Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison
Discovering the Grand
Design!
It has been an exciting time in science following the
meeting of the cadre of intelligent design (ID) scientists at the home of
author and attorney Phillip Johnson on a
Where does God fit into this new development of ID? As intelligent design proponent Professor William Dembski explains in The Design Revolution, the designer of life doesn’t have to be the Christian God (or any other) under intelligent design theory. He/she/it might be an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, ET, for example. Or, the designer might perhaps be nature herself. The universe itself might be intelligent, having a telic principle of some kind embedded at its foundations. However, ID theory does leave conceptual room for God in science (including the Christian God) at the beginning of things at the honored place of “the Creator” where Charles Darwin first placed him in his classic work, The Origin of Species.[2]
A Case for Humility in
Science
An argument might be made for humility as a basic tenet of scientific method, along with the classic tenets of empiric observation, hypothesis and test. Yes, for you materialists out there, “humility;” it’s a real word. Science absolutely does not know with certainty the nature of the origin of the universe, the origin of the form, order, and structure that is in it, or the origin of life.[3] Our theory of quantum physics is incomplete; our theory of cosmology is incomplete; our theory of evolution doesn’t explain a single thing, and it only very incompletely describes. The number of human genes keeps changing (Is it 100,000? 40,000? 20,000?) consistently downward, while the complexity of a single gene measured by its broken and scattered physical distribution across millions of nucleotides in the chromosome, the complexity of its functions, and the complexity of its regulation skyrockets up. The number of living and extinct species is unknown. Over the past fifty years the estimates of the number of currently living species have varied from 4 million to tens of millions to 100 million or more, depending upon whom you read.[4] In other words, we don’t even know that!
Neither do we know how many distinct proteins exist in nature. We have done relatively complete descriptions at the biochemical level of only a very small fraction of cellular processes. Biological science has only identified and described some 2 million of the once estimated 8-10 million living species in rough fashion, that is, in basic taxonomic and anatomical data.[5] Achieving a full biochemical process description with a complete genome map linked to phenotypic character sets and regulatory functions for even this fraction of the biosphere is still a long way off. For the few species with completed gene maps, those maps have not been linked thoroughly to the cellular and developmental processes they govern.[6] This is not likely to happen anytime soon as Dr. Anton Nekrutenko informs us that a single gene can generate several thousand expressed sequences that provide unique instructions to the cell.[7]
So, for the 25,000 or so genes now presumed to comprise the human genome that is a mere 75,000,000 or so gene sequences with primary functions to track down. What’s so hard about that? Well for starters it is in theory possible for each gene to have several sequences that affect the regulation of potentially every other gene in the genome and then you are not just tracking single level gene expression sequences, but an avalanche of domino chain reactions that can go anywhere and do anything imaginable within the astronomically complex human biochemical-genetic system.
Professor Michio Kaku, author of Hyperspace, and one of my favorite authors, reveals in a fascinating online article, “Escape from the Universe,” that physicists and cosmologists are still grappling with the very basic questions and theoretical components of the universe, things quite fundamental in nature, such as the type and number of extra dimensions, and even regarding what comprises the fundamental stuff of which the universe is made—and how much there is of it. In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking says we cannot demonstrate that the universe is not infinite. That means we still don’t know if it is infinite or not.
As late as 2003 we were finalizing confirmation of the discovery
of dark matter and dark energy—we still don’t know what they are. These
substances make up as much as 70-90% of the entire universe (estimates have varied),
yet we know very little to nothing about the nature and characteristics of
either.[8]
We only recently discovered that there are black holes out there that
are far too old to comport with existing cosmological theory. One hypothesis is
that they were formed with the aid of dark matter…but that doesn’t help because
we don’t know what dark matter is.[9]
The finding in 2010, reported in Discover Jan/Feb 2011, that neutrinos
can transform from one type to another, shook the until then comfortable
working assumption by physicists that neutrinos did not have mass, and the
recent discovery of a monster quasar challenges long held assumptions about
black holes.[10]
The hypothesized Higgs particle (boson) may turn out to be the “explanation” for dark matter and also the key to a grand unification theory in physics, but for the moment at least the Higgs particle itself remains largely a mystery. The full explanation of the Higgs particle is held to require something outside the standard model of physics.[11] Physicists are not yet sure what that something is, but the existence of extra dimensions is one of the candidates that might finally account for the Higgs’ behavior. The newly built Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva Switzerland is expected to shed light on this question now that it has begun operation, and it is also expected to reveal totally new phenomena. A golden age of physics is expected to accrue from LHC discoveries.
Physicists’ minds are now completely open to what they might find in the terascale of high-energy particle physics (the trillion electron volt, TeV, range). The terascale has never before been explored. One real possibility is that they will find a grand unifying force that will tie together our understanding of all of the forces in nature in a single explanation. Physicists are practically certain of finding new particles or confirming those particles that were until now merely hypothesized. The discovery of evidence for extra dimensions is another plausible outcome from LHC projects.[12] All of these fundamental questions about the nature of our world remain unanswered, with no known limits upon future radical discoveries, and yet the neo-Darwinian evolutionists and their atheist cousins in physics guarantee us that our universe and the life forms in it are nothing more than one big accident. But, if we don’t yet know the basic nature and number of the key ingredients in nature’s recipe, how can we be so cocksure that we don’t need a cook?
Essentially, the smug assumption by neo-Darwinian evolutionists that science has all the answers therefore no one should question their indefensible theory of accidental evolution is contradicted by what we actually know of science’s present limitations. There is plenty of room for new discoveries that would vastly reduce the degree to which we view our physical world as being at all random. Our theories of the two levels of physics are still not compatible with each other and even the theory of gravity is threatened by the new discoveries of dark matter and the accelerating expansion of our universe.
But "physicists are conservative. We
don't want to throw away our theory of gravity when we might be able to patch
it up," Nobel co-winner Riess, an STScI
cosmologist, told National Geographic News....
The trick is that no one has been able to
unify the math used in quantum mechanics, which describes the physics of the
very small, with the equations in general relativity, which deal
with large-scale interactions.
"The two theories use two different sets
of rule books, [and] we've always known that these two books are
incompatible," Riess said.
Unfortunately, "dark energy is one of
the few cases in nature that really requires us to [somehow] use both sets of
rules."[13]
Even if we eventually come to fully understand the nature or structure of matter and energy, this does not provide an explanation of the origins of that structure, or the origins of matter and energy, for that matter. These are entirely different and potentially irresolvable questions. Similarly, we now know much of the structure of life without being able to demonstrate the origin of that structure.
While a revolution in particle physics is predicted to occur over the next few decades, a revolution has already been occurring in and around evolutionary science in the new fields of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, etc.[14] An avalanche of new and substantive data has recently poured fourth that dwarfs even the information available at the time neo-Darwinian evolution was conceived—literally dwarfs it—in the new evolutionary synthesis of the 1950s, and the update that occurred in the ’80s, let alone Darwin’s protoplasmic era theory of 1859.
The flow of new biological research data is awesome. New information continues to rush past the floodgates. In no way can the full import of all this data for the intelligent design question be said to be fully understood. It has not even been fully integrated into the theoretical base of evolutionary science. Complexity, specifically, as an evolutionary issue in its own right, seems to have been largely brushed aside for what can only be political reasons.
One trend in the new data relevant to the intelligent design debate that does seem clear is that more and more directional constraints upon what was initially conceived as predominantly random process in nature are being found, and they all strongly favor the formation of complex life. This is precisely what intelligent design theory asserts and predicts: a system of physical constraints embedded into natural law and the physical constants of the universe that give guidance and direction to the evolutionary process far beyond the threshold of randomness.
The humbling discoveries of recent cosmology, genetics and microbiology reveal the pomp, puff and bluster of neo-Darwinian theorists for what it is: premature conclusions and overconfidence grounded in political bias. Far up past the more humble realms of logical analysis and common sense (that you and I inhabit), up much higher into the thin heady air of social Marxism masquerading as natural science (that is, the thought to be superior realm of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory), the neo-Darwinists feel a draft sneak past their thought to be royal attire (what turns out to be a scanty little ensemble indeed). Back down here on earth, where the rest of us mere mortals must do our science, philosophy, and theology the hard way, that is with facts not politics, conclusions don’t come so quick and easy. Here, in a nutshell is the problem with Darwin’s new clothes (neo-Darwinian theory): the current data does not support the theory.
OK, Let’s See the Data
Modern scientists are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that the evidence has long pointed to predominantly non-random processes at the heart of the origin and evolution of life. More recently, however, we have begun to see genuine signs of intelligence. With the advent of a new, fully concrete, and scientifically formulated intelligent design theory, one of the great questions of all time, the relation between God and science, has been reopened, and in grand style.
As many readers will already know, a number of the critical physical parameters in nature are so finely tuned in life’s favor that it has always been irrational to deny the prima facie case for intelligent design or cosmic purpose in nature. Dr. Hugh Ross identifies 115 characteristics of our universe and solar system that must be fine-tuned to astronomical levels of precision for life to exist. The probability that all of these factors would occur together at unimaginable degrees of precision (minus intelligent design) is dismissibly small, less than one chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000,000,000,000 (10-69). [15]
When we move from this mathematical bombshell in classic physics and cosmology to recent research in biology we encounter another explosion. So much biological complexity data has been unveiled in the past twenty years that intelligent design/cosmic purpose can no longer be dismissed as merely a nominally defensible personal philosophy; it is, in fact, as much a startling reality in biological science as in cosmology and physics. It will come as a surprise to many that the neo-Darwinian theory of accidental evolution can now be straightforwardly refuted—and that there is precious little hope of resurrection.
As I go on to encyclopedically argue in the ensuing 600 pages, intelligent design theory has now earned favored or default theory status. It will take science some years to catch up to this evidential and analytical reality (political foot-dragging), but the change in favor of intelligent design is now inevitable based upon the data.
To demonstrate why this is so let’s begin with the work of Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. Meyer is Director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He has recently presented a comprehensive case against the accidental origination of life in a groundbreaking article (one surrounded, of course, by political controversy) entitled “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.”[16] Here Meyer cites a plethora of peer-reviewed scientific studies, and (controversy or not) presents straightforward arguments that establish a magnitude of improbability for accidental evolution that science can no longer ignore.
Dr. Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell, augments that broad but convincing argument, focusing in tightly on the complex computer language-like aspects of the DNA code. Chapters 4 through 6 of Signature describe the DNA code and its transcription, transportation, and translation machinery in such clear terms that even the casual reader can grasp the implications for design. Meyer forgoes the misleading oversimplification one typically finds in neo-Darwinian discussions, giving us the real meat and potatoes of how it all works. It turns out that life is not so simple as the neo-Darwinists would have us believe, certainly not something an accident could have thrown together.
What we see in Signature is that the integrated genomic systems of life are unmistakably computer-aided manufacturing systems. Driving a well-defined system for the construction of a myriad of intricate biological machines is a computer programming code with enormous information carrying capacity (DNA). And this is only the protein/enzyme production half of the larger genomic system. The gene regulatory system is comprised of a different set of equally complex operations that closely govern the operation of living systems once they have been constructed.
Of course, the genome is not the only biological mechanism that shows intelligent design—let’s not forget the human brain. In a recent article, “Duplicating Human Intelligence is a Mirage,” computer scientist Peter Kassan informs us that a program mimicking human intelligence would have to be 25 million times the size of the largest computer software program ever written. Could an accident achieve either of these systems in the time available in evolutionary history? Clearly not, as we will see further on.[17]
Next, let’s consider Professor Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. Presented in his landmark book, Darwin’s Black Box, and the excellent follow-on Edge of Evolution,[18] Behe’s objection continues to confound traditional evolutionary explanations. Most laymen would agree with Professor Behe that irreducibly complex machines simply are a “sign of intelligence,” that biological machines, or machines of any kind, are evidence of design. Common sense remains the hallmark of intelligence, even in the twenty-first century, though at times one might hardly know it. Cells and other biological machines are simply too intricate, too complex, and too delicate to have been formed by accident. Neither can they be accidentally modified without harm because each component is critical to function.
Professor Behe explains that an accidental process will inevitably break biological machine systems before achieving substantial (progressive) functional change. All the parts must be present and closely matched to each other for many of these systems to function. Accidental tinkering substantial enough to make any real functional change will either kill the host organism outright or its gene line will be lost, vetoed by natural selection due to an inherent disability. Not every aspect of biology is irreducibly complex in this way, but a central and critical core of the functions and structures of life are irreducibly complex. As the reader already knows, everything in life is built around the cell, and the typical cell is, itself, irreducibly complex.
In short, our present knowledge of microbiology and genetics shows the gradual accidental form change process that defines classic neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory to be impossible. For an accident to achieve such complex increments of design in one step entails astronomical improbabilities. Science cannot affirm such incredible hypotheses as its default position. The vast improbabilities tell us that an accident could not have gotten the job done in real evolutionary time, nor even within the total physical resources available in the entire lifespan of our Earth, or even of our universe. A trial and error process would involve so many false starts and mistaken lines of development that the universe would be out of time and energy before hitting upon the right combination of events that would manufacture such a complex mix of biological machine components. This resource exhaustion problem is one of Professor William Dembski's primary arguments for intelligent design.
To absorb the full force of the modern intelligent design argument, Behe should be read in conjunction with both Meyer and Dembski. It is not an overstatement to say that, for those who invest in a careful reading, after first getting Behe under your belt, William Dembski’s books, The Design Inference, No Free Lunch, The Design Revolution, and Intelligent Design, present the coup de grace for accidental evolution. Dembski’s probability argument and resource exhaustion calculations especially make clear that an accidental evolutionary process could not have produced our complex tree of life within trillions upon trillions the time and physical resources available in the history of the universe.
In addition to the resource exhaustion and probability arguments, Professor Michael Behe’s thesis of irreducible complexity is key to this debate because neo-Darwinian theory depends upon gradualness. Irreducible complexity refutes gradualism. Charles Darwin came to the theory of gradualism as an offshoot of careful observation of nature at the macroscopic level. He tied his gradualist evolutionary theory to an accidental evolutionary process (still allowing for God as the source of the breath of life at the beginning) because he could discern no threads of purpose in the observations he had made of natural processes. An accidental process requires gradualism because there is just no other way an accident can build a machine except in small increments—anything else defies mathematical probability and breaks the system already in place. But accidental gradualism requires the expenditure of enormous amounts of time and physical event resources well beyond what our universe has had available.
We now know that many key biological machines and structures can only be successfully assembled and integrated into an organism’s larger design by coordinating changes to ten or more genes and associated nongenetic processes. In most cases this must be done in a closely orchestrated and time-dependent manner. In a number of cases, very many genes would be involved, at least indirectly, and in some case nearly all. Obviously, this kind of process is not gradualism at all.
Even so staunch an opponent of purposive evolution as Richard Dawkins concedes that alteration of one gene in the active genome can at times create effects cascading through an entire living system, potentially affecting all the other active genes. This doesn’t mean that all genes must be changed at the same time for each evolutionary step, but it does mean that often some provision must be made to preclude an unending series of cascading destructive repercussions engendered by blind accidental tinkering. This obligates evolution to a consistently focused, if not a very precisely purposive and directional process of change—a type of guidance or direction accident is incapable of providing.
Human beings have from 20,000-25,000 genes, and some species have many thousands more. Though a typical gene only expresses a few proteins, in some cases a single gene can express as many as 36,000 proteins.[19] Charles Darwin’s own stated criterion for the refutation of his theory was that, if any one component of a living system could be shown to be impossible to create by a series of small accidental mutations, his theory would be disproved. Thus, it only takes one step in evolution invoking the simultaneous alteration of many genes to defeat the accidental theory. What we currently know of the complexity of biological systems gives us many candidates that are certain qualifiers under this criterion.
The simple mathematical truth is that the improbability that any one of the major features of living biological systems would be achieved by accident is sufficiently staggering to imply intelligent design. The aggregate improbability of achieving all of them in sequence as manifested in the varied life forms of from 100 million to 1 billion species, with biological machines hierarchically embedded within larger machines 8-10 levels deep, as famed evolutionist G. G. Simpson conceded, simply forbids belief in an accidental process.[20]
Thus, the naïve mutationist model of evolution, and the corresponding simplistic view of life, the only view/model compatible with pure accident, has long been abandoned. While the professors and students in the evolutionary classroom know this, all too often the public does not. Even the experts who do know have only recently come to realize just how complex the replacement model will have to be. New research continues to push the envelope of biological complexity further and further out each year.
Science now understands that any substantial change in body form requires many alterations to the active operational genome, as well as closely coordinated changes to the developmental genome, chemical gene activation markers, and the microtubule structures inside the cell wall, which define the structural form of the organism—all time-synchronized. Without such close orchestration, major evolutionary change cannot occur. Again, as in the problem of the origin of life, there is no known biomechanical pathway for sets of orchestrated changes of this complexity to occur by accident in the available time. It is mathematically indefensible to argue that an accident would achieve such a thing.
What’s a microtubule? These infinitesimally small, intricately fashioned networks of nanotubes inside cell walls may be largely unknown to lay readers, but they are big players in biology. They comprise a sort of “plumbing” that delivers the building blocks of life to the right place at the right time. But even this “plumbing” must be a very smart system to guarantee that the right materials arrive when and where needed. Complex networks of microtubules are critical to assembling the structural plan of the species as such. They in fact determine which species will be built.
Genes, in addition to genome regulatory functions, specify only the complex mix of proteins required to build the species; they do not directly specify which species is to be built. Species designation is hardwired into the microtubule system (discussed below). If changes in the genes are not closely coordinated with corresponding changes in the microtubule systems, one gets a fatal mismatch analogous to building a skyscraper out of moist chewing gum. Every part specified in the blueprint has been filled, yes, but, the material specifications are all wrong. As President Bush once said, “This will not stand!”
John A. Davison, Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Vermont, says that the very notion of a gradual form change is now meaningless and that guiding information must be coming from somewhere, such as the developmental genome. Davison also reminds us that gradual change requiring millions of years to observe makes neo-Darwinian theory untestable and therefore not scientific.[21]
Davison’s thesis that neo-Darwinian theory is largely untestable within practical limits is a thesis with which Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature magazine, agrees. Gee insists that, given the “deep time” of evolution, we have too few points of evidence compared to the vast span of evolutionary time to support any historical narrative of lifeform evolution with confidence. One might call Gee and Davison the modern champions of pure scientific method in evolutionary biology.[22] Hurray for honesty in science!
According to Gee, we should abandon any and all theories of the process dynamic and narrative history of evolution, at least for the short term (and conceivably, forever). We should instead concentrate on describing the fossils and comparing the structural/functional features and genetic sequences of the species. From there we can polish alternative sets of probabilistic inferences from the raw phylogenetic data, arriving at best guesses at what the family relationships are among the creatures. The limits of deep evolutionary time entail, however, that even when we have done the best we can along these lines, it won’t be, strictly speaking, good enough. We will have comprehensively described the tree of life, yes, but we will not have genuinely explained it.
One of the main reasons Gee’s argument is so compelling is because it is straightforward and transparent. (This makes it quite a novelty in evolutionary science.) Because much of the relevant data is lost to us in the deep time of evolution, and because each branch of the "completed" tree of life will always be merely a probabilistic guess, not an established certainty, his forbidding science a definite narrative history of evolution is proper. Describing species interrelationships to the best probabilistic standards genetic science and comparative structural biology may offer at a given time, allows very intelligent guesses, but nothing in any way incontrovertible. Thus, while we may ultimately come to "see" the larger strokes of what happened in terms of probable species interrelationships, we will not be seeing the whys or hows of the evolutionary process. We won’t be seeing either the macroscopic event sequences of evolutionary history or the microscopic biomechanical pathways that evolution actually employed. The deep time of evolution, with so much data forever lost to scientific access, forbids us that kind of vision and certainty.
Gee does not argue that the theory of evolution is false, only premature. In this view, which really is the pure and proper concept of scientific method, the data collection phase should remain free of any preconceptions about how it all happened. This is necessary to avoid producing a bias that might prejudice the search for new data and skew the interpretation of data when it is found. True, hypotheses must be formed to guide research, but we should never entrench ourselves inflexibly in an overall narrative theory that goes beyond what the evidence can justify.
Though Gee’s position in Deep Time is silent on the question of intelligent design, his point about prematurity absolutely pulls the rug out from under neo-Darwinian theory’s frequently haughty presumption of an accidental evolutionary process dynamic. For 150 years Darwinists have staunchly issued dogmatic assertions that accidental evolution produced life on Earth, and that science was fully justified in making this assumption. Gee has now exposed this as a very hasty and unsupported conclusion. After decades of insufferable atheist/materialist/neo-Darwinist propaganda masquerading as pure science, it is a genuine (and fully satisfying) scandal that two of our foremost scientific authorities as Davison and Gee would so cogently establish that neo-Darwinian theory is not so much an unassailable icon as a scientific prematurity, and, in Davison's case, a physical impossibility!
This embarrassment is not entirely new. Neo-Darwinian evolution has never been unassailable, contrary to what its proponents would have us believe. Many experts, even outside of ID theory, have struck telling blows against the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution for years. Noted cell evolutionist Lynn Margulis has long challenged the neo-Darwinists for real proof of their theory—receiving only silence in response. In Mathematics of Evolution, Sir Fred Hoyle reminds us that the fossil lineages of the different orders of creatures neither lead to a definite common ancestor nor fully link up.[23] Physicist and theologian Gerald L. Schroeder does the public a service in restating this now well-established truth: “Transitional forms are totally absent from the fossil record at the basic level of phylum and rare if present at all in class. Only after basic body plans are well established are fossil transitions observed.”[24] (emphasis added)
Although fully contrary to the gradualism required by neo-Darwinian theory, this basic fact of the fossil record has been known to science for more than fifty years. Michael Denton, Stephen Meyer and Duane Gish are only a few of the noted scientists who have cited this consistent anomaly in the patterns of the fossils. In addition, mainstream scientists outside of ID theory such as Harvard paleontologist David Raup; the late icon of evolutionary science, Ernst Mayr; Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Niles Eldredge; and the late and famous evolutionist, Stephen J. Gould have also done so. Nearly all evolutionists, in fact, now concede that classical neo-Darwinian theory does not match the fossil record.[25] The fossil record establishes a non-gradual evolutionary process.
Not only do large gaps remain in the fossil sequence, but they are in all the wrong places. The gaps consistently appear where they should least likely be in a gradualist scenario. In neo-Darwinian theory, many more intermediate steps would be required to bridge the greater physiological “distance” between radically different body types than between closely related relatives of the same family.[26] Yet, few intermediates are known between the major body types, while many intermediates have been found between close relatives on the same branch. This is precisely the opposite of what Darwin’s theory predicts.
So, Darwin is out…and what or who is in? Punctuated equilibrium, random drift, intelligent design? Neither punctuated equilibrium nor random drift offer any real explanation of how we get the complex increments of change that evolution needs; they just say mutations occur and eventually add up. Science cannot demonstrate in the lab, or by any other means, that an accidental dynamic could generate the needed mutations, and the math says it is completely impossible in the time available. This leaves intelligent design theory as by far the leading contender. Intelligent design theory can now be demonstrated to be genuinely scientific, and shown to be the best explanation of the facts.
But let's be clear. Intelligent design theory is not a replacement for the theory of evolution. It is rather, a sub-type of evolutionary theory, a replacement for accidental evolution. ID is still evolution; is just adds intelligent input. Modern intelligent design theory merely says that we need not refrain, as G. G. Simpson did, in further defining the character of the purpose that Simpson and many other evolutionists have long admitted is so clearly manifest in nature. Intelligent design theory says that that purpose could only have originated in intelligence.
There is undeniably purpose in nature; but what kind of purpose, and where does it come from? These are the harder questions, and, in light of modern data, really the only questions remaining to be answered. To address these remaining mysteries, I will go further to discuss the theory not only of ID, but the theory of God at some length in Part 2. After all, if there is a designer of life, shouldn’t we expect that natural systems (including human society and psychology) would give some discernable indication of the single greatest influence on those systems: that of their designer. Behe, Meyer, and Dembski, et al. have solidly established that generic signs of intelligence are present in biochemistry, microbiology, genetics, and the fossil record. Yet there remains this final question: shouldn’t there be more, not only signs of intelligent authorship, but real clues as to who the author is?
I argue that there is more, and, after completing this book, I think you will agree. It turns out that God has signed his work after all. Not only is there an intelligent signature, as Dr. Stephen Meyer says, in the cell, but, as Dr. Hugh Ross has published for years, it is the Creator’s signature. That glorious signature is in fact boldly scrawled across the larger part of nature.[27] While the full case for God is, to borrow a phrase from Ernst Mayr, a long argument, the destination is worth the journey...and a fascinating journey it is!
Step 1, Abiogenesis: Life
from Dust
There is a key point in the debate about the origin of life that many readers may have forgotten. Evolutionary theory does not attempt to explain the creation of life at all—never has. The theory of evolution only addresses life’s subsequent transformations via genome mutation, not its origin. For this reason alone, the accidental theory of evolution, and the worldview of atheistic materialism traditionally associated with it, have always been a failure as a comprehensive explanation of life. Creating life is not just a matter of stumbling upon an accidental rewrite of the DNA code, for initially there is no code to rewrite, and no translation system to make sense of it.
To generate life in the first instance, many time-synchronized events must closely follow each other and occur in a very physically constrained environment that excludes disruptive influences. First, in addition to stringing a series of nucleotides together, to achieve the writing of the original DNA code, something must orchestrate the simultaneous construction of a DNA transcription system, a gene translation system, and a gene regulatory system.[28] Each of these systems is vastly complex in its own right. Then this must be closely followed by the creation of a myriad of critical and complex auxiliary functions such DNA error correction and repair and transpositional genomic routines. These additional components are necessary to render the genomes stable, but not so stable as to make future evolution impossible.
