It may take more than a kiss from a princess to turn a frog into a prince,
but,
according to evolution’s story, amphibians, such as frogs really did turn into mammals,
including princes.
Today, the theory of evolution is considered an established fact
but it wasn’t always so.
The book of Genesis is a brief glimpse into the mystery of origins,
the revelation of a supreme Creator to a fallen creation—
a truth doubted by few until only a century and a half ago
when an amateur naturalist set out on a voyage of discovery
and shook the world with a heretical idea.
Exploring the scorching lava beds of the Galápagos Islands
Charles Darwin was fascinated by the strange wildlife.
He saw that giant tortoises, isolated on different islands were different sizes and shapes
and he imagined that, given enough time,
if the tortoises kept on changing
they might eventually be transformed into something entirely different.
At Oxford University, Dr. Richard Dawkins is Professor of Public Understanding of Science.
The author of several best-selling books,
he is also one of Darwin’s foremost defenders.
I suppose the great mystery of life is to explain where the complexity of life came from.
Another way of talking about complexity is to say information.
Information is a kind of measure of complexity.
And the complexity of life is not just plain complexity,
it’s also adapted.
Living things not only are complicated, but they do things.
They survive.
They do everything in their power to survive
and they look as though they are beautifully designed machines;
machines designed to survive.
But not all experts agree that the complexity of life could have come about
by the accumulation of lots of lucky changes.
And a growing number of dissenters are questioning Darwin’s theory.
Molecular biologist Dr. Michael Denton is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
He claims Darwinism is “a theory in crisis”,
which assumes the so-called fact of evolution
yet cannot explain the supposed transformation of simple life forms
into complex creatures by random processes.
I don’t think the Darwinian theory of evolution is anything like the established fact that many biologists claim.
I call it the great cosmological or cosmogenic myth of the 20th century
and that’s a view I still maintain.
I think nothing I’ve seen in the biological sciences
and no advances in science that I’ve seen in the last 20 years
in any way have changed my mind in any way
about that fundamental belief of mine that Darwinism is an inadequate explanation.
Darwin’s ideas are now conventional wisdom,
and it’s considered an established fact that simple life forms evolved over millions of years of gradual change
into all the complexity and diversity of life that we know today
without the design of a sovereign Creator.
And of course the puzzling thing is, where does all this complexity come from,
where does all this information come from?
It cannot come about by chance.
It’s absolutely inconceivable that you could get something as complicated as a bird,
and as well designed as a bird,
or a human or a hedgehog, coming about by chance…
that’s absolutely out.
Because to get from nothing, from no complexity, no information,
to the extreme complexity of a modern living thing
in one step of chance couldn’t possibly happen.
That would be like throwing a dice a thousand times and getting a six every single time.
It’s out of the question.
But if you allow a little bit of luck in any one generation
and a little bit of luck in the next generation,
accumulatively adding this luck step by step by step by step
you can work from any degree of simplicity to any degree of complexity.
All you need is enough time.
So where’s it come from?
It’s come from the gradual incremental process of evolution by natural selection.
It’s taken for granted in the modern world of science that ancestral fish appeared in a primeval ocean,
then crawled out of the water and became amphibians.
Amphibians changed into reptiles,
and reptiles into mammals.
Evolutionists claim that other reptiles shed their scales, grew feathers and took to the skies to become birds.
But reptiles and birds are very different.
Reptiles have no genetic information for wings or feathers.
To change a reptile into a bird would require the addition of huge amounts of complex information.
Darwin reasoned that with a bit of luck, the accumulation of enough small changes could even turn reptiles into birds.
Michael Denton says it cannot be done.
One can quote lots of examples in the biological realm
of things which seem, as it were, beyond the reach of that simple Darwinian mechanism.
There’s things like the avian lung. There’s the feather.
There’s the amniotic egg, bacterial flagellum.
I mean really a vast number of systems
which have that unique, watch-like sort of complexity that you find in nature
where in fact to have the system functioning, you need A, B, C, D and so forth all in place,
interlocking-like together, before the thing will function.
It’s very difficult to see how those sorts of things were, were arrived at undirected, by undirected processes.
You can take the feather for example.
The flight feather is a very complicated structure
of tiny interlocking hooks and barbules,
which hold the parts of the feather together
and its these tiny little microadaptations in the feather which give it its …
which adapt the feather for flight,
and the Darwinian model of evolution requires that the intermediates are fully functional,
and I can’t imagine how you can get to such ends,
without having to sort of go through structures which are really not, not functional in some sense, in some biological sense.
Reptiles and birds also have totally different reproductive and respiratory systems.
ln reptilian lungs, air passes in and out of only one tube which ends in tiny air sacs.
But in birds, the air flows continually through the lungs in one direction,
through a complex system of interconnected air sacs,
connected up with its hollow bones.
Darwinists claim that reptilian lungs changed into bird’s lungs through a lot of intermediate stages.
But Michael Denton says half-formed lungs won’t work
because the transitional form cannot breathe.
Any intermediate stage would result in extinction of the species.
