Mariner Valley, far larger than Earth's Grand Canyon, and one of many catastrophic landmarks on Mars.

5. Evolution and Earth

Within the pages of such mainstream science magazines as Scientific American, Nature, and Science, the theory of evolution is never challenged. However, outside these organs of the modern scientific establishment, the theory has come under criticism by many individuals who have scientific reputations that are beyond question. They argue that the fossil record does not support evolution, that the molecular probability of evolution is infinitesimal, and that the design of living things is improbable for random chance to produce over the lifetime of the universe.

One of the first to detect flaws in evolutionary theory was the developer himself, Charles Darwin. This came as early as his first book, The Origin of the Species (1859). The fossil record, Darwin said, appeared mysteriously incomplete, missing many key transitional forms that theory predicted.

In evolutionary terms, the fossil record is the collected skeletal imprints of plants and animals buried over eons on Earth. Their chronological burial charts the course of evolutionary flow from simpler organisms to the more complex. Transitional forms are fossils of those organisms which are expected to appear as an evolutionary link between families of species -- such as between fish and amphibian, amphibian and reptile, reptile and mammal, and so forth.

Darwin couldn't find such transitional forms. He observed: "Innumerable transitional forms must have existed, but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"[1]

Darwin answered the question, to his own satisfaction, by assuming that as scientists continued to excavate the fossil strata, they would uncover the missing transitional forms. But more than a century has gone by, most of the fossil record has been dug up, and the gaps are still there. Even allowing for broad interpretation of what constitutes a transitional form, ninety-nine percent of the transitional species that evolutionists anticipated in the fossil record have never been found.[2]

But what do we mean by transitional form? Aren't amphibians the missing link between fish and reptiles, and don't we have a chart showing the gradual evolution of the horse? So how can anyone say that there are innumerable missing transitional forms?

One example of a missing transitional form is the evolution of bats. They are assumed to have descended from rodents. Since the articulation of bat wings is complex, as is their sonar-navigation system, the evolution from rodent to bat must have taken a long time. But if that is true, then where are the fossilized 'semi-bats'? We would expect to find a mouse-like creature with large flaps trailing its forelegs; over eons the flaps would become more wing-like. A similar gradual evolution should be found in the growth and shape of the ears as well. These 'semi-bats,' existing over millions of years, should have left numerous fossils, each slightly different from the other.

But there are no 'semi-bats' in the fossil record. There are just rodents and bats, and nothing inbetween. And the rodents and bats exist for millions of years, with no evolutionary change whatsoever, as if genetic drift was suspended. The same is true of the evolution from fish to amphibians. Legs are very different from fins, and countless mutations would be required to change from one appendage to the other. No such transformation has been located in the fossil record. And then fish and amphibians hang around for millions of years without changing in the slightest!

The lack of transitional forms is apparent also in the evolution of reptiles from amphibians. There is no transitional form telling us where mammals originated. The origin of the phyla -- of elephants, hippopotamuses, and primates -- are mysteries also. There are fish that fly, but nothing in the fossil record shows how their wings came to be.

When evolutionists deal with the question of transitional forms, they discuss minor functional changes and prefer to ignore the big leaps. They will discuss size changes in horses, the curvature of finch beaks, color changes in moth wings. But they never address species change! The title lied -- The Origin of the Species has nothing to do with the origin of the species. And neither does evolution.

Some evolutionists have now sought an answer for transitional gaps in the new theory of 'punctuated equilibrium.' According to this theory, as espoused by Stephen J. Gould, paleontologist and author of several books on evolution:

Species should be static through their range because our fossils are the remains of large central populations. In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendant species should appear suddenly by migration from the peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population. Thus, the fossil record is a faithful rendering of what evolutionary theory predicts.[3]

If evolution had been originally introduced this way, it would have been laughed away. Originally evolution explained improbable mutations by referring to gradual chages in large populations over long periods of time. Punctuated equilibrium ignores the question of improbability and says, "Since there is no fossil evidence that evolution occured logically, it must have occured illogically."

Do you go with logic, or do you go with facts? What kind of theory puts logic and facts in conflict? Can such a theory honestly be called 'scientific?'

Another possibility, one that reconciles logic and facts, is that evolution is wrong.

