Moving the Evolutionary Goalposts

“Suspension of disbelief” is a term often associated with storytelling of all sorts, such as in an action movie full of exciting scenarios where the protagonist has to pull off all manner of daring and dangerous heroic feats to save the day from the evil villain’s dastardly plot. It has to do with the amount of unbelievability the viewer’s mind is willing to accept before they check out, so to speak, and stop viewing the storyline as plausible.

Can You Believe It?

A good example of the suspension of disbelief breaking down for me was in the Indiana Jones movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Our hero, Indy—who I had seen escape death by a hairbreadth dozens of times in past movies and was willing to go with it just because I wanted to see him win against all odds—was portrayed as somehow surviving a nuclear explosion by trapping himself in a fridge and being blown clear of the blast site.

At that point, my brain switched off, and I found myself not caring about anything that happened in the rest of the movie (which was terrible anyway) because the plot was simply no longer feasible. I mean, if the hero can survive that in the opening minutes of the film, how much more danger could he be put in for me to emotionally invest in the rest of it?

Suspension of disbelief relies on the events in the story seeming just plausible enough for the mind to accept them as possible (even if they would not be plausible in reality) and allow them to go along for the ride. Different people have different tolerances as to how far their suspension of disbelief can be stretched, but good storytellers have to walk a fine line with most audiences and build emotional and intellectual equity with them carefully because once that boundary has been crossed and their suspension of disbelief is disrupted, it’s almost impossible to get them back.

Naturalistic Storytelling Stretched Thin

Why am I saying this? Well, naturalistic narrators have been stretching the credulity of listeners’ minds by recounting the story of evolution to generations of people, slowly adding more and more fantastic feats to its supposed creative capabilities. However, they have finally arrived at a point where only the most loyal of fanboys could be willing to gloss over the massive plot holes modern science has exposed, and they have come full circle now in terms of proposing hybridized concepts of intelligent design within their system in order to prop up their cratering atheistic creation narrative. Let me explain.

Since its inception, the story of evolution has attempted to replace the need for a Creator, an intelligent agent (i.e., God) of any sort, and demonstrate that a mind was not required to accomplish the wonders we see in nature. In essence, instead of intelligent design, naturalists—like the famous atheistic author, Professor Richard Dawkins—have argued for unintelligent design. Just look at his statement in opposition to William Paley’s famous watchmaker argument, where Paley logically argued that anyone coming upon something as sophisticated as a watch would rightly conclude it had been designed by a mind.

All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in his mind’s eye.

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind. . . . It does not plan for the future. . . . It is the blind watchmaker.1

Evolutionary Predictions

Now, like all good storytellers, materialists have tried to make the story of evolution sound reasonable to the average person and have recognized that without certain boundaries and parameters, it would simply sound like the magical story it is, where anything can happen if you just give it enough time. Even Darwin himself made the following statement in Origin of Species, claiming what he believed evolution could never accomplish.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.2

Darwin’s point here is well taken by anyone familiar with how the story of evolution is taught, which essentially states that when living things reproduce, there are often small changes that occur in the offspring, and if these small changes provide a survival benefit to that organism in its environment, then those changes get retained via natural selection, allowing small changes to accumulate into larger ones and evolving creatures from one kind into another over time.

So Darwin was saying that if it could be shown that more than one of the parts involved in a living system had to be there simultaneously to account for the totality of what we are seeing (i.e., it couldn’t be built up incrementally), then his “theory” (which was only ever a hypothesis at best) would collapse. So have we ever found examples in living things that would satisfy his criteria? Well, yes, I believe we have many, but here is just one to make the point.

To Bee or Not to Bee?

Let me introduce you to a plant I have discussed before called a bee orchid. Now, if you are unfamiliar, these orchids are appropriately named as they “look like a bee in shape, size, and general coloration.”3 They also feel fuzzy like a bee does because of the hairlike filaments called trichomes that provide beelike tactile clues to the male bees that visit them.

