                     THE FIVE CRISES IN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
                                    Ray Bohlin
        
        The Case of the Missing Mechanism
        
        The growing crisis in Darwinian theory is becoming more apparent
        all the time. The work of creationists and other non-Darwinians is
        growing and finding a more receptive ear than ever before. In this
        discussion I want to elaborate on what I believe are the five
        critical areas where Darwinism and evolutionary theory in general
        are failing. They are:
        
        (1) The unsubstantiation of a Darwinian mechanism of evolution 
        (2) The total failure of origin of life studies to produce a
             workable model 
        (3) The inability of evolutionary mechanism to explain the origin
             of complex adaptations 
        (4) The bankruptcy of the blind watchmaker hypothesis 
        (5) The biological evidence that the rule in nature is
             morphological stability over time and not constant change.
        
        Much of the reason for evolution's privileged status has been due
        to confusion over just what people mean when they use the word
        evolution. Evolution is a slippery term. If evolution simply means
        "change over time," this is non-controversial. Peppered moths,
        Hawaiian drosophila fruit flies, and even Galapagos finches are
        clear examples of change over time. If you say that this form of
        evolution is a fact, well, so be it. But many scientists
        extrapolate beyond this meaning. Because "change over time" is a
        fact, the argument goes, it is also a fact that moths, fruit flies,
        and finches all evolved from a remote common ancestor. But this
        begs the question.
        
        The real question, however, is where do moths, flies, and finches
        come from in the first place? Common examples of natural selection
        acting on present genetic variation do not tell us how we have come
        to have horses, wasps, and woodpeckers, and the enormous varieties
        of living animals. Evolutionists will tell you that this is where
        mutations enter the picture. But mutations do not improve the
        scenario either. In speaking of all the mutation work done with
        bacteria over several decades, the great French zoologist and
        evolutionist Pierre-Paul Grasse' said: 
        
        "What is the use of their unceasing mutations if they do not
        change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely
        hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the
        right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect."
        
        When I speak of evolution or Darwinism, it is the origin of new
        biological forms, new adaptive structures, morphological and
        biochemical novelties that I am referring to. This is precisely
        what has not yet been explained. When people question the popular
        explanations of the origin of complex adaptations such as the
        vertebrate limb, or sexual reproduction, or the tongue of the
        woodpecker, or the reptilian hard-shelled egg, they are usually
        given a litany of reasons why these structures are beneficial to
        the organisms. More precisely, the selective advantage of these
        structures is offered as the reason they evolved. But this begs the
        question again. It is not sufficient for an evolutionist to explain
        the function of a particular structure. What is necessary is to
        explain the mechanistic origin of these structures!
        
        Natural selection does explain how organisms adapt to minor changes
        in their environment. Natural selection allows organisms to do what
        God commanded them to do. That is to be fruitful and multiply.
        Natural selection does not, however, explain the crucial question
        of how complex adaptations arose in the first place. 
        
        The Origin of Life
        
        We have been led to believe that it is not to difficult to conceive
        of a mechanism whereby organic molecules can be manufactured in a
        primitive earth and organize themselves into a living, replicating
        cell. In fact, the ease by which this can (allegedly) happen is the
        foundation for the popular belief that there are numerous planets
        in the universe which contain life. Nothing could be further from
        the truth.
        
        Early experiments suggested that it was relatively simple to
        produce some of the building blocks of life such as amino acids,
        the components of proteins. However, the euphoria of the
        Miller-Urey experiment of 1953 has given way to a paradigm crisis
        of 1993 in origin of life research. The wishful, yet workable
        atmosphere of ammonia, hydrogen, methane, and water vapor has been
        replaced by the more realistic, but stingy atmosphere of nitrogen,
        carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen
        cyanide. This is the stuff that volcanoes belch out. This
        atmosphere poses a much more difficult challenge. Molecules
        relevant for life would be much rarer. Even more damaging is the
        possibility of the presence of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere
        from the break-up of water vapor. Molecular oxygen would poison any
        reaction leading to biologically significant molecules.
        
        Coacervates, microspheres, the "RNA world," and other scenarios all
        have serious flaws obvious to everyone in the field except those
        who continue work with that particular scenario. Some have
        privately called this predicament a paradigm crisis. There is no
        central competing model, just numerous ego-driven scenarios. Even
        the experiments in which researchers try to simulate the early
        earth have been severely criticized. These experiments generally
        hedge their bets by using purified reactants, isolated energy
        sources, exaggerated energy levels, procedures which
        unrealistically drive the reaction toward the desired product and
        protect the products from the destructive effects of the energy
        sources which produced them in the first place. 
        
        The real situation was summed up rather well by Klaus Dose:
        
        "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the
        fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better
        perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on
        earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on
        principal theories and experiments in the field either end in
        stalemate or in a confession of ignorance." [From
        _Interdisciplinary Science Review_ 13(1988):348-56.]
        
        But all of these difficulties together, as staggering as they are,
        are not the real problem. The major difficulty in chemical
        evolution scenarios is how to account for the informational code of
        DNA without intelligence being a part of the equation. DNA carries
        the genetic code: the genetic blueprint for constructing and
        maintaining a biological organism. We often use the terms of
        language to describe DNA's activity: DNA is "transcribed" into RNA;
        RNA is "translated" into protein; geneticists speak of the "genetic
        code." All these words imply intelligence, and the DNA
        informational code requires intelligent preprogramming, yet a
        purely naturalistic beginning does not provide such input. Chemical
        experiments may be able to construct small sequences of nucleotides
        to form small molecules of DNA, but this doesn't make them mean
        anything. There is no source for the informational code in a
        strictly naturalistic origin of life.
        
        
        The Inability to Account for Complex Adaptations 
        
        Perhaps the single greatest problem for evolutionary biologists is
        the unsolved problem of morphological and biochemical novelty. In
        other words, some aspects of evolutionary theory describe
        accurately how existing organisms are well adapted to their
        environments, but do a very poor job of explaining just how the
        necessary adaptive structures came about in the first place.
        
        Darwinian explanations of complex structures such as the eye and
        the incredible tongue of the woodpecker fall far short of
        realistically attempting to explain how these structures arose by
        mutation and natural selection. The origin of the eye in
        particular, caused Darwin no small problem. His only suggestion was
        to look at the variety of eyes in nature, some more complex and
        versatile than others, and imagine a gradual sequence leading from
        simple eyes to more complex eyes. However, even the great Harvard
        evolutionist, Ernst Mayr, admits that the different eyes in nature
        are not really related to each other in some simple-to-complex
        sequence. Rather, he suggests that eyes probably had to evolve over
        forty different times in nature. Darwin's nightmare has never been
        solved. It has only been made 40 times more frightening for the
        evolutionist.
        
        In his 1987 book, _Theories of Life_, Wallace Arthur said:
        
        "One can argue that there is no direct evidence for a Darwinian
        origin of a body plan--black _Biston Betularia_ certainly do not
        constitute one! Thus in the end we have to admit that we do not
        really know how body plans originate."
        
        In 1992, Keith Stewart Thomson wrote in the _American Zoologist_
        that:
        
        "While the origins of major morphological novelties remain
        unsolved, one can also view the stubborn persistence of
        macroevolutionary questioning...as a challenge to orthodoxy:
        resistance to the view that the synthetic theory tells us
        everything we need to know about evolutionary processes."
        
        The ability to explain major morphological novelties is not the
        only failing of evolutionary theory. Some argue that molecular
        structures are even more difficult to explain. The molecular
        architecture of the cell has recently described by molecular
        biologist Michael Behe as being irreducibly complex systems which
        must have all the components present in order to be functional. The
        molecular workings of cilia, electron transport, protein synthesis,
        and cellular targeting readily come to mind. If the systems are
        irreducibly complex, how do they build slowly over long periods of
        time out of systems that are originally doing something else?
        
        While publishing hundreds of articles pertaining to molecular
        homology and phylogeny of various proteins and nucleic acids over
        the last ten years, the _Journal of Molecular Evolution_ did not
        publish one article attempting to explain the origin of a single
        biomolecular system. Those who make molecular evolution their
        life's work are too busy studying the relationship of the
        cytochrome c molecule in man to the cytochrome c molecule in
        bacteria, rather than the more fundamental question of where
        cytochrome c came from in the first place!
        
        Clearly then, whether we are talking about major morphological
        novelties such as the wings of bats and birds, the swimming
        adaptations of fish and whales, the human eye or the molecular
        sub-microscopic workings of mitochondria, ribosomes, or cilia,
        evolutionary theory has failed to explain how these structures
        could arise by natural processes alone.
        
        The Bankruptcy of the Blind Watchmaker Hypothesis
        
        In his 1986 book, _The Blind Watchmaker_, Richard Dawkins states, 
        "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the
        appearance of having been designed for a purpose." He explains that
        
        "Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does
        not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purposes in view.
        Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress
        us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker,
        impress us with the illusion of design and planning."
        
        Darwinism critic, Philip Johnson, has quipped that the watchmaker
        is not only blind but unconscious!
        
        Dawkins later suggests just how this process may have brought about
        the development of wings in mammals. He says:
        
        "How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to
        bough, and sometimes fall to the ground. Especially in a small
        animal, the whole body surface catches the air and assists the
        leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil. Any
        tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would
        help, for example flaps of skin growing out in the angles of
        joints...(It) doesn't matter how small and unwinglike the first
        wingflaps were. There must be some height, call it h, such that an
        animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height. In
        this critical zone, any improvement in the body surface's ability
        to catch the air and break the fall, however slight the
        improvement, can make the difference between life and death.
        Natural selection will then favor slight, prototype wingflaps. When
        these flaps have become the norm, the critical height h will become
        slightly greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps
        will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until
        we have proper wings."
        
        This can sound rather seductively convincing at first. However
        there are three faulty assumptions being used.
        
        The first doubtful assumption is that nature can provide a whole
        chain of favorable mutations of the precise kind needed to change
        forelimbs into wings in a continuous line of development. What is
        the larger miracle, an instantaneous change or a whole series of
        thousands of tiny changes in the proper sequence?
        
        The other assumption is "all things being equal." These mutations
        must not have secondary harmful effects. How is the creature's
        grasping ability compromised while these wingflaps grow? These
        little shrew-like animals may slowly be caught between losing their
        adaptiveness in the trees before they can fully utilize their
        "developing" wings. Or there might be some seemingly unrelated and
        unforeseen effect that compromises survivability.
        
        A third faulty assumption is the often used analogy to artificial
        selection. "If artificial selection can do so much in only a few
        years," so the refrain goes, "just think what natural selection can
        do in millions of years." But artificial selection works because it
        incorporates foresight and conscious purpose, the absence of which
        are the defining qualities of the blind watchmaker. In addition,
        artificial selection actually demonstrates the limits to change
        since an endpoint in the selection process is usually reached very
        quickly.
        
        The blind watchmaker hypothesis, when analyzed carefully, falls
        into the category of fanciful stories that are entertaining--but
        which hold no resemblance to reality. 
        
        The Prevalence of Stasis over Mutability
        
        
        Rather than observing organisms gradually evolving into other
        forms, the fossil record speaks of "sudden appearance" and
        "stasis." New types appear suddenly and change very little after
        their appearance. The rarity of gradual change examples in the
        fossil record were revealed as the trade secret of paleontology by
        Steven J. Gould of Harvard. Gould also refers to stasis as "data"
        in the paleontological sense. These are significant observations. 
        
        Darwin predicted that there should be innumerable transitional
        forms between species. But the reality of paleontology (the study
        of fossils) is that new forms appear suddenly with no hint of the
        "gradual" change predicted by evolution. Not only that, but once
        these new forms have appeared, they remain relatively unchanged
        until the present day or until they become extinct.
        
        Some animals and plants have remained unchanged for literally
        hundreds of millions of years. These "living fossils" can be more
        embarrassing for the evolutionist than they often care to admit.
        One creature in particular, the coelacanth, is very instructive.
        The first live coelacanth was found off the coast of Madagascar in
        1938. Coelacanths were thought to be extinct for 100 million years.
        But most evolutionists saw this discovery as a great opportunity to
        glimpse the workings of a tetrapod ancestor. Coelacanths resemble
        the proposed ancestors of amphibians. It was hoped that some clues
        could be derived from the modern coelacanth of just how a fish
        became preadapted for life on land, because not only was there a
        complete skeleton, but a full set of internal organs to boot. The
        results of the study were very disappointing. The modern coelacanth
        showed no evidence of internal organs preadapted for use in a
        terrestrial environment. The coelacanth is a fish--nothing more,
        nothing less. Its bony fins are used as exceptionally well-designed
        paddles for changing direction in deep-sea environment, not the
        proto-limbs of future amphibians.
        
        Nowhere is the problem of sudden appearance better demonstrated
        than in the Burgess Shale found in the Canadian Rockies. The
        Burgess Shale illustrates that in the Cambrian period (which
        evolutionists estimate as being over 500 million years ago) nearly
        all of the basic body plans (phyla) of animals existing on earth
        came into existence in a geological instant (defined as only 20-30
        million years), and nothing that new has appeared since that time.
        The Cambrian explosion as it is called is nothing less than
        astounding. Sponges, jellyfish, worms, arthropods, mollusks,
        echinoderms, and many other stranger-than-fiction creatures are all
        found to suddenly appear in the Cambrian without a hint of what
        they descended from nor even how they could all be related to each
        other. This is the opposite expectation of Darwinism which would
        have predicted each new body plan emerging from pre-existing phyla
        over long periods of time. The Cambrian explosion is a direct
        contradiction of Darwinian evolution.
        
        If Darwin were alive today, I believe he would be terribly
        disappointed. There is less evidence for his theory now than in his
        own day. The possibility of the human eye evolving may have caused
        him to shudder, but the organization of the simplest cell is
        infinitely more complex. Perhaps a nervous breakdown would be more
        appropriate!
        
        Copyright 1993 Raymond G. Bohlin
        
        
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