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Does ‘Foundations Restored’ Use Straw Man Arguments to Refute Evolution?

A Reply to an Anonymous Critic of the DVD Series 'Foundations Restored'

Dear Friend in the Search for Truth,

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

On behalf of the Kolbe Center and all those involved in the production of Foundations Restored, we appreciate your Evolution Notes and the time you have taken to make your theological and scientific comments about the series. In this document, we will review your comments and explain why the perspective presented in your document is problematic from a theological and scientific perspective. Our responses are put forth, not to win an argument, but as a dialogue intended to help point the way to the truth about origins and the authentic harmony of faith and reason that are found in the domains of theology, natural science, history, and philosophy. If you continue to have questions or doubts after reading our reply, we invite any additional thoughts or questions you may have.

As we begin, it is also important to note that the DVD series builds upon itself, with key definitions presented in Episode 1 that are integral to later episodes and need to be thoroughly understood. An example is the definition of “evolution” in Episode 1. We believe that understanding and applying the meaning of that particular definition will address many of the primary arguments you make that dogs and peppered moths are examples of evolution in action. We will say more about this in the natural science section. Before we address the scientific issues, however, we will address the theological questions that set the entire stage for our discussion. We preserve this order intentionally, to maintain the distinction between the Queen of Sciences (theology) and the empirical (or natural) sciences.

Theological Issues and Responses

During this Easter season, it is good to reflect on the fact that our whole Faith is based on the glorious Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. As St. Paul says, “If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor 15:14).

But why do we believe in the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead?

The Roman soldiers who presided over Our Lord’s crucifixion were professional killers. They made sure that Our Lord was dead before they took Him down from the Cross. One of them even drove a lance through His side, providing one of the strongest possible confirmations that He was dead before He was taken down from the Cross. Yet on Easter Sunday, He was alive in the same body—albeit in a glorified state—that had been laid in the tomb. There is no natural explanation for the return to life of a crucified dead man. Therefore, the basis of our faith depends on an event that has no natural explanation.

So, why do we believe in the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead?

It is not because we have some kind of physical proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that Our Lord rose from the dead. Nor is it because the Gospels or artifacts like the Shroud of Turin give us some kind of quantifiable certainty. We do not believe in the saving Passion, death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ because the truth of that mystery is forced upon our minds like a geometrical proof. The reason why Catholics believe in the saving Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the same today as it has been for almost two thousand years. We believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered, died and rose again by His own divine power, because we accept the testimony of the witnesses appointed by Him, the Apostles and disciples who were eyewitnesses to His glorious Resurrection. In other words, we submit our intellect and will to the testimony of the Church established by Christ to teach and guide us on the way to Heaven, and we are able to do this because we have received the supernatural gift of Faith from God which gives us the power to believe ALL that God (through His Church) tells us we must believe in matters of Faith and morals.

In reality, every Christian who believes in the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead believes because of the authoritative testimony of His Church. Indeed, whatever a Christian believes regarding faith and morals, he believes on the authority of the Catholic Church, because it was the Church that identified and canonized the books of the Bible and gave them an authoritative interpretation from the earliest days of the first generation of Christians. It was the Church that from the beginning interpreted the first three chapters of Genesis as teaching that God created the first man, body and soul, instantly and immediately from the dust of the Earth, and that He created the first woman instantly and immediately from the body of the first man — one man for one woman for life from the beginning of creation. And, just as there is no natural explanation for the resurrection of the body and soul of the Last Adam, Our Lord Jesus Christ, so there is no natural explanation for the instantaneous formation of Adam’s body from the elements of the Earth as God breathed into Him the breath of life at the beginning of creation.[1]

We believe in the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the “last Adam,” on the testimony of God’s faithful witnesses, the Apostles and Evangelists, just as we believe in the Special Creation of Adam “from the dust of the Earth” on the testimony of God’s faithful witness Moses. To do otherwise is to act incoherently, since it would entail accepting God’s Revelation concerning the supernatural creation of the first Adam while denying it concerning the supernatural re-creation of the last Adam. Both doctrines have been proclaimed in God’s Church from the beginning.

Let us consider one more example of an article of the Creed that all Christians profess, so that we can see how faith in this article is also grounded in the acceptance of supernatural faith rather than in the postulates of natural science.

All who bear the Name of Christian rejoice in the Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. But a Virgin’s womb has no natural potency to produce a child. If a Virgin’s womb could somehow be kept in being for a thousand, or a million, or a billion years, it would never produce a child. Likewise, the first prophecy of the Messiah in Genesis 3:15 tells us that “the seed” of a “Woman” would be completely exempt from Satan’s power and would bring about the downfall of Satan’s kingdom. But no woman naturally produces “seed.” Thus, the Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ is completely inexplicable on a natural level.

Why, then, do all Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ?

All Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ because God’s Word teaches this Truth—that the Son of God, the “last Adam,” was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Ghost, just as the “first Adam” was created by God from the “virgin earth” at the beginning of time. This doctrine, too, has been proclaimed in God’s Church from the beginning.

The “virgin earth” had no natural power to produce a human body, any more than the Blessed Virgin’s womb had a natural power to produce the Sacred Body of Our Lord. We believe that the “first Adam” was created body and soul from the “virgin earth” because that is what God revealed to His truthful witness Moses who handed it down to us in the sacred history of Genesis. That is what the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church has believed and taught from the beginning—simply because God revealed it to us as an historical fact in His inspired, inerrant Word.

In short, the reason Catholics have always believed that Our Lord Jesus Christ was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the same reason that Catholics have always believed that “in six days God created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain, and rested on the seventh day”—whether they held to the overwhelming majority view among the Church Fathers that the days were 24-hour days or held to the Augustinian minority view that creation was instantaneous. God’s Word as understood in the Church from the beginning revealed that God created all of the different kinds of creatures supernaturally, for man, in the beginning of time, and that is why Catholics have always believed, believe now, and will always believe in this Truth—without seeking or demanding any confirmation whatsoever from natural science.

The sobering reality is this. Anyone who does not believe ALL that the Catholic Church proposes for his belief in matters of faith and morals does not have the Faith. This is because such a person exalts his own intellect and will above the Will and Intellect of Almighty God, reserving to himself the right to determine which parts of God’s Revelation he is going to accept. In short, such a person has put himself in the place of God, repeating the error that Adam and Eve committed in the beginning, when at the instigation of the devil they found fault with God’s Word as it had been revealed to Adam and took it upon themselves to decide which parts of God’s Revelation they would accept and obey.

We hope and pray that you will realize the absolute necessity of humbling yourself and submitting your will and intellect to the authority of God and His Church. Only in this way will you be able to rightly interpret and understand the evidence from the natural sciences, as it relates to the true origin of man and the universe. Please keep this theological preamble in mind, as you read the responses of our team to your criticisms of the scientific arguments presented in Foundations Restored. The team’s responses will demonstrate that your criticisms do not invalidate the arguments we have made against the molecules to man evolutionary hypothesis, but at the end of the day, you will only be able to interpret the natural science evidence correctly when your mind is illuminated by the light of Faith.

Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!

Scientific Issues and Responses

After your theological comments, you introduce an “evolutionary side note” related to dogs and evolution that was not one of the Darwinian “icons” presented in the series, although we should spend some time discussing this because it is characteristic of the confusion that follows in your remarks. In Episode 1, a sharp distinction was made between the concept of “limited variation within a kind” and Darwinian evolution, which is said to account for all of life’s diversity according to the molecules-to-man evolutionary model. Your position appears to be that there is no real distinction between the limited variation within a species (such as dogs) that everyone agrees occurs and is readily observed, and Darwinian evolution (or macroevolution) in which common descent is claimed for all species. Below is your statement about dogs:

“Some evolutionists use dogs as the perfect example for evolution, as after all, there’s evidence that suggests that throughout hundreds of years humans bred wolves to be tame until they became so different from wild wolves that they could not reproduce. This is claimed to be a great example that shows that a species can change greatly in a small amount of time and even become a different species, so over millions of years, macroevolution can occur.”

Because of the observable extreme variation amongst the dog kind over time, dogs are indeed a very important kind of animal that needs to be carefully considered in order to evaluate evolutionary claims. There is almost no doubt that wolves, dogs, foxes, hyenas, etc. all descended from the same original type of animal, which was most probably rather wolf-like. While the vast majority of the variety of dog breeds that exist today are the result of human-controlled breeding, obviously the differentiation of foxes, hyenas, etc. from the proto-dog occurred naturally. Evolutionists are unanimous in asserting that such simple examples of variation within a kind (which can and do lead to reproductive isolation in some cases) are evidence of “evolution.” We completely disagree.

The confusion here seems to stem from the fact that “evolution” has been defined so broadly. In our study, we have noted that there are at least three common definitions of “evolution”:

  1. The process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth (Google.com definition)
  2. Change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations (Wikipedia.org definition).
  3. Change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift (Dictionary.com definition).

If the above are valid definitions of evolution, then everyone involved with the Kolbe Center Is an evolutionist. But, of course, what we have here are definitions that are intentionally so broad as to leave out the core substance of the point at issue. Evolutionists have managed to redefine the word evolution to the extent that their definition is essentially undeniable, and then proceed to use the word in an altogether different sense. When an evolutionist claims that “evolution is undeniable,” they are generally referring to “macroevolution,” defined in the New Oxford American dictionary (2010) as “major evolutionary change. The term applies mainly to the evolution of whole taxonomic groups over long periods of time.” When “evolution” is discussed and debated, the decisive point we are really contesting is not the observable change in the gene pool over time, but the hypothetical process by which one kind of creature gives rise to another, different kind of creature with new biological functions. In the three common definitions listed above, what is being defined is merely “microevolution.” No one disputes that “microevolution” occurs—although we do object to the term itself since microevolution is not really “evolution” at all but is more correctly defined as limited variation within a created kind. Indeed, the point at issue regarding “evolution” is not that creatures vary and even devolve in successive generations, eventually even losing the ability to interbreed with other creatures within the same kind. but whether creatures can naturally acquire new functional genetic information over successive generations, driving an upward climb of phenotypic complexity, resulting in progressively more advanced creatures. It is simply not true that given enough time microevolution results in macroevolution, and this is perhaps the crux of the argument. Microevolution has nothing to do with the novel creation of functional genetic information within an organism that is expressed and then passed on to successive generations.

So-called “microevolution” works merely by the expression of variations already present in existing genetic information, or the expression of a degraded (mutated) form of this information. A philosophical axiom is that something can’t give what it doesn’t have, and this is applicable here. Parents cannot give to their offspring genetic information that is not contained in their reproductive cells. This presents an evolutionary problem: whence, then, does all the necessary “new” genetic information for building new kinds of animals come? The only tools so-called “macroevolution” has in its toolbox to create novel genetic information are genetic mutations.[2] Now that genomes in successive generations of creatures can be observed scientifically, mutations can be observed and tracked, and we can observe how these mutations degrade genomes over time.[3] Indeed, this is not unexpected; it should be obvious to all that mutations, which are random changes in the genetic code, cannot create functional genetic information. The central question, then, is not whether the genetic diversity of a population changes over time, but how mutations and natural selection acting over great periods of time could result in the diversity of life now observed when the so-called Darwinian mechanism produces only a slow destruction of any species’ genome.

