Books of Moses

Fact or Fiction?

 

 

 

Session 3

 

 

Land Animals, Humans and the Evolution of Life

 

 

 

 

Bruce Armstrong

 

 

 

Land Animals, Humans and the Evolution of Life

 

Contents

Introduction

Special Creation

Beasts of the Earth

The First Humans

The Sabbath Celebration

Evolution of Multi-Cellular Life

Increasing Complexity

Prokaryotic to Eukaryotic Cells

Vascular Plants

Males, Females and Seed

Seed Germination

Fruit Production

Symbiotic Plants and Microbes

Insects

Amphibians

Haeckel’s Fraudulent Embryo Drawings

Cambrian Explosion

Vestigial Organs

Junk DNA

Genetic Entropy

Gene Duplication and Reuse

How Complex is An Organism Like A Human?

Apes to Humans?

Animal and Human Complexity

Evolution Did It!

Conclusion

Table 1: Additional DNA Required As Organisms Become More Complex

 

 

Introduction

In the last session, we looked at the creation of plants and flying and aquatic animals in the creation model, and the origin of the first cell in the evolution model.

 

In this session, we will first continue examining the Biblical Creation Week, focusing on Day Six, during which God creates all of the non-flying land animals and the first humans.  Then God gives the humans their jobs.  After that, on Day Seven they all have a day of rest and celebration together.

 

In the evolution/secular belief model, we will look at what is required for an original ‘simple’ prokaryote cell to evolve into complex multicellular organisms like humans.  Potential roadblocks in this route will be pointed out.

 

Special Creation

 

Beasts of the Earth

 

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth live souls, each after its kind: livestock and creeping things and its beasts of the earth, each after its kind.”  And it was so.

So God made the beasts of the earth after their kinds, livestock after their kinds, and everything that creeps on the earth after their kinds.  And God saw that it was good.    Genesis 1:24 & 25

 

So God explains that He begins the Sixth Day by making all of the non-flying terrestrial animals, including worms, crawling insects, all kinds of wild beasts and even domestic livestock (Figures 1 to 8).  Again, God says these creatures all have souls, and He was pleased with them.

 

 
 

Figure 1: Compost Earthworm   (Oligochaeta)  ESB

 

 
 

Figure 2: Ant    (Crawling Insect)

 

 
 

Figure 3: Green Frog   (Amphibian)

 

 
 

Figure 4: Crocodile   (Reptile)

 

 
 

Figure 5: Red Kangaroo   (Marsupial)

 

 
 

Figure 6: Bear and Cub   (Mammal)

 

 
 

Figure 7: Triceratops   (Dinosaur – Extinct)

 

 
 

Figure 8: Wooly Mammoth   (Mammal – Extinct)

 

The First Humans

Next, God creates the first humans:

 

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, over the flying creatures of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth and over all the creeping things that creep on the earth.”

So God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.    Genesis 1:26 & 27

 

This passage introduces the last physical creations God (and His Son—see John 1:1-17) made in forming and populating the earth.  It also shows that God had a special commitment to these creatures: these humans are the only ones that He says are made “in Our image”.  He also states that He will create them to “rule over” all the earth and all the other creatures He has made.  Finally, He states that we were created “male and female” (Figure 9).  Though the other animals were also male and female, this is the first time it is specifically mentioned.

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Figure 9: Adam and Chavvah’s (Eve’s) family a few years after the Fall. (modified from Bachiacca).  It is likely that Adam and/or Chavvah were darker.

 

In Genesis 2, we are given a more detailed explanation of the process God used in making the first man:

 

And Jehovah God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul.

Jehovah God planted a Paradise in Eden to the East, and He put the man whom He had formed there.  And out of the earth Jehovah God had made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.  The tree of life was in the midst of Paradise and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.    Genesis 2:7 to 9

 

In forming the man, God confirms that the matter He used came from the earth.  But Jehovah God also shows us that merely shaping the man, complete with all of the potential genetics and nanomachines required for life was not enough.  The man was still just a corpse.  It was only when God personally blew the breath (spirit) of life into him that he became a living soul.  There are other scriptures that confirm that God must add that ‘breath of life’ to every one of us before we actually come alive.

 

1 Corinthians 2:11 explains that we must have this Spirit from God in order to know how to be human and to be able to function as a human.  This means that each person is a triune being composed of a body, soul and spirit.  When we die our first death, our spirit returns to God, and our body and soul return to the ground (Heb 4:12, 1 Thes 5:23, Ecc 12:6-7).

 

As we are made in the image of God, it should be no surprise to learn that the Bible teaches that God also has a body, soul and spirit (Dan 7:9, Lev 26:11, Gen 6:3).  So He too is a triune being.  This topic is explored in our article Spirit, Soul and Body.

 

We are only conscious, fully functioning beings when all three components are present and active.  It seems probable that our brains are the interface between our body, soul and spirit.  Thus damage to parts of our brain may make it difficult for our spirit to control the corresponding part of our body.  However, there is new research confirming that our spirits have some ability to reallocate functions in our brain, sometimes allowing communication and function to be restored.

 

Ecclesiastes 3:21 shows that animals also have their own spirits, but their spirits are stored in the earth when they die.  So they are also triune beings, but made on a different level to us.1

 

By the way, it is sobering to know that on a mass to mass basis, rats, dolphins and elephants all have brain to body ratios as large as ours.  Our status as their rulers depends on our appointment to this role by God, rather than on some imagined superiority we have of our own.

 

Then Jehovah God took the man and settled him in the Paradise of Pleasure to tend and keep it.  And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree in Paradise you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, dying you shall die.”    Genesis 2:15 to 17

 

We see that God has taken the unusual step of placing the man in His special Paradise of Pleasure, also known as the Garden of Eden.  And Jehovah God also gave the man his first job: tending and keeping Paradise.  So man did not begin as a barbaric hunter and gatherer, but as a horticulturist working and living in a superb parkland and orchard.

 

He was also given specific instructions to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which will become of immense importance next session.

 

But we still only have one man.  Let’s see where the first woman comes from:

 

And Jehovah God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”

Out of the earth Jehovah God had formed every beast of the field and every flying creature of heaven. He brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.  And whatever Adam called each living soul, that was its name.  So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the flying creatures of the heavens, and to every beast of the field.  But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.

And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.  Then the rib which Jehovah God had taken from the man He built into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

And Adam said: “This time, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, because this one was taken out of Man.”    Genesis 2:18 to 23

 

So we have an interesting interlude here.  God gives the man, now named Adam, the job of naming the various kinds of creatures that lived near the Garden.  It is likely that they came to him in male and female pairs for him to name.  As Adam worked through his task, it appears that he eventually realizes that unlike all of these animals, he does not have a female partner.

 

So one can easily imagine the conversation between Adam and God, and God’s offer to make a partner for Adam from his body, which Adam accepts.

 

So we are told that God takes a rib from Adam and builds a woman.  Note that God does not use a toe, so the woman would be under his foot, but uses a rib, as a rib is near Adam’s heart.

 

But also notice that God did not simply build a clone of Adam.  The DNA in the rib was altered to make a woman.  To achieve this God would remove Adam’s Y chromosome and replace it with a second copy of an X chromosome in every cell.  But God would have given Chavvah modified genes throughout to increase the genetic variations possible in their descendants, who include all extant versions of mankind plus the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, etc.  Verse 23 indicates Adam’s delight and satisfaction with the woman God had built for him.

 

One of the surprising things of this way of making the woman is that she was, in a way, born from a man.  The other surprising thing is that she never had a mother.  She had to invent what it was to be a woman, and became the mother model for all women.

 

Another interesting aspect of both Adam and Chavvah (Eve)2 is that neither of them likely had a navel, as neither of them were born from a womb, so they had no need for an umbilical cord and placenta.  This was perhaps a simple and effective way for them to prove to their descendants that they were both made directly by God.

 

But why would God create the woman in such an unusual way, as there is no indication that any other female creature was made in this way?  I believe that it is Jehovah God’s way of showing us how He had made His own Son, Jesus Christ.  Just as the woman came from the man, Jesus (Jeshua in Aramaic) came from His Father.  Just as the woman was not an exact clone of the man, Jeshua was not an exact clone of his Father. -Which is another way of saying that both Chavvah and Jeshua are unique, individual beings.  Just as the woman had no mother, Jeshua also had no mother.  Just as the woman was human like the man, Jeshua was God like His Father.  As the woman owed her existence to the man and Jehovah, so Jeshua owed his existence to His Father Jehovah.  You can read more on this topic in our article Jeshua the Messiah; the Son of God or Part of a Trinity? at https://chcpublications.net/.

 

But now, back to God’s Creation:

 

So God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea, and over the flying creatures of the heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”    Genesis 1:27 & 28

 

So we see that God blessed the man and woman, told them to fill the earth, and also told them both that He had placed them in authority over all the creatures on earth.  We were intended to subdue the earth, which indicates that we had permission to remove plants that were in our way, dig for minerals and modify the landscape to suit our needs.  But it seems certain that our rule over the animals was to be beneficial for all animals as far as possible.  They were not to be subdued like the earth.  Jehovah God had just created them all and was very pleased with them.  We were to rule them—lead them—under God’s direction and according to His Instructions, for God is King of kings and Lord of lords (1 Tim 6:15, Rev 17:14).  This is made clear when God describes our food, and indeed that of all animals:

 

And God said, “See, I have given to you every plant that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; it shall be for food for you.

