Micro-evolution

Dogs are an example of what Darwinists call micro-evolution. When dogs with different characteristics breed, an entirely different dog may result. A red dog with long legs breeding with a white dog with short legs may produce a dog with medium size legs and red spots. If the red spots help the dog survive better than solid red dogs or solid white dogs, the dogs with the red spots will propagate more often than the red or white dogs. No one disputes this, but it is not evolution.

The difference between creationists and evolutionists lies in the fact that creationists believe that continued breeding of dogs will always produce dogs. Evolutionists argue that continued breeding of dogs will eventually produce a new species, like a horse. Evolutionists believe that the continual breeding of whales produced the cow. Creationists do not believe this.

Evolutionists argue that micro-evolution is evidence for Darwinian evolution. They argue that micro-evolution is simply evolution in a more limited scope. It is evolution that has not yet produced a different species.

In support of the Darwinian doctrine, they point to clear instances of actual adaptation within a species. This argument gains traction because it goes beyond simple interbreeding and addresses actual physical changes that occur within a species that are obviously tailor made for the purpose of adapting the organism to an external environment.

A prime example is an octopus. The same species of octopus can live in tropical waters and in polar waters. But in order to do this, two different kinds of proteins are necessary because drastic temperature change has a significant effect on the nerve transmissions of octopuses. For instance, one study showed that "Antarctic [protein] channels would open about 14 times slower and close about 60 times slower than would tropical channels." (See Thomas, B. Octopus Cold Adaptation Surprises Scientists. Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org March 28, 2012). So, the nerve transmissions in the polar octopus had to adapt to the cold. In order to do this a different kind of protein is required. The polar octopus has the altered protein but the tropical octopus does not. Where did it come from?

Since proteins of this nature are produced by genes in the octopus DNA, the gene that produces the cold protein should be different from the gene that produces the warm protein.

The conventional Darwinist explanation for this difference is natural selection. That is, over generations of normal mutations, the octopus "warm gene" changed into a "cold gene" and when it did it gave the octopus the ability to live in cold water. The octopus with the cold gene survived and thrived in cold water, whereas the octopus that had the warm gene stayed in warm water. On the face of it, this appeared to be a clear example of natural selection.

In order to demonstrate evolution in action, Darwinists compared the "warm gene" of the tropical octopus to the "cold gene" of the polar octopus so they could show that it had changed.

However, they did not find evidence of evolution at all. They found precisely the opposite. The genes are identical.

On the basis of conventional natural selection, we hypothesized that the channels' genes would have evolved mutations to help tune them to their respective environments. Surprisingly, the primary sequences encoded by the two genes were virtually identical.

(Garrett, S. and J.J. C. Rosenthal. 2012. RNA Editing Underlies Temperature Adaptation in K+ Channels from Polar Octopuses. Science, 334 (6070): 848-851)

So, if the genes were identical, how could the protein that the genes produce be different? Where does the "cold protein" come from if the genes are the same?

The same scientists discovered that there is a molecular mechanism inside the cell that directly alters the chemical structure of the protein itself, not the original gene. This mechanism alters the "ribosomal DNA" to produce the altered protein. The ribosomal DNA is a copy of just that portion of the DNA that is used to produce the protein. So the cell makes a copy of the warm gene and then alters it just enough to make a cold gene. Evolution is not involved.

Here we show that signaling pathways that sense environmental nutrients control genome change at the ribosomal DNA. This demonstrates that not all genome changes occur at random and that cells produce specific mechanisms to optimize their genome in response to the environment.

(Garrett, S. and J.J. C. Rosenthal. 2012. RNA Editing Underlies Temperature Adaptation in K+ Channels from Polar Octopuses. Science, 334 (6070): 848-851)

So there is a molecular editing machine, a mechanism, that physically alters the chemical structure of the RNA in order to change the resulting protein from a warm water protein to a cold water protein, or vice versa.

This mechanism has to be able to start and stop, so there has to be a switch that turns it on and off. Therefore, there is a pre-existing mechanism that is tied to the temperature of the water. This mechanism turns the switch on or leaves it off at the right time; and the switch must cause the editing mechanism to start.

The editing mechanism has to be directed to the correct protein. So, the characteristics or the "name" of the correct protein has to reside somewhere in the mechanism and there must be a way to identify the particular protein. Assuming that the correct protein is targeted, there also has to be a pre-determined method or plan that causes the mechanism to correctly alter the structure of the RNA that contains the code for the targeted protein. What has to be done?

RNA is nothing but a code or language that instructs another portion of the cell as to how to construct the necessary protein. So the mechanism that alters the RNA has to conform to the language that is expressed by the arrangement of the RNA molecules. For instance, one of the 4 molecules that make up all DNA (and therefore RNA) is guanine. Guanine is a compound consisting of 16 atoms. If the guanine molecule has to be moved or replaced, the mechanism has to be able to recognize and target guanine as apposed to cytosine (13 atoms), adenine (15 atoms) and thymine (15 atoms). What method has been incorporated in the mechanism that enables it to target only a particular guanine molecule and then move it or replace it?

Specifically, one of the duties of the editing mechanism in the polar octopus is to recode (transform) the RNA of isoleucine, which is a compound consisting of 22 atoms, into the RNA of valine, which is a compound consisting of 19 atoms.

[T]he transcribed messenger RNAs are extensively edited, creating functional diversity. One editing site, which recodes an isoleucine to a valine in the channel's pore, greatly accelerates gating kinetics by destabilizing the open state.

(Garrett, S. and J.J. C. Rosenthal. 2012. RNA Editing Underlies Temperature Adaptation in K+ Channels from Polar Octopuses. Science, 334 (6070): 848-851, quoting from the Abstract

Thus the editing mechanism has to remove and/or rearrange at least 3 atoms on the RNA ladder. Each of these atoms is defined by the code that is embedded in the RNA. Each atom has a different number of condons (rungs) that define it. The editing mechanism has to be able to locate each one of the rungs that define each of the atoms and rearrange the molecules in the rungs to transform isoleucine into valine. Darwinists would have us believe that the mechanism that can change one chemical to another chemical on the molecular level came about because all those octopus who did not develop it by random mutations died.

The gene editing mechanism has nothing to do with natural selection. It is a highly specialized chemical mechanism in which every step has a purpose. It is planned machinery on the molecular level that is set to activate when the environment changes and to rearrange atoms and molecules to change one protein into another. In order for this to have been created by natural selection, it would all have to occur at once. Because piecemeal development of gene editing could not benefit the organism.

The existence of this mechanism shows that natural selection is not occurring here. To argue that such a mechanism just "happened" as a result of accidental mutations and dying animals is simply absurd.