Three thousand years ago, King David wrote in Psalm 139: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Despite having little scientific knowledge of biology, David, an ancient Hebrew, expressed gratitude for his ability to see, hear, speak, and grasp objects with his hands. He believed that these wonders indicated purposeful design, even though he didn’t understand their workings at a fundamental level.
Indeed, when we contemplate the complexity and beauty of the natural world, it seems rational and intuitive to conclude that it was intelligently designed. David would have laughed at the thought that such marvels could be explained through random or unguided processes, as if the natural world were the result of a series of chance events. David’s conclusion was repeatedly reaffirmed as scientific knowledge of biology slowly increased over time. More than 1,000 years after the psalms were written, the Roman physician Galen, arguably the best scientific mind of the classical era, noted that the human body was the result of a “supremely intelligent and powerful divine Craftsman.” In the seventeenth century, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, one of the earliest microscopists, remarked that the fantastic world of tiny creatures could not have arisen from a haphazard process:
“[T]his most wonderful disposition of nature with regard to these animalcules for the preservation of their species; which at the same time strikes us with astonishment, must surely convince all of the absurdity of those old opinions, that living creatures can be produced from corruption of putrefaction.”
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
In the early nineteenth century, the abolitionist and Anglican clergyman, William Paley, proclaimed the requirement of “an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organised bodies bear.” Yet in 1859, this historical unanimity of judgement was suddenly halted by Charles Darwin.
Evolution and God – competing explanations?
The idea that humans evolved by natural selection from the animal kingdom lay the axe at the very root of religious belief. With naturalistic views of evolution gaining popularity throughout the 19th century, the authority of the church became suspect. On the heels of Darwinian Theory, theism itself was under severe attack, and an atheistic mindset was now a “scientifically supported” reality.
Can the existence of a mechanism be used to argue against the existence of a designer of that mechanism? Philosopher Daniel Dennett believes so, stating that “Darwin was offering a skeptical world… a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind.” Dennett regards Darwin’s theory as a corrosive acid that undermines pre-Darwinian views of the world; in that, instead of the universe’s matter being a product of mind, the minds in the universe are a product of matter. We are nothing more than the results of an undirected, mindless, purposeless process. Dennett, among others, believes that evolution replaces God, providing a purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, consciousness, and thought.
In this line of thinking, the evolutionary mechanism and God are seen as competing explanations. If evolutionary processes can account for the apparent design in the universe, then inferring an intelligent origin is erroneous. According to Dennett and Dawkins, God and evolution cannot coexist. As evolutionary science progresses, the available space for theistic belief continues to narrow, making belief in God increasingly implausible.
Let us look at the logic of this position. Professor John Lennox highlights that this deduction of atheism from evolution depends on the simultaneous validity of the following two assertions:
- Assertion 1: Biological evolution is incompatible with the existence of a Creator – in other words, gives scientific evidence for atheism.
- Assertion 2: Biological evolution accounts for the existence of all of life’s complexity.
Let’s start by addressing assertion one. The debate between evolution and belief in God has often been framed as a mutually exclusive choice, but this is a category mistake. Evolution is a biological mechanism, while God is regarded as a personal agent who, among many other things, designs and creates mechanisms. The existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism.
Most theists, like philosopher Thomas Aquinas, regard God as the direct cause of the existence of a universe that has brought life about through secondary ‘natural’ causes. Analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga questions whether the theory of natural selection really shows what Dennett believes – that every feature of the world, including mind itself, “can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time?” His answer is a resounding “No!” and he goes on to explain his reasoning, concluding that “there is nothing in current evolutionary science to show or even to suggest that God did not thus superintend evolution.” The actual logic at issue here is well captured by physicist Sir John Houghton FRS:
“The fact that we understand some of the mechanisms of the working of the universe or of living systems does not preclude the existence of a designer, any more than the possession of insight into the processes by which a watch has been put together, however automatic these processes may appear, implies there can be no watchmaker.”
Sir John Houghton
On the basis of the kind of reasoning advanced by Plantinga and others, many have accepted the idea that guided biological evolution is compatible with belief in a Creator, understanding evolutionary mechanisms as the Creator’s way of producing life’s diversity through secondary causation via a process that he designed. In this way of thinking, the evolutionary viewpoint, far from invalidating the inference to intelligent origin, does nothing more than moving it back up one level, from the organisms to the processes by which those organisms have come to exist, or, if you like, from primary to secondary causation. For example, imagine a man who, on seeing a phone for the first time, supposes that it is made directly by humans, only later to discover it is made in a robotic factory by robots which in turn were made by machines made by humans. His initial inference to intelligent origin was not wrong, but rather it was his concept of the nature of the implementation of that intelligence that was mistaken.
Furthermore, leading palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, Simon Conway Morris FRS, thinks that there may well be some biological analogue of the kind of fine-tuning in physics that we have discussed in a separate essay. He cites Howard van Til’s insistence that “It is not simply the numerical values of certain parameters that must be ‘just-right’ in order for life to develop. No, it’s the entire formational economy of the universe that must be ‘just right’.” Conway Morris concludes that: “Not only is the universe strangely fit to purpose, but so, too, as I have argued throughout this book, is life’s ability to navigate to its solutions.” This sounds more like a clear-sighted navigator than a “blind watchmaker”.
All in all, I have come to reject assertion one. Biologist T. H. Huxley, who became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Darwin’s theory, concluded that the doctrine of evolution “does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine.” For the most part, I agree. My position is that, to the extent that guided biological evolution has occurred, it is certainly compatible with theism. Evolution is a biological mechanism and those who believe in God see him as the creator, who created and designed natural laws and mechanisms. On that basis, there is no conflict between evolution and theism.
So what separates the theistic and atheistic worldview, is that the theist suggests that behind materialistic processes there must be a mind if there is to be order like the design we see in life today. Contrary to this, the atheist suggests that all the complexity of life, as seen today, started and evolved to its current state via a completely mindless; undirected; purposeless; ungoverned process, void of motive. In this view, our minds are ultimately nothing but the product of mindless matter. Natural causes and material factors are all that is necessary to explain the origin and evolution of life. Therefore, the question which divides these two worldviews is simple: is the appearance of design in life real or illusionary? Is there an intelligence behind our existence, or is the cause of the complexity of life simply materialistic?
The scope of biological evolution
This leads us nicely to the second assertion – “Biological evolution accounts for the existence of all of life’s complexity.” Again, I have my doubts. To be clear, I have no intention of denying that natural selection has an important role to play in the variations that we see in the living world all around us, as Darwin observed. My doubts have to do with whether evolution by mutation and natural selection can carry all the weight that is often ascribed to it, that it can explain all of life’s complexity.
Perhaps this is a good moment to highlight that evolution is typically categorised into two domains: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution entails variations within prescribed limits of complexity, such as quantitative variations of existing organs or structures. This aspect of evolution is scarcely controversial, as such effects of natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, etc. are constantly being recorded by biologists today. A classic example is the way in which bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics and the way in which viruses mutate. Moreover, researchers in Australia have uncovered several changes in humans that have appeared over a short period. For example, some babies are born without wisdom teeth and more people have a previously rare additional artery in their forearm. Dr Teghan Lucas, of Flinders University in Adelaide, said faces are also becoming shorter due to dietary changes, and our reduced jaw size leaves less space for teeth.
In essence, microevolution pertains to minor alterations, while macroevolution encompasses significant ones. The challenge lies in delineating where the boundary should fall, whether these domains involve the same processes (albeit with different timescales), and whether the dichotomy is valid. Are macroevolutionary events (large morphological changes or speciation) simply the cumulative outcome of microevolutionary mechanisms (micromutation, selection, gene flow, genetic drift) or does macroevolution require some qualitatively different mechanism? The history of this debate is long, convoluted and sometimes acrimonious. The question that remains is whether the research has furnished any evidence of a limit to what microevolution can accomplish.
This debate has led to some serious scientific questions being asked, and not only by theists, as to the precise status of the second assertion. This is evidenced by the increasing number of publications on the topic by some of the world’s leading academic publishing houses. The remainder of this essay will examine the second assertion in detail, seeking to clarify the extent of evolution’s scope.
Why we ought to be sceptics
Before delving into the scope of evolution, it is crucial to address the unfriendly and unhelpful culture that dominates the field of evolutionary biology. Let me start with the words of Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, who once proclaimed: “You must not question evolution!” But why not? Why are claims about evolution out of bounds from doubt? Scientists have questioned the theories of even Newton and Einstein, and sometimes rightfully so. After all, isn’t questioning standard wisdom an essential way for science to progress? All scientific theories, no matter how well-established, can benefit from periodic scrutiny. So why is there such a taboo on questioning evolution? I have even heard of scientists risk funding cuts and job loss if they question the capabilities of the evolutionary mechanism. Why does this domain seem to be a no-go area? That attitude is completely antithetical to the spirit of science and yet, as Dennett put it:
“To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by evolution is simply ignorant – inexcusably ignorant.”
