In
2014 millions of people watched the television series “Cosmos: A
Spacetime Odyssey” hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Since this TV
series was heavily promoted by a host of science-related websites,
the viewers of the series must have thought they were seeing nothing
but solid factual science. But episode 2 of the series (entitled
“Some of the Things That Molecules Do”) contained some large
errors of fact and logic which we can find by looking at this transcript.
The
episode started out by talking at length about how dogs evolved from
wolves. Tyson tells us, “The awesome power of evolution transformed
the ravenous wolf into the faithful shepherd who protects the herd
and drives the wolf away.” But this was not actually an example of
natural evolution, because it was produced by intentional human
intervention, presumably after humans took wolf cubs and started
raising them as pets. This example of artificial selection (not
natural selection) is therefore an odd thing to be citing as
something showing “the awesome power of evolution.”
Tyson
then states the following:
If
artificial selection can work such profound changes in only 10,000 or
15,000 years, what can natural selection do operating over billions
of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.
This
statement commits a logic error. It would be logically correct to
make a statement like this:
If
wind erosion can produce a 1% deformation in something in 10
years, how much of a deformation might wind erosion produce in
500 years? Easily 20% or more.
But
by asking us to draw a conclusion about the power of natural
selection (something blind) from the power of artificial selection
(something guided), Tyson has committed a logic error as bad as in
the statement below:
If
non-blind painters can produce 100 portrait
masterpieces in 200 years, how many portrait masterpieces might blind
painters have produced in 500 years? Easily hundreds.
To
the contrary of what Tyson claims, there is a very strong reason why
we cannot explain any complex biological innovations merely by saying
they were the result of natural selection. The reason is that
natural selection never occurs in regard to some complex biological
innovation until after it has appeared. Once a new biological
innovation occurs, it may result in an increased reproduction rate or
increased survival rate in the organisms with that biological
innovation. But such a thing (a natural selection effect) never
occurs in regard to some biological innovation until after that
biological innovation appears. So natural selection can never be the
cause of a very complex biological innovation. You don't explain
something by referring to something that occurred after that thing
appeared.
Tyson
then makes some claims about DNA. He states the following:
DNA
is a molecule shaped like a long twisted ladder or double helix. The
rungs of the ladder are made of four different kinds of smaller
molecules. These
are the letters of the genetic alphabet. Particular arrangements of
those letters spell out the instructions for all living things,
telling them how to grow, move, digest, sense the environment, heal,
reproduce.
This
is a very big misstatement. Our DNA does not tell a fertilized ovum
how to grow to become a baby, does not tell us how to move, does not
tell us how to sense the environment, and does not tell us how to
reproduce. It is not even metaphorically correct to make the
statement quoted above, because DNA does not contain a human body
specification. There is no layout or specification of a human bone
structure or human limbs in DNA, nor is there any layout of the human
eye or ears, nor is there any layout or specification of the human
reproduction system. DNA is neither a blueprint nor a recipe for
making a human (see the end of this post for quotes by several scientists clarifying that DNA is no such thing). DNA does not contain any instructions telling a
fertilized egg how to progress to become a human baby.
How
do we know that DNA has no such things? The first reason is that no such
blueprint or recipe has been found in human DNA, even though it has
been exhaustively analyzed by major multi-year science projects such
as the Human Genome Project and the ENCODE project. The second reason
is that the expressive limitations of DNA prevent it from ever
expressing such complex information. Tyson refers to “the letters
of the genetic alphabet.” The way that this alphabet works is that
the only things that can be spelled out in such a language are amino
acids. Below we see the genetic code used by DNA. The U, C, A and G
in the table are the “four letters of the genetic alphabet” Tyson
referred to. But as the table makes clear, the only things that can
be spelled out with this genetic alphabet are amino acids (such as
proline and valine) that are the ingredients of proteins.
DNA
is therefore merely a repository of chemical information. It is not some blueprint or recipe for making a human, and its structural
limitations prevent it from being such a thing. Consider a traffic
light. A traffic light is an information system capable of presenting
only three items of information: the messages “STOP,” “GO,”
and “CAUTION.” Just as the physical limitations of a traffic
light greatly limit the type of information it can present, the
physical limitations of DNA greatly limit the type of information it
can present, limiting such information to be only chemical
information rather than complex structural biological information.