None of the textbook examples of microevolution and Darwinian “icons” covered in our series involve the creation of truly new genetic information—there is no emergence of new organs nor any new body plans. These would truly deserve the name “evolution.” While evolutionists like to claim that things like antibiotic resistance or the ability to degrade nylon[4] are new functions, the reality is that when the change is examined at a molecular level the “new function” is not the result of a gain in the molecule’s ability to do something novel, but a loss in its ability to specifically do what it was originally intended to do. To truly demonstrate that a new function has arisen through mutation and natural selection, a scientist would need to show a new gene spontaneously being created through non-directed mutations in a series of successive generations; but even though tens of thousands of these generations have been observed in bacteria, nothing of the kind has ever been observed.[5] If it could be determined that a gene in a particular population group is not present in a different population group of the same species, the evolutionist’s assumption is that the functional gene spontaneously evolved. In reality, a more plausible explanation is that the organism without the functional gene may have devolved, or, alternatively, the gene in question may have been acquired by gene transfer from a related organism.[6] It should also be considered disproportionate to anyone looking at this issue objectively that a minor variation within bacteria is being used to suggest that macroevolution is true, when clearly this is but another example of so-called microevolution. The following webpage gives a good overview of the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, and its almost ubiquitous obfuscation within evolutionist literature:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/macroevolution-microevolution-and-chemistry-the-devil-is-in-the-details/

From the above linked webpage, here are some statements by prominent evolutionists who candidly admit the fact that macroevolution cannot be extrapolated from microevolution (emphases added by the author of the webpage):


“If macroevolution is, as I believe, mainly a story of the differential success of certain kinds of species and, if most species change little in the phyletic mode during the course of their existence (Gould and Eldredge, 1977), then microevolutionary change within populations is not the stuff (by extrapolation) of major transformations.

– Gould, Stephen J., in Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Harvard University Press paperback, 1998; originally published in 1980), p. 170.


“A wide spectrum of researchers – ranging from geologists and paleontologists, through ecologists and population geneticists, to embryologists and molecular biologists – gathered at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History under the simple conference title: Macroevolution. Their task was to consider the mechanisms that underlie the origin of species and the evolutionary relationship between species… The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.

– Lewin, R. 1980 (Nov 21). Science 210:883.


One may object that these statements are old, but this is precisely the point. It has been clear for 40 years that limited variation within a species (microevolution) does not lead to macroevolution, and yet the textbooks maintain this mirage to convince young students that Darwinism is true. We hit this point very hard in Episode 1 and kindly ask you to revisit this portion of the video, for many of your examples do not recognize the distinction between macroevolution and limited variation within a species. It is precisely the inadequacy of the processes involved in microevolution to produce macroevolution—even over very long periods of time—that led to the following statement in 2019 by 1000 scientists at leading universities and even in the National Academy of Sciences:


We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.[7]


Now, to address your specific example, it must be stressed that there are no “upward” mutations observed in the variation within the dog-kind. Instead, the variety that we see among dogs is produced by loss of genetic information. To put this in a specific context, a Great Dane does not become large because it develops new genes for a larger size, but because it loses genetic information that codes for smaller body size. Within the normal limits of the breed, you cannot keep breeding Great Danes and expect to end up with a medium-sized dog. You would have to reintroduce genes into the gene pool by crossing a Great Dane to a smaller dog in order to significantly reduce body size. And two Great Dane parents will never give rise to, say, something resembling a small horse. Again, the variation that we see within dog breeds is limited variation within a kind (“microevolution”). Note that no increase in functional genetic information has occurred; in fact, the opposite has occurred, and there is a decrease in functional genetic information. This is precisely the reason for the “hybrid vigor” observed in mongrel dogs, as well as the inherited predispositions to certain types of health problems in purebred dogs.

In order to properly assess the observable processes of variation, we have to keep in mind the mechanism which is operating in all of these cases: The first step is always reproductive isolation. Isolation in this sense means that a limited number of individuals are prevented from interbreeding with the other individuals from an original population. This can happen by natural events, like a geographic separation between populations that causes two subsets of an original population to be isolated from one another, or artificially, as occurs when animal breeders breed livestock selectively for specific characteristics. Over time, the individuals who are separated will accumulate mutations in their gene pool which are different from the mutations that accumulate in the gene pool of the original population. If enough differences accumulate, the two populations will no longer be able to interbreed and would then be considered different species. The key point is that these isolated individuals are not carrying the entire genetic diversity of the original population, simply because of their small number. If the isolation process continues for many generations, then the unavoidable inbreeding further reduces the number of genes among the smaller population. If they survive this process, then the result is a new variety of animal. The new variety can have a different shape, color, or other property as a reflection of those genes which are now predominant in the new population. However, these new phenotypical characteristics, even if beneficial for survival, are not due to new genes. The underlying genes already existed in the original population, and even if they are modified by mutation, they do not represent an influx of new information. Additionally, as we showed with the Great Dane example, it is often the removal of genes from the gene pool which leads to the new phenotypes. Therefore, new populations are always genetically “poorer” than the starting population. A loss of genes is not evolution; it is also misleading to even call it “microevolution,” because it is the opposite of “evolution.” It is “devolution.”

But let us return to your original comment about dogs. It should also be noted that the nature, or essential character, of wolves, dogs, foxes, hyenas, etc. is the same. The opening sentence of your paragraph seems to suggest that wolves can somehow “not reproduce” with dogs. This is not the case. A wolf and a dog can produce offspring. It is very sensible to assume that if two creatures can be shown to create offspring, they are of the same kind. While limited speciation does occur, the only truly universal and quantifiable way of determining what makes up a true “kind” of animal, which is the taxonomic category used in Genesis,[8] is by determining which animals can interbreed. If animals have some degree of fertility with each other, then it is reasonable to assume that they are of the same created kind, even if the animals have differentiated somewhat over time to the point where they are no longer able to produce viable or fertile offspring. In other words, if it can be shown, even in a lab, that one species’ sperm can successfully fertilize another species’ egg, it is plausible that these are of one created kind. But dogs and wolves can have viable offspring naturally that do survive and can continue to reproduce with either dogs or wolves. Thus, it is stretching credulity, even for an evolutionist, to suggest that variation between wolves and dogs is an example of evolution, when we have not truly observed the very first step of the “evolutionary process” via reproductive isolation.

Examples of interbreeding across “species” are not just limited to dogs. Horses and donkeys can interbreed to create mules, though mules are sterile. Camels and llamas can reproduce; therefore it is plausible that they came from the same originally created kind. The fundamental difference between the creation model of descent as compared to the evolution model of descent is that in the creation model the originally created kinds of creatures from which all animals are descended contained all of the genetic information needed to allow the rich cornucopia of variation that came from them, within their kinds. Mutations have had an effect on this differentiation, and mutations do cause real effects, sometimes even beneficial within a particular environment, as in the case of polar bears as will be seen below, but not because they are causing an increase in functional genetic information.

Episode 5 Comments

Episode 5 begins with a reminder to viewers that it may be helpful to review the definitions in Episode 1, which include the definitions of macroevolution/Darwinism and limited variation within a species. This understanding is key because (as stated at the start of Episode 5) many textbook claims can easily be explained by the limited variation within a species that all sides readily admit is routinely observed. One does not need to rely upon the unobserved processes of macroevolution or Darwinism to explain the data.

Episode 5 reviews several icons, starting with peppered moths. Your comments on Episode 5 state concerning peppered moths:

Foundations Restored claims that is [sic] displaying the moths with their wings open on tree trunks in biology textbooks is an unjust representation of the natural way of resting of these moths, which is true, but then extrapolates that argument to say that all experiments regarding natural selection of peppered moths are invalid because the experiments were based on the moths resting in this particular manner on trees. This is a strawman argument because Foundations Restored is saying that today’s scientists are using this first experiment as the basis of today’s belief while in reality there have been many duplicate experiments done since then and the modern belief of natural selection regarding moths is based on them.

We are glad you agree that peppered moths do not normally rest on tree trunks. You also would presumably agree that it is therefore misleading for high school biology textbooks to display the moths resting on tree bark and to argue that the peppered moth predation on tree trunks represents a legitimate example of natural selection. Take away the moths resting on tree bark (with their wings wide open—another deception, as the moths rest with their wings closed), and the story as presented in the textbooks—accompanied by pictures of moths resting on tree bark—quickly falls apart. Biology textbooks the world over still use Bernard Kettlewell’s experiments as one of their top evidences of evolution, therefore the treatment of the peppered moths in Foundations Restored is concerned with refuting these erroneous claims.

The second major point of the section on peppered moths in our DVD series is that, at most, the peppered moths are an example of natural selection, but not an example of macroevolution. As we have already thoroughly explained our refutation of this idea, we will only point out that this important point is not made in the classroom textbooks, which cite the natural selection supposedly demonstrated in peppered moth experiments as “proof” of Darwinism.

Regarding the rest of your statement above, you conclude that the beliefs of today’s evolutionists do not rest on Kettlewell’s experiments but on the “many duplicate experiments done since then…” Unfortunately, no references to the scientific literature are provided and so we cannot comment on any specific studies to which you may be referring.

Further, the segment in the DVD clearly does state that additional moth studies have been performed and some have roughly supported Kettlewell’s conclusions while others have not.[9] So when you mention work done by Majerus that you claim supports Kettlewell’s results, you fail to mention that other experiments do not support Kettlewell’s conclusions.

You then state:

Also, basing oneself on the argument that moths do not normally rest with their wings open on tree trunks is almost irrelevant, as it is heavily documented that during the industrial revolution scientists noticed that there were many more dark colored moths than light colored ones, and even named this pigment “industrial melanism”. So after all, what difference does it make if Bernard Kettlewell’s specific experiment uses moths with opened or closed wings on tree barks or on branches or during the day or the night, if the phenomenon he claimed to prove was widely documented by observing scientists in the industrial revolution?

Whatever accounted for the mix of dark and light-colored moths during the industrial revolution or in Kettlewell’s day, we know that Kettlewell’s experiments and conclusions are highly flawed. Yet Kettlewell’s experiments are used in introductory biology textbooks as an example of natural selection in action and as proof of Darwinism. The representation makes for quick converts to Darwinism, but one can scarcely call this deception good science or of little consequence.

You then state:

Regarding predation, there are some fallacies in Foundations Restored’s arguments. First of all, FR claims that due to Bernard Kettlewell’s release of the moths during the day, his experiment resulted in a false conclusion of natural selection, as birds ate most of the easily visible moths. This is fallacy because even if the moths were better hidden, the birds were still more likely to see the lighter moths where there was no lichen and the darker ones where there was lichen. FR says that the bird predation is practically insignificant, due to the fact that bats account for 90% of moth predation, but that is tricky to say, as that is only true when moths camouflage with their background but not so when they contrast it.

What we are saying is that the Kettlewell experiments do not represent natural conditions and therefore the results of the experiment are called into question. The failure to match naturally occurring conditions includes the resting place of the moths, the moth’s wing position while at rest, and the release of the moths on tree trunks during the day, which set up a “feeding tray” situation. These are all criticisms of Kettlewell’s experiments found in the scientific literature. Ted Sargent, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, commented about Kettlewell’s experiments: “Those experiments in Birmingham and Dorset were just terrible! Kettlewell set the moths out in huge numbers, way above normal levels for those environments, and then acted surprised when the birds came and ate them. It was a bird feeder!”[10] Even Kettlewell admitted to the weaknesses related to release time, which is why (as the DVD series explains) he tried to release the moths in the pre-dawn period, but found them to be so sluggish that they had to be heated over his car engine.

You then summarize a study by Majerus (again, a reference to the study would be helpful) and conclude that:

the same expert they cite to discredit Kettlewell's experiment and prove their point, doesn't agree with FR but with Kettlewell.

