Fernando Castro-Chavez.

This is a critical review of a typical article promotional for evolution as it was the one appeared in National Geographic in November of 2004. The concealment in that article, and in evolutionary writings in general is of the fact that related organisms can interbreed producing fertile offspring. The fact that the Galapagos finches can interbreed, producing fertile offspring, makes them just varieties of the same kind of organism. Instead of being the finches considered as different species. That demonstrates the typical biases of a global scientific establishment evolutionarily oriented, and at the same time that the human science is not perfect at all, nor infallible, making mistakes even by misclassifying thousands of organisms. Other misclassifications include dogs, wolves and coyotes, which are able to interbreed and like those finches, to produce fertile offspring among them.

The variability or change within the same kinds of organisms is a fact confirmed by the many varieties or races of dogs that exist. And among those we can include the Wolf, the Coyote, the Jackal and the Dingo, being all of them just varieties of dogs, as they can interbreed one to another and produce fertile offspring. That speaks about the plasticity of the genomes of same kinds of organisms. Plasticity that allows them to present variability, not only for purposes of adaptation, but also for aesthetics, as can be found in the diversity of colors and sizes, as in the beauty of the seashells, no matter what the evolutionists speculation of tomorrow could be (p. xxxviii).

The same fact of variability or change within the same kinds of organisms can be confirmed even by humans, as the pigmies, Caucasians, Asians, etc. can interbreed one to another producing fertile descendants. The same with the variation within bovines, cranes, honeycreepers, mockingbirds, zebras, anoles, rheas, etc.

Variability within clearly present boundaries on the organisms, which can be called "the natural limits to biological change", allow diversity of colors and shapes, but always bringing fertility within their offspring.

What is inconceivable, something that has been "imposed" as "fact" for some people, is the extending assumption that, because there is variability within similar inter-fertile groups, that there must be also an anarchic and unlimited "transformism" for a group of organisms. That "transformism" ("anagenesis") supposedly allow organisms to "jump" over any specific boundary, as in the evolutionary sub-theory of the "punctuated equilibria". Producing then organisms totally different through time, becoming those new beings unable to interbreed or to reproduce with "the source" organisms, being this a speculation only, which minorities of the population are trying to impose to the rest of humanity.

The simple fact of fertility in the products of interbreeding has been dismissed and ignored for the pro-evolutionary press. As an example of this we can see the November 2004 number of National Geographic. There, an editorial promoting the theory of evolution was written by William L. Allen, its Editor in Chief. Allen then, to keep deceiving the public through the writings of David Quammen allowed extreme mistakes. Quammen has been writing on support of evolution for 25 years, and he declared that those same finches that we know that interbreed, were "more than a dozen new species", not explaining anywhere the interbreeding fact. Was that something that he deliberately ignored? In fact we know today that those finches are only varieties of the same kind of organism, being able to interbreed and to produce fertile offspring among themselves.

The accepted hypothesis for this article (Ha) is that: "There is a biased trend in a minority of the human population to deceivingly try to impose to the rest of the humanity, as a "fact", the theory of evolution"

Quammen wrote, "Evolution proceeds slowly - too slowly to be observed by a single scientist within a research lifetime". That is still the "best" excuse of evolutionary thinkers.

The fact is that Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin was a strong promoter of the ideas of a godless origin of the universe. Nowhere in that magazine we find this antecedent. His grandson, Charles Darwin, was just "building-up" on his family's tradition in agnosticism. What we read in the magazine is the agnostic convictions of Charles Darwin: "he spent 22 years secretly gathering evidence and pondering arguments - both for and against his theory - … Darwin himself quietly renounced Christianity during his middle age, and later described himself as an agnostic. He continued to believe in a distant, impersonal deity of some sort, a greater entity that had set the universe and its laws into motion, but not in a personal God who had chosen humanity as specially favored species." Quammen also declared that the wife of C. Darwin, Emma, a Christian woman, "prayed for his soul" (p. 9). In other part of that article, Quammen declares that "…fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life forms without any involvement of a god", as he textually writes in that magazine (p. 6). It is unfortunate that the small 12 % is nested in public scientific institutions, manipulating the scientific research and results. But, by the other side, it is very encouraging to see that at least 88 % of the American population includes God at the origin of the Universe, and also that no less than 45 % agrees that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time".

Other atheist and agnostic influences on Charles Darwin, aside of his own grandfather were Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus.

Quammen's last statement of that National Geographic number was that "Peter Kibisov, a former convict in Russia, carries two enduring remnants from his prison time: a Crucifixion tattoo and drug-resistant TB (Mycobacterium tuberculosis). He hopes God will help him, but evolution-based science is what guides the search for an earthly cure".

