Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison
Some Randomness is Compatible with
God and ID Theory: The “Big Stir”
The existence of random elements in a computer
does not prove that the machine arose by accident. The screen saver that
randomly changes colors and shapes proves that the presence of randomness is
not incompatible with intelligent design, as does a random number generator
that is used to deal electronic black jack, etc. Shuffling the cards serves a
purpose, mixing the marbles, the cake, the genes etc. In such cases, the
random aspects are closely constrained and guided so as not to critically
inhibit the achievement of the overall purpose of the machine, and to otherwise
facilitate a specific task falling within that purpose. In the mechanisms of
evolution, that purpose, in addition to perhaps creating variety for its own
sake, is, again, perhaps, to allow life some means to adapt to changes in the
environment without the creator having to intervene and visibly break the rules
(natural law) in a miraculous event.
There are clear examples of tightly controlled
random subroutines in biology that serve a purpose. Our immune system is a
startling case of a controlled random generator that is invaluable. The
antibody production routine that defends us from germs we discussed earlier in
regards to Frank-Kamenetskii’s hypothesis that antibody production may suggest
an evolutionary short cut to rapid gene production. This routine is essentially
a random generator. It rapidly runs through options for antibody construction
until a match is found that will neutralize an invading germ. One assumes that
the mental problem solving process also occasionally invokes such routines in
brain processes in the search for a conceptual match of a solution to a problem.
Randomness in evolution only rules out God or
intelligent design if it underlies all else as the foundational process of the
entirety of nature, occurring at the point of the very first origination of
things. Barring that, intermediate randomness can be quite useful to
achievement of a plethora of purposes in functional design. Although science
has no idea what the ultimate origin of things was like, that is, what is on the
other side of the Big Bang, we do know that the beginning state of matter
and energy was not chaotic, but rather very highly informed, at least in the
sense of being precisely focused or funneled in a certain direction. Sir Roger
Penrose estimates the specificity of the configuration of matter and energy at
the beginning required to produce this universe and its life forms to be
10 raised to the power of 10123, where 10123 is merely the exponent.
This is an incredibly large number. It would take roughly 10114 books this size merely
to hold all the zeroes. We know that an accidental process cannot
approach such magnitudes of order or consistent direction, not within real
evolutionary time, and not within the probability thresholds of scientific
credibility.
Thus, we know that randomness in the most
fundamental sense does not lie at the heart of the evolutionary process at all.
Randomness only occurs at certain intermediate points such as in animal
reproduction where “random” mixing of the genes of the parents does occur, but
is constrained within manageable limits, once again, inside a machine.
There is no risk of losing the structural organization of the species or the
integrity of its major systems through reproductive mixing. The worst that can
occur, typically, is for a child to receive a large set of teeth in a small
mouth, requiring surgical extension of the jawbone prior to braces. This is
hardly an explanation of macroevolution. The origin of those complex
genes that reproduction shuffles around is the harder part of achieving
biological design (with the as yet untold complexities resident in protein
folding). This is left fully unexplained in the neo-Darwinian theory of
accidental evolution. Mere mystery, or a deficit of knowledge, does not
establish randomness (modern science too often behaves as if it does).
There is a genuine contradiction involved in the
neo-Darwinian view of randomness. Neo-Darwinists simultaneously assert that a
random process can (with the help of natural selection) build any biological
machine whatsoever, even the most complex, in real time and that the presence
of this kind of randomness (affirmed by them as a potent machine building
process) also proves the absence of an intelligent designer (a builder of
machines)! How can the presence of a potent machine building process disprove
the existence of a machine builder? Go figure! If the intelligent designer is a
builder of machines, and if randomness is so good at building machines, why
couldn’t an intelligent designer use this tool to build the machines of life? Neo-Darwinists
not only contradict themselves in this position, they are just wrong about the
capabilities of an accidental process. In the real world (that is, outside the
Darwinian imagination) accident cannot build complex machines by any method,
with or without natural selection.
This is essentially proven by, of all things,
the logic neo-Darwinists have espoused in discussions like those of the Shanks
and Joplin article. In arguing that self-propagating systems naturally occur
without aid of intelligent design, and that natural selection preserves such
systems they have opened their larger evolutionary argument up to empiric
refutation. In other words, where are the complex self-propagating nonliving
physical machines in nature? Are their such machines on a scale of the human
body? If nature is capable of such things by accident, if neither a spirit of
life or intelligent design is required, why doesn’t nature build a wide range
of complex nonliving self-propagating machines? Simply put, such machines are
not out there. The most complex nonliving self-propagating system Shanks and
Joplin can offer is the rough equivalent of intestinal gas. Their argument is
refuted by lack of empiric confirmation. If accident is capable of proposing
and tends to propose the modules of complex self-propagating systems, if
natural selection will preserve them once achieved (at least for a time), and
if there has been plenty of time to work, where are these complex nonliving
self-propagating systems? The overall ecosystem of the Earth is such a system
(for now). The component systems of the Earth’s ecosystem might also be
proposed, such as the water cycle. But to offer only those examples that are
crucial to the maintenance of life and no others is to beg the question of intelligent
design of life. Why would the examples of self-propagating systems be limited
in this way to only those that support life if the cause was true accident as
opposed to a bias for life? The Sun’s solar furnace might similarly be
proposed, but it is both too simple to support the thesis of an accidental
evolution of living systems, and it too is an essential component of the
Earth’s life-supporting ecosystem.
Why is the Shanks and Joplin example of
biochemical flatulence the best example of “accidental” systems neo-Darwinists
can discover outside of the living ecosystem if the entirety of astronomically
complex living systems arose by accident? (Even this phenomenon is not
accidental as natural law is the primary ingredient in the Shanks and Joplin system.)
The answer obviously must lie at the level of the design proposal, for
natural selection will always do its part in preserving a system that can
self-propagate, and the integrity of the mechanistic steps comprising the
physical process of such systems is ensured by natural law. The limiting factor
occurs then in the proposal of the modular increments of
self-propagating system design. There is a complexity barrier that accident
cannot cross when initially proposing design modules. Accident can only propose
design modules of extreme simplicity, and it can only assemble simple
collections of such modules.
Thus, the continued viability of the theory of
neo-Darwinian accidental evolution hinges entirely upon how simple or complex
the most complex of the foundational modules of the incremental evolutionary
construction process of living systems turns out to be. The trend in recent
research has been moving consistently towards greater and greater complexity
for these modules for decades now. It is clear that accident can achieve
nothing like what has been shown to be required for the more complex features
of animals. Certain simple changes in complex creatures like color or overall
size could probably be effected by an accident, once the biological machine was
already built and in place. The evolution of new bacterial species? Possibly.
Anything more, almost certainly not. And this is precisely the limit of what
science has actually observed.
Because the intellectual capacity of the
designer of life and/or the cosmos may be presumed to permit him a far
superior ability to predict the biomechanics of evolution in comparison to
man’s capacity to predict say the generation of Hamlet by monkeys, the
scenario of an intelligent designer using embedded random components is not so
ridiculous as it might first appear. An intelligent designer, God for one
example, could be so superior to the data tracking task of physical creation
that, for him, creating the universe and all life forms in it could be a “piece
of cake” no more difficult for him than you or I stirring cream into our coffee
and being confident of an acceptable mix. We understand the chemical properties
and physical behavior limits of the components involved well enough that we
don't have to micromanage the task by checking the whereabouts of each molecule
of cream. We merely give the spoon a whirl or two and rest assured that the
results will, while potentially varying a little from cup to cup, remain within
the desired parameters of our intended purpose (nontoxic coffee).
Thus, while God or an intelligent designer may
have had similarly general goals for the universe and its life forms, he
needn’t have given up control of the process to the degree to which it would
appear say to a microbe on the surface of a globule of cream swirling around
apparently at random. Such a microbe might wonder why anyone would create an
apparently disorganized mess as appeared to exist only from its limited
perspective. The “mess” is not truly disorganized, however; it is only
apparently random from the point of view of the germ. This is due solely to the
germ’s small perspective and lack of knowledge concerning the details. The “Big
Stir” in our world started off with a Big Bang, such as the germ may have
adjudged when the first swirl of cream starts his entire world moving in
circles. Moral of the story: just because we cannot presently track the causal
chains of complex events of life back to their source, doesn’t mean that He
cannot. After all, he not only chose the coffee and the cream, but constructed
it from the ground up, as it were. He knows its properties. One thing is
certain, he made sure that the water was hot!
Christians, of course, would simply say that
Darwinists are making the whole issue too hard. We, humanity, are the highly
complex result of the evolutionary process, a result that cannot be otherwise
explained, therefore, we might reasonably be assumed to be at least one of the
purposes of it. Given current scientific instruments, theories, pattern
awareness and detection methods, and the general computational limitations of
the human intellect, science at any given moment in history may not possess the
ability to discover the full causal chain of events at its ultimate foundation.
Even were a designer to fully rig the game of evolution by taking all
possibility for randomness out of it, due to the astronomical complexities
involved and the lack of full scientific data at any given moment in time, such
a process would still appear random to humans. Thus even the appearance
of randomness given our best scientific effort does not mean that the world is
not of intelligent design. It only means that the intelligence/knowledge of the
designer would have to be advanced beyond our current science. Stir on Dude!
It is useful to recall here that modern Darwinists use the word “random” in a very limited and technical way to mean only that the mutations of a given individual creature/species are not biased towards a better adaptation for that organism in its current environment. This would seem to allow for cosmic purpose in the overall system of nature, that is, it allows for a bias toward adaptation of the entire tree of life as a whole to conditions on planet Earth generally. Darwinists at times acknowledge this possibility when they are directly confronted on the issue of the compatibility of evolution with religion. However, many of them, neo-Darwinists in particular, still quote Ernst Mayr as an authority in affirming that science has ruled out God and cosmic purpose.
Viewing the Darwinian/neo-Darwinian camp as espousing a unified and consistent theory then would produce a contradiction, for evolutionists have asserted both that there is room for cosmic purpose in evolution and that there is not. Will the real theory of evolution please stand up! As Pope John Paul II reminded us, prior to evaluating a theory of evolution, one must first determine which theory or version he or she is addressing, a version that acknowledges the possibility of cosmic purpose or one that does not.
Intelligent design theorists emphasize that, to admit the smaller claim or randomness at the level of point mutations of DNA is not to justify the larger neo-Darwinian claim of lack of cosmic purpose in nature overall. There are plenty of larger processes guiding the evolution of the genome. We see precisely the same phenomena occurring at the foundation of natural law in physics in quantum particle behavior as we see at the foundations of the evolutionary process in biology. Individual subatomic particle behavior does not reveal a bias for conformance with natural law, yet the overall group behavior of quantum particles does show a strong statistical conformance to natural law. Statistically group quantum behavior is amazingly consistent and powerfully predictive of physical events.[194] It is in fact the deepest level of the physical foundation science has yet discovered that provides order to the natural world and makes science itself even possible.
This dichotomy between erratic individual quantum particle behavior and the orderly group behavior of quantum particles viewed statistically correlates closely with the patterns in evolutionary mutations (mutations of all kinds taken collectively). The single mutations that have been observed do not correspond to a definite trend towards progression of the tree of life, but the fossil record nonetheless shows such a trend. The fossil record reflects a strong bias for both mechanical soundness and progressive development of broad set of species somehow orchestrated to form a very sensitive and complexly balanced ecosystem. Admittedly, this has not been done without loss to extinction; but it has been done.
The historical record of evolution shows a startling bias for adaptive form change, not an exclusive one, but one far beyond what a fully random process could achieve. As with most machines of human construction, this world is not mechanistically perfect when viewed from any perspective, but it is mechanistic.
What recent research has discovered to be actually happening is not accidental assembly of supremely simple components as Darwinian theory asserts, but a heavily biased assembly of highly complex components. This bias is hidden in a multitude of places in the laws of physics and chemistry, particularly regarding amino acid and protein formation, and the transpositional features of the genome. These two features, the high information bearing capacity of the DNA/protein team (along with the “ribotype” that translates one to the other) and the genetic transpositional element management system, are two of the primary overtly “intelligent,” aspects of the evolutionary process. These are now immediately available for inspection in biology, along with the Hox genes and the larger developmental genome that appear to be the key factors responsible for generating major body form change. The entire process is exorbitantly complex. There is no longer any excuse for holding that the form change modules are simple or that the process is accidental.
The potential for abiogenesis (origination of life from nonliving chemicals) is fully dependent upon strong biases in the laws of physics and chemistry, and evolutionary progress is fully dependent on a self-transformational genome. How such a system can be rationally construed as either accidental or simple is now beyond rational belief. Cambridge evolutionist Simon Conway Morris says there is a bias in the entire biophysical system of the universe, in the laws of physics and chemistry themselves, such that not only life, but distinctively human life is the inevitable result of any evolutionary process, whether here on Earth or on another planet.[195] He points to the convergence of independent evolutionary paths towards the same result, a biological design feature such as the camera eye of humans and octopi etc., as evidence for a bias towards achieving a basic standard set of design features for life. Notable among these features are human intelligence and photosynthesis in plants.
The presence of such an apparent bias in the evolutionary record means that we must first carefully map the presence and absence of bias in evolutionary pathways before we venture to use the words “random” or “accidental” in regards to evolution. To jump so quickly, as neo-Darwinists have done, from the simplistic observation that individual point mutations, and even functional and structural changes, are unbiased towards benefiting a creature in its current environment to the conclusion that the entire process of evolution is unbiased towards a hominid dominated tree of life compossible with Earth commits two logical fallacies. It argues from a part to the whole, and draws a hasty conclusion. It also violates scientific method by drawing conclusions before the data is in. While the assumption of an accidental process has always been premature, it is now fallen fully behind the times. It is contrary to the scientific data.
He
Who Rides the Wind Speaks with Hot Air
How can I be so confident that future data will continue to reveal signs of intelligent design and a bias for life? The simple truth: accidents cannot make complex machines. Let me borrow for a moment Sir Fred Hoyle’s analogy of a tornado. A tornado can move your car into your neighbors yard on a single day of bad weather, but that does not mean that, given even four billion years to try, the weather will hit upon a pattern that will consistently take you to the office and back, stopping at the corner grocery three times a week thirty years running until you retire, and then begin dropping you off at the golf course, giving you a fifty yard boost on the par 5’s. The neo-Darwinist defense of the accidental origin and development of life has reached the point of explaining the first simple event, the tornado putting your car in the neighbor’s yard. This correlates to truly accidental genetic mutations, which are almost always destructive. The neo-Darwinists then ask us with effusive confidence to accept their word as experts that a small disaster is sufficient evidence to extend the capability of the destructive process to achieve a masterpiece of organizational complexity. That extension is simply irrational.
Baking a cake may be the perfect example to show the disparity between neo-Darwinian imagination and reality. It is easy to imagine the string of events that would produce an accidental cake: a lady spills wheat flour in a puddle of water on the pavement on a scorching day near a trash dumpster where yeast mold has begun to grow and old beets have turned to sugar. (Sounds good already doesn’t it?) Next door, Mom throws out the remnants of some old baking soda that has deodorized her refrigerator. Her ten year old happens to be teaching the seven year old neighbor to milk the goat in the exact same spot as the flour spill. While digging their grubby little fingers into a can of cocoa surreptitiously borrowed from Mom’s kitchen counter, some milk is spilled as they shuffle around in the other ingredients. The sun rises to shine directly through a broken 8” X 10” magnifying sight-impaired reading lens that grandma has placed on top of the overfull trash container, creating an area of intense heat around the mess of ingredients on the ground. Half an hour later, Walla Booby! Accidental evolution has been proved! The cake is “ready” for the icing!
It could happen, in theory. But will it? More to the point, who is going to eat it to prove the process a success? And, if we do find a flawless cake sitting in the parking lot, will this scenario qualify as our best scientific theory of how to explain the existence of that cake?
Suppose further that, over the course of ten years, we find 1000 presidential banquets all mysteriously lined up in the alley out back of these children’s homes. Even should the kids be found to have chocolate fingers and toes, and even should they offer a full confession when fiercely interrogated, would we then be justified in concluding that the banquets were prepared in the same inadvertent way? Next suppose a group of professors with PhDs signs affidavits saying that their expert analysis “proves” that no other explanation is required than that those children inadvertently made 1,000 banquets exclusively from the contents of the dumpster in three weeks time? Does that argument from authority significantly alter the balance of logic and evidence? Of course not. What nonsense! Shouldn’t we, rather, begin to suspect that those children live opposite a professional catering service and that the expert witnesses have misconstrued the evidence for reasons other than scientific?
An accidental evolutionary process cannot be expected to achieve a nearly flawless result any more than the children in the cake baking fiasco. Even in the cake example, one is forced to resort to some artificial byproducts of intelligent design to make even a fouled-up result plausible. By analogy, if accident were the driving force behind evolution, the fossil record should be replete with flat cakes, sour cakes, worm ridden cakes, rock hard unleavened cakes etc, but the unavoidable mistakes (partially disabled mutants and wasteful systems) of an accidental process are simply not present in the fossil record in the proportions required by standard probability computations.
The human genome is 3,000,000,000 base pairs of nucleotides, three billion characters, many of which can be read in alternative ways for additional meaningful applications. If you accept the current theory of junk DNA (which will probably be refuted by the time this book is printed), perhaps only half of our genome is meaningful (perhaps): 1,500,000,000 characters. A substantial modern book of 400 pages typically contains less than a million characters. The human genome alone then equates to the content of 1,500 books! Estimates of the number of species in the history of life range to hundreds of millions and far beyond. The genome of each is another set of books. Although much is reused from what might be called the base set or master genome, novel variations do occur in each species and it all has to be integrated.
Neo-Darwinian theory gives no explanation of the origin of these books. Most random mutations of nucleotides are attributed to errors in the DNA replication process.[196] Together with transpositional mechanisms, this accounts for most of the mechanism of novel form variation beyond reproductive mixing of genes. This means that an existing genome and associated genetic machinery must exist before evolution spawning mutations can even occur. Noted evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley says that environmentally triggered mutations are no longer considered important in the development of life at all,[197] that most variation is generated by rearrangement of existing genetic material. All modern evolutionary biologists affirm this.
With this affirmation, neo-Darwinists have
painted themselves into a corner regarding the origins of life. One must first
achieve a substantial quantity of complexly ordered DNA, and a replication
process, and a translation process, and an error checking and correction
process, and basic metabolism, and a way to physically constrain and protect it
all, in order to generate a living organism and maintain it. Much work of the
same kind is required to generate any substantial viable evolutionary advance.
But there were no preconfigured genomes with replicative machinery at the
beginning of the evolutionary process and it is impossible to inherit an
advancement, that is, more can’t be inherited from less. Each jump in
biological information requires another origination event. Neo-Darwinian
evolution has no explanation for these origination events other than chance
recombination, which cannot accomplish the job or successful integration of a
new gene in a complex organism in real time.
In contrast, the process that neo-Darwinists
proudly put forward with pomp and bluster to explain life is not a theory of
origins at all, but only a theory of development. Many evolutionists
straightforwardly acknowledge that this is all evolutionary science should be
doing, development, not origins. But if this is true, why do Mayr and the
neo-Darwinists say that God or intelligent design is no longer needed to
explain life? Why do evolutionists say that they have a fully satisfactory
explanation of life when they don’t have a clue how all these complex
interdependent systems could be achieved and integrated in close proximity of
time?
Let’s
All Go to the Library!
Not only intelligent design advocates, but mainstream biologists aptly compare DNA to human language.[198] But because the event process of life’s origins has proven so difficult to unravel, in promoting their theory in popular discussion and debate, neo-Darwinists ignore a closely related question, the only really hard question of evolution, that of the original authorship of life’s immense library of genetic and biological information along with its translation mechanism. Their “explanation” of evolution only kicks in after the genomes have appeared, and even those portions of the hypothetical neo-Darwinian process of evolution that look more like science than magic cannot be reproduced in the lab. They rely on hypothetical population dynamics that involve millions of creatures. As such, they can never be fully tested by replicating the event to prove that they work as described.
For neo-Darwinists to point to the reorganization of existing genes as evidence of an accidental system having no designer is not good logic for two reasons. 1) Although the mixing of the genes in reproduction may turn out to be fully random, the neo-Darwinian thesis still corresponds to merely moving books around in the library and then inanely claiming there are no authors because the library was “constructed by completely random processes.” A more absurd claim has never been made in the history of science and philosophy! 2) Even reproductive gene reorganizations are being accomplished by, governed by, and constrained within a machine, the construction of which has not been explained. This is an instance of the logical fallacy of equating a part with the whole: “Part of the process is random, therefore all of it must be random.” It also ignores the fact that the occurrence of random events within a machine can never be sufficient to make the machine output fully accidental (if the machine is to retain its identity as such). Certain details of the machine product may vary randomly, but the primary output cannot be an accident so long as the basic features of the machine remain intact over time—same machine, same output.
