Mechanisms of Evolution are Really Mechanisms of Variation Within a Species or Kind. There is No Such Thing as Evolution from Species to Species

In Bret and Heather's most recent Dark Horse Podcast, #98, they discuss some criticisms of their recently published book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century and touch on some basic evolutionary principles that particularly interest me. Since one trend of criticism objects to their supposed failure to adress suchasic principlesthey spend a few minutes on them. it begins at about 41:30:



They give the very basic defintions of evolution which I've tried to address in my arguments against the ToE. I really can't fathom how they apply to their topics which are all about cultural expressions ih human populations, but I'm glad to see that they do make such a connection so that I can accept that they haven't just skipped on to some other whole definition of evolution to make their particular points.

"Evolution is a change in gene frqeuencies in a population over time"

That's the accepted definition, and they list the familiar "mechanisms of evoltuion" that are regarded as the way it all works, staring with Mutation which is of coruse always considered to be the very basis of the creation of DNA.

Mutation
Gene flow
Migration
Selection, which seems to be treated as synonymous with Adaptation

They do mean by this that they are the mechnisms of MICROevolution, which is synonymous with what I mean by variation, but to them it is just the first staage of species-to-species evolution, there being nothing in the theory to keep change from progressing indefinitely. Even the boundaries of the genome don't suggest boundaries to them for some reason.

The first thing I want to say here is that, although I think evolutionary theary is a monumental fraud on humanity, utterly wrong and pernicious, I like Bret and Heather, they often say some of the sanest most reasonable things about today's political situation, and I'm sure that their thinking in their book is also sane and reasonable given their assumptionjs about evolutionary theory, no matter how much I object to the theory. They are also liberals, so they are certainly not in my camp, but it's nice to know there are some sane liberals out there.

As I've addressed these basic principles of evolution I try to show that they simply have nothing whatever to do with evolution in the sense of Species evolving from other Species. What they are describing is not evolution, it's variation within a Species or Kind, and it's an amazing piece of intellectual deception that fuels the whole evolutionary edifice. The deception starts with co-opting the normal variations possible within a genome, through normal sexual recombination at least, to the idea of evolution from species to species. They so automatically subsume all these processes under the ToE I don't know what sort of intellectual bomb might set them free from it, but it would take some such drastic event in most cases.

You need genetic change, real change, not just variation on a theme, to make the theory work, and you do not have anything remotely approaching the sort of change you need. They pin the whole thing on Mutation as the mechanism they assume brings about such changes -- and I emphasize that they do in fact assume it, there being nothing about observed mutation that justifies this article of faith.

But the statement of faith is potent. As Heather puts it, "Mutation is the origin of all change." Mutationon is credited with the creation of DNA, all the genetic material that provides the recipe for the construction of a given organism. It's easy to see how it work. It's a mechanism for genetic change of a sort, the only one really. Most of the time it doesn't bring about change in the phenotype, or the organism itself, only in the chemical sequence of the DNA which apparently has quite a bit of built-in redundancy, and when it does bring about change in the organism it's most often a bad change, a disease to add to the long list of genetic diseases that has been accumulating. And every once in a great great while it appears to make a chanbge that's actually beneficial to the organism. And on this slim basis they erect the whole edifice of the evolution of DNA.

What are these very occasional beneficial changes mutation brings about anyway? When they're not busy destroying the organism. Sorry. Beneficial changes. Hm. Well, they are changes in the sequence of the DNA, and the sequence of DNA is a formula of sorts for a particular protein, and the protein is what somewho or other ultimately translates into a specific trait in the organism a particular genome belongs to. It changeds the expression of a gene in other words. It makes a variation on that gene. if the gene determines the shape of a fingernail, the new sequences will affect the shape of the fingernail. Am I wrong? I guess you could have a sequence that messes up two genes in succession rather than just one, and I'm not sure what happens then, but my guess is that mistakes in replication, which is what mutations are, have made corpses out of the gchanged genetic materio, relegating them to the very large cemetery in every genome known as Junk DNA. Or perhaps zombies in the casae of those that appear to retain some kind of spasmodic function.

But I digress. The point was that even a beneficial change doesn't amount to anything really new, it's just a variation on whatever that sequence of DNA does in the organism. An U wribg? Are such issues even discussed anywhere? isn't all this just assumed and taken for granted and if anyone actually addressed what actually happens the whole shebang would come crashing down?

None of the other "mechanisms of evolution" can be said to make anything but variatqions that are already built into the genome. Gene flow just shuffles the deck of possible variations, so does Migration, they bring about changes in gene frequ3encies in new populations. Changes in gene frequency are in fact ways of shuffling the deck so as to bring out new and interesting variations in a Species or Kind. They don't create anything new, they only make new combinations. And these can be quite interesting and dramatic, which can SEEM like something new although it's nothing but recombination of existing general material. Mutation is the only "mechanism" that changes something genetic which makes it seem like it must be THE agent of change that is capable of fueling evolution. It's all an illusion though.

Then we come to Selection. Around 44:30 they say "Selection is what builds complexity" and that randomness can't do that. This sounds to me like another unsubstantiated article of faith, but I really don't know what they mean. I'm perplexed as to what they mean by "complexity" since it seems to me that randomness is really the main engine of variation.

I have no clue as to how they get from biological evolution to culture through genetics, but on the biological level seletion amounts to the reproductive isolation of a gene pool or set of gene frequencies. Most often this must be a random "selection," the classical Natural Selection being very rare because it's costly. If a predator eats up all the newts except those that are poisonous then the poisonous ones proliferate, but that entails a great loss to the gene pool at large. A loss of what? A loss of genetic diversity. You are losing all the genetic material that belongs to the population of nonpoisonous newts. Actually I argue that the loss of genetic diversity is in fact the main driver of populatiohn change. When a set of gene frequencies, a gene pool, is reproductively isolated over enough generations it will bring about a new phenotypic expression in the populatiohn at large, even a new subspecies. That'has to be how Ring Species develop: each from a small portion of the genetic material from the previous population. This portion is a new set of gene frequencies and as it recombines over some number of generations in isolation from other populations it brings out a new phenotypic character in the new population. In the process it's lost genetic diversity. It has to. Genetic diversity interferes with the development of a new populationj characteristic. Gene flow interferes. It's only when a set of gene frequences is "selected" or reporductivgly isolated that you get a population level change. When a few raccoons get separated from the main population of raccoons they develop a new look as they breed among themselves for generations. that's how you get domensitc breeds. You isolate them from animals with any characteristics you don' want in your breed so that those you do want become characteristic of the breed you are creating As far as I can see, there is nothing more or less complex about a population created from a randomj set of gene frequencies and one created by a strict selection, Seems to me the degree of change in a new breed or new population however originally formed, has to do with the limiting of the genetic divrsity which is what all selection processes do, whether random or more purposeful.

I've argued this to death elsewhere so maybe that's enough for now.

So I'm sure Bret and Heather have written some fine bits of human observation in their book, but in my opinion it can only be in spite of their adherence to the theory of evolution, and lamentably restricted, even crippled by it.

The Destructive Legacy of the 1881 Bible Revision of Westcott and Hort

In a series of talks about the end times by R. C. Sproul he encounters a translational problem that he resolves in favor of the modern versions and against the King James. More than one such problem, and I'll get to the other in a minute.

Ah yes, the vexed Greek word "aeon" which the King Hames often translates"world," as in "end of the world," while the Revision of 1881 prefers "age" as in "end of the age." Sproul compares these different translations in the teaching about the tares amont the wheat in Matthew 13, where the New King James has "age" and the King James "world." He accepts the Westcott and Hort translation of "age" and says the Kiog James translators were wrong to uses "world."

Makes me want to cry. Already been crying about the political situation this morning, also the evolutionist worldview, also some personal stuff, wasn't that enough to cry about in one day? Anyway, it's sad to hear Sproul going along with what I consider to be the biggest hoax on the Christian Church going on today. Not that it's a surprise. Some of the very best preachers, most of them I suppose, have fallen for it.

OK I'm prejudiced. I accept the judgment of my own chosen authorities over those who dominate today's pulpits. The scholarly and spiritual qualifications of the King James translators far outstrip those of WestCott and Hort, and the scholarship of Dean John William Burgon who denounced them soundly rises far above theirs in my estimation. Since I have no official qualificatios to make such judgments myself, feel free to dismiss my opinion and be wrong to your heart's content.

Burgon denounced Westcott and Hort for imposing on their Bible Revision what he knew to be corrupted Greek manuscripts, which now enjoy legitimization as the "earliest" manuscripts to which everyone bows and genuflects, and for their translation into English, which he assessed as "schoolboy" level scholarship.

Their incompetence at Greek led them to prefer the literal translation of "aeon" as "age" to the rendering from the far greater experience with Greek of the King James transaltors. And today's preachers, who probably have even less of an education in Greek than even Westcott and Hort, put their schoolboy rendition above the scholarship of the King James committee, that in those days was developed from childhood immersion in Greek literature.

The same problem has blighted their rendition of the Greek aorist tense as well, or in this case it's more of an inferior tgrasp of English rather than Greek. Greek has this special tense for expressing ongoing action as opposed to one-time action. English doesn't need the awkward phrasing they give for this Greek tense, it conveys it effectively in most cases with the simple past tense, but being klutzes at both Greek and English they bequeathed to today's preachers their execrable unmelodious and stupefyingly babyish literalism.

Oh I suppose I'm being hypercritical. I guess it shouldn't matter all that much that they managed to destroy the English language on top of handicapping the Church with so many absolutely unnecessary versions of the Bible we can hardly talk to each other about any given scripture passage any more, not to mention introducing doubts about the authenticity of the King James based on their heretically corrupted manuscripts. Naa, minor problems at best, and the wonderful increase in a range of possibilities for each word, golly gosh isn't that a boon?

It's "the end of the world." "The end of the age" is an utterly meaningless concept in the Biblical contexts, and it gives a false impression that raises distracting questiohns.

The other time Sproul got tripped up by the modern versions was when he was dsicussing the Beast of Revelation 13 and the meaning of the number "666." Of course he gets lost in the red herring dead end trails this number has inspired, doesn't mention the true meaning that clearly identifies the Pope as the bearrer of that number, and then gets sidetracked by the fact that the "eareliest and best" Greek manuscripts contain the number "616" rather than "666." And we have to take this seriously because Westcott and Hort got away with their hoax and now wellmeaning seminary teachers accept that their currupted manuscripts are really "the earliest and the best" and that the manuscript tradition that underlies the King James is the one we are to doubt.

How well the devil knows his job and the people he wants to mislead.

And all we get as argument against the idea that the Pope is the Antichrist is the mention that the Reformers thought so but "few" today think so. Only too true. Gosh the devil and his Jesuits know their work.

The point of this post was to show that the Westcott and Hort hoax has consequences that are more than small annoyances. It's one of the many ways Protestantism has been undermined and the Roman Church unrecognized as THE great evil in the world that it is. The true Bible's credibility has been underminjed, heresies elevated, the English languages has been deumbed down, cacaphony introduced into the churches and the Antichrist is shrugged off or mistaken for an angel of light.

Signs of the Times

Jan Markell does a great job in this presentation where she lays out ten signs that the Lord's coming is right around the corner, and therefore the Rapture according to the Pre-Tribulation eschatology. Yes I still have a problem with the idea that there could be a group of Christians who leave in the Rapture and another group of believers in Christ who are not considered to be Christians who come to faith during the ensuing Tribulation period, but I perfer for now to accept the Pre-Trib system anyway. Certainly I want it tto be true, I wont to leave this benighted world. And the way things are stacking up in my life I'm readier than ever too.