“Also, to every beast of the earth, to every flying creature of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green plant for food.”  And it was so.    Genesis 1:29 & 30

 

So it was that the first humans were vegans.  Their food was entirely plant material.  The only exception to this would be babies who were breast-fed until they became old enough to flourish on a vegetable diet.  It was not necessary for any animals to die to provide food or clothing for humans.

 

Not only the humans, but all of the animals were also vegan.  It looks like the main difference between the humans and the animals was that only the humans had been given the fruit of the trees to eat.  So we have the original system in place which does not require the death of any human or animal.

 

Jehovah God also instituted marriage then, and married Adam and Chavvah:

 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.  And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.    Genesis 2:24

 

There are many things embedded in these two verses: One is that it would be normal for a newly married husband and wife to move out and set up their own home.  Another is that through sexual intercourse they would become one flesh, indicating that their sexual union altered and enhanced their relationship to each other, and that oneness would be shown in their children, who would each be a unique combination of their DNA.  Finally, the last verse shows their innocence and purity at that time.  They did not know what shame was.

 

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.  And there was evening and there was morning: The Sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.    Genesis 1:31 & 2:1

 

So we see God’s declaration that His creation was very good, that He had devoted one day to creating all the land animals and the first man and woman, that it was the last of the six days He used to create everything, and it was now finished.

 

 

The Sabbath Celebration

To both celebrate His Creation, and to remind everyone how long it took and that He had done it, Jehovah instituted the seven day week in which the last day was one of rest and rejoicing:

 

And by the seventh day God had completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.  Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because He rested from all His work in it, which He had created and made.    Genesis 2:2 & 3

 

God gave His seven day week to Adam and Chavvah, and thus to their descendants, many of whom adopted His seven day week and observed God’s seventh-day Sabbath.  Seven days is not a precise subdivision of either the solar year or the lunar month, so this is the only logical explanation for the wide-spread ‘custom’ of seven day weeks throughout the world.  The seven day week has been used for millennia by the Jewish, Christian, Babylonian, Persian, Chinese and Islamic calendars.

 

What we have not discussed until now is why would God decide to create all of us?  The Bible makes it clear that Jehovah God is complete in Himself and has no needs that we can fulfill for Him.  This leaves one other option: Jehovah loves being alive, and wants to share His joy in life with us.  His motivations are generosity and love.

 

Evolutionists insist that the above creation account cannot be correct, and propose an alternative method and timeline for the origin of these creatures and ourselves.  So, let us see how the Atheistic Evolution of complex life scenario explains our existence:

 

 

Evolution of Multi-Cellular Life

Let’s ignore the fact that the last session showed that evolutionists cannot even explain how the first living cell arose, and allow them to actually have their first living cell.  Now the question becomes this: How can organisms of increasing complexity evolve from this relatively basic original cell?

 

Increasing Complexity

Neo-Darwinism claims that complexity arises by random mutations to the DNA codes, which are then filtered by natural selection to remove the damaging mutations and allow the positive changes to be passed on.

 

Everyone agrees that a new feature, organ or organism can only happen if we have large amounts of new, complex and precisely coded DNA arise to specify what the new feature is, control how the new feature is manufactured and have new ‘software’ arise so the new feature can be used.

 

Neo-Darwinism also teaches that natural selection has no predictive power, which means that it has no goal that it is selecting for.  Therefore, complex and highly sophisticated new tissues and functions must arise from random DNA ‘noise’ via a long series of tiny improvements, each of which must make that organism more fit than its siblings for the changes to be selected and passed on to its descendants.

 

And when we look at organisms in the world, there are indeed some organisms that are relatively ‘simple’, such as single-cell prokaryote bacteria and others that are extremely complex multi-cellular organisms like humans.  And not only that, some of the most basic cellular functions of all these organisms are based on quite similar DNA codes.  Evolutionists claim these two features prove descent from a common ancestor: their First Cell and then evolution from it.

 

But it only ‘proves’ this if it is the ONLY explanation you will consider.  Special Creation is also consistent with these observations, but the explanation is different. To optimise each living organism, it should only have the DNA it requires.  So a simple single-cell organism only needs a small portion of the instructions that a large mammal needs. And as they are all made by the same intelligent designer, it is to be expected that he would reuse DNA code when different organisms required the same function.  It would not be intelligent to continually reinvent the wheel.

 

Do we see the process of random evolution happening in human activities?  Computer code is a close corollary to DNA code.  Does anyone generate vast amounts of random code and then select the ‘best’ one to create new functions?  No.  They first decide what new function they require.  Then they carefully propose several models that should implement their preconceived function.  Next, they select the best model and begin to write the actual code required to do what they need.  Finally, they rigorously test (select) the new code to find and remove any accidental errors (random mutations) in the code so it will be functional.  They then review how well that optimised code performs its intended role, try to refine their models to further improve it and write new code again if needed.  Restated, random code and random errors are both information technology disasters that they actively work to eliminate.  DNA code is different in that  random changes to it can actually cripple or kill the organism, making it worse than buggy software that can be deleted and leave the computer intact.

