"Stuff Piles Up" Fails to Explain Stupendous Biology Systems

Mark Rober's Crunchlabs is a TV show available on Netflix. It is a reality TV show that I would guess was inspired by the long-running TV show MythBusters. The MythBusters show would involve various informal experiments performed by two experimenters interested in doing weird experiments that would make good television footage. Mark Rober's Crunchlabs takes a similar approach. One of the Season 1 episodes is entitled "World's Largest Jello Pool."

We see a swimming pool filled with red jello, the gelatin product that forms a semi-solid substance. We are told that this is 30,000 pounds of jello. We see (at the 4:55 mark) an experiment in which small children without any attached rope are jumping onto the swimming pool of jello. It seems like a reckless stunt that might have caused one of the children to be injured, or possibly even drown. The pool of jello is a dark fluid, making it hard to see where a child is in the pool if the child is submerged in the jello. We seem to not see or hear about any precautions taken to prevent injury or death to the children involved in this experiment. We are told the swimming pool of jello is the first ever constructed, so how could the people doing this TV show have had any confidence that their experiment would not cause death or injury to a small child? At one point (the 7:14) the host says that when he dived into the swimming pool of jello, the jello filled up his ears; and who knows what risk would be involved in filling up an ear (filled with delicate components) with semi-solid gelatin material. 

Similarly, in a Season 1 episode entitled "Unbeatable Rock Paper Scissors Robot" we see a 10-year-old child skateboarding on some super-slippery surface of 3.5 million BB pellets, which the host describes (at the 2:13 mark) as "the most slippery surface I've ever stood on." At the 3:16 mark the child makes a high-speed skateboard fall and says, "I think I broke all my bones." Why endanger a child for such a stunt?

For much of the time in the show, host Mark Rober talks way too fast, so fast that many viewers will not be able to understand what he is saying. 

Another episode in Season 1 of the show is entitled "Octopus vs. Underwater Maze." At the 10:16 mark in the show we get what we call "a very simplified version of a tree of life." Rober tells us, "These kind of diagrams show you how all life is related and what evolved from what." No, they sure do not. "Tree of life" diagrams are visual depictions of scientist speculations about an ancestry of one type of living creature and another. 

Such "tree of life" diagrams are called cladograms. A scientific paper says this:

"Since the early 1990s, cladograms have found their way into high school biology textbooks, yet we know little about their effectiveness as interpretive and instructional tools in biology education. In this article we document the frequency and types of cladograms found in 31 textbooks, and classify and survey the other types of evolutionary diagrams used in the texts. Although cladograms comprised approximately 72 percent of the diagrams overall, we found virtually no attempt to explain their structure and theoretical underpinnings."

Speaking of such cladogram "trees of life," another scientific paper says, " There is much evidence that even professional biologists lack a true understanding of phylogenetic trees (Morrison 2013). "

If you do a Google image search for "tree of life," you will find dozens of different diagrams which do not agree with each other.  A common characteristic of such diagrams is the existence of many unlabeled nodes. Below is a modified version of what I get when I ask the Google Gemini AI to produce a "tree of life" diagram. I'll omit the left part, so that it is easier to read. The diagram is pretty worthless in terms of explaining any evolutionary relationships, because of all the unlabeled nodes. I have placed yellow X marks to point out places where we have an unlabeled node, typically one that corresponds to no species ever discovered. 

Such unlabeled nodes can be called "missing links."  When a "tree of life" has as many missing links as we see in the one above, the diagram fails to convincingly substantiate claims of common descent. The "tree of life" shown in the TV show  entitled "Octopus vs. Underwater Maze" (at the 10:16 mark) also has very many unlabeled nodes that  correspond to missing links. 

The show then gives us some reasoning trying to support ideas of common descent. We are told that there are 7 vertebrae in the necks of humans, giraffe, elephants, whales mice, lions, horses and bats. We are told "that's a clue they all share a common ancestor." No, it's merely a structural similarity in some mammals; and some other mammals such as sloths and manatees have a different number of neck vertebrae.  All automobiles have four wheels, but all automobiles do not have a common ancestor. 

The chart below shows how many vertebrae exist in the types of organisms mentioned. The numbers in each colored bar show how many vertebrae of a particular type exist for an organism of a particular type. The number 7 is found in all the red bars. But the numbers found in the yellow bars differ (ranging from 3 to 15);  the numbers found in the orange bars differ (ranging from 1 to 20);  the numbers found in the green bars differ (ranging from 1 to 7); the numbers found in the blue bars differ (ranging from 4 or less to 28). 

So what went on in the TV show was data cherry-picking. Overall the data on vertebrae numbers in these animals fails to strongly suggest any idea of common descent. But if you cherry-pick data by only telling people about the number of neck vertebrae,  it may sound like "a clue they all share a common ancestor."

