Questions regarding Evolution

1. If Evolution takes billions of years, then how is it that a sperm and an egg only takes 9 months to produce a human baby?

2. How did a woman's menstrual cycle evolve?

3. How did reproduction evolve?
(In Question #1, I was asking about the time factor involved; now I'm asking for the specific evolutionary steps that were supposedly involved.)

4. How did cell splitting evolve?

5. How did protons, neutrons, electrons, lepons, muons and quarks evolve?

6. How did breastmilk evolve?

7. How did feelings, emotions, conscience and imagination evolve?

8. If "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are fact; and, assuming that homosexuals were born as homosexuals; then, how is it that there have been homosexuals for thousands of years? Why did evolution not weed them out because of their inability to reproduce?

9. How did the ability to dream evolve?

10. How did sexual organs evolve?

11. Why did flounders "evolve" with two eyes on the same side of their head?

It is more probable that all the computers in the world today came together (starting with nothing) by sheer chaotic accident, with no designers or builders; than it is that man, with his incredibly complex brain (not to mention the unbelievably complex network of cells working together to make up all his organs, his body and all his functions) evolved.

Taking the side of Science

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of the failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
(Evolutionist Richard Lewontin in The New York Review, January, 1997, page 31)

Survival of the sacred

"Why religion is winning

By Dinesh D'Souza
November 11, 2007

The vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply.

– Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Religion continues to grow worldwide, and atheists in America and the West are having a difficult time explaining why. These nonbelievers, most of them Darwinists, are convinced there must be some biological explanation for why, in every culture since the beginning of history, man has found and continues to find solace in religion. Biologist Richard Dawkins confesses that religion poses a “major puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way.”

Here, from the evolutionary point of view, is the problem. Scholars such as anthropologist Scott Atran presume that religious beliefs are nothing more than illusions. Atran contends that religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” For Atran and others, religion requires a commitment to “factually impossible worlds.” The question, then, is why would humans evolve in such a way that they come to believe in things that don't exist?

Philosopher Daniel Dennett states the problem clearly: “The ultimate measure of evolutionary value is fitness – the capacity to replicate more successfully than the competition does.” Yet on the face of it religion seems useless from an evolutionary point of view. It costs time and money, and it induces its members to make sacrifices that undermine their well-being for the benefit of others, sometimes total strangers.

Religious people build cathedrals and pyramids that have very little utility except as houses of worship and burial. The ancient Hebrews sacrificed their fattest calves to Yahweh, and even today people slaughter goats and chickens on altars. Religious people sometimes forgo certain foods; the cow is holy to the Hindus, and the pig unholy to the Muslims. Christians give tithes and financial offerings in church. The Jews keep holy the Sabbath, as Christians keep Sunday for church. Religious people recite prayers and go on pilgrimages. Some become missionaries or devote their lives to serving others. Some are even willing to die for their religious beliefs.

A critical question

The evolutionary biologist wonders: Why would evolved creatures like human beings bent on survival and reproduction do things that seem unrelated, even inimical, to those objectives? This is a critical question, not only because religion poses an intellectual dilemma for Darwinists, but also because Darwinists are hoping that by explaining the existence of religion they can expose its natural roots and undermine its supernatural authority. Biologist E.O. Wilson writes that “we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences.” He expresses the hope that sometime soon “the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon.”

So how far have these evolutionary theories progressed in accounting for the success of religion? In “The God Delusion” Dawkins writes, “The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain.” He also speculates that “the idea of immortality survives and spreads because it caters to wishful thinking.” But it makes no evolutionary sense for minds to develop comforting beliefs that are evidently false. Explains cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker: “A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm. A person face to face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that he is a rabbit.” Wishful thinking of this sort would quickly have become extinct as its practitioners froze or were eaten.

