Compelling reasons?

I have been told there are many compelling reasons to believe in evolution. I do not know one. Here is what I have found, in short summary:

Evolution depends on four supports: time, chance, mutations, and natural selection. None of them aid evolution, let alone support it.

TIME: 3.5 billion years sounds so long, doesn't it? Almost anything could happen in that amount of time. That is how long evolutionists tell us life has been around on planet earth. Let's take a look at what this means.

First of all, the focus should not be on years, but on generation times. A generation time is the amount of time it takes for mature organism #1 to beget organism #2 and for organism #2 to become mature enough to beget organism #3.

For bacteria, that time can be about 20 minutes. For humans, about 15 years. For a lot of animals, about one year.

Evolution tells us that it took about a billion years for the first single-celled organism to evolve into a multicellular organism with differentiated cells. Let's look at how many generations that involved. Let's give evolution the benefit of the doubt and slow the generation time of bacteria (after all, the conditions may not always have been optimal) down to ten a day. Thats 3650 a year. In a billion years, however, that is 3,650,000,000,000,000 generations needed for this first stage of evolution. Of course, if they multiplied faster, more generations would have been the result. But no matter. By the time those multicellular organisms became something that needed a little longer, like maybe a month, to reproduce, evolution has already run out of time. Never mind a year long generation or a fifteen year long generation time. 3.5 billion years is way too little for evolution to have produced life as we know it here on earth, even if everything else worked perfectly.

Which it doesn't.

CHANCE: This has to do with mutatons, but another problem for mutations is under that heading.

Most mutations are not expressed. That means they do not seem to cause any change in the organism. Of the mutations which are expressed, approximately 999 out of every thousand are deleterious, if not lethal, to the organism. All involve a decrease in something called specificity. That gives us one potentially beneficial mutation in a thousand.

According to a field of study called population genetics, if there is as much as one heritable mutation per generation in a population, then that population is doomed to extinction. This process is called error catastrophe. So you don't dare have even one mutation that can be inherited per generation in any given population.

This presents us with a problem. One beneficial mutation must stick around for approximately 2000 generations, at the least, before the chances of another beneficial, inheritable mutation occurring. Then they must cooperate together. They must also be of instant benefit to the organism in order not to be bred out of the population. Another couple of thousand generations, and there is a chance of another possibly beneficial mutation. It would take, even if it were possible (which it is not) thousands, if not millions, of mutations to get from a bacteria to a bear. What are the chances of a possibly (not even probably, only possibly) beneficial mutation every 2000 or so generations building on the other possible mutations to construct a hip joint in a fish so it could walk on land?

Mathematically, the chances are nil.

MUTATIONS: We see many mutations which decrease function or even eliminate it. Cave fish with no eyes is a favorite example. But this does not explain how eyes came about in the first place. Mutations decrease specificity. That means that specific fits of things like proteins become less and less specific, and thus less and less able to do the job they were designed to do. This is not what evolution needs. Evolution needs gains in specificity in order to achieve the new forms and functions evolution says happened through time.

In addition, there is another problem with mutations. You can figure it out for yourself if you think of the reaction of parents when a doctor tells them them newborn has a mutation. You will NEVER hear them clap their hands and say, "Wow! Is it a good one?" We know what mutations do.

And many mutations stick around, and build up in a population over time. This is called a build up of genetic load. Our genetic load, as human beings, is horrid and building. What about the genetic load of whatever population we are supposed to be evolutionarily descended from? Did that get erased when homo sapien showed up? That does not happen in real life.

The fact of genetic load in every population is, for a number of geneticists, proof positive that no one type evolved into another -- none of us could have built up the negative mutation load that long. There would be no life on earth.

Mutations deny evolution, they do not support it.

NATURAL SELECTION: Natural selection is a real thing and was, in fact, recognized first by a Christian! It happens when some kind of ecological pressure on a population favors a particular trait in part of the population to the detriment of the absence of that trait in another part of that population. For instance, a series of cold winters may well favor those members who have a tendency to put on fat rather than those with a higher metabolism who don't put on so much fat. So the fat ones have more survivors and thus more progeny.

But what has happened after a few winters like this is that the thin ones have been bred out. That particular variation has been lost to the gene pool. Another ecological or environmental pressure might favor another trait in the remaining population and thus eliminate those without that trait.

What happens is the exact opposite of what evolution needs to happen. Instead of getting a wider variety of animals, each population in its own area becomes less and less able to vary as certain traits are selected for to the detriment of those members without them.

The result is called 'endangered species' -- an owl who can only live and breed in old growth forests, for example. The population from which this particular population came from did not have that problem. They had a greater potential variation in their gene pool. But with each successive natural selection episode, the gene pool become less able to vary and more susceptible to extinction should its particular habitat be disturbed.

Evolution has not a leg to stand on. It has only the determinations of those who refuse to take a good look at the evidence and who have been so brainwashed that they cannot see what is right before their eyes. Evolution does not have enough time in 40 billion years, let alone 4 billion. There is no chance that beneficial mutations, if they ever happen to occur in a population, would build on one another to produce a new form or function. Mutations decrease specificity and, through time, build up a negative load in a population which will eventually result in its destruction. And natural selection decreases the potential to vary in a population; it does not increase it.

Evolution needs exactly the opposite in every case to be true.

 

You are right on the first post and wrong on the second one, Joseph. Yes, I am talking about evolution as it is taught in schools, not simple variation. But natural selection is a selection process which applies to a population not to an individual.

One of the arguments evolutonists make is to say that simple variation leads to massive changes over time. That has never been shown to be true. There is no mechanism by which simple variations, which are present in the genome (genetic material) anyway will somehow go beyond the potential for variation already there and end up, no matter how much time, delivering a new form or function. And it is that new form and/or function which evolution needs to prove its point.