But, it is really that so? It is really medicine an "evolution-based science"? Not at all! We just need to remember that the founder of microbiology was a Christian believer in the Biblical record of the Creation, Louis Pasteur, as many other outstanding researchers working at their best lacked of any evolutionary superstition, like the founder of genetics himself, Gregor Mendel.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, and many others, like the Hare Krishna Srila Prabhupada, reject the theories of evolution. In an example given by the Muslim Harun Yahya, in his book The Evolution Deceit he calls the theory of evolution "a deception".

Quammen declares that "Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered the fundamentals of genetics in Darwin's time, but his ideas, published in an obscure journal, were ignored". If we dig into history we will discover that the very reason that Mendel was ignored was the presence of evolutionary ideas, as Carl Von Nagely, the incompetent advisor of Mendel, completely ignored the work of Mendel having it in his hands. Where else Mendel could have ever published his eight years of work if the evolutionary thinking of his time was blocking his findings as well as his results, to prevent them to become well known in his own lifetime? Even in the time of Bateson there was still rejection to Mendel's Laws, being its allied forces the breeders of the USDA in the U.S.A., not Bateson's grant-provider contemporary academic world. The academy, naturalists and botanists rejected Mendel's work and Laws.

More on Quammen's words related to the philosophy of evolution: "Theory… Knowledgeable experts accept it as fact… an explanatory statement that fits the evidence… embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along. The rest of us generally agree…" "…Darwin floated a number of theoretical notions… some of which were mistaken and illusory. He was wrong about a famous geologic mystery, the parallel shelves along a Scottish valley called Glen Roy. Most notably, his theory of inheritance - which he labeled pangenesis and cherished despite its poor reception among his biologist colleagues - turned out to be dead wrong…" However, Quammen and other evolutionists have decided that Darwin's Evolution, foundation of any other evolutionist concept, including their own, are right!

That is the title of the editorial of Bill Allen for that magazine's number (p., xvi). Allen tries to justify Darwin by saying, "Darwin never claimed we are". The point is that we can confidently say that humans are not descended from pre-apes or from pre-humans, neither, as the DNA of Neandertals (Neanderthals) demonstrated to be non-human, not pre-human. Neandertals appeared after humans were already present on earth. For a while both groups were living side by side, a fact not mentioned anywhere in that magazine's number, disregarding his own editorial title.¹ Why Bill Allen starts with that specific declaration that "Humans Are Not Descended From Apes"? Why the title in that editorial? It is because recent studies, not even mentioned in that full number of National Geographic, demonstrated that humans and chimpanzees are genetically very different than previous pro-evolution papers claimed it to be.²

Despite the title of the editorial, Quammen declared on page 32: "the new field of genomics uses information technology such as the DNA chip, charting the relationships among such different species as the fruit fly, chimpanzee, and ourselves". But, as we know, humans are not descended from apes, neither from pre-humans, nor from pre-apes, or from insects, or from protozoa, or from bacteria, not at all.

The last page of that number of National Geographic includes in its "flashback" an old picture of a trader with mammoth tusks, with the footnote: Was Darwin wrong? Digging It. Ending with the note of Margaret G. Zackowitz, "a September 1907 Geographic article reported that in Siberia "there has been a regular export of mammoth ivory. More than 100 pairs of mammoth tusks have come into the marked yearly during the last 200 years". "They're still coming", she adds, "trade in mammoth ivory remains legal to this day". Are the mammoths proof of any kind of evolution or rather of extinction?

It is a fact, as we have declared, that the more than 12 varieties of finches from the Galapagos Islands are able to interbreed, producing fertile offspring, even when they originally were mistakenly classified as pertaining to different "species" by John Gould, a friend of Darwin. We also need to be aware that human science is not perfect, neither infallible. There are a great number of misclassifications of organisms that were named as if being of different species, when indeed they pertain to the same kinds of organisms. The closest to home and most notable example is that of dogs, wolves and coyotes interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, which sets them as members of the same kind of organisms, adding up to the example of the finches that we are considering here.