To accomplish this and define the basic characteristics of a specific organism and impart the critical functions essential to independent life, a minimum of 1,500 complimentary genes (each of approximately 1,000 nucleotides) must be constructed in real time. That is a lot of code: 1.5 million characters, roughly the size of this book. There are only 2,500 characters on an average page of text, and monkeys typing randomly will take “forever” to achieve that page of meaningful script by accident. Achieving each of the requisite additional 600 pages by accident gets exponentially harder and harder to do, just as rolling additional dice with the same number value in sequence becomes harder and harder with each roll.
After those 1.5 million nucleotides are precisely configured into a meaningful text, they must then be combined with a plethora of physical accouterments required to bring that text to life: achievement of a cell wall, acquisition of nutrients from the external environment, and placement within a hospitable chemical-, radiation-, and temperature-configured environment. Could an accident have done all this in real time?
Not hardly. The effect of accidental tinkering on biological machines is no longer an unknown (as if the matter had ever really been in doubt). Random mutations to amino acids and proteins, the key structural components of life, have recently been scrutinized with scientific rigor for the first time. As most readers already know, very little happens in living systems without critical assistance from proteins of one form or the other. This is especially true of enzymes, the proteins that have the unique ability to induce life-essential chemical reactions. According to Dr. Stephen Meyer, citing the foundational work of Dr. D. D. Axe, the probability of getting even the most rudimentary biologically viable protein (just one) by chance from nonliving sources is no more than 1 chance in 10125. If your math is rusty, that is a ‘1’ followed by 125 zeroes! This enormous number is only the embarkation point for a much more devastating argument against the accidental origin of the tree of life.[29]
To construct a living cell, a hundred complex proteins are required at a minimum (most involve thousands). They must interact in intricate ways with several hundred other cell components, each cell performing over two million actions per minute! The improbability of accidentally generating a living cell from nonliving chemicals is therefore many orders of magnitude more difficult than generating a single protein. To prevent the big numbers from completely getting away from us, let’s intentionally underestimate it at 1 chance in 10128.[30]
Inevitably such large improbabilities translate to an endless string of biomechanical obstacles to the accidental origination and evolution of life. One such obstacle is discussed in Russell Grigg’s paper on the reversible reactions inherent in protein synthesis in water. Grigg explains that, in traditional hypotheses of abiogenesis (life from nonlife), the first proteins are believed to have been formed in solution in earth’s oceans. Spontaneously generated amino acids are assumed to have been mixed randomly in the oceans’ natural saline solution until they accidentally formed into the combinations required for biologically functional proteins. The obstacle in this case is the simple fact that proteins break down in water. Water dissolves the bonds between the amino acids and returns them back into a solution of single amino acid residues. Thus, the lifespan of proteins accidentally hit upon in this way would be so short as to preclude anything useful being done with them to originate life and further its evolution. Proteins achieved in this manner would be mere chemical “flashes in the pan;” they would not exist long enough to permit their assemblage into the complex biological structures necessary to support the construction or advancement of early life.
One can imagine a complex sequence of other events that might intervene to afford some protection to accidental protein creations, but doing this adds additional improbability. So, although the reversibility of protein synthesis in water does not make the accidental achievement of a few proteins fully impossible, it makes the near simultaneous accidental achievement of the set of key proteins needed to originate the first organism an implausible hypothesis indeed.[31]
Yes, one can imagine a solution to this problem, naturally. Imagination is free...and it is a product of intelligence. But if nature is to use an unintelligent fully accidental process it has to pay for each of trillions of trial and error excursions needed to find life’s solution with enormous expenditures of time and physical resources. In our imagination we can assume a long, varied, and somewhat turbulent shoreline where accidentally constructed proteins are immediately washed ashore onto a hospitable moist clay substratum. The clay stays just moist enough to hold the proteins in place but not so moist as to dissolve them again—and the waves that brought the proteins ashore for whatever reason don’t immediately wash them away again to be quickly dissolved. One can imagine it, but the improbabilities involved must be charged against the universe's limited checking account of time and physical resources.
A few proteins might be achieved accidentally in the Earth’s primeval oceans; but to merely achieve a protein is not to achieve life. Hundreds of highly specific differentiated proteins must be developed and placed in immediate physical proximity. We might imagine a physical pathway for this to occur, something analogous to the PAH backbone that, in theory, can hold spontaneously generated nucleotides in a given sequence, but the event is still improbable and must be synchronized with a myriad of other improbable events such as tripartite genome systems development, DNA configuration, nutrient availability, cell wall construction, temperature control, and a physical threat-free environment.
Abiogenesis, the production of the first single-celled creature from non-living chemicals, has another problem: the chicken or the egg. There are a number of highly specialized proteins that must be produced for the gene transcription system to function, but the gene transcription system is itself the only method known to science that is able to produce those particular proteins. Experimenters have discovered that a handful of proteins can be produced spontaneously under the right environmental conditions, but they do not include all of the key proteins necessary for gene transcription or most of the other 100,000 or so proteins requisite to building the tree of life. Thus, abiogenesis remains an enormous obstacle for neo-Darwinian theory (accidental evolution).
There are many other difficult steps along the way to generating the higher life forms, some arguably more difficult than originating the first single-celled organism. Therefore, even were science to demonstrate the creation of a bacterium by accident it would not prove the accidental evolution of more complex life forms.
Step 2: Proteins for
100,000,000 Highly Varied Species[32]
Many new proteins have to be generated and integrated into new systems, structures, and organs for each step up the evolutionary ladder. The problem of reversible reaction eliminates much of the useful protein production from the external environment, as does the fact that, once bacteria were present, they would rapidly consume or biodegrade any accidentally produced proteins and other biotic components existing outside the protective confines of living systems. This leaves us with internal generation of new proteins from living organisms as the primary source for evolutionary progress. Dr. Meyer estimates that the odds of getting a single new, biologically viable, standard sized protein from random genetic mutation of an existing organism are roughly 1077 to 1 against.[33] While this is “easier” than getting a biologically viable protein from nonliving sources, it is still exorbitantly hard (77 zeroes). This estimate is not a guess; it is based upon peer-reviewed scientific research.
A full inventory of all animal proteins has not been completed—or of all animals for that matter. However, the human body alone is estimated to use, at a minimum, 85,000 different proteins.[34] Total estimates for living creatures range to the hundreds of thousands. Physicist Paul Davies estimates the improbability of evolutionary protein generation at 10-40,000.[35] (40,000 zeroes in that one!) One may be amazed at how high this improbability number is, but, even so, Davies must have made some allowance for nature’s bias for life. If we were to theoretically assume true randomness (as an accidental worldview would require) the improbabilities of generating each kind of protein of the full compliment of 85,000 would have to be multiplied in sequence: 10-77 times 10-77 repeated 85,000 times. This yields a super immense improbability of 1 chance in 106,545,000! That’s a big number! Appendix 2 shows us that the universe has had neither the time nor the resources to succeed at such a task using a random approach. Yet, these computations are the correct figures. They are required by standard probability theory for the achievement of random events accomplished in sequence.
Is it hard to learn probability theory? No, not at all. It involves nothing more than figuring the odds at a dice game, or a game of cards. For example, the probability of rolling three ‘6’s in sequence using standard gaming dice is not computed by adding the difficulty level of rolling one ‘6’ to that of rolling the others. Doing it that way would yield 6 + 6 + 6, or 1 chance in 18, which is incorrect. The correct method is to multiply the probability of one die times the other, 6 X 6 X 6, because there are 36 ways of rolling two dice in sequence, and 216 ways of rolling 3 dice in sequence.[36]
Although some of those 216 alternative outcomes will contain duplicate total values, they won’t be identical physical events because the value of the die in positions one, two, and three won’t be the same.[37] In the “real world” the importance of order of events is a bit easier to see than in games because, in the events of physics, chemistry, and biology, the order of occurrence in time is more relevant to the result. Consider the following two simplistic event sequences: buy meat, cook meat eat meat; make bomb, light bomb, run. If you eat the meat before you buy it, the store manager will react differently than if you buy it first. If you eat it before you cook it, you will react differently. Lighting the fuse before the bomb is built will obviously not produce a bang, and so on.
Similarly, most natural events of physics, chemistry, and biology are sensitive to sequence. Forming air-breathing creatures before the plants of the Earth have produced any oxygen to breath obviously has a different result than making the oxygen first. Mutating a germ before it infects its host has a different effect than mutating it after it leaves the host, etc. In both cases the difference is nothing short of life and death. Likewise, the order in which chemicals are mixed is critical to the result. With the joining of the first two chemicals new compounds are made, energy is released, gases are formed and transformed, etc. When a third chemical is added it will find importantly different conditions than if it had been added to the first two chemicals separately; the reaction will then be different. Mixing two caustic chemicals directly and only later diluting the mixture with water results in poisoned air. However, initially diluting the first chemical with water and adding the second chemical afterwards does not produce noxious gas, and so on. In the physical and chemical interactions of nature we see that there really are 216 relevant possible outcomes for three “dice.” Having a ‘3’, a ‘5’, and a ‘6’ is not the same as having a ‘6’, a ‘5’, and a ‘3’.
Thus, there is no way to reduce the probability of accidentally hitting upon all the proteins of life in sequence from that computed by multiplying the improbability of each protein by the other. This is the only way to capture all of the real physical event alternatives available in a random physical construction process. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross reflect this truth in Table 12.2 of their fascinating book, Origins of Life,[38] which is used to compute the improbability of arriving at the first living creature by accident. To simplify, they used a single protein as typical instead of wrestling a long list of different values for different kinds of proteins (doing it the hard way tends to average out to approximately the same amount anyway). Here the odds of achieving the 1,500 gene minimum thought to be requisite to first independent life (a simple bacterium-like creature) is given as 10-112,500. They used Hubert Yockey’s estimate of the odds for random production of the common protein cytochrome-C (taken to represent an average protein), which is 10-75, and multiplied that by itself 1,500 times.[39]
In essence, the problem with the accidental production of life is that proteins are super-complex (as is the genome that codes for them). They are so complex, in fact, that the dice have to be considered to have 1077 numbered faces, not just six! That is one hundred thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion faces on just one die.[40] There are at least 85,000 such dice (different proteins) required to construct the tree of life, and probably a couple hundred thousand! The dice of life indeed have many faces.
Already in the first two steps of life’s construction we see indications of design by way of incremental increases in the bias for life—and an enormous bias it is. The improbability of generating the complete inventory of human proteins (the improbability of each multiplied by the other) has been reduced by as much as 4,080,000 orders of magnitude simply by moving the process of protein construction from outside a living creature to inside.[41] To me, this phenomenon has the effect of refuting accidental evolution because here the early organisms were not just built to survive, as natural selection choosing from accidental alternatives would have produced; they were built to evolve by producing many new proteins that themselves have blueprints of life, as it were, already inherent in their internal structure as defined by natural law.[42]
A single protein can contain as many as 10,000 amino acid
residues, with approximately 100 amino acids linked in an average protein. The
enormous complexity of creating a precisely folded three-dimensional
protein structure of typically from 50 to 300 amino acids, each amino acid with
many functionally relevant properties of its own, is one thing (between them
the 20 biologically useful amino acids have 437 properties relevant to
determining function).[43]
However, the full complexity of protein interactions in the cell, termed
“systems proteomics” by Gabriel Waksman, is so complex that even our most state
of the art computer simulations cannot represent it without employing shortcuts
and simplifying assumptions.[44]
The exact nature of the fold is what imparts viable biological function to proteins. Even electromagnetic properties of amino acids are involved in protein folding. The full determinants of protein folding characteristics of amino acids are traceable down to the atomic level! This is another reason the complexity of life exceeds the ability of our best computers to model accurately.
The configurational complexity of biomolecules means the
entropic contribution to the free energy is a significant factor in their behaviour,
requiring detailed dynamical calculations to fully evaluate. Computer
simulations capable of taking all interatomic interactions into account are
therefore vital. However, even with the best current supercomputing facilities,
we are unable to capture enough of the most interesting aspects of their
behaviour to properly understand how they work.[45]
As Waksman’s book, Proteomics and Protein-Protein Interactions, and the new volume, Protein Folding: New Research, edited by Tony R. Obalinsky, make abundantly clear, we know a lot about proteins, but only a fraction of what there is to know. Protein science is still in its infancy and already the complexity is off the charts, literally, for we have no way to model it fully.
Step 3: Constructing
Cellular Machines--The Astounding Complexity of the Cell
Acclaimed science writer, Boyce Rensberger (The Washington Post) gives a masterful account of some of the truly amazing things cells can do in his 1996 page-turner, Life Itself. Here we learn that “cells have the biological equivalent of a containerized cargo system,” and many other complex mechanistic systems.[46] It should not come as a surprise that extreme biological complexity at the genetic level is mirrored in visibly intricate cellular machinery.[47] But the functional attributes of these machines can be determined by nanoscale factors at the molecular, atomic and even subatomic levels!
In Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Michael Behe presents examples of a handful of biological systems that have been currently described by science to such an extent that we can very confidently analyze them. Within these closely-studied systems every component has been found not only to be essential to its function but very closely matched to each other in design. Behe calls these systems “irreducibly complex” because they can’t be reduced by even one component without destroying their function. These systems are too sensitive to deviation to permit accidental assemblage one piece at a time. Thus, they refute the theory of accidental evolution. Behe’s thesis is that irreducible complexity is typical of living systems, though not necessarily universal. Dr. Michael Denton claimed very much the same thing in his book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, in 1986. [48] Since cells, the essential building blocks of all life, are themselves irreducibly complex, it is clear that an accident could not have thrown life together.
With irreducibly complex designs, random changes (accidents) so seriously impair existing functions that, even should the mutation occur in a reproductive cell that will then recreate the change in offspring, the cell line does not survive long-term culling by natural selection. The functional efficiency of that genome is so seriously degraded that natural selection removes the dysfunctional or noncompetitive cell line from the evolutionary tree. Nor does destruction of a mutated cell result in its being reduced to smaller survivable functional units that can then reform in novel ways to support evolution as some have hypothesized because, as elementary biology texts have always proclaimed, cells are the smallest survivable units (other than destructive pathogens such a retroviruses and prions).
Beyond the complexity of proteins and the DNA code itself is the actual day-to-day operation of the cell, which involves a myriad of complex machines. Professor Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho says the assembly instructions for cellular machines are even more complex than the protein coding instructions contained in DNA.[49]
The ribosome is one such machine, a critical organelle that manages the protein assembly process. To construct a ribosome, in addition to the basic protein composition of its two-part structure (20-21 proteins, and 31-35 proteins for the respective parts), several copies of ribosomal RNA must be created and added to the structure. In neo-Darwinian theory, the RNA coding sequence must first be achieved by accident. That accident must precisely configure 1500 base pairs of nucleotides for the small unit and 3,000 for the large unit. It must also assemble 50 or more structural proteins into two functional subunits. To get a better idea of just how complex even these deceptively simple miniscule protein tunnels are known to be, see Kathleen L. Triman's article, "Mutational Analysis of the Ribosome." Note particularly the bibliography, and the text she recommends by Liljas, Structural Aspects of Protein Synthesis,[50] both of which loudly proclaim that what seems so simple a task on the surface, to merely string amino acids together in line, turns out to be enormously complex.
Because the rarity of biologically functional proteins implies the corresponding rarity of the genes that code for them within the vast ocean of possible DNA sequences, the frequency of useful randomly configured genes can be estimated at about the same magnitude as useful randomly generated proteins: 1 in every 1077. Genes perform complex regulatory functions in addition to directing protein synthesis, so the probability of randomly hitting upon a useful gene is actually much smaller than for achieving a single protein. Estimating the improbability of accidentally creating only the smaller portion of ribosomal DNA, representing a sequence of 1500 base pairs, as the improbability of one functional protein (10-77) is, then, quite conservative.[51]
Another biological machine is the cellulosome. The cellulosome is a two-component machine composed of a dockerin sequence and a cohesion module. Bacteria use it to degrade polysaccharides on the cell walls of plants. The dockerin sequence is composed of approximately 70 amino acid residues, while the cohesion module requires around 150 residues. The genetic information required to create a cellulosome is approximately 6,000,000 base pairs.[52] Again, the 6,000,000-long nucleotide sequence must be configured by accident under neo-Darwinian theory. The improbability of generating the cellulosome by accident can then be roughly estimated as 4-6,000,000, an enormous number.
There are plenty of other machines involved in life. The famed biological clock, for example, perhaps thought by some (young persons) to be mythical, turns out to be quite real, and quite complex. The circadian clock is found in all complex creatures and some bacteria. It has been studied for 50 years and all of its mysteries and mechanics are still not fully understood. In a creature as simple as the fungus it involves 11 proteins and a very complex system of interactions with many auxiliary components. Christian Heintzen and Yi Liu describe the circadian clock in amazing technical detail in a fascinating article, "The Neurospora crassa Circadian Clock," revealing feedback loops and a variety of regulatory actions, data input and output channels, etc. These clearly mark the clock as an intricately designed machine. (Heintzen and Liu neither advance nor deny the inference to intelligent design; they simply describe the clock.)
There are a variety of clock functions in humans and other creatures, as a very informative online article by Loes Pihlajamaa-Glimmerveen describes at http://www.glimmerveen.nl/LE/biological_clock.html. There may even be a clock in each cell, which would amount to trillions in a single human body. These intricate timekeepers interact with the genome and the overall metabolism to keep everything in tune and in time. Hundreds of clock-controlled genes have been identified in a wide variety of creatures. Gene expression feedback circuits are involved in the generation of circadian rhythms,[53] and another of the important functions of the circadian clock only recently discovered is to govern the timing of DNA excision and repair. This, in addition to managing sleeping, eating, blood pressure, heart rate, hormone production, and cholesterol synthesis. John B. Hogenesch has even remarked in a recent PNAS article that it begins to appear that everything is timed.[54]
A fourth biological machine that has gotten a lot of attention is the bacterial flagellum. Professor Michael Behe describes this intricate machine in Darwin’s Black Box. To get a more detailed view of the complexity of the flagellum ion powered motor, see Robert M. Macnab’s Annual Review of Microbiology article entitled “How Bacteria Assemble Flagella.”[55] The bottom line is that these are complex machines with very closely matched parts. They are, in fact, outboard motors, having rotor, bushing, and bearings, very intricately powered and controlled by miniscule electronic impulses. (See Access Research Network’s animations of the flagellum here and here.)
One of the key questions to evaluating the theory of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution is the question of just how simple or how complex the simplest modules of an incremental evolutionary construction process can or must be. In other words, what is the minimal complexity of the modules of biological systems construction required to produce life in reality, not just in abstract theory? The trend in recent research has been moving consistently towards greater and greater complexity for these minimal construction modules (the Legos of life, if you will). Professor Michael Behe has shown us several systems where the minimal increment of construction is quite complex, involving many closely matched interactive parts, and the basic cell, the foundational component of all life is one of those systems. An accident could not have proposed such complex modules. This satisfies Charles Darwin’s own rule for the refutation of his theory, that, should only one biological feature be shown to be impossible to originate by “numerous, successive, slight modifications,” his theory would be disproved.[56]
Darwin goes on to say “But I can find out no such case.” But how could he, when he did not know of genetics and modern microbiology? This is the fatal weakness in Darwin’s theory from the beginning: the science of his time simply did not know the biomechanics of life. His logic was good, but his data was not. To some extent Darwin and his contemporaries were obviously stuck in the conceptual framework and research limits of their time, but saying “I don’t know” is always an option. Humility is as much a virtue in science as in everyday life. Scientists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries should have been aware of their own limitations—and certainly we have no excuse in the 21st Century for maintaining such an outdated view.
The science of Darwin’s time thought the work of cells was managed by nondescript goo called “protoplasm.” They knew nothing of intricate cellular machines or the tripartite genome and associated systems. Thus, the critical unstated assumption of Darwin’s logic, that he might have found such a case had it been present, is actually false. We cannot blame him for not knowing, but modern neo-Darwinists, who continue to parade Darwin’s Origin of Species (which was a masterpiece for its time) as if it remained a cogent stand-alone argument for accidental evolution, should know better.
The Tip of the Iceberg
There are thousands of other biological machines that must be constructed accidentally under neo-Darwinian theory.[57] It is supremely unlikely that an undirected process of evolution could have been so fortunate.
Much more complex than unitary biological machines, of course, are biological systems. The complexity of the human immune system is often marveled at in both popular and technical writing. The adaptive immune system can recognize approximately a trillion threats, and can construct defenses against man-made antigens that are not yet known to nature. Professor Michael Behe gives us a glimpse of the hidden workings of the immune system in Chapter 6 of Darwin’s Black Box; Boyce Rensberger expands that in Chapter 11 of Life Itself; and the rest of the story is beautifully laid out in the new textbook The Immune Response, by Tak W. Mak and Mary E. Saunders, a glorious work of 1194 pages.[58] Also, a surprisingly good nontechnical overview of the immune system is given in a free online pamphlet from the National Institutes of Health, Understanding the Immune System: How It Works. .
As impressive as the human immune system is, our central nervous system far exceeds it in complexity, performing operations of much greater sophistication. The brain, of course is our paradigm of complexity, but we still don’t know how complex it really is. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain and spinal cord that make up the central nervous system, each with thousands of connecting fibers.[59] In addition, there are nine times as many glial cells in the brain. While long thought to be only structural, Peter Kassan reveals that in 2004 researchers discovered glial cells had other functions as well.[60]
The cerebral cortex alone has 10 billion neurons and 60 trillion synaptic connections. But it is what those trillions of connections do interactively in real time that is so amazing. Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project for fifteen years (now director of the National Institutes of Health), tells us in The Language of Life that the brain expresses every gene in the genome at some point in the human lifespan. I mentioned earlier that one particular gene in the brain expresses 36,000 proteins. Much of the detail of how our own perceptual/cognitive functions actually work remains to be elucidated by science. We have only recently discovered two additional and very fundamental methods the brain employs for intercellular communication (in addition to the usual axons, synapses, junctions, and extracellular fluid channels): roamer type microvesicles and tunneling nanotubes.[61]
Sir Roger Penrose suspects the explanation of these microtubules’ part of brain activity will go well into the quantum levels of physics.[62] Dr. David Faust of Brown University Medical School has this to say on the subject of brain complexity, citing J. C. Eccles 1977 book, The Understanding of the Brain, where Eccles seems to have prophetically anticipated Penrose’s assertion that new kinds of mathematical models are required to understand the brain.
If anything, I
believe the case for complexity has been understated. Anyone who wishes to
glimpse the complexity of processes needed to manage the sensory world might
find current studies of the human brain illuminating. Eccles…a prominent
researcher in this area, makes the following statement when discussing human
perception:[63]
Before the cerebral
cortex is involved in the necessary complex patterned reaction to the sensory
input so that it gives a conscious perception, there will be activity of this
immense, unimaginable complexity…it will be necessary to develop new forms of mathematics,
as yet unimagined, in order to cope with such immense patterned complexities.[64]
When it comes to the genetic systems, we cannot restrict our estimate of biological complexity to genes and proteins alone. There are a multitude of functions involved, each highly complex. [65] As with the brain, we have yet to fully understand and describe the workings of the genome, though there are already volumes of description on file. Dr. Robert Pollack, in his excellent and gracefully aging primer on genetics, Signs of Life, explains that the process of translating genetic information into functioning bodily systems is extremely complex, going well beyond the task of simple protein production and assembly.[66] A myriad of various and subtle contexts within bodily systems, many yet to be fully scrutinized by science, alter the way a given gene will finally be expressed. Multiple genes interact in governing each other in an ultra-complex system of rules. Simple models have been devised to illustrate the general concept of gene interactions but...
Unfortunately, real systems are vastly more complicated. More than two genes may be involved in activating a single gene. In the case of three controlling genes, there are already 256 different rules. And in a system of 25 genes, the number of possibilities is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe.[67] (My emphasis)
In humans alone, there are from 20,000 to 25,000 genes! “But,” one might object, “I thought we had already mapped the genomes?” Yes, we have mapped a few of them. But it is important to note that mapping a genome is not the same thing as describing its functions. Basic mapping is merely a list of the sequence of nucleotides showing a still preliminary chart of gene locations within the chromosome. Mapping does not cross-reference the segments of a gene to their functions. It does not explain the complex machinery involved in translation, transposition, error correction, repair and duplication, protein synthesis (transcription), and biological systems regulation. So, the mere fact that we have “mapped” the genomes of a few creatures does not mean that we have fully described or understood genome functions.
The gene regulatory task for the human body is enormous, requiring precise regulation of trillions of cells each doing millions of tasks per minute, with many organs, systems, tissues and body parts all working together in near perfect concert to maintain the functions of life. New, substantial, and even basic discoveries about genetic mechanisms continue to be revealed with each passing decade.
Only recently have we realized that the classic concept of the gene as being a contiguous string of nucleotides all consolidated in the same spot on the chromosome is quite wrong. The various sections of a gene are scattered all around the chromosome with hundreds or thousands of nucleotides intervening between them. Nor is the concept involved a simple one gene/one protein relationship. There are only 25,000 genes in the human genome, but there are 85,000 proteins used in human anatomy. One gene obviously codes for more than one protein. As recent research reveals, one way this gap can be bridged is through alternate reading frames where the sequence of nucleotides can be read from more than one frame of reference. The truth is that we currently understand only a fraction of the complex operations of the genome.
