There Is Reasonable Cause To Doubt The Theory Of Common Descent

I will define the Theory Of Common Descent as such: “All life on earth descended from a common ancestor.” Now I will explain why there is reasonable cause to doubt this. Here we go! First, it's not proven. If something isn't proven, then there is reasonable cause to doubt it. Second, no single celled organism has ever been observed evolving into a multi-cellular organism. Even though an evolution experiment involving mind-boggling numbers of bacteria has been underway for over two decades, and is past the 50,000th generation, not a single cell has evolved into a double-celled creature.(1) All results derived from this experiment prove that life can create beneficial mutations. It doesn't prove that multi-cellular organisms evolved from single-celled organisms. A typical excuse from Common Descent proponents is a lack of time, but this is irrelevant to this particular case because they have artificially sped up time by orders of magnitude and have yet to produce a single double-celled bacteria from it. Thirdly, bananas share 50% of their DNA with humans.(2) To claim that this means bananas evolved from humans would be silly. All this proves is that humans are half as delicious as bananas.(3) Fourth, the Bible is clear that God formed man of the dust of the ground, not of bacteria.(4) Fifth, if humans evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still around today?(5) Good question... Sixth, The Theory Of Common Descent is unfalsifiable. When a life form is found to have no other very similar life form, proponents of Common Descent just assume that there are “missing links,” instead of admitting that this is evidence against Common Descent. Seventh, Trilobites. If Common Descent were true, than Trilobites would have evolved from a similar, but less complex, organism. However, after 200 years of searching we are yet to find any multi-cellular ancestor of Trilobites. According to Stefan Bengston, Professor of Palaeozoology: (the study of fossil animals) "If any event in life's history resembles man's creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukariotic cell. The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants."(6) In his book, The Neck Of The Girraffe, Francis Hitching elaborates: “The dominant life form was the now-extinct sea creature known as a trilobite, up to a foot long, with a distinctive head and tail, a body made up of several parts, and a complex respiratory system. But although there are many places on earth where 5,000 feet of sedimentary rock stretch unbroken and uniformly beneath the Cambrian [layer], not a single indisputable multi-celled fossil has been found there. It is 'the enigma of paleontological [fossil studies] enigmas,' according to Stephen Gould. Darwin himself said he could give 'no satisfactory answer' to why no fossils had been discovered. Today's scientists are none the wiser.”(7) Eigth, Chimpanzees. It was once thought that we were closely related to them; however, new findings show this isn't the case. According to Todd Preuss, Ph.D, of Yerkes National Primate Research Center: “It is now clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more extensive than previously thought; their genomes are not 98% or 99% identical”(8)(emphasis mine) Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D, goes into more detail: “[Between humans and chimpanzees, 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.”(9)(emphasis mine) Ninth, Natural Selection can't afford to maintain mutations past a certain point. Any organism that mutates too much will be driven to extinction through the accumulation of a lethal amount of slightly detrimental mutations. Most mutations are negative. However, they are only slightly negative (10), so Natural Selection can't beat them using tricks like Sickle-Cell Anemia. No positive mutation which would outweigh the effects from a few slightly detrimental mutations would be capable of being selected for. This is because of “Genetic Linking.” Genes huddle together in linkage groups. You pass genes down to your children in these groups.(12) Any group in which would be the beneficial mutation to supposedly override the slightly negative ones would be passed down to the next generation in the same group, so it can't be selected for! Also, the number of slightly negative mutations in a group tend to outweigh the beneficial ones by a lot. So slightly negative mutations like to accumulate (very negative mutations quickly kill off members of a species who have produced it, so afflicted members pose no real threat to the rest of the specie's population). As this number grows, the chance that the species becomes extinct increases exponentially. This means that Humans should have become extinct less than 20 million years after they evolved.(13) Within the time frame accepted for evolution, humans would have been driven to extinction over a 100 times!(11) Tenth, Genetic Degradation. This is really just an expansion on the previous point, but it's looks more impressive if I have as many points as possible so please don't hate. The genome has a very strong tendency to degrade over time, not advance. The vast majority of mutations degrade the genome. This includes both detrimental and beneficial mutations. Thus, even if beneficial mutations outnumber bad ones, the net effect is still a degradation of the genome. A solution that has been proposed is “extreme truncation.” However, it's improbable, leaving reasonable doubt. Allow me to copy & paste a large chunk of academic text packed with scientific jargon that you probably can't understand in order to demonstrate my intellectual superiority insecurity: “The high deleterious mutation rate in humans presents a paradox. If mutations interact multiplicatively, the genetic load associated with such a high U would be intolerable in species with a low rate of reproduction. The reduction in fitness (i.e., the genetic load) due to deleterious mutations with multiplicative effects is given by 1 − e−U. For U = 3, the average fitness is reduced to 0.05, or put differently, each female would need to produce 40 offspring for 2 to survive and maintain the population at constant size. This assumes that all mortality is due to selection and so the actual number of offspring required to maintain a constant population size is probably higher. The problem can be mitigated somewhat by soft selection or by selection early in development (e.g., in utero). However, many mutations are unconditionally deleterious and it is improbable that the reproductive potential on average for human females can approach 40 zygotes. This problem can be overcome if most deleterious mutations exhibit synergistic epistasis; that is, if each additional mutation leads to a larger decrease in relative fitness. In the extreme, this gives rise to truncation selection in which all individuals carrying more than a threshold number of mutations are eliminated from the population. While extreme truncation selection seems unrealistic, the results presented here indicate that some form of positive epistasis among deleterious mutations is likely.”(14) But seriously, read it. It's really fascinating. Eleventh, The Minimum Gene Paradox. Did I just reach 11 points?! Not only that, I managed to use the word “paradox” for the second time! Anywho... The Minimum Gene Paradox goes something like this:(15) There must be a minimum number of genomes required to support life. Bacteria have the smallest number of genomes. To be more specific, a certain species of parasitic bacteria, Nanoarchaeum equitans, has the smallest genome in the world. Were Common Descent true, than genomes would have evolved into larger, more advanced genomes. This would mean that more advanced life evolved from Nano. e., but Nano. e. requires a more advanced host (Ignicoccus) to even exist! This mind-blowing paradox, if not fatal to the Theory Of Common Descent, is at least reasonable cause to doubt it.(16) Good luck Con! =D (1)http://myxo.css.msu.edu... (2)http://www.mirror.co.uk... (3)A member of the Korowai tribe of south-eastern Papua who requested that I keep his identity confidential (for obvious reasons) (4)Genesis 2:7 (5)An ignorant creationist. (6)Nature, vol. 345, 1990, p. 765 (7)Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe , 1982, pp. 26-27 (8)Preuss, T. M. 2012. Human brain evolution: From gene discovery to phenotype discovery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109:10709–10716. (9)Answers Research Journal 6 (2013): 63-69. (10)mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/6/1007.full (11)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (12)http://www.cod.edu... (13)http://journals.cambridge.org... (14)http://www.genetics.org... (15)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (16)I wanted to reach 16 sources