 

We often hear that our technology is evolving.  For example, wheeled land transport has evolved from a human pushing a wheelbarrow to a self-driving Tesla electric car.  Like evolutionists claim, the engineers have achieved this transformation in thousands of tiny steps.  But unlike evolution, each step was not one selection from thousands of random changes.  Each step came from an engineer’s mind, who thought of a possible solution to one of the problems they were having, and then worked towards that solution, consciously and deliberately selecting the best alternatives to reach their intended goal.  Without their ideas and their goal, no progress would have ever been made.

 

Atheistic evolution has no ideas and no goals; all it has is filtering of random mutations (errors).  Does it seem probable that blind flailing can produce the complex nanomachinery, far more sophisticated than a Tesla car, required by living organisms?  Instead, are random errors not far more likely to break the machinery it already has?

 

As we saw last session, Doug Axe’s research has demonstrated that random mutations are incapable of producing coherent new DNA code which can produce a functional new enzyme, so it is impossible for natural selection to select something that does not already exist.  The best that natural selection can do is eliminate the more damaging mutations or perhapson rare occasionsfine-tune an existing organism so it can survive better in an altered environment.  Research has shown that natural selection is not even capable of removing most of the non-lethal but damaging random mutations.

 

Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution demonstrates this with real-world examples.  Humanity’s millennia-long battle with malaria is sometimes called an arms-race. But now that we know the biochemical details of how we and malaria ‘evolve’ resistance to each other, the clearer it becomes that it is really a battle of desperate self-sacrificial sabotage.  Our main internal defence against malaria is sickle cell trait, caused by a change in one amino acid in our haemoglobin.  The defect causes the haemoglobin to gum together when a malarial parasite attacks it.  Then our liver destroys the parasite when it destroys the infected blood cell.  But when a person gets the trait from both parents, they develop sickle cell anaemia, which gives them a very unhealthy and short life.  The defence has a horrendous cost.

 

Likewise, malaria can eventually resist our anti-malarial drugs by breaking functions in its own cells which allow it to elude the drug.  But like us, it is at a cost which makes the malaria less fit in an environment without the drug’s presence.  Behe also looks at HIV and E Coli, and shows that these situations are about the same.  He shows that it takes a long time for random changes to provide even a single ‘beneficial’ amino acid in this war.  And where two amino acid changes are required, it takes much, much longer.  His maths indicate that just a three amino acid beneficial change to a protein is unlikely to ever occur, even when there is strong selection pressure, and he has not been able to find even one example where it has actually happened.  Said another way: there is no known instance where a brilliant new multi-amino acid functional enzyme has evolved which would give an organism a massive advantage.

 

For more complex life to evolve, we need more complex instructions in their DNA to code for that complexity.  How hard is that to account for?  Let’s look at the size of some of the Evolutionary Jumps required for complex life:

 

Prokaryotic to Eukaryotic Cells

Massive changes are required for this next step in evolution.  The smallest genome of a free-living eukaryote, Ostreococcus tauri (a unicellular green algae) is 12.6 million base pairs.  This is over fifteen times more information than was in the Mycoplasma pneumoniae prokaryote’s DNA (816,000 base pairs, as we saw in the last session).  Where did all of this brand new, precisely coded DNA come from (Figure 10)?  And also note that the eukaryote cells are always more complex and generally much larger than the prokaryotic cells.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZtcMBTQaS4  (4.5 min)

 

 
 

Figure 10: Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells.  Note the increase in types and complexity of organelles in the Eukaryotes.

 

Vascular Plants

The vascular plant with perhaps the smallest genome at 130 million base pairs is Capsella rubella, a Brassicae (Figure 11).  This is almost one hundred and sixty times more information than was in the Mycoplasma pneumoniae prokaryote’s DNA and ten times more information than the basic eukaryote, Ostreococcus tauri has.  Once again, where did all of this brand new, precisely coded DNA come from to build, use and maintain these new structures?  How could any of these previously unknown vascular tissues arise by random mutations?  What does some of this extra information do?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9oDTMXM7M8  (12 min)

 

 
 

Figure 11: Capsella rubella, the ‘simplest’ vascular plant with roots, leaves, stem and seeds. (from Malta)

 

Males, Females and Seed

How did the male and female differentiation, and their necessarily different, yet complementary, versions of DNA arise?  How could any of this evolve, or more accurately co-evolve simultaneously?  There are no detailed, or even plausible, evolutionary explanations for this in either plants or animals.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYSxgVGtMmU  (3 min)

 

And for plants, how could each generation’s new recombination of DNA then become encapsulated into the totally unique set of plant structures that become a seed (Figure 12)?

