Debunking Evolution

Scientific evidence against evolution - the clash between theory and reality The top problems with evolution explained using scientific evidence against evolution. In the creation evolution controversy, it is clear not only that the theory of evolution is wrong, the theory of evolution is false, but that the theory of evolution is a lie. The strongest scientific evidence against evolution: "Evolution" mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. People are shown the real part, which makes them ready to believe the imaginary part. That is how the idea of biological evolution has spread since 1859. Variation (microevolution) is the real part. The types of bird beaks, the colors of moths, leg sizes, etc. are variation. Each type and length of beak a finch can have is already in the gene pool and adaptive mechanisms of finches. Creationists have always agreed that there is variation within species. What evolutionists do not want you to know is that there are strict limits to variation that are never crossed , something every breeder of animals or plants is aware of. Whenever variation is pushed to extremes by selective breeding (to get the most milk from cows, sugar from beets, bristles on fruit flies, or any other characteristic), the line becomes sterile and dies out. And as one characteristic increases, others diminish. But 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 and natural selection to create frogs from fish, reptiles from frogs, and mammals from reptiles, to name a few. Just to be clear, evolution theory puts no limit on what mutation/natural selection can invent, saying that everything in nature was invented by it - everything: sex, eye-hand coordination, balance, navigation systems, tongues, blood, antennae, waste removal systems, swallowing, joints, lubrication, pumps, valves, autofocus, image stabilization, sensors, camouflage, traps, ceramic teeth, light (bioluminescence), ears, tears, eyes, hands, fingernails, cartilage, bones, spinal columns, spinal cords, muscles, ligaments, tendons, livers, kidneys, thyroid glands, lungs, stomachs, vocal cords, saliva, skin, fat, lymph, body plans, growth from egg to adult, nurturing babies, aging, breathing, heartbeat, hair, hibernation, bee dancing, insect queens, spiderwebs, feathers, seashells, scales, fins, tails, legs, feet, claws, wings, beaver dams, termite mounds, bird nests, coloration, markings, decision making, speech center of the brain, visual center of the brain, hearing center of the brain, language comprehension center of the brain, sensory center of the brain, memory, creative center of the brain, object-naming center of the brain, emotional center of the brain, movement centers of the brain, center of the brain for smelling, immune systems, circulatory systems, digestive systems, endocrine systems, regulatory systems, genes, gene regulatory networks, proteins, ribosomes that assemble proteins, receptors for proteins on cells, apoptosis, hormones, neurotransmitters, circadian clocks, jet propulsion, etc. Everything in nature - according to evolution theory. Just to be clear. The invention of new parts or systems by mutation has never been witnessed, nor has it been accomplished in a biochemistry laboratory. As 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. Whole article PDF

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Video So do the big changes (macroevolution) really happen? Evolutionists tell us we cannot see evolution taking place because it happens too slowly. A human generation takes about 20 years from birth to parenthood. They say it took tens of thousands of generations to form man from a common ancestor with the ape, from populations of only hundreds or thousands. We do not have these problems with bacteria. A new generation of bacteria grows in as short as 12 minutes or up to 24 hours or more, depending on the type of bacteria and the environment, but typically 20 minutes to a few hours. There are more bacteria in the world than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches of the world (and many grains of sand are covered with bacteria). They exist in just about any environment: hot, cold, dry, wet, high pressure, low pressure, small groups, large colonies, isolated, much food, little food, much oxygen, no oxygen, in toxic chemicals, etc. There is much variation in bacteria. There are many mutations (in fact, evolutionists say that smaller organisms have a faster mutation rate than larger ones17). But they never turn into anything new. They always remain bacteria. Fruit flies are much more complex than already complex single-cell bacteria. Scientists like to study them because a generation (from egg to adult) takes only 9 days. In the lab, fruit flies are studied under every conceivable condition. There is much variation in fruit flies. There are many mutations. But they never turn into anything new. They always remain fruit flies. Many years of study of countless generations of bacteria and fruit flies all over the world shows that evolution is not happening today. Mutation - natural selection

Here is how the imaginary part is supposed to happen: On rare occasions a mutation in DNA improves a creature's ability to survive, so it is more likely to reproduce (natural selection). That is evolution's only tool for making new creatures. It might even work if it took just one gene to make and control one part. But parts of living creatures are constructed of intricate components with connections that all need to be in place for the thing to work, controlled by many genes that have to act in the proper sequence. Natural selection would not choose parts that did not have all their components existing, in place, connected, and regulated because the parts would not work. Thus all the right mutations (and none of the destructive ones) must happen at the same time by pure chance. That is physically impossible. To illustrate just how hopeless it is, imagine this: on the ground are all the materials needed to build a house (nails, boards, shingles, windows, etc.). We tie a hammer to the wagging tail of a dog and let him wander about the work site for as long as you please, even millions of years. The swinging hammer on the dog is as likely to build a house as mutation-natural selection is to make a single new working part in an animal, let alone a new creature. Only mutations in the reproductive (germ) cells of an animal or plant would be passed on. Mutations in the eye or skin of an animal would not matter. Mutations in DNA happen fairly often, but most are repaired or destroyed by mechanisms in animals and plants. 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. Believing in beneficial mutations is like believing a short-circuit in the motherboard of your computer could improve its performance. To make any lasting change, a beneficial mutation would have to spread ("sweep") through a population and stay (become "fixed"). To evolutionists, this idea has been essential for so long that it is called a "classic sweep", "in which a new, strongly beneficial mutation increases in frequency to fixation in the population." Some evolutionist researchers went looking for classic sweeps in humans, and reported their findings in the journal Science. "To evaluate the importance of classic sweeps in shaping human diversity, we analyzed resequencing data for 179 human genomes from four populations". "In humans, the effects of sweeps are expected to persist for approximately 10,000 generations or about 250,000 years." Evolutionists had identified "more than 2000 genes as potential targets of positive selection in the human genome", and they expected that "diversity patterns in about 10% of the human genome have been affected by linkage to recent sweeps." So what did they find? "In contrast to expectation," their test detected nothing, but they could not quite bring themselves to say it. They said there was a "paucity of classic sweeps revealed by our findings". Sweeps "were too infrequent within the past 250,000 years to have had discernible effects on genomic diversity." "Classic sweeps were not a dominant mode of human adaptation over the past 250,000 years." --Hernandez, Ryan D., Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, 1000 Genomes Project, Guy Sella, Molly Przeworski. 18 February 2011. Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution. Science, Vol. 331, no. 6019, pp. 920-924. A 35-year experiment by evolutionists shows how things really work. Instead of waiting for natural selection, researchers forced selection on hundreds of generations of fruit flies. They used variation to breed fruit flies that develop from egg to adult 20% faster than normal. But, as usual when breeding plants and animals, there was a down side. In this case the fruit flies weighed less, lived shorter lives, and were less resistant to starvation. There were many mutations, but none caught on, and the experiment ran into the limits of variation . They wrote that "forward experimental evolution can often be completely reversed with these populations". "Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles." "The probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments." --Burke, Molly K., Joseph P. Dunham, Parvin Shahrestani, Kevin R. Thornton, Michael R. Rose, Anthony D. Long. 30 September 2010. Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Nature, Vol. 467, pp. 587-590. You may have heard of the famous Lenski experiment. Dr. Richard E. Lenski is an evolutionary biologist who began a long-term experiment on February 24, 1988 that continues today. It looks for genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of Escherichia coli bacteria that have been adapting to conditions in their flasks for over 60,000 generations. I have simplified a report by Scott Whynot, who studied 26 peer-reviewed scientific articles authored by Dr. Lenski (with others) published between 1991 and 2012. These papers represent the major genetic findings from 21 years of the experiment. 1. There was an insertion mutation that inhibited transcription of DNA involved in cell wall synthesis. 2. There was an insertion mutation in a regulatory region that encodes two proteins involved with cell wall synthesis. This may have led to larger cells. 3. A mutation in a gene led to a defect in DNA repair. 4. An insertion mutation may have knocked out a gene involved in programmed cell death and response to stress. 5. There was another mutation in a gene involved in response to stress, disrupting its function. 6. There was a mutation in the gene that encodes an enzyme that loosens DNA coils, leading to an increase in DNA supercoiling. 7. There was an insertion mutation in a gene that represses the production of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), a molecule that participates in many metabolic reactions, some affecting longevity. This might allow more NAD production. 8. The researchers noted an insertion mutation that they think inactivated a gene, resulting in greater glucose uptake. Glucose is a limited energy source in the experiment. 9. Deletion mutations caused the loss of the ability to catabolize D-ribose, an energy source that is not available in the experiment. 10. There was a mutation in a gene regulating transport of the sugar maltose, an energy source that is not present in the experiment. 11. After about 30,000 generations, the E. coli in one of the twelve isolated populations began to utilize an energy source, citrate, that they normally could not use in the presence of oxygen. E. coli already have the ability to transport and metabolize citrate where there is no oxygen, but they do not produce an appropriate transport protein for an environment with oxygen. In E. coli DNA, the gene for the citrate transporter that works without oxygen is directly upstream from genes for proteins with promoters that are active in the presence of oxygen. A replication of the region happened to put the transporter gene next to one of these promoters, so it could now be expressed in the presence of oxygen. Except for number 11, the changes found in over 60,000 generations of bacteria were due to the disruption, degradation, or loss of genetic information. The ability to use citrate in the presence of oxygen, trumpeted by evolutionists as a big deal, was the result of previously existing information being rearranged, not the origin of new information. Mutations that result in a gain of novel information have not been observed. "Most long-term evolution experiments thus far have been performed in bacteria or haploid yeast populations, where, in most environments, there exist a number of loss-of-function mutations that provide a selective advantage." "For instance, sterility in yeast provides a selective advantage by eliminating unnecessary gene expression." "The emergence of the Cit+ phenotype is the exception in experimental evolution, where most evolved mutations affect independent genes and biological pathways, driven largely by large-target loss-of-function mutations."-- Lang, Gregory I., Michael M. Desai. 2014. The spectrum of adaptive mutations in experimental evolution. Genomics, Vol. 104, No. 6, Part A, pp. 412416. Microevolution - Macroevolution

