Charles Darwin's famous book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life can be considered a book about biology, but it can also be considered a book about engineering. This is because the book claimed to explain how random natural events involving blind chance produced some of the world's most astonishing works of engineering: the very well-engineered structures of organisms such as lions, whales, eagles and humans. Darwin knew a lot about biology, but he didn't know a thing about engineering, just as he knew very little about probability mathematics.
We can use the term "no-nothing" (preceded by a subject name) to refer to people who know basically nothing about a topic. So, for example, we can call a person who knows nothing about quantum mechanics a "quantum mechanics no-nothing." And you can call me a skiing no-nothing, because I know basically nothing about how to ski. Darwin was an engineering know-nothing. His works show no understanding of the most basic ideas or principles of engineering. But that didn't stop him from making many mountain-sized claims about feats of accidental engineering that he believed had occurred.
The devotees of Darwin frequently speak like engineering know-nothings, like people who don't understand the most elementary principles of engineering. Since Darwinism can be considered an engineering theory (the theory that millions of great feats of biological engineering occurred by accidental processes), and since Darwinists tell us to make Darwinism the center of our world views, we now have an extremely absurd situation in which a group of people who are engineering know-nothings are asking us to base our worldviews on their opinions about engineering.
Let us take a close look at one of the most elementary ideas of engineering, an idea that seems to be very poorly understood by Darwinism devotees. The idea I refer to is the idea of a functional threshold. A functional threshold can be defined as the minimum number of parts that must be arranged in the right way for something to have some particular function. Until such a threshold is met, no such function can occur.
I can kind of pave the way for the idea of a functional threshold by considering physical thresholds in nature. In nature we see very often that some particular effect will not at all occur unless some level is reached. For example, consider the case of making a little spear out of ice. You can only get this functionality once the temperature drops to the freezing point of water. When temperature drops to 32F, you can start to get ice spears or icicles, perhaps large ones. But you don't get ice spears when the temperature is above 32 F. It is not at all true that you can get little tiny ice spears forming when the temperature is 33F or 34F. It's the same thing for many types of chemical reactions. Once you have the minimum materials and temperature for the reaction, it can start to occur. If you have less than that temperature or less than the required materials, the reaction will not at all occur.
Just as there are such thresholds in nature, there are countless thresholds in the world of engineering. A functional threshold is a certain number of parts that must exist and be arranged in a particular way for some function to occur. If the threshold is not met, no such function occurs.
I can give some simple examples of functional thresholds. Consider the case of a bridge built across a wide river. In this case there is a very big functional threshold that must be met in order for you to have the function of motor vehicle river-crossing. Many parts must be arranged in the right way before the function can occur. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river does not result in something 50% useful that transports half as many drivers across rivers. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river results in a suicide machine suitable only for leading drivers to their deaths at the bottom of the river. It's the same thing for building 70% or 80% or 90% of a river bridge: that merely gives you suicide machines that will dump drivers at the bottom of rivers. But if you have a bridge that goes across an entire wide river, the function of motor vehicle river-crossing is met.
Consider another example of a functional threshold: the threshold that must be met for ping-pong balls to be useful as life preservers that will allow non-swimming people to stay in water over their heads without drowning. The table below explains how ping-pong balls are useless for preventing drowning until a particular threshold is met.
|
Parts list
|
Benefit related to drowning prevention
|
|
1 ping pong ball
|
Useless for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
|
2 ping-pong balls
|
Useless for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
|
5 ping-pong balls
|
Useless for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
|
10 ping-pong balls
|
Useless for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
|
20 ping-pong balls
|
Useless for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
|
80 ping-bong balls inside a tied plastic bag holding them all
|
Useful for helping non-swimmers stay afloat
|
When you have a level of parts and organization about like that of the last row, then suddenly a functional threshold is met, and the parts are for the first time useful for a particular function.
With the origin of flight, we have a classic case of a functional threshold, a minimum level of parts and organization of such parts that must be achieved before something is useful. Consider an airplane. There is a certain number of parts that must exist and be arranged in a suitable manner for the airplane to reach the requirements threshold of being able to take off and land without killing people. Meeting only 60% or 70% or 80% of such a requirements threshold results in an aircraft that is useless but harmless (incapable of lifting off), or worse than useless (being something so unsafe it will tend to kill people riding in it). Below is a table with some rough estimates regarding levels of completion in meeting a requirements threshold for a flying animal:
Level of completion | Effect |
10% of flying requirements threshold | Useless |
30% of flying requirements threshold | Useless |
50% of flying requirements threshold | Useless |
70% of flying requirements threshold | Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself, or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it. |
90% of flying requirements threshold | Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself, or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it. |
100% of flying requirements threshold | Useful. Animal can fly, and escape predators. |
The idea of a functional threshold is implicit in a principle I call the principle of preliminary implementations, which is illustrated below:
The diagram shows a case of a functional threshold. In order to get something functioning as a chair, a certain number of parts must exist and be arranged in the right way. If we define the function of a chair as a function of allowing you to rest at least an arm's length above the ground, then we can say that the functional threshold is not met if you have only 10% or 20% or 40% of the chair.
Now, after explaining this simple concept of a functional threshold, you may be thinking to yourself, "Why of course Darwinism advocates understand such a concept -- it's so simple." But in the literature of Darwinism we frequently read people writing just exactly as if they had no understanding of this crucial idea of a functional threshold. I will give some examples.
Example 1: In his scientific paper “Evolution and Probability,” a paper which I debunk here, professor Luca Peliti asks us to accept this principle: " Let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it." Here we have a statement that sounds just like its author had zero understanding of the concept of functional thresholds. The author naively asks us to assume that every step in the right direction produces a benefit. Life and reality have never worked that way. For example, you don't get a survival benefit from building yourself 5% of a rifle; and if you move that completion percentage from 5% to 10% there is still no survival benefit. If you finally reach the functional threshold of building a working gun, then you may have some survival benefit. "Every step in the right direction gives a benefit" is a nonsense principle spoken by people who failed to understand the crucial concept of functional thresholds.
Example 2: On page 196 of Darwin's The Origin of Species he advances the same nonsensical principle advanced above by Peliti. Just after referring to natural selection, Darwin states, " All spontaneous variations in the right direction will thus be preserved." Apparently Darwin failed to understand the idea of a requirements threshold, and thought that you would get a survival benefit from any variation "in the right direction." So apparently according to Darwin, if some animal gets some random variation that gives only 5% of some new function such as flight or vision or sexual reproduction, that will be preserved because it is "in the right direction." This is the glaring ignorance of an engineering know-nothing. No functional benefit occurs until a functional threshold is met, a certain number of parts and arrangement of parts needed to produce the function. No benefit comes from a mere step "in the right direction." The talk here of things being "in the right direction" is very ironic, since according to Darwinists there never is a "right direction," as evolution is a goal-less, purposeless effect.
Example 3: In an article filled with bad reasoning, mathematician Jason Rosenhouse attempts to foist on us a triple-bad analogy for the origin of new types of proteins. He compares the origin of a new type of protein molecule to getting a series of 100 "heads" coins when coin flipping. It's a case of vastly underestimating the improbability. The average protein molecule in a mammal has an amino acid length of not merely 100, but about 400, as discussed below. And instead of there being only 2 possible states in each position of a protein, there are 20 possible states (there being twenty amino acids used by living things). Flipping 100 coins and getting all heads has a likelihood of 1 in 10 to the 30th power, but getting a random arrangement of 400 amino acids to make a functional protein molecule has a likelihood of about 1 in 10 to the 520th power. Rosenhouse tries to suggest that natural selection can easily do something like getting 100 coins that are all heads, on the grounds that it saves the successful fragments on each try, like someone who tosses 100 coins and then saves each "heads" coin, then flipping again only the coins that landed "tails." Based on his use of such an analogy, it seems like Rosenhouse has no understanding of the crucial idea of a functional threshold, and is making the same nonsensical "each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity" assumption made by Peliti. The assumption could not be more false. For example, if a protein molecule has a random mutation that adds a new amino acid, and that causes it to go from having 23.2% of what it needs to reach a functional threshold, to having 23.5% of what it needs to reach a functional threshold, that will not produce any benefit in survival or fecundity, so there will be no tendency for natural selection to preserve such a mutation.
In the majority of cases, protein molecules have extremely high functional thresholds that must be met before any function is produced, thresholds involving the fine-tuned arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts. It is not at all true that with 5% of a protein molecule you get 5% of its function, and it is not true that with 10% of a protein molecule you get 10% of the function. Instead, it is generally true that until you have most of the parts of the protein molecule arranged in the right way, the protein molecule cannot perform its function. Part of the reason the functional thresholds of protein molecules are so high is that protein molecules require very special and hard-to-achieve three-dimensional folded shapes to function.
Another crucial idea senselessly ignored by Darwinism theorists is the idea of interdependent components. When two components are interdependent, then both must exist for either component to function. In biological organisms, we find interdependent components to the most massive degree. Innumerable times we encounter components that cannot function unless other components exist, with the dependence being mutual or reciprocal.
The diagram below shows only the tiniest fraction of some of the interdependent components in the human body. An important fact about hearts and lungs is that they do not operate independently. They require signals from the brain that control the autonomic function required for hearts and lungs to keep working even when you are sleeping. Just as your lungs and hearts require your brain, your brain requires your lungs and heart. Without oxygen-rich blood from the heart (which requires both the lungs and the brain), the cells in the brain would soon die.
As shown in the diagram, the number of interdependent components is far greater than just the heart, the brain and the lungs. All three also require arteries and veins, so that the blood can circulate. There is also a dependency on red blood cells needed to carry oxygen, and a hemoglobin molecule (consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acids parts) to carry oxygen in the red blood cells. Red blood cells are short-lived, lasting an average of only four months. So red blood cells must be constantly manufactured, which occurs in the marrow of the bones.
All of the components are mutually interdependent. In each case we can give reasons why none of them would be useful unless all the other components existed. For example, without hemoglobin and blood cells to carry oxygen around in the body, vital organs such as the brain requiring oxygen would die, and the whole body would die, preventing bone marrow from doing any more work. And without the bone marrow, you would soon run out of run blood cells, causing the death of the organism. I won't bother justifying all of the arrows shown in the diagram below. But in each case where I show one of the double arrows (<----->) it is a case where some particular component could not be independently functional for a year without the component on the other side of the arrow existing.
The diagram above shows only the tiniest fraction of the total amount of component interdependence in the human body. To diagram the totality of such component interdependence might require something like a ten-volume series of books of 1000 pages each, each such book showing 1000 such diagrams, many much complicated than the diagram above. The series of very thick volumes might list all of the ways in which the protein molecules of protein complexes are interdependent on each other, with thousands of individual proteins being useless unless there exist other proteins to make up the "team members" of a protein complex requiring many different types of proteins. The student of modern biochemistry will find component interdependence everywhere, in the most mountainous amounts. Such a student will find a million problems reminding us of the old problem of "which came first, the chicken or the egg."
Alas, Charles Darwin seemed to pay no attention at all to the gigantically important topic of interdependent components. His work "The Origin of Species" made no use of the word "interdependent" and no use of the word "interdependence." just as it makes no use of the word "threshold." Searching the volume for the word "dependent" we find no sentences indicating that Darwin had any understanding of how individual biological parts are massively dependent on countless other parts in the body, with the dependence being mutual. There are eleven uses of the word "dependent" or "dependence" in "The Origin of Species," and not one of them refers to some body part being dependent on some other body part. The references are mainly just references to one species being dependent on another. "The Origin of Species" also had no uses of the word "rely" or "reliance" referring to component interdependence.
Darwin conveniently failed to pay any attention to one of the most central topics that any theorist should have paid the greatest attention to before claiming to have a credible theory of biological origins: the topic of the how gigantically interdependent are the components required to make biological systems. Darwin's fervent followers have been guilty of the same neglect. After you give proper consideration to the centrally important topic of component interdependence, the major explanation attempts of Darwinists very quickly will start sounding like old wives' tales of academia. In the vast majority of cases, major improvements in biological organisms can never occur because of some mere variation in a single component. In general, substantial improvements in biological organisms require the introduction of many new parts that are all working together to achieve the same effect, with very many such parts being individually useless unless most of the other new parts of the system exist and are fine-tuned to achieve the same functional end.
Under such conditions, the chance of getting major innovations by an accumulation of random mutations is essentially zero. A few days ago there appeared a scientific paper stating this: "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively."
It has been estimated that there are seven million animal species, and the total number of protein types in the animal kingdom can be roughly estimated as about 10 billion. Using the term "the protein universe" to mean the total set of all protein types that exist on Earth, the paper here states, "The size of the protein universe is reduced from ≈10400 to ≈1010 different sequences if only those proteins currently in the biosphere are considered " The 10 billion number is a "lowball" estimate. The source here estimates the number as being between ten billion and ten trillion, saying this: "For example, assuming there is 107–108 species on Earth and the genome of each species consists of 103–105 genes, there are 1010–1013 unique protein sequences, a speck compared to the vast sequence space, but still several orders of magnitude more than contained in today's databases."
Being very conservative, let's go with the lowest estimate of 10 billion types of protein molecules. Each one of those 10 billions types of proteins is a separate complex invention. According to this page, the average number of amino acids in a human protein is 480. The number of amino acids in a human protein varies from about 50 to more than 1000. The scientific paper here refers to "some 50,000 enzymes (of average length of 380 amino acids)." On the page here, we read that the median number of amino acids in a human protein is 375, according to a scientific paper.
Here is a comparison between the amount of well-arranged letter parts in the New York Public Library system, and the amount of well-arranged amino acid parts in the animal kingdom (not counting duplicates):
Number of volumes in a very large library building: About 100,000.
Number of different protein types in the animal kingdom: roughly 10 billion (and possibly as high as 10 trillion).
Average number of well-arranged letters (characters) in a book: about 200,000
Average number of well-arranged amino acid parts in a protein molecule of an animal: about 400
Total number of well-arranged letters (characters) in all the books in a very large library building: about 20 billion (i.e. 20,000,000,000).
Total number of well-arranged amino acids in the animal kingdom (not counting duplicates): about 4 trillion (i.e. 4,000,000,000,000), and possibly up to 1000 times more (up to 4 quadrillion).
Because of the very high functional thresholds of most types of protein molecules (requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids before any function occurs), and because of the very high sensitivity of proteins to being destabilized by tiny random mutations, scientists lack any credible explanation for the natural origin of new types of protein molecules, which cannot be credibly explained by any "each little step in the right direction is preserved" idea. Believing that most of 10 billion novel types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom arose by unguided processes is roughly as illogical as believing that most of the books in a very large public library building arose by accidental ink splashes.
No comments:
Post a Comment