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Charles Darwin was born on
February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He was
born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. His father,
Robert Darwin, was a physician. Charles’s mother,
Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, died when he was eight
years old.
At age sixteen, Darwin left
Shrewsbury to study medicine at Edinburgh
University. Uninterested in medicine, he eventually
went to Cambridge University to prepare to become a
clergyman in the Church of England. After receiving
his degree, Darwin accepted an invitation to serve
as an unpaid naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle, which
departed on a five-year scientific expedition to the
Pacific coast of South America on December 31, 1831.
Darwin’s research resulting
from this voyage formed the basis of his famous
book, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, published in 1859. Here
Darwin outlined his theory of evolution, challenging
the contemporary beliefs about the creation of life
on earth.
Darwin died on April 19, 1882,
and lies buried in Westminster Abbey.
Since Charles Darwin first
published his Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection in 1859, there have been challenges to his
theory by Christians and non-Christians alike.
The most recent critiques of current Darwinian
theory demonstrate that:
1.
Genetic Variation
After more than one hundred years of experimental
breeding of various kinds of animals and plants, the
amount of variation that can be produced (even with
intentional, not random, breeding) is extremely
limited, due to the limited range of genetic
variation in each type of living thing.
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Dogs who are selectively bred
for generations are still dogs, fruit flies are
still fruit flies, etc. And when allowed to
return to the wild state, the offspring of the most
highly specialized breeds quickly revert back to the
original wild type.
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Natural selection, claimed by
Darwinists to account for the survival of new
organisms, is really a conservative force that works
to preserve the genetic fitness of a population, not
to change its characteristics.
2.
Natural Selection
“Survival of the fittest” is
thought to mean that those animals whose different
characteristics give them an advantage will survive,
while others will die out. Again, the inference here
is that there is “new” genetic material, which is
not true.
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In actual practice almost any
characteristic can be argued to be either an
advantage or a disadvantage.
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Darwinists have even
accounted for obvious disadvantageous
characteristics by invoking pleiotropy,
which is the idea that several genetic changes may
occur all at once, so that the negative ones come
along with the positive ones.
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On this basis no
existing characteristic in any animal could be cited
to disprove the claim that the fittest survive, for
it really becomes a claim that those that have
survived, have survived, so it must be true.
Questions…
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How then do we really know
that the survival of the fittest has been the
mechanism that has led to current diversity of life
forms?
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How do scientists know which
characteristics have given an advantage in survival
to certain animals?
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The answer provided by
evolutionists is, “By observing which ones have
survived.”
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Response: This is
another example of circular logic…”A species
characteristics are the result of natural selection
due to survival of the fittest.”
ßà“Natural
section due to survival of the fittest results in a
species characteristics.”
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Of course neither the fossil
evidence, nor current living organisms, supports
this.
3.
Form Dictates
Function
The mutations required to
produce complex organs such as an eye, a bird’s
wing, a liver, kidney, or hundreds of other organs
(not to mention body systems like the circulatory,
or nervous system) could not have occurred in tiny
mutations accumulating over thousands of
generations, because the individual parts of the
organ are useless, and give no advantage, unless the
entire organ is functioning.
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Darwinists are left saying
that it must have happened because it happened. (18)
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An example of the need for
all of the parts of a complex organ system to be put
in place at once is pointed out by Kofahl and
Segraves in their book, The Creation Explanation.
(13)
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They describe the “Bombardier
Beetle,” which repels enemies by firing a hot charge
of chemicals from two swivel tubes in its tail. The
chemicals fired by this beetle will spontaneously
explode when mixed together in a laboratory, but the
beetle has an inhibitor substance that blocks the
explosive reaction until the beetle squirts some of
the liquid into its “combustion chambers,” where an
enzyme is added to catalyze the reaction. An
explosion takes place and the chemical repellent is
fired at a temperature of 212°F at the beetle’s
enemies.
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Kofahl and Segraves ask the
question whether any evolutionary explanation can
account for this amazing mechanism: Note that a
rational evolutionary explanation for the
development of this creature must assign some kind
of adaptive advantage to each of the millions of
hypothetical intermediate stages in the construction
process. But would the stages of one-fourth,
one-half, or two-thirds completion, for example,
have conferred any advantage?…No.
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Before this defensive
mechanism could afford any protection to the beetle,
all of its parts, together with the proper explosive
mixture of chemicals, plus the instinctive behavior
required for its use, would have to be assembled in
the insect. The partially developed set of
organs would be useless. Therefore,
according to the principles of evolutionary theory,
there would be no selective pressure to cause the
system to evolve from a partially completed stage
toward the final completed system.
4.
The Fossil Record
The fossil record was
Darwin’s greatest problem in 1859, and it is an even
greater problem today. In Darwin’s time,
hundreds of fossils were available showing the
existence of many distinct kinds of animals and
plants in the distant past. But Darwin was unable to
find any fossils from “intermediate types” to fill
in the gaps between distinct kinds of animals
showing some characteristics of one animal and a few
characteristics of the next developmental type.
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In fact, many fossils exactly
resembled present-day animals showing that
(according to the chronological assumptions of his
view) numerous animals have persisted for “millions
of years” essentially unchanged.
Darwin realized that the absence of “transitional
types” in the fossil record weakened his theory, but
he thought it was due to the fact that not enough
fossils had been discovered, and was confident that
further discoveries would unearth many transitional
types of animals.
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However, the last 140 years
of intensive paleontology research have still failed
to produce one convincing example of a transitional
type. The few fossils that are claimed to be
transitional are questionable.
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Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard
says that there are two characteristics of the
fossil record that are inconsistent with the idea of
gradual change through generations:
a.
Stasis. Most
species exhibit no directional change during their
tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record
looking pretty much the same as when they disappear;
morphological change is usually limited and
directionless.
b.
Sudden appearance.
In any local area, a species does not arise
gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully
formed.”
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Debate
is not just between Christians and evolutionists,
there is debate among scientists, and unfortunately
there is debate among Christians as well.
The
word evolution can mean different things:
The
concept of evolution by natural selection in
Darwin’s own words are as follows:
Before
we can discuss the origin of life we should look at
the origin of the universe.
have proposed other theories: