Evolution’s Surprising New Critics

Most people, both Christians and
non-Christians alike, would be surprised
to learn that all is not well in
the land of molecules-to-man evolution.
Creationists aren’t the only ones
questioning the reigning evolutionary
model—a band of rebellious evolutionists
is leading a new movement called
The Third Way.

As their website explains, “The vast
majority of people believe that there
are only two alternative ways to explain
the origins of biological diversity. One
way is Creationism that depends upon
intervention by a divine Creator. . . .
The commonly accepted alternative
is Neo-Darwinism, which . . . invokes
a set of unsupported assumptions. . . .
Many scientists today see the need for
. . . novel scientific thinking about the
evolutionary process.”

This rebellion among the academic
faithful is eliciting harsh responses
from hardcore evolution promoters
like Jerry Coyne, who expressed his
frustration in a blog: “I am irritated
by the constant appearance of what I
call ‘BIS’—the Big Idea Syndrome.” He
goes on to explain, “An evolutionist
finds a new phenomenon, say transposable
elements, or epigenetics, or
‘modularity,’ and suddenly that one
phenomenon becomes the centerpiece
of a claim that modern evolutionary
theory is ripe for a revolution.”1

One of Coyne’s targets is Massimo
Pigliucci, a leader in the rebellion
who replied in a tit for tat, “Talk of
an Extended Synthesis isn’t ‘any old
claim’; it is a serious discussion among
credentialed scientists. . . . At some
point Coyne, Lynch [another famous
evolutionist], and others need to do a
bit more than just shake their heads
and play armchair curmudgeon.”2

While these heated exchanges are
entertaining and enlightening, the
truth is, decades of scientific discovery
have revealed numerous complex
cellular systems that enable creatures
to develop, grow, and adapt. These
discoveries show no sign of having
evolved bit by bit through chance evolutionary
processes.

The all-or-nothing complexity of
these amazing systems, which we are
only just beginning to understand,
speaks emphatically of design by an
omnipotent Creator. And the latest
biological discoveries are doing nothing
to help the cause of the evolutionary
faithful (either the old guard or the
recent “Third Wave” rebels).

A Facade of Unity

Secular scientists have debated the
grand idea of evolution—and how it
might possibly work in the real world—since Darwin first proposed his ideas
over 150 years ago. Today this debate
has gotten hotter than ever. This huge
dissenting faction of evolutionary scientists
believes that they need a new
“extended evolutionary synthesis”
(more on that in a moment). They are
even holding their own scientific conferences,
where they are dumping the
traditional textbook version of Darwinian
evolution. You can read more about
their reasoning and agenda on their
website, www.thethirdwayofevolution.com.

Some of the more famous founders
of The Third Way are James Shapiro
(University of Chicago), Denis Noble
(University of Oxford), Eva Jablonka
(Tel Aviv University), Gerd Müller
(University of Vienna), Eugene Koonin
(National Center for Biotechnology
Information USA), and Scott Gilbert
(University of Helsinki). In fact, the
website lists 64 leading secular academics
endorsing the movement, most
of whom are prominent scientists and
researchers.

Since the days of Charles Darwin,
evolutionary beliefs have never
been fully settled. New findings have
served only to further prove the shortcomings
of the current “standard”
view (called the “Modern Synthesis”
or “Neo-Darwinism”) popularized in
most textbooks.

In the heat of debate one fact gets
overlooked. There really is a true “third
way,” an alternative option that has
been on the table from the very beginning:
creation. The evolutionary rebels
dismiss creationism on their website
as “clearly unscientific because it
brings an arbitrary supernatural force
into the evolution process.”

However, such a dismissive attitude
says more about the shortsightedness
of the accusers than the shortcomings
of the accused. Creation is scientific.
In fact, it is the best way to make sense
of all the data.

Creationists have long been adopting
and quoting many of these people
and their carefully researched findings
because they point strongly to
complex design. God put those designs
into his creatures to enable them to
adapt within the limits of created kinds
to changing needs in our fallen world.

What’s “New” About Neo-Darwinism?

Before we talk in detail about this
amazing turn of events in the scientific
world, we need to briefly review
how the discoveries of genetics created
ongoing (and unresolved) challenges
to classic Darwinian evolution.

In the mid-1800s, Darwin proposed
that nature could select among variations
within a group of interbreeding
creatures. He compared the process to
a plant or animal breeder who might
select a flower or pigeon for certain
traits and create new breeds. Darwin
then extrapolated that small variations
within a specific kind of creature
could expand into a grand scheme of
bacteria-to-people evolution.

However, neither Darwin nor his
contemporaries had any clue about
genetics or the basic principles of
inheritance, much less the complexity
of cellular biology. At the same time
that Darwin was writing, the monk
Gregor Mendel was demonstrating
how garden peas inherit simple traits
(the first studies in genetics), but his
work was unknown at the time.

In the early part of the twentieth
century, scientists began documenting
the principles of genetic inheritance
and then integrated their findings
with both mathematics and Darwin’s
ideas about natural selection. The new
system of evolutionary thought was
the topic of Julian Huxley’s 1942 book,
Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.

This new golden age of so-called
evolutionary science was full of grand
ideas but short on empirical evidence
for molecules-to-man evolution. In
fact, it didn’t take long for the facts
of scientific discovery to raise havoc
with evolutionary ideas. Two of the
most prominent troublemakers were
the leading evolutionists of this era.
Ernst Mayr was an authority on speciation
and systematics (the classification
of living things and fossils), and
George Gaylord Simpson was a leading
paleontologist.

Both Mayr and Simpson noticed that
the hugely expanding evidence of the
fossil record was not helping Darwin’s
ideas. Nearly all types of creatures
appeared abruptly. Undisputed transitional
forms between basic types
of creatures were not forthcoming.
Stasis (lack of change) was the norm.
So Mayr and Simpson concluded that
evolution must have occurred erratically
by large jumps in small populations
that did not get fossilized.3

In addition to problems with the fossil
record, evolutionary theorists were
also having great difficulty in reconciling
their statistical models with ideas
of mutation and selection. Without
getting into the details, the problem
became popularly known as Haldane’s
dilemma, named after the genetics
mathematician who exposed it.

As a result of Haldane’s dilemma, a
number of prominent dissenters in the
1960s proposed that selection was not
a major driving force in evolution, as
Darwin had proposed. They said that
mutations were mostly neutral in their
effect (instead of harmful) and the
majority of DNA in organisms evolved
randomly in a process called genetic
drift. This “neutral model” theory of
evolution is still popular with many
scientists today.

Problems with the fossil record got
worse, too, and helped give impetus for
another key chapter in evolutionary
dissent known as punctuated equilibrium,
proposed in 1972 by renowned
evolutionists Stephen Jay Gould and
Niles Eldredge. To accommodate the
bleak reality of the fossil record, they
proposed that evolution is marked by
long periods of stability interrupted by
infrequent bursts of rapid change.

Dissent Turns to Revolt

The Modern Synthesis was clearly
in trouble. Modern molecular biology
was just getting off the ground
in the 1970s and 1980s, so evolutionists
hoped some magical mechanism
would be found to explain how creatures
could evolve rapidly as Gould
and Eldredge argued. However, new
discoveries about the cell and DNA
were only revealing more complexity
and mystery.

As if these problems were not bad
enough, evolution’s worst nightmare
was yet to come—the modern revolution
in molecular biology and genomics.
Because of the immense level of
genetic and cellular complexity, evolutionary
scientists in different fields
are now at odds with each other as to
how evolution can even work.

About 10 years ago, a group of prominent
evolutionary scientists officially
broke away from the herd and formed
The Third Way, hoping to develop an
“Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.”
Their big break came at “The Woodstock
of Evolution,” a famous meeting
of 16 scientists at the Konrad Lorenz
Institute in Altenberg, Austria, in
2008. Their dissenting views were
published in the book The Altenberg 16:
An Exposé of the Evolution Industry by
science journalist Suzan Mazur.

In 2016, major scientists from a
dozen countries presented even more
evidence of the great anti-Darwinian
paradigm shift in a meeting at the
Royal Society in England. The results
were published in yet another book
by Mazur entitled The Paradigm Shifters:
Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the
Culture of Darwin.”

The Specifics

Now let’s get into the specific reasons
fueling this rebellion. As the new era of
molecular discoveries progressed, the
antiquated idea that genes were simple
units of inheritance subject to simple
selection was challenged.

No Room for Random Mutations

The complexity of genes is mindblowing.
The boundaries between
genes have become totally blurred so
that we can no longer assume genes
could evolve independently. Genes
overlap each other; some genes are
imbedded inside other genes; and
many genes have controlling regions
inside neighboring genes or sometimes
hundreds of thousands of DNA letters
away from the gene they control.