People are leaving the country, literally leaving America, seeking refuge from the extreme craziness here. I'm going to prepare to leave it as well, but I'm hoping it will mean the country I'm leaving is Planet Earth. One of my grandsons not long ago had a nightmare in which his family of four was taking a trip and their car got caught up in a tornado. I believe God gives some of us prophetic dreams and other prophetic signs that apply to our own situations, nand that nightmare feels like that kind of prophetic message to , the kind of thing my grandson will look back on later and see that Gode was with them even during a very disruptive time. . The Lord gave me a couple of those when I was a child. In one I was entering the door to a dark tunnel with a lion at my side, and I was wearing a miner's light strapped to my forehead. The symbolism is pretty clear but I didn't understand it until much later when I was finally a believer. In the other, which i had when I was yhounger, an angel had hold of my arm and was about to escort me up to heaven.

Both those dream-- the second was more like a vision -- occurred when I was a child and not yet a true believer. So I hope for my unbelieving family that the tornado will carry them to a new life in Christ. We're pretty clearly living in evil times that are moving so fast and disrupting our lives in sudden ways I think the image of a tornado is very fitting.

Anyway here's Jan's talk on The Convergence.

Eegad, They Actually Think This Fallen World is the Way It was Meant to Be?

Oh poor poor fallen humanity. They don't have a clue. There can't be an all-powerful loving God according to them because of... a whole list of things that are wrong with this world. The Problem of Evil for instance. How can there be such misery and suffering, and such evil people in a world made by a loving God? The latest I've heard is how there can't be a loving God because He wouldn't have made things so that it would be hard to keep track of time and the seasons and so on. You know, He made the Solar System wrong.

Well, I must admit I don't know how God originally made the Solar System but I do know that everything in our universe now is not as God originally made it. Even wwe Christians, who are the only ones who could have any grasp of these things at all, don't fully appreciate how the Fall affected the world, and in fact the entire universe. We can be sure that NOTHING is as it was originally created, although we are not in a position to understand just exactly how things are different.

The effect of just one little sin in a perfect universe made by a perfect God is really beyond calculating, but we trivialize it. Sin is the opposition of God, the God who made everything and runs everthing according to His own perfect nature. He can't run it any other way. Everything He does is absolute perfection, exact and precise perfection. One little sin is like tossing a galaxy-sized wrench into a perfectly functioning mechanism. Or something like that.

Of course Satan beat us to it, but he cdouldn't wait to subvert us too. Such ninnies we are, he succeeded only too well.

As we know from the Bible God created us after He created the phyhsical universe and the planet He placed us on. None of that existed before. Angels aren't physical although they have the ability to manifest in physical form. And that includes the fallen angels who have Satan as their leader.

But I digress. The point is that however the Solar Sytem was originally created, it's different now. And it may be different in exactly the way I've heard it complained about. That is, it may once have funcdtioned as a perfect clock, but the Fall damaged it so that it lost its original precision and perfection. The orbits of the planets changed. There is certainly evidence of catastrophe of some sort in all those craters we see on the Moon, all the debris of destroyed objects that also travel in orbit, the comets and meteors that still collide with other bodies and so on.

Poor fallen humanity thinks all that is normal. Same as they think disease and death are normal. Well, what else can the poor dears do but take it all as they find it and make that assumption since they deny God's atttempts to disabuse them of such ideas. Golly gosh He gave us a written document intended to guide us through this fallen universe but we know better than God of course.

I don't know if there's any way sciencew could figure out the history of the Fall but I know they aren't interested in trying. What you see is what you get and all contrary ideas are to them ancient flapdoodle. Oh maybe evolutionarily adaptive in their time and cultural context... Sigh.

Science finally accepted the Wegener observation that the continents must once have been joined together. If they can figure that out maybe they coudl figure out the Fall. Naaa. They can't even figure out the Flood although the evidence is everywhere on this Earth. Well, see, they got this false idea going strong and teach it to everybody so there's no way to object to it without getting yourself dismissed as a crank, but once you've got the Theory of Evolution you need Time, lots and lots of Time, so of coruse the next thing was to find all that Time they need, and they found it in the decay rates of the elements in rocks. Of course nobody can ever find out if the theory holds up because there's no way to go back and find out, but oh well, it works fine on paper and it doesn't need God so we're happy.

