The Continent Explorers: An Analogy

On a distant planet in another solar system there was a single continent, inhabited on its eastern side by a proud race of seven-feet-tall beings. Their ideology held that they were the only inhabitants of their continent. But the western part of the continent had never been explored.  One day the inhabitants of the eastern side of the continent sent out an exploration expedition, with the goal of finally determining what was on the west side of the continent. The expedition was led by a famous scientist, and consisted of seven males and one woman. 

The scientist had predicted that no intelligent creatures would be discovered on the west side of the continent. But at one point in the long journey the explorers saw something that seemed to challenge such an idea. Traveling on a long flat plane, they seemed to see miles ahead of them what looked rather like a huge castle far away.

"Look on the horizon!" exclaimed a woman. "I think that maybe that's some huge building, like a castle."

"Foolish woman!" said the scientist. "What you see on the horizon is merely a distant mountain, a mere accident of nature."

"I guess we'll find out for sure when we get closer," said the woman. 

The exploration party walked further towards the high object on the horizon.  Very soon a tragic event occurred. The scientist who was the expedition leader was attacked by a four-legged predator, and bled to death. The exploration party buried him, and then continued to walk on towards the interesting tall object on the horizon. 

Soon the woman noted that the tall object on the horizon now appeared to be even more clearly what looked like a high castle, not a mountain. 

"Look, the tall object on the horizon seems to be like some mighty castle," said the woman. "It can't be a mountain." 

"But the great scientist told us it was just a mountain, a mere accident of nature," said the scientist's assistant. "We must follow his wise teaching."

The exploration party walked further towards the high object on the horizon. The woman noted that the tall object on the horizon now appeared to be even more clearly some artificial construction. She noticed strange things she had never seen before on any building: electrical lighting. Her people had not yet invented electrical lights. 

"Look at those strange lights like none we have ever seen," said the woman. "This must be a work of great agency and artistry. It can't be a mountain." 

"But the great scientist told us it was just a mountain," said the scientist's assistant. "We must follow his wise teaching."

The exploration party walked further towards the high object on the horizon. The woman now noted that the tall object on the horizon appeared to have things she had never seen of nor heard of: elevators, helicopters and huge video screens on its outside. She could also see with her spy glass some great library that seemed to store vast amounts of information.

"Look at those astonishing wonders on the building," said the woman. "This is not only some work of great agency and artistry, but something far beyond anything our people could ever construct." 

"But the great scientist told us it was just a mountain, a mere accident of nature," said the scientist's assistant. "We must follow his wise teaching."

The situation described is an analogy for what has gone in biology since about the time of Charles Darwin. Around 1850 scientists seemed to see before them great evidence that the wonders of biology were not mere accidents of nature, but the work of some agency far greater than mankind.  Fine-tuned anatomical structures had been discovered abundantly. But in 1859 Charles Darwin introduced his theory that the wonders of biology were caused by purely natural processes such as random variations and the survival of the fittest. Introducing such a theory, Darwin was like the scientist of my story who sees in the far distance something that might be a castle or a mountain, and who says that it is merely a mountain, not anything the result of agency or design. 

The progression of the explorers closer and closer to the great castle is an analogy for the progression of biology in the 160 years since 1859. Just as the explorers in my story learned more and more about the castle as they walked closer and closer to it, biologists have learned more and more about the wonders of biology. Below is a table of what we now know.  The items in yellow are facts that Darwin never knew about during his lifetime.

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains 206 bones.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the circulatory system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUES CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX AND VASTLY ORGANIZED  CELLS	There are more than 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization. Cells are so complex they have been compared to factories with many types of manufacturing devices.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF ORGANELLES.	A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of different types of protein molecules that work together as team members to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex. Very many protein complexes have so many parts working together dynamically that such complexes are now being called "molecular machines."
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.  See "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of the post here for quotes stating this.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ very well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

We are now in a situation where it is very clear that the wonders of biology are far greater in their hierarchical organization and fine-tuned dynamic complexity than anything that humans have ever constructed. An aircraft carrier is a less impressive work of fine-tuned organization than the human body. Humans know how to make aircraft carriers equipped with all of their aircraft. There is not a corporation in the world or a nation in the world that could construct from lifeless materials a living adult human body. It is notable that humans are completely incapable of creating machines that can reproduce themselves.  There is not a robot in the world capable of building from raw materials a robot just like itself. But self-reproduction is something that occurs throughout the world of biology, as does molecular machinery. 

Like the castle in my analogy, containing some vast library that the woman could spot with her spyglass, biological organisms contain vast libraries of functional information in their DNA. What we see in biological organism are massive numbers of engineering effects and endless examples of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. Such a reality makes nineteenth century explanations of biology origins sound like  old wives' tales. Ink splashes don't produce long functional essays telling how to perform complex tasks; accidents don't engineer things; and random variations don't create novel astonishing works of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. It is not true that we can explain such wonders of biology by a simple principle of "random variations occur, and nature saves the good stuff," because most of the good stuff we see  requires arrangements of atoms so improbable you would never get such good stuff from random variations.  The reason that would never happen is pretty much the same as the reason why ink splashes don't produce well-written essays telling how to do complex things. 

