N

Narrow Population

One of the views held by the proponents of punctuated evolution is the concept of narrow populations. This postulates that new species form in communities consisting of very small numbers of animals or plants. According to this claim, populations containing large numbers of animals exhibit no evolutionary development, but remain in a state of stasis. However, small groups that separate from this population and become isolated (generally because of geographical conditions), will reproduce solely among themselves.

Macro-mutations then occur in these groups and rapid speciation takes place.

Proponents of punctuated equilibrium insist on the concept of narrow populations simply because they cannot account for the lack of any evidence in the fossil records. That is why they imagine that evolutionary changes took place very rapidly and in narrow populations, for which reason no fossil traces have been left behind.

In recent years, however, scientific experiments and observations have revealed that narrow populations are a disadvantage rather than an advantage. Rather than developing and giving rise to new species, narrow populations actually cause severe genetic impairments, since individuals must constantly reproduce within a restricted gene pool. As result, normally heterozygotic individuals become increasingly homozygotic. Impaired or defective genes, normally recessive become dominant, and the population suffers increasing genetic diseases.67

In order to investigate this, one study on chickens was conducted over 35 years. Chickens kept in a narrow population were seen to become genetically weakened. Egg production fell from 100% to 80%, and reproduction levels from 93% to 74%.

However, this genetic regression was halted through conscious human intervention. When chickens were brought in from other regions and the augmented chicken population reassumed normal trends.68

This and similar findings show that the claim of punctuated evolution—that narrow populations are the source of evolutionary development—has no scientific validity. (See The Punctuated Evolution Model.)

Naturalism

In general terms, naturalism is a philosophy that recognizes no other reality aside from nature and the world perceived by the five senses. Naturalism, one of the most significant products of the 19th century atheistic atmosphere, influenced Darwin and drove him to offer an atheistic explanation for life.

According to this way of thinking, nature itself was regarded as its own creator and arbiter. Concepts such as Mother Nature or clichés such as “Nature gave some people superior abilities; nature made humans what they are,” are still widely employed today, but are the result of preconceptions imposed by naturalism.

Naturalists were great admirers of the perfection in the physical world, yet found it difficult to give a satisfactory answer to how this came into being. Since they adopted positivist dogma, and believed only in concepts whose existence could be established by means of experiment and observation, they fiercely rejected the fact that nature was created by Allah. In their view, nature created itself.

Darwin’s theory served naturalist/materialist philosophy, or to be more accurate, the atheism that underlay it. It therefore received support and was imposed on society as if it were a major scientific truth. Otherwise, it would have been regarded as the speculation of an amateur biologist and quickly forgotten.

Natural Selection

Natural selection is based on the hypothesis that there is a constant struggle for survival among species and those living things that are strongest and best adapted to natural conditions survive that struggle and live to propagate themselves. For example, in a herd of deer, those animals that are naturally able to run fast will escape predators and survive. Naturally, this herd will soon consist of deer that are all able to run quickly.

But note that no matter how long this predator pressure lasts, the deer will never turn into any other species. Weak deer are eliminated and the fittest survive; but no “evolution” of species takes place, because there is no change in the deer’s genetic information. No matter how much herds of deer are subjected to natural selection, they will still remain deer.

This example applies to all other species. Deformed or weak individuals in a population, or those unfitted to environmental conditions are eliminated by way of natural selection. But no new species, genetic information or organs will emerge as a result. In other words, living things cannot evolve by way of natural selection.

Darwin admitted as much when he wrote, “Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual differences or variations occur.”69

Natural selection was a natural phenomenon known to biologists before Darwin, but described as a mechanism that enables species to remain stable without being impaired. It was Darwin who first claimed that this process was an evolutionary force and thus constructed his whole theory on that basis. The name he gave his book—The Origin of Species, By Way of Natural Selection—shows that natural selection represented the foundation of Darwin’s theory.

Stephen Jay Gould, one of the best-known contemporary evolutionists, says this about Darwinism’s grave error:

The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well. 70

In an article published in American Scientist magazine, the evolutionist C. Loring Brace describes how Darwinism has been refuted by scientific discoveries and states that we cannot regard natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism:

Readers of American Scientist may not realize the extent to which a major part of the field of biology and almost all of paleontology has rejected Darwin’s insights concerning organic evolution. Natural selection is dismissed as contributing nothing more than “fine-tuning,” and adaptation is largely ignored in practice. 71

Neanderthals: A Human Race

The Neanderthals emerged suddenly in Europe around 300,000 years ago, and disappeared, or else were assimilated by mixing with other human races, silently and just as quickly about 35,000 years ago. The only difference between them and present-day humans is that their skeletons are rather sturdier and their brain volumes slightly larger. Neanderthals were a well-built human race, as is now agreed by just about everyone.

