Arguments against the theory of evolution

Drosophila melanogaster

Despite what I said in the last paragraph of my previous post, there are still well-intentioned people who oppose the theory of evolution (although this is very rare among biologists), and sometimes offer arguments to defend their way of thinking. I will consider some of those arguments here and offer my answers.

Answer: The claim that evolution has not been successfully reproduced artificially is mistaken. We have been doing this for thousands of years through artificial selection, which gave Darwin the idea of ​​natural selection. We have been doing it for decades in the laboratory in a controlled way, as this Wikipedia article explains: Experimental evolution. And this has been done not just with bacteria, which have a very short life cycle, but also with higher animals.

Genes arising from nothing?

I have been asked me to clarify a recent piece of news that has hit the popular science press with headlines like the following:

New genes found that can arise from nothing. (Phys.org, 12/8/2023)

The tenacity of the media (and some scientists) to abuse the concept of nothing is unbelievable. They don’t know that nothing does not exist, and that nothing can arise from what does not exist. This is something that pre-Socratic Greek philosophers did know. (The first to assert this was Parmenides). Twenty-five centuries later, modern man, so proud of the advancement of science and technology, makes the same mistake once and again. In these posts I have often criticized the phrase, common today, that the universe arose spontaneously from nothing, which atheists often formulate to deny the creation and, therefore, the existence of God. This phrase does not belong to science (because current theories do not let us go back to the moment of the Big Bang). As philosophy, it’s just a flagrant proof of ignorance.

Outstanding problems in the history of life

Gregor Mendel

In a previous article I wrote about the origin of life and related problems. That is only the first of the outstanding issues regarding evolution. There are many more, for we are far from having an explanation for everything that happened during the history of life.

The theory of evolution through natural selection was first proposed by Darwin and refined by his followers when new discovered biological phenomena solved some of the problems posed since the beginning of the theory:

1.      The laws of heredity (Mendel, 1865).

2.      Mutations (Hugo de Vries, 1900).

3.      The laws of genetics (Thomas Hunt Morgan, early twentieth century).

4.      The synthetic theory of evolution (Simpson, Dobzhansky and others, around 1930)

5.      The transmission of inheritance through DNA (Oswald Avery, 1944).

6.      The structure of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code (Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and others).

7.      The neutral theory of evolution (Motoo Kimura, 1968).

8.      Punctuated equilibrium (Stephen Jay Gould, 1972).

9.      Epigenetics (early twenty first century).

Rosalind Franklin