Discovery Channel"s Feeline Fairy Tales

The Discovery Channel recently aired a documentary called "Discovery Journal," which considered the lives of various members of the cat family, and especially lions. From start to finish throughout the program the channel insisted on telling its viewers evolutionary fairy tales.

The Discovery Channel recently aired a documentary called "Discovery Journal," which considered the lives of various members of the cat family, and especially lions. From start to finish throughout the program the channel insisted on telling its viewers evolutionary fairy tales. The method employed was the "brainwashing" so dear to Darwinists: First of all the structures in living things and their uses are explained, following which stories such as that these came about by evolution are put forward, with not a shred of evidence being offered. This article will explain just why the channel"s fairy tales have no basis in reality.

At the beginning of the program the following comment is made regarding the origin of cats" teeth:

"Cats possess teeth which serve particular purposes and which have evolved in accordance with the type of prey. Their large, sharp canine teeth, which are usually deadly, are suited to the backbones of the animals they hunt, allowing them to break the animal"s spine as if cutting it with a surgical knife."

As we can see, not a shred of evidence to support the alleged evolution of cats" teeth is offered; all we have is talk of teeth having "evolved," itself based on nothing more than prejudice. The canine teeth possess a special design, the origin of which can never be accounted for by the theory of evolution. The teeth are coated with enamel, an exceedingly hard substance. They are the hardest tissues in the body, harder even than bone. With their hard structure the teeth are very useful for chewing. They are in exactly the right place in the body. They are set out in just the right order in the upper and lower jaw, and are pointed. The theory of evolution"s explanation of the origin of this structure rests on "random mutations." The theory"s supporters fondly believe that completely random processes led to teeth, which possess this special tissue, and that these processes furthermore arranged them in a regular order. That is why they base the origin of the information about teeth in DNA on chance. The fact is, however, that there is not the slightest evidence that random mutations can ever provide an organism with new, beneficial structures by adding information to its DNA. On the contrary, when mutations do have an effect they "damage" the information stored in the genes, and lead to the development of abnormal structures in the organism.

It is possible for elimination to take place amongst cats with long and short canines in nature. For instance, felines with long canine teeth might have a grater chance of survival in regions where hunting possibilities are limited, and the average length of canines in the feline population may increasingly rise. Cats with short canines might even disappear altogether in a later period. Yet the long canine teeth cited in this example have always been present in cats. The selection in question takes place in the gene pool made up of cats which already possess long and short teeth. What is happening is "elimination," not an "increase" in information. The question is not one of how cats already in possession of teeth are selected, but how these teeth came into being in the first place. And natural selection cannot explain the origin of the genetic information in which the teeth are encoded.

The Discovery Channel is naturally well aware that canine teeth cannot be accounted for in terms of chance mutations and natural selection. That is why it does not go into these matters and attempts to gloss over the issue with such superficial concepts as "teeth assuming special functions and evolving according to the nature of the prey." Yet these concepts are quite insufficient to rescue the position. That is because it is impossible for an organism to evolve teeth according to the nature of its prey and thus to serve particular functions in the light of its own needs. The well-known evolutionist Douglas Futuyama makes the following admission on this subject:

... the adaptive "needs" of the species do not increase the likelihood that an adaptive mutation will occur; mutations are not directed toward the adaptive needs of the moment.... Mutations have causes, but the species" need to adapt isn"t one of them.

Futuyama"s words indicate an important truth which totally invalidates the evolutionary fairy tales so insistently recounted on popular Darwinist television channels such as the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. The common feature of these tales is that after setting out living things" needs on the basis of their environment, they then go on to describe how they "developed" this or that organ in the light of those needs. Yet needs can never bring about new organs or new systems. It is as nonsensical as saying "Cars developed air-cooled engines because of the lack of water in the desert:" Air-cooled engines did not "develop" by themselves, but were brought into being with a conscious design by German engineers in the Second World War because of the conditions in the North African deserts. The organs of living things in nature did not evolve in response to "needs," but were given to them with a conscious design.

Despite the fact that chance mutations have no evolutionary role, Discovery Channel TV continues to air short stories based on its own imagination: "Evolution created killing machines, but in doing so it never left other creatures defenseless. The hunter and the hunted are in a constant struggle of mutual attack and defense." This is a deception employed to impose Darwinism on people: The struggle between the hunter and the hunted does not show that these evolved by evolution. Such an interpretation merely reflects the TV channel"s Darwinist beliefs. Chance can never create a complex structure. If we see a building in the middle of the desert, we realize that it must have been built by human beings and did not just come about by chance as the sand was gathered up by the wind. Living things in nature possess a far more complex design and information than the building we have just cited. To imagine that such complex designs and information could have come about by evolution is even more irrational than believing that the building in the desert came into being from the effects of wind and sand.

