Thursday, April 30, 2009

Ten Specific Predictions of Evolution

Here's a sample list of very specific predictions made by evolution. There are many more that I did not include. I got most of them from the talkorigins web site at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

1. We should not find any early hominid fossils (such as Australopithicus, Ardipithecus, or Kenyanthropus) in Australia, North America, South America, Antarctica, Siberia, or on any oceanic islands removed from Africa.
2. No birds will have mammary glands or hair.

3. No mammals will have feathers (even though feathers are an excellent means of insulation).

4. No fish or amphibians will have differentiated or cusped teeth, since these are only characteristics of mammals.

5. We should never find mammalian or bird fossils in or before Devonian deposits, before reptiles had diverged from the amphibian tetrapod line. This excludes Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, and
Silurian deposits, encompassing 92% of the earth's geological history.

6. We will never find a living or fossilized true chimera such as Pegasus, Mermaid or Griffin.

7. We will never find birds with both wings and arms, since the evolution of wings necessarily means the loss of arms.

8. No marine mammal (such as dolphins, porpoises and whales) will have gills despite the fact that gills would be very beneficial.

9. No reptile or mammal will have eyes without retinal blind spots. This is because poor design cannot be "fixed" by evolutionary processes, even if correcting the problem would be beneficial for the organism. The only "fixing" that is allowed evolutionarily is relatively minor modification of what already exists.

10. All living things on Earth will share the same nucleic acid genetic material.

Creationists will undoubtedly respond that many of these things are simple evidence of a common designer. In fact, if true, that designer is not very competent.

Consider prediction 10 in relation to the recently well-publicized swine flu. That flu jumped from pigs to humans. That is only possible because pigs and humans share the same genetic code. So a truly competent designer would have, presumably, used different genetic codes in pigs and humans in order to prevent the possibility of such an event from taking place. Note that this is NOT explained by the "Fall of Man" since the genetic codes in humans and pigs can't have changed since the [mythical] Garden of Eden.

There are many other predictions made by evolution.

There are NONE made by creationism.

Unless, of course, some creationist can come up with a similar set of predictions which, if not found to be true, would falsify their beliefs.

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