Actually, Majerus has been highly critical of Kettlewell’s study methods and results, as is made clear in the DVD series. Majerus is an important figure in the peppered moth story, as his book Melanism: Evolution in Action was called a “watershed event” in understanding the flaws of Kettlewell’s work. Judith Hooper (author of the other comprehensive book on peppered moths called Of Moths and Men) said of Majerus’ book:


Methodically and incisively analyzing every flaw in Kettlewell’s experiments and in the industrial melanism paradigm, Majerus’s book left no doubt that the classic story was wrong in almost every detail. Peppered moths, if left to their own devices, surely do not rest on tree trunks; bird vision is nothing like human vision; Kettlewell was wrong about how peppered moths choose their resting sites; the high densities of moths he used may have skewed the results; the method of release was faulty, and on and on. The various predation and survey studies conducted after Kettlewell have not replicated his results particularly well, and other ‘factors’ kept having to be invoked to squeeze the data into the standard industrial melanism model. ‘The findings of [scientists since Kettlewell],” Majerus concluded, ‘show that the precise description of the basic peppered moth story is wrong, inaccurate, or incomplete, with respect to most of the component parts.’[11] (Emphasis added)


Thus, Majerus agrees with all of our critiques of Kettlewell’s experiments. You then spend some time discussing bird vision. We refer you to Majerus’ book to see a more detailed discussion set forth by Majerus to support the position that bird vision is not like human vision.

You then comment:

Also, [the makers of the DVD] use a quote from Jerry A. Coyne from the last century when today he has already changed his mind and recognized his “mistakes” of more than 20 years ago. Coyne is a biologist known for his work on creationism but Foundations Restored does not mention that he is already an atheist today and discredits his papers from the past.

Jerry Coyne confessed that he was horrified to learn the truth about Kettlewell’s experiments. This quotation (from the last century) is notable and remains highly relevant because it was made in a Nature review of Majerus’ book. Here is a paragraph from Coyne’s review:


B. betularia shows the footprint of natural selection but we have not yet seen the feet. Majerus finds some solace in his analysis, claiming that the true story is likely to be more complex and interesting, but one senses that he is making a virtue of necessity. My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.[12]


Here we note from Coyne that Majerus still believes natural selection does play a role in the peppered moth story, but this should hardly be surprising; and it is interesting to note Coyne’s comment about Majerus’ position being one of necessity. In other words, no matter how flawed Kettlewell’s experiments may be, Darwinists have no choice but to hold to the formula: macroevolution = mutations + natural selection + time.

Also, regarding Coyne, your statement that he is “known for his work on creationism” suggests that you believe him to be a biologist who was a supporter of creationism but who has now seen the light since becoming an atheist. We are unaware of any evidence that Jerry Coyne was ever a creationist; he remains a secular Jew.[13] Regarding Coyne’s view of natural selection, we clearly see a philosophical/worldview bias, but it is the bias of someone who has assumed an anti-supernatural position. Such an individual must (of necessity) accept natural selection as part of Darwinian evolution because the subject of origins must be claimed by natural science, not historical theology. Note the following from his book Why Evolution is True (2009):


But even if we agree that natural selection does work in nature, how much work can it really do?...can it build complexity?...how can we be sure that selection was involved? How do we know that creationists are wrong when they say that selection can make small changes in organisms but is powerless to make big ones? […] we must ask: What’s the alternative theory? We know of no other natural process that can build a complex adaptation. The most commonly suggested alternative takes us into the realm of the supernatural. This, of course, is creationism…[14]


This text is sufficient to see clearly that Coyne has claimed origins for natural science; it is the only explanation he will entertain, meaning that he is not willing to follow the evidence or to admit that the claimed Darwinian process of evolution is inadequate because to do so opens the door to the idea of special creation.

You then state:

Pamela Acker says that, after all, even if the experiments could be taken at face value, they still don’t prove macroevolution to be true. But, in today’s scientific community, no one claims that this experiment proves macroevolution, but instead use it as an example of natural selection, which is the same thing that Pamela Acker said that could be concluded from this experiment.

We repeat that our objection is not against the claim that natural selection occurs in nature, but that textbooks use misinformation about Kettlewell’s experiments to claim that natural selection was not only proven by Kettlewell, but that these experiments are proof that Darwinism/macroevolution are true. And to demonstrate that the “natural selection = evolution” claim is commonly made (and is specifically being made by those who use Kettlewell’s experiments as examples), we merely point to the name of Majerus’ book: Melanism: Evolution in Action.

Episode 6 Comments

Your comments on Episode 6 state:

Foundations Restored claims that evolutionists say that there is genetic entropy, but that is “moving the goalpost”, because if there was completely [sic] genetic entropy, then life in itself would not be sustainable as there would be so many mutations that evolution could not be [sic] occur and all beings would deteriorate rapidly. Thus, that is not what evolutionists say, as they, and anyone else, can see that it does not make sense to claim that evolution occurs through entropy. What evolutionists do claim is that there isn’t complete entropy but, instead, negentropy or negative entropy, which means that it goes against nature (as a side note, I had never heard this being claimed before, and I honestly have no idea how naturalists can claim that evolution goes against nature, as evolution is based on nature, but as he didn’t really elaborate more on how this works, I’ll just drop this and hope you guys can make some sense of it!!). So, as there is order in life then you can’t say that there is genetic entropy, so by Foundations Restored saying that evolutionists claim that there is genetic entropy, they are “moving the goalpost” to be able to dismantle the evolutionists’ claim more easily.

It seems that the points raised here reflect an inadequate understanding of genetic entropy, [15] a misunderstanding of how genetic entropy affects the theory of evolution, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that genetic entropy is treated in the scientific community.[16] Before we respond to specifics, a summary of genetic entropy is in order. Since genetic entropy is a relatively new concept and is generally unknown to most, we need to start by answering the question, “What is genetic entropy?”

Genetic entropy is a concept popularized by Dr. John Sanford, retired professor of genetics at Cornell University, who has published dozens of papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and holds a number of patents in the field of genetics. To understand genetic entropy is to understand that all living things are undergoing genetic degeneration. In the words of one author:


Genetic entropy is the systematic breakdown of the internal biological information systems that make life alive. Genetic entropy results from genetic mutations, which are typographical errors in the programming of life (life’s instruction manuals). Mutations systematically erode the information that encodes life’s many essential functions. Biological information consists of a large set of specifications, and random mutations systematically scramble these specifications – gradually but relentlessly destroying the programming instructions essential to life.

Genetic entropy is most easily understood on a personal level. In our bodies there are roughly 3 new mutations (word-processing errors), every cell division. Our cells become more mutant, and more divergent from each other every day. By the time we are old, each of our cells has accumulated tens of thousands of mutations. Mutation accumulation is the primary reason we grow old and die. This level of genetic entropy is easy to understand.

There is another level of genetic entropy that affects us as a population. Because mutations arise in all of our cells, including our reproductive cells, we pass many of our new mutations to our children. So mutations continuously accumulate in the population – with each generation being more mutant than the last. So not only do we undergo genetic degeneration personally, we also are undergoing genetic degeneration as a population. This is essentially evolution going the wrong way. Natural selection can slow down, but cannot stop, genetic entropy on the population level.[17]


Generally speaking, entropy is simply a measure of disorder. All functional systems degenerate, consistently moving from order to disorder, unless additional order is imposed from the outside. You can simply consider your own kitchen table to know this is true! As time goes on, clutter and dust gradually accumulate, and you must expend considerable energy and time to put the situation back into some semblance of order. The same is true of all biological systems of information. Dr. Sanford writes:


Kondrashov, an evolutionist who is an expert on this subject, has advised me that virtually all the human geneticists he knows agree that man is degenerating genetically.[18] That paper indicates human fitness is declining at 3–5% per generation…. we at least agree that fitness is going down, not up…. There is really no debate on current human genetic degeneration….[19]


The criticism to which we are responding seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of genetic entropy and what Foundations Restored is saying about it. We are not in any way turning an existing argument from evolutionists on its head. In Genetic Entropy (2014), Dr. John Sanford writes:


For many decades geneticists have been worried about the impact of mutations on the human population (Muller, 1950[20]; Crow, 1997[21]). When these concerns first arose, they were based upon an estimated rate of deleterious mutation of 0.12 to 0.30 mutations per person per generation (Morton, Crow and Muller, 1956[22]). Since that time there have persisted serious concerns about deleterious mutation accumulation in man, leading to a high ‘genetic load’ and a generally degenerating population. There has also been a long-standing belief that if the rate of deleterious mutations approached one deleterious mutation per person per generation, long-term genetic deterioration would be a certainty (Muller, 1950). This would be logical, since selection must eliminate mutations as fast as they are occurring. We need to prevent mutant individuals from reproducing, but we also need to leave enough remaining people to procreate and produce the next generation. By this thinking, deleterious mutations in man must actually be kept below one mutation for every three children—if selection is to eliminate all the mutations and still allow the population to reproduce. This is because global fertility rates are now less than 3 children for every 2 adults, so only one child in three could theoretically be selectively eliminated. For these reasons, geneticists have been naturally very eager to discover what the human mutation rate really is![23]

One of the most astounding recent findings in the world of genetics is that the human mutation rate (just within our reproductive cells) is in the range of 75-175 nucleotide substitutions (misspellings) per person per generation (Nachman and Crowell, 2000;[24] Kondrashov, 2002;[25] Xue et al., 2009;[26] Lynch, 2010;[27] Campbell and Eichler, 2013[28]). These high numbers are now widely accepted within the genetics community…. When an earlier study revealed the mutation rate might be as high as 30, the highly distinguished author of that study concluded that such a number would have profound implications for evolutionary theory (Neel et al., 1986[29]).[...] What type of selection scheme could possibly stop this type of loss of information? As we will see, given these numbers, there is no realistic method to halt genomic degeneration. Since the portion of the genome that is recognized as being truly functional is rapidly increasing, the number of mutations recognized as being actually deleterious must also be rapidly increasing. If the genome proves to be mostly functional,[30] then most of these 75-175 mutations per person are actually deleterious.[31]

[...]

When selection is unable to counter the loss of information due to mutations, a situation arises called “error catastrophe”. If not rapidly corrected, this situation leads to the eventual death of the species—extinction. In its final stages, genomic degeneration leads to declining fertility, which curtails further selection (selection always requires a surplus population, some of which can then be eliminated each generation). Inbreeding and genetic drift then take over entirely, rapidly finishing off the population. The process is an irreversible downward spiral. This advanced stage of genomic degeneration is called “mutational meltdown” (Bernardes, 1996).[32] Mutation meltdown is recognized as an immediate threat to all of today’s endangered species. The same process appears to potentially be a theoretical threat for mankind. What can stop it?[33]


Natural science now confirms what the Bible clearly shows[34] and what the Church has always taught—that human evolution is going down, not up. An average of ~100 new mutations per generation is an absolute death blow to evolution theory; in fact, far fewer mutations per generation would show evolution is going in the wrong direction. It would confirm that what we observe in the real world is not evolution, but devolution. It is an unavoidable fact that we are slowly degenerating as a species. Many studies have confirmed that mutations are relentlessly accumulating in our genome, and we have no way to stop them. Interestingly, the same phenomenon is occurring in other creatures as well, and not just in humans. Since we can now measure the fact that we are all slowly mutating in a downward direction, evolution is dead in its tracks; science has proven that evolution is a failed concept and it will eventually go down in history as a laughable theory on par with spontaneous generation and other failed concepts that at one time most scientists (and laymen) believed in. Most scientists are simply ignoring this data, however, and will continue to do so because of metaphysical ramifications of this fact. One cannot reject evolution and continue to be what the majority of scientists are from a philosophical perspective: materialistic naturalists.

Related to mutations, you make the following comment:

Regarding mutations, Foundations Restored makes a great mistake by claiming that all mutations are harmful.

Life forms adapt to their specific environment and that adaptation is a positive mutation, but it is only positive in that specific environment. If you take it out of its environment then the mutation will no longer be beneficial, as the organism has adapted to the environment it was forced to live in.

For example, a polar bear has adapted to the cold and snowy climate with its white fur and body mass composition. But, if you take a polar bear out of the environment it has adapted to and take it to “a typical bear environment” i.e. a forest, then the polar bear won’t thrive due to its lack of camouflage, temperature, food, etc. So, with that logic you can say that the mutations that allowed for polar bears to have white fur and live in very cold climates is not a beneficial mutation as it took away its natural ability to live in forests.