Daniel Dennett
Evolution has taken the place of God, and it is now blasphemy to deny it God’s attributes. I find this sadly amusing since this attitude is usually associated with certain religious hyper-fundamentalists who, if you disagree with them even slightly, will condemn you as wicked. It is a strange phenomenon that people may become like those they hate.
JunYuan Chen, a leading Chinese palaeontologist, experienced this problem when he visited the USA in 1999. His work on the remarkable discoveries in Chengjiang of strange fossil creatures led him to question the orthodox evolutionary line. His scientific research promoted doubts about common evolutionary claims. In true scholarly fashion, he mentioned his criticisms in his lectures, but they elicited very little response. He was surprised by the lack of response and asked one of his hosts what was wrong. He was told that scientists in the USA did not like to hear such criticism of evolution. To this, he replied: “In China, we can criticise Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticise the government, but not Darwin.”
What drives this anti-scientific resistance to any criticism or doubt regarding the explanatory power of the evolutionary mechanism? The answer lies in materialistic naturalism. Naturalism is the belief that only natural laws and forces acting on matter operate in the universe, apart from any intelligent input or spiritual explanations. Naturalists believe that the universe is a closed system, so the existence of those natural laws and material mechanisms is self-explaining and does not require any external input to explain their existence. God, described as being transcendent, is unthinkable. The flag of materialism (or naturalism) flies proudly over the scientific academy, and people working under that banner are expected to show due respect. Those with a materialistic or naturalistic take on the world reject explanations outside material parameters. It is clear that part of the motivation behind evolutionary theory lies in an attempt to remove God, which begs the question of what relationship there might be between evolutionary theory and metaphysics.
Leading philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse, said that, for many people evolution has played the role of a secular religion. It’s not hard to see how even a scientific theory may become an intellectual fashion, a substitute for religion, an entrenched dogma, which has certainly been true of evolutionary theory. Phillip Johnson, a lawyer at the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out: “The danger here is that a methodological premise which is useful for limited purposes has been expanded to form a metaphysical absolute.” The late Donald McKay, whose research focussed on communication networks in the brain, described the way that this happened:
“Evolution began to be invoked in biology… as a substitute for God… From standing for a technical hypothesis… the term was rapidly twisted to mean an atheistic metaphysical principle whose invocation could relieve a man of any theological shivers at the spectacle of the universe. Spelt with a capital E and dishonestly decked in the prestige of the scientific theory of evolution (which in fact gave it no shred of justification), ‘Evolutionism’ became the name for a whole anti-religious philosophy, in which ‘Evolution’ played the role of a… personal deity, as the ‘real force in the universe’.”
Donald McKay
Similarly, in an essay entitled ‘The Funeral of a Great Myth’, C. S. Lewis explains that “we must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem, and popular Evolutionism… which is certainly a myth.”
Previously, in reference to assertion 1, we contended that naturalism cannot be inferred from biological evolution alone; but what about the reverse deduction? Suppose that naturalism/materialism is true. Then, merely as a matter of sheer logical necessity, it follows that some kind of evolutionary account must be given for life, apart from any evidence which may be offered to support it. After all, What other option do we have? If, for example, we start off with the materialistic hypothesis that all we have is matter/energy and the forces of physics, then there is only one option – matter/energy together with the forces of nature over time have produced life, that is, evolution of some sort. Simply donning an atheist cap and pondering how life came to be would inevitably lead us to some evolutionary theory.
The close relationship between a scientific theory and a worldview does not determine its truth or falsity, but it does suggest that the reigning naturalistic or materialistic paradigm may exert significant philosophical pressure, possibly preventing certain aspects of the theory from undergoing rigorous, self-critical analysis – an essential hallmark of science. Since many neo-Darwinists subscribe to naturalism/materialism, they may regard criticism of the current evolutionary paradigm as a threat to their worldview. Consequently, questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution go unanswered or ignored. It would seem then, that disagreement with those who do not share your worldview can also be a factor in negatively influencing the quality of scientific research.
In short, we must be cautious of the powerful pressure from naturalism to adopt an evolutionary paradigm. It is time to heed the suppressed voice of doubt, examine the science honestly, confront the evidence, and address the issue rationally. Several prominent atheist philosophers and scientists believe that there are valid reasons to scrutinise the claims of the modern synthesis. However, before we delve into that, we must first define precisely what we mean by evolution.
What is evolution?
The simple term ‘biological evolution’ can be explained in the sense that all organisms display variations, and these variations have different impacts on survival. Those variations that favour survival will allow the organism to live and so reproduce, passing on their beneficial traits to future generations, in time causing the features of the population to change. This, therefore, creates a process by which the less helpful variation gets weeded out, leaving the better adapted to thrive, and this is what we call natural selection.
It is crucial to understand that natural selection is not a creative process; it only maintains or eliminates what already exists. Selection means to be made from that which already exists. It deals with the modification of existing parts to keep the beneficial variations, but it doesn’t explain or create the origin of parts. In other words, natural selection may only maintain or eliminate what’s already there. Natural selection “selects,” or acts to preserve, those random variations that confer a fitness or functional advantage upon the organisms that possess them. But it “selects” only after such advantageous variations have arisen. This is an exceedingly important point because the words ‘natural selection’ are often used as if they were describing a creative process. Natural selection, by its very nature, does not create novelty, and therefore does NOT account for the form and existence of all living things.
The creative aspect of evolution, the innovation of biological development is believed to be caused by mutations, and mutations are changes in the structure of our hereditary information. Now our hereditary information is stored in packets called genes which make up our DNA, forming a long sequence of biological instructions. DNA is basically a source of instructions for building proteins.
Thus, at the core of life is a biological code, and random changes (mutations) to this code produce different instructions that can lead to changes in biological structure and form, allowing organisms to vary more significantly. Once organisms vary in this way, natural selection can maintain beneficial variations. Over time, this allows life to change in order to better survive.
It needs to be highlighted that these mutations according to materialistic evolutionary theories, can only occur by chance, a matter of probabilities, and this is the other aspect of materialistic evolution: natural selection depends on these random mutations before it can filter out the unfavourable ones. Evolution in this sense is therefore claimed as a combination of both aimless mutations and natural selection, chance and necessity. “Chance alone” the Nobel prize-winning chemist Jacques Monod once wrote, “is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of creation.” As David Berlinski noted: “It is chance that lies at the heart of materialistic evolutionary theories.”
Some sceptics may argue that evolution is not reliant on chance as natural selection guides the process. However, it must be understood that natural selection is first dependent on random mutations, which according to naturalistic evolution are a result of chance. It follows that even though natural selection constitutes a non-random process, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends precisely upon the element of randomness, namely, various mutational processes.
The door of doubt
At the heart of evolutionary theory lies the concept of chance, and it is the ability of chance to produce even the simplest step in biological complexity for natural selection to favour that warrants a closer look. It is here that the door of doubt begins to swing. As David Berlinski notes: “Chance and complexity are countervailing forces, they work against each other.” We never attribute the existence of a complex artefact to chance, never. Yet from the perspective of materialistic Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays a crucial, nay THE crucial role in generating new biological complexity.
While we may never attribute the existence of a complex artefact to chance, materialistic Darwinian theory relies on chance as the key factor in generating new biological complexity. Of course, chance alone could not be expected to produce the intricate nervous system or the marvel of the human brain in one fell swoop. As Richard Dawkins observes:
“It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck.”
Richard Dawkins
So how does evolution proceed? Natural selection is the law-like process that filters the random mutations, creating a combination of necessity and chance. Natural selection is said to find a faster pathway through the space of possibilities, breaking down greater biological complexity into smaller, manageable steps. As Dawkins put it, natural selection has a way of “breaking the improbability up into small manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.” Chance, therefore, does not have to scale a ‘mountain’ of complexity in one go, with the help of natural selection, it just has to make small steps in complexity until after long enough, that ‘mountain’ of complexity (like a nervous system, or brain, or even a fully-fledged human…) has been reached. However, even with the aid of natural selection, the ability of chance to produce small steps in complexity remains a leap of faith, as we shall see. The role of chance in the process of evolution remains a topic of much debate and speculation, one that continues to captivate the minds of scientists and sceptics alike.
The information problem
Philosopher of science, Stephen Meyer, in his book ‘Darwin’s Doubt’, informs us that when you are trying to consider the creative power of materialistic evolution, you first need to consider what it takes to build life. Much like a computer requires code, instructions, software, and information to acquire a new function, modern biology has taught us that crafting a new form of life from a simpler pre-existing form necessitates new information, and this information must serve a functional purpose.
For example, you could take a sequence of letters in the alphabet to convey a sentence in English which displays some meaning, while you could take them same letters and mix them around to convey a disorderly sentence of gibberish and this would be meaningless. Now both of these sentences contain the same number of letters, yet clearly only one of those sentences has captured something beyond, a communication function, something meaningful that extends beyond the mere accumulation of letters. Similarly, strands of DNA, like natural languages and computer codes, contain functional information: information that possesses meaning and serves a specific purpose. To illustrate this concept further, let us examine the following three sets of symbols:
“Ifjijr67 djdijf4739 jijd, frf”
“Wait for the wisest of all counsellors, time.”
