How Far Have Our Biology Origins Researchers Got?

Let us consider the question: how much progress has been made in resolving questions of biological origins? An interesting way of considering this question is to use a baseball analogy. We can ask: have our biology origins researchers scored a home run? Or have they merely reached third base, second base or a result less impressive?

We might reasonably say that we should not regard our biology origin researchers as having reached home plate until they've proven the origin of all biological organisms and all observed complex biological innovations. But let's use an easier standard. Let's merely say this: we should not regard our biology as having reached home plate until they've proven the origin of most biological organisms and most observed complex biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached home plate.

But what about third base? Let's consider out biology researchers as having reached third base if they have proven the origin of many biological organisms and many complex visible biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached third base.

But what about second base? Let's consider out biology researchers as having reached second base if they have proven the origin of some long-observed biological organisms and some long-observed complex visible  biological innovations. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached second base.

Our biologists have the theory that biological organisms and complex biological innovations arise because of random mutations and what they call natural selection (which is really just random mutations and the increased survival rate or reproduction rate of fitter organisms). But our biologists have not been able to prove that any long-observed biological organisms or long-observed very complex biological innovations appeared because of such a reason.

But what about first base? Generously granting three different possibilities, let's consider out biology researchers as having reached first base if they have proven that some kind of natural effect can produce some kind of complex visible biological innovation, or if they have credibly explained the origin of life from non-life, or if they have credibly explained the appearance of any single full-grown human body from a speck-sized egg. Under this standard, it must be judged that our biology origins researchers have not at all reached first base. 

We would say that this first-base would have been reached if scientists had been able to do some experiment showing that random mutations or so-called "natural selection" can produce some new type of never-before-observed complex visible biological innovation. Scientists have tried such experiments for many years, but no impressive results have come from them. Scientists have spent many years bombarding fruit flies with radiation, hoping to produce beneficial new random mutations. This has never resulted in any new complex visible inheritable biological innovation in a fruit fly. One very long-running evolution experiment claims to have produced a biochemical tweak in microscopic organisms that is slightly useful. But such a change in invisible microscopic organisms does not at all qualify as a complex visible biological innovation.

As for origin-of-life experiments, they have all failed to produce life from non-life. One occasionally hears about “building blocks of life” being created in such experiments, but such claims are inaccurate. The real “building blocks" of microscopic life are proteins, and the simplest living thing requires more than 100 different types of proteins. No one has ever created a protein in a laboratory experiment designed to simulate early Earth conditions. In fact, no experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions has ever even produced any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids or nucleotides). The famous Miller-Urey experiment certainly was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions. 

Considerable progress has been made in excavating and classifying fossils, but that is paleontology progress, not biology origins progress. A fossil merely tells us that some type of species lived at some particular time. Fossils don't tell us how a species came into existence. By far the most prominent occurrence in the fossil record is the Cambrian Explosion, when most of the animal phyla came into existence rather suddenly. Our biology origins researchers have no credible explanation for such an explosion of biological innovation and new functional information, an occurrence contrary to their "evolution by random mutations" explanations. 

A very important point is that the credibility of Darwinist explanations for biological origins is inversely proportional to the amount of organization, information, and fine-tuned complexity of living things.  The more organized and functionally complex and information-rich biological organisms are, the less credible Darwinism is as an explanation for such organisms and their features.  During the past hundred years the amount of organization biologists have discovered in living thing has increased exponentially.  We know know that organisms are millions of times more organized and functionally complex and information-rich than Darwin ever dreamed. There is no sign of this trend slowing, and we have every reason to suspect that each decade will continue to reveal ever-more-astonishing levels of organization and dynamic functional wizardry in living things.  The more such discoveries continue, the more justified we are in saying that biologists have not got to first base in explaining biological origins.  

A very notable failure of our biologists is their complete failure to credibly explain morphogenesis, the progression from a speck-sized fertilized egg to a full grown newborn baby. For many years many biologists have told us a childish lie about this topic: the lie that a human arises because a blueprint for how to make a human is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint.  DNA does not specify how to make a human body or any organ of that body or any cell in that body.  DNA merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein molecule.  The lie that our bodies arise from the reading of a blueprint in DNA is a very childish lie, both because of the nonexistence of such a body structure blueprint in DNA, and the fact that blueprints don't build things. Things only get built from blueprints because there are intelligent agents that read blueprints and then get ideas about how to build based on such blueprints. There is nothing we know of below the neck of a female that could read and understand a blueprint for making humans if it happened to exist in a DNA molecule.  The claims that humans arise from the reading of DNA blueprints for making humans is therefore as childish as the claim that astronauts reached the moon by riding a giant balloon.  

You may realize the "barely a few steps beyond the batter's box" status of biological origins explanations when you consider that each eukaryotic cell is so complex it has been compared to a factory, and scientists cannot even explain how a single eukaryotic cell is able to reproduce (something as marvelous as a factory splitting into two copies of itself, or a jet aiplane splitting into two copies of itself). Scientists also cannot explain how the vast hierarchical organization of a  full-grown human body is able to arise from the simplicity of a speck-sized fertilized ovum. There is no blueprint or recipe or program for how to make a human in such an ovum or its DNA, contrary to the outrageous misstatements on this topic that many biologists have made (statements contradicted by many other scientists telling us that such statements are very false indeed).  

Going from the physical side to the mental side, we find that biology origins researchers have no credible explanations for the origin of human minds or any minds. Their attempts to explain the principal  human mental phenomena as brain activity fail as badly as some child trying to jump to the top of the clouds.  There is still nothing like any credible theory for how a brain could store memories for a lifetime or even a year, and no credible theory for how a brain could instantly retrieve a detailed memory after someone hears a name or sees an image. As discussed at this site, the low-level facts we have learned about the brain reveal it to be an organ with enormous signal noise, unreliable synaptic transmission, billions of synaptic-gap signal slowers, and very high molecular turnover, an organ bearing no resemblance to a system for permanently storing and instantly retrieving memories with high information accuracy. There are no credible neural explanations for any such things as self-hood or beliefs or the arising of abstract ideas. 

The sad truth is that because they have failed to provide a single credible narrative of a natural origin of any very organized and complex visible biological innovation, have failed to credibly explain the origin of life, and have failed to credibly explain morphogenesis, our biology origins researchers have never even got to first base. But they brag and strut about as if they were frequent home-run hitters. It's kind of as if some member of a baseball team were to frequently brag about playing on the team, and often pose (after the games) for staged photos of himself sliding into home plate with a big proud smile, even though he had played season after season without even hitting a single, and without ever even getting to first base.

But there are many biologists who have made great accomplishments, including: 

• cellular biologists who have categorized the roughly 200 types of cells in the human body and the enormous fine-tuned complexity of such cells;
• biochemists who have documented the fantastically intricate chemistry involved in every living process; 
• protein experts and geneticists who have documented the specialized functions of many thousands of types of protein molecules in the human body, each type its own separate complex invention;
• systems biology experts who have documented the enormous complexity and functional inter-dependence of very complex biological systems such as protein complexes that require many different proteins acting together like team members to produce a particular effect. 

As such scientists continue to discover ever-more stratospheric levels of organization and fine-tuned intricacy and dynamic coordinated component choreography within organisms, the explanatory boasts of biology origins researchers sound more-and-more hollow. 

You will find few biologists candidly confessing to the lack of biological origins explanatory progress described above. But occasionally you will find some who make statements pointing in such a direction.  This can happen when it is confessed that the study of some thing is "in its infancy."  For example, a scientist may confess that the study of cell reproduction is "in its infancy," or that the study of organ formation is "in its infancy" or that the study of how humans recall memories is "in its infancy," or that the study of how memories persist through a lifetime is "in its infancy."  For example, one mainstream scientific paper states that "our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." Such confessions  point in the direction of what I have written in this post.   "In its infancy" is equivalent to "haven't yet got to first base." Very strangely, we may hear from the same person inconsistent combinations of humility and hubris.  A scientist may try to insinuate in one sentence that scientists understand human origins, and may elsewhere confess that the study of morphogenesis is in its infancy or that the study of how minds arise is in its infancy, failing to see the contradiction between these claims, like someone claiming in one sentence that he is a geology expert and confessing elsewhere that he does not know what causes earthquakes or volcanoes.