Evolution: Are We Really Getting the Full Story in Class?

For the past 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” there has been a great debate as to the nature of how evolution should be taught in the public schools of the United States.

Through various court rulings and decisions, our public schools teach evolution as a factual account of the history of life on Earth. However, teaching it in this light is misleading in several respects.

Evolution is a tricky word often used to describe two different processes. The first of these is microevolution, a process of small-scale changes that cause the creation of different species of an organism so the organism can survive in its environment.

Darwin’s finches are a wonderful example of this. Upon their arrival at the Galapagos, the original group of finches was separated onto the different islands. The genetic information contained in their DNA allowed them to adapt to the differing environmental conditions on their respective islands.

The other process the term evolution refers to is macroevolution, which is the large-scale change of one family/order (in the biological classification system: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) of organism into an entirely different family/order of organism. Some examples of this, which evolutionists give, would be the evolution of wolves into whales or dinosaurs into birds.

However, there is a key difference between these two processes. Microevolution is an empirically verifiable process, meaning it is observable, testable, and repeatable. Macroevolution is a process that we cannot observe, test, or repeat and therefore is not empirically verifiable.

Macroevolution also faces a challenge which microevolution does not: for organisms to change from one family/order into another (such as going from amoebas to fish) new genetic information must be added to the organism’s genetic code, information that is not already there.

After consulting the MN science department and researching online, the response that was given is that mutations will cause this to occur. However, mutations only mutate existing genetic information in an organism, leading to an overall loss of genetic information, and do not add any new genetic information to an organism’s genetic code. In fact, there is no known natural process that can do this, a fact, which, if not arbitrarily dismissed, punches a great many holes in the evolutionary story of life on earth.

While many credible scientists have endorsed the evolutionary story, the problem remains that macroevolution has no means of occurring. It can neither be tested empirically (verified by observation or experiment) nor performed naturally, which leaves no alternative but to doubt its explanatory power.