“CDCDCDCDCDCDCDCD”
The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, improbable sequence. The third sequence is not complex, but is highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, the second exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements—i.e., it is specified. According to design theorists, only the second sequence exhibits both complexity and specification, which are necessary indicators of a designed system. The third sequence lacks complexity, though it does exhibit a simple periodic pattern. The first sequence is complex, but not specified. Only the second sequence exhibits both complexity and specification. It is these two features together, complexity and specification, that is equivalent to “functional” or “specified information.” Likewise, DNA is also a source of function information – DNA exemplifies both high complexity and specification and thus contains “specified information.”
DNA is a source of biological instruction for building the proteins of life. Within DNA the specific sequence of biological text determines the function, just like how the sequence of letters determines the words to convey a language. Now just as a fortuitous rearrangement of letters in an English text might generate new words or sentences, so too might random changes in, or rearrangements of, the genetic text in DNA produce new genes and, ultimately, new proteins. Such changes – sifted by natural selection – could provide the new genetic information to produce novel forms of life without any intelligent direction.
Nevertheless, doubts soon began to arise. These doubts came at first from an unexpected quarter – a group of mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists some of whom were faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1966, they joined with leading evolutionary biologists at a seminal conference called the “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.” Held at the Wistar Institute, the conference sought to evaluate the mathematical plausibility of natural selection and random mutation as a means of producing new genes and proteins – and thus genetic information.
Murray Eden, one of the MIT professors who convened the event, emphasised that in all computer codes and written texts, specificity of sequence determines function. Thus, random changes in sequence consistently degrade function or meaning. This means it’s highly improbable that random mutations could generate new functional genes as opposed to degrading existing ones. And although there are various types of mutational changes such as duplications, insertions, and recombinations, which are all at nature’s disposal, the problem is that such changes inevitably degrade the function of information, especially when allowed to accumulate. Similarly, no computer programmer wants random changes introduced into a program that they have written. Such changes will inevitably degrade and ultimately destroy the function of the existing program long before a new program would emerge through such a process. As Eden explained, “No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed.”
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger was an eminent French mathematician and medical doctor who worked in the fields of combinatorics, formal language theory, and information theory. He was one of the participants in the Wistar Conference. Schützenberger spoke of the attempt to simulate the Darwinian process by making random changes to computer programs at the typographical level, by letters or blocks. He calculated that we have no chance “even to see what the modified programs would compute: it just jams.”
If someone makes even a few random changes in a computer program, the modified program stops working, and the same problem appears to apply in DNA as any attempts to generate completely new sections of genetic text by random means are doomed to failure. Therefore, clearly natural selection plays a crucial role in this process. Favourable mutations are passed on, unfavourable mutations are weeded out. But the issue is that natural selection can only “select” what random mutation first generates. And for the evolutionary process to produce new forms of life, random mutation must first generate – at the very least – new genetic information for building novel proteins. And that’s the problem. When it comes to producing new genetic information, the neo-Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on random mutations, faces a needle-in-a-haystack dilemma, or what mathematicians call a “combinatorial problem.” In mathematics, the term “combinatorial” refers to the number of possible ways that a set of objects can be arranged or combined.
However, sometimes the unlikely does happen. After all, there are many organisms and a staggering immensity of time. The chances of winning a new gene sequence that can code for a unique, stable and functional protein might be infinitesimal. But if you play the game often enough, you win in the end, right? After all, it works for Powerball!
Do the numbers balance out? The likelihood of random mutations generating new genetic information is a highly debated topic in the scientific community. Some argue that the sheer magnitude of time and the number of organisms make the likelihood of winning a new gene sequence inevitable, while others, like chemical engineer and Professor of Molecular Biology Douglas Axe, have calculated the probability to be vanishingly small. Axe has estimated the probability of getting a new gene sequence that can code for a unique, stable and functioning protein out of the vast number of different sequences, that is, a unique protein with a stable tertiary structure performing some useful function (I have referenced his study here), and the result is a vanishingly small 1 in 1077. It is therefore overwhelmingly more likely than not that a random mutational search would have failed to produce even one new functional (information-rich) DNA sequence capable of coding for one new protein fold in the entire history of life on earth. And, of course, building new animals would require the creation of many new proteins and protein folds, not just one.
To put this into perspective, the probability of attaining a random favourable mutation of a single gene or protein is so unlikely it would be comparable to the mathematical probability of a blind spaceman finding a single marked atom by chance among all the atoms in the universe (1 in 1082). So, if mutations themselves are truly random, that is, if they were not directed by an intelligence, then mutations virtually have no chance of producing new, innovative genetic information. To further complicate things, for the evolutionary process to produce even the simplest complexities we see in life today, thousands, possibly millions of successive beneficial mutations would be required. This is a daunting task for random mutations.
In conclusion, the numbers do not appear to balance out when it comes to the likelihood of random mutations generating new genetic information. The needle-in-a-haystack dilemma, or combinatorial problem, faced by the neo-Darwinian mechanism makes the probability of winning a new gene sequence infinitesimally small. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Blind Watchmaker has tried to answer the probability issues of neo-Darwinism. In it, he describes how he had programmed a computer to generate a well-known Shakespeare phase in order to simulate how random mutations and natural selection could generate new functional information. The glaring issue is that Dawkins’ program was directed towards a target phase. He directed the program to compare the variant sequences of letters with the desired target, a complete and meaningful sentence. Essentially, Dawkins gave the program ‘foresight’, which is a profoundly un-Darwinian concept. How could blind evolution not only see that target, but compare any attempt with it, in order to select it, if it is nearer the target than the previous one? To quote Mathematician David Berlinski:
“The Darwinian mechanism neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and makes no choices. What is unacceptable in evolutionary theory, what is strictly forbidden, is the appearance of a force with the power to survey time, a force that conserves a point or a property because it will be useful. Such a force is no longer Darwinian. How would a blind force know such a thing? And by what means could future usefulness be transmitted to the present?”
David Berlinski
The model of mutation and natural selection presented by Dawkins is hardly a realistic depiction of how these processes work, and casts doubt on whether it explains anything at all. While natural selection certainly plays a role in guiding evolution, its major weakness is that it only rewards successful adaptations after they have already occurred. In other words, natural selection can do nothing to guide or fix incomplete or meaningless mutations – it only comes into play once a fully functional adaptation has already emerged. Natural selection itself, by definition, is neither guided toward nor given information about a desired outcome generations in the future, but operates purely on what has already occurred.
Berlinski has aptly criticised Dawkins’ experiment, stating that “The entire exercise is… an achievement in self-deception.” Dawkins has merely shown that complex systems such as language and the genetic code of DNA are not explicable without the injection of pre-existing information into the system. This approach does not resemble traditional Darwinism, but rather suggests an alternative form of design.
The probability issues remain.
One beneficial mutation isn’t enough
For argument’s sake, even if by some incredibly unlikely chance you had a mutation that produced a new functional gene coding for a new unique protein, this is still unlikely to result in a beneficial change for an organism, and if not, there’s no beneficial variation, and if no beneficial variation then natural selection is useless and evolution comes to a halt. Survival, rather than the arrival (innovation) of biological novelties is all that remains.
The reason that one new functional gene or protein doesn’t really change things is because almost any biological structure of interest: the inner ear, eyes, gills, lungs, feathers or the reproductive, circulatory, and respiratory systems possess multiple necessary components. Just as an engine requires multiple parts: a spark plug, valves, pistons, connecting rods, crankshaft etc, and these are all required for the engine to carry out its function. The same is true for living organisms. Organisms are composed of tightly integrated biological systems, parts that are mutually dependent on one another to function properly. To change any system requires altering each of the many independent parts that the system is made up of. For example, if an engineer changes the length of the piston rods in the car’s engine, and does not adjust the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won’t run. Now it’s the same with biological systems and structures, for example, if you wanted to change any of the three bones of the inner ear, this will require corresponding changes in other bones and in other parts of the ear as well.
In many cases, complex biological systems depend for their functions on tens of hundreds of such independent, yet jointly necessary parts. As the number of necessary components increases, the required number of coordinated changes increases too. So if all the dependent parts do not come about or evolve simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all, because any system that depends for its function on the coordinated action of many parts cannot be changed gradually without losing function. But in the Darwinian scheme of things, natural selection acts to preserve functional advantages. Changes that result in reduced function will not be preserved.
