Sunday, April 11, 2010

Proof that Evolution fails - Dean Kenyon

Even though abiogenesis had been proven false by Ferdinand Cohn within 20 years of Darwin’s The Origin of Species being released, evolutionary theory not allowing itself to acknowledge design, still needed to come up with a theory how the very first life could have come about in the absence of an Intelligent Designer. Over 100 years later in 1969 Dean Kenyon with co-author Gary Steinman became the darlings of evolutionary discussion with their book Biochemical Predestination. In that book Kenyon proposed that the chemical properties of amino acids caused them to be attracted to each other forming the long chains that became the first proteins and, this proposed that life was, effectively, inevitable. Predestined by nothing more than chemistry. Evolutionists ate up the idea and for at least the next decade biochemical predestination dominated evolutionary theories of abiogenesis.
Dean Kenyon received a BSc in physics from the University of Chicago in 1961 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University in 1965. In 1965-1966 he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Biodynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Research Associate at NASA-Ames Research Center. In 1966 he became Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University until 1969.
In 1969, Kenyon and coauthor Gary Steinman published Biochemical Predestination, a book on the origins of life advocating a theory of natural chemical evolution. The book gained international attention putting well and truly abiogenesis back on the map of evolutionary theory. Kenyon was promoted to Associate Professor at SFSU from 1969 to 1974. In 1974 he was a Visiting Scholar to Trinity College, Oxford

In 1976 Prof Kenyon was confronted by one of his students with the challenge of how abiogenesis worked in the absence of DNA. Prof Kenyon concluded upon deep consideration that it couldn’t work. The reality that Professor Kenyon had to face was that DNA is the instructions of how to build life, and without those instructions just having the basic elements available could not produce the end product of life, so one needs to explain where the instructions came from. Dr Kenyon realized that his theory of biochemical predestination simply could not work and that the information found in DNA could only be generated from an intelligent source. DNA could simply not be produced by random processes. In 1980, the SFSU Department of Biology had a dispute with Prof Kenyon over a presentation of Intelligent Design theories in Biology module 337 Evolution. The ID theories provide a solution to the source of DNA design by simply proposing the obvious, that an intelligent source designed the DNA. At that time, Kenyon challenged anyone and everyone on the faculty to debate him. But a vote was had instead to prevent teaching of Intelligent Design theories. 

In 1989 Professor Kenyon released with co-author Percival Davis the book “Of Pandas and People” providing arguments in support of Intelligent Design. The book caused a great controversy, not least because of Prof Kenyon’s previously idolized status within the evolutionary camp. Having its lead proponent pull the rug from under abiogenesis theory has sent shock waves throughout the evolutionary camp and reactionary elements have sought to prevent any further questioning of evolutionary theory. To this end evolution supporters have gone on a campaign to attempt to ban the teaching of Intelligent Design theories in schools and universities.
Regardless of the efforts of evolutionists to keep Darwinian theory alive in some likeness of artificial life support, it appears that Darwin's theories are breathing their last breath and will soon be relegated to the shelf along side of so many other theories that have come in and out of favor over time.

1 comment:

  1. I was the coauthor with Dr. Kenyon of Biochemical Predestination. Our acceptance of the need for biogenesis information source persists in my case as well. The strongest support for this idea is the number of genes found in higher animals. However, the recent reports of a few tens of genes in Luca, a seabound monocellular organism, places it in the middle of the two philosophical extreme, ID and Darwin. I await more data from both sides of the question. Gary Steinman

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