Yet Pinker's own solution to the problem is no better than that of Dawkins. He suggests there might be a “God module” in the brain that predisposes people to believe in the Almighty. Such a module, Pinker writes, might serve no survival purpose but could have evolved as a byproduct of other modules with evolutionary value. This is another way of saying there is no Darwinian explanation. After all, if a “God module” produces belief in God, how about a “Darwin module” that produces belief in evolution?

Still, the question raised by the Darwinists is not a foolish one. Biologists such as Dawkins and Wilson say there simply must be some natural and evolutionary explanation for the universality and persistence of religious belief, and they are right. There is such an explanation, and as a religious believer I am happy to provide one.

Two creation stories

The Rev. Randy Alcorn, founder of Eternal Perspective Ministries in Oregon, sometimes presents his audiences with two creation stories and asks them whether it matters which one is true. In the secular account, “You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three-and-a-half-billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance and natural forces. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short, you came from nothing and are going nowhere.”

In the Christian view, by contrast, “You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are created in his image, with capacities to think, feel and worship that set you above all other life forms. You differ from the animals not simply in degree but in kind. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind. Your creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that he has a perfect plan for your life. In addition, God gave the life of his only Son that you might spend eternity with him. If you are willing to accept the gift of salvation, you can become a child of God.”

Now imagine two groups of people – let's call them the Secular Tribe and the Religious Tribe – who subscribe to these two world views. Which of the two tribes is more likely to survive, prosper and multiply? The Religious Tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The Secular Tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The Religious Tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The Secular Tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.

Should evolutionists such as Dennett, Dawkins, Pinker and Wilson be surprised, then, to see that religious tribes are flourishing? Throughout the world, religious groups attract astounding numbers of followers and religious people are showing their confidence in their way of life and in the future by having more children. Despite the sales figures of atheist best-sellers, atheism remains a minority lifestyle and the largest atheist organizations have only a few thousand members.

The important point is not just that atheism is unable to compete with religion in attracting followers, but also that the lifestyle of practical atheism seems to produce listless tribes that cannot even reproduce themselves. Sociologists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart note that many richer, more secular countries are “producing only about half as many children as would be needed to replace the adult population” while many poorer, more religious countries are “producing two or three times as many children as would be needed to replace the adult population.” The consequence, so predictable that one might almost call it a law, is that “the religious population is growing fast, while the secular number is shrinking.”

Country by country

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world and abortions there out-number live births by a 2-to-1 ratio. Russia's birthrate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. Canada, Australia and New Zealand find themselves in a similar predicament.

Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birthrates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birthrates ever recorded, and Eastern European birthrates are comparably low. Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the 14th century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. The philosopher Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable “last man” devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche's “last man” is finally here, and his name is Sven.

Eric Kaufmann has noted that in America, where high levels of immigration have helped to compensate for falling native birthrates, birthrates among religious people are nearly twice as high as those for secular people. This trend has also been noticed in Europe. What this means is that, by a kind of natural selection, the West is likely to evolve in a more religious direction.

This tendency will likely accelerate if Western societies continue to import immigrants from more religious societies, whether they are Christian or Muslim. Thus we can expect even the most secular regions of the world, through the sheer logic of demography, to become less secular over time.

In previous decades, scholars have tried to give a purely economic explanation for demographic trends. The general idea was that population was a function of affluence. Sociologists noted that as people and countries became richer, they had fewer children. Presumably, primitive societies needed children to help in the fields, and more prosperous societies no longer did. Poor people were also believed to have more children because sex provided one of their only means of recreation. Moreover, poor people are often ignorant about birth control or don't have access to it. From this perspective, large families were explained as a phenomenon of poverty and ignorance.

The economic explanation is partly true, but it falls short of the full picture. Poor people reproduce at higher rates despite having access to birth control and movie tickets; it turns out they generally want larger families. Sure, they are more economically dependent on their children, but on the other hand rich people can afford more children. Wealthy people in America today tend to have one child or none, but wealthy families in the past tended to have three or more children. The real difference is not merely in the level of income, it is that in the past children were valued as gifts from God, and traditional cultures still view them that way.