 

 
 

Figure 12: Sexual Reproduction in Flowering Plants.  Evolutionists cannot explain how this complex seed-producing process could have evolved.

 

Seed Germination

And now that encapsulated DNA, after being stored as a dry seed for perhaps years, is somehow reactivated and transformed back into a vascular plant like the one that produced the seed (Figure 13).  This is indeed reproduction after its kind, but at a very complex level.  It is as astounding as metamorphosis in insects.  Sadly, our familiarity with this exquisite process tends to reduce the sense of wonder we should have.  Again, evolutionary theory has no real explanation for how this could have arisen.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77zPAtVTuI  (3 Min)

 

 
 

Figure 13: The Wondrous Process of Seed Germination (Bean Plant).

 

Fruit Production

Why are there fleshy fruits like strawberries, tomatoes, cherries and apples?  How does this really benefit the plant?  Most plants do not produce fleshy fruit and are able to reproduce and spread their seed well.  The plant must invest a lot of additional energy into producing these nutritious fleshy fruits.  It certainly benefits us, and fits with God’s claim that He designed these plants to produce food for us.  But evolutionists struggle to explain why plants would evolve to produce such extravagant seed packaging.

 

Symbiotic Plants and Microbes

The article below summarises some of the recent information discovered on these symbiotic relationships, especially the signalling systems acting between the plant and its various microbes.  How could such complex interactions develop from different random mutations in different organisms?

 

https://academic.oup.com/pcp/article/51/9/1377/1829713

 

And it is important to understand the nitrogen fixing nodules on legumes are only one type of these symbiotic relationships.  There are many types known now, and they do various things like help plants extract nutrients from poor soil and survive droughts.

 

Insects

Next on the evolutionist’s ladder of life would likely be insects.  As the article below states, the smallest known insect genome belongs to the wingless Antarctic midge and is 99 million base pairs long (Figure 14).  This is over one hundred and twenty times more information than was in the Mycoplasma pneumoniae prokaryote’s DNA, but a bit less than the Capsella rubella brassica.  However, that is no comfort to the evolutionist, as hardly any of the coded DNA in the brassica would be usable in an insect.  There are many, many unique genes and control sequences separating the plant from this insect.  Once again, enormous amounts of brand new, precisely coded DNA needed to come into existence to build, use, maintain and reproduce these new structures.

 

https://www.livescience.com/47311-antarctic-insect-smallest-genome.html

 

 
 

Figure 14: Antarctic Midge (2 to 7 mm long).  Though wingless, it has most of the other structures of insects listed below.

 

Some of the unique new structures of the insects are:

Exoskeleton

Nerve systems, including brain

Eyes

Chewing digestive systems

Sexual reproduction

Legs

Wings

Metamorphosis: See:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocWgSgMGxOc  (2.75 min)

 

How could evolution ever give rise to this process?  Unless it is fully in place, no viable adult insect will ever appear (Figure 15).

 

 
 

Figure 15: Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly.  Metamorphosis is yet another complex process that evolution cannot explain.

 

Amphibians

These creatures mark another level of complexity above insects.  This is again reflected in their DNA, with frogs having about 1.7 billion base pairs.  This is almost 2100 times more information than the Mycoplasma pneumoniae prokaryote and 17 times more DNA than the Antarctic midge.  The unique structures in these amphibians compared to insects include an internal bone skeleton, a complex nervous system partly encased in a skull and backbone, directional vertebrate eyes, fins, gills, lungs, a three chambered heart running a blood vessel network and skin.  And frogs also undergo amazing transformations from eggs to gill-breathing finned-tail swimming vegetarian tadpoles to air-breathing four-legged hopping insect-eating frogs (Figure 16).

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAcwjWi6I9Y  (7 min)

Again, there is no reasonable evolutionary explanation for why and how these metamorphoses could happen.

 

 
 

Figure 16: Amphibians also have an amazing metamorphosis, as shown in the frog above. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

 

Haeckel’s Fraudulent Embryo Drawings

Haeckel produced a series of embryo drawings which he claimed showed that during each animal’s development, they went through stages when they were virtually identical, thereby ‘proving’ their common ancestry.  However, he deliberated altered his drawings to support the evolutionary stories he believed, as shown in this video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH5SKxL9wk  (4.1 min)

 

Sadly, this is only one of many, many deceptions used to ‘prove evolution’.  As evolutionists have little real supporting data, using deceptions can be attractive to some of them (Figure 17).  This topic is carefully explored by Jerry Bergman in Evolution’s Blunders, Frauds and Forgeries.

 

 
 

Figure 17: Top Row: Haeckel’s Fraudulent Embryo Drawings vs actual Photos by Dr Michael K. Richardson et al (1997) - Bottom Row.

 

Cambrian Explosion

All major body plans appear at once and fully formed in a startlingly short time even using evolution’s inflated timescales.  There was simply not enough time for these creatures to evolve regardless of how generous one was in ‘allowing’ change.

 

https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/cambrian-explosion  (13 min)

 

Not only are all our modern body plans present, but many of these creatures had unique body plans that are now extinct, there were highly complex eyes in trilobites, etc, etc.

More on this in Figure 18 and the Flood section.

 

 
 

Figure 18: Some of the new kinds of organisms that are first preserved in the Cambrian rocks.  Note that many other kinds died out in this ‘period’, which is likely the early stages of the Global Flood.  The dashed lines are not just ‘uncertain time frame’, but are entirely conjecture, revealing that NONE of these kinds have any known actual connection.

 

Vestigial Organs

These ‘ancient remnants’ are virtually all gone.  Though as school students in the 60s and 70s we were taught that many organs in our bodies were useless leftovers (vestiges) from when we were less evolved creatures, today they have been discovered to be fully functional and useful.  This provides an example of the damage that evolutionary beliefs can do:  When the function of such organs as our pituitary glands, tonsils and appendix were not known, evolutionary belief that they were useless delayed research on them for decades.  Many tonsils and appendixes were removed unnecessarily, leaving the person more susceptible to infections.

 

Junk DNA

It is now known that virtually all human DNA is used.  There is no junk.  In the 1980’s, as the evolutionists learned how large the human genome is, and that less than five percent of it is directly used as genes to make proteins, they decided in their ignorance that the rest of it was just random junk we had acquired over billions of years of evolution.  They appeared to learn nothing from their earlier claims about ‘vestigial’ organs.  But now the ENCODE project has found that almost our entire genome is read and used.3  Many of the stretches of DNA that were claimed to be useless remnants of ancient virus embedded in our DNA are now known to be critical to our development as embryos, controlling the expression of genes, etc.  This lack of junk DNA makes evolution by random mutations even more impossible.

 

Genetic Entropy

John Sanford, the inventor of the Gene Gun, wrote Genetic Entropy several years ago.  His studies of the deterioration of DNA, and especially human DNA, caused by mutations and copying errors, indicate that we are becoming less healthy generation after generation as these errors continue to accumulate.  He believes that this effect will make us less able to reproduce and perhaps eventually become extinct if there is no intervention.  His calculations indicate that at our current rate of error accumulation, humans have only existed for about six to ten thousand years.  This is also the reason why near relatives can no longer marry, as they tend to have the same genetic defects, so their children often inherit the same genetic errors from both parents, rather than one good and one bad copy.  Genetic entropy is also why evolution can never work.  Our genes are breaking down far faster than evolution could ever repair them.

 

Gene Duplication and Reuse

This process is commonly sited as a source of ‘new’ DNA which can be ‘easily’ converted into a new functional protein, etc.  A large scale example of gene duplication results in Down’s Syndrome.  In this case, one of our smallest chromosomes is duplicated, and the duplication results in life-long disability and often an early death.  As larger chromosomes are duplicated, the disabilities become more pronounced.  When the largest chromosomes are duplicated, the child will die before birth.

 

It is difficult to see how this duplication is a useful process for evolution, and there are no clear examples of this repurposing happening to a duplicated gene.  It would take far, far more than two or three amino acid changes to produce a new function.

 

How Complex is An Organism Like A Human?

The DNA in our genome is 3.2 billion base pairs long.4  This is 3,921 times the size of the Mycoplasma pneumoniae prokaryote’s genome and almost double the size of the frog’s.  Once again, a tremendous amount of new, unique, precisely coded DNA is required to make, operate and repair a human being’s body.  In addition to common design features with frogs, we have live births of our children who require mother’s milk and long nurturing periods.  Frogs mostly just lay eggs and swim away.  We can also walk upright and have complex spoken and written language, mathematics, music and incredible hands that allow extensive tool making and usage abilities.

 

As the damage done to us by random mutations makes clear, there is no way that random mutations could ever produce or improve a functioning human being.  Evolutionists bombarded plants and animals for decades during the mid-twentieth century with mutagenic chemicals and radiation to “accelerate evolution”.  All they wound up with was millions of crippled and deformed organisms.  If they had come up with even one win, you can be sure it would be in all the textbooks.  The reality is that these mutations are highly damaging, which is why we have strict laws in place to protect us from mutagenic chemicals and ionising radiation, and we especially keep pregnant women away from them.

 

We have 80 different organs and more than 200 cell types in our bodies, each performing its own function(s) to support our overall health.  (Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-25 for a brief account of the interactions needed in our bodies.)

 

There are about 37 trillion cells in each of us.  What level of design is required to grow such an organism from a single cell and ensure that each and every new cell will be where it should be, be the type of cell required there and be able to do what it must do to ensure our survival?  We are only beginning to understand how this all happens, let alone being able to even copy the process.

 

Our hands are unique, as they are designed specifically to use tools.  They are not required for walking.  No other organism has forelimbs as complex and precisely controlled as ours.

