What Are the 3 Strongest Proofs For Evolution and Are They Really So Strong?
Proof #1 The abundance of useless things in this world, such as, extinct species (Dinosaurs), Junk DNA and the appendix, proves that the created world is the way it is, due to evolution.
Proof #2 If we can sometimes observe evolutionary adaption of a species to new environmental conditions, this proves that one species can also evolve into a separate species.
Proof #3 The general similarity of the DNA in humans and others mammals prove they have a common ancestor.
Junk DNA
Regarding proof #1 in general, Judaism takes the attitude of Pirkei Avot אל תהי בז לכל דבר, which means do not disparage, anything. Indeed the Midrash relates that King David once entertained the notion that 3 things in nature were useless and in the end all 3 things saved his life.
Regarding extinct species, such as Dinosaurs, now that cloning technology is being developed, one day those species might be brought back into existence and serve as a direct benefit for man. Perhaps, G-d didn't want those species to be around in the early stages of human history, so he purposely, made those species become extinct temporarily. Or perhaps, the role of those extinct species was to give mankind certain spiritual lessons. See for example, what I have written elsewhere on the subject, What was G-d's Purpose in Creating and Destroying Worlds Before Our Current World?
As far as junk DNA is concerned, although a well-known atheist propagandist, once made the claim that most of the DNA in our bodies is junk DNA without purpose, a new study published in 2012 as quoted by the Wall Street Journal
( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443589304577633560336453228.html) claims otherwise:
The new insight is the product of Encode, or Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, a vast, multiyear project that aims to pin down the workings of the human genome in unprecedented detail.
Encode succeeded the Human Genome Project, which identified the 20,000 genes that underpin the blueprint of human biology. But scientists discovered that those 20,000 genes constituted less than 2% of the human genome. The task of Encode was to explore the remaining 98%—the so-called junk DNA—that lies between those genes and was thought to be a biological desert.
That desert, it turns out, is teeming with action. Almost 80% of the genome is biochemically active, a finding that surprised scientists.
In addition, large stretches of DNA that appeared to serve no functional purpose in fact contain about 400,000 regulators, known as enhancers, that help activate or silence genes, even though they sit far from the genes themselves.
I found an even more recent discovery about DNA that makes the belief in junk DNA even more difficult. To quote David Klinghoffer at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/12/genome_composes080111.html
Researchers at our local powerhouse public university, the U. of Washington, have discovered that the genetic code composes not in one language but two ("Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code").
Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.
"For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made," said Stamatoyannopoulos. "Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways."
The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made. [Emphasis added.]
- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/12/genome_composes080111.html#sthash.kMRO0gfx.dpuf
As far as the Appendix is concerned, newer studies have found uses for the appendix. According to an article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21153898/ns/health-health_care/t/scientists-may-have-found-appendixs-purpose/#.UNi8q6xEW-0, the appendix "produces and protects good germs for your gut".
"The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most of it is good and helps digest food".
Building on this idea, new research has shown that "Individuals without an appendix were four times more likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile", a deadly pathogen often encountered in hospitals, particularly when patients must be treated by prolonged courses of antibiotics. (see: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/01/02/your-appendix-could-save-your-life/)
Evolutionary Adaption of a Species to New Environmental Conditions
Regarding Proof #2, for evolution, namely, that we can sometimes observe evolutionary adaption of a species to new environmental conditions, one might wish to offer the following rebuttal. Proof that environment can affect some of the dominant characteristics displayed within an animal species is not proof for changes between different species.
To quote from Dr. Lee Spetner (B'Or Ha'Torah 17 (5768/2007) "
It took a maximum of seventeen years for a uniform population of finches to diverge into flocks of different shape and size of bills filling a variety of niches on a group of Pacific islands (S. Conant, "Saving Endangered Species by Translocation", BioScience, vol. 38 (1988) pp. 254-257 and S.L. Pimm, "Rapid Morphological Change in an Introduced Bird, "Trends in Evolution and Ecology, vol 3 (1988) pp. 290-291). The bill shapes, jaw muscles, and behavior of each type are adapted to their chosen niche. However, these changes could have occurred, they could not, in seventeen year or less, have occurred through random mutations and natural selection. Although this kind of observation is used to support molecules-to-man, it cannot lend such support without us having some knowledge of how these changes occurred. This experiment makes one skeptical about Darwin's story of the finches he found on the Galápagos Islands.
I suggested in my book that one way these rapid changes might have occurred is through environmental cues acting upon a built-in-capacity for change in the organism. The organism has to have the capability to respond to an environmental cue. In this way, populations can change very rapidly to adapt to new environmental conditions. Environmental cues are manifested in what is normally called stress. We know that stress causes the release of hormones that can trigger various responses in selective organs, tissues, and cells. These responses can be manifest in a change of phenotype during development, and if the hormones act on the genome, they can make heritable changes as well.
