I read
Bill Nye's book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation
to give a well-known author a chance to change my opinion that there
is no compelling evidence for the claim that the blind process of
natural selection can explain the astounding wonders of biological
complexity (for the kind of reasons I discuss here). Looking at the
book's index, I found that only 8 pages in the 298-page book
discuss natural selection. I didn't find this surprising, because
while there is lots of evidence that evolution (or a succession of
life forms mimicking evolution) has occurred, the evidence that
natural selection is the main explanation for this progression is
actually very weak. Natural selection is a real biological effect,
which can explain a few things, such as a change in a population of
organisms in which a trait held by the minority becomes a trait held
by the majority. But natural selection is not very good at
explaining the origin of new forms of biological complexity, contrary
to what is often claimed.
Looking
at the index's first reference to natural selection, I found
immediately a very misleading statement by Nye. He states,
“Evolution is also not random; it's the opposite of random” (a
misstatement he repeats later). No, orthodox Darwinian evolution is, in fact, quite random. When I do a Google search
for “definition of random,” the first definition that comes up
is: “made,
done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.”
The synonyms that are listed include “unplanned” and “undirected.”
Evolution as described by Darwinian orthodoxy is therefore quite
random, as very many evolution enthusiasts have themselves told us over
the years.
Nye
suggests that evolution isn't random because it “selects” fitter
organisms. Using the same type of reasoning, we could argue that
hurricanes aren't really random, because they “select” lighter
buildings to destroy rather than heavy buildings made of steel and
brick. We could also argue that forest fires aren't really random
because they “select” wooden buildings to destroy rather than
heavy steel buildings. Such reasoning about hurricanes and forest
fires would, of course, be quite erroneous and sophistical. It is
just as erroneous and sophistical for Nye to claim that evolution (as
described by Darwinian orthodoxy) is not random just because it
“selects” fitter organisms. The real issue in whether something
is random is whether it is blind and mindless, without a plan. The
type of evolution Nye believes in is utterly blind and mindless,
without any plan; so it is extremely misleading for him to describe
it as the “opposite of random.”
The
first four pages in which Nye discusses natural selection do not give
anything like a coherent argument that natural selection can explain
biological complexity. In fact, Nye seems to repeatedly veer into
attempts to explain natural selection by discussing marketplace and
corporate behavior. This is misguided, because corporate and market
behavior (such as the “survival of the fittest” of well-designed
products) are examples of what is known as artificial selection ,
which involves conscious decision making and is entirely different
from unconscious natural selection. You can in no way validate the
power of natural selection by giving examples of artificial
selection.
The
main problem with believing that natural selection is the main
explanation for biological complexity is that the biological world
has a thousand marvels of immense coordination, in which components
are arranged in extremely coordinated and complex groups of
components; but neither natural selection nor random mutations offer
any mechanism for coordination. Random mutations can explain why
different small components might occasionally arise, but orthodox
Darwinism offers no mechanism by which these components would arrange
themselves into highly coordinated and complex groups of components.
For the orthodox Darwinists there are countless problems of this
type: how did nature “climb the staircase” to reach some top
level of complex coordination, in such a way so that each step added
to the reproductive value or survival value of an organism, so that
each step was useful? Under Darwinian assumptions, each step must be
useful, or we can't explain it.
One
such “climbing the staircase” problem involves the evolution of
wings. To the naive mind, it does not appear that a small part of a
wing would have any use. Nye tackles this problem, but fails to
explain it away. For one thing, his approach involves a kind of
cheat. His chapter on the topic is entitled “What Good Is Half a
Wing?” Trying to explain just that is cheating, because it is
starting halfway up the stairway, when you should be starting at the
bottom of the stairway. The question that should be asked is not
“what good is half a wing” but “what good is an eighth of a
wing” or “what good is a wing stump.” To explain this problem
under orthodox Darwinian assumptions, one would need to offer a
scenario by which a species might progress through this series: (1)
no wing; (2) an eighth of a wing; (3) two eighths of wing; (4) three
eighths of a wing; (5) four eighths of a wing; and so forth. One
would need to explain how each of these progressions involved an
increase in either reproductive value or survival value.
Nye is
unable to explain such a thing. He offers two ideas to try to help
explain the evolution of wings. The first is that organisms began to
develop wings to keep them warm. This doesn't work, because that
can't explain the first two steps in the stairway; it can't explain
why a species would start to evolve a wing stump or just an eighth of
a wing. A wing stump or an eighth of a wing is worthless for keeping
you warm. If you doubt this, I suggest the following experiment.
Break a chopstick in half, and paste a few feathers on it. Then tape
that feathered half chopstick on your shoulders, and go out on a cold
night. You will not feel any warmer.
The
second idea Nye offers to try to explain the evolution of wings is to
suggest that partial wings were useful for gliding. This does not
work, for two reasons. A lesser reason is that gliding is only useful
for certain types of animals (such as tree-dwellers); but it is
believed that birds evolved from reptiles that did not live in trees.
