96% of chimpanzee genes are common to humans. In fact, the more "human-like" animals are, the more similarity is noted in genes. This is supposedly a proof of evolutionary advance and a way to map how the more complex species have descended from simpler species. This could be, but another explanation is obvious. Of the DNA whose function is known, it is not mostly a map of bodily structures, it is molecular instructions for making proteins, many of which are enzymes. (In fact, it is theorized that there are "machines" in the nucleus that ratchet down genes, read the digital instructions, and crank out proteins for use in the cell.) Animals, by and large, share biochemistry. They need the same proteins. Therefore, some animals are going to need mostly the same chemicals, and those are the animals that are genetically similar. But it doesn't follow that this is proof that one descended from another.
Humans do not have the most chromosomes. Potatoes have 48 chromosomes while humans have only 46. wiki.answers.com/Q/...have_more_chromosomes_than_human
Almost all mutations are harmful. Look at any biology text's illustrations of mutations and you see harmful mutations. A famous mutation experiment from shortly after DNA's discovery resulted from the bombardment of lab colonies of fruit flies with X-rays, which are strongly ionizing and can break up or reorder DNA. An inheritable, advantageous mutation that was recorded was the ability to endure slightly higher temperature. But it was accompanied by an increased need for water intake. So the supposed artificially induced, evolutionary improvement would not have been useful to flies in hot, dry climates. One wit has noted that X-rays could be administered to evolution-minded volunteers in order to speed up human evolution in their children, but there aren't any takers. New Oxford Review July-Aug 2009 p. 8: Dr. John Sanford Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome mutations consistently destroy genetic information and the human genome has been deteriorating ever since its origin. P. 8, 9 letter to editor by Carl Gethmann: no intermediate fossils...thin evidence for macro evolution.
Evolution thinkers were excited by the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 that attempted to simulate the origin of life. It was done in lab glassware. It was done with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, all of which occur in life, but excluding the strong oxidizer, gaseous oxygen. There was a heater to get some vapors rising, and condensations were caught in a P-trap. An arc discharge, representing lightning, was in the loop. The researchers were thrilled to find red, oily droplets in the fluid after a week. A large range of organic chemicals had formed, including amino acids. 2% of the carbon from carbon dioxide was in amino acids. It was described to the gullible public that the droplets were segregated from salty, aqueous fluid in a way mimicking how the nucleus is segregated from the cytoplasm of cells. http://www.reasons.org/articles/miller-urey-redo This made a "stir within the science community. Scientists became very optimistic that the questions about the origin of life would be solved within a few decades. This has not been the case." http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiology/miller.html "Although widely heralded for decades by the popular press as ‘proving’ that life originated on the early earth entirely under natural conditions, we now realize the experiment actually provided compelling evidence for the opposite." http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/tj/v18/n2/abiogenesis Evolutionists no longer pay much attention to the Miller-Urey experiment, and it doesn't show up much in Internet searches.
A better way to describe the oily droplets is to note that a chemistry professor in Organic Chemistry I often tells students that organic synthesis often goes wrong and results in oils or tar being produced, not the sought-after organic chemical. (Some oils are commercially useful, of course. Triglycerides are in foods. Other oils are poisonous: the aromatic-ring oil of poison ivy, which has one long alkane chain.) It is normal for oils to happen, and they are naturally immiscible in aqueous solution.
Biological, evolutionary research is most certainly not dispassionate nor is it done by the scientific method. Contrary evidence is not pursued to find the truth, it is suppressed and thrown away. Most research, biology or not, is undertaken because a scientist has an original idea and seeks to get ahead of the pack by making a stunning breakthrough. Reputations, egos, empire building, and seeking after grants are important to scientists. Many scientists through the centuries are known to have ridiculed new scientific thinking, but after years or decades it becomes apparent that the ridiculed idea was correct after all. One example is Professor Ohm's law, V=I*R.
University professors who oppose evolution are hounded by the pro-evolution, orthodox science establishment. In scientific papers written for journals, peer review weeds out papers that do not pass the evolution litmus test. Professors who attain tenure have some ability to buck the evolution juggernaut, but they risk being black balled. In scholarly papers, one often sees sentences that toss a bone to evolution just because it is expected, not because there is really a reason.
Numerous, recent books talk about problems with evolution thinking.
