EVOLUTIONARY FALLOUT

by Allan Webber, Adelaide South Australia

May 11th, 2004- updated 11th May 2007

This page sets out a case for the concept of chance as the prime cause of evolution being amended to include the concept of intrinsic patterning on the same non-ideological footing as the Big Bang theory.

Scientific theories are often flawed because observation yields results that require explanations outside of current knowledge and this seems to be the case with current evolutionary theory. Where a theory has no access to some phenomena then, for the want of a better understanding, various contradictions tend to be ignored. We are not yet in a position to acknowledge this flaw in our perception of the evolutionary universe and tend to rationalize away the implausibility that exists within the Darwinian premise.

It's always been difficult to stand aside from this issue and acknowledge the weakness in the observed pattern for to do so opens up a realm of unwanted debate with 'creationists'.

The flaw I suggest is there can be understood by looking at a previous example of a similar disparity between knowledge and observation. A clear and simple example is that of the 'life of the sun' before the concept of nuclear fusion was understood. It was not until the last century that scientists were able to explain the huge dilemma that the sun's life posed. Conventional burning rates would have implied a very short life and a huge starting size for the sun (almost touching the earth even if it was just a few thousand years old). The size of the sun was not reported as changing over the last five thousand years and science basically had to ignore the contradictions in order to move forward with geological evidence that implied a much older life for the solar system than a few thousand years.

To move forward required some degree of bluster, bravado and disingenuous argument. It required a call upon the authority of scientific orthodoxy to discredit the link that others sought to make between this failure and the scientific claim of a vast history for the universe. Yet, the flaw was real, the observation was true, the sun had not discernibly changed in size over thousands of years.

We live with such a discrepancy today. Evolutionary theory glosses over the huge barriers surrounding its core premise, the succession of chance needed to explain all types of change. It chooses to ignore one of the richest fields that show both the contradiction and the way forward. It ignores the evidence of the current debris.

Evolution is ongoing, it does not cease, nor does it as sometimes implied, wipe out all the predecessors. Survival of the fittest does not leave a clean slate behind with only the new-form surviving.

Darwin based his theory on the observation of the present, whilst today there seems to be a pre-occupation with the past, the archaeological record for the substantiation of evolution.

Yet, the present is not just the result of completed evolution, it is also the record of ongoing uncompleted change. The present must carry the debris of unsuccessful, incomplete evolution or otherwise there could be no future change. The present is just a single step in the necessary succession of changes. This is the fundamental point that highlights what we currently ignore.

What is surprising is the lack of evidence in current life forms to support the idea of major functional change. There are not enough imperfections that survive on a day to day basis to give the absolutely essential foundation for the ongoing sequence needed before the 'successful' form can emerge. There are not enough examples of half developed wings, feathers, livers, hearts, eyes and brains. There are also not enough examples of the process of evolution producing viable higher species in the living record of births. The process of birth-driven evolution has the major flaw that the record does not show it occurring.

It cannot be disputed that change occurs, new species do evolve, that new organs form but we do not see it happen before our eyes, we do not see its debris.

To move from the monkey brain to the human brain is not just a question of size. It is not just the creation of a single step, it requires a vast number of different organs, chemical producers and synchronizations all to come into being at once. You cannot operate an airplane with a perfect wing and no tail and equally as important you can't fly a plane with a perfect tail and no wings. Birds cannot fly with an imperfect wing, and it is imperfect without the proper feather structure, the skeleton and nervous system to coordinate such a complex task. And moreover without such a simultaneous perfection there is no means for the changed individual to carry the process into the future. If there was we should see the evidence of this imperfection in every individual, in every species that now lives. We should be able to identify where these imperfections are heading, to classify and study them. However we do have a good comparative basis that implies 'perfection completion' is involved in the development of the embryo and in every created form of life.

The embryo goes though every stage of its evolution. It exhibits the debris of change but importantly it does not stop at a stage of imperfection. To be a viable form it tries to move to completion, to make sure the organ becomes a complete eye, a complete brain, heart or leg. It develops a balanced chemistry that sustains the organism. We see evolution at work in this genesis and it does not support the idea that incomplete forms are an end-point. Babies born too early die, they do not form a basis of a new generation. It is why the debris is absent, imperfections die or tend to be fruitless. In the evolution of every individual there is the explanation as to why there is no debris, it doesn't come about by chance but because there is a programmed sequence guiding it. From one unremarkable cell there is division, differentiation, re-genesis and birth of cells that know their place and know their function.

The explanation that imperfections are the source of evolution gains its support through quoting mathematical statistics. The argument used is that it requires millions of imperfections before one comes along that proves to be sustainable but the sheer number of individuals born make this statistic a reality .

There is much mischief in this notion, one being that it is a lax rationalism of the unexplained. It is a non-disprovable concept.

