Darwin Is Dead!-No Evidence

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HG Narasingha Gurudas (a.k.a Martin Lyons) was gracious enough to share with us a few excerpts from his upcoming book, in which he plans to establish the positions of the Vedic paradigm on evolution and the origin of species, in opposition to some of the unproven dogmas of modern religion and science.

Here is the third excerpt he shares with us, about the unavoidable lack of e

Fourth Argument: No Evidence

In the rivers of Malaysia lives a fish that is able to invite insects for its dinner by a very extraordinary means. It shoots a powerful jet of water from its mouth with amazing accuracy at bugs resting on the leaves of tree-branches overhanging the river. I say ‘amazing accuracy,’ because the archer fish’s optical sense is compensating for the differences between how light is refracted through the two different media of water and air. We know that if we look towards the bottom of a swimming-pool, for example, we have a much distorted sense of depth as well as of the actual location of anything that might be lying down there. The archer fish’s optical compensatory mechanism is but one example of the vast array of hugely intricate and sophisticated devices and systems found throughout the entire spectrum of nature.

Evolutionists claim that however unlikely it is that such perfection and complexity could arise at random, it still must have happened that way. Just as there is no possibility of religion without a belief in the existence of God, similarly there can be no theory of evolution without a belief that random mutation is at the bottom of it. The atheistic challenge to religious believers is that they cannot point to any distinct entity identifiable as God, meaning that any deity could only be considered a figment, an ideological concept, and so quite irrelevant to any scientific investigation as to the nature of reality.

Whether or not such a challenge can be properly met (and this is certainly a topic to be discussed later in this book), the question we may ask here is whether random mutation is itself a legitimate topic for scientific discussion. Is there evidence where we can actually see it taking place, and that also supports its candidacy for being the source from which functional evolutionary adaptations may arise; or is belief in random mutation no less an ideological expression than is belief in a supernatural designer?

The fundamental assumption behind the theory of evolution is that there is no intelligent purpose or design guiding its developments. Hence the conviction that it must take place by random mutation: random as in without specific direction or purpose; and mutation as in such widespread and substantial change of form and structure as to occasionally and haphazardly produce properly useful and coordinated evolutionary features. And this necessitates that one predictable and highly visible result of random mutation would be an enormous profusion of aberrant and useless evolutionary mutations in evidence everywhere.

It’s like the old proposal that if we had enough monkeys who had somehow all been convinced to keep typing, then one of them may be reasonably expected to reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. That may be so, although we would expect the necessary number of monkeys involved to be enormous. So that while Shakespeare’s complete works might be thus reproduced, they would be practically drowned out by the accompanying vast quantity of gibberish as produced by all the other monkeys. The complete works of Shakespeare can be compared to the complexity of any functioning biological structure; and all the incomprehensible gibberish resulting from the rest of the monkeys’ frenetic typing represents the overwhelming majority of results that would be produced by purely random mutation, unguided by any intelligent understanding or sense of purpose.

In other words, one predictable result of evolution is that we should be seeing all around us a kind of cosmic version of ‘Nature’s Bloopers,’ with each new generation affording us a visible enormity of examples of hapless mutants.

But we don’t. The evidence for random mutation is conspicuous only by virtue of its absence. And why is this? Because the actual scientific fact that naturalists have ever observed is that species are by nature fixed. The word ‘species’ is connected, for good reason, to the word ‘specific.’ We recognize different species because of their specific characteristics, recognizable on account of their being basically fixed. There is certainly room for some variety within these characteristics, in terms of color, size and so on; but as the esteemed plant breeder Luther Burbank noted, there are very definite limits to such flexibility, as determined by the fundamental nature of the species involved.

By comparison we can think of a child’s construction kit, for example a collection of cubes with holes drilled on each side and so many small dowel rods by which the cubes can be connected. There are many, many different structures that could be made from such a kit, but there are definite limits regarding the kind of shapes that could be thus made. They would all be very angular, for example, and necessarily right-angular; but we would not be able to create fluid circular forms from such basic building blocks. In other words, although much variety of form is allowed and indeed provided for according to the specific shape of the building blocks involved, still, there are very definite limits within which the finished constructs must conform.