Even when books are juggled in a predominantly random manner, little risk of impairing the primary function of the library (which is to impart useful knowledge to the reader) is incurred because a general interface for the books preexists throughout the library system. The books remain accessible and their meaning is not altered. All that is truly required for the library to function is that the books can fit on the shelf and be identified by subject, title and author. Moving things around may slow down the reader in locating a book, but it will not defeat the main purpose of the library. The reader is in no danger of using a psychological self-help guide to repair his or her pickup truck. Moving books around in the library is not an example of an accidental process, only a less than fully controlled process, or a nonoptimized one. The authorship of the books, of course, is the real mystery that must be solved.
Natural selection occasionally vetoes proposed
evolutionary changes that do not work, yes. But the mere fact that an unworkable
proposal can be vetoed when it occurs does not mean that the overall system
within which the proposal was formed is accidental anymore than the
cancellation of an unpopular random change to library shelving means that all
the books and the Dewey Decimal System have no authors.
A complex structure that constrains an otherwise spontaneous process within certain tolerances so that the results can (at least at times) be successful is not a random system at all, but a designed and controlled system. It may operate with less than perfect tolerances, be less than perfectly predictable, or perhaps merely be less than perfectly understood by the scientists who are examining it. But that does not establish it as an accidental process. It may in fact be utilizing random transpositions for a purpose, such as to allow a form change to be constructed that occasionally matches changes in the environment without need of the designer’s direct intervention, or to allow/stimulate the migration of a species to another environmental niche where the new mutation will be an advantage, or to achieve variety for its own sake.
Nor do the librarians at work in the bodies of
living creatures seem to be in a great rush to move the books and furniture
around now that the Cambrian explosion has constructed the primary body plans.
Rather, modern DNA is more aptly compared to a completed library. The
“literary” works of the living genomes give every indication of being done,
at least in comparison to the Cambrian explosion. Consequently, taking the
kindergarten class to the nation’s rare book museums, blindfolding them, and
turning them loose with crayons will not improve the masterpieces on the
shelves.
Similarly, in the highly sophisticated and
finely tuned designs of living systems, truly random, that is,
accidental, genetic change can only cause cell, organ, system and structural
degradation, inefficiencies, injuries or death, at least in real evolutionary
time. Scientific theories must work within this truth to evaluate theoretical
alternatives. It is extremely unlikely that one advanced complexly designed
organism could evolve from another radically different one by accident
in the time intervals established by the fossil record as occurring between the
appearances of different creatures. Something as simple as a bacterium, maybe;
the more complex creatures, certainly not. Some neo-Darwinists ignore this
principle entirely, assuming against all the evidence that natural selection
will be presented the requisite complex modules of evolutionary change by
accident. Others appear to conform to this principle in saying that the modules
needed are not complex at all but quite simple. Modern genetic science and
molecular biology have shown this assumption to be false, however. Changes to
at least ten genes are probably required for any functional change to a complex
organism, and we truly don’t know how far the integration requirements cascade
beyond that because gene expression is potentially effected by every other operational
gene in the organism and untold other factors.
As in the case of the rare book library,
productive results from random alterations, although assumed by modern science
to be theoretically possible (over nearly infinite time), have been
demonstrated to occur so rarely in practice as to be dismissible—and we
certainly have not had nearly infinite time. As Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby
knew, children can teach us a lot. The net result of continuing unsupervised
visits by K-1 to the library would be rapid degradation of the library
irrespective of the one rare crayon that finds its mark to make the period at
Romeo’s kiss an exclamation point. Thirty years hence, half of Shakespeare’s
soliloquies, love scenes, and dramatic murders would be overwritten with X’s
and O’s, an occasional flower, happy face, or stick man.
For the children’s visit to the library to
result in one improved masterpiece, while preserving the integrity of the
others, and indeed, for the library to survive as a library at all, the process
has to be made nonrandom. Master authors would have to accompany the
children to the library and guide their hands every step of the way, or else
the system would have to be set up to receive stick men and happy faces on
electronic media, quality check the results, preserve backup copies, eliminate
the changes that did not work and revert to backup as needed. But stickmen and
happy faces can never combine to form a Shakespearean Sonnet, they can only
trivially modify one. This is what the observed and documented evidence of
presumed to be accidentally spawned gene mutations has amounted to so far:
trivia, a few examples of microevolution, minor changes within
a species. Not many of these changes are reliably traceable to definitely
accidental point mutations. Most come from more complex genetic transpositions
occurring spontaneously within the mechanisms of the genome. Despite the
neo-Darwinists loudly reassuring everyone for decades that accidental evolution
is an unquestionable fact, stickmen and happy faces are really all we have
cause to attribute to it!
In biology, natural selection does help to
preserve the best libraries after they have once been achieved.
But if blindfolded children are the only authors in the entire system, how many
masterpieces will be proposed for
preservation? To say that biological libraries were constructed by accident is
therefore nonsense. As Appendix 1 (neo-Darwinian logical fallacies) reveals, it
is not children who say the darnedest things, but neo-Darwinian evolutionists!
Appendix 2 proves, following Professor William Dembski’s resource exhaustion
argument, to the same scientific probability standard used everywhere else in
science that accident could never accomplish the evolution of the tree of
life within the time and physical resources available in the history of the
universe.
Some of Darwin’s own comments suggest that he actually believed that mutations in the stronger, purely accidental, sense were responsible for evolution. However, he elsewhere commented that evolution was probably the inevitable result of some natural law. This would take away the truly accidental nature of the process. He also said that he thought that God had left the processes of nature pretty much to themselves and that most of the resultant events were pretty clearly not preordained, especially the tragedies. I leave it to the reader to decide if that constitutes a contradiction in Darwin’s philosophical tents. He remarked that his religious views had varied over the years and so this apparent contradiction may have been the result of the progression of his thought over time.
Whatever Darwin’s considered view of things is held to be, it has long since been established that point mutations caused by toxic or radiological exposures are not constructive and make no significant input to evolutionary change. One clearly cannot call the sophisticated system of transpositional elements within the genome “random.” The transpositional genome is a complex system, a machine, one that closely constrains what can and does happen within it. It is therefore not accidental in the stronger more traditional sense of “random” used (perhaps) by Darwin and some later theorists like De Vries. Hence the move of modern evolutionists to a weaker definition of “random,” for it is all they can now scientifically defend. The typical non-scientist reader or television viewer, however, may have no idea that the meaning of the term “random” has been changed in the evolutionary discussion from its original meaning of truly accidental, and so the propaganda campaign for atheism and materialism continues to roll along fat dumb and happy under the guise of top notch science.
God's Wonderful Gizmos and Gadgets
When my son, Jonathan, was eight he (well, OK, we)
played an educational computer game called "Gizmos and Gadgets." In
this game one is shown a picture of an engineering or mechanical job that has
to be done and given a choice of tools and equipment: pulleys, levers, gears,
electric switches etc. The software was "smart" enough to know which
items would work best for a given problem because the programmers built their
engineering expertise into the program. It is important to note that no true
junk was presented for evaluation, only valid tools that would be useful in one
type of situation or another. The tutorial or demonstration module cycled
randomly through the available items, bleeping and 'X'ing out the ones that
didn't work, and visually celebrating with great pomp and circumstance the
proper solution. This demonstrates the principle that randomly cycling
through a finite serious of potentially useful options can be a valid
engineering solution in itself, particularly where the designer doesn’t want to
have to monitor and directly intervene to manually adjust the system.
Such a process is an apt solution to the problem
of how to dynamically match a genome to a changing environment, of how to
promote long term survival, if not of a given species, then at least of life
itself. It is, perhaps, no coincidence, then, that DNA displays, not only all
the requisite characteristics of a language created by intelligent beings, but
the characteristics of a computer language. The workings of the genetic
machinery with code transcription, error checking, cutting and pasting, copying,
transpositional algorithms etc. precisely correspond to the basic operations of
a computer, and the DNA code corresponds to computer language. The
self-organizational research of Stuart Kauffman et al. suggests that the
genomes resemble a computer language application where routines have been
embedded in order to periodically rearrange parts of the genome. What remains
to be determined is to what extent even the transpositional routines will turn
out to be truly random, for, contrary to the usually destructive effect of
toxic induced point mutations or replication errors, they seem to be doing
little harm while offering, on the surface at least, an enormously potent
engine for evolutionary change.
The possibility of cosmic purpose therefore is
not ruled out by the nature of even a noticeably random evolutionary process,
so long as the overall process is constrained (controlled) to predesignated
limits, and modular design components (gizmos) are available to snap into place
when the randomizer comes to call for them. The historical record of evolution
shows some elements of randomness, but it also seems to have limited the design
proposals to predominantly useful options and proposed whole sets of genes and
related epigenetic alterations at the same time. This reveals the rough
equivalent of an engineering process that, if it is random at all, is
restricted to randomly trying alternatives that are predominantly viable,
"preflighted," as it were, or at least substantially error checked.
Use of random tools by a cosmic designer is
therefore not so implausible as might first appear.
Having created the entire system, the designer would know its precise
capabilities. A designer would know that "random" event combinations,
initially constrained and focused by the order built into the first matter and
energy of the universe, and later guided by natural law, would ultimately
achieve the intended result. He would know that natural selection would
preserve the best result, enhancing a creature's ability to adapt to its
changing environment.
Is There Really a Scientific
Argument Against Cosmic Purpose?
No. Although two prominent scientists, Ernst Mayr and Jacques Monod, have proposed such arguments, they are in truth philosophical arguments, not scientific ones. Both are invalid.
A truly hulking mass of biological complexity and probability data has accumulated over the past 50 years in conjunction with the revelation of intricately designed biological mechanisms. Absolutely none of this can accident explain. Nonetheless, Ernst Mayr, writing in 1988, says that no evidence for cosmic purpose has ever been found in any natural law or other program of nature.[199] He doesn’t cite any studies on the subject, however. Nor does he say who did the looking and what scientific tools and standards were used in the search.
Since Mayr wrote his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, much of relevance has occurred. Professor William Dembski has posed the probability and resource exhaustion arguments; Stuart Kauffman has revealed self-organizational aspects of the genome; and Michael Denton’s discovery of what are potentially predetermined (life-favoring) “Platonic” forms in natural law has been published. D. D. Axe’s recent work with random protein synthesis and amino acid substitutions is yet another paradigm shattering discovery. Even Roger Penrose’s oft-cited calculations for the immense specificity of our universe’s configuration in favor of life visibly, if not dramatically, opened the door to the cosmic purpose hypothesis.[200] None of this was publicly available to Mayr in 1988, though he might have acknowledged it after the fact by recanting his assertion of the lack of cosmic purpose in his many later books. To my knowledge he never recanted.
Prior to Dembski no formal and rigorous studies have ever been done regarding cosmic purpose, nor has any objective scientific standard been established by which to judge the presence or absence of cosmic purpose. The fact that no agreement has yet been reached on the subject of purpose in nature is confirmed by theoretical physicist Paul Davies in The Fifth Miracle. Professor William Dembski has only recently completed the initial forays into this area, and his early conclusions are solidly in favor of intelligent design.[201]
The Darwinist claim that science has been unable to find evidence of cosmic purpose in nature is not based upon observed data having failed to satisfy an empiric scientific criterion for cosmic purpose because there has never been a criterion to use. Instead, the neo-Darwinists have made naïve personal philosophical judgments based upon logical fallacies (“can’t see the forest for the trees” and “a part must represent the whole,” to name only two of many). Yes, the component processes of evolution do seem to wander around a bit, and, taken separately, don’t reveal an unequivocal direction, but this hardly justifies the neo-Darwinists’ hasty conclusion that the process of evolution as a whole is devoid of purpose.
Underlying the neo-Darwinist flawed case against purpose are four additional fallacies: the philosophical arguments of perfectionism, naïve finalism, the hidden premise of materialism, and an overly narrow humanistic view of the problem of evil and suffering. All four of these lines of reasoning are refuted definitively at Appendix 1, fallacies #23, 24, 25 & 26.
In the view of the neo-Darwinists, God would not make an imperfect world (as they define “perfect”). Nor would he, in their view, create via a less than fully efficient process, or allow random components. In the view of Mayr and Monod et al., God sponsored evolution must go straight to its goal, no twists, no turns or regressions, no chances taken even at intermediate points. Neither would God, for any reason conceivable to them, allow suffering or evil. But consider for a moment: what is there that is scientific about any of this? These are all philosophical assumptions, not scientific evidence. These objections have not one thing to do with empiric science—and they are just terrible philosophy. Merely because evolutionary changes don’t always lead to greater complexity, aren’t always helpful to a given creature in its current environment, and don’t always proceed in a straight line without deviation, does not mean that all opportunities for cosmic purpose have been lost.
It is true that Darwinists, who constitute the
vast majority of evolutionists, have traditionally been in nearly unanimous
agreement on this question, invariably citing these same three “flaws” in the
evolutionary process as indisputable proof of the absence of purpose or design.
Presenting such a philosophically bogus and simplistic view of purpose hardly
equates to a case that science has ruled out cosmic purpose, however.
The Darwinists’ arguments from perfectionism, naïve finalism, and the problem
of evil are all bad arguments, non sequiturs. Yet they comprise the sole
justification for the philosophical standards Darwinists have assumed
on the question of cosmic purpose in nature and then presented to the public as
if they were established science.
Close study of the neo-Darwinists argument
against cosmic purpose reveals that it amounts to nothing more than the claim
that “God simply wouldn’t do it that way.” God would never make an imperfect
world. The Christian worldview is a clear counterexample to this assumption.
The Christian faith holds that this (“imperfect”) world is intermediate to the
perfect world that follows, and for good reasons. Thus, God might indeed make
an imperfect world, and there are rationally coherent alternatives to the
narrow neo-Darwinist view.
One wants to ask, how is it that they alone, the
neo-Darwinists, as nonbelievers, have made so close a study of God and come to
an exclusive knowledge of the limits of God’s ability to work through natural
processes, while billions of people who practice their faith and grow closer to
God each day are fully off base in their beliefs? All of science agrees that
science can make no definitive statements about God whatsoever. Yet, here they
are, the neo-Darwinist scientists, making a definitive statement about what God
would and would not do. Whence comes a scientific proof that God would
only work through perfectly efficient physical processes, disallow extinctions,
and permit no suffering or evil under any circumstances? Just one more of many
contradictions in the neo-Darwinian argument. As Pope John Paul II pointed out,
some of the foundational questions regarding the origin of life don’t lie
within the purview of science at all, but naturally and unavoidably fall into
the realm of philosophy and/or theology.
There are some, perhaps many, who would say that
science cannot, even in limited and closely proscribed ways, address cosmic
purpose at all. I, with William Dembski, Fazale Rana, Hugh Ross and others,
believe that certain limited aspects of the question of cosmic purpose
may be (optionally?) treated as legitimately scientific. This admittedly
diverges from the mainstream of modern tradition in philosophy of science. But
consider, to say that the world is finely tuned for the existence of life and
that living organisms are exquisitely crafted machines so sophisticated that
one is rationally justified in concluding they were intelligently designed is
not to make a statement about God, but to make a statement about the world:
“The living creatures of the world look so much like intelligently designed
machines that I infer that they were intelligently designed (not necessarily by
a supernatural designer).” No metaphysical statement about God is
involved here, and one merely needs an empiric criterion concerning machines,
not concerning God, in order to decide the question on a scientific basis.
Thus, for starters, one can, as Professor Dembski often reminds, assert cosmic
purpose without asserting the supernatural at all.
The harder question is, might one under any
conceivable circumstances legitimately assert a supernatural source for
observed data under the umbrella of science. In Origins of Life, Hugh
Ross and Fazale Rana say yes, that certain limited claims about the supernatural
may be properly testable. This is true only when certain conditions are met.
When genuine logical inference from the observable data suggests a supernatural
origin of the phenomena, when the explanatory model proposed can account for
new discoveries and make successful predictions, and when the model invoking
the supernatural is the more eloquent and explanatory overall among present
alternatives. I give a very general argument to the same effect in the second
section of this book, God & Science.[202] This is a more
difficult pill to swallow for modern science and philosophy of science, but it
may turn out to be quite true. I submit it here as a proposal for further
evaluation, but I am personally convinced of its legitimacy in the abstract.
I defer comment on the partially complete RTB
model Rana and Ross are developing pending further study, but, in theory, I see
nothing precluding such a model being developed within the proper boundaries of
science. Science makes inference to other dimensions and multiple universes
which are by definition outside our ability to experience and observe. From my
perspective, putting a label on one of those dimensions and calling it
“supernatural” is no reason to place it outside the boundaries of science. It’s
just a word. If our best explanatory model says the “supernatural” is in fact
interacting with the natural and we can coherently track that interaction, then
there is no difference in the tractability to science between string theory and
supernatural theory. It is only when one defines the supernatural in advance as
inscrutable that a problem arises. In the history of the Church there are two
basic approaches to the supernatural in the sense of the divine, rational
evidence and inscrutable mystical experience. The former is in theory tractable
to science via logical inference and the latter is not.
Ross and Rana contend that anytime the genuinely
empiric predictions of one model matches the evidence and its only competitor
does not, that model is to be held as the scientifically confirmed model even
if some of its foundational concepts invoke the supernatural. They are not
suggesting, of course, that science allows for ghosts in the machine as
proximate causative agents, as ghosts do not permit prediction and test, but
only that science have the integrity to admit a logical inferential model that
invokes the supernatural at the ultimate origin of things where we have no
coherent physical model with equivalent explanatory and predictive power.
If, however, we assume the opposing view, that
no aspect of the question of cosmic purpose is scientific then there would be no
grounds for Mayr, Monod and the neo-Darwinists to claim that science has ruled
out cosmic purpose and (supernatural) intelligent design. This is so because
their argument is purported to be from science and, in this more strict
view of science’s charter, it would not be in science’s charter to address the
question of cosmic purpose at all. Mayr and Monod would then be stepping out of
bounds in claiming science has ruled out cosmic purpose. They can’t have it
both ways. But that seems to be exactly the import of the position
neo-Darwinists take. They can use science to argue against God, but no one can
use science to argue for God. Alternatively, assuming the question of cosmic
purpose to be properly scientific at least to the extent that one can answer the
question yes or no, as Mayr and the Darwinists have done in the negative and
Dembski has done in the positive, means that intelligent design theory cannot
be dismissed as nonscientific by nature, as is the current practice among
neo-Darwinists.
This is a logical checkmate for the
neo-Darwinian position. Either the question of cosmic purpose is, in its
empiric manifestations (and only in its empiric manifestations), treatable by
science or it is not. The neo-Darwinists lose either way. Answered in the negative,
Mayr’s case and the entire traditional neo-Darwinian position against cosmic
purpose in evolution must be thrown out as inappropriate to the field of
science. Answered in the affirmative intelligent design theory must be allowed
in the classroom.
Neo-Darwinists have to date succeeded admirably
in pulling the wool over the eyes of both the public and the federal courts.
Using primarily their presumed scientific expertise and the innate complexity
of evolutionary science to dissuade (or confuse) dissent, they have had it
pretty much their own way. The purpose of this book is to reveal that Darwin’s
new clothes are not made of wool at all, but of something very much more
transparent!
Here we have seen that the continuation of the
neo-Darwinian myth of accidental evolution rests firmly upon nothing more than
the perpetuation of yet another confusion. It is yet another opportunity to
flip-flop, in this case on the question of whether the presence or absence of
cosmic purpose in evolution is a scientific question. (This follows on the
heels of many previous suspiciously long-lived confusions: is evolution
accidental or not, and, are random mutations accidental or not, does evolution
address the origin of life or not, etc.) In the present case, now the question
of cosmic purpose is scientific, now it isn’t. Now you see it, now you don’t!
