“Golden Rule of Evolution” Broken

Evolutionists love to talk about how evolution produces new variation and how this variation is evidence of their dogma.  However, sometimes, they actively admit in public that their ideas are just not working.  In this instance, South American lizards are providing an active challenge to a Darwinian assumption. This article will discuss how they are doing this, why Darwinians make the assumption they do, and how it ties into the failure of evolutionary dogma.

The lizards involved are from Chile, and have two separate habitats. One variant lives in the upper reaches of the Andes Mountains, while the other lives in the warmer, more temperate foothills thousands of feet below. Multiple species are involved in this study, so, unfortunately, I cannot be more specific in identifying habitats or which species are involved. Essentially the paper, presented in the peer-reviewed secular journal Evolution argues that lizards evolutionarily gained and lost the ability to give birth to live young instead of laying eggs depending on their altitude. Lizards at higher altitudes give birth to live young. Lizards at lower altitudes lay eggs. This paper, which uses the lizard example in the broader context of mountain ranges helping create biodiversity, postulates that lizards moving down the mountain actually lost the ability to give birth to live young.

The reason evolutionists are making a big deal out of this paper is a property of evolutionary dogma called Dollo’s law of irreversibility. Essentially this principle is based on probabilities. Once a species loses a given trait through an evolutionary mechanism, it is very unlikely to get it back, unless it breeds with another species which has that trait.  This is a reasonable assumption within the evolutionary dogma. After all, it requires a rare, beneficial mutation to gain new traits. Once a trait is lost, it should be very tough to get it back. However, these lizards, by gaining and losing the ability to have live young, violate that rule.

However, this idea that these lizards are flipping back and forth between egg laying and bearing live young like changing tv channels may not be as well supported as the evolutionists claim.  This idea has no observational evidence behind it. Instead, it was proposed based on phylogenetic trees constructed to determine the evolutionary history of these lizards. Basically, the phylogenetic tree that the evolutionists constructed postulates that an egg-laying species of lizard gave rise to a livebearing species, which then gave rise to an egg-laying species.  I have addressed the absurdity of cladistics and phylogenies in previous articles but briefly, cladistics attempts to determine evolutionary ancestry based on characteristics of the organisms.  The greater the similarity, the more closely related the species are purported to be. Thus based on the phylogenetic tree constructed by these researchers, the ability to give birth to live young appears and disappears throughout the phylogenetic tree.

Either direction the evolutionists go on this, they have issues.  If they accept the phylogenetic tree as accurate, then they need to explain how these lizards appear to gain and lose traits, which are based on the information in the genome, virtually at will.  If however, they reject the phylogenetic tree upon which this is based, they have to deal with trying to construct a different, better phylogenetic tree.  Of course, they might argue that this is equally problematic for creationists in that is shows the development of a new trait.  However, this is spurious for multiple reasons.

First of all, since the journal article is not open access, at least as of this writing, I have no way to check and see if the lizards they are speaking of are members of the same kind.  Further, this flip-flopping between methods of reproduction has not been demonstrated, it has only been inferred based on the faulty evolutionary cladistical methodology.  Even if it had, we have no knowledge of the mechanisms involved. Perhaps the information is already present in the genome and is controlled by epigenetics?  There are too many unknowns and moving parts here to reach a firm conclusion on how this would fit into a creation model, but it certainly is problematic for evolution.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-14/the-lizards-breaking-the-golden-rule-of-evolution-anu/10802342