|
Creation Triumphs
Over Evolution
Molecular Evidence
—
Darwinists Confirm
God Created Man
Chapter One
With the enormous advances in biochemistry, a relatively new discipline is being developed by evolutionists. The principal molecular components of the “biological cell” are proteins—which consist of a long chain of amino acids in a specific sequence—and the molecular sequences of the DNA and RNA molecules. Different techniques are employed to measure the divergency in these molecular sequences. Accordingly, biochemists are classifying species and larger groups by their degree of similarity at the molecular level. But the validity of these classifications so obtained is a point of controversy even among evolutionists.
Darwin Caught in a Mousetrap
While Darwinists were playing games with biochemistry, Michael Behe confronted them with a challenge that has left them reeling. This greatest scientific challenge yet to Darwinism was capsulated in a
Christianity Today article as follows:
During the fall of 1996, a series of cultural earthquakes shook the secular world with the publication of a revolutionary new book, Michael Behe’s
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution. The reviewer in the New York Times book review praised Behe’s deft analogies and delightfully whimsical style, and took sober note of the book’s radical challenge to Darwinism. Newspapers and magazines from Vancouver to London, including
Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and several of the world’s leading scientific journals, reported strange tremors in the world of evolutionary biology.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper read primarily by university professors and administrators, did a feature story on the author two months after his book appeared. The eye-catching headline read, “A Biochemist Urges Darwinists to Acknowledge the Role Played by an Intelligent Designer.” (1)
With his book realizing multiple printings, Behe is popular on the university-speaking circuit. In a typical lecture, Behe projects on a screen his favorite quote by Darwin from
The Origin of Species:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. (2)
Behe takes on Darwin’s challenge by asking, “What type of biological system could not be formed by ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications’? Well, for starters, a system that has a quality that I call irreducible complexity.”(3) Next, Behe flashes on the screen his hallmark illustration of “irreducible complexity”—a mousetrap! After observing that all five parts of the trap are simultaneously essential for performance, Behe adds:
You need all the parts to catch a mouse. You can’t catch a few mice with a platform, then add the spring and catch a few more, and then add the hammer and improve its function. All the parts must be there to have any function at all. The mousetrap is irreducibly complex. (4)
Next Behe explores the ultra-complex world of molecular machinery and cellular systems. He describes the chemical chain reaction that gives rise to vision, details the elegant but complex structure of the whiplike cilium with which many kinds of cells are equipped, and then observes the extremely complicated mechanism by which blood is formed (see Appendix). Behe’s logical and eloquent conclusions are summarized:
To Darwin, the cell was a “black box”—its inner workings were utterly mysterious to him. Now, the black box has been opened up and we know how it works. Applying Darwin’s test to that ultra-complex world of molecular machinery and cellular systems that have been discovered over the past 40 years, we can say that Darwin’s theory has “absolutely broken down.” (5)
With that observation of cell complexity, Darwin is caught in Behe’s mousetrap! Behe presses his point further:
As you search the professional literature of the last several decades looking for articles that have been published even attempting to explain the possible Darwinian step-by-step origin of any of the systems, you will encounter a thundering silence. Absolutely no one—not one scientist—has published any detailed proposal or explanation of the possible evolution of any such complex biochemical system. And when a science does not publish, it ought to perish. (6)
Behe’s only conclusion is that everywhere we look inside the cell, evidence is staring scientists in the face that suggests the systems were directly designed by an intelligent agent. The only answer mustered by evolutionists to Behe is:
You’re giving up too soon. Biochemistry is in its infancy. These systems were discovered just 20 or 30 years ago. Within the next few years, we may begin to figure out how all these systems evolved.
