This must be surprising because at a first glance, similarities between organisms seems to support Darwinism. Why do we have hands that are closely similar to those of chimpanzees? The answer 'because both humans and chimpanzees descended from the same ancestor' seems reasonable. So it seems reasonable to suppose that the similarities between organisms supports Darwinism as it suggests common descend. However, this is erroneous and fallacious! Infact, the similarities destroys Darwinism! Similarity between living things of different species can only be maintained if the change is done in a very carefull way to preserve the similarities. The Darwinian evolution is suppose to happen accidentally. As we will see, numerous accidental changes cannot preserve similarities. Natural selection cannot select 'similarities'. It can only select 'usefullness'.
Suppose you have 10 dice on the table. Innitialy they all read the same way. You are going to pick one of them randomly and then toss it. So the crucial point is that your choice to pick which one of the dice is random. So you close your eyes and then pick one and then toss it. You are going to repeat it over and over. You thoroughly shafle the dice and then pick one randomly and toss it. What you realize is that it will be a miracle either to consistently never pick some 3 or so dice or for some 3 or so dice to always read the same innitial value after tossing! In other words after numerous pickings and throwings, we espect all the dice to change!
Let me use another example. Suppose you have 6 dice and you have 6 people, each with one dice. What will it happens if they all throw the dice? What we espect is that all the six faces of the dice will show up. Even if it doesn't in a single throw, it will happen after only a few throws. What it takes a miracle to happen is for two or more people to always find a similar face of the dice after they throw.
Another example: Suppose you ask 100 people to write a 10 digit number randomly. It will be a miracle to find even only two of the people with an exactly similar number! Each number will be unique! Then if you ask them to write the numbers over and over thousands of times, you will find that they will end up writting all possible ten diggit numbers. What it cannot happen is for certain numbers to repeat over and over and thus certain numbers to never appear.
Now back to DNA. If DNA does changes randomly, then over a long time, and thus after millions of changes, we espect every aspect of the DNA to change! All possible configurations of the DNA must have happened in search for those DNAs that are fit for living things! Therefore if Darwinism were true, we expect to see all POSSIBLE living things in this planet, or at least extremely many types that makes finding two similar creatures practically impossible! At no point would changes in the DNA systematically omit certain sections of the DNA from changing, or omit certain ways in which the DNA can change, simply because the change is random and undirected!
Darwinists often unwittingly undermine their own theory. If, for instance, you show that evolution did not take as long a time as they often claim, a Darwinist might be tempted to say 'so evolution realy happen faster than we though'. This is wrong! The reason why they thought it has to take that time was so it may make a blind evolution plausible. If you are going to guess ten digit phone numbers, then you will take years of trial and error, in each guess! If you find that you always make a few step before you get the correct number, so that you don't include a long list of 'wrong' numbers that you tried, then you are not really guessing the numbers. Some 'magics' are happening, and this turns out to be the case in the living creatures, so 'evolution actually happens faster than we thought'.
Now let us exermine specific cases. You find that the leavs of a cassava, cannabi and castor are closely similar. Both tend to have seven leaves branching from a given center (though at times the two smallest leaves fuses to the adjusce leaves to form 5 leaves). Unfortunately, Darwinists never thought that it is wise to first try to understand how the living things makes their structures from DNA before they can stick to the idea that living things change into other living things through random changes in their DNA. This is unfortunate becuse only after such understanding can we see how plausible/implausible such a mechanism can be. For instance, is it reasonable to suppose that the stem of the cannabis plant can change to an hollow stem, in evolving into the castor stem without changing the number of leaves emanating from the center in the process? We cannot answer this question without first understanding the morphogenesis of the leaves as guided by the information in the DNA.