This candid admission is from the evolutionist journal Nature: "Darwin anticipated that microevolution would be a process of continuous and gradual change. The term macroevolution, by contrast, refers to the origin of new species and divisions of the taxonomic hierarchy above the species level, and also to the origin of complex adaptations, such as the vertebrate eye. Macroevolution posed a problem to Darwin because his principle of descent with modification predicts gradual transitions between small-scale adaptive changes in populations and these larger-scale phenomena, yet there is little evidence for such transitions in nature. Instead, the natural world is often characterized by gaps, or discontinuities. One type of gap relates to the existence of 'organs of extreme perfection', such as the eye, or morphological innovations, such as wings, both of which are found fully formed in present-day organisms without leaving evidence of how they evolved."-- Reznick, David N., Robert E. Ricklefs. 12 February 2009. Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution. Nature, Vol. 457, pp. 837-842. Another evolutionary biologist wrote, "the processes underlying evolutionary innovation are remarkably poorly understood, which leaves us at a surprising conundrum: while biologists have made great progress over the past century and a half in understanding how existing traits diversify, we have made relatively little progress in understanding how novel traits come into being in the first place." "The origin of novel features continues to be a fascinating and challenging topic in evolutionary biology."-- Moczek, Armin P. May 2008. On the origins of novelty in development and evolution. BioEssays, Vol. 30, Issue 5, pp. 409-512. Evolutions Third Way

Evolution theory says that accumulated small changes in creatures (microevolution) lead to new types of creatures (macroevolution). But 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. This is from The Third Way website: http://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/ "New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations." "The DNA record does not support the assertion that small random mutations are the main source of new and useful variations. We now know that the many different processes of variation involve well regulated cell action on DNA molecules." " the twentieth-century scientific consensus about evolution appears outdated and incomplete due to the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution". "The fossil record, in fact, does not show Darwin's predicted gradual changes between closely related species but rather the "punctuated equilibrium" pattern described by Eldredge and Gould: a jump from one to a different species." "How do new species evolve? Although Darwin identified inherited variation as the creative force in evolution, he never formally speculated where it comes from. His successors thought that new species arise from the gradual accumulation of random mutations of DNA. But despite its acceptance in every major textbook, there is no documented instance of it." "The genes eye view of life, advocated by evolutionary biology, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of the genetic codes." But "understanding the components of a system (be they individual genes, proteins, or even molecules) may tell us little about the interactions among these components." "Neo-Darwinism ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis." "Evolution, as it turns out, is much more dynamic than biologists realized just a few decades ago. Genomes merge, shrink and grow, acquire new DNA components, and modify their structures by well-documented cellular and biochemical processes." " evolutionary change [is] an active cell process, regulated epigenetically and capable of making rapid large changes by horizontal DNA transfer, inter-specific hybridization, whole genome doubling, symbiogenesis, or massive genome restructuring." "To understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, that is life." Orphan genes - the final blow?

Here is an evolutionist with experience in molecular biology, Francois Jacob. Francois Jacob won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, along with two others, for discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis. He had joined the Institut Pasteur in 1950. He was appointed Laboratory Director there in 1956, then Head of the Department of Cell Genetics in 1960. In 1964 he was appointed Professor at the College de France, where a chair of Cell Genetics was created for him. He was Chairman of the Board of the Institut Pasteur from 1982 to 1988. The work of Francois Jacob 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."20 For decades, everyone agreed. But as researchers compared the genes of similar creatures, they found that the genes differed, from just a little to a lot. They imagined different ways that could have happened. Gene duplication, non-deleterious frame shift mutations, alternative reading frames, overlap with transposable elements, horizontal gene transfer, or overlapping gene.45 As usual with evolutionists, they do not know what really happened, they assume it was one of these mental explanations, and that is enough. But some genes are so unique, even imagination fails. Evolutionists now conclude they must have assembled spontaneously - "de novo". In fact, "all genome and expressed sequence tag (EST) projects to date in every taxonomic group studied so far have uncovered a substantial fraction of genes that are without known homologs [equivalents]. These 'orphans' or 'taxonomically restricted genes' (TRGs) are defined as being exclusively restricted to a particular taxonomic group."21 "Orphan genes are defined as genes which lack detectable similarity to genes in other species". "They typically make up 10 to 30% of all genes in a genome." 45 The foundation of evolution theory, gradual modification over time, slowly transforming genes that already exist, suddenly ran up against orphan genes, genes without parents in every taxonomic group studied so far. Looking at it objectively, the theory of evolution has been falsified. After careful study, evolutionists made a bold choice:

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They cut the theory's last connection to reality, declaring that the impossible is normal: of course genes are produced de novo! The new foundation of evolution theory is Poof - there it is (which sounds like the foundation of creation by Intelligent Design - de novo). Evolutionists now think orphan genes are awesome. "There should be greater appreciation of the importance of the de novo origination of genes." "Today, we know that this evolutionary process is not impossible."47 "De novo evolution is clearly a strong force - constantly generating new genes over time." "It seems possible that most orphan genes have evolved through de novo evolution."35 "It looks as if we couldn't find the families of most orphans because they don't really have families."35 "The sequencing of a large number of eukaryotic and bacterial genomes has uncovered an abundance of genes without homologs... and has shown that new genes have arisen in the genomes of every group of organisms studied so far including humans".21 For evolutionists, the theory of evolution can never die. The rest of us can see that Francois Jacob was right. Orphan genes reveal that macro-evolution does not represent reality, and is physically impossible. Evolve this: Blue morpho butterfly Before the scientific era, people often made up imaginative stories to explain what they saw in the world. The scientific method changed that by requiring rigorous experimentation to test hypotheses and determine what is real. With the Theory of Evolution, people are back to making up imaginative stories. These excerpts from How Did Insect Metamorphosis Evolve? in Scientific American, August 10, 2012 by Ferris Jabr are a great example: "Insects may account for between 80 and 90 percent of all animal species, which means 45 to 60 percent of all animal species on the planet are insects that undergo complete metamorphosis according to one estimate." "However metamorphosis evolved, the enormous numbers of metamorphosing insects on the planet speak for its success as a reproductive strategy. The primary advantage of complete metamorphosis is eliminating competition between the young and old. Larval insects and adult insects occupy very different ecological niches. Whereas caterpillars are busy gorging themselves on leaves, completely disinterested in reproduction, butterflies are flitting from flower to flower in search of nectar and mates. Because larvas and adults do not compete with one another for space or resources, more of each can coexist relative to species in which the young and old live in the same places and eat the same things. Ultimately, the impetus for many of life's astounding transformations also explains insect metamorphosis: survival." In fossils found in Permian rock, "some insects hatched in forms that neither looked nor behaved like their adult versions." This "incomplete metamorphosis, describes insects such as cockroaches, grasshoppers and dragonflies that hatch as nymphs--miniature versions of their adult forms that gradually develop wings and functional genitals as they molt and grow." " insects that mature through incomplete metamorphosis pass through a brief stage of life before becoming nymphs--the pro-nymphal stage, in which insects look and behave differently from their true nymphal forms." And now, storytime: " the evolution of insect metamorphosis remains a genuine biological mystery even today." "Metamorphosis is a truly bizarre process". Nevertheless, "biologists have established a plausible narrative about the origin of insect metamorphosis, which they continue to revise as new information surfaces." "Complete metamorphosis likely evolved out of incomplete metamorphosis." It "likely involved a genetic tweak that bathed the embryo in juvenile hormone sooner than usual and kept levels of the hormone high for an unusually long time." "Perhaps 280 million years ago, through a chance mutation, some pro-nymphs failed to absorb all the yolk in their eggs, leaving a precious resource unused. In response to this unfavorable situation, some pro-nymphs gained a new talent: the ability to actively feed, to slurp up the extra yolk, while still inside the egg. If such pro-nymphs emerged from their eggs before they reached the nymphal stage, they would have been able to continue feeding themselves in the outside world. Over the generations, these infant insects may have remained in a protracted pro-nymphal stage for longer and longer periods of time, growing wormier all the while and specializing in diets that differed from those of their adult selves--consuming fruits and leaves, rather than nectar or other smaller insects. Eventually these prepubescent pro-nymphs became full-fledged larvae that resembled modern caterpillars." "The pupal stage arose later as a kind of condensed nymphal phase that catapulted the wriggly larvae into their sexually active winged adult forms." But wait - theres more! The underside of the wing has a brown pigment, which helps hide the resting blue morpho. That shimmering blue on top is not pigment. These extremely tiny shapes that cover the scales on top of the wing cause light wave interference. Blue light has a wavelength range from 400 to 480 nm. The slits in the scales of the Morpho are 200 nm apart. Because the distance between slits corresponds to half of the wavelength of blue light, this is the wavelength that undergoes constructive interference. The slits are attached to a base of melanin, a material that absorbs light, further strengthening the blue image. If evolutionists get around to making up a story for how these structures evolved, what do you think it will be? Come on, use your imagination! ...or this: Pufferfish nests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B91tozyQs9M The pufferfish in the video did not learn how to do this, it is hardwired in his brain. Can you guess which mutations occurred to build this unique behavior into the mind of a pufferfish? If you can, be sure to tell an evolutionary biologist; they need your help. Small pufferfish make a particular design in the sand off the coast of the Ryukyu Islands. This species of pufferfish is less than 5 inches long, yet the male makes a circular structure 5 to 7 feet in diameter in seafloor sand over 7 to 9 days. A female releases her eggs into the central zone. After spawning, males remain in the circular structure for 6 days to care for the eggs. Once the eggs hatch, males leave, never to return. But they begin to construct a new circular structure in a different place. "The nest exhibits 3 unusual characteristics that have never been reported in fish. First, radially aligned peaks and valleys are created outside the nest site; second, the peaks are decorated with shell fragments; and third, fine sand particles are gathered in the nest site to create an irregular pattern. All 3 characteristics are completed and maintained before mating, when females visit the nest site, and they collapse thereafter."--Kawase, Hiroshi, Yoji Okata, Kimiaki Ito. 1 July 2013. Role of Huge Geometric Circular Structures in the Reproduction of a Marine Pufferfish. Scientific Reports, Vol. 3, Article number: 2106. 5 pages. DOI:10.1038/srep02106. ...or this: Cuttlefish skin Cuttlefish have "one of the most complex systems of motor coordination ever recorded." "Cuttlefish skin contains millions of cells called chromatophores, which can produce tiny dots of colour (yellow, orange, red, brown or black). If the radial muscles that control a chromatophore are relaxed, the pigments are imperceptible. But muscle contraction produces a colorful pixel several tens of micrometres wide." "The millions of individual pixels form a complex image". Cuttlefish transfix their prey by strobing as they approach. "Chromatophores are regulated by modules of motor neurons that function in synchrony, and that operate on skin patches of different sizes." There is "a remarkable level of fine control by motor neurons, and highlights the potential of cuttlefish studies to deepen our understanding of complex motor systems." The difference in colour reflects a difference in age. The pigment of every chromatophore starts as yellow before turning red, then brown, and ending up as black. New chromatophores are generated throughout the life of the cuttlefish, and the ratio of black to colored chromatophores is maintained by keeping a tight balance between the birth rate of new cells and the time it takes them to mature to a black color." "The next challenge will be to determine how cuttlefish change the 3D texture of their skin for camouflage on sand, algae or corals. This process involves sets of muscles called papillae that create bumps and lumps." "Cuttlefish coordinate millions of muscles simultaneously". Jouary, Adrien, Christian K. Machens. 18 October 2018. A living display system. Nature, Vol. 562, pp. 350-351. ...or this: Scallop eyes (Quotes from a 2017 report in the journal Science) Scallops possess a visual system comprising up to 200 eyes. What benefit does the scallop receive by having up to 200 eyes located on the periphery of its semi-circular mantle, spanning ~250°? The optic nerves from nearly all of the eyes project on to the site of visual processing in scallops. There, the scallop can combine the visual information from the... overlapping and differently focused views from multiple eyes. Each eye is ~1 mm in diameter and is composed of a cornea, a weakly refracting lens, and a concave mirror, in addition to a highly unusual double-layered retina. Two striking features were observed in all the eyes. First, the mirror does not have a simple hemispherical shape. Rather, the curvature of the mirror varies across its surface. Second, the optical axes of the mirror and the lens are not aligned. The mirror is tuned to reflect the wavelengths of light penetrating the scallops habitat and is tiled with a mosaic of square guanine crystals. The crystals are arranged so that the high-refractive-index faces are oriented toward the direction of the incident light across the mirror, creating a highly reflective surface. The square-plate morphology is also optimized for tiling. Each layer of the mirror is formed from an almost perfectly tessellated mosaic of two-dimensional (2D) squares - closely resembling the segmented mirrors used in reflecting telescopes. The multilayered mirror is constructed from 20 to 30 layers of crystals separated by thin layers of cytoplasm. Crystal tiling minimizes surface defects at the crystal interfaces that would cause optical diffraction effects. The mirror forms images on a double-layered retina used for separately imaging the peripheral and central fields of view. The mirror forms functional images on both retinas, which appear to be specialized for different functions. The distal retina responds to relatively dark, moving features, triggering defense or escape reflexes. The scallops well-focused peripheral vision could provide useful information to control and guide its movement. Palmer, Benjamin A., Gavin J. Taylor, Vlad Brumfeld, Dvir Gur, Michal Shemesh, Nadav Elad, Aya Osherov, Dan Oron, Steve Weiner, Lia Addadi. 1 December 2017. The image-forming mirror in the eye of the scallop. Science Vol. 358 Issue 6367, pp. 1172-1175. DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9506 ...or this: Lampsilis mussel fooling bass

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0YTBj0WHkU The Lampsilis mussel cannot see. The lure is startling, but also remember that the mussels microscopic larvae (glochidia) must become parasites in bass for a while in order to develop. How do you suppose that got started? The rest of the story The late Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and perhaps the best known since Charles Darwin, according to his New York Times obituary. In 1996 he wrote an essay about a famous giraffe evolution story in his "Natural History" magazine column. "I made a survey of all major high-school textbooks in biology. Every single one - no exceptions - began its chapter on evolution by first discussing Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characters, and then presented Darwins theory of natural selection as a preferable alternative. All texts then use the same example to illustrate Darwinian superiority - the giraffe's neck. Giraffes, we are told, got long necks in order to browse the leaves at the tops of acacia trees... available to no other mammal." "Darwinian evolution may be both true and powerful, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed". "If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration then we are in for trouble". Although acacia tree leaves are the preferred food for adult giraffes during the wet season, giraffes will browse on many other trees and bush types. There is plenty of foliage at lower-levels, and giraffes often eat bushes and even low-growing land vegetation. They commonly munch on long grass and low bushes and many kinds of ground-growing plants. The neck of the average female giraffe is two feet shorter than male necks. If, during a drought, only a longer neck could reach the last leaves high up on acacia trees, then the females would have starved to death and giraffes would have gone extinct. Gould continues: "Even if we assume that the giraffe's neck evolved as an adaptation for eating high leaves, how could natural selection build such a structure by gradual increments? After all, the long neck must be associated with modifications in nearly every part of the body - long legs to accentuate the effect and a variety of supporting structures (bones, muscles, and ligaments) to hold up the neck. How could natural selection simultaneously alter necks, legs, joints, muscles, and blood flows (think of the pressure needed to pump blood to the giraffe's brain)?" To drive blood eight feet up to the head, the heart is exceptionally large and thick-muscled, and the blood pressure is probably the highest in any animal. But when the giraffe bends its head to the ground it puts great strain on the blood vessels of the neck and head. The blood pressure plus the weight of the blood in the neck could produce so much pressure in the head that the blood vessels would burst. Pressure sensors along the neck's arteries monitor the blood pressure, and can activate other mechanisms to counter the increase in pressure as the giraffe drinks or grazes. Contracting artery walls (with increasing muscle fiber toward the head), shunting part of the blood flow to bypass the brain, and a web of small blood vessels (the rete mirabile, or "marvelous net") between the arteries and the brain all serve to control the blood pressure in the giraffe's head. The lungs are oversize to compensate for the volume of dead air in the long trachea. Without this extra air-pumping capacity a giraffe would breathe the same used air over and over. The giraffe's lungs are very large and it breathes slowly, which is necessary in order to exchange the required large volume of air without causing windburn to the giraffe's 12 feet of trachea. Red blood cells in a giraffe are about one-third the size of human red blood cells, so many more can fit into the same space. That provides giraffes with 3 times more red blood cell surface area than humans for the same volume of blood, producing higher and faster absorption of oxygen. This helps to retain adequate oxygen in all extremities, including the head. Gould notes that "Giraffes provide no established evidence whatsoever for the mode of evolution of their undeniably useful necks." "Giraffes have a sparse fossil record in Europe and Asia and the spotty evidence gives no insight into how the long-necked modern species arose." "The standard story, in fact, is both fatuous and unsupported. In the realm of giraffes, current use of maximal mamalian height for browsing leaves does not prove that the neck evolved for such a function." "Why then have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (such as textbooks)." -- Gould, Stephen Jay. May 1996. The Tallest Tale. Natural History, Vol. 105, Issue 5, pp. 18-23, 54-57.

