| Unfinished Business - July 2014 |
| by Do-While Jones |
Evolution doesn’t follow a straight line.
Sadly, last month our "6-page newsletter" was 10 pages long, so we did not have space to address this quote from last month’s feature article:
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Heretical hypotheses such as this strike a blow against the anthropocentric view that complex animals emerged gradually along one lineage only, culminating in humans, and that complex organ systems did not evolve twice. But such views do not reflect how evolution really works. Evolution does not follow a chain of events in which one lineage progresses continuously towards complexity while other branches stagnate. Instead, it is an ongoing process in all lineages. 1 |
The argument that, “Evolution does not follow a chain of events in which one lineage progresses continuously,” usually appears in the context of human evolution because evolutionists no longer believe in a straight-line evolutionary path from Australopithecus afarensis, to Homo erectus, to Homo habilis, to Cro-Magnon man, to Neanderthal man, to modern man. There are a whole bunch of fossils that don’t really fit that picture, leading to a whole bunch of side branches, which we told you about in our July, 2011, newsletter. 2 Things have not gotten any better for the evolutionists’ story about human evolution in the last three years.
Last month, this argument was used to try to explain how two very different central nervous systems could evolve independently. In this month’s feature article, evolutionists claimed that nearly identical electric organs evolved independently six times in distantly related groups of fish. Looking at Figure 1A in that article, it is clear that there was no straight line path from non-electric to electric fish, so this argument could have been used by evolutionists again.
The argument is bogus because it doesn’t matter if “other branches stagnate.” That is, it doesn’t matter how many brothers, or uncles, or nephews you have who produced no offspring—you can still trace a direct line from you to your father, to your father’s father, to your father’s father’s father, and so on, as far as ANCESTRY.COM will let you go. It doesn’t matter if Australopithecus garhi did not leave any descendants if it wasn’t on the path of human evolution. The “bushiness” of today’s evolutionary fable about human evolution is simply evidence that there is no discernable path from an apelike ancestor to modern humans. There are just a bunch of fragmentary skeletons that evolutionists would like to use to prove we descended from apes—but can’t.
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Footnotes:
1
Andreas Hejnol, Nature, 21 May 2014, “Evolutionary biology: Excitation over jelly nerves”, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13340
2
Disclosure, July 2011, “Ancestor Arguments”,