Transcription
In essence, it seems once a particular evolutionary evidence has built up enough marketing cloud in the scientific and educational community, it's typically just massaged a little to somehow still fit with evolutionary explanations so that it doesn't lose its entire impact overall. And this is the exact same thing that's happening around this whole junk DNA situation.
Do you remember the old phrase, one man's junk is another man's treasure? Well, according to a brand new scientific study, that certainly is the case now as far as our DNA goes. And what do I mean by that? Well, for years now, many of our materialistic, atheistic, evolution believing friends along with their compromising theistic evolutionary cohorts had been trying to convince us the overwhelming majority of the human genome was well, just leftover junk from our evolutionary past. In essence, that would be similar to me saying that the majority of the information in this library doesn't have any meaning, just a few books because those are the only ones I understand at this point.
And like many other supposed evidences for evolution, this concept was widely taught in classrooms, TV shows, and various other education and media forms around the world beginning over 5 decades ago. As the popular Quantum magazine stated in a recent online article on junk DNA, scientists casually referred to junk DNA as far back as the 1960s, but they took up the term more formally in 1972 when the geneticist and evolutionary biologist Susumu Ono used it to argue that large genomes would inevitably harbor sequences passively accumulated over many millennia that did not encode any proteins. Soon thereafter, researchers acquired hard evidence of how plentiful this junk is in genomes.
Now, of course, biblical creationists had been pointing out the many challenges to this claim from the beginning. The most obvious point being that just because scientists don't know what large portions of DNA were doing, that didn't mean they were junk. I.e., ignorance shouldn't be reason to jump to evolutionary conclusions. And of course, that's exactly what it was. Because while many evolutionists said there shouldn't be a significant amount of leftover genetic material in living things because it would have been removed by natural selection over supposed evolutionary deep time, other evolutionists rather conveniently proposed what's called a neutral or near neutral theory that suggests that leftover DNA might not be affected by selection and would just build up over supposed millions of years. Kind of like a materialistic hoarder piling up as much stuff as they can possibly fit inside their overcrowded home. Thus explaining where all of this supposed useless DNA inside us came from.
As an aside, this itself demonstrates something interesting about the story of evolution. Because it doesn't seem to matter what the facts are, you can always come up with an evolutionary story to explain them. Even if these stories conflict with one another simultaneously. And this highlights that when people refer to evolution as being scientific, it isn't the type of science that's repeatable, testable, and always yields the same results. Regardless, this junk DNA interpretation of what these large areas of supposed non-coding regions of DNA were became a dominant view in secular science for many years.
An anti-creationist used such ideas to criticize biblical creation or intelligent design by laughing at the notion of an intelligent agent using defective and/or useless bits of genetic material. As this article from the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Journal in 2010 typified, why an intelligent and loving designer would have infused the human genome with so many potential and often realized regulatory flaws is open to theological debate. Any such philosophical discussion should probably include the issue of whether the designer was fallible and if so, why.
However, when you think about it, this junk DNA claim was always just a modern take on the old vestigial organ argument, where evolutionists used to claim there were over 100 useless organs inside humans that were just ancient organic artifacts that were no longer needed, but just hanging around inside us like a bunch of trash that hadn't been taken out to the evolutionary curb yet. And again, the reason for this argument at the time was the same, i.e., they didn't know what these brilliant biological constructs did at the time, so they concluded they were leftover junk. Of course, today you'd be laughed out of your biomed class, let alone your medical practice, if you were so obtuse to claim the things that used to be on that list, like your pituitary gland, were useless organs. Even one of the most popular and last vestiges of that particular argument, the once so-called useless appendix, is known to be fully functional these days.
And of course, just like clockwork, the whole DNA idea itself will now need to be thrown into the evolutionary trash bin, just like so many other evidences before, as a brand new article from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology just dropped a materialistic busting bombshell on it in the summary of an article titled, "Scientists Just Discovered a Secret Code Hidden in Your DNA." What scientists once dismissed as junk DNA may actually be some of the most powerful code in our genome, controlling how other genes are turned on or off, especially during early human development. They then go on to describe that how what they once thought wasn't doing anything is actually doing a whole lot, yada yada, and basically describe how even more brilliantly designed the human genome is than we realized before.
But here's the thing. This isn't exactly my first rodeo in the creation evolution debate. So, I know this won't be seen by most evolutionists as a big deal whatsoever because they can just fall back on the old other argument they had that predicted the entire genome would likely have function and just go, "Whoopsie, no big deal. That's just how science works." You get new information and you update your ideas. Why are these silly creatards making such a big deal about this? Well, for one, because your former mocking in regard to our criticism of the whole idea certainly won't be apologized for, and it will likely never be mentioned that we predicted observational science would eventually find function in most of the genome based on biblical history saying God created everything being very good in the beginning and then degrading after the fall. So, our scientific hypothesis was certainly better than yours, despite your claims to the contrary.
But on top of that, I've seen how the propaganda game has been played out in these scenarios time and time again. And it's the same MO here as well, as I'll demonstrate shortly. I'm very familiar with the playbook followed whenever these so-called proofs of evolution get overturned. And what's the play I'm talking about? Well, from the very beginning of the promotion of modern evolutionary theory, when forced to admit they were wrong about whatever big idea they were promoting overall, they always seemed to find a way to insert an evolutionary saving mechanism into their explanation of the facts they found in order to blunt the blow against their failed and former bold claims that supposedly proved evolution but now don't.