The evolution of cichlid fish has been the subject of much study. Some cichlid fishes have been reported to develop a crushing pharyngeal dentition when their diet includes snails, but a simple piercing dentition when it does not. The biochemical signals that effect this have not yet been deciphered. A gene, bmp4, has been found in other cichlid fishes, however, that when overexpressed results in morphological changes in the jaws. Moreover, the authors have demonstrated that bmp4 has the potential to alter the jaw structure that mimics adaptive variation among the fish species. We can see here more than a hint of how evolution can be driven by the environment through nonrandom genetic changes, be they mutations or genetic rearrangements.
There are now a great many other examples of rapid evolution that do not fit into the neo-Darwinian theory. I have already mentioned the controlled experiment that showed a rapid evolution of the finches in a species no more than seventeen years.
An example of even faster evolutionary change is an experiment on guppies. Guppies adapt differently in the presence of different predators. Guppies living with cichlid fish are smaller and mature earlier than those living with killifish. Guppies were taken from an environment containing cichlids and placed with killifish. The guppy population quickly changed to adapt to the new environment. The full change in the guppy population was observed as soon as the first samples were drawn, which was after only two years. Moreover, the changes have shown to be inheritable and are therefore of genetic origin. The presence of the predator seems to be the environmental cue that induced genetic changes in a large proportion of the population.
In light of Dr. Spetner's article, one might wish to argue that evolution within a species does not necessarily indicate that evolution is also responsible for changing one species into another. It could be that each of the different species was directly created by G-d with evolutionary cues to allow for adaption to changing environments.
Regarding the Similarity of the DNA in Humans and Other Mammals
Regarding Proof #3 for evolution between species, that the general similarity of the DNA in humans and others mammals prove they have a common ancestor. This proof is indeed stronger than the first two proofs but not as strong as it proponents make it.
A potential rebuttal to the view that the genetic similarities between man and other mammals prove common descent is that just as an efficient computer programmer reuses successful computer codes in different programs, so too, G-d might have wished to reuse successful genetic codes for different animal species. Furthermore, man has a great benefit from the fact that mammals such as mice, have similar DNA. Namely, by virtue of the fact that mice have somewhat similar DNA, we can perform medical experiments on them and learn valuable information from those tests to solve diseases that occur to man.
Another potential rebuttal is that recent scientific discoveries have shown that there are additional factors other than common descent that are used to explain genetic similarities between different animals. If even strong evolutionists admit that sometimes, similar genes do not always indicate a recent common ancestor, perhaps there are other factors at work to explain genetic similarities between man and other mammals.
As an example of another factor that leads to genetic similarities in different species, Ed Yong in a an online National Geographic article dated Jan. 1, 2013 entitled: How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes, states:
Genomes are often described as recipe books for living things. If that’s the case, many of them badly need an editor. For example, around half of the human genome is made up of bits of DNA that have copied themselves and jumped around, creating vast tracts of repetitive sequences. The same is true for the cow genome, where one particular piece of DNA, known as BovB, has run amok. It’s there in its thousands. Around a quarter of a cow’s DNA is made of BovB sequences or their descendants.
BovB isn’t restricted to cows. If you look for it in other animals, as Ali Morton Walsh from the University of Adelaide did, you’ll find it in elephants, horses, and platypuses. It lurks among the DNA of skinks and geckos, pythons and seasnakes. It’s there in purple sea urchin, the silkworm and the zebrafish.
The obvious interpretation is that BovB was present in the ancestor of all of these animals, and stayed in their genomes as they diversified. If that’s the case, then closely related species should have more similar versions of BovB. The cow version should be very similar to that in sheep, slightly less similar to those in elephants and platypuses, and much less similar to those in snakes and lizards.
But not so. If you draw BovB’s family tree, it looks like you’ve entered a bizarre parallel universe where cows are more closely related to snakes than to elephants, and where one gecko is more closely related to horses than to other lizards.
This is because BovB isn’t neatly passed down from parent to offspring, as most pieces of animal DNA are. This jumping gene not only hops around genomes, but between them.
This type of “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT) is an everyday event for bacteria, which can quickly pick up important abilities from each other by swapping DNA. Such trades are supposedly much rarer among more complex living things, but every passing year brings new examples of HGT among animals. For example, in 2008, (now at the University of Utah) discovered a group of sequences that have jumped between several mammals, an anole lizard, and a frog. He called them Space Invaders.
The Space Invaders belong to a group of jumping genes called DNA transposons. They jump around by cutting themselves out of their surrounding DNA, and pasting themselves in somewhere new. They’re also relatively rare—they make up just 2 to 3 percent of our genome. BovB belongs to a different class of jumping genes called retrotransposons. They move through a copy-and-paste system rather than a cut-and-paste one, so that every jump produces in a new copy of the gene. For that reason, they spread like wildfire.
