If you’re a fan of Knight and Rose Show, then you’ll have noticed that we have skipped a few weeks without publishing a show. And this is not our fault! Rose and I have recorded a couple of shows, and sent them off to our sound guy. But the sound guy is busy gallivanting all over the world, climbing mountains and running marathons! So, let me try to keep you entertained with a new post.

So, there was a recent issue of Salvo magazine that was mainly concerned with the 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which occurred in Dayton, TN. Because Rose and I are huge fans of Salvo magazine, we decided to ask the Executive Editor of Salvo to come on and tell us about it. Her name is Terrell Clemmons. I’ve met her in real life and blogged about her a few times before, too. So I hope you will get that episode, soon.

Anyway, the issue #73 of Salvo is filled with interesting articles, but one of them stood out to me: this article by Richard Townsend. He’s done a bunch of research about the Scopes Trial and about William Jennings Bryan. In the movie, “Inherit the Wind”, Bryan is portrayed as an idiotic Biblical literalist. But, just like Darwinism, the facts are very different from the myths.

Here’s the article from Salvo #73.

It says:

Bryan was one of the most famous Americans of the early 20th century. He ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, losing all three elections, but gaining a large, loyal constituency that never lost its devotion to him. He was influential in national politics from 1890 until his death in 1925. It is hard for people living in the 21st century to grasp how influential he was and how effectively he advocated for his beliefs.

And here was his reason for wanting to be the prosecutor at the Scopes Trial:

For Bryan, [World War 1] displayed a danger associated with the prevalence of materialistic thinking associated with Darwin’s theory. The beliefs that everything happened by chance and that death determined the most-fit species’ survival had led, at least in part, to grotesque violence. Those factors changed Bryan’s ambivalence into action. He saw Darwin’s theory to be the causal force driving societal decay; it had to be opposed.

Actually, the theory of evolution was very significant for many of the aggressive tyrants of the 21st century. They seemed to latch on to the ideas of different “races” of people struggling against each other for survival. Definitely, the German and Japanese leaders were influenced by Darwinian evolution, and embraced Social Darwinism. Both regimes took the concept of “survival of the fittest” and applied it directly to their militaristic aggression.

When you watch propaganda movies like “Inherit the Wind”, you don’t get the facts. These movies are shown in public schools, by unionized public school teachers. They have an agenda, and their agenda isn’t to tell the truth to children. Far from being a young-Earth literalist, William Jennings Bryan had 4 scientific reasons for doubting evolution. Read below, and ask yourself, have these been resolved by the scientific progress of the last 100 years? Or are they even bigger problems now (for the naturalist / materialist) than they were before?

1. Origin of life:

Bryan saw this as a major hurdle, one Darwin brushed aside with a rhetorical flourish as he theorized a “warm little pond.” Bryan was not convinced.

Those who reject the idea of creation are divided into two schools, some believing that the first germ of life came from another planet and others holding that it was the result of spontaneous generation. Each school answers the arguments advanced by the other, and as they cannot agree with each other, I am not compelled to agree with either.6

Bryan clearly did not agree that the case was closed on the origin of first life.

We did an episode on the origin of life with Dr. Fuz Rana, President of Reasons to Believe.

2. Genetics and Morphology:

Little was known about how genetics worked in Bryan’s lifetime, but Mendelian genetics had morphed into the neo-Darwinian synthesis incorporating genetic mutation with natural selection. The “neo-Darwinian synthesis” terminology became standard usage after Bryan’s passing, but the concepts were being circulated in his lifetime. Bryan didn’t buy it and used a watermelon illustration to explain his doubts.

I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty.… One [seed], put into the ground, when warmed by the sun and moistened by the rain, takes off its coat and goes to work; it gathers from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forcing this raw material through a tiny stem, constructs a watermelon. It ornaments the outside with a covering of green; inside the green it puts a layer of white, and within the white a core of red, and all through the red it scatters seeds, each one capable of continuing the work of reproduction. Where does that little seed get its tremendous power? Where does it find its coloring matter? How does it collect its flavouring extract? How does it build a watermelon?

Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty and say just what He would do or how He would do it. I cannot explain the watermelon, but I eat it and enjoy it.9

Bryan’s argument was that a watermelon seed contains “power” (which we now know to reside in the genetic code) to build a specific fruit, another watermelon. The structure of the plant and its fruit are the morphology (shape and structure) of the vine that produces the watermelon. And Bryan knew that the process was unexplained.

We did an episode about biological information with Dr. Casey Luskin, from the Discovery Institute.

3. Chemistry and Evolution:

One early idea about nature’s ability to generate new complex features was that the chemistry of life naturally tended toward such complex coding. Bryan doubted that was the case. He wrote this comment in his planned closing argument, later published after his death:

Chemistry is an insurmountable obstacle in the path of evolution. It is one of the greatest of the sciences; it separates the atoms, isolates them and walks about them, so to speak. If there were in nature a progressive force, an eternal urge, chemistry would find it. But it is not there. All of the ninety-two original elements are separate and distinct; they combine in fixed and permanent proportions. Water is H2O, as it has been from the beginning. It was here before life appeared and has never changed; neither can it be shown that anything else has materially changed.12

In short, Bryan said that there was no chemical imperative to life.

We talked about chemical evolution in our episode with Dr. Fuz Rana.