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis 1985 Michael Denton
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution Michael J. Behe
Natures Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe Michael Denton
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design Stephen C. Meyer
The Myth of Junk DNA Jonathan Wells
Icons of Evolution You and your children have been lied to in science lessons at school and university...for decades. The author, a Berkeley Ph.D in Biology, is not a creationist, but his book describes many serious misrepresentations of facts commonly found in biology textbooks, which are used to perpetuate belief in evolution.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design 2006 Jonathan Wells For today’s Darwinists, there may be no other choice: unable to fend off growing challenges from scientists, or to compete with rival theories better adapted to the latest evidence, Darwinism—like Marxism and Freudianism before it—is simply unfit to survive.
Evolution supporters think the way they do, not because it makes sense, but because they want to deny God and avoid being accountable to God.
The familiar image, silhouettes of transition species from ape to man, is popular and ridiculous. A transitional form that is midway between knuckle walking and standing is at a disadvantage in nature and would not possess an advantage in terms of survival of the fittest. By the way, survival of the fittest has a lot of validity and is related to plant and animal breeding. But it never results in new organs. Absent the judgement of a breeder, the natural direction of genetics is often downhill. Look at cave-dwelling animals--they are often blind, not because that gives them an evolutionary advantage but because the loss-of-sight mutation hasn't yet weeded them out.
Wrong thinking also happens with creationists. In the 1960s, in the limestone bed of the Paluxy River in Texas, where there are dinosaur footprints, the attention of creationists was drawn to footprints of people. This was really exciting because it was evidence of people being contemporaneous with dinosaurs. But after some years, a creationist found that they weren't people footprints, they were three-toed dinosaur footprints that had gotten squeezed and filled in with sediment on the two outer toes, leaving one center toe print that was mistaken for people footprints.
When you use your imagination & consider what God has created, you see a really rich creation. Up until the 1600s, it was possible for some scientists to literally know all of science. Then science got so big that one human can't know it all. (This happened with math much earlier.) In light of Higgs boson, superstring theory, & dark energy, there seems no end of physics, especially considering that particle physics & quantum physics act at both the tiny and the star-size.
2021 Oct 3 Coast to Coast AM Dr. Casey Luskin, geology and law, talks about intelligent design to George Noory, whose thinking is receptive to this thinking. John Engelbrecht thinks this was a significant interview. Most Coast to Coast is whacky paranormal, but this was physics.
Phrases: sociology of science, undirected change, language-based code in RNA and DNA, blindly generating diversity over time (only in the minds of materialists), irreducible complexity, genetic seeding, fine tuning of physics (laws and even constants) and chemistry, primordial soup, Milley-Urey experiment, the RNA World (theory since 1962, before there were proteins there may have been an RNA World), young-earth vs. old-earth.
Luskin is an old earther and believer in the Big Bang, but a Big Bang that is finely tuned, not a random Big Bang.
The writer of this note, John Engelbrecht, can see young earth and old earth points, and has a personal hypothesis that the earth is old, but Adam and Eve were there from the sixth day, but did not sin for billions of years. During that long time, geology did its business.
Either you say that geology worked for a long time, and the radioactive decay happened, or you say that all the geology seen in the crust of the earth was created in a couple of days with an appearance of age built in. People will object to Adam and Eve living for billions of years, but why not? They had pristine DNA with zero genetic defects, telemeres did not shorten with age, and the digital code of their DNA ensured exact replication of cells as needed.
John E sees the Big Bang, physics, the development of stars at 550 million years after the Big Bang (sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205131233.htm), and the development of planets as elaborations of the Genesis chronology, Genesis chapter 1. See my solderandcircuits web site (a Google free site), an essay about creation/a-dramatic-reading.
George Noory, a Roman Catholic (but taking liberties that are heretical) doesn't see that randomness can produce all these beautiful things. He asks Luskin about genetic seeding from above, to give humans.
Luskin recounts that the physics laws and constants are finely tuned to host life. This is acknowledged by many scientists, to the extent that materialist scientists try to account for the fine tuning by hypothesizing the multiverse, where countless universes exist in parallel, each with a random set of physics laws and constants (fundamental physical constants, such as speed of light, electron charge, Planck constant). Most of these universes sputter or explode. Others are "gray," with few interesting features and no chemistry. A small portion have a long life and interesting features. People are in one of the tiny number of long-life universes. The whole idea of the multiverse is merely to explain in materialist terms how our universe could be finely tuned to host life. To John E., the multiverse is silly.