The larger reason is that to get even a capability for gliding, a
wing must be quite well developed, much more than just a wing stump.
So a gliding hypothesis cannot explain why an organism would evolve
the first eighth of a wing or a wing stump.
For
the orthodox Darwinian, there are countless problems like this wing
stump problem – problems of explaining how blind evolution could
have reached some improbable target involving a great complex
coordination of components. If you shrink the scale, things get
much, much worse. The problem of explaining the mechanisms of
cellular machinery are vastly more difficult. For example, the basic
cellular operation of protein synthesis involves at least six
different very complicated components which must all be tightly
coordinated: a genetic code, DNA, messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA,
transfer RNA, and proteins. The degree of coordination at this
microscopic level makes the coordination of muscles and bones in a
wing look very trivial in comparison.
How
can all this coordination be explained when Darwinian orthodoxy
offers no mechanism for coordination? Nye offers no hint, and I do
not find “coordination” in the ten-page index at the back of his
book. I see in his index only two pages that discuss biological
complexity (pages 60-61), and those pages offer nothing to explain it
(other than the not very helpful claim that the “speed of sexual
selection” may contribute to biological complexity). I also see no
mention of “coordination” in the index of Ridley's 600-page
textbook on evolution. But I guess that's not surprising, since
explaining biological coordination is not something that Darwinian
orthodoxy does in any substantive way.
Here
is how Lane attempts to describe this change, using not natural
selection as the explanation but the weird theory of endosymbiosis.
The world is split in
two. There are the eternal prokaryotes and the kaleidoscopic
eukaryotes. The transition from one to the other seems not to have
been a gradual evolution, no slow climb to complexity...Only a rare
and fortuitous event, a collaboration between two prokaryotes, one
somehow getting inside the other, broke the deadlock. An accident.
The new chimeric cell faced a host of problems...A happenstance
solution may have given rise not just to the cell nucleus but also to
a tendency to collect DNA and to combine it it in the endless
constellations of the magical world around us. Another accident. The
world of marvels around us, it seems, springs from two deep
accidents. On such tender threads hangs fate. We are lucky to be here
at all.
This
is the weird theory that seems to be that a very complicated cell arose after one
simple cell ate another simple cell and they somehow magically became
a nice coordinated cell that was vastly more complicated. It's
extremely hard to believe that this would happen by chance. “A
quantum leap in complexity by digesting something” is not a
plausible theory, particularly since eukaryotic cells are a hundred times larger in diameter than typical prokaryotic cells such as bacteria. That
such a theory must be resorted to is further evidence that natural
selection is not up to the job of explaining the origin of biological
complexity.
Lane's
book highlights the fact that the growth of biological complexity is
a story of “great leaps.” These leaps include:
- The appearance of the first self-replicating molecules.
- The appearance of the first primitive cells, and the genetic code they required (a system of symbolic representations).
- The appearance of photosynthesis -- quite the marvel, judging from the complexity described by Lane, who describes it as five “complex interrelated systems” that “work in sequence...it's an enormously complicated way to crack this particular nut.”
- The appearance of eukaryotic cells vastly more complex than prokaryotic cells – a quantum leap which Lane suggests cannot be explained by a gradual progression.
- The transition of life from the sea to the land (hard to explain under current thinking, rather like explaining an evolution from earth-based organisms to organisms that live in a vacuum of outer space).
- The appearance of birds, which has the wing stump problem.
- The appearance of the human mind (with lots of features that natural selection doesn't explain, because they don't have survival value, as explained here).
Overall,
the ability of natural selection and mutations to explain these
things is poor. If scientists think otherwise, it's partly
because they have long had a habit of underestimating requirements,
as Lane does rather laughably when he makes this reductionist claim
about the famous “hard problem of consciousness” emphasized by
philosopher David Chalmers: “Surely Chalmers' hard problem is
actually a problem in biochemistry.” As if some chemical equation
could explain how Mind arises from matter.
But
the very clannish and dogmatic community of
evolutionary biologists will probably continue for quite a while to
push the Official Party Line that natural selection explains the
origin of biological complexity, in a way rather similar to the way
that Marxist dogmas (an Official Party Line) would be handed down
authoritatively from Moscow in the years of the Soviet Union.
Postscript: See this link for a list of about 50 researchers who are described as "a list of researchers and authors who have one way or another expressed their concerns on natural selection’s scope and believes that other mechanisms would better explain evolution processes." It's a very distinguished group (mostly scientists and professors), and each of them has written a book describing their views.
Postscript: See this link for a list of about 50 researchers who are described as "a list of researchers and authors who have one way or another expressed their concerns on natural selection’s scope and believes that other mechanisms would better explain evolution processes." It's a very distinguished group (mostly scientists and professors), and each of them has written a book describing their views.
No comments:
Post a Comment