Alas for Darwinism the science seems headed in the opposite direction.

 Four Troublesome Trend Lines for Evolution

David Klinghoffer

I’m thinking of four troublesome trend lines for evolution. No doubt you can suggest others. More and more “junk DNA” and functionless “vestigial organs” are found to have function after all (see, for just the most recent examples, here and here). More time goes by with origin-of-life researchers making no progress (here) in their work to explain how life could have arisen from non-life through blind natural processes alone. Practical science research, meanwhile, takes one biological design after another as inspiration for human technological innovation — this is what fuels the remarkable field of biomimetics (here).

In any of these areas, evolutionists can take a snapshot of the day’s news and dismiss design evidence as an anomaly. As our favorite stalker, Professor Dave, put it regarding “junk DNA,” “Good thing most of it is indeed junk which makes zero sense in the context of design but perfect sense in the context of evolution, eh dummy?” But the trend lines persist, and we merely call them out as such. The trends are what ought to be worrying Darwinists. Taken as a totality, they make “zero sense in the context” of classic evolutionary theory.

You snooze ,you loose (even if you're king of titans)

 

There is no way back for the RNA World?

 Another Headache for the RNA World Theory

Andrew McDiarmid

The RNA world is proposed by some to explain how early life began before DNA. But is RNA capable of maintaining a life-friendly self-replication rate? On a new episode of ID the Future, I welcome back Dr. Jonathan McLatchie to discuss another headache for the RNA world scenario. Before a trial and error process like natural selection can even get started, self-replicating molecules must have a minimal accuracy rate to copy genetic material effectively. The required fidelity rate is estimated to be 2 percent. Any error rate higher than that results in error catastrophe for organisms. The average error rate in RNA copying is estimated to be around 17 percent, vastly higher than the estimated maximum error threshold for survival. McLatchie explains the implications of this for chemical evolutionary theories like the RNA world hypothesis. He also explains how a Bayesian approach to this evidence can provide us with the likeliest explanation for the origin of biological life. “The sorts of features that we observe in life are not particularly surprising if we suppose that a mind is involved,” says McLatchie. On the other hand, things like minimal self-replication fidelity are wildly surprising on a naturalistic hypothesis. Download the podcast or listen to it here.