Mandatory Intellectomy
Jedi Master
Since you brought this up, I think it may be time for this post. It may help clear some ideas.
As I keep reading, I keep thinking about all this. Often I do more of the latter and reading is slow. -_-
So I often take some notes about ideas that come to mind. They are just various notions and observations from different points of view, restating of the same ideas in different ways, various examples, and so on. They're not sorted in any particular way, and there isn't necessarily any continuity in this. Just random points that I want to share and that I hope might give others some insights and sort of clear some things up.
Darwinism has only ever been able to account for simple adaptation. No new complex system has ever been shown to have appeared by random mutation.
Darwinian evolution is a theory that has become widely accepted as "fact" without any evidence. (Largely because it came a century before any real evidence was scientifically possible.)
Darwinists have continuously been confusing change in degree with change in kind. A deer's antlers can evolve into shorter antlers, longer antlers, simpler antlers, more complex antlers, sharper antlers, thicker antlers, wider antlers, lighter antlers, or just about any kind of antlers. What Darwinists fail to acknowledge is that antlers can't evolve into wings, fins, or microwave transmitters.
Microbiology shows insurmountable obstacles to Darwinism, and it might be worth pointing out to people that in Darwin's time, microbiology didn't exist. Back then, biology was orders of magnitude more simple than today, and thus his theory may have seemed somewhat plausible (at least if you didn't think about it too much).
When people say something has evolved (implying Darwin), it's worth considering to just add the word "randomly" before "evolved" to give them a more accurate sense of what they're saying. Because randomly is exactly how Darwinian evolution works. "Giraffes have randomly evolved a long neck." This already makes it significantly more absurd to add "so that they could reach higher" or some other made up comment. "Birds have randomly evolved wings." "Humans have randomly evolved from monkeys." You could also say "accidentally" and it would still be perfectly in line with how Darwinism is supposed to work. Maybe when people hear it like that, they'll give more thought to whether it makes sense. (Which they apparently otherwise don't do.)
Another option is to rephrase things as "monkeys have (randomly) mutated into humans". Sounds a lot weirder and more dubious, but according to Darwinist principles, it's more accurate!
(Something you can tell people: ) Name one example of something complex and functional in our world that has "evolved" by RANDOM steps.
Take the Rubik's cube. Twisting it around in all directions is akin to what random mutation does. So you can get hundreds of different configurations of colours, including some interesting patterns. That's more or less what Darwinism does. But at the end of the day, no matter how much you twist it, the cube is still a cube. Nothing new was created, nothing evolved. The idea that random mutation is limitless and could have created all the life forms we know from a single cell is as bizarre as the idea that twisting Rubik's cube long enough could produce a bicycle.
It's interesting to see how whenever Darwinists try to explain evolution, they can't seem to avoid words that imply design, intelligence, and purpose, even though they vehemently deny that these things are actually involved. They even say things like "well it looks like life was designed, but it wasn't". This invokes the saying, "If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck..."
Imagine ocean waves on the shore moving grains of sand on the beach randomly. This can create some patterns in the sand that may occasionally look interesting enough to catch your attention. The notion that RM+NS can create complex functional systems is akin to the notion that the ocean waves can build a sand castle with battlements, windows and knights on horses. The disconnect between moving grains of sand around and building a castle is the same as the disconnect between what RM+NS really does and what DWs claim it can do.
If we look at mutations that damage or improve the code, it goes beyond just the fact that the damaging ones are 100 times more common. Let's say you have 100 specimens that will get a mutation that NS will keep. 99 of them will get a damaging one, and 1 will get an improvement that doesn't break anything. (Note that it doesn't really get anything strictly "new". Just a previously unused variation of its existing code, which just happens to offer some advantage at the moment.) But it doesn't stop there. All 100 mutations were picked by NS, so the 1 that's good (and usually comes late) won't spread any more than the other 99. (More likely less because it came later than most.) But where does it go from there? Those 99 have practically no chance to restore their code to its former functionality (the chance to get ANY improvement may be 1:99, but to get a specific one, restoring it to a previous state, would be MUCH lower), but the 1 has a good chance to get another mutation somewhere down the line that will break the part that was previously improved, simply because it happens to offer some advantage that is more essential at the moment than preserving the code. (Preserving the code is not something NS understands.) In other words, what breaks is unlikely to ever get fixed, but what gets improved has a decent chance to get broken later. So even if you get a temporary improvement, the chances that you'll be able to build upon it further are much lower than the chances that it will break at some point.
An example with numbers: Say you have a code that consists of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. With random mutation, you can replace any number with any of the others (like replace 3 with 5), switch them around (switch an existing 3 with an existing 5 next to it), delete any number, or duplicate any number or sequence of numbers any number of times. You can now create an infinite number of sequences of numbers (presumably of any length) with this code, which is very nice, but you'll never get a 7 or 8 or 9. So if you see another code that does have 7, 8, and 9, it could not have evolved from the first one by a process of random mutation.
A new feature kept by NS may just be something useful under particular temporary conditions. Once the conditions pass, the feature is not useful anymore, but as 99% of such features break the DNA code, the organism has "evolved" to be "worse" with nothing to show for it in the long run. (For example malaria gains resistance to a drug by breaking a gene, we stop using the drug because it doesn't work anymore, so the malaria doesn't need the mutation any longer but can't fix the gene.)
Darwinists use the reversed logic of "if the simple is possible, the complex must be possible too" to infer all of evolution from observed simple adaptation.
What if everything in the world worked like Darwinian evolution?
- You could build a house by randomly throwing bricks around. (It would just take a bit longer.)
- You could compose a symphony by randomly hitting the piano without knowing how it works.
- You could write a book by randomly hitting the keyboard.
- [your own example]