Consider this analogy: when modifying the design of a machine, an engineer can shut down the machine to make the modification. But in evolution, the gradual improvement must be made while the machine is running. Not only must the end product – the final machine so to say – be feasible, but all the intermediates must be feasible also. Therefore, a genetic change affecting any one of the necessary components, unless matched by many corresponding and vastly improbable – genetic changes in other biological components to match it, will result in functional loss and often death. Complex adaptations (also called multi-mutation traits) require multiple coordinated mutations before providing any advantage to an organism. However, the combined probabilities required for these mutations make their occurrence astonishingly unlikely.
Biochemist Michael Behe and Professor David Snoke calculated that in multicellular organisms, population sizes are too small, and too few generations have lived, to produce a complex adaptation requiring only two mutations before providing an advantage. Even Behe’s critics calculated that a complex adaptation requiring two or more mutations could not arise in humans within a reasonable timescale. Ann Gauger and Chemical Engineer Douglas Axe tried to convert one bacterial enzyme into another closely related enzyme, and found that the conversion would require at least seven coordinated mutations, which is ravishingly likely. Therefore, it is reasonable to question whether natural selection, operating on random mutations alone, is the sole explanation for the complexity and diversity of life we observe today.
Irreducible complexity
This brings us nicely onto the subject of irreducible complexity.
The past three-quarters of a century have given rise to a fundamental discovery that has rocked our understanding of life at the most basic level. It turns out that cells are not run by some mysterious force, but by a bevy of enormously complex molecular machines whose work is orchestrated by a vast array of intricately coded instructions. There are machines in cells that act as outboard motors, others that behave as molecular trucks and buses to ferry supplies throughout the cell to their various proper destinations, more that act as chemical factories synthesising the necessary molecular components of life, and—just as important—breaking them down once their jobs have been completed.
The modern discovery of the elegant molecular basis of life has exposed multiple ruinous problems for Darwin’s mechanism as the main driver of the unfolding of life. One of the major difficulties is that the molecular machinery of the cell strongly resists explanation by the many slow, gradual, incremental steps that Darwin postulated his mechanism required.
Charles Darwin regarded gradualism as the very essence of evolution. He presented a challenge to opponents of his theory when he wrote: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” The point is repeated by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, who says that if such an organism is found he will “cease to believe in Darwinism.” Such a complex organ, if it existed, is called irreducibly complex.
It turns out that in the past 75 years we’ve discovered many such cases of irreducible complexity at the molecular foundation of life. Biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, has taken up Darwin’s challenge in his book Darwin’s Black Box, which has generated a great deal of discussion, resulting in a second book to address the debate – A Mousetrap for Darwin. His main candidate for an irreducibly complex biological entity is the tiny acid-driven motor, discovered in 1973, that powers the bacterial flagellum – a propeller-like device that enables bacteria to swim – and this motor, so small that 35,000 laid end to end would take up only one millimetre, consists of some 40 protein parts including a rotor, a stator, bushings, and a drive-shaft. What’s more, it can rotate at over 18,000 rpm, whereas the upper range for a car engine is around 6,000 rpm. The propeller enables the bacterium to move at a rate of 100 body lengths per second. Remarkable. What’s even more intriguing is that the absence of any of these protein parts would result in a complete loss of motor function. That is, according to Biochemist Michael Behe – ‘the motor is irreducibly complex’ – it is a ‘single system’ composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any of these parts would result in a complete loss of motor function.
A simple illustration of this concept is the humble mousetrap. All of its five or six components must be present for it to function. Such an irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part, is by definition non-functional. And dysfunctional ‘dies off’ in nature. So an irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by “numerous, successive, slight modifications.”
The flagellum is only one among many irreducibly complex molecular machines that exists, and it’s not clear how they would have evolved, since current theories of evolution fail to provide a mechanism that can account for irreducible complexity in biology. This fundamental challenge to Darwin’s theory of evolution raises important questions about the origins of life and the complex processes that drive it.
Beyond Genes
Now to puzzle your mind a bit further, more recent discoveries have shown that genes alone do not determine the three-dimensional form and structure of an animal. There are other sources of biological information that lie outside of genes that play a crucial role in the formation of animal development.
Let me start with Barbara McClintock. She was an exceptional cytogeneticist who had started research as a student in the 1920s and in 1953 felt she had to stop because of intense opposition from the scientific establishment, another victim of the risk of challenging the reigning Darwinian paradigm. However, her work triumphed and she was honoured in 1983 with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of ‘mobile genetic elements’ – the first woman to win it outright.
Her research was revolutionary in that it totally contradicted the established wisdom of Darwinism by showing that an organism could actually act as an agent and modify its own genome. Not only that, but that the reaction of the genome to stress could trigger species formation.
Research work flowing out of this breakthrough has been proceeding ever since, showing that there are many heritable changes in gene expression that are not caused by changes to DNA sequences. For example, DNA contains information necessary for building proteins, but biological information is needed at many other levels to help arrange individual proteins into systems of proteins, systems of proteins into distinctive cell types, cell types into tissues, and different tissues into organs etc… These features often require epigenetic information—heritable biological information that exists outside of DNA. The concept of epigenetics (epi = upon or above) was originally introduced and defined by the highly influential British developmental biologist Conrad Waddington FRS (1905–75) to refer to the role of networks in organisms in interpreting and controlling their genetic inheritance.
A cytoskeletal array of microtubules determines cell shape and function, although the instructions for constructing the array are independent of DNA. Fruit fly development depends on patterns of regulatory proteins on the interior surface of an egg, but their arrangements are not determined by DNA information. Electromagnetic fields generated by ion gradients across cell membranes are crucial for development, but again, the field locations are not determined by genetic information. The arrangement of cell types during development are influenced by complex patterns of sugars on cell surfaces, but this “sugar code” is not determined by DNA. All of these sources of epigenetic information challenge the sufficiency of materialistic theories of evolution. This is because according to neo-Darwinism, new information, form, and structure arise from natural selection acting on random mutations arising within the genetic text alone. But the genetic text alone, the DNA, isn’t by itself fully responsible for the way life develops. DNA sequences can mutate all the time and still not produce a new body plan, regardless of the amount of time and the number of mutations available to the evolutionary process.
Building a new body plan requires more than just genetic information, it requires mind-bending epigenetic activity that controls the switching on and off of genes that enables cell differentiation and placement at exactly the right places to form the complete organism. In short, building a body plan requires information that is not stored in DNA, and so cannot be generated by mutations to the DNA. Oxford physiologist Denis Noble CBE FRS, has made groundbreaking advances in further elucidating the epigenetic dimension. He states:
“The DNA record does not support the assertion that small random mutations are the main source of new and useful variations. We now know that the many different processes of variation involve well-regulated cell action on DNA molecules.”
Denis Noble
The development of an organism involves much more than the genome: If there is a score for the music of life, it is far bigger than just the genome alone. DNA never acts outside the context of a cell. And we each inherit much more than our DNA. The fact is, DNA does not control the development of an organism. DNA is necessary, but not sufficient; other factors are also involved.
Discoveries of extra levels of epigenetic complexity in organisms would seem to make the mystery both of the origin and the development of life very much more resistant to elucidation in terms of purely naturalistic processes. Given the revelation of epigenetic information, the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism does not provide an adequate explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the major innovations in biological form that have arisen in the history of life on earth.
Darwin devolves
So far we have discussed that random mutations, emphasised on being “random”, are not capable of creating new biological complexity. Instead, mutations tend to degrade genes and impair the normal function of proteins. Therefore, it begs the question, how does life evolve or adapt to its environment if random mutations cannot increase the genetic complexity of an organism and, in fact, ultimately degrade the ‘complexity’ at a molecular/genetic level?
Biochemist Behe, in his book Darwin Devolves, explains that evolutionary biologists are surprised to find that the vast majority of helpful, positively selected genes are estimated to have suffered at least one damaging mutation. Consider a polar bear: the polar bear has adapted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading genes that its ancestors already possessed, for example, the effect of one of these degraded genes (APOB) altered the bear’s metabolism to cope with larger portions of fat, which is vital to the bear’s survival due to scarce meals. A second highly selected gene, LYST, which deals with pigmentation, is believed to have degraded, resulting in the polar bear having a white coat. This is ideal for the bears’ ability to ‘sneak up’ on prey. Despite the impressive abilities of the polar bear, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominantly by devolving. But this is not just the case with polar bears, it has become evident that beneficial mutations can and are often ones that damage molecular machinery.
Now, how can mutations that damage protein functionality be positively selected in nature? To understand this, let’s consider Darwin’s study of finches. Over generations, the beak of finches changed from large and sharp to shorter and blunter, helping the finch survive. If the normal activity of the protein during development helps make a beak sharper and more elongated, then hindering its activity could cause the beak to develop as less sharp and less elongated, in other words, shorter and blunter. If this type of beak helped a finch survive, say through a drought, the mutant gene would be selected. Thus, a beneficial mutation can be one that damages molecular machinery.
