Summary of Part 2

4 – Failed Prediction #1: Life emerged from chemistry

The view commonly held by intellectuals and the public at large is that life arising by naturalistic processes in the universe is “inevitable” and even “easy” and that scientists, if they have not solved the problem yet, soon will. And yet:

In seventy years of intensive work, origin-of-life chemical research has made no progress of any significance. We are no nearer to simulating the origination of anything approaching a living cell under laboratory conditions, never mind those that simulate a prebiotic environment.
While concentrating on the “just chemistry” question, researchers have failed to grapple with the real problem…
Information: what makes DNA and proteins (and some other biomolecules) unique amongst chemicals is not just their respective chemical structures, but the fact that they carry or express functional information, language, a code: what’s known as specified complexity.

Research work in the early 2000s demonstrated the extraordinary extreme rarity of amino acid sequences required to make almost every functional protein.
These results come close to proving that the observable universe is incapable of making a single functional protein by natural processes – such as the relatively small myoglobin—never mind the hundreds of other designs needed for even the simplest living cell. As some researchers have concluded, “all observable evidence provides no hope that natural processes can produce life”.

The protein myoglobin

5 – Failed Prediction #2: Natural selection has creative power

Through our education system and the media we’ve all been repeatedly assured that natural selection has the power to create all of the living world we see around us, including ourselves. Richard Dawkins expresses it this way, “Darwin discovered the alternative to chance and design … The answer is cumulative natural selection. Provided that a smoothly cumulative gradient exists – not a difficult condition to realise – natural selection is likely to find it, and will propel evolution up the slopes of Mount Improbable to apparently limitless heights of perfection”. In this chapter, we discover that each of the points in this statement can be challenged:

“Cumulative natural selection”. Computer simulations, by Dawkins and others, intended to illustrate how this process works misrepresent its power and fail in their own terms. They invoke foresight in some way: that natural selection somehow ‘knows’ its target and how far away it currently is from it.
“Provided that a smoothly cumulative gradient exists”. Actually it turns out that a smooth gradient is in fact a “difficult condition to realise”. The irreducible complexity of molecular machines – the bacterial flagellum is just one example – and the finding that even the “small-scale problem” of evolving a new protein, needing only seven nucleotide mutations relative to another in the same family, are both beyond the reach of natural selection.

“Find it, and … propel evolution up the slopes”. Natural selection can only operate upon something that already exists. It’s not a creative agent in itself. In order to move up Mount Improbable, it’s randomly occurring mutations that must “find” something that is functional. But, the proportion of configurations at the molecular level that produce any function at all is so extraordinarily tiny as to be vanishingly small.

“Limitless”. The classic textbook examples of melanic moths, finch beaks, cichlid fish and more, are good illustrations of microevolution (change within species), but provide no evidence that macroevolution (at family level and above) could have occurred. Likewise, artificial selection—intensive breeding of dogs, cattle, etc.—strongly suggests that there are limits to the amount of change achievable by selection, whether natural or artificial.
It turns out that mutations occurring at random are far more likely to damage or completely disable an existing gene function long before new functionality can be “found”. Dawkins’ Mount Improbable does not have a gentle slope.

Monument Valley is a better analogy. There is no gentle slope up Mount Improbable

6– Failed Prediction #3: The tree-of-life is recorded in the fossils

Darwin knew that the fossil record, in his time, did not provide evidence of the millions of intermediate species that his theory predicted simply ought to be there.
Unfortunately for Darwin, the last 150 years—in which more than 99% of all fossil discoveries have been made—have merely confirmed and accentuated the overwhelming pattern of the fossils. “The known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism”.
“[Evolution] never seems to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years … When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang … Evolution cannot forever be going on some place else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution”.
And yet, “Just about anyone who took a college biology course during the last sixty years or so has been led to believe that the fossil record was a bulwark of support for the classic Darwinian thesis, not a liability that had to be explained away”.
A small number of stories of fossil “intermediates” are popularly promoted, such as Archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik and whale evolution. But these are the exceptions, their chronologies are in disarray, and they simply beg the question, “Where did the additional biological information come from and how did it arise so quickly?”

Crucially, the waiting-time for the essential specific mutations is far longer than the transition times available according to the putative fossil sequences.
The overwhelming pattern of the astonishing Cambrian Explosion with its complex animals, and the many other explosive radiations of jawed fish, winged insects, angiosperms, mammals and more, is the sudden appearance of novel phyla (body plans) and classes, followed by orders, families, genera and species. This is the very opposite of the pattern predicted by evolutionary theory.
Contrary to the Darwinian prediction, the fossil record fails with statistically “mathematical certainty” to record the tree-of-life.

