Why Evolution Can’t Advance

Imagine a standard model car as it rolls out of a vehicle assembly plant. No frills, just the basic vehicle.

Now imagine that we want to produce a “Deluxe” version of the same vehicle, and beyond that a “Super Sports Grand Prix.” The Deluxe model has extras such as a radio/cassette, body trim, rear window heater, rev-counter, power steering.

To produce the standard car you require instruction manuals to produce all the pieces that make it up. But now that you are adding features, such as a stereo, etc., you need extra information put into those manuals to describe the production and assembly procedures for all of the added features, plus alteration of the standard information so the new bits will fit.

If we now go to the “Super Sports Grand Prix,” it has a CD player as well as a 15-band graphic equalizer and electric aerial, a sunroof, mag wheels with locking wheel nuts, fuel injection, four-speed automatic gearbox, high compression head with four valves per cylinder plus other engine refinements which together increase horsepower by 50%, triple swing-away quartz halogen headlights, remotely controlled wing mirrors, computerized ignition and braking systems, car phone, air bags, cruise control, fully reclining pure leather bucket seats, and it’s a fastback with aerofoils and tinted windows.

These additions require thousands of pages of new, detailed, and highly accurate information to be put into the production and assembly manuals. And this is not taking into account all the specialized machines that need to be built—with all their production and assembly manuals—so that the new pieces for the car can, in fact, be built!

Precisely the same sort of thing would have been necessary for the evolution of living things (if it were true)—only living things have all the production manuals and machines within them!

Beginning with raw chemistry, living things would have to have acquired, over time, the myriad complex systems so common to us today. But for every postulated evolutionary advance, that is, for the acquisition of every new system, an increase of information is required. This is because biological systems, like cars, derive from information. They do not come out of thin air. The information comes before, and gives rise to the systems. Thus, to get new systems you first of all need new information.

However, as evolution has no way to get either any initial information, or the information necessary for each increase in complexity,1 it can be ruled out of contention as the way living things came to be.