Evolution of Evolution: "The New Theories of Evolution"

A recent post at telegraph.co.uk purported to offer updated "proof" for the theory of evolution. You know, the "utterly proven" theory about the origin of the species that millions of scientists have dedicated their life to re-proving, much the way they do other "Laws" of science such as gravity, entropy, and displacement...er...oh, wait.

Be sure to read his article before continuing.

As proof, the author offered several contrived examples: from modern technology to insect and bacterial behavior to show how the evidence is mounting in such a way that, soon, even the "most hardened skeptics" will become convinced of the truthfulness of evolution. Waiting...waiting...hm...still no.

The first absurd claim comes when the author claims that, "Computers have long been used to model biological evolution." Since I am a computer programmer, let me offer my opinion on this. The computer that could truly model even the splitting of a single cell into two cells has not yet been invented. No computer existing today has the memory or processing power that it would take to even begin the insanely complex task of modeling biological reproduction, the foundation for "evolution". Though you may read about today's super computers being used to simulate "protein folding", keep in mind that protein folding is to single-cell division what memorizing your ten decimal digits is to quantum physics and doctorate level calculus. The two can hardly be compared, even though the first is a building block to the second. Secondly, all digital system that simulate physical systems must do so a pre-determined "resolutions". In the world of 3D graphics, for instance, as a car speeds towards a wall, the picture of the car and wall may be drawn 10 times, 100 times, or 1000 times depending on how fast the "real time" engine is capable of satisfying the "geometry engine's" will to keep the car in the right place given the amount of time elapsed. For instance, if the computer can re-draw twice every second the complex vertices and shaders that make up one frame, then a very choppy presentation will show the car hitting the wall in 3 seconds. If the computer can draw 10 frames per second, the display will show a much smoother rendition of the car hitting the wall, but still in just 3 seconds. If the display can render 32 or more "fields" (half-frames, every other "scan line"), then the display will actually fool the human eye into believing that it is watching a "full-motion" rendering of the car hitting the wall. However, this isn't actually true. In fact, in 3 seconds time, only about 100 frames could be rendered at 32 fields per second. But it you've ever seen high-speed photography of a crash dummy hitting an air-bag or a bullet flying from the barrel of a gun, then you know that even at a million frames per second, small changes are reflected in EVERY FRAME! So how many states you choose to measure in a second determines how many states you capture, and take into account. In biological and physical systems, these states are the moments in time that you are watching. But between these moments, the vast majority of time passes without observation. If you're watching a tortoise crawl through the sand, then 32 frames per seconds will certainly suffice. You can pretty much guarantee that the tortoise didn't run off and get a burger and fry between frame 17 and 18. If, however, you're watching the blindingly fast reaction between molecules that make up proteins that make up a strand of DNA interacting with an mRNA strand, then a million frames per second doesn't really do it justice at all. The only way to model such complexities in our day is to elongate time.

A former manager of mine used work for Amdol designing I/O bus architectures. He said that they ran a weeks-long software simulation of one of their chips, but only simulated a total of 6 seconds worth of actual I/O once the chip was finally constructed. Software is much, much slower than hardware. Even much more so, software is infinitely slower than the real world. No matter what resolution you choose to measure a physical system, virtually all time passes between your measurements. Any attempts to circumvent this method of modeling and optimize the output is merely a model of one's assumptions, not of the real world. The more optimized the output, the less of a true model it is and the more of a model of one's assumptions it is.

All that to say this: if someone today claims to use computers to simulate evolution, you must parse their words. They purport to have modeled unspeakable numbers of creatures over eons of time and arrived at a result in short order. In order to do that, your "model" would have to be nothing BUT assumptions. Thus, if you write a program to tell you that evolution is true, then don't be surprised if it does!

