I’m sure all the TENS enthusiasts won’t be at all reluctant to abandon their little theory now:
Theory predicts that it should be impossible for any species to survive in such circumstances. According to Muller’s Ratchet, a law devised by Hermann Joseph Muller, an American biologist, without the genetic reshuffling of sexual reproduction, an asexual population will accumulate mutations which over many generations should spell its doom.
The Amazon molly defies that analysis. After devising mathematical models which describe the evolutionary process, researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh calculated that the fish, which has a life cycle of a year, should have died out 50,000 years ago.
One thing that is annoying about evolutionists is the way that many of them declare they would be happy to abandon it if it were falsified. But every time a genuine falsification is produced, the theory is promptly respun sans substantive modification in such a manner as to dance around the previous falsification. Does anyone truly believe that a single TENS believer would abandon the faith if Haldane’s proverbial rabbit fossils in the Precambrian were found? There are many different reasons that the Molly fish may not, in fact, falsify the theory. But is there a single evolutionary adherent who will disavow it in the absence of those reasons? I doubt it… because it is first and foremost a matter of faith, not science.
Dr Myers, meanwhile, points out that evolution only requires 30 generations. So, now we’ve got a good falsification model for testing a hypothesis based on the theory. Given the reproductive cycles of rats, we can have conclusive proof or falsification of evolutionary theory within five years by seeing if we can turn rats into cud-chewing herbivores or not.
Evolution created something new, and it did it quickly (about 30 generations), and the appearance was documented. It’s still just a lizard, but we expected nothing else — and it’s now a lizard with novel adaptations for herbivory.
I look forward to the innovative excuses offered for why we can’t actually test the model’s predictions….