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Fitness Terrains and Their Challenge to Darwinian Theory

fitness terrains

A new episode of ID the Future on fitness terrains is quite relevant to the fish-to-man question I wrote about earlier today. Evolutionists picture major innovations in the history of life as no big deal. Forget fish-to-man — consider the more modest challenge of fish-to-amphibian, as Dr. Miller notes.

As Center for Science & Culture research coordinator Brian Miller explains in a conversation with Sarah Chaffee, minor changes (microevolution) lie with the reach of unguided Darwinian processes. But major inventions are a different story.

Remember, in the Darwinian understanding, every modification, building up successively over generations, must be advantageous to survival and reproduction or, at worst, neutral. From human innovation, he gives the example of trying to transform a car into a helicopter. Imagining such a thing necessarily entails catastrophic losses of function along the way, something that evolution could never tolerate.

Brian Miller is a fine and lucid science explainer. Listen to the episode here, or download the podcast here.

Photo: Tiktaalik, Field Museum, Chicago, by Eduard Solà (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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amphibiansBrian MillerCenter for Science & CultureDarwinian theoryevolutionfishfitness terrainsID the FutureSarah Chaffee