An article at Phys Org claims that scientists have witnessed evolution in real time. But is this true? Well, after 30 years of experimentation, researchers found that the traits of a marine snail- traits like size, shape, color and behavior- predictably changed based on their new environment.

This experiment began after the original population of wave snails was wiped out by toxic algae. Researchers then introduced crab snails to the region. The crab snails were larger, their shells less colorful, but more robust. Their behavior differed too, as they were more wary of predators.

So what did the scientists predict? They predicted “transitions in shell size and morphology, allele frequencies at positions throughout the genome, and chromosomal rearrangement frequencies.” And the results were that “Observed changes closely agreed with predictions and transformation was both dramatic and rapid.”

But the problem is, none of this is evolution. What they observed was adaptation, speciation and natural selection. Evolutionists certainly refer to all this as evolution, but doing so causes confusion because the term doesn’t accurately reflect what is happening. Further, the term isn’t being used consistently. Referring to these changes as evolution does a great disservice to science and leads to indoctrination.

Consider, if we refer to these ordinary changes as evolution, and if we also refer to unobserved, extraordinary changes as evolution- like the evolution of eyes or feathers- then people begin to blend these two different ideas into one. This blurs the line as to what evolution is, resulting in some people believing apes must have evolved into humans because an experiment with snails demonstrated that snails can rapidly adapt to a new environment. However, such a leap in logic isn’t justified.

Just because the color of a snail’s shell changes, or the snail becomes smaller, doesn’t mean that feathers could appear on a featherless organism over many millions of years. This would be an unwarranted assumption. Enormous amounts of time won’t produce the genetic code for feathers. Why? Because something so complex requires programming, and programming requires intelligent thought.

Interestingly, the article is self-refuting. But first let’s clarify one more thing about evolution. A popular definition is a change in allele frequency in a population over time. That’s it. Simple. But meaningless. Allele frequency does change over time, no doubt, but when most people think of evolution, they’re thinking of something else. They’re thinking of a fish evolving into an amphibian, an amphibian evolving into a mammal, a dinosaur evolving into a bird, or an ape evolving into a human. All this requires a massive reorganization of existing genetic material into something optimally different, like a complete change in bone structure or a circulatory system. A change in allele frequency doesn’t cause such radical changes and novel body plans.

So some unknown process must be at work in order for massive changes to exist. A random accumulation of proteins over millions of years isn’t going to produce a successful genetic code. Something must put these proteins in a meaningful order so that eyes evolve on an eyeless organism. But we don’t observe such changes anywhere in nature. And that’s an important point to understand. Evolutionists assume these kinds of changes happen- not because anyone has observed them, but because eyes exist on many different kinds of organisms… this is called circular reasoning.

I’d suggest a better explanation exists for why these snails possess certain traits: namely, they were created with the genetic diversity needed to fill their environment. God designed them with a genetic code capable of adapting to change.

Now here’s where the article is self-refuting. It plainly states these snails did not “evolve” these traits entirely from scratch! There’s the rub. This shows how evolution means two different things. Most people think evolution produces new traits entirely from scratch. Yet evolution is invoked when an organism already possesses the genetic code for certain traits and passes them along to its offspring. In fact, one researcher said, “Some of the genetic diversity was already available in the starting Crab population but at low prevalence.” In other words, the genetic diversity already existed, so nothing evolved. Evolution implies that it didn’t exist in the first place. If the traits did exist, then it’s not evolution. Nonetheless they claim this is an example of rapid evolution. This is an evolutionary tactic referred to as a bait-and-switch, and, sadly, is very effective.

In addition, evolutionists can’t explain how these traits evolved in the first place. If evolution had any merit, evolutionists would explain how an organism evolved into a snail, and how the snail evolved into some other kind of animal, and they would explain each step of the process, specifically how the molecules, proteins and enzymes became encoded in the DNA to accomplish these complex tasks.

One scientist said, “The snails’ access to a large gene pool drove this rapid evolution.” This is not true. The reason why the changes occurred so rapidly is because they were already there. God designed them that way. It had nothing to do with evolution. Calling it evolution is deceitful because nothing evolved. Evolution, by its very nature, cannot be rapid. It takes millions of years. If it is rapid, then it’s something else and not evolution.

The reason why these researchers could predict the changes is another reason why it’s not evolution. Evolution cannot be predicted. One cannot predict that feathers will evolve on pigs or snakes. But, if crab snails are introduced into an environment depleted of wave snails, then it’s reasonable to predict that the snails would adapt to an environment void of competition. And they would do so by becoming similar to the wave snails since those are the most successful traits for that environment.

Lastly, both the crab snail and wave snail remain snails. They haven’t evolved into something else. So even though the article claims evolution has been witnessed in real time, it isn’t evolution that they witnessed. It was simple genetic inheritance. The article is propaganda and has nothing to do with evolution. Nothing evolved. Even if they call it evolution.