Walla Booby! Abra cadabra! Presto chango! Accidental evolution proved! Please…
The traditional Darwinist philosophical
assumption that grounds their view of purpose irrationally requires that any
cosmic purpose or goal must remain tied to the small component processes
of evolution, it cannot be assigned to the larger process as a whole (where
common sense would typically place it), and it must allow for no deviation
from course and no variation in the end result whatsoever. This is
fallacious quite simply because it rules out the optional use of alternative
means to a given end and requires God or the intelligent designer of life to be
a micromanager who is concerned with the details of physical trivia as opposed
to the larger spiritual result. Even God needn’t be a perfectionist in the
sense of being concerned with small things unrelated to his primary goals. The
Darwinist view requires that small component processes visibly forecast the
final result of the larger process to human intelligence. This is an artificial
and unduly restrictive criteria to use for the presence of cosmic purpose in
evolution, or intelligent purpose anywhere else.
The component processes of our own inventions,
automobiles and space vehicles, for example, do not meet this test. One cannot
tell by looking at the frame and carburetor that the purpose is a car, nor can
one deduce a space shuttle from much of the computerized circuitry and even the
wings. Certain other components will pretty much give the purpose away, of
course, like the wheels of a car, but this is not a necessary attribute of all
machines, some of which may require all the components to be in place before
the purpose is revealed.
On the other hand, ID theorists and scientists
like Michael Denton who argue a more potent form of natural law (Platonic
forms), have revealed that nature has components that pretty much give away its
purpose (life) as well. What we are entitled to infer from most partial sets of
machine components is not the specific purpose of the larger machine at all,
but rather the more general conclusion that we have an intelligently designed
machine of some kind or other on our hands. Darwinists irrationally refuse the
justifiable inference to intelligent design, in favor of the indefensible
belief that partial sets of components of a process, system or machine
must inerrantly permit the prediction of its purpose.
But, of course, the goal and purpose of
evolution need not be tied to the predictability of subprocesses at all.
Purpose might legitimately be posed more generally, and only made visible in
the final result. For example, the purpose of evolution might simply be the
creation of the larger tree of life and a functional ecosystem very much as we
see it, minus any rigid specifications of which of many alternative paths must
be taken to achieve it (assuming there turn out to have been alternative
paths). Variation might be allowed at non-critical points, many thousands of
them, without precluding the achievement of the final goal of a tree of life.
Substitution of suitable alternative components and features might be
permitted, even to the species level or higher. Even randomness could be
embedded in places in the evolutionary process so long as random subprocesses
are constrained to produce minimally acceptable alternatives within tolerable
margins of “error.” A wandering path still arrives at its destination.
Indirect routes may at times be preferred over a
direct path for a variety of reasons. God needn’t be a simple-minded
micromanager (and Darwin needn’t be a god). Purpose need not imply scientific
predictability in any case. In board games, for example, one may traverse the
perimeter to achieve the objective of the game, or, alternatively, cut across
the center. The unpredictability of players regarding which route they will
select does not establish the absence of purpose, but the presence of
alternative routes to achieve it. Even if there were to be random spinners at
junction points that alternatively let the players off in a variety of
directions by pure chance it would not preclude the purpose of the game being
accomplished. This would be true so long as the chance element was sufficiently
constrained within the larger design such that its impact did not overwhelm and
negate the directional features of the game. The objective could, typically,
still be accomplished within the standard time allowed.
Surprisingly enough, it is the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense that give us the conceptual framework for a genuine and final resolution to the design question in nature, the problem of how cosmic purpose is manifested in an evolutionary process where specific biological form variations are not required to match the present needs of the organism. The much maligned defense contracting system is structured around a performance requirement that is published in what is called an RFP (Request for Proposal). When DoD needs a new fighter jet, they do not (usually) specify to defense contracting corporations that the companies build them an F-16, per se. Rather they list a set of general performance criteria or parameters that any plane built under that contract must satisfy. Under some contracts these may be fully general parameters specifying only such things as range, maximum altitude, armaments, maximum load, takeoff and landing distances, etc. The machine simply has to be able to do the job. If the Department of Defense needs a very light, fast, plane to offset the latest enemy advancement in air superiority fighters, if the threat is urgent, they may not care how the job gets done, or what form it finally takes, so long as that threat is quickly neutralized.
Neo-Darwinism Ignores Nature’s Funnel Toward Life
Similarly, in the case of the evolution of life, God’s request for proposal, transmitted to physics via natural law and the informed initial state of matter and energy need not have set down design specifications describing this exact world in specific detail at all. Rather a world with more or less the same general performance characteristics as this one may have been indicated, with the details permitted to vary via a partially random process. Just how narrowly the constraints embedded into astronomical, physical and biochemical constants and laws have driven the origin and development of life remains to be demonstrated. However, a general directionality towards complex life has already been substantially revealed in nature.[203]
Because of the enormous improbabilities that we now know must be overcome at each of the various steps in evolution, additional important constraints pointing the process in the direction of life are certain to be discovered. This will very likely occur in proteomics and the sciences of the genome. Michael Denton reports in the Journal of Theoretical Biology that one enormous factor has already been found in the determinants of basic protein folds. His article is entitled “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms.”
However, in the case of one class
of very important organic forms—the basic protein folds—advances in protein
chemistry since the early 1970s have revealed that they represent a finite set
of natural forms, determined by a number of generative constructional rules,
like those which govern the formation of atoms or crystals, in which functional
adaptations are clearly secondary modifications of primary "givens of
physics…." We argue that this is a major discovery which has many
important implications regarding the origin of proteins, the origin of life and
the fundamental nature of organic form. We speculate that it is unlikely that
the folds will prove to be the only case in nature where a set of complex
organic forms is determined by natural law, and suggest that natural law may
have played a far greater role in the origin and evolution of life than is
currently assumed.[204]
The characteristics of proteins determine the larger part of what happens inside the cell, so the discovery that protein folding is largely predetermined by natural law reveals that an enormous directional influence towards complex life is built into nature. Other examples of the kinds of directional factors I am speaking of include nucleohistones, pseudogenes and DNA strand curvature-based chemical affinities. We have known since the 1960’s that nucleohistones influence the organization of genes into the superstructure of the chromosome. More recently, research has revealed that pseudogenes are not junk after all but influence gene expression, genetic diversity, and recombination, thus potentially guiding the next step in evolution. Even the curvature of the DNA strand affects selection factors such as the bonding of the DNA strand to inorganic macromolecules.[205]
All these things affect the course of evolution. But let’s stop for a moment and contemplate the further implications of just one of them: Denton’s protein folding predetermination thesis. Proteins are folded three dimensional structures so complex that hundreds of thousands of computers linked together cannot keep up with their complexity. This means that proteins potentially harbor unimaginable magnitudes of information. Proteins in fact are the instruments of both structural formation and process regulation, all of the key aspects of biological systems.
We know there is a lot of information in the genomes, which dictate which proteins will be built. We can manage the information the basic genome conveys to some great extent, though new complexity is discovered practically every day. Proteins, however, are quite a different story. We know that we have barely scratched the surface on the information capacity of proteins. We know they regulate the biological processes; but we can’t say exactly how they do it. What we do know is that the information bearing capacity of proteins apparently dwarfs that of the basic DNA sequence (though perhaps not so much the entire transformational genomic system as a whole). This means there are potentially very important new revelations about life hidden within the protein structure. My guess is that the mystery to the origin of life will be found there, inside the protein once we unlock the secrets of protein folding complexity, if we ever do. It makes sense that the missing information will be found there because proteins are both the key to all the important processes and structures of life and because they are known to be the largest gold mine of information and the one that has been explored the least. Many readers will fill a certain thrill in that realization, as they should: “Aha, so that’s where the mystery of life will be resolved.” It really is a profound realization. And it is an ironic one since the popular view of proteins started out as little more than the goo of Darwin’s protoplasm. Now they are outperforming all of our best computers linked together!
But my point is this. Step back and link up this realization with the fact that Michael Denton is saying that the source of this vast information that will probably be the key to the origin of life is actually predetermined by natural law; it had to happen that way. If proteins are the treasure trove of biological information and they are obligatory under natural law, then there is absolutely no reason to assume an accidental worldview, and every reason to posit intelligent design. Neo-Darwinists will immediately object: “Wait just a minute. Just because natural law limits the forms proteins can take does not mean they self-organize automatically. Experimental research has not been able to generate a substantial demonstration of self-organization in proteins. Thus the formation of life cannot be shown to be locked-in and unavoidable.”
While this much is true as of the present date, two other things are also true. Proteins, when they do form, are constrained to form into life promoting configurations, this in itself demonstrates a bias for life. But beyond that, the fact that science has not been able to induce self-organization of proteins in the natural environment indicates either that the factors that must be properly set for spontaneous protein formation reside below the level of basic chemical substances, perhaps in the electromagnetic properties of the atoms and molecules, or that we know of no natural way for the complete inventory of biologically necessary proteins to form outside of a living organism at all. In the latter case, one encounters the chicken and the egg problem for which there is no known resolution except intelligent design. In the former, if the electromagnetic properties of atoms are the determining factors, the improbabilities for life’s accidental formation skyrocket exponentially beyond our present already forbidding estimate, which hasn’t yet taken that additional level of physical complexity into account.
One of the testable hypotheses of intelligent design theory is that, once such factors are more fully understood and mapped out as a complete set, they will be seen to combine to give evolution a very specific direction toward complex life. The writing is already on the wall. The Templeton Foundation Web site maintains an extensive bibliography devoted entirely to the fine tuning of the universe for life (and publishes a substantial list of other good titles on God and science).[206] Some of the articles are available in full text. As evolutionist Conway Morris eloquently says, it turns out that human life is virtually inevitable in a lonely universe. The issue of convergence alone has forcefully raised the question of direction in evolution as the new Templeton volume edited by Morris, The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? reveals.[207]
Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross reveal in Origins of Life that we already know there are plenty of constraints guiding the process long before life begins. Over 200 characteristics of our galaxy, solar system and the Earth are fine-tuned to make life possible. One of the first scientists to bring this facet of nature to our attention was famous physicist and champion of intellectual activism, Freeman Dyson, in his very enjoyable tour of mind expanding ideas, Disturbing the Universe. Paul Davies gives a much more detailed exposition of these fine-tuned aspects of physics in his 1982 factual treasure trove The Accidental Universe.[208] More recently Davies goes further to explicitly propose the very hypothesis we are discussing, that the universe has developed in accordance with what amounts to a cosmic blueprint in The Cosmic Blueprint. New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe.
In addition to the self-organizational tendencies of neural networks (brain cells in petri dish fly flight simulator),[209] protocells (Sidney Fox), self-organization of genomes (Stuart Kauffman), and now protein folding predetermination (revealed in Michael Denton’s new book, Nature’s Destiny),[210] apparently there is a ready and seamless interface for inorganic and living physical systems to interact. The interaction seems to facilitate the directional funnel towards life. Some inorganic substances, such as mica, have specific affinities regarding biotic molecules like DNA and will bond differently depending upon the coding sequence and resulting curvature profile of the DNA strand.
The sequence-dependent curvature
is generally recognized as an important and biologically relevant property of
DNA because it is involved in the formation and stability of association
complexes with proteins. When a DNA tract, intrinsically curved for the
periodical recurrence on the same strand of A-tracts phased with the B-DNA
periodicity, is deposited on a flat surface, it exposes to that surface either
a T- or an A-rich face. The surface of a freshly cleaved mica crystal
recognizes those two faces and preferentially interacts with the former one.
Statistical analysis of scanning force microscopy (SFM) images provides
evidence of this recognition between an inorganic crystal surface and nanoscale
structures of double-stranded DNA….
Currently, nanotechnology is trying to mimic biological mechanisms to assemble technological nanomachines. Much effort is nowadays paid to use DNA molecules for the building of self-assembling nanostructures….[211]
Here the authors are hinting at the potential usefulness of the self-assembling nanostructures and preferential binding characteristics of DNA molecules to the construction of biotic machines for human technological use. In other words, in this research we are already implicitly recognizing that nature contains components of a biological machine building process of a kind that we as intelligent designers find ready made for building biotic machines in an intelligently guided way.
There are clearly directional forces and controls in nature geared toward the creation of complex life, but perhaps, not so many or so rigid that we can immediately detect their activity at a glance, or such that the system is clearly micromanaged in the classical finalistic sense. The specifications for the end result may be more generalized. An RFP creation is more like the world Darwin himself believed he had perceived with his keen scientific instincts and disciplined system of observation, a world that, in some sense, had been left to physically develop more or less on its own. From his vantage point in history, having no idea from the rudimentary science of the 1850’s of the complex physical constants and sophisticated genomic and biochemical mechanisms involved, Darwin understandably termed evolution accidental. We now know that there are many subtle and unseen constraints that guide the process and ensure the required performance specifications are met.
Clearly, purpose can allow for variation. For
example, the Air Force maintenance and supply system uses a concept called
“suitable substitute” in determining the acceptability of the mechanical components
of its systems and equipment. While maintaining exacting precision where
required, engineers and mechanics are not concerned about irrelevant details of
each minute part where the same purpose can be achieved. These are permitted to
vary within reasonable tolerances so long as the function of the overall design
is not adversely affected.
In contrast, the overly simplistic neo-Darwinian
logic requires us to reject the presence of purpose in our defense department’s
requests for proposal merely because they have not specified each nut and bolt
to be used, because they permit significant variation, and because the final
result of the process is not predictable except in general terms. The
neo-Darwinian concept of purpose is simply naïve and artificially restrictive.
Being more narrow than the range of genuine alternatives, the neo-Darwinian
requirement for a humanly predictable, unvarying, unidirectional evolutionary
path is inadequate as an objective scientific criterion for cosmic purpose.[212]
No Real Evidence Against Cosmic
Purpose
Despite the entire foundation of the
neo-Darwinian argument resting upon such an indefensibly naïve assumption,
their discussion proceeds as if the “accidental” view of evolution has been
fully established by previous, voluminous, and indisputable evidence,
evidence always to be found elsewhere, of course, but evidence everyone
knows about, evidence that can be so readily found in the commonly
accessible primary works of science that, well, it would be an embarrassment wouldn’t
it, indeed an insult, if one were so uninformed as to ask where that
evidence might actually be. Having begun my investigation into this
subject as gullible as the next guy, I went looking for that evidence.
What I found after four years of digging in the university bioscience library
is that absolutely no such evidence exists. No evidence exists for accidental
evolution outside of the unwarranted assumption of a naïve and simplistic
concept of purpose dating back to the end of the 1800s. That’s… it.
Having arbitrarily defined purpose in so limited
a way, neo-Darwinists naturally have no difficulty pointing to observations in
natural processes that contradict it. In doing this they have merely rigged the
game, stacked the deck in their favor. The naive neo-Darwinian assumption about
purpose is not science at all, but merely philosophy, and it receives a failing
grade in that subject. No credible scientific evidence has ever been presented
that rules out all the options genuinely available to God or an intelligent
designer.
What the alleged volumes of evidence for
accidental evolution amount to are examples of the unpredictability of certain
natural event processes, such as the mixing of genes during reproduction, the
apparently random affect of environmental changes on the survivability of a
given species, right or left turns in the evolutionary process that move a
branch of the tree of life away from increased complexity back toward
simplicity, etc. What this amounts to is the unsurprising claim that the
physical world is neither perfect, perfectly predictable, nor perfectly under
control. Imperfectly controlled systems do not rule out purpose. Take livestock
farms, fish farms, cattle and horse ranches for example. None of these are
perfectly under control, but they are the creation of intelligent design and
serve their purpose nonetheless. Automakers do not have their factories
perfectly under control. The frequency of defect recalls show the process to be
less than perfect. But clearly the auto manufacturing industry is purposive.
The other industries are no different in this regard. None of them are perfect,
but they all have purpose. Neo-Darwinists know this, they simply require
absolute perfection in nature because they feel this world, not the next, must
be perfect if God has in fact made it.
By proclaiming the unevidenced and unsupportable theoretical tenet of lack of purpose an established scientific fact neo-Darwinists evince a religion of materialism/humanism where only the physical and the here and now, not the spiritual and the hereafter can be used as evidence for or against anything, ironically, including God. Their position is “If there is a God, then by gosh he must comply with our focus on the physical life today and nothing else!” This goes beyond merely foolish, and into the fully ridiculous.
In providing no demonstrably workable biomechanical explanation for the improbable processes of accidental evolution, and unjustifiably ruling out cosmic purpose, neo-Darwinists are, in effect, asking us to take their position on faith alone. This is not good science. As Mary Midgley teaches us in Evolution as a Religion, it is not science at all.[213] Eugene Goodheart echoes a similar concern in indicting neo-Darwinists for exceeding the bounds of their academic expertise in biology in attempting to debunk religion.
In their attempt to
formulate a biological theory of religion, the neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins
and Daniel Dennett, among others) have moved beyond their area of competence,
revealing themselves to be inverted fundamentalists. Ignorant of the long and
rich history of religious thought, they commit an ideology, rather than a
science.[214]
Neo-Darwinists occasionally do give what, on the surface, appears to be an argument that science has ruled out cosmic purpose and intelligent design, but these are visibly flawed in ways so obvious as to be unworthy of either science or philosophy. For example, Sean B. Carroll makes the most elementary mistake in a recent book called The Making of the Fittest in confusing basic evolution with accidental evolution. Carroll surveys the historical evidence for basic evolution and lays out some clear and concrete examples of the evolution of biological systems (like the complex camera eye). However, he then steps well away from the logical import of the evidence to say that the evidence (which is for basic evolution) “eviscerates” the argument for design by an external intelligence. There are simply no logical grounds for this position, as basic evolution and intelligent design are fully compatible. Carroll gives no argument whatsoever that the process of evolution is accidental. He has therefore not made a proper logical transition from the evidence for basic evolution to the conclusion of accidental evolution. He leaves the reader to make the mistaken assumption either that the evidence he has presented for basic evolution establishes the process to be accidental or to assume that basic evolution is somehow at odds with intelligent design.[215] This plays fully off of the longstanding and much nourished confusion as to which version of evolution mainstream science is actually propounding and makes the longevity and continued propagation of that confusion highly suspect.
Ernst Mayr
The following is evolutionist Ernst Mayr’s
argument that purportedly shows that science has disproved cosmic purpose.
The proponents of teleological theories, for all their efforts, have been unable to find any mechanisms (except supernatural ones) that can account for their postulated finalism. The possibility that any such mechanism can exist has now been virtually ruled out by the findings of molecular biology. As the late Jacques Monod argued with particular force, the genetic material is constant: it can change only through mutation. Finalistic theories have also been refuted by the paleontological evidence, as George Gaylord Simpson has shown most clearly. When the evolutionary trend of any character—a trend toward larger body size or longer teeth, for example—is examined carefully, the trend is found not to be consistent but to change direction repeatedly and even to reverse itself occasionally. The frequency of extinction in every geological period is another powerful argument against any finalistic trend toward perfection.[216]
The entire neo-Darwinist case against cosmic
purpose embodies the straw man fallacy. Mayr here refutes, not the real
possibilities for cosmic purpose, but only the naïve views of a certain school
of thought that he refers to as finalism. Not all teleological theories, that
is, theories of purpose in evolution (certainly not all the modern ones),
postulate such naïve forms of finalism as were popular in Darwin’s time—150
years ago. The same simplistic views were the target of G. G. Simpson.
Finalism, as interpreted by the Darwinists, requires that the process of
evolution proceed directly from microbe to man without any twists, turns or
reversals. Perhaps even more conclusive is the fact that Mayr’s position has
now been overcome by events, as we liked to say in the Air Force. It turns out
that the genetic material is not constant at all. The genomes are
self-transforming, as recent studies of the genetic transpositional elements
reveal, and even environmental factors can induce heritable change to the
genome through a dynamic process that may more properly be described as
information exchange than a classic mutation.[217]
Thus the possibility remains that the innate
genetic transformational processes will ultimately be shown to reveal, at least
in RFP type terms, a limited set of predefined and predetermined forms much as
Michael Denton describes regarding protein folding determinants. RFP is enough
to demonstrate a possible pathway for cosmic purpose. Modern intelligent design
theorists do not postulate a simplistic and outdated view of the evolutionary
process, such as the one labeled by Mayr as “finalism” in his argument against
cosmic purpose. Nor do I, nor do the 900 million members of the Catholic
Church, to name a few. We simply assert that the designer chose to create via a
process of evolution more or less like the current historical scientific record
describes. In other words, intelligent design theory does not claim, as do
Creation Scientists, that creatures were made in their current form at the very
beginning. Neither does it claim that the evolutionary route to achieving the
biological forms could not be permitted to vary over time. While the
evolutionary process does seem to meander about a bit, and it is, from a
micromanager’s point of view, technically imperfect, it permits life to adapt to a changing world without requiring
the direct and frequent intervention of the designer.