George Noory brings up the primordial soup. This comes from the Miller-Urey experiments in 1952 which generated tremendous excitement among scientists and was popularized for the public. But the atmosphere used by Miller and Urey was long ago discounted as being representative of an early earth atmosphere, and the red, organic, oily droplets in the liquid do not have a lipid-bilayer structure of real cells.
Luskin says there is no geological record for primordial soup, and scientists who look for where life could have started look more to the hot, deep, hydrothermal vents in the oceans.
Luskin brings up the RNA World (1962). Could there have been a self-replicating RNA molecule before there were proteins and DNA? He doesn't talk about the number of bases a self-replicating RNA would need, he just says you can't get the right order of bases by randomness. John E fills in this fact: the required number of bases is on the order of tens of thousands, and the order has to be near perfect. When you consider that the probability (permutations) of just 30 bases to be in the right order is one part in 30 factorial (30!), that is one part in 2.6 x 10 to the 32 power. We are talking impossibility for thousands of bases to be in the right order.
Luskin talks about the Cambrian explosion and mentions several other explosions (each in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking): mammals, flowering plants, etc.
Noory says he has talked to plenty of physicists on Coast to Coast AM and none can explain, in layman terms, how something came from nothing. Then Noory talks about his concept of the first human evolving from apes, or whatever the missing link is. The first human would look like a human baby but would be born to a mother which is not human and does not look human (this is Noory's way of thinking about it). He speaks of the disbelief of the non-human mother--what is this baby that is born to me? It looks nothing like the babies of the other mothers. Then Luskin notes that one human baby, grown up, would not reproduce, you need a male and a female. This line of thinking is a bit silly but it was interesting to hear Noory.
The phenomenon of soul is brought up. Luskin says there are indeed near-death experiences that can't be explained other than by a soul that sometimes is out of the body. There is brain, but mind is beyond brain.
Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Laureate, is mentioned. He says Big Bang was not the first thing, there is "conformal cyclic cosmology."
A caller supports evolution thinking by bringing up "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" from Ernst Haeckel. John E heard long ago that recapitulation in mammal growth (first weeks) was based on imaginative drawings by Haekel, and the whole idea was a hoax. Nevertheless, for decades, biology taught it. Luskin assures the caller that the idea is outmoded.
Luskin allows that Darwin had an open mind, may have been a theist, and was not doctrinaire as modern evolutionists are. John E has read about Darwin's secret journals; they were made public long after Darwin's death. They indicate that Darwin was a materialist from early in his life.
Noory ends the two hours: "I agree with you, there is some form of intelligent design."
New Oxford Review June 2020 p. 11 The past three popes believe the lies of the scientific establishment concerning macroevolution. "Serious discussion of the truth of creation has all but disappeared from Catholic circles."
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html
"Evolution" mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. Variation (microevolution) is the real part. Evolutionists want you to believe that changes continue, merging gradually into new kinds of creatures. This is where the imaginary part of the theory of evolution comes in. It says that new information is added to the gene pool by mutation.
Franklin Harold, retired professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Colorado State University, wrote in his 2001 book The Way of the Cell published by Oxford University Press, "There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biological or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." Evolutionists often say "it evolved", but no one lists all the molecular steps because no one knows what they could be. All known mutations in animal and plant germ cells are neutral, harmful, or fatal. But evolutionists are eternally optimistic. They believe that millions of beneficial mutations built every type of creature that ever existed.
Some evolutionary biologists are admitting that microevolution does not happen by the supposed mechanism of evolution - mutation/natural selection. Instead, living things have built-in mechanisms that adjust to quick changes in their environment to produce variation. The mechanisms are only beginning to be understood, yet 64 evolutionist academics have put their names and faces on The Third Way website.
A system for variation makes sense because species' survival can depend on adapting fast and not waiting millions of years for "beneficial mutations". But this leaves macroevolution out hanging by itself, which is why Third Way members are often bitterly opposed by conventional Neo-Darwinists.