Another analogy that can help illustrate this concept is if you were on a sinking ship and had to keep it afloat until it reached shore to survive. Throwing overboard any heavy, unneeded equipment, no matter how sophisticated, like computers, radios, or cargo, would be the winning survival strategy. You would survive by reducing complexity. Now it’s not just a matter of excess weight: suppose there were a terrorist attack in a train station. In this emergency, everyone needs to quickly evacuate from the station, but the ticket barriers are still active, hindering people from escaping. If the ticket barriers were disabled so that people could escape easier and quicker, lives might be saved. Similarly, in the biological world, there are many circumstances in which getting rid of something or breaking something at a molecular level can be helpful.
Take another example, the majority of variations behind the wide variety of dogs is largely degradative. Known genetic changes such as increased muscle mass of dogs, small size, short legs, tails and muzzles are all associated and driven by the degradation or blocking out of genes. But, if for argument’s sake, the selection pressure in nature favours increased muscle mass of dogs, small size, short legs etc, then nature would select and maintain those dog variations which have been genetically degraded.
In a further book, The Edge of Evolution, Behe backs up his argument on the research on E. coli bacteria in which no real innovative changes were observed through tens of thousands of generations. Microbiologist Richard Lenski, a microbiologist at Michigan State University, extends these results to show that E. coli is still E. coli after 60,000 generations of breeding in the laboratory (equivalent to almost two million human years). After more than 60,000 generations of evolving the bacterium E. coli in his laboratory and after the arrival of dozens of helpful mutations that made the bug grow faster, the very large majority of those mutations are ones that degrade or destroy the genes in which they occur. The net result is that evolution has produced is mostly devolution. Although some marginal details of some systems have changed during that sixty thousand generations, the bacterium has repeatedly thrown away chunks of its genetic patrimony, including the ability to make some of the building blocks of RNA. Apparently throwing away sophisticated but costly molecular machinery saves the bacterium energy. Nothing of remotely similar elegance has been built. The lesson of E. coli is that it’s easier for evolution to break things than to make things.
This is part of the evidence that Behe adduces to argue that there is an ‘edge’ to neo-Darwinian evolution, that is, there are limits to what natural selection and mutation can do. Convinced Darwinist’s John Maynard Smith and E. Szathmary took a similar line: “There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.” For Behe, the conclusion is that it’s very likely that all the identified beneficial mutations of bacteria worked by degrading or outright breaking their respective ancestor genes. In other words, by way of natural selection, the loss of a pre-existing genetic capacity improved the bacteria’s survival. Regardless of whether a mutation destroys a previously functioning system or not, whatever works at the moment is selected. The basis for variation, whether that be a degeneration of the organism’s complexity, is irrelevant to natural selection because it only cares about what does better in the environment for any reason.
Here’s one hypothetical illustration: suppose a bacterium becomes resistant to an antibiotic. At first everyone’s amazed as it seems the microbe has gained a new ability. But at the molecular level, this gain in capability could actually be caused by the loss of molecular complexity. For example, a control gene that normally selects one amino acid to defend against antibiotics breaks, causing the bacteria to instead use another kind of amino acid that ends up being more effective at blocking the drug from working; that would be classified as a modification-of-function through the breaking of a gene. These scenarios would yield a drug-resistant microbe, but reflect very different events at a molecular level.
The unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of the scientific community in laboratory evolution over the last few decades is that the great majority of these favourable mutations damage an organism’s genetic information, either by degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements. It would seem then, that random mutation and natural selection both help evolution on a small scale and hinder it on a larger scale. Mutation supplies the variations upon which natural selection acts, but the greatest amount of variation comes from damaging or outright breaking previously working genes. In the case of an already functioning complex system, natural selection shapes it more and more precisely for its current role, making it less and less adaptable to other complex roles. This means that the neo-Darwinian mechanism sharpens a system’s function to its environment for survival, yet in the same way and by the same mechanisms it also breaks things, ceases the development of a system and greatly delays the appearance of a feature. Therefore, the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations can wonderfully explain the variation within family groups of living organisms. Like the differences between the wide variety of dogs or the wide variety of cats, for example. But it does not explain the differences between the members of two separate families, like a cat and a monkey, because they are not of the same family tree. Natural selection and random mutations alone cannot create the biologically complex innovations that differentiate the different family groups of living organisms.
Random mutations and natural selection are simply inadequate for building complex structures; they can only break them or refine them through minor degradations. In many circumstances, the random damaging of genes can be helpful to an organism. The long term picture, however, is devolution. Darwin’s mechanism is powerfully devolutionary and explains why unguided evolution is self-limiting. Random mutation and natural selection do help adapt species, but chiefly by promoting the loss of genetic abilities. The Darwinian mechanism of evolution explains how life changes, adapting to its environment, but natural selection and random mutation together do not explain the most fundamental innovations of biology.
The implication is therefore that devolution runs along a path of survival until after long enough, life is fully devolved and has no way of adapting any further. Natural selection is vital in biological adaptations for ensuring the robustness of the genome in the face of changing environmental pressures. However, its potential for innovation is inadequate as far as explaining the origins of the distinct coding sequences that contribute to the complexity of the organism and diversity of life. We need to underscore the profound difference between adaptation (tweaking something in a way that provides immediate benefit) and invention (bringing an ingenious thing into existence for the first time). The origin of life forms and biological complexities remains a mystery within the Darwinian narrative. According to Behe, an organism will never have significantly greater genetic order than it inherited. That, at least, is the picture painted by the very best, most sophisticated evolutionary experiments the biological revolution has produced to date. And the principles revealed by the work are so fundamental that we must search for an even more basic principle to account for the source of life’s wealth. What accounts for the origin of molecular machinery and genetic complexity itself? In our uniform, unbroken experience, there is only one known explanation for the purposeful arrangement of these parts. We shall touch on this later.
What about the fossil record?
We have discussed the mathematical challenges to neo-Darwinism, as well as the challenge of irreducible complexity, but what does the fossil record have to say? This will be our next exploration.
Darwin believed that all forms of life which are and have lived on the earth have ultimately descended from a single common ancestor somewhere in the distant past, from some singular primordial form. And that this primordial form gradually developed by a process of modification into new forms of life, and after many millions of generations, developed slowly into all the complex life forms we see in the present world today. This suggests a view in which living creatures are spread smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities, like colours merging ever so slightly in a colour chart, each species trailing off into the next. The fossil record, however, is simply not like this. Yes, species and creatures do change over time, but certainly not as smoothly as Darwin expected. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness, oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness.
Darwin predicted that the fossil record would display a continuous distribution of animal forms. But contrary to this, a great number of species enter the fossil record apparently fully formed then depart unchanged, some millions of years later. Palaeontologist Robert Carroll noted that most of the fossil record really “does not support a strictly gradualistic interpretation.” Likewise, the late Robert Wesson of Waterloo University, Ontario, a physicist with broad scientific interests wrote: “Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.”
This statement came as a surprise to me. I thought, given the widespread public impression, that one of the most compelling evidences for evolution comes from the fossil record. And yet, as I discovered, that impression does not really correspond to all that is to be found in the scientific literature.
In Darwin’s time palaeontologists were among the most formidable opponents of his theory. They argued that the fossil record failed to demonstrate gradual accumulation of features over geologic time. Darwin commented on this in ‘The Origin of Species’:
“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several palaeontologists – for instance by Agassiz, Pictet and Sedgwick – as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.”
Charles Darwin
Swiss-American Louis Agassiz of Harvard University was arguably the world’s leading palaeontologist of the day and a founder of the American scientific tradition. His work on glaciers and fossil fish are regarded as classics. Agassiz, along with one of the founders of modern geology – Adam Sedgwick, confronted Darwin on his theory of gradual evolution by pointing out that in Darwin’s tree of life representing the history of evolution, the connecting nodes, the transitional terminals, connecting major branches of life in the history of evolution, were absent in the fossil record.
Agassiz then puzzled Darwin by pointing out a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the sudden appearance of animal life in a remote period of history, a period known as the Cambrian. During this geological period, many new and anatomically sophisticated creatures appeared suddenly without any evidence of simpler ancestral forms in the prior fossil record. In other words, there is an absence of transitional intermediate fossils leading to the Cambrian animal forms and this event is what palaeontologists today call the Cambrian explosion.
The Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison who had explored geologic strata in Wales as Sedgwick had done, reported: “The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organisation, entirely exclude the hypothesis of transmutation from lower to higher grades of being.” Darwin was concerned that this sudden appearance of animals so early in the fossil record was inconsistent with his new theory of gradual evolutionary change. He wrote,
“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several leading palaeontologists – as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. I admit this fact would be fatal to my theory. To the question of why we do not find rich fossil deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no answer… The case at present must remain inexplicable, and maybe truly argued as a valid argument against my views.”
In light of this, Darwin hoped the mystery of the missing ancestral fossils would be solved by future geological discoveries documenting the gradual transitions his theory predicted. Yet while time has passed, the sheer number of unique animal forms and new anatomical structures that arise suddenly with new Cambrian animals remains a fact of the fossil record, still presenting a difficulty for evolutionary biologists today.
