This post doesn’t directly address points made by evolutionists in the ‘doubters of God’s existence’ thread. I may respond to each point individually in a later post. However, I would first like to provide the evidence that supports my claims about materialist evolution’s invalidity.
Before I begin, however, I would like to say that I am a believer in evolution. However, not the belief that animals can somehow shift somewhere along the lines of phyla. Or in other words, I don’t believe the entire variety of animals on earth today was ‘evolved.’ I believe that, based on the evidence, it is apparent that kinds of animals are able to evolve to changing environments, based on their original genetics, but not gain new genetics (my claim is an observable fact, since all positive adaptations or mutations come at a loss to the gene pool).
Claim number 1:
Life can be spontaneously created from some kind of primordial soup.
Why isn’t this true? In experiments, scientists tried to recreate ‘early earth’ to get the building blocks of life to form. During the experiment, they left out oxygen. The reason being that oxygen (even the oxygen in water) breaks down molecular bonds. However, without oxygen, early life on earth would have been destroyed or broken down by ultraviolet rays from the sun because we would have no ozone.
That means life can’t begin with oxygen, and it can’t begin without it.
Either way, within this experiment they created amino acids, which are (as everyone should know) building blocks of life. However, there are left handed and right handed amino acids. Life only uses left handed amino acids, since right handed amino acids are actually something akin to a ‘poison’ to life. The problem is that naturally, amino acids will form an even mixture of left and right handed, known as a racemic mixture. This racemic mixture is non-life, by principle. The ONLY place we find only left handed amino acids are within a cell. However, we can’t have a cell unless we only have left handed amino acids. So which one came first if they both are requisites for the other’s existence?
Here’s a link to an interview with Miller who performed the experiment. I’m going to take out an excerpt real quick.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/NM/miller.htmlQ: The original study raised many questions. What about the even balance of L and D (left and right oriented) amino acids seen in your experiment, unlike the preponderance of L seen in nature? How have you dealt with that question?
A: All of these pre-biotic experiments yield a racemic mixture, that is, equal amounts of D and L forms of the compounds. Indeed, if you're results are not racemic, you immediately suspect contamination. The question is how did one form get selected. In my opinion, the selection comes close to or slightly after the origin of life. There is no way in my opinion that you are going to sort out the D and L amino acids in separate pools. My opinion or working hypothesis is that the first replicated molecule had effectively no asymmetric carbon.
For a lesson in L and D amino acid molecules, you can visit here
http://dl.clackamas.cc.or.us/ch106-05/optical.htmAnyway, here is the next question.
Q: You are talking about some kind of pre-RNA?
A: Exactly a kind of pre-RNA. RNA has four asymmetric carbons in it. This pre-RNA must have somehow developed into RNA. There is a considerable amount of research now to try and figure out what that pre-RNA compound was, that is, what was the precursor to the RNA ribose-phosphate.
I did some research on this field and the best they can come up with for a precursor to RNA is PNA. Which, by the way, only exists synthetically. Or in other words, it doesn’t occur in nature.
The reason they want a precursor is because RNA is very unstable and most scientists agree that it wouldn’t have been able to keep from decomposing for long in a primordial world on its own. Let alone evolve into something else.
That’s without getting into the problem of how this PNA molecule formed, and then how that molecule would have led to RNA. PNA would have had to have formed RNA before DNA because PNA can’t become DNA, however that still brings us to the conclusion scientists have had about RNA being unstable.
So you can stop acting like you know life was accidentally created. Because if you know it, show scientists how you know and you can win one of those shiny medals. Based on the evidence at hand, it’s more likely that we were created than that we were spontaneously assembled, or evolved from non-living material. That doesn’t mean scientists shouldn’t speculate, speculation is what could lead to the discovery that we did evolve from non-living materials and if we have then that’s great. I want to be the first to know. But right now, it’s still just speculation and can’t be backed up with evidence.
So that’s the origin of life out of the way.
Claim number 2:
Every species on earth today (or in the past) evolved from one original self replicating cell.
Why isn’t this true? Well, this is going to get VERY lengthy, and I’m sorry for that, but there are many reasons why this can’t be true and I want to cover as many of them as possible. First I’m going to focus on some common myths or misconceptions that lead people to believe materialist evolution is true.