The second absurd claim is that network and telephony networks exercise "evolution" when passing data through them. Now, every network programmer knows what a "trace route" is. In windows, the tracert command echoes back the "route" used for data to travel from your computer to some remote computer and back and the elapsed time between each hop. Most also know that if you tracert the same host on different days, it will often result in a different route than before. If I'm getting data from a computer in India, the data might make 20-30 "hops" from one router to another along the internet backbone. The request for the data goes from my computer to my local router, usually in the same building. From there it "hops" to my internet service provider: Comast, Earthlink, AOL, or some other provider. After a couple 2 or 3 "hops" at Comcast, it goes out to the real internet and finds it's way to the host computer via a series of hops that tend to move it geographically closer and closer to it's destination. Finally it's received by their internet service provider, forwarded to their company's router and finally to the specific computer that has the data I want. The data then takes the reverse route, usually, but not always identical to the request route. But all those "hops" hit routers in between Comcast and say, Bangalore Electronics's routers. Those public routers are "learning" systems in that they are constantly measuring the response times from various other routers and re-routing packets of data around slower or over-burdened routers to keep the total "latency" (response times) rather low. When routers fail to auto-optimize routes, human administrators can go in and define "static routes" to override the router's artificial intelligence and assert a better plan.


Breathe! Ok, now what Dr. Chimp is trying to hoist on the public is that this auto-optimization, similar in all digital networks, is proof of evolution!!! These systems were designed from the ground up to do exactly what they do, and this is proof of evolution! Yikes!

The third absurd claim is that the behavior of colonies of ants proves evolution! Now admittedly, when he claims it proves evolution, he's talking about the tendency of randomness to produce an improved system. The problem is that the things he states as randomness could easily be rephrased as "applied design". The scent trail, foraging specialists, carriers, and sudden, mass, hunger-based movements of colonies that he observes are all programmed responses using intricate instruments that pre-exist the duration of his experiment. In this clever, misleading way, the bar for "proving evolution" gets set so low that a child cutting across a field to get home proves evolution!!!

The fourth example is not any better. That bacteria in clusters suddenly change their behavior in a way that kills their host and thus, ultimately themselves is, by no means, producing a better system. I think he kind of lost focus towards the end of his chat.

If this is what passes for proof of evolution amidst the echoes of learned professors in the higher halls of learning these days, then I'm not all that worried about a sudden shift towards the hopeless world view of evolution. And by the way, Steve, your article is misnamed.

P.S. - Keep an eye out for Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled. It is documented proof of the slight of hand and scholastic intimidation that is commonplace in the scientific community today.

Irreducible Complexity: Three Species Wide

I've written before about the topic of Irreducible Complexity: the idea that some systems in nature are too complex and interdependent to have come together by method of gradualism. Each part of the system relies on all the other parts of the system to have any function or meaning. Therefore, this system can't have come into existence by slow gradual improvement. This still hasn't stopped researchers from trying to compose a story line for how it happened anyway.

Irreducible Complexity is bad enough a problem for Evolutionists to try to explain; but researchers have stumbled upon an even greater challenge to the evolutionary faith. What do you do when the irreducibly complex system in question spans three different species!?!

A species of ant called Cephalotes atratus was discovered looking much like a berry of the bush it was climbing. This seemed odd to the researchers since his million or so cousins and nephews had black abdomens. As it turns out, the berry-ant was infected with a certain round worm's eggs that made it's abdomen inflamed and reddened. What else is odd is that the ant tended to stick it's abdomen up in the air each time it stopped, which had the effect of making it look even more inviting to passing birds. The birds would come by, eat the infected ant thinking it was a berry. The bird would excrete the digested ant a day or so later, and the eggs previously occupying the ant's abdomen would be hatched in a fertile pile of the bird's droppings, where they would mature, wallow a bit, and lay new eggs (very high ik factor).

This involuntary symbiosis was destructive to the ant, irrelevant to the bird and critically important to the roundworm. But the question is, how does a system like this get started? A keen observer would see that the ant and bird would naturally have existed before this entire symbiosis existed if evolution were true. But then how could the reproductive cycle for the roundworm have gotten started. There's no reason to believe that the roundworm couldn't have live elsewhere in other conditions as well, pads of bat guano, for instance would provide large fields of persistent housing for these dung-fairing roundworms. The ants might have wandered into a cave where they sampled a bit of the bad guano smörgåsbord and become infected. Thus, the cycle could have come together gradually!! A victory for evolution!

