Dawkins, the mountain and the explosion

There’s a problem with evolution: it seems impossible, improbable, inexplicable. When one looks at the incredible complexity and diversity of life on this planet (and we can’t look elsewhere – as far as we know we are alone amongst the stars) it seems to be a stretch too far to believe that we all started as single celled organisms that, over the last 3 billion years (give or take a million) evolved into every living thing around us. This is one of the key reasons that many people have trouble buying this theory of origins today – it just seems too unlikely for this process not to have had help along the way.

Prof Richard Dawkins sums up the problem nicely for us when he says (paraphrasing) that it’s like we are standing at the bottom of a very high cliff, looking straight up. We say to ourselves, ‘there is no way we could get up there, it’s just too high”. I think this is not a bad analogy, for it does seem improbable that we could get from the bottom of the cliff (amoeba) to the top of the cliff (everything that exists around us today) without aid.

He then offers a solution: if we were to look around the other side of the cliff, what we would see is that there is a long, gentle slope stretching from ground level up to the top, and that it is this route that evolution through natural selection took to get us to the top of the cliff. Not a direct ascent, scaling the vertical cliff-face, but a slow, steady stroll up the gentle slope at the rear of the cliff.

Not a bad analogy, right? Seems to take the improbable and make it seem possible. The problem with this idea, though, is that the evidence seems to me to speak against it. When the fossil record is examined, what one finds over and over again is fully formed and complete organisms, organisms from the top of the cliff, with no evidence of that slow ascend Dawkins is selling. Take, for example, the Cambrian Explosion. What one sees here is the sudden arrival in the fossil record of most major groups of animals, in forms that are incredibly similar to today’s animals. This is not evidence of a slow and steady ascent!

What we would need for evidence of a slow and steady ascent would be millions and millions of intermediate fossils, the so-called ‘transitional forms’. Darwin knew this was an obstacle for his theory, but he believed they would be discovered eventually. But 150 years on, they haven’t been. All we have are a handful of fossils (like Archaeopteryx or Ida, the latest flavour-of-the-month) that are claimed by some evolutionists to be a transitional form, while other evolutionists clam they are not a transitional form. This is the best we have – a few examples that not even all the evolutionists are agreed upon. If Dawkins’ slow and steady ascent really took place it would have obviously happened over billions of years, which gives ample opportunity for thousands, possibly millions, of fossils to be preserved after each step evolution took, giving us a pretty good picture of what happened. But that evidence is just not there! Not only is the evidence sparse, it is so sparse that the evolutionary ’tree’ keeps getting re-drawn when new discoveries come to light, which tells us that we really don’t know the way it happened at all. Why should I trust the way the story is told at the moment when it is likely to be re-drawn with the next major find?

If we couple this lack of evidence of transitional forms with the many examples of so-called ‘living fossils’ that look the same today as they did in the earliest fossil records of their kind, showing almost no ‘descent with modification’ over those millions of years we see a fossil record that shows stability in form, not change. For example, the Wollemi Pine, first appearing in the fossil record 150 million years ago, thought to be extinct, then being re-discovered in the mid 1990s in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. This tree shows no ‘descent with modification’ just ‘descent’! Or there’s the coelacanth, an ugly fish thought to have died out 300 million years ago, but recently re-discovered alive and well in the Indian Ocean, again showing merely descent, not modification.

It seems to me, therefore, that Dawkins’ attempt to persuade us that his idea of slow and steady ascent doesn’t square with the facts. We have evidence of the rapid appearance of fully formed organisms, no real transitional forms, and ‘living fossils’ that seem to be sitting still, not moving (morphologically speaking) at all. Sorry, Prof, time to go back to the drawing board. And while you’re there, re-draw the evolutionary tree – I’m sure it time for a do-over!

Quick Thought on Evolution

This just passed through my head (as a lot does - mostly wind) in regards to Evolutionary Theory. Please let me know if anyone else you know of has thought of it previously or if there are flaws in my logic or if it is unclear, which I am positive it will be - this is quickly thought out and quickly written:

One of the most pivotal of Evolution's tenets is that of Natural Selection. Creationists do not argue Natural Selection insofar as it describes "the survival of the fittest," or "adaptation over time" but do make the point - and a very valid one I do believe - that Natural Selection cannot create information, merely weed out that which is useless or, at least no longer used (or not needed in a specific location at a specific time, e.g. long fur coats in the tropics). Creationists and ID'ers note that all change from any one species to another within the same family ("Equine Poppa" to horse, zebra or donkey) is a loss of genetic information. One may find a useless fin here or there, but its always on a fish, never a tapir. Men have nipples, yes, but it would look mighty funny if we didn't. My point is, we see useless things occasionally, but never something that actually bears tremendous potential. Natural Selection supposedly gets rid of what we do not use therefore "whittling us up" to ever slightly larger potentials by whittling out the unused or unprofitable.

This point pops up a lot in discussions, and rightly so. There is no proof whatsoever of any mutation ever giving us a gain in information. Sorry, Wolverine's "healing factor" remains in the realm of comics and Hollywood. What has popped into my head is that, well, even if something terrifically useful were formed by mutation/chance/alien space bats it's usefulness would be in direct proportion to how much it was put to use. We don't see bumblebees with wings that, aeronautically speaking, could allow the creature to fly at hundreds of miles an hour but the creatures just don't do so... that seems ludicrous and real evolutionary scientists would tell you that just isn't the way evolution works.

One might say, but look at the potential the human body has! Look at the human mind! We only use 10 to 20 percent of that! Think of the potential! [Editor's note: the 10% theory is a myth - but I don't think it means "power" so much as "potential" anyway.]

Bingo.

We might see chimpanzees who can be taught to ride a bicycle, but I don't know any chimpanzees that can make a bicycle. Ironically, the human mind is far more powerful than any of us know (or possibly can know), and certainly if it were to come about during a thousand millennia through chance, adaptation and environment, it would still not be the wonder we see now. Even by Evolutionists own standards, mutation and natural selection would only allow a brain of fractionally more potential that what we currently use.

How can Evolution therefore account for the sheer immensity of the human mind, especially in regards to its seemingly unlimited potential? The Creationist standpoint that the mind of Man was designed as such by a Being who wished to make Man in His own image does not seem so incredible now.