Hold your breath! How long before are forced to breathe deeply of the amazing mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon and a trace amounts of a few other gasses?…that is unless you live in Mexico City where the other gasses are not so trace. Taking that air and converting the oxygen into usable metabolic portions for your cells are your lungs. Lungs are incredible organs that function as part of our remarkable respiratory systems.

Now I’ve been told that natural selection acting on random mutations has enough power to produce everything in biology…including lungs. I’ve put these claims to the test several times before each time with the same result…no evidence…just assumptions:

• Can Evolution Explain Altruism?
• Can Evolution Explain Reason?
• Can Evolution Explain Software?
• Can Evolution Explain Software 2.0?
• Can Evolution Explain The Indonesian Mimicry Octopus?
• Can Evolution Explain the Eye?
• Can Evolution Explain Empathy?
• Can Evolution Explain Morality?
• Can Evolution Explain the Human Brain?
• Can Evolution Explain the Origin of Information?
• Can Evolution Explain the Origin of Minds?

Many God-deniers and skeptics are angry rubes, but Steve McRae is not unthinking or a rube. We disagree, but I’ve found him to be fair in my interactions with him. Recently, he posted that he believes there is evidence that evolution (natural selection acting on random mutations) can produce lungs. He linked to this article from the National Library of Medicine. Let’s see if the powers of evolution can explain the origins of lungs.

Here’s how this works: The quotes from the article in red italics and then just below the quote, I’ll post my analysis in the default black font. I have added bold and underline to key words from the authors throughout, so this is just a note to say that neither the bold nor underline appear in the original article.

Right from the start in the abstract we get the first caveat:

the origin and early evolution of vertebrate lungs remain highly controversial, particularly whether the ancestral state was paired or unpaired. Due to the rarity of fossil soft tissue preservation, lung evolution can only be traced based on the extant phylogenetic bracket

That’s quite a lot to overcome, but I’m sure they will try. Of note: Their admission that since there is no fossil evidence of lung evolution, they rely “only” on creatures that are alive today to extrapolate backwards in time with a collection of assumptions. Their words…not mine.

After giving the proper obeisance to the evolutionary story, the authors get right into it:

How this important organ (lungs) first evolved is a hotly debated topic. This is largely because lung tissue does not preserve well in fossils, making it difficult to trace how the lungs of vertebrates changed over the course of evolution

It will indeed be difficult to trace given the narrative of evolution, but because it is the dominant paradigm, it MUST try to provide an explanation – difficult or not

Lungs, the most important organ of the pulmonary complex, are rarely preserved in fossils, hindering direct evidence of how the earliest air-breathing vertebrates breathed air

I’ll take that as an admission that direct evidence is absent. We will proceed knowing that what follows from them is a collection of assumptions and story-telling

Yet, lung affinities for such structures remain elusive (Janvier et al., 2007) and could not be confirmed by anatomical, phylogenetic, or biological data (Goujet, 2011; Béchard et al., 2014). Here, we follow Janvier et al., 2007, Goujet, 2011 and Béchard et al., 2014, and consider that observable evidences are elusive and do not support the interpretation of these paired masses as a lung

Indeed, the evidence is elusive and cannot be confirmed. The available evidence consists of assumptions and unsupported interpretations. Got it

Our knowledge about the morphological and genetic development of the lung is, however, highly biased towards amniotes, and consequently the original form of this evolutionary novelty among osteichthyans remains largely elusive

Elusive = missing

One hypothesis, formed and supported by studies on tetrapods (particularly mammals and birds), assumes that the lung evolved through a modification of the pharyngeal pouch

Assumptions abound

Curiously, some living vertebrates display an unpaired organ, leaving the ancestral condition equivocal

The origin of lungs is a curiosity for evolutionists since they are forced to make up stories of their origin. And they use words like “equivocal” to hide the fact that they are left clueless as to the origin.

