Evolution, a House Divided

Creationists have been led to believe that a literal understanding of Genesis 1 is contrary to the theory of evolution (TOE). This is simply not true, the only aspect of TOE that creationism is opposed to is Darwin's Tree of Life.

Among the icons (idols) of modern mysticism there is one that reigns supreme. It is the myth of single common ancestry. We scoff at the gods of the ancient pagans as if we were untouched by their superstition and yet we mystify our science with the likes of Darwin, the high priest of natural selection. Darwin taught a fable that started in a warm little pond and through a process that has became known as gradualism (minute changes over eons) all life arose out of a primordial soup.

Sit back and close your eyes because you will need your imagination for this one. It all began billions of years ago when the elements were forging the impersonal, elemental, primordial world and cooking something I like to call primordial soup. The first part in our mythical trilogy is the emergence of life from biochemical nothingness.

There are basic things that have to be functional before chemicals become the 20 amino acids of life (there are many chemical amino acids but only 20 in living organisms) and the nucleic acid sugars ribose and deoxyribose. Basically the chemistry has to make a transition that will create (for lack of a better word) RNA or something like it. RNA is the key to life replicating itself. Some how Amino acids form into chains forming polypeptides, this polypeptide chains are the building blocks of proteins. These proteins are folded into three dimensional structure called conformation. This as far as I know is the fundamental process that makes up the mechanisms that build into the most basic form of life, the cell. Now mind you the cell at this point has yet to be built but the basic tools and materials have been formed.

(Department of Energy Human Genome Program http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis)

There is a need for nitrogen containing compounds called nitrogenous bases: (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), cytosine (C ) and uracil (U) for the double helix to be formed. This requires RNA to facilitate its formation. This is required for the information in DNA to be expressed and utilized. RNA is used in all biologic functions. We know this from observation and experimentation so there is little room for speculation here. The nucleic acid RNA (ribonucleic acid) has to be present for amino acids (asymmetrical) to produce proteins and nucleic acids.

(Department of Energy Human Genome Program http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis)

How do we know so much about how living things work and traits are passed down from one generation to the next? It wasn't Darwin, enter Gregor Mendel, Mendel's experiments yielded two laws of science that became the foundation of modern genetics. Without directly observing the chromosomes he built a scientific model that demonstrated how the internal mechanism of inherited traits worked. Nearly half a century later his only surviving paper on the pea plant experiments were discovered and demonstrated again and again in the early 1900s. Mendel noted that one trait masks the other; the one that masks the other is dominant the masked trait is recessive (aka epistasis). It was believed that inheritance was a mixture of characteristics that blended to produce unique internal traits. We know now that the genes, Mendel called the 'elementen', recombine through a process of recombination called Meiosis

Mendel clearly states based on his experiments that the demonstrated mechanisms that are the bedrock of modern genetics had defining boundaries. These boundaries are the elementum (genes) that are separated from each other as gametes form. The gametes join at fertilization and would recombine at random. The traits are expressed in different ways because a gene can exist in alternative forms, or alleles. In summarizing after producing 70 hybrid crosses with each of the seven traits he studied, from 10,000 meticulous experiments, crossing and cataloging some 24,034 plants, over a six year period (1857-1863), Mendel writes:

“Gärtner, by the results of these transformation experiments, was led to oppose the opinion of those naturalists who dispute the stability of plant species and believe in a continuous evolution of vegetation. He perceives in the complete transformation of one species into another an indubitable proof that species are fixed with limits beyond which they cannot change.”

Darwin proposed natural selection was the mechanism for the change of one species to another, the selection of most favored races, he called it. It was based on the 'geometric growth of populations', which claims that populations tend to populate beyond the ability of the resources to sustain them and there is a struggle to survive. The ones best 'fitted' would survive while the rest would die off, it is simplicity itself, natural selection is the elimination of the less fit. This is how Darwin and neodarwinians see nature, as a red in tooth and claw struggle for survival within a population yielding improved fitness. The only model Darwin offered in Origin of Species was what he called the tree of life starting with an undefined protoorganism and growing like a tree from that single stem into countless branches of living systems. The mechanism he proposed was natural selection:

"But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. Natural selection, on the principle of qualities being inherited at corresponding ages, can modify the egg, seed, or young, as easily as the adult."

Natural Selection

Mendel’s work and Darwin’s were the basis for the modern synthesis. The concept of modern evolutionary biology itself is a synthesis of Natural Selection and Genetics. What it consists of is modern genetics as the empirical backbone of the a priori presumption of the universal common ancestor evolving into all the branches of living systems by means of natural selection.