As the “DNA Surveillance and Repair” chapter of the National Library of Medicine’s online bioscience library reveals, the complexity of DNA repair systems alone is extreme. A recent textbook devoted entirely to that subject goes over 800 pages, describing an astoundingly complex system, for which we still do not know the full details. Many readers will already be familiar with basic DNA transcription and repair tasks, but more complex functions are being discovered as research proceeds. Even the straightforward task of translating a gene into a protein has hidden complexities.[68]
Way back in 1971 one of our most famous biologists, G. Ledyard Stebbins, offered a simplified chart of the interactive complexity of biological systems based upon the concept that more than one gene and multiple gene expression tags are involved in regulating or directing protein synthesis for any one biological functional.[69] In Stebbins’ chart one can trace 10 different junction points on the road to gene expression resulting in a functional phenotypic feature. In light of more current research (Stebbins’ book is over 35 years old) this has become an underestimate, as Stebbins already acknowledged in 1971. The expression of a single gene can involve up to 100 gene expression markers scattered around neighboring sequences up to many thousands of nucleotides away. A single gene can generate up to several thousand instructional sequences directing cellular activity and be read from more than one reading frame.[70]
Yes, D. D. Axe’s random protein synthesis estimate cited by Stephen Meyer captures the basic improbability values for the genetic system regarding protein production, but only a few of the hundreds to thousands of expressed sequences generated by a gene are used for protein building. The rest have regulatory functions. As mentioned, the regulatory mechanisms of the genome are enormously complex, pushing the improbability estimate for accidental evolution far beyond the previous figures derived from protein synthesis alone.
Beyond the sheer complexity of the genome lies another, perhaps, more important point: DNA is a language, and language is a sign of intelligence. As Professor Emeritus James W. Valentine tells us in chapter 3 of his enjoyable textbook On the Origin of the Phyla, DNA qualifies under all the technical requirements to be a language: “letter” symbols, rules of syntax or organization, standard dictionary, consistent translation (meaning), punctuation, etc. Valentine does not infer intelligent design from this, but there are no known instances of a naturally occurring language originating outside of an animal intelligence. All known languages (at least the highly complex ones) are the artifacts of human intelligence, artifacts of civilization. While there are much simpler behavior systems in lower creatures that involve a set of signals used to trigger group behavior under certain conditions, these (apparently) only mimic language (pseudo-languages, if you will), and in any case are orders of magnitude simpler than the tripartite genetic coding system of life. And basic DNA coding is apparently not the only language used in biology, for cells and cellular systems seem to have the ability to signal to others.
The brain, the genetic system, protein complexity and protein interaction (proteomics), cellular systems, and the immune system are the five big guns of biological complexity, but the complexity of even the most basic biological machines clearly signals the larger difficulty of the evolutionary task. Some simple organisms have thousands of ribosomes in one cell (the bacterium E. coli has 15,000).[71] Nor do we know absolutely everything regarding their construction. Substantial questions remain unanswered, and current research reveals the construction process for even “simple” machines like the ribosome to be enormously complex.[72]
So, where have we got to so far in sketching out the complexity of life: a three part genomic system, complex beyond any hope of an accident putting it together; two hundred thousand proteins, each of which is so complex that an accident can only assemble it one time out of 1077 tries; proteins necessary for life that can only be produced by life (chicken and egg dilemma); protein interactions so complex that our best computers cannot model them; the human brain, so complex that it takes a software program 25 million times the size of the largest program ever written to match its computational power (if we had the mathematics necessary to model the brain’s processing patterns at all—still waiting on Penrose for that); a circadian clock in (potentially) every cell; up to trillions of cells per creature each having many biological machines and hundreds of proteins critical to their operation, each cell performing two million life-sustaining actions per minute. Does that sound like an accident to you?
Out of Tune and Out of
Time
There simply was not enough time in Earth’s history for an accidental evolution of the complex life forms on Earth. A mutated creature must first somehow integrate the change with the rest of an immensely complex system in a way that does more good than harm, then reproduce sufficiently to give the newly modified species a chance to compete against prior forms of the same species as well as against natural enemies. Natural selection needs time to express an opinion as to whether the mutation is conducive to survival of the species based upon a complex interplay of factors such as physical health, stamina, resilience to injury or disease, environmental compatibility, inter-species competition advantages, direct physical self-defense, and reproductive fitness factors. Accomplishing this slow and resource exhausting process across the entire gamut of simple to complex creatures for each proposed form variation allows plenty of time prior to natural selections verdict in each case for deformed and dysfunctional variations to be produced in large quantities by accidental mutations and make imprints in the fossil record. But those deformed design proposals are not in the fossil record in the numbers entailed by an accidental process.
One can provide easy as pie estimates such as Richard Dawkins et al. are famous for doing, but they ignore the fact that an accidental process would make trillions upon trillions of useless mutations, or even destructive ones, before finding each of the correct mutations needed to advance biological design.[73] Yes, the useless or destructive mutations could be accomplished at a rapid rate, but not the helpful ones, which are astronomically more rare. When the math is done realistically the accidental pie never makes it out of the oven.
Let’s check the recipe again to be sure. Science has established the standard mutation rate to be 1 mutation per billion nucleotides per year (10-9 per year). Based upon this rate, one would think accidental evolution could span an evolutionary gap of say 500 to several thousand point mutations between each of an estimated 1,000,000,000 historical Earth species very quickly. But when we also consider the success rate of these mutations based upon peer-reviewed research, it requires trillions upon trillions of times the age of the Earth to get the job done.[74] And this is before Professor Behe's problem of synchronizing multiple interdependent changes is even considered—and this is just to produce the parts, not to get them together.
Thanks to D. D. Axe, we now know the biological success rate of mutations, at least for proteins, and proteins are key components of all biological systems. Axe's work reveals that only one mutation out of 1077 could be a biologically viable change capable of supporting novel form development, and not all of those will be the right change for a given species at a given time. Axe’s research makes it startlingly clear: directed (non-accidental) evolution is the only thing that can work. An accidental process is simply a terrible engineer. Having only one mutation out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1077) that doesn’t fail is not nearly enough.
Yes, we have a lot of creatures out there simultaneously being mutated, especially bacteria. But so few of those mutations are biologically viable that when the astronomical error rate of an accidental process is taken into account, it doesn’t help the math all that much. The standard mutation rate of 10-9 doesn’t give us a total number of mutations over the approximately 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence that falls anywhere near the ballpark necessary.[75] The full genomes of billions and billions of bacteria and other creatures multiplied by the mutation rate may seem like a lot of mutations, and it is, but it is not nearly enough. When we add D. D. Axe's research findings we discover that this is not even enough mutations to accidentally produce one biologically viable mutation—not one! Only one truly random or accidental mutation out of 1077 will be biologically viable.
How can this be when Darwin and his contemporaries (and Richard Dawkins and his contemporaries) assure us there is plenty of time for an accident to work in 4.7 billion years? The complexity of a single protein; that's the problem—one of them. An average protein contains 100 amino acid occurrences. For each 20 amino acid occurrences there are potentially 437 properties relevant to determining biological form, and the string of amino acids is folded in upon itself in three dimensions to form an unimaginably complex protein structure that then interacts with others in ways so complex that our best computers cannot keep pace with it. Combining only average proteins with 100 amino acids (remember, they can go to 10,000 amino acid occurrences) then compares to tossing dice with 2,000 faces (roughly 400 relevant properties times 5) raised to the power of 2,000 (all possible combinations of roughly 2,000 form determining properties with each other) raised again to the power of 3 (to cover three dimensions).
D. D. Axe's research reveals that nature has a built-in bias for life because it has reduced the purely accidental possibilities for mixing all of these amino acid features in three dimensions by over 200,000 orders of magnitude. In other words, in a truly accidental random mixing of this many component variables, the odds of getting an ordered system of the kind a biologically viable protein represents would be far greater than what Axe has found is actually the case. Something in the inherent designs of proteins strongly favors life. This is essentially what Dr. Michael Denton has been saying. Denton has recently suggested that a set of Platonic-like forms that define templates for complex protein structures may be inherent in natural law. These preset specifications for the building blocks of life, codified into natural law, drive or at least greatly facilitate the rapid assembly of complex life in a manner that is dramatically nonrandom.[76]
Axe's research might at first glance appear to be way off the scale and out of the ball park. But the complexity data for proteins show us that it is really the naive estimates of Richard Dawkins and company that are out of specs. The honest figures leave us over a billion trillion years short of what is required to get one biologically viable mutation by accident—and trillions of these mutations must be achieved! That’s how complex and sensitive to change the key components of life really are.
Charles Darwin had no idea of this complexity and sensitivity when he developed his theory of accidental evolution. He thought the cell merely contained a bunch of relatively nondescript goo called protoplasm. Darwin explicitly allowed that such data as Axe has presented would refute his theory, but modern neo-Darwinists are stubbornly refusing to face the music. They insist that natural selection can take the accident out of an accidental process by getting “smarter” along the way, thus blatantly contradicting standard probability theory. Standard probability theory tells us that even if fortuitous events allow the incremental construction of a machine that just so happens to improve itself each step of the way in a manner that tends to make viable future design achievements more and more likely (Richard Dawkins' "cumulative selection" concept) there is still a cost in time and resources that must be paid to get such a machine-building-machine into operation by accident.
There is no escaping this cost, as Professor William Dembski says, no “free lunch.” Once we assume natural processes to have been truly accidental from the outset, standard probability theory for random events must be held to apply. Calculations require additional cost for each step along the way. Having such a machine-building machine saves cost in time and resources, but you have to build the machine before you can use it. The probability theory costs accruing from each step in the construction process for that machine shows the accidental theory of evolution to fall far outside the bounds of scientific credibility. Neo-Darwinists, have an answer for that too, of course, but it is not a scientific answer. They say that there is no cost for building nature because nature wasn’t built, it just is; it is eternal; it’s just that way. Nature just so happens to be life-friendly to unthinkable degrees of precision. But that is not a scientific explanation because it is no explanation at all. One can claim such a thing as a philosopher, but not as a scientist. Scientists must seek explanations. Thus, we see that, as the father of the philosophy of science, Sir Karl Popper, once remarked, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is not science at all; it is metaphysical system of materialist philosophy.
The bottom line is that, contrary to what the “easy as pie” theorists would have us believe, even after accounting for the number of simultaneous mutations going on in a large living population, the time requirement for accidental evolution is trillions of times the 4.6 billion years actually available in Earth’s history. Simply put: accidental evolution did not happen.
Even if “nature” always was (although Big Bang theory contradicts that claim too), evolution of life on Earth is not an eternal process; it is time delimited to 4.6 billion years, and that is not a fraction of the time required for an accidental process to stumble upon the tree of life as we now know it to be complexly constructed.
The Cambrian Explosion
Reduces the Time Available
During the Cambrian Period, which began some 530 to 570 million years ago, the vast majority of the animal body plans that have ever existed evolved within only five to ten million years.[77] In other words the bulk of the evolutionary task does not have the full lifespan of the earth (4.45-4.6 billion years) available for its completion. These basic forms gave rise to at least nineteen and as many as thirty-five of the forty different animal phyla we have today.[78] Having practically all the primary animal body forms evolve in only ten million years as opposed to billions dramatically increases the odds against it happening by chance.
Interruptions to Evolutionary Progress
There have been at least seven major disruptive events, ice ages or mass extinctions, that would have cost evolution a significant amount of time. These catastrophes would almost certainly have "vetoed" many of natural selection's choices, removing thousands of previously favored species, at times compelling a near full restart on an entire branch of the tree of life. For example, ninety-six percent of marine animals were lost during an extinction occurring toward the end of the Permian period.[79] Major extinction events have also occurred within the last eighty million years, extending all the way up to the last ice age less than two million years ago. A large portion of evolutionary development was certainly lost in these catastrophes. The lost progress further increases the workload and derivative improbability of an accidental evolutionary process.
Symmetry is a striking characteristic of most biological machine designs. The presence of substantial, even near perfect, symmetry is a hallmark feature of living things. Symmetry is easy to achieve in biomechanical terms because the biological information that directs it need merely be placed at a very early point in the embryonic construction process. The code simply says that whatever is done for the left of the torso segment should also be done for the right, or for the top the same as the bottom, etc.[80] Nonetheless, in my view, symmetry is something randomness is incapable of producing with consistency initially, that is, prior to natural selection's evaluating the symmetrical performance profile on the battlefield of life. Swimming and flying, even walking and crawling, creatures would eventually move to symmetry for efficiency of movement, but they need not have begun that way in an accidental process.
In the early years of life, the first complex biological form innovations out of the chute, as it were, for each level of advancement on the tree of life would in many cases have no direct competition; they would be at the top of the food chain, or in a niche without competition, at least for a while. Thus, selective pressures favoring symmetrical over asymmetrical forms would often not have been present for some time.
Where are the fossils of the failed attempts at asymmetrical design that should be there at the beginning? Granted, they would rarely, if ever, be competitive, but an accidental process, even given natural selection, would not know this at the outset. Natural selection takes time to work, and not every environmental niche has intense competition or scarcity of resources. Given the neo-Darwinian assumption of an accidental process, there should be a substantial record of asymmetry in the fossil record—but it’s not there.
One can say that the solution is simple: UCA, universal common ancestor. The UCA, probably a bacterium, had symmetry so all the others simply inherited it. Sounds good, so it must be true, right? No. It might be true, but there are no links between bacterium and complex creatures in the fossil record. So it may not be true, and there is a certain logic that argues against it: two heads are better than one. The computer I am using now has six “brains,” six co-processor chips. It far outperforms any of my prior machines that used single processors. If symmetry was a universally inherited trait, why did nature deviate on features where it would have been a decided advantage to leave the inherited symmetry in place? Why don’t we have two or four heads, and eyes in the back? One can say, well there is a complexity barrier in interfacing four brains and two sets of eyes into the spinal column, but it is really only cut and paste with a time sharing controller. Our systems already do much more complex things. And if we want to recognize a complexity barrier here, why don’t we recognize it in the creation of the brain itself and in the construction of the tripartite genomic system?
Do not be misled by the occasional examples of a tendency to symmetry in certain simple structures of basic chemistry.[81] The same natural laws that govern chemistry do not constrain random mutations of DNA to a symmetrical result. The ease with which symmetry is achieved becomes a disadvantage for preservation because only a very few nucleotide sequence combinations will preserve symmetry of bodily form, while many millions will radically disrupt it. Thus, although asymmetrical deviations would not be preferred by natural selection, they would not endure for many generations, still they would be recreated almost constantly in an accidental process that was immersed in the myriads of ongoing mutations that neo-Darwinian theory requires.
Symmetry in body form is useful for balance, stability, agility, grasping with counter pressure, efficient swimming, flying etc. Clearly, natural selection would preserve symmetry in these applications, once achieved. But why did an accidental process so unanimously and quickly hit upon symmetry in all the right places throughout all of evolutionary history without first creating imbalanced designs that were temporarily survivable but not optimized? Conversely, why didn't symmetry appear too often, that is, in the wrong places as well as the right? While two heads are better than one, it is also true that too many cooks spoil the broth. Why wouldn't an accident try four feet per leg; it adds balance, though it is awkward and non-elegant. The answer is simple: evolution is visibly a "smart" process. This is the only alternative that explains the evidence.
Beyond symmetry, there is the undeniable presence of art in nature. This has long been an argument for intelligent design. Art in nature perhaps reaches its peak in tropical birds, tropical fish, and flowers, though it can be found almost anywhere: in wondrous microscopic structures, panoramic landscapes and glorious cosmological vistas, and everything in between. The argument for design from these magnificent, living, moving, and growing works of art is simple: we know art when we see it. This remains true despite the fact that an accident could achieve substantial variations of color and pattern much more easily than it could achieve complex mechanisms. On the other hand, the mere presence of simplicity doesn’t disprove intelligent design either. If that’s all it takes to get the job done, why over overcomplicate the design by adding more things that can go wrong?
In most cases the average person can immediately distinguish scribbling and junk design from good human art. Most people would also concede that, the magnificent works of nature frequently “blow away” the bulk of human art, easily outclassing the competition. Though colors and basic patterns do serve practical functions in many species, the larger aspects of art, including overall elegance and beauty achieved only by integrating many thousands of components, are not things relevant to natural selection. Color patterns obviously add functional advantage in brilliant mating displays, camouflage, attraction of pollinating birds and insects to flowers, etc. Selective advantage may, and apparently does, explain some simple aspects of color variation; but it does not explain the overall artistic quality inherent in the much more complex presentations. If nature didn't contain real art, why would bird watching and nature viewing be the world’s most popular hobby? There must be something positive in favor of the cute little multicolored feathery dickenses, beyond carrying lice and crapping all over the patio. And, there is: that something is fine art, and it is glorious. There are even elements of music, dance, aerial and water ballet involved.
Any doubts one may have about the artistic merits of nature are easily dispelled. Simply stop philosophizing for a moment and observe; buy a good pair of binoculars and get out of the house and into the field. Go to the ocean, the mountains, the lakes, and rivers (take precautions against turbulent weather and animal attack, however). Also, look at the video documentaries, books and magazines. Films like Richard Attenborough’s Life on Earth,[82] come to mind, in addition to Science and Nature magazines, National Geographic, and Discovery Channel documentaries. Look at the field guides to the tropical birds and flowers in the nature area of your bookstore, or better yet, go to the high-end pet stores or zoos; see the real thing. (Better yet, stop by the dog pound and save an animal from being killed.)
Total Body Complexity of
Hierarchical Systems
In humans, complex interactions of trillions of cells have to be organized and regulated to ensure the proper function of systems, organs and tissues. The entire body plan of the organism must somehow make all these components work together to provide integrated body-wide functions.[83] The probability of creating the tree of life by accidentally hitting upon hierarchically integrated designs of this complexity that may embed systems within systems to nine or ten levels deep and then waiting years to submit each change for natural selection's opinion vastly exceeds our estimate for protein synthesis alone.[84]
Simultaneous Development
of Complimentary Traits
An additional problem for neo-Darwinian evolution in terms of resource costs and probability hurdles is the improbability of an accident being able to properly synchronize the generation a set of features that must work closely together, features that would individually convey no obvious advantage. The set of characteristics in birds comes to mind: acute long distance vision, wings, a lightweight frame, rapid flight capable reflexes, and feathers. At a minimum these features would have had to appear in the right order. Otherwise they would pose an explicit vulnerability to the organism. For example, moving to such a fragile frame would be a decided disadvantage if the bird could not first get off the ground to escape predators. A non-flying "welter weight" creature would lack the necessary strength and weight to stand and fight, and the fragile frame would not be sufficiently rugged and durable to withstand periodic (otherwise non-lethal) injuries from combat. Agile flight at high speed would be accident prone without improved vision and fast reflexes, etc.
Traditional discussions have dispensed with this objection by citing imaginary routes to evolving a related set of complementary traits.[85] However, while such routes are theoretically possible, they are vastly improbable. Achievement of those complex imaginary routes via accidental processes adds substantial improbability and additional time and physical resource requirements because an accidental process is not likely to manage such a complex transition efficiently on the first attempt. Additional tries are required. These consume more time and resources.
A transition procedure with a complex result that is not sequenced exactly right is going to fail. Partial success is worse than no success at all in such cases because having only one or more features of a complimentary set makes the creature vulnerable and noncompetitive. To avoid quickly losing the prototype organism's new gene line (and the evolutionary progress it carries) to extinction before the rest of the complimentary set of features can be added by accident, a highly improbable path, one much more near to a "perfect" route of transition such as an intelligent designer might devise, must be taken.
The high efficiency, the shear mathematical improbabilities, and the resource economy that we see in the historical record of evolution, despite a seemingly wandering path toward the creation of humanity, suggests intelligent design because an accidental process could not conceivably have achieved such a phenomenal string of successes within the time and resources available in Earth's history. As usual, a little common sense goes a long way. The fact that evolution first wandered about creating a magnificent support system, a beautiful life-sustaining garden full of fellow creatures with which mankind can compassionately share the planet, hardly rebuts intelligent design. It may simply be a matter of preparing our place before we were placed into it. We do as much for the puppies we bring home from the pet store (or the pound). It is, in fact, the same general process described in the book of Genesis in the Holy Bible: the plants and animals were created first, then humans.
Convergence: Achieving
Similar Design by Multiple Independent Routes
Simon Conway Morris, a popular modern evolutionary writer, is Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge University. His book, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, gives a fascinating account of the many and varied cases where evolution uncannily converged on the same design through multiple independent pathways.[86] For example, the camera-type eye common to humans and octopi has evolved separately in at least six different creatures. Other features that have evolved independently in multiple instances include olfaction (smell), hearing, the trachea, myoglobin, anti-freezing mechanisms, photosynthesis, social organization, and quite a few others, almost certainly to include hemoglobin and even intelligence. Morris goes so far as to say that convergence is found practically everywhere in nature.
In convergence extreme similarity cannot be explained by the standard Darwinian mechanism of inheritance because the creatures having the feature in common do not share ancestors on the tree of life. They may or may not turn out to have bacteria or other single-celled organisms as a common ancestor, but bacteria don't possess any of the features in question. This suggests either that the features achieved via convergence were preestablished goals of evolution, or that a master genome containing instructions for these advanced features was already in place with bacteria (or that the equivalent design information for the converged upon features was coded into nature in some other, perhaps more subtle form). In either case, the standard dynamics of neo-Darwinian evolution, accidental mutations assisted only by natural selection, was almost certainly not the process by which these components of life were created.
Intelligent design is strongly implied here, for how does an accidental process manage to generate a hugely complex design proposal again and again in nearly identical fashion without benefit of inheritance or intelligently preestablished goals? At a minimum, a large bias in nature for the repeated design solution is indicated even where there are noticeable variations on the theme.
If instances of convergence are in fact to be found practically everywhere in nature as Morris suggests, the increase in workload and improbability for an accidental evolutionary process to have achieved such a thing is astronomical. Reaccomplishing complex designs in thousands of instances as opposed to reusing a previous design achievement via inheritance would require a substantially increased rate of mutation that is well beyond what science can demonstrate to be occurring.
Convergence does not disprove that inheritance frequently happens, but it does add enormous obstacles to the already lagging credibility of an accidental evolutionary process. It shows that other than accidental dynamics played a substantial part in the creation of life.
Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a noted physicist and applied theologian, author of Genesis and the Big Bang, The Science of God, and The Hidden Face of God, (properly) estimates the probability of convergence at a magnitude well beyond what could be achieved within the lifetime and resources of our universe. That, in itself, rules out chance as the architect of life.[87] If we consider another of Schroeder’s salient points, that life in the form of the first single-celled organism is known to have appeared immediately after the appearance of water on the earth, we see that there was no time for an accidental process to compose life in small gradual steps.
Nongenetic Control Structures and Species Determination
Dr. Jonathan Wells reports that scientists have discovered three- dimensional control structures, a sort of patterned network of plumbing for cell product distribution and cell component assembly, inside of cell membranes: microtubules. Microtubules were mentioned briefly in the introduction. Much like Willy Wanka’s chocolate factory, if you put the right ingredients in at the front, a specific well-defined result comes out the other end. These microtubule systems function as developmental control factors that act independently of DNA. Microtubule arrays occur in animal cell membranes and, particularly relevant to our purpose here, in the cell membrane structures of egg cells.[88]
According to Wells, recent research in developmental biology reveals that DNA does not control species determination in animals, at least not directly: the microtubule arrays in egg cell membranes control species determination. In other words, placing the DNA of species ‘A’ into the egg of species ‘B’ does not change the species from that of the ‘B’ egg to species ‘A’, and the result will not likely survive. This is because the 'B' form structure defined by the microtubules is being supplied with an improper list of proteins, the wrong building materials, from the 'A' species. Scientists have observed varied instances of nongenetic factors of this kind since 1964.[89] Thus, an accidental evolutionary process must closely coordinate physical mutations of microtubule systems in the cell membrane with corresponding DNA mutations.
Epigenetic gene activation markers must also be managed by evolution because they can at times be stable enough to be passed on to the next generation, affecting the biological form assumed by the offspring. A 2003 Wistar Institute study suggests that gene activation itself is much more complex and dynamic than previously thought. Gene activation involves a whole series of preparatory alterations to the histones by adding ubiquitin, and the precise sequence of multiple steps seems to be critical to the result. DNA Methylation and histone methylation must often be coordinated, and factors as elusive as diet can influence the result.[90] Such complications would greatly slow an accidental evolutionary process to await such an unlikely coincidence of the many interrelated factors that must be configured in compatible ways to make the next progressive mutation possible.
Obviously, gene
activation is not just a matter of flipping an on and off switch by making a
unitary chemical change to the DNA molecule. Add the fact that genes are
constantly being turned on and off (typically only one in ten genes is turned
on in a cell at a given time) to the astoundingly complex things the genes do
and you get a system that seems far beyond the reach of accidental
construction.
What’d
Ya Say?
Why do all creatures use the same biological language of DNA? I don’t mean the same 4-letter code as such, but why do they use that code in the same way? As many readers will know by now, there are four letters of the language of DNA: C, G, T, and A. Any given combination of them could be used to stand for different things in the biological architecture. (A triplet of nucleotides specifies which amino acid is to be built.) In other words, different DNA dictionaries might be used that associate different three “letter” strings of nucleotides with different amino acids. They would all work as long as the method was consistent. Why then do all creatures speak the same physiological language when they don’t have to? Why do all use the same dictionary? Darwinists say this phenomenon proves inheritance from a common ancestor, and that is a plausible explanation. Having the same designer is an equally good explanation. Some of both, perhaps, is best.
But what about the accidental question? A truly accidental process would have tended to try other possibilities. Nobel laureate Francis Crick uses this same logic to defend his theory that life came here (on purpose) from outer space, expanding it to include not only the DNA dictionary but the structure of DNA:
Coming full circle
to his groundbreaking discovery of DNA's structure, Crick wondered, if life
began in the great "primeval soup" suggested by the Miller/Urey
experiment, why there wouldn't be a multitude of genetic materials among the
different life forms. Instead, all life on Earth shares the same basic DNA
structure.[91]
Crick’s theory remains an open question; it remains possible that other DNA structures and dictionaries were tried on other planets. However, there is substantial evidence that life arose on Earth.