Evolutionists, on the other hand, have made great efforts to portray these people as a “primitive” species, although all the facts show Neanderthal Man to be no different to a fairly stocky human walking around today. The New Mexico University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus, regarded as an eminent authority on the subject, writes:

Detailed comparisons of Neanderthal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neanderthal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans. 72

Therefore, many modern researchers describe Neanderthal Man as a sub-group of modern man and refer to him as Homo sapiens neandertalensis. Recent discoveries show that the Neanderthals buried their dead, made various musical instruments and shared a culture as developed as that of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens.

“Nebraska Man” Fraud, The

In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, announced that near Snake Valley in Nebraska, he had found a molar tooth that bore common human and ape features, dating back to the Pliocene Period. Before long, a profound scientific debate on the subject had begun. Some people regarded this tooth as belonging to Pithecanthropus erectus, while others said it was closer to being fully human. This fossil was given the popular name of Nebraska Man and the scientific name of: Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.

Based on this single tooth, Nebraska Man’s skull and body were reconstructed in artists’ conceptions. Pictures were even published of Nebraska Man in his natural habitat, together with his wife and children. This whole scenario was spun out from a single tooth. Evolutionists so believed in this hominid made from whole cloth that when a researcher by the name of William Bryan cast doubt upon all these firmly held opinions based on a single tooth, he attracted the most terrible fury.

However, other parts of the skeleton were discovered in 1927. In the light of these remains, this tooth was found to belong neither to an ape nor to a human being, but to an extinct species of American wild boar known as prosthennops. Science magazine covered the story under the title “Hesperopithecus Apparently Not an Ape Nor a Man.” 73

As a result, all pictures of Hesperopithecus haroldcookii were swiftly removed from the literature.

Neo-Darwinism Comedy, The

With the genetic laws discovered in the first quarter of the 20th century, Darwin’s theory reached a complete impasse. At this, a group of scientists determined to remain loyal to evolution theory came together at a meeting held by the American Geology Association in 1941. After lengthy discussions by geneticists such as G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky, zoologists such as Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley, and paleontologists such as George Gaylord Gibson and Glen L. Jepsen, the decision was reached to patch up Darwinism.

To the question of “What is the source of beneficial changes that cause living things to develop?”—which Darwin had been unable to answer, but had sought to resolve based on Lamarck—these people replied, “Random mutations.” They advanced a new theory by adding the concept of mutation to Darwin’s thesis of natural selection; which new theory began to be known as neo-Darwinism (or the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution, which see).

The decades that followed saw hopeless attempts to prove neo-Darwinism. Mutations were well known to be breaks, shifts and defects occurring in living organisms’ genes as the result of external factors, which give rise to serious damage on practically every occasion. Nevertheless, neo-Darwinists carried out thousands of experiments to try to establish an example of a useful mutation—endeavors that invariably ended in fiascos. (See Mutation: An Imaginary Mechanism.)

At the same time, neo-Darwinists also sought to prove that the first living organisms could have emerged by chance under the conditions of the primeval Earth—as required by the theory. The same fiascos were experienced in that field, too. All the experiments intended to prove that life emerged by chance ended in failures. Probability calculations showed that not a single protein, the basic building blocks of the cell, could form by chance. As for the cell itself, the smallest living unit, not a single one could be formed even in laboratories with the most highly advanced 20th century technology. Then how could a cell have come about as the result of chance in the primitive, uncontrolled conditions of the primeval world, as evolutionists claimed?

Neo-Darwinist theory was also dealt a fatal blow by the fossil record. In long years of excavations, no intermediate forms—that should, according to neo-Darwinist theory, have demonstrated that primitive species gradually evolved into more advanced ones—were found anywhere. Comparative anatomical studies showed that living things once assumed to have evolved from one another in fact possessed very different anatomical features and could never be one another’s forerunners or later descendants.

Neo-Darwinism was not a scientific theory, but rather an ideological dogma. For that reason, evolution’s adherents still continue to support the theory in the face of all the evidence against it. In their view, evolution is a belief that can never be abandoned.