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Evolution – Smevolution!
 

Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison

 

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Section 2

 

 

 

Punctuated Equilibrium & Gaps in the Fossil Record

Frequent large jumps or gaps in the fossil record commonly (and erroneously) referred to as punctuated equilibrium tell us that at times whole sets of complex features appear to have been proposed and achieved in a single step.[143] The fossil record is very much in accord with both Professor Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis that whole systems have to be changed at the same time, and with our present knowledge of genetics, which tells us that several genes plus additional integration work is required for viable biological form change. Some of the gaps will be narrowed by additional fossil discoveries, but, at this point, we are not entitled to expect that they will be closed as the default scientific assumption. The historical path evolution is seen to have taken as represented in the fossils and corroborated by microbiology and genetic science is thus not the expectation of gradualism entailed by the accidental neo-Darwinian model. It is a much more difficult path for accident to achieve.

 

The real theory of punctuated equilibrium, that evolution had periods of more rapid development, pushes the improbability of an accidental process even farther beyond the already prohibitive magnitudes we have been discussing by requiring the accidental process to accomplish more in less time. Both of these alterations to our view of evolution, that evolution had to do more complex tasks and that it had to at times do them more quickly, mean that the few very small changes that can be observed in the lab, alterations to a few amino acids or a simple bacterial gene mutation, are no longer valid demonstrations of the ability of an accidental process to accomplish the evolutionary steps. We have no directly observable changes of the type needed to accomplish progressive macroevolution.

 

Frequent rapid jumps in the fossil record are postulated by punctuationists to arise from the geographical isolation of small to moderate sized populations. The combination of geographic isolation and small population size is thought to make it more likely that a radically new feature could emerge (due to loss of genomic cohesion factors) and avoid being overwhelmed by re-emersion into the genomes of a very large host population, which would tend to remove the feature before a suitably large population was achieved to support its continuance. While isolation of a small subpopulation does give novelty a better chance to survive if it occurs, biological form change novelties of the size and complexity represented by the punctuated jumps actually seen in the fossil record and known to be required by the realities of microbiology and genetic science are simply not going to be proposed by accident in real time.

 

Even if isolation can ultimately be shown to have consistently occurred through the history of evolution at the point of emergence of new traits (this has not been done), the fact will remain that an accidental process could not have arranged such an unlikely convergence of astronomically improbable events. The fact that any change that is accidentally achieved stands a better chance of surviving the Mendelian eraser inherent in interbreeding with a larger population does not help the problem of lack of a sufficient statistical base from which to first generate the change randomly.

 

Ernst Mayr thought that the cohesive factors that normally retard rapid change of the genome tend to loosen when small interbreeding populations are geographically isolated. The loosening of constraints on rapid genomic change would then, in Mayr’s view, counterbalance the loss of routine genetic variations due to reduced population size, and promote the emergence of radical new features. But this seems to involve the abandoning of the assumption of random mutation as the source of the new features. It implies that the biological information or the ability to generate that information well beyond random parameters are already there in the genome and just need an opportunity to get out. Mayr apparently didn’t see the need to draw that conclusion, but I consider it warranted given what we now know of the complexity of the genome and irreducible complexity of cellular systems. Again, neo-Darwinists have been proceeding in the grand Darwinist tradition of oversimplifying life. But the goo (protoplasm) is gone as the hypothetical engine of biological mutation and we have to deal with the astronomically more complex systems of genetics and microbiology. Certainly Mayr knew of much of the new complexity, but he did not realistically integrate it into his theory of evolutionary change—he never defended the accidental dynamic, he merely assumed it.

 

If the source of viable form change proposals is assumed to be random, its performance should parallel D. D. Axe’s ratio of viable to nonviable proteins from random synthesis, that is, it should approach a rate of 1077 failures to every 1 success. Given this astronomically small rate of success, even large populations could not reach a viable form change within the known tenure of any species on the planet. Therefore, Ernst Mayr’s geographical isolation model for macroevolutionary change requires (as does every other model we have seen so far) a nonrandom source for the new genetic information if it is to retain plausibility. There may be much merit in the model otherwise if only we take the indefensible assumption of accident out of it.

 

It is not clear if Mayr’s postulated cohesive factors have been empirically and experimentally confirmed, identified, and described such that they are in fact known to loosen under the conditions of geographic isolation of small interbreeding populations. Pending further empiric studies that can demonstrate the existence of such cohesion factors and their “performance” characteristics in geographic isolation, Mayr’s view remains a plausible speculation that is both intuitive and very explanatory, but only given the proviso of a nonrandom source of the form change proposals that drive evolutionary jumps.

 

Until his death in 2005, Mayr was acknowledged to be the senior living expert in the field of evolutionary theory. Axe’s protein synthesis data, being quite recent, was not available when Mayr’s cohesion factor hypothesis was invented. How Mayr would view the situation in light of the most recent data from Axe, the revelation of transpositional genomic elements, and epigenetic environmental cues affecting the developmental genome is not clear.[144] All of these factors and many more tend to de-randomize and de-simplify the process of evolutionary change. Ernst Mayr was not in the habit, as are some less conscientious evolutionists, of ignoring new evidence. He would, rather, admit the new evidence and then integrate it into the theory of evolution. He apparently did recently admit that the constancy of the morphological form of species through history was a problem for the Darwinian model.[145]

 

To get some idea of what Mayr means by a loosening of cohesion factors I offer the following quote from distinguished microbiologist John W. Drake’s (University of Illinois) seminal tome, The Molecular Basis of Mutation (1970), “the first extensive introduction to mutational mechanisms.”[146] Drake doesn’t explicitly identify Mayr’s “cohesion factor” concept in this discussion of “Localized Genetic Instabilities,” but, if memory serves, Mayr does reference him.

 

Localized Genetic Instabilities

Specific genes or sites sometimes suddenly become highly mutable, without a concomitantly increased mutability throughout the genome. A number of plausible molecular explanations for such instabilities may be imagined, but none have yet been established in any particular instance. Mutations which revert at extremely high rates could result from duplications which are reversed by recombinational events. Mutations could also occur which would not by themselves inactivate a gene, but which would nevertheless greatly increase its chance of mutation to an inactive form. Base pair substitutions, for instance, might assist in the creation of new hot spots, in which case most of the mutations which appeared later would be localized at a single site. Base pair substitutions could also partially inactivate a gene, not sufficiently to produce a phenotypic change in the organism under standard conditions, but sufficiently to render visible many further mutations within the cistron which might otherwise have gone undetected. In this case an entire gene might be unstabilized.[147]

 

Since the time of Mayr’s hypothesis we have learned that transpositional elements in the genome tend to have (yet to be explained) periodic bursts of intense activity. This, in addition to the action of morphogenetic fields in the developmental genome, is now hypothesized to account for much of the radical form change of evolution. If and how these bursts will be tied to geographical isolation triggered cohesive factors and other aspects of classic Darwinian population studies remains an open question, but the classic Darwinian model seems clearly to have failed to explain macroevolution.[148]

 

If, with C.R.C. Paul, we assume the fossil record is at least good enough to reveal the general patterns of evolutionary change, that is, if we take the current lessons the fossil record has to teach literally, we must acknowledge that the evolutionary process made even more frequent and larger jumps than neo-Darwinian theory has yet to admit, changing entire sets of features at the same time. All the evidence suggests that design proposals sophisticated enough to ground large jumps in life form evolution can arise consistently (and, I would say, at all) only from a highly nonrandom source having a strong bias towards functionally efficient designs, else the complex change could not be achieved in the time available, and the evolutionary path would be primarily a trail of horrific disabling mutations minus much of the constancy of the historical record.

 

No doubt natural selection accounts for some of the appearance of bias for efficient complex design we see in evolution. But it only accounts for improved designs being retained, not for their being proposed. It does not account for the uncanny efficiency of those proposals and the overall constancy in biological form through history. The bias for mechanical soundness, if not environmental niche-based fitness, is overwhelming in nature. Bias and accident, by definition, cannot coexist. Simpson conceded this in "The Problem of Purpose" chapter of This View of Life, saying it was unthinkable that the achievement of thousands upon thousands of viable progressive biological advancements at the rate we see in evolution could be accidental.

 

The Shanks and Joplin Challenge: “I feel so redundant!”

Some biologists, notably Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, have claimed that observed redundancy in biological systems refutes Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, asserting that redundant systems could in theory absorb the destructive impact of random mutation in one subsystem while another subsystem carries on its functions. This would allow the mutating cell to survive while evolution tinkers with it further.

 

In his reply to Shanks and Joplin in Philosophy of Science, Professor Behe dismisses these objections for several good reasons.[149] Foremost among those reasons is the fact that many of the examples Shanks and Joplin give do not qualify as meeting the level and type of complexity Behe’s irreducibly complex systems exhibit. Indeed, some don’t involve living systems at all. They are merely the catalytic cycles of raw chemicals. The processes cited are simple and the parts are not well-matched to each other. Thus they can hardly be considered representative of living organisms. The analogy Shanks and Joplin attempt to make is clearly a broken one.

 

But even to show that there are some examples of truly redundant systems in biology is not to show that accidental evolution could have occurred. To demonstrate the feasibility of accidental evolution one must demonstrate not just defense, but offense as well. How to coordinate so many complex alterations in real time? That is the question, the first one.

 

The second question is how to achieve, not just information storage redundancy but true functional systems redundancy. For Shanks and Joplin to establish their thesis they must show not just poor examples of poor redundancy in nonliving systems, but that all complex biological systems presently have or previously have had true and full functional systems redundancy in all critical component systems. This will be a tough order to fill because there are many examples of complex living systems that do not appear to have true functional systems redundancy (practically all of them, in fact). It only requires one complex system in one life form with irreducible complexity minus true functional systems redundancy to satisfy Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory, that is, finding a system or structure in biology that could not be formed by a series of small accidental variations.[150]

 

Evolution has to build all of the known living systems, not just some of them. If accident can be shown incapable of building at least one of them, then there is evidence for purpose in nature. Functional systems redundancy is required beyond information redundancy first of all because an accidental mutation dynamic such as neo-Darwinian evolution proposes will be tinkering with all systems, not just inactive information storage, and breaking them. On the other hand, when it tinkers with the inactive information storage components only, it cannot do much because of the complexity barrier and because natural selection is taken out of the process. Natural selection can only quality control things in the active genomes.

 

It is true that there is an impressive amount of information storage redundancy, and also some “chalkboard space,” if you will, for evolution to tinker around with “junk DNA.” After all, there is an inactive allele for every gene. In that sense biological systems have information storage backup to the tune of nearly 100%. They don’t have functional systems backup to this extent however.

 

If the theory of the late Professor Susumu Ohno and many others is correct, there is a significant amount of “junk DNA” in genomes that serves no useful purpose, and every gene has an inactive twin, an allele, that can perhaps be harmlessly modified (I say “perhaps” because the allele may at times be called to play actively). So, yes, alleles and junk DNA could function as blank “chalkboard space.” Evolution could work harmlessly in that space while the active genes take care of the cell’s daily genetic functions. Current estimates show “over half” of human DNA to be (suspected) “junk,” 5-10% for bacteria. Most other creatures range somewhere in between.

 

The Chalkboard space thing sounds good on the surface, but it constitutes a vast oversimplification of the problem. It is not just one gene that must be changed at the same time, given irreducible complexity, and the change must be integrated into the larger system. The only way junk DNA space would permit the building and implementation of systems advancements without destructively impinging upon actively coding or regulating regions of DNA is if an entire integrated subsystem were assembled and then launched as a complete working unit along with a variety of snippets that must be patched into just the right places in perhaps hundreds of locations around the genome to insure trouble-free integration of the change.

 

But, again, evolution's doing a full system design and development in inactive DNA space means that natural selection cannot quality control the building process. Natural selection will not “see” the new developing subsystem until it is fully done and integrated into the active functions of the organism. Minus quality control, it is most unlikely that the thousands of genetic and cellular changes that have to be closely coordinated to make a functioning subsystem and integrate it could be achieved by accident. Natural selection is the only quality control an accidental process has.

 

Without quality control one cannot reasonably expect a highly complex system to be built minus nearly infinite time and physical resources. But natural selection doesn’t come into play in inactive genome systems development. Natural selection only explains how good designs are preserved, not how they are proposed. Such an unthinkable improbability might occur, in theory, yes. But presuming that a complex set of inactive alleles that might constitute an entire new systems advancement would first be constructed in time-synchronized fashion and then somehow be reverted to active in the same creature all at the same time minus conflicts in other areas defies the probability threshold for scientific credibility.