But wait. Then how come the eggs make the ant's abdomen look like host berries? A roundworm on the outside of the ant's abdomen could see what the abdomen of the ant looked like, but didn't stand to effect the ant's appearance. A roundworm on the inside could affect the ant's appearance, but couldn't see what change he might affect from in there! Besides, the roundworms don't even have eyes, let alone know what the berries look like, or how an ant could be made to look like a berry, especially to passing birds! And even if it could, how does this worm coax the ant into sticking his abdomen way up in the air to appear like a stemmed berry, y'know, like the rest of the bush's berries? Perhaps one of the worms wiggles his way to the ant's eardrums and sings Elvis hits into his ear? Do ants have ears? Hmm. It does beg some questions.

Some systems in nature are so obviously the handiwork of a Designer that any attempt to explain them in other terms sounds desperate; bias, might one say?

If the ants worms and birds could talk and reason (like in Narnia), then scientists would congratulate them on their cooperative intelligence and ingenuity. Since they can't, scientists mysteriously detect no intelligence at work at all. How convenient. My recommendation to the scientists, don't look down the barrel of your intelometer, you might not like what you find.

Feathered Dinosaurs: That Didn't Last Very Long

Have you ever met someone who is impulsive? I suppose we all have impulsive tendencies about some things. Some guys have a different girl friend every time I see them. Others are driving a new car every time I talk to them. A friend of mine got a new, black 2007 Mustang, a lightly driven, black Hummer H2, and a new black 2008 Mustang in about 5 months. (I just wanted to draw out how consistent he was in his love of the color black).

But paleontologists have, once again, tweaked...er...altered...er...swapped out their theory on the whole feathered dinosaur issue. In a recent article from the National Geographic Online (the only one I read consistently when time is tight), paleontologists have unearthed a dinosaur whose skin was fossilized intact. They even believe that they can make out teeth marks in the skin of this "130 million year old" dinosaur named Psittacosaurus (last name not provided).

Now normally a grand dino showing a little skin wouldn't excite even evolution-espousing paleontologists all that much, but this one tends to refute the recently acquired, but deeply-held belief that dinosaurs had feathers (especially around 130 million years ago!)

So what's the big deal? Scientists swap out the pillars of their evolutionary faith about as often as Hollywood actors adopt African children against their parents' will. But this time is a little different. The article entitled "Amazing" Dino Fossil Found With Skin, Tissue in China states that:

The research also suggests that some dinosaurs had thick, scaly skin like that of modern-day reptiles, refuting the theory that dinos had primitive feathers.

So dinos didn't have feathers, big deal. But this discussion impacts more than simply whether dinosaurs carried combs or sunscreen. The whole point of gluing feathers to dinosaurs was to account for the rise of modern birds!

This new discovery effectively orphans all birds everywhere as surely as being adopted by Madonna or Tom Cruise orphans an African child!! Help! Help! ...Man! There's never a PETA member around when you need one!

Upon the topic of dinobirds, wikipedia has this quote in one discussion of feathered dinosaurs:

“The presence of unambiguous feathers in an unambiguously nonavian theropod has the rhetorical impact of an atomic bomb, rendering any doubt about the theropod relationships of birds ludicrous.”[3]

However, not all scientists agreed that Caudipteryx was unambiguously non-avian, and some of them continued to doubt that general consensus. Paleontologists like Alan Feduccia, who opposes the theory that birds are theropods, sees Caudipteryx as a flightless bird unrelated to dinosaurs.[7] Jones et al. (2000) found that Caudipteryx was a bird based on a mathematical comparison of the body proportions of flightless birds and non-avian theropods. Dyke and Norell (2005) criticized this result for flaws in their mathematical methods, and produced results of their own which supported the opposite conclusion.

Setting aside my guilt about being "ludicrous", I guess my question is this: if the issue is still unsettled, then why did the I-Max here in Utah show a lengthy, multi-million dollar movie about how birds evolved from dinosaurs? The movie was targeted at young children and included cute scenes of affable, feathered dinosaurs hopping around the Barremian age. The advanced, computer graphics were stunning and convincing to young eyes and the story line was explained in no uncertain terms to educate someone with a first grade understanding of the world (that translates to 8th grade for most public schools). They even named the dinosaurs with cute, child-like names and gave them endearing personalities. The movie, like all modern scientific material for public consumption, left no room for discussion as to whether dinosaurs evolved into birds over the course of 50 or so million years!

