What makes humans different from the other species? This was the subject of a recent Time magazine cover story. Life scientists are rapidly learning more about this mystery, and the Time issue conveyed some of these fascinating details. Unfortunately it was all awkwardly forced into the usual evolutionary dogma.
While random mutations are usually harmful, the Time cover story informed the reader that "sometimes, purely by chance, the change gives the new organism some sort of advantage that enables it to produce more offspring, thus perpetuating the change in another generation." And when these lucky shots accumulate you end up with designs that baffle the best scientists in the world. The DNA code, hemoglobin, echolocation, the cheetah, jellyfish, woodpecker, and a million other designs and species just happened to have been created. This is, unfortunately, where evolution has taken us. Bizarre conclusions which have little correspondence with empirical science are passed down as known truths.
Of course throwing Homo sapiens into the mix does not help matters. As if sensing the obvious absurdity, the authors make an appeal to authority and deep time:
As scientists keep reminding us, evolution is a random process in which haphazard genetic changes interact with random environmental conditions to produce an organism somehow fitter than its fellows. After 3.5 billion years of such randomness, a creature emerged that could ponder its own origins--and revel in a Mozart adagio.
A random process in which haphazard genetic changes result in Mozart? In evolution, science has become a tool for promoting the mathematically implausible. This is, no doubt, one of the greatest creation tales of all time. And while its appeal to billions and billions of years may sound good to evolutionists, deep time does very little to solve the problem. For instance, the complex designs we find in biology arose abruptly, in time windows that are, at the outside, several orders of magnitude shorter than the billions and billions of years to which evolutionists like to appeal. All the action occurs in those brief spurts where new designs appear.
What evolutionists really need is a cause for their effect. They need a narrative in which mind boggling designs arise via a directed mechanism, rather than by winning the lottery a million times. Having to explain repeatedly that blind luck has produced yet another engineering marvel doesn't sound good. So evolutionists tend to explain biology's designs as having been caused by selection. It is a non evolutionary explanation since Darwin's theory calls for selection to act after the design has been somehow created, but that's a technicality. Using selection as the cause sounds much better.
Not surprisingly this sort of appeal shows up in the Time magazine piece where anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy explains the increased brain size of humans as a consequence of selection. Human brains, he explains, "expand because they were selected." It sounds better than claiming that one of the most complex items in the universe arose from a random process.