 

And the “chalkboard,” for whatever good it might actually do evolution, continues to shrink before our eyes. As research continues, it is evident that significant portions of "junk" DNA working space are incrementally going away. The “junk” is turning out to have a purpose after all. In his Internet article on “Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of the Genome,” Dr. Paul Nelson discusses the work of John W. Bodnar, et al.., which reveals a hidden language resident in junk DNA.[151] Recent developments in genome research suggest that one of the purposes of “junk DNA” may be precisely to facilitate evolutionary development. This may be done through feeding the thought to be junk repeats and transpositional segments back into the primary genome, not in a truly random way, but rather in a manner closely managed by the genome itself.[152]

 

An amazing amount of the mystery of junk DNA has already given way to intensive genome research. Scientists like James A. Shapiro and Richard von Sternberg have adopted the working assumption that ‘junk DNA’ is not junk at all. “Indeed, we may come one day to regard erstwhile ‘junk DNA’ as an integral part of cellular control regimes that can truly be called ‘expert’.” This techno-prophecy has already been substantially realized in the brief three year period since Shapiro and von Sternberg's 2005 article with the discovery that the thought to be nonfunctional heterochromatin section of the genome contains essential genes and assists with several important genome functions.[153]

 

Subtracting the heterochromatin section alone from the 50% of the human genome previously suspected to be junk, radically reduces the suspected junk portion to only 30%. With such a substantial change in the estimate occurring within a very few years suggests that the presumed to be junk portion of the genomes may soon be revealed to be effectively nil. In addition to already mentioned discoveries about the important part genomic proteins called “ubiquitin” play in managing gene activation, a recent article in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution confirms the trend of junk DNA going away and suggests that we have been hasty in drawing conclusions about what is essential genomic material and what is not. [154]

 

Reduction in the “junk” portion of DNA increases the improbability of accidental evolution by increasing the complexity of the organism’s functional design and informational blueprint, the genome, leaving less room to tinker without doing harm. However, even if a function is established for all ‘junk DNA’, it does not mean that there is no systems the redundancy in living systems at all; some examples of true redundancy in biological systems remain. Shanks and Joplin point out that there are clear instances of cells and systems doing the same thing in more than one way. It is not nearly enough to save accidental evolution, however.

 

Shapiro and von Sternberg also indicate that some of the repetitive active DNA segments provide functional backup, though not all.[155] In other instances repetitive segments are required to work in concert with their duplicates to accomplish a specific task. However, one cannot conclude from this that mere repetitiveness ensures redundancy; that is clearly not so. Nor has a functional backup for every critical DNA sequence been found. Furthermore, finding two or more genetic locations offering some true redundancy does not equate to the possibility of risk-free random tinkering of any particular kind minus a full systems analysis, something we can rarely produce for any living system at this point in research.

 

And one cannot replace just any gene with any randomly modified substitute with impunity, even in redundant areas, because single genes have been found to be managing more than one biological process. The gene may be redundant in having a backup for one of the processes it regulates or for one protein it codes, but may have no redundancy available for another critical process it governs. Random mutations to gene P53 in the mouse may allow embryonic development to continue more or less unaffected because another gene also directs developmental processes in the meantime (or most of them), but the mouse without P53 becomes susceptible to cancer. In other words, one of gene P53’s critical functions is redundant, but another is not.

 

Therefore, even where some redundancy exists, one cannot conclude that random tinkering is possible without showing the exact mechanisms and pathways that accidental tinkering will be using. But this is precisely what neo-Darwinists have never done: demonstrate the concrete and specific biomechanics of the accidental evolutionary event process at the genetic and intracellular level. Their theory has always been abstracted to a general conceptual level far removed from the biomechanics of form change, with the focus remaining on the gross visible form characteristics of fossils, on the phenotype, and on the phylogenetic trees that portray presumed hereditary relationships. This removes the key scientific requirement of testability, and without just cause. The biomechanics of evolution are absolutely relevant to any theory of evolution.

 

What we have seen in the heavily politicized environment of modern evolutionary science is a ludicrous intellectual tap dance instituted for the sole purpose of saving the accidental worldview for the socialist/Marxist/materialist/atheist components of the intellectual community. Where the research is biomechanically specific it does not reflect accidental processes, and where claims are made for accidental processes the research cited, if any, is not biomechanically specific. This is so totally frustrating for an objective researcher that one wants to scream “Where’s the beef!?” (or something a little stronger) If the evidence for accidental evolution were magically translated into fillet mignon and the human race had to survive on the equivalent, extinction due to starvation would follow within weeks. There is no beef to the argument for accidental evolution. Random mutation of genomes in the laboratory have produced nothing but horrible mutations and trivialities.

 

Early studies of repetitive DNA report much less than full genetic redundancy in organisms, and true systems redundancy as so far reported is very scarce. Combined with the demonstratively destructive effects of random mutations in the lab this shifts the burden of proof to the neo-Darwinist to establish that individual organisms can survive random tinkering. How does a mutated gene line escape a veto by natural selection long enough for subsequent accidental changes to convert an initial tragedy into an advancement given the known complexity of living systems? Neo-Darwinists have little hope of producing an answer.

 

Exclusively nonviable or neutral results reported from mutagenesis studies, legs in place of antennae and wings that don’t work etc., suggest that even full redundancy may be insufficient to produce a beneficial result from random mutations. The fruit fly averages over 40% redundancy between the male and the female, but no viable results effecting major body form have been produced by random mutations. Darwinists make the invalid argument that because nonviable changes can result from random mutation, progressive macroevolutionary advances can result as well. It doesn’t logically follow that they can. This is like a mechanic arguing his case at a job interview by saying that he knows the vehicle design so well that he can break it a thousand ways, while giving no evidence of his knowledge of how to repair it.

 

The results of mutagenesis studies belie the significance of the few examples of partially redundant biological systems cited in Shanks and Joplin’s article “Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry.”[156] All the indications from the laboratory indicate that redundancy in biological systems is seldom true or full redundancy at all because random mutations are producing destructive results regardless of any redundancy that may be present.

 

The empirical evidence of multitudinous genetic studies demonstrates that random mutations create almost exclusively destructive effects irrespective of any redundancy that may be present. These studies show us that the type and magnitude of redundancy necessary to facilitate accidental evolution is simply not there. Some thirty years ago, Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard did a classic large-scale mutagenesis experiment on the fruit fly aimed at saturating its genome for mutations affecting embryonic development.[157] The effects of a strong mutagenic chemical on millions of flies were observed. The study was successful enough to win them the Nobel Prize. The 95% plus credibility of the full saturation of this genome for developmental affectations is confirmed in Genetics, September 2004.[158] However, Dr. Paul Nelson reports that at an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in 1982 Eric Wieschaus reported noting no viable mutations among the results.[159]

 

Shapiro and von Sternberg report that the darling of the laboratory, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, used in the Wieschaus/Nüsslein-Volhard study has from 33.7-57% repetitive DNA. That’s a lot of potential “redundancy”—yet still no viable results were seen from 95% saturation. These results are not surprising. Remember, random mutations are indiscriminate and imprecise. They are not intelligently guided to affect only one of two or more repetitive DNA segments. An exposure to toxics sufficient to affect one side of a duplicated segment may also mutate its backup.

 

It only takes one nucleotide change to alter a triplet that codes for an amino acid. As little as two random changes to the amino acid sequence of a protein can, and usually does, destroy its proper function.[160] The destruction of a biological function via accidental genetic mutation is thus a simpler achievement than the formation of cancer, which requires up to 20 genetic pathway exposure events,[161] and cancer is an enormously common event. An accidental evolutionary process, then, will always break a living machine before it advances it, or so nearly always that accidental evolution is deprived of its hypothesized engine for productive change in real time. The phenomenon of cancer is the “best” that we have seen an accident achieve—that and outright breakage of the machine or regression in function.

 

The dynamic of accidental mutations is basically a shotgun approach to design. The fact that shotguns don't work to fix watches, is hardly surprising. But mutation studies suggest that in many cases there is in fact no available bridge between creatures, nowhere for an accidental evolutionary process to go, no small change options that will simultaneously comprise an improvement in fitness for the host creature and also be a mechanical advancement toward its nearest relative on the tree of life. This modular approach where each step toward a new creature is also an improvement for the current host creature that natural selection can preserve is the only hope of a believable process that accidental evolution has ever had. But the fossil record shows no evidence of such a continuous gradual build with multiple use modules of biological change, all simultaneously of use to the present and the future. Punctuated equilibrium theorists say the intermediate fossils aren’t there because evolution sped up so much that the intermediates weren’t around long enough to produce populations sufficient to give a statistical expectation of being discovered. But such a rapid systems development puts the accidental dynamic even further out of the credible range of probabilities, and it is already well beyond the scientific threshold.

 

Given what we know of the fossil record, genetic science, and microbiology, the survivable steps necessary to move between different types of creatures are, at the end of the day, quite large and complex—too large for an accidental process to manage. And if the punctuated equilibrium theorists are correct, they occurred too fast for an accident to achieve.

 

Even some of the top neo-Darwinists are backing away from gradualism. “Thus, more often than not, the gradual origins (if indeed there were gradual origins) of species and higher taxa have not been documented.”[162] As famous evolutionist Stephen J. Gould has written, the gradualist scenario of classic Darwinian theory is no longer defensible. Without gradualism, however, the accidental hypothesis is not defensible, if it ever was.

 

The Separate Problem of Early Redundancy

Although achieving sufficient genetic redundancy in the earliest life forms may not be seen to be an especially difficult problem for neo-Darwinian theory, since it might appear to require nothing more than a “copy command,” for such very simple creatures, it does pose both a logical dilemma for neo-Darwinian theory, and a factual conflict with the empiric data. How so? If redundancy is good for the creature, why didn’t natural selection preserve all that redundancy that evolution requires to have been there? As a matter of fact, we don’t see that much redundancy in living systems. If it wasn’t good for the creature, neo-Darwinists cannot expect their model of evolution to have preserved it. That’s a problem for the future steps in evolution because they won’t have the redundancy needed to keep accidental tinkering from breaking things beyond repair.

 

And obviously the problem of accidental construction of redundant design is not a problem restricted to bacteria and early life forms alone, where it might appear to be relatively easy to achieve. It must again be overcome anew at increasing levels of complexity with each new evolutionary advancement in cell types, additions of a new biological forms and features, structures, and functions. A single structure in advanced organisms like mammals is many times more complex than the entire system of a prokaryotic organism (bacteria, algae etc.). But just where redundancy is the hardest to achieve it is most needed. More complex designs tend to be more sensitive to tinkering, and therefore have a greater need for redundancy to support an accidental evolutionary dynamic.

 

There are 120 different types of cells in vertebrates alone.[163] Achieving redundancy in 120 different cell types via random mutations requires that the improbable event of achieving initial redundancy in a bacterium be repeated 120 times. That’s the easy part. Creating redundancy at each level of increasing hierarchical bodily systems complexity increases the improbability for the total task of achieving sufficient evolutionary redundancy exponentially. A hugely improbable total series of redundancy achievements is needed, encompassing each of the many thousands of alterations to the genomes that occur on the evolutionary tree as bacteria advance indirectly towards humans on the tree of life, ultimately achieving a thousand fold increase in genome size.

 

Modern arguments of the Shanks and Joplin variety too few examples of redundancy and cannot demonstrate that achievement of the needed redundancy is within reach of an accidental process in real time. Nor do they address the failure of existing redundancies to counteract the deleterious effects of random mutations in experimental studies. In the final analysis, it is the total improbability that puts the thesis of an accidental achievement of rich biological systems redundancy beyond the threshold of scientific credibility.

 

“We have a winner!”

Having survived the Shanks/Joplin redundancy challenge, Professor Michael Behe's irreducible complexity thesis remains strong. A true counterexample to irreducible complexity must demonstrate (1) that critical nonredundant DNA segments are virtually nonexistent in biological systems; and (2) that the exclusively nonviable results of thousands of mutagenic studies are somehow invalidated.  Professor Behe reminds us that as the evidence against neo-Darwinian evolution inexorably mounts we must at some point concede that the threshold of sufficiency has been crossed.[164]  

 

The following table summarizes that mounting evidence in the form of factors affecting the probability of an accidental origin of all life forms.

 

Table 1: Improbability of neo-Darwinian Evolution

 

Factor Description

Symbol

One chance in

1. The improbability of getting life from a chemical soup

OL

10-128

2. Achieving minimal redundancy needed to proceed forward from the first simple organisms via random evolution

IR

3. Achieving redundancy in 120 different cell types

CTR

IR120

3a. Achieving redundancy in much more complex systems and then have that redundancy removed after the fact against the preferences of natural selection.

CSR

IR120 to the power of ?     

4. The improbability of randomly generating enough useable proteins to create 100 million species (an underestimate)

PG

 

(Strictly computed  this should be  10-77 raised to the power of 85,000, or 10-6,545,000.)

5. Systems proteomics, the complexity of protein-protein interactions, appears far beyond what an accidental process could achieve (This will be an immense number as our best computers cannot model this process due to its complexity.)

SP

 

6. Accidentally creating one cellular machine: a ribosome. See footnote 39 in Part 1, Section 1.

CM1

10-3,927

7. Accidentally creating a 2nd cellular machine: a cellulosome

CM2

4-6,000,000

8. Accidentally achieving the genetic mechanisms for DNA  transcription, replication, and regulatory functions, including the alternative splicing process and transpositional mechanisms of the more complex organisms. The complexity of transcription (translation) alone must equal or exceed the genome being translated. The regulation of cell functions is another enormous increase in complexity. Some of this complexity may be subsumed under the protein/enzyme synthesis factor previously estimated at #4 but not all of it.

GN

 

8a. Accidentally developing complex epigenetic systems that must be closely synchronized with genetic systems, such as gene activation marking systems.

GM

 

9. Accidentally creating many thousands of cellular machines (at least 1077 X itself 1,000 repetitions)

CM

10-77,000

10. Reaccomplishing the jump from single celled to multicellular organisms multiple times, i.e., at the beginning of each phyla

MC

MC40

11. The Cambrian Explosion of most animal forms in a brief 5-10 million year period radically reduces the time available for a random process to work.

