Opinion polls

• In a MORI poll asking 2,000 Britons what best described their view of the origin and development of life, 22% chose ‘creationism’, 17% ‘intelligent design’ and 48% ‘evolution theory’.

• In an Opinionpanel Research poll asking the same question of university students, 14% expressed support for creationism, 22% for intelligent design and 56% for evolution theory.

The appearance of design in the world is ‘overwhelming’

• In his book The Blind Watchmaker evangelist for atheism Richard Dawkins defined biology as ‘the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose’ . In a newspaper interview he went so far as to admit that the appearance of design was ‘overwhelming’. It would be hard to disagree. Nonetheless, the agenda of Darwinian biology is to persuade people that the appearance is illusory, by transferring the creative powers of the apparent designer (God) to agents within nature (random mutation and between-species competition).

• One of the ways in which the concept of design is discredited is by suggesting that the adaptedness of organisms to particular conditions is incompatible with their having been designed. That is not the case: the ability to adapt to changing conditions requires more information - more computing power in the genetic program - than an inability to adapt.

There are at least five ‘kingdoms’ of life, not just plants and animals

• It used to be that kingdom was the highest level of biological classification, and organisms were classified into just two kingdoms, plants and animals. Now the highest level is the domain, of which there are three: eukaryotes, comprising all organisms with nuclei in their cells, and two very different groups of microbe: bacteria and archaea. The eukaryotes comprise four kingdoms: plants, animals, fungi and protists (unicellular algae and protozoans).

• Of all the gaps that separate one category of organism, the gaps between domains are the greatest of all. ‘How the eukaryotic cell came to be is one of the greatest enigmas in biology’ (Nature 446:983). Evolution theory assumes that the gaps arise through former intermediate forms becoming extinct, but the fossil record provides no evidence that these intermediates ever existed. The same is true of gaps between kingdoms, between phyla within kingdoms and between classes within many of the phyla.

Biologists admit that it is impossible to construct a single tree of life

• One of the principles of evolution theory is the belief that all organisms descend from a common ancestor. However, efforts to infer what kind of organism the last common ancestor might have been before it branched into different domains and kingdoms have ended in frustration. Genetic analyses do not support tree-thinking. Ignoring the possibility that their belief in common descent is misplaced, biologists are therefore trying to visualise close to the beginning a thicket of gene transfers between microbes.

The first 80% of the fossil record consists only of microbes and algae

• The earliest signs of organic activity go back some 3.5 billion years in radioisotope time, and all three domains are attested by 2.7 billion years ago. However, organisms more complex than microbes and plankton do not appear until 600 million years ago, with the mysterious ‘Ediacaran fauna’.

• Complex multicellular life does not appear until 545 million years ago, with the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, when organisms of astonishing diversity appear out of the blue. As Dawkins admits, ‘It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.’ (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 229)

Genesis does not say that species were created with forms fixed for all time

• The first chapter of Genesis refers to ‘kinds’, not species. It does not list or define what the kinds of plants, trees, marine animals etc were, and says nothing about whether, by virtue of being ‘kinds’, their forms were fixed.

• If, as he purportedly says of himself, God is capable of seeing all things from the beginning and nothing is impossible for him, one might suppose that he would have provided them with an ability to adapt as conditions changed.

Genesis in fact implies that some animals were created with enormous evolvability

• The third chapter speaks of the ‘snake’, a kind that originally had legs. Although it was condemned to creep on its belly, we should not assume that this happened all at once.

• There is compelling scientific evidence that snakes evolved from lizards, i.e. they once did have legs. The earliest fossils of snakes show the remnants of hind legs. Lizards and snakes share the same toxin types and have a venom system that goes back to the time before some lizards lost their legs.

• The earliest fossil lizard is an iguanian from the Triassic period. The fossil record does not suggest an evolution from any non-lizard kind of animal.

Human genes are not 99% the same as chimpanzee genes

• Ever since an influential Science paper by Wilson & King in 1975, it has been asserted that humans and chimpanzees are genetically 99% the same, but in the same journal that figure has now been described as a ‘myth’. ‘Human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%’, and researchers are finding that chunks of missing DNA, extra genes, different connections in gene networks and the very structure of chromosomes confound any quantification of “humanness” versus “chimpness”. In the case of the brain cortex, 17.4% of connections have been found to be specific to humans. In short, ‘there isn’t one single way to express the genetic distance between two complicated living organisms.’