1 – Vestigial organs.
The easiest way to take vestigial organs out of the picture is that they really only prove devolution. If snakes really have ‘useless’ leg nubs, then they’ve lost data. We don’t see snakes spontaneously growing legs.
You can say these organs are ‘suboptimal’ but since creationism allows for devolution, that doesn’t mean these creatures were created with suboptimal organs but that they mutated downwards to their current form. So that isn’t evidence of a suboptimal designer. And that also depends on what you mean by suboptimal. If the appendix isn’t necessary for life, but still does its job of destroying bacteria that enters the digestive system, is that suboptimal? I think not. In that case, our teeth are suboptimal, but for obvious reasons I don’t think anyone will disagree with their importance.
Most or all of what scientists thought were vestigial organs actually turned out to have a purpose. The tailbone, the appendix, the muscles of the ear was all thought to prove evolution for years until their purposes were discovered.
But really it’s all beside the point when you consider that this simply demonstrates devolution. Not uphill gaining of genetic data, which is necessary if you’re going to postulate that a single cell eventually became every living thing on earth.
This evidence actually backs up the Bible, but that’s not the point of this thread. And no, I don’t believe that snakes have these ‘leg’ nubs because God cursed them. Those nubs are simply used in reproduction. But that’s getting sidetracked.
2 – Speciation
Speciation is a staple of both evolution science and creation science, believe it or not. Without speciation, Noah would have had his hands full with the Ark. But I digress. Both evolutionists and creationists can agree that speciation occurs. It’s something that we can actually see with our own eyes and with experimentation. However, the end result of speciation is where creationists and evolutionists begin to part paths. Materialists believe that speciation is proof of further, unobservable evolution through kinds of animals (that lizards can become birds). Creationists only deal with the real evidence that speciation is a natural reaction animals have to changes in environment, and that without speciation extinction would be rampant.
Let’s take a look at one of Darwin’s original observations. He went to the Galapagos Islands and there he observed many different species of finches, all with different beaks, coloration, body size, etc. From this evidence, he assumed that these finches all ‘evolved’ from a common ancestor. After all, they all were definitely finches, but they had different body types and they were also definitely separated into different species.
It was originally postulated that this wide variety of finch was the result of 1 to 5 million years of evolution.
Which is interesting, because based on recent observations of exactly how fast these finches (and all animals for that matter) adapt to their environments, scientists have had to lower the amount of time it took to centuries.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_01.htmlThat link shows how quickly these adaptations can take place. But I want you to notice how misleading the conclusion is. These finches became larger after the drought, much quicker than evolution allows, showing that it doesn’t take a mutation, just simple variation in the species to produce adaptations. The data for larger birds was already there to begin with, there’s no other answer. Yet the website claims this is evidence of evolution. Evolution doesn’t work on that time table. It is evolution in the sense of a change within a kind of animal…but did the finch gain anything new? Or was the bad data for smaller birds just weeded out?
These variations were already encoded in most species. However, due to environmental pressures, certain genetics are localized or specialized, and when the environment changes the birds adapted by growing smaller, etc. This shows that, outside of the evolutionist timetable, animals are able to quickly and easily adapt within their genetic range to changing environmental conditions. If this weren’t so, we could say God was a suboptimal designer because the birds, with rigid genetics, would have simply become extinct.
So does this variation in species prove the unobservable? That they evolved from some lower form? Or does it prove that they devolved from some more generalized form (which already contained the genetic data for the variations) over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years at the hand of natural selection, genetic drift, and specialization? Well…since we can observe animals adapting at a very high rate causing changes in genetics on a materialistic evolutionary scale in short periods of time, I’ll stick with the more likely answer that they were derived from something akin to a ‘master species.’
Darwin himself had this to say of the finches.
“Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”
http://www.rit.edu/~rhrsbi/GalapagosPages/DarwinFinch2.htmlThese are the words of the founder of evolution, basically saying (whether he realized it or not) that these finches came from a more generalized finch that simply specialized to different environments. Yet people to this day still claim that these finches prove materialist evolution. This is why people even believe evolution in the first place, they see natural changes within kinds of animals, and assume that that means animals can somehow gain new data. This has NOT been observed in the natural world, so it is simply an assumption that must be made through faith alone. Not evidence.