The shapes and structures of complex three-dimensional organs and
organ systems cannot possibly be expressed in DNA given the
limitations of the genetic code, nor can complex assembly
instructions such as would be needed to specify how to create a human
body.
A
third reason why Tyson cannot be correct in saying that DNA is
something that contains “the instructions for all living things,
telling them how to grow, move, digest, sense the environment, heal,
reproduce” is that if DNA were to contain such information, which
would be fantastically complex instructions, there would be nothing
in a human womb capable of understanding instructions so complex. A
blueprint dumped at a construction site (containing lumber, nails,
bricks, mortar, copper wire and pipes) doesn't cause a building to be
built. The building is only built because there are agents smart
enough to read and understand the blueprint and act on its
instructions. But we know of nothing at all in a human womb that would
be capable of reading and understanding incredibly complex instructions for making a
human if they were in DNA. Wombs don't have brains or minds.
So
how is it that humans are able to reproduce? How is that a fertilized ovum is able to progress to become a full-sized baby? That is a
gigantic mystery of biological life that we don't understand. The
reality that DNA does not specify body plans or a recipe for making
an organism is a fact that contradicts and smashes all attempts to
explain a progression of earthly life forms merely by citing a
progression of genomes, which is exactly the faulty explanation that
Tyson relies on.
Tyson
next tries to warm us up to the idea that random mutations (random
changes in DNA) can produce changes in organisms. He first presents
the very
unimpressive case of a mutation that might have caused a bear with
dark fur to become a bear with white fur, giving a camouflage
advantage if the bear lived in a snowy climate. Strangely, the 2014
episode I am discussing was written two years after the New York
Times reported “Polar bears...are not descended from brown bears,
scientists report.”
But
regardless of whether it did occur, a possibility such as the one
Tyson has mentioned is not terribly improbable. Such a thing is
called microevolution, a small change in an organism that does not
involve any complex innovation. Microevolution does indeed sometimes
occur.
You
can get a rough idea of the likelihood of a favorable random mutation
by considering the case of a monkey at a keyboard. If you are an
average typist with about a 1% typing error rate, and you bring in a
monkey to randomly strike a key on your keyboard, the chance of that
random keystroke improving your text is about this 1% figure
multiplied by the number of keys on the keyboard. This gives a
probability of about 1 in 3000. Similarly, a random mutation in DNA
might have something like 1 chance in 3000 of producing some tiny
improvement that natural selection might favor.
But
what's the chance of getting a new functional protein from random
mutations? The chance of this is exponentially smaller. An average
protein consists of about 200 amino acids arranged in just the right
way to achieve a particular functional effect. There are 20 amino
acids in the genetic code. A protein with 200 amino acids might have
its amino acids arranged in 20 to the 200th power ways (20200 ways),
and only a microscopic fraction of these would be functional.
Similarly, there are roughly 30 to the 200th power ways in which a
typing monkey might type random text (30200 ways), and only a
microscopic fraction of these would be meaningful useful
instructions.
So
while it is not terribly improbable that a typing monkey might
produce a keystroke that improves your written text (such a thing
having a probability of about 1 in 3000), it is almost infinitely
more improbable (more than a trillion quadrillion quintillion times
more improbable) that a typing monkey might produce a usable 200-word
computer program. And similarly, while it is not all that improbable
that a single mutation might produce some small improvement in a
genome, it is almost infinitely more improbable (more than a
trillion quadrillion quintillion times more improbable) that random
mutations might conspire to produce a protein of 200 amino acids
arranged in just the right way to produce some novel functional
effect. Given a billion typing monkeys across the globe hitting
typewriter keys for a billion years, we would not expect any of them
to produce a functional 200-word computer program; and given five
billion years of random mutations across the globe, we would not
expect a functionally useful new protein of 200 amino acids to appear
by such chance mutations. The human genome contains genes for about 20,000
such proteins.
In
the Cosmos episode, Tyson tells us a story about the appearance of a
functional protein. Here is what he says:
In
the beginning, life was blind. This is what our world looked like
four billion years ago, before there were any eyes to see. Until a
few hundred million years passed, and then, one day, there was a
microscopic copying error in the DNA of a bacterium. This random
mutation gave that microbe a protein molecule that absorbed sunlight.
Of
course, this is utter nonsense. A random mutation changes exactly one
nucleotide base pair in DNA, and its effect is never greater than
changing or adding one particular amino acid in a protein. But
proteins are made of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the
right way to achieve a functional effect. If a light-absorbing
protein molecule had appeared by random mutations, this would have
required a fantastically improbable conspiracy of random mutations
occurring over millions of years. But Tyson has told us that “one
day” such a functional molecule has appeared, because of a single
random mutation. This is as crazy as someone saying that a monkey
could produce a 200-character functional new computer program by
typing a single keystroke (or an intelligible 50-word recipe by
typing a single keystroke).
The
molecular complexity of proteins was unknown to Darwin, who also knew
nothing of the complexity of the cell. Proteins are a great
embarrassment to all who would claim that humans are the result of
blind forces. Our bodies are built of many thousands of proteins, but
scientists have no credible accounts for the origin of any protein,
and each is as complex a piece of functionality as a 200-word
computer program. A mainstream scientific paper says, "A wide
variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the
evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."
Tyson
then tells us the following tale:
Here's
a flatworm's-eye view of the world. This multi-celled organism
evolved a dimple in the pigment spot. The bowl-shaped depression
allowed the animal to distinguish light from shadow to crudely make
out objects in its vicinity, including those to eat and those that
might eat it a tremendous advantage. Later, things became a little
clearer. The dimple deepened and evolved into a socket with a small
opening. Over thousands of generations, natural selection was slowly
sculpting the eye.
Tyson
is using here a standard strategy for those trying to suggest that
vision systems could have appeared accidentally: start out by
mentioning the tiniest visual structure you can imagine, and hope
that people regard this as something very simple that could
have easily appeared accidentally. But if you were to delve into all
the microscopic details and biochemistry details, you would find that
this tiny thing is actually extremely complex. Cells are very tiny,
but they have functional complexity so great they have been compared
to small cities. There are 1000-page books devoted to nothing but
describing the complexity of cells. And the flatworm organ Tyson
refers us to is much more complicated than a cell.
Flatworms
have primitive light-sensing structures called ocelli. In the quote
above Tyson implies that first we had the fairly primitive ocelli of
the flatworm, and then much later we had the first real eyes. This
does not match what the fossil record tells us. Animals with the
primitive ocelli of the flatworm do not appear earlier in the fossil
record than animals with complex eyes. Both the flatworms and many
types of animals with eyes are believed to have first appeared at the time of the Cambrian
Explosion in which most of the animal phyla rather suddenly appeared,
contrary to what we would expect from Darwinian gradualism. There is
no fossil record of any primitive eyes that appeared before the first
complex eyes in the fossil record, and which are believed to be the
predecessors of species with complex eyes.
The
visual above (from this mainstream science web site) shows the situation. The flatworms are the
Platyhelminthes. Fish with eyes appeared in the phylum Chordata, the same phylum of humans. There is no evidence of fish
descending from flatworms, and no evidence that the first animals
with good eyes descended from flatworms (contrary to what Tyson has insinuated).
A
very important misstatement by Tyson is his claim that the crude
visual organ of the flatworm had the ability to “distinguish light
from shadow to crudely make out objects in its vicinity, including
those to eat and those that might eat it.” This amounts to a claim
that flatworms have vision. But they have no such thing. They merely
have a light-sensitive patch sufficient only to tell lightness from
darkness. The primitive “eyes” of a flatworm (its ocelli) are
not sufficient for it to “crudely make out objects in its
vicinity.” And the tiny “brain” of a flatworm (with only a very
small number of neurons) is way too small for vision. A scientific
paper says this of the flatworm's-eye: “There is no image-forming
apparatus, and the eye is probably used merely as a detector of light
with directional sensitivity.”
What
difference does it make whether a light-sensitive patch of an
organism is sufficient to provide a crude, blurry form of vision,
rather than merely telling an animal which direction is up and down?
It makes a very great difference to the question of whether we can
reasonably imagine a gradual evolution of an eye from a primitive
light-sensitive patch. If a light-sensitive patch and the tiniest
brain (like a flatworm has) is sufficient to produce crude vision,
then we can imagine that each additional change leading up to an eye
producing clear vision was a change producing a benefit to the
organism that had such a change. If, on the other hand, a
light-sensitive patch and the tiniest brain is not sufficient to
produce vision, then we have to imagine many additional changes in
the eye region and brain occurring without producing any reward,
until finally after many required changes there occurred the late
reward of functional vision. The latter scenario is one that is not credible under Darwinian
assumptions.
