Week 8 - Post 2 - What Darwinian Evolution is not

Darwinian evolution = Change over time in species:

“Darwinian evolution is biological change over time.” How many times have you heard that mantra? It has been repeated a million times since 1859 and practically every youtube video on evolution makes that statement. Is that a good definition? Humans have known about change over time since before Heraclitus who is credited with saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Everything changes, but everything does not change for the better. The human is born and from the time she takes her first breath, her destiny is death by gradual, slow incremental changes over time. That is biological change over time, but is it Darwinian evolution? Biological change, in and of itself, regardless of the time involved, is not Darwinian evolution. Degradation is change over time, but it is not Darwinian evolution. The natural change over time that we see every day in nature is devolution, not Darwinian evolution.

Changing from one lifeform into another kind of lifeform over time is Darwinian evolution. Yes, change over time is said to be a component of Darwinian evolution, but it is not Darwinian evolution itself. Everything in the universe has been changing since the beginning of time; that is nothing new. Rather than everything graduating to a higher more complex and organized state of existence as Darwinian evolutionary theory predicts, things are degrading and moving toward disorganization, entropy and chaos. Given enough time, the universe will suffer a heat death when the amount of useable energy in the universe reaches entropic state.

Darwinian evolution is not variations in bird beaks. It is not selected breeding that changes how an animal looks or behaves. It is not adaptation to environment. A cat with long hair, a cat with short hair or no hair at all, is not Darwinian evolution. They are all cats. A man has lots of thick brown hair when he was 19 and a few years later, he is balled on top and gray on the sides. That is biological change over time, but it is not Darwinian evolution. The man did not change into a different kind of animal. He is still human.

Darwinian evolution is not a bird’s beak becoming thicker or thinner over time. They started out as birds and they ended up as birds. That process is called adaptive evolution, not Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolutionists love to conflate the two types of evolution because one can be observed (adaptive evolution) and the other has never been observed (Darwinian evolution). Adaptation happens all the time and Darwinian evolution has never been observed in nature, in the laboratory or anywhere else. A bird that adapts to its environment and subsequently looks or behaves somewhat differently as a result may be a new species, but it has not evolved to a higher, more organized and complex state of existence. It is still a bird. When the beak changes of birds are complete, there has been no new DNA added. A new species of dog does not constitute a new kind of animal. It doesn’t matter if it is a Great Dane or a Pekingese, it is still a dog. Natural selection and adaptive evolution works with the existing DNA of the animal. The process dos not add new DNA.