Recently
a scientific journal published a paper entitled “Darwin's Aliens”
that was a strange inconsistent mishmash with highfalutin
pretensions. The authors claimed in their synopsis that they would
“show how
evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about
aliens.” But their paper is an odd blend of orthodox
recitations from the Darwinist catechism, statements that conflict
with Darwinist claims, misleading graphics, and discussions
of marvelous cooperation and sudden transitions that are
non-Darwinian or in conflict with Darwinian ideas.
The
paper starts out by discussing Darwin's theory of natural selection,
but the diagram it gives to illustrate the idea is misleading. We see three animals, one of which has a tiny
neck, the other a medium-sized neck, and the third with a long neck
like a giraffe. These are given as examples of “variation.”
There's some lines under the long-neck giraffe, labeled “differential
success," leading to three similar animals with very long necks.
This
visual gives the completely erroneous idea that you might see some
huge beneficial change in the structure of an organism due to some
random variation within a generation. That is untrue. If there were a
horse-like species with a small neck, it would need very many muscle
and bone changes to become an animal with a long neck like a giraffe
– not merely many changes in the neck, but changes in the main
skeletal structure to support such a neck. It could never be that
some random mutation or variation within a generation would cause
such a change. You would need many random mutations across multiple
generations, all coincidentally conspiring to achieve the same end –
something vastly harder to account for than what is shown in the
visual the paper provides. The paper's visual is a kind of
visualization of the discredited idea of “hopeful monsters” (also
called saltations or macromutations), which many evolution experts
have rejected as unrealistic, and which is inconsistent with the
Darwinian slogan that “nature does not make leaps.”
The paper
occasionally states some standard Darwinist dogma, such as the claim
that natural selection can produce design without a designer,
something that has not actually been demonstrated as we have no proof
that any complex visible biological innovations have been produced by
natural selection. And why should we be so eager to believe in
design without a designer, like someone believing that the cooking he
is served comes from no cook, or that the heat in his apartment
comes from no heat source? What is the intellectual virtue in
believing that nature is some huge counterfeiter, that has engaged in
some gigantic fake-out by making all these thing that look like
designs, but are not? You cannot answer with some anti-theistic
answer, seeing that you could still postulate a design source for
some earthly organism by imagining extraterrestrial visitors as the
design source.
The
paper contradicts its earlier claims about natural selection and
design by stating that “The
theory of natural selection itself is silent about whether
complexity will arise.” How's that? If natural selection actually
could produce design (which is functional complexity), then how could
natural selection be silent about whether complexity will arise?
The
paper then considers the origin of complexity. It attempts to argue
that complexity increases during “major transitions,” an idea
that is pretty vacuous. For example, if simple cells evolved into
far more complex eukaryotic cells, or one-celled life evolved into
multi-cellular life, those would be “major transitions,” but by
classifying them as major transitions we are not shedding any light
on how such things happened.
The
paper also suggests the idea that complexity increases when there is
an “alignment of interests.” The authors speak rather like
someone describing soldiers selflessly enlisting or September 11th
volunteers selflessly sacrificing their individual interests for the
common good, in some altruistic way. The paper states this:
For
example, the evolution of multicellularity involved a
transition from an entity with one part (the single-celled organism)
working for the success of itself, to an entity with
many parts (the multicellular organism), working for the success
of the whole group. The cells can now have very different functions
(a division of labour), as each is just a component of a multicellular
machine, sacrificing itself for the good of the group, to
get a sperm or egg cell into the next generation....The rise in
complexity on Earth has been mediated by a handful of such jumps,
when units with different goals
(genes, single cells, individual insects) became intricately linked
collectives with a single common goal (genomes, multicellular
organisms, eusocial societies)...Major transitions involve the
original entities completely subjugating their own interests for the
interests of the new collective. This represents an incredibly
extreme form of cooperation.
You
will be excused for having a big chuckle while reading this excerpt,
which is kind of a sociological-sounding attempt to explain
biological organization. Unlike human beings with minds, cells
don't have individual goals, interests, or self-interest drives, and
don't nobly engage in self-sacrifice. We cannot explain cells
entering into fantastically more organized systems as some form of
altruistic loss of selfishness, similar to that of volunteers
joining up to form a search party looking for lost mountain hikers,
or a soldier volunteering to join an army. What we have here is a
kind of fallacy of personification, as when the authors say,
“Complexity requires multiple parts of an organism
striving to the same purpose.”