Obviously creatures using the first system that gets a good start would have a competitive advantage over those using a fledgling new experiment that still has "bugs" in it, at least where competition was present. Increased efficiency gained through years of being polished by natural selection could easily be decisive. But all creatures do not compete with all others. Nor is there competition in all niches at all moments in time. The competitive constraint only applies within competitive groups in competitive niches. But even there the fossil record should show traces of failed attempts to use an alternative system that later proved noncompetitive.
But, hold the phone. Universality of the DNA dictionary is no longer the sure assumption it used to be: a few exceptions have been recently discovered. After decades of Darwinists flaunting the universality of the DNA dictionary as indisputable proof of inheritance, it turns out that the DNA dictionary is not universal after all. Way back when the argument about the universality of DNA was first originated, there were no fossilized DNA records of alternative DNA dictionaries available, and no known instances in creatures currently living. However, the universality argument has now been overcome by events and must be updated.
Professor Geoffrey Zubay, professor of prebiotic chemistry at Columbia University, tells us in his book Origins of Life on the Earth and in the Cosmos, that exceptions to the standard DNA dictionary have been found. What remains to be determined is whether the type and quantity of the exceptions imply anything significant for the evolutionary debate.
The newly discovered variations of the DNA dictionary occur predominantly in very primitive organelles like chloroplasts and mitochondria. They may be the remnants of true alternative systems that never quite got off the ground, or they may result from alterations that occurred after inheritance of the otherwise universal system.
The occurrence of variations of the DNA dictionary exclusively in organelles that were originated at the very beginning of the tree of life is suggestive. The harder question is what does it suggest? My guess would be that it suggests a complexity barrier. In being restricted to only simple systems in very simple creatures, these alternative DNA dictionaries may be evidence that accident can do only very simple things. In other words, the rare variations on the DNA dictionary found in simple life forms could have been, at least in part, accidental, but that was as far as an accident could go—and perhaps accident needed a living system (created by intelligent design) to work from to do even that much. By implication, the existence of such a complexity barrier means that the successful standard DNA dictionary that went on to drive the construction of the larger tree of life was no accident.
Common sense and biological fact both suggest that regardless of how the DNA system was first achieved, once bacteria arrived they would literally eat most of the competition (novel biotic molecules that originated outside of a living organism’s protective immune system). Since bacteria can be transported in the wind and water, there are few places out of reach of their voracious appetites.
The only variations on the DNA dictionary likely to survive would be the ones that were internalized in early bacteria/algae level creatures. Changing the dictionary within a highly complex living creature would seem to be impossible unless the different translation systems could be physically segregated because the probability of conflict would be enormous. The event of a step-by-step evolution of such parallel systems in living creatures would almost certainly make them noncompetitive with creatures having a viable unitary system. Evolution's accidentally tinkering with the DNA dictionary, then, would often be harmful or wasteful of resources. It therefore makes sense that we only find alternative DNA dictionaries in very simple creatures and simple biological applications. Under this logic it becomes unlikely that we will find many more variations of the DNA dictionary than have been found, and those that are found are also likely to be resident in the simple organelles that could have been components of early bacteria and algae. Presently, we know only this much for certain: the DNA dictionary is not, in fact, fully universal.[92]
So, what does all of this have to say on the question of intelligent design? Not much, beyond restricting the reach of an accidental process to the very simple. However, the discussion of the DNA dictionary is also interesting from the perspective of the history of the evolutionary debate. Darwinists used to assert the thesis of inheritance from a common ancestor based upon the huge improbability of a presumed to be accidental evolutionary process achieving multiple independent origins of life. That, according to the Darwinists would be too improbable. (Note the Darwinists’ acceptance of the probability argument here.)
Inheriting a system is easier than creating it all over again. That’s simple enough, so what’s the problem? The problem is that the neo-Darwinist position here contradicts their current argument against intelligent design. The accidental achievement of the entire tree of complex life forms is hundreds of orders of magnitudes more improbable than the event of originating the simplest creatures at the beginning of the tree in multiple independent origins. One can see this at a glance in comparing the genome of a bacterium at about 3 million with that of a human being, which is 3 billion. Although the complexity is only a thousand times greater, achieving it by accident adds exponential increases in improbability with each step due to the rules for computing sequential achievement of events by a random process (standard probability theory). Therefore, if a second event of life’s origination by accident via an alternative DNA system (or an alternative to DNA) is so improbable as to be ruled out, so is an accidental origination of the tree of life as a whole. But modern Darwinists (neo-Darwinists) reject intelligent design theory's probability argument, while having earlier asserted the very same logic to argue for inheritance and against multiple origins.
When evolutionists such as W. Ford Doolittle or Richard Dawkins dismiss the probability argument for intelligent design as of no consequence they are contradicting themselves, the standard practice of science, and the history of the Darwinian position in the evolutionary debate. (See “Stacking the Deck” below.) If probability is good for the goose, it is good for the gander. Once we accept standard probability theory (and science does accept it everywhere else), intelligent design theory is firmly established as the most probable theory of the origination and evolution of life.
No Explanation for the
Origin of the (Sets of) New Genes Required for Macroevolution, the Origin of
Biological Information
The late Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) was one of the best writers and thinkers on their side of the debate, one who candidly admitted that lack of intermediate fossils poses a serious challenge to Darwinian Theory, possibly one of the best writers and thinkers world literature has to offer on any subject. Nonetheless, in What Evolution Is, we find Mayr offering a single unevidenced phrase to address what is the only real point of contention between intelligent design and neo-Darwinist theories: how to originate complex biological information in the first place. “Even though all new genes are produced by mutation…”[93] That’s it. That is the entire neo-Darwinian explanation of the origin of meaningful biological information repositories comparable to whole libraries of books: it happens by "mutation."
Obviously mutations of some kind are involved; something has to make a change to the nucleotides. But why should we presume the process to be accidental. Setting the typeface for a new book, for example, is a form of mutation, changing the content from a prior book's text to the present printing job one character at a time. But when such mutations produce 300-600 coherent and meaningful pages virtually overnight (electronic typesetting) we are not entitled to assume that an accident caused it. The same is true of evolution of 100,000,000 species, the genome of each being the rough equivalent of five full-size books.
Expending the entire 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s existence to do the job only allows 9.2 years per book. Granted, that is a little longer than the average author of mildly technical nonfiction takes, but accident can’t touch it. The tripartite genome is not mildly technical. It is much more complicated than a simple number representing the genome size indicates. Given the extreme complexity already built into protein structures by the laws of nature even before the genome starts building them, the closest analogy we have to that level of complexity would be a rigorous mathematical exposition of theoretical physics, or a detailed textbook on, you guessed it, genetic science. Thus, the 9.2 years is actually close to what an intelligent human would require to produce a book of that complexity, if his or her mind could reach that far at all.
Any forensic investigator stumbling upon such a typesetting change at a printing press, even over centuries, let's say at a museum of the Gutenberg Press that had been closed and later reopened, would be entitled to assume with confidence that someone had been in there and made the change. In everyday life we all know that once certain thresholds of complexity are passed, accident can no longer be our default explanation. Yet neo-Darwinists cling to that default explanation for the evolution of life even though since Darwin the tree of life has turned out to be the most complex thing in our experience by many, many orders of magnitude.
"Surely you exaggerate," you may challenge. "There must be more to the neo-Darwinian explanation than that." Just, “mutations?”
Am I glossing over the true depth of expertise of neo-Darwinian scientists concerning the explanation of the origin of genes and biological information? You be the judge. Here is the entire section of Ernst Mayr’s discussion on the subject excerpted from What Evolution Is.
The Origin of New
Genes
A bacterium has
about 1,000 genes. A human has perhaps 30,000 functional genes. Where did all
these new genes come from? They originate by duplication, with the duplicated
gene inserted in tandem in the genome next to the sister gene. Such a new gene
is called a paralogous gene. At first it will have the same function as its
sister gene. However, it will usually evolve by having its own mutations and in
due time it may acquire functions that differ from those of its sister gene.
The original gene, however, will also evolve, and such direct descendants of
the original gene are called arthologous genes.
Additions to the genome come not only by the duplication of single genes, but sometimes through the duplication of groups of genes, whole chromosomes, and entire chromosome sets. For instance, a special mechanism, involving kinetochores, can lead to a duplication of chromosome sets in certain orders of mammals, leading to highly variable chromosome numbers in these orders. Lateral transfer is another way for addition to the genome.[94]
We need to note several things about this “explanation.” First it doesn’t explain, it merely asserts, and no evidence is given to support the assertion. It doesn’t say how mutations can create a radically different biologically meaningful gene from an original one in real evolutionary time by accident; it simply assumes that it happens. This is the equivalent of saying books are written by accident! It also does not address how to originate the first set of genes at a time when there were none to duplicate. Ultimately, this kind of explanation is guilty of the logical fallacy of equivocation. It confuses the physical mechanism that produces a change with the guiding influences that determine which extraordinarily precise change is produced. The neo-Darwinian explanation is like saying that the fingers of the typesetter for Gutenberg's press were the form determining force behind Shakespeare's Macbeth or Tolstoy's War and Peace instead of the authors’ minds.
Copying an existing book does not equate to authoring one. There is an astronomical difference in difficulty level. The hard part here is simply assumed by Mayr, not explained. Such over-simplified explanations, though transparently deficient, are typical of evolutionists across the board. Neo-Darwinists don’t know how new meaningful genes are created, so they merely tell us how copies of genes are created. They simply assume that an unguided process can write the new book from a copy of the old. Two fallacies: equivocation and begging the question.
To be fair, gene duplication is not totally irrelevant to the hypothesis of accidental evolution. It does add redundancy, and, at least once evolution gets to complex creatures, plenty of it—but it doesn't add new complex biological information. Duplication does not write new books. So, yes, redundancy would help complete the total job of accidental evolution if the larger parts could otherwise be done. But neo-Darwinian evolution has no explanation for the larger and harder part of evolution: the creation of new highly complex biological information.[95]
Two other things should be considered in regards to this weak gene duplication explanation of life. First, complex life has already been achieved before the process of gene duplication comes into existence. Thus, gene duplication cannot be used to explain the origination of complex life, for it is itself dependent upon the preexistence of complex life. Second, this explanation only postpones the problem of integration of a new feature into the complex organism until the next generation; it does not solve the problem of integration any more than it solves the problem of the creation of complex biological information.
Why does the larger system (in complex creatures, at least) not incur many conflicts when the new gene starts operating prior to overall integration with the rest of the system? Remember, this new gene was not intelligently designed according to neo-Darwinist theory; it's an accident. In their theory, it is completely blind to the requirements of the rest of the system. Darwinists don’t say. Yet this is the “fully satisfactory explanation” proposed by acknowledged experts like Ernst Mayr and Richard Dawkins: genes split and mutate, and we need only wait a few million years and it's all done. Walla Booby! Abra cadabra! Presto chango! Accidental evolution proved!
"Not so fast," we should be objecting. Show me the money. What have we actually seen accidental mutations accomplish? The answer: not much. We may have seen a handful of simple degradations of existing genes that can still do something useful, altered genes that are created by removing a segment of DNA already present, or a few very simple changes in bacterial genes, but that’s it. We have never seen the accidental origination of a new gene set sufficient to generate complex functions in a complex organism. Nor can we randomly create or substantially progress a gene or set of genes in the lab to produce an evolutionary advancement.
To see just how little evidence there is for the accidental generation of new beneficial genes, go to the Wikipedia Web site and review the entries for “genetics” and “mutation.” Look for “beneficial mutations.” The sparseness of evidence will amaze you. Ask yourself “Is this enough to explain the entire tree of life?” If that doesn’t convince you, go to a biosciences library and ask for information on beneficial mutations and the origin of new genes, the genetics of evolution, etc. You will be very disappointed, probably frustrated, and perhaps even angry at the politicized exaggeration of the evidence that has gone on now for decades. The evidence for accidental origination of new genes sufficient to explain evolution is simply not out there. For 150 years science has merely assumed that the creation of the tree of life happened by random mutation. They have never demonstrated this assumption, nor have they even substantially evidenced it. All the while massive evidence has accumulated against the possibility of truly random (accidental) mutations producing complex new genes.
Doesn't Richard Dawkins'
Information Theory Solve This Problem?
No. Richard Dawkins merely gives us another dressed-up version of the same, what I would call the “trust me, I’m an expert” explanation. In his “The ‘Information Challenge’ ” article,[96] he confidently informs us that new genes have arisen quite unproblematically from gene duplication and splitting. It’s that simple—easy as pie. This, to him, is obvious because of the branching of the tree of life. It requires new genes, and duplication/splitting is the only process we see nature using to make new genes, therefore splitting must be the answer. We can see that evolution happened—the historical fossil record says so—and multiplication and diversification of genes is necessary for it to happen, so this is the answer. The new genes had to come from somewhere. Therefore, we can be confident that, following duplication and splitting, mutation got the job done.
Other than the fallacy of begging the question of what an accident can really accomplish, what is Dawkins’ logic here? Who knows; his logic is unstated. Dawkins' unstated logic seems to be something like, "We know the theory of accidental evolution is correct, and accidental mutations would have to happen for the theory to be correct, therefore they did happen," or perhaps "We know the mutations must have occurred because the genes have in fact changed, so since evolution is already known to be accidental, the mutations must be accidental too." Either way Dawkins is begging the question because he starts out assuming that accidental evolution is true, then uses that assumption as an axiom to assist in drawing later conclusions. The problem occurs when he invalidly offers those conclusions back again in a circular fashion as proof that accidental evolution is true. This is terrible reasoning. It is unworthy of either science or philosophy. The bottom line is that he has offered no explanation for the nucleotide sequence reconfiguration within the new genes. To accomplish this for the entire tree of life is a task equal in complexity to writing entire libraries of books.
Michael Behe and D. W. Snoke, writing in the journal Protein Science, provide ample reason to dispute this accidental book-writing assumption in their article “Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues.”[97] Once again, the math doesn’t work because proteins are too sensitive to amino acid substitutions.
Obviously the job was done—somehow. But why should we assume with Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists that the production of biologically meaningful genes could occur by accident? Richard Dawkins has an “answer,” but it certainly is not a good one: “Information is being created in massive amounts by genetic mutation every day.” In his article, “The ‘Information Challenge’ ” article, Dawkins defines information in so general a way that it is not necessary for data to be biologically meaningful to qualify as information. Under his definition of general information, mutations do produce a lot of it, but we don’t need general information for evolution; we need biologically meaningful information. Once again: the fallacy of equivocation. This fallacy cannot be overemphasized. Dawkins triumphantly announces the solution to the problem of creating new biologically meaningful “information” while at best only having addressed trivia, or, as would more frequently be the case with accidental mutations, incoherent nonsense, which is less useful than trivia.
Dawkins’ use of the term “information’ is not the sense of biological information central to the evolutionary debate. Dawkins here switches the meaning of an absolutely critical term from its proper connotation. In this case astronomically complex and meaningful genomes billions of nucleotides long (biological information) are falsely equated to binary trivia (Dawkins' information).
For Dawkins, information is simply a yes or no answer to a question, any question. But in evolutionary theory we are looking for the answer to a specific question. By restricting the alternatives that follow on a path of inquiry, or a physical event path, entering a yes or no at a given point reduces the possibilities, yes. Therefore, in some sense, it is “useful” information because it reduces the alternatives, and in so doing drives the process "forward." But this kind of information is only useful to historians in discovering where history chose to turn right or left. For historians forward can be any direction at all. For system architects, builders, and engineers, however, this is not so. Forward has to be a very precisely focused direction and controls must be implemented to make sure the direction does not change until the system is built.
Moving information forward for Dawkins does not mean progress towards a design advancement, but only movement in any direction whatsoever. This includes backwards or in a circle. For purposes of the advancement of the tree of life, however, just any old direction and termination point is not good enough; the path has to be astronomically specific or life won't be the result.
Mere movement in the sense of choosing a path, any path whatsoever, is insufficient to produce life; it has to be the right path, the path to highly complex biologically meaningful genes. Dawkins’ view of information counts any random path whatsoever as equally of use in providing biological information and it just isn’t so. He conveniently forgets to mention that the accomplishment of specific tasks requires the creation of not just any kind of information but information highly specific to that task. We now know that life is so complex that any undirected method of generating the biological information requisite to evolutionary form innovation simply does not arrive at the tree of life within real evolutionary time. The same holds true for any equally complex task: information in the general sense is of no help; it must be task-related information.
In applying such a method as a solution to the problem of the evolution of life Dawkins is merely restating the neo-Darwinian tenet that it was all a big accident. He is not explaining anything; he is merely reasserting, in other words and in an unhelpfully veiled manner, that “Accident can do this.”
Turn left, turn left, turn left, even where evolution needs to turn right…this is all an informed process to Dawkins. Yet it is clearly a futile waste of resources for evolution. It only goes in a circle, as does the neo-Darwinian argument. Such “information” accomplishes nothing useful for biology though it may occasionally work for dumb physical systems like propellers and windmills.
In Dawkins' sense of information, all outcomes that have had 1,000 decision steps are equally "informed." Going in a circle to the left for 1,000 decision steps is as informed a process as the creation of a 1,000 letter essay or poem, or a meaningful gene. Dawkins' trick is a classic case of the fallacy of equivocation. He first introduces his essay as a solution to the evolutionary problem (which turns around very task-specific and meaningful biological information), not the information theory problem. He then proceeds to discuss an entirely different subject: information theory in general. His conclusion, that information is easy as pie, is then presented. But it is the solution to a different problem than he announced himself to be solving at the beginning of his essay—bait and switch. Did he intend to trick his readers? I don't know. He may simply be confused about the nature of task-specific information. But, intentional or not, he did trick the reader.
Gradual changes, information decision points if you will, that just so happen to fall into the right place in the right manner at the right time by accident, are meaningful to biology, if they occur, yes. But Dawkins’ theory of “information” does not require the right decisions, only any decision. His theory of information does not tie the decision points to a specified end product. And, of course, "information" of this kind is easy as pie. Useful biological information, however, is so specified; it is tied to a specific biological function. Otherwise nothing gets done to advance the tree of life in real time. This kind of task-specific information is not easy as pie. Achieving it by accident requires trillions the time and physical resources the universe has to offer.
As the reader is no doubt thinking already, so the key question then becomes one of mathematics: "How often does the right change occur in the right spot at the right time by accident?" This is quite correct. We only recently have found an answer grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research. The research of D. D. Axe on random changes to amino acids and proteins tells us that only one random genetic change out of every 1077 does anything useful for life, yet Dawkins counts all random mutations as successful creation of information that contributes to solving the problem of accidental evolution.
At the end of the day, all that Dawkins has explained is the creation of junk, useless and potentially destructive forms of binary trivia. More correctly put, what he has actually described is, as Stephen Meyer teaches us in his new book, Signature in the Cell, nothing more than raw information carrying capacity. Information capacity is not information content.[98]
Imagine a blank telegram message form with erasable placeholder letters randomly selected and printed on the forms in place of the usual blanks. The nucleotide “letters” that comprise the trillions upon trillions of DNA sequences that must be searched through to find one biologically useful protein are of no more consequence to life than that blank form is to interpersonal communication. It has the potential to carry useful information, yes, but when your three-year-old steps up with a crayon to fill it out, useful information is not what you get on the receiving end of the telegram. A completely accidental process does even worse than the three-year-old.
Another way to see the uselessness of Dawkins-information is to approach the question from the point of view of asking the right question. One can receive trivial and meaningless information in asking directions at a fork in the road, for example, if one does not ask the right question. Let’s say a traveler heading to London encounters options to either London or Lisbon. A “yes” or a “no” to the question of “Take the left fork?” will be useful. But a “yes” or a “no” to the question “Does the option you want contain an ‘L’?” produces no visible effect at all, and the question "Does the option contain an 's' can set the traveler back a great deal in time and resources. Yet answering all of these questions is equally good “information” in Dawkins’s sense of information. Obviously then, Dawkins' sense of information does not solve the problem of how to get the useful biologically meaningful information requisite to evolution in real time.
If the fork in the road is not merely between Lisbon and London, but rather is followed by trillions upon trillions of alternatives, as in evolution, is an unguided series of yes or no answers ever going to bring you to your destination within your lifespan (forget making your appointment)? If we add more realistic conditions representative of an accidental evolutionary process where the traveler must go a long way down the road with each guess only to be vetoed by natural selection and yanked back to the starting point before returning for another try (several thousand decision points or more), after wasting untold resources, does Dawkins’ definition of information really resolve the dilemma of how to achieve the genomes within the realities of the time and resources available on the historical timeline of evolution? No, of course not.
Now, what becomes of the potency of Dawkins’ easy as pie information theory if the further known realities of biology posited by Professor Michael Behe (irreducible complexity) are added to the scenario? Whole sets of 3-10 genes (possibly hundreds), each gene 1-5 thousand nucleotides in length, with complimentary components occurring in close proximity of time in both nongenetic systems and the developmental genome, all requiring closely orchestrated integration into a sensitive living system, must be achieved in near-simultaneous fashion to produce a new biological feature. Here the traveler is required to guess from 3,000 to 50,000 letter occurrences in the correct combinations at each branch in the road before proceeding! In accidental evolution, the traveler would often have to come back and do it all over again, even having guessed "correctly" sufficient to produce the new feature, because the new feature wasn't the right one for that particular creature's current environment or it mismatched the rest of the creature's anatomy. Yes, it achieved a new feature, but the organism was made less efficient and competitive than it was before the change. Is biological information really easy as pie? Not hardly.
In Dawkins’ oversimplified view only one letter need be guessed at any given point, and it needn't be a letter of relevance to any specific goal at all! Dawkins’ theory of information merely says a turn is a turn is a turn. It provides no means of directing your travel. Of course, Dawkins and company feel you can get there by accident quite easily, given four billion years to try. But when the number of turns in the road is 1077 multiplied times itself 20,000 times (the number of human genes), for a total of 101,540,000 possible turns, is 4 billion years enough to stumble out the correct path blindly? Not even close. There is only enough time and physical particles in the history of our universe to complete a total of 10150 decision steps! That’s not enough to bring the expectation of success down into the range of scientific credibility. We can say that such an improbability could, in theory, occur, but we can't affirm the belief that it did occur as a credible scientific hypothesis.
There are three questions central to the debate over accidental evolution/intelligent design: 1) “What is the minimum number of genetic and physical changes that must be posed in conjunction or in a closely orchestrated sequence to generate each of the biologically viable changes in function or structure that match the historical record of evolution?" 2) “Which of these complex sets of alterations is achievable by accident within the time window within which they can be seen to have occurred in the fossil record, if any?” And, 3) "Could accident get the total job done within the time and physical resources available in the history of our universe?" Dawkins’ concept of information simply assumes that the answer to the first question is “one,” that the answer to the second is “all,” and that the answer to the last is "Why not?” For Dawkins, all “information” is created equal. This approach explains nothing, and is merely a restatement of the unsupported neo-Darwinian assumption that an accident can do anything within any time frame.
According to the neo-Darwinists, it could all have just popped out of the hat as one big freak accident on first try—“Good rabbit!" one wonts to say. While there remains the slimmest theoretical possibility that it could have all fallen into place with no mistakes or wrong turns, the probability is so fantastically small as to be virtually impossible. Science would have to abandon its own standards of credibility to affirm such a thing.
We have to remember to ask the right question. Here, the right question is not, “Could it happen in theory,” but “Is it good science to affirm that it did happen?” The answer is “No. Science has to affirm the most probable alternative, and here the competitors are not even close.”
D. D. Axe’s protein synthesis values demonstrate that the ratio of trivia to meaning to be expected from random mutation is 1077 to 1! The improbability of achieving a biologically meaningful result from accidental mutation of 10 genes in sequence as is required to effect a macroevolutionary change is therefore less than one chance in 10770. Simply asserting that yes and no answers are given by random mutations does not prove that the universe has sufficient resources to randomly try the 50% of such an astronomical number of alternatives to make the accidental achievement of an evolutionary advancement scientifically credible under standard probability theory (at least 50% probable). Nor does it establish a known physical process that could explore those alternatives in the complex combinations required with sufficient speed to achieve the tree of life in the time available. Populations must have time to grow and natural selection needs time to offer its fitness pronouncements on each proposed change. Given the complexity of life and the sensitivity of proteins and amino acids to random mutation that has recently been shown, that amount of time is simply not available.
Random drift theorists posit that a few hundred neutral point mutations can accumulate in the right places and add up to a beneficial change over vast amounts of time. While this is certainly possible in theory, the known sensitivities of enzymes to random mutation say that it will rarely happen without first harming the organism. We know that a single nucleotide change is usually sufficient to alter the meaning of a triplet that specifies an amino acid, and we know that three or fewer random amino acid substitutions destroys the viability of a protein.[99] Therefore it is vastly unlikely that accumulations of initially neutral point mutations will survive the cut of natural selection long enough to construct a new advanced biological feature.
Thousands of mutagenesis studies demonstrate that only destructive changes come from accidental point mutations, or that they are neutral and have no effect. Here we have practice confirming theory in favor of intelligent design: both contradict Richard Dawkins facile theory of biological information.
A more realistic analogy is to say that a traveler en route to Genome City will not have any navigable turns available for single letter (single nucleotide) guesses (mutations) at all. If he or she insists on doing it that way, given 101,540,000 possible turns, they will be led off into the countryside, dangerous alleys, or side roads, from which they will never regain their path.