CE

 

12. The total biological complexity of all of an organism’s hierarchical systems embedded ten levels deep taken together vastly increases the improbability that a random process could construct them. A single organism, the human body, has trillions of cells each with potentially thousands of parts (certain proteins are made on demand, that is, they are situation specific) doing millions of things per minute.

TBC

 

13. The complexity of the human immune system alone appears beyond the scope of an accidental construction process, known to be capable of producing as many as 1012 antibody neutralizing immune cell configurations.

IS

14. The complexity of the human brain and nervous system is beyond our current comprehension. (100,000,000,000 brain cells, each with thousands of connecting fibers)

NS

15. The complexity of the DNA regulatory, damage recognition and repair systems

DR

 

16. The added improbability of accidentally developing several critically related complimentary traits at the same time

CD

 

17. Convergence. The independent achievement of the same design feature over and over again in separate evolutionary routes multiplies the workload and improbability of the accidental evolutionary process significantly.

CV

 

18. Mutation rates are insufficient to produce enough random variation to generate the taxonomic inventory within the geologic timeline established by the fossil record.

MR

 

19.The improbability of consistently achieving significant levels of symmetry in millions of designs (primarily in plants, though in some animal features) by accident.

SD

 

20. Fine art in nature. Neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain the origin of designs of this type, or explain how they can be preserved in a randomly mutating environment where natural selection has no concern for artistic aspects.

AF

 

21. Harmful effects of random genetic transfers impede evolutionary progress more than advance it. Accidents break living machines before advancing their design.

GT

 

22. The absence of a common ancestor, links between the phyla and many major variations create a requirement for many fast and extensive jumps in evolutionary progress (punctuated equilibrium) each of those jumps hugely improbable.

FR

 

23. Minimal dysfunctional designs in the fossil record show that few random attempts were made, if any, prior to hitting upon correct design. This is supremely improbable for a random process.

FA

 

24. Mass extinctions and ice ages cause the loss of significant evolutionary progress at least seven times in Earth’s history.

ME

 

25. Complexity and fragility of developmental processes precludes the possibility of accidental tinkering generating anything except tragic birth defects.

DC

 

26. The species barrier: extragenetic control mechanisms determine the species, not DNA. DNA and cell membrane microtubule control structures must then be evolved in close coordination. Achieving coincidental mutations between two different systems exponentially multiplies the improbability of achieving macroevolution by accident. The DNA and microtubule systems are not necessarily fully independent but the total volume of change is increased by the need to coordinate the two systems. Nor has the microtubule cell membrane structure been shown to be completely dependent in such a closely linked way that the corresponding changes in DNA and microtubules for evolutionary advancements can be assumed to be synchronized regardless of what an accidental process may do.

SB

 

27. Extragenetic factors such as methylated DNA and RNA mediated gene silencing systems add yet another level of complexity that must be coordinated and integrated by accident to achieve advancement in biological function (proper gene expression).[165]

EP

 

28. Genetic changes to areas of the genome governing somatic behavioral routines for such things as mating behavior must be synchronized with other genetic changes, thus further complicating the evolutionary process and reducing the chance of accidental success.

SOM

29. Limitations of entropic or accidental forces to achieving proportionately small magnitudes of ordered effects make it impossible for random mutations to generate complex life forms.

LEF

 

30. The library analogy: it is impossible to improve one masterpiece by accident, let alone millions in succession.

LA

 

31. The high complexity and closely matched parts of cellular systems forbids both accidental assembly and random tinkering  (Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis).

HC

 

32. The irreducible complexity/system integration problem. The close interaction of many parts of cellular and bodily systems with many others requires simultaneous implementation of corresponding changes to multiple parts, systems and genes—another exponential increase in the total improbability.

IC

 

33. The lack of a neo-Darwinian biomechanic for change, a biochemical pathway for the accidental evolution of life after so much dedicated investigation and so much biomechanical visibility adds to the improbability that there is an accidental pathway to be found. Read Granville Sewell’s paper  “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution” in The Mathematical Intelligencer. Vol. 22, no. 4 (2000): 5-7 here.

BM

 

34. Frequent reversals of initial progress. Reversible processes create an almost impassible barrier to accidental evolution. Proteins dissolve again in the solution they are hypothesized to have been formed in. Biological machine design proposals are relentlessly pounded with harmful changes while the first few thousand genetic and cellular changes are being compiled. This makes the process of getting a new design proposal constructed up to the point where it can affect survival fitness—the earliest point at which natural selection can lock it into place—nearly impossible for an accidental process. DNA sequence change by accidental mutation does not reflect a strict reversal scenario, but rather a highly probable reversal. In this case accidental mutations are

incessantly trying to fix something that isn’t broken, “reversing” any small amount of progress to an again meaningless or harmful string of nucleotides.

RIP

 

35. Universality of the DNA dictionary: the improbability that an accidental process would not have tried other DNA translation schemes beyond the minimal variations that have been seen in tightly circumscribed exceptions.

UDNA

 

36. Time management programs, biological clocks that synchronize independent events, order dependent sequences of critical multiple step processes, critical time windows for process completion, all add yet another layer of complexity and improbability that forbids construction of living machines via an accidental process.

TM

 

Total =   One chance in approximately 10-6,549,203 (PG) X OL X IR X CTR (IR120) X CSR (IR120 to the power of ?) X SP X 10-3,927 ( CM1) X 4-6,000,000 (CM2) X GN X GM X 10-77,000 (CM) X MC40 X CE X TBC X IS X NS X DR X CD X CV X MR X SD X AF X GT X FR X FA X ME X DC X SB X EP X SOM X LEF X LA X HC X IC X BM X RIP X UDNA X TM X PENROSE (this last item is explained in the Stacking the Deck section a few pages below)

 

Note: the actual improbability is somewhat but not critically less than this amount because achieving early components of life have the effect of making a machine-building machine, thus taking much of the accidental out of the process of completing later steps. This is what Monroe Strickberger and Richard Dawkins are camouflaging as “cumulative selection,” but they want it free of probability costs, which it is not. Since it is not yet clear where all of those points of permanent design bias enter the system, this formula reflects what it would take to make each component separately strictly by accident with only the help of the living system to reduce the improbability of new protein design from 10-125 to 10-77. Achieving the specific genomes also takes much of the probability difficulty out of achieving specific living systems such as the immune and nervous systems because the information and translation mechanisms are already there to build those systems. Reuse of previously constructed DNA sequences also reduces the probability in many instances, but, once these adjustments are allowed for the improbability remains far beyond what science can rationally affirm and beyond what our universe can afford.

 

Ultimately, there is no free lunch, no way to cheat the math. To first make a machine that makes a machine does not cheat the difficulty factor of making a machine from scratch, for the machine that makes a machine must be at least as complex as the machine it makes. This chart is here merely as a visual aid to the memory and imagination. We know for certain that the improbability of this indirect route at producing a human being, which has 20,000 genes or more, must be no less than that required to produce the human being directly. If the process is considered to be an accidental one, that probability is, at a minimum, 10-77 times itself 20,000 times, or  10-1,540,000. But since we already know that there are at least 85,000 proteins in the inventory of life, the certain minimum for the larger process of evolution can be raised to at least 10-6,545,000 plus some unknown fraction of the additional improbability of achieving all the other steps requisite to building the tree of life.

 

 

Is the Probability Argument Valid?

Defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution have strangely attempted to tell us that probability is irrelevant to scientific explanation in evolution, while it remains the very essence of explanation everywhere else in all the other branches of science. Some theorists have even claimed that standard probability theory need not be used to determine the correct values where evolutionary issues are concerned. But no other scientist or engineer ignores standard probabilities when important issues hang in the balance. Since the advent of quantum mechanics, it has been indisputable that the very foundations of science, even the natural laws, are probabilistic.[166] Absolutely all of science’s arguments have now taken the form of a probability argument.

 

In Scientific Laws, Principles, and Theories, Robert E. Krebs gives a candid and succinct statement of the probabilistic nature of science:

 

Historically, all effects or events were assumed to have a cause, or possibly several causes, or to be co-events. We now know that many natural events are described and predicted by statistical probabilities, not mathematical certainties. This is true of very large events in the universe, as well as the very small events as related to subatomic particles and energy. These very small events led to quantum theory and indeterminacy (uncertainty principle), resulting in some problems with the cause-and-effect concept for accepted physical laws.

 

Scientists do not think in terms of possible or could, or impossible or couldn’t, but rather in terms similar to likely or credible (probable), or unlikely or incredible (improbable). This of course, makes the use of statistical methods such as probability theory a powerful tool.[167]

 

John Gribbin informs us in Q is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics, that quantum mechanics, especially, integrates probability theory into its understanding of all that occurs at the level of subatomic particles: “Alternatively, you can think of it as another manifestation of the probabilistic nature of the quantum world—where everything is governed by the rules of probability, nothing is certain.”[168] A more “down to earth” case in point is the meteor threat. We are reasonably comfortable that a 1 in 6000 chance of a catastrophic meteor strike in the next century will not happen.[169] On the other hand, in proposing the ludicrous theory of accidental evolution science asserts that a possibility less than one chance in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000...continued to well over 470 zeros, comprises our best explanation for the origin of life? Is this logically consistent? No.

 

NASA wouldn’t spend valuable research dollars on a mission with such an abysmal chance of success; nor would any research scientist. Nowhere else in science will a scientist affirm a hypothesis with such an infinitesimal probability. Why then do we require our entire scientific research community and educational system to be tethered to this absurdly improbable assumption of accident as the basis of life’s origin? Anywhere else in science, when the improbability of a theory or hypothesis becomes so great, scientists reject it out of hand. In footnote 17 to chapter 3 of The Fifth Miracle theoretical physicist and noted science author Paul Davies confirms this:

 

An explanation that relies on freaky circumstances, although not impossible, is inherently implausible. We may take the odds against those circumstances as a quantitative measure of our disbelief, or lack of confidence, in the fluke theory.

 

Robert Shapiro reports in a recent article in Scientific American that Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve has called for a rejection of immense improbabilities as essentially equivalent to the miraculous and therefore outside of science.[170] Shapiro, himself, goes on, in arguing for a metabolism-first as opposed to RNA-first origin of life, to use the probability form of argument to support his own thesis, arguing that the improbability of RNA being accidentally formed in the prebiotic environment of Earth suggests a metabolism-first origin of life.

 

The science of weather is built around probability. Gamblers depend upon it to make decisions. Who would bet real money on a roulette wheel with 106,545,000  number/color options? Birth control methods are based upon probabilities. Probability is key to winning sports strategies. Even rules of engagement in life and death confrontations of armed combat are derived from probabilities. Physicists at least understand that all of science is a probabilistic endeavor, and that probability theory is a valid enterprise. Noted evolutionists, such as Mark Ridley, use similar estimates of genetic probabilities in their own logic, and one of the primary tools the neo-Darwinists use to construct the hypothetical tree of life, maximum likelihood, is a straightforward application of statistical probability theory.[171]

 

Evolutionary scientists have been inconsistent with normal scientific method and standards in another way. When encountering the highly improbable scientists ask for a concrete and detailed explanation of the mechanics of the process in order to establish that such an implausible thing is even possible. The next step requisite to even marginally legitimizing a fluke theory is to seek a causal explanation of what brought such an unlikely sequence of events into being in the first place. In the case of accidental evolution, neo-Darwinian theorists have failed on both counts.

 

Darwinists do not provide a process description that links minor changes into major body form innovations. Nor do they give a causal explanation that can account for the highly improbable origin of complex biological information from accidental processes. In short, we are missing the biomechanics of the process of evolution, and every time we look at the genetic and molecular structures and processes in order to discover those biomechanics we find a new seemingly insurmountable obstacle to an accidental process having originated life or generated major biological form change. 

 

G. G. Simpson, one of the fathers of the new evolutionary synthesis of the 1950s, in acknowledging that a chance process could not achieve such adaptations as have been seen in the history of evolution without exhausting all the resources of the universe first, implicitly admitted not only the validity of the probability form of argument, but that it is sufficient to unequivocally establish purpose (of an unspecified kind) in evolution. Here too is the forerunner of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument: the probability bound, the discussion of which follows in some detail in Appendix 2. Simpson did not call the purpose he saw in nature “cosmic purpose,” or “divine purpose,” or even “intelligent design,” he merely called it “purpose,” and dismissed true accident as an impossibility. He believed that science could go no further in its conclusions than to rule out accident. Simpson believed that, by accomplishing a series of probability-reducing steps one step at a time, the evolutionary process could achieve what is admittedly astronomically improbable taken as a whole.

 

What Simpson believed is basically what Richard Dawkins and modern neo-Darwinists call “cumulative selection,” and, while it sounds awfully good if you don’t look at it too closely, it is really just magic dressed up in scientific jargon. With “cumulative selection” the probabilities are not computed for each step in achieving the advancement of the probability-reducing machines of life (including the first step, life from chemicals, abiogenesis) as mathematical integrity requires, but only the easy steps after the probability reducing steps are done. More correctly put, the neo-Darwinists don’t actually compute the probability for the real steps at all; they only abstract the concepts from the physical realities and say, “See, it is all as easy as pie.”