But our scientists keep senselessly claiming that the wonders of biology are not the product of intelligent agency, but mere accidents of nature, as accidental as mountains. They keep telling us that we must follow opinions of the scientist Darwin, reached around the year 1859. The scientists who do that are like the assistant scientist in my story, who asked the team to follow some opinion reached when the castle was a blur on the horizon, instead of forming an opinion based on what we now know to exist.  The assistant scientist in my story was advising the group: don't decide based on what you now see clearly, but decide based on what some dead guy thought when the picture was so much blurrier. And that is very much like what is going on when scientists tell us to not judge based on the current known realities of biology, but to follow some opinion first formed before we knew half of the relevant facts we now know. 

The Negligible Presence of Evolutionary Explanations in Six Biochemistry Textbooks

One of the bad habits of Darwinist literature is to incessantly quote a misleading statement by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one making it sound like evolutionary explanations are an indispensable part of biology. But to help show that Darwinism is actually a quite dispensable part of modern biology, let us look at how little presence evolutionary theory has in recent textbooks of biochemistry. You can verify my statements below by using the links to see the books on www.archive.org, where you can use that site's text search feature to look for phrases such as "evolution" and "natural selection." 

• The 32nd edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry is an 813-page 2023 textbook describing cells, genes, enzymes, proteins, metabolism, hormones, and biochemistry in the greatest detail, with abundant illustrations. The book makes no mention of Darwin and its only use of the term "natural selection" is to ask on page 718 a question whether aging evolved through natural selection. The book makes only a handful of uses of the term "evolution": a vacuous statement that new insights have been gained about human evolution; a statement that something has been "highly conserved" throughout the evolution of enzymes; a brief speculation that something "might allow more rapid evolution of biologic function";  a claim that "jumping genes...profoundly affect evolution"; a mention that PCR is used to study evolution; a claim that "the evolution of a diverse array of freely circulating blood cells was critical to the development of animal life" (a statement in which the word "evolution" was superfluous and could have been replaced by "origination" or "appearance"); a claim that gene duplication and exon shuffling "contributed to the molecular evolution of the coagulation system"; a claim that genetic variability "furthers evolution"; and a question asking something whether evolution should increase lifespan. This being the book's only references to evolution, evolution has a negligible presence in it. 
• The sixth edition of Textbook of Biochemistry for Medical Students by D.M. Vasudevan and others is a 1995 672-page textbook that makes no mention of Darwin or natural selection, other than to say on page 500 that "Darwin's natural selection" deletes abnormal genes.  The book makes only a few references to evolution, which are these:  on page 29 it says amino acid sequences are conserved during evolution; on page 305 it uses "evolution" merely talking about change in carbon dioxide;  on page 472 it merely says "as the evolution proceeds, DNA content has also increased";  on page 486 it merely says that "in the pre-cellular epoch, nucleic acids were biological catalysts; and in course of evolution proteins took up this this activity"; on page 498 it says that "evolutionary relevant mutations tend to accumulate in 'hotspot genes'"; on page 503 it says "although rare, beneficial spontaneous mutations are the basis of evolution," providing no examples; and on page 617 it says DNA is used to study evolution. This being the book's only references to evolution, evolution has a negligible presence in it. 
• The third edition of Marks ' Basic Medical Biochemistry:  A Clinical Approach by Michael Lieberman and Allan D. Marks is a 2009 textbook of more than 1000 pages. The book makes no mention of either Darwin or natural selection. The book makes only a few uses of the word evolution: on page 83 it carelessly says that "divergent evolution" can occur if a gene "can mutate into a protein with another function" (a gene can mutate into a different gene, but cannot mutate into a protein);  on page 100 it says with a little hesitation that similar functions "are believed to be the product of convergent evolution";  on page 244 it merely says "a process known as exon shuffling has probably occurred throughout evolution";  on page 659 it refers to the non-Darwinian "evolution of an artherosclerotic plaque"; and on page 957 it merely says,  "Members of a homologous family have somewhat different structures and are related only by their evolution from the same ancestral gene" (again speaking carelessly, since people don't claim species evolve from a single gene). This being the book's only references to evolution, evolution has a negligible presence in it. 
• The seventh edition of Principles and Techniques of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology edited by Keith Wilson and John Walker is a 772-page 2010 Cambridge University Press textbook that we might expect to have many references to evolution, given the claimed strong association between molecular biology and evolutionary biology. But the book never refers to Darwin or natural selection. The book only refers to evolution a few times: on page 192 it says studies on genome variation and evolution can be "viable"; on page 233 it refers to artificial molecular evolution; on page 249 it says during evolution mutations may be inherited; on page 541 it merely parenthetically refers to "evolution time"; on page 698 it says something indicates some chemical had an "early evolution"; and on page 730 it merely refers to a drug's evolution. This being the book's only references to evolution, evolution has a negligible presence in it. 
• The fifth edition of  Biochemistry by Mary K. Campbell and Shawn O Farrell is a  793-page 2006 textbook. A search for "evolution" in the text produces 23 matches, but if you discard mere references in questions or thought assignments or captions or the appearance of the word "evolution" in cited books or papers, we have only about a dozen references to evolution. None of these references says much of anything. They consist of these: a line that merely refers to "an interesting frame of reference from which to consider evolution"; another line saying many have said the hydrogen bond is essential to the evolution of life; another line referring to two applications that "give molecular  information about the evolution";  another line mentioning researchers who "speculate that RNA polymerase evolved eons ago"; another line mentioning researchers who think that understanding something is important to understanding evolution; another line saying "these two classes of enzymes appear to be unrelated and indicate a convergent evolution"; another line saying "the evolution of aerobic metabolism...was an important step in the history of life"; another line saying certain organelles "may have been independently living organisms very early in evolution"; a claim that something "allows more opportunity for evolution." The only reference to natural selection is a passing reference to "billions of years of natural selection." Since such references are nothing of any real substance, evolution has a negligible presence in the book. 
• The eighth edition of the Textbook of Medical Biochemistry by M.N. Chatterjea and Rana Shinde is a 2012 894-page textbook. Ignoring two or three places in which the word "evolution" is used in a question or student study request, the book has only about 7  places mentioning evolution, which are these: a claim that one thing "seems to have evolved later" than another; a statement that "the conservation of 'junk DNA' over millions of years may imply an essential function"; a claim that so-called junk DNA "may be an important genetic basis for evolution"; a mention that PCR is used to study evolution; a mention that genome research has some value in studying evolution; a mention that the ozone layer has "been present through much of evolution"; and a claim that some test can be used to judge whether or not something "is a pattern in evolution." Since such references are nothing of any real substance, evolution has a negligible presence in the book. 

