Creation Science Winter 2008

Natural selection does not produce any new information, it only allows for beneficial information that already exists in a species to survive or to be preserved. So the question is, can natural selection working on mutations produce new complex structures.

Evolutionists believe that reptiles evolved into birds. According to Darwinism, the forelimbs of some ancient reptiles gradually evolved into the wing of a bird. The process took millions and millions of years. Allow me to illustrate the process with a story.

Once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a reptile running around that had some mutations which caused it to have offspring to have scales which were elongated on the forelimbs. Those reptiles in turn had baby reptiles which had more mutations that caused the scales to get longer and longer. Those scales were beginning to evolve into early feathers. Over a period of millions of years and tens of thousands of generations this kept occurring further lengthening these scales and eventually becoming a wing.

There is a problem with this story. Can you see it? As these scales were gradually getting longer and longer within a population, pretty soon you've got these scales hanging down several inches off the forearm of the lizard. It cannot yet fly, but now it has a problem because it can't run very well either. So natural selection now prefers the ones without the longer scales and these long scale guys get wiped out. The lizard is not a more fit organism because it has no advantages like flying but it does have many disadvantages. Because it cannot run, it cannot compete against the other animals for food and other resources. Furthermore, it cannot successfully evade its predators.

The wing fails to evolve because its transitional forms were non-viable. A transitional stage is not more fit that what it came from.

It is not just wings and feathers that have to form for flight either. The dense bones of a reptile must reform themselves into lightweight versions for flight too. All these changes are not trivial. Vast amounts of new information in the DNA must come from somewhere.

W.E. Swinton, in Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds said:

"The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."

Some deduction, with no fossil evidence to show for it. Remarkable change indeed. No, make that remarkable God!

Next time you meet an evolutionist ask this question:

Would you please explain how random mutations over a long period of time could produce the visual system when the mutations that are supposed to give rise to it do not increase the survivability of the organism?

If you came to my garage when I was a teenager and found that I was rebuilding the engine on my car with the parts all over the floor, you might ask "let's take it out for a spin." I would have to say that I was not finished yet. Until everything was put together, the car is useless as are the individual parts. Lying all over the garage floor, they just get in my way. The only benefit they serve is that I know what purpose they will eventually serve once I get it all put back together. But in evolution, they cannot possibly know what direction they are heading. The random chance mutations have no direction or design. It is impossible for a transitional form on its way to being part of an irreducibly complex system to be of any benefit in an unguided, purposeless, material process.

This is what is know as the non-viability of transitional forms.

Perhaps you have used digital cameras and have had the wherewithal to use a photo editing program to remove red eye or change the color cast in a photo. It is amazing what you can do with programs like Photoshop. If fact it has become part of the news in the last few years how can you trust what is printed in the media since it is so convenient to be able to "photoshop" a picture. Such image processing tools are very sophisticated and have taken engineers years to understand how images are interpreted by the viewer and how colors and pixels work together to give us the illusion of seeing an image that looks so real.

What is really fascinating is that our brains and the eye must do similar things in real time! We know that the eye sends signals to the brain from each rod or cone which are the individual pixels of the image we see in our brain. And the cones have the ability to detect red, green or blue wavelengths of light. This is the exact same thing a digital camera does! But furthermore our brains must then take millions of these signals and put them together into an integrated image and then do pattern recognition so that we know what it is we are seeing and can compare it with our image memory. Once you see an image it becomes a permanent part of our memory. Perhaps a bit fuzzy as time goes on, but we still can immediately recognize the house we grew up in after many years away, or of a friend's face we haven't seen in years.

The significance of this is that not only must there be a way to capture photons of light, focus them, detect them, and then send an electrical signal down the optic nerve to the brain, but there must also be a way to process that information to form a mental picture. Furthermore do this so fast that a baseball player can see the stitches on a fast ball coming at him at 90+ miles an hour and coordinate all this information into a split second muscular response strike the ball with a bat.

Praise God for the miracle of our eyesight!