When a change in the organism’s fitness does arise through mutation, it is often associated with what evolutionary biologists call a “fitness cost”[35] – this cost can significantly reduce the beneficial nature of the new trait and brings into question whether mutations can truly be considered beneficial without misleading equivocation. Even leading evolutionary websites admit that beneficial mutations are not beneficial in all situations.[36]

In discussing this section of your comments, it is helpful to define what exactly is meant by “harmful” and “beneficial.” Evolutionary biologists usually use these terms to reference changes that occur at the level of the organism and affect its fitness by either reducing or enhancing it. But this ignores a fundamental principle that is extremely important in determining whether mutations can be a possible mechanism for evolutionary change; and this is the principle that a “harmful” or beneficial” change in the fitness of the organism is “harmful” or “beneficial” does not necessarily entail that the underlying change in the genes of the organism is “harmful” or “beneficial.” In other words, you can have a “beneficial” change in the fitness of the organism that is the result of a “harmful” change in the genes. Foundations Restored does not claim that all mutations are “harmful” in the sense that they all decrease fitness; on the contrary, there are a number of mutations that improve fitness in organisms. However, we do claim (in accordance with the overwhelming evidence) that mutations are truly “harmful” in a genetic sense; that they involve a loss of genetic information, a loss of specificity in the gene product, or the loss of a gene product altogether. As we have discussed, this can be beneficial in the same way that stripping down a car for a race can help the driver push the car to fly around the track faster; but if some accident occurs in which the stripped-down material would be helpful, the driver may have cost himself the ability to win the race.

As shown in the footnote #5 that quotes Darwin Devolves by Michael Behe, it is certainly possible that even a degradative mutation can be beneficial to an organism while that organism remains in a specific environment. Pertinently, in that same book, Behe writes about polar bears and how their ancestors managed to adapt to a new environment:


Only several years ago--only after laboratory techniques were invented that could reliably track changes in species at the level of genes and DNA--was the genetic heritage of the Arctic predator laid bare. The results have turned the idea of evolution topsy-turvy…. 65 to 83 percent of helpful, positively selected genes are estimated to have suffered at least one damaging mutation. It seems, then, that the magnificent Ursus maritimus has adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading genes that its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominantly by devolving.[37]


The polar bear is like the stripped-down racecar—it has become highly efficient for its environment by losing what its ancestors had, not by gaining what they did not have. This clearly illustrates our point that it is one thing for an organism to adapt to its environment by breaking genes and devolving, and it is an entirely different thing for it to be truly evolving novel genes in the process.

Creatures becoming adapted to their environment through gene degradation fits within microevolution, or limited variation within a created kind—limited because there are only so many degradations that can occur before extinction. Clearly a bear adapting to a different environment while remaining a bear is an example of a horizontal change (change within a kind), not vertical change (change from one kind into another). Taking into account the genetics, this change in the polar bear, if it had any verticality at all, was a move “down” and not a move “up.” There is a major limit to what can be accomplished by simply breaking genes and even if a benefit is conferred in a specific environment, this is certainly not a mechanism that would drive any true “evolutionary” process. Instead, this mechanism supports the Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Creation very well, that in the beginning there were genetically perfect creatures and over time the genome degraded, resulting in different varieties that were often more specialized but no more, and usually less, advanced than their original ancestors.

You continue by stating:

Thus, saying that bacteria mutating to resist antibiotics is a negative mutation is a false interpretation, as bacteria have mutated to adapt a [sic] specific environment. Once, they [sic] are taken out of the specific environment they adapted to and moved to a different one, it is obvious that they won’t thrive like the bacteria that have been adapted to that other environment. A mutation is beneficial only in the context of the organism’s specific environment.

This example also ignores the principle that what is positive at the level of the organism can be negative at the level of the genome. Most instances of antibiotic resistance involve a change in the structure of the bacterium which weakens its normal constitution. For example, MRSA has a change in a structural protein that causes methicillin (a common antibiotic) to be unable to bind to the resistant bacterium; but this same change means that an important structural component of the bacterial cell wall is weakened in the resistant bacteria.[38] Resistance to streptomycin, another antibiotic, is a result of a modification in the bacterial ribosome that keeps the antibiotic from binding to the ribosome and completely disrupting its function. But the mutation itself, which renders the bacterium resistant, causes diminished functioning of the ribosome, which is ultimately detrimental to the microbe.[39] What needs to be remembered here is that the mutations we are talking about, when bacteria mutate to become resistant to a certain antibiotic, are permanent changes that have broken genes and are now fixed in the genome to be propagated to all their progeny. Yet again, we have an example of what could be called microevolution, but which actually shows us a more complex genome becoming less complex. Breaking genes can convey a survival advantage in certain situations, as we have explained, but it is still merely a mechanism of adaptation and variation within a kind of creature.

In addition, not all antibiotic resistance arises from mutation. Many antibiotics are naturally occurring substances or derived from naturally occurring substances.[40] Penicillin, the first and perhaps most famous antibiotic, is a complex organic molecule produced by molds of the genus Penicillum. New discoveries of natural antibiotic resistance are being made with surprising regularity.[41] These naturally occurring antibiotic resistance genes may be passed from one species to another by horizontal gene transfer. In a simple process known as conjugation, a bacterial cell can, though cell-to-cell contact, directly pass genetic material to another bacterial cell, usually in the form of a small circular piece of DNA known as a plasmid.[42] Bacteria can also scavenge genes from other bacterial cells that have died and ruptured in a process known as transformation[43]. Genes can even be transferred from viruses or eukaryotes into bacterial genomes, though the mechanism of transfer from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is not well understood.[44] While all of these mechanisms result in rearrangement of genes that provide “new” functions in some microorganisms, it should be obvious to the impartial observer that nothing truly novel is arising genetically. So we see again that it is important to distinguish between what is happening in the organism and what is happening in the genes—we can indeed see a benefit to survival while still maintaining a “net gain” of no genetic information, or even observing a loss of information.

Finally, this segment of your comments makes clearer an error that you seem to subscribe to, and which you repeat in further statements on this topic: the idea that an organism can adapt to be better suited to a specific environment, rather than the environment simply selecting against organisms that are less well-suited to survive in it. Evolutionists have to maintain that no such thing is the case. It is not possible for the environment to drive genetic change in the organism. It is only possible for the environment to provide selective pressure (i.e. be an agent of natural selection) once a mutation spontaneously arises in the population. The way that you seem to describe adaptation does not quite do justice to this consensus view; rather, it seems to imply that the environment can drive the organism to change in some kind of specific way.

You continue:

Another example would be sickle-cell anemia, as in a specific environment where malaria is very prominent, a person with sickle-anemia would be more likely to have a longer life than someone with malaria.

The only reason sickle-cell anemia can become prominent in places with malaria is because it exists in two forms, the more severe homozygous form, and the less severe heterozygous form. It is only the heterozygous form that conveys any real statistical survival advantage to the affected individual because homozygous sickle-cell anemia drastically decreases life expectancy.[45] Secondly, we see yet again that this is another example of a gene being broken that happens to convey a survival advantage in a specific environment. The mutation causes the protein hemoglobin to fold incorrectly and clump together, resulting in the characteristic “sickle” shape of the red blood cells that gives the disease its name.[46] Yet, again, we see no increase in functional genetic information, and instead we have a mutation causing a severe disease from which the affected individual can never recover; indeed, his progeny, if they inherit this disease, will suffer with it and will likely pass it on to their progeny.[47] Just as in the previous example of acquired antibiotic resistance in bacteria, here we have a more complex and more functional genome breaking down, resulting in a less complex and less functional genome. On the other hand, this type of disease makes perfect sense in light of genetic entropy.

You continue:

A third example would be natives of the North Sentinel Island. As they have not had contact with the outside world, they have not adapted to outside illnesses but have adapted to the island they live in. If you take them out of their natural habitat and place them in a “normal human habitat”, let’s say, a city, they wouldn’t last long, as the illnesses we have long ago adapted to resist and are at most a common cold for us, would prove to be deadly or almost so to them. But, most likely, if we were to live where they have lived for so many years untouched by civilization, some of their common illnesses might result to be very deadly for us.

With respect to the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, an isolated island off the coast of India who have rejected contact with the outside world, even if we speculate that they would be more susceptible to diseases they have not previously been exposed to, this has nothing to do with evolution, as if people who live in the outside world are somehow more evolutionarily advanced than the islanders. If they were indeed susceptible to diseases that they had not been previously exposed to, this would be the result of their immune system not having been exposed to these particular infectious diseases and certainly not because their ancestors haven’t conveyed to them some evolutionary advantage that you or I have when it comes to the ability to withstand infectious diseases.

You continue:

Also, the process of mutations is not random. Which mutation occurs is random, of course, but which ones survive isn’t, as those that make the organism less fit for the environment die off. So, the book example is misleading as it gives all copying errors the equal chance of being passed on, when in reality those more adapted to the environment survive and tend to be passed down much more than those that aren't beneficial. So, the squirrel example is a misinterpretation of survival of the fittest.

The process of mutations is indeed random, as the squirrel example makes clear, and as we pointed out above when explaining that organisms cannot adapt directly and purposefully to meet the challenges of their environment. While it is true that natural selection is not random, a common fallacy that evolutionists often propagate is the idea that natural selection is close to perfect in its efficacy. In fact, natural selection can only eliminate from the population those organisms with mutations that are so harmful that they can be selected against at the level of the phenotype. One of the important points that is made in Foundations Restored is that most genetic mutations are subtle; so subtle, in fact, that they cannot be selected for by natural selection because they are not identifiable at the level at which natural selection works.[48] Thus, most genetic mutation errors are able to slowly but relentlessly build up in the genome of the entire population. Certainly, if a genetic error occurs that expresses itself in a gross way phenotypically, this may be dealt with by natural selection; but it takes an egregious error for this to be the case, and sometimes even these significant errors can become fixed in a population through mechanisms that are still poorly understood.[49] In addition, natural selection is really only a destructive force, not a creative one; it can remove most significantly harmful mutations from the population, but it cannot provide anything new to drive macroevolution.

It is true that selection is not blind towards finding “fitter” individuals among a population. However, selection is blind towards finding the pathway to a new organ. These two are entirely different technical problems. For example, selection could favor the individual reptiles that possess the fittest limbs for walking. However, selection cannot guarantee that this mutation is also leading towards the construction of wings, which reptiles would have to have given to the birds they are supposed to have evolved into. For natural selection to drive the evolution of wings would require thousands of small leg improvements and each one of them would have to be – by pure chance! – at the same time an improvement of flight ability. Such a “lucky” sequence is statistically impossible.

If such a sequence could happen, we would have to admit that a natural process with decreasing entropy could occur. Natural law, however, excludes this. Phenomena like crystal formation in so-called “open systems” are no real exception to this universal law[50] as they only make molecular, pre-existing order visible. They don’t create it.

You continue:

Regarding the squirrel, it is unjust to the scientific community to say that after eons of time and many mutations, the squirrel could suddenly pop out wings, as that is not a true representation of what evolutionists claim that occurs (sadly, what they apparently do claim, was not stated).

Evolutionists have claimed far more absurd things than this. They have claimed that a cascade of harmful random mutations directed by nothing more than the non-creative culling force of natural selection has built the human genome (and every other genome on the Earth) and endowed us with every faculty humanity possesses (and every feature that every other creature on the Earth has ever possessed). They claim that the most sophisticated information code on earth, DNA, was able to create itself spontaneously over time, and with it all of the variety in creation.

