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4. Did you know that the “Icons of Evolution”, those “facts and evidences” that have been taught in virtually all biology textbooks from Junior High through advanced courses have for the most part been proven false or at least shown to have serious questions about their validity including the Peppered Moth, the Miller-Urey Origin of Live experiments, the similarity in early embryo development, etc.?
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The Peppered Moth
The Peppered Myth: "Of Moths and Men" An evolutionary tale (excerpts)
by Jonathan Wells
September 30, 2002
(http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?program=CRSC&command=view&id=1263)
Most textbooks fail to mention, however, that the peppered moth story began to unravel in the 1960s, when biologists noticed that dark moths were unexpectedly plentiful in some unpolluted locations. When anti-pollution legislation led to cleaner air in the 1970s, light-colored moths made a comeback; but, contrary to theory, the comeback occurred without corresponding changes in tree trunks. Then, in the 1980s, biologists realized that peppered moths almost never rest on tree trunks (as Kettlewell wrongly supposed when he initially released the moths onto tree trunks, creating atypical conditions). Instead, these night-flying insects probably spend their days hiding underneath horizontal branches high up in the trees, where they can't be seen.
So, what about those textbook photographs that impressed my college professor friend? If peppered moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, how were the photographs obtained? It turns out that they were staged, often by pinning or gluing dead moths in place.
Book Review: "Of Moths and Men" by Judith Hooper (excerpts)
By Alison Motluk
September 18, 2002
(http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?program=CRSCstories&command=view&id=1300)
[In] 1953 Bernard Kettlewell... set off to test that idea [Darwinists, eager for a real-life example of evolution at work, suggested the color change (of the peppered moths) might be due to "natural selection] in the field…. By releasing marked moths -- both dark and light -- then counting how many live ones he could lure back, he aimed to show that the dark moths fared better in polluted areas and light ones in pristine areas and that the reason was selective predation.
Darwin was already in the grave by the time someone first made the connection in 1896. The great man himself had never witnessed a clear-cut case of natural selection and had not expected to. But those who carried the flame were beside themselves with excitement.
This is indeed what he (Kettlewell) "found." He reported that twice as many darks as lights survived near Birmingham and three times as many lights as darks survived in Dorset. It was marvelous news for evolutionists. The findings were hailed as "Darwin's missing evidence," evolution's "prize horse" and "evolution in action." The story of the peppered moth became a staple in biology texts and science museums everywhere.
[In] 1969 Ted Sargent at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst pointed out that moths don't actually choose to rest on colors that match their own. Other exposés appeared everywhere from the New Scientist (1987) to Whole Earth magazine (1999).
...during Kettlewell's first summer testing of the peppered moth hypothesis, he wrote to his boss, the formidable professor E.B "Henry" Ford, bemoaning his low recapture rates. Ford replied, innocuously enough, "I do not doubt that the results will be very well worth while." Oddly, the very next day they suddenly were. After six days of catching only two or three moths per day, Kettlewell suddenly started netting 23 and 34…. Hooper speculates that he might have fudged the numbers.
...in Dorset, Kettlewell rejigged his procedure partway through and ignored a few days' data, a big scientific no-no. All decent scientists will immediately see the problems with his work...while lay readers only find out about the mistakes many pages after they learned the salient details of the experiments in question.
...the list of Kettlewell's scientific shortcomings is fairly long.... For example, he wasn't "blind" to what he was measuring; that is, he alone decided how dark to score a moth while at the same time knowing the result he wanted to get. Also, he placed many more moths per tree than would be the case in the wild, leading his critics to charge that he simply constructed a bird feeder; in other words, he failed to prove that birds were selectively eating the most visible moths. Somehow the most egregious of all was that photo -- impressed on the memories of all young biology students -- with two moths side by side on a tree, one nearly invisible because of crypsis, and the other totally obvious. Well, it was a setup. Worse, peppered moths don't even rest openly on tree trunks that way.