Muslim countries, with their oil revenues, are by no means the poorest in the world and yet they have among the highest birth rates. Practicing Catholics, orthodox Jews, Mormons and evangelical Protestants are by no means the poorest groups in America, and yet they have large families. Clearly, religious factors are at work here. The declining birthrates in the West as a whole are, in considerable part, due to secularization. The religious motive for childbearing has been greatly attenuated, and children are now viewed by many people as instruments of self-gratification. The old biblical principle was “Be fruitful and multiply.” The new one is “Have as many children as will enhance your lifestyle.”

False prophets

The economic forecasters of the disappearance of religion have proven themselves to be false prophets. Not only is religion thriving, it is thriving because it helps people adapt and survive in the world. In his book “Darwin's Cathedral,” evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion provides something that secular society doesn't: a vision of transcendent purpose. Consequently, religious people develop a zest for life that is, in a sense, unnatural. They exhibit a hopefulness about the future that may exceed what is warranted by how the world is going. And they forge principles of morality and charity that simply make their group more cohesive, adaptive and successful than groups whose members lack this binding and elevating force.

My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no higher purpose to life or the universe. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins, Pinker and Wilson could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

D'Souza's new book, “What's So Great About Christianity,” is published by Regnery. Website: dineshdsouza.com. Email: dineshjdsouza@aol.com."

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20071111/news_mz1e11dsouza.html

The missing link

"The missing link between man and the apes...is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated... Evidence from fossils now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school..." [Newsweek, Is Man a Subtle Accident? Nov. 3, 1980 p. 95.]

Asking the Forbidden Questions

According to Darwin, the absence of intermediate fossil forms “is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” What new fossil finds, if any, have occurred since Darwin wrote these words nearly 150 years ago? Do they overturn Darwin’s bleak assessment of evolutionary theory? If the absence of intermediate fossil forms holds as much today as it did back then, why should anyone accept evolution?

Progressions invariably come from organisms with the same basic body plan. In the “evolution” of the horse, we are always dealing with horse-like organisms. And even with the “evolution” of reptiles into mammals, we are dealing with land-dwelling vertebrates sharing many common structures. What we don’t see in the fossil record is animals with fundamentally different body plans evolving from a common ancestor. For instance, there is no fossil evidence whatsoever that insects and vertebrates share a common evolutionary ancestor.

The challenge that here confronts evolution is not isolated but pervasive, and comes up most flagrantly in what’s called the Cambrian Explosion. In a very brief window of time during the geological period known as the Cambrian, virtually all the basic animal types appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no trace of evolutionary ancestors. The Cambrian Explosion so flies in the face of evolution that paleontologist Peter Ward wrote, “If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.” Note that Ward is not a creationist.

The challenge of the fossil record that Darwin identified 150 years ago has not gone away. To his credit, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould conceded this point: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

But IS this inference actually reasonable?

According to evolutionist Richard Dawkins, the “evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” Yet he also states, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” How does Dawkins know that living things only appear to be designed but are not actually designed?

The great fallacy of evolution is that it claims all the benefits of design without the need for actual design. In particular, evolution attributes intelligence, the power of choice, to a fundamentally irrational process, namely, natural selection. But nature has no power to choose. Real choices involve deliberation, that is, some consideration of future possibilities and consequences.

But natural selection is incapable of looking to the future. Instead, it acts on the spur of the moment, based solely on what the environment right now deems fit. It cannot plan for the future. It is incapable of deferring success or gratification. And yet, so limited a process is supposed to produce marvels of biological complexity and diversity that far exceed the capacities of the best human designers.