Having the 'right DNA' is just having a tiny piece of the puzzle. The DNA just specifies how to make proteins. Having a manual for how to make bricks is an entirely different thing from being able to build an house. We must reason with a cell that is already a life, and already with a behaviour that we cannot artribute it only to DNA without first understanding how the cell originated from just a DNA! There are already cell walls, ribosomes, cytoplasm etc that we don't know how they are built solely using the information in DNA. These structures affects the behaviour of the cells. We cant know how this comes about solely from the information in the DNA because cells divides while there are already other cells alife in their adjacent space, including the parent cells. This other cells influences the activities in the new cell. They do so in such a way as to determine what kind of proteins this new cell will manufacture. Therefore the events from the external cells (including the parent cell) influences the behaviour of the new cell, and determines its lifetime characteristics!
The morphogenesis of an organism doesn't happen in the same way proteins are created. In the latter, only the blue print in the DNA is neaded. However in the former, the entire BEHAVIOUR of the cells must be considered! So it is never easy to see how the shape of a leave follows from the information in the DNA. It is like the way it is not easy to see how a house comes about by studying the information in the brain of an architect! Yes we know that the collection of all knowledge the architect have does INFLUENCES the kind of a house he designs, but to explain how this does so is futile, and to insist that the information causes the house in the same way the DNA causes the proteins is a fat lie! We know that the information is just one thing. The insanely comples BEHAVIOUR of the brain is an entirely different thing! Same is the case in morphogenesis. So it is incredibly disingenuous for Darwinists to, following the discovery of DNA, insists that they now understand the mechanism under which the tail of an ape slowly disappeared in formation of a tail-less human etc! When we insists on the detail things that happened, including the 'tail morphogenesis' from the information in the DNA, we find that actually, they donnot have any plausible mechanisms for evolution!
The understanding that morphogenesis and development follows from how a cell BEHAVES rather that what EXISTS inside the cells pose an insurmountable problem to neo'Darwinism. Supposing a small change does happen to the DNA of one cell. Then this small change affects the behaviour of the cell. This change in behaviour influences what cell manufactures. The presence of the things manufactured in turn further influences the behaviour of the cell and so on. Furthermore, the cell begins to send different information to adjacent cells, influencing those other cells as well, the circle repeats!! So we find that we have a chaos, rather than events that neatly follows some blue print. The shapes of organisms are realy not 'things from blue prints' but rather 'order from chaos'. The feature of a chaos system is the one where small, negligable causal changes does not result in small effects. A flapping butterfly in Tokyo creates tornadoes in America.! We find that reductionism fails as it meets insane complexity. So must neo-Darwinism fail because it is a reductionistic theory. It purports to explain the evolution to be a results of changes in DNAs. It is like trying to explain rain by positing that it is caused by butterflies! Such a claim can neither be explained nor empirically verified nor falsified because the explanation for rain will be impossibly complex and predictions of trains of events following the butterflies flappings will be impossible due to chaos.
Understanding morphogenesis this way, lets come back to the qieston of why the stem, the seeds and the size of castor changed from that of cannabis but the structure of its leaves did not change. A slight change in DNA, like we saw, should generally result in a huge change in the shapes due to repercussioning of events that changes the behaviours of cells. It is this chaotic nature of morphogenesis that makes changes that priserves some features all more unlikely. If changes were constantly happening to the plant's DNA, changes on the leaves structures would be very easy to happen and consequently, we would have so many types of leaves that it would be next to impossible to find two similar things among two different species. Cannabis dinnot reproduce with castor or cassava. On the contrary, millions of changes are supposed to have happened in their DNAs, as they blindly searched for working traits. So why do they still have any similarity at all? If two people are independently throwing a set of 1000 dice at random, never copying from themselves, can they, after thousands of throws, finds that all the 1000 dice are reading the same value? Such is the absurdity Darwinism implies!
Comments
So a daunting question evolutionist must answer it for us is: where are all the bajilions of creatures that came about as DNA changed randomly in search for better gene?? I mean for every 'guess' the nature made, there was a living thing born! There must be zillions and zillions of wrong genes that mutated, for every single right gene. So where are all these living things that a whole solar system cannot contain?