We can compare different varieties within a species to the different shapes allowed from the same fundamental building blocks; whereas different species are represented as different constructs resulting from differently shaped blocks and differently aligned dowel holes. And so we can breed so many different species of dog, which are all closely related to each other; or we can breed many varieties of cat, which are similarly intimately connected. But we can’t hope to produce a cat from breeding dogs, or vice versa. Rather we see one generation of any particular species of flora or fauna giving rise to the next generation of the same, true to type in all the fundamental details.

So as humans we can have so many different shades of hair, for example; but it is always human hair, it’s not that someone can sprout rabbit fur or tendrils or feathers or something previously unknown. And we can get together and mate and look forward to having children, confident that this is in fact what we will have: children. In other words, never mind speculations about random mutation and other such intellectual abstractions; we have a basic instinct regarding such actual facts of life as the fixity of species, for instance. Or we would quail at the very idea of having children: “I don’t know John; I mean, will we have a boy or a girl … or maybe something else entirely?”

Let us be clear that all the evidence, all of it, proves only the stability and fixity of species: frogs are birthing frogs, fish fish, reptiles reptiles, birds birds, chimpanzees chimpanzees, humans humans. How would one species spawn another at some distant historical point, as evolutionists claim, and then continue to be true to itself, without apparently again diverting from basic type? So many species have been faithfully reproducing true to type for many millennia, such as Gingko trees and alligators, for example. Why? Why, if mutation and evolution is the natural way, are they not mutating and evolving? If evolution is indeed a scientific principle, then what are its laws, and how come all the species we can observe are exempt from such laws, which apparently operate only when no-one is looking?

Let’s re-cap the present argument: the necessary context in which the possibility of evolution could occur would be such frequency of random mutation that every species should be in a constant state of flux. And the primary product of such a flux would necessarily be an enormous volume of dysfunctional mutations or ‘birth defects,’ i.e. useless if not harmful aberrations from the species norm.

The entire natural world would be like one enormous Larson cartoon. Imagine multitudes of hopeful archer fish lacking the essential optical compensatory mechanism to support their newly evolved water pistol-like mouthparts, just squirting water virtually everywhere except at their insect targets. And whole populations of centipedes tripping all over the umpteen pairs of feet random mutation has blessed them with while neglecting to also evolve the unimaginably complex integrated network of all the nerve-blood-‘ligament’ connections necessary for all those legs to move in harmony. These are but two examples among millions and millions, because the simple fact is that every single life-form has so many specific and complex mechanisms and functionalities by which it is perfectly suited to surviving in its environment.

Random mutation exists as an idea only, a proposal that is neither supported by physical evidence nor by common sense. Even if we overlook that most mutations would be dysfunctional, still there is no evidence for evolution in the form of new features that are not true to the previous generations, that do not merely represent some minor variation in a feature that the parents already possess and that are thus still indicative of the parent species … but that are new and distinct, as is a feather from a scale, for example.

In conclusion: there is no evidence to show that random mutation is anything other than mere figment, ideological concept. Not only that, but it is indeed also hopelessly irrational. After all, the theory of evolution purports to explain, as per the title of Darwin’s book, the origin of species. And yet its underlying operating principle is that there must be an incessant and massive volume of mutations necessary to provide for it. In other words, the offspring from one generation to the next would have to be continually and randomly mutating so as to allow for the occasional appearance of a useful coordinated evolutionary feature: this constant variation is absolutely fundamental to the theoretical possibility of evolution. But this completely opposes the fact of stasis, of distinct species as preserved by reproductive stability: re-productive literally meaning producing again, or copying. So this argument offers another demonstration of the hopeless irrationality and self-contradiction that is so intrinsic to the entire evolutionary non-science.

“To improve a living organism by random mutation is like saying you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and bending one of its wheels or axis. Improving life by random mutations has the probability of zero.” (Nobel prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi)

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