7– Failed Prediction #4: Similar embryos imply common ancestry

Developing embryos do not repeat an organism’s putative evolutionary history:

Primarily due to drawings of embryonic stages of development published in 1874 by Ernst Haeckel, it became widely believed that, for example, a human embryo first resembles a fish, then an amphibian and finally a reptile on its way to becoming a recognisably human fetus.
It turns out that Haeckel falsified the evidence in his drawings and that his ‘biogenetic law’—that embryos repeat their putative evolutionary history—has been demonstrated to be false.
Despite this, recent biology textbooks and other sources have continued to present his drawings and rehearse a version of his “law”, confusing generations of young people into believing that they were once fish/amphibians/reptiles in the womb.

The earliest stages of embryonic development – the very ones Evolution would predict to be most similar – are surprisingly different in all of the main vertebrate classes: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
Even the embryonic development processes of vertebrates’ key homologous feature—their vertebrae—differ strikingly.
Contrary to the claims of popularisers of Evolution, trees-of-life derived from comparison of different genes most often disagree with one another as well as with conventional trees based on anatomy.

What’s more, as the genomes of hundreds of species have been sequenced in the last twenty years, researchers have been surprised to discover that typically around 10% of the protein-coding DNA of each species is unique.
Darwinian theory makes the prior assumption that nature is fundamentally continuous: that simple mutations in genes will induce smooth transitions in embryonic development and hence anatomy. In this way all species would be connected via a gently branching tree of universal common descent. However, anatomical homology is neither underpinned by homologous patterns in embryology nor in genetics.
Instead, the evidence points to discontinuity, and to “the existence of types that are real in nature. Distinct forms are apparent at various hierarchical levels, ranging from the phylum level [body plan] down to the basic types, most commonly identifiable with the family level, and recognisably distinguishable from the nearest forms by clear gaps or discontinuities”.

8– Failed Prediction #5: The human species evolved from apes

Darwin’s theory that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor quickly gained acceptance because it gave scientific legitimacy to the widely held view that Europeans were superior to other “sub-human” races. It was then self-evident that transitionary species must have existed and that fossils would be found.
The sociology of fossil-hunting encourages poor scientific practices, “Paleo-anthropology’s ecosystem of publishing, access, fundraising, career advancement, media promotion and celebrity seems squarely aligned against the field’s ability to self-regulate, a condition exacerbated by the limited fossil resources available”.
New fossil discoveries touted as “missing links” in our human ancestry instantly attract high profile media attention and celebrity status for the palaeoanthropologist in question. As often as not, when the new find is examined in succeeding months by other experts it turns out to be much less of a breakthrough—if at all—than the original hype and headlines promised. But the impression of human evolution as “fact” has already been reinforced in the public consciousness.

“We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates”.
“If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we’ve got, he’d surely say, 'forget it; there isn’t enough to go on’”.

“Imagine if we lined up human skeletons—including a 7 foot-tall Watusi tribesman, a dwarf, a professional wrestler, a midget, and various modern humans with various growth disorders or pathologies. This would represent a wider range of skeletal morphologies than all the variations seen among the fossils that are described as different species of the genus Homo.”
It follows that most of the fossils classified in the genus Homo, including erectus and neanderthalensis easily fall within the range of modern human morphology.
Meanwhile those in the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Ardipithecus together with the “mess” of the Homo habilis classification are almost certainly no more than various species of extinct apes.
Evidence from sites in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia suggests that modern humans appeared suddenly and coexisted with various ape species including australopithecines, such as Lucy.
Today no fossils are claimed to be clearly ancestral to modern humans in the putative lineage from an ape-like ancestor.
Again, it’s the differences that matter. The genetic difference between humans and chimps is much greater than the apocryphal and widely touted 1%, and may be as much as 16%.
The waiting time for just two co-dependent beneficial mutations to occur in a pre-human species is more than ten times the claimed timespan in which modern humans supposedly evolved.

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Credits and Permissions

Titanic side plan. Image ID: PC4HXP, History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo. License No. OY74667416.

Myoglobin image courtesy of Opabinia regalis, [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Monument Valley, courtesy of Moritz Zimmermann [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Trilobite (Paradoxides), courtesy of Dwergenpaartje [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons. Marrella reconstruction, courtesy of J. T. Haug et al. [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons. Opabinia restoration, courtesy of N. Tamura [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons. Hallucigenia, courtesy of Qohelet12 [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Amphibian and reptile embryology diagram with the kind permission of David Swift, from his website “Evolution under the microscope”. See Useful Links.

March of Progress, [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.