Wegener's hypothesis was well evidenced by the match between the fossils on both sides of the Atlantic. Very good evidence indeed to add to the visible match of the shapes of the continents. .But they took their notions of enormous lenths of time, which they'd needed to justify their Theory of Evolution and do away with God, and made the drifting apart of the continents into this long drawn out affair, when in fact it so nicely fits the Flood timing. Yep.

The Flood gives a good reason for the splitting of the continents. Such a planet-wide upheaval would have had all kinds of catastrophic effects. The Bible barely hints at them in giving a few facts about the nature of the pre-Flood world that no longer exist. The earth was watered by mists that came up from the ground, not by rain. Rain apparently occurred for the very first time with the forty days and nights of the worldwide cloudburst that covered the planet in water. Along with the opening of the "fountains of the deep." None of this is easy to understand from our position but if you know that the Bible is God's word you know it describes something that really happened. And we can surmise a few things maybe. Such as that if it rained continuously for forty days and nights there must have been a very thick covering of water-saturated structure of some sort over the earth that was the source of it all.

And when it was finally spent we can surmise that the Earth was exposed to outer space in a way that it had never been before having had an atmopheric cover or "canopy" as the creatinoists refer to it. And why is that important? Because it answers those who say that the Flood and the splitting of the continents at the rate that had to occur if the Flood was the cause of it, would have generated so much heat it would have fried the planet to a cinder, so forget any such fables as eight people surviving in a wooden ark floating on the Flood waters.

But with the canopy of moisture gone the heat could have escaped readily into space, not being held down by those "greenhouse gases" any more. In fct so much heat would have so rapidly evacuated into space it would have brought on the ice age we also know existed and which is only now retreatd to the point that we may have a "global warming" problem. One ice age is quite enough to account for all the phenomena it needs to account for, one ice age with lesser retreats and returns over the centuries, and the markers of the movements of glaciers are detectable in many places. We don't need many ice ages. Only the Ancient Earth hypothesis needs them. But the Biblical timing will suffice.

The catastrophes associated with the Flood on Earth appear to extend to the Solar System, perhaps the entire universe. Meteor strikes for instance. Naa, the meteor Chicxylub didn't kill the dinosaurs, the flood killed the dinosaurs. Haven't you seen those dinosaur beds where they are all tumbled together where they were thrown by the water. Great jumbles of bones. Chicxylub put out a layer of iridium though, that got itself dispersed at the top of the layer of sediment called the Cretaceous Period. It's just one of the layers the Flood deposited over the Earth, it's not a Time Period, but of coruse that's what they call it. So since it is found at the surface of those rocks it is interpreted as being the cause of the mass death of the dinosaurs whose fossils are found in those rocks. Actually all it mans is that this meteor hit during the Flood at the time that layer of sesdiment was being deposited. And a meteor hitting during the Flood fits with the whole catastrophic picture of the Flood with the opening of the atmosphere and the shaking of all the planets out of their orbits and the splitting of the continents and so on and so forth.

God's Judgment on the Earth. It wasn't just the Original Sin of the Fall by that time, but the accumulating of much sin by the human family with the help of coruse of Satan and his angels who turned themselves into "gods" over various people groups. Anyway there's lots of evidence for the Flood. The strata we seen in the Grand Canyon are the most remarakbly preserved example of that kind of evidnece. Elsewhere the strata are twisted and broekn and fallen down, much of the upper layers washed away completely, but there is evidence of this layering worldwide. The upheaval of the splitting of the s continents accounts well for the distortions of the strata, as well as for the mountainbuilding and the volcanism, all of which are the cause of earthquakes. Sorry, the Old Earth explanation for the strata is ludicrous. Do I have to review it again?


I know they are so smitten with their Evolution and their Cosmos is All There Is Or Ever Was Or Ever Will Be mindset everything I'm saying falls on deaf ears. There's another Judgment of God coming though and a lot of us think it's coming very soon. "The Fire Next Time" in the title of a popular book written a few decades ago. Water the first time, fire the last. Just before Jesus returns. That will wake up some people. It would be nice if they'd wake u before it happens though since that's the hard way to do it.