Discovery Channel TV puts forward the just-so evolutionist story regarding the origin of cats:

"Where does the origin of carnivores go back to? The first cats emerged 37 million years ago. The first cats were small creatures living in trees in the jungle. They were exceedingly agile, and possessed eyes like binoculars and a sharp sense of hearing. Eventually they came down from the trees and for the first time moved onto the plains. A string of new feline species evolved in as short a timeframe as 2 million years."

Attention needs to be paid here to the way things are being glossed over. Saying that the first cats emerged 37 million years ago is no answer to the question of how they emerged, though the Discovery Channel glosses over this in a Darwinist way, as if it had been explained in terms of evolution. The truth is, however, that the origin of the cat family, just like that of the other mammal families, is uncertain in evolutionary terms: the fact is that they all emerged suddenly and have no common ancestors.

Another story in the Discovery Channel documentary concerns the mutual so-called evolutionary influence of human beings and sabre-toothed tigers. Sabre-toothed tigers are an extinct species of tiger with very long canine teeth. The program offered some totally speculative stories regarding the connection between the extinction of sabre-toothed tigers and the emergence of man by evolution:

"Could the emergence of another creature on the plains of Africa be one of the reasons why sabre-toothed tigers became extinct? A world dominated by at least three species of sabre-toothed cats and panthers might have been too dangerous for our hominid ancestors. Leopard teeth marks have been found on the skulls of primitive human beings in South Africa. Maybe it was our ancestors who had to adapt in order to survive on the African plains. In one sense, the Olduvai Valley in Tanzania is the cradle of mankind ... It may have been we who pushed to sabre-tooths to the edge of the abyss, but had there been no great cats then we may not have become as intelligent and cooperative as we are today."

It is deceptive for a scientific television channel to broadcast such tales. These tales about evolution are devoid of any scientific evidence whatsoever. Darwinists, who maintain the dogma that all the millions of species of living things in the world emerged by evolution, also interpret fossil discoveries in the light of this prejudice and impose their fairy tales on viewers by means of evolutionist media institutions such as Discovery Channel TV. Evolutionary scenarios about natural history such as these have no more scientific value than fairy tales. This situation was set out in an interview with Colin Patterson, head of the Paleontology Department of London"s famous Natural History Museum, in an interview on BBC television on March 4, 1982:

I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story-telling. And this is the result about cladistics because as it turns out, as it seems to me, all one can learn about the history of life is learned from systematics, from groupings one finds in nature. The rest of it is story-telling of one sort or another. We have access to the tips of a tree, the tree itself is a theory and people who pretended to know about the tree and to describe what went on with it, how the branches came off and the twigs came off are, I think, telling stories.

Discovery Channel TV so oversteps the mark in these accounts that it even manages to offer detailed stories regarding "hominids" who are assumed to have broken the 3-centimetre piece of bone on which one particular tale rests. Robert Blumenschine, a paleontologist working in the Olduvai Valley, offers the following speculation on this cylindrical piece of broken bone, no bigger than a sparrow"s toe: "This (bone) is a splendid example. It is hard to say to what kind of animal it belongs. Yet looking at the breaks on it one can say that it was broken by tools made by primitive human beings who ate the marrow out of it. They may have broken the bone with a few blows. It would sometimes be enough just to break the end of it."

This tale rests on imagination, not science. A single bone is examined, it is assumed from the way the edge of the bone is broken that it was broken by a tool made of stone, and then guessed that this stone implement had been produced by a "hominid," in other words an "ape-man."! The same approach led to the Nebraska Man in the 1920s. Based on a single tooth discovered in the Nebraska Desert in 1922, evolutionists claimed that belonged to a so-called intermediate species in human evolution, and even went as far as producing pictures of the body of this imaginary creature, together with its family. Yet it was impossible from just one tooth to calculate that it had belonged to a living thing which possessed a body covered in hair and an appearance somewhere between ape and man. In fact, the evolutionist fantasies soon came to nothing when it was realized that the tooth was that of a sow!

Discovery Channel must give up airing new "Nebraska Man" tales and trying to portray evolutionary scenarios based solely on imagination as if they were scientific facts. If it really wants to address the scientific facts about the origin of living things then it can start with the questions of why the different categories of life on earth emerged suddenly, why no mutations have ever been observed to improve genetic information or whether the complex organs in living things are capable of reduction or not. In that event both its viewers and the Discovery Channel itself will come to realize why it is that the theory of evolution is in a "state of crisis."