Giraffe biological information from: Davis, Percival, and Dean H. Kenyon. 1993. Of Pandas and People. Second edition, Haughton Publishing, Dallas, Texas. Origin of Life research

Evolutionists don't like to talk about "origin of life" research because it has been such a dead-end, but if chemicals never assembled themselves into the first living thing, evolution could never get started. So to keep hope alive, every once in a while over the last 60 years they have announced discoveries that supposedly bring us closer to understanding how life on Earth began. However, the main lesson scientists have learned over those decades is that the long molecules (polymers) that allow biological creatures to work must be isolated in pure concentrations for there to be any chance of success. Unfortunately, that can only happen in biochemistry labs, computer simulations, and living cells. In all other settings, the products are unusable due to contamination, unwanted reactions with other chemicals, and minuscule concentrations that quickly fall apart.

Picture by T. Hoffman. Here is an origin-of-life researcher, biochemist David Deamer, who thought what he had made in the lab might work in the real world. In 2005 he poured a concoction of organic chemicals into a pool of hot water. He was just trying to make the walls of a cell, like the plastic case of a phone without the electronics inside. Did it work? "The answer was a resounding no." said another origin-of-life researcher. "The clays and metal ions present in the Siberian pool blocked the chemical interactions." "Deamer's demonstration that we cannot translate lab results to natural settings is valuable." "This provocative insight explains why the origin-of-life field has been short on progress over the past half-century".-- Shapiro, Robert. 4 August 2011. Life's beginnings. Nature, Vol. 476, pp. 30-31. An interview with 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 Two prominent "origin-of-life" researchers have laid out their vision of how life arose from chemicals: (see my video on this) 1. Start with a molecule capable of copying itself. "The first protocells contained RNA (or something similar to it) and little else". 2. A fatty acid bubble forms around the self-copying molecule, which then makes a copy of itself with nucleotides that filter through the bubble. "Molecules as large as nucleotides can in fact easily slip across membranes as long as both nucleotides and membranes are simpler, more 'primitive' versions of their modern counterparts." 3. The double-strand RNA separates into single strands if it is heated just right. That might happen in an icy pond next to a volcano, where the bubble could circulate between the ice and the hot rocks. "The sudden heating would cause a double helix to separate into single strands. Once back in the cool region, new double strands, copies of the original, could form". At the same time, the bubble is picking up fatty acid molecules and growing. Adding fatty acids makes the membrane grow longer, and a little shaking breaks the bubble into some smaller bubbles, each with some of the self-copying molecules inside, so you have "cell division". 4. "At some point some of the RNA sequences mutated, becoming ribozymes". The "ribozymes (folded RNA molecules analogous to protein-based enzymes) arise and take on such jobs as speeding up reproduction and strengthening the protocell's membrane. Consequently, protocells begin to reproduce on their own." "Other ribozymes catalyze metabolism -- chains of chemical reactions that enable protocells to tap into nutrients from the environment." 5. "Next, the organisms might have added protein-making to their bag of chemical tricks." "Complex systems of RNA catalysts begin to translate strings of RNA letters (genes) into chains of amino acids (proteins)." "Proteins take on a wide range of tasks within the cell." 6. "Protein-based catalysts, or enzymes, gradually replace most ribozymes." "Proteins would have then taken over RNA's role in assisting genetic copying and metabolism." 7. Later, the organisms would have 'learned' to make DNA". "Thanks to its superior stability, DNA takes on the role of primary genetic molecule. RNA's main role is now to act as a bridge between DNA and proteins." 8. "Organisms resembling modern bacteria adapt to living virtually everywhere on earth and rule unopposed for billions of years, until some of them begin to evolve into more complex organisms."-- Ricardo, Alonso, Jack W. Szostak. September 2009. The Origin of Life on Earth. Scientific American, pp. 54-61. They are currently working on steps 1 and 2 in the laboratory. Let's compare their "origin of life" ideas to the plans of children making a spaceship out of a cardboard box: 1. Get a large box. Draw controls and gauges on the inside. Cut out a door and round windows. Attach cardboard fins to the sides. 2. Put a chair in the box, sit down and start the countdown. 3. Launch the spaceship towards the Moon. Using the Moon's gravity, fling the spaceship to the outer reaches of the solar system, constantly accelerating with the impulse engines. 4. After passing Neptune, engage the warp drive in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic to avoid the Kuiper belt. The children are currently working on steps 1 and 2, and are as close to demonstrating their vision as the "origin-of-life" researchers are. Franklin M. Harold has been studying cell biology for over 50 years. Researcher William F. Martin called him "a grand master of cellular workings and bioenergetics" in a BioEssays book review. Harold Is Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Affiliate Professor, Department of Microbiology, University of Washington Health Sciences Center, Seattle, Washington. In a chapter titled "Ultimate Riddle - Origin of Cellular Life" in his 2014 book "In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Lifes Building Blocks" published by the University of Chicago Press, he examined at length the current state of origin-of-life research. These are some of his conclusions: Over the past sixty years, dedicated and skillful scientists have devoted much effort and ink to the origin of life, with remarkably little to show for it. [Quoting Radu Popa, 2004,] "So far, no theory, no approach, no set of formulas, and no blackboard scheme has been found satisfactory in explaining the origin of life." At the conclusion of a century of science, whose great glory is the discovery of how living things work, there is something downright disgraceful about this confession, an intimation that despite our vast knowledge and clever technology there may be questions that exceed our grasp. But its truth is indisputable. A survey of the literature devoted to the beginnings of life leaves one in no doubt that all the critical questions remain open. For the present, we are in limbo. The natural path from simple cosmic molecules to cells, from chemistry to biology, remains undiscovered. where we should look for illumination I cannot say. The difference between a puzzle and a mystery is that the former can be solved within the framework of known principles, while the latter cannot. In the end, the origin of life remains a mystery that passes understanding. we may still be missing some essential insight. 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. Life's origin has been most ardently pursued by chemists, apparently on the unspoken premise that once the molecular building blocks are on hand, cellular organization will take care of itself. That premise is surely incorrect. Modern cells do not assemble themselves from preformed constituents, and they would not have done so in the past. the notion that the first protocells assembled themselves spontaneously from a generous menu of precursor molecules conveniently supplied by abiotic chemistry (or imported by way of comets and meteorites) is now widely recognized as simplistic and effectively has been abandoned. Among its most cogent critics are experienced masters of the art of prebiotic synthesis, who are well aware of the shortcomings of many of the proposed routes and of the wide gap between the range of molecules that living things employ and those that can be made in the laboratory. the fact is that chemists have encountered insuperable difficulties in generating a working replicator, and many have expressed doubts about the project. It is at least incumbent upon proponents of its spontaneous genesis to explain how the "correct" monomers could have been selected from the "prebiotic clutter," how a sufficient concentration of monomers was maintained, where the energy came from, and how the replicator evaded the tendency of polymers to break down by hydrolysis. A decade ago, a hot topic for debate was which came first, replication or metabolism? That issue has not been resolved but has been largely superseded by the recognition that neither of them, by itself, can take one far along the road to life. It is simply not credible to claim that anything beyond the most rudimentary kind of replication or metabolism could have arisen in free solution. In truth, there is presently no persuasive hypothesis to account for the emergence of protocells from the primal chaos. The crucial step in the transfiguration of protocells into true cells will have been the invention of translation and the genetic code. the origin of the principles that govern cellular operations today - genes specifying proteins and all the apparatus that this requires - remains quite unknown and points beyond the capacity of present-day biochemistry and biophysics. In a lecture in 2014, famous "origin-of-life" researcher Jack Szostak showed this slide: He said these problems were known 15 or 20 years ago. Regarding the third problem, the RNA backbone is always the same in living things. But making it with chemicals in a lab leads to haphazard forms. Szostak believes this will not be much of an obstacle after all. The last problem on the list is about magnesium ions. They are required for copying RNA, but they also degrade RNA and destroy membranes. His lab's experiments found that adding citrate to the magnesium ions prevents the destruction. That is hardly surprising since citrate is essential to cellular metabolism, but citrate is not a plausible prebiotic chemical because it is a product of living things. He did not mention that in the lecture. And so the faithful continue to strive, year after year, decade after decade, to solve the impossible mystery. As long as evolutionists can say that scientists are working on it, the rest of the world doesnt notice that the research is stalled where it started.