As is typical in the scientific world, consensus is easier to establish than proof. People are fascinated by dinosaurs for the same reasons that they liked the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings: it stimulates the imagination (and ten million dollars of computer graphics doesn't hurt either).

So where did the birds come from? Do we have any eye witnesses? Hmmmmmm. Oh, here's one, yes, You, on the back burner of society:

Gen 1:20-23 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

To accuse evolutionists of simply lying is like accusing Judas of trespassing on temple property. These snakes are actively trying to heist a fabricated account of our origins on the public, and particularly undiscerning children, so that they can accomplish their ends of destroying God and turning men against God.

The lesson from all this? Hold your head high and speak with confidence and a percentage of people will buy what you're selling (thus "cat people"). But...

Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Sorry to those of you who bought "authentic dinosaur feathers" from the travelling paleontologist. I fear they're doomed to the same devaluation as Beanie Babies, and stock in Countrywide.

Rapid "Evolution": New Fish Sighted!!

Evolutionists get all excited about the strangest things. Of course, often the only reason they're even surprised is because they believe in evolution and all it's presuppositions and derivative axioms.
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One such supposition is that "evolution" (variation) happens very slowly, over the course of millions or even hundreds of millions of years. In a recent article by the National Geographic Online, scientists show themselves, once again, to be all bubbly about the mundane. The opening paragraph states:

It's a miracle! Blind cavefish, despite having adapted to their lightless environment for more than a million years, can produce sighted offspring in just a single generation, a new study reveals.

Um............duh!

They mated blind fish from one cave with blind fish from another cave and whala...the offspring could see!! Evolutionists weren't surprised simply by the fact that blind fish could produce sited fish. They expected to find that. What surprised them was that it could be done in a single generation, undoing some million years of evolution!!!

Of course, they're wrong about the million years of evolution. They could alway acknowledge that God created the world 6,500 years ago, and so all variations seen today happened during that time (I'm just sayin'). Lately, it seems that what is provable is true; what is unprovable is science. Hardly anything in the scientific world gets much press and attention unless it is unprovable and believed only by faith.

Evolutionists need to acknowledge that variation happens much more rapidly than they have convinced themselves. They need to acknowledge that they will continue to find more and more examples of this as time progresses. Whomever of them embraces this truth first will be an early adopter, cutting edge, so to speak. The remainder of them will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, across the flat earth to the finish line. Just kidding about that flat earth part.

Note: I've renamed the article entitled Like Watching Water Boil to Rapid "Evolution" Like Watching Water Boil to align with this post and start a new category of posts. It looks like there will be plenty of them coming.

Lazarus Effect: Goblin Shark

We reported a while back that a rare "Frilled Shark" was found swimming around in the coastal waters off Japan. Once again, another "Lazarus" species has been spotted, as reported by National Geographic Online. For review, a Lazarus species is one that is "back from the dead", thought extinct, but now found swimming/walking/crawling around: a creative choice of names by someone who doesn't believe in God or the Bible.

This species closely resembles sharks that have been unearthed long before in the fossil record. Antique biological journals record that it went extinct around 57 million years ago in the Eocene epoch, until, that is, it was found swimming around the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Twelve breeding grounds have been identified spanning the globe. Evolutionists had grand ideas about how it evolved and why it became extinct. But their ideas have shown to be mere speculation.

The Goblin Shark is remarkable in that it can grow, some believe, to a maximum length of around 6 meters! Species of 3.9 meters have been caught in deep-ocean nets or washed up on shore. At that size, you'd think someone would have seen one before the last century or so. But it's no real surprise they've been able to escape humanity's attention for the last 6,500 years; they live and die at depths below 200 meters, where no sunlight can penetrate.

If you are interested in the topic of Biology and species identification, then the oceans and Indonesia are, by far, the hottest places to look. Dozens of new species are being identified each month.

While many species remain known only from the fossil record, similar methods were used to identify their origins and status as were used for the Frilled and Goblin sharks. One could expect that an equal amount of artistic license and subsequent inaccuracy plagues those species' biographies as well. These many Lazarus species, so called, demonstrate that evolutionary biologists really have no special powers of post-constructing the pre-historic past any more than Sister Destiny has the power to pre-tell the future.