy & Embryology. It turned out that Haeckel had used the same woodcuts for some of the embryos and doctored others to make sure that the embryos looked alike. “It looks like,” Richardson said, “it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology”—which, in a field crowded with other evolutionary “proofs,” was quite a claim.

After Richardson published his photos of the embryos, the scientific community demonstrated its fearless commitment to the truth by completely ignoring his exposé. It turned out that Haeckel’s drawings had been known to be fakes for a century. Stephen Jay Gould responded in the March 2000 issue of Natural History magazine, saying he had known all along. And yet the keepers of the state religion had kept mum.9

Fully five years later, the New York Times reported that biology textbooks were still running Haeckel’s doctored drawings. The Times specifically singled out the third edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, “the bedrock text of the field,” as one of the culprits. Caught red-handed hawking fake evidence, one of the authors of the “bedrock text” justified the use of the Haeckel fakeries with the sort of pompous non sequitur you always get from the cult members: He said Haeckel’s drawings were “overinterpreted.” If they were fakes, why were they being interpreted at all? Why were they still in his textbook? If it took evolutionists fifty years to notice the “ask me about my prehuman grandchildren” decal on the back of Piltdown Man’s skull, needless to say the Darwiniacs aren’t giving up just because Haeckel’s drawings were fake.

You’re probably asking yourself, Why would the New York Times be printing the truth? The only reason the Times even mentioned the continued publication of Haeckel’s phony drawings was to complain that the fakery was helping intelligent design proponents who were screaming from the rooftops about the long-running hoax. As the Times said, “Intelligent design has helped its cause by publicizing some embarrassing mistakes in leading biology textbooks.” The article concluded with this stirring declaration of faith: “Biologists say the findings do not shake their confidence in the theory of evolution.” No evidence will ever shake their confidence in the theory of evolution.

Then there was the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, which seemed to re-create the beginnings of life in a test tube. In a genuinely groundbreaking experiment, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey reconstructed what was thought to be the Earth’s early atmosphere. They sent a spark of electricity through the primordial soup and—wham!—simple amino acids appeared. They had produced the building blocks of life with the laboratory equivalent of a bolt of lightning. It could only be a short step to discovering how life came from nonlife on the early Earth. Next stop, David Hasselhoff in a test tube!

The first problem to arise was that for the next twenty years, scientists couldn’t get close to the next step, which was to produce proteins. Simple amino acids aren’t even proteins, much less life, so the bridge between nonlife and life remained elusive. The primitive “building blocks” created by Miller have no proven pathway to life. Still, it was something.

But the real fly in the primordial soup arose in the early seventies, when geochemists realized that the Earth’s early atmosphere was probably nothing like the gases used in the Miller-Urey experiment. Miller-Urey’s experiment used an “atmosphere” modeled on what we knew of Jupiter, composed of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water. In the 1970s, geochemists discredited this theory of the Earth’s early atmosphere and concluded that it probably contained more carbon dioxide, almost no hydrogen, and possibly some oxygen. Creation of even simple amino acids would have been impossible in such an environment. As Miller himself has said, “Either you have a reducing atmosphere [i.e., with lots of hydrogen atoms] or you’re not going to have the organic compounds required for life.”10

The revolutionary 1953 Miller-Urey experiment has been moot since the seventies. It proved nothing about the origin of life because the atmosphere assumed by the experiment was the opposite of what existed on ancient Earth. There is still no plausible account for the origins of life. You would think that fact might interest people who are always boasting that they are impartial scientists, going wherever the evidence leads them, with no ideological predispositions.

Guess what is still taught in biology textbooks as proof of evolution? That’s right! The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment.

The Darwin cult has the audacity to compare the theory of evolution to Einstein’s theory of relativity, saying that it is “just a theory,” too. Okay, but when Einstein announced his theory of general relativity, he also offered a series of empirical tests that would prove it false. That’s what made it a “scientific theory” and not, say, “an astrological profile.” If light had not appeared to bend away from the Sun during the 1919 solar eclipse or if his equations could not account for Mercury’s orbit around the Sun, Einstein would have abandoned the theory. In the end, of course, his theory accounted for both phenomena and has been repeatedly retested and proved true.

By contrast, Darwin imagined a mechanism that would account for how life in its infinite variety might have arisen and offered a nondisprovable standard to test his theory. You will recall, Darwin’s test for his theory was this: “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.”

The great philosopher of science Karl Popper said any theory that cannot conceivably be refuted is not science. The very fact that it is nondisprovable is an “immunizing stratagem,” distinguishing pseudoscience from real science. Either there is no evidence that could possibly disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution—or it has been disproved for about half a century. So it’s possible that Darwin produced an actual scientific theory, but his disciples have turned it into a pseudoscience by their refusal to admit it can be—and has been—disproved.

The evolutionists’ other great contribution to the scientific method is to cite obvious, undisputed facts having nothing to do with evolution and brandish them as if they’ve just grown John Travolta from an earthworm.