Not a good explanation for biological organization
Even
if there were to be some noble self-sacrifice among cells, that still
wouldn't explain biological organization. You may nobly join an army
for the common good, but there's always higher planners who come up
with a plan, and direct the volunteers into particular functions,
telling one volunteer to fly a plane and fight at some location, and
another to become an infantryman and fight in some other location.
If we had a trillion volunteer self-sacrificing cells, how would we
account for their organizational orders directing them to so many
different complex specific purposes, according to such intelligent
plans?
We may also note
that what the authors are talking about sounds like cooperation, goals and
purpose within nature, and there's nothing Darwinian about that.
Darwin was constantly emphasizing the opposite idea of the “struggle
for existence,” in which life is always at war with other life in a
dark purposeless struggle. I think the authors have given a title of
“Darwin's Aliens” to ideas that are largely non-Darwinian, like a
Chinese leader in 1980 saying, “Let's do something very Marxist and
Maoist: we'll let people own their businesses, own their apartments,
and let many of them become millionaires.”
In
their conclusion, the authors (claiming to be using “evolutionary
theory to make predictions about extraterrestrial life”) say that
“complex aliens will be composed of a nested hierarchy of entities,
with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those
levels.” But this cannot be claimed as something that Darwinism
predicts about alien life.
Life
on our planet is organized in an extremely hierarchical way, with the
hierarchy going from organelles to cells to tissues to organs to
organ systems to organisms, as shown in the diagram below.
But
such hierarchical organization is a thorn in the sign of Darwinism,
which does nothing to explain it. Darwinism is not a theory of
organization, but merely a theory of accumulation (that life evolves
when favorable variations or mutations accumulate). Organization is
something vastly more complicated and hard-to-explain than
accumulation. A heap of auto parts in a junkyard is an example of
accumulation; your car parked in the junkyard parking lot is an
example of organization. As
an evolutionary biologist confessed
recently,
referring to the “modern synthesis” that is Darwinism combined
with genetics, “Indeed,
the MS [modern synthesis] theory lacks a theory of organization that
can
account for the characteristic features of phenotypic evolution, such
as novelty, modularity, homology, homoplasy or the
origin of lineage-defining body plans.”
We
can actually imagine a type of alien life-form that would be the most
compatible with Darwinian theory. It would be some life form that
might have appeared because of gradual accumulations. For example, we
can imagine some ocean life form consisting of a giant blob of cells.
It might be the size of a dolphin, but consist only of a blob of
tiny little units, kind of like the type of rock that is called a
conglomerate, and merely consists of an accumulation of little
pebbles. There would be no organized body plan like we see in typical
mammals, the type of thing so hard-to-explain under Darwinian
assumptions. Such an organism would not at all consist of a “nested
hierarchy of entities.” We can imagine an organism simply starting
out as one tiny little unit, and then simply growing bigger and
bigger as more of these units appeared.
Such
an organism would have no organ systems and no appendages, both of which are
very hard to account for using Darwinian explanations. The problem is
that the first tenth of an appendage or the first tenth of an organ
system will always be useless, and Darwin assured us that nature is always
discarding useless variations or mutations; hence the difficulty of
explaining how a useless tenth could ever evolve into a functional
unit by Darwinian natural selection.
Interestingly,
there are very few earthly organisms with such a simple arrangement,
even though we can imagine 1001 relatively easy ways for large-scale
life to progress to such simple arrangements. The only examples I can
think of are jellfyish and sponges, which are pretty simple from a
structural standpoint. It is as if earthly life was following some law
of maximum complexity, almost always having an arrangement the least
likely to be explicable through very simple ideas such as natural
selection.
The
authors give an illustration of a hypothetical creature they call the
octomite. Was this some organism that resulted from a computer
experiment they did, an experiment simulating evolution? No, it is
merely an imaginary organism they drew (or had drawn) rather like
kids doodling a monster picture during a boring class. But that's
fine. When a science paper is speckled with dubious logic, it's a
nice improvement to add a cool drawing of an imaginary alien
creature.
Their
imaginary creature has about 12 appendages protruding out of its
thorax. Since appendages are hard-to-explain by Darwinian
explanations, for the reason previously given, their imaginary
organism is exactly not what we should be calling one of
“Darwin's aliens.”
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