Charles Darwin himself, in order to "sell his product" decided to use a weak definition of species. Darwin's definition of "species" was more similar to the definition of varieties. Darwin considered, for the advantage of his theory that morphology was the "very soul" of natural history. Instead of taking the painstaking experimental approach to verify if those finches were able to interbreed and to produce fertile offspring, Darwin decided to be based in suppositions, like the never to be found or seen "unbroken descent from common ancestors" (p. 13). But, even over his sandy and weak definition for "species", which rather is a definition for varieties within the same kind of organisms, Darwin built up his edifice of "the origin of species", which should be called, true to facts, "a description of varieties". Darwin does not explain any origin or any real and new "species". "Evolution by natural selection" is Darwin's hymn, hymn that the faithful ministers of evolution repeat and repeat, concealing and dismissing the evidence for the contrary, like this fertility test for the second generation of similar organisms and like the common design of life.

In p. xlii Quammen recommends the book of Ernst Mayr What Evolution Is. We need to remember that Mayr, likewise as Darwin, proposed a second weak classification for "species" based on "geographical isolation". For Mayr's definition, the Chihuahua dog from Mexico should be a different "species" when compared to the German Shepherd. But that is not true to facts, as the dog breeders know it. Even Darwin had "puppies of Bull-dogs & Greyhound" in flasks. Darwin knew that fact and concealed it by not measuring other species with the same rule. Other of Quammen's recommended books was written by Niles Eldredge, who co-proposed the unlikely "punctuated equilibria", together with Stephen Jay-Gould, hypothesis resembling the old proposal of Nagely, the bad advisor of Mendel. Opposing theories within the evolutionary thinking demonstrate that instead of being a consistent and unified body, the evolutionary field is a floating space filled with unlimited conflicting and contradictory speculations.

Quammen still declares (in pages 26-27): "There was a similar pattern of diversification, Darwin had noticed, among Galapagos tortoises and among mockingbirds. Why should remote islands contain such diversity? His answer was that isolation - plus time, plus adaptation to local conditions - leads to the origin of species. It seemed more logical than assuming they had been created and placed in the Galapagos individually". However, the complete "castle" of the theory of evolution based on "the origin of species" of Darwin crumbles when we clearly inform the people that none of those are new or different "species". Not the different tortoises, nor the mockingbirds, neither the finches. Darwin, with full knowledge, attempted to deceive his readers in order to make his point. Those are varieties or races of only one and the same kind of organism. There is variability within "species", not the origin of any new species within "species". Furthermore, those new varieties are not "evolving" in something else, or something different, but just being adapted to new environmental conditions, while continuing to fertile interbreed with their distant relatives. All kinds of organisms have been intelligently designed with such plasticity to adapt to diverse environments and to exhibit different colors without necessarily responding to any environmental pressure or need, but to a natural art on aesthetics and beauty.

In the Website of that magazine we read the interesting statement of the photographer Robert Clark who deckared that the most memorable part of this assignment was shooting the finches at the Tring branch of the British Natural History Museum, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) outside of London. Clark declared, "the finches were a major source of inspiration for Darwin, and getting to see them up close, to have them arranged for me by the curators, to light them, and to make pictures of them was an extraordinary experience."

Indeed, being the finches a major source of inspiration for Darwin, and being confirmed that they are just varieties of the same kind of organism, as his other inspirational sources. The varieties of fancy pigeons likewise, as the finches, interbreed and produce fertile offspring. With that we can see that Darwin always in his books, on describing factual living organisms, was referring to varieties or races of the same kind of organisms only, but not to new emerging "species". The cameraman was the only one that did all the painstaking traveling throughout the world to illustrate Quammen's article. Clark himself declared: "Time was the toughest thing to handle. I had about six weeks to complete shooting at 24 different locations in six countries and commonwealths: Russia, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. I shot most of the story using a large-format camera, which demands pretty powerful lighting. So I was traveling with 10 to 12 cases of equipment. You don't want to hear about the customs inspections and the excess baggage charges!" Related to his most painful assignment he declared: "It was strange to be working at the tuberculosis prison in Russia. We worked in masks and gloves for three days among inmates infected with a multiple drug-resistant strain of the disease. It was scary knowing they couldn't be cured." By the contrary, the writer of the article himself, Quammen, declared: "I've spent 20 years doing field travel that helps me understand evolutionary ideas, and there have been some scary moments in all that time. But for this assignment I simply visited a few cities and spent time with very civilized, very smart evolutionary biologists in the comfort of their offices. Absolutely no suffering involved."