Your objection seems to be that most evolutionists wouldn’t claim that any animal could “suddenly” pop out wings; instead they would claim that the wings could only arise gradually. Yet, when it became apparent that a gradual evolution was not recorded in the fossil record due to a lack of transitional forms, gradualism was abandoned by many evolutionists in favor of a more punctuated model. This model, called punctuated equilibrium, is: “a theory of evolution that claims that change happens suddenly over short periods of time followed by long periods of no change.” [51] In other words, due to the lack of transitional forms, evolutionists have also been forced into a sort of “hopeful monster” theory[52] holding that evolutionary changes must have happened so rapidly and in isolated populations that they left no fossil record. Look at what emerges. When we ask to see an example of macroevolution in action in the present day, we are told that it happens too slowly to witness. But when we look in the fossil record, we are told that it happens too rapidly to see. Which is it? [53] The squirrel example is intended to show the absurdity of evolutionary claims and specifically the mechanism by which evolutionary changes are supposed to be driven.

You continue:

In addition, the episode does not mention paralogs, which is [sic] clear evidence that many species have common ancestors.

Regarding paralogs,[54] the answer is much simpler than invoking the non-parsimonious tangle of convergence that is required for evolutionary theory to explain their origin. When an evolutionist observes two genes that seem similar but are not identical, he invokes common ancestry and dubs the genes “homologous.”[55] In the Creation framework, when a scientist observes two genes that seem similar but not identical, he invokes a common designer and concludes that the genes have a similar function. There are three very solid reasons why God would design similar features across many species, and none of them require common ancestry. The first is that there is an optimum design for performing any given function; thus, it is reasonable that God would not deviate much from this design when creating the bodies of animals.[56] The second is that similar design in animal body plans (and even similarities to human body plans) maximizes man’s ability to have stewardship over nature; just think of how difficult it would be for a farmer to raise livestock if cows shared no similarities with chickens, goats, pigs, or sheep, or for veterinarians to practice their trade if every animal’s body was wildly different.[57] The third is that it is appropriate that there is an elegant uniformity in nature, and this is comforting to man; think what a wild, strange world it would seem if every time a new creature was encountered we would have to learn all over again what constitutes its face![58] Indeed, Stuart Burgess makes the additional profoundly moving argument regarding the third point, that of the elegance and appropriateness of common design:


[T]here is an additional and special reason why God has created similarities between humans and other animals. God ordained that mammals such as bulls, sheep and goats should be used as animal sacrifices to give a picture of redemption. In Old Testament times, the blood of bulls, goats and sheep was shed in order to obtain forgiveness for the sins of the people. These animal sacrifices pointed towards the supreme sacrifice on the cross of Calvary where the Lord Jesus Christ paid the penalty for the sins of his people so that they could be given a place in heaven. Since animal sacrifices needed blood to be shed, it is appropriate that mammals have a blood system similar to that of humans.[59]


Thus we see that similarity of structure does not require common evolutionary ancestry. In fact, the evolutionary model’s explanation of similar structures is much less elegant and straightforward. There are many features of animals that are “homologous” which evolution can only explain by invoking convergent evolution, or the ad hoc explanation that somehow these very similar things managed to evolve independently and repeatedly—wings on bats, insects, and birds, being one example. Yet this is complete speculation and no conclusive fossil evidence can be put forth to support it. Another good example is the appendix, which scientists believe “must have evolved independently at least 32 times, and perhaps as many as 38 times.” [60] How could such an explanation be considered not to grossly violate the necessary principle of parsimony[61] that is adhered to when determining evolutionary relationships? This was a problem before the development of genetic sequencing techniques, and is an exponentially compounded problem for the evolutionary hypothesis now.[62] If evolutionists can believe this, then it is certainly much more reasonable for Christians to believe that Almighty God created similar genes in different creatures that have similar but not exactly the same functions for the purposes we discussed above.

Before leaving this topic, it must also be noted that a major reason that paralogs are considered notable in evolutionary circles is because some paralogs were found that seemed to have no or virtually no function. These were termed “pseudogenes” and generated a great deal of excitement because they were seen as the conjunction of the homology and the old vestigial organ arguments. Of course, we now know that the arguments for vestigial organs were arguments from ignorance and that so-called pseudogenes have been continually found to have real functions. Thus, paralogs do not demonstrate evolution.

You continue:

Regarding the research paper done by the Japanese scientist, Kimura, that is mentioned near the end of the episode, the research paper at the end concluded that his findings were compatible with evolution: "The theory applies only for evolution at the molecular level, and is compatible with phenotypic evolution being shaped by natural selection as postulated by Charles Darwin." "... although it was received by some as an argument against Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, Kimura maintained (with the agreement of the majority of those who work in evolutionary biology) that the two theories are compatible...".

It is no surprise that an evolutionist like Kimura, or any evolutionary biologist for that matter, is going to refuse to jettison the theory of evolution, regardless of how much the data from his findings contradict the theory of evolution. We see this repeatedly in the literature—people of good faith on both sides of the arguments are using the same data but coming to completely different conclusions about it. It is an unfortunate prejudice of modern times that the results of an experiment produce a self-evident conclusion, but this is not the case. The results must be interpreted by a human being, who brings to them his own presuppositions and assumptions, and his own worldview. Why would an evolutionary biologist not conclude that his results were reconcilable with his worldview if he can invent a narrative that would explain how such a thing might have evolved? For the danger in accepting evolution as real science lies just here, in the area of interpretation—it is very easy for anyone to suppose how something might have evolved and weave a narrative around the supposition, but there is no real evidence to demonstrate how anything actually did evolve.

The evolutionary hypothesis has undergone such an evolution itself that its malleability knows no limits. No matter what findings come up or fly in the face of the current theory, the primary axiom, which is the dogma that evolution is true and can explain everything in biology, is upheld as firmly as any religious belief. The data in peer-reviewed scientific papers reveals startling findings that would make any open-minded person question the evolutionary hypothesis. As just a few examples:

  • An analysis of 88 proteins grouped rabbits with primates and not rodents.[63]
  • A study of 13 genes in 14 species of animals linked sea urchins with chordates.[64]
  • A study of single chain antigen receptor proteins found sharks in close relation to camels.[65]
  • Bats and dolphins both have a sonar system that is almost identical at a molecular level, which should suggest that they shared a reasonably immediate common ancestor if evolution is correct.[66]

Instead of considering that the evolutionary hypothesis is inadequate to explain these findings, evolutionists will put some evolutionary spin on it so that they do not have to deal with the multitude of consequences that would arise from questioning the primary axiom.

You continue:

Returning to mutations, it is stated many times in the episode that mutations do not expand the genome, but they just copy it wrong, and that is why there needed to be junk DNA in order for evolution to be able to occur. But, even though most mutations are that, there are also duplication errors that extend the length of the genome. These mutations are not very common but do exist, even of whole chapters, so throughout millions of years, the genome could grow all it needed to in order for all the different animals to exist.

Foundations Restored does not declare that there are no mutations that can increase the length of the genome. There is no empirical data, however, that shows a true duplication event creating useful genetic information that improves the function of an organism as the genomic length is increased; instead these events simply introduce errors into the genome. There is much speculation among evolutionists that this is how evolution worked, with paralogs, etc., but this is unsubstantiated and there is not a shred of evidence that this actually occurred. [67][68][69][70]Instead, it is another “just-so” story in the style we have just described to claim that the similarities we see in genomes now had to have been due to duplication events in the past—events that we did not observe and we cannot replicate—and then turn around and claim that these purported duplication events (which were posited in the first place because we assumed evolution was true) are evidence of evolution.

You continue:

Regarding the fruit fly experiment, using it to disprove evolution is extrapolating evidence because that experiment consisted of artificially made mutations and, thus, cannot discredit natural selection as what occurred was not natural.

Again, a rather odd veneration is shown to the power of natural selection, and you are still confusing mutations with selection (as though the two always went hand-in-hand, which is manifestly not the case—as we have already shown). Natural selection is sometimes erroneously thought of as some sort of positive force, conveying upon the most fit individuals the ability to thrive and advance. But let us think critically for a moment about this idea. Mutations are the only thing that hypothetically could cause any genetic change and confer any subsequent phenotypic advantage upon an organism.[71] Natural selection is not a creative force in the least—it is purely destructive as it “weeds out” any particularly harmful mutations from the population. Natural selection is merely killing off the worst, most unfit individuals in a population, preventing them from producing offspring. With the worst out of the way, certainly the more fit individuals have less competition, but ultimately they can only survive and thrive according to the state of their genomes, including whatever mutations they have acquired. We have seen that in over a century evolutionists have not been able to give a single demonstrative example of the type of genetic change that would be necessary for macroevolution to occur. All that they can point to are examples of microevolution—none of which involve true novel increases in functional genetic information—and a handful of wild hypotheses.

Artificial selection is far, far more efficient than natural selection in isolating any mutations that one wants to exploit and increase in subsequent generations. Anyone who has studied or partaken in animal or plant breeding can tell you this. Indeed, any basic genetics course usually involves experimentation on fruit flies because it is so easy to do breeding experiments with them, and to see the results after multiple generations. If fruit fly experiments are meaningless in this discussion, then why do they adorn the evolutionary textbooks and why have countless evolutionists dedicated countless hours to utilizing them in an attempt to demonstrate evolution in action? In truth, there is only one reason for evolutionists to discard the results of fruit fly experiments and that is because they provided no support whatsoever for the microbe-to-man evolution hypothesis.

You continue:

Also saying that scientists have never seen fruit flies turn into anything other than a fruit fly is misleading. This claim, even though it is true, makes the person watching assume that evolutionists think that in our observable time frame (namely, a lifetime), macro evolution can occur and will see the fly turn into something other than a fly. This claim misrepresents the evolutionist stance, as no one is claiming that such a thing will happen in our lifetime or in a couple more. Hundreds of years is not enough for macroevolution to occur or for that fly to turn into anything else.

How many years and generations is the lower limit for macroevolution to occur? 10,000? 1,000,000? Does anyone really have an answer? The answer seems to be as many years as necessary to make it conveniently completely unobservable in real time, and thus out of the range of experimentation and falsification. In truth, this inability to falsify evolution really renders the idea unscientific by definition.[72] If there is no possibility of demonstrating that a hypothesis is false, then you cannot subject it to authentic experimental methods. It becomes just another “just so” story.

Is it an overstatement to say this is true of evolutionary speculation? We don’t think so. As mentioned previously, when we ask to see an example of macroevolution in action, we are told that it happens too slowly to witness. But when we examine the fossil record and notice a lack of transitional forms—and the constancy of forms from layer to layer, stretched out over rocks that are presumed to represent millions of years of evolutionary time—we are told that it happens too rapidly to see. Which is it? Since we have shown that we do not even have an experimentally observed viable mechanism of action that could be hypothetically extrapolated to account for macroevolution, it does not really matter how many hypothetical years evolutionists claim they have to work with, since increasing the number of years will only increase the number of mutational errors and broken genes while not producing any new genetic information.

You continue:

Also, using Richard Dawkins, a famous anti-Christianity atheist who is more of a writer than a real scientist, is pretty much a Ad Hominem Fallacy, as many people would see what he believes in and not side with it solely because of who he is and represents and not due to the scientific evidence against what he says.

Since Richard Dawkins is the most famous evolutionist on Earth and has spent his life pumping out scientific books and doing interviews promoting evolution—indeed, since he has done more to promote evolution theory than any other living person—why would we choose to ignore this man and his works? Countless Christians have read his books and have become atheists as a result of believing his evolutionary fables, just as many individuals read Darwin, lost their faith and did great harm to the world when they acted on the ramifications of what they read (such as John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey). Shockingly, countless Christians parrot many of Dawkins’ godless evolutionary ideas, turning themselves into those whom Marx would describe as useful idiots for the atheistic agenda. In the case of Richard Dawkins and his ilk, a discerning person should be able to perceive that the primary underpinning for their atheism is their unshakable belief in the theory of evolution, and spreading their atheistic “faith” is done by spreading faith in Darwinism. One chooses to adopt such common underpinnings at his soul’s own peril.