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The Miller-Urey Origin
Report of Jeffrey Bada's talk, ''Revisiting the Miller Experiment 50 years later"
June 10, 2003
by Casey Luskin (http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/ucsdoriginoflife062003.htm)
(Jeffery Bada is the director of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT) in Exobiology at Scripps Institution for Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. He has worked with Stanley Miller for over 30 years on the origins of life and is the recent co-author, with Christopher Wills, of ''The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup.'')
“Bada essentially conceded that Miller's experiment was not relevant to earth chemistry because the atmosphere was not what Miller used…”
The bottom line is that by the end, Bada seemed to have conceded 2 key points:
1. The atmosphere on earth is totally improper for Miller-experiment chemistry, and the best evidence says it always has been that way.
2. There is no way to get significant organic material to earth from space, even if Miller-experiment chemistry was happening in space on meteorites.
So, Bada single-handedly seemed to implicitly concede that the Miller- paradigm of the origins of life is dead.”
Nicholas Wade writing in the New York Times (6/13/2000){49} about the origin of life notes:
“The chemistry of the first life is a nightmare to explain. No one has yet developed a plausible explanation to show how the earliest chemicals of life - thought to be RNA, or ribonucleic acid, a close relative of DNA, might have constructed themselves from the inorganic chemicals likely to have been around on the early earth. The spontaneous assembly of a small RNA molecule on the primitive earth "would have been a near miracle" two experts in the subject helpfully declared last year.”
(http://www.origins.org/articles/bradley_existenceofgod.html)
- Finch Beaks
I find no satisfactory mechanism for macroevolutionary changes. Analogies
between a few inches of change in the beaks of a Galapagos finch species
and a purported transition from dinosaur to bird (or vice versa) appear
to me inappropriate.
Dr. Henry Schaefer is Professor of Chemistry at the Univeristy of Georia
and a prolific scholar with over 750 scientific publications to his
credit. A theorist who uses quantum mechanics to solve problems ranging
from biochemistry to astrophysics
http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?program=CRSC&command=view&;id=1268
What...are we to make of the recent newspaper articles worldwide
proclaiming that a new study of finches and their beaks have shown
"Darwin was Right"? A team of Princeton scientists have won a prestigious
award for 20 years of study of the finch's beaks on one tiny island in
the Galapagos chain, home of only a few finch species, and a best-selling
novel entitled, The Beak of the Finches, tells their story and explains
their findings. Just what was found?
The two scholars, Drs. Peter and Rosemary Grant observed how, under
drought conditions, birds with larger beaks were better adapted than
others, thus their percentage increased. But this trend reversed when the
cyclical conditions reversed. Furthermore, in times of drought, the
normally separate species were observed to cross-breed. They are related
after all. Darwin was right!
But is this really evolution? Even after the changes there is still the
same array of beak sizes and shapes. This is variation and adaptation,
not evolution.
Actually, de-evolution has occurred; the observation is that there are
larger groupings of species into what may be more reminiscent of the
originally created kind. Creation agrees with Darwin's observations and
with the newer observations, but evolution doesn't, even though the
Grants interpret this as rapid evolution. Wonderful study-great data,
wrong interpretation.
DOES 'THE BEAK OF THE FINCH' PROVE DARWIN WAS RIGHT? by John D. Morris, Ph.D. http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-b/btg-072b.htm
- Four Winged Fruit Flies
"The mutations that produce the four-winged fly damage a gene that normally enables the fly to develop 'balancers'--tiny structures behind the wings that help to stabilize the insect in flight. Unable to form balancers, the mutant fly sprouts a second pair of normal-looking (though not normal-functioning) wings by default. In other words, the mutations lead to a LOSS of important structures..."
"...The second set of wings lacks flight muscles, so the useless appendages interfere with flying and mating, and the mutant fly cannot survive long outside the laboratory. Similar mutations in other genes also produce various anatomical deformations, but they are harmful, too. In 1963, Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote that the resulting mutants “are such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as ‘hopeless.’ They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination” through natural selection..."
Jonathan Wells in Inherit The Spin: Darwinists Answer “Ten Questions” with Evasions and Falsehoods http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_inheritthespin.htm
- Early Embryo Development
- Archaeoraptor liaoningensis (The feathered Dinosaur)
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