The History of Pseudoscience
These are the most significant milestones of twaddle science in the last 200 years.
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) developed his idea of Evolution by Natural Selection. According to Darwin, evolution and natural selection work as follows:
Some finches develop a strong and thick beak due to random variation, which leads them to become seed eaters. Finches with delicate beaks become insect eaters. Thus, natural selection directs birds with different beak shapes to acquire more food, giving them a competitive advantage. They have more offspring than birds with less food, thereby strengthening the trait in subsequent generations. This leads to isolation, which results in speciation.
Darwin was wrong because the size and shape of Finches' beaks do not vary randomly. Instead, the food type impacts the Finches' epigenomes which results in the regulation of their gene expression. So, if a Finch starts to eat seeds, its' offspring will have stronger and thicker beaks. Birds that eat insects will have offspring with more delicate beaks. Nothing to do with randomness. Nothing to do with imaginary selection. Nothing to do with evolution. Just epigenetic regulation that will cause minor genetic errors.
EVOLUTION DEBUNKED. - Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), a Dutch botanist, developed his own idea of random mutations and evolution. He believed that these mutations provided the raw material for evolution to act upon, leading to the emergence of new species. According to de Vries, mutations are always random changes. So, this is the original definition for the term 'mutation'.
De Vries was wrong because random mutations never lead to any evolution. For example, there are more than 2 million mutations in the human genome worldwide but the number of random, fully beneficial mutations is 0. Random mutations are always harmful. The idea of neutral mutations is also outdated:
https://news.umich.edu/study-most-silent-genetic-mutations-are-harmful-not-neutral-a-finding-with-broad-implications/
EVOLUTION DEBUNKED. - The term "junk DNA" originated in the 1960s, but it gained formal recognition when Susumu Ohno coined it in 1972. Ohno observed that the accumulation of mutations, especially deleterious ones, imposed a limit on the number of functional genetic loci that could be anticipated given a typical mutation rate. Because of this silly idea, scientists believed for decades that there's only a small portion of functional DNA in the genome. We may have heard statements like this:
"If much more than 3% of the genome is functional, evolution becomes primarily a destructive process." (PZ Myers, 2015)
Furthermore, there has been a surge in scientific investigation exploring potential functions of the remaining 98% of the human genome, which does not contain instructions for making proteins. Over 90% of the human genome is probably transcribed, resulting in an intricate network of overlapping transcripts. Among these transcripts are tens of thousands of long RNAs that cannot form proteins, collectively called non-coding RNA.
So, the mutation load remains but the protective junk DNA is missing. Evolution is a destructive process. Genetic entropy is a biological fact.
EVOLUTION DEBUNKED. - Lenski's experiment, officially known as the Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE), is a pioneering scientific study initiated by Dr. Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University. The experiment began in 1988 and is one of the longest-running evolution experiments conducted with bacteria.
The original aim of the LTEE was to investigate the dynamics of evolution in real-time and to observe how populations of bacteria adapt to their environment over long periods. Specifically, Lenski and his team sought to address fundamental questions about evolutionary processes, such as the repeatability of evolution, the role of chance in evolutionary trajectories, and the genetic basis of adaptation. After ~90,000 generations of bacteria, evolution has not been observed to happen. Instead, bacteria have lost ~3% of their DNA and many strains are close to extinction. The reason is the same as all over nature: Organisms are rapidly losing biological information due to a strong tendency of methylated cytosines to turn to thymines. This is causing GC contents to decrease and AT contents to increase. This results in negative consequences in nature, such as rapid chromosome loss, poisonous organisms, parasites, loss of taste receptors, etc. EVOLUTION DEBUNKED.