If someone tells you that the Principia Mathematica was typed randomly, then the wrong ones were selected away and thrown to the dust pin, then simply dare him to show you a dustpin big enough to contain all the wrong books that necessarily came about in the trial and error done in so typing the book!! As you may be able to calculate, there must be bajjilions, gazillions and sextrillions of such books!!
This is how we do it: don't allow the evolutionist to wave an hand!! No no no no!! Claiming that 'random changes occur in DNA some of which are beneficial, the beneficial ones are selected for and the harmful ones are selected against' is a typical example of 'hand waving'. He is glossing over an insanely complex thing like a numbskull! The following better presents what the theorist should actually state, but it is still too simple:
We can divide a DNA into sections, call them genes. In around the DNA exists an enzyme that sequentially reads the DNA (RNAp). But this enzyme does not run through from end to end. It begins somewhere and stops somewhere. Sometimes it jumps. A change in DNA may involve an addition of more genes. If we add the genes in between, it will spoil that gene. Therefore in order for the mutation not to be harmful, the new added gene must be placed exactly in between two genes. Furthermore, in order not to interfere with RNAp, we must place the new gene in a region where in RNAp never has to ran through it, or we must add a 'jump' instruction to the RNAp!
You can see that even a slightly more detailed explanation of a condition necessary for a mutation to be harmless already makes the idea of 'harmless mutation' seem dubious, let alone a 'beneficial mutation'! We haven't gone to the next level: the condition necessary for the mutation to be useful!
At this point, we must point at the crucial fact that even simply useless mutations MUST quickly disappear. This is what many people, including the evolutionists themselves, overlooks, thanks to the rampant hand wavings! They only think of 'disappearance of genes due to being selected away' and forget about 'disappearance due to the very same mutation'. In other words if mutations occur over and over, it might as well make genes disappear altogether rather than evolve! So a very good explanation must be given as to why a gene, once formed, does not disappear via the same mutations. The only explanation is that some survive but others die. But if only such were the case, then we won't need 'natural selection' at all!
Natural selection is needed simply because there is no way a useless gene can persist amid constantly changing DNA! The only way a gene persist is when any change that alters it happens, such mutation is fatal to the organism and so it has to die, living only the desired gene. Furthermore if even 'useless' genes could persist, then we land back to the same problem where there would be just too many kinds of living things! If you are trying to type The Principia Mathemstica randomly, then you will have to produce gazillions of wrong ones upto to the point where the whole universe cannot contain all the 'wrong' books you will have to dump! Yet living things are far more complex than the principia mathematica!!
So what is the point of Darwinism at all? If a single cell can naturally develop into a multi-cellular organism without neither supernatural intervention nor millions of years of accidental changes, all by who knows how the DNA triggers the series of events, why not just posit that the single cell from which all the creatures came was infact a 'zygote'? I mean if we must begine from a scenario where a fully living cell is already there, caring less how it, itself, came into being, why should we, in turn, impose some limitations on the characteristics of this single cell? What logic does Darwinist uses to support a stance that it is it easier to produce a bacteria than a zygote if he cannot explain how either of them can have come out from non-living matter? Furthermore, as far as how 'nature' might see it, a zygote is not any more 'complex' than a bacteria! Surely, if a bacteria can accidentally emerge from non-living matter, a whole human sperm cell can similarly pops up! This means all these millions of years does not realy do anything to make 'evolution by chances' plausible!
Now, a human body has 30 trillion cells! But the DNA has only a billion nucleotides. In other words it is far easier to develop a DNA from a single nucleotide than to develope a whole body. Yet the former happens only in 9 months and the latter, we are told, requires billions of years! Why can't we just suppose that a single cell is to the whole body as a sigle nucleotide is the the whole DNA? Then the evolution of DNA becomes no more 'blind' than morphogenesis is!