Get the inside story If you want to know about origin of life research from an expert in synthetic organic chemistry, you can't do any better than Dr. James M. Tour, Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue with postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford, currently Professor of Chemistry, Computer Science, Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University. He answers the most important questions about origin of life from chemicals in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y For more depth, see his 2016 lecture on YouTube. (His analysis starts at 57:06 of the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zQXgJ-dXM4 Dr. James M. Tour says, "From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That's how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues - National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners - I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it's all worked out, if your teachers say it's all worked out, they don't know what they're talking about." "We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology's functions... Those that say, 'Oh this is well worked out', they know nothing - nothing - about chemical synthesis - nothing." And read his 2017 "An Open Letter to My Colleagues" at http://inference-review.com/article/an-open-letter-to-my-colleagues How long would it be before natural forces (nothing living) screwed the screw into the hole in the wood? That's right - never; natural forces are not organized enough. It would be immensely harder for chemicals to organize themselves into a biological machine without a living cell guided by a code like DNA, or a trained biologist. Gradual change versus leaps

There are two versions of evolution theory. The main version proposes that many tiny changes over millions of years made new creatures. It is called the Modern Synthesis or Neo-Darwinian evolution. But "major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity." "The principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable."23 Since the fossil record does not show long series of tiny changes between one type of creature and another, some evolutionists proposed a modification to evolution theory. It says that change occurred by occasional leaps (punctuated equilibrium), not gradually. However, each hypothetical beneficial mutation could only make a slight change. Any more than that would be so disruptive as to cause death. So punctuated equilibrium is not really about big leaps. It envisions a lot of slight changes over thousands of years, then nothing happens for millions of years. Evolutionists say with a straight face that no fossils have been found from a leap because thousands of years is too fast in the billions of years of "geologic time" to leave any. Yet without fossils there is no evidence that any leaps ever happened, and of course there is no evidence that leaps or gradual changes beyond variation are happening today in any of the millions of species that still exist. Waiting for mutations

Evolutionists believe that humans share a common ancestor with the great apes of Africa. They say "hominins" are the human lineage arising from that ancestor. A 2015 paper calculated how long it would take to change the nucleotides in hominin DNA. These excerpts from it will shock you: "Given the unique capabilities of humans, an evolving hominin population (as would give rise to modern man) would need to establish a great deal of new information." "It is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5%, representing about 150 million nucleotide differences." "The gene can range in size from about 1,000 to more than one million nucleotides long. A typical human gene is roughly 50,000 nucleotides long. A new gene is thought to arise from a previously existing gene, with the mutation/selection process establishing mutations within a long text string that is already established and functional." "It is now generally recognized that beneficial mutations are rare, and that high-impact beneficial mutations are extremely rare. In higher life forms where population sizes are modest, the mutation rate per nucleotide per generation is normally extremely low (about 10−8). This means that the waiting time for a specific nucleotide within single chromosomal lineage would be 100 million generations." "We simulated a classic pre-human hominin population of at least 10,000 individuals, with a generation time of 20 years, using the numerical simulation program Mendels Accountant (Mendel version 2.4.2, now being released as 2.5)." "Biologically realistic numerical simulations revealed that a population of this type required inordinately long waiting times to establish even the shortest nucleotide strings. To establish a string of two nucleotides required on average 84 million years. To establish a string of five nucleotides required on average 2 billion years. We found that waiting times were reduced by higher mutation rates, stronger fitness benefits, and larger population sizes. However, even using the most generous feasible parameter settings, the waiting time required to establish any specific nucleotide string within this type of population was consistently prohibitive." "Even given very substantial fitness effects, the waiting time for a specific point mutation ranged between 1.5 and 15.9 million years" which "is very sobering, since it is estimated that mankind evolved from a chimp-like creature in just 6 million years." "As string length increased linearly, the increase in waiting time was of an exponential nature. When there were as many as six nucleotides in the string, the average waiting time (4.24 billion years) approached the estimated age of the earth. When there were eight nucleotides in the string, the average waiting time (18.5 billion years), exceeded the estimated age of the universe." "Our results generally represent best-case scenarios in terms of minimizing waiting time. When we use more realistic parameter settings for our simulations, we consistently get much longer waiting times." "When a population faces a specific evolutionary challenge, a specific fix is needed, and it must arise in a timely fashion. Positive selection cannot generally begin to resolve an evolutionary challenge until just the right mutation (or mutations) happens at just the right position (or positions). Selection for the required trait can only begin after the mutation (or mutations) result in a substantial (selectable) improvement in total biological functionality." "The creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man" who has "a genome with over three billion nucleotides." "We need multiple point mutations to arise on the same short strand of DNA, which is very difficult. While a population is waiting (through deep time) for the correct string to arise, genetic drift is systematically eliminating almost all the string variants. Nearly all of the time there will be essentially zero strings anywhere in the population that are even close to the target string." "It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns. When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million, the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years. This amount of time approximates the estimated time required for the evolution of worm-like creatures into people. When we extrapolate our data to a population size of ten million we still get a waiting time of 202 million years. Even when we extrapolate to a population size of one billion we still have a waiting time of 40 million years." "A bigger population increases the number of mutations arising per generation, but does not increase the number of mutations per short DNA strand (mutation density). To create a complete set of linked mutations requires many mutations arising on the same short stretch of a given DNA molecule." "Numerous other researchers have come to similar conclusions. The long waiting times we report here are even supported indirectly by the papers that have argued against a serious waiting time problem. When examined carefully, those papers indicate that for a hominin-type population, waiting times are as long or even longer than we report here." It is true that "during the waiting time period for a functional string to be established at a given location, other beneficial mutational strings can be happening in other parts of the genome." "However, those other strings are not likely to meet the same specific evolutionary need that our target string can meet. Evolution often needs a specific fix to a specific problem, and that fix must be timely in order to retain relevance." "Even if all of the ~20,000 genes in the hominin genome were already poised for a significant enhancement and all of them were waiting for their own specific string, each one of those potential enhancements would have its own severe waiting time problem." "Furthermore, this would be happening in the context of countless nearly-neutral deleterious mutations throughout the genome which would drift to fixation within the same deep time. Unless there was very strong purifying selection operating for all the nucleotides in the general region of the string, the context of the string would be erased long before the string itself actually arose." "The waiting time problem becomes very severe when more than one mutation is required to establish a new function. This is a very interesting theoretical dilemma."-- Sanford, John, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith and John Baumgardner. September 17, 2015. The waiting time problem in a model hominin population. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 12, No. 1, Article 18, 28 pages, DOI: 10.1186/s12976-015-0016-z. Fossil record

