The Missing Link

Scientists and archaeologists continue to look for the "missing link" that connects man to ape.  Occasionally, a few bits of ancient skeleton will be touted as "the missing link", bolstering the belief that man evolved from ape.

But man did not evolve from ape.  Neither did any species evolve from any other species.  These statements are undeniably demonstrated by the fossil record.  Here's why.

The differences between a man and an ape are many.  Thus, many links are needed, not just one or even a small handful.  More significantly, the differences between various species are overwhelming.  For example, it has been estimated that the differences between a sea dwelling creature and a land dwelling creature are in the neighborhood of 50,000.  These are not minor differences, but significant biological differences that are required to survive on land vs. in the sea.  Because evolution must have happened incrementally if it happened at random, what we need for evolution to be true are at least tens of thousands of links.

But this is only a small part of the story.  If these links are came about through random mutation, then we are not just missing the links.  We are missing the mistakes.

Let's take the example of a dart board.  Let's say that every dart that hits the bulls-eye represents a "missing link".  What we need to do is hit the bulls-eye 50,000 times, and viola, we will have evolved ourselves a land dwelling creature from a sea dwelling creature.  Sounds fine so far except that we must do this at random.  That is, I cannot use my intelligence to guide the darts.  Instead. someone must blind-fold me, place the dart board in a random location at a reasonable distance from me, and not tell me where the dart board is or when I hit the bulls-eye.  I am then given billions of darts, since of course we have billions of years over which the evolutionary process supposedly occurred, to throw at random.  As long as I get at least 50,000 darts in the center of the dart board, we will achieve our goal.  And, given enough time and enough darts, I will inevitably achieve the goal.  That fact cannot be denied.

But what happened to the darts that miss the dart board?  Each of these darts represents a "mistake" in the evolutionary process -- a species that was partially formed but contained a major flaw that caused it to die out quickly.  If I throw several billion darts at random in order to achieve the necessary 50,000 bulls-eye shots, where did all those billions of other darts go?

Do you see it now?  Do you see the insurmountable problem at hand?

We are not looking for a missing link.  We are not even looking for 50,000 missing links.  We are looking for billions of missing mistakes.  Where are all the mistakes?  If evolution happened at random over billions of years, there must have been far, far more mistakes than right answers.  Yet, when we look at the fossil record, we essentially only see the right answers (fully formed species).  All those drawings in grade school text books of intermediate species do not correspond to archeological finds.  They are simply art work.  Where are the billions of partially formed species?

They simply are not there.

All you have to do is consider the complexity of life, along with the fact that there are essentially no missing links between species in the fossil record, and realize without a doubt that evolution did not happen.  It isn't a matter of whether it "could have" happened.  Anything could have happened.  The question is whether it did happen.  And the answer is a resounding, "No, it most certainly did not".

No matter how much you might want to believe that evolution is the way life came about; no matter how much you want to believe that the existence of everything around us came about through the slow working of observable natural laws, I'm sorry to say that it simply is not true.  The fossil record does not bear out the evidence, and if evolution had happened, we would be swimming in evidence.

Not Evolving

Why would someone purposely believe something that is directly contradicted both by scientific evidence and simple common sense?

This question ran through my mind this morning as I considered the most influential scientific theory of the nineteenth century, namely the theory of evolution.  Evolution is taught as a proven scientific fact, yet it is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence and provably impossible due to the overwhelming number of interdependent factors in even the simplest of life forms.  The only aspects of the theory ever demonstrated inside or outside the laboratory are that random mutations occur and natural selection can lead to extinction.  Should it not then be called the theory of extinction?

And if the widely accepted "fact" of evolution is in fact not true, then a worldview shaking conclusion follows:  We are not evolving.

Our ability to think abstractly often causes us to gloss over important details and to equate things that are not true.  For example, we see machines such as automobiles wearing out with use, so we assume that our bodies similarly wear out over time.  This is simply not true.  Unlike an automobile, our bodies grow stronger when exercised.  If we break a bone, the bone heals and is often stronger than it was before.  Why then do we eventually die?  Because the systems within our bodies shut down as we grow older.  We do not wear out; we shut down.

Likewise, we think that because we are evolving technologically, we must be evolving in other ways and therefore the whole universe is somehow evolving.  This again is a fallacy.  That we are evolving technologically is undeniable.  That we are evolving physically or mentally is provably false.  Our ability to remember and to delineate between finer shades of meaning has significantly decreased over the centuries and millenia.  This can be observed through the flattening of language, such as the devolution of ancient Greek to modern Greek.  It can also be observed by comparing the vast amounts of information memorized by people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as compared to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first  Going back further to medieval and ancient times, and we find people frequently of memorizing huge volumes of information.  This is not to say that we are no longer capable of doing so today.  We simply don't do it because we don't need to.  Modern information sources are at our fingertips, so why do we need to memorize so much?  For the same reason, we often allow others to do the delineating of finer shades of meaning for us and so lose that capability as well.  Thus, our technical progress is actually in spite of our mental change, not because of it.

The conclusion here is critical to dwell upon.  We are not evolving.  Stop for a second to think what that means.  Even if you don't accept it after reading this post, think about what it would mean if you did.  This need not be a depressing thought, though it likely is for someone who has spent their entire life believing we are evolving.  It is simply truth that can point us to a different source of hope.