Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you hard evidence that evolution is mostly fantasy cooked up in the eye of those who behold the evidence. Quite ironically, as I recall, it started out exactly that way (or at least this story was part of its beginnings - I forget the whole story). As I recall, Darwin was inspired by some pigeon breeder who managed to get some really funky looking pigeons by breeding different varieties. Darwin
"reasoned" from this (read: imagined) that, given enough time, nature could produce the kind of diversity in the species we now see.
The funny thing was that I recall some documentary on PBS recounting this story back when I still gave evolution about a 50/50 chance of being true. And what struck me about the pigeon story was that it demonstrated something quite different than what Darwin imagined. It demonstrated clearly (with no imagination required) that given an outside intelligent force (the breeder), one could achieve a good degree of diversity very quickly.
But my point here is not that pigeon breeding proves creation, but that there are often many ways to look at things. Evolutionists, however, tend to have blinders on (whether they are self-imposed, as Lewontin testifies, or not).
To demonstrate this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I offer you exhibit A:
Originally posted by seebs
The degree of anatomical similarity between mammals is astounding - and not necessary for them to be successful in their niches.
This would make me doubt evolution. After all, if mutation happens so often and so dramatically that out of a single source we can evolve into cats, elephants and men, why is it that these features which are not necessary for our success have survived through it all?
I can already hear the answer -- the fact that they were not necessary for our success means there were no needed changes.
So evolution assumes two very interesting things happening simultaneously. On the one hand, you have tiny successive mutations that turn things like a nose into an elephant's trunk, even though we have no way of proving a few million or even billion of those inbetween-nose-trunk mutations didn't actually hurt its success. We simply ASSUME that every minute mutation somehow miraculously helped its success because we have similar-to-reptile-mammals and we have elephants, and we simply BELIEVE that one must have turned into the other.
Oh, and let us not forget that we also believe that the millions of PREVIOUS mutations, even though they were only slightly different than the next ones, were somehow so different enough to be so unsuccessful that these half-nose-half-trunk went extinct in favor of 0.4999-nose-0.5001-trunk creatures, which went extinct when the 0.4998-nose-etc creatures evolved.
No, perhaps I've got that wrong. These minor successive mutations don't NEED to be better than the last ones, because they're smart enough to see the future and know that a trunk is eventually going to be useful.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, you have all those other "anatomical similarities" which aren't mutating hardly at all. Now someone might think that they're not mutating because they were created. But as the trunk demonstrates, evolutionists know that random mutation is smarter than God. These genes are failing to mutate simply because they know enough about the future not to bother. Why should they bother mutating when they know in advance that they aren't going to contribute to the animal's success?
Obviously, the art of evolution is to balance advantage/mutation/selection/extinction perfectly in your imagination in such a way as to provide a link between any two things, regardless of how the balance causes contradictions in your reasoning.
And to demostrate that point, let's take a look at exhibit B:
It certainly doesn't suggest that God makes mammals the same way - why would He do that, since there's no particular *advantage* to us in having the same basic bone structure as a cat?
As I said, good jury, the evidence -- heck, even the reasoning -- means nothing. It's all in the eye of the beholder. So it doesn't matter what evidence you present. People will see what they want to see, and return the verdict they want to return.
