Page Content (OCR)
humans?...And if nature can produce such rich diversity as the present animal and plant kingdoms by pure chance, why is it that thousands of years of serious guided election by humans has resulted only in trivial sub-specific variation of domestic plants and animals, while not one new species has been cre- ated? (p. 9) An important factor in bringing about the universal dominance and acceptance of Darwinian evolution has been that virtually every eminent professional scientist appointed to posts in the life sciences in the last 40 or 50 years, in the English-speaking world, has been a convinced Darwinist. (p. 12) I want to begin this examination with a closer look at what is probably the central issue: the age of the Earth. The reason that this issue assumes key importance is because the central mechanism of neo-Dar- winism, genetic mutation, means change has to take place at an agonizingly slow pace, requiring hun- dreds of millions or even billions of years. If the Earth is of such an age, then neo-Darwinism could be true. If the Earth is not of such an age, then the theory of cannot be true—despite what other evidence may indicate. (p. 14) ...the age now universally accepted for the Earth is so vast—4,600 million years—as to allow life to have evolved not once but many times. But let us use our imaginations for a moment to ask two hereti- cal questions. Does an age of 4,600 million years really provide enough time for evolution to have worked along Darwinian lines? And—even more outrageous—what if the Earth is not as old as we think? (p. 15) What has to happen for life to get started in the primeval oceans and to develop by mutation and natural selection into the animal and plant kingdoms we see today? First, the inert chemicals in the sea must form amino acids, probably under the influence of ultraviolet light and electrical discharges in the form of lightening...The Darwinian view is that although the formation of protein molecules without any precursor is highly improbable, it could have occurred given enough time—hundreds of millions of years. (p. 16) But let us be generous and allow the full 600 million years. What is a few million years when we have so many at our disposal? This interval must accommodate not only the spontaneous combination of basic materials into amino acids, but also the combination of amino acids into protein molecules, the appear ace of at least one self-replicating molecule, and the subsequent evolution of this molecule into self-replicating cellular bodies to the bacterial level. And remember that of these four steps, one alone (the second) has been estimated to happen by chance once in 1,000 million years...So, of the 4,600 mil- lion years of geological time that Darwinists have granted themselves, only a small fraction—less than 600 million—is available to accommodate the processes they believe to have taken place. Darwinian evolutionary processes are already running short of time. (p. 17) Strictly speaking, Darwinism is not concerned with abiogenesis—the appearance of life from inanimate matter—but only with the subsequent evolution of those primitive organisms into more highly devel- oped species. (p. 18) 176 Appendix B: Book Abstracts Darwinians One And All The Big Question The Darwinian View Problem: Life is not spontaneously emerging today in the seas. Running Out of Millennia Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation