Cynic Direct Action Blog

Editor’s Note:

Science must involve debate. Our ideas, opinions and views on Evolution should be open to new data, new discovery and new theories if applicable. Our Theory of  Evolution should evolve if supported by the data. Debate is crucial.

~soveriegnjohn

by Dr. Bob and Zohara Hieronimus
originally for “UFO” Magazine August/September 2003
www.21stCenturyRadio.com

www.FutureTalk.org

Thoroughly Debatable Darwinian Theory of Evolution

http://newbeing.org/NB_Milton.html

“The Survival of the Fittest” = Just Stating the Obvious?

The first question Milton asked was how do you measure one of the tenets of Darwinism: the survival of the fittest. How do you measure fitness of an animal or plant? As he told us, “The answer Darwinists give is by its capacity to survive. If it has a high capacity to survive, it’s very fit. If it doesn’t have a high capacity to survive, it’s not very fit. So, how is survival measured then? Well, that’s simple. You measure survival by the number of offspring left. If it lives to a great age and breeds many, many offspring, then its survival factor is very high. So, fitness ultimately means breeding success. The trouble is survival is also measured by breeding success. So, survival of the fittest means breeding success of the successful breeders. It’s just tautology. And it’s not just me that says that. Conrad Waddington, a Professor of Biology at Edinburgh University, said, ‘Natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable although previously unrecognized relation.’ He says that the fittest individuals in a population defined as those who leave most offspring, will leave most offspring. That’s perhaps a useful way of putting things, but remember what we’re looking for here is the engine of evolution. I don’t think a tautology of any kind is really advancing our scientific understanding of the world. These are just words. It’s just a way in which we look at things and classify what’s going on. We’re not talking here about something which is fundamentally underlying the biological realm.”

The Famous (Falsified) Chart of the Evolving Dog and Pony Trick

First and foremost, the theory of evolution according to Darwin is a theory of gradual change. Darwin noticed that every species varied. There were small variations from animal to animal. He bred pigeons and he discovered that by selecting pigeons he could change their appearance, their coloring, quite dramatically over just a few generations. And so he thought about what would happen in nature, and the idea we’ve all been taught in school is that a favorable adaptation, like a long beak in a bird, will result in offspring with longer and longer beaks until it stops being a favorable adaptation. But as Milton found, there is absolutely no evidence of any species anywhere gradually changing into another species (like the idea that an ape evolved into a human). Transitional species are missing entirely from any and all fossil records. As Milton said, “There is a discontinuity between stratum and every species. Nowhere in the world can you find an ice section of 20, 30 or 40 strata and a species gradually changing into another species and then another and another. And really this should be the norm if life evolved as Darwin imagined. That’s what the rocks ought to show, but they don’t show it anywhere.” Most scientists have been taking this concept on an act of faith, but one or two individual scientists have apparently taken it upon themselves to supply the missing evidence. “For example,” said Milton, “you look at the very eminent and distinguished paleontologist George Simpson (of Harvard and Columbia Universities) who produced a chart of horses, which I’m sure everybody will remember from their school days, showing the horse evolving from a very small, dog-like creature 50 million years ago, through something the size of a small pony, up to the modern horse. He did so on the basis of fossils, and he was absolutely emphatic that this chain was complete and there was no possibility of error. But if you read his own book, he admits that there are actually gaps in that sequence that we’ve all seen in the encyclopedias. And that they are unbridgeable gaps, so actually it is really just supposition that these animals are related, and they could be an ancestor and have a descendant relationship certainly, but the proof is missing.” (Click here to see the whole chart.)

Homeostasis - the Horse is still a Horse

Genetic homeostasis was coined by Ernst Mayr who was Professor of Zoology at Harvard, who pointed out that if you try to cross-breed any animal or plant, you will eventually reach a point where you can’t breed any further. As Milton explained, “You can breed a horse for being fast like an Arab Stallion, or you can breed it for being very strong so it can pull a plow or heavy loads. But there’s a limit to how far you can go. It remains the horse is still a horse. It reaches a point where it won’t change any further. The first time that this was discovered was when people discovered you could crystallize sugar from sugar beets. So they thought this is a great alternative sort of sugar. What we need now is a sugar beet with a lot of sugar in it. The common sugar beet only had about 5% of sugar, so they started cross breeding the high sugar yield types, and it went up 5%, 10%, 15%, then it got to, I think, about 17%, and that’s where it stayed. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter how many high yield sugar beets you cross, you’re not going to get any more than 17%. You just reach this barrier, this limit, this genetic homeostasis beyond which it won’t pass. Now the funny thing is that every Darwinist that you talk to will acknowledge this. If you say to them, what about genetic homeostasis, they say, okay we accept that. And then they completely forget all about it and say, oh yeah, of course, and a microbe can turn into an elephant given enough time.”

http://newbeing.org/NB_Milton.html