Yes, these finches did evolve. But they evolved into finches. Nothing else. Furthermore, certain color, body size, or beak variations carried over to certain other species. This shows a common link to a more varied species of finch, or a finch with a wider variety of possible genetics. Outside pressures just hide or cleave unneeded genetics from species, thus creating new species, but still not adding new data.
Think about it for a moment. These birds have different colors, larger or smaller beaks, different body sizes, etc. But all of these natural changes occurred within the original bounds set within their DNA (through Darwin’s own words) from a single ‘master species.’ Darwin is my favorite person to use as proof against evolution. I love the guy.
3 – Mutations
In order to understand why mutations are almost always bad, and why even the ‘good’ mutations are still bad you have to understand genetics a bit. I’m not an expert, so I suggest you study beyond what I say here. However, I’ll use some metaphors to outline why mutations cannot improve creation.
Someone said on the forum that since mutations are random, they can cause anything, good or bad to happen. Someone also said that there is no filter for good or bad mutations.
There is no ‘filter’ for mutations, but apparently there is something preventing good mutations or they would actually occur. Here are some examples of ‘good’ mutations:
1). Beetles on an island stopped growing wings, and eventually became more dominant than the species with wings because they were less likely to blow off the island via wind. A loss of the genetic data required for wings is considered a ‘good’ mutation. However, we still end up with a beetle, in fact with a beetle that was less than it used to be.
2). Sickle Cell Anemia prevents Malaria. However, despite having less of a chance to get Malaria, you still have Sickle Cell Anemia. If you want to know why that’s a bad mutation, then by all means research sickle cell anemia.
(I’m going to copy and paste this one below because I’m lazy so if you notice a change in my diction (word use) that’s why).
3). Chlamydomonas is a unicellular green algae capable of photosynthesis in light, but also somewhat capable of growth in the dark by using acetate as a carbon source. Graham Bell cultured several clonal lines of Chlamydomonas in the dark for several hundred generations. Some of the lines grew well in the dark, but other lines were almost unable to grow at all. The poor growth lines improved throughout the course of the experiment until by 600 generations they were well adapted to growth in the dark. This experiment showed that new, beneficial mutations are capable of quickly (in hundreds of generations) adapting an organism that almost required light for survival to growth in the complete absence of light.
If the data is already there to live in the dark, did we really end up with anything new? Within these creatures there is a variety of genetics. One, they can live off photosynthesis, and two, they can use acetate as a carbon source. All the scientists did was force these creatures to adapt within their original genetic bounds. This is adaptation, but not on a scale that would change a single cell creature into a human over billions of years. These creatures went from being able to live in the dark, to being able to live in the dark. Nothing new is being created; they just weeded out the data that would have kept these creatures from surviving. Or in other words, they once again had to lose data to prove that somehow a single cell can evolve upwards. Why this is used as proof of materialist evolution? I’ll never know.
4). Eyeless fish that live in caves have scars where eyes would have been. Besides the fact that once again this still proves devolution, its also interesting to note that these are the same species of fish with eyes that live outside the same cave where these eyeless fish were discovered. In fact, scientists implanted a lens, from the same species of fish with an eye, and the eyeless fish began to grow eyes again. This suggests that the fish lost the eyes due to natural selection and mutation, but not the data for them. This would also explain the ‘scars’. Something similar happened in the drosophila experiment too. You might ask what the purpose of losing the eyes would be. Well, in the dark the fish would have bumped up against the walls, causing infection and eventually death. Those that mutated to lose the eyes would survive.
Don’t these adaptations that show how slight variations within bounds can cause a species branch (or evolution within a kind) really prove that animals were created by an optimal designer, who knew that every animal on earth would need the capability to adapt and change to harsh, changing environments? They certainly don’t show new genetics springing up, so there is a likely answer besides materialist evolution, whether you want to see it or not.
Furthermore, the drosophila experiments were brought up. Why would an evolutionist bring that up when it’s a known failure for the proof of materialist evolution (that is evolution that could cause a single cell to become all living things)?
I’ll give a quick recap of the back story for those of us who never heard of this experiment.
For about 60 years now, a specific fruit fly called drosophila melanogaster has been chosen to test the boundaries of evolution. It was picked specifically because they breed quickly, require little food, have lots of observable characteristics, and few chromosomes per cell relative to some animals.
So for years now scientists have been zapping it with x-rays, introducing it to chemicals, irradiating it and so forth and watching what happened to future generations. They did indeed produce a lot of interesting mutations on the poor things.
In effect, what they managed to simulate on these creatures was the equivalent of millions of years of evolution, much more time than we (humans) have even existed on the evolutionary timetable according to scientists. What did they end up with? More fruit flies. However, here are some interesting things to note about what these mutations did to the fruit flies.
1). If the flies were selectively bred for a specific mutation, and then mutated further along that line, they would become sterile. Suggesting that not only do mutations not change what the animal essentially is to begin with, they damage the genetics of that animal and they also will eventually cut off that genetic line.
For example, they bred from a parent group with 36 bristles, a child group down to 25 bristles, but shortly after that time the line died out. When they mutated and bred for more bristles the line also died out.
These bristles numbers were an average by the way, since it naturally varies.
“It was also demonstrated that levels of mutation necessary to cause significant evolution were not present in the environment and would cause sterility; e.g., in fruit flies.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_theory2). In one instance, a generation of flies were born without eyes. When they were separated and allowed to breed normally, the eyes grew back within only a few generations. Evolution doesn’t work on that time table. In fact, there is a natural defense mechanism in most cells (especially of complex animals) that protects against some kinds of mutations and will actually repair the mutations (you can look it up for yourself).
The only thing that would have prevented these eyes from coming back would be natural selection. Say, if for some reason the eyes were a hindrance to the fly.
“Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability. The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtually every breeding experiment."—Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (1983), p. 134.
"Out of 400 mutations that have been provided by Drosophila melanogaster, there is not one that can be called a new species. It does not seem, therefore, that the central problem of evolution can be solved by mutations."—Maurice Caullery, Genetics and Heredity (1964), p. 119.
It should be noted that these 400 mutations were the only ones that were actually carried on after sterility or the outright lethality of the mutations.
Furthermore, even if all 400 mutations had been combined into one specific fly, it still would have been a fly. Albeit, the fly would have been greatly reduced and damaged.
"The clear-cut mutants of Drosophila, with which so much of the classical research in genetics were done, are almost without exception inferior to wild-type flies in viability, fertility, longevity."—Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964), p. 126.
"Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs. Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, and in the body reduce the wings, eyes, bristles, legs. Many mutants are, in fact lethal to their possessors. Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority, and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization in the normal environments are unknown."—Theodosius Dobzhansky, Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955), p. 105.
So if there is no filter, why are all these mutations either bad, or neutral?
That’s simple. There is a kind of filter on genetic mutations, and that is the already established genetics. When you’re dealing with genetics, you can think of bases as the alphabet which spells out words (amino acids). In turn, these amino acids make sentences (genes) and these sentences are organized in paragraphs and stories.
The entire creature itself is the story of genetics. If you go into a book and randomly misspell words and rearrange sentences, is the story still going to make sense? In fact, could this random rearranging possibly even be beneficial to the overall story? This is why, when you look at the creature overall (not just amino acids, or genes) you understand why there really is a sort of filter for good or bad mutations.
When you crash a car against the wall, you don’t expect the outcome to be good. You might rearrange the pieces, but the car is going to be either hindered or destroyed. At best the car can be fixed, but it will still be a car. This is evidenced in these experiments.
In a more scientific example consider a single cell. Even the most simple of cells requires thousands of proteins to be working correctly in the right place at the right time. If you rewire one of these proteins (through genetic mutations) then the cell cannot perform its duty. This is why we get cancer, by the way (the device by which cells are told to stop dividing (or to have a purpose) gets switched off by mutations).
So, no, mutations cannot convert a cell (over millions or billions of years) into all life on earth.
