Debunking Evolution

Why would I want to help you debunk evolution?

• I am sick of reading incompetent attempts at debunking.
• I would find it very exciting if somebody found a hole in evolution. My loyalty is to the truth, not to the current evolutionary theory.
• Sometimes I fantasise about finding some flaw myself.

The biggest mistake people make in debunking evolution is misunderstanding what the theory of evolution says, or deliberately misrepresenting what it says with a straw man argument.

If you go to AnswersInGenesis you will learn only gross distortions of the theory. They are not very honest or very informed. What they do is the equivalent of debunking the bible by quoting a non-existent verse Jehosophat 99:99. Anyone who knows anything about the bible would dismiss the argument immediately. Some of the common errors creationists make in talking about evolution include:

• Evolution is all about the big bang. It has nothing to say about the big bang, just the gradual changes in life.
• Evolution is all about the origin of life. No, that is called abiogenesis.
• Evolution is about life appearing by random accidents. There is nothing random about natural selection. It is even more strenuous than the judging on American Idol.
• Evolution is about individual dogs turning into cats, and gorillas turning into humans, similar to the way humans turn into werewolves in movies. It is actually about very slow changes over the generations and hundreds of thousands of years from common ancestors. Individuals do not change at all.
• Creationists refuse to admit any evolution at all in 3 billion years, but claim mankind shrank from 4.57 metres (15 ft) to 1.83 metres (6 ft) in less than 1000 years far faster change that anything permitted in evolutionary theory.
• Evolution is just a theory. Theory in science does not mean hunch. Theories are even better than facts in science, e.g. the theory of gravity.
• There is no evidence for Evolution. It look in science texts, rather than asking creationists, you will discover we have fossil evidence, one species splitting into another in the wild, one species splitting into another in the lab, viruses evolving immunity to dozens of drugs…
• Creationists claim there are no intermediate forms. In Darwin’s day, we had few intermediate fossils. Now we have museums full.

To get a fairly deep understanding, including how DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) chemistry makes it all work see Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks.

Here is an idea I have been chewing on that you might like to develop to find a fault in evolution. There are way more species than there are niches. You’d think natural selection would generate standard utilitarian animals, without any quirkiness, all pretty much alike. But if you look at coral reef fish, they are a riot of shapes and colours. Does sexual selection account for all this? What happens when there is no sexual selection?

If you do manage to poke a hole in evolutionary theory, don’t expect evolution as a whole to topple and creationism to reign. Evolution will likely remain much as it is with a patch. Creationism already has thousands of holes that nobody has been able to patch. So it is not going anywhere.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)