DBU students should know about “evolution? Creation, and Intelligent Design. Most of you probably agree with me on most aspects of this huge, complicated issue, but I’m sure that at least most of most of you, if not most of you, agree with me for different reasons.

The most important thing most people don’t know is the difference between macro-evolution and micro-evolution . “Evolution?means all sorts of things, so it causes problems when people say “evolution?and don’t say what kind they’re talking about. Micro-evolution is changes within a species. Macro-evolution would be the changes that form new species. (Maybe (macro)evolutionists think there’s no difference between the two, that is, no particular barriers between species, but at least they need to acknowledge that others use these two words very differently.)

Now, then: classical Darwinism was the brilliant idea for a mechanism to select the members of a species that are stronger. The mechanism was natural selection, often described as “survival of the fittest:?the stronger members of a species survive longer, reproduce more, perpetuate their genes more. The descendants of a stronger member of a species eventually become numerous enough to change the whole species. Natural selection chose which members of a species survive, which differences in a species last. What actually made the differences was not really decided on till 1959, one hundred years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published.

So in 1959 a bunch of dudes (many were actual scientists) got together and decided that natural selection was only half the show: the rest was mutations. Mutations happen by chance, each one resulting in a change in an individual’s DNA. Then natural selection comes along and selects the strongest ones. This is the chance-selection mechanism. Such was the conclusion of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Those of us who are “creationists?of one sort or another are skeptical of Neo-Darwinism and the creative power of the chance-selection mechanism. But I hope that most of us can appreciate the beauty of this theory: the chance-selection mechanism thing is a lovely hypothesis, which doesn’t of course mean it’s true. The chance part provides the new DNA, the selection part chooses it. It’s actually incorrect to say that “evolution?(macro-) is all about chance. It’s not. In the chance-selection mechanism, chance is half the show. Natural selection is not chance; it works with, chooses, things that happened by chance. Remember that.

Anyways, now for the five major reasons why I think the Neo-Darwinian synthesis fails. These are what I consider to be the strongest challenges to Neo-Darwinism.

This really is, in my mind, thenumber-one challenge to neo-Darwinism. There are no actually good mutations. Let’s look at a classic example: suberbugs. Certain mutant bacteria, doctors and hospitals have found, survive antibiotics better than non-mutants. Naturally this is a good thing for those bacteria.

However . . . this is to define “good?in relation to the environment and the selecting agent, which would in this case be the antibiotic. A “good?mutation must also be defined in relation to the non-mutant. This doesn’t work because the non-mutant bacteria always win out when they come into competition with the mutant bacteria (doctors know this and have been known to advise patients infected with super-bacteria to expose themselves to normal bacteria to get rid of the super ones). The mutation actually makes the bugs weaker. This sort of mutation is not an improvement.

An evolutionist might want to reply that using the word “good?in the first place is unnecessary because the chance-selection mechanism only has to be able to create more “complex?organisms, not more “good?ones. To this I would reply that mutations are not even adding truly new meaningful information (I’ve never heard of one; somebody show me one). I have heard of mosquitos immune to dynein who had bad nerves or something; and bacteria immune to streptomycin who had bad ribosomes. You biology types know as well as I do what that means (I took AP bio; I remember ribosomes; ribosomes are cool!).

I think the authoritative definition of “species?is ability to reproduce. If two creatures cannot produce offspring who can also produce offspring, then they are not the same species. Macro-evolution requires that, through accumulated mutations, new species can emerge.

I have never heard of such a thing. If there is such a thing, I would be most interested to know. They might be harder to find because “reproduction?has to be impossible between species at a micro-level; physiological difficulties, such as that between a great dane and a chihuahua, won’t do, since great danes and chihuahuas are still both dogs (which makes great danes our friends, but chihuahuas are our enemies); if we combined their DNA in the laboratory, they’d have to still not be able to produce viable offspring. If there is no such a thing, that is a serious problem for macro-evolution, especially because we can accelerate the mutations (in the lab) of species that reproduce rather quickly anyways, such as fruit flies; also, especially a problem because of dogs: even with hundreds or thousands of years of intelligently-guided breeding programs of dogs, all dogs are still dogs. You’d think the isolation of genetic variance within a group, coupled with humans acting as the selecting agent, would be able to create viable new species of dogs. Nope, nothing new but different strains of dogs.

Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson, originally a lawyer from Berkely, is an extremely important book these days. The book’s thesis is discussed further down, but I bring it up now just as an example of one source that documents trouble in the fossil record. Another one would be Bones of Contention by Marvin Lubenow. More accessible sources are icr.org and answersingenesis.org.

The fossil record ranges from not-so-bad, like the archaeopteryx (yeah, I bet you can’t spell it either), to pathetic, like that one missing link between man and ape-like creature that turned out to be a pig’s tooth (might have been Nebraska man).

Because I just don’t feel like going into much detail (it is almost 2 AM, after all), I’ll summarize: I’m not impressed by the alleged macro-evolutionist fossil record. It seems forced. It seems to me like it’s more missing link than found link; this is especially pathetic since, way back in Darwin’s day, they were promising that the fossil record would soon prove macro-evolution.

One thing that the fossil record does, apparently, indicate, is massively different from Darwin. Darwin’s system was inherently gradual. One conclusion drawn lately from the fossil record is that macro-evolution takes place very quickly sometimes and the rest of the time very little; it progresses in spurts; this is the theory of punctuated equilibrium: the fossil record is mostly uniform but is punctuated every now and then by massive evolutionary changes. (Think of what Professor X said at the end of X-2.)

This is drastically different from classical Darwinism; remember that. Also note that it explains away a typical lack of macro-evolution in the fossil record, and a lack of abundant transitional forms during the ‘punctuated?spots.

The random-letter generating coupled with the selection of the right letters is supposed to mimic how the chance-selection mechanism can come up with meaningful information. It does demonstrate the chance-selection mechanism. Beyond that, however, the argument, sadly, is pathetically incomplete. The program was given a . The information was not come up with by natural selection, but put into the program by the programmer. This is more like God directing the chance-selection mechanism than it’s like anything else.

So that’s the idea behind what’s called irreducible complexity. Behe’s book tries to show that you can look inside the ‘black box?of biology–a cell–and find quite a few irreducibly complex systems. Most of the content of the book is spent in trying to demonstrate that these systems, for instance the bacterial flagella, are irreducibly complex.

What’s this mean for macro-evolution? Well, macro-evolution is a form of gradualism because change happens step-by-step. But if Behe is right about there being some irreducibly complex biological systems, they can’t have come about step-by-step; there’d be a bunch of worthless parts lying around, unless the system is formed all at once. What’s the use of a mousetrap without a hammer?

(Ken Miller from Brown University wrote a book, Finding Darwin’s God, which apparently contains an important rebuttal to Darwin’s Black Box. Behe responded to Miller here: http://www.trueorigin.org/behe02.asp.)

The thesis of Darwin on Trial is not that macro-evolution is false. The thesis is that the evidence can be interpreted in different ways, and the reason macro-evolutionists interpret the evidence for macro-evolution the way they do, is because they already believed in macro-evolution. Phillip Johnson has noticed that he doesn’t really offend atheist Darwinists. Why should he? They have no problem with being told that they have atheist presuppositions.

The people who get ticked off by Johnson are the theistic macro-evolutionists. I think the reason for this is that a guy like Johnson who points out that the scientific evidence is interpreted according to what one already believes. That sort of information would force theistic macro-evolutionists to a crisis between two worldviews; as it is, they’re trying to hold onto bits of both, and they don’t want to be told that they have to choose just one worldview. Maybe that’s why theistic evolutionists sometimes are dualists of some sort or another, separating Scripture into accurate spiritual truth and inaccurate historical traditions, or saying that religion and science are entirely separate and distinct pursuits.

Having said all that, the proper doctrine of the Bible being inerrant is that it is never incorrect in what its authors intended to say. For instance, if Moses when he wrote Genesis was trying to get across something that had nothing whatsoever to do with how long a “day?was, the earth could be as old as we’d like. This may not be likely (I suppose it could be; I’ve heard of some interesting studies into the literary form of the first chapter of Genesis), but it was just an example. The point is, the worldview conflict is not always the necessary result of any sort of compromise, and comes in varying degrees; just a little disclaimer; after all, I’m a theistic micro-evolutionist myself.