4. No Definitive Proof of Origin of Any New Species:

Bryan discussed the problem of an organism’s deviating from the tendency toward stasis—the continuity of features and body plans found in previous generations of a species. He suggested that no evidence had been presented to validate the claim of new species arising naturally. He cited a letter in which an acquaintance had claimed that “nearly all scientists seemed to accept Darwinism.”14 Bryan countered that “many evolutionists adhere to Darwin’s conclusions while discarding his explanations.… [They] accept the line of descent which [Darwin] suggested without any explanation whatever to support it.”15 To paraphrase, Bryan said there was no convincing evidence to support Darwin’s theory of species arising through materialistic, undirected means.

We did an episode on the fossil record with Dr. Gunter Bechly, also of Discovery Institute.

In our podcast, we’ve met with guests to talk about each of these problems with the Darwinian naturalistic / materialistic origins theory, and what we found was that in each case, the progress of science made the problems worse for naturalism / materialism. So, far from the progress helping the naturalist / materialist, it’s actually made it worse for them. The simplest self-replicator got MORE complex. We found MORE stasis and MORE biological big bangs in the fossil record. Things got worse… for the Darwinists.

Anyway, read the article, maybe check out the rest of the issue, and if our sound guy ever comes back from vacation, then you can finally get the episode that we did on this topic! Like, share, comment and subscribe, in the meantime. We talked a lot more about the Social Darwinism angle in the podcast.

Regular readers will know that I love everything about birds, and I love every bird. And my favorite birds of all are parrots! Every time I see a scientific discovery involving parrots, I blog about it. Well, there was just such a discovery, and published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature. In it, we find evidence for intelligent design, and evidence against Darwinian evolution.

Before we see the new discovery, let’s review with the definition of convergence in biology.

In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.

So, for example, if we could find a feature that is common to parrots and humans, that would be an example of “convergence”, because the same feature would be found in to kinds of creature, but these creatures don’t have a recent common ancestry. The feature would have had to evolve TWICE, independently, and that is not the kind of evidence that Darwinists like.

So here is the discovery, in Science News:

When it comes to speech, parrots have the gift of gab. And the way the brains of small parrots known as budgerigars bestow this gift is remarkably similar to human speech, researchers report March 19 in Nature.

So far, budgerigars are the only animals known to have language-producing centers akin to those in humans, says Michael Long, a neuroscientist at New York University Langone Health. This “is really the first nonhuman animal in which that has been shown.” Understanding how speech gets created in budgies’ brains could help clarify what goes wrong in certain communication disorders in people.

[…]The similarities between human and parrot brains may reflect two species solving a problem in a similar way, neurally speaking. These parallels could be “a very tidy example of convergent evolution, where you have humans that have developed this kind of neural mechanism for speech, and these parrots have developed a kind of similar mechanism,” Long says.

Here’s an excellent, recent article from Evolution News to explain what convergence means for the two competing views of Darwinian evolution and intelligent design:

Biology is replete with instances of convergence — repeated designs in distant species. Marsupials and placentals, for instance, are mammals with different reproductive designs (placentals have significant growth in the embryonic stage attached to the nutrient-rich placenta whereas marsupials have no placenta and experience significant development after birth) but otherwise with many similar species.

The marsupial flying phalanger and placental flying squirrel, for example, have distinctive similarities, including their coats that extend from the wrist to the ankle giving them the ability to glide long distances. But evolutionists must believe that these distinctive similarities evolved separately and independently because one is a marsupial and the other is a placental, and those two groups must have divided much earlier in evolutionary history. Simply put, evolution’s random mutations must have duplicated dozens of designs in these two groups.

It is kind of like lightning striking twice, but for evolutionists — who already have accepted the idea that squirrels, and all other species for that matter, arose by chance mutations — it’s not difficult to believe. It simply happened twice rather than once (or several times, in the cases of a great many convergences).

What is often not understood, however, by evolutionists or their critics, is that convergence poses a completely different theoretical problem. Simply put, a fundamental evidence and motivation for evolution is the pattern of similarities and differences between the different species. According to this theory, the species fall into an evolutionary pattern with great precision. Species on the same branch in the evolutionary tree of life share a close relationship via common descent. Therefore, they share similarities with each other much more consistently than with species on other branches.

This is a very specific pattern, and it can be used to predict differences and similarities between species given a knowledge of where they are in the evolutionary tree.

Convergence violates this pattern. Convergence reveals striking similarities across different branches. This leaves evolutionists struggling to figure out how the proverbial lightning could strike twice…

And convergence is everywhere in the history of life. A common example is echo location in bats and dolphins, but my favorite example is octopus eyes and human eyes.

Here’s an evolutionist explaining the problem:

One of the most remarkable features of octopuses is their eyes, which are remarkably like our own. Like ours, their eyes consist of an iris, a circular lens, vitreous fluid, pigments, and photoreceptors. In fact, the octopus eye is superior to ours in one notable way: Because of the way they develop, the fibers of the optic nerves grow behind the retina rather than through it, meaning they lack the central blind spot common to all vertebrates. And this difference exists because the octopus eye evolved entirely separately from our own, starting from that blind flatworm 600 million years ago, along an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree.

Got that? No common ancestry for 600 million years. The similar eyes appeared independently. And these are difficult things to make. You can’t write eye code by dropping a bowling ball on a keyboard over and over. To get the design twice strains credulity.

When you look at software, which is my field, you will often see similar solutions to problems across different companies. These companies don’t inherit the solutions from a parent company, they develop them on their own. And often, this process means pulling in “open source” components to solve problems that have already been solved, but not by “ancestors”. The developers who pull in these open source components have no “ancestry” with the developers of these open source components. But they can pull them into a composition of their own, and make use of the component to solve the same problem.