Creation Moment 7/29/2022 - The Groaning Observed: Not Evolution

For we know that the whole creation groaneth....

Romans 8:22

 

"I turned to a headline from last week at the news site Big Think, “Humans are evolving a new artery.” Oh, really? Darwinian evolution is producing a novel functional structure before our eyes? That would be remarkable if it were true. In fact, the headline at best greatly overpromises. The author, Kristin Houser, makes that clear immediately. She calls the phenomenon mere “microevolution.”

Acknowledging it as micro- rather than macro-evolution is a retreat from the headline.

---It turns out what we have here isn’t “evolution.” Even “micro-evoluton” doesn’t capture it. It is what biologist Michael Behe calls “devolution.” Genes break and sometimes that provides an advantage. Other times not. Either way, it’s not the creative “evolution” that Darwin had in mind.

 

Reporting in the Journal of Anatomy, scientists in Australia had

uncovered that more adults now possess a “median artery of the forearm,” contrasted with studies over the past two centuries.

Prevalence of this additional artery may be of significance to modern medicine, because sometimes the “the median artery, when present, passes through the carpal tunnel, thus it can compress the median nerve, causing carpal tunnel syndrome.” 

---Given that millions of us struggle with carpal tunnel syndrome in our device-infested world, this is potentially a legitimate cause for concern.

 

Setting aside for a moment the small sample size (as the authors

acknowledge), let’s assume that the numbers reported in this study and in prior studies back to the mid 1800s are reflective of a genuine trend in the prevalence of the forearm median artery. Let’s further assume that the researchers’ projections for the future increase of this prevalence are spot on and that everyone born after 2100 will carry a median artery. What does this demonstrate about evolution? After all, it isn’t sufficient to simply observe a biological change and then declare that, therefore, humans are “evolving.” We must look at the underlying cause to understand what is really happening.

The authors of the study acknowledge that the cause of this change is unknown, but suggest it is likely the result of a mutation in a regulatory structure. Specifically, the median artery is “an embryonic structure, which normally regresses around the 8th week of gestation.” 

The median artery is therefore a perfectly normal aspect of human

anatomy, present during early embryonic development and then typically fading or disappearing altogether as the radial and ulnar arteries on either side of the forearm develop and take over the job.

If we pause here and consider the facts, we can already see the clear outlines of a rational fact-based answer to the question at hand. The median artery is a normal (presumably essential) part of early embryonic development. After the artery has done its job, the developing embryo shuts down the median artery as it develops the radial and ulnar arteries. This speaks clearly to regulation and control. The kinds of things that are consistent with a planned and purposeful process. Indeed, the authors recognize that a regulated system is at work: “The mechanism for the regression of the median artery is initiated and regulated by specific genes. Persistence of the median artery into adulthood indicates the failure of the expression of these genes” (emphasis added). The researchers go on to suggest that this failure of the regression process “could have resulted from alteration of or damage to genes by mutations,” or perhaps an environmental factor, such as an infection of the mother, could have disrupted the regression process.

 

References to evolution are sprinkled throughout the paper. 

Yet despite the clear implication that the failure of median artery regression is due to a hitch in a sophisticated control process, little additional attention is paid to this fact. The authors do not mention “regulation” again, and there is no discussion of controls or outlines of additional research that could be pursued along these lines. Instead, the observations are shoehorned into a mental box of Darwinian thinking, with vague appeals to “selection pressure” as the cause of the observed change. There seems to be a collective blindness to the evidence right under our noses…what we seem to be observing in the case of the human median artery is a breakdown of a pre-existing system and a failure of a regulatory process to proceed along its pre-programmed lines." EN&V