The so-called left lung of L. paradoxa is most likely a diverticulum or a modified lateral lobe, which might have evolved secondarily, an advantage for enlarging the surface area for oxygen-uptake, eventually enabling the obligatory air-breathing performance in the linage towards L. paradoxa

Most likely? Might have evolved? Are we talking about “the mountains of evidence for evolution” or a story? Most internet evolutionists are VERY good at searching through the headlines of articles on Google Scholar or Nature or Wikipedia for “evolution of _______” fill in the blank. But 9/10 have never read the contents of the article. If they had, they would see over and over phrases like: most likely, might have, could have, probably, perhaps, feasibly, presumably, conceivably…just like in this article

There are some very interesting charts and figures. Notice from the chart below

I modified the chart with the red/green boxes arrows and text. The upper part of the figure in green is science. The lower part in red is the part where they try to “prove” evolution, but it’s in the assumption category because there is no evidence for their claim

From this evolutionary point of view, our results lead to a new definition of the vertebrate lung: either an unpaired or paired respiratory organ developing ventrally from the foregut. Vestigial forms secondarily released from the respiratory function should be also designated as lungs (e.g. the lung of coelacanths). Some criteria previously used for discriminating lungs from gas bladders are no longer supported, including: paired/unpaired organization, position ventral to the alimentary tract (Marcus, 1937; Funk et al., 2020; Lambertz et al., 2015; Graham, 1997), as well as its function. The dorsal position of the majority of osteichthyans lungs described here may be related to its dual and secondary functionality of respiration and buoyancy control (Thomson, 1968). Actually, the only morphological characteristic that can be used to distinguish lungs and gas bladders is the ventral and dorsal origins from the foregut, respectively (Funk et al., 2020; Cass et al., 2013). This phenotypic differentiation into true paired lungs in tetrapods may be related to differential gene expressions (Funk et al., 2020; Bi et al., 2021). Nevertheless, at a level of developmental mechanism, the possibility of co-options of gene regulatory networks of the pharyngeal pouch morphogenesis cannot be excluded, as both the lung bud and pharyngeal pouch develop through the invagination of the foregut endoderm. Our results open the door for future molecular analyses to trace possible regulatory elements for the evolutionary transition from unpaired lungs to true paired lungs in tetrapods.

A long quote indeed, but it was interesting to note that they did not want to restrict anything from being a lung that might look like or was assumed to previously be like or might have once acted like or could be a vestigial form of – a lung. The organs that previously weren’t lungs are now being defined as lungs…possibly

Based on the extant phylogenetic bracket, we infer that the bilaterally paired nature of the lung evolved only in the lineage towards fossil and extant tetrapods, as a synapomorphy of this clade

Inference is not a bad thing to do. Just be sure that your worldview can justify inference due to the principle of induction (uniformity in nature). But again, inference is not evidence

Paired lungs may have been present also in early tetrapods and were probably essential to raise lung surface area and volume capacity during the evolution of vertebrate respiratory system and the air-breathing intensification at the water-to-land transition

I hope by this point that you’re seeing the pattern: “may have been” followed by a “probably” and the ever present ambiguous word: evolution. Not evidence. Just caveats built on assumptions believed because of the story of evolution.

Yet another article that when you read the headline: “Lung evolution in vertebrates and the water-to-land transition”, you are lead to believe it will be packed with evidence for evolution. But when you read the contents of the article, it’s the story that some hard-working scientists conjured up through extrapolation based on their faith in common ancestry. No evidence was actually presented that evolution (natural selection acting on random mutations) could produce lungs or vestigial lungs or air bladders or ventral respiratory organs or anything else.

Objections

After posting these “Can Evolution Explain…articles, I inevitably hear evolutionists respond with some form of: “get your paper peer-reviewed and only then can you get your Nobel Prize for disproving evolution. Until then STFU!”

To be clear, these “Can Evolution Explain…” articles are NOT intended to disprove evolution. They are simply meant to analyze the assertions of evolutionists to see whether the subject matter is actually evidence for evolution by their own standards or not. It’s an internal critique. What I find in all of these articles is that what’s been proclaimed as “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution is really just story-telling and assumptions. We’ve seen that this article is more of the same bluster devoid of actual evidence.

There will be no shortage of “papers” that the devout evolutionists will propose that I must analyze. I don’t have the time or the desire to expose EVERY single article, but I do analyze the top authors and the articles that evolutionists THINK are actually evidence as shown above. Hopefully, given the example of my analysis, other Christians will be motivated to expose how the “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution are really massive canyons. These articles are not intended to prove creationism or anything else. They are meant to push back against the dominant paradigm rather than just blindly accepting what is being taught. If these works of evolution can survive scrutiny, then so be it, but so far, I’m finding that their claims are impotent.