Francois Jacob, the Nobel prize winner, dealt mainly with the genetic mechanisms existing in bacteria and bacteriophages, and with the biochemical effects of mutations. He wrote, "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it new functions or combining several systems to produce a more elaborate one." "During chemical evolution in prebiotic times and at the beginning of biological evolution, all those molecules of which every living being is built had to appear. But once life had started in the form of some primitive self-reproducing organism, further evolution had to proceed mainly through alterations of already existing compounds. New functions developed as new proteins appeared. But these were merely variations on previous themes. A sequence of a thousand nucleotides codes for a medium-sized protein. The probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero. In organisms as complex and integrated as those that were already living a long time ago, creation of entirely new nucleotide sequences could not be of any importance in the production of new information." Jacob, Francois. June 10 1977. Evolution and Tinkering. Science, New Series, Vol. 196, Issue 4295, pp. 1161-1166.
Steven A. Benner, Ph.D. Chemistry, Harvard, prominent origin-of-life researcher and creator of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, was posted on Huffington Post on December 6, 2013. In it he said, "We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA." "The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar. If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water. If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy, that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA -- 100 nucleotides long -- that fights entropy. And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-mazur/steve-benner-origins-souf_b_4374373.html
Radu Popa, 2004,] "So far, no theory...has been found satisfactory in explaining the origin of life." A survey of the literature devoted to the beginnings of life leaves one in no doubt that all the critical questions remain open...Scientists' refusal to grant some space to the mind and will of God may strike the majority of mankind as arbitrary and narrow-minded, but it is essential if the origin of life is to remain within the domain of science. A nudge from the divine would help us clear some very high hurdles; but once that possibility is admitted there will be no place to stop, and soon the settled principle of evolution by natural selection would be thrown into doubt...the notion that the first protocells assembled themselves spontaneously from a generous menu of precursor molecules conveniently supplied by abiotic chemistry is now widely recognized as simplistic and effectively has been abandoned.
"The only data sets from which we might construct a universal hierarchy including prokaryotes, the sequences of genes, often disagree and can seldom be proven to agree. Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal Tree Of Life rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true." There is "the possibility that hierarchy is imposed by us rather than already being there in the data." "The finding that, on average, only 0.1% to 1% of each genome fits the metaphor of a tree of life overwhelmingly supports the... argument that a single bifurcating tree is an insufficient model to describe the microbial evolutionary process."
The only tactic left to evolutionists is to ridicule their critics as simpletons who don't understand how their pet theory really works.
2018 The complexity of eurkaryotes (nucleus-bearing cells with kinesin motors and actin-fiber "roads," the cells suitable to make multi-cellular organisms) has been apparent since around 1955. How the prokaryotes (no nuclei, single-celled, bacteria and other single cells) have been viewed as being simple "bags of enzymes" for decades is a mystery, but JE comes across the truth, see the 2013 section here. But the bags of enzymes simplicity idea dies hard, see the Quora section in the next paragraph. The materialists stubbornly hold onto their materialism.
Quora Benoît Leblanc mulls over a gradual evolution of self-replicating molecules, even RNA, on clay scaffolding, where the state of being alive is hard to pin down.
Find his two-page writeup on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/How-could-life-evolve-before-it-could-reproduce-How-could-it-reproduce-without-evolving-to-that-point?top_ans=98452521
"How completely inorganic material of a humble nature could undergo the process of replication, selection and evolution." "At which point a self-replicating molecule, associating with a few others, becomes “alive” is a philosophical question." JE comment: I don't have the biochemistry background to judge, but I think Leblanc's thinking is full of holes. A sure thing: a self-replicating molecule, associating with a few others, is going to be at a low concentration and won't have a cell membrane to protect the association. Once there is a cell membrane for protection of RNA, the clay scaffolding will no longer do its thing.
In the same Quora page, Berens: the earliest prokaryotic bacteria were VERY simple. JE: irreducible complexity has something to say about this. Grönroos has his say, but JE repeats, the concentration is going to be very low and the organic chemicals will be susceptible to decomposition. Kodicek handwaves freely, which must be satisfactory for evolution grad students, but it sure doesn't explain anything. Day: All animal bodies are simply a single cell (the ovum) which doubles its DNA (fertilization) to make body cells - a body. JE: well, it is just so simple and straightforward! Who could doubt?