It is just as if zero effort was being made in these six biochemistry textbooks to use evolution or natural selection as substantive explanations for the wonders of biochemistry, and that the only times the authors used the word "evolution" or the phrase "natural selection" was in rare superfluous uses of the word "evolution" or "natural selection." Similarly, a historian will typically make no substantive use of the concepts of insanity, psychosis or mental illness in explaining historical events; but very rarely in a long history book you may find a use of the word "insanity" or "psychosis" or the term "mental illness."

Why is it that substantive attempts to appeal to evolution as an explanation are missing from the pages of these six very long biochemistry textbooks?  It is because today's world of biochemistry is a realm of the most gigantic levels of systemic organization, fine-tuned functionality and targeted molecular machinery in which the slight and feeble 19th-century notions of Darwinism can't even get to first base. 

Not a student of engineering or probability, Darwin had the very naive idea that very impressive biological innovations could occur by a step-by-step process of random variation in which each random variation produced a benefit. He had this idea because he had no understanding of how many well-organized parts must be added to make an improvement in survival ability or reproduction ability of an organism. He had no idea that cells are enormously organized units that require millions of well-arranged proteins, that human bodies require about 200 types of cells and more than 20,000 types of proteins, and that each of these types of proteins require hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acids, which have to be arranged as carefully as the letters in a well-written paragraph for the protein to be functional. 

We see below an example of one of the thousands of types of very complex protein complexes known to today's biochemists. The page describing the protein complex tells us that the visual is a very big oversimplification, and that the actual complex is very much more complicated than what is depicted in the visual. 

The pie graph below asks: how many parts must be added at the right places to make some improvement or useful innovation? The right half of the graph shows the answer we get from modern biochemistry. In very many cases (a significant fraction of the cases) hundreds or thousands of parts of the right type must be added at the right places to make a new biological innovation. Biological functions such as flying or walking or vision require (among many other things) multiple new types of protein molecules, each of which require hundreds of amino acid parts of just the right type arranged in just the right way. Overall such improvements require thousands of new parts of the right type, added in the right places. Biochemistry provides us with countless cases corresponding to the light blue, purple and green wedges in the pie chart below.  Trying to explain such cases though some "each little change produces a benefit" ideology is a fool's errand. 

Humans now make fantastically complex machines consisting of many thousands of well-arranged parts of the right type, and humans have used some of these machines (such as electron microscopes) to discover that our bodies have fine-tuned functional complexity more complex and more well-organized than any machines humans can make. So now we understand that a situation like the one depicted in the graph above holds true not just in biology but in many other fields such as computers, software and electronics. Just as you can't explain the accidental origin of a computer or a smartphone or an automobile, you can't credibly explain the origin of biological improvements or biological innovation requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts of just the right type, using weak Darwinian ideas such as the idea of an accumulation of favorable random mutations. Perhaps sensing the futility of such attempts, many of the authors of biochemistry textbooks don't even try to present Darwinian explanations for the wonders of biological organization that they describe.  They limit themselves to rare quick mentions of evolution, and pay only the tiniest lip service to evolution.