SOAPBERRY BUGS

"That natural selection generally acts with extreme slowness I fully admit….I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only at long intervals of time…Slow though the process of selection may be.  As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps."    Charles Darwin
                                                        
According to evolutionary theory changes are supposed to happen very, very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of generations, even though much of historical evidence points to 'saltational' or sudden changes.  Life suddenly appeared; oxygen metabolizing organisms suddenly appeared; all the basic body plans that exist today suddenly appeared during the Cambrian Explosion.  Evolutionary biologists argue these points, but in recent experiments where soapberry bugs, for instance (there have been similar experiments with other creatures*) have been exposed to a new food host (the golden rain tree), without having access to the food host that they were previously adapted to (the balloon vine), amazing changes in body size, beak length, flying patterns and the rhythm and speed of their whole cycle of reproduction has changed within fifty years.  Is this evolution?

The researchers in the soapberry experiments that I have read about define any change in the genetic makeup of these bugs as "evolution."  Wow!  Good thing for Darwin that he is deified.  If Newton was deified, Einstein would still be just a weird clerk in a patent office in Switzerland in need of a hair cut and socks.  Heisenberg would have been run out of town as a heretic.  Yet, when it came to Newton, the tiniest discrepancies in his theories and predictions caused the scientific community not to close ranks, but to search diligently for new answers and new theories that would explain these phenomenon; hence, relativity and quantum theory, hence, the use of atomic energy and space travel, transistors, lasers and atomic clocks.  Yet here we have a case of, not small discrepancies, but enormous ones.  We have organisms, soapberry bugs, and other organisms in different experiments, adapting at a rate thousands of times faster than Darwinian theory would have predicted.  And this, of course, doesn't perturb the researchers in the least.  They just define evolution as "any change in genes" and their results are published as further proof of evolution.  If, upon measurement, we discovered that an action did not produce an equal and opposite reaction, but produced a reaction that was a thousand times stronger or a thousand times weaker than the initiating action, would we still blithely say that this was Newton, or would we look for a different theory?  Would we say, "Oh,yeah, that's Newton alright, of course it's Newton. Good ole' Newton.  It's just a very strong (or a very weak) Newton."  Folks, wake up!  All this information points to something that is deeply, inherently, basically wrong with Darwinian thinking.

At this point all we are really saying when we use the word evolution to refer to a biological change is that it is random; that there was no guiding principle involved.  Yet if there were no guidance, how did all the changes in the soapberry bug occur so quickly, changes not just in alteration of genes but in new beak shapes and new proportions within those beak shapes, new metabolic changes and distributions of energy throughout the body, new firing patterns of genes, new rhythms of enzyme discharge so that the newly adapted bugs grew to sexual maturation much more quickly than the originals, and were no longer capable of flying.  How do all these changes take place, changes which quickly and perfectly change the soapberry bug from a creature that was perfectly adapted to living in harmony with the rhythms and challenges of the balloon vine, to a creature that is perfectly adapted to live in harmony with the rhythms and challenges of the golden rain tree?  Were all these processes random?  If so, where were the millions upon millions of 'mistakes' until the new adaptations were the perfectly appropriate ones for the new host?  Even if natural selection were at play, natural selection only operates among viable competitors. Selection has no influence over what genetic copying 'mistakes', what mutations, will occur.  Where were the new offspring, even if they didn't survive to have progeny, even if they were still born, who flew further instead of not at all; whose rate of reproduction was slower rather than faster; whose beak size was longer or fatter or narrower rather than shorter;  whose new beak shape didn't work at all, because the beak of the soapberry bug is so long (seventy percent of its body length) that it is constructed in three parts that unhinge when it eats and fold up when it doesn't.  How many beaks were created where the hinging didn't work at all; where the size and weight of the beak prevented the animal from any locomotion what so ever; where the nervous system connected to the beak was misconstructed so that the bug could not control the movement or the positioning of the beak and did not have the ability to use it to pierce the covering of the plant seeds or no longer had the ability to grasp food in the front of its beak, move it to the rear of the beak and swallow it? All of these are enormously complicated mechanical processes and any change in shape must be accompanied by changes in nerves and blood vessels and precise adjustments to the part of the brain that these nerves connect to in order to have a newly functioning beak of a completely different size; and the amount of processes that have to take place for an organism to change from a reproductive cycle that is annual to a reproductive cycle that takes place two or three times a year, is so complex in all its details that it becomes overwhelming to study it all, much less to actually execute such changes.  I'll tell you how many mistakes from this random 'hit or miss' process:  none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, niente!  Not a one.  This whole process of dazzling complexity proceeded with no mistakes, no trial and error, not even a scintilla of evidence that there was any 'randomness' involved.  Instead it shows clear proof to anyone except those fundamentalists who worship at the church of the great god Darwin, that all of these changes  took place in a perfectly straight line with absolutely clear purpose and transcendent intelligence.

