My Problems with Evolutionary Theory

  I have a logical, scientific mind, and I have trouble with some of the assumptions made by evolution scientists.  Maybe I haven't read the right stuff yet and maybe I will happen upon some sensible explanations at some point, but here's where I am right now.

  First let me say that I don't have a problem with energy and matter and physics and astronomy and geology.  I believe the universe is really old.  Just last month astronomers reported the discovery of the farthest away, oldest galaxy (named z8_GND_5296) at the other side of the cosmos.  It is 13 billion light years away, making the universe at least that old.  The Big Bang that apparently started it all is entirely logical to me and consistent with what I see when I look up into the sky at night.  I am fully aware that what I see is not current but rather a snapshot of the universe the way it was millions and billions of years ago.

  Similarly, while I was in college my geological studies led me to conclude that the earth is millions of years old.  I could see it in the fossils and strata that I was digging up with my little rock hammer in the strip mines of southern Indiana and in the cut-away cliffs of the Rockies.

  So my problems are not with the physical sciences.  I am not a young earth theorist;  that doesn't make any sense to me.  At this point my fundamentalist creationist friends and I part company.

  But I'm also having trouble with some of the foundational biological premises of evolution.  Here's where my evolutionist friends and I part scientific company:

Problem #1:  You can't evolve if you can't reproduce.  Evolution requires time.  Lots of time.  Millions of years of evolutionary process must take place to deliver any noticeable change in a species.  And evolution also requires reproduction - lots of it - and right from the outset.  But if you can't reproduce, how can you evolve?  You don't have the luxury of millions of years to grow a male penis and then millions more years to develop a female vagina, and then millions of millennia to produce reproductive cells and everything else that goes with the reproductive systems, male and female.  It all has to be working in the first generation in order to have a second generation, if you know what I mean.  Excuse my explicit logic here, but if you can't procreate, you're screwed...  in a manner of speaking.  It doesn't require a whole lot of thought to arrive at the obvious conclusion that it is not possible for reproductive systems to evolve.  There must have been some creative point of origination when everything was suddenly working.  But is that still evolution?

  In the evolutionary sequence (called the Tree of Life) there is a huge gap between the slime molds and the duckbilled platypus, early ancestors of humans.  Somewhere in that gap sexual reproduction had to develop, and it had to show up all at once, along with a lot of other things.  This is a big problem, because natural selection does not have the balls for this; it is not a viable operative here.  Biologically speaking, natural selection can't get 'er done.

Problem #2:  Mutations can't close the gaps.  Natural selection (sometimes called the survival of the fittest) assumes that the positive adaptations of nature will live on to further evolve and the negative mutations will die out.  That's fine within species, but it seems pretty farfetched when trying to evolve from one life form to the next.  It is counterintuitive for me to concur with an evolutionary timeline that is a virtual continuum of development from lesser to greater, from simple to complex, from dumb to smart.  In my view, there's an insurmountable gap between every major family and the next higher life form. (See Hillis' completely sequenced genome Tree of Life here or Darwin's and several other early models here.)

A simplified version of evolutionary sequence called  Tree of Life

  On the contrary, a more panoramic observation reveals a slow decline of the biological world.  There are fewer species of plant and animal life on the earth now than there were last year or last epoch.  So the dinosaurs are gone, along with the dodo birds and a bunch of other cool stuff, gone forever.  Occasionally a scientist discovers a new butterfly in the Amazon jungle, but it is not really a new insect, just a newly discovered insect.  Many species are lost every year.  The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports in their latest update to the Red List of Threatened Species, which reviews more than 60,000 species, that 25 per cent of mammals on the list are at risk of extinction.
In my mind, this points to a grand beginning and a slow diminishing of biodiversity.  Natural selection and the tree of life standing on its head, if you will.

Problem #3:  The Missing Links are still missing.  There should be transitional forms of every kind of organism in the fossil record.  But there aren't.  150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), they are still missing.  300-million-year-old fossils of the sea turtles show no significant variation from those alive in the ocean today.  Fossils exist of plants and animals that are now extinct, amazing things we have not seen before, but there have been found no viable transitional forms between the frog and the cat, the cat and the dog, the dog and the horse.  And there should be.  In fact, there should be millions upon millions of these "in-between" specimens embedded in the earth's crust, and with the thousands of archeologists who are on the job around the world, these should be emerging from the soil every day to be displayed in our newspapers, our science classrooms and our museums.  But they're not.

  Logically, this makes me think there was a definite point in time for the origination of each plant and animal group.

Problem #4:  DNA lacks creativity.  Adaptation falls short.  Adaptations can be the results of external forces applied on a particular life form.  So humans who lived in the tropics for many generations developed dark skin for their own protection.  And when they migrate to temperate climate zones they continue to birth babies with dark skin for many generations following, because of an essential change in the DNA when they lived in the tropics.

  But the original adaptation was a mutation, an adjustment to the DNA in response to an outside stimulus: sunlight.  This is the normal modus operandi for adaptations.

  But DNA do not have a mind of their own.  They are a reliable code or program that is automatically followed, usually without variation, a consistent phenomena called genetic homeostasis.  They cannot originate new body parts.  They cannot convene a committee and collaborate to develop an organ, a system or a sense, like the sense of sight, for example.  They cannot initiate a group effort to form an eyeball with a cornea, retina, optic nerve and eventually a center in the brain that interprets sight from nervous impulses - even though their blind host organism would certainly benefit from it if they could.  DNA are oblivious to the needs and wants of their host; they are not able to initiate these necessary monumental changes; they are barely able to react and adapt to outside stimuli and only do it infrequently and reluctantly through an occasional mutation.

  What I'm getting at here is that complex systems like digestion and breathing and circulation and the senses of sight and smell and so on, could not be generated by ignorant DNA.  Without the help of some miraculous, creative outside force, they cannot cause the countless improvements that are essential for the evolutionary process.

   Many evolutionists give examples of adaptations as proof of evolution, and indeed, it is essential to the entire scheme.  But adaptations never have and never will change one type of animal into another as evolutionary processes require.  Thousands of miraculous mutations - strategic upgrades - would have to take place for this to happen.  Yet this remains the foundational core of evolutionary theory.

  So I think that much of evolution science rides along on the backs of some very hopeful but unlikely hypotheses.  I have talked to some of my evolutionary friends about these fundamental gaps, and no one has offered explanations for any of this.  I guess maybe Charles Darwin could be excused for his optimism, hoping that science would eventually fill in the gaps, but I'm a bit more skeptical.  I am not comfortable with the cognitive dissonance that natural selection creates for me; it's just too fantastic.

  When my daughter came home from her first year at university she told me that her professor had said that, "Evolution has pretty much been proven by now."  My first thought was, "Really? When did that happen?"  Scientists don't even agree among themselves about the classifications of the simplest life forms.  In their search for the earliest universal ancestor evolutionary biologists are discovering that "...the emerging picture is far more complicated than had been expected, and the ancestor's features remain ill-defined.... Five years ago we were very confident and arrogant in our ignorance; said Dr. Eugene Loonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.  'Now we are starting to see the true complexity of life."*
  It seems that the more information that scientists gather, the less there is that they are certain of. (See also, Oldest Human DNA Reveals Mysterious Branch of Humanity for more speculation on human ancestry.)

  Post Script:  There is a battle continuing between creationists and evolutionists that is as unscientific as it is polarized.  I think part of the problem is the "package deal" that both sides are expected to embrace.  The creationists have a complete platform that they promote including an actual 6-day creation and a young earth (7000 years old) theory turned to dogma.  The evolutionists do the same, driven by the prerequisite that there be no intelligent creator in the equation.  And both sides have made their platform into a political and an emotional campaign.  Both sides overlook the obvious.

  When it comes to the origin of species, I am a man without a country, so to speak.   As you can see in this post, I do not subscribe to either traditional platform.  I think it is more reasonable to take an objective approach that is based on observation and real scientific evidence and without initial bias.

  My study and interest in this will be on-going, and I'm looking for facts. Conjecture is fine at the start.  That's where the scientific method begins.  But when reliable results aren't forthcoming after 150 years of study, it may be time to look for other answers.

  Also, please notice that I wrote this entire post in the first person.  That is an attempt to keep my friends from becoming offended and disowning me.  I respect the right of everybody to have their point of view, and I haven't made suggestions about what anyone else should believe about evolution; I have simply stated my own opinion.

Thank you for reading!

To make a comment or to suggest the next expert that I should study on the subject, click on "Post a Comment" below.  (There will be a delay before it is posted as I have to moderate all incoming comments.)  Thanks again!

* Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, article "Tree of Life Turns Out to Have Complex Roots".
   --Cartoons by Mueller and Ham, in The Funny Times, December 2013, Volume 28, Issue 12