There’s no evidence that natural selection is up to the task. Natural selection is fine for explaining certain small-scale changes in organisms, like the beaks of birds adapting to environmental changes. It can take existing structures and hone them. But it can’t explain how you get complex structures in the first place. That’s why cell biologist Franklin Harold writes, “there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific research program that looks for signs of intelligence from distant space. Should biologists likewise be looking for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not? Could actual intelligent design in biological systems be scientifically detectable?

After all, “intelligent design is scientifically detectable in many areas of science, such as archeology, forensics, and cryptography.” And “nonhuman intelligence could be scientifically detectable, as with SETI.”

Do any structures in the cell resemble highly intricate machines designed by humans?

Evolutionists claim that these structures evolved. But if so, how? Could such machines have features that place them beyond the reach of evolution?

There are structures in the cell that don’t just resemble humanly built machines—they actually are machines in every sense of the word.

Take, for instance, the bacterial flagellum, which is now referred to as the “Icon of Intelligent Design” by some evolutionists because it has been so effectively used to criticize evolution. The bacterial flagellum is a marvel of nano-engineering.

Biologist Howard Berg at Harvard refers to it as “the most efficient machine in the universe.” The flagellum is a little bi-directional motor-driven propeller that sits on the backs of certain bacteria and drives them through their watery environment. It spins at 20,000 rpm and can change direction in a quarter turn. It requires approximately 40 protein parts for its construction. If any of the parts are missing or not available in the right proportions, no functional flagellum will form. So, how did it evolve?

Despite thousands of research articles that have been written about the structure and function of the flagellum, biologists don’t have a clue how it could have evolved. Evolutionists have only one straw at which they continually grasp when trying to explain how the flagellum might have evolved, namely, that the flagellum contains within it a structure similar to a microsyringe found in some bacteria. Having found this sub-structure, evolutionists merrily conclude that the microsyringe must have evolved into the flagellum.

Such pathetic lapses in logic are everywhere in the evolutionary literature. The challenge for evolutionary theory is not to find components of such systems that could be grist of natural selection’s mill. Rather, it is to provide detailed, testable, step-by-step scenarios whereby such components could reasonably have come together to bring about the marvels of nano-engineering that we find in systems like the flagellum.

What evidence would convince you that evolution is false? If no such evidence exists, or indeed could exist, how can evolution be a testable scientific theory?

"The burden is on Darwin and his defenders to demonstrate that at least some complex organs we find in nature really can possibly be formed in this way, that is, by some specific, fully articulated series of slight modifications.” (University of Texas philosopher Robert Koons)

The evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, when asked what would convince him that evolution was false, replied that finding a rabbit fossil in pre-Cambrian rocks would do quite nicely. Such a fossil would, by standard geological dating, be out of sequence by several hundreds of millions of years. Certainly such a finding, if rigorously confirmed, would overturn the current understanding of the history of life. But it would not overturn evolution.

Haldane’s rabbit is easily enough explained as an evolutionary convergence, in which essentially the same structure or life form evolves twice. In place of a common underlying intelligent design, evolutionists invoke evolutionary convergence whenever confronted with similar biological structures that cannot reasonably be traced back to a common evolutionary ancestor.

So long as some unknown or unexplored evolutionary pathway might have led to the formation of some biological structure or organism, evolutionists prefer it over alternative explanations such as intelligent design. And since the unknown and unexplored allow for an infinity of loopholes, the committed evolutionist regards Darwinian and other materialist explanations of life’s origin and subsequent development as always trumping alternative explanations, regardless of the evidence.

Richard Halvorson, writing for the “Harvard Crimson,” has aptly remarked, “We must refuse to bow to our culture’s false idols. Science will not benefit from canonizing Darwin or making evolution an article of secular faith. We must reject intellectual excommunication as a valid form of dealing with criticism: the most important question for any society to ask is the one that is forbidden.

