by Bill Nugent
Article #258
The Innocence Project and similar groups have used DNA evidence to exonerate and free many people wrongly convicted of crimes. More than 250 have had their convictions overturned since 1992, including more than a dozen that were on death row. The flip side of this is that DNA evidence has revolutionized law enforcement and has resulted in far more convictions of criminals than exonerations of the innocent.
There is something very exacting and unequivocal about the science of genetics, especially since the human genome (DNA molecule) has been decoded. The genomes of many other species have also been decoded. Like most advances in biological science, the DNA revolution has revealed that emperor evolution has no clothes.
An article published by the Seattle based Discovery Institute’sCenter for Science and Culture in its June 25, 2012 e-newsletter titled “Theory Creep: The Quiet Shift in Evolutionary Thought”by Douglas Axe discusses how new advances in genetic sequencing have overturned evolutionary “family trees” of species.
We all remember the diagrams of “family trees” in our high school biology textbooks that purported to show how species evolved from a common ancestor and the species in the family tree are supposed to be related to each other. Back in the 1970s scientists studied the amino acid sequences of proteins to place species with similar proteins into the same family tree. Recently, however, scientists have studied the nucleotide sequences of the underlying genes and this has overturned the neatly constructed evolutionary scholarship of the past.
This overturning of the evolutionary family trees is a serious blow to both naturalistic (atheistic) evolution and also to theistic evolution (the claim that God used evolution). The article quotes two evolutionary scientists, James Degnan and Noah Rosenberg that express their frustration in a paper published in 2009:
“Many of the first studies to examine the conflicting signal of different genes have found considerable discordance across gene trees: studies of hominids, pines, chiclids, finches, grasshoppers and fruit flies have all detected genealogical discordance so widespread that no single tree topology predominates.”
Notice that these evolutionists admit that the studies “all detected genealogical discordance” that was “widespread.” I will point out that such genetic inconsistency from species to species is exactly what you would expect to find if special creation took place as the Bible teaches. The DNA evidence has convicted Darwinian evolution of fraud. Evolution is the great imposter of science. As science advances, the flaws of Darwinism become more apparent.
Genetic evidence is more rigorous than fossil evidence. Evolution gained sway because the incomplete skeletons of extinct apes looked vaguely human so scientists could artfully reconstruct images of apemen consistent with their own evolutionary presuppositions. They constructed family trees of apes and humans and family trees of many other animals and plants. Now the hard genetic evidence shows that these species are not related at all. Apes and humans do not have a common ancestor.
I have often said that evolution is not pure science but is a liberal art. (I’m not using the word “liberal” in its political sense.) Darwinian evolution is a theory of natural history. History, including natural biological history, is technically an art and not a science. Experimental science can be applied to the fossils to examine them but the overall “connecting the dots” or putting the evidence together is artwork and storytelling. The genetic evidence is showing that the Darwinist storytelling is wrong.
Darwinian evolution is really a 19th century theory that emerged as the origins myth of a new secular faith called Secular Humanism. In the 1800s scientists looked through primitive microscopes at cells and saw them as little sacks with dots in the middle. They thought cells were simple and that cells could form by chance in a “warm little pond” as Darwin put it. We now know that cells are too fabulously complex to have formed by random collisions of atoms. Even famed microbiologist Dean Kenyon has publicly rejected affinity theory, which he had previously promoted as a theory of spontaneous generation.
In a similar way, in the late 1800s, genetics was in its infancy. DNA had not yet been discovered. The amazing complexity of the DNA molecule was unknown. The fact that mutations are destructive errors that virtually never add design information to the DNA was not known in the early days of evolutionary biology. Twenty-first century science clearly points to the need of a Creator to explain the origin of life. Even many nonreligious scientists are becoming part of the Intelligent Design Movementthat has rejected Darwinism.
The fact that we have a Creator impels us to find the purpose for which we were created. The Bible is not just another black book. The Muslims have their black book and the Mormons have theirs so why should we believe the Bible? One reason to believe the Bible is that the Bible has internal supernatural evidence that far exceeds the evidence that any other religious book can present. Bible prophecy is like God’s signature on His book.
The Bible has several thousand predictive prophecies contained in its pages. Other holy books have few or none. The Bible has foretold many things that have come to pass in amazing ways. Christian scholar, Josh McDowell, has painstakingly listed and examined Bible prophecies and shown their fulfillments down through history. His books, “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”and “A Ready Defense” give irrefutable evidence for the divine inspiration of the Bible.
God put us on this earth to learn to love Him and to learn to love each other. All of us fail at this and this is called sin. God sent the Messiah, His only begotten Son, to be the sin bearer to redeem us. Jesus Christ came in fulfillment of over 300 prophecies that were written in the Old Testament centuries before His birth. These prophecies predicted, among other things, that Christ would suffer and die, taking upon Himself the penalty of our sins.
If we repent of our sins and turn to Christ and ask for forgiveness we will receive forgiveness of sins and we will receive eternal life. Turn to Christ today to receive the forgiveness He obtained for you!