However, not only do they look, feel, and are colored like a female bee, “They also produce pheromones that smell like a bee (virtually indistinguishable from the insect’s natural pheromones). Yes, they smell like a female bee in ‘heat,’ so to speak.”4

To keep this article with a PG rating, allow me to describe how these orchids reproduce in a kid-friendly manner that will be simplified for our context but accurate and understandable (moms and dads can explain the birds and the bees as they see fit).

Picture Mr. Bee flying around one day when he catches a whiff of perfume and, looking down, sees what he thinks is a female bee.

First, we should note that these plants have both male and female parts, per se. The male part is the pollinia, and the female part is the stigma. The part of the Bee Orchid that Mr. Bee lands on (that looks like a female bee) is called the labellum [pictured above], which is a specially designed landing platform. And because of the way he mounts this platform in an effort to mate with the flower, his head will bump into the pollinia, which has a special glue that attaches a structure containing the pollinia to his head!

When Mr. Bee decides to leave, a special mechanism in the structure that is now stuck to his head (called the caudicle) bends the pollinia down to a more horizontal position. Undaunted by the acquisition of this strange new “hat” he’s acquired, Mr. Bee carries on his day. Of course, as a typical male with a one-track mind, he then looks down and sees what he thinks is another female bee.

This time, when Mr. Bee lands, the pollinia (the male part) stuck to his head is now aligned to contact with the stigma (the female part), and voilà, we get more Bee Orchids! Scientifically, this mechanism is called Pseudocopulation, the name given to a situation in which individuals interact in a manner resembling intercourse, but no real copulation occurs.5

Many people often mistakenly assume only female bees visit flowers because they are familiar with honeybee workers (which are all female), but male bees of many species regularly visit flowers for nectar and to search for mates.

Evolutionary Explanations?

To quote myself from a previous article again,

Orchids aren’t observing bee shapes and colors to imitate. They don’t have chem labs to concoct various versions and blends of chemical compounds to find a female bee’s perfect sex pheromones (cuticular hydrocarbons, in particular; n-alkenes, oxygenated acids, aldehydes, alcohols, fatty acids, and corresponding esters, etc.). They aren’t feeling bees so that they “know” to be fuzzy!6

So the big question is this: How can an orchid, without eyes, a brain, tactile senses, or a nose to differentiate between scents put together such a sophisticated assemblage of parts and functionality through random processes essential for its survival?7

What good is a pollinia without a stigma? What good is a pollinia without a release mechanism and an adhesive in the correct spot to stick to a bee’s head? What if there’s no mechanism inside it to shape it to fit the stigma? What good is any of it if there’s no pheromone to attract the bee? What if the plant initially created a pheromone that smelled like a skunk or a banana or a taco instead of exactly like a female bee in heat? What if there were no bees? And if you were able to reproduce before all of this gradually built up, then why did natural selection create such a delicate system that requires extra resources and increase the chance of extinction anyways?

And do evolutionists have any answers to these logical, rational, and reasonable questions? Well, apparently not, because according to the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society,

Despite considerable progress made in our understanding of the floral traits involved in pollination by sexual deception, little is known about the evolutionary origin of this remarkable mimicry system, the role of pre-adaptations in promoting its evolution and its extent as a pollination mechanism in flowering plants.8

Excuses, Excuses

Of course, evolutionists will claim that maybe these plants reproduced differently in the past, and just because we don’t know exactly what each of these separate parts and their various components might have done to benefit this orchid on their own, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one originally. And that’s the beauty of storytelling, you can always massage the rules, move the narrative along, and adjust the goalposts to save you from taking the “L” that Darwin himself proposed. However, for the thinking person out there, it can certainly begin to stretch the suspension of disbelief somewhat in this story’s supposed legitimacy.

More Evolutionary Musings

Of course, Darwin hasn’t been the only famous evolutionist to make predictions as to what it could supposedly have never produced (based on the fact a mindless process shouldn’t be expected to be able to derive certain things only attributable to a mind). The evolutionary giant of his day, J. B. S. Haldane, claimed in 1949 that evolution could “never produce various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect.”9

Again, he was stating that natural selection could preserve and improve intermediate stages only if those stages conferred some usable function to a creature; therefore, a mechanism that does nothing useful until many coordinated parts are already arranged into a sufficiently complete system presented a conundrum to evolutionary thought.

