Testing Evolutionism- Why it is Impossible Today

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Evolutionism posits a somewhat gradual, incremental evolution driven by culled genetic accidents. Natural selection, a process of elimination, is said to be blind, mindless and incorporates heritable random, as in happenstance/ accidental, mutations. Dawkins calls it blind watchmaker evolution.

What we need is a way to model what mutations do. That is something beyond the piddly changes we observe. Changes in beak size does not explain the finch. Anti-biotic resistance does not explain bacteria. Moth coloration does not explain the moth. Changes in eye color does not explain the vision system nor the type of eye nor the organism. An albino dwarf with sickle-celled anemia is what we can get when mutations accumulate. Not quite what evolutionism requires.

We need to be able to test the hypothesis that changes to genomes can account for the diversity of life starting from the first populations as Darwin saw it- simple prokaryotes. Only then could we determine if natural selection is up to the task. But thanks to the current state of biology being dominated by blind watchmaker evolution, no one has any idea what makes an organism what it is and the evidence is against the “organisms are the sum of their genome”*

To understand the challenge to the “superwatch” model by the erosion of the gene-centric view of nature, it is necessary to recall August Weismann’s seminal insight more than a century ago regarding the need for genetic determinants to specify organic form. As Weismann saw so clearly, in order to account for the unerring transmission through time with precise reduplication, for each generation of “complex contingent assemblages of matter” (superwatches), it is necessary to propose the existence of stable abstract genetic blueprints or programs in the genes- he called them “determinants”- sequestered safely in the germ plasm, away from the ever varying and destabilizing influences of the extra-genetic environment.

Such carefully isolated determinants would theoretically be capable of reliably transmitting contingent order through time and specifying it reliably each generation. Thus, the modern “gene-centric” view of life was born, and with it the heroic twentieth century effort to identify Weismann’s determinants, supposed to be capable of reliably specifying in precise detail all the contingent order of the phenotype. Weismann was correct in this: the contingent view of form and indeed the entire mechanistic conception of life- the superwatch model- is critically dependent on showing that all or at least the vast majority of organic form is specified in precise detail in the genes.

Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes as Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a small fraction of all known genes, such as the developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene- Michael Denton “An Anti-Darwinian Intellectual Journey”, Uncommon Dissent (2004), pages 171-2

See also Why Is A Fly Not A Horse?

You would think that answering that question what makes an organism what it is? (with science as opposed to dogmatic declaration) with be paramount to biology. Because without an answer to that question evolutionism is untestable and Dobzhansky is just question begging "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".

And that is another reason why Doug Theobald's "29+ evidences for macroevolution" is absent a mechanism and also why it fails-> there aren't any known mechanisms for producing macroevolutionary change because no one even knows what it entails.
 


* we are just what emerges from the somehow coordinayed interactions of the matter and energy of a fertilized egg (the environemnet wouldn’t change what type of organism comes out)