 

King David spoke truly when he said this about how God had made him:

 

For You have formed my inward parts; and You have carried me from my mother’s womb.  I will praise You for the wonders You have done; marvellous are Your works, and my soul knows that very well.    Psalm 139:14

 

Apes to Humans?

Let’s look at the real story about DNA similarity between humans and apes, who supposedly have a common ancestor:

 

The similarity was first claimed to be about 97% based on a few fragments of DNA.  Now that both organisms’ DNA is fully sequenced, the similarity is down to about 85%.5  Which means there are vast differences between humans and apes.  15% of our DNA means there are 480 million differences. - And these are only the changes that are supposedly retained and therefore beneficial.  Even if we accepted that humans and apes diverged 3 million years ago and the gap from generation to generation is only 16 years, this means that there would at most be 187,500 generations.  So we would have to inherit 2,560 beneficial, directed DNA changes every generation.  Not only that, but those changes would all need to be conserved in each generation, and eventually all wind up in one man and one woman, who would then become the ancestors of every human alive today.

 

Even the most optimistic geneticists doubt that we could get more than 2 or 3 beneficial changes per generation, and even that would require a huge population.  Actual research shows that it can take tens to hundreds of generations to achieve even one beneficial change.  There is no conceivable way that this much genetic information could be generated and passed on in this time frame, nor even in many hundreds or thousands of millions of years.  The only possible conclusion is that we could not have evolved from an apelike creature.  For an in-depth exposé of the fossils that are claimed to show that we have evolved from apes, please read Contested Bones by C. Rupe and J. Sanford.

 

Animal and Human Complexity

MeiosisHow could evolution ‘decide’ to create the organs needed to make male and female reproductive cells, such as a sperm and an egg, and give each of them only one copy of the normal cell’s two DNA copies when it is utterly incapable of planning or deciding anything?  And why would ‘natural selection’ preserve such apparently defective cells?

 

Animal conception is complex and different to plants:

Usually involves intercourse.

Sperm and egg, not pollen and ova

Testes and sperm -full of mitochondria so they can swim fast.

Zinc “spark”- marks fertilisation of egg.  Perhaps it also marks when the spirit is given?

Ovariescontain hundreds of thousands of eggsuseful for a woman initially designed to live thousands of years.

Uterus

PlacentaHow would a partly evolved placenta keep a fetus alive?

Change-over to air breathing at birth even requires a rapid change in the baby’s haemoglobin.

Mammaries are needed to feed an infant.How could our ancestors survive while breasts were evolving?

Colostrum and suckling instinct.  Where did they come from?

Hearts and blood systems

Precise, multi-step blood clotting system required, otherwise:

fatal haemophiliac bleeds due to no clots, or fatal strokes due to blood clots.  How could we survive while this evolved?

Lungs

Worms – have no real lungs, which limits their size.

Mammals have complex lungs with rib cages and diaphragms to allow them to inflate when inhaling.

Birds have unique lungs that the air passes through, not in and back out like mammals.

Digestive system -human:

Chewing – complex activity

Teeth – baby and adult (mammoths grow three sets of teeth)

Saliva

StomachCurved shapesolids retained, liquids pass through

Hydrochloric acid—converts protein to amino acids

Small IntestineVilla and microvilla enhance absorption

Large intestinesymbiotic biota in gut – part of the immune system

Rectumtwin valve system – gas or solid on the way out?

Kidneys and bladder

Eyes

Eyelid and lash to protect eye

Cornealubricated, transparent, but living cells

Lensfocusable

Iristo control light levels

Back of eye

Macular – for fine work

Blind spot ‘eliminated’ by muscle/nerve system interactions

Massive image processing requirements

So-called ‘Backwards’ design is needed for blood vessel cooling system

Uses fibre-optics to pass light through to retina

Nervous systems

Origin of backbones?

Origin of brains?

Complexity of human brain.

Role of brainBody-soul-spirit interfacea demanding job.

 

The above is just a few items in an extremely long list that are all far too complex for random mutations to be capable of creating them...

 

Evolution Did It!

Though I can be accused of saying ‘God did it!’, one needs to be even more cautious when an evolutionist claims ‘Evolution did it!’.  The difference is this: Jehovah God can perform miracles.  Evolution cannot!  And life is miraculous.  Every kind of organism is full of its own miracles in their design and function.  There is no natural process that can create precise, coded information.  Miracles are essential!  Of course, they will be very careful to avoid saying ‘evolution did it’, but look carefully and you will see that is exactly what they mean.  Almost all scientific papers which claim that something ‘evolved’ make absolutely no attempt to explain how it evolved.  Which is just a subtle way of saying “Evolution did it!”  And those few that do make some attempt to show how something evolved are always very vague and make many highly questionable assumptions.  Why do they do that?  Because they have no actual evidence that evolution has ever evolved even one new gene, let alone a new organ or a complex organism.

