"The scientific concept of the origin of life on earth begins with the premise that life first appeared billions of years ago with the formation of microscopic organisms out of inanimate matter. In the billions of years which followed, small organisms evolved into higher and more complex forms of life through random mutations, and one species evolved into another."
Natural selection weeds out the failed mutations, leaving the survival of the species more adpated to their surroundings. Allowing them to pass on their genetic material.
My doubt is that the above mechanism along with the fossil record proves that these random mutations are not the driving force behind the development of life on Earth.
The theory of evolution is order out of chaos, an analogy of this is a monkey left on a typewriter long enough would eventually write a perfect combined copy of the works of Shakespeare through random keystrokes - & random mutations would eventually produce complex lifeforms
How is this relevant?
Well once you left this monkey and returned years, years, years later you would have a perfect copy of Shakespeare... BUT you'd also expect loads of meaningless paper with nothing but rubbish printed.
This is my problem with evolution...
evolution must of produced millions of dysfunctional life forms for every functional one. Surely the fossil record should be bursting with millions and millions of these dysfunctional organisms?
Instead, what the fossil record shows is an overwhelming number of well-formed, functional-looking organisms, with an occasional aberration. Let alone we haven't found the plethora of 'gradually improved' or intermediate species (sometimes referred to as 'missing links') that we should have, we haven't even found the vast number of 'mistakes' known beyond a shadow of a doubt to be produced by every random process.
A process that will produce organization without the chaos normally associated with randomness is the greatest proof that the process is not random.
The notion that the fossil record supports the Darwinian theory of evolution is as ludicrous as saying that a decomposed carcass proves an animal is still alive. It proves the precise opposite. The relative scarcity of deformed-looking creatures in the fossil record proves beyond a doubt that if one species spawned another (which in itself is far from proven) it could not possibly have been by a random process.
To answer why we don't see many of the 'mistakes' in the fossil record, some scientists point out that the genetic code has a repair mechanism which is able to recognize diseased and dysfunctional genetic code and eliminate it before it has a chance to perpetuate abnormal organisms.
Aside from this not being the issue, this isn't even entirely true. Although genetic code has the ability to repair or eliminate malfunctioning genes, many diseased genes fall through the cracks, despite this. There are a host of genetic diseases -- hemophilia, various cancers, congenital cataract, spontaneous abortions, cystic fibrosis, color-blindness, and muscular dystrophy, to name just a few -- that ravage organisms and get passed on to later generations, unhampered by the genetic repair mechanism. During earth's history of robust speciation (species spawning new ones) through, allegedly, random mutation, far more genes should have fallen through the cracks.
And, as an aside, how did the genetic repair mechanism evolve before there was a genetic repair mechanism? And where are all those millions of deformed and diseased organisms that should've been produced before the genetic repair mechanism was fully functional?
But all this is besides the point. A more serious problem is the presumption that natural selection weeded out the vast majority, or all, of the 'misfits.'
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