You continue:

Who made all the research for this series? It is weird that a dentist, an engineer and a convert to the church are the ones that speak the most and make most of the scientific claims. It would be more believable if more scientists and experts in the area would talk and give their own input, instead of having these other people interpret and “cherry-pick” evidence.

The research for this series came from a wide range of individuals, holding various degrees ranging from advanced degrees in biology, theology, philosophy, physics, geology, economics, and engineering. What we found is that individuals who are able to think critically and who were not indoctrinated into believing that Darwinism is a “fact” are among those most effective in recognizing the logical inconsistencies in Darwinism. We invite you, through the series and our comments, to reflect on the degree to which you readily accepted weak claims for Darwinism as a “scientific fact” in the classroom when you were young.

The main point of having varied presenters, besides for the sake of variety, is simply to show that educated people from a variety of backgrounds support the content. Rather than nitpick such details, those who have gotten the most out of the series are those who have dedicated themselves to carefully studying the entire series with an open mind. The content speaks for itself and is well referenced for those who want to look up the details. For those who have already made up their mind, who are content to follow the herd and are unwilling to question the evolutionist narrative, it is unlikely that anything short of a miracle will convince them. [73]

You continue:

As a whole Foundations Restored seems to be cherry-picking the evidence that suits its conclusion, misrepresenting the evolutionists’ claims in order to make them easier to tear down, and brainwash people into creationism. Foundations Restored portrays macroevolution as a jump from one species to another and no one is ever claiming that, but instead evolutionists claim that enough gradual changes could result in a new species.

It is highly ironic that a person who likely has received a lifetime of education in which nothing but evolution has been taught to him in regard to the origin of man and the universe, accuses us of brainwashing for putting forth a robust defense of the truth that has been handed down to us from Jesus Christ and His apostles—and, before that, from the people of God going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The series shows through sound natural science, sound theology, and sound philosophy, that the evolutionary claims that have indoctrinated billions are nothing more than lies from the pit of hell, designed by Satan to sow seeds of disbelief and ultimately to bring those who reject Him and His Holy Church to eternal damnation.

Regarding your comment on gradualism in evolution, we have not willy-nilly made a strawman of evolution theory but have gone to great lengths to explain why the proposed mechanism for gradual change cannot account for the diversity of life that we see. In the minds of its adherents, evolution theory has turned macroevolution into a kind of nebulous but inevitable simple equation, whereby small changes plus time necessarily result in large changes. Nevertheless, when we examine the genetic details of these small changes, we do not observe any type of increase in functional genetic information, and even in the beneficial mutations in specific environments we see that the mechanism of action consists of broken genes and error accumulation. This ultimately results in a loss of genetic information transmitted from the organism’s precursor, not the increase in the genome which would be necessary for evolution to occur. So really what we have is the following equation:


(Small ultimately degradative changes) x (time) = (large ultimately degradative changes)


This is evolution going the wrong way—devolution. We are left with the unavoidable conclusion that an alternative explanation of origins is needed. This explanation is found in the domain of historical theology, not natural science. Genesis was right all along: In the beginning, everything was very good (perfect, in fact) and since the Fall all of creation has slowly deteriorated. Our Lord Jesus Christ is our only hope for redemption from our bondage, and the bondage of all creation, to this inevitable decay:


For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.[74]

And if you be unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.[75]


You continue:

On a small side note:

People have mentioned the theory that evolutionary proof was planted by the devil to test our faith and have said (in a serious manner) that this theory is more believable than to discredit evolutionary proof, as there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution. I honestly have no idea how to even answer this. The logical thing that follows to such a conclusion (if it is true that the amount of evidence for evolution is overwhelming and that creationism is true at the same time) is that you cannot trust your sense or any form of evidence as you would have to follow a faith that straight up contradicts the observable world. If you have any article or any source that explains how the idea that the devil planted all the proof for us to find and that we should not believe in it contradicts the Christian faith, then I’d appreciate it. This small side note falls under the initial disclaimer, by the way…

The comment suggests that creationists contend that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming because God has allowed the devil to plant false evidence to deceive our rational minds so that adherents to the traditional doctrine of creation are forced to retreat to an all-faith-and-no-reason position where we cannot trust our senses, observations, or science. None of us adheres to this system of thinking, though it certainly is possible for God to send a strong delusion or hardening of heart to one who persists in rejecting His revealed truth (for instance Pharaoh as recorded in the Book of Exodus). It also should be stated unequivocally that the theory of evolution is indeed diabolical. But rest assured that the evidence for evolution is not only not overwhelming, it is ridiculously underwhelming. The only reason one would find it overwhelming is because one has been indoctrinated to accept it for years on end, which, in fact, the vast majority of the population has been. The following statement shows that when the theory of evolution was first introduced to German scientists of Darwin’s day, who of course had not yet been conditioned to believe that his theory could be conceived of as rational and normative, these scientists literally laughed at it:


Darwin’s ominous book [Origin of Species] had been available in Bronn’s translation for two years. The German professional zoologists, botanists and geologists almost all regarded it [Darwin’s theory] as absolute nonsense. Agassiz, Geibel, Keferstein, and so many others, laughed until they were red in the face.[76]


Indeed, there is not a single people group in the world, even in antiquity, whose traditional beliefs included any type of evolutionary notion or concept in line with evolutionary theory.[77] Belief in evolutionary theory is not natural, [78] it is not rational, [79] it is not sensible[80]; it was invented by men who hated the Church and had to come up with a theory to explain everything without God, and thus its most vehement promoters are atheists and satanists.[81] So it is diabolical indeed—but not for the reasons you seem to suppose.

You continue:

Also, here are some videos/articles that have been recommended as further proof:

https://www.youtube.com/user/fnovovill/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW1tojSWPxA

 

The author of the above cited video attempts to explain how macroevolution could proceed based on the erroneous assumption that different kinds of creatures have evolved one from another, or perhaps from some primordial ancestor. The author simply assumes that macroevolutionary processes involving gene duplication have occurred without any experimental evidence demonstrating the mechanisms that would be necessary to accomplish these hypothesized events. Evolutionists do not even consider the more reasonable premise that a common designer would be expected to create in such a way that similar functions would be designed with similar genetic programming. It is important to note that gene duplication itself is not an unlikely event; Trisomy 21, or Down Syndrome is a good example. But this is hardly a good example of macroevolution. While there are multiple lines of evidence that make convincing arguments that macroevolutionary gene duplication events are the stuff of science fiction rather than reality,[82][83][84][85][86][87] the following excerpt, from Evolution News and Science Today, entitled Adam and the Genome and Whole Genome Duplication Events, aptly addresses the major problem with the evolutionary assumption that macroevolutionary processes can arise from gene duplication:


[D]uplicating DNA is the easy part. No one doubts that whole genome duplications generate new DNA. There are many mechanisms that can do this.... The issue is how gene duplicates can acquire new functions. [...] For all we know, genes may easily duplicate. But new protein functions are difficult for random mutation to find because functional sequences are rare in sequence space. This would make it highly unlikely that WGD [whole gene duplication] events can explain how new genes arise.

[Stephen] Meyer explains that indeed it is very difficult for gene duplicates to be recruited to new functions:

But this scenario faces an overriding problem: the extreme rarity of sequences capable of forming stable folds and performing biological functions. Since natural selection does nothing to help generate new folded, functional sequences, but rather can only preserve such sequences once they have arisen, random mutations alone must search for the exceedingly rare folded and functional sequences within the vast sea of combinatorial possibilities. (Darwin’s Doubt, p. 199)[88]

If you want to claim that a gene duplicate was able to acquire a new function by mutation and selection, then you must demonstrate that it is mathematically feasible. Gene duplication accounts of the origin of new genes frequently involve a specific sequence of mutations that are necessary to generate the gene in question. In an article, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information,”[89] Casey Luskin spells out three questions that must be addressed to establish an evolutionary account of the origin of a new gene through gene duplication:

  • Question 1: Is there a step-wise adaptive pathway to mutate from A to B, with a selective advantage gained at each small step of the pathway?
  • Question 2: If not, are multiple specific mutations ever necessary to gain or improve function?
  • Question 3: If so, are such multi-mutation events likely to occur given the available probabilistic resources?

Luskin looks at about a dozen different papers purporting to explain the evolution of new genes. He finds that:

[I]n no cases were the odds of these unlikely events taking place actually calculated. Incredibly, natural selection was repeatedly invoked in instances where the investigators did not know the function of the gene being studied and thus could not possibly have identified any known functional advantages gained through the mutations being invoked. In the case where multiple mutational steps were involved, no tests were done of the functional viability of the alleged intermediate stages. These papers offer vague stories but not viable, plausibly demonstrated explanations for the origin of new genetic information. … In not a single case did the above papers cited by Long et al. actually explain how new functional information arose. In no case was there an analysis of how natural selection could have favored mutational changes that were shown to be likely along each step of an alleged evolutionary pathway; never was any detailed step-by-step mutational pathway even given. At best, these studies offered vague and ad hoc appeals to duplication, rearrangement, and natural selection — often in a sudden, extreme, and abrupt manner — to form the gene in question. In many cases, natural selection was invoked to allegedly account for changes in the gene, even though the investigators didn’t even know the function of the gene and thereby could not identify the advantage provided by the gene’s function. In no case were calculations performed to assess whether sufficient probabilistic resources existed to produce the asserted mutational events on a reasonable timescale. In some cases, the original genetic material for the genes was unknown, or the studies asserted spontaneous “de novo” origin of genes from previously non-coding DNA. While they readily admitted that “de novo” gene emergence is rare, no attempt was made to assess whether such an unguided mechanism is even remotely plausible on mathematical probabilistic grounds. [90]


You include the following links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrKZBh8BL_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SXHMm5I-68

 

Response: The above videos, purporting to show how easily the human eye (and all other eyes) could naturally evolve, are truly fanciful in their conjecture. It should be obvious to the viewer that the argument put forth here could be used as a definition of a “just-so story.” With a complete absence of evidence, experimental or otherwise, the makers of these videos have worked on the following premise: Since evolution must be true, all eyes must have evolved, and since evolution proceeds gradually (except when gradual evolution would invalidate the theory) then the human eye must have evolved gradually. The evolutionist is like a child whose teacher gives him a bowl full of coins from around the world. The assignment is to invent a story to explain how these coins came to be, and the only boundaries which the teacher lays out is that the child must not include within his story any notion that the coins were designed. The child dumps them out and then arranges them left to right in some sequential order, perhaps from small to large, perhaps from lighter to heavier, perhaps from less intricate to more intricate. The child then makes up a fanciful story as to how the coins came to acquire their unique characteristics, explaining each one as part of an overall narrative that relates how each one led to the other, or is linked to the one before it. While these videos do indeed form a critical part of the atheist’s creation myth, it is truly bizarre that a Christian would choose to adopt this fable, since not only is it contrary to reason, but it directly contradicts divine revelation itself.[91] The following links include two videos refuting the wild idea that the human eye evolved, followed by a report that shows that the gift of sight is much more than the sum of its parts:

You include this link:

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/converge.html

Response: The idea that flight evolved independently in birds, bats, and pterosaurs is truly absurd,[95] but of course within the majority of scientific circles, one is forbidden the freedom to question the evolutionary narrative. Within these circles, it is believed, without questioning, that given enough time the impossible becomes not only possible, and not even merely probable, but virtually certain. The author, like most evolutionists, acts as though gaining the power to fly is a fairly simple mechanistic process, involving simple small changes that cumulatively transform a form, the creative force being nothing but random mutations. The author neglects to explain:

  • how new information in the DNA can be created.
  • why the transitional forms which would give credence to the evolutionary narrative are lacking,[96]
  • the fact that the structures that make up the form are remarkably different than non-flying creatures (cells, etc.),
  • and the fact that the brain and the neurologic system has to work in perfect tandem with the structures and form, in order to give the animal the ability to actually use the wings it would have.