 

This is cheating. It is what Professor William Dembski calls looking for a “free lunch.” When we honestly pay for lunch by doing proper math and science, the probabilities of achieving each step in the evolution of life add up to such an astronomical sum that accident is fully ruled out. Yes, one can honestly say that at some points after certain living systems are achieved it becomes easier and easier to achieve further evolution of advanced life forms, but we have to pay the probability costs for achieving those key steps in the first place. For example, the achievement of the first living organism reduces the probability of achieving new biologically viable proteins from 10-125 to 10-77, and having a transpositional genome that adds ready access to preformed sequences of DNA nucleotides to a transpositional system with physical controls operating within the protected environment of a living cell/creature further increases the chance of mutational success by many orders of magnitude. But you first have to pay the probability costs for achieving those systems, and the subsequent increments of evolution never become easy. The probability cost for an accident to produce the very first achievement of each new system component must be “added” to the total cost of accidental evolution as a whole. When this is done, accidental evolution does not turn out to be easy as pie, and cumulative selection does not bring the total improbability down within the scientific threshold of credibility.                                   

 

And, to add insult to injury, neo-Darwinists want to use our strict probability argument to support their theory when it suits. They are trying to have it both ways. Historian of science John H. Wilson in a sense “steals a page from Meyer and Dembski’s books” in posing an attack on Creationists by way of the strict form of the probability argument. In his article, "The Origin of Life," Wilson asserts that creationists were not calculating the probability based upon the actual chain of events that evolutionists had proposed, rather they were erroneously assuming that the proteins/enzymes needed for life were synthesized prebiotically. Well, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If we are going to compute probability strictly, then let’s. And, of course, Wilson’s argument against the Creationists also fails in its thesis that moving biotic protein construction from outside the organisms to inside makes accidental evolution easy enough for scientific credibility. Dr. Doug Axe has recently shown (2004) in a peer-reviewed study that the random synthesis of a biologically useful enzyme within a living organism is still far from easy, having a probability of 10-77.[172]

 

In the final analysis, the improbabilities established for neo-Darwinian evolution by modern intelligent design theorists come from a complete and scientifically rigorous description of the physical processes involved. They are based upon peer-reviewed studies and uncontested facts of biology. Therefore, the probability argument of Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and the intelligent design team is valid.[173]

 

Stacking the Deck 

Scientists such as W. Ford Doolittle have offered criticisms of some of the early forms of the probability argument:

 

To switch gaming metaphors, wonder in the face of the improbability of a horse is like bemusement over receiving any particular hand in a game of bridge. Since there are 4 X 1021 possible hands, any single hand is incredibly unlikely, and one would be foolish to anticipate receiving it—but no hand is any more unlikely than any other…[174]

 

But, or course, this is a bad analogy as regards the origins and development of life. Certainly broken, incomplete or otherwise flawed machines are much more likely to be dealt out of an accidental process than elegant, sophisticated, and efficiently functional mechanisms. We may not be justified in wondering at getting a horse as opposed to an elephant; but we are justified in wondering that we got either. We are also justified in wondering at getting something alive versus dead, healthy versus disabled, or sophisticated versus simple.

 

To be plausible even on the surface Doolittle’s argument must assume a standard deck where all cards occur with equal frequency. Once again the neo-Darwinists are not describing the system before assigning the probability. In this case they are ascribing the description of another system to that of life, that of a specific card game. This is a totally invalid scientific approach. Is the system description of life the same as the game of bridge? No; nothing could be further from the truth.

 

We have just seen that in the biology of life the odds against getting a single protein by accident is at least 1077 to one. Thus, Doolittle’s bridge probability of 4 X 1021 is a gross underestimate for one hand in the game of life, and he conveniently forgets that we must deal at least 85,000 hands, the probability of each multiplied by the others under standard probability theory. No doubt, he feels “cumulative selection” relieves us of that obligation, but we have already seen that “cumulative selection” is just another smoke screen veiling a cheat on proper scientific computation of probabilities.

 

Now, let’s play the game of life for a moment instead of the game of bridge. A human body employs approximately 85,000 different proteins. The improbability of achieving those in sequence by accident is 10-77 times itself 85,000 times! (10-6545000). Even allowing for a much larger number of possible survivable species designs (not just the 100,000,000 or so species that actually came to exist) and we didn’t care which of these were produced, the probability of getting any one of those options, if they were to have 85,000 biologically viable proteins in their structure, would still be 10-6545000 in this world. The proper analogy is that each species represents the end of a game of bridge that has many more cards than bridge and at least 85,000 hands. Thus, Doolittle’s bridge analogy fails as a solution to the probability objection to accidental evolution.

 

It is very important to realize that nature does not have a standard deck of playing cards. Natural law and the highly informed state of matter and energy at the Big Bang entail that all possible “denominations” of cards do not occur with equal frequency within the “deck” of the physical universe. DNA sequences that do anything useful for life have been found to be vanishingly rare among all the possibilities in comparison with those that are deleterious or neutral.

 

Clearly, if you play blackjack with a multi-trillion-card deck having 4 of every denomination out of every 52 cards except the ace, of which there is only one in the entire deck, not every hand is going to be as probable as any other. In the game of life on Earth, a biologically viable protein is that ace. The deck of life is very nonstandard according to bridge. One has to adjust statistical expectations in accordance with the known content of the deck of the actual game one is playing. This is the first and most elementary principle of probability theory: describe the system accurately first, then compute the probability afterward. Doolittle invites us to make the mistake of failing to first accurately describe the deck of cards being used before calculating probabilities.

 

It is important to realize just how astronomically rare the hand of life is known to be. Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose estimates the rarity or specificity of the exact configuration of our life-compossible universe as 10 raised to the power of 10123.  That is 1 followed by ten thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion zeroes. One good sized book (400 pages) can only hold a million of those zeroes. In other words, the estimate I have given in Table 1 for the probability of accidental evolution doesn’t even include this larger improbability of having a physical universe with natural laws, an initial state, and key parameters that are so conducive to life. Exactly how much probability must be offset when the two figures are combined to account for the bias and outright self-organization produced by our life-friendly universe must await further exposition of the processes of nature, but the increase clearly will be enormous. So, we can add yet another presently nonquantifiable probability factor (and it’s not a small one) to the summary in Table 1: X Penrose.

 

Finally, as Andy Rooney might say, there is another thing I don’t like about all of this. Criticisms of the probability argument have been far too casual. Richard Dawkins claims to have explained the whole problem away by starting his explanation, in Climbing Mount Improbable, in the middle of the process after life forms and genomes have already been built. But, as we have just seen, most of the probability cost occurs precisely in those two steps: abiogenesis, and building the self-transformational transpositional genome. Dawkins skips the hard parts then focuses on merely moving genes around “randomly.” In light of the structured system of transpositional elements that have since been discovered genome evolution should not be considered random at all, and may even be substantially directed by the aggregate of natural laws and the self-organizational tendencies those laws produce. None of the biomechanics of protein and gene creation from scratch are addressed whatsoever in Mount Improbable, and these are the areas, with the gene translation system, in which the largest increments of improbability are generated. More accurately stated, Dawkins has not climbed Mount Improbable, he has ignored it, and explained an ant hill because he has failed to describe the system first before assigning probabilities.[175]

 

The ant hill is the oversimplified protoplasm-era imaginary process of evolution that neo-Darwinists insist on preserving beyond its natural theoretical life span. The whole thing is easy as pie to Dawkins. Random mutations that don’t work are culled by natural selection. The accidental form changes that work are preserved, and the tree of life is built up one step at a time in this fashion. But this is merely a process in the imagination of the theorist, it has not one thing to do with the concrete demonstrable facts of biological mechanisms. Once again: no real system description. Dawkins’ theory has not advanced from the time Darwin issued it in 1859! It is a protoplasm-era theory, and invokes the same “magical” concepts.[176] In neo-Darwinian theory, biological form variations come out of nowhere, and we can be confident that natural selection can do all the rest. There is no evidence for either, and all the facts of microbiology, genetic science, and mathematics say it can’t be done in real evolutionary time. Yet, neo-Darwinian theory is shamelessly called an established fact and hailed as an icon of science with an overall credibility rivaling that of the theory of gravity and Einstein’s relativity theory!

 

This is the biggest scandal in the history of science and philosophy. Neo-Darwinists suggest we shouldn’t put credence in well-supported probability estimates, when we are known to do exactly that everywhere else in science, industry and life. At times they go so far as to imply that there is no standard and reliable way to compute probabilities, and that anyone’s view of probability is as good as anyone else’s. This is all complete nonsense. The computational rules of probability theory are both well-defined and invariable. For those unfamiliar with such things, the computational rules for probabilities are laid out clearly in most math textbooks and many reference books, including the fifth edition of James' Mathematics Dictionary and Armstrong's Elements of Mathematics. The rules for standard calculation of probabilities have been known since they were originated by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century![177]

 

Monkey Business

But what about the monkey typists theorem? Don’t monkeys somehow have the ability to type themselves out of a probability bind (writers certainly do not)? Certain Darwinists are famous for trying to convince people that accidental evolution is possible by quoting a claim attributed (possibly falsely) to Thomas Huxley that reflects mathematician Emile Borel’s mathematical “proof” that chimpanzees typing random keystrokes at a normal rate would ultimately (not necessarily in the lifetime of the Earth or even the universe, however) produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.[178] Neo-Darwinists are so supremely confident when they talk about the power of a monkey at a typewriter that one feels that intelligent design writers should simply stop arguing in mid-sentence and immediately fall in with the unemployment line. According to the neo-Darwinists, evolution is so simple monkeys could do it!

 

Once again, lack of a true system description is the problem. Borel’s demonstration is only valid given the (physically and biologically) artificial rules and assumptions he sets for his proof. Those rules and assumptions are not compatible with the realities of the physical/biological world.

 

Borel says that, given infinite time, monkeys typing randomly would eventually recreate Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in fact all of the great works of history. Should such an imaginary example about monkeys typing under the purely theoretical conditions of abstract mathematics give us good reason to deny the concrete results of mutagenesis studies, birth defects, and the inability to reproduce neo-Darwinian claims in the laboratories of our own non-theoretical world? Did evolution occur in infinite time? Hardly. The monkey example may be endearing, but it is not scientifically valid as applied to biology.

 

The Monkey Theorem only applies to pure number theory, not biology or physics. In biology and physics the definition of entropy is operative, as are the physical systems descriptions of living biology, Penrose’s computations for the specificity of a life-compossible universe, etc. Existing solely in the realm of pure mathematics, the monkey typist theorem is fully removed from physical and biological reality. The two systems, the one argued from (pure mathematics) and the one argued to (the real physical world) must be analogous for the proof to hold, but they are not analogous, any more than life is analogous to the card game of bridge. The two assumptions Borel makes, infinite time and fully random or chaotic motion of elementary particles, motion absent any bias towards order whatsoever, have not held so far in the history our physical world. Therefore the analogy does not hold and Borel’s proof is invalidated as it applies to evolution. Our universe is not only demonstrably, but dramatically, not a fully random system, and according to Big Bang theory has not been around for infinite time.

 

The strongest refutation of the monkey typist argument is inherent in thermodynamic law. If the monkeys are typing in our world, the real one, then the natural laws of this world apply. The definition of entropy in thermodynamic law states that entropic energy can never assume a significantly ordered state again; it is completely and permanently useless. Complete randomness in the physical world is 100% entropy.  Therefore, no ordered result can ever accrue in a fully random world in any amount of time.

 

Many of the physical constants that comprise the directional current toward life have now been described by Roger Penrose, Hugh Ross, Simon Conway Morris, D. D. Axe, Stephen Meyer, Michael Denton, William Dembski, and many others. Probability theory strongly confirms the enormous bias in the highly improbable outcome we have seen in the rapid achievement of complex life forms on Earth.[179] Therefore, our world is not the purely random system assumed by Borel, and if it were, no form would be produced in it at all based upon the entropic rules stipulated in the laws of thermodynamics. If you want to give up the laws of thermodynamics in the argument’s initial parameters, then you are not talking about our world.

 

Even if the book of life had only one volume, such as using Borel’s argument about monkeys typing Shakespeare implies (it has whole libraries), consisting of only a million characters using a 26-character alphabet, it would still be improbable to the tune of 261,000,000, which exhausts the time and physical resources of our universe trillions upon trillions upon trillions times over. Using Borel’s monkey typist theorem as an analogy for life is further invalidated because, once again, the neo-Darwinists conveniently forget that we have multiple books that must be achieved in sequence by accident under their theory. In this case the improbability for each must be multiplied by the other, generating even more astronomical figures that the real universe cannot support.     

 

Let’s look at the real world for a moment, instead of Borel’s abstract mathematical system. The standard mutation rate at one change per billion nucleotides per year is not the speed of typing. One nucleotide change every thousand years for a bacterium hardly equates to a monkey or human banging away at full speed, even blindly. A large book only has a million characters in it; the human genome has three billion, and there are a few genomes larger.

 

One can of course imagine with the neo-Darwinists that, if there were a way to constructively add up all the mutations from an entire population into a single creature every now and then, the math problem would be solved. But, as we discussed in the sections above concerning lateral transfers and the acquisition of genomes, if the consolidation process requires random, that is, accidental, transfers no time is gained and potentially greater damage is done than if single nucleotide changes had been used.

 

There are 1080 particles of physical matter, more or less, assumed to be in our universe. The number of combinations of particles are then 1080 raised to the power of 1080. There is presumably a range of these options that would still allow a world something like our own to be formed, but the odds against it are not substantially reduced for the purpose of our argument. The minimum time for a particle movement is 1045th fraction of one second. How many billions of years would it take to achieve a 51% probability of achieving the form of our world after moving things around randomly each 1045th of a second?   Yes, I’m going to say it…you figure it out!

 

Trust me, it’s a long time. It is far longer than the age of our universe at roughly 13.7 billion years, suffice it to say trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years. But even then, merely coughing up the design of our world for an instant flash in the pan is not enough; the design must be consistently held through epochs of time. Natural selection only helps on the biological side, not with holding randomly changing physics in place. Holding that same cosmological-geochemical form for only the smallest fraction of a second (1045th) requires the initial improbability to be multiplied by itself, at least given nearly full randomness many times per second. Thus with each passing fraction of a second the difficulty of the task increases exponentially. The amount of time required for an accidental event process to warrant the expectation of a consistent and stable world of natural law similar to our own within the bounds of a probability threshold endorsable by science is then incomprehensible.

 

An ongoing purely random process will repeatedly access the polished form of the manuscript, even after it is final. The book will nearly always be quickly ruined and degenerated into gibberish. In a truly random (Borelian) world (as opposed to the one we actually have), the Shakespearean masterpiece would exist only for an instant before another monkey grabs it from the author’s hand, reinserts it into the typewriter and changes it to, at best, one of the perennial favorites of the men’s room, such as “Here I sit…’[180] Neither natural selection nor anything else can function to preserve and continue the best designs in a truly accidental world because the designs themselves fluctuate chaotically. They are, as it were, in a state of constant re-proposal.

 

Many modern scientists say I am beating a dead horse here, that they have admitted the world to be nonaccidental for decades. The problem is that neo-Darwinists use Borel’s monkey typist theorem as an argument against intelligent design. Within the context of the assumptions of that theorem’s application to our world, the world is assumed to be truly accidental. Now the world is not accidental, now it is again. Every time objective scientists, philosophers, and theologians turn their back that dead horse I am accused of beating mysteriously rises and gallops through the countryside of neo-Darwinian arguments proclaiming the virtues of an accidental worldview, and the indisputable “fact” of neo-Darwinian evolution. Trust me: that horse “ain’t” dead in neo-Darwinian rhetoric.

 

A significant faction of scientists, specifically neo-Darwinian evolutionary theorists, have not abandoned the accidental worldview at all. They are simply loathe to try to defend it against modern data. A fully accidental world is incompatible with the very existence of natural law and therefore precludes science itself. Fully accidental worldviews contradict what cosmology has discovered so far of the initial highly ordered state of the universe at the Big Bang, as well as contradicting the laws of Thermodynamics. The 2nd Law says that entropy tends to increase. A fully accidental world begins with 100% entropy and therefore no tendency toward increased entropy can be grounded in such a system. Neo-Darwinists will counter that our world is not fully accidental, just largely so. But the math doesn’t work until the bias for life becomes so large that such largely nonaccidental worlds are still amenable to the purposes of an intelligent designer and cannot be used to support the atheist/materialist argument.

 

Yes, the “Paul Reveres” of accidental evolution continue to ride a dead horse, but they only ride “at night,” that is, amongst those who haven’t done their homework. One of “Paul’s” more recent excursions follows in the next quote, which is from the NCSE Web site. The bottom line for this part of our discussion is that the probability argument of intelligent design theory is not refuted by Borel’s theorem because the requisite conditions required for Borel’s theorem do not apply to the physical world.

 

Nonetheless, the public minded citizens at the National Center for Science Education remain certain that Borel’s monkey theorem refutes intelligent design definitively and proves that all of us who support ID are blithering idiots who can do neither math nor science. Here the author begins with the scientifically unsupportable assumption of an infinite universe and infinite time contrary to Big Bang theory, ignoring the fact that the only alternatives we have to Big Bang theory (including multiverse[181] and an infinite universe) are not testable and therefore not scientific theories at all. He goes on to say that those who challenge the monkey theorem are not interested in good science. (The author here mistakenly lumps intelligent design theory in with Creation Science, a common and all too convenient error among Darwinian evolutionists.)

 

Thus creationist probability arguments can often be undermined by pointing out that any event with a probability greater than 0, no matter how low, will be likely to happen, if given enough opportunity, and sure to happen if opportunity is unlimited.

 

This principle is sometimes illustrated with the following thought experiment (of which the reader has probably heard one version or another): Suppose that a monkey, trained to hit the keys of a typewriter one by one in a truly random fashion, types forever, producing infinitely many pages of texts. No one doubts that the monkey would type page after page of gibberish, but it follows from the above principle that sooner or later the monkey would type all of the works of Shakespeare from beginning to end, without error, solely by accident…  

 

The opponents of evolution are not interested in good science, and as I have attempted to show in this article, neither are they interested in good mathematics. Hence their arguments are not based on a complete and contemporary understanding of the scientific and mathematical principles that are relevant to the issue. This is yet another reason why creationist material has no business being taught in science classes - it threatens our students' education not only with bad science, but also bad mathematics.[182] 

 

These statements are ironic indeed, considering that what NCSE says here ignores the reality of genuine system descriptions in biology, and does not do the math at all in terms of computing the actual probabilities in relation to the actual time available.

 

And how can hearing both sides of the issue ever be a threat to science students in a democratic society? Errors in math, logic or empiric data can occur at any time on either side of a scientific debate, regardless of which position is ultimately proven correct. The neo-Darwinist side is not immune to such errors of logic, as I demonstrate in the first appendix where 101 glaring logical fallacies in the Darwinist argument are revealed. Under the logic NCSE proposes here, neo-Darwinian evolution should be banned from the schools because its proponents have made serious mistakes in their math estimates of the improbability of accidental evolution. Their entire proposal is scientific nonsense, of course. Banning a coherent theory from discussion, whether it is ultimately proved mistaken or not, is not a method of science. If lack of evidence were cause for censorship, accidental evolution should never have been discussed at all!

 

Information control such as NCSE proposes in this article has no place in any of the classrooms of a free democratic nation, least of all in science class. Our students deserve to hear both sides of this debate. 

 

The real questions of evolutionary science, of course, are tied not to what is possible in infinite time with no rules of natural law, but to what is likely in the limited time available in Earth’s history, given our natural laws and the constraining influence of events that have come before in our history.

 

In scientific prediction, test and theory evaluation, given both natural law and the description of prior events, probabilistic inferences are made possible as to which alternative outcome is most likely, often to the point of near certainty. Professor James W. Valentine reveals in chapter 3 of On the Origin of Phyla that it would, on average, take a monkey 10180 years just to type the first sentence of Darwin's Origin of Species. This is a trillion, trillion, trillion (15 repetitions) years and the Earth has only existed less than 5 billion years—the universe less than 14 billion years.

 

All the monkeys should be allowed to do under a strict application of the truths of biology to Borel's theorem is to shift sets of several fully edited pages at random until they line up to make the final text. This is what the facts of genetic science and the irreducibly complex nature of cellular and other biological systems require. Thus, neo-Darwinian theory is caught once again fully divorcing itself from any inconvenient facts of biology, physics, or mathematics. It is merely an imaginary construct that can only sound credible in fully abstract discussions that ignore hard data.

 

Our conclusion: The monkey typist example is fully disconnected from the facts of biology, physics, and cosmology. It can in no way be defended as representative of the actual biomechanics of evolution.

 

Doesn’t Natural Selection Make Accidental Evolution Possible?

In a recent Internet interview with ActionBioscience magazine, noted evolution text book author Professor Douglas Futuyma says this: 

 

The reason that natural selection is important is that it’s the central idea, stemming from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, that explains design in nature. It is the one process that is responsible for the evolution of adaptations of organisms to their environment. Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1859. Evidence to support evolution and natural selection, of course, has accumulated over time, and now science accepts that evolution is a fact and that natural selection explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place.[183] 

 

While respecting Professor Futuyma’s expertise in biology generally, I fully disagree on this point, one of the most basic questions of the evolutionary debate. There is an inescapable difficulty that modern biochemistry has brought to light: highly complex sets of genetic sequences and extragenetic changes must occur before natural selection votes. There is no quality control mechanism for the extensive early design work that must be done before an advantageous evolutionary adaptation is achieved. Natural selection can only favor design changes after they are complete; it cannot help to build them. If natural selection cannot explain how complex design changes are built but only that the survivable survive, is it really true that it “explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place”? No. And the Cambrian explosion adds substantially to this problem, because design information, presumably in the form of substantially completed genomes of creatures not yet built, must have been present at the begging of the Cambrian or in the Precambrian to accomplish most of the animal body plans in only 5-10 million years.

 

The Cambrian explosion poses a genuine challenge to those who, like Futuyma, casually assume the power and prevalence of natural selection as the driving force of evolution. It has prompted the late and distinguished Professor Susumu Ohno to pose the theory of a master genome with the genes needed for the new body plans being in place before natural selection sees those features and gets to vote on them. Famous living evolutionist James W. Valentine describes the event in much the same way in his contribution to Tempo and Mode in Evolution: "The explosion required a repatterning of gene expression that mediated the development of novel body plans but evidently did not require an important, abrupt increase in genomic or morphologic complexity."  

 

Ohno's theory and Valentine's interpretation of the evidence both indicate that the genes were in place in reasonably final form before the novel body plans began appearing in the early Cambrian. But this would mean that the bulk of the animal body plans were developed without natural selection ever having had a hand in the process. Many of the functions and structures of the Cambrian animals had never before appeared on the world stage, their phenotypes were previously unknown to nature. They were not selected as most competitive over a mass of failed design proposals as the classic accidental form of evolutionary theory requires.

 

Neo-Darwinian theory can only be saved here vis-à-vis this particular objection (it still fails based upon the previous discussion) if the neo-Darwinists can prove three things: 1) all the smaller components of the sets of genes needed for the new features of the Cambrian were in fact seen on the stage of life (this has not been done) prior to the Cambrian;  2) all the components were an advantage to their host creatures and therefore preserved by natural selection (this has not been done); and 3) either these components are such that they would naturally tend to assemble themselves rapidly into the new body types and other features seen to have appeared during the Cambrian, or rapid changes in gene expression marker changes (or some combination of the two) did the job (this has not been done).  

 

Even if these three difficult tasks can be eventually completed, we are still left with no explanation of how the fully formed genes for a myriad of novel forms, apparently latent in Precambrian fauna, could be composed by accident in the time available or how an accident could so quickly selectively activate all the right gene markers, particularly considering that we now know gene activation marker changes are complex, requiring multiple steps and coordination between several physical component systems.

 

The exact same mystery is seen at the base of the tree of life where evolution had to do this seemingly impossible task, pull together from simple raw chemicals the constituents of a vastly complex biological information system and precisely configure a half million RNA/DNA nucleotides into the minimum gene set that could support a simple organism. Simple organisms do not require only one gene (~1,000 nucleotides), or two or three, but parasites require from 300 to 500 genes, and independent life 1500. Humans have roughly 20,000-25,000 genes.

 

This same feat of originating new complex information had to be reaccomplished many times throughout the tree of life as new genes were needed that could not be generated by minor modifications to existing ones. Obviously there must have been a way, for it did happen, but my point is that what is possible for a system of natural law and physical constants geared to produce life (a purposive or directional system) is not possible for a purely accidental system aided only by natural selection.

 

In Darwin’s day before we could see inside the cell, natural selection offered an appealing explanation of design adaptation. It was never observed to be operating on the grand scale Darwinian theory asserted, however. There has been some 150 years of rapid scientific advancement since. We still have no proof that natural selection can pull the rabbit of macroevolution out of the hat of an accidental process. What ID theorists have discovered that the general public is still waiting to find out is that by doing the math rigorously (indeed, by doing it at all) we discover the concept of cumulative selection to be invalidated by standard probability theory.

 

The most recent findings in evolutionary genetics suggest that thousands of mini-Cambrian explosions, if you will, are what has produced the bulk of macroevolutionary innovations. Rapid bursts of internal reorganizations of genetic sequences and gene activation markers within the chromosomes of a phylum, genus, or species, aided by the occasional fortuitous lateral gene transfer, have been the source of radical new biological form innovation (macroevolution). While this supports the theory of punctuated equilibrium generally; it does not support an accidental theory of evolution.

 

Such rapid internal reorganizations of complex sets of genes, activation, integration, and regulatory elements do not give natural selection time to vote on the minimal component elements of design modules, that is, to help construct them, as neo-Darwinian theory has always claimed that it did—and these minimal design modules are not simple as neo-Darwinists have claimed; they are complex. Natural selection is left largely out of the loop on design proposal, though it will still vote to preserve the good designs.

 

Natural selection does see highly complex design modules being rapidly cranked out by the transpositional genomes of living organisms, a machine being produced by another more complex machine, but this is not the accidental scenario of neo-Darwinian theory. Granted, some of the modules won’t work because the process isn’t perfect. Here natural selection does help, but it cannot be considered the primary architect of biological systems design. Professor Behe sums up the situation.

