An Alternative to Evolution: Confirmations (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 17, 2018, 17:47 (2319 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony: A recent article adds confirmation to a few predictions from my hypothesis. It demonstrates ubiquity of the programming language, and a system wide level of complexity that Darwinism can not explain. Why would every bar code be different?

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

"The answer is no," said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.

For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same," he told AFP.

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

"This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," Thaler told AFP.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

And then Creationist Weigh In

The end of the article is a part you might have added:

Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?

Darwin perplexed

Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

"Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey—all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply," he told AFP, commenting on the study.

"In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species."

But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population "bottleneck" is only a partial explanation at best.

"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.

"It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between.

"If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

Comment: Pure punctuated equilibrium. Not much of Darwin remains except his idea of common descent.