Evolutionary Tall Tales From The BBC -I-

The documentary The Human Body, prepared by the BBC is full of intense propaganda intended to impose the theory of evolution on viewers. Yet this propaganda served no other purpose than to prove that the theory of evolution is nothing but an unscientific myth.

The documentary introduces the human body, and describes the so-called evolution of man in a fairy tale manner, offering the viewer no evidence whatsoever. Intended as thoroughgoing propaganda, the documentary actually demonstrates how devoid of scientific support the theory of evolution really is. What follows is a scientific reply to the errors in the documentary:

BBC's Bacteria Myth

BBC's evolutionary tall tales begin with the sentence that there were first of all bacteria in the primitive world, and plants and animals later evolved from these bacteria. The fact is, of course, that the expression "there were bacteria in the primitive world" is meaningless because the problem is how those bacteria came into being. Those who prepared this documentary on BBC might have thought they could gloss over this crucial question on the assumption that their viewers would adopt a superficial view of the matter such as "those bacteria must probably have come into being by themselves." (Even worse, they themselves might hold just such a view.) In truth, however, even the origin of the very simplest bacterium represents a major difficulty for the theory of evolution, one that cannot be glossed over with the words just mentioned.

In this picture, magnified 15,000 times, can be seen the DNA molecule of a bacterium which has been exposed to special intervention. There are 4 million base pairs in this bacterium's DNA, and if this DNA were stretched out flat it would be 1.5 mm long, or 1,000 times longer than the cell itself. Just the way in which such a complex structure is squeezed into such a restricted space shows the fine detail in God's art of creation.

The origin of bacteria is a problem for the theory of evolution because the theory maintains that life on the primitive earth came about from random chemical reactions. Yet even the simplest bacterium contains such a complex organization and information that these can never be accounted for by any chemical reaction.

Let us examine this information: A bacterium has around 2,000 genes, each gene consisting of up to 1,000 letters (codes). This means that the information in its DNA must be at least 2-million letters long. That, in turn, means that the information contained in the DNA of just one bacterium is equivalent to 20 novels of 100,000 words each.1 That being the case, it is quite impossible for a single bacterium to come about by chance or to evolve as the result of chance effects. Any chance intervention to a structure containing information on such a scale would damage the functioning of the bacterium's entire system. A deficiency in a bacterium's genetic code would mean damage to the working system, and therefore death.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, calculated the probability that all 2,000 of the different types of proteins that it takes to make up even a simple bacterium could have come into being completely by chance. According to Shapiro, the probability is one in 1040,000.2 (That number is "1" followed by forty thousand zeros and it has no equivalent in the universe.)

Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Cardiff, commented on Shapiro's result:

… One to a number with 1040,000 noughts after it…It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.3

Sir Fred Hoyle, the British mathematician and astronomer, has this to say about these figures:

Indeed, such a theory [that life was assembled by an intelligence]  is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.4

Below can be seen a singlecelled protist, and to the side are shown nerve cells with their complex structure. These cells are all marvels of design.

It is therefore impossible for even the simplest bacterium to have come about by chance, as evolutionists claim. In fact, the theory of evolution is even unable to account for the emergence of just one of the 2,000 kinds of protein that go to make up a simple bacterium. For that reason, saying "first there were bacteria, and plants and animals later developed from bacteria" is a huge deception, devoid of any scientific foundation. Those who prepared the BBC documentary must in any case be aware of this, since they avoided the subject of how the first bacterium came into being, simply beginning their tale with "bacteria that somehow came into being."

Furthermore, evolutionists have not one shred of evidence for their evolutionary fantasy; no intermediate form between bacteria and the first plants and animals exists, and they themselves admit the fact. One such evolutionist is Professor Ali Demirsoy, a prominent Turkish defender of evolution, who confesses:

One of the most difficult stages to be explained in evolution is to scientifically explain how organelles and complex cells developed from these primitive creatures. No transitional form has been found between these two forms. One- and multicelled creatures carry all this complicated structure, and no creature or group has yet been found with organelles of a simpler construction in any way, or which are more primitive. In other words, the organelles carried forward have developed just as they are. They have no simple and primitive forms.5

The Mistaken Idea that Bacteria Evolved as their Environment Changed

It was suggested in the BBC documentary in question that bacteria were gradually exposed to change, as a result of which more complex life forms emerged. This is nothing but a work of the imagination, without any scientific foundation. Bacteria have very short life spans, and a single scientist can therefore observe many generations of them. Evolutionists have thus subjected bacteria to countless mutations for many years, but no evolution has ever been observed in a single one. Pierre-Paul Grassé, one of France's best-known zoologists, the editor of the 35-volume Traité de Zoologie, and former president of the Académie des Sciences, writes the following about this bacterial immutability which invalidates evolution:

Bacteria... are the organisms which, because of their huge numbers, produce the most mutants. [B]acteria... exhibit a great fidelity to their species. The bacillus Escherichia coli, whose mutants have been studied very carefully, is the best example. The reader will agree that it is surprising, to say the least, to want to prove evolution and to discover its mechanisms and then to choose as a material for this study a being which practically stabilized a billion years ago! What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not [produce evolutionary] change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.6

In short, if mutations brought about evolution in bacteria, then examples of this should have been seen in the laboratory. Yet, in fact, quite the reverse is the case.

The Mistaken Idea that Small Changes Gradually Led to Evolution

In the documentary, space is devoted to evolutionists' traditional claims, and it is maintained that over billions of years small changes occurring in organisms combined and led to new species. There is no scientific foundation for such a claim.

The "one by one, small, imperceptible changes" in question are mutations, since mutations are the only mechanism of change the theory of evolution can offer.

Mutations are corruptions and changes in living things' genetic codes brought about by various external factors such as radiation and chemical effects. The genetic code of a healthy living thing possesses a flawless order and sequence. Ninety-nine percent of mutations damage DNA (the other 1 percent having no effect). Mutations tear apart, destroy, or confuse the DNA sequences in which a living thing's genetic code is recorded—that is, they eliminate existing information. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl are just a few contemporary examples of the damaging effect radiation has on genes. As a result of the genetic mutations caused by these tragedies, countless people and other living things lost their lives, many were crippled, and handicapped individuals were born in subsequent generations.

The American geneticist B.G. Ranganathan describes the damage mutations do to living organisms in these terms:

First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building, which, in all probability, would not be an improvement.7

That is why there is no mechanism in nature that might bestow minute, imperceptible beneficial changes on living things. The reason why BBC glosses over this subject with superficial accounts and avoids going into any detail on it stems from the fact that it is only too well aware how that change actually came about.

The Mistaken Idea that Species Evolved from One Another

1. Graeophonus - Scorpion fossil from the Carboniferous Period. 2. Fossil of betulites leaf from the Cretaceous Period forests. 3. A fossil frog from the Mesozoic era. 4. Fossil of the Williamsonia flower from the Mesozoic era. 5. Fossil trilobite 6. Leaf fossil of the Liquidambar tree which also exists today.

According to evolutionists, all living things developed from one another. A previously existing species turned into another one over time, and all the species eventually emerged in this manner. According to the theory, this transition occupied a period of hundreds of millions of years, and happened in stages.

Yet if these evolutionists' claims were true—if, in other words, fish had evolved into reptiles, reptiles into birds, etc., as BBC claims—then countless "intermediary species" should also have emerged and lived during this transformation period.

For instance, some half-fish/half-reptiles should have lived in the past that had acquired reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had. Or there should have existed some reptile-birds with novel bird traits in addition to their pre-existing reptilian traits. If such creatures in a transitional process had existed, they would have been crippled, handicapped, and defective organisms.

Evolutionists refer to these imaginary creatures, which they believe to have lived in the past, as "transitional forms." If such animals had really existed, there should have been millions and even billions of them. More importantly, the remains of these strange creatures should be present in the fossil record. The number of these transitional forms should have been even greater than the present animal species and their remains should be found all over the world. This is a fact which Darwin also accepted.

Even Darwin himself was aware of the absence of such transitional forms. But he hoped that they would be found in the future. Despite his hopefulness, he realized that the biggest stumbling-block to his theory was the missing transitional forms. Therefore, in his book The Origin of Species he wrote the following in the chapter "Difficulties of the Theory":

…Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?… But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?… But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me.8

Despite evolutionists' best efforts, no transitional forms have yet been uncovered. All scientific findings have shown that, contrary to the beliefs of evolutionists, life appeared on earth all of a sudden and fully-formed. A famous British paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, admits this fact even though he is an evolutionist:

The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find—over and over again—not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.9

Another evolutionist paleontologist Mark Czarnecki comments as follows:

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record... This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants—instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fuelled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.10

So, since the fact is that no intermediary forms have ever been found, and that this represents a serious problem for the theory of evolution, how is it that BBC and other like-minded evolutionist media are able to continue propagating the myth that "fish became reptiles and reptiles became birds?" The answer to this question is given in an article in the journal Science:

A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and palaeontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.11

As revealed in Science, behind BBC's unscientific claim lie such factors as "not being unbiased and imagining." BBC presented evolutionary fantasies to the viewer like a fairy tale, talking about "bacteria turning into human beings," and "reptiles that were birds and fish that walked on land," as if it were talking about "the prince who turned into a frog."

Why Does BBC Still Portray Haeckel's Deceptions as if they were Science?

The invalidity of Haeckel's fictitious claims emerged with scientific evidence. The development of the human embryo inside the mother's womb is one of the greatest miracles in the world.

Human and fish embryos are compared in the BBC documentary The Human Body, and the theory of "recapitulation," which ceased to be part of scientific literature years ago, is still portrayed as a scientific fact. The term "recapitulation" is a condensation of the dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," put forward by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the nineteenth century.

This theory of Haeckel's postulates that living embryos re-experience the evolutionary process that their pseudo-ancestors underwent. He theorized that during its development in its mother's womb, the human embryo first displayed the characteristics of a fish, and then those of a reptile, and finally those of a human.

It has since been proven that this theory is completely bogus. It is now known that the "gills" that supposedly appear in the early stages of the human embryo are in fact the initial phases of the middle-ear canal, parathyroid, and thymus. That part of the embryo that was likened to the "egg yolk pouch" turns out to be a pouch that produces blood for the infant. The part that was identified as a "tail" by Haeckel and his followers is in fact the backbone, which resembles a tail only because it takes shape before the legs do.

These are universally acknowledged facts in the scientific world, and are accepted even by evolutionists themselves. Two leading neo-Darwinists, George Gaylord Simpson and W. Beck, have admitted: "Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny."12 In an article published in American Scientist, we read:

Surely the biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail. It was finally exorcised from biology textbooks in the fifties. As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties…13

Haeckel himself was forced to admit that his drawings from the end of the 19th century were fraudulent.

The following was written in an article in New Scientist, dated October 16, 1999:

[Haeckel] called this the biogenetic law, and the idea became popularly known as recapitulation. In fact Haeckel's strict law was soon shown to be incorrect. For instance, the early human embryo never has functioning gills like a fish, and never passes through stages that look like an adult reptile or monkey.14

Another interesting aspect of "recapitulation" was Ernst Haeckel himself, a faker who falsified his drawings in order to support the theory he advanced. Haeckel's forgeries purported to show that fish and human embryos resembled one another. When he was caught out, the only defense he offered was that other evolutionists had committed similar offences:

After this compromising confession of 'forgery' I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner's dock hundreds of fellow-culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of 'forgery,' for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematised and constructed.15

In the September 5, 1997, edition of the well-known scientific journal Science, an article was published revealing that Haeckel's embryo drawings were the product of a deception. The article, called "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," had this to say:

The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London… So he and his colleagues did their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson reports in the August issue of Anatomy and Embryology.

In short, despite its having emerged as early as 1901 that Haeckel's drawings were counterfeit, defenders of the theory of evolution such as BBC portray this theory as if it were scientific fact and attempt to keep the evolution deception alive.

Empty Words and Statements Intended to "Bewitch" the Viewer

"It is He Who originated creation and regenerates it. That is very easy for Him. He is the most exalted designation in the heavens and the earth. He is the Almighty, the- All- Wise" (Qur'an, 30:27)

"The miracle of evolution;" "evolution accomplished this extraordinary transformation;" "the human body shaped by evolution." Expressions such as these are frequently encountered in evolutionist sources. BBC often uses them, trying to inculcate the idea of "the miracle of evolution" alongside striking and colorful images. When these expressions of BBC's are examined closer, however, it can be seen that they are hollow, devoid of any scientific proof and actually state and explain nothing at all.

Using such expressions as these, BBC sets out a string of claims, although as one might expect, it fails to explain how any of these might have come about and which evolutionary mechanisms might have wrought such changes. These are some of the issues which BBC does not or cannot explain and which it glosses over with fancy words:

BBC says that "as the environment in which bacteria found themselves changed, more complex groups of cells began to emerge." Yet, it says not a word about one great enigma, the greatest stumbling block facing the theory of evolution: the question of how even a single cell could have come about by chance evolutionary mechanisms.

BBC says, "fish evolved into reptiles." Yet, it says not a word about how a creature which breathed in water by means of gills and had no lungs to allow it to breathe on land or feet to walk with, could have immediately adapted to life on land, nor about which organs evolved by means of which evolutionary mechanism. That is because this is a major dilemma for evolutionists, and one that cannot be accounted for by any so-called evolutionary mechanism.

BBC says, "reptiles became birds, and reptile scales turned into bird feathers." Once again, however, it fails to discuss how such an impossible evolution might have come about. That is because evolutionists are perfectly well aware that it is impossible for reptiles to have evolved into birds by means of chance mutations, that reptile scales and bird feathers have entirely different structures, and that it is impossible for one to turn into the other.

The ear is such a complex wonder of design that it alone nullifies the explanations of the theory of evolution based on "chance" occurrences. The hearing process in the ear is made possible by an irreducibly complex system.

BBC speaks of "an area shaped by evolution with unbelievable methods over thousands of years" when discussing the bones of the ear. Yet it never actually says what these methods were. That is because no such method is known to BBC or evolutionists.

BBC says, "The other parts of the ear, which provides balance and allows us to walk on two legs, as well as to hear, our hands, arms and our entire body took shape thanks to evolution." Yet it never says a word about how evolution shaped all these complex organs. That is because the theory of evolution cannot explain how organs possessed of irreducible complexity came about.

BBC says, "Decisions such as how we live, the shape of our bodies, were made billions of years before the appearance of the first human being." Yet it is unable to explain who decided what human beings' eyes, ears, hearts, and brains, which would emerge only billions of years later, would be like, nor who planned such conscious, intelligent, and organized systems in a world full of inanimate matter. Is BBC able to answer such questions? In other words, which unconscious, unaware, and unintelligent atoms in the primitive world could have planned the flawless design in the human body?

As we have seen, BBC's evolutionist propaganda is quite baseless. It puts before its viewers claims with no element of reason, logic, or science, under a scientific mask. BBC must be aware that the theory of evolution cannot actually support such claims, since before describing the myth of evolution it stresses that the story is "hard to believe," and continues: "The miracle that makes our bodies' daily lives possible also conceals another great secret from us. That secret, one which is harder to believe, is the story of how we assumed our present appearance."

The Mistaken Idea that Life Began by itself in an Environment of Volcanoes and Sulphurous Waters

In order to see how unreasonable and illogical the theory of evolution is, it will be sufficient to have a look at this claim made in the BBC documentary: The program shows an image of Yellowstone National Park in America, where thermal springs are found, and says, "If you had been here 3 billion years ago, you would have witnessed how the first living things came into being." If witnessing the emergence of living things is such an easy matter, as evolutionists claim, why is it that they do not carry out experiments to try and create the first living things in just such an environment?

Furthermore, evolutionists could impose whatever conditions they wished in these experiments, using whatever materials they wished. In fact, the uncontrolled, chance effects in the primitive earth could be done away with, and they could use consciously directed mutations instead of random ones. They could even be allowed to use ready-made amino acids and proteins, and all the different materials necessary for life, from phosphate to carbon.      Then, in addition to all of this, if they said, "We need time," they could pass the area of the experiment on to one another as a legacy for millions of years. The world's most prominent evolutionary scientists could contribute to the experiment.

Evolutionists claim that amino acids came about by chance in what they call the "primeval soup" and that the first life emerged in this way. If it were really that easy to witness the emergence of living things, why do evolutionists not carry out an experiment by throwing such materials into a swimming pool? Moreover, they can establish such conditions as they wish by means of modern technology. Random effects could even be eliminated in the conditions of this primitive world; consciously directed mutations could be employed instead of random ones. They could even be permitted to use ready-made proteins and all the substances necessary for life, from nitrogen to carbon. In addition, if they say "We need time" they can pass the site of the experiment on to one another for billions of years as a legacy. Yet despite all these many facilities, evolutionists will never be able to form professors of biology who study the cells which comprise their own bodies, roses, tigers, tomatoes or brain surgeons in such a place. All that will emerge is a brown, muddy water.

Yet, despite all this flexibility given to them, evolutionists would still never be able to bring about roses, leopards, eagles, pigeons, butterflies, budgerigars, cats, fig trees, mulberry trees, orange trees, tomato plants, lemon trees, melons, violets, sunflowers, film producers, writers, nuclear engineers, brain surgeons, university students, professors of biology who study the cells which make up their own bodies, university rectors, heads of state, artists, and architects. They would not even be able to produce a single cell.

Despite being an evolutionist, Professor Hoyle admitted this fact:

If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You will find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon . . . In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.16

Conclusion

With the documentary The Human Body, the BBC has entered upon a programme of evolutionary propaganda from which it can never obtain any results. Telling viewers things like "first there were bacteria, which later evolved and eventually became human beings, and this is a great miracle of evolution," without offering any scientific evidence, as if they were reading a bedtime story, is a fruitless attempt to get people to believe in evolution. Today, not even middle school children take evolution seriously; indeed, they find it rather comic. Our hope is that the BBC will realize that this documentary, which it perhaps decided to air solely because of its striking images, actually contains an account which is far removed from true science, and revise it accordingly.