Worst enough, in page 30 of the same magazine, and in an attempt to answer their self asked question: "Can we see evolution in action? Can it be observed in the wild? Can it be measured in the laboratory", the very first example that they present is that of the finches. Finches can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Quammen mentions the research done by "Peter and Rosemary Grant, two British-born researchers who have spent decades where Charles Darwin spent weeks" but conceals the plain fact, killer of the "evolutionary theories".³ It is the finches' evidence, evidence of evolutionary transformisms (branded as "anagenesis"), or of "speciation"? No! According to Quammen "speciation" is the other major phase of evolutionary change "being at the same time rarer and more elusive", than "anagenesis" (pp. 30 and 9). What else "evolution" can invent in its attempt to support their barracks? That does not prove evolution at all (not even by repeating their chants time after time, p. 12). Just the opposite! It tears "evolution" down! The same can be said regarding the experiments done with Drosophila melanogaster. Those continue being a Drosophila melanogaster (the small fruit flies) after 35 or more generations and under different laboratory conditions. However, Rice and Salt say and think that seemingly, or "very nearly so" (p. 30), recorded and almost ("incipient", they declare) case of "speciation". The same can be said regarding the experiments done with innumerable varieties of bacteria, like countless generations of Escherichia coli, those Escherichia coli still being Escherichia coli and still being just diverse varieties of bacteria.

Nowhere in the magazine we are able to learn that fact that all those finches, no matter if scientists originally wrongly misclassify them as "members of different species", are able to interbreed and to produce fertile offspring.

What credibility do you concede to a magazine that does that? A magazine that has been found biased while presenting in the past a spurious evidence of a supposed evolution of birds from reptiles (National Geographic's "Archaeoraptor")? A magazine that stills presents the Archaeopteryx as a link between reptiles and birds (p. 13) instead of the published fact to the contrary?⁴ The same happens with the supposed embryological echoing of "evolution" (pp. 9 and p. 13), when Darwin wrote that the embryo "reveals the structure of its progenitor". Haeckel took it to the extreme of the fraud on drawing that, and more recently that has been already demonstrated as an error, even corrected by the authors of the textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell.⁵ The same mistakes can be seen in the supposed "evolution" of the horse (p. 12), which was fraudulently framed by putting, in an ascending vertical, extinct members of different species, even starting with an extinct member of the rodents (Eohippus ('Dawn horse') = Hyracotherium)!⁶ Or the very Quammen's idea of the "evolution" of the ants to became wasps, based on a picture of two worker ants preserved in most ancient amber (pp. 22-23).

The opening of Quammen's article presents a two-page picture of a fancy pigeon, the jacobin. Then declares that the domestic breeding of fancy pigeons was Darwin's analogy for selection in the wild. However, anyone careful enough can identify that "the jacobin, the English pouter, the scandaroon, and the nun, etc." are only varieties within one particular and same kind of organism, the pigeon. Not a "speciation" event, but a fancy variability needing only of a domestic breeding and selection. How "evolution' explains fancy features in nature that have nothing to do with any "struggle of the fittest"?

In the same way, to their self asked question: "Was Darwin wrong?" the National Geographic team responds: "No. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming". But, it is really so? Not at all, as we have seen that the main inspiration for Darwin's theory and for its "speciation" consists of varieties within similar organisms, able to interbreed and to produce fertile offspring.

The similarities between different kinds of organisms (i.e., the resemblance between a five-fingered hand and a five-toed paw) is blindly interpreted by evolution as "common descent, shaped by natural selection", also called "the continuum of life" (p. 21). In the same way they interpret the words "Human Biology By Proxy", in reference to the sequenced genome of the mouse with its 30,000 genes. Quammen even declares, "laboratory mice serve as research models because, sharing our mammalian ancestry, they also share a large proportion of our DNA". But anyone, trusting God as the source of life in the Universe, can see in those similarities the common design, which is perfect by allowing flexibility, with high plasticity to adapt itself and to aesthetically change within a boundary or limit.

Is it possible that diseases like cancer, virus and bacteria are now the preferred tools used by evolutionists to try to support their theories? Is that their "better" evidence now? Yes, as we read in that magazine: "the dynamics of those microbes within human bodies, within human populations, can only be understood in terms of evolution". It is that true to facts? What kind of change or "evolution" is happening in the microbes? Are they being transformed in something different than being those same particular microbes (virus or bacteria)? No.

Quammen further declares, "bacteria and viruses evolve too", and that, "the capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous to large numbers of people and so difficult and expensive to treat". However, we can see that the "capacity for quick change" among those dangerous microbes is that allows them to become resistant to diverse killer drugs and to adapt to the most adverse environments, as different hosts. That is just a characteristic of their nature.

Bacteria never transform into protozoa and virus never transforms into bacteria. Their limits or boundaries are still present, as in any other living being.

The microbes have the elevated ability to produce varieties or races at a fast pace, everything happening within them can be completely understood within the boundaries of their own nature, as they are not being transformed in something different to their very nature, no matter the evolutionary opinion.