In the early twentieth century, further evidence of the Cambrian explosion was found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada, by the Director of the Smithsonian Institute, Charles Doolittle Walcott. He and his co-workers eventually put together a vast collection of more than 65,000 fossil specimens of a great variety of hitherto unknown creatures, some of them so bizarre that they were given appropriately bizarre names – like Hallucigenia Sparsa. They included specimens from around 20 out of approximately 27 phyla – the broadest classification category that are to be seen in the fossil record – they had all appeared in a geologically short period.
The ‘explosive’ nature of this event has created a considerable amount of controversy. In particular, the book, Darwin’s Doubt, by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, gives a detailed account of the ‘Cambrian Explosion’. This has come under criticism by those claiming that there was in fact no explosion and the timescale is enough for the modern synthesis to account for it. Meyer addressed these criticisms in a later edition of his book.
This sudden quantum leap in complexity from simpler pre-Cambrian organisms is too sudden to be explained by the gradual activity of natural selection and random mutations. Yet what makes the situation even more difficult is that the Cambrian period also reveals the appearance of arguably, more differing body plans than ever before or since. And this arose at the most unexpected time: namely, right at the dawn of animal life (according to the Darwinian theory of evolution). The mystery at hand is where were the pre-Cambrian creatures which the Cambrian animals should have evolved from? With the development of offshore drilling technologies, oil companies began to drill through thousands of feet of marine sedimentary rock, and as geologists evaluated the content of these drill cores, they still did not find the predicted pre-Cambrian fossils. They’re simply not there. Therefore, the fossil record is actually documenting the most intense burst of diverse animal life emerging suddenly in the Cambrian period, from which, it’s claimed, many of our animal groups today are descended.
The fossil record simply does not document the gradual emergence of the crucial distinguishing characteristics of the Cambrian animals. The expected Darwinian pattern of a deep fossil history of this Cambrian fauna, showing their gradual development, stretching hundreds of millions of years into the Precambrian, has failed to materialise. Darwin’s doubt, his great gamble of hoping the evidence would later appear, has failed.
Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms. In recent years, palaeontologists have uncovered many fossils that demonstrate explosions of information at several points throughout history. There is a series of salient episodes of evolutionary innovation, such as the Cambrian explosions, the angiosperm (Flowering-plant) “big boom” during the Cretaceous, and the mammalian radiation in the Eocene period. In fact, the first winged insects, turtles, dinosaurs, sea reptiles, birds, flowering plants, mammals, as well as other animal groups, appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. Palaeontologist David Raup of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, which houses one of the largest fossil collections in the world, said in 1979:
“We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”
David Raup
Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Institutes of Health, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, said, in 2007, essentially the same thing Raup said 30 years earlier:
“Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.”
Eugene Koonin
We can safely say that the history of evolution is surprisingly unclear.
Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University remarked: “Biologists are much more impressed by the discreteness of organic form, and the general absence of intermediates.” Colin Patterson who looked after one of the greatest fossil collections in the natural history museum confirmed that he struggled to find many convincing transitional records for watertight argument.
This lack of clarity in regard to the fossil record also applies to our own evolutionary history. Far from supplying “a nice clean example” of “gradualistic evolutionary change” that has “no gaps” or “no lack of transitional fossils,” the record shows a dramatic discontinuity between ape-like and human-like forms. Human-like fossils appear abruptly in the record, without clear evolutionary precursors, contradicting Darwinian expectations.
First, the fossil record is fragmented, and long periods of time exist for which there are few hominin fossils. So “fragmentary and disconnected” is the data, according to Harvard zoologist Richard Lewontin, that “despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.” A second challenge is the fragmented nature of the fossil specimens themselves. Typical hominid fossils consist of mere bone scraps, making it difficult to form definitive conclusions about their morphology, behaviour, and relationships. Most hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls. Flesh reconstructions of extinct hominins are likewise subjective. They often attempt to diminish the intellectual abilities of humans and overstate those of apes. The famed anthropologist Earnest Hooton from Harvard University gets straight to the point: “alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.”
Third, the field itself is fragmented. The sparse nature of the data, combined with the desire to make confident assertions about human evolution, often betrays objectivity and leads to sharp disagreements. After interviewing paleoanthropologists for a documentary, PBS NOVA producer Mark Davis recounted that “each Neanderthal expert thought the last one I talked to was an idiot, if not an actual Neanderthal.” Nature editor Henry Gee conceded that the “fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”
In 2015, two leading paleoanthropologists,Bernard Wood and Mark Grabowski, reviewed the fossil evidence regarding human evolution in a prestigious scientific volume titled ‘Macroevolution’. They acknowledged the “dearth of unambiguous evidence for ancestor-descendant lineages,” and admitted that the evolutionary sequence for the majority of hominin lineages is unknown. Most hominin taxa, particularly early hominins, have no obvious ancestors, and in most cases ancestor-descendant sequences (fossil time series) cannot be reliably constructed.
Contrary to common belief, our own genus Homo does not gradually emerge from ape-man fossils in Africa, but instead, appears abruptly with its distinct differences and special adaptations for long-distance running. In the year 2000, renowned paleoanthropologist John Hawks co-published a study that documented the morphological gap between the australopithecines and Homo. His results were celebrated as a “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the genus Homo.
Even the various cultural achievements that involve complex symbolic thought—like jewellery, ivory carvings, and cave paintings—did not develop gradually. Instead, they appeared suddenly during the “Upper Paleolithic human revolution” about 40,000 years ago, together with the first humans that have a globular braincase and a chin. Theologians have jumped on this event as a possible correlation with the origin of real humans as the image bearers of God.
A summary of the fossil record
What, then, does the fossil record reveal? Leading evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:
1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’.”
Stephen Jay Gould
Gould and palaeontologist Niles Eldredge argued that an honest reading of the fossil record revealed short periods of rapid change, followed by long periods of stasis. They were both baffled by the fact that most species seem to display no directional transition during their tenure on earth, but that many species seemed to arise rapidly in the fossil record, without gradual transformation. This led to their development of the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’. Their idea is that the long periods of stasis are broken sporadically by sudden large macroevolutionary ‘jumps’, which is a radical revision of the standard Darwinian narrative. As a spectacular example of such a jump, Gould, in his bestselling book Wonderful Life, described how all the major phyla (taxonomic ranks) we have today – plus a good many more which have become extinct – appeared very suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion.
To summarise, surely the fact that such leading thinkers as those we have cited are publicly expressing concerns about foundational aspects of the theory, in particular about the extrapolation from the present to the past, would indicate, at the very least, that the fossils do not offer the strength of support to the neo-Darwinian theory at the macro level that is often claimed. While it is true that transitions in the fossil record do exist among certain features of organisms, there are also huge gaps in the fossil record, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever. The fossil record simply does not document that all forms of life trace back to some common ancestry, but is instead highly discontinuous and contradicts Darwin’s prediction of gradualism.
Do similarities in organisms prove that all evolved from a common ancestor?
An alternative argument is that similarities in living organisms, similarities in anatomy and in the sequences of DNA, RNA, and protein, point to ancestral forms and to an evolutionary history that fossils have failed to document. Many palaeontologists now admit that the long-sought-after pre-Cambrian fossils, necessary according to the Darwinian account of the origin of animal life, are missing. They instead suggest that the common ancestor has been documented, not by fossil evidence, but by molecular or genetic evidence. It is argued that the extent to which genes differ in two or more animals represents the amount of time that has passed since those animals began to evolve and diverge from a common ancestor. A small difference would represent a short time since the divergence of genes, and a big difference a long time.
The issue is that these studies have generated widely deferring results. A series of leading palaeontologists have pointed out that depending on which genes and which estimation methods you use, you can get results ranging over billions of years. Leading molecular evolutionists Dan Graur and William Martin concluded that this method often gives the illusion of precision but is extremely uncertain. Sometimes even different studies of the same group of molecules have generated dramatically different times. This raises the question: if we don’t have fossils documenting a common ancestor and if genetics studies produce such contradictory time estimates, how do we know when or if the first animals began to diverge from a common ancestor?
It’s also important to understand that these studies do not establish a common descent of all animal forms. Instead, these studies assume the existence of such common ancestors and then merely attempt, given that assumption, to determine how long ago such ancestors might have lived. It assumes the conclusion beforehand and then bases the studies on that assumed conclusion which the study is thought to establish. So the reasoning behind this method is circular and does not prove that a single, original ancestor of Cambrian life-forms actually existed.
Neither the fossil record nor genetic studies establish that all forms of life trace back to some common ancestry. Maybe scientists will find some way to prove this in the future, but you shouldn’t assume this, rather, you ought to explain the evidence you have at hand. A 2009 paper in ‘Nature Reviews Microbiology’ maintained that “there is no such thing as a tree of life” because “the tree looks more like a forest.” A 2012 paper in ‘Annual Review of Genetics’ explicitly doubted universal common ancestry, proposing that “life might indeed have multiple origins.” Another paper in ‘Biology Direct’ noted that the “sudden emergence” of new complex life-forms contradicts a tree pattern:
“Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.”
