Mountains and Moles
What if someone was to tell you that the great mountain ranges of the world were the result of moles tunneling for millions of years in the same place piling the earth higher and higher? You'd probably find it amusing, but not take it seriously. There are just too many logical problems with such a notion! Today we understand more about things like "plate tectonics", The earth's crust moves and shifts, breaks and piles up at various places to produce a complex topography including mountain ranges and hills.
Evolution is a similar proposal in many respects. We know that "adaptation" in creatures can cause changes in appearance, behavior, survival, etc. These changes, when observed, are typically subtle like the mole tunneling in the ground beneath tall grass. It will usually take a trained eye to see. Now the mole does his tunneling to feast on the tender roots of plants that grow down into the soil. The subtle changes in living things that we call "adaptation" are the result of genetic "variation" by and large.
Living things typically reproduce in a more or less cookie-cutter likeness to their parents. Raccoons all look pretty much the same, so do rabbits and squirrels. Closer examination of these will reveal certain differences, though. This is "variation". Each plant or animal has a certain "range" of variants: sizes, weights, colors, etc. Some variants do better than others in the wild. This may be reflected in those variants eventually replacing others as the new type can have an edge over its fellows. Squirrels that avoid roadways will flourish as those that don't begin to die off. This is how "adaptation" works.
Just as moles are limited to how tall of a hill they can produce, adaptation is also limited. Moles typically skim just below the turf. If they push the ground up too high, they will run out of roots to forage. If a squirrel that avoids roadways starts to fear heights as well, he will have trouble feeding himself and avoiding predators.
Evolution is about "adaptation" functioning as a design engineer. Creating completely novel creatures as the adaptive "steps" are linked over vast time periods and more importantly, multitudes of generations.
There are several fundamental problems with this idea. First, animals and plants prefer the status quo in the wild as a general rule. Dogs have "evolved" into very different looking things at the hand of mankind and it's the most extreme kinds of dogs that have the worst time surviving on their own. This is refereed to as the "reversion to wilds syndrome". Why is this? Could it be that creatures are made too well to tolerate much modification either by man or "freaks" of nature.
Freaky Science
Yet, it's the "freaks" that drive biological evolution theory. From the frog to the prince you have an endless parade of in between freaks that somehow make it to the next step in the creative process. Lizards that loose their teeth, sprout spikes that transform over many generations into quills meanwhile amazing "variants" emerge with webbed armpits and the quills start to have variants that branch perfectly in the shape of "feathers" that can louver together in just the right fashion to let the once grotesquely disfigured "arms" lift the animal off the ground. A few feeble inches at first, then in another million years or so from tree to tree with the greatest of ease.
The ratio of "freaks" to perfection may vary from one type of animal to the next. For the evolutionist to make "adaptation" such a designer and creator of the kinds of creatures we see today nature must be proven to be much more "freak tolerant" and "freak generating" than is the case today. What we see today is a world full of very perfect creatures that need to stay that way in order to survive and flourish.
The real world of nature is all about "status quo", for the evolutionist it's a fantasy world of mountain making moles and long parades of generations and generations of freaks perfecting themselves instead of dying out.
The truth is, adaptation may produce change and that change had better not be towards a freakish type. Using examples of adaptation as proof of "evolution", demonstrates instead a basic lack of understanding of what "adaptation" is. Saying "adaptation" can design super complexities we call, living things given enough time is like saying 2+2 can equal 50 given enough time. Some things, like living things, resist change tenaciously. Time only seems to favor the "run of the mill" and freaks of nature seem to always fade away.
The many faces of ev-olution?
The word, "evolution" simply means "gradual change".
But, ever since it was first used to describe the process of "adaptation" in living things the word has been more and more exclusively used to label the prevailing formulation of Darwin's natural creation story?
Today, to say you are an "evolutionist", is to say you see all living things as the product of "natural design" starting with single cell forms that nature somehow with a magical blend of just the right mutants and gobs of time organized themselves into every living thing past or present. A religious faith that makes "nature" a "creator god" capable of virtually unlimited engineering ability far and above anything mankind collectively has ever achieved.
In a recent news article, scientists are depicted as, "forcing evolution". There is a mutant of the tobacco hornworm that's skin darkens from a medium green to an almost black color as air temperature increases due to low levels of a hormone. But by exposing them to periods of higher temperatures two groups emerged. One group stayed green at higher temps and others became darker.
The writer admits, "Scientists have not understood evolution's exact role in the differences".
Why can't they just say that perhaps after a few generations, the mutant gene was being corrected or that the mutant strain wouldn't breed true for some unknown reason. Somehow "evolution" must be held responsible. The puzzle of "how evolution did it" must be solved.
Ogging- Use Your Imagination
This sort of "ogging", or "origins guessing" goes on continually among evolutionists. The challenge is to, "take away any doubt that there may be about a trait's or a creature's evolutionary origin". When i was a taking an insect taxonomy class one of the instructors was fond of raking some hapless students over the coals if he failed to classify some bug on a certain lineage.
So, your able the discern the heritage of any critter based on fitting it somehow into the accepted evolutionary "family tree". Don't dare suggest that groups could represent separate design groups that aren't related to each other at all. Everything "MUST" be related somehow.
Yet, even in this example (that no one would suggest the caterpillars were completely unrelated), it is uncertain if any tie in to evolution is possible. But, there remains that compulsion to find one. You can see by the title of the article that there is an irony to all this.
Evolution, truly, must be forced into every little aspect of the modern study of biology and science as a whole.
Something is wrong with this practice. What if the evidence points to something else? What if there is some sort of genetic repair of damaged DNA taking place because of some designed-in failsafe mechanisms? Increasing environmental temperatures may have just helped speed the process some.