Marxist America

Here's Mark Levin on how America now follows the Communist Manifesto rather than our founding documents:

Still Having Questions about the Timing of the Rapture

Ah well. No, I do't want to debate anyone about anything, but that doesn't mean I don't have questionsa about certain systems of thought, and in this case I'm thinking of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. I just listened to the latest Understanding the Times radio show by Jan Markell which addresses the arguments against the Pre-Trib point of view, and as usual althougj it touches on my questions it doesn't answer them. Are my questions especially odd or what?

I do have this point of view that they don't share, which is that the Antichrist was shown by the Protestant Reformers to have already been revealed when the Bishop of Rome became preeminent over all the other bishops of the Church. That was the begining of institutional Romanism headed by the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. I've made the case for this view of the Antichrist over and over here and don't think I'll make it again in this post, but he was recognized as the Antichrist, meaning THE Antichrist, over the centuries by hundreds of Christians outside the Church of Rome, then by the Protestant Reformers who found the evidence in scripture.

This difference of viewpoint doesn't challenge much in the Pre-Trib point of view as I see it it, all it means is that we already know who the Antichrist is. We also know the history of the Inquisition or persecutions and martyrdoms of believing Christians by that Pope and his Roman Church-Kingdom throughout the Middle Ages. The horrific persecutions of believers we see in the Book of Revelation by this Antichrist person seem to me to be a renewal of that Inquisition of the Middle Ages, only this time with I Islamists as the main executioners. Which i've also argued before.

At least one of the questions that keeps haunting me does come from my having this point of view, but really it comes from actual history, not just a point of view. That is, in the Rapture according to the Pre-Trib system all the martyrs of the Roman Inquistion of the Middle Ages will be included. So when we see a group of martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6, who are waiting for more martyrs to join them, it raises this question in my mind why they are being treated as a different group from the martyrs who were raptured? Martyrs are clearly singled out as a special group, but then why is that group divided d between those already raptures and those to come later? I really don't get it.

And this is of a piece with the other question who the Church could have been raptured but uncountable others become believers during the ensuing Tribulation period and yet not be considered to be part of that Church. The Church raptured but millions more who come to belief not part of that group of raptured believers? Are not believers in Christ all the Bride of Chrfist? How can the Bride of Christ be divideed into two groups, two brides as it were? I don't get it.

And then the fact that passages that refer to the Rapture also refer to the sound of a trumpet, in one the "last" trumpet, raised the question why this rather blatant indicator of the event of the Rapture is never mentioned, or is lightly dismissed, by the Pre-Trib people It's clearly "the last trumpet" in First Corinthians 15, and it's the "trummp of God" in Thessalonians something or other which I'm going to have to look up, so I guess I'll have to come back with that information.

It's the sounding of the trumpet that suggests the Rapture could occur at the midpoint of the Tribulation period, since the Last Trumpet of the sev3enth seal seems to occur at that time, and it herals the seven vials or bowls of God's wrath which finish the Great Tribulation. HOWEVER, there are clearly martyrs to be made after that point, and their trials are going to be more horrific than anything we can imagine, so the question doesn't stop there.

All this is Bible-based, I'm not bringing up anything extraneous to the Bible. The Reformers derived the identify of the Antichrist as the Pope from the Bible, and the trumpet is in the Bible, so I don't think what I'm saying is open to the criticism that it's not biblical.

I don't want to argue it though. If I get a nice clear answer, great, if I don't they will just remain questions.

Here's Jan's show for reference:

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Vaccine Mandates and Biden's Divisive Speech

Tucker Carlson sums up the totalitarian COVID craziness:




Whoever thought it could come to this in the USA. I understand why people are leaving the country. I would too if I could.

He goes on from the COVID nightmare to the California nightmare where they are throwing out votes for Elder against Newsome. This is America? Not any more it isn't.

UPDATE: Adding Chris Pinto's last radio show about COVID as the New World Order:

http://www.noiseofthunderradio.com/noise-of-thunder-radio-show/2021/9/11/notr-9-11-australia-the-covid-new-world-order-91121.html