A child once informed his friends his toy bulldozer could dig all the way through the Earth. But wasn’t the Earth too big? No, look at the Grand Canyon—it is proof of what such small shovels can do. Such childish logic, amazingly, shows up repeatedly in evolutionary “theory.” It is a treasure trove of bizarre and silly claims and justifications which rises to the surface, as with the child’s reasoning, when the evolutionist is questioned about his convictions. Consider, for example, the oft heard evolutionary mechanism of random mutation followed by natural selection which, like the toy bulldozer, apparently can do just about anything. When queried about this most amazing idea, the underlying evolutionary logic is revealed.

One response evolutionists give when confronted with their own extraordinary claims about random mutation and natural selection is to complain that mutations aren’t really random, and any such notion is clearly erroneous. They don’t just happen willy-nilly but in fact reveal non random patterns both across the genome and across time.

But this is an equivocation on the word “random,” which is used with reference to something. When evolutionists speak of random mutations, they mean that the mutations are random with respect to the need of the organism. There is no plan or intelligence behind mutations—evolution has no final causes.

When questioned about their bizarre claim that the entire field of biology is a consequence of such Lucretian bloopers, their rebuttal that mutations actually aren’t random after all reveals how shallow is their thinking.

Evolutionists are the ones who claimed mutations are random (with respect to the need) and the fact that mutations are not random over space and time does not change that Epicurean claim. (By the way, this is yet another evolutionary expectation that turned out to be false. That became clear when the empirical evidence caught up with evolutionary speculation.)

Another response evolutionists give when questioned about their startling ideas of the power of random mutation and natural selection is to focus on the latter. Mutations may be random but evolution certainly is not, for selection pressure brings out the winners.

Of course this is false. Selection “pressure” is another evolutionary euphemism. The only thing Darwin’s natural selection can do is kill off the faulty or inferior designs—it does not induce helpful mutations to magically arise. All evolutionary creations must arise from those random mutations.

Yet another revealing response evolutionists give when queried about their heroic claims of random mutation and natural selection is to complain that such a query is nothing more than a strawman rendition of evolution.

Random mutations, after all, are only one of a great many evolutionary mechanisms. One professor has listed almost fifty different so-called “engines of variation” that work together to build biology’s wonders. How silly to think random mutation was the sole artist in Darwin’s montage.

For example, biological variation can arise from changes in the expression levels of genes, which in turn can arise from changes to sequences that control such expression levels, or changes to the protein machines that bind to those sequences. And there are far more involved examples, such as the various forms of symbiotic mechanisms. The professor concludes:

So, next time you hear or read a creationist or IDer cite "RM & NS" as the sole explanation for evolutionary change, point out to them and everyone else that there are at least 47 different sources of variation

But does this really rescue random mutation from its overachiever status? No. Once again the evolutionary logic has bubbled up to the surface for all to see. The most obvious problem here is simply that biology’s various engines of variation are, according to evolutionary mandate, ultimately the product of, yes, random mutation.

Of course RM/NS is the ultimate explanation for evolutionary change. The fact that biology reveals incredibly complex adaptive and physiological changes does not give evolutionists license to invoke them as evolutionary starting points, without reference to their own origin.

Indeed, with evolution what we must believe is that its blind mutations just happened to create phenomenal mechanisms which, themselves, not only are astonishingly complex but become crucial agents of evolutionary change. The heroics continue to mount at an astronomical pace as evolution, we must believe, creates evolution. If a toy bulldozer can dig through the Earth, then why not?

What do bacterial resistance to antibiotic drugs and the universal genetic code have in common? They both have been explained by horizontal gene transfer, a mechanism that evolutionists are increasingly using to explain the origin of the species. And what’s wrong with that? First, it makes evolution superfluous and second, it makes evolution ridiculous.

In the last century widespread use of antibiotics led to widespread resistance to antibiotics. Sometimes the resistance was rapid and so indicated a transfer of resistance between bacteria rather than independent adaptations. We now understand that bacteria, as well as higher organisms, can trade genetic material via several different mechanisms collectively referred to as horizontal gene transfer. As one science writer put it:

This seems to be a crude analogue of social learning, in which one species can learn the good tricks already discovered by another … the apparent ubiquity of horizontal gene transfer implies that microorganisms have an impressive capacity to actively alter their genomes in response to environmental stresses or opportunities.

This provides evolutionists with a convenient explanatory device for the many instances where the genetic sequence data do not cooperate with evolutionary expectations. Various studies have found that bacterial sequences often do not form the predicted evolutionary tree, and in such cases horizontal gene transfer is the typical explanation.

