Zombie Birds of Science

The latest outlandish headline from the mainstream scientific-industrial complex comes from CNN, proud purveyor of Fake News™: Extinct species of bird came back from the dead, scientists find.

A previously extinct species of bird returned from the dead, reclaiming the island it previously lived on and re-evolving itself back into existence, scientists have said.

The white-throated rail colonized the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean and evolved to become flightless, before being completely wiped out when the island disappeared below the sea around 136,000 years ago.

But researchers found similar fossils from before and after that event, showing that the chicken-sized bird re-appeared when sea levels fell again a few thousand years later, re-colonized the island and again lost the ability to fly.

The flightless rail can be found on Aldabra to this day.

The extremely rare process is known as iterative evolution -- the repeated evolution of a species from the same ancestor at different times in history.

Most people, if asked about evolution, would agree that evolution has been proven by science. Also, most people don't really understand what evolution means. Even the majority of Christians agree with evolution, but only so long as terms are muddied and unproven assumptions are implicitly made. Pew Research Center found that the majority of Christians believe that humans have evolved over time (link). What's being conflated here is origin of species with adaptation of species, and the implicit unproven assumption is that they are the same thing. Scientists have direct evidence that species can adapt over time. They have no evidence that new species arise by adaption; it is assumed.

Evolutionists believe that all change (whether adaptation or species genesis) occur by random mutations of genes. Most mutations, of course, are harmful. Proteins are highly complex molecules that must be composed and folded in just the right way to function as needed. The vast majority of random changes will destroy functionality, not enhance. And the odds that the change will create a new protein with a new function that the cell will be able to implement usefully are far thinner yet. Imagine taking the cover off your TV and randomly modifying the various circuit boards underneath. What are the odds you improve the TV functionality, rather than destroy it?

Evolution isn't just the miraculous random production of new & improved genes, but many thousands of those mutations properly synchronized and temporally ordered across the genome. Many have pointed out that the eye could not randomly evolve, to which evolutionists respond that the eye provides a perfect example of random evolution in action. Even if so, the process also requires that the visual cortex evolved in lockstep with the eye to process vision with each incremental improvement in sight, as did the optical nerve, as did all the various connections to the other parts of the brain that actually use the vision feed to some useful purpose. A random mutation that improves the lens carries no survival advantage if the retina can't resolve the improved image, the visual cortex can't process it, and the various nerves can transmit it. A single beneficial random mutation is a miracle. Score of them in a synchronized fashion is impossible. Not improbable; impossible. [Also, this all supposes that genes actually encode traits which, as we saw in Biological Materialism, they can not because there are not nearly enough of them.]

Even more incredibly, scientists promote the evolutionary theory of convergence, which is used to explain observations of shared traits in species where it cannot be attributed to a common ancestor. Convergence has become a worse problem, not better, by genome mapping, which often conflict with existing species taxonomies. Convergence shows that evolution is not a falsifiable theory. If two related species share a common trait, it is proof of evolution from a common ancestor. If two related species show different traits, it is proof of evolution by divergence. If two unrelated species share a common trait, it is proof of evolution by convergence. There is not even a hypothetical scenario that evolutionists would entertain as evidence against evolution, and this latest conclusion proves it. "Iterative evolution" is even more fanciful than convergence in magically whisking away all evidence that contradicts the theory.

It's the same pattern we see in other scientific domains, like astronomers promoting neutron stars; absurdity should drive scientists to re-examine both theory and evidence. Because they already plow through all logical contradictions, adding another aspect of absurdity doesn't particularly phase them. The first response to the new findings should be to take it as evidence that the atoll was not fully submerged after all. Perhaps the limestone deposits on the island are not properly aged, for some reason. It is a far more reasonable assertion than theirs, which is that evolution is basically deterministic (even though random!) and species evolution is all but trivial. Another conclusion might be that modern theories of evolution don't actually account for the origin of species (of which there is already substantial accompanying evidence). The most amusing aspect of all this is that the re-emergence of the zombie bird species is that it actually provides more evidence of creationism than evolution, but of course they will never admit so. They don't believe in creationism, they believe in evolution. They've already chosen a side, the evidence is just details to be explained away, whatever it may be.