Eugene V Koonin
The message is clear – an honest look and we haven’t got a clear evolutionary tree which ties back to a common ancestor, we have nothing like a tree.
Furthermore, it is one thing to say that there is genetic relatedness; it is entirely another to claim that mutation and natural selection are the only cause of that relatedness. Zoologist Mark Ridley makes an important observation that is familiar to mathematicians: “The simple fact that species can be classified hierarchically into genera, families, and so on, is not an argument for evolution. It is possible to classify any set of objects into a hierarchy, whether their variation is evolutionary or not.” Cars, for instance, can be arranged in a hierarchy. But all cars have similar parts because those parts are essential for their operation, and because they are constructed according to a common design, not because the cars have ‘descended’ from each other. From this perspective, similarities in the DNA sequences could therefore logically equally well be read as evidence of common design. Indeed, from a philosophical perspective, the common ancestry might have been designed, so that the concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Professor John Lennox offers us a simple thought experiment to help our intuitions here: Imagine a molecular biologist, based on some remote planet 10 million years’ from now, analysing the structure of the DNA of various kinds of wheat from the early twenty-first century that archaeologists found embedded in a rock drifting out into space. Let us also assume that the biologist does not know that this is a piece of the planet known as Earth after it was destroyed by a comet. Her molecular analysis shows that the different wheat appear to be related in that their DNA is very similar – indeed identical for long stretches – so she puts the differences down to natural selection and random mutation. A short time later, space archaeologists find a bit of text on the rock in space and that says, “Professor Johnson genetically altered the structure of wheat in order to increase the yield.” They bring this scrap of decoded text to the molecular biologist: “This text suggests that atleast one of your wheat samples was not produced by random mutations and unguided natural process but was deliberately designed.” “Nonsense,” she responds. “This is a myth from a primitive civilisation. That isn’t real science. My research is following a very promising line and I think we shall soon be able to see that chance and necessity can readily account for what we observe. I am not prepared to believe in a ‘Professor Johnson of the gaps’ that would bring my science to an end.” Yet we who live in the twenty-first century know that human intelligence has produced genetically modified crops. Furthermore, acknowledging that such a ‘professor’ existed, far from being a science-stopper, could open up new avenues of research into ancient civilisations. The point is, both genetic and morphological relatedness are to be expected whatever hypothesis one adopts – whether design or common descent or a combination of both.
Summary – The scope of evolution
The bulk of this essay has been to content with the second assertion stated at the start, whether “Biological evolution accounts for the existence of all of life’s complexity.” The answer to that is a clear ‘No’. There are limits to what the neo-Darwinian mechanism can account for.
Modern science has shown that strictly materialistic theories of evolution have failed to identify a cause capable of generating the information necessary to produce new forms of life. Purely mindless, materialistic processes such as natural selection and random mutations cannot produce the intricate designed-like structures that we see in living organisms. For example, there is no publication that describes anything close to a testable hypothesis for how random mutations and natural selection could account for the sophisticated molecular machinery of, say, the cell, let alone experiments that demonstrate it. As Michael Behe wrote: “The literature remains totally devoid of explanations, yet Darwinist’s remain incongruously smug.”
Taking an honest look at the research, I am compelled to become a sceptic. I doubt that the neo-Darwinian mechanism can achieve the macro-level of evolutionary change, to which it is often claimed. Strictly materialistic theories of evolution don’t explain the origin and complexity of all of life, especially the presence of coded information or other complex adaptations. Beneficial mutations have been observed, but all of them produce only small biochemical changes—not new organs or body plans. Frequently these advantageous changes involve the loss or diminishment of function at the biochemical level. Geneticist Richard Goldschmidt argued that “the facts of microevolution do not suffice for an understanding of macroevolution.” He concluded, “Microevolution does not lead beyond the confines of the species, and the typical products of microevolution, the geographic races, are not incipient species.”
Leading evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller claimed that standard neo-Darwinian theory has failed to explain the origin of the new and complex anatomical features and structures that have arisen throughout the history of life. That would include novel animal architectures such as the arthropod, chordate, and molluscan body plans; new anatomical structures such as wings, limbs, eyes, nervous systems, and brains; and new specialised organs such as the vertebrate liver, digestive system and kidneys. In short, neo-Darwinian fails to explain the origin of the most important defining features of living organisms, indeed, the very features that evolutionary theory has, since Darwin, claimed to explain.
Palaeontologist Günther Bechly describes how the scientific principle of following evidence wherever it leads has led him to doubt the materialistic paradigm of Neo-Darwinian macro-evolution via a purely mechanistic process of chance (random mutation, sexual recombination, genetic drift) and necessity (natural and sexual selection), even when supplemented with more modern concepts like symbiogenesis, multilevel (group) selection, epigenetic inheritance, evolvability, natural genetic engineering, phenotypic plasticity, and niche construction. None of these phenomena can sufficiently explain the origin of complex biological novelty, and some of them (e.g., natural genetic engineering, phenotypic plasticity, and evolvability) themselves require fine-tuning and specified information themselves.
How, then, should we view the evolutionary mechanism? Philosopher Paul Erbrich said that: “The mutation-selection mechanism is an optimisation mechanism.” That is, it enables an already existing living system to adapt selectively to changing environmental conditions much in the same way as genetic algorithms facilitate optimisation in engineering. It does not, however, appear to create anything radically new. As Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries famously asserted – natural selection works on adaptations that concern only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.
James Shapiro, an expert in bacterial genetics at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the University of Chicago, in his ground-breaking book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century says that the evidence of DNA leads him to reject the deeply ingrained notion that evolution occurs through the “gradual accumulation of numerous successive slight modifications” – to use Darwin’s phrase. Shapiro also goes on to argue that there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system; only a variety of wishful speculations. Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist who rejects both the gradualist thesis and Intelligent Design.
Another French biologist whose research convinced him long ago that there was a limit to what mutation and natural selection could do and so led him to reject neo-Darwinism was Pierre Grassé of the Sorbonne in Paris. Grassé was President of the Académie Française and editor of the definitive 28-volume work Traité de Zoologie. The great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky held Grassé in high esteem: “One can disagree with Grassé, but not ignore him… his knowledge of the living world is encyclopaedic.” He described Grassé’s book, L’évolution du vivant, as “a frontal attack on all kinds of Darwinism. Its purpose is ‘to destroy the myth of evolution, as a simple, understood and explained phenomenon’, and to show that evolution is a mystery about which little is, and perhaps can be, known.” In his book, Grassé observed that fruit flies remain fruit flies in spite of the thousands of generations that have been bred and all the mutations that have been induced in them. In fact, the capacity for variation in the gene pool seems to run out quite early on in the process, a phenomenon called genetic homeostasis. There appears to be a barrier beyond which selective breeding will not pass because of the onset of the exhaustion of genetic variability. If there are limits even to the amount of variation the most skilled breeders can achieve, the clear implication is that natural selection is likely to achieve a lot less. It is not surprising that he argued that microevolution could not bear the weight that is often put upon it, that is, microevolution does not extrapolate into macroevolution.
Grassé is far from alone. The famous mathematician and astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle FRS who founded the astronomy department at Cambridge was a genius but of a somewhat irascible nature that, in the opinion of many, was the reason that he was not awarded a Nobel Prize for his prediction of carbon resonance. To be fair he probably deserved it. He made an important statement on scientific methodology, one which I think is very relevant to our essay:
“When ideas are based on observations, as the Darwinian theory certainly is, it is usual for those ideas to be valid at least within the range of the observations. It is when extrapolations are made outside the range of observations that troubles may arise. So the issue that presented itself was to determine just how far the theory was valid and exactly why beyond a certain point it became invalid.”
Sir Fred Hoyle
Hoyle has to the same conclusion on the basis of mathematical calculation as Grassé did, summarising his own work as follows:
“Well as common sense would suggest, the Darwinian theory is correct in the small but not in the large. Rabbits come from other slightly different rabbits, not from either soup or potatoes. Where they come from in the first place is a problem yet to be solved, like much else of a cosmic scale.”
Sir Fred Hoyle
I think Hoyle was right. It is too early to be conclusive on evolutionary change and how this really plays out is still to be understood.
A new proposal of evolution
If the evolutionary mechanism doesn’t account for all of life’s complexity, what else is needed? This opens up (although it does not confirm) the possibility that a mind could have played a role in designing, guiding and directing the unique animal forms that arose at the dawn of animal life. Would we consider that maybe certain features of living systems are actually best explained by the design of an actual intelligence – a mind, as opposed to an aimless, mindless, materialistic process? The possibility emerges that these semblances of design may not just be semblances after all. Of course, proposing a mind as an explanation to the origin of life’s complexity quickly slides to the obvious suggestion of God, and I want to be careful at this stage not to jump to a “God of the gaps” argument – which is the argument that gaps in scientific knowledge are evidence for God’s existence and direct intervention. It’s an argument of ignorance. Just because evolutionary biology doesn’t currently explain all of life’s complexity, doesn’t logically imply that God does. That is not the argument I want to make, instead, I want to propose an evidence based approach.
