Does Natural Selection Really Work

Dwayne: Sorry for the confusion. I don't consider myself an ID advocate in that they insist on an intelligent designer but won't say who that would be. I have on more than a dozen occasions conducted seminars on Creation Science, showing the YEC is completely compatible with a literal rendering of the Scriptures. My intention is to encourage believers to have complete confidence in the God of the Bible and His Word. He is certainly intelligent beyond our ability to conceive.

I don't think that Plato was a believer in the God of the Bible, but that he was aware that there are and always (since Eden) have been forces at work in the world trying to manipulate and control people through trickery and deception.

 

Dwayne: I think there is room for both approaches; one assumes that the God of the Bible is the designer, the other declares it without apology and both make their case based on objective science. As for the verses in Romans, they are all true; the first two, at all times and the third is generally the case, but not all people turn away from God. And considering the history of Israel, when they turned away from God it was often at times when Gods' prophets were challenging them to hold to the truth.

As for the seminars, they are always done in churches. For 12 years I owned and operated a Christian Bookstore, and so had frequent contact with many of the pastors and church leaders in the city. At one time I was working with the youth pastor of a large church to set up a seminar. This church did not do Sunday School during the summer so that their teachers could have a break. So I offered to do the seminar as a summer quarter to all of the adult teachers and college age members. The youth pastor liked the idea and talked to the SS superintendent, who called me and asked what, exactly I intended to teach. I said I would teach a recent Creation and a literal flood. He refused my offer, saying he didn't believe those things. It was a Baptist church. Go figure.

 

Dwayne: I have the utmost respect for Morris and Whitcomb, their work and their legacy. It is discouraging that so many Christians, even Baptists, who choose to interpret the unchanging Word of God by the ever-changing dictates of science, instead of the other way around. As I have said before, I have known a man for many years who literally is a rocket scientist, and a believer. If I broach the subject of Creation science with him he will not speak to me. I am not afraid to challenge anybody to trust the Word over conventional science, though I probably wouldn't do to well trying to debate an evolutionary scientist, as I have no formal science education. But a "degree" from the Lord carries a lot more weight than one from any college or university. I understand that you can't prove God in a lab, but if evolutionary scientists and professors would even consider the facts that contradict there ideology then there would be hope for them. One science professor, whose name escapes me right now, at San Francisco State University, was asked by a student following one of his lectures, if he had ever considered the evidence that exists against evolution. He was taken aback, apparently unaware that any existed. At some point he took the bait and was shocked to find that there was much factual evidence that contradicted evolution, and it affected him profoundly. Anyway, I never pass up an opportunity to share the facts that refute evolution, and I never apologize for believing the old, old story. Have a great day.

 

Dwayne: I think this would be a good time to answer the question “Does Natural Selection Really Work?” I’ll go back once again to a question I asked of an evolutionist that I debated some years ago. I asked him if there were any prerequisites to the operation of natural selection (NS). His answer was both correct and profound – NS cannot operate until after the existence of at least one living cell. So the question of whether NS really works cannot be answered until we can explain the existence of life apart from it. So we will first visit the question of whether spontaneous generation is true or whether life was created.

Science cannot answer this question directly because the origin of life was not observed, and the very definition of empirical science is the objective, systematic analysis of observable, repeatable processes. And the historical sciences are based on inferences and are subject to the bias of the investigator. And even if scientists could “create” some kind of life in the lab today that wouldn’t prove that anything like it happened in the wild in the past.

All life is based in vast amounts of highly specific information. So, can random chemical reactions produce information? Not in our experience. Could monkeys pounding away on keyboards for millions of years produce the complete works of Shakespeare? No. Evolutionists will argue that, given enough time, anything can happen. This is the last hideout of people who are desperate to avoid the obvious.