Well the avian lung is an example,
like the living cell or like the feather,
of a, a highly complicated system, very, very involved, very complicated,
which as far as I can see, you can only conceive of it functioning
as a … for respiratory gas exchange,
if the whole current structure and order of it is in place—
one of the toughest examples in nature of a highly complex system,
composed of a whole lot of interacting components
all of which must be there, as they are in every single bird’s lung, before the thing would function.
ln the case of the avian lung, this is for me, a very tough nut for Darwinian … for Darwinists to crack, because, I mean,
I can’t imagine how that sort of … the lung and other analogous things like it, could come about
as the result of the accumulation of small, random changes.
For simple life forms to evolve into more complex ones requires a massive input of new information.
A microbe has about two books of five hundred pages of complex coded genetic information on its DNA.
A human has the equivalent of at least one thousand books.
To transform a microbe into a human means adding a whole library of new information.
So where does this new information come from?
Professor Werner Gitt is a specialist in information theory
and a director at the Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Brunswick, Germany.
He says the evolution of complex life forms from simpler ones by selection of lucky improvements is impossible,
because there is no source of new information.
The biggest problem in evolution is origin of information.
Where is the information coming from?
It is impossible to come from a simple living being
to an elephant
or to a human being.
It needs very much more information,
and information cannot come in by a random process.
Darwinists say the new information comes from genetic mutations
that are passed on from one generation to the next.
Genetic mutations are random errors,
rather like mistakes made when copying a text.
According to evolutionists, the most favourable of these mutations are preserved by natural selection.
And it’s the molecular genetics which finally provide detailed evidence,
the absolute knock-down evidence that nobody could possibly go against,
because the molecular evidence really shows,
with the detail of …
just like a sort of human text—you can see the changing letters, the changing words of the DNA
which are in effect describing, as generations go by,
describing the anatomical changes,
which are all that Darwin himself were able was able to see.
Genetic mutations occur when genes are damaged
often by exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals.
Some mutations have no effect,
but most are detrimental and they’re often fatal.
Although most mutations are harmful
some mutations may be beneficial.
Darwinists claim that evolution occurs when these rare beneficial mutations accumulate through natural selection.
The Galápagos Islands are the “Showcase of Evolution”,
where the unique wildlife is studied by international scientists.
Here, tourists are shown the flightless cormorant as an example of evolution through beneficial mutation.
The Galápagos cormorant has lost the genetic information for wings
and without wings it can swim and dive quite well,
which may be an advantage.
Galápagos tour guides explain that because of this apparent advantage
the flightless cormorant left more offspring
and so, through natural selection, it survived,
while the other birds with wings, died out.
Flightless cormorants are really degenerate mutants
with the loss of information for making wings.
All examples of mutations are actually loss of information, even the favourable ones.
There is no new genetic information.
Claimed examples of ‘evolution-in-action’ are actually examples of variation within a kind.
Antibiotic resistance,
insecticide resistance,
peppered moths …
all these are examples of rearrangement of existing genetic information
or loss of genetic information.
There’s no new genetic information.
If you reject the sufficiency of chance—undirected chance,
as an explanation for biological phenomena as we see them on earth
then you have to have some form of design hypothesis,
that’s the only alternative available.
I think when you look at the laws of nature and you look at the cosmos
you have these, these two conflicting possibilities—
you have the possibility of the transcendent Hebraic God who created the world and organized all the laws of nature to this end
or you have the other possibility that somehow the universe is a living whole, a self-organizing system.
At the wailing wall in Jerusalem, orthodox Jews worship the God of creation.
According to the book of Genesis it is by design, not chance that we came into existence.
Israeli biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner is uniquely qualified to comment on the role of mutations in evolutionary theory.
A specialist in the physics and mathematics of information,
he has researched the signal/noise relationships in DNA
as a Johns Hopkins University Fellow.
He has published in leading journals on theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biology.
He believes the evidence supports the biblical account
that God created certain basic types,
which have, through time diversified as they adapted to their environment.
I really do not believe that the neo-Darwinian model can account for large scale evolution.
What they really can’t account for is the build up of information.
It’s very improbable that there can be many small steps of evolution,
many small changes, adding up to one large change.
And
not only is it improbable on a mathematical level, that is—theoretically
but experimentally, one has not found a single mutation that one can point at that actually adds information.
ln fact every beneficial mutation that I have seen reduces the information, it loses information.
Australia’s Royal Show in Perth is the place to show off your pure-bred.
If it cannot be seen that mutations and natural selection increase genetic complexity,
what about artificial selection?
Selective breeding does produce great variety
but is there a limit to the change?
Charles Darwin himself made great play of domestication.
And the nice way to look at this is to say,
suppose you wanted to do an experiment
to actually demonstrate experimentally that this process of selection worked, what would you do?
Well what you’d do would be, you’d say
‘Well, it’ll take me about a thousand years.’
But, given a thousand years, what I can do is
in every generation I can breed for those qualities that I want to get.
So for the next thousand years, what we’re going to do is
in every generation we’re going to mimic natural selection by choosing for breeding those individuals which,
which most embody the qualities that we admire.
So if you can go from say, a wolf to a Pekingese in a few thousand years
then you have to extrapolate that process and say
how much further could you go in a thousand million years?
