First published: Creation 24(2):16–19 March 2002 Browse this issue Subscribe to Creation magazine

The evolution train’s a-comin’
(Sorry, a-goin’—in the wrong direction)

by Carl Wieland

The atmosphere in the crowded lecture theatre foyer was alive with curious anticipation. It was the late 1970s, the heady early days of the creation movement in South Australia. The creation/evolution debate I was about to take part in, before some 40 science teachers and involving a prominent academic evolutionist, was a first for the region.

As the words of an animated conversation drifted across to me, I realized that my opponent-to-be was only a few metres to my left. A senior lecturer (associate professor in US terms) in population biology, he was holding forth to a small group of supporters, clearly unaware that his creationist protagonist was within earshot.

Credit stock.xchng

‘This is really frustrating’, I heard him say. ‘I feel like an astronaut who’s come back from the moon, seen the spherical Earth, and now he’s supposed to debate with someone who tries to tell people it’s flat. In my job we see evolution happening in front of our eyes.’

Back then, before creationist arguments had had a good airing, it was understandable for him to think like that. Biology teachers could perhaps be excused for perpetuating such a naïve belief. They simply assumed that the easily observable genetic changes in many types of living populations were an obvious demonstration that evolution from microbes to man was fact. Just give it enough time, and voilá , such ‘micro’ changes would accumulate, continually filtered and guided by natural selection. It seemed obvious and logical to expect these ‘little steps’ to keep adding up so as to lead to the ‘macro’ changes—the really big jumps, frog-to-prince, fish-to-philosopher, that type of thing. (As we will show later in this article, though, the very opposite is true.)

In that light, this biology lecturer’s perplexed frustration can be readily understood, because he thought that he was often seeing a small bit of what would in time become a large chunk of change. We need to understand that most evolutionists, even today, still think this way. Which is, frankly, why the usual answers given by most Bible-believers, when challenged on the subject of biological change, are inadequate.

For instance, a challenger might say, ‘Mosquitoes have evolved resistance to DDT in just 40 years. If that’s not evolution happening before our eyes, what is?’ Most Christian responses focus on the amount of change. For instance, they will say, ‘Well, that’s just variation within a kind.’ Or they reply, ‘But the mosquito’s still a mosquito, isn’t it? It hasn’t turned into anything else.’

Both of these replies are true. But they are inadequate and seldom impress the challenger, who thinks, ‘Well, that’s just a copout for the Christians. Evolution takes millions of years, and here we have all this change in only 40 years. So, give it a million years and imagine what sort of change we’ll have then!’

The analogy I have for many years used in explaining this in public lectures is that of a railway train. Imagine you see a train pulling out of a station in, say, Miami, Florida, headed north to Chicago.¹ The distance you see it travel is only a few hundred metres. But you can reasonably presume that, given enough time, it will end up in Chicago. You have seen sound evidence to indicate that it is in principle capable of making the whole journey, you don’t need to see it make the whole trip. This is just how evolutionists see the little changes (often called ‘microevolution’, but see aside below) happening all around us. If a mosquito has changed a little in 40 years, you don’t need to see it turning into an elephant—it has shown that it is in principle capable of making a similarly radical journey.

What we need to be aware of, and focus on in our answers, I tell audiences, is not the amount of change, but the type or direction of change. It is not just that the train has not gone far enough, but that it is headed in the wrong direction. The types of changes observed today, though they can be accommodated within an evolutionary framework, are, we will see, precisely and demonstrably the opposite of the ones which evolutionists really need in order to give some semblance of credibility to their belief system.

So while you may be seeing the train pulling out of the station at Miami, if the reality is that it is not heading north, up to Chicago, but is headed in the opposite direction, downwards to where the line (if there was one) would end in the deep blue ocean, then it will never get to Chicago. Time will not solve the problem, since it is in principle an impossibility to reach Chicago by train in that downward direction. Just so, once we can point out to people that the ‘evolution train’ (really the train of biological change) is headed downwards, not upwards, then the more time there is, the less likely the whole evolution scenario becomes.

Before explaining what I mean by biological changes having a ‘direction’, I will share what triggered this article. It was a book review² by well-known evolutionary biologist Dr Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, who could not resist an opportunity to lash out at the creationists.³ Amazingly, Coyne uses the train journey analogy himself, reinforcing my point of how evolutionists see the issue. Though his intention is to mock creationists, he unwittingly provides a great opportunity to show how misplaced this common reasoning is.

The book he was reviewing⁴ uses familiar examples of rapid human-induced biological changes (antibiotic resistance in bacteria, pesticide resistance in insects, changes in growth rate of fish from overfishing) to get people to ‘consent’ to the bigger idea of microbes-to-man evolution.

Coyne deplores the fact that the book’s examples will probably not change the minds of creationist advocates, who have already accepted such changes as ‘adaptation within a species’ (‘variation within a kind’ would have been more precise). He says that creationists argue that ‘such small changes cannot explain the evolution of new groups of plants and animals’, and goes on to say: ‘This argument defies common sense. When, after a Christmas visit, we [presumably his family in Chicago—CW] watch grandma leave on the train to Miami, we assume that the rest of her journey will be an extrapolation of that quarter-mile.’ Thus, says Coyne, a ‘creationist unwilling to extrapolate from micro- to macroevolution’ is being ‘irrational’.