A third potential rebuttal is that the commonly used argument used by hardcore evolutionists that the genetic similarity between chimpanzees and humans is close to 99% is incorrect or misleading. The claim made in the past that there is nearly a 99% similarity was based on a small and unrepresentative sample of Chimpanzee DNA. Today evolutionists readily admit at the very least that you have to knock the figure down close to 95% by including what is called indels. In a study by a group of scientists including Tatsuya Anzai of the Department of Genetic Information, Division of Molecular Life Science, Tokai University School of Medicine, we learn:
Once the indels are taken into account, the above-observed 98.6% sequence identity drops to only 86.7% (substitution, 1.4%; indels, 11.9%). This indel-included 86.7% identity may be a better representation of whole-genome sequence similarity between the human and the chimpanzee, as confirmed by a recently published study comparing a number of fragmented chimpanzee sequences with their human counter- parts. (source:http://www.pnas.org/content/100/13/7708.full.pdf)
Non-Jewish scientists (who are members of a religion with an anti-evolutionary ideology), such as, Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D add the following additional objections.
The chimp genome is 10 to 12 percent larger than the human genome. This by itself shows the 99% similarity between Chimp and Human DNA is misleading.
Since the original 2005 report for the chimpanzee (chimp) genome assembly (5X rough draft), an additional one-fold redundant coverage has been added. Using the new 6X chimpanzee assembly, a sequential comparison to the human genome was performed on an individual chromosome basis. The chimpanzee chromosomes, were sliced into new individual query files of varying string lengths and then queried against their human chromosome homolog using the BLASTN algorithm. Using this approach, queries could be optimized for each chromosome irrespective of gene/feature linear order. Non-DNA letters (gap filling ‘N’s) were stripped from the query data and excluded from the analyses. The definition of similarity for each chromosome was the amount (percent) of optimally aligned chimp DNA. This definition was considered to be conservative because it did not include the amount of human DNA absent in chimp nor did it include chimp DNA that was not aligned to the human genome assembly (unanchored sequence contigs).
For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor. (source: http://designed-dna.org/blog/files/269f5ba93730e963bd54c1a139dd48f9-55.php)
Jeffrey Tomkins, Jerry Bergman, and other anti-evolutionary scientists have also attacked another scientific foundation for the viewpoint that men, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Bonobos, and Orangutans descended from a common ancestor. Humans have only 46 chromosomes (23 from our father and 23 from our mother) while chimpanzees and the great apes have 48 (24 from the father and 24 from the mother). Pro-evolution scientists explain the difference in the amount of chromosomes in humans came about because there was a fusion of two small chimpanzee-like chromosomes (2A and 2B) that formed one stable chimera chromosome in humans (bringing down the number provided by each parent from 24 to 23). Anti-evolution scientists claim that a closer examination of the data totally disproves the theory of fusion. They claim that new data concerning the alleged point of fusion of the two small chimpanzee-like chromosomes (2A and 2B) disproves the notion that fusion took place.
This is not BS, it is BE: BULLSEYE!
The stuff edu posted is the same type of stuff from Jewish sites. Also being influenced by atheism is just as bad as being influenced by Christian fundamentalism.
To quote from Dr. Lee Spetner (B'Or Ha'Torah 17 (5768/2007) "
It took a maximum of seventeen years for a uniform population of finches to diverge into flocks of different shape and size of bills filling a variety of niches on a group of Pacific islands (S. Conant, "Saving Endangered Species by Translocation", BioScience, vol. 38 (1988) pp. 254-257 and S.L. Pimm, "Rapid Morphological Change in an Introduced Bird, "Trends in Evolution and Ecology, vol 3 (1988) pp. 290-291). The bill shapes, jaw muscles, and behavior of each type are adapted to their chosen niche. However, these changes could have occurred, they could not, in seventeen year or less, have occurred through random mutations and natural selection. Although this kind of observation is used to support molecules-to-man, it cannot lend such support without us having some knowledge of how these changes occurred. This experiment makes one skeptical about Darwin's story of the finches he found on the Galápagos Islands.
Kahane-Was-Right BT the type of Evolution that is pushed by the secular scientific world is that it is quite easy for life to develop out of non-life and then given enough amount of time and survival of the fittest you will end up automatically with life forms similar to what we see on Earth.
This brand of evolution is not really backed by the facts.
I DO NOT believe human life developed due to random mutation or any such nonsense. Jewish faith is emphatic that Human life is the ultimate goal of Hashem and his creation. Believing that life just magically happened because of random events is denying the Will of Hashem and also seems ridiculous. It would be like me expecting my computer to randomly write a complex software system, it NEVER happens. Or like throwing up a bunch of metal and expecting a 747 airplane to magically become assembled, it too NEVER happens.
Hashem guided every process of creation, never leaving anything to random events or chance.