Evolution

The mechanism of evolution is random mutation. The theory is that mutations occur within an individual that give this individual a competitive advantage over the other members of his population. He uses this advantage to get more food, live longer, mate more, and have more offspring. His offspring inherit this advantage and soon you have a new species.

It seems to me that the idea of evolution by random mutation takes quite a bit of faith to accept. I’m certainly not a biologist, and I don’t claim to know all there is to know about evolution, but here are a few problems I have with the basic concept:

Some mutations are caused by radiation from space. However, the Earth's magnetic field protects us from this radiation. If radiation does make it through, it must hit the DNA in a cell to cause a mutation, which is very unlikely. Other mutations are spontaneous and are caused during cell replication. But these are rare since higher species have mechanisms to avoid mutations or to destroy the mutated cell because mutations are harmful to the individual. Mutations occur all the time, they are called cancer. The cancerous cell is either destroyed or it ends up killing the individual. Very, very few mutations (in fact, almost none) result in a competitive advantage for the individual.

The mutation must occur in a reproductive cell so that it will be passed on to offspring. The mutation will only occur in one cell, and that cell must be the cell passed on to the offspring. And even if that is the cell that is passed on, there is still the possibility that the trait would be recessive and so would not appear in the individual. He would have to mate with another individual with the same recessive trait in order to have offspring that exhibit this trait. So any advantage the trait may offer would not be apparent until at least the third generation, if at all. And of course, the most likely scenario is that the mutation would not cause an advantage, but rather it would be harmful to the individual and he may die before he can even be born.

Mutations occurring in reproductive cells would not cause a change in the parent, only the offspring. Therefore, there would not be a competitive advantage caused by the mutation that would allow the parent to live longer, get more food, mate more, et cetera. And so natural selection would not work in the carrier’s advantage. He would not have a better chance of passing on his mutation to his offspring. That is, if he is able to survive at all since it is more likely that the mutated cell would become cancerous and eventually kill him.

Now, before someone writes to me about the London moth that started out with white wings and now has black wings because of the London smog, let me say there is a difference between evolution and adaptation. I have brown hair. If my wife also has brown hair, then our children will most likely have brown hair. If, for some reason, having brown hair is an advantage then we will soon have an entire town of brown haired people. This is adaptation. The population is using its genetic diversity to adapt to environmental pressures. However, we are still human. We have not evolved into something else.

When evolution is examined critically, and not simply taken on faith, then it is revealed as absurd. And I haven’t even mentioned the billions of variables that all had to go just the right way for life to even appear on Earth. It was necessary for the Earth to have a moon to steady its rotation. We needed a giant neighbor like Jupiter to suck up comets and asteroids so they wouldn’t crash into us. The Earth needed to form at just the right distance from the Sun. The Earth needed a magnetic field to protect fragile life from destructive cosmic radiation. And of course, there is the matter of matter, meaning, where did all this matter come from? Could it have been created out of nothing? That would be a violation of the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy which states that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, they can only change forms.

And that brings up another issue. Before the Big Bang, we are told, there was only energy. After the Big Bang, that energy was converted into matter. However, energy does not only convert into matter, but also equal amounts of antimatter. Whenever matter and antimatter come near each other (Star Trek fans are familiar with this) they annihilate each other and convert into energy. If this is the case, then any matter that may have been created during the Big Bang would have been annihilated by antimatter, and there would be nothing left but energy slowly cooling off in the expanding universe. But, that is not what happened. Somehow, in defiance of physical law, more matter was created than antimatter.

And speaking of physical law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics describes entropy, the tendency of things in nature to move from a state of order to a state of disorder. Nature prefers chaos. If you build a house, the wood will eventually rot or the stone will eventually erode and the house will fall apart. That is, unless you maintain it. The house is the product of expended energy. More energy must be invested into the house to maintain it. Life defies this natural law. Life is order, and it flies in the face of nature’s preference for disorder.

No wonder scientists at first did not want to accept the idea of creation. Before Edwin Hubble noticed the Red Shift, science believed the universe was static and eternal (interestingly, Epicureans believed the same thing). Creation brings up way too many problems for the naturalist.

A good book to read on this subject is Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God.

–J.E. Heath
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