Despite this strong experimental and mathematical case against the capabilities of random mutations, the easy to perceive relationships between some modern genes and those in ancestral organisms makes the whole question of genome evolution an open and shut case for Dawkins. The genes are similar; therefore, they are inherited. New additions were simply achieved by splitting and later diversification via random mutation. Here again, Dawkins simply assumes accident can do this; he does not give evidence for the assumption. However, to the unwary reader, Dawkins’ tone and modality of language certainly suggests that he is giving evidence, that he has proved it. No such proof has been given for the accidental dynamic however, only for the basic fact of inheritance. Basically, Dawkins is saying “Look at all of this ‘information’ that mutations creates! Surely some of it must be right, and natural selection will preserve it when it is.” But a closer look at the real facts of biology and mathematics says quite the opposite.
When all is said and done, Dawkins assumption that accidents can make machines is simply unwarranted. No matter how many times you split a volume of the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, no collection of subsequent typos is going to turn it into Shakespeare in real evolutionary time. And, lest, we forget, in neo-Darwinian theory, the creation of the original volume remains fully unexplained. Did Dawkins, in his “Information Challenge” article give us an explanation of the initial achievement of specific genomes in higher animals? No. He only offers a very abstract and general account of how versions of essentially the same gene (hemoglobin) might have achieved minor variations as it descended among various ancestral lineages. Are these particular examples of small changes biologically meaningful? Yes, but they were preselected for that reason. They are the exception to the rule for achieving change of evolutionary substance and they don’t come near to addressing the question of how to achieve large macroevolutionary change, let alone abiogenesis.
Once again Dawkins has us asking the wrong question, in this case “Aren’t these examples of biologically meaningful mutations?” This is the wrong question to ask. The right questions are: "Are they surprising?” “Are they representative of the complexity of the larger task of evolution?” "Are they macroevolution?" “Can we show they happened by accident?” The answers are "No, no, no, and no." They are relatively trivial achievements (and not shown to accidental) compared to the total task of evolution. Can Dawkins (or anyone else) produce a set of such small changes achievable by accident that will add up to the macroevolutions known to have occurred within the time known to have been available? No, they cannot.
Science might come to demonstrate a few simple microevolutions producible from random mutations—eventually. But microevolutions such as we have seen to hinge on a minimal number of nucleotide substitutions, such as the changes in a finch’s beak size, the body shape of a minnow, and the coloring of a moth, will never combine to make a human being. They are not representative of the complexity and difficulty of the larger task of evolution, yet neo-Darwinists present them as if they were.
Yes, the occasional small accidental change may preserve biological meaning, assuming the number of nucleotide alterations needed are not many and that the effects of the intermediate steps for some reason are not fatally destructive to system performance. However, the neo-Darwinian practice of using limited, rare, atypical and imaginary cases does not constitute scientific evidence for the capabilities of the larger and typical process of accidental evolution. Minor variations of the same gene are not the core issue of macroevolution at all. Many thousands of such changes could occur either by accident or design and there still be no major evolutionary consequence.
The real question is macroevolution: how to originate radically new features never before seen on the tree of life. This requires many absolutely new and radically different genes working in concert. Randomly achieving this greater feat prior to “breaking” the existing design functions of the host creature is not a thesis we are entitled to believe without proof. Given the protein research of D. D. Axe, the irreducible complexity observations of Professor Michael Behe, and the resource exhaustion mathematics of Professor William Dembski, the burden has legitimately shifted to the neo-Darwinists to prove the physical possibility of their theory because the neo-Darwinian theory of accidental evolution can now be demonstrated to be more improbable than any threshold for falsification ever employed in the history of science.
"Surely," you may object, "you are not saying that Richard Dawkins has no inkling of information theory for he is an acknowledged genius." You are correct; I am not saying that. I am saying he has misapplied general information theory to the very different task-specific problem of biological information. He made a mistake. He may be a genius, but he is a human genius, and he may be a bit set in his ways conceptually such that blind spots occur in his reasoning. It happens. He has oversimplified the problem based upon the traditions of his discipline.
Answering a series of yes or no questions concerning the type, quantity, and location of every atom and molecule on one’s plate at dinner, for example, explains the structure of the material, yes, but only in the sense of a description; it does not reveal the chain of causation operating in real time and limited space and physical resources that produced a gourmet meal. It doesn't explain how nature could eliminate an enormous set of physical alternatives that might have happened in that same space and time. The same problem must be overcome to arrive at biological information instead of junk DNA. The set of physical alternatives for each event of a truly accidental nucleotide change is far greater than one might expect. To arrive at a single gene 1,000 nucleotides long there must be information sufficient to defeat odds greater than 4 to the 1,000th power!
Back at the dinner table the question is how could those molecules accidentally appear in a configuration that is (almost always) hot, aromatic, and delicious in time for dinner? Dawkins’ concept of information most assuredly does not answer that question; only the presence of the cook answers it. Do not have dinner with this man unless you call to verify the presence of the cook first!
In light of what we now know, it is no more reasonable to expect large jumps in design evolution by accident, than for a bachelor to postpone sleep and work in anticipation of duck á l’orange magically appearing on his dining room table before bedtime. He must first hire a cook. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, would say “Just tuck in and hold tight, the information to form our meal is readily available from a string of accidents.” My response to that is, "Thank you very much Professor, but I am late for an appointment at Burger King."
So Dawkins has not satisfactorily found a solution to the nagging (and most probably fatal) criticism that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origin of biological information; he is merely talking about information in the abstract without demonstrating any relevance to the task-specific problem of macroevolution.
To this point in our investigation, we have already accumulated four showstoppers to accidental evolution: irreducible complexity, origination of biological information, integration of new genes, and resource exhaustion (see Appendix 2). All of these obstacles push the theory of accidental evolution beyond the probability thresholds that science has established for credibility.
But Don't We Now
Understand the Mechanics of Genome Evolution?
Yes, and no. We understand it somewhat, that is, more than we did. But our understanding is still only very partial despite the fact that there are some excellent texts on the subject of genome evolution out there. The Evolution of the Genome, edited by Dr. T. Ryan Gregory (published in 2005) is a superb example. It portrays many of the concrete mechanics of how the genome might evolve and grow. These mechanics do not argue for an accidental process, however; they are still substantially incomplete; and they are largely hypothetical, that is, unconfirmed as regards their evolutionary output.
The questions of how it could all be done within the available time and physical resources of the universe, the need for a directional dynamic to overcome mathematical odds, the much tighter budget crisis of limited time in the Cambrian explosion, these issues are not addressed by our current texts on genome evolution at all. What our current textbooks on genome evolution show us are only some of the basics of the physical mechanics of how the genome transforms itself. No explanation is given as to how we got to a self-transformational and transpositional genome in the first place. Enormous specificities, complexities, and improbabilities are involved, and these remain fully unaddressed. And, lest we forget, the transformational genome is itself a machine. To say that evolution was produced by a machine is to say that it is non-random/non-accidental.
Gregory comments, without supporting argument, that the fact that the transpositional systems of the genome are nonrandom does not obligate us to infer intelligent design, but he presents no case in support of that position. While this is less than helpful for a resolution of our topic, Gregory is in no way obligated to do our work for us. Having said that, and despite the unquestionable value of his book and the visible innocence of his statement, it remains possible that some readers may be importantly misled. How so?
One of the points intelligent design theorists like William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have been trying to bring to the public awareness is that science has yet to formally establish a means, that is, an objective criterion, to use to answer the question of when the conclusion of intelligent design (called the “design inference”) is warranted. Other than William Dembski’s recent proposals, which have not been adopted by mainstream science as the standard, there is no criterion for ID. There is therefore no previous application of an intelligent design inference criterion that Gregory could have been referencing to form his position. So what is his opinion that we need not infer intelligent design from the transpositional genome based upon? We don’t know because he doesn’t say. Because there is no default position for science to assume on the question of the intelligent design threshold Gregory really does need an argument to justify his statement.
Professor Dembski has gone to great lengths to propose some preliminary models of what such a criterion would be, but until these models are confirmed, refined, and incorporated into mainstream science, science in fact has no criterion to use. Until science does establish a design inference criterion, statements regarding the presence or absence of an obligation to make a design inference, such as Gregory innocently offers, may mislead readers. They will naturally but incorrectly assume that science has a criterion by which the question can be resolved, and that the author has consulted that criterion in forming his position. The naked truth is much to the contrary, however. Outside of Dembski, Behe, and Meyer, there is presently no basis upon which to evaluate claims for or against intelligent design, and those authors are all in favor of ID.
Don’t get me wrong. Gregory’s book clearly adds to our understanding of genome growth. It contains a wealth of the latest research and readers will benefit a great deal from his work. But readers should understand that Gregory’s failure to commit to ID is not sufficient justification to casually dismiss the intelligent design hypothesis. There is too much that argues for it, and he presents no supporting argument whatsoever.
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. Research into the transpositional/transformational genome is still preliminary and incomplete. The larger part of the workings of the genomes regarding evolution remains mysterious. However, it does appear that the transpositional/self-transformational genome, itself a nonrandom complex biological machine, has somehow managed to accomplish the bulk of the work of evolution over the millennia.
Quickly drawing unsupported conclusions about whether or not intelligent design might be established in such an event is visibly premature. Perhaps this is all Gregory is saying, that regardless of how suggestive the evidence may be, we needn’t draw conclusions either way concerning the intelligent design hypothesis at this point. I concur in that much regarding the transpositional genome (until the rest of the evidence for ID is added, that is), but what Gregory doesn’t say is that a model attributing much of evolution to the transpositional genome contradicts the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution because mutations generated by a biological machine cannot be considered random. One might forgive Gregory this omission because he is not writing an evolutionary text per se, but he did take the trouble to address one of the competing theories as not being fully entailed by the evidence, while omitting to say that the other is refuted by the same evidence.
Professor Maxim D. Frank-Kamenetskii (Boston University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering) has acknowledged the lack of a current scientific explanation for the origination of new genes. To remedy this lack, he has proposed a new hypothesis for novel gene formation. He speculates that a process similar to our immune system antibody construction mechanism may have assisted evolution in the past, generating new DNA sequences at a hyper-mutation rate similar to what the human immune system does when finding an antibody match to the protein coat of new pathogenic antigens that invade the body.[100] Given an identifying signature for an invader in its protein coat, immune cells can then hunt and destroy them.
However, Frank-Kamenetskii does not explain how this new information finds its way back from the somatic (non-reproductive) cells of the immune system into the reproductive cells, the germ line, of the host genome where it must be to do evolution any good. This is the same problem that defeated the Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Unless the acquired change can be passed on to a creature’s progeny, it does evolution no good to generate the change. Frank-Kamenetskii’s hyper-mutation is similarly restricted to the somatic cells of the immune system. Until research can demonstrate a plausible route from the immune system into the reproductive cells, Frank-Kamenetskii’s hypothesis lends no credence to the accidental theory of evolution. But even if such a path could be demonstrated, it is still a situation of a very complex biological machine performing hypermutation within the constraints of a living creature, another biological machine. There is nothing random about the larger process; it is a case of a random generator whose output is nonrandomly harnessed by the machine that contains it.
But if the evolutionary process is as capable as neo-Darwinists say it is, it would have found a way to reroute new dramatically useful advancements generated by the immune system into the genome—but it hasn’t! In other words, if natural selection can detect all of the relatively mediocre advancements that have been built into life, why did it miss the extraordinary bonanza entailed by a redirect from the immune system to the reproductive cells? Such a system promises fast and broad-reaching real-time evolutions that would be invaluable in negating new threats in the environment. Far from making accidental evolution more plausible, Frank-Kamenetskii’s revelation of the immensely useful potential in the immune system antibody production routine really argues the opposite. It argues that large rapid genetic transfers affecting complex functions cannot be successfully integrated into living organisms in real evolutionary time by a random process. If this were possible, neo-Darwinian theory says that nature would have found a way to reap such a great advantage, randomly exploring all possibilities, and then preserving the good ones by natural selection.
Here we have an astoundingly rapid genetic information producing mechanism already present in our bodies, yet it has only been used to match the most primitive and earliest genes on the tree of life, the genes of bacteria. It is only used for simple applications. Why? Why not use it to generate amazing advances in complex systems? The reason must be the complexity barrier/integration problem. Otherwise natural selection would favor nothing so strongly as a rapid means of evolving solutions to critical threats in the environment.
One might say, well we (humans) have survived as a species, so we apparently didn’t need rapid gene substitution after all. But we are only entitled to say that we have survived so far, and we are certainly not entitled to say we have survived on the basis of accidental inputs alone.
And what about the thousands of other creatures that haven’t survived extinction? Why didn’t they inherit such an astounding advantage that was technically available via only a moderately difficult recombining of features already present in their ancestors? It almost certainly would have saved them. They cannot benefit from the "Well, we're still here aren't we?" argument because they are extinct. The obvious answer is that rapid gene substitution doesn’t work in complex systems
With such a system as Frank-Kamenetskii proposes, all the sequence changes for a beneficial new gene could be rapidly produced; the problem therefore doesn't lie in production. In fact our immune systems have almost certainly produced many useful new genetic sequences, only to cavalierly toss them away again. The human body has the basic genetic machinery that could, with not too substantial a modification, reroute the gene sequences produced by the immune system into the DNA of a reproductive cell: move the spleen down to the gonads; run some bone marrow (where immune cells are produced) to a dead end at the reproductive organs; use symbiotic bacterial transfers between the somatic immune cells and gametes, etc. The somatic-germline transfer problem could have been readily solved, so why don’t we have such a system?
There is clearly a problem with the neo-Darwinist accidental mutation/natural selection model? Why couldn't it get this job done? The problem is that their model, following Charles Darwin's long-antiquated 1860's-level biological science, assumes that life is very simple. We now know that life is ultra-complex. Systems using Frank-Kamenetskii’s hyper-mutation system would fail after the new information was produced and installed because so many other complex changes would have to be accomplished at the same time. It would encounter the complexity barrier/gene integration problem. Minus a plethora of additional closely-orchestrated changes, serious disruptions would occur to important biological functions. Integration is the problem here, and it is a problem because there is a complexity barrier that accident cannot cross in real time.
Once again, Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis rears its theoretically formidable head. Living machines, at least most of them, have passed certain threshold levels of complexity; they are too complex to tolerate accidental tinkering, and rapid tinkering is worse than slow tinkering.
The Oxford Journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution, has recently published the first study analyzing the mechanisms for, and the speed of, integration of lateral gene transfers. Researchers Martin J. Lercher and Casaba Pal report in a 2008 article, “Integration of Horizontally Transferred Genes into Regulatory Interaction Networks Takes Many Million Years,” that the process of integration is not simple; it must take place in incremental steps over vast amounts of time. This reveals that rapid generation of new sequences is not a time saving solution for evolution because integration cannot keep up. Yet, Richard Dawkins and company continue to assure us that it is all as easy as pie: “Just tuck in and hold tight; supper’s on the way.” This reflects a Charles Darwin era oversimplified view of life where transformations of biological systems were thought to derive from spontaneous mutations in a nondescript goo called protoplasm, something like a lava lamp. We now know it’s not that easy.
The integration/complexity barrier negates the entire gamut of potential time-saving devices that accidental evolution needs to overcome the limitations of the basic mutation rate. Large genetic transfers, frequent symbiotic mergers, large scale acquisition of foreign genomes, etc. These kinds of large random genetic transfers cannot (typically) be integrated any better than a redirection of the output from Frank-Kamenetskii’s immune antibody genetic sequence generator. True, some of these mechanisms may occasionally work in simple creatures where a compatible pre-integrated subsystem is merged in its entirety or in the rare case where the results are not harmful prior to long-term integration, but such exceptions are too infrequent to solve the time problem and limited to relatively simple creatures.
Thus, we are left to face the music: the basic mutation rate is far too slow to support the historical record of the advancement of the tree of life by an accidental mutation dynamic. As a matter of fact, science already knows that the truly random component of that rate has historically been only a negligible fraction of the total. Truly random mutations such as point mutations caused by injuries or toxic substances have already been discredited as a substantive source for evolutionary change. We have long known that true accident is not the engine that drives evolution.
Lateral
Transfers and Acquisition of Genomes
Our ideological opponents, the neo-Darwinists, have long suggested that errors in the transcription and repair of DNA combined with other randomly effected DNA transfer mechanisms could cause the cutting and pasting of very large segments of foreign DNA, to include whole genes or sets of them, thus solving the time problem. This might be accomplished in either one or several transactions, combining progress from the genetic lines of many individual creatures into one through a series of diploid reproductions, bacteria plasmid transfers, conjugations, phage transductions, or small segment acquisitions (transformations), plus symbiotic mergers, etc. And, yes, if it could all happen in the right places, in the right sequence, in the right manner, at the right frequency such that the vast time required for normal integration was skipped, it would, in theory, solve the time problem. But the neo-Darwinists are working entirely in their imagination. The research of D. D. Axe and the irreducible complexity observations of Professor Michael Behe tell us it will never happen in the real world.
But even if it could happen the time problem would be solved only in part. To generate the entire tree of life as opposed to just repeating transmutations randomly combining features already present, the information transferred would, periodically, have to be fully new to the tree of life. For this to occur, there would first have to be not just accidental transfers but an origination event where biologically meaningful information is created for the first time. For each of the thousands of origination events evolution requires, hundreds or even thousands of DNA segment transfers would have to all be consistently focused in the same direction over short periods of time, focused in the direction of the new change in form or function. This is something an accident cannot do to the standards of scientific credibility. The time required for random integration of new genes forbids it, as do Professor William Dembski’s resource exhaustion calculations for the production of the complexities of life by accident. The universe would run out of time and physical particles before an accident would get the job done.
Even if all the integration work from a given DNA donor came along with the transfers, it would be integration for the wrong creature. It wouldn’t approximate the integration needed by the recipient unless the donor and recipient were already close relatives on the evolutionary tree. In that case little that is new is being accomplished. In any case, recent research tells us that transfer phenomena are too limited in scope and frequency in their actual occurrence to have accomplished the enormous total workload of evolution. Current data indicate that gene transfers account for no more than 2% of bacterial genomes.[101] Because of complexity barriers, they are probably far less frequent among vertebrates.
The probabilities derivable from biological design complexity tell us that only nonrandom integration of large genetic transfers within the more complex areas of an organism’s design could ever succeed in real evolutionary time. There is no known method of guiding a physical process to such complexly specified results that does not involve both intelligent planning and intelligently constructed physical control systems to guide implementation. Because it takes 8-22 million years to integrate accidental lateral single-gene transfers into genomic regulatory networks,[102] lateral transfers cannot be the time-saving device accidental evolution needs. Remember, the Cambrian explosion generated most of the animal body types in only 5-10 million years. Obviously, if lateral gene transfers take 8-22 million years to achieve integration, some other type of biomechanical change dynamic was driving the Cambrian explosion.
Two important discoveries have come out of recent statistical studies of bacterial genomes. First of all, even in bacteria, which are extremely simple creatures, the operational genes that produce a simple product such as a single enzyme having primarily external effects seem to have no difficulty being transferred, but the informational genes that govern the more complex and internal functions of genome management are not being transferred.[103] Thus, a complexity barrier of some kind seems to be indicated. Apparently, only the simpler types of transfers can succeed. Next, analysis of genomes reveals that relatively few gene transfers have occurred between bacteria and vertebrates.[104] Thus, bacteria have not served as rapid gene production factories that fueled all of evolution as neo-Darwinists frequently hypothesize.
There is one known event where lateral transfers have apparently been key to the success of a major evolutionary jump. That event is not known to have been accidental, however. A huge spate of lateral transfers apparently occurred during the mysterious evolutionary leap from simple prokaryotic creatures such as bacteria to the more advanced eukaryotic cell lines that eventually went on to somehow produce all of complex life. “Analyses of complete genomes indicate that a massive prokaryotic gene transfer (or multiple transfers) preceded the formation of the first eukaryotic cell.”[105] So, while it is true that lateral transfers have not been useless to evolution, at those points where it is most clear that they must have happened it also seems clear that they could not have been accidental. This conclusion is based upon the large negative probabilities involved in accomplishing so much complex design advancement so quickly by accident. Contrary to what neo-Darwinian evolutionists would like us to believe, lateral gene transfers are not a magic wand that allows an accident to make a sophisticated machine in real time.
Symbiotic genome mergers are also a genuine contributing factor to evolution. As Professor Lynn Margulis explains in Acquiring Genomes, the merging of the genomes of symbiotic host and parasite remains more than an open question; it is a most likely hypothesis. But the process of symbiotic genome merger is neither fully understood nor demonstrably random. Margulis herself vigorously disavows the traditional neo-Darwinian line that asserts accidental mutations as the primary source of evolutionary form change.[106]
Successful transplantation of a gene requires that the affected subsystem of the recipient must be compatible with the new gene in key areas, and that the rest of the organism is able to absorb the new function without conflict. The success of a chimerical gene transfer therefore implies that the task of integration of that type of gene in that kind of creature has already been done by evolution. Our chimera scientists are not discovering what an accident can do; they are discovering instances of what evolution has already done. They are discovering ready-made opportunities for transfer, as opposed to demonstrating that genes can be randomly bandied about recklessly just anywhere at all across species with no problems.
Our very limited success with chimeras does not contradict the principles that accidents foul things up, and that bigger accidents cause bigger problems. (It is not, in fact, clear that what has been done so far constitutes a success from the evolutionary perspective at all.) This limitation is confirmed in what we have seen in genetic science to date in chimerical operations and in horizontal gene transfer, as well as in mutation studies generally. Speculations to the contrary abound in fiction and in the abstract discussions of popular books on evolution, but observations to the contrary are unheard of in the laboratory. Thus, the position of intelligent design theory that truly accidental gene transfers cannot consistently produce radical form change in a rapid manner, though they might occasionally get lucky, is not refuted by either spontaneous lateral gene transfers in nature or chimerical gene implants in the laboratory.
Bacteria may seem to be the exception to this rule, but bacteria are extremely simple designs. Bacterial genes seem to have unique characteristics that make plug-and-play gene transfers across different species of bacteria occasionally possible. It is likely that the requisite pre-integration to horizontal gene transfer is found more often in bacteria simply because it is easier to accomplish in simpler organisms. And, believe it or not, even the bacterium that receives the gene for insulin has a lot of integration work already done in regards to accepting similar genes. The most well-known and perhaps most common function for bacterial genes is to do precisely that: produce a single enzyme or protein on demand that is routed to the exterior of the organism for defense or that requires no complicated interface with the rest of the organism. Bacterial gene transfers do not constitute evidence against complexity barriers in evolution so much as evidence for those barriers.
Nothing radically new is going to come out of the bacterial gene transfer process for the purpose of evolution of complex animals, and complex creatures simply do not have the ability to do this kind of gene transfer in most areas of their physiology. In complex creatures, unless it is a simple change routed to the exterior of the organism like a color or size change, or a change that otherwise bypasses the complex interrelated functions of critical systems, like the production of a new immune system antibody, quick and easy horizontal gene transfers simply can't be done.
We can place a human gene to produce insulin into bacteria and they will mass produce this very valuable medical substance for us, yes. But this is an ultra-simple function compared to the complex interrelated systems that would have to be generated to produce, say, mammals from reptiles. To put the genes for the wings from a chicken (not a bat) into a rat (and have the wings work), extensive integration work is required. It is reasonable to conclude that, if we can’t do this on purpose with simple direct chimerical gene transplants after much study by our most expert scientists, nature can’t do it by accident. Once again the prevailing rules of accidental biological change are confirmed: simple biological form changes can be, rarely, done by accident; complex changes cannot be done by accident in real time with a statistical frequency of any significance to evolution.
What about gene therapy, then, you may want to ask? Gene therapy treatment of genetic illnesses does not represent a situation where a more primitive design is being advanced. Rather, in gene therapy an individual who deviates from the original design of the species in having a malformation or pathology is, at best, returned to the original design of the species. New genes are not introduced; new designs are not created; and the integration work is already done.
Darwin was right about one thing: If random evolution can work, it must work through slight gradual modifications. Anything else translates to a large wrench in a delicate machine. Modern evolutionists also affirm this basic principle. In 1977 G. L. Stebbins, writing with Theodosius Dobzhansky and others in the seminal tome, Evolution, acknowledged that “…mutations having conspicuous effects on the phenotype usually reduce fitness and tend to be rejected by natural selection.”
What modern research has revealed is that large and varied sets of modifications have to occur in close coordination across substantial sections of the genome to integrate a functional design change in a complex creature. So we encounter a “Catch 22,” type dilemma for accidental evolution. Large random gene transfers cause damage that disables or degrades the cell line, causing natural selection to deem the mutated cell line noncompetitive, but large genetic modifications are the only things that will work to produce macroevolution. We must conclude from this that the sets of mutations that did in fact produce macroevolution were not accidental.
Having lost the shortcut of large and rapid accidental gene transfers, the magnitude of improbability and amount of time required for the accidental evolutionary model is not reduced below that applicable to what one might call the single, linear, incremental nucleotide change model (LINC). For computational purposes, then, it is legitimate to assume that the neo-Darwinian process has to do evolutionary advancement the slow way (if it does it at all). It has to individually configure each nucleotide of the non-“junk” portion of the 3,000,000,000 base pairs of the human genome over time to move from amoeba to man. The junk portion is currently thought to be about half the genome, though the percentage of “junk” is steadily declining with research. By the time you read this the figure will certainly be much lower.
Given the standard mutation rate of 1% every 10 million years, it can be shown that there is not enough time for the LINC model to work. Starting with a 3,000,000 bp genome of a typical primitive organism, and giving evolution all of the Earth’s approximately 4.6 billion years to work (these are liberal assumptions regardless of whether one assumes the first simple bacterium was formed on Earth or came from space), the math says it can’t be done by accident. Further assuming that no more than one out of a thousand mutations will be “beneficial,” that is, will advance a cell line’s evolution (this is also exorbitantly generous, for accidental processes are trillions of times less efficient in changing living biology), the standard mutation rate only advances that initial 3,000,000 bp bacterial genome to well under 3,200,000 (only a fraction of that required) by the time homo sapiens appears with its genome of 3,000,000,000. And don’t forget the Cambrian explosion, where much of the work of evolution was done in only 5-10 million years. Once again Charles Darwin comes up a day late and a dollar short.
The neo-Darwinists have no counter to this mathematical argument—none. So what have they done? They have ignored the math. To neo-Darwinists, math is not relevant to the evaluation of the accidental thesis of evolution. It is, of course, supremely relevant when they go to roll out their vaunted population studies. Now math is relevant, now it isn’t. Go figure.
Even should neo-Darwinists find some spontaneous phenomenon in nature that could plausibly converge many more mutations on a single gene line in a brief span of time and produce the necessary periodic aberration to the standard mutation rate, with an accidental theory there is no way to produce the requisite focus and direction of those mutations necessary to advance so far so fast while avoiding catastrophic damage to the organism.
The bottom line here is that no process can generate large amounts of useful biological information in real evolutionary time without stepping outside the mathematical boundaries of the random and into a strong bias towards functional design. Such a bias is not compatible with an accidental theory. Yes, in one’s wildest imaginings one can say that such an anomaly could happen by accident. But because the probabilities are so astronomically remote, it will never be scientific to affirm that it did happen by accident.
Our conclusion: the word “accidental” must be removed from science’s description of the evolutionary process. One cannot affirm the astronomically improbable and still be scientific. A materialist philosopher can befriend the theory of accidental evolution and still be a philosopher (though they can’t rationally defend it), but a scientist cannot affirm the theory of accidental evolution and remain within the realm of the scientific.
Can
Mythical Chimeras Come to Life? (Aloe Dolly!)
But, one might object, what about recent chimerical gene transplants? One would think that our occasional success in transplanting genes, organs, cells, and tissues from one species into another suggests that accidental evolution is not so ineffective after all. The response to that is that, first of all, the process laboratories use to install and integrate chimerical gene, cell, and organ transfers is not accidental. Human doctors and scientists are the intelligent designers in those cases. They keep the process under very precise control—and they have the entire finished tree of life to work with for crying out loud! They can pick and choose from tens of thousands of species, ranging across the entire spectrum of these creatures’ anatomy and biochemistry in order to select a very few transfers that might turn out successful.
Where chimerical gene transplants do work, it is clear that either the functions involved are very simple or that evolution has already done the integration work in advance. What our experience with chimerical transfers more truly suggests is that intelligent design is what is needed to make viable biological form changes of any substance.
There are “known” limits to such chimerical experiments in the sense that the limits are visible in the results: where transfers have succeeded and where they have failed. We may have even seen some of those limits in the “aliens” of Roswell and the Chupacabras of Latin America, Mexico, and Texas.[107] I assert this as a matter of common sense, though mainstream scientists will probably say we don’t yet know where those limits are. They are right to be cautious and preserve scientific method here, and there is a lot of very big money potentially riding on some of this research, so they won’t want to shoot themselves in the foot with premature comments—but I think we can already see the writing on the wall.
Yes, it is true that scientists have successfully transplanted genes from one creature into another, achieving some simple mixing of characteristics between species.[108] They have not thereby created new body forms, however. They have only added a feature or two to an existing body plan without radically changing the plan or imparting any major new functions, at least not functions for which the integration was not already present in the recipient’s system. Such plug and play opportunities are the exception, not the rule for gene transfers. They require evolution; they do not produce it. The larger picture of chimerical gene transfers suggests that the inter-phyla barrier to random genetic change is a real barrier that cannot be breached by a mere chain of accidents.
The chimera discussion raises another important question, one about evolution generally: Why didn’t evolution find some of the more radical chimerical variations that would have been dramatically beneficial? Like what? How about Aloe vera cactus leaves on a sheep? “Ha! Ha!” you may laugh, and ask, “Would that benefit all the sheep, or only those with dry skin?” I admit that it sounds funny, but it would benefit all the sheep by keeping their primary predator, wolves, from eating them. The long, thick, and sturdy Aloe vera leaves have strong cactus needles along two edges which, though possibly tasty, would be immensely painful to eat.
“Oh, come on now,” you may want to object, “could a plant-animal hybrid be possible?” Well, I personally doubt that it is, but the neo-Darwinists must think so; they have explained greater mysteries this way: “It’s merely a matter of randomly mixing the genetics, you know.” For the sake of argument, let’s explore the possibility under the neo-Darwinist assumption that major gene transfers are as easy as pie. On the surface, the problem is an easy one for evolution to solve. A second external layer of skin could contain the plant system, water could be routed to that layer from internal supplies without much trouble and the animal could have a scooped nose and flexible neck to give itself daily dust baths to keep the plant in mineral nutrients. What could be simpler? It’s just “Swamp Thing,” nothing harder than that. So, if it is all as easy as pie, why didn’t evolution discover this method to protect sheep?
Darwinists will say that it is precisely because the process of evolution is accidental that this didn’t happen. In other words, evolution was very fortunate just to stumble upon those beneficial combinations that it did find, and then natural selection preserved them. Accidental evolution, they reasonably say, is far from being 100% thorough, taking a haphazard hit and miss kind of a course, producing some beneficial results while certainly not exhausting all the possibilities. Sounds good so it must be true, right? No. It sounds good only so long as we don’t foul up our imagination with any inconvenient mathematical facts. In this case it is the math that is the problem again. Any random biological search routine thorough enough to achieve improbabilities so vast as we here demonstrate as applicable to the origin and evolution of complex life (the human brain, the tripartite genetic system, etc.) would have had to have been so potent as to literally exhaust the alternatives. Why? Two reasons: First, the probabilities for exhausting the alternatives are precious little different from those of doing what evolution has in fact done, and, second, an accidental process will always tend to move through the simpler achievements before hitting upon the complex ones. It is hard to conceive of a physical system more complex than the human brain and the tripartite genetic system.
If an undirected search routine could develop an eye, a brain, a genetic system, from scratch it could arrange to patch simple plant extremities onto the exterior of an animal that spends its time immersed in the sun grazing near the earth where tossing minerals or rolling for a dust bath is, in fact, as easy as pie. A random search routine that must run so long and reach so far and wide among the possibilities as to achieve the ultra-complex mechanisms of life, should almost always find such easy variations as well. By way of contrast, a nonrandom or directed search such as intelligent design theory proposes need not have done the simple things first at all. It may have chosen to, but need not have. Intelligently designed systems may also intentionally employ random search for parts of the construction process and/or parts of system functions, but randomness won’t be central to the top level process dynamic of either.
During the first (and primary) evolutionary synthesis of
the fifties just prior to the discovery of the double stranded DNA molecule in 1959
scientists modified
Why does current mainstream science continue to deny biological reality and push an overly simplistic theory onto the public? Politics of course: personal preferences for political philosophies, specifically Communist/Socialist Materialism. Here, in a 1941 Time magazine article reviewing Columbia University Assistant Professor of History Jacques Martin Barzun’s book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner, you see that the godless accidental worldview was in fact built into neo-Darwinian theory. To be clear, Charles Darwin did not do this; his successors did.
Darwin's
discovery was "evolution by natural selection from accidental
variations." The dynamite, says Author Barzun, was in the phrase
"from accidental variations." Reason: it denied the role of God in
the universe, ruled out a purpose in existence, made men mere puppets of
mechanical forces.[109]
Darwin, himself, allowed that God did have a role in the universe: starting it off and instilling the initial breath of life. He could detect no further guidance being exerted on the processes of nature from that point forward, however. To merely deny that God micromanages the processes of nature does not conflict with the existence of free will in humanity. We may well be less puppets for having an infinitely powerful God that chooses to largely butt out of our affairs, rather than be an overwhelmingly controlling influence.
Also, to say that God does not micromanage the course of nature means neither that he cannot predict or control its course indirectly, for example, in the sense of a bowler releasing a bowling ball. He or she doesn’t micromanage the course of the ball; but having once set it on its way in an informed and skillful fashion, the bowler can still be confident in the result. How much more so could God, being fully informed and all-powerful, set nature on its course and instill the breath of life in such a fashion as to insure the result while still not negating a meaningful purpose for human life. Bowl on dude!
All of these false conclusions go well beyond Darwin’s own position. They are simply political spin in favor of socialistic materialism, having no foundation in either scientific fact or philosophical logic.
Darwin’s thesis about accidental transformations was merely a theory, of course. It was not a “discovery” at all, but rather a proposed hypothetical explanation. Neither Darwin nor any scientist who came after him knew or could prove that accidental changes or a series of single point mutations could produce major life form evolution. They had not seen it; they could not demonstrate it; they merely assumed it. They felt confident in that assumption because, under the simplistic protoplasm-era biology of the day, it seemed very explanatory given what little they could see on the macroscopic level minus the aid of modern genetic science and microbiology. The whole enterprise was vastly premature, considering that they could not yet see inside the cell. Nonetheless, many of the scientists, writers and commentators of the fifties and sixties onward have continued to throw the entire weight and confidence of science behind this unevidenced and outrageously implausible 1860-vintage assumption of an accidental process having produced the biological evolution of complex life.
During the heyday of the new evolutionary synthesis (1950-1960s) our knowledge of the genome was only the merest fraction of what we now have, and the view of the genome quite simplistic. More recently, the design of living systems has turned out to be vastly more complex than anyone ever imagined. What we have since discovered is that truly accidental mutations cannot generate complex life form evolution because they fail to preserve the (frequently) irreducibly complex mechanical integrity of the organism and there is not enough time and physical resources available for an accident to throw such a complex system together.
One need merely note the enormous improbability figures arrived at by famous mathematical physicist Roger Penrose for the odds against our life-hospitable universe being produced, 10 raised to the power of 10123, to see that the assumption that accident could achieve it within the time and physical resources available in the history of our universe is beyond the threshold of scientific credibility. For the nonmathematician (like myself), the difference between 10123 and 10 raised to the power of 10123 is that 10123 is 1 followed by 123 zeroes, whereas 10 raised to the power of 10123 is 1 followed by enough zeroes to fill trillions upon trillions of books. Science has never affirmed and cannot rationally affirm anything so vastly improbable. From the moment these figures became known to science along with modern data from genetic science and microbiology an accidental origin of our universe and the life forms within was ruled out as a scientifically credible hypothesis.
In the mid twentieth century, when neo-Darwinism came into vogue, positing randomness in the strong, truly accidental, sense as the source of variation seemed to offer a powerful explanation because we had not as yet observed its destructive effects in practice through gene mutation studies. And, again, we mistakenly thought life was relatively simple. Thousands of mutagenesis experiments later the accidental hypothesis has turned out to be a problem because, in the experimental lab, random mutations have proved themselves, with only the rarest and insignificant exceptions, exclusively destructive or neutral.[110] “Undoubtedly many mutations are neutral or nearly so, having very slight effects on fitness…However, many do affect fitness, and their average, or net, effect is deleterious.”[111]
Professor Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution, points out that the designs of living systems involve so many critical interrelationships that many changes must be made at the same time for the system to advance. What this means is that, contrary to the undemonstrated beliefs of random drift theorists, small changes that do not have conspicuous effects are not comprehensive enough to accomplish any progressive evolutionary change; they can only produce an occasional triviality: color change or something fully irrelevant to the complex internal mechanics of an organism, such as scaling up or down the overall size of the creature. When such small changes do finally accumulate sufficiently to cause a change in internal functions, the effect is destructive due to the inevitable occurrence of a conflict among closely matched interrelated parts.
Dr. Jonathan Wells confirms that in the developmental genes that govern embryonic development random mutations never produce beneficial changes, and typically lead to death or deformity.[112] But the developmental genes are where major body type evolution must occur, else it cannot occur at all. Enter yet another impassable barrier for neo-Darwinian theory: developmental sensitivity.
Dr. Robert Pollack who worked with James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, also says that major alterations to the DNA of embryonic cells caused by environmentally induced mutations are normally tragic.[113] This poses a sort of catch-22 for the accidental mutation theory of evolution. Mutations occurring outside of reproductive cells do not get passed on to the next generation and those that do alter reproductive cells are invariably harmful or have no effect. Therefore, the only evolutionary result accidental mutations appear capable of producing is a destructive result, though many are neutral.
It is not surprising that random mutations show no beneficial effect. Remember, there is an enormous amount of DNA for random mutation to have to sort through (the rough equivalent of 600 round trips to the Sun).[114] Reports of modern genetic research reveal that the available options for new biologically viable DNA sequences are so rare within the vast library of total DNA sequence options, the distance between them so great, that the odds are overwhelmingly against random search ever finding an alteration that works to advance the organism.[115] That’s how complex life is. Darwin and his contemporaries had no clue.
Contrary to the approximate rule of thumb that seems to be casually implied in some of the neo-Darwinian literature, that one could expect roughly one in a thousand mutations to be beneficial, the protein synthesis research of D. D. Axe cited by Stephen Meyer indicates the true ratio to be closer to 1 out of 1077. Trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of useless or harmful mutations must occur to get one beneficial change at the “simplest” level of biological construction, the protein. How many would be needed to produce the sets of multiple genes that must work in concert to construct a new biological function or structural feature? The increase would be exponential due to the rules of probability theory, in other words, something on the order of 1077 X 1077 X 1077 X 1077, or 1 mutation event out of 10308 might be of use to macroevolution. But, as we discuss in Appendix 2, Professor William Dembski has informed us that there are only enough resources in the history of the universe to generate the smallest fraction of that number of mutations.
A Mickey Mouse Operation
Neo-Darwinian theory makes the outrageous claim that nature has, while blindfolded, and with no blueprint in mind, successfully tinkered with the Mickey Mouse watch (a bacterium) without stopping the watch or malforming it beyond natural selection’s standards more than 1,500,000,000 times (the non-“junk” portion of the human genome). It claims that an accident has inconceivably succeeding in advancing the Mickey Mouse watch design to the Space Shuttle (a human being). However, the historical fossil record, in fact, now reveals that the larger part of the work of evolution was done in the brief 5-10 million years of the Cambrian explosion. Billions of years of working time have been lost to the imagined accidental process at the same time that the known complexity of biological systems has skyrocketed. Simply put, such a thing seems both fully impossible and contrary to the historical evidence.
Darwinists respond to this objection with an oversimplified and, therefore, fallacious, logic. They note that bacteria can, and clearly do, generate “useful” mutations each year, for there are trillions of them and they mutate all the time. Granted, bacteria do come up with some “useful changes” every day, but they are only useful for bacteria. There is no evidence that these changes ever exceed a very simple threshold of form change. In the larger evolutionary event process, as soon as complex designs arrive on the scene, the ability for accidental mutations to do anything useful to advance life disappears. This loss of ability to tolerate random design change proposals occurs at the same point on the evolutionary tree that creatures lose three other features unique to bacteria: enormous population size and a life span so short and reproductive rate so fast as to make the generational input to the rate of genetic change astronomical. Thus, what little credibility the Darwinian dynamic has ever had relies fully upon the fallacy of using a creature that is atypical of nature (the bacterium) to model what is claimed to be the typical evolutionary process for the entire tree of life—clearly a flawed argument.
Can we now in the laboratory, while simulating the Cambrian and post-Cambrian environments of earth regarding mutagen prevalence and delivery, and with true random targeting of nucleotide base pairs, generate two or three ultimately progressive mutations per year?[116] No. We cannot produce any. We can only demonstrate that under limited conditions creatures with genetic features quite unique in nature, bacteria, can produce varied changes of the simplest form and function within a definite and very limited set of options, useful only to themselves, at no time yielding a new type of organism outside the family of bacteria.
After thousands of laboratory studies, all we know for certain is that accidental mutations are almost always harmful. A mechanism (accidental mutation) that cannot be conclusively demonstrated to account for any new increments of viable biological information sufficient to generate one substantial evolutionary advancement certainly cannot be rationally held to account for all of them.
Darwinists are fond of holding up tree diagrams as proof of evolution. One wants to ask, specifically, “Where is the tree full of documented viable progressive results from random mutations?” “Where is the tree of the requisite steps that must be accomplished to move between the known species?” For every newly evolved animal type there must have been thousands of mutative steps along the way. Where are the examples from nature and the lab that such frequently needed occurrences do in fact occur and that they link up in real time to form cumulatively progressive results?
There is, of course the unfortunate fruit fly with a leg on its head, a poor dog turned into Cyclops, and the fly with broken wings that replace its flight stabilizers, thus fouling up flight dynamics. Aberrant deformities, genetic illnesses, regressive changes, and malfunctions are practically the only documented form-changing mutations we have on record![117]
The only exceptions to this rule are simple changes that don’t require complex integration with an organism’s complex internal functions, and which do not evidence a change in form and function significant enough to be a step towards macroevolution. There are no known mutations that are exceptions to the intelligent design claim that accident cannot do what is required for evolution.
Noted evolutionist Professor Douglas Futuyma notes two kinds of simple changes as proof of evolution: a bacterium that gains the ability to metabolize new organic chemicals, and the fruit fly becoming more efficient in the use of food. He also notes that hair color and height vary continuously across the spectrum in humans.[118] While this is true, such things are the simplest, least problematic, alterations to make. They pose no integration challenges to the complex internal machinery of the body for they are minor variations on a physiological theme already in place.
The known results of accidental mutations would indeed fill a tree, but it would be a horrible thing to behold, with monstrous deformities and birth defects hanging from every limb. I challenge any scientist or team of scientists to construct an evolutionary tree from the known results of accidental mutations, anything that has produced a beneficial progressive macroevolution vice a chamber of horrors. It can’t be done.
The practice of good objective science requires us to hypothesize not that accidental evolution can produce large changes in complex biological functions resulting in the entire tree of life, but, that accident can, at best, produce only the small simple changes that we have actually seen. We should stick to the evidence.
Neo-Darwinists cite minor changes to the already completed genomes, so called “random mutations,” as convincing evidence for accidental evolution. However, they can’t give even one example of a mutation that can be demonstrated to be both truly random and that can be shown to have led to a significant step in progressive evolution. In fact, they can’t give a definite concrete causal explanation of any kind, random or otherwise, for even one major step in evolution.
Neither Darwin, nor any Darwinian, has so far given an actual causal explanation of the adaptive evolution of any single organism or any single organ. All that has been shown…is that such explanations might exist (that is to say, they are not logically impossible).[119]
In scientific writing the allusion is often made to “beneficial mutations.” Typically, studies documenting the referenced mutations are not cited, nor is it even made clear what the term “mutation” in that context fully implies. Are the referenced mutations confirmed by observation, or are they, rather, merely theoretical assumptions? Are we speaking of mutations beneficial in some minor way to one species, or mutations that can be demonstrated to link with others to advance the creature towards a more complex organism on the tree of life? Are they truly accidental point mutations caused by toxic exposure or replicative error, accidental chromosome relocations caused by physical or chemical injury, or are they not so accidental allele substitutions, reproductive mixing of genes, genetic transpositional element induced changes, or genetic marker changes closely managed and shepherded by the governing mechanisms of the genome? The answer makes all the difference in the world to the question before us: accident or purpose? Yet no effort is made to give the reader the information they need to properly evaluate the neo-Darwinian claim of an accidental process.
One can find the biomechanical aspects of each of these types of mutations discussed in genetics texts in general terms, but documented and observed examples of instances of truly accidental mutations leading to evolutionary advancement are not to be found. Demonstrably accidental mutations known to have led to a major evolutionary advancement are the unicorns of biology. They are believed in; they are imagined; they are hypothesized; but they have never been seen.
Recently Dr. Jerry Bergman accomplished an exhaustive search of the scientific literature and did not find any genuine examples of information-gaining gene mutations at all. The few examples that did anything useful for an organism generally required an unusual circumstance to be beneficial and were otherwise injurious. Dr. Bergman’s paper recounting that search entitled “Darwinism and the Deterioration of the Genome” is available online at True Origin and also at the Creation Research Society Quarterly journal online.
In order to locate
all alleged examples of beneficial mutations, I carried out a computer search
of the literature. My review covered all published scientific studies
that dealt with beneficial mutations. The definition of beneficial
mutation used was a mutation that was regarded as beneficial by the authors
surveyed. Key words used in the computer search included synonyms of
beneficial, such as “favorable, helpful, usable, valuable, adaptive, good,
advantageous, supportive, positive,” etc. The search of two data bases
totaling 18.8 million records found that, of all articles discussing mutations,
only 0.04 percent, or 4 in 10,000 articles on mutations, were located that
discussed beneficial or favorable mutations. Some overlap exists in the
data bases searched, consequently the actual total
number of records searched was less than 18.8 million. The overlap in the
search was estimated by extrapolating from the records found. Assuming
that the same level of overlap exists in the entire database, a total of
approximately 16 million records was searched.
These searches may have missed some relevant articles but are useful to
indicate trends.
All of the 126
examples located were then reviewed, focusing on evidence for information-gaining
beneficial mutations. It was found that none of them contained clear, empirically supported examples of
information-gaining, beneficial mutations. Most “examples” of actual,
beneficial mutations were loss mutations in which a gene was disabled or
damaged, all of which were beneficial only in a limited situation.[120]
I have myself made a much less exhaustive search through two of the electronic academic journal services by obtaining a user account at the local university and could find nothing reflecting any viable mutations that might lead to evolutionary advancement. There is apparently no central databank of beneficial mutations leading to progressive evolution maintained for the common use of researchers and the public. But why not? There is a databank for absolutely everything else. If beneficial mutations exist in such abundance and neo-Darwinian theory so critically depends upon them, why haven’t they been traced and recorded with the greatest of care? Why don’t pro-Darwinian articles wave this alleged multitude of progressive evolutionary mutations around in public view as a great victory for their theory? Certainly they have tried to do more with less. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t have anything beyond the trivial to present.
Evolutionists explain the process of evolution to students and the public in the simplest of terms as if the process were child’s play, easy as pie, implying that any fool can see how it happens. But when pressed to demonstrate real examples of specific mutations that have led to evolution they protest that it is an unfair demand because of the enormous size and complexity of the event process, and the trillions of small gradual changes involved. However, when one looks at the fossil record one sees that the changes were neither small nor gradual.
“OK fine,” we respond. “We can agree on this much. It is not simple. Which complex set, then, of accidental changes must occur in sequence or conjunction in order to create a specific recognizable step in macroevolution? Just give us one complete set of accidental mutations for just one substantial step in macroevolution as an example. Then we can test that hypothesis in accordance with proper scientific method. We can go try to randomly replicate those steps in the lab, do the math and see what the resource requirements would be to get the job done within the realm of scientific credibility, etc. This is how science works, after all.”
The Darwinists protest again. “We can’t do that. We don’t know a complete set of mutations sufficient to accomplish any specific macroevolutionary step, and, even if we did, attempting to randomly generate enough useful mutations to produce a new complex feature in biology would exceed the budget of all of science for millenniums! (They don’t add, as they should, “If it could be done at all.”) The entire process is too big.” What they fail to recognize, though their objection is in other ways well grounded (the process is enormous), is that implicit in their own objection is the truth that accomplishing all of the needed complex new features and function changes required for the evolution of the tree of life by accident exceeds more than the budget of science, it exceeds the total budget of the universe in time and materiel. (see Appendix 2)
“Well, how about this?” they may say. “Let us break something for you. We can do that easy enough. No trouble at all. We can make a fly that doesn’t fly; oh, and a one-eyed dog. How about that?” “No, thanks,” we politely demure. “Any fool can break something; but evolution is the process of building more and more complex forms of life well fit to survive in their environment. To demonstrate evolution you have to demonstrate forward progress, not major malfunctions and regressions.” Yet, it’s true; all that science can do in the genetics lab to this day, is break things (or produce trivia), not progress them.
This demonstrates that progressive evolution is not a simple matter of a few accidental point mutations, but an enormous closely guided process involving multitudes of time-coordinated changes affecting the many interrelated parts of highly complex integrated systems (irreducible complexity). If life is not irreducibly complex as Professor Michael Behe claims, if it is all simple and easily thrown together as the neo-Darwinists say, why can’t we reproduce these easy steps in the lab?
Some Darwinists, of course, claim that new genes are created by the bushel every single day, and that beneficial mutations are everywhere. But they are not everywhere documented. They are not everywhere in the textbooks and science journals. They are only everywhere hypothesized without proof. The next time you confront a Darwinist say “Show me the money! Where are the documented mutations that have generated the difficult steps of evolution toward the complex forms of life?” They will only produce a few bacterial changes that go nowhere beyond bacteria, regressions of genes that go backward in functional capacity, genetic illnesses, horrific defects, and trivial changes requiring no substantial integration with the complex internal design functions of the organism.
Beware the word game. Consider the following quote from Douglas Futuyma:
So
is it true, as the creationists claim, that good mutations are vanishingly
rare? Certainly it is true that many, many mutations are harmful. But if even
only one hundredth of 1 percent of all mutations are
beneficial, 20,000 of them should crop up in the gypsy moths of Long Island
just this year. Moreover, the early geneticists significantly underestimated
the proportion of beneficial mutations, because they studied a biased sample of
possible mutations, the ones that drastically change an organism instead of
modifying it only slightly.[121]
The wording here is very misleading in several ways. “if even only one hundredth of 1 percent of all mutations are beneficial”—is this a generous figure as Futuyma clearly suggests? Hardly. Do we have any hard research indicating such a figure is in fact generous? No. The only concrete research we have is quite to the contrary. D. D. Axe’s protein synthesis research, which, in fairness, was completed after Futuyma’s statement was published, has revealed that the proportion of useful mutations in the sense of being able to produce at least one biologically viable protein (the minimum change to have a significant effect on the organism’s design structure) is not 1 one hundredth of 1 percent but only a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of that, or one part in every 1077! Thus we should expect, not 20,000 (simple) beneficial evolutionary changes in the gypsy moths of Long Island each year. We are entitled to expect one beneficial evolutionary change every 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years; that’s it. But the universe is only 20,000,000,000 years old! Thus, the truth is not what Futuyma implies, that there are more than sufficient numbers of beneficial mutations to ground accidental evolution. Rather, we should expect no beneficial random macroevolutionary change whatsoever.
