Evolution?

We’ve all heard the story…There was a big bang, followed by a condensation of stars and planets. Our planet earth formed, cooled down, and water came into abundance. Slowly, over millions of years, organic molecules formed, giving way to self-replicating biological systems. Through a process of mutation and Natural Selection, an entire tree of living things emerged, ultimately taking the form of humans.

However, if you look past the artist’s renderings and mood music, just how plausible is this explanation? Consider for example:

· How much of the above sketch can be demonstrated in the laboratory? Can chemicals be heated, shaken and mixed to spontaneously form the building blocks of life? Laboratory experiments like the Urey-Miller experiment show that some amino acids can form under laboratory coaxing, but these molecules are trivial when compared to living things. Where does the information in DNA come from? Can we go to any chemistry lab and brew up some new life forms?

· A really big mystery is the source of information found in living things. This topic is currently popularized as the intelligent design hypothesis. Can the volumes of information contained in DNA just happen by chance? Does anything get more orderly, more sophisticated by itself?

· If mutations produce positive and useful changes (increasing the genetic information), there should be many examples. Do any come to mind? (Hint: Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist spokesman for evolution couldn’t name any when asked.) And if these changes are so good, why don’t we take x-ray showers to help the evolutionary process along? Also, if we want to write better software, why not throw in a few random characters for good measure.

· Natural Selection does shift the composition of existing populations, but where do new structures come from? In the famous Peppered Moth example, birds ate more white moths from trees darkened by industrial pollution than dark ones. Thus, it is said that “moths turned from white to black”. Now consider what would happen if a paint pigment plant coated the trees bright blue; would the moths also turn blue? Along the same lines, can humans be breed to fly? To run 60 MPH? Change is limited by the genetic information.

· Does the fossil record support the notion that life changed incrementally as predicted by evolutionary theory? Is so, why are there so many missing transitions in the tree of life? How do you explain the “Cambrian explosion” where many different types of creatures suddenly appear in the fossil record, fully formed, in a “geological instant”?

These are just of few of the many unsettling questions that make explanations about origins less than an open-and-shut case.