Many people fail to understand that although evolution, i.e. process of evolution, is a fact, this process is totally powerless in creating higher life forms, as required by the theory of evolution. Higher life forms are characterized by novel proteins, organs, molecular machines, and body plans, that were nonexistent in the lower life forms, such as first self-replicating cells. The theory of evolution holds that the above mentioned process was able to repeatedly produce such novelty in a short period of time. Namely, according to the theory, at the beginning of the Cambrian period, in an interval of 20 million years or less, the process of evolution resulted in the explosion of animal diversity with multiple feats of anatomical and physiological novelty. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, most major animal phyla were fully developed. Recently, the "
big bang" of bird evolution has been mapped, revealing that almost all of the modern groups of birds appeared in a small window of less than 10 million years. So evolution must have happened extremely fast and produced novelty in a short period of time. Finally, based on 53-million-year-old fossils of whale-like, semi-aquatic mammals, scientists had thought mammals gave rise to whales in a process that took 15 million years.
The new find suggests it took just 4 million years. So again, in an evolutionary blink of an eye the evolution process must have produced a lot of novelty to turn a terrestrial mammal to a fully aquatic marine mammal.
However, the observation clearly shows the complete powerlessness of this process. For e.g. in the last 300,000 years, the variation part of the evolution process produced more than 100 billion different Homo sapiens genomes. But has this enormous diversity caused humans to start to develop some new, distinct organs, molecular machines, or body plans that will occupy ecological niches humans previously could not occupy, i.e. enable the selection part of the evolution process to act on them? Well, obviously not. After an enormous number of different genomes produced, humans are anatomically, morphologically and physiologically practically identical, without any traces of new structures starting to develop. The same is true for the E.coli long-term evolution experiment, which is the longest running microbial evolution experiment. After more than 67,000 generations of E. coli, which is the equivalent to over one million years of human evolution, not a single, new and distinct structure was created. Most of the changes involved streamlining the genome, deleting genes no longer needed, or reducing protein expression, with one change being the breaking of a repressor switch which caused preexi sting citrate-uptake pathway to turn on. So, both humans and E.coli have undergone a lot of evolution, but nothing structurally new was created. This clearly shows that the fact of evolution has nothing to do with the validity of the evolution theory. The evolution process is indeed factual the same as other natural processes, be it: fog, thunder, tornadoes, decomposition, wave propagation, erosion, etc. But natural processes, including evolution, are totally powerless in creating new functional things. Many educated people fail to differentiate between evolution process (fact) and evolution theory (human idea about what the evolution process can and cannot do), which is why they hold irrational beliefs about the enormous creation powers of a mere natural process that is in reality totally powerless.
