My challenge to everyone else believes the evolutionary story of human origins, is not to provide the list of mutations that did the trick, but rather a list of mutations that can do it. Otherwise they’re in the position of insisting that something is a scientific fact without having the faintest idea how it even could be. That’s just not what scientists should be doing.

Paul McBride, a PhD student studying vertebrate evolution in New Zealand, is concerned that religion may be driving the research that Ann Gauger and I are doing, or perhaps that we’ve been driving under its influence. As you might guess, there’s some irony in this. His criticisms of my chapter in Science and Human Origins suggest that he may actually be the one whose scientific reasoning is being impaired by his beliefs. We all agree that evolutionists are crediting remarkable things to an unguided material process. McBride also agrees with us that this process has significant limitations. In his words: “Evolution is not a process that is capable of producing anything and everything, at all times in all species. It is, conversely, a greatly constrained process.” This being so, surely McBride ought to agree with us that the claims of evolutionists need to be evaluated in light of these constraints. It seems to me that to disagree with this would be to adopt a decidedly unscientific stance.

In essence, the scientific approach here should follow two steps: 1) determine unequivocally what the evolutionary mechanism can do (present tense) by performing experiments with appropriate mathematical models used to interpret the results, and 2) determine whether the things that evolutionists claim it did do (past tense) marry up nicely with what we’ve found that it can do. Ann and I have invested heavily in this undertaking, and we have some work to show for it. I can’t fault McBride for not investing in it, because the evolutionary community he finds himself in certainly doesn’t cater to this. For him to adopt their aversion to critical analysis of Darwinism, though, is regrettable.

Like many of his peers, McBride seems to thinks it’s illegitimate to suggest that laboratory tests showing what evolution can’t do have anything to say about what it can do (or did do). Ann and I conducted experiments to find out how many changes would have to occur in a particular enzyme X in order for it to begin performing the function of another enzyme, Y. We found that they are too numerous for unguided evolution to have accomplished this transformation, even with the benefits of a massive bacterial population and billions of years. Having carefully made the case that our chosen X and Y are appropriate for the aims of our study, we think this result has catastrophic implications for Darwinism. McBride disagrees:

The real question is not “Can X be turned into Y?” because that sense of direction requires preordination, which is not theorized to be a part of evolution. If we remove this preordination, the question becomes “Can X turn into something else?”

In my book chapter I compared our X-to-Y conversion to the challenge of converting one golf club into another — a putter into a pitching wedge. Now, if someone were to claim that there’s a natural unguided process that refashioned not just golf clubs but thousands of other things as well, producing a great variety of extraordinarily sophisticated things from humble starting points, the scientist in me would want to see some evidence to back that claim up. Cruise missiles from roller skates? Really? Smart phones from flashlights? Are you sure about that? And my skeptical stance would naturally intensify if I were to find that this highly touted process can’t actually produce a pitching wedge from a putter in the time it supposedly performed all these miracles.

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