 

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.[184]

 

Yes, genetic transpositions may be random in the sense of moving books around in the library, or chapters of books around to make a larger encyclopedic masterpiece (which is more like what is really happening), but science cannot explain how an accident could create the initial living creatures and their core genomes required to get the transpositional process started, or how an accident could originate the subsequent complex modules of biological design that followed.

 

It is time to face the facts, and the paradigm change in science that they inexorably drive. Darwinian evolution is an old theory, so old in fact that it has fallen fully out of touch with the realities of modern research. It is so far removed from the detailed biomechanics of organismal change that it has simply lost its force of explanation. It is standing on a handful of big names in evolutionary science that continue to irrationally affirm it, and upon nothing else whatsoever.

 

Natural selection undoubtedly occurs to some extent—survival of the fittest is unavoidable—but it can neither redeem the failings of an accidental process nor explain the Cambrian explosion, or the rapid bursts of macroevolution from the transpositional and developmental genomes. The presence of natural selection is not incompatible with intelligent design, of course. The concept of natural selection as one potential tool a designer might use is neither new nor implausible. Michael Ruse tells us in the seventh chapter of The Darwinian Revolution that both Darwin and Wallace, the co-originators of the theory of evolution (both amateurs by the way), separately allowed for this possibility of natural selection being just one tool in a designer’s toolkit, or one component of a nonrandom machine. Darwin posed this alternative in the form of the God as farmer analogy, with God selecting what to harvest and what to replant (throwing the rest away), while Wallace viewed natural selection as representing a self-regulating machine.

 

While ID theorists typically relegate natural selection to a much smaller role, they don’t have to do this to remain ID theorists. An intelligent designer who foresees the entire future of his creation can employ natural selection far more effectively than an accidental process.

 

Reality check: We don’t yet know the biomechanics of moving from one species to another. Until we do, accidental evolution can’t even be tested regarding the claim that the intermediate biomechanical steps required for accidental macroevolution of new creatures were all beneficial to the prior host creatures. There is no way to match up environmental changes that might have driven the selection of the intermediate biomechanical steps because we don’t know what the intermediate steps are—and we don’t know the history of Earth’s ecological, topographical, geophysical, and biochemical evolution in terms specific enough to reveal the relevant features of environmental niches for given species at particular times.

 

As Henry Gee tells us, we have little hope of ever extracting the historical information needed. To further complicate matters, much of the intermediate biomechanics of evolutionary change would produce no visible indicators in the host creature’s fossil form. Wherever that is true, and to the extent that it is true, neo-Darwinists are forever precluded from proving their theory. For many of the intermediate steps there has never been and will never be any historical data to find. So there really is no way to test the theory of natural selection and the neo-Darwinian theory of accidental evolution that fully depends upon it. There never has been and never will be much evidence for it—but there is now much that refutes it. 

 

Back in Darwin’s day, when science thought that living cells were quite simple, natural selection was a startlingly new, gee whiz kind of concept that appeared to be great progress in unmasking the mystery of life. Now that we know that living systems are so astronomically complex, natural selection doesn’t seem to explain anything important. The full extent of natural selection’s contribution to macroevolution will always remain unknown: it can’t be proved; it can’t be disproved; it can’t be tested. However, the real problem is now, if that weren’t enough, that it doesn’t explain. There were insufficient opportunities and insufficient time for it to act. In view of all this, natural selection must be relegated to being merely a small to moderate contributing factor to macroevolution, not the primary engine of it. This means that neo-Darwinian theory can no longer be justified as science’s favored theory of evolution.

 

Come One, Come All! Everyone Wins at Strickberger’s Lottery!

Dr. Monroe Strickberger, a noted evolutionary scientist and textbook author, claims that figure 4-2 of the first edition of his textbook, Evolution, and its accompanying explanation of natural selection completely allays any concerns one might have about accidental processes—this without mentioning a single biochemical fact! Strickberger’s explanation is 100% abstract (unconnected to the facts of microbiology at the level where the change must actually take place), as was Charles Darwin’s in the 1860’s. It incorporates none of the scientific advancements made since Darwin’s time. It is as fully unconnected to the biochemical systems of real organisms as Borel’s monkey typist theorem is, to which it has a close logical affinity. 

 

There are two flaws in Strickberger’s example that negate its value. First he stacks the deck by portraying a bowl full of workable adaptive combinations. Of course, if 90% of everything chance has to choose from works well for the organism’s advancement, evolution would be achieved in short order!

 

Strickberger is throwing us a curve ball here in that he can justify presenting a bowl full of workable adaptations on the basis of the actual historical process of evolution. Yes, the evolution of life was achieved in short order, so something akin to what he describes must have been involved. But he has subtly changed the subject, committing the logical fallacy of equivocation, or, if you prefer, bait and switch. He introduced the figure as a defense of the accidental model, not as a description of the real history of evolution. By confusing the two he has presented the nonrandom historical record of evolution as evidence of what an accidental process can do. This is the logical fallacy of equivocation writ very large indeed, and is therefore fully unacceptable as a defense of what accidental evolution can do even with the aid of natural selection. It merely begs the question of whether evolution was accidental or not; it does not answer the question.

 

Strickberger’s bowl full of letters defense of accidental evolution is essentially G. G. Simpson’s “Cat in the Hat” strategy, which is discussed by Michael Denton in chapter 13 of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Here are some of the difficulties with “Cat in the Hat.”

 

1)      As Michael Denton reveals in chapter 13 of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, the functional islands of viable mutational sets are not easily found, so there are very few letters of any kind in Strickberger’s bowl, and no cat in the hat.

 

2)      There is the further problem that the functional intermediates required by neo-Darwinian theory have not been proved to be real species on the tree of life, real living points in evolutionary history—they haven’t been found. So there is a problem of continuity, of moving between events of form change via an accidental process.

 

3)      The clincher is the fact that the pool of letters in the “hat” cannot be shown to be reduced more and more in favor of useful combinations as Simpson and Strickberger et al. claim until a living genome, a machine using a machine programming language, is first created (by means presently unknown to science and demonstrably out of the reach of an accident). They admit that they are beginning their explanation only after life has first been created; they are not attempting to explain abiogenesis. But they do not acknowledge that this changes their model from one possibly representing an accidental process to one definitely not representing an accidental process. Their model in fact merely derives life from life, not life from random physical events.

 

4)      Finally, irreducible complexity requires that, typically, many sets of amino acid-specifying nucleotide triplets be drawn out of the hat at one time to make a functional change in an organism. On the surface, macroevolution would seem to require an exorbitantly large number of such sets to produce any substantial functional feature and arrange its integration into an existing genome. (There is no gradualist biomechanic of evolution the neo-Darwinists can present to demonstrate otherwise. So far there is no biomechanic of evolution at all.) This removes the easy as pie assumption that neo-Darwinian theory has always affirmed based upon the false belief that individual nucleotides were the minimal units of biological change evolution requires to get the job done.

 

The only place in biology where the “Cat in the Hat” and the bowl of letters analogies makes sense is inside a living machine after the tripartite genome is present with its DNA dictionary and translation mechanisms. Even then it is only reaffirming the obvious: that reuse of DNA segments saves the probability and resource cost of reinventing them all over by accident. To go further to say that todays environmental niche-favored mutations are nothing less than the required genetic innovations to build tomorrow’s evolutions on the tree of life requires the corroboration of tracking such changes through evolutionary history. As we just discussed, Henry Gee has shown us our ability to do such a thing is very limited. The results can be expected to be quite sparse, and to date they are practically nil.

 

And future biological form variations that build upon reusable DNA sequences are not being spawned in a random chance environment. They are produced inside the closely controlled machine-environment of living genomes. Here biological “words” and “phrases” are manipulated, prevalidated against a dictionary, and transposed in ways that (much too often for a true accident) also preserve syntax. In this way the library of useful building blocks of life becomes more diversified and sophisticated over time, yes, and it does give evolution a more powerful tool kit, but the foundations of the process are not accidental

 

The genomic error repair and correction process, if nothing else, closely manages and constrains the extent to which limited random mutations are allowed within the genome. And it is far from clear that there are no subtle or long term logarithms used by the transpositional genome that further reduce the accidental element. The end result of all this is that the transpositional genome is visibly engaged in doing precisely what an accident cannot do: evolve living organisms without destroying them. Natural law pitches quite a bit of form determination input into the process and even environmental factors can induce heritable change to the genome. The entire dynamic biological form change process as revealed by modern biochemistry and genetics should more properly be described as an information exchange process than a classic mutational accident.

 

Yet Strickberger would have us believe that his bowl of letters model, which in biological reality correlates to the transpositional genome more than anything else, demonstrates what an accident can do. The biological truth is that it is not random chance that creates a set of increasingly effective filters for viable genetic sequences, as neo-Darwinists claim; it is living machines that do that. And they get a lot of help from a huge bias for life built into what Dr. Michael Denton calls the “Platonic forms” of protein structure already “hard-wired” into natural law, and several other self-organizational tendencies inherent in biochemistry and genetics.

 

Simpson and Strickberger might try to defend their analogies by saying, yes, the living system provides the set of increasingly effective filters for evolutionary advancement, but accident has built the living systems. However, this claim cannot be demonstrated since science has no explanation of abiogenesis of any kind—and there is a mountain of evidence arrayed against it. Furthermore, doing this merely takes neo-Darwinists in a circle because they are now using what they set out to prove with the model as a defense of the model: the thesis that an accident can make a machine. Remember, their “Cat in the Hat” and bowl full of letters analogies are supposed to be the proof that an accident can make the living machines of life.

 

Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. Michael Denton have informed us that, working upon the assumption of randomness that neo-Darwinists’ claim grounds the evolutionary process, the number of viable adaptive options present in the bowl would be exactly the opposite of Strickberger's assumption. There would be astronomically few opportunities for accident to find new DNA sequences useful to evolution. Truly accidental evolution gives us a virtually empty hat to work with, at least in terms of real evolutionary time. Thus, the flip-flopping technique, equivocation, bait and switch, whatever you want to call it, is the best strategy neo-Darwinists have to make their accidental theory seem to be possible. They can describe the real event of evolution (which works), but they can’t call it an accident. Or they can produce an abstract model that is accidental but will not work to create life and does not mirror real evolution. However, they cannot show the real event of evolution to be accidental. So what their discussions tend to do is simply vacillate between the two without warning the reader of the switch. When the neo-Darwinists start moving to computer simulations and artificial models, look out; you are almost certainly being taken for a ride, for they cannot connect the model to reality by real evidence. They can only say “Experts built the model.” This is the notorious “Argument from Authority” fallacy, or if you prefer, “Trust me.” 

 

Clearly, evolution has acted as if the "bowl" was in fact full of viable adaptive combinations because it has made so much progress in such a short time. And there is precious little evidence of failed attempts along the way. But this is not surprising because the real “bowl of letters” cannot help but create life because it is life. Thus the real bowl of letters from which evolution works has nothing whatsoever to do with an accidental model.

 

Dr. Stephen Meyer, citing the work of D. D. Axe, has told us that protein synthesis studies show that less than a handful of random amino acid substitutions will destroy the viability of the protein—generally more than one random change is too many.[185] DNA mutations are predominantly deleterious as well. An accidental process simply will not produce the neat and clean lockstep road to inevitable progress that Strickberger portrays in his diagram. It is mathematically “impossible,” meaning science cannot rationally affirm something so improbable, although it might in theory occur as the wildest fluke. Ironically, what Strickberger has portrayed with his bowl full of letters is not accidental evolution, but a large bias for producing viable new life forms that is inherent within life itself!

 

Claim jumping, equivocation, begging the question, circular reasoning, the whole discussion is nothing but a string of fallacies. (See Appendix 1 for a list of 101 such fallacies found in the neo-Darwinian argument.) When neo-Darwinists get to the hard parts of the explanation of life they just  cheat; it is that simple.

 

There is yet another fallacy. It occurs in Figure 4-2, and it is a mathematical one, involving a gross violation of the rules of standard probability theory. Strickberger pulls an odd math trick on us (not necessarily intentional) concerning how to compute the improbability of achieving multiple steps in a sequential process. Strickberger’s probability formula here is just wrong. Its effect is to seriously mislead readers on the critical question of whether or not accidental evolution is too improbable to be a plausible theory. Strickberger makes overcoming the improbability of Darwinian evolution sound like a walk in the park, when it is in fact a walk in (mathematical) Jurassic Park, where the obstacles are gigantic.

 

To be more specific (and it is very hard to find any coherence to what he says), appears to be saying that because natural selection can lock in adaptive combinations it can reduce the total improbability of the complete set of steps in a long sequence to no more than the improbability of the final step. This not only violates the standard rules of probability computation, it is just visibly ridiculous. Strickberger blatantly deletes the probability cost for thousands of incredibly difficult first-time evolutionary achievements. There is no mathematical or logical justification for doing this whatsoever. His conclusion is simply a non sequitur.

 

Perhaps what Strickberger is trying to get across with the bowl of letters is that ID theorists are always harping about “complexity,” “complexity,” “complexity,” but here, with the bowl of letters, we see that achieving complexity is as easy as pie because, when we get to constructing the most complex phrases at the end of long lines of development, we need merely snap together a bunch of the reusable simpler components (all very “simple,” he implies, and therefore very easy). For some strings of letters and words this may be true, but the analogy is broken to biology because achieving just one biologically viable protein by accident even after life has been created is exorbitantly hard, once again, due to the immense complexity and sensitivity of the proteins of life.

