Darwinism -- The Forbidden Subject
The question has been decisively answered in the affirmative. Yet shortly after this affirmation, Simpson admits in passing that the chart he has drawn contains major gaps that he has not included: a gap before 'Eohippus' and its unknown ancestors, for example, and another gap after 'Eohippus' and before its supposed descendant 'Mesohippus'.
What is it, scientifically, that connects these isolated species on the famous chart if it is not fossil remains? And how could such unconnected examples demonstrate either genetic mutation or natural selection? Even though, today, the bones themselves have been relegated to the basement, the famous chart with its unproven continuity still appears in museum displays and handbooks, text books, encyclopaedias and lectures.
The remarkable 'Archaeopteryx' also seems at first glance to bear out the neo-Darwinian concept of birds having evolved from small reptiles (the candidate most favoured by neo-Darwinists is a small agile dinosaur called a Coelosaur, and this is the explanation offered by most text books and museums.) Actually, such a descent is impossible because coelosaurs, in common with most other dinosaurs, did not posses collar bones while 'Archaeopteryx', like all birds, has a modified collar bone to support its pectoral muscles.
Again, how can an isolated fossil, however remarkable, provide evidence of beneficial mutation or natural selection? Neo-Darwinists were quick to claim that modern discoveries of molecular biology supported their theory. They said, for example, that if you analyse the DNA, the genetic blueprint, of plants and animals you find how closely or distantly they are related. That studying DNA sequences enables you to draw up the precise family tree of all living things and show how they are related by common ancestry.
This is a very important claim and central to the theory. If true, it would mean that animals neo-Darwinists say are closely related, such as two reptiles, would have greater similarity in their DNA than animals that are not so closely related, such as a reptile and a bird. Fifteen years ago molecular biologists working under Dr Morris Goodman at Michigan University decided to test this hypothesis. They took the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles -- a snake and a crocodile -- which are said by Darwinists to be closely related, and the haemoglobin DNA of a bird, in this case a farmyard chicken.
They found that the two animals who had _least_ DNA sequences in common were the two reptiles, the snake and the crocodile. They had only around 5% of DNA sequences in common -- only one twentieth of their haemoglobin DNA. The two creatures whose DNA was closest were the crocodile and the chicken, where there were 17.5% of sequences in common -- nearly one fifth. The actual DNA similarities were the _reverse_ of that predicted by neo-Darwinism. 5 Even more baffling is the fact that radically different genetic coding can give rise to animals that look outwardly very similar and exhibit similar behaviour, while creatures that look and behave completely differently can have much in common genetically.
There are, for instance, more than 3,000 species of frogs, all of which look superficially the same. But there is a greater variation of DNA between them than there is between the bat and the blue whale. Further, if neo-Darwinist evolutionary ideas of gradual genetic change were true, then one would expect to find that simple organisms have simple DNA and complex organisms have complex DNA. In some cases, this is true. The simple nematode worm is a favourite subject of laboratory study because its DNA contains a mere 100,000 nucleotide bases. At the other end of the complexity scale, humans have 23 chromosomes which in total contain 3,000 million nucleotide bases. Unfortunately, this promisingly Darwinian progression is contradicted by many counter examples.
While human DNA is contained in 23 pairs of chromosomes, the humble goldfish has more than twice as many, at 47. The even humbler garden snail -- not much more than a glob of slime in a shell -- has 27 chromosomes. Some species of rose bush have 56 chromosomes. So the simple fact is that DNA analysis does _not_ confirm neo-Darwinist theory. In the laboratory, DNA analysis falsifies neo-Darwinist theory. An even more damaging blow to the theory was the discovery that the very centrepiece of neo-Darwinism, Darwin's original conception of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is fatally flawed. The problem is: how can biologists (or anyone else) tell what characteristics constitute the animal or plant's 'fitness' to survive?
How can you tell which are the fit animals and plants? The answer is that the only way to define the fit is by means of a post-hoc rationalisation -- the fit must be 'those who survived'. While the only way to characterise uniquely those who survive is as 'the fit'.