Indeed, it is as if the author is explaining how a computer’s hardware could be built, through random instructions, and after this just-so story is done, he still has neglected to explain the operating system and all of programming. The following videos and articles show the silliness of the contention that random mutations plus natural selection could design these magnificent creatures:

You include another link:

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/evolution-and-natural-selection/a/lines-of-evidence-for-evolution

Response: The above linked website rehashes the same old arguments in favour of evolution, and anyone who takes the time to go through our DVD series will easily be able to refute these and other evolutionary myths. Foundations Restored answers these contentions and many more.

You include a last link:

https://www.nature.com/news/massive-genetic-study-shows-how-humans-are-evolving-1.22565

Response: The article itself states the following:


'This is not, by itself, evidence of evolution at work. In evolutionary terms, having a long life isn’t as important as having a reproductively fruitful one, with many children who survive into adulthood and birth their own offspring. So harmful mutations that exert their effects after reproductive age could be expected to be ‘neutral’ in the eyes of evolution, and not selected against.'

[...]

'Studying ongoing evolution in humans is notoriously difficult. Scientists who want to observe selection directly would need to measure the frequency of a mutation in one generation, and then again in all that generation’s children and, better still, grandchildren, says Gil McVean, a statistical geneticist at the University of Oxford, UK. “That would be very hard to do well,” he says. “You would need vast samples”.[101]


Thus, the authors themselves acknowledge that we cannot draw any definitive conclusions from this study. But even if we could, no new genetic information has been introduced into the genome; all this shows is that people with harmful genetic mutations tend to be dying off and not living as long, which is hardly a revelation.

Conclusion

Dear Friend in the Search for Truth,

We hope that you will acknowledge that we have taken quite a bit of time and care to respond to your criticisms and that none of the scientific research you referenced has provided any evidence for molecules-to-man evolution. The only evidence we have found of change over time in the biosphere consists of adaptation and variation within limits determined by the genetic architecture of the various kinds of organisms—an architecture whose origin cannot reasonably be attributed to any kind of purely naturalistic material process.

We hope that you will recall the constant teaching of the Catholic Church that God created all of the different kinds of creatures supernaturally from the beginning of time, each one perfect according to its nature, and that death, deformity and disease entered the world because of the Original Sin. Is it not remarkable how beautifully this account of the origins of man and the universe harmonizes with the evidence? We see a biosphere full of well-designed creatures, devolving through the cumulative effects of harmful mutations, from what must have been a state of genetic perfection a few thousand years ago.

With this in mind, recall that you yourself profess to believe that the sacred humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary without the help of a human father; and that His same sacred humanity died on the Cross at Calvary, was buried, and rose again from the dead. In other words, you profess to believe—as all Catholics are obliged to do—that the humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ was created by God supernaturally without the help of a human father. And you profess to believe—as you should—that Our Lord Jesus Christ raised His mutilated, dead Body to life on Easter Sunday supernaturally by His own divine power.

All that we ask is that you prayerfully reconsider your belief in molecules-to-man evolution in light of the following facts: 1) there is no empirical evidence that microbe-to-man evolution is occurring or has ever occurred; 2) the same Church that proclaimed that Our Lord Jesus Christ was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and that He died and rose from the dead by His own divine power—that same Church teaches that God created all of the different kinds of creatures, including man, supernaturally, at the beginning of time. On what reasonable grounds, then, would you withhold your assent from the doctrine of creation—a doctrine that harmonizes perfectly with all that we see in nature and which provides the only logical foundation for the central doctrine of Christianity—the life, death and Resurrection of the “last Adam,” Our Lord Jesus Christ, for our Redemption?

Your friends in Christ through the Immaculata, in union with St. Joseph,

Dr. Kevin Mark, D.M.D.
Mr. Hugh Owen, M.S.
Dr. Thomas Seiler, Ph.D., Physics
Mr. John Wynne, M.S.
Miss Pamela Acker, M.S., Biology


Footnotes:

[1] Likewise, there is no natural explanation for the reformation of the body from the dust that will have to take place to allow for the reunification of the body and the soul at the general resurrection—the resurrection of the dead— on the last day.

[2] Note that gene transfer or other methods of merely horizontally transferring pre-existing genetic information do not create any new genetic information.

[3] Ochman, H. Genomes on the shrink. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Aug 23; 102(34): 11959–11960. Published online 2005 Aug 16. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0505863102

[4] Evolutionists like to suggest that the nylonase enzyme is an example of genetic information that has been spontaneously created. However, as Dr. Don Batten points out: “Recent reviews acknowledge that the gene, nylB, that codes for the main nylon-degrading enzyme under discussion (nylB) came from an existing gene (nylB’) that codes for a protein that had some existing enzymatic activity for degrading nylon compounds. The enzyme was a carboxylesterase that had a particular β-lactamase fold that could grab hold of and degrade nylon naturally. Because nylon is a man-made fibre, it was thought that no natural enzyme would be able to attack it. However, the basic amide bond of nylon is common in living things, so it is not surprising that an existing enzyme can degrade nylon to some extent”. (https://creation.com/nylonase-update (accessed 4-16-20) In layman’s terms, the gene was already present in the bacterium; it was just changed in a way that made it less specific for a bond that was naturally present in living things (thus “giving” it the ability to process slightly dissimilar bonds that are present in nylon).

[5] “[T]he lineage of bacteria at Michigan State has surpassed sixty-five thousand generations, which is equivalent to over a million years in the history of a large animal species like humans. So not only are there the big numbers of organisms from which to get real answers to evolutionary questions; there are more than enough generations for profound changes to occur too…. Lenski deliberately decided to let the cells simply grow, in the absence of artificial conditions or barriers, just to see how they changed over time…The cells started to grow faster…. Interestingly, most of the improvement came in the earliest generations; the rate of betterment slowed with time. After fifty thousand generations, the most evolved cells grew only about 70 percent faster than the originals. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that the first of the helpful mutations could be tracked down at the DNA level. The watchful researchers noticed that all the evolved cell lines had lost the ability to metabolize a sugar called ribose…. To put a point on it, a beneficial mutation (by itself that deletion mutation increased the cell’s growth rate by 1 to 2 percent) turned out to be a degrading mutation, one in which the loss of a preexisting genetic capacity improved the bacteria’s survival.

“How can that be? How can the loss of an ability be helpful? Well, what might be the quickest, easiest way to improve the gas mileage of your car, other considerations be damned? One way is to get rid of unneeded weight--toss out the spare tire, the hood, or even the doors or windshield. Of course, those things might be helpful in some future circumstances, but if the most important factor for your survival right now is the gas mileage, it would be beneficial to pitch whatever could be spared.” -Behe, Michael J., Darwin Devolves, The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, pp 172-179. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2019.

[6] See link: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/Testing_the_Hypothesis_That_the_Nylonase_NylB_Protein_Arose_De_Novo_via_a_Frameshift_Mutation/7865009/1

[7] A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. www.discovery.org/m/2019/02/A-Scientific-Dissent-from-Darwinism-List-020419.pdf. Accessed 18 April 2020.

[8] Genesis repeatedly says God created “according to their kinds,” and in the vast majority of cases, based on fertility studies, a “kind” represents a taxonomic category in line with a genus, family, or even order. The biological definition of a species is, “a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. The species is the principal natural taxonomic unit, ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial, e.g. Homo sapiens” (Oxford definition of “species,” retrieved 4 Apr, 2020 from:https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/species ) Thus, the definition itself is problematic, because there are many creatures which have been labelled different species within a genus and sometimes even in different genera or even different families, yet they are interfertile. In the paragraphs that follow this one, when we use the term, “species,” we are referring to the first part of the Google definition only.

[9] For a summary of peppered moth experiments that do not support Kettlewell’s predictions, see Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2000), pp. 144-146.

[10] Hooper J. Of Moths and Men, (New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 2002), p. 243.

[11] Ibid., p. 283.

[12] Hooper, p. 284.

[13] Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True,

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/stupid-religious-rule-11734-and-a-note-on-my-ancestry/ Accessed 5May, 2020.

[14] Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True, (Penguin Books, New York), p. 136.

[15] The only way one will be able to fully understand genetic entropy is by reading the book, “Genetic Entropy”. Here the ebook can be downloaded for a very reasonable fee: https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Entropy-John-Sanford-ebook/dp/B00TYWLCO8 Accessed 5 May 2020.

Here are some videos featuring the author of “Genetic Entropy”, Dr. John Sanford that give one a decent understanding of the premise behind genetic entropy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqIjnol9uh8 Accessed 5 May 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZUJ7PZ8f74 Accessed 5 May 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieLu-IHagjM Accessed 5 May 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN6XXCDorLg Accessed 5 May 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1FuKkK64AU Accessed 5 May 2020.

For one who wants to delve into this and other subjects related to this topic on a deeper level, view the following book, available online for free: “New Perspectives on Biological Information”. We are confident that anyone who looks at this information with an open mind will realize that Darwinism is untenable:

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/8818 Accessed 5 May 2020.

[16] The comments above are curious, because at no point does Foundations Restored present evolutionists as arguing that genetic entropy is the source of evolutionary change; rather, we present genetic entropy as a concept diametrically opposed to evolution’s claims, which, if true, completely demolishes the argument for evolution-by-mutation.

[17] FMS Foundation. “What’s Genetic Entropy?” 2018. https://www.geneticentropy.org/whats-genetic-entropy. Accessed 28 April 2020.

[18] Lynch, M., Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(3):961–968, 2010.

[19] Sanford, J. Critic ignores reality of Genetic Entropy.7 Mar 2013. https://creation.com/genetic-entropy. Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[20] Muller, H.J. 1950. Our load of mutations. Amer. J. Human Genetics 2:111-176

[21] Crow, J.F. 1997. The high spontaneous mutation rate: is it a health risk? PNAS 94:8380-8386.

[22] Morton, N.E., J.F. Crow, and H.J. Muller. 1956. An estimate of the mutational damage in man from data on consanguineous marriages. PNAS 42:855-863.

[23] Sanford, J.C. 2014. Genetic Entropy, 4th ed. Longmedow, MA: FMS Publications. p. 37-38.

[24] Nachman, M.W. and S.L. Crowell. 2000. Estimate of the mutation rate per nucleotide in humans. Genetics 156:297-304.

[25] Kondrashov, A.S. 2002. Direct Estimate of human per nucleotide mutation rates at 20 loci causing Mendelian diseases. Human Mutation 21:12-27.

[26] Xue, Y., et al. 2009. Human Y chromosome base-substitution mutation rate measured by direct sequencing in a deep-rooting pedigree. Current Biology 19:1453-1457.

[27] Lynch, M. 2010. Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation. PNAS 107(3):961-968.

[28] Campbell, C.D. and E.E. Eichler. 2013. Properties and rates of germline mutations in humans. Trends in Genetics 29:575-584.

[29] Neel, J.V., et al. 1986. The rate with which spontaneous mutation alters the electrophoretic mobility of polypeptides. PNAS 83:389-393.

[30] The human genome has indeed proven to be mostly functional. “In 2007 a large international consortium of genome scientists published the findings of the ENCODE project, showing that the human genome is vastly more complex than they had expected, and that essentially all of the genome is transcribed—most of it in both directions. They concluded that most nucleotides are not only functional but are poly-functional, having multiple roles. This means that the genome’s functionality exceeds 100% (most of both strands of the DNA are functional). In this light, no mutations should be considered ‘perfectly neutral,’ and almost all mutations must be considered deleterious. This means that the real deleterious mutation rate in man is nothing less than staggering—in the ballpark of 100 mutations per person per generation. This is more than two orders of magnitude greater than was previously considered possible.”

