Questions on Evolution

Recently, a big story was that a team of scientists had "created life." What really happened was they took a strand of DNA, replicated it with computers and machines, then changed a few pieces here and there, then inserted the modified strand into the nucleus of a stem cell and the cell lived and was able to reproduce. The scientists claimed it was a triumph and I'm sure many people were touting it as proof of evolution, since it shows life "can come from nothing."

Of course, what they forget is that 3.8 billion years ago, there were no computers and machines to put together all the elements into protein building blocks, match these building blocks to each other, and join them in a long string, and no stem cells to put these new DNA strands in.

Another issue is that if the earth was created 4.5 billion years ago as a mass of liquid hot rock, it's rate of rotation (estimated at 6.5 hours back then) would have produced enough centripetal force to make a huge bulge around the equator and flatten the planet and, some scientists believe, that bulge would have been large enough that the planet would have flung itself apart at the seams.

A third issue is where all the matter and energy came from in the first place. The best explanation I have heard is that it came from the collapse of the universe before it, but that theory has two problems with it: 1. It doesn't explain how the rate of expansion of the universe is actually increasing, which makes contraction and collapse impossible. If the first universe had collapsed, how can the second have enough energy that it doesn't? 2. It doesn't answer the question of where that universe's matter and energy came from, it only pushes the question back another 30 billion years.

To get to evolution itself, there are a host of issues with it:

1. The supposed point of evolution is survival. Survivability is greatly enhanced by being adaptable to different situations. Why then are amphibians considered low on the evolutionary chart? Being able to survive above and below water seems like a huge advantage in getting food. So does being able to fly. I know it sounds ridiculous, but if we were to design the perfect animal, we really couldn't do much better than a dragon, save to make it amphibious. It can fly, has a long life, has very thick scales, and breathes fire. Most legends also have them as being as wise and intelligent as humans. What do we have instead? Creatures with no defense systems to speak of, like the rock hyrax, kiwi, and plankton.

2. How did these creatures come to be in the first place? The simplest cell has about 582,000 base pairs of proteins that need to be matched up, each protein of which is made up of several atoms that have to bond together in the right way, as well as sugars to bind the pairs and make the walls of the double helix. The odds of this happening are so astronomically small that it has been compared to a tornado sweeping through an airplane junkyard and creating a fully functional Boeing 747.

3. Going from a single-celled organism to multi-cellular organisms seems impossible, too. I understand the argument behind why there are two genders in animals, but how does that functionality come about? Furthermore, if you had a multi-cellular creature that was asexual, and it produced offspring that were male and female, how would the offspring know what to do to make more of themselves? This functionality slowly developing over millions of years doesn't make much sense, either, for it would be saying that evolution, which is reactionary, had a plan for the future, and it still doesn't explain how they would know what to do to reproduce. Similar arguments could be made for almost all systems, such as digestive, cardiovascular, and pulmonary.

4. One of the ways evolution has attempted to get around this is punctuated evolution. The problem is that 98% of all mutations are harmful and, of those that aren't, few mutations are useful and many of them are sterile. Also, for this theory to work, the parents would have to have multiple children with the same mutation who then mated with each other and had that mutation carry on, or multiple parents had that mutation at the same time. Mating between species (such as would happen if a mutant that is a new species couldn't find a fellow mutant) usually produces sterile offspring as well.

5. On a more humorous note, consider the woodpecker. Here's a bird who bangs its head against a tree every day to get food. If the whole point of evolution is to improve a species, this has to be a step up from what it was doing before. Kind of makes you wonder what it was doing previously, doesn't it? ;)