Rapid Chernobyl Adaptations Surprise Evolutionists

Stuart Thompson, senior lecturer in plant biochemistry at the University of Westminster, describes plants thriving around the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor in spite of high doses of radiation. Though he claims the radiation-resistant mechanisms in plants somehow evolved, the characteristics of their adaptations are far more consistent with systems designed to be adaptable.

[Thompson] notes that remarkably “Chernobyl’s exclusion zone isn’t devoid of life. Wolves, boars and bears have returned to the lush forests surrounding the old nuclear plant. And when it comes to vegetation, all but the most vulnerable and exposed plant life never died in the first place, and even in the most radioactive areas of the zone, vegetation was recovering within three years.

These cases of rapid, and in some cases immediate, adaptation are at clear odds with Darwinian selectionist theory. Evolutionary theorist, Andreas Wagner, envisions that “Over thousands and millions of generations, copy error after tolerable copy error can thus accumulate and slowly change a protein’s amino acid sequence.”

Solutions depicted as trial-and-error or hit-and-miss would mean that evolution “does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer….” The anti-design thrust of evolutionary theory’s “trial-and-error” conjecture is rather obvious. [However] It is now obvious that creatures have innate mechanisms that enable them to self-adjust to a higher range of radiation than anticipated. Chernobyl was a unique radiation producing event—as there has not been enough time for them to have developed due to evolutionary “tinkering” via “trial-and-error” struggles to survive.

(https://www.icr.org/article/11446/)