Reason vs rhetoric

Why can one say with confidence, concerning the biological changes observable today (man-induced or otherwise) that the train is headed in the wrong direction? Why is it that when evolutionists use this ‘grandma’s train’ extrapolation argument, it can be turned around to make the opposite point? Because the real issue in biological change is all about what happens at the DNA level, which concerns information.⁵ The information carried on the DNA, the molecule of heredity, is like a recipe, a set of instructions for the manufacture of certain items.

Evolutionists teach that one-celled organisms⁶ (e.g. protozoa) have given rise to pelicans, pomegranates, people and ponies. In each case, the DNA ‘recipe’ has had to undergo a massive net increase of information during the alleged millions of years. A one-celled organism does not have the instructions for how to manufacture eyes, ears, blood, skin, hooves, brains, etc. which ponies need. So for protozoa to have given rise to ponies, there would have to be some mechanism that gives rise to new information.

Evolutionists hail natural selection as if it were a creative goddess, but the reality (which they invariably concede when pressed) is that selection on its own always gets rid of information, never the opposite.⁷ To have a way to add information, the ‘only game in town’ for evolution’s true believers is genetic copying mistakes or accidents, i.e. random mutations (which can then be ‘filtered’ by selection).⁸ However, the problem is that if mutations were capable of adding the information required, we should see hundreds of examples all around us, considering that there are many thousands of mutations happening continually. But whenever we study mutations, they invariably turn out to have lost or degraded the information. This is so even in those rare instances when the mutational defect gives a survival advantage—e.g. the loss of wings on beetles on windy islands.⁹

As creatures diversify, gene pools become increasingly thinned out. The more organisms adapt to their surroundings by selection, i.e. the more specialized they become, the smaller the fraction they carry of the original storehouse of created information for their kind. Thus, there is less information available on which natural selection can act in the future to ‘readapt’ the population should circumstances change. Less flexible, less adaptable populations are obviously heading closer to extinction, not evolving.

We see that, just like with the train pulling out from Miami and headed south, if the sorts of changes we see today are extrapolated over time, they lead to extinction, not onwards evolution.

Remember, evolutionary belief teaches that once upon a time, there were living things, but no lungs—lungs had not evolved yet, so there was no DNA information coding for lung manufacture. Somehow this program had to be written. New information had to arise that did not previously exist, anywhere.

Later, there were lungs, but no feathers anywhere in the world, thus no genetic information for feathers. Real-world observation has overwhelmingly shown mutation to be totally unable to feed the required new information into the system.¹⁰ In fact, mutations overall hasten the downward trend by adding genetic load in the form of harmful mutations, of which we have all accumulated hundreds over the generations of our ancestry.¹¹

In other words, populations can change and adapt because they have a lot of information (variety) in their DNA ‘recipe’. But unless mutations can feed in new information, each time there is variation/adaptation, the total information decreases (as selection gets rid of the unadapted portions of the population, some information is lost in that population). Thus, given a fixed amount of information, the more adaptation we see, the less the potential for future adaptation. The train is definitely headed downhill, destined to fall off the jetty of extinction.

The supreme irony is that, of all the examples lauded by Dr Coyne as ‘evolution’, whether antibiotic resistance¹² or changes in fish growth rates, not one single one supports his ‘train’ analogy, but rather the reverse. Not one involves a gain of information; all show the opposite, a net loss. Pondering all this, I feel a sense of the same sort of frustration (only in reverse) that my evolutionist opponent was airing all those years ago, which he could have paraphrased as: ‘Why can’t they see it? It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

Who knows, perhaps somehow this article will get into Dr Coyne’s hands. Maybe it will give him, and some other evolutionist apologists, food for thought the next time they put one of their grandmothers on a train.

References and notes

1. I normally use Australian cities as examples, of course, but these will be more recognizable to readers worldwide, and fit nicely with the evolutionist Coyne’s comments later in the article. Return to text.
2. Nature 412(6847):587–588, 9 August 2001. Return to text.
3. Dr Coyne was cited in our article about the peppered moth fraud (Creation 21(3):56, 1999). He said that finding out that this ‘prize horse in our [evolutionists’] stable’ had to be thrown out gave him the same feeling as when he found out that Santa Claus was not real. Return to text.
4. Palumbi, S.R., The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change, W.W. Norton, New York, 2001. Return to text.
5. Specified complexity is another way of referring to the sort of information carried in written text, or DNA. See Thaxton, C.B., Bradley, W.L. and Olsen, R.L., The Mystery of Life’s Origin, chapter 8, Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, 1984. Return to text.
6. Even the ‘simplest’ life-forms we know of have massive amounts of information, equivalent to more than half a million ‘letters’. Return to text.
7. Wieland, C., Muddy waters, Creation 23(3):26–29, 2001. Return to text.
8. Hybridization is simply mingling two sets of pre-existing information, and chromosome duplication (e.g. polyploidy) creates no new information. Return to text.
9. Wieland, C., Beetle bloopers, Creation 19(3):30, 1997. Return to text.
10. Spetner, L.M., Not by chance!, The Judaica Press Inc., New York, 1997. Return to text.
11. Many of these mutations are harmful only if you inherit the same one from both parents. That is why today intermarriage of close relatives can cause biological deformities in the offspring, since there is a higher possibility of inheriting the same mistake from each parent than if we marry someone more distantly related (all are related), who will have a different set of mistakes. But the further back in history, the less time there has been for such mistakes to accumulate, thus pointing to a time when close intermarriage would not have caused such problems (Batten, D. Ed., The Answers Book, Brisbane, Australia, ‘Cain’s wife—who was she?’, chapter 8, 1999). Return to text.
12. Wieland, C., Superbugs—not super after all, Creation 20(1):10–13, 1997. Return to text.