 

The proteins of life are so complex that achieving only two of them in sequence by accident is improbable (10-77 X 10-77 = 10-154) beyond the threshold that chance can cross, which is 10-150. The full resource base of particle events for the history of the universe is only 10150.[186] Assuming standard probability theory, the average outcome requires a number of attempts equal to half the total improbability to achieve the result, in this case two viable proteins. However, half of 10154 is still 5 X 10153. Our universe cannot afford to make the achievement of even two viable proteins by accident more probable than not (that is, at least 51% probable). Science can never legitimately support the expectation of the less probable over the more probable, so the theory of accidental evolution assisted only by natural selection fails. Neither Strickberger’s bowl of letters or G. G. Simpson’s Cat in the Hat, both of which are analogical representations of Richard Dawkins’ “cumulative selection,” can save it.

 

To keep the analysis simple, there are three basic problems. Strickberger skips almost all the steps in a sequence of complex design development, only calculating the probability cost of the last step; he misrepresents the individual minimal steps of life as being very simple and easy, when they are exorbitantly difficult and complex; and he assumes that snapping them together to form astronomically complex machines having hundreds of closely matched interrelated components reaching many layers deep even to the electromagnetic properties of molecules and the atomic level will invoke no serious complexity hurdles. It employs invalid math, and it is bio-molecular nonsense—completely unconnected to the facts of biology.

 

The proper way to compute the probability of the steps in evolution is as follows. First, the probability cost for all steps counts in the first instance of construction for each design element; then substantial deductions can be allowed for reuse. Next the improbabilities of two or more succeeding steps in a process (first instances only if reuse occurs) must always be multiplied by each other. It doesn’t matter how strongly some physical event process intervenes to lock an earlier step into place: “…the chance that two or more independent events will occur together is the product of their chances of occurring separately.”[187] All that is accomplished by locking in a feature is to ensure its availability for reuse; the probability cost for initial construction of each separate design component remains unaffected.

 

Natural selection, even the new version, cumulative selection, only reduces the improbability for accidental evolution from an incomprehensibly enormous magnitude to one that is by scientific standards still fully impossible in the available time. Reuse of previously designed component systems does decrease probability by an enormous margin from what it would otherwise be, though not nearly by the magnitude required. Counting only the first-time achievements takes us far beyond the resource limits of our universe.

 

This is what the highly-vaunted magical concept of “cumulative selection” is all about, and all that it is about. To go beyond cost reduction via reuse to asserting that the form innovations natural selection approves as beneficial to creatures in their environmental niches also just so happen to combine together with extreme specificity and against all odds to build all of the future complex new designs of the tree of life that otherwise have no relevance to the creature’s present survival fitness quotient whatsoever is to move beyond the credible range of an accidental process which can do no such thing. It is to move into the realm of precognition where intelligent design is clearly required.

 

The bottom line for the math here is that neither the preservation process of natural selection nor the possibility of reuse removes the requirement to compute the improbability of achieving each unique biological form module in its first occurrence on the tree of life—and then multiply them all by each other in sequence. Table 1 above gives an abbreviated look at what that probability cost would be for just the first occurrences of biological modules, and the cost far exceeds the time and resources available in the history of our universe.

 

Strickberger says the achievement of the tree of life is made fully tractable to an accidental process by his line of reasoning about letters, which he never bothers to ground in real biological data. Is accidental evolution so easy that no competent scientist should give the matter a second thought, as Strickberger implies? Hardly—the straightforward improbability of achieving a human being with a 3,000,000,000bp genome, 100,000,000,000 neurons with thousands of connecting fibers, 900 billion glial cells in the brain, 10,000,000,000,000 cells in the body each using hundreds to thousands of the total inventory of 85,000 unique proteins that make up the human body, each distinct protein improbable in itself to a magnitude of 10-77, each cell doing hundreds of tasks per minute, the total organism integrating hundreds of intricate biological machines all working closely together in close precision is far beyond the magnitude that would exhaust all of the time and physical resources of the universe before an accidental process could achieve human life. Can the complexity of these processes be adequately captured by pulling letters out of a hat? No way. Strickberger never counts the letters required to make the tree of life and then compare it to the time and physical particle resources our universe has had available to complete the process. Life is too complex and the resources are not available.

 

To add a final insult to injury, under close scrutiny, Strickberger’s bowl of letters turns out to be the designs of life, not their accidental precursors as he implies! How does an accidental process get to those designs, wasn’t that the question he started out to answer? He has an answer. It is the obvious one, and it sounds awfully good until you do the math and check the biological data. Paraphrased, it runs something like this.

 

It’s all done one step at a time. Evolution starts slow, and very gradually picks up speed in forming an ultimately huge bias for complex life—all by accident, helped only by natural selection. Nothing to it really: natural selection simply locks in what works for the creature in its current environment. Fortuitously enough, it just so happens that many of the modules achieved for past creatures are precisely what evolution needs to build future creatures. And this fortuitous coincidence is partly just an accident, and partly just a truism: “What can be built will be built.” It doesn’t have to be any particular creature that comes out of the pipe next; it can be any creature whatsoever—whatever works given a recombination of the modules available, plus a modicum of genuine innovation of new biological information at the time. ‘You pays your money and you takes your chances’, as Tom Clancy is fond of saying. Chance pulls the novel parts all together and a new creature is formed, so are new, more complex, subsystems and larger component design modules. The availability of these latter items make the next generation of evolution easier still by adding modular capabilities to the inventory available during the last cycle. In other words, the list of gizmos and gadgets that nature has to work with grows incrementally over time due to natural selection preserving them, and so new design achievement keeps getting easier and easier. With each round of changes natural selection again locks those useful building blocks into the inventory by preserving the new creature and all its novelties. Then the process is repeated over and again, all completely accidental, with incremental forward progress until the tree of life is done. “Walla Boobie, accidental evolution proved!”

 

Sounds good so it must be true, right? No. The problem once again is, kind of like our national debt issue here in the United States: it would be nice if it could all happen that way, but we just can’t afford it. This is what Professor William Dembski is saying, very much like our Tea Party. There simply are not enough resources to get all of this done in the time available. And by the way, evolutionists have never tracked and charted the modules to show that one generation’s fitness modules in fact correspond to a sufficient set of design modules to build the next creatures on the tree of life, or reduce the total new biological information innovation task to within the mathematical reach of the resources available. It simply hasn’t been done. They have a few matches of partial sets, and that is it.

 

What you just heard, that fully abstract step by step discussion in the prior inset paraphrase is the full theory of neo-Darwinian evolution, including the magical concept of cumulative selection. No math, no genetic complexity data, no systems complexity data, no probability computations, no resource limits, no microbiological systems descriptions, no nothing, as Mom used to say when she was standing on her dignity (May God rest her lovable soul in Heaven). Neo-Darwinian theory is fully divorced from the descriptive biological data, from the quantitative measurements, and from the mathematical computations of available resources. When you describe the system and do the math, what neo-Darwinists make sound so easy in the abstract becomes scientifically incredible; it couldn’t have happened by accident.

 

In Figure 4-2 Strickberger is only right in so far as he says that nature has acted as if it had a bowl full of useful biological changes ready. The formidable improbability in achieving only two proteins by accident tells us that the bias was not built up incrementally at all; it was there at the beginning or the process would never have “gotten off the ground.” While Strickberger’s description of evolution is correct in general terms, his quantitative evaluation is all wrong. It is actually missing, but what he implies about the math (that it works for his hypothesis) is wrong. And he gives neither the biomechanics of macroevolution nor a genuine theoretical defense of the accidental dynamic.

 

Even his description is problematic in that it suggests precisely the opposite conclusion from the one he draws. It suggests that purpose or design has been built into nature. Strickberger has co-opted famous evolutionist G. G. Simpson’s example of how nature impressively increases the odds of successful adaptation over time almost verbatim—but he has left out the punch line that Simpson admitted: an accidental process could not do this. Simpson affirmed cumulative selection, yes, but he admitted that a fully accidental world could not be the foundation for such a process. Simpson even allowed the possibility that God was the planner whose purpose was manifested in the strong bias that brought about life against all odds.[188] Simpson says that nature’s tendency to increasingly lock in more and more adaptive combinations explains, not why the process is less improbable than it looks, but how evolution managed to achieve the highly improbable.[189]

 

So let’s do the math again in brief and see how realistic Strickberger’s story of evolution turns out to be. At a minimum each of the unique proteins in life must at least be counted toward the total probability cost of evolution, or each of the unique DNA sequences that correspond to them. Working from the protein side of things, the improbability, strictly computed, equates to 10-77 X  10-77 X  10-77…to at least 200,000 repetitions (assuming a minimum of 200,000 unique proteins occur through the tree of life), or roughly 10-15,400,000.

 

Alternatively, working another math short cut from the genome, the improbability is at least 4-1,500,000,000, and this accounts for only half the human genome (after subtracting the presumed to be “junk” portion which will probably turn out to be non-junk). Even after reducing the numbers thousands of orders of magnitude to account for the efficiency of reuse, an accidental process attempting to achieve such an improbable result would exhaust the physical and time resources of the universe (which is only 10150 particle events) trillions upon trillions upon trillions of times over.[190]

 

Yet Strickberger portrays the accidental evolutionary process as so easy as to be nothing worthy of the concern of science, when in no other field of science would such an improbability be endorsed as even a remote hypothesis. So, Strickberger’s story (which is neo-Darwinian theory) is a work of fiction that bounces off the math and biological data.

 

It is true that what we actually see in the fossil record is strongly geared toward an increasingly fit product, though not unanimously without exception, and even then, one has to allow that intelligence is in fact an advantage to show a positive trend. This pattern may result from many forms of a bias for life, including a chemical selection that favors the biotic molecules of life, such as has been described by Sidney Fox, and the self-organizational tendency of the genomes to form themselves into more and more complex versions (described by Stuart Kauffman), perhaps in combination with Michael Denton’s stronger formulation of natural law that invokes predetermined forms for proteins.[191] Certainly what we see in evolution is self-organization on a grand scale. Such mechanisms of self-organization are plausible tools an intelligent designer could use, and they could not plausibly be the manifestation of an accident pulling a cat out of a hat.

 

Our conclusion: One has to be very careful, to remain alert for both logical error and linguistic subtleties when reading neo-Darwinian literature. In the course of reading no more than two brief and innocuous looking sentences concerning the “bowl of letters/cat in the hat” analogies, one in Simpson, and the other in Strickberger, we are moved fully from the admission of the observed fact that the improbability of life fully forbids its accidental achievement to the exact opposite, a new neo-Darwinian “proof” that accident could create life standing on its head—both from the precise same analogy! “Walla Booby! Accidental evolution proved at last. Come one, come all. Everyone wins at Strickberger’s lottery!” Please….

 

Surely, science can do better than this. This fully fails Carl Hempel’s long-established requirement for explanatory relevance, which along with testability, are the two classic criteria used to evaluate scientific theories.[192] As we see in Appendix 3, neo-Darwinian theory fails on the testabiity criterion as well. Nothing Strickberger says goes to an authentic defense of an accidental process. A cat has been pulled from the hat alright, but evolution hasn’t done it; Strickberger has.

 

OK, Fine. Natural Selection Fails. But Doesn’t Natural Law Make the Accidental Issue Go Away?

Darwinists and even some laymen may intuitively object: "Natural law has the ability to produce order. So let’s not call the evolutionary process accidental, let’s just say it wasn’t done on purpose. Then we don’t have to look ridiculous trying to explain the fantastically sophisticated designs and highly ordered systems of nature as resulting from accidents because natural law itself explains everything—and, as a bonus, we can still get rid of that primitive old superstition about God." Walla Booby! Neo-Darwinian evolution proved at last, right? No, not quite.

 

First of all, if it’s not an accidental process aided only by natural selection, it’s not neo-Darwinian. Second, saying that nature is a machine-building machine does not relieve us of the difficulty inherent in explaining how an accident can make a sophisticated machine (millions of them); it replaces the problem with one that is even more difficult. A machine-building machine is still a machine, just somewhat more complex. Neo-Darwinists may respond by saying, “Well nothing made natural law; it just is; it’s eternal.” But to say that something “just is” is not to offer a scientific explanation; it is to forsake not only scientific explanation, but proof and testability.

 

To assert eternal natural law fully begs the question of whether God exists. Taking such a position reduces neo-Darwinian theory to superstition or unjustified faith, particularly in view of the fact that it contradicts the currently well-accepted theory of cosmology, Big Bang theory. In merely asserting the nature of our world without proof (and in contravention to our best scientific theories), neo-Darwinian theory ceases to be a scientific theory itself, and becomes, as Christoph Cardinal Schönborn said in the New York Times editorial, mere ideology—or as noted philosopher of science Karl Popper once called it, a metaphysical research project (materialistic scientism). Here, as Mary Midgley has shown us in her book Evolution as a Religion, what should be the theory of evolution (which requires proof) becomes the religion of what one might call “atheistic evolutionism”—and there are plenty of “believers” out there. But a theory that doesn’t require proof is not a theory at all; it’s a personal faith. At least Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims can encounter God. How does one encounter eternal natural law?[193]

 

Stephen Meyer, citing the seminal works of Hubert Yockey and Michael Polanyi, explains that, based upon what we know of natural law at the present time, the level of complexity and the type of information that science can currently demonstrate to be inherent in natural law (that is, its magnitude, complexity, and mathematical, logical and structural forms), visibly mismatches, and certainly does not entail, the more complex design information of living creatures.[194] Natural law, therefore, cannot qualify as a full explanation of life until it can be shown to be capable of generating the more complex forms of information resident in living designs—and our best science tells us natural law is not eternal; it had a beginning at the Big Bang. So, using eternal natural law as an explanation of life that does not require intelligent design to get the ball rolling fails for these two big reasons: 1) natural law is insufficient to produce life without adding immense amounts of outside information; and 2) natural law is not eternal.

