Back in the day, when I was less preoccupied with writing books,
and had more time to debate science and faith, I used to get into debates like
this one below - a debate from 2009 with a staunch creationist fundie called Andrew Halloway, who is the contributing editor of the magazine ‘The Delusion of Evolution’.
The
content of my original article isn’t really worth taking up extra space here –
it was a standard reminder that Christianity and science are not mutually
exclusive, and that they are comfortable bedfellows for those not beleaguered
by a fundamentalist mindset. But as it might be archived soon, I think the debate that ensued in the ‘comments’
thread between myself and one of the so-called ‘top men’ of anti-evolution
creationism is worth saving and sharing, not just for the factual errors seen in
creationism, but as a quintessential example of the mental contortions into
which creationists get themselves when trying to defend false dogma.
Hope
it’s informative……
Andrew Halloway
The reason is that while the evidence for micro-evolution is
well-founded (and no creationist disputes that), the evidence for
macro-evolution is far from certain. It is an unjustified extrapolation from
micro-evolution, that the latest studies in cell biology and genetics are
increasingly showing to be too fantastic to believe. Prof Anthony Flew, the
world's leading atheist philosopher for five decades, recently converted to
belief in a God of some sort on the basis of the scientific evidence. He sees
the evidence for intelligent design of the world as outweighing the against
God, and says he is following where the evidence leads.
That said, to get back to the interpretation issue, I would say
that far from evolution easily harmonising with Scripture, it presents enormous
obstacles to a correct interpretation of scripture. You do not have to be a
young earth creationist to see the conflict between evolution and an orthodox
view of the Bible. In fact, accepting evolution forces you into a liberal
interpration of scripture. If you don't mind that, fine. But for me, evolution
conflicts with a whole panoply of biblical doctrines including the Fall, the
Cross, and the restoration of creation at the end of time. True science does
not contradict the Bible, so I argue it is quite possible that evolution is not
true science. It is a philosophy - a belief system - that ultimately opposes a
Christian view of the world.
So, James, defend science and I will agree with you. Defend
evolution and I will not.
James Knight
Hi
Andrew,
What I
have made clear from the outset is that evolutionary theory does not conflict
with scripture at all. The comments about lack of intermediary fossils are
simply incorrect, but even if that were true, given the vast timescales here,
one shouldn’t be overly demanding, particularly bearing in mind that most
creatures do not fossilise anyway. Given what they have to work with,
evolutionists succeed as pretty good cartographers in mapping an accessible
theory.
The
human genome project has provided for us accurate information about the whole
history of evolution through analysis of DNA and the chain of events which led
to ourselves and other primates. Scientists are even very sure that they know
at which point in the tree of evolution the chromosomal fusion occurred in our
ancestors for Homo-sapiens to evolve. Technically to say that we evolved
directly from apes is incorrect - there were of course many proto-humans,
intermediaries that used to cause us to ask about the missing link, many of
which have now been found and provide us with an accurate picture of what our
intermediary proto-humans were like. The evidence in favour of evolution used
to be utterly compelling, now it is virtually impossible to doubt, if one knows
enough about it.
Take a
look at atavisms as a prime example. Occasionally creatures are born with
traits which have been repressed in their recent evolutionary history. For
example, humans born with tails, horses born with feet, hens born with teeth
and whales born with legs. These atavistic features are always those which were
present in those creatures’ ancestors - completely consistent with the
genealogy of life according to comparative biology, the fossil record and
genetics. There are never birds born with nipples or lizards born with a
placenta or mammals born with feathers. The reason for this is that the nipple
and lactation evolved in mammals, and feathers in birds, after the common
ancestor shared by birds and mammals. i.e. - the two groups had already split
before these features were developed. Whales however, evolved from leg bearing
ancestors, chickens from toothed ancestors and humans from tailed ancestors.
The evolutionary perspective fits the facts perfectly.
Aside from Atavisms, there are many strong evidences to support evolution; vestigial traits, species transitions in the fossil record, biological cladistics (of homologous structures) and genealogy which matches the fossil record, genetic cladistics which give the same tree of life as the comparative biology and the fossil record, evidence from embryology, the position and sequence of endogenous retroviruses in our genomes, and, to some extent, animal and human psychology.
While
once we might have had more reasons to be sceptical - now are we beginning to
fill in the gaps - the evolutionary jigsaw is virtually complete.
Andrew Halloway
James, I'm sad that you seem to be so concerned with supporting
evolutionary theory that you can't see its obvious conflicts with biblical
theology. However, whatever the theological problems with evolution, the
scientific ones are just as great. You make the same mistake as atheists when
you claim that "no scientist with any credibility denies the two principal
findings of evolutionary biology." This is simply an absurd ad hominem
attack on your opponents.
There is a vast chasm between micro-evolution and
macro-evolution... Micro-evolution is the in-built ability God has given to
every creature that enables them to adapt to survive in their environment. It
is an observable fact accepted by all scientists. For example, Darwin ’s
famous finches on the Galapagos Islands , some
of which have larger beaks than others. In years of food scarcity, this gives
them an advantage over smaller-beaked finches, so more of the larger-beaked
variety survive – and the end result is that finches as a whole don’t go
extinct. But when food is more plentiful, the smaller-beaked ones return,
provided they have not died out completely. So this is not evolution, despite Darwin
So micro-evolution is something of a misnomer, because it is not
evolution at all. It could just as easily be called variation on a theme.
Natural selection encourages different kinds of finches, but doesn’t change
them into hippos. All it means is that organisms can produce a wide range of
varieties, depending on what instructions for change are ALREADY contained
within their genetic make-up. What is needed for real evolution -
macro-evolution - is NEW genetic information that is capable of building
completely new biological structures. The evidence for this is simply missing.
All the examples given by evolutionists to prove
macro-evolution, are in fact examples of micro-evolution. Macro-evolution has
never been observed nor proven, so evolutionists point to micro-evolution and
just extrapolate, i.e. assume that organisms can change beyond all recognition.
What they never explain is how. How can new information arise in an organism’s genes that is capable of building new, useful structures, and so developing a fish into a mammal or a dinosaur into a bird? Mutation is simply not an adequate explanation. The gene shuffling in the bacterium merely plays with what information is already there - it doesn't create a fish from a bacterium, just another bacterium. Creationists don't believe in the immutability of species - just the immuntability of the created 'kinds' of Genesis (perhaps the genus or a near equivalent).
Scientific experiments have shown that all mutations are either
damaging or neutral. So a mutation may give an organism a temporary ability to
survive better in its environment (e.g. the salamander's loss of eyes), but
it’s at the expense of its ability to adapt in the long run because mutations
actually damage or destroy genetic information. They don’t add instructions
capable of building new types of organisms. So where could this new genetic
information come from? The only source of information that we know of is
intelligence. DNA is a written code that could have only come from an
intelligent Mind. Chance variations in the genes cannot write new instructions,
only shuffle around and activate existing ones.
In any case, calculations of the rate of mutation have shown
that it is too slow. Even if mutations could explain evolution, there hasn’t
been enough time in the entire universe – never mind since life appeared on
earth – for mutations to change micro-organisms into complex creatures like humans.
Today, aware of the failure of mutations to explain evolution, evolutionists are hunting for new ways to understand how macro-evolution could work. It is far from proven! As things stand, either miracles were needed for this grand evolution scheme, or God created without using evolution at all. On current scientific evidence, there really are no other options.
Of course, new research might one day discover another mechanism by which evolution works, but history suggests this is unlikely. Far from proving evolution, billions of pounds of research over 150 years has only uncovered more and more complexity in life that has become harder and harder to explain by chance processes. The more obvious explanation for life is becoming impossible to ignore: that nature bears all the hallmarks of intelligent design – and therefore of an Intelligent Designer. Many machines in nature look very much like human designs. For example, the molecular motors which turn the cilia of cells look exactly like little electric motors complete with bearings, shaft and housing. In fact, engineers are always looking at nature for ways in which they can copy God’s designs, because his designs are more sophisticated than our own. For example, the flagellar motor in bacteria is so efficient that it is beyond the capabilities of any human-designed motor.
In addition, many of these mechanisms are not only complex but
irreducibly complex. That means that if you take away a single part, they will
not work, so they cannot have evolved bit by bit – they had to be complete at
the beginning. Evolutionists' attempts to explain the evolution of the
flagellar motor are laughable. There are also many biological processes that
are irreducibly complex. For example, to code for RNA production within a cell
you must already have whole and complete DNA. Yet to make DNA you must already
have whole and complete RNA. Without one, you can’t have either. Also, it
requires about 70 proteins to fabricate a DNA molecule, but you must have whole
and complete DNA to fabricate those same proteins. Which came first – the
chicken or the egg?!
Finally, research on the human genome shows that it is decaying
rather than improving or evolving over time. In other words, we are accruing
mistakes – hence the increase in genetic diseases and abnormalities – which is
evidence of devolution, not evolution. When you look at the evidence, rather
than theories, it is obvious that without miraculous intervention by God,
evolution is impossible. The Bible describes six separate acts of creation, and
that is a more logical conclusion from the evidence than evolution. As you
acknowledge yourself, evolutionists themselves are now acknowledging that Darwin
The fossil record shows that life forms are complex right from
the beginning – not simple. For example, various species of Trilobites had very
sophisticated eyesight – some 620 million supposed years ago! And almost every
major group or ‘phyla’ of complex animals that exists today appeared in a very
short space of time during just one very early period in geological history –
the Cambrian. It was so quick that this burst of creativity is called the
Cambrian Explosion! This explosion of
life appeared in a geological instant, with no apparent evolutionary
precursors. Even Richard Dawkins concedes that "it is as though they were
just planted there, without any evolutionary history."
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin
If God can create the universe, then life is no problem either.
The truth is that it takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.
Perhaps that's because it is an atheistic philosophy, not a validated
scientific theory. The incredible design intrinsic to all life shouts out one
conclusion: an all-powerful Creator.
What I am concerned about is that you accept evolution as if it
were fact, and are determined to build your theology on it. If evolution is
proved wrong tomorrow, what will happen to your belief system? Science moves
on. New theories arise. Even Isaac Newton's gravity theory is under review, and
Einstein brought a new understanding that superceded much of what went before.
Science arose quite happily in a theistic environment, and design was the
accepted universal paradigm before evolution came along. What atheists have
done is succeeded in imposing their own creation myth that, they believe, removes
the need for a Creator. Christians who go along with it are aiding and abetting
them, quite unnecessarily, as the evidence for evolution is by no means secure.
In fact, every single 'proof' of evolution given in my school textbook when I
was at school has since been discredited (not to mention that one or two were
fraudulent in the first place - the peppered moth and Haeckel's embryos).
New ones have arisen, but they are not nearly as convincing. At
the same time, insights into DNA and cell biology reveal a specified complexity
that can have only arisen from an Intelligent Mind, not the chance processes of
evolution. In addition, abiogenesis was disproved by Pasteur long ago, yet it
is a pre-requisite for atheistic evolution today, despite a complete lack of
evidence that life can arise from non-life. Theories of chemical evolution are
at a dead loss to explain how the first life could have arisen. And the more we
find out about life's complexity, the more unbelievable evolution becomes.
Intelligent Design is often written off by theistic
evolutionists as a 'God of the gaps' explanation that will be removed one day,
as God is gradually squeezed out of the gaps in knowledge. But quite the
reverse is happening. As knowledge of life's complexity grows, the strength of
the ID argument continues to grow. Evolution has become a 'Darwin
James Knight
Hi again
Andrew,
Thanks
for the response. Sorry mine hasn’t been so prompt, but I’m only just back
online. There was certainly a lot to get through, and as you spent so much time
with your response, I will take the time to go through your points with some
detail. I have numbered your points and responded accordingly. I would like to
extend the hand of friendship out to you, and say that although I think there
are many parts to your post that are incorrect, I do not see them as impugnment
against your faith, and I would ask that that precept is reciprocated. These
subjects are contentious, and discussions about them should be conducted with
the least pugnacity possible.