Evolution is all about constant change, whether gradual or in leaps. Consider a cloud in the sky: it is constantly changing shape due to natural forces. It might look like, say, a rabbit now, and a few minutes later appear to be, say, a horse. In between, the whole mass is shifting about. In a few more minutes it may look like a bird. The problem for evolution is that we never see the shifting between shapes in the fossil record. All fossils are of complete animals and plants, not works in progress "under construction". That is why we can give each distinct plant or animal a name. If evolution's continuous morphing were really going on, every fossil would show change underway throughout the creature, with parts in various stages of completion. For every successful change there should be many more that lead to nothing. The whole process is random trial and error, without direction. So every plant and animal, living or fossil, should be covered inside and out with useless growths and have parts under construction. It is a grotesque image, and just what the theory of evolution really predicts. Even Charles Darwin had a glimpse of the problem in his day. He wrote in his book On the Origin of Species: "The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on Earth must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." The more fossils that are found, the better sense we have of what lived in the past. Since Darwin's day, the number of fossils that have been collected has grown tremendously, so we now have a pretty accurate picture. The gradual morphing of one type of creature to another that evolution predicts is nowhere to be found. There should have been millions of transitional creatures if evolution were true. In the "tree of life" that evolutionists have dreamed up, gaps in the fossil record are especially huge between single-cell creatures, complex invertebrates (such as snails, jellyfish, trilobites, clams, and sponges), and what evolutionists claim were the first vertebrates, fish. In fact, there are no transitional fossils at all between single-celled creatures and complex invertebrates, nor between complex invertebrates and fish . That alone is fatal to the theory of evolution. The fossil record shows that evolution never happened. What fossil evidence is there for the evolutionist vision for the origin of life? Nothing, except for shapes that might have been cells, or something else. Everyone agrees that the big surprise is the sudden appearance of fossils above the bedrock in the Cambrian Explosion, supposedly 541 to 530 million years ago. The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion are complex invertebrates, sea creatures like trilobites, sponges, worms, jellyfish, sea urchins, sea lilies, mollusks, brachiopods (lamp shells), sea cucumbers, and swimming crustaceans such as

Opabinia, 3 inches long (8 cm) with 5 eyes and a long claw arm, and

Anomalocaris, 3 feet long (91.5 cm), and the top predator in the Cambrian environment. "Darwin argued that the incompleteness of the fossil record gives the illusion of an explosive event, but with the eventual discovery of older and better-preserved rocks, the ancestors of these Cambrian taxa would be found. Studies of Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils continue to expand the morphologic variety of clades, but the appearance of the remains and traces of bilaterian animals in the Cambrian remains abrupt." (Erwin et. al.) Abrupt indeed. Here is "the ancestor of all animals" supposedly from 14 million years before even the Cambrian Explosion: "Geologists have discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans. The worm-like creature, Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut. It was found in Ediacaran Period deposits in Australia and was 2 to 7 millimeters long, with the largest the size of a grain of rice." - Science Daily In the classification diagram biologists use, all these animals are so unrelated to each other that they are in different classes or even phyla. From time to time evolutionists announce with great fanfare that they have gotten a colony of bacteria to eat something they could not eat before, or some other small variation. These changes are always below the family level on the diagram. If evolution were true, there would have been ancestors and transitional creatures between each genus, family, order, class, and phylum in the layers below the Cambrian Explosion. But there are no fossils for any of these. What to do? A team of evolutionists solved this problem using their most effective tool - storytelling. First they assumed evolution occurred. Then they estimated how fast it should have happened, and decided that the creatures in the Cambrian Explosion had been evolving for over 250 million years before any showed up in the rocks as fossils! "We estimate that the last common ancestor of all living animals arose nearly 800 million years ago and that the stem lineages leading to most extant phyla had evolved by the end of the Ediacaran (541 million years ago)." Yes, millions of generations of all kinds of creatures all over the world living, dying, evolving without leaving any trace of their existence. Not only that, "from the early Paleozoic onward there is little addition of new phyla and classes". "Little high-level morphological innovation occurred during the subsequent 500 million years". Their story was published in the prestigious journal Science, and was hailed as having solved a mystery challenging evolution theory all the way back to Darwin. --Erwin, Douglas H., Marc Laflamme, Sarah M. Tweedt, Erik A. Sperling, Davide Pisani, Kevin J. Peterson. 2011. The Cambrian Conundrum: Early Divergence and Later Ecological Success in the Early History of Animals. Science, Vol. 334, pp. 1091-1097. Fossil compound eyes from the Lower Cambrian, where the first complex creatures suddenly appear in the fossil record, have been found in the Emu Bay Shale of South Australia. The fossils are supposedly about 515 million years old. They may be corneas of Anomalocaris that were shed during moulting. The lenses are packed tighter than Lower Cambrian trilobite eyes, "which are often assumed to be the most powerful visual organs of their time." Notice that the lenses in the picture are different sizes. It is the same in the fossils. Each eye has "over 3,000 large ommatidial lenses". "The arrangement and size-gradient of lenses creates a distinct [forward] 'bright zone'... where the visual field is sampled with higher light sensitivity (due to larger ommatidia) and possibly higher accuity". This indicates "that these eyes belonged to an active predator that was capable of seeing in low light." "The eyes are more complex than those known from contemporaneous trilobites and are as advanced as those of many living forms" today, such as the fly in this picture, "revealing that some of the earliest arthropods possessed highly advanced compound eyes".27 When the earliest form is the most complex, there is no evolution. This tiny fish (a little over an inch long, or 3 cm) is Haikouichthys. Its fossils have also been found in the Lower Cambrian. This "first fish" has a spine and spinal cord, eyes, gills, fins, scales, mouth, etc., though no jaw, like a lamprey. About 500 were found buried together.39 This is Guiyu, a fossil fish that "represents the oldest near-complete gnathostome (jawed vertebrate)."48 It measures about 15 inches long, or 37 cm. Clearly, the earliest fish were as much fish as today's fish. Guiyu is "a representative of modern fishes" from the Silurian, before the so-called "age of fishes" (Devonian).9 In the evolutionist's mind, "a whole series of major branching events... must have taken place well before the end of the Silurian." "A significant part of early vertebrate evolution is unknown."9 Coelacanth disappeared from the fossil record with the last of the dinosaurs. That was supposedly 65 million years ago. In the early 1900s, evolutionists touted it as the first walking fish, the transition between fish and tetrapods. That is, until 1938 when one was found alive and unable to walk. Evolution theory says that pressures from competition and the environment force changes over time. In chapter 9 of his book, Darwin wrote of ancestor species in general: "If, moreover, they had been the progenitors of these orders, they would almost certainly have been long ago supplanted and exterminated by their numerous and improved descendants." Here is a coelacanth today, alive and unchanged like many "living fossils". Where is the evolution? Evolutionists tell us this dragonfly has not shown up in the fossil record for 250-300 million years! Dozens of the A ncient Greenling Damselfly live near Melbourne, Australia. " The damselfly, part of the dragonfly group Odonata, is the only living representative of the family Hemiphlebiidae. Its ancient predecessors are found solely in 250-300 million-year-old fossil records from Brazil to Russia." --Smith, Bridie. January 5, 2010. Found: fossil-linked, listed damselfly. www.theage.com.au (newspaper website) This is a drawing of a supposed predecessor, Protozygoptera. With a wingspan of under 6 cm, it is the earliest damselfly-like insect ever found and "the origin of modern dragonflies". Its fossil wing was found in rocks of the Upper Carboniferous which evolutionists think are about 300 million years old. As with many creatures, dragonflies appear suddenly in the fossil record, fully formed. Damselflies living today look like Protozygoptera; there are no transitional intermediates and there was no evolution. --Jarzembowski, E.A., A. Nel. 2002. The earliest damselfly-like insect and the origin of modern dragonflies (Insecta: Odonatoptera: Protozygoptera). Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Vol. 113, pp. 165-169. Evolutionists always point to Archaeopteryx as the great example of a transitional creature, appearing to be part dinosaur and part bird. However, it is a fully formed, complete animal with no half-finished components or useless growths. Most people know "the stereotypical ideal of Archaeopteryx as a physiologically modern bird with a long tail and teeth". Research now "shows incontrovertibly that these animals were very primitive". "Archaeopteryx was simply a feathered and presumably volant [flying] dinosaur. Theories regarding the subsequent steps that led to the modern avian condition need to be reevaluated." --Erickson, Gregory, et al. October 2009. Was Dinosaurian Physiology Inherited by Birds? Reconciling Slow Growth in Archaeopteryx. PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, Issue 10, e7390. "Archaeopteryx has long been considered the iconic first bird." "The first Archaeopteryx skeleton was found in Germany about the same time Darwin's Origin of Species was published. This was a fortuituously-timed discovery: because the fossil combined bird-like (feathers and a wishbone) and reptilian (teeth, three fingers on hands, and a long bony tail) traits, it helped convince many about the veracity of evolutionary theory." "Ten skeletons and an isolated feather have been found." "Archaeopteryx is the poster child for evolution." But "bird features like feathers and wishbones have recently been found in many non-avian dinosaurs". "Microscopic imaging of bone structure... shows that this famously feathered fossil grew much slower than living birds and more like non-avian dinosaurs." "Living birds mature very quickly and grow really, really fast", researchers say. "Dinosaurs had a very different metabolism from today's birds. It would take years for individuals to mature, and we found evidence for this same pattern in Archaeopteryx and its closest relatives". "The team outlines a growth curve that indicates that Archaeopteryx reached adult size in about 970 days, that none of the known Archaeopteryx specimens are adults (confirming previous speculation), and that adult Archaeopteryx were probably the size of a raven, much larger than previously thought." "We now know that the transition into true birds -- physiologically and metabolically -- happened well after Archaeopteryx."--October 2009. Archaeopteryx Lacked Rapid Bone Growth, the Hallmark of Birds. American Museum of Natural History, funded science online news release. What evolutionists now know for sure is that their celebrity superstar was not a transitional creature after all. Wow! OMG. They better find a new one fast... How about the Platypus? They could call it a transitional creature between ducks and mammals. The furry platypus has a duck-like bill, swims with webbed feet, and lays eggs. As for the birds in the evolutionary tree, evolutionists just placed living and extinct species next to each other to make the bird series. Early bird: Fossils of Archaeornithura meemannae were found in very Early Cretaceous strata in China. In the evolutionary tree (above) it sits at the bottom between Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis. Do you see anything primitive here? "The fossils' specialized anatomy suggests that key factors in birds' long-term success, such as expert flying ability and rapid growth rates, arose surprisingly early in avian evolution" "and make it almost certain that the origin of the lineage was much older still."--Wang, Min, et al. 5 May 2015. The oldest record of ornithuromorpha from the early cretaceous of China. Nature Communications, 6:6987, DOI:10.1038/ncomms7987 The famous horse series; it looks great, doesn't it? But each of the supposed ancestors is a complete animal. They are not full of failed growths and there are no parts under construction. There are many more differences between each type of animal than their size and the number of toes. Every change in structure, function, and process would have had to develop through random trial-and-error if evolution were true, but no transitional forms have been found. The fossils have not caught any changes in the midst of being created, even though they should have occurred over long periods of time. In the late 1800's, evolutionists simply placed living and extinct species next to each other to make the horse series. However, evolutionists no longer believe there was the direct ancestry (orthogenesis) shown in this chart... Evolutionists now imagine it to be this branching bush. Many of the supposed ancestors apparently lived at the same time, especially after Mesohippus. It is doubtful that Hyracotherium (formerly Eohippus) has any connection to horses. So the progression of toes is an illusion that was useful when the theory of evolution was first being sold to the public. Several hundred species are extinct; only one genus, Equus, survives. Rather than play the evolutionist's game and try to untangle varieties of one animal from another in the horse bush, let's be clear on what we are talking about. Biologists divide all living things into groups and subgroups. The basic framework is the Linnaean system of taxonomy, published in Linnaeus' expanded 10th edition of Systema Naturae in 1758. That was a century before Darwinism, and it was never intended to show that one creature morphed into another. It just grouped animals with similar characteristics. Once they seized control of the study of biology, evolutionists took over the Linnaean system and have tinkered with it ever since to fit their belief that animals transform over time. Birds are at the class level (Aves), which has 23 subgroups below it called orders and 142 subgroups below them called families. All the members of the evolutionist's horse bush, living and extinct, are in one family, (Equidae). To get up to the class level where birds are, you pass the order Perissodactyla (browsing and grazing mammals with an odd number of toes) to the class mammals (Mammalia). Other examples of families include cats (Felidae), dogs (Canidae), deer (Cervidae), bears (Ursidae), squirrels (Sciuridae), and cattle (Bovidae). So the level of "evolution" in the horse bush is within a family, which is pretty low and has no relevance to the main issue, macroevolution. But evolutionists have always used the varieties in the family Equidae to entice people to imagine that all animals morph from one kind to another. Look at their tree of life for mammals, the class Mammalia. Novacek, M.J. 1994. The Radiation of Placental Mammals, in Prothero, D.R. and Schoch, R.M. (editors) Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution. Paleontological Society Short Courses in Paleontology, No. 7, pp. 220-237. That's right; they want us to believe that elephants and manatees, primates and tree shrews had common ancestors. They show you three toes changing to one toe, browsing teeth changing to grazing teeth in the horse bush so that you will believe that reindeer and whales morphed from common ancestors. That is why the horse series is an evolutionist icon. The "Tree of Life" is falling

