Railroading page 1 of 3

Charles Darwin and a few others came up with the theory of evolution. Like us they looked at other animals and saw eyes and ears and legs and same behaviours like eating and looking for a partner. Charles wrote a book just over 150 years ago putting forward the idea that animals evolved and that it was through ‘natural selection’. To prove it would rely on finding the fossils.

After Charles Darwin wrote his book, the race to find the proof was on. I think it’s an American expression where ‘railroading’ can occur. You set out to prove something and do find some evidence that points in the right direction. Charles Darwin was looking for the evidence before he set out on a voyage around the world . His uncle /grand parent Erasmus took the stance that animals evolved , so Charles Darwin already had an ambition to prove that animals changed from one species to another before any evidence at all. The railroading gets going from there.

Fossils galore have been found of whole animals going over 500 million or more years. A handful of the fossils are put in some sort of order to show that evolution in a few animals might have happened. Then add to this the eagerness to prove and it all makes the boundary between proof and conjecture to be conflicted. Having a sense of certainty in us about anything we think about , doesn’t make what we are certain of is right. If we’d never heard the word evolution , then we wouldn’t think that say the spiders in our houses evolved.

Spiders have legs that move and eyes to see and they find a partner. Nothing about looking at them would normally bring about the thought that they evolved those features and that somehow they like each other and then go on to make eggs that turn into baby spiders . It’s firstly very difficult to skip over the fact that an egg can be produced to make another baby spider , never mind all the rest. There is then having the male and female spiders having the different bits and pieces to make the eggs The only reason we might think that the spider evolved is because someone else said that they have evolved. But It is meaningless to say that a spider fancies another spider because evolution made it fancy another spider.

Evolution thought is in everybody’s thinking even if we are not thinking about it. When a nature programme says that this or that animal evolved we don’t blink an eye lid. It’s almost like the onus is on finding evidence to prove that the idea of evolution is wrong , and that leaves the evolution ideas to be right , because there isn’t any evidence to say that animals didn’t evolve. That doesn’t mean though that evolution is right. You’d have to explain the phenomena of just eggs and legs and the fact that each animal fancies it’s own species first to say whether they or the whole animal did or didn’t evolve.

Spiders have all the functionality of any other animal that existed 500 million years ago including flesh and blood and bones. One would almost at once get a feeling that a process does not exist to bring about the spider. We surely absolutely know with our thinking ability that the spider and it’s eyes and all the rest of it relied on no evolutionary process. It’s as if a spider spinning a web was always going to happen with or without the help of evolution.

A spider also has another common feature of life , a brain. It’s almost as if the spider could be a spider without the physical body parts. Then for whatever reason , the spider at some point uses the universally available physical parts like brains and eyes and flesh and blood to be a physical spider , as after all , all other animals have them too. That of course could be applied to us humans and all other life and include plants and trees.

That and the rest of course is conjecture. But so too is evolution theory. Who could tell anyone else that we have the words to explain a spider. We do though. We use the words ‘evolution’ ‘random mutations’ and ‘natural selection.’
Problem is though, that it leaves out the fact that evolution does not cause legs and brains and trees. Those body parts of the spider and tree parts in my thinking don’t exist because of evolution. But the word evolution does sort of carry with it the thought that evolution is involved with the existence of them and that it is also involved with the existence of other phenomena like toe nails and hearts and eyebrows. In the very least, whenever the word evolution is used , it should be stated what the word is meant to hold in it.

It’s not that there is any deception going on when the use of the evolution is used , but it should be explained that when an animal is said to have evolved say a chemical that protects itself from a disease , evolution doesn’t make the chemical or cause the chemical to exist. Evolution has nothing to do with with the new chemicals actual existence. Evolution theory could only be used to say that those animals that now have that new chemical are more likely to survive and have more babies. That’s giving evolution thought a bit of a breather. But what’s more likely is that if an animal or plant gets a new chemical to fight say disease , since it can somehow get the new protecting chemical to come about , it surely would not be relying on the trials and errors of natural selection to have the new chemical protector come about in the first place. Somehow the new chemical protector comes about in one go. Of course it might not happen at all , not sure.

Could think in the same way about feet with toes and toe nails at the end of our legs. Seems to me that evolution theory has nothing to do with their existence or their future. It should in the least be pointed out to children , that when we say that this or that evolved , like a heart , that the heart was not made by evolution and that we don’t know how the heart exists. The existence of a heart does not rely on our evolution ideas. The phenomena or idea of a heart has to exist in the first place , and then the heart has to be on a planet that has air on it , and it pumps blood. It’s pretty bloody obvious that a heart does not rely on our evolution ideas.

Continuing with the conjecture mentioned further above for a moment though , trees and frogs might exist without the physicality , and then planet earth comes about and the trees and frogs whatever they are , use the available universal physical possibilities like hearts and legs and flesh and blood and carbon in the air , to be what they look and feel like. The frog would use the brains and flesh and blood etc. In the case of the tree , let’s say it was in a perfect invisible form , in a form that was so perfect having never met sunlight or water , then it would say for simplicity use wood, which is carbon taken from the air to to add physicality to it’s form. The form of the invisible tree that uses the wood would of course meet up with that sun and wind and the rest of the environment and be the shape that it is. The frog would be happy to have it’s physical features to be able to breath and live in a pond and on land to do whatever the frog without the physicalities wants to do.

