In Evolutionary Literature, Researchers Habitually Slip in Teleological Language

Cornelius Hunter

March 1, 2017, 2:02 AM

How would you explain the evolution of a small set of genes that are expressed for but a few brief hours — when we consist of only 8-16 cells — in a finely tuned choreography unique to placental mammals?

The answer, of course, is to use teleological language. That is because the evolutionary explanation is so transparently unrealistic. Thus, in a Science Daily article, Oxford University’s Ignacio Maeso explains:

It was really shocking to find these genes are only read for a pulse of a few hours in our entire lifetime.
…
They are found on chromosome 19, known to be an unstable part of our genome. Think of it as a bubbling cauldron of DNA, with individual bits of DNA being added and taken away, occasionally forming whole new genes. At the dawn of placental mammals, 70 million years ago, these genes emerged and were grabbed by evolution to perform a new task, acting to control what cells do in the earliest stages of development.

“Grabbed by evolution to perform a new task”: As often happens, the combination of passive voice and infinitive form tells the tale.

The teleology is not a mere slip-up. As we have documented many times, it is a common thread running throughout the genre of evolutionary literature. It is needed to make sense of the data, because evolution doesn’t.
Not too surprisingly, teleological language appears in the original research journal paper in BMC Biology as well. To wit:

A small number of lineage-specific tandem gene duplications have occurred, and these raise questions concerning how evolutionarily young homeobox genes are recruited to new regulatory roles. For example, divergent tandem duplicates of the Hox3 gene have been recruited for extra-embryonic membrane specification and patterning in dipteran and lepidopteran insects, a large expansion of the Rhox homeobox gene family is deployed in reproductive tissues of mouse, and duplicates of TALE class genes are expressed in early development of molluscs.

Two of the evolutionists’ favorite words are “recruited” and “deployed.”
They sound so active, despite, once more, the passive voice. And note the teleology slipped in, in the form of a prepositional phrase (“for…specification and patterning”), a construction typically used to indicate a subject’s purpose or objective.

What better way to obviate the rather awkward problem that, if evolution is true, all biological variation must be random with respect to fitness (a claim that, by the way, has been falsified so many times we stopped counting), and thus without objective or purpose.
Evolutionists nonetheless continue to spread this fake news.


https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/in_evolutionary/
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