Over the past weeks I have come to doubt the theory of evolution, although I strongly maintain my belief in a billion year old universe.
Here is what I have been thinking about:
>How does a bat get echo location through random mutations? The problem is that you cannot go halfway- a bat with a fully-formed echo-location system is necessary to prevent natural selection from crossing out an animal with something completely useless, like high-pitched sounds.
>How does a fully formed nervous system develop from a single-celled organism? Certainly, any animal that was born with, quite literally, half a brain, would die.
>Where are those transitionals?
>The number of mutations required to create something like a human from an ape is enormous? Why do we not see such a transition in the fossil strata?
>How does the venus fly trap evolve? Any plant that developed, for example, a highly sensitive "mouth" that would close when touched, but happened to be unable to reopen, or lacked the necessary digestive fluids and the mechanism of releasing these fluids, would quickly die. Developing such a complex system would be extremely complicated and extremely lucky!
>In many cases, as in the venus fly trap or bat, we would require massive mutations and miraculous luck to produce a healthy and competitive animal/plant that would survive the "forces" of natural selection. Why is it that we do not see such massive leaps today? Why do we not see more than just albinos or retarded animals?
>In cases where large scale mutation occurrs, it is extremely likely that at least one negative mutation would spoil the animal. This makes the chances of a highly mutated animal surviving long enough to reproduce unlikely.
>The low volume of mutations and high-number of negative mutations makes it very difficult to create such diversity in the plant and animal kingdom.
>The fossil record is compatable with evolution, but it does not give any evidence of evolution. The diversification indicates gradual evolution, but what created these differences, and what embeds diversity in a population? There is no evidence of mutations in the fossil strata. Where are transitionals? Where are grossly mutated organisms?
Don't get me wrong- my stance on creationism has not changed in the slightest. Creationism uses miraculous rates of evolution as well,and is more likely to be a fable than a factual record. I am not a creationist. And, believe it or not, I still am an atheist.
But recently I have come to challenge what I took as granted- mutations.
Demonstrate that mutations are not sufficiently abundant, or that the ratio of positive mutations is small, and you completely dismantle the evolutionist argument.
Darwin had some very sharp ideas, but at the time that he formulated such ideas, he was unable to test his theories of mutations.
The problem came when others ran with the idea. They, too, lacked the devices to test his radical and appealing concepts. But nonetheless, the concept sounded so good to them, that they propagated it. They planted it into the scientific community so quickly that by the time the methods to test it [mutations] came about, people had taken the concept for granted.
And that's what evolution is- a concept. This concept is not inherently false- the concept that you can travel faster than the speed of light is inherently false. Evolution is wholly possible, as long as you solidify the notion that random mutations could create diversity. Because science had grown around evolution, it forgot about testing it.
It's my opinion that there's another explanation to life and diversity on this planet. But no one's looking for a scientific alternative, because no one sees a reason to. Evolution is taken with a blind faith.