And how did DNA come to contain coded information that proteins just happened to know how to read? Proteins themselves are amazing machines. The simplest extant cell we know of, mycoplasma genitalium, has 562,000 base pairs in its’ DNA and requires 482 different proteins. And scientists conducting minimal complexity experiments think that a proto-cell might have been able to survive with only 250 proteins, although they haven’t been able to demonstrate this. So, let’s consider the likelihood of just one small protein forming by “chance”. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are able to fold into particular three-dimensional shapes that can perform specific functions. A protein of 150 amino acids is considered a small protein, yet for that protein to form by chance is astronomically improbable. Four hurdles must be overcome for this to happen and all of them are huge.

The four hurdles are bonding, chirality, sequence and function. For amino acids to become a protein they must link together only by peptide bonds, but that only happens in nature about half the time. The probability of a polypeptide of 150 amino acids is ½ to the 150th, or about 1 in 10 to the 45th. Next is the matter of the handedness of the optical isomers. Except for glycine, all of the amino acids that are used in protein synthesis are left-handed, or L-forms of the amino acids. All D-form amino acids are toxic to proteins. So, again we have the same probability of randomly selecting 150 L-amino acids as with the bonding issue: ½ to the 150th, or 1 chance in 10 to the 90th of “chance” forming a polypeptide 150 units long made up of only L-alpha amino acids. The third hurdle, sequence, is much, much bigger. The number of ways that 150 units can be arranged is about 10 to the 195th, and that is assuming that only L-form alpha amino acids are available to choose from, but in nature there are hundreds of amino acids that are useless to protein formation. So for the sake of argument we are giving “chance” a very real advantage here. Even so 10 to the 195 is a number so large that there frankly isn’t enough time since the Big Bang for chance to try all the possible arrangements of 150 amino acids. It is also worth pointing out that there are only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the visible universe, and most of that matter in locked up in the interior of stars, leaving only a relatively small amount for the formation of life. Given only L-alpha amino acids to choose from, there are 160,000 different arrangements possible for just the first four positions, and the number grows exponentially with each additional position.

DNA is a library of information on, among other things, the synthesis of proteins. But only proteins have the ability to read that information. And proteins without DNA are a one-night wonder, not having the ability to replicate by themselves. Both had to appear at the same time and in the same place, or else life is impossible. DNA is a huge molecule with two spines made up of sugar/phosphate pairs linked together, and the 5-carbon sugar molecules are all right-handed with all of the sugars in one spine facing up and in the other spine facing down. Do you really think that just happened by accident? Three billion times in a row?

Lastly there is the matter of function. Even if a polypeptide of 150 L-alpha amino acids did form, would it fold into a three-dimensional shape that would be able to perform some metabolic function? Douglas Axe has calculated that of all the possible arrangements of 150, the number that could fold into stable, biologically useful shapes is 1 in 10 to the 74th. He compared the likelihood of chance producing a functional 150 amino acid protein to the odds of finding a single marked atom somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy through a blind, undirected search. Remember also that for our imaginary protocell to be viable this “miracle” would have to happen hundreds of times, all in the same place in the universe and at the same moment in time. And even if it did, how would DNA know how to code it’s’ sequence into a gene for future synthesis? So, the short answer is that it couldn’t happen and didn’t happen. But for the sake of argument let’s say that it did happen. Does/did NS work to improve living organisms?

Most evolutionists admit that beneficial mutations are extremely rare, occurring only about once in 20,000 mutations. Three of the common examples they offer are the four-winged fruit fly (which can’t fly), peppered moths (which are the same now as they were before the industrial revolution) and sickle cell disease (which, while it does confer an immunity to malaria, kills 25% of the people who inherit it, and the other 75% suffer from it their whole lives). Another example they use is bacteria that can become resistant to antibiotics. But this is generally the result of the loss of genetic information and produces an organism that has a survival advantage in the presence of the antibiotic, but is disadvantaged in general terms – they don’t compete as well as the regular forms of the organism in the wild. Also, random changes to genes that control body plan and early development are typically fatal. So, 1 step forward and 19,999 steps sideways or backward is not a good recipe for the great diversity of life that we see all around us. So, the answer is NO, natural selection doesn’t work. Once again, the only reasonable and rational explanation for life is the God of Creation.

 

Dwayne: That's very clever. May I quote you? Have a great day!