The fossil record's denial of evolution confirms what a minority of scientists have discovered in calculating the probability of evolution. To understand their work, let's digress briefly about scientific notation.

Scientific notation is used to denote extremely large numbers in 'powers of ten.' This means, 10 is '10 to the first power,' written as 10^1. Likewise, 100 is represented by 10^2, and 1000 by 10^3, and so on. Obviously, a power of ten is equal to 1 followed by the same number of zeros when written out.. A million is thus 10^6, and a billion is 10^9. In scientific notation, the age of the universe is 2 x 10^10 (twenty billion) years, and can be expressed alternatively as 6 x 10^17 (600 quintillion) seconds. Astronomers currently believe the entire universe contains approximately 10^80 atoms (a number so big it has no name).

Scientific notation is useful for evaluating extremely low probability events. For example, consider a roomful of monkeys banging on typewriters (or word processors) and randomly tapping out the complete works of Shakespeare by their mindless activity. If someone were to tell us confidently that this would happen with a million monkeys and a million years, we may find our intuition overwhelmed by the big numbers and inclined to believe him.

In reality, typing anything comprehensible by chance is exceedingly difficult. Even sticking to just the letter keys, there's only one chance in 26 of a monkey getting the first letter in a sentence right. The first ten letters would have a probability of 1/26 multiplied by itself ten times, which works out to one chance in 140 trillion. Scientific notation needs to be used for a fifty letter sentence -- in which the resulting probability is one chance in 2.3 x 10^35 tries.

How many tries would the hypothetical typing monkeys get? A million monkeys (10^6) each typing one letter per second for one entire year (3.1 x 10^7 seconds) would type a total of 3.1 x 10^13 letters; it would take them decades to correctly type the first ten letters of a Shakespeare sonnet. A ten-word sentence with fifty letters would take far longer than the age of the universe.

Even the reality limited to letters in a sentence shows complexity that boggles human intuition. Human intuition usually assumes that bringing order out of chaos is much simpler than it actually is.

What goes for letters in a sentence goes for evolutionary probability as well, because the situations are analogous. Organic molecule chains inside cells are strings of atoms and smaller molecules, just as sentences are strings of letters and words. The major difference is that cellular protein chains are much longer than the typical linguistic sentence, running to lengths of thousands of atoms. Also, unlike mere words, protein molecule chains are dynamic machines with precise functions. If even one molecule in the chain is altered, the molecule becomes useless for its assigned role within the cell.

The evolutionary vision has microorganisms arising spontaneously from a few simple organic compounds. The processes of cellular replication and differentiation are often considered trivial matters. Evolution declares the microcellular world is filled with the chaos and confusion, the flaws and mistakes we would expect from a trial-and-error formation process. In response, Michael Denton, a microbiologist researcher, has written of what a human cell would actually look like if it were expanded to the size of a city and if we could then voyage inside it:

We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine -- that is one single functional protein molecule -- would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.[4]

The imagery of a factory, designed for a purpose, is compelling. It's far removed from the evolutionary notion of molecules sloshed together randomly in a primordial ocean.

Compare the probability of randomly stringing a few dozen letters together in an intelligible sentence with randomly stringing together a molecule with three thousand precisely placed components. And when you've finished assembling one such protein molecule, you've got to start over again, and again, and again -- for a hundred thousand times, because there are that many different types of molecular machines inside the cell. It would take a lot of microscopic monkeys.

The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, a respected member of the scientific community yet also a staunch critic of non-directed evolution, calculated the chance of all 2,000 enzymes used in biological organisms occurring through random processes as 1 in 10^40,000, and stated, "This is a crucial statistic, because it seems that without these 2,000 enzymes being formed in exactly the correct way, complex living organisms simply could not operate."[5]

Given the age of the universe (10^17 seconds) and the mass of the universe (10^80 atoms), such a probability figure (1 in 10^40,000) seems beyond comprehension. Numbers like that are consistently generated by evolutionary calculations.

In the Bible, Romans 1:20 bluntly states, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." The Bible sees no excuse for belief that chance could produce the rich complexity of life on Earth. One does not have to descend to the molecular level to see the truth. It is manifested in the larger life forms of Earth. Birds are far more complex than airplanes, fish more than submarines, humans more than calculators. If those instruments of technology required designers, how can we think otherwise about biological organisms?