At the present time researchers are trying to determine the precise genetic changes that occurred to the soapberry bug as it re-adapted to the golden rain tree. If there were subtle changes in some of the bug's genes, that is not the cause, but a fairly minor result of this metamorphoses. If there were subtle changes in genes, there were much less subtle changes in gene firings.  It is the changes in the firing and the rhythm of the firing and the quantity of the firing of those genes through the embryonic development of the bug and the changes of the shape templates that the structural proteins fill out that make the real change.  Isn't it obvious that this "evolution" of the soapberry bug had to proceed by ideas, ideas of how to change the timing of gene firing, the shape that the structural proteins will take and, possibly, but not necessarily, some change in the amino acid make up of some proteins if different qualities of some of the protein materials involved are needed?  To attribute all this dramatic change to a few minor one or two amino acid mutations misses the point entirely.

These researchers, who have obviously drunk deeply of the Darwinian Kool-Aid, are in the process of preparing a 'scientific' paper where they will attribute one or two or a few minor amino acid genetic changes, which they will call random mutations (and not intentional changes as the new ideas for adapting to the golden rain tree were undertaken) as the cause of the entire transformation.  And they will dutifully ignore the changes in genetic firing patterns and the introduction of new shapes simultaneous with these few genetic changes, that prove that all three aspects: shape changes, firing sequence changes and protein modifications, were all part of the same idea which led to a straight line, purposeful and rapid transformation of the soapberry bug. They will wind up writing a paper that 'proves' that the entire transformation was caused by a few 'mutations' which, by themselves, have nothing to do with shape changes in an organism; and the whole thing will be considered further evidence of Darwinian evolution.   At this point, traditional biologists are so inculcated in Darwinian thinking that they are  twisting all new data into a Darwinian box and interpreting it as proof of Darwinian style evolution, when in fact, it is proving just the opposite.  

Your comments are always most welcome.




*Writing in Science Magazine, Portugese biologists Lidia Perfeito and Isabel Gordo report that beneficial mutation rates in Escherichia coli bacteria, not when they are measured in a stable environment as they usually are, but when they are measured adapting to a new environment, are A THOUSAND times higher than one would have predicted by random replication accidents. And these are beneficial mutations. Of all the possible accidents that could happen in gene replication, how many of those possibilities would be beneficial, if these accidents were truly random. Here we have a thousand times the rate of any mutations, and the mutations are beneficial. Whole colonies of bacteria are undergoing the same mutations that are moving them to an adaptive balance with their new surroundings. (EVOLUTION).
*In June 2008 the popular science magazine New Scientist printed a story about Professor Richard Lenski's twenty-year project examining the evolution of E. coli. They reported that, as a result of several beneficial mutations, his organisms had acquired the ability to metabolize citrate - or more correctly an ability to transport it through the cell wall prior to metabolizing it. This was an entirely new ability for this species - an increase in complexity provided by a beneficial mutation.