For example, when all based on his forged embryo drawings of human and animal kinds, the German scientist Ernst Haeckel's ridiculous claim that human babies relive their evolutionary ancestry inside their mother's womb as they develop, changing from a wormlike creature to a fish stage to an ape-like creature before turning into a human, etc. which was encapsulated by the grandiose sounding phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was shown to be complete made-up junk science. Instead of just admitting the whole concept was bogus, the story just got modified to retain its credibility. Evolutionists then claimed that yes, that part about recapitulation was incorrect, but the similarity between the embryos of the various creatures compared to humans still provided legitimacy to Haeckel's original claim. So they were included in textbooks for the next 140 years even though they were known to be fraudulent forgeries from the beginning. And it was finally in 1997 that the evolution-believing professional embryologist Dr. Michael Richardson declared them as such and demonstrated with actual pictures that the similarity argument itself was completely bogus. Saying about Haeckel's drawings, "This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. These are fakes." And yet even then they were still included in public school textbooks after that.
Another example would be the evolutionary icon Archaeopteryx. Once claimed to be the first bird or "dino bird" and said to be the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. Well, with new fossil finds showing that birds predated Archaeopteryx by supposed millions of years, demonstrating it couldn't have been the transitional creature it was claimed to be because you can't be older than your grandparents. Some evolutionists are now claiming Archaeopteryx was in fact a bird-like dinosaur rather than a dinosaur-like bird. So, even though their "first bird" claim has been debunked, it's still somehow proof of evolution.
In essence, it seems once a particular evolutionary evidence has built up enough marketing cloud in the scientific and educational community, it's typically just massaged a little to somehow still fit with evolutionary explanations so that it doesn't lose its entire impact overall. And this is the exact same thing that's happening around this whole junk DNA situation.
And to prove it to you, let's go through the article I mentioned earlier and show you how a patchwork of unproven evolutionary explanations are woven into the observed scientific discoveries demonstrated that contradict their original claim about so-called junk DNA. In order to make it sound like evolution is still somehow involved. To make it easy to spot, first I'll show you only the parts in this section of the article that describe what's been confirmed through observational science. And after I'll show the same section as originally written, padded with evolutionary presuppositions with no direct scientific support, i.e. their made-up stories inserted to make it sound more like evolution did it.
"What scientists once dismissed as junk DNA may actually be some of the most powerful code in our genome. A new international study reveals that DNA buried in our genes plays an active role in controlling how other genes are turned on or off, especially during early human development. These sequences act like tiny genetic switches. Using new analysis tools and large-scale experiments, researchers discovered that certain DNA fragments are especially strong at activating genes."
>> Okay, now that we've heard the actual scientific discoveries they've made through direct observation, let's listen to that section again with all of the evolutionary storytelling built into it.
>> "What scientists once dismissed as junk DNA may actually be some of the most powerful code in our genome. A new international study reveals that ancient viral DNA buried in our genes plays an active role in controlling how other genes are turned on or off, especially during early human development. These sequences, originally from long extinct viruses, have evolved to act like tiny genetic switches. Using new analysis tools and large-scale experiments, researchers discovered that certain viral DNA fragments are especially strong at activating genes and may even have helped shape what makes humans different from other primates."
Can you see the difference? All observational science has shown that this DNA has function, which means their junk DNA hypothesis is junk. But to maintain some kind of materialistic credibility, they claim it's ancient viral DNA and then mention it in relation to other primates to emphasize the common evolutionary premise that we share a common heredity with them. And this gives the impression while conceding this supposed ancient junk DNA does have function, it does so because of evolution acting on it over evolutionary time.
Here's another quote from the article summing up the observational facts within an unobserved evolutionary framework. "The study offers a model for understanding how junk DNA can evolve into regulatory elements with important biological roles. By tracing the evolution of these sequences and directly testing their function, the researchers have demonstrated how ancient viral DNA has been co-opted into shaping gene activity in primates."
So, what they're implying is that junk DNA is no longer junk, although it apparently started off that way because it eventually evolved functionality. So, it's still kind of junk, but not really junk. You see the spin? But how exactly do they know how old this DNA is or when or how it came into being or that it evolved without any observational repeatable experiment that could prove it definitively? They haven't demonstrated any of the supposed history they claim to have happened. It's just a thin glaze of evolutionary storytelling poured over observed facts to make it fit their naturalistic worldview. And again, this is to lessen the impact of their failed junk DNA hypothesis by implying it's still old junk, but that it now has function because of evolution, which is what the original argument was trying to prove in the first place.
Training yourself to recognize the difference between science and storytelling when exposed to evolutionary indoctrination is important because this sleight of hand scientists often employ when blending observed facts with naturalistic narratives is now endemic to the secular scientific community. And most scientists are likely unaware they're even doing it because of their training telling them to conform to the concept of methodological naturalism, i.e., nature is all there is. However, many secularists active in the creation evolution debate are acutely aware of what they're doing. As this quote from the famous Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, which I've used many times before, clearly shows, "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense, is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs. In spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life. In spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories. Because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism."
Or as immunologist Scott Todd said even more simply, "Even if all the data points to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."
So it's not that there isn't any evidence for God or biblical creation. The fact is the evidence is overwhelming as Romans 1:20 states. "For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made." So they are without excuse. It's that it's all automatically dismissed or reinterpreted towards a materialistic explanation categorically.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man. and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things."
So, Christians need not be browbeaten by evolutionary interpretations of God's world. They simply need to train themselves to be discerning as God's word teaches. Just apply 2 Corinthians 10:5 and learn how to "destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and to take every thought captive to obey Christ."