Evidence of Evolution — SERIOUSLY?

morgueFile/cielo 

Not too long ago, I was fond of the "reality shows" that dealt with the paranormal. The investigators would look for natural explanations of phenomena before they would entertain a paranormal explanation. The door opens by itself? Yes, and opening a door down the hall would create a kind of wind effect, plus the weak latch — no spirits here, Bruce. 

Similarly, critics of creation science create a straw man based on prejudicial conjecture: that creationists simply write everything off as "GodDidIt", and that do not want to know anything that is actually scientific.

Yet, evolutionists will look for "EvolutionDidIt" as the first explanation.

Sometimes they do this despite evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated, and despite empirical evidence! In fact, they are guilty of circular reasoning, because they allege that many things, despite alternative explanations, are considered to be evidence of evolution. People believe things like this with no evidence because they want to — it keeps them comfortable with their fundamentally flawed worldviews.

Some things in nature get attributed to Darwinian evolution, but might be better seen as manifestations of design or other alternative, non-Darwinian mechanisms.

Deterministic Evolution

In “Predictable Bacterial Diversity,” Nature highlighted some experiments that showed bacteria converging on the same mutations when exposed to identical environmental stresses.  “They found many similar and a few identical mutations that underlay the evolution of diversity in the three experiments,” the article said. “The findings suggest that this evolution is a predictable processthat is driven by natural selection.”  The story is based on a paper in PLoS Biology that was summarized in on Science Daily, which said, “Any evolutionary process is some combination of predictable and unpredictable processes with random mutations, but seeing the same genetic changes in different populationsshowed that selection can be deterministic.”

This claim, however, runs contrary to the unpredictable, contingent nature of Darwin’s theoretical mechanism.

You can read the rest of "This 'Evolution' Is Not Darwinian".