The eye's retina is located in the back of the eye and is responsible for receiving the focused light and generating signals to send to the brain. The rods and cones are packed side by side and have their nerve endings exiting out the front of the retina. These individual nerves are then routed to a central location where nerves exit out the back of the eye forming the optical nerve, a thick cord which carries the signals to the brain. (that's where your blind spot is). This means the light has to pass through this web of nerves before it reaches the light sensing rods and cones. Well the evolutionists say this represents a bad design and point to this as evidence for their theory since no good creator would ever use such a poor design. Such a creator would obviously turn the rods and cones around so that the nerve endings exited through the rear of the eye. This way, the light would not have any interference in reaching the light sensitive cells.

But is it really bad design? Turns out, the rods and cones are attached to the Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE), a blood engorged membrane which is responsible for delivering nutrients to the rods and cones. What benefits are their to having the rods attached in a reverse orientation to the RPE?

1. The light sensitive end of the rod which is closest to to the RPE at the rear has a huge demand for nutrients since these cells are so active. Furthermore, their is much damage to these cells from the light which strikes them. Have you ever noticed how a car's paint begins to fade and peel if left outside in the sun for long periods of time? It is the energetic rays of the sun which does this damage. Same thing with the eye. So not only do these cells need nutrients to supply the energy needed for their activity, but also for the constant rebuilding necessary due to damage. The rods are place in an inverted position so that the most needed area of the cell is closed to the blood supply.
   
2. Also you know how light can warm things up, even your skin can get hot and needs to sweat to carry away the excess heat build up. Same thing again with the rods of the eye which are cooled by the blood flow away from the RPE which acts as a radiator.
   
3. Finally, the RPE is very dark in color. If it were to be placed on the inside of the eye in front of the rods so the they could be turned in the "right" direction, no light could pass through at all since the RPE is opaque. This dark color at the back of the eye serves a good purpose too. It acts as a light absorber so that no stray photons of light bounce around like they would off a lighter surface. Our camera lenses are all painted flat black on the inside surfaces to accomplish the same thing.

So it turns out that this is not such a bad design after all. In fact the so called "good design" the scientists argue for would indeed be a very poor design. Of course the final point is that this so called "bad design" works marvelously well!

We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, and that we should know very well. [Psalm 139]

Darwin said:

“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 breakdown"

Darwin thought about the eye a lot. He came up with a scenario illustrating how the eye socket could have formed. The diagram shows on the left side a light sensitive spot (purple) on the skin of an animal. You can see that as oblique light rays shine on the spot, all areas of the spot are struck equally consequently the spot has no way to determine the direction of the light. But suppose the animal's light sensitive spot began to mutate into a cavity. Then the angled light would not strike all parts of the light sensitive spot. One side would be in shadow. This way the spot could deliver enough information to the animal's brain such that it could interpolate which direction the light is coming from. While the light sensitive spot capable of sensing light and darkness is beneficial, this directional capability would be even more so. Darwin then imagined the cavity getting larger, forming into a socket, eventually capturing a gel like substance which eventually becomes an eyeball complete with a lens. Now I know I went fast on that last one but that was left up to our imagination to figure how that happened.

Also notice how Darwin started with a light sensitive spot. Easy to say but would it be easy to do with random mutations and natural selection? Take a look at the five minute video of how a photon of light is captured by a rod in the retina of the eye and turned into a nerve signal to the brain.

Some light sensitive spot, huh? Have we sufficiently demonstrated such a complex organ for Darwin's challenge? Well of course Darwin did know know what we know today but he did say:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

If we stopped there, you might think that Darwin was stumped. But he is really just setting up a strawman to knock down so that he can praise his own theory. So Darwin does not admit he is stumped; he goes on to say:

“In living bodies, variations will cause the slight modifications, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"

"May we not believe...", that's pretty bold. If only he could see how the eye really works. Oh yeah, that's right, now he knows the truth.

The idea of irreducible complexity as described by Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box is that there are complex systems "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning". This lack of a functioning precursor to a complex system means the individual parts must have arisen without the benefit foreseen in the final component. But natural selection requires each tiny step of change to be beneficial along the way.