A mechanism that does nothing useful until many coordinated parts are already arranged into a sufficiently complete system presented a conundrum to evolutionary thought.

This is almost certainly why Haldane selected the wheel and magnet as examples of what Darwinism could never accomplish. Even an imagined crude proto-leg or eye could conceivably have some locomotor function or light sensitivity that could perhaps be argued as having some kind of benefit (even if only in the land of “what if” so common to evolutionary musings). But Haldane was pointing to mechanisms where an incomplete precursor could have no useful mechanical function at all until a specific threshold of organization had been crossed.

However, with the discovery of motors inside living things such as these:

• ATP synthase (a microscopic rotary motor made of roughly 30 protein subunits, featuring wheel-like rotating rings, a central shaft, and a stationary housing, which uses proton flow to physically spin and manufacture ATP, which is the universal life currency of every living thing),
• The bacterial flagellum (another molecular motor featuring ringlike wheels, a central drive shaft, bushings, a hook-like universal joint, and a long helical propeller, which moves the bacterium through its environment), and even
• Magnetotactic bacteria (containing microscopic chains of magnetosome organelles, each holding a tiny crystal of magnetic iron mineral that together act like an internal compass needle that aligns the bacterium with earth’s magnetic field to guide its swimming toward favorable environments),

Mr. Haldane’s boundaries as to what evolution could “never produce” were not only met but blown so far past his predictions that he would likely have been embarrassed to have said them if he were still alive.

And understand, Haldane wasn’t some run-of-the-mill materialist—he was one of the major architects of twentieth-century population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis we know today as neo-Darwinism.10 But again, did atheistic evolutionists admit to evolution’s undoing upon finding these discoveries? Of course not! They simply gaslit the scientific community by pooh-poohing any dissent and claiming that we really shouldn’t be surprised to see these things in living things. After all, they are there for all to see and evolution is a fact, so evolution must have been able to do it, even if we don’t know how!

However, these sorts of discoveries burst the bubble of belief in many thinking people’s minds and forced them to reassess some of their evolutionary assumptions. This is where much of the traction for the Intelligent Design community came from. Meanwhile, biblical creationists (like myself) just nodded and smiled because we know Christ the Creator and already understood we are fearfully and wonderfully made because we’d read our Bibles and trusted in the truth of God’s Word from the very first verse.

Modern Materialistic Predictions?

Are there more modern predictions of what evolution “should never be able to produce” from more contemporary sources? Why yes, there are. The following quotation is from the widely referenced book What Evolution Is, written in 2001 by (now deceased) Ernst Mayr, who was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century and was, like Haldane mentioned earlier, also a principal architect of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

He was a longtime Harvard professor (referred to by peers as the “Darwin of the twentieth century”11) and was the recipient of many of science’s highest honors, including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize, and the Crafoord Prize (often regarded as the Nobel-equivalent for fields not covered by the Nobel Prizes). And he stated explicitly in his book, “There is no known genetic mechanism that could produce goal-directed evolutionary processes.”12

Of course, Mayer was simply following his atheistic-driven logic—just like Richard Dawkins who I quoted earlier saying, “All life has no purpose in mind. It has no mind. . . . It does not plan for the future.” If there is no God, then naturally there can be no mind behind what we see in nature. And only minds can have goals, so he predicted that evolution could never produce goal-directed processes.

And check out this remarkable quotation from a 2009 article published in the respected peer-reviewed scientific journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, written by evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph (just an hour from where I live here in Canada) called, “Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions.” The quotation explains what natural selection can—and cannot—do. And, similarly to his evolutionary compatriots, Gregory concluded, “Natural selection cannot have plans, goals, or intentions, nor can it cause changes in response to need.”

Never Mind

Except, that’s not true anymore according to many evolutionists today, who are looking at what modern science is showing and having to shelve those predictions. Study after scientific study keep on demonstrating that even the simplest of life-forms on the planet operate via goal-driven processes and intentionality, utilizing directed genetic programming that does indeed operate in response to their needs on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day, month-to-month, and even multigenerational basis.

