Tag Archives: Evolution

How PBS uses your tax dollars to distort the evidence for evolution

Evolutionists believe that the embryos of different mammals look similar in the earliest stages of development because the mammals share a common ancestor. And they believe that as the embryos develop, they begin to look less similar. This theory was invented by Ernst Haeckel, who believed that”ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

With that mind, consider this post by embryologist Jonathan Wells at Evolution News, in which he describes PBS’s latest effort to use taxpayer dollars to push evolution on children, without any presentation of opposing views.

Excerpt:

On the website for its December 29 special, PBS offers an interactive “Guess the Embryo” exercise featuring four different vertebrate embryos: an 8 day-old mouse, a 5 day-old quail, a 17 day-old turtle, and a 40 day-old bat. The purpose of the exercise is to convince viewers that “embryos of different species can appear startlingly similar to one another.” A discerning viewer, however, will notice that the turtle embryo already has a rudimentary shell on its back—thus distinguishing it clearly from the others. A discerning viewer might also notice that the bat embryo bears little resemblance to the mouse embryo, even though both are mammals. What viewers may not know—and PBS does not tell them—is that the interactive exercise shows embryos midway through development. The earliest stages are systematically omitted. Perhaps this is because in their earliest stages vertebrate embryos are striking different from each other. They follow a pattern that embryologists call the “developmental hourglass”—wide at the top, narrow in the middle, and wide at the bottom. In other words, vertebrate embryos start out very different from each other, become superficially similar midway through development, then diverge again as they mature. Like Darwin’s German disciple Ernst Haeckel, PBS distorts vertebrate development to make it seem to provide evidence for Darwin’s theory.

As Wells notes, the embryological evidence actually shows that mammal embryos are different in the earliest stages, and similar in the middle stages of development. So embryological development Darwinian fundamentalist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings were discredited as a fraud in the 19th century. The drawings also showed intermediate stages of embryo development – not the earliest stages.

Wells’ Ph.D in Biology is from the University of California at Berkeley. His area of specialization is embryology, in which he has conducted post-doctoral research.

Darwinists present a solution to the Cambrian explosion

Story from Darwin’s God. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Now, thanks to the latest research, we have the answer: calcium. Evolutionists are now saying that a rise in ocean calcium levels triggered the assembly of unicellular organisms into multicellular organisms and the rest, as evolutionists say, is history. What is astonishing is that there is anyone left out there who questions evolution. Can’t they see that these guys are doing the heavy lifting? This is just rock solid investigative research, the kind we’ve come to expect from evolutionists.

From the abstract of the paper:

We propose that stronger cell adhesion allowed the integrity of genetically uniform animals composed only of “self” cells, facilitating genetic constitutions to remain within the metazoan individual and be passed down inheritance lines. The Cambrian explosion might have been triggered by the coincidence in time of primitive animals endowed with self-/non-self-recognition and of a surge in seawater calcium that increased the binding forces between their calcium-dependent cell adhesion molecules.

It seems to me that the thing to be explained in the Cambrian explosion is “where did the NEW information come from for the NEW body plans”. Positing better glue to stick single cells together doesn’t address where the NEW code came from totally NEW body plans and NEW organ types.

Please post challenges on Dr. Hunter’s blog, as biophysics is his area of expertise.

Does Darwinism explain anything?

Dr. Cornelius Hunter answers the question here. (H/T ECM)

Here’s the criterion specified by naturalists to make an explanation scientific:

…in order to qualify as legitimate science a theory must distinguish between different outcomes. Naturalism is needed because otherwise each outcome is equally probable and the theory is not true science.

Deciding what does and does not qualify as legitimate science is notoriously difficult. There seem to be exceptions to every rule. But perhaps Felsenstein’s criterion is reasonable. Shouldn’t a scientific theory say at least something about the probabilities of what we might observe in the data?

Does Darwinism satisfy the criterion? Hunter argues that it does not.

Whatever we find in biology, evolutionists say it must have evolved. Their predictions and expectations are often falsified and they have to patch their theory repeatedly. And there is no distinction between a new, fantastic design and a repeated design–both are equiprobable under evolution.

If a new, fantastic design appears such as the trilobite eye, then evolutionists ascribe it to natural selection. If similar designs are found in different species, then it is ascribed to common descent. If later cousin species are found to lack the design, then common descent can be dropped as an explanation and the design can be said to have evolved independently. The evolutionary explanation is extremely flexible.

If distinguishing between outcomes is the hallmark of true science, then evolution is the theory that doesn’t qualify.

Read the whole thing!

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