Darwinists Beg the Question: Common Descent or Common Design?
By Jonathan Witt Published on September 6, 2017
https://stream.org/darwinists-beg-th...common-design/
I look a lot like my dad because, yes, he’s my dad. I’m descended from him. Darwinists often point to similarities across species, classes and phyla, and argue that this proves we’re all descended from a common ancestor.
DNA, for example, crops up practically everywhere in the living world.
But to say such things prove common descent
ignores another possibility. A common feature may be due to common ancestry. But it might instead be
due to a common design strategy. Think of cars. A Jaguar and a Mustang share many features ..... That doesn’t mean the Mustang evolved from the Jaguar.
No, designers reuse design features proven to work for specific engineering needs.
...Looking for the Truth, Not Rigging the Answers
So, what about with living things? Might a designer have used and reused a good design concept in widely different biological contexts?
The only way to jump straight from biological similarities to
evolution is to rule out the design hypothesis from the start....
...What does the evidence suggest is the better explanation for the origin of new plants and animals in the history of life? Is the best explanation
blind evolution, or intelligent design? And what new findings might count in favor of one over the other? Those are the kind of questions an unfettered, truth-seeking scientific culture is happy to explore.
The Case of So-Called “Junk DNA”
Return to the example of DNA. DNA contains information that codes for biological machinery and form. We’re told chimp DNA and human DNA are
98 percent similar. That’s supposedly what you’d expect if humans evolved from a chimp-like ancestor. But that figure
plummets if you compare
bigger units of DNA....
...A related argument for ape-to-man evolution is that a stretch of DNA in humans and chimps seems to be a shared bit of junk DNA, bad code left over from a genetic mutation long ago, from before chimps and humans (supposedly) split from their common ancestor. No designer would have put the same line of junk DNA in chimps and humans, the argument goes. It’s pretty convincing on first blush.
But today the whole idea of junk DNA is in retreat as geneticists discover more and more uses for stretches of DNA once considered useless.
Darwinian theory led its champions to
expect, and
predict, that most of our DNA would prove to be
junk left over from a blind process of trial-and-error.
Intelligent design theorists
predicted that “junk DNA” would
prove to have function.
The former led to a
failed prediction.
The latter led to a
successful prediction. Sounds like good science.