From bacteria to bugs, bees, bullfrogs, buffalo, baboons, and the biochemists that are studying them, living things demonstrate that they are bursting at the seams, so to speak, with reams of genetic programming that allow them to make decisions in real time to accomplish goals that demonstrate forethought and future planning.

Here is just one such example that comes from the common honeybee to illustrate what I mean. When the female foragers find a food source and wish to let other bees in the hive know about it, she will communicate its location by calculating the distance (including topographical considerations13) in relation to the hive’s facing in relation to the sun to other bees,14 even taking into account the change in angle that would have occurred due to the passage of time since she was there vs. when she is communicating it to the others.15

As mind blowing as that may be, when the other bees receive the coordinates,16 they also do additional calculations in order to maximize their payload17 when they return from their expedition. What do I mean? Well, worker bees operate on various mixtures of sugar and water for the most part, and they carry their food supply (typically the honey made by them) in a container within them known as the honey sac (or crop). They use this container not only as a gas tank of sorts to supply them with fuel to accomplish their various tasks but also as a storage container to carry the nectar they will gather for later processing.

Now obviously, if your goal is to travel somewhere and bring back the maximum allowable supply, then you want the container you are using to be as empty as possible when you arrive at the resource center you are visiting so you can fill it to the brim. And then, you can use just enough of the fuel you need to get you home so you can deliver the greatest amount upon return.

So upon receiving the coordinates, they then calculate how much fuel they will need to get them there within a slight margin of error (strong winds that might make the flight longer than anticipated perhaps), but no more.18 And you might wonder how they can possibly do that? Well, workers within the hive typically operate close to empty and just eat enough honey to keep them going about their regular tasks. In that way, they can always top up to whatever level they need to accept and complete the mission they are presented with and achieve maximum efficiency.19

Insect Algorithms

Can you see the challenge for the older-school-of-thought evolutionists I quoted? They claimed evolution could never produce goal-directed processes; that natural selection can’t have plans, goals, or intentions, or cause changes in response to need; and that life doesn’t plan for the future. Think about it. If I asked you to take your vehicle to a gas station and bring back as much fuel as you possibly could, would you be able to do it with a great margin of efficiency off the top of your head with no research or calculator?

It would make a big difference whether you have a Ford F-150, a Honda Civic, or a moped, right? Figuring out how much fuel you would burn traveling 120 kilometers there and back vs. 12 kilometers round trip would also make a big difference, wouldn’t it? And whether you were traveling on a level highway vs. a mountainous route would also factor in as well. You would need to know the fuel consumption rate, gas tank capacity, travel conditions, etc., and have the know-how to perform several calculations based on the variables involved. In other words, you would have to use forethought and strategize to achieve your goal, the very things evolutionists declared evolution could never achieve.

And the most vicious blow that genetic programming like this does to the entire evolutionary edifice is this: Those bees do not have any immediate survival benefit to themselves whatsoever, which is the only type of change natural selection is supposed to preserve. So how could natural selection favor numerous, nonphysical, multi-coordinated genetic algorithms along with the physical features needed by bees to perform these tasks?

Ask yourself, Would the forager bee be able to survive better by just staying within the hive where she is protected and food is available? Or could she better survive taking the risks of being outside where predators are and where a miscalculation in honey intake or adverse weather conditions could result in her running out of fuel before she reaches her target? These bees are burning up minutes or hours of their brief six-week life cycle and putting themselves at great risk being out in the wild. The entire operation is executed for future benefits (i.e., more honey and pollen for the hive) that many of the bees involved in performing it might never enjoy.

There is a goal: Get more resources. There are plans, calculations, and choices being made based on new data so they can make decisions in real time. The bees demonstrate forethought (i.e., I’ll need X amount of fuel to be able to travel Y distance) and plan for the future (that way I’ll be able to be maximally efficient and bring home the most food possible) to accomplish goals that have no immediate survival benefit to the organism performing these functions.

Even the simplest of bacteria demonstrate forethought and future planning.