We then have in the TV show a visual showing the arm bones of humans, bats, chickens, turtles and dolphins. They look very different, as you can see in the diagram below. 

But with some arbitrary color-coding not corresponding to colors in nature, the TV show (around the 10:49 mark) suggests some similarity, giving us a diagram looking like the one below:

"Similarity of anatomy" cases like this never provide good evidence for unguided Darwinian evolution as an explanation for biological innovations, as opposed to purposeful design. A designer might tend to use similar designs, rather than using a completely different design each time. 

At the 10:54 mark the host tells us, "It's wild what tiny beneficial mutations and millions of generations can produce." That's the standard Darwinist story, a "stuff piles up" explanation appealing to accumulation. But it makes no sense, because those tiny mutations would almost always not have been beneficial when they occurred; so they would not have been preserved and proliferated by any "natural selection" effect. To credibly explain dazzling biology wonders resembling products of purposeful engineering, you need a theory of organization, not a mere theory of accumulation. 

At the core of Darwinism is a fallacy we may call property misattribution.  The fallacy consists of attributing to "tiny mutations" a property of advantageousness that such mutations would almost never have by themselves. I can explain the fallacy with a little story involving alphabet cards, cards that each have only one letter of the alphabet printed on them. 

On his birthday a cruel person gave blind Will a deck of cards, each of which had a letter of the alphabet printed on it. "I will now spell out a message that is very helpful," said Will. "How will you do that?" asked his puzzled mother, knowing that blind Will could not see. "It's so easy," said Will. "I will just divide the cards into two piles, putting the helpful cards in one pile, and the cards that are not helpful in another pile. Then it will be easy to spell out a helpful message, by using only the cards from the pile of helpful cards." 

Will has made an error in logic, committing a fallacy of property misattribution. Individual letters do not have any property of being helpful or beneficial or advantageous. You can use the letters to spell out a message that is helpful or beneficial or advantageous, a message such as "Remember to look both ways when crossing the street." But that useful result does not arise until there is a special arrangement of letters.  The helpfulness or advantageousness only arises "late in the game," once such a special arrangement has occurred. 

Darwinist theorists make a similar error. They assume that great wonders of biological innovation are accumulations of random mutations, with each tiny mutation being preserved by a blind, mindless process of so-called "natural selection" because the mutation was beneficial. But if there are 100 or 1000 tiny mutations needed for some very complex biological innovation requiring a special arrangement of many parts, it would not be that each mutation (or that most of the mutations) would be beneficial when they occurred. So no "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" effect could explain the preservation and proliferation of such tiny mutations if they occurred in some individuals, before a requirements threshold was met. The requirements threshold would only be reached "very late in the game," when there had occurred a sufficient arrangement of parts to produce the useful function (an arrangement enormously unlikely to ever occur by chance).

What good is half an eye? No good at all -- you can't see with half an eye. What good is 100% of an eye? No good at all, unless that eye is part of a vision system requiring much more than just an eye, including different types of protein molecules (each requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids), an optic nerve, and a specialized region of the brain allowing vision. 

The system that allows humans to hear is one of the many stupendous biology systems in the body, marvels of purposeful engineering which are often systems of systems of systems. In my post "Human Anatomy Structures and the Cell Types Each Requires" I detailed the cell types different body parts require. While writing that post, I was struck by how many different cell types are required for hearing. I listed all of these cell types as being involved in hearing:

Ceruminous gland cell, Planum semilunar epithelial cell, Organ of Corti interdental epithelial cell, Elastic cartilage chondrocyte, Inner pillar cells of organ of Corti, Outer pillar cells of the organ of Corti, Inner phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Outer hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Inner hair cells of vestibular system of ear, Outer phalangeal cells of organ of Corti, Border cells of organ of Corti, Hensen's cells of organ of Corti

When you consider how every one of these cell types is itself an incredibly organized component consisting of many types of organelles that are themselves extremely organized components, you may realize the sky-high levels of organization required for hearing. 

Mark Rober should study at length the extremely high organization of many parts or extremely complex components needed to achieve stupendous biology systems such as the hearing system, the vision system, the reproductive system and the blood circulation system; and he should also study how such systems require very many interdependent components, with components only becoming useful when most of the system exists.  If he studies how a capability such as hearing requires the most fine-tuned arrangement of very many delicate and interdependent parts, he may be less likely to give fallacious biology explanations, and be less likely to be involved in some risky stunt such as one in which children dive into a swimming pool of jello gelatin, with the possibility of their ears getting filled with gelatin that may damage the intricate delicate fine-tuned mechanism required for good hearing.