SCIENCE AND FAITH: Three Stunning Recent Discoveries Challenge Conventional Evolutionary Wisdom
Darwinian evolution has been the established orthodoxy in respectable academic circles for a long time and, just as is the case in the political world, challenging the conventional wisdom about the origin of the species can be a risky business.
But as the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News (EN) frequently notes, a growing body of evidence and an increasing number of top-ranked scientists and researchers are making discoveries that at the very least ought to make reasonable people seriously consider the possibility that currently accepted Darwinian assumptions may not be the whole story.
Is the progression in BMW sedans an illustration of evolution or Intelligent Design? Photo by Cenk Batuhan Özaltun on Unsplash
Just consider the following three recent discoveries, as described by EN (Note to skeptics – EN provides links to the original materials so you can verify that the descriptions are accurate):
First, lots of the folks sitting in prison these days are there because police linked them to a crime scene via their fingerprints. But a recent discovery by scientists at Flinders University in Australia renders fingerprints old news in forensic criminology.
Why? Because the Flinders team discovered that every human being drops DNA breadcrumbs everywhere they go. That’s right, everywhere you go, your body leaves bits of your unique DNA behind, including on surfaces you don’t actually touch.
“We share our personal CSI everywhere we go, resembling the character “Pig-Pen” in the old Peanuts cartoons, who walked with a cloud of dust around him — except that our dust is the most densely packed information in the known universe.
“Presumably our whole genome could be reconstructed from invisible particles that float off our skin and breath, as if we are sharing copies of our biography everywhere we go — a biography so information-rich that if printed in 130 volumes would require 95 years to read (University of Leicester),” observes EN.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, consider the second recent stunner: Archeologists digging in the Marble Canyon field have discovered a previously unknown giant from the Cambrian Era. Dubbed the “Titanokorys gainesi by the Royal Ontario Museum, it is half a meter long, almost as big as the famous Anomalocaris,” according to EN
“Like Anomalocaris, it has a toothed round mouth characteristic of radiodonts (round teeth). And like all the Cambrian animals, there is no evidence of transitional forms. Titanokorys carried a big carapace over its soft parts, including its enormous head and a suite of complex organs … That’s a pretty big and complex animal to explode into the fossil record,” EN observes.
And here comes recent stunning discovery number three: Proteins communicate over long distances via DNA. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science report finding that, rather than a one-way order from the DNA to the protein, the communication is more like a dialogue.
“We were surprised to discover that DNA, in addition to containing the genetic code, acts like a communication cable, transmitting information over a relatively long distance from one protein binding site to another,” said one of the researchers quoted by EN.
So, if you are open to new ideas, head on over to EN here and get the rest of the story of these three amazing discoveries. Then come back and share your thoughts with everybody else in the comments.