RSR: The Origin of Fingerprints

Neo-darwinism cannot create fingerprints* Can Darwinism Make Fingerprints? RSR co-hosts Fred Williams and Bob Enyart talk about the origin of fingerprints!

* Can Fingerprints Evolve? A fingerprint goes so far beyond and is completely irrelevant to any physical gripping benefit of providing ridges for tactile functionality. Instead, what the correct origins model needs to explain is the fingerprint information management and maintenance system. Taking into consideration the full range of the fingerprint system demonstrates that they could not evolve by the neo-Darwinist mechanisms of mutation and natural selection. Fingerprints in gorillas, chimpanzees, koala bears, and humans cannot evolve by any Darwinian process because no survival benefit in the wild could be conferred by any of the functional requirements in its complex multipart system. Having no theoretical survival value means that evolution is back to pre-Darwinian days before natural selection was considered as a possible way of answering the mathematical impossibility of evolution. Consider however that the following system requirements provide no survival value, thus the large commitment of resources to develop and transmit this system cannot be explained by evolution:

Electron microscope photo close-up of a fingerprint with rows of divits between the fingerprint ridges1. The system draws the design by an algorithm that develops and maintains the information for the pattern
2. The system ensures that the pattern will survive and even re-emerge through most injuries to fingers
3. The system will vary the design between billions of individuals
4. The system draws the prints not as raster images (in pixels), but with mathematically defined vectors
5. The system begins to implement the unique prints in early fetal development
6. The fingerprints will scale as tiny digits grow from infancy, through puberty and into adulthood
7. The system, unlike random static on a TV screen (or sand on sandpaper), varies the design in human-discernible patterns
8. The system will produce raised surfaces consisting primarily of continuous curved lines
9. The system will produce non-intersecting pathways that create clean patterns without crossed lines
10. The process of skin formation including the programmed death of billions of skin cells to constantly reform the epidermis will not alter the programmed pattern.

Understandably the Creator would put unique, lifelong fingerprints (and footprints) on human beings because of the importance of identification. And for His enjoyment and taking advantage of the human ability to identify such patterns He also put fingerprints on various animals. Find out more by listening to this show!

* The Evolution of Real Science Radio: Bob and Fred talk about:
- the inception of Real Science Radio
- the polite threat from National Public Radio to stop using the name
- Our polite response
- the more than 120 freely-accessible shows in the Real Science Radio archives
- the recollections of favorite RSR programs.

Bob Debates Eugenie Scott, Ph.D.

Today’s Resource:  You'll just love the science DVDs, books, and written, audio or video debates we offer through our Real Science Radio broadcasts! So have you browsed through our Science Department in the KGOV Store? Check it out at store.kgov.com. Or to order any of our RSR science products by phone just call us at 1-800-8Enyart (836-9278).



* Special Editions of Real Science Radio:
- RSR's famous List of Not-So-Old Things
- Bob's debate with Christian Darwinist British author James Hannam
- PZ Myers blogs against Real Science Radio so we hit back with the PZ Trochlea Challenge
- Waiting for Darwin's Other Shoe: Science mag cover: Darwin Was Wrong on the Tree of Life
- Microbiologist in Studio: Creation Research Society Quarterly editor on new genetic findings
- Caterpillar Kills Atheism: describe how a bug could evolve to liquefy itself and then build itself into a flying creature
- And see the RSR Offer of $2,000 to get 16 letters of the alphabet in their correct places; $500 paid in 1998; $1,500 in 2010...