You can breed dogs for thousands and millions of years
but if you have no source of new genetic information, they’ll still be dogs.
The problem with evolution is it has no way of providing, no way of providing new genetic information.
Both natural selection and breeding, (or artificial selection) cause loss of the genetic information.
If we take a long-haired dog and we only breed from long-haired dogs
and just select the long-haired pups and let them breed in the future,
then we end up with a variety of dog which concentrates all the genes for long hair in one variety.
But that means that that dog can never breed a short-haired dog,
because it does not have the genes for short hair.
So we’ve lost genetic information.
Natural selection does the same.
If we take wolves,
varieties of wolves before the Ice Age—long-hair, short-hair.
And during the Ice Age the extreme cold resulted in the killing off of the short-haired wolves.
We end up with a new variety of wolf,
even a new species, with long hair which is adapted to cold conditions.
But this adaptation, again, is not involving new genetic information.
ln fact the process causes the loss of the genetic information for short hair.
Great diversity is possible through the new combinations of existing genes.
Even mutations can cause rearrangements of chromosomes
and degenerate changes, or loss of information, which creates diversity.
This is a fundamental problem.
Mutations and natural selection both result in loss of genetic information.
So there is no way that evolution of increasing complexity can occur.
It is impossible that new information is coming from a random process.
If you see a computer program, it needs a programmer.
If you see a car, it needs a designer.
If we see the biological information in the cells then we must say, that is the right conclusion, it needs a creator
who has made the programs, the genes to create the proteins, to create the organs.
It is necessary that we have this.
So we can say evolution is an impossible process.
Every schoolchild learns the supposed evolution of the horse
from tiny ones with multiple toes, to large, one-toed modern horses.
Equids: Tracing the ancestors
But has the horse really evolved? Many scientists doubt it.
There are many different varieties of horses we can get through breeding,
but they’re still just horses.
We can get large ones, small ones,
even ones with three toes.
The evolutionists put these into a sort of a sequence,
and add a fossil rock badger at the bottom
and then claim that’s evidence for evolution.
But you take out the fossil rock badger,
and you just have variation within a kind.
Horses breed horses.
That’s not evolution.
The information required for large scale evolution
can really not come from random mutations.
The Darwinian model says that it does
but nobody has ever made a calculation to show that it does.
I’ve made a calculation that shows that it doesn’t.
Professor Dawkins, can you give an example
of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?
[ Ed.: This is Dr Dawkins’ actual reaction. He then asked for the camera to be switched off to allow time to think, before giving the ‘answer’ shown next. ]
There’s a popular misunderstanding of evolution which says that, er…
fish turned into reptiles, and reptiles turned into mammals, and,
and so somehow we ought to be able to look around the world today and look and look at our ancestors.
We ought to be able to, to see the intermediates between fish and reptiles
and between reptiles and mammals
and we ought to be able to see fish, kind of, on the way to becoming reptiles
but of course that’s not the way it is at all.
Fish are modern animals. They’re just as modern as we are.
They’re descended from ancestors, which we’re descended from.
Way back three hundred million years ago, there would have been an ancestor
which was the ancestor of modern fish and the ancestor of, of modern, modern humans.
And that ancestor, if you could have been there then
you could have seen the first steps towards a fish, say, coming out onto the onto the land,
and becoming a, becoming a, something like an amphibian.
But that was a long time ago. You wouldn’t expect to see that today.
If one were to believe the neo-Darwinian account,
you would have to say that information is built up gradually, in small steps,
a little bit at a time.
And if one examines the mathematics of this sort of thing happening
it turns out that one has to assume that at any stage in evolution
that there are a large number of possible mutations,
that could occur that could be adaptive.
And if there are a large number we should be able to find some today.
And the fact is that we don’t.
All the mutations that have been examined on a molecular level
show that the organism has lost information, and not gained it.
The Genesis account of creation implies that
virtually all genetic information existing today was present in the original kinds.
So,
great variation is possible within each kind
but one basic kind cannot change into another.
Michael Denton believes information can only come from an intelligent source.
I tend to think that in fact
the evidence suggests a transcendent sort of Hebraic God, in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
An external Creator made the world
and gave it its order, its patterns and its ends.
It’s consistent I think with the evidence. It’s consistent with it.
Just as the information in books has to come from an intelligent source
so the huge amount of genetic information in living things must come from an intelligent creator.
The evidence fits the biblical model
where there’s a large amount of genetic information created in the beginning
allowing adaptation within the kind, and being degraded since.
The information had to be programmed into the living things in the beginning.
Living things did not evolve, they were created.
If we look to the Bible then we see there is a creator.
The creator has made all things—
the material processes and also the information.
Evolutionists believe complex life forms came from simpler ones
but random processes with natural selection can’t account for it
and it’s never been observed or replicated.
The accumulation of gradual changes produced by lucky chance
has never been shown to add new information or increase complexity.
Creationists believe that all the evidence points to a creator.
Dogs may be hairy or bald, and frogs may be spotted or green
but dogs will be dogs, and frogs will always be frogs.
Even with a kiss from a princess
a frog will never become a prince.