Scientists have figured this out through scientific methods, not emotion or craziness. I’ll also tell you why they keep bringing up scientific examples that disprove materialistic evolution. They have already decided that evolution is true, so there’s no point in focusing on what disproves it. They’ll just try and find proof elsewhere. Furthermore, they know the layman will be unable to tell the difference between a change within kinds of animals, and materialistic evolution (ability to produce new data) so probably without realizing it they are misleading people, or just as likely misleading themselves.
Claim number 3:
Evolution takes millions of years.
Why isn’t this true? Well, the idea that evolution took millions or billions of years was born in ignorance by scientists. They had yet to observe natural changes within kinds of animals, and didn’t realize exactly how fast these changes occurred.
Researchers in Trinidad relocated guppies from a waterfall pool to previously guppy-free pools above the falls where there was only one known possible predator (the predator would only eat small guppies, leaving larger guppies safe). Future generations of the transplanted guppies adjusted to their new circumstances by growing bigger, maturing later, and having fewer and bigger offspring.
Reznick, D.N., Shaw, F.H., Rodd, F.H. and Shaw, R.G., Evaluation of the rate of evolution in natural populations of guppies (Poecilia reticulata), Science 275(5308):1934—1937, 1997.
However, it all happened so fast that it threw scientists for a loop, because their standard millions-of-years view is that the guppies would require long periods of time to adapt.
An evolutionist stated, ‘The guppies adapted to their new environment in a mere four years–a rate of change some 10,000 to 10 million times faster than the average rates determined from the fossil record.’ Morell, V., Predator-free guppies take an evolutionary leap forward, Science 275(5308):1880, 1997.
Of course, it goes without saying that these are still changes within kinds of animals. But it still debunks the idea that adaptations of such magnitude take millions of years, and goes a long way in demonstrating the preprogrammed variety inherit in all life. There are a lot more examples. For one, the finches on the Galapagos Islands were adapting so fast that scientists agreed it would have taken centuries, not millions of years, for speciation to take the finches to their present forms.
There are many more examples of this happening.
Mosquitoes in London were trapped in a subway and adaptation led to speciation within a couple of years. House mice on an island called Madeira only took 500 years to lead to speciation due to environment and other outside pressures.
These cases also back up the ‘master species’ idea.
Here’s some evidence of what I’m talking about.
As they were no longer able to interbreed with the surface bird-biting variety any more, Wieland, C., Brisk biters, Creation 21(2):41, 1999.
Britton-Davidian, J. et al., Rapid chromosomal evolution in island mice, Nature 403(6766):158, 2000.
Its interesting how, the more we learn about our world through science, the more likely creationism seems to be. This isn’t really science versus creationism, this is science versus faith. And it takes more apparent faith to believe animals evolved from a single cell that it does to believe they were created to exist in their current form with the ability to adapt to their environments.
Claim number 4:
The fossil record proves evolution.
Why isn’t this true? First and foremost is that the fossil record is simply a record of specie as they once existed. We can decide that ‘apparent’ common ancestry proves evolution, but it doesn’t prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, because many or most of these animals no longer exist on earth. Therefore, we have to find lizards with wings and assume that the presence of these wings mean they were gained.
But what exactly do we have? We have a distinct species, presumably perfectly adapted to its environment. If it wasn’t adapted to its environment, it wouldn’t have gotten that far in its evolutionary development. If it’s a distinct species, well adapted to its environment, then it really isn’t the missing link between lizards and birds. Unless of course you assume that evolution is true to begin with.
Where are the transitions of lizards with deformed limbs slowly becoming wings? The same could be said of any of these so-called ‘missing links.’ We haven’t really found an accurate record of transition, just a wholly formed species, and this somehow proves evolution. Without a true step-by-step record, everything is just an assumption based upon the predicated belief that evolution does happen on a scale of single-cell to man.
Common ancestry is inevitable, even in a world where all living things were created by God. Why? Well if something needs to fly, what else would you give it but wings? What would you have instead of a heart? In a world such as the one we live in, we are limited by our environment to features that keep us alive in such an environment. This is to be logically expected.
http://www.exn.ca/dinosaurs/story.asp?id=2000012156&name=archivesWe also have to be weary when dealing with the past; otherwise mistakes like this can happen. We all know what happens when you assume.
