The Unsubstantiated Hypothesis of Evolution
People should not use the term 'the theory of evolution' because the word 'theory' gives credence to the concept of evolution. Evolution is a hypothesis and is not substantiated in any way!
Natural selection is incapable of producing a life form to a higher order. It may seem logical that small changes over millions of years could produce, say, a man from an amoeba. But the details required for this to happen make it inconceivable that it could happen.
I am not talking about changes within a species! There are often many varieties of an animal within it's species. That is clear for all to see. Just look at the variety of dogs that have a single dog as their common ancestor. Some of these dogs have been deliberately bred (designed?) by people for specific purposes. But all that has happened within the species is that certain genetic features have been emphasised and some has been bred out. No new genetic material has been created, but some has been lost!
No new species have been created. The fact that these dogs will produce offspring with the same characteristics as the parents is not evolution as defined by Darwin. They are still dogs! These very first dogs (one male and one female) were fully formed and capable of breeding. They contained all the complexities that dogs have now! Lucky that they were both in the same location at the same time in order to breed and produce the new species!
Do bear in mind that the wide variety of dogs that we now have actually supports the idea that all dogs originated from a single pair of fully formed and fully functioning dogs, one male and one female. Their offspring took on various characteristics over time and most of these changes would have been in response to environmental factors although a number of dog breeds have resulted from selective breeding by human beings.
The real question is where the original pair of dogs came from! What were they before they were dogs? What were they like over the supposed thouands of generations which left them ending up looking dogs? Why haven't the dogs kept evolving?
There are some interesting questions to ask about the recent discoveries of thousands, possibly millions, of species at the bottom of our oceans? How did they get there? It is an extreme environment environment, the water pressure is huge.
Species cannot adapt to the water pressure at depth. It takes years for generations of a species to adapt and one second to be crushed to death if they were not fully adapted!
I find it a lot easier to believe in a Creator God!
Most people would probably agree that a million monkeys typing randomly into a million computers could never by pure chance alone end up with one of them typing a Shakespeare play! Some people claim that it is theoretically possible but science demonstrates that anything with a probability greater that 1018 is actually impossible of happening!
The complexity of even a dog is so great that for a random process to produce such a creature it would be like one of these industrious monkeys randomly typing every play that Shakespeare wrote one after the other completely word perfect!
It is interesting that a mechanism exists within most species that prevents them from interbreeding with other species. If this restriction evolved then natural selection was severely restricting itself from operating and could not then be responsible for the wide diversity of life forms on planet Earth!
Can a mutation create a new species?
The answer is 'no' because a mutation normally only loses genetic material. There is no way that a mutation could cause all the changes to the brain, the nervous system and the rest of the body by affecting the dna in the fertilized egg in such a way that a new species results! A mutation could not result in a different species. In reality, damaged/changed dna is more likely to cause an animal (or human) to be damaged or to be sick.
If you haven't yet looked at the makeup of a cell (including the DNA) then you will find it really interesting seeing the latest scientific discoveries about what the DNA contains.
Where are the intermediate stages?
If evolution's claims that small changes over millions of years would produce a new species from an existing species then we would be able to see some intermediatory forms in the fossil record. We should be able to see them all around us now!
Changes from 'pure chance' are just as likely to stop happening at some point as they would be to continue the changes until a new species is completely formed! where are these intermediate species?
Don't let people use the excuse that the fossil record is 'incomplete'. What they really mean is that it doesn't support their belief system! There are two reasons why the fossil records would be incomplete from the perspective of an evolutionist:
1. No one has yet found any intermediary stages.
2. There are no intermediary stages to be found.
The evolutionist now suggests that the changes occurred in small, isolated populations so that it would be highly unlikely that the intermediatary forms would be found!
This is simply a red herring, an attempt to justify themselves with something that could never be proven one way or the other.
It is also unlikely that small, isolated poulations of species would survive over many, many years until evolution decides that enough change has taken place for that species to then spread around the globe. Remember that this would have to apply to all the millions of different species that have 'evolved' on planet earth.
Any small group of plants and animals is susceptible to being destroyed by other creatures, changing weather patterns, natural disasters, floods, predators, illnesses, etc. We are talking about a huge number, potentially millions, of endemic species of animals, insects, plants, etc. all existing in these small groups, isolated from contacts outside the group, yet slowly evolving into the form that we see them now!
Ice core samples show that the Earth climate has been far from stable over the years. Several ice ages have taken place. These millions of small groups of endemic species would have problems surviving to our modern age. This would suggest that the evolutionary requirement for millions of years for new species to evolve is just plain wrong!
The 'evolutionary trees' as envisaged from the days of Darwin, simply do not exist. 'We have access only to the tips of the tree, the tree itself is a theory'
[Colin Patterson The Listener 106:390 http://evolution-facts.org/Appendix/a15.htm].
The Evolutionist also needs to explain why mankind is finding more and more creatures, insects and plants that are unchanged from the fossil records of million of years ago!
Why would natural selection be working on some creatures and not on others? If it was really only by 'pure chance' that change happened then it could be said that these species had not changed because 'lady luck' had not visited them yet! But this thinking would only be valid if one accepts that the same 'pure chance' would also mean that some species would start to change and then not complete the changes! If a species can survive the effects of evolutionary change over thousands of generations then it is most likely that we would see some species which have stopped changing and are left in an incomplete state!
In many cases the so-called 'original' form does not seem to be any different to today's version! So the scientists just 'assume' that they are precursors to the current models! For example the recent 47 million year old (!) Lemur like (may 2009) creature is seen as the missing link between today's primates and more distant relatives. Really!! Why can it not be a Lemur like creature that has been fossilised over time and which shows very little difference to modern day Lemurs? Even if it is a Lemur of a very long time ago, all that is demonstrated by its presence is that a Lemur-like creatue existed then and exists now!
Yes, some creatures have died out. We have seen species die out in our lifetime. We are seeing more and more species becoming extinct at this time.The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) identifies these species that have become extinct recently or are close to being extinct.
Scientists talk about ice ages, volcanos, earthquakes being the reason why species have died out over time. But this would suggest that the Earth was not very stable over the ages thus making the idea of small, isolated populations being given peace and quiet to transform into new speces highly improbable!
But if the claims for millions of years of evolution to have taken place for the modern day man, animals, plants, etc to be as they are, then it must be impossible for any creatures not to have changed at all!
Almost all fossils are found in water-laid sediments. The fossil record shows species appearing abruptly and fully functional in the strata. Where are the intermediatory stages?
The fact that fossils are mostly found in water-laid sediments and that there are frequently animals, fish and plant fossils all intermingled together (in one fossil a fish is in the process of swallowing a smaller fish), it would seem obvious that severe flooding has swept all this organic material together (which must have been a surprise to the fish that was having it's dinner!).
The oil and coal fields of the world would seem to also support severe flooding theories. The world appears to have been extremely rich in organic matter which was mostly destroyed and swept together into deep water to become the oil, coal and gas that is so convenient to us now! And of course the existing polystrate fossils of plants and trees must have been buried in some cataclysmatic event.
To summarise: if scientists dropped the idea of millions of years for species to evolve then they would have to give up the concept of evolution. But they would be able to explain the current global situation with very few issues. Of course they would have to accept the concept of a designer! And acknowledging a designer is something they seem desperate to avoid doing!