To show the illogic of what we are asked to believe consider a car travelling though a city. What are the chances of passing from one end of the city to another without getting a red light?. I have never achieved this in Adelaide, South Australia, which is a small city with a low density population. The best I've ever achieved is to get half way through on one occasion. I agree that given enough people and enough time eventually someone is likely to get through and therefore there is a finite probability of the event occurring. Even if we expanded this notion out to requiring the driver to repeat it a hundred times in a row within the city of Adelaide, there might still be a calculable chance. But if we transfer that same question to a city such as New York or London or Sydney where there is usually at least one point where you can never successfully get between two successive lights without stopping then the probability is zero. It only requires one stopping point for the event to be impossible.

Similarly, the more complex a change and the more components needing to simultaneously adapt, then there is not just a diminution of probability but a probability of impossibility of occurrence. If the eye needs an optic nerve to adjust its lens, it will not ever proceed to the lens unless there are numerous paths by which it could reach that goal, where a pseudo lens and a pseudo nerve work together with a pseudo set of receptors and a pseudo optical region of the brain. The debris of evolution should show countless forms of creatures that live today that have lens based eyes that do not work but are used for other activities. We should see every form of the eye in its perfect state and in its developmental states right now, in the current time. We should see history as well as the potential future coexisting. Evolution of the eye didn't stop once the secret was granted to various species, all those with less primitive eyes should still be developing and their offspring should show all of the trail that archaeologists look for in the fossil record. The record can't just be in the rocks, it has to be there in the individuals that live today. Every step of the evolutionary should still exist in life today if the theory of chance is right.

In the absence of this debris we are required to believe that it took place as a consequence of a statistical loophole but this has too many points at which the probability can be reduced to zero. None of these difficulties occur if we use what the world of living things does reveal within its debris.

The development of life from a seed is the most abundant source of evidence of evolution. Each individual develops from one primeval cell. It differentiates into cells that are unique and we see this as the consequence of a chemical program built into that first cell. This one cell grows into a universe that is a life-form. It draws nutrient from the external universe to build mass that was not there in the original cell, it divulges specific operation rules to the next generation as each new cell is generated and specifies the means of survival of each element and the total mass of the organism. It is not unlike the creation of the universe, it is a big-bang that sets physical and chemical rules, that generates dimensions that seem to have no source but yet exists in the original creation.

The evolution from seed is displayed in every instance of life existing today and in every form that has ever been. There is no lack of evidence of this type of evolution and there is no lack of debris.

And central to this process is the concept of a program built into that very first cell, a program that takes each process to its perfect conclusion. Where it does not and an abnormality is created, it doesn't come in the form of a highly complex function, but a shading of that which already exists. This is the evolutionary story that Darwin's work showed for there is adaptation of form and we see it all around us. Each individuals has attributes that differ from their parents . Yet we don't see examples of organisms giving birth to a new style of organ so close to perfection that their survival is assured and enhanced. We do see differences that seem like imperfections at the time and which can evolve with the changing environment but this is different to moving from a land creature to one capable of flying. We don't see organisms whose parent have no ability to fly being born with wings that allow them to fly or even with potential wings that suggest it's just waiting to happen. We don't see the signs of 'this will happen but not just yet'. The debris does not show nature's changes are waiting to build on a vast universe of hidden imperfections..

The debris of life does show gross imperfection but it leads to extinction of the greatly malformed individual. Survival of such a vast change of genetic material would require two individuals to be created simultaneously if the line was to regenerate itself. This is true even if the perfect organ was created by a massive functional evolution, it has to breed and unless there's two, it must breed with an inferior species, that from which it came.

Within the growth of the individual from the egg this is not a problem, its growth is not controlled by chance but by a program that avoids its non-sustainability. Embryonic evolution lets the creature have imperfect organs but they evolve into sustainable forms. The eye is not capable of seeing in its half-complete foetal state, nor does it depend on breeding with other organs for it to reach its final form. It only gets to its stage of perfection because it is programmed to pass to that point. It is true that there is debris from this growth. There are imperfections in the program resulting in malformation but they aren't proof there is no program just that it has failed.

There is no difficulty in accepting the programming capability of the single cells from which organisms are generated. We haven't ever felt the need to propose an ideological reason to endorse this idea, and the growth of the individual is the result of evolution, it is part of the debris of evolution, it is the exemplar of evolution's rules. Everything we know to be true of evolution applies to the growth of the individual. It should not be difficult to accept that the development of the individual is exactly the process of evolution but on a smaller scale.

We do know that one aspect of life has not changed. It is the essentials of the gene. Its spiral and its components are thought to have been the same in the very first organism and in every one created since.

At the creation of the universe there were brought into being electrons, atoms, planets, galaxies all bound by laws that define the universe we see. It is not far-fetched to think of life as another dimension of this same creation, to think that the creation gene holds the laws of evolution within itself and that at points in time it reveals another one of its infinite store of perfect developments. Looking at the growth of a baby from the embryo we see this unfold, and as marvellous as it is we accept it is held within an invisible program. There seems to be little difference between what we see in the growth of the individual and the growth of species. The answer surely lies in that mysterious program that each generation holds within its genes.

End of paper.

Hoodia