Second, by opting to include the slight changes that do not “drastically change the organism” Futuyma has excluded a demonstration of macroevolution by definition. Finally, nothing is said here as to whether the mutations are accidental in any real sense, but, since no delimiting characteristic is given, Futuyma is apparently considering all types of mutations taken together. Once again, when one takes the nonrandom mutations generated by the internal mechanisms of the genome out of this group to leave only the apparently accidental, there will not be thousands of beneficial mutations per species per year; there will be none, barring only the horror stories and trivialities previously discussed.
Why aren’t the examples of new randomly produced genes that effect evolutionary advancement in the textbooks if we get 20,000 beneficial mutations per species per region per year? One thousand roughly correlates to a gene totally rebuilt from scratch, which yields roughly 20 new genes per species per region per year. Where are they in the text books? This would be the best evidence neo-Darwinian theory could produce, rapid generation of new genes with beneficial results. All we see in the text books and science journals are deleterious mutations such as Sickle-cell Anemia, Downs syndrome, Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy,[122] wings that don’t work, a leg in place of an antennae, regression in the capability of a gene, etc. A collection of mistakes and regressions, no matter how elaborate, will never assemble themselves into an evolutionary advancement of a complex living machine. These are not real beneficial mutations Futuyma is referring to; they are imaginary, and his imagination is based upon mathematics fully out of touch with recent research.
It is time for the public to put the neo-Darwinists on the spot: show us the new genes, show us that they make substantial progressive change, and demonstrate that they were evolved by accident! Then link a set of them together to show a real step in macroevolution, one phyla evolved from another, one class evolved from another. Then replicate the process in the laboratory. This would be proof of accidental evolution, and only this—and accidental evolution will not be a fact, as neo-Darwinists have prematurely claimed, until this is done.
Let’s visibly catalog those alleged new gene evolutions and place the complete data before the public where it can be rigorously scrutinized to see if it adds up to an achievement of new, complex, and highly integrated biological systems. This would comport more with the presumed integrity and known method of science, as opposed to what is presently occurring, that is, casually referring to volumes of evidence that exist only in the interpretive imaginations of the neo-Darwinists. I guarantee you that, when produced, the so-called evidence will produce a thin catalog indeed, consisting of front cover, back cover and a single insert saying TBD (to be determined by further research). If the quality of the evidence was as good as Darwinists have claimed, we wouldn’t have to publish in the nation’s leading science journal studies of regressive change as proof of progressive evolution.
A catalog of beneficial mutations would be the best, certainly the most direct, evidence neo-Darwinian theory could conceivably offer. Professor Futuyma says there are plenty of instances of beneficial mutations. Why not lay them out for inspection and see what they add up to? Frankly, I just don’t believe it. I think the neo-Darwinists’ extreme faith in evolutionary theory has blinded them to the truth. Their theory has explanatory power only in the abstract, that is, in the imagination, so that is where all of their arguments reside. There is no genetic or biochemical evidence for accidental evolution. Accidental mutations that can be shown to lead to macroevolution simply do not exist—they are unknown to science.
Neo-Darwinists may reply that gradual random mutation-based changes that lead to macroevolution take too much time to be observed, and this may be true; but that makes their claim unobservable and their theory not scientific because it can’t be tested.[123] The implications of the mutations we can observe are very different from the assertions of neo-Darwinian theory, however. Truly random mutations are observed to consistently degrade the efficiency of the organism, or even destroy it—cancer and birth defects being cases in point. The neo-Darwinist objection then amounts to “The changes that support our theory are too big to be observed, the beneficial changes, but the destructive changes that argue against neo-Darwinian evolution are small enough to be seen all the time.” That is rather a dubious claim, and it is hard to see how it helps their case.
Granted, if random mutations could produce beneficial change, it would take them longer to make a sophisticated biological machine than to break it. But this does not further the neo-Darwinist case. Quite the opposite. It places the neo-Darwinists in a logical pin, or checkmate. It amounts to an implicit admission that biological machines should break long before they constructively evolve under the influence of random mutation. But this is exactly what Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis entails, one of the primary arguments against accidental evolution!
The Mutation Factor:
Darwin Runs Out of Geologic Time
Could the beneficial mutagenic rate be high enough to make neo-Darwinian theory credible? Genetic science, unavailable to Darwin, now says no. According to Dr. Stephen Meyer, citing Dr. Susumu Ohno, the scientist who discovered the link between cancer and genetic mutation, a random mutation rate of 10-9 per nucleotide base pair per year is taken to be a reasonably liberal assumption. That is one mutation per billion base pairs per year and includes all types of point mutations: harmful, beneficial and neutral.
Other scholarly sources confirm the standard mutation rate and there is general agreement upon it.[124] As Dr. Ohno indicates, a standard mutation rate of 10-9 would correspond to only a 1% change in DNA over 10 million years, almost all of which would be destructive or neutral.[125] How then were 48%-87% of our elegantly functional body types evolved during the Cambrian period in the time that should have generated only a 1% predominantly destructive change to the genome as a whole, producing no new viable body types and wounding any already present?
Believing that even a 1% change useful to evolution could happen requires the unreasonable assumption that all mutations will be beneficial for 10 million years running when all the evidence to date says we should expect none to be beneficial—if they are truly accidental. The time available on the geologic timeline established by the fossil record to move from bacteria to man is approximately 550 million years. The standard mutation rate allows for a 55% change in that time, only the smallest fraction of which should be beneficial, and most of that trivial. The bacterial genome, however, is only in the neighborhood of 3,000,000 base pairs of nucleotides, whereas the human genome is 3,000,000,000. That equates to an initial 100% change, done a thousand times over!
How long does it take to achieve one beneficial mutation, and of those few that are beneficial, one that goes further to contribute to advancement of macroevolution of highly complex species? No one knows. We have never seen any randomly generated mutations that can be positively linked to the development of a significant new body form or a beneficial complex functional innovation—not one. That may be because we haven’t been looking long enough, because the process is simply too big and too complex for empirical science to ever complete the linkage, or it may be, as complexity analysis, probability theory, and mutational studies suggest, because there aren’t any accidental mutations that lead to macroevolution.
Where we do see phenotypic changes arise within a species in nature, they are minor microevolutions that do not lead to a significant change of body form—and these have not been linked to external/toxin-induced (accidental) mutations as their source.[126] Rather, nontrivial biological form change appears to be coming exclusively from the internal shuffling of highly configured genetic information. This information is already present in the organism and is being both randomly and nonrandomly rearranged by allele substitutions, modification of gene expression tags that turn on or off a complex design module already complete, transpositional mechanisms that move genetic components around based upon the built-in rules of the genome (in part still poorly understood but on the surface nonrandom), and the well-known variations that result from reproductive combinations.[127] Even the most random of these elements are not fully accidental in that they are harnessed within a nonrandom living biological machine, but it is the recently discovered role of transpositional elements and mechanisms that I wish to highlight here. Retrotransposons are one such mechanism.
Retrotransposons
are mobile genetic elements that transpose through reverse transcription of an
RNA intermediate. Retrotransposons are ubiquitous in plants and play a major
role in plant gene and genome evolution. In many cases, retrotransposons
comprise over 50% of nuclear DNA content, a situation that can arise in just a
few million years. Plant retrotransposons are structurally and functionally
similar to the retrotransposons and retroviruses that are found in other
eukaryotic organisms…Recent studies are providing valuable insights into the
mechanisms involved in regulating the expression and transposition of
retrotransposons.[128]
Mobile group II introns, found in bacterial and organellar genomes, are both catalytic RNAs and retrotransposable elements. They use an extraordinary mobility mechanism in which the excised intron RNA reverse splices directly into a DNA target site and is then reverse transcribed by the intron-encoded protein. After DNA insertion, the introns remove themselves by protein-assisted, autocatalytic RNA splicing, thereby minimizing host damage.[129]
The rapid and highly directional genetic shuffling required for macroevolutionary form change is often performed by very sophisticated mechanisms in the transpositional and developmental genomes, both of which are nonrandom in the larger sense of being mechanisms themselves, although random events do happen there.[130] In sum, the problem of intelligent authorship of the books that govern the designs of living creatures remains unsolved, but nearly all of the DNA juggling process needed to produce macroevolution occurs within a living machine. At a minimum you have a chicken and egg situation here for the accidental worldview. Even if we could demonstrate that all transpositions were truly accidental and unguided (hard to do when the math shows a tremendous bias for functional forms of life), we would still need complex life with a transpositional genome to produce evolution. And we cannot show how an accident can produce complex life with a transpositional genome.
But don’t panic yet, you die hard neo-Darwinians; here come billions upon billions of gene transferring hyper-reproductive bacteria and viruses to save the day. Hurray for germs! There are undeniably an astounding number of them (70,000,000,000,000 in your intestines alone[131]), and they reproduce at amazing rates. Bacteria do carry spare genetic information around with them in “sacks” called “plasmids” that spontaneously mutate the organism via recombinant DNA processes.[132] Walla Booby, accidental neo-Darwinian evolution will be proved this time for sure! Right? No.
Bacteria are visibly exceptional to all other creatures in nature in that they carry spare bags of genetic material around, material clearly designed to be periodically integrated into their (ultra-simple) genome in routine ways. And they are exceptional in being astronomically simple. Nor is bacteria’s extraordinary reproductive rate typical of nature. Therefore, what accidental genetic substitutions can do for bacteria they can do for no other creature on Earth.
Although early Darwinian discussions often pointed to plasmid gene substitutions as if they were true random accidents, we now know that the plasmid is not just a patch of stray genetic sequences stuck onto the bacterium; it is a closely governed portion of the organisms overall machinery. When the bacterial cell reproduces the plasmid also divides and the process is controlled by genes within the plasmid. The plasmid phenomena is therefore hardly an accident.
Bacterial plasmids encode partitioning (par) loci that ensure ordered plasmid segregation prior to cell division. par loci come in two types: those that encode actin-like ATPases and those that encode deviant Walker-type ATPases. ParM, the actin-like ATPase of plasmid R1, forms dynamic filaments that segregate plasmids paired at mid-cell to daughter cells. Like microtubules, ParM filaments exhibit dynamic instability (i.e., catastrophic decay) whose regulation is an important component of the DNA segregation process. The Walker box ParA ATPases are related to MinD and form highly dynamic, oscillating filaments that are required for the subcellular movement and positioning of plasmids.[133]
Ultimately, the unique success rate of bacteria in adaptive gene substitutions may derive from two very simple things: the rate at which bacteria try substitutions, which is astronomically high, and the fact that it is not hard to do what they do, that is, to decompose things, to tear things apart. It is always easier to break something (in this case to break it down) than to construct it.
The bacterial enzyme based digestion/defense mechanism is unitary and functions on the exterior of the organism’s design. It requires neither close nor complex interaction with other components. Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle with a single simple standard node that plugs into the exterior border, there is practically nothing to conflict. Genes of more complex animals that govern critical internal processes, on the other hand, have multiple functions and are additionally cross-referenced to a very sensitive developmental genome. They therefore correspond to a highly complex internal piece of the puzzle with multiple nodes. There is more to conflict. Necessary modifications might cascade in a chain reaction that extends to as many as ten vertical levels in the hierarchy of the organism’s design, and to untold instances laterally. A new genetic change, the effect of which is simple and routed solely to the exterior of the organism, however, as is the bacterial defense mechanism or digestive enzyme, avoids the necessity for a cascading series of modifications, and is thus much easier to implement.
Mutations of plasmid DNA have only demonstrated the capacity to do simple things like add antibiotic resistance or generate a new enzyme to breakdown an additional source of food. No plasmids are known to routinely transfer from bacteria to complex organisms and the cells of complex creatures are not able to pick up free DNA as bacteria do.[134] Once again, the problem of equating the process of microevolution in one “abnormal” species with the very different processes of macroevolution across the entire tree of life must be avoided.[135]
The ability to generate a single type of useful change does not establish the ability to do anything more. To say that because bacteria can evolve and transfer simple enzyme affecting DNA segments that they can evolve and transfer absolutely everything else necessary to generate the entire tree of life is ungrounded speculation. Genetic transfers from bacteria to other species, if they happen at all, are not the norm, but the very rare exception. Therefore we do not have benefit of the enormous numbers of bacteria and their fantastic reproductive rate to create trillions upon trillions of mutations of all types that might solve Darwin’s lack of time problem.
Even if large numbers of bacterial gene transfers to other species could take place, transferring in many genes from simple creatures does not make a complex creature. As Peter Kassan tells us in his refreshingly candid discussion of the failed attempt to duplicate human intelligence by artificial means,[136] transferring in 3,000,000 cockroach genes doesn’t equate to the functionality of a human, it equates to the functionality of a colony of cockroaches.
Known genetic recombination systems are internalized mechanisms of genetic transfer and they involve transfer within an optimized environment, that is, an environment where a supportive internal mechanism is in place to facilitate the transfer. If large transfers cannot occur the easy way within a supportive structure of a creature's internal mechanisms honed to optimization over millenniums of natural selection (remember Frank-Kamenetskii), they certainly cannot occur the hard way as completely random, individualized, nonsystematic proposals from outside the organism.
One aspect of the genome that forms a barrier to accidental recombinant DNA substitutions in complex organisms is alternative splicing or alternative reading frames. Alternate splicing is used on as many as three quarters of the genes of complex creatures. Those genes are “read” or edited in several different ways in order to produce more than one protein from the same gene. In addition, in complex creatures, a single gene tends to be involved in regulating multiple processes, not the single process of biodegrading one substance as is the case with the simple bacterial genes. Gene substitutions that work for bacteria are no longer so simple for other creatures.
Instead of effecting a simple change in immunity to a standard threat, the substitution of a single gene in complex creatures can, hypothetically, alter the development of the embryo causing children to be stillborn, remove cancer protection, and flatten the arches all at the same time. Consequently, one cannot say with confidence that the ability of bacteria to spontaneously evolve new antibiotic resistance demonstrates any real potential for the larger process of evolution across the taxonomic inventory of life. For the substitution of a gene from bacteria to be less than catastrophic in the far more complex variably-read machinery of a mammal, the entire mammalian genetic system would have to be regressed to remove the developmental genome and the alternate reading frame mechanisms. Thus, bacterial gene transfer may have played a minor part in evolving bacteria and primitive creatures, but would be of little or no use in promoting further advancement and differentiation of mammals. Their big contribution was more likely an early symbiosis that led to our present transpositional elements. But those elements are now harnessed by a very sophisticated machine, and there is very little about the larger mechanisms of the genome that appears accidental. The math alone says that our transpositional genomes are not completely random, else the rate of genetic illness would be astronomical.
True, the relative simplicity of bacterial design taken together with their closely circumscribed plasmid-based enzyme altering mechanism may explain our strong suspicion of successful horizontal DNA transfers among prokaryotes.[137] But it simultaneously invalidates the larger evolutionary inference that the same thing could be routinely accomplished with higher organisms, for they are too sophisticated to tolerate such a primitive tool. In short, bacteria are set up to handle such transfers, while other creatures are not. All that we can safely conclude is that some microevolution of bacteria may be promoted by DNA transfers. We may not safely conclude the ability to move from one type of creature to another via DNA transfers.[138]
Retroviruses, do, in a sense, routinely alter the DNA of the host, but. the transfer of viral DNA isn’t going to cause an advancement or a continuing series of advancements, it is simply going to make the host ill, as is commonly seen. Good evolutionary science like good police work should confine itself to the facts, and to valid logical inferences from those facts. All we truly know to have resulted from naturally occurring bacterial and viral exposures are infectious or genetic diseases and birth defects.
Nor can the use in the laboratory of germs as gene vectors, that is, delivery vehicles, be used to evidence an accidental evolutionary process. Here a genetic sequence is analytically chosen by scientists and then carefully edited. All the troublesome aspects are (hopefully, but not necessarily) cut out or cropped off. The carefully prepared gene segment is then placed by an expert scientist into a germ already known to be suitable for the delivery task. The germ is introduced into the recipient cell via a substantially controlled procedure, not a random or accidental one. This tells us that, under artificial, intelligently-guided conditions, germs can effect a beneficial genetic change to an organism within certain limits. It does not demonstrate that an accident can do the same thing. It certainly does not demonstrate that an accident can do absolutely everything that macroevolution requires. To date it has not been possible to achieve the radical biological form changes needed for macroevolution (any of them) even with intelligently guided laboratory procedures.
The amazing adaptations of germs and the adaptive capacity of bugs to pesticides, when compared to the dramatically smaller adaptive capacity of higher life forms suggest that there is an inverse relationship between complexity and the ability to rapidly evolve viable biological form change. It also suggests that the adaptive options are primarily/exclusively limited to those options predetermined by the overall design of the organism, such as the generation of antibiotic and pesticide resistance and the creation of new biodegrading enzymes. This is a good example of a random generator program built into a larger highly ordered and constrained design that does not have unlimited capacity to generate novel change. Rather it can only run through a list of predetermined options, many of which are “preflighted” to work but cannot, as it were, step outside of their programming to do anything truly novel in terms of macroevolutionary form change.
Even where such gene substitutions have occurred in bacteria they are substitutions of a precomposed gene from a preexistent set of such genes containing at least some genes that convey an advantage. It is not a case of visible evolution from fully accidental mutations in real time.
It is almost certainly not a coincidence that the only thing the human body does comparable to the bacterial ability to rapidly generate new genetic information, that is, antibody production by our immune system, also routes the results to the “exterior” dead end of an event chain, a point in the process architecture where an ensuing cascade of design changes is not required. After the human antibody is produced, like the bacterial enzyme, it then confronts an exterior threat, an invader. It attacks the external enemy with a chemical attack that destroys design, which is much easier than interacting with it. Such examples seem to me to more precisely describe the limitations of accidental genetic substitutions than to demonstrate their unevidenced hypothetical capability to generate the evolution of complex life forms.
While almost always destructive to living systems, it is (in theory) possible that an accidental process might (rarely) achieve a simple system, such as a bacterium, from nonliving components, given sufficient time and a highly improbable and complex set of conditions. It may seem odd to allow that an accidental process might achieve a bacterium but go no further, but bacteria are both uniquely simple and, in many ways, simply unique. As such, they may be a genuine dead end for accidental evolution. Bacteria may represent the upward delimiting boundary of the capabilities of an accidental process in biology. It is possible that accident can do that much but no more.
Whole gene or large DNA segment substitution events, such as occur with bacterial plasmid substitutions, as opposed to single or multiple nucleotide change events, don’t qualify as true examples of novel design origination because is these cases the existing design merely rotates preexisting design modules within a common interface. New complex design modules are not originated; they are already present. It is like turning a multi-lens microscope to a higher magnification or moving between slides during a slide show on your home computer. The high power lens is not created on the spot; nor is the next slide; its design is already present, made available by a prior process. A feature of the microscope’s design permits alternation between optional preexisting components but it does not generate those components in real time. So it is with bacterial plasmid gene transfers. This is not a case of visible evolution in real time, but a case of an existing design performing a preexistent rotation function, in this case rotating genes much as a shooter rotates the cylinders in a gun.
Point mutations of nucleotides are a different matter than gene substitutions, however. Something new is added in the rare event of a point mutation. The problem is that it rarely does evolution any good. Evolutionists now admit that the point mutations caused by environmental mutagens do not play a significant role in evolution.[139] That leaves replicative errors or transpositions within the genome. These latter two events are so closely shepherded by error correction and repair, transpositional, and reproductive mechanisms that it is far from clear that any viable macroevolutionary change can be traced to true randomness (accident).
A Precambrian Master Genome?
But neo-Darwinists never say die. Here’s another proposed solution to Darwin’s lack of time problem. It is a truly ingenious one belonging to the late, much loved, and highly respected Professor Susumu Ohno. Ohno proposed that at some time in the distant past, probably during the Precambrian period, a creature or creatures somehow accumulated a genome containing such a large set of genes essential genes that they were sufficient, given some further rapid mutations, to quickly generate the advanced features of the more complex organisms of the tree of life. Hence, the 5-10 million year surge of evolutionary development that is called the Cambrian Explosion.[140]
In Ohno’s view, most of the creatures of the early Cambrian or Precambrian, came to possess this same master genome. Later variations in biological form, including most of the major body types of the animal kingdom, were produced from the master genome by rapid altering of gene expression and silencing tags. Thus, we have a plausible explanation, though not an accidental one, of the rapid explosion of life form variation in the Cambrian period. Ohno calls this master genome the “pananimalia.” One virtue of his theory is that it allows for a more reasonable period of time to develop the first comprehensive set of genes: three billion years leading up to the first bacteria, as opposed to the mere ten million years of the Cambrian explosion.
Explanatory power is another virtue of Ohno’s hypothesis. The pananimalia genome can explain things otherwise fully inexplicable (except by intelligent design). How to accomplish the jump from bacteria to the first complex invertebrates. How to rapidly develop thousands of radically divergent vertebrate and nonvertebrate forms without leaving fossil traces of intermediate transitionary stages. Generally it explains how to accomplish so much in so little time without making a complete mess of the attempt.
Ohno’s proposal goes as far towards the solution to the time problem as anything we have short of intelligent design theory. It remains to be corroborated by direct evidence, however, for we have not discovered any solid indications of the master genome in the early Cambrian/Precambrian. Unfortunately, when employed as a neo-Darwinian argument for an accidental process, it only goes so far before encountering insurmountable obstacles. To my knowledge, Ohno did not so state it, that is, he doesn’t explicitly invoke accidental processes as the exclusive or primary mechanism involved.
In the pananimalia scenario the new genes must either originate within the inactive portion of the genome or quickly become inactive. We know this because, if the widely varied genes of the pananimalia were all actively expressed, the pananimalia creatures would be bizarre mixed genre chimeras of which the fossil record gives no evidence.
Inactive genes are good from one perspective. Partially developed new parts proposed by evolution, and some of the associated integration work for use in a later design, could, in theory (though not by accident), be perfected in inactive DNA prior to implementation. With inactive DNA, modifications to an inactive genetic sequence still in development place no wrenches into the working machinery of the organism. Once the inactive code was perfected, gene expression tags could be changed to active and the creatures could start to differentiate into the fifty different major body types of the animal kingdom and on to a myriad of diverse species.
But how would an accidental process know when to switch which tags in which combinations? If gene expression markers were being moved around in a truly random manner, as neo-Darwinian theory requires, one would expect to see nearly all the intermediate variations that the DNA of the host creature could produce in the fossil record—if the creatures could survive the accidental tinkering at all. Those intermediates are not present in the fossil record. It is highly improbable that an accident could reset thousands of gene expression markers in very complex interrelationships with such precision in one generation. Once again, it is remotely possible that it could have happened, but it is not scientifically proper to assert or believe that it happened.
At least some of the randomly tagged gene combinations would produce inefficient, disabled and dysfunctional designs that could nonetheless survive for a time sufficient to make fossil imprints. However, there is no fossil evidence of an abnormal spate of aberrant, chimerical, or even intermediate functional forms in or around the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary! This is a major problem for the accidental theory of evolution. An accidental process would have tended to produce the intermediates. Their absence indicates either that the intermediates were not survivable, which defeats the gradualist view essential to classic accidental evolution, or that a built-in (nonrandom) filter of some kind ruled out most of the options being tried. The sensitivity of the developmental genome to mutation suggests there may be such a filter. Alternatively, the absence of intermediates suggests that the process was otherwise guided, directed, channeled or informed, not accidental at all. A built-in filter that eliminated some biological form change proposals and allowed others at early points in development is one tool an intelligent designer might use to direct the process towards predetermined goals.
Another serious objection to a neo-Darwinian pananimalia hypothesis is that random development of the new DNA sequences in inactive mode takes natural selection out of the lineup. Natural selection would be precluded from picking the intermediate modules of design variations or rejecting them because inactive genes have no effect on the survival of the organism. The developing pananimalia genome would, in effect, be invisible to natural selection until implemented in the active portions of the genomes. Without natural selection there would be nothing to give direction to the accidental development process, to tell it where to go or when to stop. In this scenario, new design development would have to be accomplished exclusively by random drift or other fully non-directed processes. Once again, random drift would have produced many intermediates, dysfunctional forms, and chimeras unless directional filters or other forms of directional constraints were imposed upon the process.
Because a pananimalia genome would explain so much, one cannot, by any means, rule out its existence. On the other hand, it is clear that, minus aid from natural selection acting as a quality control mechanism, such a large genome could not have originated in inactive mode completely by accident. The lack of intermediates to the many large jumps in design advancement simply rules out the accidental neo-Darwinian model.
Ultimately, the deciding evidence for or against the pananimalia master genome hypothesis will have to come from the fossil record, including fossilized DNA from ancient creatures,[141] and comparative studies of the genomes of early life. Although the evidence currently presented by fossilized and comparative DNA studies of living organisms shows a lot of similar sequences going back to bacteria, thus hinting at common ancestry, it falls a long way short of demonstrating an early master genome—and it says nothing whatsoever in favor of accidental evolution. My own best guess, which I describe further on in this book, is that the “master genome” was not so much literal, as virtual. A very sophisticated and closely orchestrated dance of factors, including Michael Denton’s Platonic protein forms, rules of biochemistry set in natural law that facilitate self-organization of life in a plethora of different ways, and a mass of information hard-wired into protein structures that is yet to be elucidated, combined to allow the creation of first life from inert chemicals and guide evolution towards, at least roughly, preset goals.
The Fossil Record
As of 1985, 250,000 species of complex life forms (Cambrian forward) were represented in fossil records.[142] However, an insignificant number and range of transitional forms between major body types and between phyla were present in these fossil records to support neo-Darwinian theory.[143] Michael Denton an Australian medical doctor, research geneticist, and author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny, points out that although the fossil record was not complete as of 1986 it had systematic problems in relation to Darwinian theory, problems so extensive that the significance would remain at any rate of fossil sampling. What Denton is pointing to is the fact that there are consistently fewer intermediates between the larger branches on the tree of life than between the smaller. For example, there are many intermediate forms between an ancient and a modern horse, but relatively few between land mammals and whales.[144]
Ultimately, Denton's argument boils down to the fact that, whatever the level of sampling reliability of our fossil record may be (and we now know that it is really quite good in proportion, not to the totality of what is out there, but to what we can ultimately expect to have), in at least the majority of cases (and probably all) we should have seen many more intermediate forms between the originating and terminating creatures of a presumed large evolutionary jump, including between the phyla, than between the smaller jumps that separate the lower divisions and smaller physiological distances. Yet we have not seen this in any case—not once.
D. M. Raup, writing in an official NASA publication on evolution says “…the basic evolutionary tree of life has been worked out and it is not likely to change very much as a result of further study.”[145] Other scientists have more recently suggested that now, more than twenty years later, our fossil record is substantially reliable. Nonetheless, Denton’s objection remains: the systematic problem of lack of sufficient intermediate species between major divisions on the evolutionary tree to support an accidental process.[146] We have only 40 phyla and over 250,000 fossilized species. While granting that there are many legitimate unknowns that remain to be discovered in the evolutionary process, the one thing we are entitled to affirm is that the fossil record should reflect many more intermediate species between the phyla than between the species and genera if the neo-Darwinian theory of accidental evolution is true.
The point Denton makes about systematic problems, though seemingly an elementary one, is quite formidable. Despite its simplicity, it is crucial to understanding the weight of the fossil evidence because it flatly contradicts the predictions of neo-Darwinian theory, equating to a failed test of the theory. There should be many more intermediates populating the larger distances between the major divisions of the tree of life than populate the shorter distances between species if the evolutionary process is undirected, random, or accidental. It is that simple. Raup reports that even Darwin acknowledged this.[147] The exact opposite is seen however.
Given that there are as many as 100,000,000 species presumed to have existed through the history of life (estimates vary, ranging to 2,000,000,000 or higher),[148] having only 250,000 represented in fossil records raises a concern about incomplete or nonrepresentative sampling. It might be said that the missing links could all still be out there because we are missing 400 fossil species (possibly many more) for every one that we have. While this is true, it is scientifically invalid to presume the nature of the evidence prior to its discovery. Instead of filling in the gaps, future fossil and fossilized DNA discoveries could pose new problems for neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory or further corroborate (as one would expect) the patterns already present.
In The Fossils Still Say No! Professor Duane Gish leaves little room for doubt that intermediates between single-celled organisms and complex invertebrates have not been found in the fossil record.[149] Given the absence of an explainable link between the various phyla and what would otherwise be presumed to be a common ancestor at the base of the evolutionary tree (bacteria-level prokaryotic organisms), the absence of intermediate links between the phyla (the main branches of the tree of life), and an approximately reliable fossil record, we are forced to conclude that if anything like Darwinian evolution occurred it accomplished approximately forty partial restarts: once at the beginning of each phylum. As Dr. Jonathan Wells tells us in Icons of Evolution, that is exactly what the evidence suggests: many of the phyla appeared abruptly and fully formed.[150] NASA scientists’ study of the fossil record also echoes or at least suggests the theme of independent origins of the phyla in acknowledging that “…multicellularity appeared independently in many different lineages…Fossil records of the first evolutionary steps in the development of multicellular animals are lacking.”[151]
The necessity of duplicating the jump between single-celled and multicellular organisms some forty times over increases the already enormous improbability of neo-Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, as Dr. Jonathan Wells points out, according to the fossil record, the phyla essentially did the equivalent of coming out of nowhere. Sounds almost Biblical: “…created after their kinds.” It certainly is not the pattern expected from an accidental process.
Arguments have been made that the 3% representation of primate species in the fossil record is too small to ground a criticism of Darwinian theory because randomly placing 3% of the species on a tree diagram of primates doesn’t yield a single instance of the known fossils of even two creatures occurring in immediate proximity on the same branch.[152] The objection that there are too many missing links is, Darwinists say, therefore, shown to be premature; we should wait for the discovery of more fossils. But this same inadequacy in the fossil record argues just as strongly that we have far too little fossil evidence to solidly ground any hereditary theory of evolution, let alone an accidental one. The similarities in genetic sequence among species does strongly suggest inheritance, but until we can trace the specific events of inheritance, sketch the tree with confidence, and show concrete biomechanical pathways and concrete historical routes, we remain “light years” away from having sufficient evidence to affirm any specific narrative or biomechanical theory of evolution, including, and especially, the accidental one.
To be consistent, if we are to wait for more evidence from the fossil record to draw conclusions, then all of our conclusions should await that evidence, not just some of them. Otherwise, we are violating the standards of scientific thinking by anticipating what the nature of new discoveries will be. “We don’t yet know” is an answer scientists are not reticent to give anywhere else in science where the evidence is inadequate or ambiguous, except where huge political stakes exist, such as in the struggle between materialism/atheism and the religious worldview that has assumed the evolutionary debate as one of its primary battlefields.
By far the strongest case that has been made for restraining the unbounded imagination of the neo-Darwinists and sticking to a strict cladistic description of the fossil record is made by Henry Gee. Gee discloses in his recent paradigm shattering, In Search of Deep Time, that there are no grounds for evolutionists to presume to assert why or how (or even when in many cases) creatures have emerged through history as they have, but only to describe the record of that emergence in an objective way. Over an extended and very convincing course of argument grounded in the concrete facts of the fossil record, Gee demonstrates that to say more is to move well beyond what rigorous science can in fact support. It is to arbitrarily import and impose sociological or philosophical preconceptions on the objective data.[153] We will always be missing so much of the total evidential database that inferences as to why, how, and when the phylogenetic relationships between creatures occurred will always be at best probabilistic, and never certain.
Critics of the
completeness of the fossil record rightly point out that soft- shelled and
invertebrate creatures are rarely preserved as useable fossils. Though this is
true, fossil evidence of invertebrate history is not fully lacking.
Invertebrates compose some 90% of the species on the planet. Given their enormous
numbers, despite the comparative infrequency of fossil creation from
soft-bodied creatures, invertebrate fossils are still frequently found. The
fossil database at The National Center
for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California has
a substantial number of invertebrate fossils. Their fossil catalog
consists of over 110,000 taxonomic occurrences, with an emphasis on marine
invertebrates.[154] Although critics of the presumed inadequacy
of the fossil record have made much of the slight representation of
invertebrates, the marine invertebrates clearly have a substantial presence in
the fossil record. The global marine invertebrate database either grounds or
supplements more significant modern studies than any other; so we obviously trust
our marine invertebrate fossil sampling enough to draw certain types of
scientific conclusions—and much progress has been made in sampling reliability.[155]
With this in mind, it is not surprising that, in Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, C.R.C. Paul tells us that the "fossil record is much less incomplete than is generally accepted. Its incompleteness is largely irrelevant to the sequence of preserved fossils and hence to phylogenetic reconstruction provided only that we confine our phylogenies to known organisms. We ignore the fossil record at our peril.” David Woodruff echoes the same belief in his May 1980 Science article, "Evolution: The Paleobiological View" in saying "Evolutionary biologists can no longer ignore the fossil record on the ground that it is imperfect."
There is another problem with the fossils. Given the destructive nature of random mutations and the enormous mutation rate required to support neo-Darwinian theory (accidental evolution), there should be an extraordinary number of aberrant designs reflected in fossil records. Evolutionists have traditionally almost unanimously dispensed with this concern by saying that natural selection would quickly eliminate dysfunctional and disabled designs, thus leaving few fossil imprints of the disabled. However, I think that the mathematics of random biological form change entailed by D. D. Axe’s recent research into random substitutions of amino acids in proteins shows us that natural selection cannot handle the job.
There are two problems. First, the huge numbers that are implied by recent research into random changes to proteins by D. D. Axe mean that fossil traces of disabled and deformed species would abound. Second, defective designs must survive long enough for natural selection to act upon them. In many historical environmental niches there would be plenty of time to generate a population of a disabled/deformed species sufficient to create fossils in numbers large enough to be discovered. The absence of such fossils therefore suggests that those disabled mutant designs were never made. But why not, if the process were accidental?
In many cases, at least in the early epochs, natural selection would have been in no great hurry to vote out an imperfect design because it was either living in a friendly niche or one with little or no superior competition. Thus many of the defective designs that should have vastly predominated in the proposal stage of an accidental process could have survived and reproduced sufficiently to make fossil imprints. But the fossil record does not reveal their presence.
For natural selection alone to explain the absence of multitudes of mutant forms it would have to have, in effect, magical power (precognition). Natural selection would have to be able to veto a mutant before or immediately after it was born, prior to giving it a real competitive test on battlefield Earth. Obviously that cannot be the case in the accidental neo-Darwinian concept. So why don’t those disabled designs appear in the fossil record?
Considering the horrid efficiency of an accidental design process there should have been, not merely defects in individual creatures, but millions of bad species designs. Defective species could have reproduced successfully for several generations (perhaps many) before natural selection culled them out. In the early millenniums of life such nonoptimized creatures would at times only have had to compete with designs equally horrid, and at other times have had no competition at all. In a truly accidental process most early “competitors” would be stumbling and fumbling around with substantial design flaws. One competitor would be more or less as equally inept as the other. In those early days, a predatory act would be something like comedian Tim Conway going to Harvey Korman as his dentist. Here the dentist would be just as likely to lose a tooth as the patient. Early predators would have been more akin to Wily Coyote than T-Rex. Each attempt at a meal could potentially turn into a genuine comedy of errors.
Granted, the fossil record would reveal to us only a small portion of failed designs. Some birth defects would preclude a creature’s living to reproduce. More minor defects, however, would impair the long term survivability of the species, but not its immediate reproduction. Certainly, we would be entitled to expect less occurrences in the fossil record than if the species had lived a fuller term, but we should still find myriads of malformed yet survivable designs in the fossil record. False starts toward optimal design would number into the trillions of trillions. The sheer number of defective designs based upon standard probability computations would produce a number of defective species that in aggregate would equate to an enormous combined population, dwarfing the total of all other fully functional species combined.
Mutant fossil occurrence should also be relatively uniform across the geographic and ecological strata because the random process of neo-Darwinian theory is presumed to be ubiquitous. Paleontologists and paleobiologists could not, then, easily miss the myriad of defective fossils that an accidental process would have created. A trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion bacteria may fit in a few thimbles of solution and therefore be overlooked in fossil sampling, but a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion antelope with horns on their rump (or a variety of other disabilities and disfigurations) do not fit in a thimble. Where are the mutants in the fossil record?
When fossils are found, in most cases it is not a case of finding an individual occurrence of a single fossilized species, but rather whole communities of species are found entombed together. Helmut Mayr tell us in his nice little book, A Guide to Fossils, that, because of the hit and miss nature of the geophysical forces that produce fossils, we should only expect to see the most abundant species in the fossil record. While this is true, it is still a mistake to assume that the most abundant rule applies only to species; as a mathematical truism it applies to any characteristic whatsoever. If microscopic creatures are more abundant, microscopic creatures will be most often found in the fossil community, vice macroscopic creatures. If swimming creatures are more abundant, vice crawlers, their fossils will appear the most, etc., assuming conditions where fossilization can in fact occur. Again, this rule holds for absolutely any characteristic or criteria one can devise to differentiate members of a population, including the presence or absence of a dysfunctional design feature. It requires only that the disabled mutant be “born.” It doesn’t even have to be born alive, but merely achieve and independent physical presence eligible to be separately preserved by fossilization.
Again, if, as D. D. Axe has discovered, the odds against achieving even a single functional protein by accident are 1077 to 1, the odds against accidentally achieving a complex functional design feature requiring several if not hundreds of proteins must be at least as great. If only a single individual survived with each of the possible dysfunctional features that would have resulted from an accidental process, approximating the limit of >1077 defective designs for each success in design improvement, visibly dysfunctional aberrant designs would not just be present in the fossil record; they would strongly predominate. But the fossil record does not show this.
Here we see evidence that there was some kind of filtering system, perhaps in the developmental genome, active in the evolutionary process, a filtering system that precluded inefficient and disabled designs from surviving the developmental/reproductive process or birth. Of course, natural selection itself cannot perform this function; it must wait until the creature has competed in the natural environment and been found wanting. It must score the various attributes relevant to overall fitness such as biological efficiency, reproductive rate, competitiveness for scarce resources, physical hardiness, defense mechanisms, etc.
The developmental genome/embryonic organism is the only system available to perform the necessary quality control filtering prior to birth, but it is a highly complex machine whose functions are far from being truly random. The absence of mutant fossils, unexplained except for the influence of such nonrandom systems as the developmental genome, therefore implies a nonrandom evolutionary process. Evolution is no accident.
One might object that the mathematical argument from lack of disabled/deformed mutant fossils is not so strong because there are only so many ways to foul up a living design such that it could continue to live long enough to make a fossil imprint, and that is true. The ratio of biologically useful protein mutations to nonviable or neutral ones may be only one for every 1077, but there certainly are not 1077 survivable options available for any given design. This is true, but there are still very many.
Probability theory says the simple will occur much more frequently than the complex. Because it is easier to break something than to build it, the unworkable design sequences are typically much simpler than the workable design sequences. They will therefore occur with greater frequency in an accidental process.
Typically at least three genes must be configured very precisely to achieve even the simplest feature, and often many more genes will be involved. If the process of evolution were indeed accidental it would be analogous to rolling several hundred to several thousand 4-sided dice at one time trying to achieve one and only one precise outcome (out of as many as 43,000 alternatives). That one desired configuration of the dice is quite specific and complex; the right pattern of numbers will come up very rarely. Achieving a given disability, on the other hand, is much easier.
Any one three-gene set containing 15 erroneous triplets of DNA can potentially produce a survivable defect if the rest of the genome remains intact. They can be erroneous in many ways, for there are 64 different DNA triplets that can be derived from the base-4 DNA code, and 61 of the triplets code for a biologically useful amino acid. There are only 20 biologically useful amino acids, so there is some duplication.[156] Generally no more than two of the 64 triplet options will work in a given location of the genetic sequence. So it is readily apparent that it is easy to break biological machines.
Current estimates indicate that at least 100,000,000 species have lived on Earth. Originating a new species by accident will, presumably, require, at a minimum, several increments of viable design innovations affecting functional and structural modules and subsystems. Therefore, the number of successful design innovation events involving major systemic or body form changes (that is, the easily visible alterations that might be detectable in a fossil) can be conservatively estimated to be at least 300,000,000 (three per species). But the ratio of defective attempts to successful ones in these areas is enormous if one assumes an accidental process. Assuming at least three new proteins are needed to achieve a viable new function, and using the research data of D. D. Axe, means that the odds of achieving a novel fully-functional biological feature by accident is at least 1077 X 1077 X 1077, or 10231 to 1 against. That yields a total number of detectable defects somewhere in the ball park of 10239. How many of these defects would allow extended survival or reproduction is not easily predicted, but at these enormous numbers it doesn’t matter. Disabled and deformed fossils should predominate in the fossil record.
This aggregate mutant population is in fact many trillions of times larger than the entire population of all creatures that science currently presumes have ever lived on Earth. Therefore, one can safely assume a fully accidental evolutionary process never happened. If it had, there should be trillions of disfigured/dysfunctional designs in the fossil record for each normal/optimized one.
As usual Darwinists will counter from the far-reaching depths of their scientific expertise, that, “Well…shit happens.” It could simply be that the final polished versions of the developmental genomes for all 100,000,000 species were quickly hit upon by sheer luck and that is all there is to it. Nature got lucky and we will just have to live with it. Truth be told, that is about as strong as the neo-Darwinian argument ever gets; for we all know that shit does happen. But two telling objections must be raised against them here. First, such positions are not science because they forsake the possibility of genuine explanation and go against the probabilities. Second, the accidental view contradicts the facts. As G. G. Simpson points out, such a process as we see in evolution manifests an overwhelming bias for viable design. It can, therefore, in no way be classified as accidental.
One can only get lucky in the same direction and same manner with astounding consistency for a very brief period before rational analysis must cease to call it luck—and before one is rudely thrown from the casino. A string of mathematics defying luck stretching over millions of years is too much to believe. Such a built in bias, present at the beginning of the evolutionary process, precluding dysfunctional proposals from getting past the embryonic stage, means that the model is not neo-Darwinian at all for it is not truly accidental.
While granting, as modern evolutionists frequently remind us, that there is no bias that requires an evolutionary change to match the organism’s present environment, there is clearly another kind of bias that is present: a bias for avoiding disabling structural or systemic mutations. An accidental process would not have such a bias. What the fossil record suggests, then, is that the evolutionary process, although occasionally marred by accident, does not have accident as its foundation.
[1] This seminal meeting is documented in a fascinating video entitled Unlocking the Mystery of Life, from, Illustra Media (DVD), http://www.illustramedia.com. Many of the primary intelligent design team members make significant appearances in this video, such as Scott Minnich, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Jed Macosko, and Dean Kenyon. Professor Phillip Johnson is the author of one of the early trailblazing works on intelligent design, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), as well as The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000) and Defeating Darwinism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
[2] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st ed., (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), 210, 525. The second edition adds a third reference to the Creator as he who breathed life into creation. This appears in the very last sentence of the book.
[3] See the NASA article, “Universe 101: How Did Structure Form in the Universe?” http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_struct.html; Jim Manzi, “The Origin of Species, and Everything Else,” National Review, October 8, 2007, 42-46.
[4] Trevor R. Hodkinson and John A. N. Parnell, eds., Reconstructing the Tree of Life: Taxonomy and Systematics of Species Rich Taxa (Boca Rotan, FL: CRC Press, 2007), 4.
[5] Kristi Lew, Evolution: The Adaptation and Survival of Species, Understanding Genetics Series (New York: Rosen Publishing, 2011), 65-67. We have never known precisely how many living or extinct species there were, and unfortunately, we are now losing more than 50,000 species a year to extinction, primarily from reductions in the rain forests.
[6] Julian L. Griffin, “Metabolic Profiles to Define the Genome: Can We Hear the Phenotypes?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, Biological Sciences, vol. 359, no. 1446 (2004): 857-871; Behe, Black Box, 41.
[7] Anton Nekrutenko, “Reconciling the Numbers: ESTs Versus Protein-Coding Genes,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 21, no. 7 (2004): 1278-1282.
[8] See the discussion of dark matter in Lawrence Krauss, Quintessence (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
[9] Charles Q. Choi, “Dark Side of Black Holes,” Scientific American, vol. 302, no. 3 (2010): 22-24.
[10] Andrew Grant, “Ghost Particles Shake Physics,” Discover, Jan/Feb 2011, 64. Alicia Chang, “ ‘Monster’ Quasar Is Brightest Object Ever Found,” Huffington Post, 29 June 2011: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/quasar-earliest-brightest-most-distant_n_887094.html.
[11] Chris Smeenk, “The Elusive Higgs Mechanism,” in PSA 2004 Part II, Symposia Papers, edited by Miriam Solomon, Philosophy of Science, vol 73, no. 5 (2006): 487-499.
[12] Chris Quigg, “The Coming Revolutions in Particle Physics,” Scientific American, vol. 298, no. 2 (2008): 46-53.
[13] Jaggard, Victoria. “Physics Nobel Explainer: Why Is Expanding Universe Accelerating?” National Geographic News. October 4, 2011: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/111004-nobel-prize-physics-universe-expansion-what-is-dark-energy-science/.
[14] Massimo Pigliucci, “Postgenomic Musings,” Science, vol. 317, no. 5842 (2007): 1172-1173.
[15] Hugh Ross, Kenneth Samples, and Mark Clark. Lights in the Sky & Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFOs and Extraterrestrials (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), Appendixes A and C. Ross also presents portions of this list of fine-tuned physical values in his offering entitled, “Big Bang Model Refined by Fire,” which comprises Chapter 15 of the multi-author collection, Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), edited by William Dembski. Go to http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html for an instant review of the major physical constants of our universe that are so precisely and critically fine-tuned for life. The author of that excellent Web page, Rich Deem, has conveniently replicated for us the data of Dr. Ross. Another of Hugh Ross’s relevant offerings on this subject, written with co-author Dr. Fazale Rana, is Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004). Also, see Paul Davies’, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[16]
Stephen C. Meyer, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher
Taxonomic Categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of
This article is available on the Web at http://www.discovery.org/; free offprints are available upon request. There is also a heavily politicized controversy concerning the unusual event of the peer review status of Meyer’s article being withdrawn after its publication, and the firing of the editor who approved it. All of this, of course, is highly nonstandard, but the neo-Darwinists assure us no politics were involved whatsoever. In any case, the research Meyer cites in his article is peer-reviewed, and the logic of his argument stands on its own merits. Also see his new full-length book on the subject: Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). A brief synopsis of the controversy is given on page 2.
[17] Peter Kassan, “Duplicating Human Intelligence is a Mirage,” in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Sylvia Engdahl (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2008). Also, see Appendix 2 for a detailed presentation of this case, what has been called the resource exhaustion argument. This is my own reformulation in terms of the historical biomass of the Earth and should not be read as an explicit restatement of William Dembski. It begins from Dembski’s resource limit computations and extrapolates a similar line of argument using cumulative biomass instead of total number of atomic particles.
[18] Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 2007).
[19] Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 187. The estimate of the number of genes in the human genome has declined steadily since the initial estimates, which hovered around 40,000. Francis S. Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project for 15 years, now the director of NIH, cites 20,000 in his highly acclaimed 2010 offering, The Language of Life, which makes it close to being official, but we are still learning. Why the decline? The answer appears to have more to do with discovering the increased complexity of single genes, than with overestimates of the complexity of genetic systems. DNA sequences integral to a given gene have been found to be scattered in fragments that occur throughout the chromosome instead of being confined to a single jelly-bean like contiguous stretch of nucleotides as was hypothesized in the early days of genetic science.
[20] G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), 71, 202.
[21] John A. Davison, “Instant Evolution” published to the Internet at http://www.iscid.org/papers/Davison_InstantEvolution_050204.pdf.
[22] Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.)
[23] Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution (Memphis, TN: Acorn Enterprises, LLC, 1999), 107.
[24] Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 10.
[25] David Raup, “Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, vol. 50, no. 1 (1979): 22–29; Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 14. Large gaps in the fossil record have long been universally acknowledged in evolutionary science and paleontology. It is an undisputed fact, and these two experts are only mentioned as representative of the broad consensus.
[26] If you have trouble remembering the taxonomic divisions, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species see thefreedictionary.com for some mnemonic tricks.
[27] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1992); Hugh Ross, Creation and Time: A Biblical and Scientific Perspective on the Creation-Date Controversy (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1994); Hugh Ross, The Fingerprint of God (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2000); Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astrophysics Reveal About the Glory and Love of God, 3rd ed. (Kissimmee, FL: Signalman, 2010). It is Hugh Ross’s science that I am lauding here; his theological argument seems based upon a reading of scripture that is not Catholic.
[28] Barbieri, Marcello. The Organic Codes: An Introduction to Semantic Biology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[29]
Stephen C. Meyer, “Word Games,” in William Dembski and James M. Kushiner, eds.,
Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design, (Grand Rapids,
[30] This is a gross oversimplification and a gross underestimate. The simplest living things that we know for certain are alive, Mycoplasma, require 300 genes at an absolute minimum. The improbability of achieving these genes by chance is greater than 10-77 times itself 300 times: 10-23,100. See the Astrobiology Magazine article, “Life from Scratch,” Nov 26, 2002, at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article319.html. I give the minor increase in improbability to avoid losing the reader to whom such enormous numbers don’t really convey anything concrete to manipulate in the imagination. A change of only three orders of magnitude is something we can imagine, but tens of thousands of orders of magnitude cannot be mentally projected. The effort Dr. Meyer has made to exercise conservative rigor in his estimate can be seen in comparing his work to other estimates that have been offered for the probability of accidentally accomplishing this first step of life. As Dean Overman informs us in his excellent book, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, the improbabilities range from fully trillions of times larger to super-immense improbabilities like Overman’s own one chance in 10-10(110). In being grossly safe underestimates, my estimates in this book conserve the rigor of the Meyer/Axe values from which they are derived. See, D. D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology. Vol. 341 (2004): 1295-1315; Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 58-64.
[31] Russell Grigg, “Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm?” published to the Answers in Genesis Internet site at http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v13/i1/monkeys.asp.
[32] See Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 271. Paul Davies here cites a debate between Carl Sagan and Ernst Mayr published as "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Scientific Quest or Hopeful Folly?" Planetary Report, vol. 16 (1996): 4. Mayr indicates that the number of species in Earth's history may be as high as 50,000,000,000. Estimates of the number of species offered by different scientists have varied widely over the past fifty years but appear to have been steadily declining. The only significance of the figure I use here is that it is a visible underestimate. There is no consensus on the best estimate of the number of species in the history of life, or even on the number of living species. In a recent Huffington Post article, Richard Dawkins pegs the number of species that ever lived at a billion. So we are in the ballpark and visibly conservative at that.
[33] Meyer, “Biological Information,” 220; Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences."
[34] D. B. Davison, “Brute Force Estimation of the Number of Human Genes Using EST Clustering as a Measure,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 45, no. 3/4 (2001): 439.