Joel Kontinen
Darwinian icons tend to have a relatively short lifespan. Recently, research on microRNAs basically brought down any hopes of reconstructing Darwin’s tree of life.
Evolutionists believe that all living beings are related and hence belong in the same tree.
This is not the first time that hypothetical tree is in big trouble.
According to Nature news:
“As their name suggests, microRNAs are much shorter than the long RNA strands that are translated into proteins within cells. MicroRNAs instead regulate the expression of genes, an essential duty that means that the genes that code for microRNAs are expected to remain mostly unchanged from generation to generation.”
They were used to “deduce evolutionary relationships between animals.” However, “the latest findings pour cold water on what seemed like a hot approach to solving some big mysteries in evolutionary biology.”
Recent findings move animals from one branch to another, so now researchers know even less of assumed evolutionary relationships than they thought they knew previously. They admitted that they had hoped microRNAs to be silver bullets that could solve evolutionary dilemmas but they suspect that a “relatively large number of microRNAs had been lost over time.”
When it comes to microRNAs, Ken Halanych, an evolutionary biologist at Auburn University in Alabama, says: “A simple tool to decode how animals have evolved over hundreds of millions of years would certainly be nice — but it is looking unlikely that one exists.”
In other words, evolutionists don’t know how (or if) animals evolved as instead of evidence they have a theory that does not work.
Source:
Maxmen, Amy. 2014. Flaws emerge in RNA method to build tree of life. Nature news (28 July).
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