Just because we cannot now see how a
designer could assure himself that the tree of life would be the ultimate
result of the evolutionary process so far elucidated hardly proves that the
designer would be limited by the same deficits in data, perceptual scope,
imagination and understanding as limit current human science. Christoph
Cardinal Schönborn comments in Chance or Purpose, “When an astronomer,
who is also a priest and theologian, even has the presumption to say that God
himself could not know for certain that man would be the product of evolution,
then nonsense has taken over completely.”[218] The comments of
astronomer Father George V. Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory,
are discussed at length at Appendix 1, Fallacies #41, #79 and #97.
But what about extinction, specifically. Surely
that’s a problem for intelligent design? Neo-Darwinists assert that it is
obvious that no designer would allow his creatures to become extinct. One might
as well ask why then don’t scientists still use the original version of the
first microscope? Why don’t they still drive a model-T Ford. Why do the
machines humans make wear out? Why do all material substances decay over time?
Obviously, if this world was designed, neither it nor anything in it was
intended to be permanent. So why make a big deal about the impermanence of
species when it only reflects the larger impermanence of the entirety of this
world?
Clearly, if the designer creates a living
dynamic world such as ours, subject to all manner of catastrophes from meteor
impacts to continental drift/tectonic shifts, floods, droughts etc., he would
guarantee the extinction of many of his species if he did not also allow life
to evolve and adapt in some manner. Therefore, assuming that the creator of
life knows at least as much about the processes of life, geophysical evolution,
and cosmology as we do, he also knows that extinction is an unavoidable
circumstance of Earth’s dynamic environment. Why couldn’t this be the
designer’s intention as opposed to his failure? (see Appendix 1, fallacies #23,
#24, #25, & #26)
It is odd that neo-Darwinists echo the very same
thesis of biblical fundamentalists that they, the neo-Darwinists, have so
harshly criticized all these years, viz that the entire tree of life must have
been immediately created in its final form if an intelligent designer were
responsible. There is nothing in science that requires this. The only
grounds for such a restrictive view are in a literal reading of the book of
Genesis. Here the neo-Darwinists appear to be using a literal reading of the
Bible to disprove the existence of God! Come now, you may chortle, they are
only trying to refute the Biblical view, not endorsing it. They are doing that
much, granted, but, my point is that they are not only doing that much.
In saying that their argument against finalism and immediate special creation
defeats all options for theistic alternatives to accidental/atheistic
evolution, they have tacitly endorsed the literal reading of Genesis by ruling
out all others. But how can they argue that the literal reading of Genesis is
the only reading possible and simultaneously claim that it is not true?
The obstinate refusal of neo-Darwinists to allow
the broadening of the intelligent design case to arguments more sophisticated
than those of the original theistic critics of evolution in the early 1900s is
an attempt to revert to those glory days when Darwinian rebuttals had some
semblance of logical force, when they were on the cutting edge of the then
primitive evolutionary science. However, that edge was a bit blunt, as there
was as yet no microbiology and genetic science. The nonsensical thesis that an
accident can make a living machine was then plausible only because living
machines were held to be relatively simple. Neo-Darwinists are now, some 100
years later, refusing to let go of that time delimited success. They are refusing
to acknowledge genuine progress in the intelligent design case—over 100 years
of it! “But you said in 1900 that according to the Bible life was immediately
created in its final form…” is all they will say in response to everything you
see in this book and quite a few others besides. Such is the logical merit and
substance of the neo-Darwinian “scientific” case for the absence of cosmic
purpose. It is simply the “straw man” fallacy committed in extremis (see
Appendix 1).
While denying the natural course of intellectual
progress through history to intelligent design theorists, Darwinists allow
themselves to modify their own theory at will. They are permitted to solve any
problems whatsoever as they arise. Now evolution is gradual, now it is abrupt. Now
natural selection must approve most if not all changes, now natural selection
approves very little, with most changes drifting randomly into place. Now
evolution is fully chaotic and accidental, now it is highly controlled and
directed by natural law. Now life is merely an optional fluke, now it is
inevitable. Now mutations are truly accidental, now they are only technically
random in not being tied to the current environmental niche. Now the
environment can cause heritable change, now it cannot, and so on. Darwinian
theory cannot be held to its past mistakes, but intelligent design theory must
be held to its past mistakes. That is the neo-Darwinists’ position. It is a
clear double standard, but mainstream science has so far endorsed it, as have
the federal courts.
Given that most if not all evolutionists no
longer consider the event process of evolution truly accidental (Simpson
himself says that such an idea is an unthinkable travesty of logic),[219] there is no reason to
assume the designer could not successfully predict the outcome of the
evolutionary process despite what to us is a meandering course. G. G. Simpson
did not argue against cosmic purpose as a whole as does Ernst Mayr, contrary to
what may seem to be implied by Mayr’s comments lauding Simpson’s refutation of
finalism. In the Terry lectures, Simpson explicitly said that cosmic purpose
could not be ruled out, and that science could not properly address the subject
at all. He went further to say, that we can absolutely discern purpose in
nature, though, in his view, there is no scientific evidence for a “purposer”
or designer.
I, and likely many others, have never found the
idea of purpose without a purposer coherent, however, so I don’t “buy” this
part of Simpson’s presentation, but at least he allowed for the compatibility
of God and science and affirmed the presence of purpose in nature. There are
several other kinds of technical forms of purpose used in biology, the physical
sciences, and the philosophy of science, but when one talks about the
astronomical odds against a highly sophisticated machine involving
computer-like codes and intricate translation schemes occurring by chance he or
she is talking about purpose purpose, intelligence More is involved than
merely specifying the end result of a functionally directed dumb natural
process (technical purpose).
Considering naïve finalism as the only option
for a designer of life is an indefensibly limited view of teleology.
It is practically an anachronism in modern thought. Our discussion of the use
of viable random tools within larger mechanisms in the preceding sections, as
well as the globe-spanning well-considered view of Catholic theology in which
God potentially creates life through an evolutionary process, shows this to be
true. In sum, the naïve argument against finalism that Mayr touts as having
fully ruled out cosmic purpose simply fails because it does not rule out any of
the following valid options: highly complex purpose; intentionally variable or flexible
purpose; delayed achievement of purpose (this might be called intermediate
purpose and includes the intentionally imperfect intermediate goal
hypothesis that corresponds precisely to Christian theology);
indirect/circuitous routes to the achievement of purpose; unanticipated methods
by the intelligent designer beyond present human scientific experience; a
process within which there was a lack of smaller intermediate purposes such
that none of the intermediate steps would (understandably) yield a clue to the
final result until the process was finished (that is, God just wanted a world
something like this one and had a phobia of neither wandering processes nor
random subroutines that didn’t’ get out of hand).
Jacques Monod
Monod’s argument against cosmic purpose in
evolution involves the three basic fallacies we have briefly discussed: naïve
finalism, the problem of evil and suffering, and perfectionism. I have refuted
these at length in fallacy #23, 24 &
25 of the “Whew, Bad Logic!” section below.
It is fully possible that a virtual or
even a literal meta-genome exists in combination with other physical
constraints in the laws of nature and the informed state of matter at the Big
Bang that directs and controls the process of evolution at a level of
sophistication science has yet to fully decipher. In other words, there are
already rational grounds for the suspicion that the twists and turns in
evolution will turn out to be explainable as reflecting the characteristics of
a closely guided mechanistic process, not radically wandering at all, and
constrained enough to guarantee the result in general terms.
It is odd that neo-Darwinists can look at the
barest beginnings of a new home construction site, 30 or 40 pieces of wood on a
slab of concrete, and have no doubt that there is purpose involved, but when
looking at the human body with its 85,000 different proteins, sophisticated
mechanical systems embedded in higher and higher systems 8-10 levels deep,
having trillions of cells, each cell with thousands of parts in motion doing
millions of precise tasks per minute, they cannot see purpose.
In addition to recent research by Sidney Fox and
Stuart Kauffman, Mayr’s argument is additionally refuted by coherent
self-organizing models such as that of Bernd-Olaf Küppers. All these, although
preliminary, now visibly represent concrete mechanisms for the expression of
cosmic purpose that Mayr said simply could not be found anywhere in nature. I
am not saying their observations, calculations, results and models will stand
completely unmodified by future discoveries, but they give a prima facie case
for concrete control mechanisms that influence the direction of the
evolutionary process. Direction and purpose are not technically the same thing,
but the presence of direction in a system does mean that purpose cannot be
ruled out prior to a complete revelation of the system’s origin. Big Bang
theory says that science can never reveal those origins with completeness
because the entire informed configuration of matter and energy at the beginning
of things has its origin in a phenomenon presumed to be forever out of reach of
scientific research. Thus, contrary to Mayr’s claim that science can rule out
cosmic purpose, the only thing science can legitimately rule out concerning
cosmic purpose is every being able to fully rule it out.
One must be careful not to read too much into
the label “self-organization.” It can be misunderstood to imply that science
knows that the spontaneous organization of complex molecules that facilitated
life and the later modifications in living genomes occurred without aid of
intelligent design. Science knows no such thing. It only knows that the
constraints of natural law and information embedded into matter at the Big Bang
makes self-organization of complex prebiotic and biotic molecules and complex
genome evolutions possible against what would otherwise be impossible odds.
Thus, the phenomenon of self-organization is strong probablistic evidence for
intelligent design, though scientists involved in this research may not
personally see it as such.
It may have appeared to Mayr that molecular
biology revealed no potential mechanism for teleology (cosmic purpose) 25 years
ago when his article was written, but the genome has since been shown to be a
very dynamic and self-transforming system. This is not only true of the
developmental genome, which is obviously, but dramatically, self-transforming,
but of the adult genome as well, with its myriad recently discovered
transpositional elements. Reducing the astronomically complex dynamics of
genetic systems to the single word “mutation” as Mayr does, in no way does
justice to the truths of modern genetic research. To my mind at least, modern
research has now gone well beyond revealing a minimal pathway for cosmic
purpose in nature.
But Didn’t Freud Disprove
Religion?
Now comes, as the materialists suppose, the coup de grace: the argument against God from the “science” of psychology/psychiatry. What we will find in this argument, however, is not disproof of God, but only yet another example of how neo-Darwinists ignore evidence and hold a double evidentiary standard. First of all (see Fallacy #18 at Appendix 1) to want to believe is not disproof of anything. Early Native American populations exploring New York and Canada, trudging through dense forests in mid August may have become so tired and thirsty that they fervently hoped to find a large refreshing waterfall just over the rise where in fact Niagara was soon proved to be waiting. The mere fact that those exhausted explorers had a need to believe does not disprove the existence of Niagara Falls. Similarly, the human need to find refreshment in a blissful afterlife following the sufferings of this world does not prove that afterlife unreal.
The reader may tend to rebel against my thesis here because psychology/psychiatry, particularly Freudian theory, has been so strongly accepted in the popular culture that it may come as a shock to learn just how little evidence there is for it. Neo-Darwinists, as do most unthinking people, many scientists included, accept psychological theories without question as fully validated science. So what’s wrong with that? Two things are wrong with it. First, psychological and psychiatric theories have not yet been fully validated. The second problem is that neo-Darwinists, and much of the scientific community and public whose thinking has been conditioned by neo-Darwinian rhetoric over the years, casually rule out the existence of God as a scientific hypothesis, when upon close examination, that hypothesis turns out to be identical in its epistemological base to that of psychological and psychiatric theory. To see this, let’s start at the beginning.
Science can proceed in one of three ways, or in some combination of the three as is usually the case: (1) empirically/experimentally (for matters which can be directly tested); (2) historically (where there is observable indirect corroboration in an historical record, but where the thesis cannot be directly tested); or (3) by abstract theoretical explanation posed in terms of an hypothetical model that seems to match the evidence. Physical science is predominantly empiric, with some purely theoretical explanation needed at the fundamental levels of matter that we cannot directly get at to test. The methods of history are, of course, predominantly historical, with corroboration provided at points from physical science in the course of evaluating the characteristics of artifacts. Psychology employs a version of the purely theoretical approach, which one might call corroborative modeling. In other words, people act as if the theoretical model used to “explain” their behavior were true. So, what’s wrong with that?
The problem here is that there are many quite different theoretical models of psychology/psychiatry, and they all seem to be producing comparable results. Since they can’t all be true at the same time, we have a situation where some of the theoretical models must be false yet they have been reported as having a reasonably good success rate in healing or improving the psychiatric patient. How can that be?
In a groundbreaking study of the late 1950s the recovery rate of psychiatric patients undergoing psychoanalysis was shown to be no better than the rate of spontaneous recovery with no treatment at all. After psychologists raised a furor over the conclusion of the study, a multitude of other studies were quickly issued across a broad spectrum of different psychiatric schools of thought, and low and behold they all, despite their different approaches and different theoretical assumptions, oddly showed a consistent improvement roughly 50% greater than the spontaneous recovery rate. From the vantage point of a disinterested outsider, the whole thing was entirely suspect, though the behavioral scientists who designed and implemented the studies may have done their best to ensure objectivity.
Two important observations need to be made about these so-called validations of psychotherapy. Whatever the motivations of the behavioral scientists involved were, they never isolated the contribution of the purely theoretical factors to the healing process because many different theories, techniques and approaches to therapy were shown to all be generating roughly the same level of improvement.[220] This, in addition to the fact that some of the conflicting theoretical models had to be false, indicates that the varied approaches to therapy had something in common that was responsible for the healing of the patient over and above the purely theoretical component—a false theory cannot reasonably be proposed to have healed anyone strictly of its own virtues. So what was responsible for the healing?
Common sense would suggest that the offer of friendship and support by the therapist was a factor; emotional comfort; someone to listen sympathetically allowing the patient to unburden themselves of their concerns and express pain and frustration; reassurance that they were not alone in their experiences, that such problems were a common element of the human condition; practical advice useful to troubleshoot concrete problems; confidence that the problem had now been placed into professional hands; and aid in focusing on a definite plan of action. These factors, present in all therapeutic encounters (or at least they should be), are pretty clearly the genuine causes of healing where it actually occurred, not the assumption of obtuse contrivances about the id, the ego and the superego, spooky archetypical symbols, sexual freedom etc.
Thus, to date, we have no genuine evidence for the truth of any of the theoretical schools of psychiatry as a theoretical science. We only have evidence for personal supportive techniques as a craft. We cannot strictly say that psychiatry properly qualifies as a science until we develop some means to distinguish the relative merits among the competing theories. Until we complete studies that successfully filter out the genuine healing factors from the Freudian, Skinnerian-Behaviorist, Jungian, Reichian, Phenomenologist, Humanist, Rogerian, Frommian, etc., theoretical constructs and show the effects of those constructs in strictly controlled applications, we cannot say that scientific theory has added one darn thing beyond what basic supportive and problem solving techniques accomplish on their own.
Some studies have reported a particular school of psychiatry performing better than the core set of supportive techniques minus the theoretical add-ons but the various schools have never really faced-off in a large well-designed and rigorously controlled study to see which theoretical model truly warrants our confidence. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the previous studies that showed a positive effect of adding the theoretical model to basic supportive techniques involved Freudian theory. Now let’s further suppose that a large well-designed study faces off all the competing theories with each other and Rogerian therapy comes out a clear winner, scoring 85% against the others 20-30%. If we feel this would warrant an affirmation of the truth of the Rogerian model and a refutation of the Freudian model (and that it would be a contradiction to simultaneously affirm two of more different models as true), we would be forced to go back and find an alternative explanation to the results of the study that showed an additive benefit of the Freudian approach. Until the alternative theories are validated against each other in this way, we can’t rule out that the effect noted in the Freudian study was not the result of a placebo affect of some kind, such as the patient’s confidence being enhanced by a feeling of “Now I have an expert theoretician on my team, not just supportive nursing.”
There are probably many behavioral scientists out there who would say “Hold it right there. We don’t feel one has to affirm the literal truth of a psychiatric model for it to be an effective tool. We only view psychological theory as heuristic and not literal at all. Therefore, for us, it is not a contradiction to affirm the truth of more than one model of psychology/psychiatry at the same time.” And I have no doubt that many, and perhaps most, competent and well-intended behavioral scientists view it this way. But that makes validation a real bear because the placebo affect of having an “expert” psychiatrist on a patient’s team in addition to general supportive techniques may turn out to be the full explanation of the limited successes that are achieved. That, the experts may say, is in fact the reality of psychiatric science and we must live with our limitations. That is all fine when it is contained within the community of behavioral scientists. However, when the neo-Darwinists pull Freud out of their hat as an argument against God, the merely heuristic approach has been shouldered aside and they are claiming objective truth for Freud’s atheistic suppositions. They are claiming literal truth for the supposition that the religious believer has created God in his/her own mind out of nothing more than a psychological need. The merely heuristic approach fails here because the bulk of religious believers do not in fact act as if they have done this self-deception, and they show no signs of any definable neurotic profile.
Why hasn’t something so obvious and fundamental as a comprehensive validation of psychiatric science ever been done? I don’t know, but I have a hunch, a suspicion really. My hunch is that, once again, the propaganda campaign for materialism is to blame. Suppose such validation studies were done. The materialists would run the risk of having the atheistic Freudian model out-performed by, say, the more positive Carl Rogers style approach. In that case the atheistic theoretical assumptions of Freud would be refuted and Freud could not then be used to argue against God and for materialism. The materialists therefore do not stand to gain from a proper and thorough validation study in psychiatry because theirs is the currently favored theory; they can only lose ground. Freudian theory is one of the biggest guns in the materialist propaganda arsenal, one they could hardly afford to lose. My suspicion is that here again we see the willingness of materialists to forgo the requirements of proper science in order to advance a political agenda, even at the cost of avoiding the proper validation of an entire discipline.
Where is the id, the ego and the superego? We cannot observe these things. They are simply components of an abstract model that is felt to mirror the way people act. Many, if not all, psychologists/psychiatrists, acknowledge that these Freudian constructs are not assumed to literally correspond to reality, but that people behave as if they do. Psychiatric theory is therefore considered a heuristic model as opposed to a literal description of reality. In other words, people act as if they had an ego, an id, and a superego, at least while they are in the doctor’s office being interrogated, that is to say, “treated” (and certainly after they receive the bill).
Surely, though, the four billion or so God-fearing people of the faiths of the world who go to church, read the holy books, and assiduously teach their children the faith, who donate their hard earned money to the poor, are acting as if there were a God as much or more so than as if they were suppressing a hatred of their father and an infatuation with their mother! People do this across the entire range of situational factors, rich, poor, educated, illiterate, at peace, at war, in trauma, in happy times, in support groups, in isolation etc. The religious view is therefore as good an explanatory model of important and substantial components of human behavior as is Freudian psychology or any other school of psychology, yet the materialist neo-Darwinists won’t hear of its being admitted into any social or historical science—“mere superstition, you know.”
The reason I bother to make this lengthy aside and risk pissing off the entire community of behavioral scientists in the process is that the heuristic model of Freudian psychology is considered valid evidence against religion while the religious model is every bit as well-substantiated by precisely the same heuristic logic, that is, it predicts and explains the behavior of roughly 4 billion living religious people and billions of others now deceased (especially the martyrs who were willing to die for their faith) at least as well and perhaps better than the Freudian model explains that of its patients. The heuristic religious model could therefore equally be used to argue against the Freudian model, at least that part that says that religion is merely a psychological pacifier. The dramatic success of a heuristic model in explaining and predicting serves as evidence for the existence of the theoretical entities that comprise the model, in this case God. It is logically inconsistent, and therefore scientifically improper, to dismiss religion as not genuine purely on the basis of a psychological theory whose explanatory model itself corresponds less precisely to the world than the religious model it claims to refute.
Neo-Darwinists might reply that Freudian psychology doesn’t prove the theistic model wrong, it merely shows it unnecessary to explanation. But the Freudian model does not explain the devout behavior of two thirds of the world’s population that believe in God and don’t have adulterous affairs with their mother or hate their father. Are all believers to be classified as neurotic? What would the clinical definition of the religious neurosis be, considering that it is spread across 4 billion people spanning all ages, genders, life circumstances, occupations, mental states, physical and behavioral profiles? By the process of elimination the definition would reduce to you are a religious neurotic if you believe in God. But a neurosis by definition must generate some negative impact on the individual or society and include a definable set of irrational behaviors. What would those be for the person of faith? Charity? Community service? Practicing the virtues? Having a loving and forgiving disposition? Prayer and attendance at church? Remaining loyal to your wife? Please….