Stephen Palumbi declared, "antibiotics exert a powerful evolutionary force driving infectious bacteria to evolve powerful defenses against all but the most recently invented drugs". To what kind of change or "evolution" is Palumbi appealing? To that "transformism" implied in the evolutionary supporters? Or rather, on the generation of variability of new resistant varieties of bacteria (TB) and of virus (HIV)? Practical evidence indicates that Palumbi is referring to the second case, the variability within similar kinds of organisms. The same can be said of insects and weeds that acquire resistance to insecticides and herbicides throughout the very same process. Are those insects and plants being transformed into something different than in varieties of their very own inherited nature? No. Those insects and plants still the same kinds of insects and plants that were before, as interbreeding tests can confirm it.

Medicine and Agriculture were not originated because of "evolution". Thus, those are not "evolutionary-based" fields.

With what we have seen thus far we can clearly see that there is a bias in the evolutionary thinking. There are many people involved in science, which are "antievolutionists" because the conjectures of Darwin and his followers can not stand their serious and critical scrutiny. It is not the same with other fields of knowledge. Have you seen any public or strong movement of "anti-relativists", "anti-Copernicans, "anti-Continental Drift", anti-atomic theory" or "anti-electricity"? Can that be because all of those other scientific ideas do not reject "a-priori" the revelation and the existence of an Almighty God, as the evolutionary theory certainly does? Yes. Those other fields of knowledge mentioned well can fit into the Biblical revelation, not so evolution.

The worst case of speculation is that exhibited by "the empiricist" Philip D. Gingerich and his fallacy-based "research" on the evolution of whales. That man did a big model based on a piece smaller than a lug nut fitting inside the hand, a small lump of petrified bone found in Pakistan, "a single piece of fossil", "a pulley-shaped anklebone", an "astragalus" from a supposed four-legged whale. Gingerich then invented full-scale "weird skeletal shapes that seemed almost chimerical", Quammen declared. Gingerich's group's imagination generated that animal, and then they claimed it to be an evolutionary earthly ancestor of the oceanic whale. Here, the product of a man's imagination, "the progress of thinking about whale evolution", says Quammen, "combines intellectual passion and solid expertise", and, I must say, a lot of money invested in an attempt to support evolution. The same can be said of whale-like "ear bones" assembled in a "dog-like" creature, or the "webbed feet", and legs plus "a long toothy snout", etc. Whales now are, in the evolutionary imaginations, descended from artiodactyls, the even-toed herbivores, such as cows, pigs, antelopes, hippopotamuses, camels, giraffes, etc. and not of carnivores. Is that speculative behavior justified to try to support something impossible as that imaginary evolution among different kinds of organisms? No.

The academy rejected for more than a century also the work on geographical catastrophes started by Geroges Cuvier, based on the Biblical record.⁷ Cuvier was mentioned by Quammen as an outstanding morphologist, also.

Is it out there really a "vast body of supporting evidence for the theory of evolution" as Quammen says, or just the opposite? In Quammen's own words we can perceive the answer: "the fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting-room floor". Gingerich and others have taken the task to invent to them their own 999 frames that they suppose are lost!

Critical References:

1. Krings M, Stone A, Schmitz RW, Krainitzki H, Stoneking M, Paabo S. Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans. Cell 1997; 90:19-30.

2. International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium. DNA sequence and comparative analysis of chimpanzee chromosome 22. Nature 2004; 429:382-388.

3. Grant PR, Grant BR. Genetics and the origin of bird species. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1997; 94:7768-75.

4. Feduccia, A., cited in V. Morell, ‘Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms’, Science 1993; 259:764–65.

5. Pennisi E. Developmental Biology: Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered. Science 1997; 277:1435.

6. Eldredge N, cited in L. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th Ed., Master Books, Santee, CA, USA, p. 78, 1988. Othniel C. Marsh's 'Horse Evolution' became enshrined in every biology textbook and a grand fossil exhibition was staged at the American Museum of Natural History. "The exhibit is now hidden from public view as an outdated embarrassment. Almost a century later, palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson re-examined horse evolution and concluded that generations of students had been misled." Encyclopedia of Evolution - Richard Milner. The identity of Eohippus as being equal to Hyracotherium is given, i.e. in: Vollmerhaus B, Knospe C, Roos H. The phylogenesis of equine teeth. Anat Histol Embryol. 2001;30:237-48.

7. Pope KO, D'Hondt SL, Marshall CR. Meteorite impact and the mass extinction of species at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1998; 95:11028-11029.

Other Useful Links:

Research on Intelligent Design

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