Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Genes, Design, and Designer

Skeletal remains, footprints, and artifacts indicate that human beings of our type have existed for hundreds of millions of years and that we did not evolve from more primitive apelike creatures. But what about biochemical and genetic evidence? Many evolutionists assert that there is strong evidence from DNA that humans arose relatively recently, most probably between one and two hundred thousand years ago in Africa. Evolutionists also claim that one can by genetics and biochemistry trace the origin of the human species all the way back to the very beginnings of life on earth. In comparison with this genetic and te ambiguous and that the conclusions based upon it are shaky.

People often get the impression that scientists, when they talk about genetic data, are reading directly from the “book of life.” But genetic data is just a series of A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s, representing a sequence of molecules called nucleotides (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine) on a DNA strand. When scientists try to turn that series of letters into statements about human origins, they use many speculative assumptions and interpretations. Anthropologist Jonathan Marks (1994, p. 61) therefore says it is a “pernicious pseudo-scientific idea that independently

. . . genetic data tell a tale.” Marks (1994, p. 61) says that genetics is one area of science in which “sloppy thought and work can often carry as much weight as careful thought and work,” and he therefore warns that “one is forced to wonder about the epistemological foundations of any specific conclusions based on genetic data.” Marks (1994, p. 59) noted that “the history of biological anthropology shows that, from the beginning of the 20th century, grossly naïve conclusions have been promoted simply on the basis that they are derived from genetics.” In light of this, the fossil evidence outlined in the previous chapter retains its importance as a useful check on genetic speculations. For the following discussion, I am indebted to the works of Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe, and other members of the modern intelligent design movement.

The Beginning of life

The genetic theory of human evolution is in trouble right from the start. Technically, evolution is not about the origin of life. Instead, evolutionists study the changes in reproducing biological forms, each with a genetic system that helps determine the exact nature of the form. Changes in the genetic system result in changes in the successive generations of biological forms. But evolutionists understand that they also have to explain the origin of the first biological forms, and their genetic systems, from prebiotic chemical elements. Therefore, proposals for the natural origin of the first biological organisms have become an integral part of modern evolutionary thought.

Today, the simplest independent biological organisms are single cells, and most scientists assume that the first real living things were also single cells. Early evolutionists like Ernst Haeckel (1905, p. 111) and Thomas H. Huxley (1869, pp. 129–145) thought cells were mere blobs of protoplasm and gave relatively simple explanations for their origin. They thought chemicals like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen would somehow spontaneously crystallize into the slimy substance of life (Haeckel 1866, pp. 179–180; 1892, pp. 411–413).

As time passed, scientists began to recognize that even simple cells are more than just blobs of protoplasm. They have a complex biochemical structure. In the twentieth century, Alexander I. Oparin, a Russian biochemist, outlined an elaborate set of chemical stages leading to the formation of the first cell. He believed that the process would take a very long time—hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years. Oparin (1938, pp. 64–103) proposed that ammonia (a nitrogen compound), methane, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor, with ultraviolet light as an energy source, would combine with metallic elements dissolved in water. This would produce a nitrogen-rich prebiotic soup, in which simple hydrocarbon molecules would form. These would combine into amino acids, sugars, and phosphates (Oparin 1938, pp. 133–135), and these would in turn form proteins. The groups of molecules reacting together in this way would become attracted to each other and surround themselves with chemical walls, resulting in the precursors to the first cells. Oparin called them “coacervates” (Oparin 1938, pp. 148–159). These primitive cells would compete for survival, becoming more complex and stable.

Oparin’s ideas remained largely theoretical until the experiments of Stanley Miller and Henry Urey. Miller and Urey proposed, as did Oparin, that the earth’s early atmosphere was composed of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. They reproduced this atmosphere in a laboratory and then ran electric sparks through the mixture. The sparks represented lightning, which provided the energy needed to get the relatively stable chemical ingredients of the experiment to react with each other. The experimental apparatus included a flask of water, in which the tarlike residues of the experiment accumulated. When after a week the water was analyzed, it yielded, among other things, three amino acids in low concentrations (Miller 1953). Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which are necessary ingredients of living things.

Later experiments by other researchers produced all except one of the twenty biological amino acids. Still more experiments produced fatty acids and nucleotides, which are necessary for DNA and RNA. But the experiments did not produce another essential element of DNA and RNA, the sugars deoxyribose and ribose (Meyer 1998, p. 118). Nevertheless, many scientists believed that a viable cell could eventually arise from the chemical elements produced in the prebiotic soup.

However, this idea has several shortcomings. When geochemists analyze the sediments from the early history of the earth, they fail to find evidence of a nitrogen-rich prebiotic soup, of the kind predicted by Oparin. Other researchers have determined that the earth’s early atmosphere was most probably not Oparin’s mixture of water vapor and the reducing gases ammonia (a nitrogen compound), methane, and hydrogen. Instead it was a mixture of water and the neutral gases carbon dioxide and nitrogen (Walker 1977, pp. 210, 246; Kerr 1980). Some free oxygen was also included (Kerr 1980; Dimroth and Kimberley 1976). Today, scientists believe most of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere came from photosynthesis in plants, but even before plants arose, oxygen could have been derived from the break up of H20 molecules and from gases released into the atmosphere by volcanoes. Even small amounts of free oxygen would hamper the production of amino acids and other molecules necessary for life. The oxygen would make the required reactions more difficult, and it would also, by oxidation, break down any organic molecules that did form.

Despite these difficulties evolutionists maintain their faith that the ingredients for the bodies of the first living things could have formed spontaneously during the earth’s early history. Let us now consider in a more detailed way some of their speculative ideas about how this may have happened. The ideas fall into three main categories: chance, natural selection, and self-organization.

Chance

Some evolutionists propose that chance operating on the molecular level can account for the origin of proteins, which are formed of long chains of amino acid subunits. But there are some big obstacles to such proposals. Let us consider a simple protein composed of 100 amino acid subunits. For a protein to function properly in an organism, the bonds between the amino acids must be peptide bonds. Amino acids can bond with each other in various ways, with peptide bonds occurring half the time. So the odds of getting 100 amino acids with all peptide bonds are