In the beginning was the primordial soup, or so they say. It seems that this soup had just the right gases above it and just the right amino acids in it so that by some happy accident (evolutionists often posit a lightning strike as the energizing agent) they merged to form the first living cell.  Very cleverly this cell somehow produced its own cell membrane and encoded its own DNA so it could proceed with assimilation and reproduction. I should point out here that modern man, with all his technological know-how, has not yet been able to produce a single reproducing cell.

According to the theory of evolution, over the ages, strictly by chance, the second law of thermodynamics notwithstanding, that first cell then became more and more complex until it had morphed into a swimming creature, complete with gills and fins. Simply stated, the second law of thermodynamics says that things tend to become less organized when left to themselves.  A car rusts in the junkyard; plants and animals decompose; even the sun is running down.  But not our little swimming creature.  After many more genetic mutations the fins turned into limbs and it continued its fall up the evolutionary ladder until it crawled onto land where it needed lungs and chanced to get them. Then came dinosaurs, all of which vanished, only to be replaced by whales and wolves, koalas and kangaroos, monkeys and men, a veritable explosion of random conglomerations!

If all this sounds unlikely to you, you need to understand that so-called “evolution” proceeds by chance or accident, and at each stage an organism progresses to the next level as the result of a happenstance occurrence which gives it some advantage and thus we have “the survival of the fittest.” The theory is filled with conjecture about the consecutive  steps, for example, by which a fin could eventually develop into an arm or a wing .

In my twenties, I was responsible for indexing Darwin’s works for the Great Books Syntopicon under the direction of Mortimer Adler.  At the time I have to admit I swallowed the whole Darwinian “natural selection” scenario hook, line, and sinker.  It was so beautiful, so overarching, so all explanatory.   Later I came to realize that too much was left unexplained.

Now this is where we get to the really tricky part. Wikipedia’s fanciful Evolutionary History of Life goes through all the above steps at some length with the usual patter and conjecture about how the simple cell, given the appropriate millions of years, could have gradually evolved into modern forms of life.  But there is one very important development on which they do not offer any halfway convincing conjecture.  This is what Wikipedia says:

How sexual reproduction evolved and survived is an unsolved puzzle.

I must give credit to the authors of Wikepedia for being up-front about the fact that there has not been any plausible explanation for the origin of sexual reproduction.  Apparently Darwin did not wonder about it.  Either it has not occurred to his followers  that they have no explanation for the beginning of sexual differentiation into male and female, or they are deliberately ignoring it.  They do, indeed, treat at length the advantages of sexual differentiation.

Evolutionists have many theories about the “‘why” of sexual differentiation.  They think reproducing sexually is costly in that time and energy have to be devoted to finding an suitable partner, there is a risk of remaining unmated, there is a risk of producing offspring less fit than themselves because of recombination. Other things being equal, asexual reproduction is quicker and easier.  Asexual reproduction is more common in species little troubled by disease.   On the other hand, sexual reproduction increases diversity and the likelihood of  survival in changing circumstances, it purges the species of damaging mutations, they are able to evolve new defenses against infections.  Some animals actually breed sexually and asexually at different times!

But as to  “how” sexual reproduction first came about there is little said.  In Why Have Sex?  The Population Genetics of Sex  and Recombination, (2006) Otto and Gerstein mention some of the reasons for sex listed in the previous paragraph.  But they offer no answer as to how it all got started.

Confronted with the fact that sexual differentiation actually does exist in most multicellular animals, we have to surmise that at some point throughout the millenia one of these creatures in the process of cell division just happened to  develop a cell with only half the usual complement of genetic material. We might call this a rudimentary egg (oocyte or ovum). Whatever could be the advantage of producing an egg? An egg would be of absolutely no use unless there was a sperm to fertilize it. If this animal found no mate, it would, of course, have been the first and last of its kind!

Well, perhaps another creature of the same species accidentally produced a sperm, complete with a tail. Why on earth  would it grow a tail when it didn’t have a clue that it would have to go swimming after an egg? And of course it would not be genetically pre-programmed to recognize an egg if it should chance to run into one!

If we accept evolutionary theory we are required to imagine that each animal that today reproduces sexually, in the distant past was going about its business of reproducing asexually, dividing and budding away, then ALL OF A SUDDEN it accidentally produced an egg and at the same time, in the same locale, another animal of the same species just happened to make a sperm cell. Also, simultaneously and independently they each accidentally acquired the apparatus to get the egg and sperm together so they could produce offspring with a full set of genes.

Are you buying this?

If ever there was a case of “irreducible complexity” we have one in the transition from asexuality to sexuality.  (Irreducible complexity means simply that the process cannot be reduced to a series of simple steps one after another.  If a number of things do not happen and come together all at once, nothing works.)

Asexual reproduction is going to produce progeny identical to the parent, unless genetic mutation occurs which will produce some change in the DNA.   For an organism to initiate sexual reproduction there is required additional genetic information, not only added to one organism but simultaneously to two organisms of the same type, at the same time, but differing so that the changes will be complementary.  There is no point in having a genetically female animal if there is no matching male anywhere around.

Accidental genetic mutations are almost always deleterious and have never been shown to involve an increase in genetic information. Consider that the informational content of the DNA in a single human cell equals that of 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica or 10,000 floppy discs. Where did all the new additional information required for sexual differentiation come from?

The first big stumbling block in the theory of evolution, much discussed, is the source of the first living cell.  The likelihood that it put itself together (spontaneous generation) has been judged by Yale physicist Harold Morowitz, in the Origin of Cellular Life (1993) to be one chance in 10^{100,000,000,000}.  Francis Crick, Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of DNA, thought the possibility of life arising spontaneously in some super-soup so unlikely that he posited “interstellar spores” coming from outer space as the source of life on planet earth!

Considering the way the probiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler, 1985, 261.

The second big stumbling block, almost totally ignored, is the origin of sexual reproduction.  When it comes down to sexual differentiation, there has been no cockamamie evolutionary scenario posited that will even begin to explain how two animals, of the same species, each separately acquired the necessary DNA information so that they could come together  to produce a third animal of the same species.  I have never seen any even remotely plausible explanation of how sexual differentiation might have first evolved in the Darwinian scheme of things. To my mind, the very fact of sexual differentiation necessitates, yes, demands a plan. And a plan demands a planner. “Male and female He created them,” not “Male and female they decided to become.”

What at a leap of faith it takes to accept that the evolution of amoeba to man accidentally “just happened” without any intelligence lurking in the background.  Over the years I have come to realize that the theory of evolution is primarily imaginary, not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, the fossil record,  mathematical probability — or even common sense.

Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made!

~~~

A spin-off of this article was subsequently published by MercatorNet in Australia titled Vive la difference!–but how did it begin?