Our experience suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between intelligent activity and the production of information. Systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not from chance or physical-chemical laws. The connection between complexity and design, and so between complexity and intelligence is reasonably understood. It’s logical. Whether inscribed on paper or recorded in a computer code, a design is, after all, the physical outflow of intelligence itself, its trace in matter. David Berlinski wrote:
“Molecular biology has revealed that a living system is a combinatorial system, its origination is controlled by an obscure text, one written in a biochemical code. It is an algorithm that lies at the heart of life, ferrying information from one set of symbols (the nucleic acids) to another (the proteins). We find that information passes from the genome to the organism. Something is given, something read; something is ordered and something is done. The triple concepts of algorithm, information, and symbol lie at the heart of life.”
David Berlinski
In every other sphere of our experience, these three features are only known to arise from the activity of intelligent agents. In fact, we have not identified a single materialistic cause that also generates large amounts of specific information, especially in digital or alphabetic form. Design from intelligence is the only known cause we are aware of that produces functionally specified digital information. Therefore, the great infusion of such information found in life points more clearly to an intelligent cause.
Animal forms contain more than just genetic information. The development of an animal relies on tightly integrated networks of genes, proteins and other molecules to regulate development and produce different types of proteins at the right place and the right time. It’s a series of biological networks programmed into our DNA, logically interacting with itself to form integrated machinery that collaborates to produce an adult animal form. It’s an incredibly complex, computer-like system. Yet materialistic theories of evolution have been unable to identify a mutational mechanism capable of generating anything even remotely resembling a complex integrated circuit. But in our experience, complex integrated circuits are only known to be produced by intelligent agents – by engineers. In addition to this, human agents often design information-rich hierarchies and are the only known entity or process that has this capacity.
It’s worth noting that we cannot consider examples of apparent complex informational hierarchies (e.g ant colonies) supposedly created by evolution in our consideration of materialistic evolution, as that would constitute a circular argument. Therefore, we can scientifically suggest intelligent intervention as the best explanation for the origin of the organised layers of information needed to build the first animals. It follows that the great infusion of such information in the Cambrian explosion and comparable events in the history of life is best explained as the activity of an intelligent cause – what the great nineteenth-century palaeontologist Louis Agassiz described as “acts of mind.”
Furthermore, intelligent design is becoming increasingly probable as we use computers to create an output with self-organising properties. Computers are not self-organising entities – they are intelligently designed, and their programming is an intelligent activity. Philosopher Steve Fuller therefore says that the ability to simulate evolution on a computer strengthens the case for divine creation. The point is that if humans have the ability to program a computer that creates an output with profound self-organising properties, surely God could do the same? Fuller concludes: In short, intelligent design becomes more and more plausible as an alternative explanation for the emergence of life as evolution theorists rely increasingly on computers to demonstrate that natural history is not merely complicated but genuinely complex. This is simply because the two positions will become harder to distinguish from each other, and the evolutionists will be playing on the intelligent design theorists’ turf.
For the above reasons, the proposition of intelligent intervention is not an argument from ignorance, quite the opposite: it is an argument based upon observational effects. Now the idea of intelligent design/intervention does not reject evolution defined as change over time, as organisms clearly do adapt, but it disputes the idea that the appearance of design is completely blind and undirected. It adds a twist to common ideas of evolution. Recognising the science, listening to the doubt, the theory of intelligent design states that the Darwinian narrative of natural selection and random mutation does not explain the origin of life forms. The mechanism does not invent things, rather, it merely tunes things. From our experience and scientific induction, the innovations of lifeforms would be best explained by the activity of intelligence, to which the ‘evolutionary’ mechanism can then act to further refine a living organism as its environment changes, mainly through devolution.
So, according to the theory of intelligent design, the conception and construction of life is credited to the activity of intelligence, which then hands over the operation of life to the mechanical guidance of random mutations and natural selection to tune that life to its environment.
This scientific conclusion seems logical and reasonable based on the evidence at hand, so why do so many people get frustrated with the idea? I would say that the reason many do not consider intelligent design is that they hold a strictly materialistic/naturalistic philosophy which does not enable them to consider certain explanations that lie outside strictly material causes. They are allowing their atheistic worldview to mix in with their judgement in science. That is what naturalism is. This means they cannot consider the activity of any intelligence even if the evidence points in that direction. This a priori bias is unethical and leads to bad science.
A scientific explanation must not be constrained within the boundaries of materialism or naturalism but should be broadly tested within the criterion of testability, falsifiability, observability, repeatability and the like. What matters is whether a theory is justified by evidence or not. Intelligent design is tested against our knowledge of the cause-and-effect nature of the world. We are attempting to explain prior events and causes in reference to current observation and causes; any rule that prevents us from considering such an explanation erases the rationality of science because it prevents scientists from considering a possibly true explanation. For this reason, the naturalist who confines his or her view to strictly materialistic processes is bound to reject possible true theories before even considering the evidence and following that where it leads.
Perhaps this is worth reiterating – the commitment of many to naturalism, or more directly, atheism, has led to a culture which denies explanations beyond the naturalist paradigm, and suppresses the data when naturalism seems inadequate. Atheism is a commitment, not a deduction. Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve made this commitment. Having taken that step, your next step is to order your beliefs around that commitment. Whether the commitment was rational or not, you want to think of yourself as being rational, so you seek a way to make sense of the world and yourself without exposing your fundamental commitment to critique.
When Richard Dawkins wrote that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” he was expressing the same idea from his God-denying perspective. No one wants to look foolish. Atheists want their God-denial to look respectable, and in their desire to make their rejection of God appear rational and sophisticated, many have suppressed certain data. If young children automatically ascribe dragonflies to a “God-like designer” for all the right reasons—reasons that are both intuitively obvious and valid—then for educated adults to insist otherwise is folly. Those who insist that such complexity arose purely through blind, unplanned evolutionary processes must resort to far-fetched explanations and appeals to chance. They must satisfy themselves with the hope that all the remarkable inventions on display in these insects came about through a long series of coincidences involving genetic mutation and natural selection. The young child is right to think that unguided processes are incapable of producing the complex and exceptional arrangements found in nature. Masters of storytelling, like Dawkins, almost make it sound plausible, assuming you don’t allow yourself to think about it too deeply. The whole problem is that unguided processes have no way to bring all the right things together in the right way to produce something that rises to the level of a clever invention. Mutation and selection can lock in changes that fall well short of that, but these are invariably evolutionary dead ends. This is where Darwin’s project sinks, as well as all other projects that attempt to ascribe life to unplanned, unguided natural processes. The mere fact that ingenious inventions always require highly exceptional arrangements, that when all raw possibilities are considered there are always vastly more useless arrangements than ingenious ones, means that someone clever has to do the arranging. All insistence to the contrary amounts to an appeal to spooky coincidence, which is not a respectable explanation for anyone who values reason and evidence. Since nobody believes in spooky coincidences, these appeals are always disguised to look more respectable, but that doesn’t change the underlying facts.
One of the smartest, Philosopher Thomas Nagel, writes that “for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works.” His fellow atheists would like to blame his incredulity on ignorance, however, the fact that scientific advances only make the problem worse seems to contradict that interpretation: “The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.” Nagel recognises that “doubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus,” but, he continues, “that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution.”
Atheists of the Dawkins variety like to pretend that scientific progress has made God less plausible. They love that conclusion, but what they lack is a valid argument to support it. Nagel refuses to play that game. He’s an atheist because he dislikes the thought that he comes under God’s authority, which I suspect is true of most atheists, including Dawkins. Nothing intellectual or scientific in that. Just very human. Here’s how Nagel put it in The Last Word:
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
Thomas Nagel
I admire Nagel’s honesty. The defence of a strictly materialistic Darwinian theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. If the evidence leads to the possibility that life may have been designed by an intelligent agent, then logically that draws us to the possibility of the existence of God. Maybe here lies the reason many reject anything other than materialistic/naturalistic worldviews, despite their inadequacy. People do not want to consider God and so forbid certain hypotheses right from the start. They want a conclusion to meet their own preconceived motives. Naturalism, with its rejection of intelligence in all but contingent causes, is simply bad science at the most fundamental level.
Further Reads
This essay has intended to be a brief, but holistic overview of the challenges to neo-Darwinism and contentions with Christian theology. For more on the challenges to neo-Darwinism, please refer to my below book list:
- Darwins Doubt – Philosopher of science Stephen C.Meyer
- The Edge of Evolution – Biochemist Michael Behe
- Darwin Devolves – Biochemist Michael Behe
- Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed – Molecular biologist Douglas Axe
- The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith – William A. Dembski (Author), Casey Luskin (Author), Joseph M. Holden (Author), Stephen C. Meyer (Foreword)