In fact, in order to truly be able to objectively have any missing links (or in order to find missing links in a world where evolution isn’t already assumed to be true) the animal would have to be a confusion of adaptations (the archaeopteryx is believed to be able to fly, and even if it couldn’t it could still be a bird…think of chickens for example). And even then we have to question whether or not these missing link features are not simply just a loss of data once again. We need to have an actual gain of data, not just an assumed gain of data, in order to prove materialist evolution is possible.
However, it seems evolutionists disagree on whether or not the most famous of all (archaeopteryx) transitional forms is truly a ‘missing link’ to begin with. It turns out it has actual flight feathers, and that it is a true (perching) bird. Not even a dinosaur at all.
Here’s what evolutionists have to say about it.
“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Feduccia, A.; in: V. Morell, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259(5096):764–65, 5 February 1993.
More evidence against the dinosaur to bird transition, namely scientists claim scales aren’t similar enough to feathers to have evolved into them.
‘At the morphological level feathers are traditionally considered homologous with reptilian scales. However, in development, morphogenesis, gene structure, protein shape and sequence, and filament formation and structure, feathers are different.’ A.H. Brush, ‘On the origin of feathers’, Journal of Evolutionary Biology 9:131–142, 1996.
In fact, the more we discover about the archaeopteryx, the more it turns out it was just a bird all along. While we can’t see one of these in real life, it appears to have been able to fly (which is why it would have needed wings with flight feathers), as well as perch, which is why it had the backwards facing toes. And contrary to most artist renderings, the feathers would have covered the entire body (based on the fossil, which had ‘bumps’ covering the entire body where the feathers were connected) and so it would not have had a reptile head or body. That’s another example of misleading, by the way.
To better illustrate what I mean about the fossil record, let me come up with a fictional example. Let’s imagine all the varieties of dogs we have nowadays were suddenly wiped out and a sample of each was fossilized. What conclusions could we draw from these examples? We would see a large variety of these four legged dogs and think it must show evolution based on common ancestry. Well, in fact we know that these dogs are all actually even the same species (they can produce fertile offspring), and that they’re simply derived from wolves. However, because in this fictional example we couldn’t observe these dogs, one might be led to assume, by the variety of skeletal structures, that we were viewing a record of evolution. This is why you can never really prove evolution through the fossil record.
Before you bring up the time gap between fossils, I’ll reference you to polystrate trees. Or in other words, fossilized trees that extend through multiple layers of geological strata. I think anyone with any kind of sense will admit that these trees could not possibly have stood through millions of years of deposits, and that evolutionists will finally have to admit that not only are their dating methods wrong, but that geology actually supports the idea of a great flood.
Of course, you might be aware of the talk origins response to the polystrate trees. However, all the scenarios evolutionists come up with in which trees can be buried (in rivers during flooding) still don’t take into account how those trees are prevented from rotting, and further, how they are fossilized. This still also doesn’t address the problem of how these trees pierce geological strata assumed to be millions of years old. The strata are only millions of years old when it doesn’t have a polystrate tree through it? These evolutionist scenarios also don’t take into account that the material in some of these real life polystrate tree instances is different from observable burials. They have no answer, and this calls into question many of the foundations of materialist evolution, or what I like to call ‘pretend science.’
I’m going to end with one final analogy. The reason so many people have a hard time not believing evolution is true, is because they see small changes within kinds of animals, and assume that means these changes can build up to something better. (I am stealing this analogy, but it’s a good one).
Evolutionist’s perspective: You see a train heading north from Florida towards Chicago. You may not see the whole trip, but you know it can make it to Chicago just by interpolating the evidence. Well, what if that train were heading south towards the ocean (bad mutations)? Would it ever really make it to Chicago? All these mutations, etc, have shown scientists only one thing: that changes within kinds of animals come at a loss of data through natural selection, genetic drift, etc (even the good ones).
So you have to ask yourself this: is the train headed north to Chicago? Or is it heading south towards the ocean? Based on the evidence, it’s easy to see its definitely not heading north. And it would take a huge leap of faith to believe otherwise. You have to believe there are mutations that take place without a loss of data, without evidence, or in other words through faith.
I’m going to leave it at that. At this point, it’s already far too long, and I think I’ve already made my point many times over.