A masterful example is this inane passage from the New York Times:

Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin did not know the biological mechanism of inheritance, but the theory of evolution required one…. Darwin may have been the classic scientific observer. He observed that individuals in a given species varied considerably, variations now known to be caused by mutations in their genetic code.

The idea that Darwin was the first person ever to notice that traits were hereditary and that there was variation within a species is absolute lunacy. Even B.D., before Darwin, people noticed that their children looked like them—but not exactly like them. And they didn’t understand the mechanisms of inheritance either! Yet the Times claims Darwin was the first to notice that information was passed from one generation to the next and then boasts, “The discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome, the pinpointing of genetic diseases and the discovery that a continuum of life from a single cell to a human brain can be detected in DNA are all a result of evolutionary theory.”

Using the same logic, one could also claim that DNA, human genome sequencing, the discovery of genetic diseases, and the growth of the human brain are also a direct result of generations of humans saying, Hey! Look—little Billy has his father’s nose! But we don’t teach, Hey! Look—little Billy has his father’s nose! as a groundbreaking scientific discovery.

The same article reports that Darwin “also realized that constraints of food and habitat sharply limited population growth; not every individual could survive and reproduce.” Will Darwin’s wondrous feats never end? Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859—about ten years after the Irish potato famine killed one million people and drove another million to flee the country (1845–48). I believe other people besides Darwin may have noticed that the absence of food limited population growth. Darwin’s innovation was that mutation + death would produce a new species. And yet the Irish are still Irish. The only new species we got out of the Irish potato famine was the blight-resistant Idaho potato, invented by intelligent designer Luther Burbank, American plant breeder.

The only evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution is fake evidence, and every time Darwiniacs are caught hawking fake “proof,” they complain that it’s merely a “gap” in the theory. The Darwiniacs play a shell game with the evidence, but the evidence is never under any of the shells. The point isn’t that schoolchildren should be “taught the controversy”—schoolchildren should be taught the truth. This includes:

the truth about the entire fossil record, which shows a very non-Darwinian progression, noticeably lacking the vast number of transitional species we ought to see

the truth about the Cambrian explosion, in which virtually all the animal phyla suddenly appeared, with no Darwinian ancestors

the truth about the Galápagos finch population changing not one bit since Darwin first observed the finches more than 170 years ago

the truth about the peppered moth experiment

the truth about Haeckel’s embryos being a fraud perpetrated by a leading German eugenicist

the truth about the Miller-Urey experiment being based on premises that are no longer accepted

the truth about the nonexistence of computer simulations of the evolution of the eye

These aren’t gaps in a scientific theory—there is no scientific theory. There is only a story about how a bear might have fallen into the ocean and become a whale. As Colin Patterson asked, What is any one true thing about evolution?

In the end, evolutionists’ only argument is contempt. The cultists know that if people were allowed to hear the arguments against evolution for just sixty seconds, all would be lost. So they demonize the people making those arguments. You’re just saying that because you believe in God! You probably believe in a flat Earth, too! You sound like a Holocaust revisionist! That’s all you ever get.

The evolutionists’ self-advertisements paint a different picture. A New York Times review of a book on intelligent design summarized the situation this way: “As Michael Ruse points out, modern science’s refusal to cry miracle when faced with explanatory difficulties has yielded ‘fantastic dividends.’ Letting divine causes fill in wherever naturalistic ones are hard to find is not only bad theology—it leaves you worshiping a ‘God of the gaps’—but it is also a science-stopper.”11 Far from chastely refusing to acknowledge miracles, evolutionists are the primary source of them. These aren’t chalk-covered scientists toiling away with their test tubes and Bunsen burners. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true and any evidence to the contrary—including, for example, the entire fossil record—is something that must be explained away with a fanciful excuse, like “our evidence didn’t fossilize.”

Meanwhile, and by stark contrast, intelligent design scientists do not fill the “gaps” with God. They simply say intelligence is a force that exists in the universe and we can see its effects and what it does—in Behe’s flagellum, in the Cambrian explosion, in Gould and Eldredge’s “punctuated equilibrium.”

Evolutionists keep modifying their theory to say, “Assume a miracle,” and the intelligent design scientists say, “Hey, does anyone else notice that it’s always the same miracle?” It’s a miracle of design. Design in the universe may well be explained by something other than God, but we’ll never know as long as everyone is required to pretend it’s not there. To say intelligent design scientists are merely “filling in the gaps” with God is like saying Sir Isaac Newton “filled in the gaps” with the theory of gravity. He saw stuff dropping to the ground and tried to explain it. If only the Darwiniacs had been around, they could have told Newton, I don’t see anything dropping! It’s just an accident! Do you believe in God or something?

Nor are intelligent design scientists looking at things they can’t explain: Quite the opposite. They are looking at things they can explain but which Darwin didn’t even know about, like the internal mechanism of the cell, and saying, That wasn’t created by natural selection—that required high-tech engineering. By contrast, the evolution cult members look at things they can’t explain and say, We can’t explain it, but the one thing we do know is that there is no intelligence in the universe. It must have been random chance, or it’s not “science.”