Evolution fails to explain several past events (retrodiction) that we have evidence of today. Below are seven of these observable phenomena showing there are problems for evolution in retrodictions.
1. How acquired beneficial mutations pass on to the descendants
For a mutation to stay in a population it has to be transferred to the offspring. It is easy in single-celled organisms, but not for higher organisms where germ cells are separated early during embryogenesis and there is no further communication between somatic cells and germ cells during an individual’s life (in higher organisms, we have to talk about individuals rather than populations).
The only way this can happen is if the mutation is acquired in a fertilized egg or an early embryo; but in that case, how can it be a mutation in response to the external environment?
The environment in this case would be the parent organism (temperature of the parent, the nutrients that the parent absorbs from the food it eats, etc.). The only answer Neo-Darwinists give to that idea is “horizontal gene transfer” which is again clear and documented in single-celled bacteria, but not for higher organisms.
2. Consciousness, morality, arts.
Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has been a vocal critic of evolution in favour of a “Naturalistic Teleological” event. In his book, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” Nagel holds that evolution fails to explain the emergence of morality and consciousness [1]. Much of our modern-day civilized morality goes against the morality necessary for survival.
Nagel claims that the failure of a materialist reduction of mind to matter has implications for science in general, including natural selection. Since the brain does not adequately explain consciousness, neither can natural selection, even if it adequately explains the brain. The mind-body problem becomes the mind-evolution problem.
Nagel supplements his argument from consciousness with two others, to the effect that natural selection is incompatible with the possibility of theoretical knowledge and the objectivity of ethical judgments.
But he also more generally entertains the notion that natural selection is too improbable to explain much of anything. Nagel finds it “highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection” (pg. 6).
He seems to doubt that there could be enough time in the world or available mutations to produce something as remarkable as a squirrel, much less human beings and consciousness.
3. Devolution of many organisms.
While Darwinism is directionally agnostic by definition, it is mostly used to explain complexity but not necessarily the macro-evolution of simple living things to more complicated ones. However, it has been exhibited that organisms are more likely to evolve into less complicated structures which is also compatible with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy). For example, race formation (genetic diversity), is not a small step in macro-evolution because it is a step towards a reduction of genetic information and not towards its increase.
In fact, decreasing complexity is common in the record of evolution. For example, the lower jaw in vertebrates shows decreasing complexity, as measured by the number of bones, from fish to reptiles to mammals. According to Darwinists, Evolution adapted the extra jaw bones into ear bones. Likewise, ancestral horses had several toes on each foot; modern horses have a single toe with a hoof, and four “vestigial” toes.
4. Impossibility of explaining the evolution family tree, based on genetics, and the convergence of anatomical structures in distant creatures within the family tree.
Such convergence in anatomical structures actually points to Intelligent Design. For example, a shark and a dolphin are distant from each other in the family tree. One is a fish and the other is a mammal. However, both are morphologically “similar” – both have fins but one is a fish the other is a mammal. Similarly, bats and birds have wings and can fly, yet are distant from each other in the evolution family tree. Over the past twenty-eight years, experimental evidence has revealed that family trees based on genetics are divergent.
Just as troubling for the idea of macro-evolution, family trees based on different molecules yield conflicting and contradictory family trees. As a 2012 paper published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society reported, “Incongruence between phylogenies derived from morphological versus molecular analyses, and between trees based on different subsets of molecular sequences has become pervasive as datasets have expanded rapidly in both characters and species,” [2]. We cover more about convergence in a later article.
5. Archaeological, paleontological, and historical evidence that dinosaurs coexisted with humans.
Most illustrations of dinosaurs are NOT reconstructions from the fossil record, they are based on actual drawings by ancient civilizations of dinosaurs. The Incas in Latin America, Cambodians in Asia, and Pharaohs in Egypt all drew dinosaurs, and sometimes those dinosaurs were busy eating humans or being chased by human hunters.
Moreover, there is paleontological evidence supporting the recency of dinosaurs. Historical evidence includes Alexander the Great’s army encountering a dragon, and Marco Polo recording dragon dealings. Flavius Philostratus provided this sober account in the second century:
“The whole of India is girded with dragons of enormous size; for not only the marshes are full of them, but the mountains as well, and there is not a single ridge without one. Now the marsh kind are sluggish in their habits and are thirty cubits long, and they have no crest standing up on their heads.” (Lucius Flavius Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyanna, AD 170 to 247) [3]
Pliny the Elder also referenced large dragons in India in his Natural History. More recently, historian Bill Cooper described many ancient news accounts of dinosaur encounters from England and Europe, which to this day contain place names that reference the dragons that were once there, like “Knucker’s Hole,” “Dragon-hoard,” and “Wormelow Tump.”
6. Mating in Bees.
The behaviour of worker casts, which are the female siblings of the queen bee, is hardly an example of the idea of the survival of the fittest that the theory of evolution rests on. The worker casts do not mate and, therefore, behave against their individual “fitness” for the sake of the species. Similar examples are seen in other creatures, e.g. ants.
7. Living Fossils
Charles Darwin predicted in his book: “Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity,” (page 428) [4] However, after this book was published, several “living fossils” have been discovered, completely identical to fossils found that had been dated as millions of years old. Thus, in retrodiction, Darwin’s theory has inexplicable occurrences of several species that have not evolved at all over millions of years.
Conclusion:
Every bit of data or evidence seen today needs some form of interpretation to make sense of its existence. There are multiple cases of data today that do not fit into the interpretation of this data being the result of macroevolution taking place over a deep-time (millions-of-years) time scale. Scientifically, if your interpretation does not match the data observed, then the model you have used to arrive at your concluded interpretation must be in error and a new model be investigated.
The model of Intelligent Design explains these “exceptions” perfectly.
Sources:
- Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. United States, Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Dávalos, L. M., Cirranello, A. L., Geisler, J. H., & Simmons, N. B. (2012). Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons from phyllostomid bats. Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 87(4), 991–1024. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-185X.2012.00240.x
- Philostratus, Flavius, The Life of Apollonius of Tyanna, AD 170 to 247.
- Darwin, Charles.1876. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th edition with additions and corrections. London: John Murray.
Other articles in this series:
The Scientificity of Evolution – Comparison to a scientific law
The Scientificity of Evolution – Observability Criterion