But while such explanations make sense, they also make evolution vulnerable to Occam’s razor. For when evolutionary predictions fail, as they often do, we find scientific explanations that are independent of evolution. Organisms intelligently adapt to environmental challenges and genes show up in the wrong place. We now understand that epigenetic and horizontal gene transfer mechanisms, respectively, often account for such phenomena. And while evolution requires such mechanisms to save it from its failures, those mechanisms do not need evolution. As we increasingly explain life with empirically observed, non evolutionary, mechanisms, why do we drag along with them the unwieldy nineteenth century Victorian doctrine?

The least of its problems

But horizontal gene transfer’s making evolution superfluous is the least of its problems. For in order for the evolutionary story to make sense, we must believe that evolution created horizontal gene transfer. This mechanism, increasingly understood to be a crucial player in adaptation, is not simple. Unlike the bumper sticker’s reminder, horizontal gene transfer is not something that just happens. It is a consequence of various complex mechanisms for which evolution has no explanation beyond the usual speculation.

So we must believe that evolution, sans horizontal gene transfer, somehow happened upon such a facility which then allowed for more evolution. Apparently we are living in the right multiverse.

This incredible level of serendipity has evolutionary theory looking increasingly ridiculous. Recently this reached a fever pitch when horizontal gene transfer was employed to explain the universal genetic code. The code is essentially the same across all species and yet it is profoundly robust and efficient. Compared to randomly selected codes the actual code is a standout. Now, to account for the codes “universality and optimality,” recent evolutionary speculation calls for a massive level of horizontal gene transfer which was “likely to be present in early communal life” and led to “innovation-sharing protocols.”

And how do we know such a world was “likely”? Because it is needed to evolve the genetic code. The evolutionists explain that traditional evolutionary theory doesn’t account for how the code could have arisen. Amazingly, following Francis Crick, evolutionists have often ascribed such marvels as the genetic code to accidents of history. But if that is excessive serendipity, so is the new idea.

The researchers set up a virtual world to rerun history multiple times and test out different ideas. As one report explained:

Starting with a random initial population of codes being used by different organisms - all using the same DNA bases but with different associations of codons and amino acids - they first explored how the code might evolve in ordinary Darwinian evolution. While the ability of the code to withstand errors improves with time, they found that the results were inconsistent with the pattern we actually see in two ways. First, the code never became shared among all organisms - a number of distinct codes remained in use no matter how long the team ran their simulations. Second, in none of their runs did any of the codes evolve to reach the optimal structure of the actual code. “With vertical, Darwinian evolution,” says Goldenfeld, “we found that the code evolution gets stuck and does not find the true optimum.”

The results were very different when they allowed horizontal gene transfer between different organisms. Now, with advantageous genetic innovations able to flow horizontally across the entire system the code readily discovered the overall optimal structure and came to be universal among all organisms. "In some sense," says Woese, "the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background is a sort of echo of the big bang. And its form points to a process very different from today's Darwinian evolution." For the researchers the conclusion is inescapable: the genetic code must have arisen in an earlier evolutionary phase dominated by horizontal gene transfer.

In other words, a population of organisms that just happened to arise, also just happened to develop advanced genetic codes--a large number of codes. And they then just happened to trades parts of their codes with each other, taking the good and leaving off the bad. This all just happened to happen. And fortunately incredible horizontal transfer mechanisms just happened to arise, to facilitate all this.

Evolutionists are now making the Greek myth makers appear downright sober. In an all-time understatement they do admit that pinning down the details of that early process remains a difficult task. This work augments the already rampant evolutionary serendipity with absurdity. Evolutionary theory is not merely superfluous, it is ridiculous.

The theory of evolution states that biological change occurs by the natural selection of otherwise unintelligent biological variation. Organisms just happen to vary in their designs, and those that work better are better represented in later generations. But recent research shows change occurring far more rapidly than such a blind process could generate. The results not only are yet another falsification of an evolutionary prediction, they also demonstrate the limited usefulness of the theory.

The new research used a commonly studied plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, to study how plants adapt to temperature variations. In one experiment two generations were exposed to mildly hot temperatures. The next generation was exposed to normal temperatures, and then for the final generation the temperature was again elevated. These plants significantly outperformed plants whose ancestors had been exposed to colder temperatures.

In other words, these plants had adapted to the warmer temperatures, and the adaptation had persisted through a generate exposed to normal temperatures. This example of rapid adaptation defies the evolutionary expectation of lucky changes undergoing natural selection. As one science writer put it:

Because the chance of accumulating mutations within just two generations that led the heat-conditioned plants to thrive in hotter conditions was essentially nil, the authors conclude that inherited epigenetic factors affecting flower production and early-stage seed survival in those plants had to be at play.

Of course this is a falsification of an evolutionary prediction, but the research also has important implications for agriculture. As the researchers explain:

the result has significant and practical implications for understanding variation in agronomic productivity

Whereas Jonathan Weiner once asked, “How can you be a creationist farmer any more?,” the operative question now seems to be, “How can you be a evolutionist farmer any more?”