One frequently-discussed example of complexity in a biological organism is the defensive spray system of the bombardier beetle. To protect itself, this beetle ejects an explosive spray of steaming hot liquid upon its predators when attacked. The system is quite complicated, as explained in Francis Hitching's book, The Neck of the Giraffe:

Brachinus, commonly known as the Bombardier Beetle, squirts a lethal mixture of hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide into the face of its enemy. These two chemicals, when mixed together, literally explode. So in order to store them inside its body, the Bombardier Beetle has evolved a chemical inhibitor to make them harmless. At the moment the beetle squirts the liquid out of its tail, an anti-inhibitor is added to make the mixture explosive once again. The chain of events that could have led to the evolution of such a complex, coordinated and subtle process is beyond biological explanation on a simple step-by-step basis. The slightest alteration in the chemical balance would result immediately in a race of exploded beetles.[6]

How did the explosive spray system of the bombardier beetle manage to mutate itself into existence? More interesting is how evolutionists seek to dismiss the complexities involved. Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins has attempted to do so in his popular and acclaimed pro-evolution book, The Blind Watchmaker:

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles. I am now about to mix the two together . . . According to the above [he quoted Hitching's description], they will explode in my face. Here goes . . .

Well, I'm still here. I poured the hydrogen peroxide into the hydroquinone, and absolutely nothing happened. It didn't even get warm. Of course, I knew it wouldn't: I'm not that foolhardy!

. . . . If you are curious about the bombardier beetle, by the way, what actually happens is as follows. It is true that it squirts a scaldingly hot mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone at enemies. But hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone don't react violently together unless a catalyst is added. This is what the bombardier beetle does. As for the evolutionary precursors of the system, both hydrogen peroxide and various kinds of quinones are used for other purposes in body chemistry. The bombardier beetle's ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be around. That's often how evolution works.[7]

Dawkins's smugness informs us he thinks he has dispatched the argument -- but he's only dug his own grave deeper! Instead of two chemicals to be carefully handled, there are three -- and three times as much plumbing, to say the least. Which would be even harder to evolve.

Dawkins asserts two of the chemicals involved in the spray mixture as pre-existing within the beetle's body chemistry, and then dismisses the whole matter of the spray system by the rather breezy statement, "The bombardier beetle's ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be around."

Let's take an engineer's look at what he's hiding behind those words, 'simply pressed.' How would an engineer consciously design such a system as the bombardier beetle's defense spray?

First of all, whatever glands in the beetle are responsible for the manufacture of the chemicals must be enlarged to supply the extra needs of the defensive spray system.

Second, there must be some sort of internal plumbing to transfer the fluids from the organs where they are manufactured to the reservoirs where they are stored for the defensive system.

Third, separate reservoirs must be created to keep a sufficient supply of these chemicals in reserve for an attack.

Fourth, there must be muscles present which will pressurize the reservoirs as defensive needs call.

Fifth, there must be an aperature between each reservoir to a mixture chamber.

Sixth, each aperature must have a valve which prevents the chemicals from leaking out of their storage reservoirs into the mixture chamber -- except when needed.

Seventh, there must be a mixture chamber.

Eighth, the mixture chamber must have a valve which opens and closes at an appropriate pressure level during the explosion process.

Ninth, all muscles and valves within the system must have various types of nerves for monitoring and control.

Tenth, the brain of the bombardier beetle requires sophisticated pattern-recognition programming -- currently at the leading edge of human technology -- to sense a predator, target said predator with the defensive system, and then perform the feedback and control functions necessary to utilize the system effectively.

Got all that? There's more . . . .

In Science magazine, a scientific paper reports that the actual system is even more complex, suggestive of an even greater degree of design:

. . . The glands are essentially binary weapons. Each consists of two confluent chambers in which the chemical reactants are separately stored. Hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide are stored in the large, inner chamber of each gland (the reservoir) and the oxidases in the smaller, outer chamber (the reaction chamber). The reservoir is thin-walled, enveloped by muscles, and compressible; the reaction chamber is thick-walled and rigid. A tight valve ordinarily keeps the juncture between the two compartments sealed. Ejections are presumably effected by brief compression of the reservoir. This compression forces reservoir fluid through the inner valve into the reaction chamber, where the catalytic events leading to quinone formation are initiated.

