How do people decide that all of life is the product of blind forces like mutation and selection? Many people encounter the blind forces narrative in government-run schools at an age where they are not qualified to investigate anything themselves, at must rely on adults. And what kinds of “evidence” do the adults use on them? Does that “evidence” stand up over time?

When I was in high school, we had the choice to study 2 or 3 of the hard sciences: physics, biology or chemistry. I chose physics and chemistry, because I didn’t want my young Earth creation views being assaulted by adults who held the red marking pen. At the time, I was in a secular left country, and my non-Christian working parents only wanted to hear that I was getting the highest marks. Recognizing that the odds of overturning Darwinism in my public schools were against me (for now), I declined to participate in biology indoctrination, and threw myself into math and computer science instead. (I still scored near the top in physics and chemistry) Everything worked out fine for my career, and I eventually went back and got a biology education on my own, from the strong position of having a full time job that paid me more than the government school teachers.

But during high school, I heard about what my less careful friends were learning about in the biology classroom. One of my best friends, a Muslim named Shareef, told me about how he had learned that the chimp genome was only 1% different from the human genome. To him, this was proof of common ancestry, and showed that a naturalistic origin of the diversity of life was likely. He went on to get with a rowdy crowd, eventually dropping out of his engineering degree after 1 year where he performed poorly. Many people embrace evolution because it gives them moral license to drink a lot, and play the fool, which is bad for their grades. It was bad for his grades, and he got into more trouble later.

Well, at the time, I didn’t have the evidence to contradict Shareef about the chimp genome. But now I do!

Here is the latest evidence in Evolution News from Casey Luskin, who you might remember because he was a guest on the Knight and Rose Show.

[N]ew data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.

Many times over the years, I’ve discussed how this 1 percent claim about humans and chimps is likely wrong. It is also misleading. No matter how similar humans might be to chimps at the genetic level, anyone who has been to the zoo knows already that chimps and humans are vastly different. After all, we’re the ones writing scientific papers about them—not the other way around. So common sense alone dictates that there is something misleading about that number and how it is used.  But the new data show that the previous statistic isn’t just misleading. It’s flat-out false.

As I will elaborate in a subsequent article, this team of researchers has published “complete” sequences of ape genomes that were created ‘from scratch’ rather than using the human genome as a template. As a result, for the first time we can attempt a much more accurate assessment of the true degree of difference between the human and chimp genomes.

The results are groundbreaking:

• At least 12.5 percent and possibly up to 13.3 percent of the chimp and human genomes represent a “gap difference” between the two genomes. That means there’s a “gap” in one genome compared to the other, often where they are so different, they cannot even be aligned.

• There are also significant alignable sections of the two genomes that show “short nucleotide variations” which differ by only about 1.5 percent. We can add this difference to the “gap difference,” and calculate a 14 percent to 14.9 percent total difference between human and chimp genomes. This means that the actual difference between human and chimp DNA is 14 times greater than the often-quoted 1 percent statistic. 

It’s true that large portions of the human genome are still only about 1.5 percent genetically different from the chimp genome. We’ll explore what that means in a subsequent post. But the new data reveal just how little this one fact tells us about the overall picture. We now know that major portions of the two genomes — 12.5 percent to 13.3 percent of the human genome, in fact — are so different that arguably the sections are unalignable and/or not directly present in one genome or the other.

And he has subsequent articles dealing with the details:

• Fact Check: New “Complete” Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome
• Genetic Differences Between Humans and Chimps Represent Functional DNA
• What’s the Best Explanation for Human-Chimp Genetic Differences?

So, if this is something you or your children have ever encountered, it might be worth familizarizing yourself with the response: that the original estimates were based on using the human genome as a “target” and ignored the new evidence of gap differences. You can always come back to Casey’s articles if you need more evidence.

I hope you also see how you have to play the game as a Christian, in terms of strategy. When I was young, I didn’t have the parents or the experts to help me deal with the government school teachers. I was alone! And in many ways, I’m still alone now. But even so, every Christian has to navigate the world as it is, guarding their beliefs until the time when they are strong enough to make their claims in public. Now, I have no problem butting heads with the atheists in my workplace – they’re terrified of me. But that’s the result of a long journey of reading books, listening to podcasts and watching debates, and keeping up with the data on all of these controversial questions.

So, I recommend to people to get a copy of Luskin’s book “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith“. And if you haven’t checked out the Discovery Institutes classes in biology and chemistry for students, you should do it. The default path for most young people in America is just to believe a lot of lies and half-truths served up to them by failure-to-launch teachers whose salaries based on whether their students can be tricked into voting for bigger government. They have an agenda.

I should mention that Shareef did eventually become a Christian, although he is still pretty liberal politically.

A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“. One of my favorite 6 arguments for a Creator and Designer is the origin of the simplest replicating living system. When you look into the cell, what you’ll find is carefully sequenced components that for complex structures, like proteins. In this lecture, you’ll learn all about this “biological information”.

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

• intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
• Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
• Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
• but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
• even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
• can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
• there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
• overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
• the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of bases that code for proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
• meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
• it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
• although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
• similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
• the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
• so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
• however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
• there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
• but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
• the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
• the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
• the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
• if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
• the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
• the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
• we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
• the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

There is a good breakdown of some of the slides with helpful flow charts here on Uncommon Descent.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument
• The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature