I do not have time to review here everything that has been published
on the question of whether biological evolution (as understood by those
who accept the notion, namely universial descent from a common ancestor)
actually happened. Instead I will concentrate on what I found to be the
compelling arguments for and against it.
I grew up in a Bible-believing Christian family, but despite my parents' best efforts I was exposed to a high-school teacher who promoted the idea of evolution without disclosing its problems, and I bought into it. I received a logical, scientific, mathematical education, and scientists believed in common descent, so it must be true. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the strongest argument I have ever seen for biological evolution: "All the scientists believe it."
Not all.
Twenty years later, in grad school, my thesis advisor invited me to take another look at the evidence supporting evolution versus fiat creation. I noticed a curious phenomenon: nobody had any evidence of their own; they always pointed to some other discipline as compelling. Ask a paleontologist how he knows how old these fossils are, and he tells you it's from the rock strata; ask a geologist how he knows how old the rock strata are, and he tells you it's from the fossils. Really. Yes, they have radiometric dating, but radiometric dates are all over the map, so they calibrate them from the fossils. Really. Check it out.
So for twenty years I have been asking The Question of anybody with a terminal degree in any field at all:
What evidence in your own area of expertise supports the common-descent evolution model over fiat creation?In 20 years, not one qualified person has ever even attempted an answer! One person with only a Masters degree offered the observation that there is only one species of Cretacious fossil cypress tree, but there are seven species today. I asked him how different that one species of Cretacious cypress was from a hybrid of the seven today -- in other words could all seven modern cypress "species" be derived from that single Cretacious parent without any evolution at work at all? He did not reply. I asked this same Question directly of a high-ranking evolutionist member of the Southwest Baptist University Biology department faculty. He did not reply. Or rather, he did reply, but declined to address the scientific question with scientific data. There's a reason for that: There is no evidence for evolution.
The reason for insisting on a terminal degree in this Question was impressed
on me by a grad student in entomology, which is an important (biological
science) department at Kansas State University, where I taught for three
years. He said that undergraduates and masters level students are not told
the whole truth about the problems with evolution, but they don't keep
it from the PhD students because they cannot do original research without
knowing all the facts.
The November 1987 issue of Scientific American was devoted to Entropy, and all the schemes that scientists have come up with over the years to create a perpetual motion engine, and the technical reasons why each idea failed. Some were quite clever, like involving little trap doors to let hot molecules collect on one side only of a two-chamber box. One of the reasons it failed is that you cannot measure the temperature of the molecules without added energy.
One of the interesting findings of Information Science is that the same formulas for Entropy in the energy domain apply also to the information domain. And like the failed search for perpetual motion energy sources, there cannot be any success at all in achieving "perpetual motion" information sources. Our experience in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research supports this finding. Serious new AI research is no longer attempting to make self-intelligent learning machines, but only mimicking human intelligence in the computer. Unlike the energy domain, where the earth is not a closed system (it continuously receives energy from the sun), the earth is a closed system in the information domain. Therefore the Second Law of thermodynamics (in the information domain) applies and proves that biological evolution is physically impossible apart from an external information source. At any point in time (today, or 1,000,000 years ago, it doesn't matter which), all the genetic code in the world is a fixed (albeit very large) body of information; but it cannot increase in a closed system -- in fact it will tend to decrease. That means species and genera and phyla will die off (go extinct), but nothing new will come that is not merely a reshuffling of the information already there. This is a prediction from the theory, and it is supported from all the evidence. In the 140+ years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there has not been a single documented novel feature evolved, but hundreds of species and entire genera have gone extinct, carrying into oblivion their entire genetic code. Information has been lost, but not replaced with new information.
For evolution to work, the small variations that we see in organisms
today -- including the various beak sizes of the finches on the Galapagos
islands and the coloration of the peppered moth in England -- must continue
unbounded to the creation of novel forms. It simply does not happen. When
the climate changes, the finches in the Galapagos start to grow a different
size of beaks, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but they are always
still finches. Race horses have been carefully bred for speed (survival
of the fittest, enforced by careful breeding) for centuries. If evolution
worked, they would continue to get faster and faster, but they don't. Races
are now won by hundredths of a second, because all the horses run as fast
as a race horse can run. The evolution (if you can call it that) is bounded
and limited to what horses were designed to do, just like the genetic programs
in computer software which are limited to what the programmer designed
them to do.
Tom Pittman
First Draft 2003 July 21