 

Here is an example from Charles Darwin:

 

To suppose that the [human] eye .... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree....[But] Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”6

 

Indeed, there are different light sensing systems in different animals, each suited to that animal’s requirements.  And it is possible to make a long list of these animals, arranged from the simplest to the most complex eye.  But what evidence is there that the DNA instructions required to form and use one type of eye evolved into the next more complex one even once, let alone again and again?  There is absolutely none, nor can the paleogeneticists align these organisms into an inheritable timeline even remotely like the list Darwin required.  Like Darwin, modern evolutionists blindly choose to believe that it happened, however absurd it is.  Which is to say: “Evolution did it!”  They have a remarkable, but completely unscientific, faith in the creative ability of random mistakes.

 

Conclusion

Creating new tissues, organs and organisms requires massive additions of new and precise DNA.  Table 1 summarises just how much is needed:

 

 

Table 1: Additional DNA Required As Organisms Become More Complex

 
 

As you can see, humans require almost four thousand times more DNA than a ‘simple’ bacteria to grow, maintain, operate and reproduce their bodies.  Evolution cannot explain how ANY of these carefully coded new instructions came into existence.  The atheist’s spontaneous evolution of Adam from atoms is entirely mythical.

 

In contrast to random DNA mutations, which indisputably have the ability to mess things up, Jehovah God has the creative ability to design and the power and control required to produce new coded DNA, organs and organisms, and to do it all beautifully.

 

 

Next Session:

Paradise Lost: The Fall.  How we went from joyfully living forever in the Paradise of Pleasure with God to isolation, hard slog, sickness and death.

 

 

Bruce Armstrong

M App Sci

 

Copyright © 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022

Revised 4 October

 

 

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Books of Moses: Fact or Fiction Series

Origin of the Universe and Our EarthHow did Earth and our Universe Originate?  Both the Biblical and Big Bang Models are presented.  Evidence for and against the models is also presented.

Origin of LifeHow did Life Originate on Earth?  Both the Biblical Special Creation and Evolutionary Neo-Darwinian Models are presented.  The Biblical Model covers the creation of plants and aquatic and flying organisms, while the Evolutionary model investigates the Origin of the First Cell.  Evidence for and against the models is also presented.

Mankind and Evolution of LifeHow did complex life, including humans, originate on Earth?  Both the Biblical and Evolutionary Models are presented.  The Biblical Model covers the creation of land animals and the first man and woman, while the Evolutionary model investigates what is required for their First Cell to evolve into complex organisms.  Evidence for and against the models is presented.

The Fall of CreationWhat is the Fall of Creation on Earth, and what was its Impact?  The Biblical Account is presented, including sin, death and the banishing of Adam and Chavvah (Eve) from the Garden of Eden.  Evidence for and against this account is presented.

The Great Flood, Part 1Was there a Great Flood during Noah’s life?  The Biblical Account explains why there was a Great Flood, Noah’s role in it and the extent of the Flood. This session ends with Noah and the animals leaving the Ark after the Flood.

The Great Flood, Part 2What events followed the Great Flood during Noah’s life?  Where did the Ark land?  It also looks at many of the objections to the Great Flood and shows evidence that it was a real event which shaped the world we live in.

Shinar, Nimrod and the Tower of BabelWhat did mankind do after the Flood?  Where is the Plain of Shinar and where was Nimrod’s first Kingdom, including the location of the Tower of Babel?  Why did God intervene and create a myriad of new Languages?

The Exodus from EgyptHistorical and Scientific information relating to the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt is presented, analysing several proposed pathways to Midian, including crossing the Soph (Red) Sea.

To Mount Sinai and God’s InstructionsAfter crossing the Soph Sea, where did the Israelites go until their arrival at Mount Sinai, and where is this mountain?  This article includes Jehovah God giving them His Instructions there.  Historical and Geographical information is presented, some of it new and previously unpublished.

 

The Holy Bible CHCoG TranslationFrom the original Hebrew and Aramaic.  It is accurate and readable, giving you a clear understanding of God’s message.

 

 

 

Endnotes

 

1 This is explored in our Animals in the Bible document.

2 The first woman’s name in Hebrew and Aramaic is חַוָּה (Chavvah, with a silent c), which means Life.  Life in Greek is Eva, from which Eve is derived.  We will use her Hebrew name throughout.

3 https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/junk-dna/junk-dna-and-encode- revisited/

4 The only human computer code that comes close to this is Google’s software, which is now about two billion bits long.  This has taken many thousands of IT staff working for twenty years so far and it is still being debugged, refined and expanded.  Much of it is just simple word-matching and website-ranking options, both far less complex than our DNA code.

5 https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/ arj/v9/101_chimpanzee_human_dna.pdf

6 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, pg 228