I AM FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE
Lesson 4

MICRO EVOLUTION – IS IT EVIDENCE FOR MACRO EVOLUTION?

Evolutionists believe in progressive change leading from the simple to the complex. However, the evolutionary community has not adequately addressed the evidence that goes against the Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian theories to explain our origins. When issues against evolution are brought forth in a debate, an evolutionist cannot fall back on the evidence from the fossil record, which is sorely lacking the transitional forms necessary to support evolutionary arguments. To quote Steven Jay Gould again, in Evolution's Erratic Pace, Natural History, Vol. 5, May 1997, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record, persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches. The rest is inference, however reasonable, but not on the evidence of the fossils. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favorite account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad, that we never see the very process we profess to study."

Since the fossil record does not record transitional forms as evidence for evolution, what arguments will be brought forth? Evolutionists like to point to the proven phenomena of micro evolution as "evidence" for macro evolution. Macro evolution being the proposed phenomena of one species changing over time into new and different species.

What is Micro Evolution?

Over the past thousand years or so, mankind has been able to successfully breed a number of different varieties of dogs, cats, horses, and many other plants and animals. The process of selectively breeding animals or plants with desirable traits in order to further bring out and concentrate these traits is an example of micro evolution. This does occur in nature under the process of adaptation. Evolutionists often postulate that micro evolution, where nature or people produce variations within a species, is ‘proof' that evolution does occur. It is theorized that given enough time, micro evolution will bring about new species, which cannot interbreed with the originals. Two questions arise from this postulation: How much variation is possible within a species?, and; Will the rise of great variation within a species cause new species to be formed?

Lets take the example of horses: it turns out that if you start with two, medium sized wild horses as your beginning stock, they and the successive offspring can be bred to eventually produce tremendous variation - miniature horses weighing 50 pounds all the way up to huge 2,500 pound draft horses! This can be accomplished in the period of a few lifetimes simply by selective breeding of traits. The process of bringing out desirable traits is an example of forced micro evolution. But is it truly evolution, that is the creation of new information within the DNA code for the offspring of the original two horses? The answer is NO. What it is in actuality, is simply selecting the information that was already present in the DNA of the organism. In other words, it is the variation within the species that is already present in the DNA information. This is why you get such wide variation in nature within a species.

Science recognizes that horses are of the same species. But how similar are some of the related species? For an example, lets examine the different species of cats to see how similar they are.

There are many species of cats, from the common house cat all the way up to tigers. All of these are recognized as related species, sharing an incredible number of similar structures, varying mostly in size. A recent documentary on cats brought to light the incredible "sameness" within all of the cat species. Question: how different are the species within a "kind"? If they can interbreed, are they really just variation within the same species? The San Diego Zoo has successfully produced a "species" called a Lyger. A Lyger is a large cat produced from the breeding of a lion and a tiger. In fact, there have been experiments where the sperm of a common house cat has been used to successfully breed with lions and produce medium sized cats. If you can successfully breed such ‘different' species, doesn't this mean that there is one ‘cat kind'? Horses have been successfully bred with zebras. Are they not separate species? If so, then why can they be interbred? The answer is that these examples of related species are all of one ‘kind' with tremendous variation within the ‘kind'. This does not represent evolution, it simply represents the origin of these different variations due to isolation in a specific environment.

A wonderful example of micro evolution that has been taught in college concerned a species called the Peppered Moth. Before the industrial revolution in England the peppered moth was a white moth with black speckles that rested during the day on birch trees. Because of the whitish bark of the birch tree, a Peppered Moth resting on the tree was almost invisible to birds - its pale, speckled color was perfect camouflage. Occasionally, black Peppered Moths were born along with the lighter colored moths. These black colored moths were easy prey as they were clearly seen when resting on the birch trees.

When the industrial revolution hit England, large amounts of soot were produced by the factories which had an interesting side effect... the bark of the birch trees turned black. Now the white moth was more visible and birds could pick them off with ease. Consequently, the black colored Peppered Moths became the predominant coloration. Evolutionists of the time seized on this example and taught it as PROOF of evolution at work! What happened next is a source of embarrassment for the scientific community. After the industrial revolution, cleaner factories were built and the birch trees turned white again. How this affected the Peppered Moths should be readily predictable. The white moths became predominant again. Obviously, this was not evolution, only variation within a kind. Black Peppered Moths are still being hatched along with white Peppered Moths. The two color variants are contained within the DNA of all peppered moths!

How about bacteria? We are told that the proven fact of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics is proof of macro evolution. It certainly is an example of micro evolution or adaptation, but not evidence of macro evolution.
Here is an interesting study which questioned the conclusions of the evolutionists.

In 1849 (90 years before penicillin was discovered), an Englishman named John Franklin set out on a expedition across Canada to find a "Northwest Passage" to Russia and establish new trade routes. The ships of the expedition were wrecked on an island near the Arctic Circle. Over a period of time, all of his shipwrecked crew eventually perished, and were buried by each other in marked graves. In 1989, an expedition from a Canadian University decided to go to this island and do autopsies on the remains. This was possible because the people from Franklin's expedition had been frozen since death in the permafrost - ground that never thaws due to its location within the Arctic Circle. When the autopsies were performed, someone had the foresight to culture the bacteria in the intestinal tract of these men who had died in 1849. The cultured bacteria was then brought back to the University of Saskatchewan where the bacteria was tested to see if they were resistant to antibiotics. The theory was that these bacteria had never been exposed to antibiotics and would therefore not be resistant. What they found was that not only were the bacteria resistant to many antibiotics, but they were resistant to many of the modern synthetic antibiotics! The bacteria were resistant to antibiotics invented in labs in the 1980's! What this evidence shows is that the genetic coding to be resistant to antibiotics existed within the DNA of these bacteria before modern day antibiotics were developed!

Some of the scientific community admit that micro evolution does not lead to macro evolution. Here is a quote by Roger Lewen, 1980, ‘Evolution, a Theory Under Fire', Science, Vol. 210, # 22, pg880, " The central question of the Chicago Conference (a conference discussing the mechanism of evolution) was whether the mechanisms underlying micro evolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macro evolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people (evolutionary scientists) at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear no". He went on to say that adding long periods of time will not help macro evolution because time allows the accumulation of so many harmful mutations within a population that it becomes extinct before any benefit can be realized. So what other options are available?