There
is no reason why natural selection would make a whole bunch of
changes to produce a vision system unless there was a continual
reward for each change in such a series of changes. But it very frequently happens (inside of biology and outside of it) that there is no
continually rewarded path leading to a new complex innovation, and no reward
comes until many changes are made, and many parts are arranged in
just the right way. Such “late reward” scenarios are far more
common than “continual reward” scenarios, a fact that constantly
stymies and short-circuits explanations of the type Tyson is trying
to make here. On the protein level, the origin of every functional
protein is a “late reward” scenario (halves of a protein molecule
being non-functional), so in the human genome with genes for some 20,000
proteins, we have some 20,000 “late reward” scenarios that all
defy attempts to explain them by imagining some continually rewarded
Darwinian path.
What
Tyson has done is to paint a speculative picture of continually
rewarded evolution from a primitive light-sensitive patch (supposedly
producing crude vision) to an eye. The scenario is not supported by
the fossil record, and is not credible because light-sensitive
patches on organisms like flatworms do not at all produce crude
vision. And when we delve down to the protein level, we find that
even this supposedly primitive light-sensitive patch would require a
very high state of functional amino acid organization most unlikely
to ever appear by chance.
Based
on these numerous misstatements and misleading impressions, Tyson
claims, “The complexity of the human eye poses no challenge to
evolution by natural selection.” To the contrary, there is no
complex biological innovation that can plausibly be explained by
natural selection, which never occurs in regard to a biological
innovation until after that innovation occurs. Tyson has reached his
reassuring “we got this” conclusion by engaging in various cheats
large and small, including the gigantic whopper of claiming that a
light sensitive protein might originate on a single day, the crucial
misstatement suggesting DNA is a recipe for making an organism, the
unfounded suggestion that the first advanced eyes evolved from primitive eyes
(which the fossil record does not support), and the erroneous idea
that mere light-sensitive patches like those in flatworms produce a
crude form of vision. Once we realize that genotypes do not specify
phenotypes (merely influencing them), and that DNA does not and
cannot store body plans, the legs are pulled from out of the
Darwinist explanation for complex biological innovations such as
eyes. Since DNA does not actually store the extremely complex
structural arrangement of a vision system, there is no way that
vision systems could have appeared through any imaginable
modification of DNA, whether it be random mutations or anything
else.
Near
the end of the Cosmos episode, Tyson claims that scientists are “not
afraid to admit what we don't know.” To the contrary, many of them
seem to not at all know what they do not know, and to think that they
know very much more than they do know. The typical modern scientist
claims that he understands the origin of complex visible biological
innovations, but admits that he does not understand the origin of
life itself or the mysteries of morphogenesis and embryonic
development. It makes no sense to claim that you understand the
first of these things without understanding the last two of these
things, since there is every reason to suspect that all three are
produced by similar causal factors. Man's knowledge of nature is
fragmentary, and the mere fragments we have (like ten or twenty
pieces of a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle) are not sufficient to allow us
to answer biological origins mysteries that may take mankind a
thousand years to unravel. It's no sin for a scientist to act like
some “Wheel of Fortune” very-early-guesser who guesses the answer
after only three or four of the 30 letters have been turned; but such
guesses should not be passed off as established truth.
Tyson
is one of many scientists who feed us similar origins baloney. Very
recently the Science Daily web site (using a Stanford University
press release) had a news article entitled, “Why deep oceans gave
life to the first big, complex organisms.” The article dealt with
the great mystery of why most of the known animal phyla suddenly
appeared in the Cambrian Explosion, in a vast explosion of
organization and functional information that included the first
animals with vision systems. We are told in the last paragraph of
the article that the explanation offered by an assistant professor
Sperling is simply that the temperature at the bottom of the ocean
was right for this. Sperling says, “The only place where
temperatures were consistent was in the deep ocean. That's why
animals appeared there.” This is reasoning on the same inane level as
trying to explain the appearance of ten extraterrestrial monsters in
your local swimming pool on Labor Day by saying that the reason the ten monsters suddenly appeared was that the water wasn't too hot or cold
on Labor Day.
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