. . . We postulate that the individual pulsations represent individual microexplosions, repeated as the beetle delivers its spray. Critical to the operation of such a cyclic mechanism is the maintenance of continuous pressure on the reservoir through sustained contraction of its musculature and an oscillatory opening and closing of the valve that controls access to the reaction chamber . . . .

. . . A striking technological analog of the bombardier beetle is provided by the notorious V-1 "buzz" bomber of World War II. Both the beetle and the V-1 engender a pulsed jet through an intermittent chemical reaction, and both have passively oscillating valves controlling access to their reaction chambers. For a propelled vehicle such a system is suboptimal because thrust is discontinuous. For the bombardier beetle the appropriate measure is not thrust but rather production of an effective deterrent with good control and high discharge velocity, with investment of minimal muscular force. For this purpose the pulsed mechanism is ideal.[8]

To mutate from an ordinary beetle to a bombardier beetle, we require a lot of genetic changes. Even to specify the run of 'internal piping' from a reservoir chamber to the reaction chamber must require a multitude of DNA instructions, both for the tubing thickness and for every kink and bend in the run. Not only the piping, but the various chambers, valves, nerves, and neural programming must also be defined in the coding, or else the overall system is ineffectual. A beetle that has mutated with extra chambers, but no valves, will be unable to use the system, but nonetheless forced to drag around its extra weight. A beetle that has all the internal plumbing, but not the neural programming to operate the system, also will be at an evolutionary disadvantage. Missing the genetic code for a component renders the system useless.

There can be no gradual, incremental evolution from ordinary beetle to bombardier beetle. A partially evolved bombardier beetle would carry all the weight of a defensive spray system with none of the value. In the competition of natural selection, the partially-evolved bombardier beetle would lose to the ordinary beetle, and die out before passing its genetic characteristics onto future generations for further mutation. There is no gradualist road of tiny mutational steps from ordinary beetle to bombardier beetle. Evolution may want it, but natural selection forbids it.

The only way to 'evolve' a bombardier beetle is all at once -- one day, an ordinary beetle without a defensive spray system must give birth to a bombardier beetle. We're back to the millions of monkeys on a million typewriters, but now they have only a day to write the equivalent of megabytes of genetic coding. Not to mention the design of the cellular molecular machinery that will read the coding and construct the organism according to design specficiations.

Evolutionsts complain that their critics always present arguments with the phrase, "It is difficult to believe . . . . " But such criticism is an occupational hazard for those who insist on believing in very low probability events.

There is no absolute proof that the Cydonia Complex is artificial. We simply perform a probability calculation by stringing component probabilities together into a net probability, and find the value too low to accept that it all happened by chance. Biological design has no absolute proof, either. And again, we perform a probability calculation to determine our response.

It's ironic that evolutionists should accuse others of 'wishful thinking' and of falling prey to the fallacy of human intuition. Isn't it the ultimate wishful thinking to imagine we have figured out the mechanism of the universe? Isn't it usually the failing of human intuition to underestimate the amount of effort required to do useful work?

Evolutionary doctrine has been pursued with religious fervor. It claims to be scientific, but what scientific advancement has depended on evolutionary doctrine? Evolution can only be justified in terms of itself: evolutionary knowledge is to be pursued for its own sake, because 'all knowledge is worth knowing.' But how do we know that evolutionary doctrine is knowledge?

At Cydonia, evolutionary doctrine has gotten in the way of scientific advancement. It's not the first time. Genetics was hampered for decades by the now-discredited evolutionary notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Biological science was held back by evolutionary belief in embryonic recapitulation. And the health of millions of people was recklessly jeopardized by evolutionary theories which asserted the body must be full of 'vestigial organs' from evolutionary mistakes, and that the tonsils were an example of vestigial organs, and ought to be immediately excised from the body. Evolution is no help even to natural history. Paleontologists ignore evolution in their classification schemes, and geologists have found evolutionary theories useless in the hunt for oil and coal deposits.

The breakdown of evolution on the sands of Mars is just one more failure. Evolution is dead as a science, and lingers on only through blind faith.