All conjecture but what we think of and what we mean when the word evolution is used should be dismantled into what it is meant to convey. For example , we could say say that the nose on any face of any animal has evolved. Surely it’s far from likely that millions of species of animals have noses to smell and breathe air using the conjecture that evolution acted on each species of animal to have a nose that somehow fits on a face below in most cases a set of eyes and above a mouth that eats food.

Much more likely , in the world of conjecture , would be that every animal , whatever they are , use the available noses and eyes and brains to physically exist. Quite clearly all of those noses and ears and brains , flesh and blood , and eyebrows , have never had to struggle to exist. They seem like they are all there ready to be used. They somehow exist.
We can’t though compare them to a whole animals struggle to find food and shelter and how to get up in the morning. That’s much more difficult to comprehend.
But it is beyond any doubt at all , that the physicality of body parts are a simple occurrence. They don’t require any evolution. There is clearly no hard work in their coming about. They somehow exist.

Back to the railroading though , and using fossils to prove the idea of evolution. There doesn’t seem to be the abundance of fossils that you would expect to see of even one animal out of millions turning into another animal. It’s as simple as conjecturing that any of the 500 million year old fossils of animals that have been found with an obvious eye socket where an eye must have been , turned from that animal into any one of the animals on earth today. Eyes existed 500 million years ago and there is no evidence to that say that those animals from that time with eyes evolved into the animals of today like spiders or the butterfly or a hippopotamus. The fossils show only that eyes existed along with their whole body.

Could this be the biggest miscarriage of justice ever. That is , that all of life has been found guilty of having evolved using random mutations and natural selection based on scant evidence. Railroading most definitely could have occurred here. There are no sequences in the fossils showing that one animal evolved into another. Just attempts using conjecture. There should be millions of sequential lines of fossil evidence. The fossil evidence shows only that different animals have existed as whole animals.

We could take the length of time that a species of animal has existed before going extinct. Dinosaurs existed for over 165 million years. Out of the mountains of fossils of them there seems to be some that show dinosaurs that had feathers , and the conjectures after the finding leads to the idea that dinosaurs turned into birds. Since there existed lots of different types of dinosaurs that existed for over 165 million years , then there should be an unwholly amount of fossils showing that dinosaurs evolved into all sorts of different species. There are just about none.

Same with lots of other species of animals. Penguins have existed for 60 million years. There are fossils showing that they changed a bit in height and feet length , but in the main they have always been penguins at about the same size. In 60 million years you’d think that evolution would make bigger changes. Same in the other eight million species of animals on earth. The evidence for evolution using random mutations and natural selection is more than scant. It should be overwhelming and it’s not. Animals from their beginning could move and they could see and they could find their partner and make eggs to make babies. Surely not one of those abilities or physicalities relies on an evolution process.

Basically the theory of evolution says that animals within a species that had the best new evolved changed body features went on to have more babies to work in their environment using natural selection . Other animals along the way didn’t survive. To come to this conclusion that animals had evolved and that it was through natural selection , Charles Darwin had noticed that there were about 17 different types of the finch bird on the Galapagos islands in the Pacific Ocean and they all had different shaped beaks to eat different kinds of nuts and seeds. And then it is followed with the idea that the finches had these different shaped beaks because over thousands of years of evolution they used this natural selection to allow those with the best beaks to break those nuts survive and have more babies.

Problem is though , that bird beaks have to exist on the birds face in the first place to do what they do. The beaks are used to eat , make nests , feed young and lots more. And they can’t get in the way of the eyes vision. So how did a beak never grow upwards and block vision using evolution ideas. They seem more like exact features to do what they do.

Pic by Shyamal and Jeff Dahl, Wikimedia Commons

Conjecture could just as easily also be used to say that once the finches munched on different foods/seeds then their body or whatever realized the type of food they were eating and however they do it the genes modified the beaks with all of the possibilities in genes. That’s not evolution. That is genes choosing from it’s arsenal the most suitable beak.

Since there can exist the dense structure of a beak to crack nuts in the first place there is no point in explaining away the variety of beak shapes using natural selection acting on random mutations. To get that density in beaks could be compared to getting the density in teeth compared to the rest of the body. You’d have to explain that density and how that happens. Put simply, if beaks and teeth and bones have that density compared to flesh and blood they would all be using what they do by using whatever they use in the first place. Then there is the density in finger and toe nails. And that they are all in the right places on a body. This might all seem like silly thinking , but the words natural selection and random mutations and evolution have been compiled together to explain all of these things.

First thoughts on the finches would be that even though their beaks were a bit different , they were or are still finches. No evidence of species change. So why write a book with the title ‘On the Origin of Species’ based on the shape of the finches beaks. Maybe Charles Darwin was a collector and liked cataloguing and any collector likes to give meaning to their collections.

The finches do have differently shaped beaks. That is not in question. But humans have different facial features like say a European to a Chinese face. We still think that they are humans. That’s not a good example , but it is more a question of how can we pin our idea of natural selection to explain not just those beaks with their density, but the whole diversity of animals and plants and their different parts and how each behaves and thinks. Animal breeders and botanists can change certain features in animals and plants but only so far , but don’t put those changes down to natural selection. Those changes are more like possibilities that exist in an arsenal of possibilities . Don’t know who said this but ” genes establish a range of possibilities to the environment.” If that’s the case then that range might be restricted to just any one animal. That though is not our evolution ideas at work.

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