Modern evolutionary synthesis

The Modern Synthesis

The challenge for Creationism is clear, to me at any rate, separate the science of Mendelian genetics from the presumption of the single common ancestor model. Evolution is not opposed to creationism in any way shape or form and young earth creationists should understand this. Do you think that Darwin and Mendel have nothing to do with any of this? We have came to the point in modern science where they have mapped the entire genome of both human beings and the ape thought to be our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. In the opening remarks of the paper that anounced the completion of the Human Genome project they speak of Mendel:

"The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century. sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century. The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity, with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same."

(Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 409, 860 - 921 (2001)

When they completed the Chimpanzee genome project in September 2005 they speak of Darwin:

"More than a century ago Darwin and Huxley posited that humans share recent common ancestors with the African great apes. Modern molecular studies have spectacularly confirmed this prediction and have refined the relationships, showing that the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus or pygmy chimpanzee) are our closest living evolutionary relatives."

(Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome, Nature 437, 69-87 (1 September 2005))

The human genome project can account for the differences in humans worldwide with Mendelian genetics. What differences have they uncovered between the chimpanzee and humans? What they found was approximately 35 million differences at a single-nucleotide level in addition to approximately 5 million indels (insertions/deletions). In order to understand the importance of these findings you have to consider what would have had to occur for human beings to share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Now in order for these 35 million differences to occur there would have had to be 3.5 mutations established genome wide per year for 10 million years.

35,000,000 differences in 10,000,000 years
3,500,000 differences in 1,000,000 years
350,000 differences in 100,000 years
35,000 differences in 10,000 years
3,500 differences in 1,000 years
350 differences in 100 years
35 differences in 10 years
3.5 differences per year

“The size of human brain tripled over a period of _2 million years (MY) that ended 0.2–0.4 MY ago. This evolutionary expansion is believed to be important to the emergence of human language and other high-order cognitive functions, yet its genetic basis remains unknown.”

Evolution of the Human ASPM Gene, a Major Determinant of Brain Size

Despite the fact that the genetic basis for this unprecedented expansion is a mystery to scientists, evolutionists have simply chanted the mantra of the neodarwinians, it happened by natural selection. The size, shape, structure and dating of the fossils been used to paint a picture of an impossible transition with no testable hypothesis by which this transition can be tested on a genetic basis. Here are the particulars on the fossils giving us the timeline.

Early Human Phylogeny

For decades we have been told that the changes needed to evolve humans from apes were just a couple of random mutations, a little selective pressure, a pinch of geologic isolation, and stir for millions of years and you have Homo sapiens. The truth is slowly coming out that it is just not that simple. The structure of the human chromosome 21 and its counterpart chimpanzee chromosome 22 were compared by dozens of world class genetic research scientists, for three years who identified the genetic features that make us uniquely human:

“Human–chimpanzee comparative genome research is essential for narrowing down genetic changes involved in unique human features, such as highly developed cognitive functions, bipedalism or the use of complex language. Here, we report the high-quality DNA sequence of 33.3 megabases of chimpanzee chromosome 22. By comparing the whole sequence with the human counterpart, chromosome 21, we found that:

1) 1.44% of the chromosome consists of single-base substitutions
2) 68,000 insertions or deletions.
3) These differences are sufficient to generate changes in most of the proteins.
4) 83% of the 231 coding sequences, including functionally important genes, show differences at the amino acid sequence level.
5) We demonstrate different expansion of particular subfamilies of retrotransposons between the lineages, suggesting different impacts of retrotranspositions on human and chimpanzee evolution.
6) The genomic changes after speciation and their biological consequences seem more complex than originally hypothesized.”

Coding sequences:

“A total of 140 of these 179 genes show amino acid replacements… In contrast, 47 PTR22q (chimp chromosome 22) genes show significant structural changes affecting at least one of their transcript isoforms. Fifteen genes have indels within their coding region yet retain frame constancy”

DNA sequence and comparative analysis of chimpanzee chromosome 22

When I ask neodarwinians for an explanation on how these changes could occur the most common answer is natural selection. That is not a scientific answer based on directly observed or demonstrated evidence, it is an a priori assumption. Mutations are the only way these differences could be in the these two chromosomes apart from independent creation. Given the effects of mutations as directly observed and demonstrated in modern genetics and Mendle's laws of inheritance it is fundamentally impossible. There is only one logical, scientific and rational explanation for these differences, independent creation.