The
numbering does not reflect the order in which your points were received, rather
that there were a couple of questions/points that are quite involved, so I’ve
left them until last. Here goes…
1) What I am concerned about is that you accept
evolution as if it were fact, and are determined to build your theology on it.
I would
like to address this first, and assure you that I regard us as brothers in
Christ, and that intrinsically the issue of evolution has, for me, nothing to
do with my Christian faith or fellowship with any Christian brothers or
sisters. I most certainly do not build my theology around any science - in
fact, I have gone to reasonably great lengths in my recent articles to show
that the two do not negatively overlap. I have written nearly one hundred
articles on Network Norwich, most of which are theological and do not mention
evolution, so I would not say that my scientific views are at all cardinal in
my theology.
2) If evolution is proved wrong tomorrow, what
will happen to your belief system?
To my
Christian faith? Nothing. To my scientific views? Plenty – but that is what
good science demands of us - that we assent to what is shown to be right. I
would be very excited at any discovery that demonstrated the falsity of
evolutionary theory as we know it. Do I think it will happen? Absolutely not.
But I have a very open mind. Do you, Andrew? When it comes to the more
contentious tenets of science, to ask oneself ‘Do I have an open enough mind?’
is often to ask oneself the most important question of all.
3) James, I'm sad that you seem to be so
concerned with supporting evolutionary theory that you can't see its obvious
conflicts with biblical theology.
There
aren’t any conflicts Andrew. The Bible is not a book of science.
Let me
just reiterate, I do not think that most people reject evolution because of
anything scientific. In most case, science is only a pretext to conceal their
theological biases. Of course, if you know some of these good folk, Andrew, and
they do not operate in a hermetically sealed discourse, you could always invite
them on here to discuss these issues.
4)The truth is that, behind closed academic
doors, evolutionists themselves dispute so many aspects of the theory that
there is no overall agreement on the mechanisms, despite the united front
presented to the public.
This is
partially true, but it is not the mechanisms that are causing the principal
disparity – we all agree that there is still work to be done before we can
unfold the precision of the mechanism. But it is a sine qua non of the field of
biological research that life has been evolving on this planet of millions of years.
The only people who dispute this are those with a confused theological agenda,
and those who know virtually nothing about science.
5) There is a vast chasm between
micro-evolution and macro-evolution...
But only
an imaginary chasm created and tailored by those on the minority fringes of
sensible scientific enquiry. I think you’re confusing ‘chasm’ with
‘distinction’ - the distinction being that micro-evolution simply entails the
extreme latter stages (the last few thousands years) of a very long macro-evolutionary
timescale.
6) So micro-evolution is something of a
misnomer, because it is not evolution at all. It could just as easily be called
variation on a theme. Natural selection encourages different kinds of finches,
but doesn’t change them into hippos.
Well of
course it doesn’t! Finches and hippos are from different species-groups, so of
course there is no change of that kind – but nobody is claiming there is.
7) All it means is that organisms can produce a
wide range of varieties, depending on what instructions for change are ALREADY
contained within their genetic make-up. What is needed for real evolution -
macro-evolution - is NEW genetic information that is capable of building
completely new biological structures. The evidence for this is simply missing.
The next one is a pretty meaty talking point - it concerns that tricky subject ‘information’. In a moment I will address here your claim that “Chance variations in the genes cannot write new instructions, only shuffle around and activate existing ones.”, because that is not quite right.
8) All the examples given by evolutionists to
prove macro-evolution, including the salamanders and bacterium you mention, are
in fact examples of micro-evolution. Macro-evolution has never been observed
nor proven, so evolutionists point to micro-evolution and just extrapolate,
i.e. assume that organisms can change beyond all recognition. What they never
explain is how. How can new information arise in an organism’s genes that is
capable of building new, useful structures, and so developing a fish into a
mammal or a dinosaur into a bird? Mutation is simply not an adequate
explanation. The gene shuffling you mention in the bacterium merely plays with
what information is already there - it doesn't create a fish from a bacterium,
just another bacterium. Scientific experiments have shown that all mutations
are either damaging or neutral. So a mutation may give an organism a temporary
ability to survive better in its environment (e.g. the salamander's loss of eyes),
but it’s at the expense of its ability to adapt in the long run because
mutations actually damage or destroy genetic information. They don’t add
instructions capable of building new types of organisms.
This too
is incorrect. Let’s have closer look at the problems here. When it comes to
evolution, ‘beneficial mutations’ is the name of the game. Even in
comparatively recent times there are many examples of beneficial mutations
occurring, adding 'information' to the genome to confer a phenotypic advantage.
There is
a German boy who has phenomenal muscles and superhuman strength.
(http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/06/24/musclegene.php).
There is
a family with almost unbreakable bones.
(http://yalemedicine.yale.edu/ym_au02/findings.html).
There
are some people with a ‘beneficial mutation’ which allows then to see UV light.
Also,
bacteria in Japan
There is
a certain type of fungus that has evolved to withstand the highly radioactive
interior of the Chernobyl
Here in
the UK
There
are many more examples like the ones I have given above, but let me give a bit
more detail on how new genes and 'information' can arise. I will give two
mechanisms - each gene has a copy number. This is simply the number of times
that that gene appears in an organism’s genome. Take the African clawed frog -
Xenopus laevis - it has an extra copy of every single one of its genes; that is
to say, the entire genome was duplicated. This is an extreme example; gene
duplication usually occurs on a stretch of DNA, not the whole genome. Then, one
copy of a gene can continue doing its function whilst the other can mutate. A
mutated gene which confers survival advantage can be selected by natural
selection and as a result the species has a new gene with a new function with
new 'information' in the gene pool. An example of 'information' arising from
this method is haemoglobin. I came across this a few years ago when I was
researching beneficial and optimum growth methods in weight training. We have a
version which is used to carry oxygen around in our blood as adults. There is a
modified version, myoglobin, which is used to store oxygen in our muscles, and
another version, foetal haemoglobin, which had greater affinity for oxygen, and
is used to carry oxygen from mother to child during pregnancy.
Another
fascinating way in which new genes and 'information' can be added is by
endogenous retroviruses. A retrovirus inserts its DNA into its host and
provokes the host to create more copies of the retrovirus. For one reason or
another, the virus DNA is inserted but with mistakes which fail to aid the
cause of the virus. Studies have shown that if this failed retrovirus DNA is
inserted into germ line cells (i.e. sperm or egg cells) the inactive virus is
inherited in the DNA, and that vast swaths of our genome have been produced in
this way. We can trace genes for most things back to previous genes with
previous functions. Take for example placenta development genes. At one point,
an ancestor common to all humans was infected with a retrovirus. The virus
genes were inserted into the DNA of a sperm or egg, the product of which is
also a common ancestor to all humans. This virus DNA failed to produce more
viruses, but was adapted through natural selection to form the structure
connecting mother and child (the structure that we call the placenta). Wherever
we go, the actual amount of evidence left in the wake of a certain evolutionary
pathway is very conclusive indeed. Take the flagellum as a good example; the
degree of homology between the flagellum and the components from which it
evolved is overwhelming. Of course one must remember, it has been known for a
long time that DNA from viruses are not only in our genome, but that they can
make copies of themselves once they are in there. They were known about since
before the human genome was sequenced, and appear in both famous original
papers on the genome*
* They are, The Sequence of the Human
Genome by Craig Venter, and Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome
by the International Genome Sequencing Consortium (which included our Christian
brother Francis Collins; both of which were subsequently published in Science
and Nature).
Studies
have shown that as much as 8% of the genome is made up of retroviral DNA - and
I have, in fact, read several papers belonging to the Journal of Virology, in
which you can find as many as 22 families of human endogenous retroviruses,
which in various states of disrepair appear in abundance in the normal human
genome. Moreover, there are copies of numerous old endogenous retrovirus DNA
which appear in exactly the same place in our sequence as in those of other
primates, giving extra confirmation that we are ancestrally related.
A moment
ago I spoke about ‘information’, but I ought to explain what is meant by
‘information’. Information in colloquial terms is a vague concept - yet
mathematically, it is not - it is measured in bits where each bit acts to
reduce uncertainty by a factor of 2. The question arises, uncertainty in what?
The obvious answer is uncertainty in what is required to construct a useful
biological molecule. This is incredibly difficult in practice because it would
require making all the mutations possible for a given gene, and testing each of
them for functionality by expressing in cloned life. This is not the perfect
measure for information in biological systems - in fact, on the digital level
of DNA sequences it is rather impractical. Furthermore, this information is
only useful in the context of the other genes around it. If one gene in, say,
the vitamin C synthesis cycle breaks, then all the other genes become useless
and lose information. Information is ephemeral.
There
are of course some examples where there clearly is new information, such as the
creation of new genes - but it ought to be noted that in the strictest (and
ideal) mathematical sense there is no new information out there because all
possibilities are retained in the great nexus of mathematical potential - so in
this sense nothing is new. Therefore when I talk about ‘new information’ I mean
‘new’ in the sense that they are new relative to that which is currently known
or existent. In evolution, natural selection simply chooses the genomes with
information that confers survival and reproductive advantage, occurring with
repeated rounds of selecting the information that gives a better survival
machine, and this results in a species adapting to its environment (the whole
gene pool of the species shifts towards better survival). If one defines
information as the genetic sequences available (that may do something useful -
i.e. have the potential to have a function, but may not), then strictly
speaking new information is generated whenever there is a fertile union between
a male and female: the reshuffling of genes generates new combinations.
Additionally, gene duplication events would also increase information.
The exact
sequence of the parents is, of course, lost in the offspring, so there is also
a loss of information, but if, however, you define information as only those
bits of the genome which aid survival, then the animals with less information
in their genome are more likely to die than those with more information.
Therefore more information is naturally selected and for each generation that
passes, more information is accumulated in the genome. Admittedly, it is one
step back and two steps forward, but over a number of generations, there will
be a ratchet effect.
This
definition of information is related to a third definition; if you define
information as that which encodes for complex functional structures, then
information comes and goes, but still the ratchet effect which increases
information occurs when averaged over many generations. Although complex
structures do not a priori give survival advantage, one can observe from
intricate structures evidential examples of our relation with our ancestors. We
used to have vitamin C synthesis genes, but as we switched our diet to include
more fruit we no longer needed these genes to produce vitamin C. The energy
spent producing the enzymes needed for vitamin C production could have been
better spent doing something else, such as finding food or pursuing mates. So
losing the complex vitamin C synthesis pathway resulted in a survival advantage
once we had plenty of vitamin C in our diet. Having said that, there are, of
course, many complex structures that certainly do aid survival: the immune
system, endocrine system, nervous system, vascular system, to name but four. So
overall, complex structures can give great survival advantage - survival
advantage is selected for by natural selection and so natural selection selects
for complex systems and hence information.
A moment
ago I said that with information we can compare different species and observe
the exact DNA differences between them. Here is an example, related to the
above paragraph. Vitamin C is a vitamin because it is essential, but it is not
produced naturally by our bodies. Many species still have the genes for
producing vitamin C. We know the pieces of machinery that are involved in its
biosynthesis, and we know which DNA sequence makes these pieces of machinery.
When humans had their DNA sequenced, scientists found relics of vitamin C
biosynthesis genes. A broken gene with no function; still mostly intact but
riddled with a number of mutations. When the DNA sequences of other simian
primates are sequenced, not only do we find the same broken gene, in exactly
the same place, but we find the same mutations. This is just one of many
excellent pieces of evidence for the common ancestor between us and other apes.
But the
story goes deeper Andrew. There are other primates that still have vitamin C
genes intact - such as tarsiers and members of the strepsirrhini sub-order.
These primates eat mainly insects, but we higher order primates eat more fruit.