[31] Sanford, J.C. 2014. Genetic Entropy, 4th ed. Longmedow, MA: FMS Publications. p. 38-39.

[32] Bernardes, A.T. 1996. Mutation load and the extinction of large populations. Physica ACTA 230:156-173.

[33] Sanford, J.C. 2014. Genetic Entropy, 4th ed. Longmedow, MA: FMS Publications. p. 45.

[34] The following website links to a PDF document that clearly demonstrates that when lifespans as recorded in Genesis are plotted across generations after Noah, we see a dramatic decline in life expectancy, with the pattern of decline revealing a very clear biological decay curve. The curve is consistent with the concept of genomic degeneration caused by mutation accumulation: https://www.logosra.org/genetic-entropy Accessed 5 May 2020.

[35] A quick search of the scientific literature yields thousands of hits related to the “fitness cost” of particular traits or mutations. When referring to evolutionary fitness, scientists have long recognized that fitness is not absolute – what might make an organism more suited to one environment could be disastrous if the environmental conditions changed.

[36] See, for example: NIH. How are gene mutations involved in evolution? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/mutationsanddisorders/evolution. Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[37] Behe, Michael J., Darwin Devolves, The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, p. 16-17. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.

[38] Stapleton & Taylor. 2002. Methicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus. Sci. Prog. 85:57-72.

[39] Spetner, L. Not by Chance! Brooklyn: The Judaica Press, 1998. p. 138-143.

[40] Nickolau et al. “Recent Advances in the Chemistry and Biology of Naturally Occurring Antibiotics,” Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2009; 48(4): 660–719

[41] Marshall, B. M., D. J. Ochieng, and S. B. Levy. 2009. “Commensals: unappreciated reservoir of antibiotic resistance.” Microbe 4:231-238.

D'Costa et al. “Antibiotic resistance is ancient,” Nature; London (Sep 22, 2011): 457-61

Franklin et al. 2016. “Antibiotics in Agroecosystems: Introduction to the Special Section,.” J. Environ. Qual. 45:377-393.

These are just a few of the possible references on the topic.

[42] Pommerville, Jeffrey. Alcamo’s Fundamentals of Microbiology. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2011. p. 266-268.

[43] Ibid, p. 273

[44] Rogers, K. Horizontal Gene Transfer. The Encylopaedia Britannica (online). https://www.britannica.com/science/horizontal-gene-transfer Accessed 9/12/17

[45] The median life expectancy for someone with sickle-cell anemia (homozygous for the sickle-cell mutation) is 42-48 years.

see: Platt, O.S., Brambilla, D.J., Rosse, W.F., et al. Mortality In Sickle Cell Disease -- Life Expectancy and Risk Factors for Early Death. N Engl J Med 1994; 330:1639-1644.

[46] NIH. Sickle Cell Disease. https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/sickle-cell-disease. Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

see also: University of California, Berkeley. A case study of the effects of mutation: Sickle cell anemia. Understanding Evolution. University of California Museum of Paleontology. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/mutations_06. Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[47] To be clear, homozygous individuals will pass the disease on to their progeny; heterozygous individuals have a 50% chance of passing the disease along to each child they may have.

[48] This notion is also discussed in detail in John Sanford’s book, Genetic Entropy. Most genetic mutations have been observed to be “nearly neutral.” But nearly neutral is not the same as truly neutral; these mutations are still copying mistakes that cause the loss of small bits of genetic information, but are not severe enough to cause much change in the phenotypic expression.

[49] NIH. How are gene mutations involved in evolution? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/mutationsanddisorders/evolution. Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[50] Open systems allow energy to flow from the surroundings into the system, while closed systems do not. Sometimes scientists try to “get around” the constraints of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that entropy, and thus disorder, is always increasing in the universe) by pointing out that

[51]Cambridge Dictionary: punctuated equilibrium. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/punctuated-equilibrium. Accessed 18 Apr 2020.

[52] “[Richard] Goldschmidt believed the large changes in evolution were caused by macromutations (large mutations). His ideas about macromutations became known as the hopeful monster hypothesis, a type of saltational evolution, and attracted widespread ridicule.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Goldschmidt. Accessed 30 Apr 2020.

[53] Indeed, since evolution is supposedly continually happening, why do we even have discrete kinds of creatures at all, let alone creatures that are so easily divided into taxonomic categories?

[54] These are genes that are considered to be “homologous” because they code for similar (but not identical) proteins. Paralogs are thought to have arisen by gene duplication events according to evolutionists.

[55] As a side note, two genes that are considered homologous cannot be used to prove that evolution occurred unless there is some independent confirmation that one derived from the other. Comparing sequence similarity and concluding that the genes have a common ancestor because they are similar, and then turning around and arguing that they prove evolution because they had a common ancestor, is ultimately circular reasoning because of the way that homology is defined. How do you know that two genes are homologous? You know because they are derived from a common ancestor. How do you know that they derived from a common ancestor? Because they are homologous. The sequence similarity on which homology is based is not an independent confirmation, because it is assumed that sequence similarity is indicative of common ancestry. If, as we argue, there are other explanations for similarity, the designation of homology is little more than a tautology.

[56] Burgess, S. The origin of man. Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2004; p. 14-18.

[57] Ibid, p. 18-19.

[58] Ibid, p. 19.20.

[59] Ibid, p. 20.

[60] Baras, C. Appendix evolved more than 30 times. 12 Feb 2013. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/02/appendix-evolved-more-30-times. Accessed 20 Apr 2020.

[61] University of California, Berkeley. Reconstructing trees: Parsimony. Understanding Evolution. University of California Museum of Paleontology. <https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/phylogenetics_08> Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[62] Cf. Logan Paul Gage, “Barking up the Wrong Tree,” https://www.discovery.org/a/5431/ (accessed 5-03-20)

[63] Sweeting, J.N, Siu, M, McCallum, G.P., et al. Species differences in methanol and formic acid pharmacokinetics in mice, rabbits and primates. Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 2010 Aug 15; 247(1), p. 28-35

Also referenced in: http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/calwild/1996summer/stories/counterpoints.html

[64] Castresana, J., Feldmaier-Fuchs, G., Yokobori, S., et al. The Mitochondrial Genome of the Hemichordate Balanoglossus carnosus and the Evolution of Deuterostome Mitochondria. Genetics 1998 Nov 1; 150 (3), p. 1115-1123.

[65] Könning, D., Zielonka, S, Grzeschik, J, et al. Camelid and shark single domain antibodies: structural features and therapeutic potential. Current Opinion in Structural Biology. 2017 Aug; 45, p. 10-16.

[66] Parker et al. Genome Wide Signatures of Convergent Evolution in Echolocating Mammals. Nature 2013.

[67] Liu, Y. and Moran, D. Do new functions arise by gene duplication? Journal of Creation 20(2):82–89, August 2006. https://creation.com/do-new-functions-arise-by-gene-duplication Accessed 5 May 2020.

[68] Purdue, G. Gene Duplication. Answers in Depth, Vol. 3, (2008), pp. 31–33. https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/aid/v3/gene-duplication.pdf Acessed 5 May 2020.

[69] Mitchell, E. New Function through Gene Duplication. Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/mutations/new-function-gene-duplication/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[70] Carter, R.W. Can Mutations Create New Information? Journal of Creation 25(2):92–98, August 2011. https://creation.com/mutations-new-information Accessed 5 May 2020.

[71] Carlin, J.L. (2011) Mutations Are the Raw Materials of Evolution. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):10. <https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/mutations-are-the-raw-materials-of-evolution-17395346/> Accessed 28 Apr 2020.

[72] Ellis, G. and Silk, J. Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics. Nature, 2014 Dec 16: 516, p. 321–323

[73] Luke 16:31

[74] Romans 8:19-23 RSV

[75] Joshua 24:15 RSV

[76] Bölsche, W., Haeckel — His life and work, (a favourable biography) p. 138, 1906, tr. Joseph McCabe (1867–1955, a vocal apostate and leading village-atheopath) Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Publishers.

[77] Certainly, there were certain atheists and pagans who invented some preconceptions of evolutionary thought, but these were not traditional beliefs that were common to the people of the time.

[78]For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of fourfooted beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:20-25 DR).

[79] It is not in accordance with reason or logic that God, the primary author of the divine revelation that is Scripture, would allow lies to be taught as truth for thousands of years only to have men who hate God and His Church reveal the truth to them, that everything God and the Church taught about origins was wrong.

[80] It is not in accordance with wisdom or prudence to believe the wild story of evolution when it is unsubstantiated by any sound science, but instead lives in the minds of its adherents, propped up by just-so stories and extrapolated from unwarranted conclusions that have no basis in reality, especially when it is peddled mainly by atheists who are clearly using it to prop up their own false worldview.

[81]What is the Difference Between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan? The Satanic Temple. https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/what-is-the-difference-between-the-satanic-temple-and-the-church-of-satan Accessed 5 May 2020.

[82]Jonathan M., Does Gene Duplication Perform As Advertised? Evolution News and Science Today. January 5, 2011. https://evolutionnews.org/2011/01/does_gene_duplication_perform_/ Accessed 4 Apr2020.

[83] Can New Genes Emerge from Scratch? Evolution News and Science Today. 20 Jan 2020. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/01/can-new-genes-emerge-from-scratch/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[84] Andrew McDiarmid and Michael Behe. The Journal Science Reviews Darwin Devolves. Behe Responds. Discovery Institute. 20 Feb 2019. https://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2019/02/the-journal-science-reviews-darwin-devolves-behe-responds/#more-34510 Accessed 5 May 2020.

[85] Casey Luskin. A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge.” Discovery Institute. 4 Oct 2007. https://www.discovery.org/a/4278/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[86] Jonathan Wells. Darwin of the Gaps - Review of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins. Discovery Institute. 26 Mar 2008. https://www.discovery.org/a/4529/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[87] Michael Behe. Correspondence with Science Journals: Response to critics concerning peer-review. Discovery Institute. 17 Oct 1997. https://www.discovery.org/a/450/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[88] Meyer, S. C. (2013). Darwin's doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design. New York: HarperOne.

[89] Casey Luskin. The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information. Discovery Institute. 2 Mar 2010. https://www.discovery.org/a/14251/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[90] Adam and the Genome and Whole Genome Duplication Events. Evolution News and Science Today. 13 Mar 2018. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/03/adam-and-the-genome-and-whole-genome-duplication-events/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[91] The Church has always taught that the primary author of Scripture is God Himself, with the human authors being merely the secondary authors:

“I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also.” 2 Maccabees 7:28 DR

“For God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. For he created all things that they might be…” Wisdom 1:13-14 DR

“For every creature according to its kind was fashioned again as from the beginning, obeying thy commandments, that thy children might be kept without hurt.” Wisdom 19:6 DR

“But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female.” Mark 10:6 DR

The Church herself has also ruled on the issue at hand in the article:

Hugh Owen, The Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Creation. The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation. https://kolbecenter.org/the-traditional-catholic-doctrine-of-creation/ Accessed 5 May 2020.

[92] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[93] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[94] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[95] The author conveniently leaves out the plethora of insects that would have had to independently evolve the ability to fly.

[96] All that are dredged out are a handful of highly disputable transitional forms, creatures like archaeopteryx, which even some in the evolutionist community reject as somehow proving the non-flight to flight narrative.

[97] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[98] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[99] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[100] Accessed 5 May 2020.

[101] Martin, B. Massive genetic study shows how humans are evolving. Nature News, 2017 Sept 6; https://www.nature.com/news/massive-genetic-study-shows-how-humans-are-evolving-1.22565 Accessed 24 Apr 2020.

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