The evidence for the Freudian model has been exaggerated for political reasons while the evidence for the religious model has been entirely ignored despite its being evidentially, heuristically and epistemologically equivalent or superior to any of the models of psychology/psychiatry. The religious model also has a greater and more consistent correspondence ratio of observed behavior to modeled behavior, and a correspondingly greater predictive success. We can say with high probability that most religious people will pray to God tomorrow, go to Church next Sunday, donate to charity within six months etc.
One can object that, well, scientists who exclude the religious model know all these things, they are simply excluding the model because it is religion, and religion and science don’t mix. Sounds good, so it must be true, right? No. We addressed the question of whether scientific evidence can at times point to something nonphysical and remain legitimately within the bounds of science in Appendix 1, Fallacy #17. Clearly science thinks that it can because our current theory of the origin of the universe does point to something nonphysical at the Big Bang. Further, a more careful look at what I have argued here reveals that asserting a religious model for explanatory purposes is not the same thing as practicing a religion at all. It is merely the proposal of a scientific hypothesis that God exists and in some perceivable ways influences human behavior. Proposing the religious model of explanation is not religion itself but, rather, a theory of human religious behavior much like Freudian theory is not religion when it purports to explain religious behavior. The difference is that the religious model asserts that rational psychologically healthy people practice religion due to an authentic encounter with God or because they have an honest and well-corroborated faith in the historical Christ, Muhammad etc., as well as perhaps a minority who may in fact have deceived themselves and have a need to believe for pathological reasons.
Consider, is it more likely that a religious person not otherwise showing signs of neurosis is deceiving themselves into giving away their time and money, and sometimes their lives (religious persecution occurs in some twenty or thirty nations around the globe even today), for their love of God, or that a disturbed patient documented to have abnormal thinking would be susceptible to the suggestion of the authoritative Freudian therapist who may be perceived as a virtual lifeline to emotional safety. The suffering patient is desperate to be healed, the Freudian therapist assures them that they can be healed, and so they are healed…by a psychological placebo effect, the power of suggestion. Some of them may even have been hypnotized as part of therapy.
Where lies the greater risk of deception (intentional, unintentional, conscious or unconscious)? In an average man or woman practicing their faith, or in a pathologically disturbed mind being authoritatively guided by a true believing Freudian therapist using an antiquated, and one might even say, neurotic, view of human nature? Yet this is how the neo-Darwinists represent the Christian faith, as a self-imposed deception neurosis, while the pathological patient of the Freudian therapist could not possibly be deceived in any way! For the materialist we Christians, and yes I am one, are all neurotics deceiving ourselves because we don’t have the courage to face the fact that we are alone in the universe, and, they, the materialists, are the brave heroes in shining armor who charge to our rescue. Their latest act of heroism, however, involves alleviating us of the burden to think logically or preserve the integrity of science. They insist that science should deny the fact that clear empiric evidence points to the existence of intelligent design of the universe and its life forms. For the materialist it would seem, anything is OK, just so long as it doesn’t point to God. These people are not scientists first, but social activists. They are people who believe the principle of Marxism, that the result justifies any method used to achieve it. They are trying to sculpt society in the direction of their beliefs first, and do objective science second. Thus, they intentionally deny valid logic and empiric evidence that suggests the reality of God because they feel that revealing these truths to the public might dangerously aggravate what they falsely presume to be the religious neurosis. They truly believe that a godless society is best for mankind and fear that validating intelligent design theory would put society back hundreds of years into the superstitious “stone age.” Materialists actually believe this **##*#!!!, and there are many of them among neo-Darwinian evolutionary theorists. They are willing to bias their science to promote political goals.
Is religion merely a neurosis? The neo-Darwinists will never admit it, but a scientifically defensible heuristic model of religious behavior can be validly introduced into the science of psychology or sociology. A scientifically coherent and very explanatory model is available that allows the some 4 billion religious believers in our world to be sane. If you prefer, we can call it a theory of sociology instead of psychology because what is being described is the interaction of humans with another person, the person of God, the person who happens to be their creator. The politically biased Marxists in the neo-Darwinian community wish us to believe that putting forward the religious model as the most explanatory of the evidence equates to practicing religion, when it merely describes behavior and proposes a hypothesis that seems to best explain it. To construct a heuristic model of religious behavior as a school of psychology/sociology is not to practice religion anymore than to construct a model of abnormal psychology is to behave abnormally. Nonetheless, even one of our federal courts, in the recent Kitzmiller decision, has asserted as a matter of law that intelligent design theory must always be considered to be religion and excluded from the science classroom! Here the court has deigned to tell the intellectual community what the meaning of a scientific theory is, and in direct contradiction of what the originators of the theory have defined their theory to assert. This kind of intervention of the courts into freedom of thought does not bode well for the continuance of a free and democratic society. It is a flagrant first attempt at information control intended to favor one political model and worldview over all others. The court may or may not have realized the political dangers inherent in what they did in Kitzmiller, but the Marxists among the neo-Darwinists are not so naïve.
The religious model in psychology/sociology, that is, a model that says that most religious behavior is not neurotic but rather represents a genuine interaction between God and his people, evaluates much more favorably on behavioral correspondence and predictive ability than does the Freudian model that says two thirds of the world’s population are all crazy. Yet, the more explanatory and more predictive (and more sane) theoretical model is arbitrarily excluded from consideration merely because it allows for the validity of religion. When philosophical debates about God arise in wider intellectual circles, “science” as represented by the neo-Darwinists is then free to use Freudian theory to argue that there is no God after having unfairly dismissed all alternative views as nonscientific! Once again Froehicky’s protest from the X-Files rings in our ears: “They are rigging the game!” And its true; politics has invaded science.
Rigging the game is precisely what is happening in the current evolution debate regarding intelligent design theory. Legitimate scientific evidence and associated explanatory models, hypotheses, and theories are dismissed as being religion instead of the objective explanatory model of the world that they are. When logic is properly applied to empiric evidence science should have the courage to go where the evidence leads, even when it indirectly corroborates the existence of God. Contrary to what the neo-Darwinists in modern science would have us believe, the tactic of prematurely rejecting intelligent design theory as nonscience is not a heroic effort to defend the purity of science and free man from superstition; it is a politically biased Marxist-like tactic aimed at advancing the philosophy of materialism. The blind compulsive pursuance of that tactic has led modern science to ignore great volumes of genuine evidence of intelligent design in biology and elsewhere in the cosmos. That evidence includes the rationally held religious beliefs and behaviors of two thirds of the world’s population.[221]
Social, Political, Psychological and Cognitive Prejudice in Science
Many modern evolutionists were heavily influenced by the dialectical materialism of Marxism. Though the historical dynamic of Marxism can now be seen to have failed, many of its tenets live on in various modern schools of thought, one of which is the school of materialistic scientism, the intellectual ills of which are too often expressed by modern evolutionists. One of the core beliefs of Marxism is that the result justifies any method used. One cannot trust the science of a Marxist to be objective. Where political and philosophical impact favorable to their system of thought can be achieved by distorting the truth, Marxists have no qualms in sacrificing scientific objectivity for political ideology.
In materialistic scientism, the overriding importance of the survival of the state that holds center stage in Marxism is replaced by the survival of the species. All else may be sacrificed for that, and for the material well-being of a society. Democratic principles and moral standards need not apply. “Give me liberty or give me death” is thrown out in favor of “Give me anything instead of death.” This view opens the way to cruel forms of behavioral conditioning, permanent enslavement of whole classes of people for the good of mankind, etc. Individual human rights are a joke in such a system.
This odd circumstance that has recently occurred, that our federal courts would be unable to distinguish between science and materialist philosophy/propaganda derives primarily from the fact that the courts are getting prejudiced testimony from mainstream science. They may themselves have been strongly influenced by the prevailing materialist mindset in Western academia. Oh, come now, you may say, science is objective by definition; there can be no prejudice in science, and certainly not the courts. Au contraire, scientists can be prejudiced, after all they are human. The courts know this to be true. Judges are routinely dismissed from cases to remove even an appearance of bias.
Our courts have been listening to the scientists, but in The Limits of Scientific Reasoning, Dr. David Faust reports that generalization of the results of cognitive studies suggest that scientists have been performing their professional judgments in surprisingly poor fashion. According to Faust, cognitive limitations inherent to our entire species have been a relatively minor player in this; the primary cause of poor judgment and low abstract reasoning skills among our scientists has been, you guessed it, bias. I feel my thesis that the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher is, in part, corroborated by Faust’s inference that scientists have probably not been doing well on such tasks as theory evaluation. Furthermore, theories involving abstract logics such as intelligent design theory’s probability and complexity arguments are precisely the areas most at risk of erroneous evaluation. This is true even before the factor of attempting to break strongly entrenched social/political prejudices and scientific paradigms is considered.
Assuming for the moment that
judgment findings pertaining to cognitive limitations do generalize, what image
(description) of the scientist might emerge? As I argued in chapter 1, complex
considerations and information are relevant to most, if not all, scientific
judgments. Across all scientific activities and so-called levels of inference,
from the “seeing” of facts to the “seeing” of theories, from the measurement of
atomistic units to the measurement of hypothetical constructs, from the
selection of laboratory equipment to the selection of research strategy,
complexity is the rule. The judgment literature suggests that individuals are
least able to perform adequately exactly these types of decisions—those
that require the cognitive management of considerable complexity.[222]
Faust’s book reveals that, yes, the typical scientist provides great value to society in his discipline and rigor in dealing with concrete data and experimental controls. But when it comes to abstract thinking, logical reasoning, conceptual theory construction, and objective evaluation (with the exception of purely mathematical determinations), the track record of our scientists’ is not nearly so impressive.
Unfortunately, the risk of prejudice in science is more than a hypothetical possibility inferred from test scores of experimental subjects. Over the past five decades the academic research system has effectively disallowed competing research strategies in evolutionary science. Alternative theories are rarely studied or written about—or even considered in the planning of scientific research. Modern research is planned, developed and carried out making the assumption of the truth of an intelligent design-free and materialistic form of Darwinian theory without ever looking for or investing in genuine opportunities to disprove it. To presume the answer before collecting the data, of course, is not the scientific method at all. It has, however, too often been the method of modern science.
Chapter 7 of Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution describes an easy to understand case of this bias in an interesting historical account of the industrial melanism phenomenon in peppered moths. Such a biased process as is shown in the peppered moth study can only have one result: presenting the favored theory in greater and greater light. While modern researchers are doing a better job of considering relevant factors than was achieved in the moth studies, the fact remains that they are only looking at factors falling within the scope of neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory, a theory heavily influenced by the dialectical materialism of Marxism and its more recent variant, scientism. In such a materialistic culture, the words “intelligent design” must always remain taboo, not because a logical inference to intelligence from certain design features is not a proper scientific step to take, but because revealing such truths opens the door to the public’s belief in God.
The pseudo-scientific mindset of scientism was a feature of the failed Communist ideology, itself spawned by Karl Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism. Now in retrospect, we can see clearly that the abstract reasoning skills of the architects of these materialistic systems grossly failed them. For what better hope have the lower classes than the vote with which they are empowered by free democratic societies and the Christian compassion that moves the upper classes to assist and empower the poor towards the realization of full social justice (a prime point of emphasis of the modern Catholic Church). By definition, the upper classes control the policy and resources of a society. How then can the lower classes ever hope to be empowered if it is not through the instilling of Christian compassion in the upper classes that would move them to share power and the right for the lower classes themselves to actively sculpt social and political policy through the right to vote? But these two crucial elements, democracy and religion, were precisely the two things Marxism most vehemently opposed and fought to extinguish from the planet! The harder they fought, the more they ensured the failure of their primary purpose, which was to liberate and empower the lower classes.
Real
Alternatives
Come now, you may say, all of this heady social theory is fine, but there aren’t really any legitimate alternatives to neo-Darwinian evolution, are there? So the Darwinists would have us believe, who have for decades upon decades denied the existence of alternatives. But, yes, there are legitimate and explanatory alternatives. Any number of optional and plausible scenarios can be composed under the banner of intelligent design. There is also old-fashioned Darwinism, something closer to the view Darwin himself held as a published scientist. Contrary to the neo-Darwinists’ contrived reconstructions of Darwin’s private thoughts, Darwin officially held that God was the source of the origin of life. This controversy is discussed further in the conclusion. I here offer a brief description of my own alternative hypothesis of how evolution may have proceeded. All of its components have been discussed or implied before in previous intelligent design discussions by other authors. I call this view the information first theory (IFT). It is an example of an alternative evolutionary model, an explanatory framework. It explains both the genetic and molecular similarities between creatures[223] and the fossil record, as well as the glaring question of the origin of astronomically complex biological design information that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot answer.
In the classic neo-Darwinian model of gradualism the major evolutionary advancements are constructed as time goes on by small accidental “mutations,” which are then locked in place by natural selection. We have already discussed the problem concerning how big of a mutation is big enough to impact survival and reproductive fitness so that natural selection can vote. IFT says that natural selection doesn’t have to vote, at least not often. This view does not preclude a frequent vote by natural selection, but says the event of that vote is not crucial to the construction of biological designs.
IFT says that most of the necessary information “modules” requisite to building the tree of life were achieved in advance of the Cambrian ala Susumu Ohno. The IFT concept of information module does not confine the source of information to genetic modules, but allows that it might include information embedded in a variety of sources in nature and natural law, especially in folded protein structures. With IFT, undirected mutations are a relatively small player for primary construction tasks, though they may ultimately do some work on the periphery of organismal design.
IFT hypothesizes that many genetic transpositions (these are more complex and less random than individual point mutations) are constrained by natural law or other factors that focus them towards viable evolutionary steps. This produces a success rate for adaptation of the tree of life (as a whole) to the geophysical/environmental features of the Earth well beyond what chance could achieve. Thus, the apparent workhorses of evolution, genetic transpositions, are considered to be, at least in part, substantially directed in IFT (yet not micromanaged in detail). This is despite the haphazard appearance the raw genetic sequences of the genomes have presented to the superficial inspection of some researchers. The surprises the genome has provided over the past few decades along with the enormity of the complex tasks the genome accomplishes argue convincingly that it would be hasty indeed to draw conclusions based solely upon our such impressions.
Thus, natural selection has only a minor role to play in IFT. It still preserves the best overall designs, but contributes very little to the construction process. IFT, however, includes the expanded concept of a form-determining information module that potentially reaches far beyond the gross characteristics of the genome into yet to be elucidated laws of physics and chemistry.
One possibility for a specific version of IFT (IFT is general just as Darwinian theory is general☺), the most literal one, is as follows. A substantially complete inventory of proteins, a rudimentary gene translation system, protein assembly organelle, and/or a master library of RNA sequences was somehow achieved in the early Cambrian/Precambrian (an event so far hidden to the view of modern science). How this was achieved is not specified in IFT, but left open to research. It could have been something on the order of Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii’s immune antibody random sequence generator externalized and run amuck, or not; the specifics are not core to IFT, just as they are not core to neo-Darwinian theory. The inventory of early master architectural components needn’t be sufficient to directly generate the Cambrian explosion of life form novelty in its entirety, so long as additional form determining factors are present elsewhere in nature and natural law sufficient to guide the seminal code structure in a secure, if not straight, path toward more complex life.
One might object that if the event is hidden to the current view of science it is by definition an implausible theory because we have no confirmation of it. My answer is that IFT, though as yet unconfirmed by direct observation, is much more explanatory than neo-Darwinian evolution. It therefore deserves a slice of the research pie to see what can be discovered to corroborate or refute it. If our strategy is to only devote research dollars to theories already confirmed we will never have any confirmed theories.
The nonliteral version of the same thing says that instead of a nearly complete cadre of RNA sequences and proteins there was less of these components initially. In the next phase form-constraining determinants in natural law and other facets of nature guaranteed or made likely that evolution would occur.
There is the possibility, too, that interactions of the genome with the creature’s environment occur that both trigger or stimulate genetic transpositions and perhaps in some complex manner yet to be understood allow the organism to gain biological information in the process via that interaction. Models have been proposed of such dynamic information increasing interaction with the environment such as Eugenio Andrade’s (National University of Columbia) presented at the SEED Journal Web site.[224] This is not an IFT or ID model as I understand it, but one that argues for greater emphasis in research on environmental influences and epigenetic factors in evolution. For decades neither question received the attention it merited or was allocated significant resources for research.
Under IFT, many of the presumed to be inherited relationships among creatures are not derived from inheritance from living organisms. Rather, simple creatures originated the tree of life in a form more like a bush, with many separate lines of descent from multiple points of origin at or near the base, roughly equating to the phyla. Of course, if any kind of fully potent form determining constraints are present at the beginning of life it is pretty much irrelevant what shape the tree of life assumes so long as that shape is consistent with the determining factors.
Here, the “roots” of each phyla initially had access to both the master RNA library and the master inventory of proteins if there was such or a correspondingly potent but more dispersed set of form determining constraints embedded into nature and natural law that tended to find similar solutions to similar biological problems. This, of course, explains convergence very nicely. Some opportunity for each phyla to “capture” portions of the early master libraries of both proteins and RNA occurred early on in life’s development, perhaps at several points in the process. Phyla were then constrained to move in closely convergent directions by the (yet to be elucidated) form determinants embedded in natural law and/or contingent information initially present in matter and energy at or since the Big Bang.
IFT extends somewhat beyond the current evidence for an RNA world (self-replicating enzymes, ribozymes etc.), self-organization of biotic molecules, and self-organizational themes in the genome, but not so far as to be an implausible extension of those concepts. By further integrating the theory of Michael Denton on the apparent natural law driven constraints on protein folding we get a picture where the initial inventory of proteins was composed of predominantly biologically viable proteins. By extending this natural law driven bias for life one step further to the substantially directed construction of Marcello Barbieri’s ribotype we arrive at DNA, proteins, and a translation system without suffering catastrophically failed explorations that exhaust the physical and time resources of the universe and massive numbers of disabled mutants. This is exactly what the fossil record reflects, a track record so effective that it could never be achieved by an accidental process.
IFT is vastly more explanatory than the current Darwinian model.[225] Yet, neither Information First Theory or any other competing theory with explanatory merit is permitted to guide current research strategies; only the Darwinian model is presently acceptable. The political reason for this is obvious. Once we admit that the design information might have been present at the beginning, the impact of natural selection is reduced far beyond its role in the classic Darwinian model. There is no time for natural selection to operate in the construction phase of biological machines, incrementally selecting each step along the way, because the heavily biased IFT process is constantly racing ahead of it by developing preexisting deposits of biological information and then being onward funneled towards the rapid completion of viable forms of life by natural laws within which those forms are predetermined. Natural selection has been the only thing ever proposed that might save the accidental process from complete impotency.
Once IFT is incorporated into our theoretical assumptions, natural selection becomes largely, though not completely, superfluous. This allows the accidental evolutionary process to be discarded, and along with it goes the accidental worldview. Atheists and materialists in mainstream science are dragging their feet on acknowledging the possibility of such a transition from the failed neo-Darwinian accidental/purposeless view in opposing research that might explore purpose or design informed alternatives. Thus, unfortunately, to date such research has not been done in the mainstream of science.
Contrary to Ernst Mayr’s assertion that science can find no purpose in nature, the truth is that the neo-Darwinists haven’t even been looking. On the rare occasion when they have looked to answer the question of purpose it has not been to science, but rather to philosophy. Even then they have not turned to logical analysis as one should, but only to intuitive approaches based upon the fallacious argument from authority (trust the experts to know). Intuition minus the corroboration of analysis and logic amounts to no more than superstition, and the argument from authority is nothing more than intellectual totalitarianism—a scientific dictatorship that idolizes Darwin and worships materialism. Hence, Mary Midgley’s observation that for many, evolution has become a religion, not science at all.[226] The neo-Darwinists, of course, view all religions as unfounded superstition—except their own.
The limitations that the entrenched political prejudice for neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory impose on the practice of modern evolutionary science is confirmed by Dr. Mae-Won Ho in her book Beyond Neo-Darwinism. “The synthetic theory is based upon a definite assumption about how evolution occurs. The evolutionist is supposed to accept this as a given and simply show how the process may have operated in various different cases…”[227]
Although Dr. Ho uses the term “synthetic theory,” I take her to be following the customary practice of including neo-Darwinian theory under that umbrella as a linguistic convenience. G. G. Simpson indicates that synthetic theory basically subsumed neo-Darwinian theory and added certain embellishments, neo-Darwinian theory having itself subsumed mutationism and added natural selection. The two theories, synthetic and neo-Darwinian, live hand in glove in the scientific community with little and infrequent care taken to distinguish them in the bulk of published research. The language is hardly standardized. For example, Mark Ridley says “Fisher, Haldane, and Wright demonstrated that Mendelian heredity and natural selection are compatible; the synthesis of the two ideas is called neo-Darwinian or the synthetic theory.”[228] Since both versions of the theory have this much in common, that is, Mendelian genetics and the population dynamics it spawns, as well as some form of natural selection, they are treated as functional equivalents for the purposes of many discussions. Ernst Mayr uses the term “neo-Darwinian” quite differently, however, tying it to a specific author, and G. G. Simpson suggests the usage I have adopted here, differentiating the two theories by means of the accidental component that marks neo-Darwinian theory. Simpson cites a purportedly more potent form of natural selection as the hallmark of synthetic theory.