New discoveries are bringing down the whole notion of a "tree of life", as passages from an article in the mainstream magazine New Scientist show: 26 "The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection, according to biologist W. Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened." "For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. 'For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,' says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach." "But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. 'We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,' says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change." "The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes". "As more and more genes were sequenced, it became clear that the patterns of relatedness could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species - often across huge taxonomic distances". " 'There's promiscuous exchange of genetic information across diverse groups,' says Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine." "As early as 1993, some were proposing that for bacteria and archaea the tree of life was more like a web. In 1999, Doolittle made the provocative claim that 'the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree'. 13 'The tree of life is not something that exists in nature, it's a way that humans classify nature,' he says." "Recent research suggests that the evolution of animals and plants isn't exactly tree-like either." "A team at the University of Texas at Arlington found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals - the mouse, rat, bushbaby, little brown bat, tenrec, opossum, anole lizard and African clawed frog - but not in 25 others, including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. This patchy distribution suggests that the sequence must have entered each genome independently by horizontal transfer." 34 "HGT [horizontal gene transfer] has been documented in insects, fish and plants, and a few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows." "Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California, Davis... compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed." "The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories." " 'We've just annihilated the tree of life. It's not a tree any more, it's a different topology [design or shape] entirely,' says Syvanen." "It is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works." "Rose goes even further. 'The tree of life is politely buried, we all know that,' he says. 'What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.' Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says." " 'The tree of life was useful,' says Bapteste. 'It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on.' " 26 Evolutionists write: "The meaning, role in biology, and support in evidence of the universal 'Tree of Life' (TOL) are currently in dispute. Some evolutionists believe... that we can with available data and methods reconstruct this tree quite accurately, and that we have in fact done so, at least for the major groups of organisms. Other evolutionists... do not doubt that some... branching tree can in principle represent the history of all life. Still other evolutionists, ourselves included, question even this most fundamental belief, that there is a single true tree." "Darwin claimed that a unique inclusively hierarchical pattern of relationships between all organisms based on their similarities and differences was a fact of nature." Yet "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 TOL 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." 12 "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." "When chemists or physicists find that a given null hypothesis can account for only 1% of their data, they immediately start searching for a better hypothesis. Not so with microbial evolution, it seems, which is rather worrying. Could it be that many biologists have their heart set on finding a tree of life, regardless of what the data actually say?" 10 "A single, uninterrupted TOL does not exist, although the evolution of large divisions of life for extended time intervals can be adequately described by trees." "Tree topology tends to differ for different genes." 26 The genomes of all life forms are collections of genes with diverse evolutionary histories." "The TOL concept must be substantially revised or abandoned because a single tree topology or even congruent topologies of trees for several highly conserved genes cannot possibly represent the history of all or even the majority of the genes." "The 'strong' TOL hypothesis, namely, the existence of a 'species tree' for the entire history of cellular life, is falsified by the results of comparative genomics." "So the TOL becomes a network, or perhaps most appropriately, the Forest of Life that consists of trees, bushes, thickets..., and of course, numerous dead trunks and branches." 22 Kevin Peterson, a molecular paleobiologist at Dartmouth College, "has been reshaping phylogenetic trees for the past few years, ever since he pioneered a technique that uses short molecules called microRNAs to work out evolutionary branchings. He has now sketched out a radically different diagram for mammals: one that aligns humans more closely with elephants than with rodents." " 'I've looked at thousands of microRNAs, and I can't find a single example that would support the traditional tree,' he says. The technique "just changes everything about our understanding of mammal evolution'." "And as he continues to look, he keeps uncovering problems, from the base of the animal tree all the way up to its crown." "Peterson and his team are now going back to mammalian genomes to investigate why DNA and microRNAs give such different evolutionary trajectories. 'What we know at this stage is that we do have a very serious incongruence,' says Davide Pisani, a phylogeneticist at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth". --Dolgin, Elie. 28 June 2012. Rewriting Evolution. Nature, Vol.486, pp.460-462. This is huge. Professional evolutionists spend most of their time adjusting their "tree of life". They have fun thinking how one type of creature "developed" into another type, how abilities "arose" or "emerged" here and there, but that is just playing at science. These articles show that, while they still cling to their belief in evolution, the truth is becoming inescapable to a few evolutionists who dare to look at the facts: Darwin was wrong; microbes, insects, plants, and animals do not fit a "tree of life" with linear descent. There is no pattern to their similarities and differences because each one is a uniquely designed, complete creature. The big fudge