We understand the benefit of the integrated complex systems which perform some amazing functions like vision or hearing or respiration. But how can the parts which make up this system be of any benefit by themselves? What good is a light sensitive spot (an early retina) without the nerve to carry the signal or without the brain function to interpret the signal as vision? Just as the individual parts of an airplane are all non-flying parts until they come together in an organized and specified complexity, the parts of a integrated system also perform no worthwhile function without the other parts.

The famous example Behe gives to illustrate this concept is the mousetrap. As simple as it is, the mousetrap is highly effective but irreducibly complex. The mousetrap is made up of five major parts as illustrated in the diagram.

How effective would this mousetrap be if it were missing any one of the parts? Would it be able to catch any mice without the holding bar for example? Of course the answer is that any missing part would render the mousetrap useless and essentially broken. Any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition useless. All parts must come together at same time, and along the way, each separate part has to be beneficial to survival. If a part is not yet integral to the complete system, it must play some other beneficial function in the meantime (millions of years).

People have often talked about building a better mousetrap. Well, the "mousetraps" we have in our bodies such as the eye are models of perfection so the question is not how to make it better but how to make it at all.

According to Neo-Darwinian Evolution I am. Let me explain.

Natural selection does not create anything new. It is just the idea that when something new comes along it may or may not be beneficial but if it is, it will be favored within the population and will have a better chance to succeed in the struggle for life. So how does something new come about? Darwin just called these changes "modifications" and really did not understand much more that the fact he observed differences among offspring and assumed these sorts of changes were a fact of life. But modern science now understands how the modifications or changes occur and that is through mutations.

A mutation can either be harmful, lethal, neutral or beneficial. A mutation might be something as simple and benign as a patch of discolored skin or it could result in a dramatic increase in the length of some bones. These mutations might even be beneficial and could be inherited by offspring which would then benefit as well. But how often do you think of a mutation as beneficial? First of all mutations are rare, thank God. But when they do occur, we normally recoil a them because they mostly have deleterious consequences. But the idea of a beneficial mutation is unheard of. Supposedly beneficial mutations are preserved and concentrated in the population while all the others are weeded out.

A mutation is a mistake in the cell division process. Cell division requires that the DNA strand be duplicated. An error in this copying process is a mutation. I am a software developer and suppose I write a computer program that I want to market and so I finish my work and I am ready to make the CD's to package and sell my product. I take my original program, which is nothing more than a organized sequence of bits and bytes, to a CD duplicator and lets suppose that a mistake occurs while copying the bits over to another CD. Is there any chance my program will improve? What do you suppose will happen when the instructions at the location of the mistake are executed? The program will not be any better, rather it will crash or at best give an incorrect response.

Mutations are the engine of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky, in the American Scientist Journal said:

“The process of mutation is the only known source of the raw materials of genetic variability, and hence of evolution ... The mutants which arise are, with rare exceptions, deleterious to their carriers, at least in the environments which the species normally encounters.”

And Ernst Mayr said "Ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to mutation.” Think about the consequences of this. The DNA molecule specifies a living organism's entire structure, it's size, shape, color, and function. The words and language of the DNA molecule are found in the arrangement of nucleotide base pairs which make up the "rungs" of the DNA ladder. For the singled celled amoeba, there are about two million of these instructions. For the human, there are about six billion. That's a 3,000 times increase in information content.

To tell you how to build a cool paper airplane, I can write the instructions for how to fold it on an index card easily. But can you imagine the number of books, blueprints and manuals it would take to specify the construction of the space shuttle? The reason it requires more instructions is intuitive; a space shuttle is far more complex than a paper airplane. This is true of the difference between a human and an amoeba. But we are supposed to believe that we all came from a single celled life form arising from the primordial goo. The point is, that is an astonishing increase in perfectly organized information content due entirely to beneficial mutations. And the motivation for believing such an absurd thing in the presence of all the evidence to the contrary is to avoid any mention of God.

Am I a mutant? Certainly not!

Genesis 1:27 (NKJV)

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.