Fruit is rich in vitamin C, insects are not. Now we know that the last common
ancestor that we shared with insect eating primates was approximately forty
million years ago, as ascertained by dating the fossils which connect us and
them. It appears that around forty million years ago primates switched from a
vitamin C poor diet to a vitamin C rich diet. As there was no longer any
evolutionary pressure on the vitamin C producing gene, mutations accumulated
because detriment of this gene no longer affected survival rates.
The
choice is straightforward - either we did not evolve from proto-human
ancestors, yet God created very similar species with the same useless gene in
the same place to make it look as though we did, or we did in fact evolve in
the way that it appears. The answer seems to me obvious when we see that we share
EXACTLY the same broken gene, in EXACTLY the same position, on EXACTLY the same
chromosome, with EXACTLY the same mutations, in EXACTLY the same positions in
the gene. This is even more remarkable when we consider how big the human
genome actually is; we have more than six billion base pairs. This is precisely
what we would expect from common ancestry. The fact that the genes correlate
with feeding habits is both the icing on the cake and the cherry. Moreover, it
isn't just this broken gene with which we see common ancestry. Genetic
homologues are the same for almost every single gene in the human body. Of the
22,500 genes in the human body, every one that has ever been used in
comparative genomic studies shows EXACTLY the pattern expected.
One only
need visit the National Centre for Biotechnology Information page for human
comparative genomics:
In the
bottom right hand corner is a window called Tax Plot. Here you can plot the
similarity between the human genome and that of two of 41 different species.
So, for example, select Homo sapiens (human) versus Rattus norvegicus (rat) and
D. melanogaster (fruit fly) and you will see that the rat has greater
similarity to humans than the fly does. Now obviously the example I just gave
has extreme differences, but you can do this for any combination of three
species and get exactly what you'd expect from common ancestry as laid out by
the fossil record and comparative biology. If the anti-evolutionists are right,
God seemingly created all life with the specific purpose of making it seem that
all species evolved from one common ancestor and that the further we observe
along the evolutionary tree the greater the genomic similarities occur in
exactly the places we would expect if evolution really happened.
Some
creationists clutch at the thinnest straw and argue that the similarity in
genomes between similar species is a testament to God using similar designs for
similar species - but this does not really help matters, after all, there are
many examples of useless genes in the genomes which give the appearance of
evolutions, as well as the many intermediary fossils which give the appearance
of transitional creatures.
I have
already spoken of another example of a useless gene which we share with our
primate relatives - endogenous retroviruses. Reteroviruses are viruses that
implant their own genetic code into that of its host and the host's replicative
machinery is used to make more viruses. Sometimes the virus successfully
implants its genetic material, but the replication process fails to initiate.
This occurred before the division of humans and other higher order primates. In
at least one case, it occurred in s*x cells - and the virus genome was inherited
by the progeny of our infected ancestor. We still have the relic of this virus
in our genome, as do our higher order primate relatives. The working version is
still seen in viruses. We have this relic in the same position, on the same
chromosome as the other primates. This is another example of a useless gene
which clearly shows ancestry.
9) So where could this new genetic information
come from? The only source of information that we know of is intelligence. DNA
is a written code that could have only come from an intelligent Mind. There are
also many biological processes that are irreducibly complex. For example, to
code for RNA production within a cell you must already have whole and complete
DNA. Yet to make DNA you must already have whole and complete RNA. Without one,
you can’t have either. Also, it requires about 70 proteins to fabricate a DNA
molecule, but you must have whole and complete DNA to fabricate those same
proteins. Which came first – the chicken or the egg?!
Again,
this is wrong and based on more outdated science, but I had better take this
further, as I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “new genetic information” -
do you mean the special arrangements of items of meaningful units which
represent concepts? Usually Andrew when I get in discussions about increases in
information, I ask my interlocutor to define exactly what he/she means by
information, and how they think it 'increases'. The two root fallacies are
usually…
(1) Information
is the special arrangement of items of meaningful units like letters or numbers
which represent corresponding concepts.
(2) For
evolution to be true information must increase.
So
Andrew, increase in what? size? number? meaningfulness? corresponding concepts?
Please, Andrew, if you going to argue on scientific grounds, at least use
precise language. Can you stipulate what you think is a corresponding concept?
A stretch of junk DNA with no use corresponds with the concept of ‘useless'.
Does 100,000 base pair of useless DNA have less information than 200,000 base
pairs of useless information?
Here is
a question to aid me in understanding your definition of information.
If a
number of genes (with their DNA sequences) are all involved in a process, such
as ascorbic acid biosynthesis for example, then these genes contain
'information'. If all these genes are needed to perform the function of
producing ascorbic acid (one gene for step one, another gene for step two,
etc), then all the genes would have 'information' pertaining to their
individual steps. If one of the genes was mutated so that the whole process is
disrupted, then where are you saying is the loss of information; is it just in
the gene that was mutated or do all the genes lose information?
This is
a very relevant question, because a living thing is technically a non-linear
system. What I mean by this is that all genes interact with each other in an
intricate interwoven manner, with consequences far downstream from the location
of the DNA. The 'meaningfulness' of the 'corresponding concept' of a gene (your
“new genetic information”) simply cannot be assessed without the context of the
other genes. Haemoglobin, which transports oxygen around our blood, is useless
without other proteins to take that oxygen, split it up, move its electrons
around etc. So which is it? Do all the genes involved in a chain of events lose
information when one gene gets broken, or is it only the one that breaks?
Moving
on to your point about DNA and RNA. DNA is a sequence which is transcribed into
RNA and then the RNA is translated into proteins, which by their intrinsic
properties then perform a function in the context other proteins, DNA, RNA, the
environment and the by-products of the reactions between proteins, DNA, RNA and
the environment, but you haven’t stated where you think the information lies?
Seek out
'A hierarchical model for evolution of 23S ribosomal RNA'. It is a paper I read
showing the experimental validation of a hierarchical ribosomal evolution
hypothesis. They believe that the ribosome, which appears almost unchanged in
all life on the planet (apart from viruses), evolved from a simple machine into
the complex machine we see today, very early in the history of life. Consistent
with this hypothesis would be an essential core of the machine with
non-essential units attached on the periphery. They found a layer of 19
non-essential components on the surface of the ribosome, which can be removed
from the underlying structures. They then found another layer underneath, of 11
components. The interesting thing is that the structural features of the second
layer were important for maintaining the integrity of the first layer only, not
any of the underlying structures. They repeated this stripping of layers 12
times, identifying 59 elements along the way, leaving only a single, simple
core. Every time they peeled off a layer, that layer was only important for the
structural integrity of the layers above it. There were no cyclic dependencies
- none of the units in the ribosome were irreducibly complex (i.e. every piece of
the ribosome could be removed one by one without causing structural
instability).
Here is
an excerpt for you…
10) In any case, calculations of the rate of mutation have shown that it is too slow. Even if mutations could explain evolution, there hasn’t been enough time in the entire universe – never mind since life appeared on earth – for mutations to change micro-organisms into complex creatures like humans.
Given
that you think the earth is possibly 6,000 years old, I’m not surprised you
think this, hahahaha!!! Only kidding!
But
seriously, is this based on your Design Institute friends’ assertion that it
would take 10,000,000,000,000 years for the differences between Chimpanzees and
man to build up? This is complete nonsense, as I will show.
You
should try to get a copy of a thesis called "Estimate of the Mutation Rate
per Nucleotide in Humans" This is from a much better body of authority and
puts a figure of 175 mutations per generation, comparing us to chimpanzees.
With about 3x10^9 nucleotides in the human genome, and around 2% genetic
difference between us (60m nucleotides), it would take around 350,000
generations. Chimpanzees breed at around 12-14 years of age (and Humans too,
until relatively recently). Therefore it would take around 4.8 million years
for the genetic difference to accumulate, not 10,000,000 million years as the
DI says. Experts disagree on precisely (stress PRECISELY) how long ago humans
and chimps diverged, but they all agree that it is less than 7 million years
ago.
The DI
uses underhand tactics to criticise radioisotope dating on the basis that we
don't know if nuclear decay rates were the same in the past as they are now.
But really they should know by now that the theoretical basis for calculating
decay rates is quantum mechanics - the same theoretical basis for the field
that the infamous Mr Peet worked in; spectroscopy. We can use spectroscopy to
study the composition of stars that are many light years away from us and we
find that they have the same spectrum as they do on earth. Therefore this shows
that the underlying theory, which determines nuclear decay rates, has remained
the same for millions of years!
11) 150 years has only uncovered more and more
complexity in life that has become harder and harder to explain by chance
processes.
Now it’s
begging to become clear why you’re rejecting evolutionary theory – you’ve
created a ‘chance’ or ‘random’ muddled caricature and rejected it on false
premises. Even I reject your brand of evolution. Your interpretation represents
a serious misunderstanding of evolutionary theory - a fallacious belief that
the theory of natural selection is one of random chance. It is not, it is the
very opposite. It is true that there is a certain chance element in the
process; mutation is a process of random chance but it is only random with
respect to improvement. Natural selection is the non-random survival of
randomly varying genetic codes - the survival of which depends upon their
phenotypic effects as regards the process of embryogenesis on phenotypes (on
bodies) which cause survival or non-survival. Survival and reproduction depends
upon the passing on of the genetic code of instructions that built them,
equipped them and made them conducive to survival and reproduction. One of the
reasons I think that this process is so hard for people to reconcile to their
imagination is the sheer magnitude of the geological time in question (as I
have shown in one of my earlier articles with Francis Collins’ clock analogy).
Things
don't evolve by chance alone Andrew! Natural selection, the key to evolution,
is not a random chance process. The environment applies very specific pressures
(nature selects for certain characteristics). In a desert, for example, certain
strategies for plant survival are favoured while others are selected against.
Since major environments often last a long time, their effect on evolving life
is not random. In the desert, the edge goes to plants with better adaptations
for reproducing, despite the heat and lack of water. Mutations may be thought
of as random, but mutations are not the same thing as evolution. They merely
enrich the gene pool whose diversity natural selection acts upon.
In
actual fact Andrew, it is easy to show you where you’re going wrong. Did you
know scientists have shown that if the principles behind natural selection are
fed into a powerful computer we can create complex engineering designs?
Engineers (the prototypical intelligent designers, ho hum!) are using the
creative powers of natural selection to aid them in their design efforts. The
technique of "genetic algorithms", pioneered by computer scientist
John H. Holland (somewhere in America, I forget where), simulates the mechanism
of Darwinian evolution, involving mating, genetic recombination, reproduction,
selection and mutation to design jet engines, integrated circuit chips, scheduling
work in a busy machine shop, operating gas-pipeline pumping stations and
recognising patterns. Thus, we have engineers using some of the key principles
behind evolution to help them work out complex engineering solutions. There are
loads more examples of this; anything from designing better bridges, to working
out efficient routines for complex scheduling problems – they even use them
here at the Council in Norwich
12) Many machines in nature look very much like
human designs. For example, the molecular motors which turn the cilia of cells
look exactly like little electric motors complete with bearings, shaft and
housing. In fact, engineers are always looking at nature for ways in which they
can copy God’s designs, because his designs are more sophisticated than our
own. For example, the flagellar motor in bacteria is so efficient that it is
beyond the capabilities of any human-designed motor.
Again
there is some confusion here. There are ~30 components in the flagellum, and we
want to find out 'how did this evolve?'. If it could be shown that this could
not have possibly evolve, then you are correct is assuming that this would be a
major problem for evolutionary theory. But it isn’t at all. Just as we can
build models of cancer related human proteins from similar (homologous) animal
proteins by comparing the sequence of the proteins and accounting for the
differences, we can do the same for the proteins from which the flagellum is
composed. The first step is to get the sequence of the proteins in the
bacterial flagellum. This is easy for someone who is qualified to do so (I’m
not), as there are many databases that have this information (Entrez, ExPASy,
SwissProt, PIP, to name but four). Searching for similar sequences in the
databases (using a method called BLAST) we find that the flagellum has proteins
related to three different systems:
(1) The
type 3 secretory system. Bacteria use this to inject material into more
complicated cells, such as human cells. This can cause cell death and provide
food for the bacteria, or even stimulate the cell to take in the bacteria and
allow the cell to be eaten from the inside!
(2) ATP
synthetase. This generates ATP, an important molecule which stores energy in a
way which can be used to fuel many cellular processes. This is a reversible
machine. It has a rotor and a stator. It can work forwards, when the machine
generates ATP from the food absorbed by the bacteria. It can also run backwards
and destroy ATP as/when there is too much, preventing the build up of free
radicals and subsequent cell death. It can do this because the rotor can rotate
clockwise or anti-clockwise under biochemical control.
(3) The
Tol-Pal system - this is important for maintaining the integrity of the
bacterial outer membrane, but is more trivial in this issue.
So the
first thing that stands out is that all these systems exist in the cell
membrane. So does the bacterial flagellum. This fits nicely because you would
expect the thing that is evolving to be in the same place as the bits it is
evolving from, ho hum!! Now, (2) and (3) are very primitive and it is clear
that they existed before the flagellum. It is possible that (1) actually
evolved from the flagellum and not the other way round, but this is unlikely
because there are 5 other, related secretory systems that are known. It seems
that the secretory system evolved first and then diverged, with the flagellum
evolving from the type 3 secretory system. There is also some other evidence
which points to the same conclusion.
Having
seen where the components came from, we are ready to ask the question 'how did
these bits come together to form a working flagella?'. We know the motor came
from ATP synthase and that the bit that sticks out came from the secretory
system. What is needed is a simple modification of these components that gives
an advantage to the bacteria over its competitors. Obviously this wouldn't be a
direct signalling pathway because a signalling pathway for using a motor
without the motor itself is of no use. If a signalling pathway were essential,
then the system would be irreducibly complex and hence unevolvable, but it has
been shown quite clearly how the motor came first.
(1) The
secretory system that extends out of the bacteria is not rigidly attached to
the membrane. Just as, say, bath water scum is at the interface between the
water and the air, the extension is at the interface between the fatty membrane
and the watery medium that the bacteria is in. This is easily demonstrable..
(2)
There are often several copies of a gene. The number of copies is, not
surprisingly, called the copy number.
(3)
Mutations can cause an interface between two components to occur. This occurs
all the time and again, is proven. One conceivable (and most likely)
explanation is that a random mutation created an interface between a copy of
the ATP synthase and the secretory system.
(4) This
interface could cause a ratchet effect. ie) ATP synthase moves clockwise and
the extension doesn't move. If ATP moves anticlockwise then the extension does
move.
(5) When
there is plenty of food/nutrients, the ATP synthase moves clockwise and the
attached extension doesn't move. When there is not enough food, ATP synthase
moves anticlockwise, causing rotation of the extension.
(6) This
rotation propels the bacteria away from the food deficient region, giving an
advantage to this bacteria over its competitors.
Now
here’s the rub Andrew; this mutant with the interface between ATP synthase and
the secretory system will have a survival advantage that is inherited by its
offspring. This very primitive flagellum has just evolved. Natural selection
can then refine the basic system and optimise it. There is so much evidence in
the past few years that the flagellum is not irreducibly complex. One study
showed that of the hundreds of copies of one protein that make the flagellum so
powerful, it is possible to knock them away so that only one remains. The
flagellum still worked even in these conditions, albeit not very well.
Not only
is the flagellum not irreducibly complex; in fact, I would go further, I do not
think any organism is irreducibly complex. Your underlying assumption that
evolutionary theory fails to provide even a relatively complete idea of the
evolutionary routes is simply not true, and is straight out of the
anachronistic Michael Behe school, of thought. These claims are so outdated,
but of course, if one is trying hard to close one’s eyes to them, one will
remain in his own personal darkness.
When one
talks about zooming in looking for creative qualities or intentionality, it is
always important to remember something else here, Andrew. As a Christian,
allowing that the primary ontology of our universe contains a cosmic blueprint
designed by a vastly intelligent mind with the property of Aseity, then it is
likely that He has incorporated creative qualities or intentionality at a level
beyond the discernment of man. In other words, the universe isn’t necessarily
going to serve up its ‘created’ secrets at the levels that IDists are looking
for them.
12) In addition, many of these mechanisms are not only complex but irreducibly complex. That means that if you take away a single part, they will not work, so they cannot have evolved bit by bit – they had to be complete at the beginning. Evolutionists' attempts to explain the evolution of the flagellar motor are laughable.
Irreducible complexity is a deductively untenable proposition, for reasons already stated in the threads on my “Bringing Christianity and Science Together part one” article - namely because of the ‘scaffolding’ possibility, it is impossible to say that there are no evolutionary pathways. Given the foregoing, the very most one can ever say is that such-and-such MIGHT be irreducibly complex but it cannot be demonstrated that it is irreducibly complex
13) The fossil record shows that life forms are
complex right from the beginning – not simple. For example, various species of
Trilobites had very sophisticated eyesight – some 620 million supposed years
ago! And almost every major group or ‘phyla’ of complex animals that exists
today appeared in a very short space of time during just one very early period
in geological history – the Cambrian. It was so quick that this burst of
creativity is called the Cambrian Explosion! In On the Origin of Species, Darwin
Again,
another example of your outdated science. All of the above represents a serious
and rather crass distortion of the true picture. In fact, you are so wrong in
so many places, I hardly know where to being here. This has to be one of the
biggest myths perpetuated in anti-evolution circles - and it has to be said,
not only do we have numerous amounts of transitional fossils (that is,
transitional between species), when it comes to physical organisms, every
species in the fossil record is, strictly speaking a transitional form (that is
to say, watch us evolve for another few thousand years and there would be
significant differences in our organisms - we are always progressing and, thus,
transitional).
But when
it comes to transition between species there are plenty of species in the
fossil record which are so similar to others that they constitute that which
most people would refer to as a "transitional form". In the mid to
late 19th century when Darwin
Moreover, if you examine the bones in your hand, a fish's fin, a whale's fin and indeed the forefeet of many tetrapod groups, you will notice that in a great many cases the bones all correspond. This is also apparent in many structures in the bodies of vertebrates - there are clear connections. Furthermore, aside from the many transitional forms, we see many kinds of events which bring about genetic isolation. An example is the Common Mynah, a bird from south-east
Regarding
our own transitional ancestors - what was once called ‘the missing link’ - we
can look back hundreds of thousands of ape generations to see the small changes
accumulate, by looking at the fossil record and dating the rocks in which the
fossils are buried. When we do that, we see a branching tree, one of the
branches of which connect us, along with other apes, to a common ancestor, via
a series of small changes. First we became bipedal, then our brains started
getting bigger, then we started becoming more skilled, more intelligent, etc,
until we reached the point as an organism when God was ready to put Himself
into it - the first Adam.
Here,
going approximately from oldest to youngest, is a list of some of the ape
fossils which can be used to trace our past.
Sahelanthropus
tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis, Ar. kadabba and Ar. ramidus, Au. anamensis, Au.
afarensis, Au. africanus, Au. bahrelghazali, Au. garhi, Kenyanthropus platyops,
P. aethiopicus, P. boisei, P. robustus, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo
ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo antecessor, Homo cepranensis, Homo erectus, Homo
heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens
idaltu, Archaic Homo sapiens and Homo floresiensis.
Once we
choose to break free from the chains of enslavement that manifest themselves in
the shape of an anti-evolutionary bias, we can see that wherever we look there
is demonstrable evidence that creatures have been evolving on this planet for
millions of years, and that human beings are part of that evolutionary tree
14) What atheists have done is succeeded in
imposing their own creation myth that, they believe, removes the need for a
Creator. Christians who go along with it are aiding and abetting them, quite
unnecessarily, as the evidence for evolution is by no means secure.
Your
first assumption is, I believe, correct, but then you go and spoil it by
claiming that any Christian that is pro-evolution is assisting atheists. Ever
thought that it is, in fact, the fideists, extremists and crackpots that are
doing more to damage the reputation of Christianity? One must look out for the
warning signs, and realise that even the less systemic philosophies create
their own system, as they so often emanate from a system of conjectures (see
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for a fuller exposition)
15) New ones have arisen, but they are not
nearly as convincing. At the same time, insights into DNA and cell biology
reveal a specified complexity that can have only arisen from an Intelligent
Mind, not the chance processes of evolution.
Hmm…..now
we’ve arrived at the very difficult concept of Complex Specified Information
(CSI for short). Above you say “insights into DNA and cell biology reveal a
specified complexity that can have only arisen from an Intelligent Mind”. What?
Not true!! Not yet anyway! This is a very long and complex investigation that
many experts are working on – it’s a lifetime’s work, and I suspect we will not
be able to know for certain. But here’s you decreeing by fiat that this is
already a fait accompli, case-closed fact. Not true, and one can tell a lot
about how competent a person is on this subject by how far they are willing to
go outside of what is already accomplished. In science those that run before
the others have finished learning to walk are usually the ones talking
nonsense.
But
let’s look at CSI further, shall we? As I’ve said, this is certainly still work
in progress, but the main rub is that Creationists/IDists claim that
"evolution can't produce new information." For example, this is the
core argument of Stephen C. Meyer in his allegedly peer-reviewed paper,
"The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories"
in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (see also the
extensive critiques of this paper at The Panda's Thumb).
Natural
selection doesn't increase the information; it simply chooses the genomes with
information that confers survival advantage. Repeated rounds of selecting the
information that gives a better survival machine results in a species
adaptation to its environment - the whole gene pool of the species shifts
towards better survival. If you define information as the genetic sequences
available which may do something useful (i.e. have the potential to have a
function, but may not), then new information is generated whenever a male and
female mate: the reshuffling of genes generates new combinations. Additionally,
gene duplication events would also increase information, as I have already said
(see my response to your section 12) .
16) In addition, abiogenesis was disproved by
Pasteur long ago, yet it is a pre-requisite for atheistic evolution today,
despite a complete lack of evidence that life can arise from non-life. Theories
of chemical evolution are at a dead loss to explain how the first life could
have arisen.
Again,
this is simply wrong, Andrew. The only way we can approach the question of
abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life) is by conceiving of everything
conceivable and then removing the impossible, and that is something that
neither Pasteur nor anyone else could do. If the means for making life is part
of what is left, then life can spontaneously appear. Defining life as something
that can replicate itself and is amenable to evolution, the first trimming of
conceivable ideas is that the life must be constructed out of things that
exist. As far as we know, all things that exist are made from a finite set of
constituents which are called the elementary particles. The manner in which
these elementary particles interact with each other is well known; quarks come
together to form nucleons, nucleons come together to form nuclei, nuclei
combine with electrons to form atoms, atoms combine with each other to form
molecules and materials, materials and molecules and atoms can create or
destroy photons, and so on.
Just as
we know about the compounds that pervaded the early solar system, because we
know what comes out of stars and what can be carried in by comets, we know this
because we can do astronomical spectroscopy and observe the contents of newly
formed solar systems - we know that amino acids, the constituents of proteins,
life’s 'workhorses', are found in space and can be synthesised in a lab by
mimicking lighting striking earth’s primordial oceans. We also know that
ancient clays can catalyse the reaction of some of the early compounds on earth
into nucleic acids - which are often touted as the 'building blocks' of life.
Not only that, but we also know that nucleic acids can spontaneously form the
molecule known as RNA. RNA can not only speed up chemical reactions which could
confer biological advantage, but it can work as a template for itself - perhaps
the first mechanism of reproduction. When in comes to explaining the biological
changes that have occurred in the last four and a bit billion years, as
highlighted by cladistics and the fossil record, evolutionary theory stands up
wonderfully well.
Of
course, the formation of life depends on the environment. In order for
something to proliferate indefinitely, it would have to grow and extract the
necessary matter it needs from its environment. So the second trimming of
conceivable ideas is that this incipient life must exist in a possible
environment. Looking out into the skies with telescopes tells us that there are
many environments ranging from the cold depths of space to the tens of millions
of Celsius in the heart of the hottest stars, with almost all intermediates.
However, not all these environments are conducive to the forming of life, in
fact, many are impossible incubators.
As none
of the elementary particles nor their simplest combinations can self-replicate
in an evolvable way, life can spontaneously form only in those environments
which allows life to retain its specific configuration of elementary particles
that allows reproduction. On top of this, an environment that stays static will
not do. These considerations rule out the depths of space, as not only is it so
cold that change is incredibly slow, but cosmic rays will blow out any
configuration of elementary particles which is complex enough to reproduce.
Similarly, the thermal fluctuation present in really hot environments also blow
out complex systems before they are even made, so these considerations
significantly reduce the fraction of the known universe that could create and
support life.
A planet
orbiting a star seems like the only places left where the temperature ranges
are good enough for supporting life. Similarly, comets and asteroids can cause
serious terminal destruction of these planets, and so a big planet capable of
deflecting these away would be needed to create and support life. The next
trimming down of conceivable possibilities is that life must be made of what
can be created by possible processes - theoretical considerations suggest that
there may be more stable elements in the periodic table than we those of which
humanity is presently aware.
Now that
most the difficulties have been removed, we are left with universe that is more
than 14 billion light years wide - most of which cannot produce life. However,
the elements of the periodic table still allow a rich range of chemistry to
happen; so rich in fact that many complex chemicals do exist and undergo
reactions. We know that the vast majority of these compounds cannot reproduce
under any known environment, but it seems that reproduction (self-replication)
is not so complex that it cannot happen - it is just such a rare event that it
needed a molecule to form a template of itself, against which the compounds in
the environment spontaneously form a copy of the template. Even given the fact
that our universe has approximately 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion
starts in it, such is the RNA molecule, it is unlikely that a self replicating
RNA molecule will spontaneously form on any given planet. But what if the
universe had a blueprint that made such as self-replicating organs not only
possible or likely but certain? Believing as I do that God is the creator and
sustainer of the universe, I see no reason to worry about the likelihood of
life ‘spontaneously’ occurring - all we are left to do as Christians is to
observe the mechanism by which God did His creating and sustaining - for then
we can have a clear picture of the blueprint and, most importantly, keep adding
to it when we discover new information about our world. That, in fact, is
exactly the opposite of what young earth creationists do - they have a rigid
and intransigent idea about creation, and foolishly reject any discoveries that
do not accord with their own worldview.
What we
know about the origin of life is this. In this world, the common states are
liquid, solid and gas. We know such incipient life could not exist in solids,
because things in solids cannot diffuse around, and atoms vibrate around an
average position. Equally, life isn't likely to exist in the gas phase, because
the replication machinery has a necessary complexity - and hence weight which
is too heavy to get into the gas phase. The fact that life exists in liquids is
because liquids allows signal transducation by diffusion and can act as a
suitable solvent for bio-machinery. Life was unlikely to exist in any other
state apart from liquid - hence the ‘primordial soup’ metaphor.
The high surface tension, low viscosity, boiling point, melting point and the fact that water expands upon cooling can all be explained by the way water molecules interact with each other - namely that it is capable of making four hydrogen bonds. Why it does this ultimately lies with the laws of quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger equation, when solved for a given collection of atoms, tells us the properties of that collection of atoms. It tells us how much energy we need to pull it apart, or equivalently, how much energy is released when it forms. The same can be said for collections of water molecules. The solution to the Schrodinger equation is found using the same methods whether we are dealing with water, or ammonia, or caffeine or any other compound we care to study. The properties of water and all other molecules are the inevitable outcome of the natural dispositions of electrons and nucleons. The properties of water aren't arbitrary, they are emergent phenomena of the properties of the universe - just one of a myriad of consequences of the laws of physics.
The
fact that life on earth depends on water, is a testament to how life has
adapted to the aqueous environment found on the planet on which it arose. It
seems true that many of water’s special features played a key role in allowing
life as it is to exist - however, seeing that the properties of water are just
a consequence of the combination of fundamental particles from which it is
made, it is no surprise that us complex beings find ourselves on a planet which
has this life-enhancing molecule in abundance, as opposed to anywhere else in
the universe
Having
said all that, it is important not to fall in the trap that many creationists
fall in, decreeing that as we have no evidence that abiogenesis has ever
happened evolution fails as a theory. This is simply not true, and using a
court trial analogy, that is tantamount to saying 'we don't know where the
knife came from, so no crime took place’ despite the overwhelming evidence to
the contrary. It should be remembered that evolution doesn't say very much at
all about the origin of life - it is a theory which explains the diversity of
life via a selectional mechanism.
One must
remember that a theory does not fail if it does not explain all of the
observable facts. What makes theories great is that they unify facts. Quantum
theory is fantastic because it explains so much. It can be used to calculate
how much heat is generated when a compound is burnt, how a compound will behave
in a magnetic field, what colour compounds are, even things such as why
clingfilm is clingy.
There
are so many discoveries that could show evolution to be false, yet not one of
these discoveries has occurred. Rabbit fossils in a pre-Cambrian geological
strata would prove evolution wrong, so would any land vertebrate fossils found
in the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, cretaceous, quaternary, tertiary,
proterozoic or archean layers of rock. Moreover, if species were heterogamous
and not homogamous, then that would falsify evolution too. If a bird with
nipples or a mammal with feathers were to be found, that would also falsify the
theory of evolution. The fact that 150 years of searching hasn't found anything
to disprove the theory of evolution is a testament to how great a theory it is.
The
theory of evolution predicted that transitional fossils will be found as
intermediates between older and newer species. There are many such examples
connecting dinosaurs to birds, fish to land vertebrates and primates to humans
amongst others. Another prediction is that the unit of inheritance (DNA) should
show more similarity between closer relatives than more distant relatives.
Well, primates do have greater similarity to humans than other mammals. Other
mammals have greater DNA similarity to humans than birds, and so on.
Evolution
is a fact, Andrew.
17) And the more we find out about life's
complexity, the more unbelievable evolution becomes.
To
finish, I would say that, in fact, the more we find out about life's complexity,
the more stupendous evolution becomes – and let me add to that, the more
amazing.
I hope
that’s given you plenty to think about, and been helpful in painting a bigger
picture for you.
Best
wishes
James
Hi James, would just like to come back on some points you make.
1. When I said I am concerned that you are building your
theology on science, I'm afraid you have not allayed my fears. As with all
theistic evolutionists, you cannot avoid reading Genesis through evolutionary
spectacles, which clearly affects how you interpret Scripture. Of course, an
understanding of history, culture and archaeology can help illuminate
Scripture, but as Denis Alexander's latest book on theistic evolution (Creation
or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?) clearly shows, maintaining belief in
evolution requires a distortion of the plain meaning of Scripture.
2. To my question, 'If evolution is proved wrong tomorrow, what
will happen to your belief system?' You replied, 'To my Christian faith?
Nothing.' In general of course, I agree, but I was referring to your beliefs
about how Genesis is interpreted, which directly affects your theology of
creation.
3. You say 'There aren’t any conflicts (between evolution and
Scripture)'. In your opinion, yes, but there are hundreds of theologians who
would disagree with you. You say 'The Bible is not a book of science.' True,
but I'm not contending that the Bible is a science book. However, it does tell
the truth about the history of mankind and creation, and so whenever science
conflicts with that truth, it is science (a human, fallible knowledge system)
that we should doubt, not the Bible (divine truth). Instead, you seem prepared
to idolise evolution over the Bible. True science does not conflict with the
Bible, but evolution does - which means it's not true science. A fundamental concept in biblical
interpretation is 'Sola Scriptura' - which demands that all other authorities
are subordinate to, and are to be corrected by, the written word of God. But
theistic evolutionism falls far short of 'Sola Scriptura'. This is seen clearly
in Denis Alexander's book, which performs interpretative gymnastics with
Genesis in order to shoehorn evolution into the story of creation, when it
clearly doesn’t exist there.
The Bible says the world was created very good and fell,
beginning to decay. Evolution says it began in chaos and has gradually
self-created into a state of complexity. The Bible says God created everything
at the beginning, and his creative acts ended when he rested on the Seventh
‘Day’ (and we are still in that Sabbath Rest). Evolution says order has come
about through natural processes which are continuing to ‘create’ today, and
organisms will continue to be ‘created’ by evolution in the future. Both can’t
be true. Which is authoritative and infallible, the Book of God or the Book of
Nature? God can speak to us through nature, yes, but nature and human
scientists are fallen – so they are not a perfect vessel for revealing God’s
truth. Only the Bible is.
The Bible is our ultimate authority, and therefore takes the
prime place in interpreting itself. so true Christian exegesis means to find
out what the Bible itself actually teaches us about what Genesis means, e.g.
how did Christ use its teachings and what was his and the apostles’
hermeneutic? When you look, you find out that Christ and the apostles refer to
Genesis as literal history. Denis
Alexander warns us against the danger of reading passages with excessive
literalism. Where, though, I wonder is the opposite warning? We live in times
dominated by Enlightenment thought. We live in the unpleasant afterglow of over
a century of unbelieving theological liberalism. We live in times when people
think of the Bible in terms of myth… not the real world of time and space.
As one reviewer says: “It is not excessive literalism which has
ruined the mainline denominations of the professing Christian church; it is
liberalism. So where is Denis’ warning that we might be in danger of treating
straightforward matters of history as if they weren’t? Where are we alerted to
the risks of facing the Bible’s cold, hard assertions about real history, real
space and time, and committing the sin of unbelief in their face?” Denis
Alexander sums up his whole liberal approach when he says that Genesis “is
describing creative events that occurred before anyone was around to describe
them, so it cannot be history in any normal use of that term.” So, God isn’t
capable of writing history unless he has human eyewitnesses to do it for him?
Is it not possible that God inspired Moses to write real history – as the Bible
itself claims – or are miracles not allowed in theology any more? For theistic
evolutionists, Genesis is theology and evolution is science, and never the
twain shall meet. The Bible wasn’t written as a scientific textbook, true, but
they then conclude that where it does touch on scientific issues it can’t be
trusted to say anything plainly – it must be all symbolic. In contrast,
neo-Darwinism is science, so it can be trusted! Hail the new religion of
evolution! The truth is that Genesis
makes historical claims and so does evolution, and in many places they are in
conflict.
As the reviewer says: “As I read Dr. Alexander’s book, my main
fear ironically isn’t that it’ll persuade Christians to embrace Darwinism. What
this book will actually do to Christians who really take it to heart is much
worse… it might lead them into a much more far-reaching theological downgrade,
through the methods of Bible interpretation that Dr. Alexander uses… The authentic
Christian approach to the Bible is to give it an unrivalled place of supreme
authority and absolute truth, so that it dictates the parameters which any
other supposed sources of truth must adhere to. The Bible is certain and
non-negotiable; other sources of truth are uncertain, must fit within the
parameters of Scripture and be believed with appropriate tentativeness.”
5. I said that evolutionists themselves dispute so many aspects
of the theory that there is no overall agreement on the mechanisms, despite the
united front presented to the public. You agreed, but said "The only
people who dispute (evolution as a whole) are those with a confused theological
agenda, and those who know virtually nothing about science." Please don't
resort to ad hominem mud-slinging again. I don't have a 'confused theological
agenda' and althogh I don't claim to be a scientist, there are plenty of
scientists in the world who oppose evolution - do they all know "virtually
nothing" about science?
6. I'm glad you agree that God would be needed to make evolution
happen (if it happened) but believing God was needed undermines the concept of
evolution itself. As Dawkins famously said, evolution made him an
intellectually-fulfilled atheist, precisely because it enabled him to exclude
God from the picture. Evolution is an explanation (however poor) of how life
could have diversified from a single common ancestor to all the organisms we
see today - by purely NATURAL processes, and therefore by definitin, WITHOUT
the need for a supernatural God. You can't have your cake and eat it. You can
have God as the originator of the first single common ancestor and as the
designer of that ancestor's capability for evolution from then on, but he is
not allowed to be involved in the process. But that's closer to a deistic than
theistic belief.
7. You claim the poll showing most people don't believe in
evolution was biased towards creationism because Theos is a Christian think
tank? Think again. Theos co-published the research with Denis Alexander and
theistic evolutionists as part of a 'Rescuing Darwin' from creationists
campaign!
8. When I said evolutionists have had 150 years to convince the
public, your answer was that "macro-evolution is... not amenable to simple
laboratory testing or test/confirm or refute scenarios." Hmmm. How come
you are so confident it's a fact, then? I quite agree it's not testable and
difficult to prove -which is precisely why it is not a fact of empirical
science but an uproven theory of historical science.
9. 'There is a vast chasm between micro-evolution and
macro-evolution...' Saying it's imaginary is completely untrue, James.
Evolutionists themselves use this terminology. There is a distinct difference
between the two. Proving micro does not prove macro.
10. 'Natural selection encourages different kinds of finches, but doesn’t change them into hippos.' You said, 'Well of course it doesn’t! Finches and hippos are from different species-groups, so of course there is no change of that kind – but nobody is claiming there is.' Yes you are! Macro evolution is the theory that microbes can change to fish to reptiles to mammals etc. Evolution is all about change.
11. Information - see later.
12. Examples of apparently adding new information to the genome
and mutations. All the examples you give are, as I said, micro-evolutionary
adaptations to the environment. They are not the type of changes that involve
the building of new bodily structures that can bring about macro-evolution. To
take just your first example, the strong boy. The genetic info to create
muscles was already there. The report says his strength was caused by "a
mutation in a gene called myostatin, which regulates the growth of muscles. The
mutation shuts down the gene." So a genetic mistake which allows muscles to
grow unregulated is a good thing?! Look what happens when the regulation of
growth hormones is 'shut down' - people grow abnormally tall but as a
consequence have a whole load of other health problems. If this boy's muscles
kept on growing out of proportion to his bone structure, his muscles could
break his own bones. How is that an evolutionary advantage? Sure, nice to be
stronger, but there is always a limit to the advantages of micro-evolution - a
barrier which prevents macro. Michael Behe's book 'The Edge of Evolution'
covers the latest genetic research which shows that micro-evolution cannot
achieve much at all in the long run.
13. Regarding James's claim that Vitamin C synthesis loss is
evidence for evolution, on the surface this seems to be a strong argument. But
his comment in the first paragraph about natural selection selecting for
complex systems and hence information is nonsensical. The example he gives is a
LOSS of information, being that of vitamin C synthesis. It would be perfectly
logical to imagine a scenario where a function is lost through Natural
Selection, but this is a world away from showing that Natural Selection caused
that same function to develop in the first place. The former is not the issue,
the latter most certainly is and he has avoided the issue entirely. The real
question for him is how does Natural Selection explain the emergence of the
‘but four’ complex structures that he cites. Further, how does he say the
information (which he says Natural Selection can select for) was generated.
Secondly, on what basis can it be conclusively stated that the
‘useless genes’ are in fact useless? Evolutionists used to claim that most of
the genome was made up of junk DNA and this was evidence of evolutionary
history. As readers of the New Scientist will know, this has now been
thoroughly debunked. There is now plenty of evidence for usefulness of the
so-called 'junk'.
The key enzyme in this discussion is gluonolactone oxidase, GULO
for short. The gene in humans is known as the GULO pseudogene GULOP, found on
Chromosome 8.
Whilst the ancestry is an interesting point, James seems to be
arguing that evolution has conclusively demonstrated that complex biological
systems have been beneficially lost over the process of time. He suggests that
this was caused by such a system becoming unnecessary and a waste of energy,
but this is not the only conclusion that he could draw. For example, humans can
manufacture 10 of the 20 amino acids that we eat plenty of in our diet. We do
not call such systems a waste of energy.
The energy waste argument would only be valid if there was a
large amount of vitamin C with a corresponding lack of glucose available in
history, by deduction rendering synthesis of vitamin C from glucose a
disadvantage, but this is simply not the case for fruit which has plenty of
glucose and therefore it makes no sense to combine these two for his
conclusion. To call such a scenario a survival advantage is frankly ridiculous.The
only possible survival advantage I can think of is where some studies have
tried to link high vitamin C intake with copper deficiency and birth defects.
I would argue that complex systems like the vitamin C pathway
are hardly a waste of energy, even with modern diets, other studies have shown
that the average lifespan of a human being using vitamin C went up by sometimes
as high as 20%. Vitamin C production in humans, guinea pigs, primates etc.
have clear and scientifically validated survival advantages. It
was one of the scientific observations that sparked off the 'free radical'
nutrition movement years ago. One could argue from an evolutionary standpoint
that such primates were forced to adopt fruit eating behaviour because they
lost the ability to manufacture vitamin C. It is an error to conclusively
assume that genetic change came after the change in behaviour and quite frankly
it is naïve to call this a survival advantage open to natural selection. It
would be quite sensible to suggest that behaviour was forced to adapt to
accommodate a genetic disaster in the vitamin C manufacturing system. To me
this is far more likely with an evolution paradigm, as the survival of a
species to a shifting environment is dependent on adaptability based on
adaptable survival systems rather than loss of such systems.
The existence of scurvy and no evidence of this system being able to re-evolve within the primate world would suggest to me that James' presented evidence is at best devolution evidence, if indeed his claims are not overblown, which I suspect they are. There are some studies that look at this same issue in birds but the variety is so great even within species that suggestions of re-evolution of this gene in birds are at best mere speculation rather than fact. Finally, There is a recent article in Scientific American about the HAR1 gene that has 18 differences between ape and man, but only 2 different between an ape and chicken. To follow James's logic, are we therefore more closely related to chickens than apes?!
See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-makes-us-human
14.Mutation rates. There is plenty of evidence in the public
domain that shows that current mutation rates are far slower than needed for
evolution to be viable. I don't need Discovery Institute's figures for that. For instance, if we want to turn an ape-like
ancestor into a human in 2 million years we can assume 100,000 generations
based on a 20 year generation period. If we assume out of 3 billion nucleotides
10 percent funcationality we have 300 million to work on - and if we assume a 5%
genetic difference between apes and man then we need to find 15 million
beneficial mutations in 100,000 generations; or we would need to find and fix
in a population 150 beneficial mutations per generation. Now if we then
consider some of the problems that Haldane and others identified, then to find
sufficient beneficial mutations we need very large populations, and to get
those mutations to spread through a population we need very small groups. To
weed out the far more numerous harmful mutations and avoid error catastrophe we
need evolution to proceed very slowly. Haldane argued that only 1 beneficial
mutation could be fixed in 1667 years, whereas the current model requires 150
beneficial mutations fixed per 20 years. Even Steve Jones has said the current
human population is not evolving for these types of reasons. But even if
mutation rates were quicker in the past, there is still the problem of what
mutation actually achieves - and for me it definitely doesn't achieve the sort
of positive change that is needed to justify macro-evolutionary progress.
As for radioactive dating techniques, I'm sure that everyone
realises they are based on several unprovable assumptions, and not just the
decay rate in the past. But I'm not arguing for a young earth so I don't know
why this is in the discussion.
15. James, when you argue that evolution is not a theory
dependent on chance processes, you sound just like Richard Dawkins, who tries
to argue the same. He says that because natural laws are involved then
evolution is a directed process. But if there is no God, as Dawkins believes,
then natural laws themselves weren't created but are themselves the product of
chance processes, so they can't be used as an argument against chance. The fact
is that you would say that God directed evolution, and I would say that for
evolution to have occurred God would have had to intervene so much in the
process to make it work that it might as well be called creation! The reason
'punctuated equilibrium' (PE) was invented as a theory was to take account of
the fact that the fossil record shows too little evidence of gradual evolution.
But all PE did was draw attention to the fact that there are huge leaps in the
fossil record (I wish this site told me when I am running out of space!) that
gradual evolution cannot account for. Then you say that natural selection
itself is not random, so it can direct the process. Well, forgive me, but
natural selection does not have intelligence, so it cannot direct anything. It
is itself dependent on the random variations in the environment, so it is
random too. Natural selection is not God.
And for the evolution of the first life form to be true, atoms
must form useful molecules such
as enzymes, amino acids and proteins by random chance. It is
mathematically impossible for these molecules, much less the far larger DNA
molecule, to form by random action in nature. As for saying that a computer
programme based on natural selection can help in engineering, well that's a
self-defeating argument as the programme depends on an intelligent designer to
design the programme and he can set it up to do what he/she likes.
16/17. Evolutionary arguments for how the flagellum came about.
James, your explanation for how the flagellum MIGHT have come about by
evolution is not proof that it did. The imagination can do anything
(evolutionists need a lot of imagination, by the way) and you certainly have a
lot, because so much of that explanation depends on so many other evolutionary
assumptions being right. Just because we can conceive of an evolutionary
pathway does not mean it happened that way. To disprove irreducible complexity
you would have to find strong evidence that the flagellum DID evolve down a
particular pathway.
18. Transitional forms. I'm sorry but you are so blinded by your
acceptance of evolution that you say "every species in the fossil record
is, strictly speaking a transitional form". What can I say if you see
everything as evidence? That attitude is only evidence of your predisposition
to see evolution where there is none. The truth is that a neutral person can
look at the fossil record and see it evidence of the variety of forms created
by a Creator (plus the variations within kinds that are possible under
microevolution). Of course, someone with a predetermined view on evolution can
come to the record and see it as macroevolution, sure. But both views are in
the eye of the beholder. The fossil record is evidence that certain organisms
existed. It is not evidence that one evolved from another - that is a huge
assumption made only by those who have already assumed evolution is true.
Hardly an unbiased, scientific approach to the evidence. The most that closely
similar fossils can do is give us the idea evolution MAY have occurred. They
cannot prove it one iota, because it is just as logical to assume that they
represent micro-evolutionary variation. In the case of large differences, the
fossils can logically represent completely separately created organisms, within
the 'kinds' mentioned in Genesis.
Homologous structures, again, can logically be viewed either as
a Designer using similar plans to construct species, or as common descent. You
choose. And you already have, of course.
As for human evolution, that you seem to accept unquestioningly, you are on even weaker ground. The whole story is contrived on such meagre evidence of very incomplete skeletons (in some cases nothing more than one or two teeth and half a skull cap) and on evidence so widely disputed among evolutionists themselves that it takes a huge gullibility to believe. Really, James, we are told we all came from one ancestor in
20. I said, "Every single 'proof' of evolution given in my
school textbook when I was at school has since been discredited (not to mention
that one or two were fraudulent in the first place - the peppered moth and
Haeckel's embryos)." You replied,
"Any text book that proffers “the peppered moth and Haeckel's embryos” as
evidence for macro-evolutionary theory, probably isn’t worth reading."
Well, when I was studying O level and A level biology in the late seventies,
these two were offered up as solid evidence of evolution, and they still are
today. Even the BBC's own Darwin-celebratory programmes this year have put
these forward as evidence for evolution yet again. And they are still in
textbooks today.
But aside from those two, you didn't answer my statement that
every 'icon' of evolution that was promoted as fact to me at school has since
been discredited. It's taken time, but even the last two standing, Darwin
In 2003, Richard Dawkins wrote: “…full knowledge of the tree of
life will make it even harder to doubt the fact of evolution. Fossils will
become by comparison irrelevant to the argument, as hundreds of separate genes,
in as many surviving species as we can bear to sequence, are found to
corroborate each other's accounts of the one true tree of life." (Richard
Dawkins (2003), A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
London, UK, p.112).
How wrong Dawkins was. Less than five years later, the Tree of
Life came under assault not only from paleontology but also from genetic data.
In January of this year, even the highly pro-evolution New Scientist ran a
front cover story saying, 'Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.'
To quote from that article: "For much of the past 150
years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the
tree. 'For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,' says Eric
Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre
and Marie Curie
University in Paris , France
Creationists and Intelligent Design (ID) theorists had been
saying that for years, but had been ignored, of course. Then take junk DNA. The
scientific literature is now replete with examples that junk this concept. ID
supporters predicted that functional DNA would be found within the 'junk', yet
you say that ID has no testable theories. Well, this one has been tested and ID
came up trumps.
In 1994, ID-proponent Forrest Mims predicted that non-coding
“junk” DNA would have function, writing a letter to Nature, “Those supposedly
meaningless strands of filler DNA that molecular biologists refer to as ‘junk’
don't necessarily appear so useless to those of us who have designed and
written code for digital controllers.”
Nature rejected the letter, but in 1998, long before the
"junk-DNA" revolution was in full swing, William Dembski predicted
function for non-coding "junk"-DNA based upon intelligent design:
"But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can
foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider
the term 'junk DNA.' Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome
of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected
evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions
are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of
useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as
much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings
suggest that designating DNA as 'junk' merely cloaks our current lack of
knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of
Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how 'non-coding DNA in eukaryotic
genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development.'
Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages
it."
(William Dembski, "Intelligent Science and Design,"
First Things, Vol. 86:21-27 (October 1998))
Finally, in 2004 Jonathan Wells wrote, “research shows that
‘junk DNA’ does, indeed, have previously unsuspected functions. Although that
research was done in a Darwinian framework, its results came as a complete
surprise to people trying to ask Darwinian research questions. The fact that
‘junk DNA’ is not junk has emerged not because of evolutionary theory but in
spite of it. On the other hand, people asking research questions in an ID
framework would presumably have been looking for the functions of non-coding
regions of DNA all along, and we might now know considerably more about them.”
(Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific
Research,” Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, 3.1.2 (Nov. 2004),
emphasis in original)
21. Complex and specified information. I didn't explain my view
in detail as you have now done, so let me do so now. I can't explain it better
than William Dembski himself, so forgive me if I quote him direct:
"Natural causes cannot account for Complex Specified Information (CSI). Natural causes comprise chance and necessity (cf. Jacques Monod's book by that title). Because information presupposes contingency, necessity is by definition incapable of producing information, much less complex specified information. For there to be information there must be a multiplicity of live possibilities, one of which is actualized, and the rest of which are excluded. This is contingency. But if some outcome B is necessary given antecedent conditions A, then the probability of B given A is one, and the information in B given A is zero. If B is necessary given A, Formula (*) reduces to I(A&B) = I(A), which is to say that B contributes no new information to A. It follows that necessity is incapable of generating new information. Observe that what Eigen calls "algorithms" and "natural laws" fall under necessity.
Since information presupposes contingency, let us take a closer
look at contingency. Contingency can assume only one of two forms. Either the
contingency is a blind, purposeless contingency-which is chance; or it is a
guided, purposeful contingency-which is intelligent causation. Since we already
know that intelligent causation is capable of generating CSI (cf. section 4),
let us next consider whether chance might also be capable of generating CSI.
First notice that pure chance, entirely unsupplemented and left to its own
devices, is incapable of generating CSI. Chance can generate complex
unspecified information, and chance can generate non-complex specified
information. What chance cannot generate is information that is jointly complex
and specified.
Biologists by and large do not dispute this claim. Most agree
that pure chance-what Hume called the Epicurean hypothesis-does not adequately
explain CSI. Jacques Monod (1972) is one of the few exceptions, arguing that
the origin of life, though vastly improbable, can nonetheless be attributed to
chance because of a selection effect. Just as the winner of a lottery is
shocked at winning, so we are shocked to have evolved. But the lottery was
bound to have a winner, and so too something was bound to have evolved.
Something vastly improbable was bound to happen, and so, the fact that it
happened to us (i.e., that we were selected-hence the name selection effect)
does not preclude chance. This is Monod's argument and it is fallacious. It
fails utterly to come to grips with specification. Moreover, it confuses a
necessary condition for life's existence with its explanation. Monod's argument
has been refuted by the philosophers John Leslie (1989), John Earman (1987),
and Richard Swinburne (1979). It has also been refuted by the biologists
Francis Crick (1981, ch. 7), Bernd-Olaf Küppers (1990, ch. 6), and Hubert
Yockey (1992, ch. 9). Selection effects do nothing to render chance an adequate
explanation of CSI.
Most biologists therefore reject pure chance as an adequate
explanation of CSI. The problem here is not simply one of faulty statistical
reasoning. Pure chance is also scientifically unsatisfying as an explanation of
CSI. To explain CSI in terms of pure chance is no more instructive than
pleading ignorance or proclaiming CSI a mystery. It is one thing to explain the
occurrence of heads on a single coin toss by appealing to chance. It is quite
another, as Küppers (1990, p. 59) points out, to follow Monod and take the view
that "the specific sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule of the
first organism came about by a purely random process in the early history of
the earth." CSI cries out for explanation, and pure chance won't do. As
Richard Dawkins (1987, p. 139) correctly notes, "We can accept a certain
amount of luck in our [scientific] explanations, but not too much."
If chance and necessity left to themselves cannot generate CSI,
is it possible that chance and necessity working together might generate CSI?
The answer is No. Whenever chance and necessity work together, the respective
contributions of chance and necessity can be arranged sequentially. But by
arranging the respective contributions of chance and necessity sequentially, it
becomes clear that at no point in the sequence is CSI generated. Consider the
case of trial-and-error (trial corresponds to necessity and error to chance).
Once considered a crude method of problem solving, trial-and-error has so risen
in the estimation of scientists that it is now regarded as the ultimate source
of wisdom and creativity in nature. The probabilistic algorithms of computer
science (e.g., genetic algorithms-see Forrest, 1993) all depend on
trial-and-error. So too, the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural
selection is a trial-and-error combination in which mutation supplies the error
and selection the trial. An error is committed after which a trial is made. But
at no point is CSI generated.
Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This
broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for
short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the
following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or
decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously,
or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3)
The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system
eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system
though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system
of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it
contains before it became a closed system.
This last corollary is especially pertinent to the nature of
science for it shows that scientific explanation is not coextensive with
reductive explanation. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many scientists are
convinced that proper scientific explanations must be reductive, moving from
the complex to the simple. Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 316) will write, "The
one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how
organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." Thus Dennett
(1995, p. 153) will view any scientific explanation that moves from simple to
complex as "question-begging." Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 13) will
explicitly equate proper scientific explanation with what he calls "hierarchical
reductionism," according to which "a complex entity at any particular
level in the hierarchy of organization" must properly be explained
"in terms of entities only one level down the hierarchy." While no
one will deny that reductive explanation is extremely effective within science,
it is hardly the only type of explanation available to science. The
divide-and-conquer mode of analysis behind reductive explanation has strictly
limited applicability within science. In particular, this mode of analysis is
utterly incapable of making headway with CSI. CSI demands an intelligent cause.
Natural causes will not do.
James Knight
Hi Andrew,
this pit of exoneration that you're digging for yourself is swallowing you more
and more every time you post on here. Every time I see you transgressing the
logical boundaries with comments like the ones above, a heavy wave of
disquietude fills the air - these statements are a shriek for help. This
horrible image appears - it’s you standing there with a light bulb over your
head and the laughing devil standing behind it slow-dancing to Wagner’s ‘Ride
of the Valkyries’. Not a pretty site. Wouldn’t you like to be disenthralled
from this nightmare and shown the way to true uninhibiting science?
If, on
the methodological Richter scale, a top thinker and assimilator of the data is
1 and a crackpot is 10, I would place you somewhere between 6 and 7. It’s not
that I think you’re mad, just that I don’t think you are capable of abandoning
or sensibly adressing your anti-evolutionary prejudice - whatever the data.
Ok
Andrew, now that we’ve had a bit of fun, let’s get down to some serious talk by
addressing your points. I will address what I think are your misunderstandings
regarding evolution, biology and selection, as well as provide an explanation
as to why I think you are entirely misunderstanding both naturalism, evolution
in its proper sense, how the universe itself actually works, and what seems
like a good prima facie case for a 'cosmic blueprint' theory. I also need to
run through with you the ways I think you can address your investigative
techniques with regard to suitable philosophical enquiry. let me just address
some of the biological issues, by reminding you that evolution has left a
massive trail of evidence in its wake, which you seem to have overlooked.
1)
Vestigial traits – there are huge amounts of relics of ancient ancestry that,
frankly, make those who deny our evolutionary past seem quite desperate.
Moreover, if the earth is over four billion years old (a fact which is beyond
doubt) – using an argument on your lines, there is absolutely no reason to
suppose that God left it uninhabited for all those tens of millions of years
before the Genesis account. Don’t forget, Andrew, the life that has been
evolving for millions of years is hardly ‘left to its own natural causes’ – God
is involved every step of the way; nothing happens if it isn’t in His original
blueprint.
2)
Embryology - not only are human embryos indistinguishable (except chemically)
from those of a fish or lizard in the early stages of development, consistent
with the idea that each generation is a slight modification of the previous,
but the course of development is telling too. The whale foetus grows legs and
then absorbs them, a testament to its legged ancestry. A cow foetus has upper
teeth which are also absorbed, leaving no upper teeth in the adult - an
advantage to their rudiment feeding habits which rely on back teeth for chewing
(you may not have noticed, Andrew, but superfluous teeth do little more than
collect bacteria and cause disease. There are many books written on this
subject.
3) The
fossil record - there is a clear picture which arises from the fossil record,
which is consistent with geology and physics. We can date these fossils, and we
can see from our studies of dinosaurs that 200 million years ago, when pangaea
broke up, that this one species started to diversify differently on different
continents. Take another example - the formation of the ear. We can see the
multi-boned reptilian lower jaw in fossils. We know that this structure could
feel vibrations. Sound IS vibrations Andrew. We can see the bones rising upward
as we look at more recent, but similar fossils. We can trace this all the way
until we get to the modern mammalian ear - with three tiny bones in the middle
ear which are essential for precision hearing. There are so many transitional
fossils, such as those of wolf-like animals evolving into horses. We have
fossils of ambulocetus, an intermediate between land mammals and whales. We
have fossils of acanthostega and icthyostega, intermediates between fish and
land vertebrates, etc, etc, etc - there are so many Andrew. Just do some
research and see as an example the amount of proto-elephants – there are loads
of them – and you will see what I mean.
4)
Comparative biology. All our closest closet ancestors closely mirror human
traits and characteristics and behavioural patterns. Have you ever seen the
things that humans and apes do that no other animal does?
Also,
consider this. Imagine that you have three butterflies and look at their
appearance. One purple with big antennas, one purple with small antennas and
blue spots and one purple with small antennas and yellow spots. The simplest
'family tree' for this would be:
(1
group) Big antennas Small antennas -> Spots (2 groups)
Yes,
it’s possible that spots evolved first, then antennas got small, then the spots
were lost and then the antennas grew big - but the simplest tree has the fewest
connections. Now - imagine you look at other features - feeding habits, eye
structure, bio-molecular signalling pathways, flower preference and so on. Nine
times out of ten, you will end up with the same family tree. Now - make the
tree bigger and include moths and dragonflies and other flying insects. It is
possible, by comparing these creatures, to lay out a family tree to see the
order in which species diverged. You can use common features to define common
ancestors. Of course, you can do this with all creatures and the way different
features co-localise on the same tree is astounding. Take lactation - it only
happens in mammals. No bird or reptile or insect or fish lactates - not a
single one. Lactation appears on one branch of the tree, the mammal branch.
Take another feature - the placenta. This too appears on the mammal branch, but
evolved later on. We know this because there is a branch off the mammal branch
that doesn't have a placenta - these lactating, non-placental mammals are known
as marsupials and are very common on the Australasian continent. If you actually
did some proper research Andrew, you would find countless other examples;
one-way breathing system of birds, molecules for the immune system, bone
lengths, heart structure, blood types, shell composition, ear shape, lengths of
intestines, fur thickness, intelligence and so on, and so on. Nature provides
so many features that encyclopaedias could be written on the subject of
comparative biology and it ALL fits into an evolutionary framework - not only
that but biological characteristics fall into the same family tree as seen in
the fossil record.
5)
Atavisms - atavisms occur when ancient genetic pathways are expressed by
accident. Every so often a child is born with a tail. I'm not kidding, Google
it. This is a relic of our tail-bearing past that has been accidentally
switched on during foetal development. Similar things happen in nature -
Chickens with teeth and horses with feet instead of hooves. In fact, they say
Julius Caesar would only ride atavistic horses that had feet instead of hooves.
One remarkable observation is that according to the evolutionary tree, horses
have footed ancestors, chickens have teethed ancestors and humans have tailed
ancestors. Everything fits into place perfectly from an evolutionary
perspective. I’ve told you this before, Andrew, but just like many of my other
comprehensive points, these are the ones you chose to overlook, or ignore and
hoped I wouldn’t notice. If I thought it would be in the least bit worthwhile I
would carefully go through all of the things to which you failed to provide a
satisfactory answer, but I doubt your mind is open enough to consider the
evidence properly. I hope I’m wrong about that, because I think you’re missing
out on so much. Did you find the time to read my ‘Miracle of Evolution article?
Its’ hardly the circumscribing viewpoint that you seem to suggest.
6)
Molecular biology and genetics - these is SO much evidence in this field that
even if there were no evidence from any of the above, the theory of evolution
would have more than enough proof from genetics. Would you even listen if I
elaborated? The gene sequences can be compared to one another in all manner of
different species. The difference between them can be categorised and used to
work out exactly which species are related to which other species. You scoffed
at the Africa ancestry, but it is in fact possible to trace the spread of human
populations out of Africa , by looking at where
certain mutations appear, and drawing lines on a map between the indigenous
populations that have those mutations. We know the first wave of exploration
went on to colonise Australia
7) The state
evolution has left us in - our senses are terribly flawed. Our brain filters
what we see, removing much detail and giving only a vague outline of the
external world to our conscious mind. Scotoma patients, who have damaged
retinas, fill in so much visual detail that it impacts their lives, but it is
just an exaggeration of what occurs naturally in a normal human brain.
Similarly, our eyes detect only three colours of the infinite number
conceivable, the mixing of which form the palette of our visual experience. Our
hearing is restricted in frequency and our taste buds, which come in but five
varieties, are severely limited in chemical scope. Whatever external reality
is, it is very different to how we perceive it.
There
are some things we can only infer the existence of by their effects, such as
most planets outside of the solar system. Modern physics seems to be like
peeling back layers of an onion. It started in ancient Greece
I have
only just touched the surface of what’s out there on evolution. My simple
examples are nothing compared to specific cases of evolution - cases we can
investigate with the full repertoire of modern scientific methods.
Moreover,
the physical properties of the materials, from which machines and life are
built, are those we would expect from the average behaviour of their atomic
constituents. I'll give an example - a cosmic ray hits a tumbling molecule and
passes energy to it. Quantum mechanics shows us that we cannot predict when the
energy is re-released, only the probability that the energy will be released
within a finite time, and so we cannot know what orientation the molecule will be
in when it emits radiation, nor where that radiation will go - it may end up
causing a beneficial mutation. If it doesn't, then something else would.
Moving
on to your comments about the tree of life – you’ve twisted that one a little.
Contrary to your assertions, the tree of life is still pretty much correct, at
least for us metazoans. It's a bit like pointing to a Pepsi can and saying
'Look, it isn't blue because there is a red bit'. There are a few of examples
when branches on the tree fuse - such as the mitochondial merger and subsequent
endosymbiosis which resulted in the evolution of eukaryotes, or the later
merger which resulted in chloroplasts. Other symbioses may have resulted in
gene transfer in some species, such as starfish, where the two genomes can be
completely merged, forming one species from two, where the genes for the two
parent species are expressed sequentially – for example, a larval stage then a
reproductive stage.
Whilst
the benefits of such merges are clear (some species are better at eating,
others better at reproducing - together they can have the best of both worlds),
the mechanism isn't. I will explain a paradigm in the next paragraph, but first
I will describe why the tree fails when studying the 'trunk'. Horizontal gene transfer
is quite common in bacteria, but there is still a core set of genes for each
species which can be used to define the species and place it on the tree of
life. However, to place a branch on the tree requires a lineage from which it
can branch. This is fine for all recent life - following back it gives three
clear lineages from which all modern life arose: prokaryotes (bacteria),
archaea and eukaryotes. The meeting point of these three lineages is where the
problem arises, and that was the bit that needed addressing – it wasn’t that Darwin
* Check
out Chris Ponting (you can see him here,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MH8XgQzjEE discussing the platypus genome).
With his latest methods of making phylogenetic trees (he is top of his game),
he predicts that he CAN get all the way to the root of the tree. I eagerly
await his next publication in my non-crusading way.
OK, so
now we know why the root of the tree seems more like an intertwined network
rather than a hierarchical tree, I will discuss two ways that genes can
transfer from one species to another - one way which creates a new hybrid
species, the other resulting in translocation of individual genes. Both are
understood, and I will speculate on how for example, snake genes found their
way into cows (have you read about that?).
1)
Symbiosis. Some species adapt to live so closely together that they cannot
survive without one another. We, for example, cannot live without bacteria in
our guts, however we are still two distinct species. Lichen, which seems to be
one species, is not. It is a fungus and another species (often algae) which
live so closely together that their genes can flow from one to the other -
which probably makes lichen taxonomy a nightmare, ho hum! However, they are
still two distinct species, even if the boundary is fuzzier and taxonomists use
the fungal part to place them on the tree of life (although this fungal part of
the tree merges with another part, in a sense). Finally, we get species where
two species have merged and the genome of one has been almost totally
transferred into the other. Often bacterial consortia are found. A consortium
is a group of different bacteria where the waste product of one, be it ammonia
or oxygen or hydrogen sulphite or whatever, is the food of another. The
material coming into the consortium is recycled, often leaving a very efficient
colony. The transfer of materials between consortia members is limited by the
surface area that they can share. If only one member could get INSIDE another,
then the whole process would be even more efficient. This has happened at least
twice in the history of life (probably much more often), including in our
lineage. Once one species is inside the other, a strange situation occurs. Both
have separate genomes that compete with one another, yet they still rely on one
another. There is a battle between friends. If the genes of one can be
transferred into the other, then having two genomes is no longer a biological
imperative. One eventually wins over the other and two species merge into one
species (Nick Lane
2)
Retroviruses. Retroviruses insert their own genetic code into the host
organism, which is then read by the host’s replicative machinery in order to
make more copies of the virus. When the virus attacks germ cells (sperm, eggs,
ones that have DNA that is inherited), sometimes the virus fails to replicate
and the viral DNA is passed on from parent to child. Our genome contains vast
amounts of retroviral DNA. We know these genes come from viruses because they,
and their relatives, are not found in other lineages and because they are found
in viruses. In fact, I’ve already told you about three times, genes for the
development of the placenta were derived this way - they started as viral genes
which were then adopted for novel biological function. Now, it is completely
plausible (although not likely, I admit) that some RNA of a snake entered the
genome of a retrovirus, which then successfully reproduced in the host and went
on to infect another species - a cow. If this happened, then we would expect to
see the snake gene in the cow genome to be located right next to retroviral
genes on the chromosome. Admittedly this is just one of the strange goings-on,
but the point remains.
Also,
Andrew, remember there was not a light switch from non-life to life, it was a
long process, and the best working hypothesis at the moment is that RNA
dominated in the early/pre-life stage. This RNA was free floating, not in
cells, so be careful with your distinction of ‘an organism’ and what would
constitute ‘horizontal transfer’. RNA molecules interacted with each other, and
in some way or another teamed up, or just got bundled up into cell membranes.
Once there were entities which could rightly be called individual life forms
the tree analogy starts to work pretty well.
Imagine
throwing a bucketful of pebbles onto the floor and throwing away the ones you
don't find attractive. You are effectively saying that the act of throwing away
pebbles cannot produce nice pebbles. You completely miss the point -
reproduction and genetic recombination produces new 'pebbles' all the time.
Natural selection throws out the bad ones most of the time.
Finally,
on thermodynamics, Andrew, you make so many scientific errors, that one hardly
knows where to begin. You've just demonstrated the problem with simply citing
other people’s work without having much of a clue about what they're on about.
This, in fact, forms the basis for most of your arguments - I'm not sure even
YOU know what you're really arguing.
The
second law of thermodynamics does no such thing – it is not a roadblock to
evolution. It says that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed
system will not decrease, but this does not prevent evolution from taking
place, because increasing order is not being prevented.
Firstly,
the earth is not a closed system Andrew; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on
it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the
change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in
entropy on earth. But entropy is not the same as disorder (although, of course,
the two correspond), but sometimes order increases as entropy increases.
Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules
by size and the subsequent cellular activity that goes on to produce change. We
can take this further - even in a closed system pockets of lower entropy can
form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system. The rub,
Andrew, is that order from disorder happens on earth all the time, and
evolution is a prime example of this. The only processes necessary for
evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of
these are seen to happen all the time, therefore, you are barking up the wrong
tree - no physical laws are preventing them. Vast amounts of study have been
done and this - connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in
great depth - and never to the detriment of evolution. But you're the sort of
guy that sees a catchy headline (as you did with the ‘Darwin was wrong’ title
on the New Scientist mag, mentioned in the other thread - {he wasn't wrong, by
the way] - and takes that as a great big bullseye on the posterior regions of
those who argue differently (and as it happens, more sensibly) than yourself.
It may
even be true that evolution/origin of life is driven by entropy; in fact, some
see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according
to the second law, so organisms diversify to fill empty niches, rather like a
gas that expands to fill an empty container. One could even propose that highly
ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase
overall entropy) more efficiently - but the counter argument to that seems to
be based on this spurious notion of yours (although it's not really yours, is
it Andrew?) that increasing order is possible, locally and temporarily, only if
there is a Governor to direct growth and a power converter. Once again, you’re
confusing 'God is necessary for creation' (a true statement) with this 'I,
Andrew, can claim a palpable absence of X means Y' (an incorrect statement) -
given that your proprietary estimation of the nature of X and Y really are, of
course faulty. Here's a better way of viewing the situation. The second law of
thermodynamics says absolutely nothing about programs to direct growth, and the
only "power converter" it deals with is change in entropy - you
cannot justifiably make such claims by bemoaning an absence of intentionality.
Growth and order can be seen arising without an X program in many places.
Clouds form complex orderly patterns, streams sort the size of the stones in
their bed along their length, cooling basalt forms a hexagonal pattern of
cracks. All of these show an increase in organisation, but you wouldn't say
that we can't make them fly with theoretical notions - that's just how the
world is Andrew - at least, that's how we view it.
Let me
reiterate something for you Andrew - increasing order is NOT a violation of the
second law of thermodynamics - even temporarily. A violation would be a
decrease in entropy without a greater increase in entropy to go with it.
Neither growth nor evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics because
both take advantage of local differences in entropy to get work done. The
environment IS the program through which and in which evolution occurs, and
natural selection serves to communicate information from the environment to the
populations of organisms, which, as I have said before, we see happening in
every area of evolution.
Here's
some more homework for you Andrew - get to grips with the notion that an
increase in organised complexity is NOT the same as a decrease in entropy. The
second law applies only to entropy; it says nothing that you think it says
about organised complexity.
I've
given you enough evidence there so that no reasonable person could question the
fact of evolution, or that it is perfectly compatible with Christianity.
Yours
fraternally
James