And adding to this genetic complexity
is the fact that virtually the entire
genome is now proving to be functional,
leaving no room for vast, randomly
evolving regions of “junk” DNA
as the neutral model of evolution had
proposed (mentioned above).

Now it has also become very
clear that beneficial mutations are
extremely rare. Most genes that have
been studied are unable to mutate
freely and evolve as once thought. In
fact, mutations are not only typically
harmful, but because genes form complex
networks with other genes, a
harmful mutation can actually have
wide-ranging negative effects. It would
be like pulling a chip from the motherboard
of a computer and expecting
something good to happen.

Recognizing this clear impediment,
evolution dissenters in the Third Way
movement stated that Neo-Darwinism
“ignores much contemporary molecular
evidence and invokes a set of
unsupported assumptions about the
accidental nature of hereditary variation.”
They go on to say, “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.”4

Epigenetics

Part of this complex,
multilayered regulation of DNA is
an emerging field called epigenetics.
This “outside” management of DNA
has different levels. At one level,
highly specialized machinery in the
cell places specific tags, called methyl
groups, directly on the DNA molecule.
These tags help control the activity of
genes. But it doesn’t stop there. DNA
is wrapped around bead-like protein
complexes (called histones), which
can themselves be tagged with as
many as 100 different types of modifications
that also control the activity
of genes.

The code for these tags is specific to
whether a cell is in a liver or a brain.
More than that, they play a key role in
helping creatures adapt to changing
environments. For example, much of
the variation observed in beak shapes
between the different species of
finches that Darwin observed is now
known to be caused by epigenetics.

Specialized sensors, pathways,
and control mechanisms in cells are
designed to respond to changes in
the environment (light, temperature,
chemicals), and they epigenetically
modify the genome to allow the
creature to adapt. And many of these
adaptive epigenetic changes can be
passed along to offspring so that it, too, can
be better adapted from birth.

Orchestrated Cell Division

A significant
number of developmental biologists,
who study how one cell divides
and specializes to produce humans or
animals, are also joining the ranks of
dissent. This burgeoning field of science
has shown that mutation cannot
tamper with the specific modules of
genes necessary during the development
of an organism. These orchestrated
genes work together, by design,
in forming the basic body plan of, for
example, a dog or cat. But later, in the
final stages of development, the genes
that form the finishing touches can
vary within limits, such as genes to
shape a specific breed of dog.

Some early steps must be incredibly
rigid, and later steps flexible but
not too flexible. This sophisticated
orchestration shouts that it came from
a Designer. Genesis teaches that God
originally made distinct “kinds” of
creatures, but within each created
kind, we get all the variety we see
today. The discoveries of developmental
biology confirm that teaching.

It gets even better. Complex adaptive
mechanisms manipulate developmental
processes (called developmental
plasticity). Like epigenetics,
these systems play an additional role
in adaptation that is not at all random.
An example is the nest temperature
that determines how many alligator
eggs become females versus males.

Genetic Integration with Other
Life Forms

Another important factor
increasing the complexity of life is
the fact that organisms do not live in
isolation but in highly complex, interdependent
communities with other
organisms. Humans, animals, and
plants depend on many different types
of microbial organisms for proper
growth, development, and daily living.
In fact, specific genes and biological
pathways in both the host (us) and the
many different microbes that live in
our bodies are designed to interface
with each other and exchange specific
chemical messages. The impossibility
that these systems could have evolved
independently for such highly optimized
purposes not only complicates
evolution, but utterly defies it.

Third Way scientists astutely recognize
the failure of evolutionary ideas
to explain the history of life but can
offer no credible alternative. Instead of
acknowledging the obvious, that God
created all this biological complexity,
they claim ignorance, saying we still
need “a deeper and more complete
exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary
process.”

To them, invoking a Creator as the
origin of this complexity is outside the
realm of science. Yet it isn’t outside science.
It’s merely outside their unyielding
commitment to the naturalistic
(godless) paradigm of life’s origin, no
matter how absurd it now appears.

The world is filled with highly complex
engineered systems beyond our
wildest imaginations, which our top
scientists are only just beginning to
understand. The most satisfying scientific
explanation, by far, is the work of
an omnipotent, all-wise Creator.

https://answersingenesis.org/evolution/evolutions-surprising-new-critics/ This article originally appeared on answersingenesis.org

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