Evolution has become an ideology, and the one thing that ideologies fear is exposure.
That’s why evolution forbids certain lines of questioning. But the questions need to be asked. Too much is riding on evolution for it to escape proper scrutiny.

http://www.designinference.com/documents/2004.04.Five_Questions_Ev.pdf

Why Evolution persists

"One wonders why, with all the evidence, the (Godless) theory of evolution still persists. One major reason is that many people have a sort of vested interest in this theory. Jobs would be lost, loss of face would result, text books would need to be eliminated or revised."
(Dr. Emery S. Dunfee, former professor of physics at the University of Maine at Farmington)

Atheism needs Evolution

"Polls have shown that about 40% of scientists acknowledge a supernatural power. But the majority of the scientific community, especially evolutionary leaders today, hold an atheistic worldview. As support for their anti-supernatural worldviews, these scientists need mechanisms for the origin of life, especially humans.
Atheism needs evolution to escape from any implications regarding a creator. If one starts with Darwinism, certainly it is easy to escape from any obligation to God. Those opposed to their reasoning are branded as obscurantists who are trying to intrude religion into science."

(Wayne Friar, Ph.D., AIA's Resource Associate for Science and Origins)

An exercise in imagination

"I shall discuss the broad patterns of hominoid evolution, an exercise made enjoyable by the need to integrate diverse kinds of information, and use that as a vehicle to speculate about hominid origins, an event for which there is no recognized fossil record. Hence, an opportunity to exercise some imagination." [American Anthropologist, Distinguished Lecture; Hominoid Evolution and Hominoid Origins, by David Pilbeam. Vol. 88, No. 2 June 1986. p. 295.]

Silence

"Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried this question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. - - Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way." Dr. Colin Patterson, Evolution and Creationism, Speech at the American Museum of Natural History, New York (November 5, 1981), pp. 1,2. Dr. Patterson is senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History and editor of its journal, as well as author of the book Evolution.

Debunked years ago

"It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student...have now been debunked." [Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology, Imperial College, London), ‘The nature of the fossil record'. Proceedings of the Geological Association, Vol. 87 (2), 1976, pp. 132-133.]

A Pure Mathematician

"A scientific study of the universe has suggested a conclusion which may be summed up in the statement that the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician." — Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 140.

Creation or Spontaneous Generation

George Wald, a prominent Evolutionist (a Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate), wrote, "When it comes to the Origin of Life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous Generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!" ("The Origin of Life," Scientific American, 191:48, May 1954).

Probability of Spontaneous Formation

"The likelihood (probability) of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." Sir Fredrick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 148.

Intermediate links

"...intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic change, and this is perhaps the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory." [Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species," 1859, Chapter 11, "On the imperfection of the geologic record."]

...And this still holds true today!

Appearing suddenly, disappearing abruptly

"Each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, equally abruptly, without leaving a directly descended species." [ New Scientist vol. 93 No. 1295, The Reptiles that became Mammals, by Tom Kemp, March 4, 1982, p. 581.]

Denying the obvious

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved." - Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner, "What Mad Pursuit", 1988 p. 138.

An honest quote

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."
- Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner, "Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature", 1981 (p. 88)

A theory in conflict

"The explanatory doctrines of biological evolution do not stand up to an objective, in-depth criticism. They prove to be either in conflict with reality or else incapable of solving the major problems involved."
(Pierre-P. Grasse', Evolution of Living Organisms [New York: Academic Press, 1977], p. 202)

A theory of desperation

"Evolutionary theory has been enshrined as the centerpiece of our educational system, and elaborate walls have been erected around it to protect it from unnecessary abuse. - - What the 'record' shows is nearly a century of fudging and finagling by scientists attempting to force various fossil morsels and fragments to conform with Darwin's notions, all to no avail. Today the millions of fossils stand as very visible, ever-present reminders of the paltriness of the arguments and the overall shabbiness of the theory that marches under the banner of evolution."
(Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny [New York: Viking Press, 1983], pp. 112, 125)

Acceptance despite evidence

"The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proved by logical, coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible!"
(D.M.S. Watson, Scientist)