From five years earlier, 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832201/#__ffn_sectitle Microcompartments and Protein Machines in Prokaryotes
Milton H. Saier, Jr. The prokaryotic cell (prokaryote sounds like prototype, early) was once thought of as a “bag of enzymes” with little or no intracellular compartmentalization. We now consider a bacterium or an archaeon [in a new light, not the old bag-of-enzymes idea, but] as a highly structured, non-random collection of functional membrane-embedded and proteinaceous molecular machines, each of which serves a specialized function. [Summarizing...] In this article: microcompartments including (i) cytoskeleton and DNA, (ii) energy apparati (light-driven proton pumping, ATP synthesis), (iii) motility and external-stimulus machines, (iv) machines of protein folding, secretion and degradation, (v) metabolasomes, (vi) 24-hour clocks allowing bacteria to coordinate metabolism with the solar cycle and (vii) protein compartmentalized structures (sulfur granules and gas vacuoles).
Remarkable complexity of what was once thought of as a simple non-compartmentalized cell. For several decades, the “bag of enzymes” has been known to be inadequate [Mathews, 1993], grossly inaccurate picture of a prokaryotic cell. Many prokaryotic cells possess membrane-bounded structures that can be considered to be organelles, and even nuclear envelopes, whereas the previous thought was that they lacked organelles. New hypotheses regarding the evolution of eukaryotic organelles...now crystal clear that prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes possess the abilities to synthesize a large variety of membrane-bounded organelles, many not found in eukaryotes...hundreds of such machines...rich sources...future research. Most enzymes form “hyperstructures.” Most biologists now accept the notion that a majority of cellular reactions occur in microcompartments [in prokaryotes]. Striking evolutionary plasticity of cytoskeletal proteins. In many bacteria, the constituents of the cytoskeleton appear to form a single interconnected dynamic network that coordinates many cellular functions.
The size of the typical bacteria flagellum is about 1 billion Dalton units (Da is about a hydrogen mass), 10 microns long! It is an amazingly complex rotary machine.
Although it sounds like science fiction, it has been reported that live bacteria can use nanowires to energize “dead” bacteria, bringing them back to life while creating a membrane potential, negative inside. Intracellular protein degradation has become recognized in recent years as a highly complex means of regulating hundreds of aspects of cell physiology.
24 hour circadian clocks are found in some prokaryotes and eukaryotes. (1) cycle of about 24 hr that continues several cycles without external stimulus input; (2) it is subject to entrainment by cycles of light/dark, warm/cold, humidity change and/or redox variations and (3) it is temperature compensated so that its 24 hour cycle continues regardless of the temperature. In cyanobacteria, the oscillator of the clock is a multiprotein molecular machine [Nakajima et al., 2005]. This 3-component clock is capable of keeping time outside of the bacterium in an in vitro environment as well as in the cell.
Bacteria protect themselves while storing large quantities of toxic sulfur by surrounding the particles with a protein membrane.
We can marvel at the current status of biological apparati that allow living organisms to defy entropy.
Membrane-bounded prokaryotic organelles were considered in a recent JMMB written symposium concerned with membraneous compartmentalization in bacteria. [Saier and Bogdanov, 2013] The long web page is not available for free on Internet.
Cross Referencing a theme, complexity of simplest, self-reproducing life gives doubt of random mutation causation
Find similar parapgraphs on this page or by Google-site search using "evoxcross"
Time Line 1900-1990
1966 genetic code, evolution is concerted
Time Line 1990-present
2007 Shkedi. Flew becomes believer in God and ID.
2010 Oct Margulis, no simple branching, 17 steps of photosynthesis, concerted process indoctrination.
2015 Oct 30 Margulis lack of evidence. LCMA already complex. Data is destroying evolution.
2018 Gene Machine
2021 Jan 3 RNA by randomness is improbable. Lucky Planet.
Essay: When God Painted Himself Into a Corner
Footnote 9 even simplest cell is complex, 482 genes
Essay: Creation-Evolution Personal Blog
80% down the page even microevolution by mutation is in doubt by The Third Way
Near the bottom, failed to get from simple...tar, entropy. All critical questions are open. No branching tree of life.
Essay: Genius, Hawking, and Creation of Life
437 genes in super-simple organism
75% down the page smallest genome 160,000 base pairs