The fact is, even the simplest of bacteria demonstrate forethought and future planning, so the genetic genie is now out of the bottle for everyone who can read a science journal and connect the dots and see how intelligently designed life is. We’re all very familiar with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems in cars, home cleaning robots, self-driving vehicles, delivery drones etc., all of them created by brilliant engineers who write ultrasophisticated algorithmic programs that allow them to perform the exact same types of functions we see in living things. And all of them designed to do so.

What Now?

What have today’s evolutionists done to counter the (once-again) failed predictions of their predecessors (that evolution has no mind—it can’t think, plan, have goals, learn, cause changes in response to needs, etc.)? Oh, that’s simple. Simply teleport the goalposts a couple hundred miles into the next county, grant evolution Godlike attributes, and now claim evolution functions like an all-knowing brain!

Think I’m making this up? Just look at the front cover of a 2016 issue of New Scientist, which says, “Intelligent Evolution, How Life’s Processes Act like an All-Knowing Brain.”

Indeed, the article inside titled “Nature’s Brain: A Radical New View of Evolution” has a subtitle that gives the entire plot away up front, “How does natural selection create so much complexity so fast? A bold new theory says it learns and remembers past solutions just as our brains do.”20

And this article is actually a follow-up to another they did a year earlier titled “Is Evolution More Intelligent than We Thought?,” where they summarized their conclusions this way.

If evolution can learn from experience, and thus improve its own ability to evolve over time, this can demystify the awesomeness of the designs that evolution produces. Natural selection can accumulate knowledge that enables it to evolve smarter. That's exciting because it explains why biological design appears to be so intelligent.

Do you see how they describe how awesome God’s designs truly are but try to strip Him of His glory by attributing them to a nonthinking entity that somehow “learns,” accumulates knowledge, and becomes “smarter” all without a brain? Now, do they explain exactly how evolution is supposed to be able to learn, think, and plan without having a mind? Well, they refer to something they call “learning theory” as the answer.

Learning theory enables us to formalize how evolution changes its own processes over evolutionary time. For example, by evolving the organization of development that controls variation, the organization of ecological interactions that control selection or the structure of reproductive relationships that control inheritance—natural selection can change its own ability to evolve.

Now, just go ahead and reread that nonsensical blather over and over again as many times as you want, and what you will come away with is this: “By evolving the ability to learn, evolution evolved the ability to learn.” It’s simply more storytelling, which has been the hallmark of the story of evolution from its inception. And of course, as ridiculous as their propositions are, they still attempt to gaslight anyone out there that is clear-minded enough to realize the emperor has no clothes on with statements like this, “Even today, creationism and intelligent design thrive on intuitive incredulity that an unguided, unconscious process could produce such intricate contraptions.”21

No, it’s not that intuitive incredulity makes us believe in intelligent design. It’s the knowledge of what intelligent design requires: a mind that demonstrates forethought, agency, and purpose. And the more sophisticated the construct, the more sophisticated the mind required. Rather, it is the evolutionist who can clearly see what modern science is showing and yet still comes to the incredulous conclusion that a no-mind process could produce what the most brilliant minds we know of cannot. And then they have the audacity to call it science and demand others agree with their delusion.

Dealing with Dissenters

When someone says something like, “So you just believe in the magic man in the sky?,” I’ll just nod, roll my eyes, and say m-m-m-m-m. Which in my mind stands for “So you believe magical, mindless matter made me? M-m-m-m-m.”

The fact is, evolutionary predictions have failed so spectacularly and so repeatedly now that atheistic materialists have been forced to come full circle and embrace, co-opt, and incorporate the very concept that the story of evolution was supposed to have replaced. The need for an all-knowing mind that designed everything! But how do you have a mind with no mind?

For the average person with an open and informed mind that is willing to think for themselves, the story of evolution has long passed its due date in terms of intellectual consumption. As our understanding of the nature of living things continues to grow, the star of the naturalistic worldview continues to fade, fritz, and fizzle more rapidly all the time.

And for those willing to keep going with this charade, continue their suspension of disbelief, and go on shilling for the story of evolution despite its failed predictions, “just-so” stories, and anti-science claims (especially professing Christians), I will refer you to the book of Romans to describe what is happening, despite what you may believe.

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the likeness of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:22–25)