Did you know that most of the evidence claimed for evolution is actually not evidence for evolution? That's right, remember the mountain of evidence that evolutionists say is supposed to make evolution a fact? Well most of it consists of biological findings that merely have been interpreted according to evolution.
Here is an example that I've discussed before at Evolution News & Views. A prestigious scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published detailed findings about how DNA information is used to make proteins in our cells. The research team, led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory professor Michael Zhang, discovered subtle signals in the DNA that help guide incredibly complex molecular machinery when editing the DNA information. The findings are not in any way evidence for evolution, and yet the headlines proclaimed “Scientists Find a Fingerprint of Evolution Across the Human Genome.”
This was not merely a case of journalistic naivete. One can hardly blame the science writer when the journal paper itself presented the results as elucidating the evolutionary process. The paper's title alone (“RNA landscape of evolution for optimal exon and intron discrimination”) suggests a new finding about evolution, and the paper concludes that human genes seem to have been optimized “during evolution.”
But the “during evolution” part is gratuitous. The key findings are about how the genetic signals work, not that they evolved. There is, in fact, nothing in the findings to indicate evolution. The science writer concluded that “the researchers found signs that evolution rejects some types of mutations,” but there simply was no such finding. What the researchers actually found was the presence of certain subtle signals in the genome. They found no evidence that the signals were produced by evolution.
This dynamic is common and, not surprisingly, influences popular thinking. For reports such as this are taken to be objective, scientific confirmations of evolution. They often find their way into the popular literature, text books, Internet discussions, origins debates and so forth. Because evolution is believed to be a fact, we have lost the ability to rightly evaluate scientific evidence. All evidence must point to evolution, even if it doesn’t. This is yet another way that evolution harms science.