There were warnings of problems in the very "tree of life" diagrams evolutionists were fabricating. If you believed these diagrams of new forms arising from old forms, then you believed that parts can be lost from a creature and then exactly re-invented in the same creature millions of years later. And that might happen several times! Not only that, the same part might appear independently in unrelated creatures. For example, wings would have had to evolve completely independently four times: in insects, flying reptiles, birds, and bats. When a creature produces light with chemicals it is called bioluminescence. "A remarkable diversity of marine animals and microbes are able to produce their own light, and in most of the volume of the ocean, bioluminescence is the primary source of light." "On land, fireflies are the most conspicuous examples, but other luminous taxa include other beetles, insects like flies and springtails, fungi, centipedes and millipedes, a snail, and earthworms." Evolutionists think bioluminescence evolved independently 40 to 50 separate times! --Haddock, Steven H.D., Mark A. Moline, James F. Case. 2010. Bioluminescence in the Sea. Annual Review of Marine Science, Vol. 2, pp. 443-493. In another study, evolutionists concluded that the cecal appendix evolved independently at least 32 separate times in mammals.41 This dodge is quite common in "evolutionary science". Instead of heeding the warnings and scrapping the diagrams, they solved the problem by giving it a name: either "convergent" or "parallel" evolution (according to the situation), and it became standard in evolutionist writings. Now they just casually throw out statements like "convergent evolution is widespread across the mammal tree of life". --Helgen, Kristofer M. 28 October 2011. The Mammal Family Tree. Science, Vol. 334, pp. 458-459. In their sales pitch to the public, evolutionists use the gimmick, "if a million monkeys typed randomly for millions of years, eventually one would type one of Shakespeare's sonnets", and people think "well, maybe...". How about the monkeys typing the same sonnet twice or more? It would be shocking if random mutation-natural selection produced any working part, let alone the same part twice or more from scratch. With convergent/parallel evolution, evolutionists could fudge any situation. Perhaps the most brazen example of this can be seen in the "parallel evolution" of two types of mammals, placental (such as humans) and marsupial (such as kangaroos). Evolutionists tell us that each group evolved separately, yet many are remarkably similar, including cats, mice, wolves, moles, flying squirrels, anteaters, and others. This is whole animal duplication, not just an individual part. A normal person would be embarrassed if their theory of random change made such claims, but you cannot embarrass a fanatic. The only reason for the "convergent/parallel evolution" trick is to force the "tree of life" framework onto a world of uniquely designed creatures. Animal genomes have billions of DNA base pairs, but each species is so unique that a very short stretch, or "barcode" is all you need to identify them. "For animals, the standard barcode is a 648 base pairs fragment of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase 1 (COI). The use of COI for species identification and discovery has been extremely successful for the animal kingdom, and the BARCODE OF LIFE DATASYSTEMS database (BOLD) now contains more than 4.2 million validated barcodes." -- Coissac, Eric, Peter M. Hollingsworth, Sebastien Lavergne, Pierre Taberlet. 2016. From barcodes to genomes: extending the concept of DNA barcoding. Molecular Ecology, Vol. 25, pp. 14231428. Design flaws?

Evolutionists say that while no intelligent designer would design anything with flaws, evolution is a mechanical process of trial and error, so evolution easily explains the existence of flaws in biology. In his 1986 book, "The Blind Watchmaker," the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote about the eye, "Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away, from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas." "This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion". Evolutionist professors have told this to their students for years, while looking at them with perfect vision. It is true that "images projected onto the retina have to pass several layers of randomly oriented and irregularly shaped cells with intrinsic scatterers before they reach the light-detecting photoreceptor cells". "When light passes through multiple layers of cells, as in tissues, images rapidly deteriorate".16 "The mammalian retina and the peripheral retina of humans and primates are organized in a seemingly reverse order with respect to the light path. This arrangement places the photoreceptors, responsible for light absorption, as the last cells in the path of light, rather than the first. Therefore, the incident light must propagate through five reflecting and scattering layers of cell bodies and neural processes before reaching the photoreceptors. This 'inverted' retinal structure is expected to cause blurring of the image and reduction in the photon flux reaching the photoreceptors, thus reducing their sensitivity."25 Then researchers took a closer look at glial cells in the eye. "Glial cells are the most abundant cell types in the central nervous system. They surround neurons to support and insulate them." "Muller cells, the major type of glial cells in the retina, are responsible for the homeostatic and metabolic support of retinal neurons. By mediating transcellular ion, water, and bicarbonate transport, Muller cells control the composition of the extracellular space fluid. Muller cells provide trophic and anti-oxidative support of photoreceptors and neurons and regulate the tightness of the blood-retinal barrier. By the uptake of glutamate, Muller cells are more directly involved in the regulation of the synaptic activity in the inner retina. This review gives a survey of recently discoved new functions of Muller cells. Muller cells are living optical fibers that guide light through the inner retinal tissue."37 Muller cells span the entire thickness of the retina. "Individual Muller cells act as optical fibers. Furthermore, their parallel array in the retina is reminiscent of fiberoptic plates used for low-distortion image transfer. Thus, Muller cells seem to mediate image transfer through the vertebrate retina with minimal distortion and low loss."16 "The basic fiberoptic plate-like structure is especially characteristic for the retinae of all mammals with the exception of the fovea centralis of humans and higher primates, the region of our retina that is responsible for sharp vision; here, the photoreceptor cells are not obscured by any inner retinal layers at all."16 "Every mammalian Muller cell is coupled to one cone photoreceptor cell (responsible for sharp seeing under daylight conditions, i.e., photopic vision) plus a species-specific number of rod photoreceptor cells (about 10 in both man and guinea pig), serving low light level (scotopic) vision."16 "Light of relevant wavelengths for cone visual pigments is directed towards the cones, while light of wavelengths more suitable for rod vision is allowed to leak outside the Muller cells towards the surrounding rods."25 "The fundamental features of the array of glial cells are revealed as an optimal structure designed for preserving the acuity of images in the human retina. It plays a crucial role in vision quality, in humans and in other species."24 As usual, once we learn more about something in biology, evolutionist claims fall apart. Reliving evolution?

An old evolution myth still hanging around is the notion that things that look like gill-slits, tails, etc. in developing human embryos show the embryo repeating all the stages of evolution. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed his "biogenetic law" (not to be confused with the law of biogenesis that says life only comes from life). His idea was that growing vertebrate embryos went through all the forms of their supposed evolutionary ancestors ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"). He published drawings comparing growing embryos of a number of animals such as the pig, cat, salamander, etc. to growing human embryos. The similarities that he said he found helped persuade people to believe the theory of evolution. Scientists eventually discovered enough about embryology to quietly discard the "biogenetic law", but it was not until a careful photographic study of growing vertebrate embryos was conducted in 1997 that Haeckel's deceit was fully revealed. They found that his drawings were so far from reality that they could not have been done from the actual embryos.38 He must have faked them. Vanishing vestigials

If evolutionists do not know what something does, they assume it is useless, as we will see with "junk DNA". One of their "proofs" of evolution has been that as creatures evolve, some body parts that were useful long ago become less important in the new and improved creatures. Eventually these parts no longer function and they shrink in size. Evolutionists called them "vestigial organs". In the late 1800s they made long lists of vestigial organs in humans, including the tonsils, pineal gland, thymus, and appendix. 5 In the years since, advances in our understanding of anatomy and biology have knocked them off the lists one by one. Yet the notion lingers on that "there is something to it". Over 70% of all primate and rodent taxonomic families contain species with an appendix. 40,41 In 2009, researchers at Arizona State and Duke Universities reported that the little appendix is a "safe house" for important gut bacteria. If the intestine becomes infected and is forced to flush everything out (diarrhea), the good bacteria stored in the appendix are there to return the intestine to normal working order. "Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a vestigial organ." 14 The vestigial organ idea helped fool millions of people into believing the theory of evolution. Today, this "proof" is down the toilet. Violating the law

The theory of Evolution violates two laws of science. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (law of increasing entropy) says that things which start out concentrated together spread out over time. If you heat one room in a house, then open the door to that room, eventually the temperature in the whole house evens out (reaches equilibrium). Knowing how far this evening-out has progressed at any point in time tells you the entropy. Entropy can measure the loss of a system's ability to do work. Entropy is also a measure of disorder, and that is where evolution theory hits an impenetrable wall. Natural processes proceed in only one direction, toward equilibrium and disorder. Things fall apart over time, they do not get more organized. W