Behe’s ready reply is:
Actually, many of these systems have been fully understood for 40 years or more, and not one explanation has been published offering a plausible scenario by which they could have evolved. Any science that claims to have explained something, when in fact they have published no explanation at all, should be brought to account. (7)
The “intelligence” behind such marvelous “irreducibly complex systems” in nature, of course, is God. How infinitely more complex the human cell, the eye or the brain—than a mousetrap! How wonderfully and poetically the Psalmist expressed appreciation of his Intelligent Creator who engineered the most beautiful of systems:
Thou it was who didst fashion my inward parts; thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb, I will praise thee, for thou dost fill me with awe; wonderful thou art, and wonderful thy works. Thou knowest me through and through: my body is no mystery to thee, how I was secretly kneaded into shape and patterned in the depths of the earth. Thou didst see my limbs unformed in the womb. . .day by day they were fashioned, not one of them was late in growing. How deep I find thy thoughts, O God, how inexhaustible their themes! (8)
Darwinists Prove Man Was Created
A recent study by evolutionary biologists Dorst (Yale), Akashi (University of Chicago) and Gilbert (Harvard) disproved the premise of evolution. Their study left evolutionists reeling. In their quest for the ancestry of humans, these scientists probed for genetic differences in the Y chromosome of 38 men of different ethnic groups living in different parts of the world. To their amazement, Dorit and his team found
no nucleotide differences at all in the nonrecombinant part of the Y chromosomes. This lack of deviation verified that no evolution has occurred in the male ancestry of humans. Stunned by these unexpected results, Dorit and his associates did a statistical analysis to determine whether the 38 men sampled somehow inaccurately represented the male population of the earth. They were forced to conclude that man’s forefather was a single individual—not a group of hominids—who lived no more than 270,000 years ago.(9)
The Bible account of creation is vindicated by scientists. God created Adam, father of the human race. Also, the “no more than 270,000 years” is an interesting retraction from wilder speculations of millions of years. Still, the molecular clock is
a priori geared to an evolutionary time frame of history—without consideration of the Biblical time frame.
This study was devastating to Darwinists. Shortly thereafter, an American molecular biologist, Michael Hammer, examined 2,600 nucleotide base pair segments of the Y chromosomes in 16 ethnically distinct groups. His results indicated that all descended from one man living as recently as 51,000 years ago.
A British team of geneticists studied 100,000 nucleotide based pairs in five ethnically distinct groups. The results were even more compatible with the Bible. Humans are descendants from one man who lived, according to their calculations, 37,000-49,000 years ago.(10) A few more careful studies and scientists’ molecular time clock will agree with the Biblical time frame of history.
Another study was conducted in 1987 on the mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed in the female line from mother to daughter. The conclusion of this study was that all contemporary humans are descendants of one woman (whom ironically they call “Eve”), living less than 200,000 years ago. This study observed a very
slight variation on the sampling of women, in contrast to no variation on the men. The study on women may indicate the possibility of slight micro-evolution. Therefore, the male study harmonizes with the Genesis account of creation. Males have a singular origin—Father Adam—whereas this is not true of women. Eve was created from Adam, which accounts for the slight variation in the mitochondrial DNA of women.
Darwinian biochemists face another big problem when the Y chromosome of humans is compared with the Y chromosome of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Large genetic variations occur between these species. Yet within each specie very little, if any, variation is found. According to Darwinists, all modern primates evolved from a common ancestor 7 to 20 millions of years ago. If this model is correct, less genetic variation between modern primates should be identifiable and greater variation within these species. But the opposite was true. Darwinists employ every rationale to counter these findings, but the facts stand for themselves.
Recent research on Neanderthal has challenged the Darwinists’ arbitrary evolutionary sequence of hominids. In 1996 anthropologists Jeffrey Schwartz and Ian Fattersall examined more than a dozen Neanderthal skulls. They found nasal bones and sinus cavities many times larger than modern man’s—and no tear ducts. Their conclusions could cause tears for evolutionists! Why? They asserted that anatomical differences eliminates Neanderthal from the line of human ancestry!
The final blow to Neanderthal was struck by Darwinists in 1997. Darwinist molecular researchers recovered DNA from a Neanderthal fossil and decoded it to compare how closely it resembled human DNA. Their conclusions—the human face is neither descended from nor related to Neanderthal species. This blow to Darwinism startled the world. The news was heralded by
Newsweek (July 21, 1997, V. 130, p. 65) with a picture of Neanderthal on its front cover.
The Darwinists’ “molecular clock” is beginning to look more like the “Genesis clock.” Molecular research confirms what would reasonably be expected of a creation model.(11)
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. . .And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.(12)
|