The prejudice Ho reveals similarly extends favor to both versions of the theory for purposes of experimental research. Experimental research is only presumed proper when it proceeds from the assumption of the truth of one or the other of these favored views to further exposition of their hypothesized mechanics. Studies exploring empiric grounds to refute either theory or new explanatory paradigms such as intelligent design are practically nonexistent in modern research. In such an environment it is ridiculous to criticize ID theorists for a scarcity of experimental studies; such studies are neither approved nor funded based upon the prejudice for Darwinian theory that permeates practically the entire academic and research communities. Treatment of the accidental thesis, which as I said, is the only thing that truly distinguishes synthetic theory from neo-Darwinism, has been mostly banished from experimental research to the higher realms of abstract speculative discussion.
Given the enormous prejudice for the confused
duo of theories in the current scientific culture, if researchers did look to disprove
neo-Darwinian theory or design a study giving serious credence to a contrary
hypothesis, their chances of being published in a peer-reviewed professional
journal (or funded) would be practically nil. The lack of any kind of validated
procedural framework to approach the accidental question in empiric research
effectively locks out any attempt to refute neo-Darwinian theory. When
Professor William Dembski proposed the first models to ground such studies the
academic/research community did not encourage or assist him in polishing and
revising the models as normal scientific protocol would entail. Instead, they
ridiculed it, called it nonscientific by definition, and refused to admit
anything done under the banner of intelligent design as scientific, inanely
calling it disguised religion. Despite
working with one hand tied behind their back in this way, intelligent design
theorists have still managed to produce peer-reviewed scientific research. A
portion of it is listed at the Discovery Institute website on the peer-reviewed bibliography page.[229]
And what, exactly, has six decades of research
focused exclusively on the classic neo-Darwinian paradigm produced as
explanation of the origin and development of life? Dr. Ho is in a better
position to say than I:
It is now approximately half a century since the
neo-Darwinian synthesis was formulated. A great deal of research has been
carried on within the paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are
limited to the interpretation of the minutiae of evolution, such as the
adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say
on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in
the first place.[230]
OK.
If You’re So Smart, What’s Your Version of the Origin of Life
My version? Everyone balks when put on the spot like that because no one really knows the process of life’s origin. But I do have a guess. This guess is consistent with the IFT framework. I won’t characterize it as more than a guess, and certainly it is refutable by future research. But I don’t expect such a refutation. Here’s why.
Science now knows enough about the level of complexity in biological systems that we can actually deduce (in my opinion) certain parameters within which the origin of life must occur. Two of those parameters I propose to be absolutely certain. The first parameter is IFT itself, the information must be there first or there will not be sufficient time and resources to incrementally develop biological system information over the time available in evolutionary history. The other parameter is that the information must be sufficient, that is, it must be sufficient to overcome the irreducible complexity of the tripartite system, genotype-phenotype-ribotype. Here is one hypothetical scenario in which that might have occurred.
I will call this hypothesis the Pseudo-fold Theory, or PFT. Because amino acids are the components of proteins, and proteins have such an enormous information bearing capacity in three-dimensional folded structures, amino acids and the few abiotically achievable proteins presently known to science are the starting point for the origin of life in PFT. Nature itself has imbedded these entities with enormous information bearing capacity and amino acids have been shown to spontaneously arise (Urey-Miller) under conditions approximating the primordial Earth.
Amino acids and any spontaneously (abiotically) derivable proteins that may be obtained from them are the only source of biological information presently known to be available in the primordial Earth. Any spontaneously achievable strings of nucleotides in early RNA cannot be demonstrated to be anything but random. Early RNA is therefore considered to bear no useful biological information. In this approach to IFT, proteins, or some pseudo-folded structure of amino acids whose information structure would very closely model that of proteins, are posited to be the only available source of biological information from which life can be originated (proteins first, if you have to say it that way, though PFT does not require anything more than an approximation of a protein).
Those early amino acids (in “pseudo-folds”) or abiotically synthesized proteins might then have initiated a sequence of steps leading to the first living cell in a scenario similar to that which follows. Are a few amino acids or rudimentary proteins enough information-wise? In theory yes.—and potentially much more than enough. The 20 biologically useful amino acids have, between them, 437 properties relevant to determining biological function. Only two of them (not two residues, but two types) could potentially express on the order of 1021 bits of biological information. That information would be expressed across varying sequences of residues laid out in physical proximity (considering only two dimensions patterns for the moment) alternately arranged to reflect all possibilities of positional reconfigurations relevant to the twenty or so biologically active properties of each of the two amino acids. Exploring the alternative configurations of the same two amino acids in three dimensions (given the availability of sufficient residues) increases the number of alternative configurations exponentially.
If Michael Denton’s thesis of predetermination of protein folds is correct, one or more of those alternatives may both be instrumental in reverse engineering the genome of the first living cell and highly preferred by natural law. The information capacity involved in the set of “pseudo-fold” configurations available to only two types of amino acids even computed for two dimensional patters is a trillion times the information needed to make a 3,000,000bp bacterial genome, assuming some method of reverse transcription could be employed. This would probably be outside the reach of an accidental process even if the needed configuration resided in the 1021 options, but would not be out of reach of a biased process where natural law enforces a strong preference for a smaller set of options, one of which allows reverse engineering of the first simple genome.
To make clear where the possibility of intelligent design enters the system I have labeled the initial and unexplained information sources in the ‘S’ series. The ‘E’ series are events of biological organization driven by natural law working upon information provided by the initial sources. The meaning of “pseudo-fold” is very general. It merely means any semi-permanent organization of amino acids (chemically bonded to each other or not) that can provoke a consistent chemical reaction similar to what folded proteins can otherwise do when either folded or during any phase of unfolding.
(S1) Partially by arbitrary hypothesis and partially by deduction this version of PFT assumes that the blueprint for life is (approximately) 90% contained in folded protein structures.
(S2) Again by hypothesis, PFT assumes that the natural laws of physics and chemistry contain the other 10% of the blueprint for life. Exactly how, where, and when secondary instructions in the genome and protein folds can interact dynamically with natural law to produce the tree of life is not yet specified in PFT, just as the biomechanics of evolution are not specified in Darwinian theory. The distribution of the percentages of the blueprint for life between S1 and S2 given here are completely arbitrary. They are of no central concern to PFT. They could be 80-20, 50-50 etc., no matter. I mention definite percentages only to give enough concreteness to add clarity to the explanation.
(E1) “Pseudo-folding” of amino acids occurs. This is facilitated by clay substrata holding amino acids into close physical proximity so that their physical-chemical cues can be chemically “read” by a primitive, spatially expanded functional equivalent of the ribotype. The ability for this to happen within a spatial scale requisite to integrated chemical response may depend upon the unfolding (or pseudo-unfolding) of one or more abiotically achieved proteins. Chemical cues in the environment with or without the aid of water solubility caused decomposition could cause the unfolding of the protein (perhaps in ways science has yet to anticipate) The pseudo-folds are “read” as if they were folded proteins. To what extent the achievement of a primitive ribotype translation mechanism will prove to be genuinely accidental hinges upon how much direction towards the spontaneous achievement of such a system is ultimately found to reside in natural law and the contingent but irreversible history of the universe from the Big Bang.
(E2) The genome is reverse engineered from information in the pseudo-folds by a chemical reversal of the ribotype translation system made possible by S2 (natural processes of physics and chemistry). In other words, the random sequence of nucleotides in primitive RNA sequences is reordered in accordance with the information from the pseudo-folds and the genome of the first living cell is actively configured in real time in a non-random manner.
(E3) Microtubule nano-structures self-organize from a combination of the new genome, pseudo-ribotype, and the tendencies vested into natural law to facilitate or encourage such self-organization.
(E4) With the achievement of a first level genome, rudimentary ribotype and nanostructures of microtubules a sequence of similar and incrementally more and more complex pseudo-systems are made possible via continued dynamic interaction of the new pseudo-cell with natural law. This involves the continued unfolding of more and more complex information from proteins some of which may have been newly built by the intermediate pseudo-cell systems themselves at various intermediate levels.
After several or many levels of such intermediate construction, the first living cell is ultimately achieved. At the intermediate levels of pseudo-cell construction (and with the evolution of more complex life forms that follows) incremental advances are made possible by a complex dynamic interplay between information vested into natural law, new increments of directional information sequentially revealed in folded proteins, and recent genome additions that are “intelligently” configured by the reverse engineering component of this process, the R-ribotype.
PFT does not describe a simple process. It gives a general description of a horrendously complex process. The information that comprises the blueprint for life is not (necessarily) all in a given set of proteins. It is not all in the genome. It is not all in natural law. Even the ribotype (the genetic translation system) is useless by itself. All of these major sources of biological information help each other not to evolve in terms of content (the information content is already there), but to evolve the concrete expression of that content into more and more complex biological forms. Thus, the limits irreducible complexity imposes are never violated. The tripartite system of biological information, translation and structural construction is present from the beginning. Once the system is capable of building biological structure and reverse engineering the genome it can incrementally advance itself and having done so the reverse engineering capacity (we can call it the R-ribotype) is eliminated from the system. In the PFT version of IFT, the equivalent of Ohno’s master genome is a master blueprint for life contained in information resident in three-dimensional folded structural patterns within proteins.
(E5) The modular information-guided construction process of evolution under PFT is continued beyond unicellular life with the aid of the developmental genome and the transpositional genome. These systems are “self-organized” in a dynamic similar to that described in E1-E4, guided, once again, by the master plan contained in S1-S2. Directional information within these two higher-level systems, built in from prior steps, continues to guide evolutionary development. Rapid jumps in evolutionary advancement are explained in PFT by occasional interjections of reverse engineered information bursts from the master blueprint stored in folded protein structures. The mechanism for this is an hypothesized, yet to be elucidated, rare phenomenon of reverse transcription, perhaps some kind of throwback to the R-ribotype. This might look like a genetic defect or dysfunction to an unsuspecting researcher.
Scientific
Prematurity, Deep Time and the Argument from Authority
Can we trust neo-Darwinian “experts” to define the meaning of life for us when they couldn’t pass an elementary logic course if they were allowed to copy? (See Appendix 1) Is the history of science so free of political bias that we can safely assume its absence in modern scientists? No, and no.
The vast new resource of biological information science has accumulated in the past twenty years reveals that evolutionary theory construction has been (over)confidently proceeding upon what has turned out to be a fully inadequate base of information. Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature magazine, agrees, attributing the deficit of information in paleontology primarily to the inherent limitations of “deep time.” That is, more time exists in the historical epochs of life’s history than we could conceivably collect sufficient evidence to reliably represent with limited point in time representations by fossils, ancient DNA, or other historical data points. For this reason, Gee goes so far as to say that any and all historical narrative explanations that purport to give a “known to be true” narrative historical progression of evolution and a single definite tree of life are merely indefensible assertions from authority. The only basis for such specificity, according to Dr. Gee, is the “expert” opinion of a particular scientist or group of scientists. However, since the nature of the objective evidence for evolution is insufficient to demand the same opinion from all informed interpreters, expert opinion alone does not guarantee truth, nor does it satisfy the rigor of scientific method. Gee, as everyone should, derides the argument from authority, which the history of science and philosophy condemns as unreliable, politically suspect, and fully contrary to scientific method.[231]
I agree with Gee completely. The whole enterprise of Darwinian evolutionary theory has been vastly premature. While it was scientifically premature for Darwin in the absolute sense that he was missing masses of critical data, it was not conceptually premature or disingenuous for Darwin to propose his theory because he did not know he was missing critical data. What Henry Gee’s book reveals is that we do know it, or should.
My own view goes a bit further than Deep Time. I propose that we are now experiencing additional limits similar to the limitations incurred from “deep time,” namely “deep information,” and “deep complexity.” This is not new. Dembski and possibly Stephen Meyer or other ID theorists have previously identified the same problem, at least by implication. (One might also say, in regards to the neo-Darwinian penchant for propaganda that stretches over half a century, science must also wrestle with deep BS.)
While deep complexity and deep information produce improbabilities for the accidental thesis far exceeding those required to refute it, they make any more detailed formulation of a definite view of the process dynamic of evolution premature at best. We cannot presently even match the folding complexity of a single protein by chaining hundreds of thousands of computers together. Thus, the ultra complexity that has been revealed in biological systems over the past few decades is absolutely genuine. This means that complexity in addition to deep time requires us not to prematurely issue comprehensive theories of evolutionary dynamics until we first objectively chart the data and achieve a data synthesis capability equal to the task.
We are presently a very long way from achieving this. It is therefore no surprise that neo-Darwinian theory has it all wrong. As of the “new” evolutionary synthesis circa 1950 science had yet to breach the threshold of discovery requisite to revealing the foundational character of the processes of life, let alone having full data and a matching capability for synthesis and analysis. Compared to what we know today, even the update to evolutionary theory achieved in the 1980s is merely knee-deep in complexity data, whereas today we are up to our necks in it. And yet, we probably have not crossed the threshold of data acquisition essential to reveal the true character of the evolutionary process. Additional biological form determining factors almost certainly reside at deeper levels than we have yet mapped: electromagnetic properties residing at the atomic level, self-organizing nanostructures etc. We physically cannot yet fully synthesize or analyze the massive data we already have available from proteins, genomes and neural networks.
Asserting a definite theory of the evolutionary process, the how’s, why’s and when’s, along with a definite ancestral tree of life, therefore must wait—it has been vastly premature. This is discussed further at fallacy #70. The gap between the presumed confidence level of the accidental worldview based neo-Darwinian theory such as Richard Dawkins and others propound and the evidence base that will ultimately be shown to be relevant to evolutionary theory is as great now as it was when Charles Darwin proposed his theory believing that a nondescript goo called protoplasm was all we had to deal with inside the cell.
In the absence of sufficient and mature data all that remains to support definite theories of evolution is the argument from authority, which, again, is not a proper method of science. The proper method of science is to first gather the facts, then compose the theory. What Henry Gee is telling us is that, to preserve the purity of scientific method, we must realize the vastness of the evolutionary question, the “deep time” involved. Phase one of the scientific method, data collection, is not yet over and only the cladistics approach, that is, first charting the data minus any preconceived theory at all, preserves the scientific method in evolutionary science. The neo-Darwinian approach is therefore invalidated as contrary to scientific method.
The loud demands of neo-Darwinists that ID theorists must present a complete detailed model of evolutionary dynamics to replace the (imaginary) neo-Darwinian model before criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory can be taken seriously are here shown to be worse than bogus. They amount to an insistence that everyone violate the scientific method as they have done, to theorize in advance of the data.
The prematurity of neo-Darwinian presumption can be seen in other facets of their thinking. The neo-Darwinian “authorities” have told us for decades that the historically “failed” theories of evolution, inheritance of acquired characteristics, orthogenesis (directed evolution), etc. could be fully dismissed as naïve and fatally flawed—never to rise again. However, it turns out that some, if not all, of the old theories of evolution that “authority” had previously condemned now appear to have at least a valid secondary role to play in evolution after all. That certain acquired characteristics can be inherited has also now been established. Thus a form of “Lamarckian” inheritance (I only mean to imply the most general sense of this term) is still alive and well in evolution, as is a limited but steadily growing presence of orthogenesis (direction). The phenomena of convergence, molecular selection and self-organization revealed by researchers like Simon Conway Morris, Sidney Fox, and Stuart Kauffman clearly reveal significant aspects of determinism, direction (orthogenesis), and nonrandom control in parts of the process. While not establishing a simplistic goal for evolution, what might be called naïve orthogenesis, or even a fully unidirectional process, these nonrandom processes do establish substantial elements of direction at key points in the development of life.
The exposition of the total mosaic of what has turned out to be a more complex evolutionary process than the “authorities” had conceived it to be remains to be completed, and thus, Gee’s thesis of “deepness” may be legitimately extended beyond time into information. We do not yet have the evidential grounds for confidence in definite theories of the larger evolutionary dynamic, but can only describe and test much more narrow claims about the concrete genetic and structural relationships between specific nodes and clades on the tree of life, and then only in terms of relative probability. To say more is merely to assert the argument from authority.
Although, we do not yet know the larger dynamics of evolution, there clearly is direction to the process. It is certainly not chaos, and the overall bias for life in nature is undeniable. It is, however, an enormous job to map out all the constraints in physical systems that give evolution direction (assuming the evidence when fully in will bear out a dynamic similar enough to classic evolution to retain the name). The mapping of additional directional constraints will probably continue for many centuries. Given the “deepness” of the time and information involved, the process of discovery may simply go on indefinitely.
In any event, the neo-Darwinian
hallmark of randomness has now visibly fallen to secondary explanatory status
in science (it retains primary status in politics, of course). Although
randomness may still play a secondary role in subsystems of the larger evolutionary
process such as the Mendelian random gene mixing during reproduction, it has
been all but ruled out in the initial achievement of all the hard parts of
evolution: the origination of the first living organisms and the initial
genomes. Although some researchers refer to aspects of the transpositional
genetic elements as random while others label the system nonrandom, the larger
transpositional system taken as a whole clearly has achieved results far
outside the parameters of what standard probability theory would require for a
fully unbiased and unguided process. A fully accidental transpositional
sequence could never permit the genome to modify itself in a manageably
constructive manner or to successfully synthesize new biologically useful
proteins.[232]
Thus, the continued affirmation of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary model rests
upon nothing more than the presumed authority of the noted scientists who
refuse to give it up. It is in fact refuted in the evidentiary base and, as
Philip Johnson has so eloquently said, society merely awaits the rhetoric to
catch up to the facts.
Consensus
Among Scientists in Different Fields
Neo-Darwinists try to forestall this inevitable paradigm shift away from both the accidental worldview and the classic narrative historical theory of evolution by citing consensus. The problem, evident throughout history, with citing mere consensus is that consensus does not guarantee truth. There was consensus for Hitler and Stalin, consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth, consensus for protoplasm as the essence of a cell, etc. More to the point, every paradigm shift in science that preceded significant progress has been accompanied by precisely the problem we see in biology today: a politically prejudiced consensus on the wrong side of the issue. Progress, almost by definition, and certainly by historical precedent, implies that the majority will initially be on the wrong side. Certainly, Simpson’s confident proclamation that there was an overwhelming consensus among scientists circa 1960 that the demonstration of the origin of life from chemicals in the laboratory (abiogenesis) was imminent was not subsequently borne out as justified. Over a half-century later no such demonstration has been achieved and the consensus that it is imminent no longer exists. Rather, the current consensus is not that the demonstration of abiogenesis is imminent, but, despite enormous new complexity barriers discovered since Simpson, merely that it may yet be possible. Based upon the last five years of research for this book, I get the sense that even that slim hope is fading.
As of
In 1871 St. George Mivart, a contemporary of Darwin’s and one of the most renowned biologists of his age, gave the following description of the workings of the cell in his book, Elements of Science. [Note: St. George was not canonized as a saint; “St. George” is simply his given name.]
…But if
the body of any living organism be divided, it will, at the very least, be seen
to consist of a variety of minute distinct particles, called “granules,”
variously distributed throughout its interior.
All
organisms consist either (as do the simplest, mostly microscopic, plants and
animals) of a single minute mass of protoplasm, or of a few, or of many, or of
an enormous aggregation os such before-mentioned particles, each of which is
one of those bodies named a “cell” (Fig. 28, p. 195). Cells may, or may not, be
enclosed in an investing coat or “cell-wall.” Each cell generally contains
within it a denser, normally spheroidal, body known as the nucleus.
Now
protoplasm is a very unstable substance (as we have seen many substances are
whereof nitrogen is a component part), and it possesses active properties which
are not present in the non-living, or inorganic world…
Protoplasm
has also the wonderful power of transforming certain adjacent substances into
material like itself—into its own substance—and so, in a sense, creating a new
material…
The small
particles of protoplasm which constitute “cells” are far indeed from being
structureless. Besides the nucleus already mentioned there is a delicate
network of threads of a substance called chromatin within it, and
another network permeating the fluid of the cell substance which invests the
nucleus, often with further complications…
But every
living creature consists at first entirely of a particle of protoplasm.
Therefore every other kind of substance which may be found in every kind of
plant or animal, must have been formed through it, and be, in fact, a secretion
from protoplasm…
Lastly,
protoplasm has a power of motion when appropriately acted on. It will then
contract or expand its shape by alternate protrusions and retractions of parts
of its substance…
Such is
the ultimate structure, and such are the fundamental activities (or functions)
of living organisms (so far as they can here be described), from the lowest
animalcule and unicellular plant, up to the most complex organisms and the body
of man himself. [233]
It is not that Mivart is wrong in his description, but that the implied “and that’s all there is to it” is wrong. While this amount of knowledge was a stupendous achievement for the science of Darwin’s time, it does not even “scratch the surface” of what we know today. Consensus that Darwin was right is no longer enough. His theory was a protoplasm era explanation, not bad for its time, but wholly inadequate today. The theory of evolution has to be brought up to date.
Given that the requisite defense of accidental processes now appears impossible, neo-Darwinian evolution must be considered refuted. I therefore (do not) regret to announce that classic neo-Darwinian theory is logically and evidentially dead, including the unsuccessfully patched up versions of G. G. Simpson, Richard Dawkins, and Monroe Strickberger, who feel that natural selection is sufficient to take “accident” out of an accidental world. These versions are not, however, politically dead. The battle has then become, as Phillip Johnson very perceptively observed, a rhetorical one. It is now a struggle to bring the true import of the existing scientific facts to public awareness. This would appear a simple enough task were it not for the political obstructionism thrown in the way by neo-Darwinists and the materialists/atheists in society who support them.
Modern neo-Darwinists are not oblivious to the new complexity data, for they have helped discover it; they merely want to have it both ways. They want to move away from the claim of accident, which they can no longer defend, but to make that move silently so that political ground is not lost to religion in popular thinking. They are dragging their heels to avoid announcing to the public that the original form of neo-Darwinian theory is effectively refuted. To avoid this confession, they have redefined the theory without renaming it, and into twenty or thirty different variants between which they can switch to defend the most pressing objection of the moment. However, the neo-Darwinists have not informed the public that they have done this. With this trick, the public is left with the mistaken impression that the accidental claim remains well evidenced.
Could mainstream science be so unethical and inured to the strict code of ethics science has always maintained, so inured to science’s requirement for objectivity and honesty? Yes, they could, and yes, they have been. In the early decades of evolutionary theory, many intellectuals, especially in Britain, began leaning way to the left of the political spectrum, even to Marxism. They saw liberal social theories as the salvation of mankind, and were, in truth, fervent believers. Marxism, of course, is the theory that says the end justifies the means. Many neo-Darwinists are still enamored of this view today. They are trying to change society by moving the public towards materialism and a Marxist social philosophy. Their primary loyalty is not to science at all, but to the revolutionary cause. It is not immoral in their view to use a lie (of accidental evolution) to lead people to the (supposed) truth (of materialism). Thus, mere consensus among scientists can not be trusted; one must review the evidence and the logic.
Ultimately the argument from consensus reduces to another of the Darwinists’ rhetorical word games. The risk of falling prey to this kind of intricate verbal deception is resolved by following Pope John Paul II’s advice. One must ask the right questions: consensus on what, consensus on which version of evolution? There clearly is no consensus on accidental processes being capable of originating life. Most, if not all, of the modern theorists have denied that they are claiming an accidental process at all. What there appears to be consensus on is that the atheistic materialistic scientific community members should all drag their heals stubbornly in the ground to delay and confuse by all means the public’s awareness that modern science has moved away from an accidental worldview.
ID Scientists Don’t Play Well with
Others
Sometimes, in saying that science can’t speak to
religious questions at all, Darwinists appear to be saying that they are
neither denying or affirming cosmic purpose, God, or intelligent design; they
are simply saying they don’t need those things to adequately explain life. A
recent document from the National Academy of Science, by asserting that science
cannot speak to the supernatural in any way, is one example of this “innocent
of all charges” ploy. “Those bad intelligent design theorists are always picking
on us for absolutely no reason,” they seem to imply. And, of course, some are
innocent; they simply affirm scientific method while at work on scientific
matters, keeping God and all other things supernatural out of the middle of
their concrete causal explanations. While ding this, some scientists may admit
that God could still be the ultimate source of things; he is simply of no use
to them in their work.
Opinion polls show that many
people believe that divine intervention actively guided the evolution of human
beings. Science cannot comment on the role that supernatural forces might
play in human affairs. But scientific investigations have concluded that
the same forces responsible for the evolution of all other life forms on Earth
can account for the evolution of human beings.[234] (My
emphasis)
At other times, however, as we have seen, neo-Darwinists clearly say that evolutionary theory has confirmed materialism, or assumes it, and rules out cosmic purpose. But these kinds of claims have far different implications. Affirming materialism absolutely rules out a spiritual God, as does denial of cosmic purpose and intelligent design. The same theory can’t both affirm materialism and be God-neutral. The same theory can’t deny cosmic purpose and be God-neutral. Intelligent design theorists are therefore not wrong in pressing the debate because, as Pope John Paul II said, there is more than one version of evolutionary theory out there, and many of them are far from being innocent of all charges.
Summary
& Conclusion
The Case of Uncle Bob on the Bus—A
Question of Time
As Sherlock Holmes might upbraid Watson for
holding simplistic theories, one wants to say “Yes! Uncle Bob is the
same guy we saw in
Because the biomechanical processes of evolution
have yet to be demonstrated, neo-Darwinists are in the situation of asking us
to decide the issue before we even know the mechanical features of “the bus.”
Not only is the basic evolutionary bus fully undescribed in the biomechanical sense,
but the accidental evolution version of that bus can already be
certified as nonoperational. This is because the ascribed power plant,
accidental variation, is known to be incapable of moving the machine between
known points on the phylogenetic tree in real evolutionary time. Futuyma says
it is an uncontestable historical fact that we had bacteria, then salamanders
then monkeys then man. The proper response for ID proponents is “Yes, well, we
knew that didn’t we. But how did we get them by accident in the time
available?”
Darwinists assume that the biomechanics of
biological form change will simply be worked out over time. They assume
that the results of future research will fall comfortably within their theory.
Over the past several decades, it has not so fallen. The neo-Darwinist
assumption is at odds with the fact that there are now known biomechanics fully
incompatible with the accidental thesis, even with natural selection added. And
the more we look the more difficult the process is seen to be. For
evolution to have achieved so much so fast with so little error, the necessary
biological information for the larger part of the tree of life would, as Susumu
Ohno has said, have to have been present in the early stages of life’s
development (no later than the Cambrian). The role of natural selection is substantially
reduced in such a strongly directed event, and in no way can the variations
spawned by a predesignated blueprint be termed accidental.
Neo-Darwinists are in denial of what we already
know. We now have a firm grasp of the basic underlying structures of biological
machines. We know enough about DNA and protein to know that such complex
changes to them as would be necessary to move from dust to amoeba to man won’t
happen by accident in any conceivable amount of time—just as we know a bus
doesn’t travel 400 miles an hour in a straight line over all types of terrain.
Of this much we can be certain without knowing every detail of the bus design
and construction—buses can’t do that.
For decades now, neo-Darwinian theorists have
selectively ignored evidence that argues against their theory, acknowledging
only that which supports it. Despite thousands of truly impressive (sounding)
studies that hybridize fact and imagination, we have established no
biochemical pathways between any two creatures with different body types that
would be achievable (by accident) in real evolutionary time.
At some point or another in the development of the tree of life I believe we will ultimately find a case, or a few cases, where (preexistent) Hox genes combined with highly complex (preexistent) combinations of microtubule structures, and other important and substantial epigenetic factors (preexistent gene marker patterns), and a set of complex maneuvers performed by a (you guessed it) preexistent transpositional genome, will be shown to produce one creature from another. It is almost inevitable, as we know life developed and differentiated somehow, and we can see the basic types of mechanistic steps it must have involved. However, even having shown instances of highly complex preconfigurations that lead with mechanical surety and statistical consistency to predictable instances of macroevolution we will not have shown an accidental achievement of those necessary preconditions. To demonstrate accidental evolution we must do more than merely demonstrate the last steps of evolution (after all the hard part is done); we must show how true randomness can get us every step of the way to the point where our demonstration begins as well as from there forward. In light of what we already know of the irreducible complexity of cellular systems and other complex organs, the probability argument, and the resource exhaustion argument (Appendix 2), such a demonstration is far beyond the expectations of good science; it is a manifest impossibility.
The available evidence already says no to the
viability of accidental evolution in very convincing fashion. Each time we
delve further into a biological process or system the more complex it is seen
to be. New research can only move biological complexity and the corresponding
improbability numbers in one direction, further beyond the boundary that rules
out chance altogether. One needs only scan the bioscience publications to see how true this is. The
known complexity of biological systems has grown exponentially over the past
five decades and continues to advance at an astounding rate. Some of the
reasons for this are discussed briefly but cogently in the introduction to
Karen de Bruin’s thesis, “Construction of cDNA Libraries,” submitted to the University
of the Free State, Bloemfountein, South Africa, June 2004.
For a nice look at how modern evolutionary
science proceeds and also a hint at how fantastically complex the life sciences
have become see the Evolution of CAKs[235] chapter of the online
book Cell Cycle at the Eurekah Bioscience Collection, which is only a small part of
the National Library of Medicine's Online NCBI
Bookshelf collection. Also see the recent Eugene V. Koonin et al.. article
on evolutionary classification of proteins published online at Genome Biology.[236] These articles do not
reflect the apex of complexity in modern scientific studies, they are only
moderate in that regard. Both of these works are very well done, and it was
good of their authors and Web publishers to make them available on line. A
somewhat more complex discussion may be found in a PhD thesis published on the
Web by the University of Nottingham, UK submitted by Richard Grayson Bradley,
August 2006 on immune targeted tumor therapy research for cancer tumors. For
a look a bit further down that scale towards the far side of complexity see the
Covalent
Antibody Display article from the Nucleic Acids Research
journal on the Oxford
Journals Web site.
Then, just for fun, look at the article by S.
Gerlo et al.. in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences or the classic
evolutionary study of Hiroki Oota et al.., also available online: “Genetic
Study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Southeast Asians.”[237] This study is so well
done that it makes paleogenetics look easy. Note, however, that for the
purposes of our discussion, this kind of study, while showing an evident relationship
between modern man and his early ancestors, only gives evidence of inheritance
between humans. It does not therefore evidence large-scale evolution between
widely divergent species nor an accidental process.
Next wander over to SpringerLink, Pub Med,
Annual Review of Genetics, Journal
of Theoretical Biology, Genome Biology, BioMedCentral,
Cornell University’s Arxiv project,
and then on to Elsevier
Science. Read some of the articles on biochemistry, genetics, protein
research, etc. After noting the level of technical detail and complexity in the
process descriptions, browse or search through the holdings enough to get a
good feel for the size of the entire collection: 7,900,000 articles at Elsevier
alone! Stop by a university bioscience library and flip through some of the
technical journals to get an even closer look at how astronomically complex
life science has become. Alternatively, if you don’t want to work that hard,
just go to Science
magazine’s beautiful Web site. In a matter of hours, some favorite snacks,
a couple of ice cold sodas (or steaming cappuccinos) and you’ll be up to date
again (you can’t do this during Lent).
It doesn’t really matter where you look. The
complexity of biological systems is off the charts! How large is the biological
database? There are thousands upon thousands of volumes of professional studies
in scientific journals. If one enters a single volume and issue number
and a single term such as 71(3) AND “biological systems” into Google and
searches the Internet he/she gets over 465,000 returns! This particular term is
very general, nearly all encompassing, so this won’t hold equally for other
terms, and many of the references are duplicates, but you get my meaning. This
knowledge base for biological systems is growing exponentially every year. It
now reaches down to atomic and subatomic structures and nanosystems. An
accidental process has no chance to create living designs of this magnitude of
sophistication, and modern science has discovered only a fraction of the life
science knowledge base that will ultimately be revealed. The clear trend is
that there are precise natural laws at the atomic and nanosystems level that
are geared towards the production of the essential forms of biological life.[238] This does not represent
an accidental neo-Darwinian scenario of stumbling upon design inadvertently in
accidental increments preserved by natural selection of the most reproductively
fit or most survivable, but rather the flowering of design information already
present in nature.
A Beautifully Simple Conception
If the case for the accidental version of
neo-Darwinian evolution is so weak as I have described it here, why do we cast
aside the obvious design inference and defer to
Within the socio-historical context of the mid
nineteenth century,
Glaring gaps in the accidental worldview remain,
and not only in biology. The seven questions science still cannot answer are 1)
Where did all the matter and energy come from at the Big Bang? 2) Why did the
Big Bang occur that made our universe? 3) Why were things so incredibly
informed at the beginning as opposed to chaotic if the process is accidental?
4) Why do quantum particles obey the laws of nature in groups when their
individual behavior is erratic, that is, why do we have consistent natural
laws? 5) Why did the ordered structures of the galaxies form when the laws of
nature as presently described apparently don’t require it? 6) How do we explain
the origin and development of life, how did the astronomically complex living
systems come to be formed when accident clearly cannot do the job? and 7) What
is the nature of mind, the mental, emotional and spiritual experience of
humanity. These seven points of profound mystery occur at precisely the
points in the formation and function of our world where one would rationally
expect the creative influence of God or an intelligent designer to be manifest.
They correspond with miraculous creation, divine purpose, the blueprint for
God’s plan (information), controls for pattern development (quality control on
implementation of the blueprint), structural design for the cosmos, bringing
forth living creatures after their kinds, and a faculty for the self-aware soul
to interact with the body. Yet Ernst Mayr and the neo-Darwinists insist that
science can find no trace of cosmic purpose! Poppycock! Nothing could be more
obvious. This is a classic case of what Dr. Faust describes: poor judgment by
scientists due primarily to bias.
In all fairness to Darwin, he presented a
darn good case within the capacity of the science of the time. There was
nothing wrong with his judgment. Darwin’s weak spot was that he was simply
missing key information, information that has since become available. Darwin
didn’t have Big Bang theory, genetics or microbiology. There was a goo inside
the cell that was imminently pliable and variable. The parts are small, the
changes tiny, and the time to work enormous. So, one day all the necessary
miniscule modifications just accidentally fall into place. What could be
simpler or more explanatory? Walla Booby! Accidental evolution proved!
Darwin had a persuasive,
a truly logical style of writing (many of his successors have met with less
good fortune). What he did not have was knowledge of modern genetic science and
electron microscope empowered biochemistry. As Professor Michael Behe has
written, cells were simply black boxes to
Now, in the twenty-first century, one wants to
say that that is all a bit fast. No one questions that
How is DNA/RNA first achieved by accident? How
is it preserved long enough in close proximity with rudimentary cell components
in prebiotic conditions for further accidents to turn it into a living cell that
can reproduce itself? What are the detailed mechanics of the billions of
critical steps at the biochemical level at which they must occur to achieve
transition from amoeba to man, including the generation of enormous quantities
of new biological information by accident at many steps along the way, each
step of thousands equivalent to an achievement as difficult as the accidental
construction of the first cell? How can random changes add up to something
significantly beneficial without first getting in the way in a harmful manner?
Here’s another troubling question. If the design
inference is so obvious to you and I, how did Darwin get past it?
First, in an odd indirect sense, he didn’t.
Darwin didn’t deny the possibility of making a design inference; he made one in
the negative. He personally did not perceive design in nature. But of course he
was unable to reach deep enough to see where the intricate machinery was
operating at the cellular and genetic level. When Darwin looked at nature at
the gross superficial level he perceived accidental processes—or thought that
he did. He saw no overriding plan or sense to the natural course of events that
was then available to inspection. Nonetheless, he offered his theory of
evolution as a theistic evolutionist, as if God had first made the world
and then left it more or less on a random course. Darwin’s intellectual
independence is in clear evidence here. He was not a card-carrying member of
the church of a meaningless and accidental world. He may be the only thinker on
record in the history of the evolutionary discussion who saw not even the
appearance of purpose in natural processes and at the same time affirmed the
Creator as the source of life. And yet, modern atheistic materialists who dismiss
God out of hand revere Darwin practically as he were a god himself.
Second, the electron microscope:
Although
It was a beautifully simple conception, except
for one thing: it was wrong. It provided a completely stress free
environment for evolutionary theorists, however. “Oh, don’t worry about it, it
could happen by accumulated small changes. The protoplasm does all the work,
you know.” As Michael Behe has been kind enough to teach us,
All these years since (approximately 150)
Darwinian theorists have not offered an explanation of the biomechanics of how
complex biological machines could arise in the first instance, or of how one
type of organism can evolve into another (major body form innovation). They
only purport to tell us that highly configured DNA sequences, genes, and gene
sets, once originated, could be shuffled and realigned in accordance
with primarily structured and orderly processes within the body in a relatively
simple fashion to generate minor viable changes within a species (reproductive
based variations from Mendelian genetics) and that somehow the big
changes just happen through some unknown event involving many of these
small changes, and often in a hurry. This is hardly more advanced than the goo
hypothesis, an nonexplanatory anachronistic embarrassment, one wants to say.
Now that protoplasm is gone, and random
mutations have been shown to be predominantly destructive, the only rabbit
neo-Darwinists have left in the hat is natural selection. Natural selection can
help us, they claim, by locking accidental beneficial changes into place and
editing out those proposed changes that don’t work. True, natural selection
does choose among the proposed changes that are substantial enough to affect
survival and reproductive fitness. But this only solves the problem of how to
keep the best machines once they have been produced, not how to produce them.
Why are the biologically viable enormously complex increments of form change
being produced in the first place? This is the question Darwinian theory cannot
answer.
As genetic drift theorists tell us, natural
selection offers an opinion much less often than
Science has now advanced to the point that, if
we were honest enough to cast aside political intransigence, we would see that
Darwinian theory has lost both of its primary functional components: random
variation and natural selection. Random mutations have been shown to be
destructive and natural selection is now held to infrequently offer an opinion
and to be unable to work with what accident can propose. Without those two
elements there is no neo-Darwinian theory. At some point we are simply going to
have to make the psychological adjustment and admit it:
No matter how big a fan one may be of natural
selection, in and of itself natural selection does not distinguish between
intelligent design and Darwinian theory (or any other theory). The catastrophic
events of nature and other significant pressures of the natural environment
will unavoidably cull and tailor a designer’s creations no less than those of
random origin. Natural selection will be there to offer an opinion on major functional
differences in either case, and in any case. The fittest will always survive no
matter how they came to be.
Natural selection is the one thing all
scientists agree upon, though they differ as to the extent to which it is
involved, the exact parameters within which it operates, and its ultimate value
to the evolutionary process. Intelligent design scientists do not deny that
natural selection works at times to preserve functional form variation. They
deny that an accidental process can propose modules of biological change of
sufficient complexity and numbers in real evolutionary time for natural
selection alone to construct an amoeba from chemicals and a human being from an
amoeba.
Similarly, the fossil record and the
genotypic/phenotypic similarities of organisms do not serve to evidence
accidental Darwinian evolution over intelligent design. Darwinists will loudly
object that those scientists closest to the data can absolutely see that at
many critical points in the development of life the process was left to a
random outcome (within certain tolerances of preexistent physical and
historical parameters). That may well be so. But it is precisely the last
proviso, “within certain parameters” that permits the compatibility of the
historical record with an RFP concept of intelligent design in evolution. The
data is therefore equally compatible with both theories with one exception: the
known limitations of an accidental process mismatch the known complexity of the
necessary modules of evolutionary change. A designer could have done it
in accordance with the historical record, though one may tend to look at him
somewhat askance given the limited imagination of our small human perspective,
while an accident could not have done it in accordance with the historical
record at all.
What Decides the Issue?
Only four things have been shown capable of
distinguishing between intelligently designed and accidentally constructed life
forms: (1) the creations of an intelligent designer might exceed demonstrable
time constraints; that is, the designer might act faster than an accident of
nature could act through known biochemical processes; (2) the design features
in organisms might be so complex, so specified and so closely matched as to
require a straightforward design inference (one could tell they were
intelligently made just by looking at them); (3) the origin of sophisticated
biological information at levels of what might be termed hyper-complexity (the
genome and its translation system, the brain/nervous system etc.) cannot be
explained by an accidental process; and (4) the magnitude of improbability for
an accidental construction process in total could be so great as to forbid reasonable
belief, so great, in fact, as to require an assumption of time and physical
resources in excess of those available in either the history of the universe,
the history of the Earth, or those available in any historical segment of the
evolutionary process known to be time-delimited by the fossil record. All four
of these criteria are seen to converge toward the inescapable conclusion of
intelligent design when one closely investigates the question.
We must keep in mind that the complex genetic
machinery of advanced organisms we now see is the final result of the
creative/evolutionary process, not the beginning of it. The Darwinian
explanation only begins after genomes are present. Darwinian evolution has thus
never been an explanation of life of the kind that the man or woman on the
street, or the philosopher, seeks. It has been represented as being a fully
satisfying explanation however. How this is not a deception I leave for the
reader to judge.
It is critical to understand that the claim
of accident is not a historical claim as is the claim of the basic event
sequence of evolution as reflected in the fossil record. The claim of an
accidental form variation process is not a claim about what happened at the
macro scale of historical events, but about how it happened. This
unavoidably entails assertions about the biomechanical process. The
facts of biochemistry and microbiology must support this claim for it to hold
true. As such, it must be tested and demonstrated under the protocols of
experimental science, not just historical analysis.
The philosophical adjunct of an accidental
process has always been the crazy uncle that evolutionists have consistently
kept in the closet when authentic experimental research is being done. Why?
Because it is a claim about the biomechanics, and so far the biomechanics only
support a nonaccidental process. The current trend in research data is
exploding exponentially away from the accidental. The accidental tenet of
neo-Darwinian evolution can thus be refuted—and would be if formally and
properly tested.
One can only surmise that this is why
neo-Darwinists so loudly proclaim that evolution is an historical
science, to redirect attention from the biomechanics, which are all against
them. As with synthetic theory, neo-Darwinian evolution’s nonaccidental twin,
the research and exposition of neo-Darwinian theory has historically been
focused on the macroscopic, the big phylogenetic changes visible in the fossil
record, augmented by populations studies and comparative genomics.[240] Neo-Darwinists have
strongly directed our focus to these areas and away from biochemistry and
microbiology, apparently hoping/expecting that the highly nonrandom trend in
research would reverse over time. There is little hope of it doing so now. The
biomechanics of biology at their foundations have been demonstrated to be
predominantly, though not exclusively, nonrandom. Ultimately, no genuine formal
test of macroevolution via accidental mutations has ever been performed, and
the results of research that would logically serve as informal tests, while
showing accidental evolution impossible, have been rhetorically spun in the
opposite direction.
In addition to failing at the biomechanical
level, the Darwinian approach leaves us with the mystery of the origin of the
genomes, the origin of natural law, and the origin of the initial order of
matter and energy in our universe. If all of nature, its laws and informational
content, came about in a fraction of a second in a complete mystery, a
singularity that science admits does not conform to natural law (the Big Bang),
how can science assert, as Darwinists always have, that it does not need
anything beyond the natural in its explanations? The fact is that absolutely
all of nature has arisen from a non-natural event.
If the Darwinian theory of life only begins
after the genomes have (inexplicably) appeared, why do neo-Darwinists claim
their theory is a fully satisfactory explanation of life? When the hard
questions come out the neo-Darwinists start the shell game. “Oh, the origin of
the genomes is definitely nonrandom, but still fully natural,” they will say.
What they don’t say is that the world their theory asserts to have produced
these genomes is in fact held to be fully accidental and without purpose; only
the intervention of natural selection has guided the process and nothing else
whatsoever. This is what the neo-Darwinists call “nonrandom,” accident mediated
exclusively by natural selection. It is also what they call “random” because
the mutations so produced have no correlation to what is beneficial to the
organism. Surely this is not the best our leading scientific theorists can do
(scientists who have also appointed themselves as our authoritative guides on
the nature of God, morality and just about everything else).
Is it rational to dismiss the source of all of the complex information in nature, information needed to drive the evolutionary process, as an accident when we know that every other occurrence of information modules far less complex across the entire historical span of human experience have come exclusively from intelligent design? Is it scientific for fractal theorists and computer modelers to suggest a hundred different imaginary ways that (simple and temporary) order can come out of disorder as our preferred view of evolution when we can only empirically demonstrate the opposite, that order will never arise from disorder beyond a threshold far simpler and less permanent than that required for human life and its history on planet Earth?
It is an odd form of genius indeed that sees the
complete mystery and admitted unnatural singularity of the Big Bang as a purely
natural scientific explanation but cannot see that it is reasonable to assume
that an ultra complex machine has a designer until proven otherwise.
Intelligent design theory at least attempts to push the explanation back as far
as it will go. This has always been the hallmark of science.
Let’s grant for a moment that natural law can
spontaneously generate living systems given nothing more than the informed
state of matter and energy following the Big Bang. To say that in nature we
have such a system-building system, a machine-building machine, if you will, is
not to say that the intelligent design requirement is lessened but that is
increased. An enormous system that builds subsidiary systems is more complex
than its subsidiaries. Therefore the Darwinist tactic of falling back upon
natural law as the explanation of the origin of life as if it ruled out the
need for intelligent design in explanation fails because it both adds to the
complexity of the designs that must be explained and because it proposes as the
explanation only a complete mystery. As currently described, the Big Bang is as
perfect a physical corollary to the miraculous creation story of Genesis as we
could ever hope to find. One regrets that when God said “Let there be light!”
in his mercy he did not add “Let there be common sense too!”
What Did
To be fair to Charles Darwin, he was always a
theist in his professional published scientific work. He was also a theist for
most of his personal life. He certainly was not what we now call a
neo-Darwinist, who add atheism and materialism as part of the theory of
evolution. Darwin’s overall score on logic was excellent while the logic of the
neo-Darwinists stinks.
Although Charles Darwin’s personal religious
views transitioned at times from believer to agnostic, he was a theist
when he wrote The Origin of Species, holding that the Creator
formed natural law and imbued the essence of life into matter at life’s
inception. This is remarkably consonant with the account given by Cardinal
Archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schönborn in his recent book, Chance or
Purpose, at least so far as the inception of life goes. Darwin did not
perceive God’s guiding hand on the course of natural history as does Cardinal
Schönborn. At the time of his writing,
To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.[241]
Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind to some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker.[242]
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the correct description of my state of mind.[243]
Note that Darwin here proposed an interesting
argument for God/intelligent design: the existence of intelligent thought
cannot be accounted for except by positing that an intelligent source somehow
engendered it. We have no genuine alternative to this day. Finally consider
Darwin’s secretary’s remarks upon persistent inquiries from the public.
Mr. Darwin begs me to say that he receives so many letters, that he cannot answer them all…He considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God…[244]
Consider these additional informal comments of
the great evolutionist.
I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.[245]
Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.[246]
Claims have been made that
Darwin’s published views on science
clearly did incorporate the Creator as the source of life and natural law. In
other words, Darwin saw no other explanation for these, and we have no other
explanation to this day. True, the development of life took what appeared
to Darwin to be an accidental course, but he did not feel the origin of
life was accidental. Some of his later speculations posited that natural law
would be found to account for life, but he also attributed natural law itself
to the work of the Creator.[249] Darwin’s position is
fully consonant with the general RFP form of information first theory, that I
have proposed above under the banner of intelligent design. The appearance of
randomness in natures course, correctly noted by Darwin, has since been
overridden by overwhelming evidence of design beneath the surface of that
course in the biomechanics, discovered only with the advent of the electron
microscope and genetic sequencing tools. These tools were unavailable to
Darwin. Nevertheless, it is a testament to his genius that his postulations of
a process guided by natural law, a process requiring a Creator at its
inception, can now stand without need of amendment in the face of modern
research while the work of his neo-Darwinian successors has been refuted.
Despite neo-Darwinists making much of Darwin’s
comments in his private journals that he had at some point lost his personal
faith, Darwin’s published scientific position was one of theistic evolution.
That position was never officially changed. Proper interpretation of
scientific writing is not established or amended based upon the literary
criticism and interpretive procedures for fiction! A commentator’s view
of an author’s personal beliefs cannot be legitimate grounds for altering a
theorist’s original published scientific work. The application of this rule is
particularly clear where the author has expressly distinguished between the standards
he employs for private correspondence and “official” recommendations to the
public as Charles Darwin has done.
It is true that Darwin privately came to believe
so strongly in the influence of natural selection that he felt the force of the
design argument had been negated as pertains to evolution of gross biological
structures. But Darwin did not have the benefit of the evidence of modern
biochemistry and genetics in order to see the full strength of the argument for
design. He could have no way of estimating the enormity of the total task of
constructing the genomes and their translation systems, or the apparent
impotency of random mutations to generate the necessarily complex modules of
biological information in the requisite immense numbers in the real
evolutionary time of the Cambrian explosion. One can only surmise that the
level of complexity modern biochemistry reveals would qualify under Darwin’s
own view of his stated criterion for the refutation of his theory.
Darwin saw no divine purpose revealed in the macroscopic
day-to-day operations of nature. If a man was struck by lightening standing
under a tree, Darwin saw no divine providence in it. Neither do I…usually. It
is interesting to note that Christ himself saw no divine providence in it; he
acknowledged that there are true accidents in the world, yet he certainly did
not deny the world’s creator. Neither did Darwin in his published work.
All along I have been echoing the indictment that the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. Here I think one has to admit the impulse to say that even Darwin may have contradicted himself. Darwin was indisputably a great scientific logician in his published works (the neo-Darwinists are not), but by his own self-admission he never devoted the time, rigor, and research to the formation of his private views that he marshaled for his professional writing. As a result, one must conclude that Darwin’s private philosophical musings fail the test of logical rigor that his professional work passed with exemplary marks, marks arguably unequalled to this day. Thus, we reach a very surprising conclusion. One can legitimately be both a Darwinist in the truest sense and hold to intelligent design or theistic evolution while staying fully in sync with the latest scientific data and most demanding logical analysis.
Neo-Darwinism, however, the accidental model, is dead. It is no more defensible than protoplasm and for the same reason; it is based upon an uninformed and oversimplified view of biomechanics. Just as protoplasm era theories were necessarily critically uninformed, neo-Darwinian theory was produced circa 1950 in the absence of critical information about key biological systems. What has been made clear only recently is that macroevolution can only be generated by a closely synchronized process involving the developmental genome, a complex system of transpositional genetic elements, and key nongenetic microstructures within the cell and DNA molecules. This tripartite system is not only responsible for practically all significant change in biological form, but it is clear that the three components have to act in close concert. There is no evidence that nature has fumbled around in the dark to accidentally arrive at the necessary synchronization of these three components and every reason to believe that synchronization to be so complex as to be fully out of reach of an accidental process.
In any case it is clear that the neo-Darwinian engine of population dynamics built around Mendelian gene mixing via reproduction trimmed and guided only by natural selection only accounts for minor changes, not macroevolution. The tripartite system is the clear source of radical form change and it is guided much more strongly by natural law than the neo-Darwinian model allows. Consistent self-organization of biotic molecules and complex systems cannot be explained by an accidental model, but only a strong directional influence towards the construction of complex life that is inherent in natural law. Natural law apparently also sets concrete predetermined parameters as to what specific options are to be permitted in the primary biotic components of life, notably protein fold structures, and these two aspects of natural law both guarantee the success of the evolutionary process and substantially predetermine its outcome. The neo-Darwinian explanation has thus fully failed in light of current science. It is a dead theory. This is true in terms of logic and scientific viability, though politically, neo-Darwinian may pass away from the social venues in a very slow and agonizing fashion indeed. The whole thing is unseemly, really, to maintain a scientific lie at the very foundations of the theoretical base for purely political purposes—a true scandal in science.
The End
---------------------
[194] Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1.
[195] Morris, Solution.
[196] Davison, “Instant Evolution” published to the Internet at http://www.iscid.org/papers/Davison_InstantEvolution_050204.pdf.
[197] Ridley, Evolution, 76-78.
[198] Valentine, Phyla, 77-79.
[199] Mayr, Philosophy of Biology, essay three.
[200] Of the five authors cited, only Dembski has, to my knowledge, explicitly drawn a firm conclusion for cosmic purpose/intelligent design. I feel he is absolutely justified in that conclusion. I cite the logical import of the author’s work here for my argument, not their personal opinions.
[201] William A Dembski, The Design
Inference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William A
Dembski, Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press,
1999); William A Dembski, No Free Lunch (Lanham,
[202] I should make clear that, while I endorse and applaud the fabulous job Ross and Rana have done in meticulously compiling a rigorous logical and scientific argument in Origins of Life, I take the Catholic view of the Holy Bible, which says that the Bible is not, even partially, a science book. That doesn’t preclude the existence of inevitable clues to the worldview of the authors of the books of the Bible, and their individual conceptions of history. But it means that it was not God’s intent as such to establish facts of science by reference to scriptural passages. It doesn’t mean proper exposition, as Ross and Rana so rightly emphasize, won’t yield some cases where some general principles or even a conceptual outline of creation is given. What it does mean is that, when it comes down to specific scientific facts, as opposed to the general concepts, the passages that seem to genuinely yield those specifics through proper linguistic, historical and other exegetical analytic tools are only revealing views properly ascribable to the background and assumptions of the author, not to God. Thus in validating the scientific implications of a scripture-based event sequence for evolution and the history of the Earth, that is, a biblical creation model, one is not really validating God’s model at all, but only a synthesis of the conscious or unconscious models of the biblical authors. This is because it was not God’s intent to provide such a model. Therefore, divine inspiration did not extend to those aspects of the texts. In the Catholic view, to attempt such a model is not to scientifically defend the Bible but only to defend a synthesis of the conceptual assumptions of those who wrote it.
[203] Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, 17.
[204] Denton, “Protein Folds.”
[205]James Bonner, The Nucleohistones (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1964); K. Ekwall, “Epigenetic Control of Centromere Behavior,” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 41 (2007): 63-81; E. S. Balakirev and F. J. Ayala, “Pseudogenes: Are They “Junk” or Functional DNA?” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 37 (2003): 123-151. Claudio Anselmi, Pasquale de Santis, Raffaella Paparcone, Maria Savino, and Anita Scipioni, “A Possible Role of DNA Superstructures in Genome Evolution,” Origins of Life and the Evolution of the Biosphere, vol. 34, no. 1-2 (2004): 143-149.
[206] See the Templeton Foundation catalog at
http://www.templetonpress.org/catalog_complete.asp and the fine tuning bibliography at
http://www.templeton.org/archive/biochem-finetuning/biblio.html, last accessed 28 Jan 2009.
[207] Morris, Simon Conway, ed. The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008.
[208] Fazale Rana, and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004), 222; also see Behe, Edge, ch. 10; Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 250-253; Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe, ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[209] Lovgren, Stefan. “ ‘Brain’ in Dish Flies Simulated Fighter Jet.” National Geographic News, November 19, 2004. Published to the Internet at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1119_041119_brain_petri_dish.html.
[210] See also Richard Morris, The Edge of Science (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1990), 216-219.
[211] B. Sampaolese, A. Bergia, A. Scipioni, G. Zuccheri, M. Savino, B. Samori, P. De Santis, “Recognition of the DNA Sequence by an Inorganic Crystal Surface,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science United States of America, vol. 99, no. 21 (2002): 13566-70.
[212] A more complete treatment of this problem is given in Appendix 1 at fallacy #24, 25 & 26.
[213] Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (New York: Methuen & Co., 1985), 50.
[214] Eugene Goodheart. “Neo-Darwinism and Religion,“ Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (2008): 125-129.
[215] Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 212.
[216] Ernst Mayr, "Evolution" in Leo F. LaPorte, ed., The Fossil Record and Evolution: Readings from Scientific American (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982). 10; Mayr, Philosophy of Biology, essay three, essay fourteen.
[217] Robert Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt, “Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 6 (2003): 823; T. Ryan Gregory, ed. The Evolution of the Genome. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005; Eugenio Andrade, “The Interrelations between Genotype/Phenotype/Environment: A Semiotic Contribution to the Evo:Devo Debate,” SEED Journal, vol. 5, no. 2 (2005): 27-65.
[218] Schönborn, Chance or Purpose, 169.
[219] Simpson, View, 202.
[220] I am not saying that no studies have been done that provided theory-free supportive therapy and counseling, but that so long as conflicting theoretical models are all producing positive results it is reasonable to infer that the theoretical component is not as important as the supportive component, and that any given theoretical model can have no claim to truth or even heuristic validation. Some behavioral scientists will object that they have impressive predictive success, which should justify heuristic validation. But predictions of patients’ behavior is only meaningful if the entire pool of candidates for therapy are included in a predictive study, not just the ones the therapist has gotten to know well enough to anticipate and where the predictions so happen to fit the theoretical model of a particular school. In other words, if the therapists can freely dismiss the bulk of candidates as either an “unresolved diagnosis” or “unresponsive to treatment” or “left for another type of therapist” etc. before the statistical evaluation of predictive success is done, it amounts to rigging the game by including only those cases already known to be predictable.
[221] For a further discussion of religion and psychology, see Professor Keith Ward’s The Case for Religion ( Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2004).
[222] David Faust, The Limitations of Scientific Reasoning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 116.
[223] K. Dolinski and D. Botstein, “Orthology and Functional Conservation in Eukaryotes,” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 41 (2007): 465-507.
[224] Eugenio Andrade, “The Interrelations between Genotype/Phenotype/Environment: A Semiotic Contribution to the Evo:Devo Debate,” SEED Journal, vol. 5, no. 2 (2005): 27-65.
[225] I give credit for the IFT concept primarily to three professionals: the late Susumu Ohno who first originated a scaled down version of the master genome concept (he might or might not agree with other components of IFT); Professor William Dembski whose Law of Conservation of Information virtually entails that a process similar to IFT originated life; and biologist Gary Jordan who first brought to my attention the fact that current evolutionary theory had no explanation for the origin of new complex meaningful biological information. There are probably quite a few others who have touched upon similar concepts who deserve credit as well. Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis implies that something along the lines of an IFT type scenario is needed to assemble the intricate machines of life. Certainly Marcello Barbieri’s ribotype theory is suggestive of the fact that our explanatory paradigm has to date been less than sufficiently powerful to deal with the origination of a biological information system that has three separate primary components, DNA, the functional bodily systems, and the translation machinery that bridges the two. Being careful scientists however, they may be reticent to speculate with greater specificity than the current data obligate. Certainly writers and scientists like Gerald Schroeder, Dean Overman, Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana have been pointing us generally in similar directions. Being merely an amateur philosopher of science, I will humbly take whatever credit remains for the origination of IFT, if any.
[226] Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion. New York: Methuen & Co., 1985.
[227] Mae-Won Ho, Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An introduction to the new evolutionary paradigm (London: Academic Press, 1984), x.
[228] Ridley, Evolution, 19
[230] Ho, Beyond Neo-Darwinism, ix.
[231] Gee, Deep Time, ch. 5.
[232] Fox, Emergence; Meyer, “Biological Information;” Ryan, Evolution of the Genome; Axe, “Functional Enzyme Folds;” Axe, “Conservative Amino Acid Changes.”
[233] St. George Mivart, Elements of Science (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1894), 193-197.
[234] “Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution,” From the National Academy of Science book Science and Creationism, published to the Internet at http://newton.nap.edu/html/creationism/conclusion.html.
[235] Ji Liu and Edward T. Kipreos, “The Evolution of CDK-Activating Kinases,” in Cell Cycle, Web published in the NLM Eurekah Bioscience Collection at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowTOC&rid=eurekah.TOC. Also see the National Library of Medicine’s NCBI bookshelf, the parent collection of many more online books at NCBI Bookshelf.
[236] Eugene V Koonin, et al. “A comprehensive evolutionary classification of proteins encoded in complete eukaryotic genomes,” Genome Biology, 5, no. 2 (2004).
[237] Hiroki Oota et al. “Genetic Study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Southeast Asians,” Human Biology, 73, no. 2 (2001): 225-231.
[238] Michael J. Denton, “Physical Law Not Natural Selection as the Major Determinant of Biological Complexity in the Subcellular Realm: New Support for the Pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Bio Systems, vol. 71, no. 3 (2003): 297-303.
[239] Behe, Black Box, Ch. 1-2.
[240] Peter Schuster, “Evolution and Design: A Review of the State of the Art in the Theory of Evolution,” in Pope Benedict XVI, Creation and Evolution, 40-41.
[241] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), 525.
[242]
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, (
[243] Ibid, 63.
[244] Ibid, 65.
[245]
[246] Ibid, 72.
[247]
[248]
[249] Darwin, Origin, 525.