 

To the extent that we have presently described them, our natural laws are merely compatible with the origination and evolutionary development of life; they do not require it. However, Michael Denton’s recent work suggests that natural law is making a significant contribution to facilitating life in defining preset forms for the biologically viable proteins. So it is almost certainly true that, when combined with the many physical constants known to be fine-tuned for life (which are not required by natural law alone), all the laws taken together do produce a huge bias for life that is nearly certain to produce life within the history of our universe. This is something the accidental thesis cannot claim, for an accidental process requires trillions of trillions of trillions the time available in the history of our universe. 

 

So, yes, natural law certainly becomes a large component of a plausible theory for the origin and evolution of life, for it helps produce a large bias for life that is monumental in its magnitude. But natural law is not the full answer. The kinds of simple information structures in natural law as presently formulated are incapable of generating astronomically complex, highly differentiated, living, interactive systems. Living creatures have billions-long sequences of precisely formatted DNA code with a corresponding translation system, error checking and repair systems, protein and organelle construction systems, regulation systems, materiel transportation systems, immune (defense) systems, nervous systems and conscious brain, a developmental genome which directs the construction of the entire body, and a ten level deep vertically stacked organizational hierarchy of biological machines and systems of machines embedded into each other. In addition, in any given moment, intercellular communication is taking place between cells, organs, and tissues to guide their interactions in untold thousands of transactions horizontally.[195] To create such complex forms of life, natural law would require a much richer information structure than science has heretofore ever theoretically attributed to it.  

 

As our natural laws are presently described there is a strong theoretical consideration that literally proves that our natural laws taken as a complete set are not the source of order in the universe. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that this natural law governed universe is winding down in terms of ordered content; it is moving towards increased disorganization, or entropy. Entropy or disorganization tends to increase with every physical transaction that occurs and never decreases. The effect of our natural laws taken together as a complete set, then, because they all conform to and implement the more basic 2nd Law, is not to increase order at all, but to decrease it. They only govern the dynamic transactions of physical forces and objects, managing and transforming order already present—they did not create that order. All the while they require the average loss of some energy and order to entropic disorganization.

 

This does not preclude the formation of life in a subsystem of the universe where localized increases in order can be offset by losses elsewhere, but it does mean that when the natural laws were first applied to the initial increment of matter and energy at the Big Bang natural law could not have been the source of the initial order imposed upon that matter and energy at the Big Bang because the best natural law can do is to leave order at the same magnitude in which it was encountered, and then not for long before reducing it. In other words, natural law is a governing system for the order which already exists, it is not a source of the initial order in the universe, and the 2nd Law exacts a periodic maintenance fee that incrementally reduces the total magnitude of order in the universe over time.

 

Neo-Darwinists are quite fond of reminding us that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not preclude life's formation in a localized subsystem of the universe (like Earth) so long as the entropy of the larger system of the universe does not decrease as a result. This much is true, but it is irrelevant to our argument against natural law as the source of life. What the defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution fail to note is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics reveals that randomness as such is not, and cannot be, the original source of the order in the universe because randomness as such is entropy and no order can be derived from pure entropy whatsoever. Thus, randomness is not itself alone the explanation for life and adding nothing but natural law to it, which requires the initial order to decrease over time, while it can produce life in a local subsystem from the order it is given, it cannot be the source of that order.

 

The singularity of the Big Bang is the source of that order (which singularity looks exactly like a miracle). This can be deduced, once again given the way our natural laws are currently described because natural law is not the source as presently described and we know of no other candidates. Almost certainly the demonstration of a greater information content in natural law sufficient to entail life in and of itself will never be achieved because the informed content of matter and energy at the Big Bang is itself already known to be a large component of the total information needed to generate life in that the precise values of so many parameters and physical constants critical to life seem to derive from that initial state description. In theory, natural law could be later found to contain duplicate information, but finding that the universe is redundantly configured for such an astronomically complex and improbably result just confirms the bias for life even further, making accident an even less likely mathematical long shot than we have already seen it to be.

 

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that in tracing the physical chain of events back to the Big Bang, science at some point in the future discovers they have made some mistakes: the physical parameters and values critical to life are not derivable from the initial state description of the universe after all. In this case, the only remaining alternative will be that some subsequent event or group of events presently unknown to science inserted additional information into our universe from outside sometime after the Big Bang: miracles, singularities, cross-over transactions from other universes—something. All of these events, in interjecting design information, would look, on the surface, very much like a creator intervening to manipulate his creation.

 

Within the context of evolution discussions neo-Darwinian evolutionists and materialist scientists act as if such a thing is unthinkable for science to propose. Yet, they accept with complete equanimity the description of billions of black holes as singularities where the laws of physics break down, as well as the unexplainable singularity at the Big Bang that is the source of absolutely everything in our universe. They also allow that wormholes or other yet to be discovered eccentricities of physics can provide pathways between other universes and our own—and that there might be many other universes out there. All the while, science cannot explain how the ordered structures of the cosmos came to be or how life might have originated and evolved. Is that consistent? No, it reflects a prejudice against intelligent design theory and against God.

 

Ultimately, for the present discussion, it just doesn’t appear that natural law has what it takes. From my perspective, the logic Meyer uses in his summary refutation of structuralism in “The Origin of Biological Information” is good. The only natural laws with proximate application to the spontaneous assembly of biological machines are the laws of chemistry. But the laws of chemistry are known, and they are known to be relatively simple in comparison to the astronomically complex information rich content of living organisms. Michael Denton’s theory of Platonic forms being inherent in biotic proteins may dramatically alter this, particularly if it can later be shown that the proteins essential to life will self-organize with high probability under the conditions of primeval Earth. At lower levels of life’s matrix information structures may ultimately be found that are fully sufficient to entail the complex design structures of life (assuming we could ever map such an enormous and intricate matrix).

But Denton’s argument accrues on the side of intelligent design, as does any system of nearly full self-organization—at least they refute accidental evolution assisted only by natural selection.

 

Perhaps a demonstration may someday really be made that a statistical bias exists in natural law and the initial state of our universe sufficient to guarantee life’s ultimate creation given billions of years of time. Personally, I fully expect this to occur. I expect a visible advancement toward such a demonstration to continue from this day forward. In other words, the self-organization theorists don’t yet know how right they are! After all, life did originate somehow, and the concept is not so radically new. Roger Penrose and Simon Conway Morris have told us the mathematical specificity of the bias for life and the actual physical tendencies in the processes of nature are all as right as rain to make a thesis of nearly full self-organization a rational hypothesis.

 

Let’s face it, the only alternative to an impotent accident (that will never produce life in real evolutionary time) and a potent self-organizational bias that can, given sufficient time and resources, produce life is a direct and continuous intervention of the designer/creator of life. While such intervention could occur, and discovery of multiple points where information has been injected into our universe from outside would suggest such an explanation, a theory with God frequently interacting to change his creation is not tractable to routine manipulation by science. Science won’t prefer it even if future evidence suggests it. The intellectual stock for the hypothesis of potent self-organization can’t help but climb in the future.

 

Ongoing periodic divine intervention that modifies the physical world is presumed to be beyond a full demonstration by science, and it is ruled out almost universally even by theologians—it will always be the political black sheep in theology. Therefore, such a theory, while possibly true, can only garner at best very limited intellectual-political support. Thus, in the leading contender, a highly potent network of “self-organization,” we have a process that strongly suggests intelligent design because it equates to a machine-building machine. And if we want to remain consistent with the spirit and tradition of science, to continue to look for a deeper and deeper explanation where one is available, intelligent design theory is the only explanation that reaches levels below self-organization. The only alternatives are “It’s just that way” or “Shit happens,” both of which equate to an “explanation stops here” sign. 

 

At a minimum, being compatible with intelligent design, self-organization should not be portrayed as a mutually exclusive alternative to ID. There are three options where self-organization are concerned: self-organization as a potential instrument of an intelligent designer; self-organization as an eternal artifact of an eternal universe having no designer; or self-organization as an emerged property of an eternal universe having no designer. In the latter case of emergence, we already know from the previous mathematical arguments that if a machine-building machine capable of building life emerged it did not happen by accident. The math tells us there was not sufficient time and physical particles for such a thing to occur within the probability thresholds of scientific credibility. So, it is not accidental emergence we are talking about here. Here we are left with a dichotomy between it’s not accidental (by intelligent design) and it’s not accidental (and it’s just that way).

 

Thus, if we are to be consistent with the spirit and tradition and science and move to a deeper explanation where one is available, it’s our turn to exclaim, “Walla Boobie, Intelligent Design Theory is proved!” We are entitled. Intelligent design is not proved as an absolute fact—nothing in science ever is—but it is established as the scientifically most meritorious option. It should therefore be formally christened science’s default theory of life’s creation and evolution.

 

In the meantime, pending radical advances in proteomics, nanosystems research, and investigations of the electromagnetic and atomic properties of molecules that can reach down into the subatomic level, self-organization is not seen to be so potent. We know only the rudiments of the basic kinds of standard molecules that tend to spontaneously form. We know that the self-organization of a few amino acids and protocells can occur. Simple self-propagating catalytic reactions that have points of similarity to our sugar based metabolic process might be captured temporarily in a micro spherule along with a few amino acids, and possibly even a couple of heat-generated proteins of no use to life…but that’s about it.[196] In other words, in terms of presently demonstrable self-organizational processes science can explain a simple form of natural flatulence. What it cannot explain is the origination of a true life form having design structures so magnificent as to dwarf any machine we can ourselves create. It cannot explain bacterium, let alone a human being. Yet at times the super-ebullient self-confidence of neo-Darwinian rhetoric has reached such a nonsensical pitch that one is tempted to describe the situation as flatulence describing flatulence.[197] Neo-Darwinists exaggerate self-organization to keep their accidental theory afloat, but if self-organization were in fact so potent as they claim, intelligent design would in fact be established! Talk about claim jumping. Neo-Darwinists have no shame. This is a hallmark of the Marxist influence in their intellectual inheritance.

 

In summary, when one looks at natural law in isolation, he or she has to say that, yes, there is significant ordered information content inherent in natural law. It permits some basic structure to arise out of what would otherwise be chaos (though we can’t yet say how), and has succeeded in preserving the larger portion of that order over time, while continuously losing more and more order to entropy. (The order our universe does have is “leaking” to entropy; our universe is winding down, as it were.) But so does a child produce order out of a pile of building blocks, tinker toys or Lincoln logs. That does not mean, however, that the child can go into a nuclear power plant and repair the electronic console (the incentive of free donuts notwithstanding). Such tasks require a different order of magnitude of information-generating capacity than the child can produce. There is a critical threshold there. The child can’t cross it, and science has not shown (and is not likely to show) that natural law can cross the complexity threshold inherent in life.

 

Perhaps unbeknownst to many, it remains possible (and appears likely) that science will discover many critical complexity thresholds along the pathway of life’s evolution (in addition to abiogenesis). Any one of them might defeat either an accidental process or a “non-accidental” process having only a very limited information generating capacity (such as natural law would have minus the help of the ordered matter and energy at the Big Bang). Merely crossing any one or more of those thresholds does not guarantee that any of the others can be crossed.

 

For example, let’s start at the beginning with abiogenesis, the transition of life from nonliving chemicals. The public, and perhaps many scientists, from the initial forays into origins of life science in the 1950’s, perhaps even until the present time, have assumed that the most difficult step in the origin of life/evolution was the first one—perhaps the only difficult step. Recent speculations about ultra-simple protocells however, although they are probably not truly alive, show that the first step may not be the most difficult at all. A creature capable of independent life requires 1500 genes, but a single gene in the brain can express 36,000 proteins! Is the brain more complex than a bacterium? To my knowledge, there is presently insufficient research to answer the question, but the question in that case remains open. Given life as a starting point, certainly the brain is more complex on the surface as a structure.

 

But just because the structure seems more complex doesn’t mean that the process of creating the brain, given the availability of biotic proteins, is more complex than the process of abiogenesis where biotic proteins must be first created from raw chemicals. Abiogenesis, the creation of life from nonliving chemicals, does not have the luxury of assuming the existence of the fantastically complex and functionally specific biotic proteins. So, the comparison is between abiogenesis, which must create the biotic proteins, and construction of the brain after those proteins have already been created. Here further research and analysis is needed to answer the question of where the greater complexity lies. Nonintuitively enough, in terms of straightforward construction, abiogenesis would seem to get the nod, because the structure of a single biotic protein appears more complex than the simple protein-based structure of the entire brain, even with synaptic networks added. The competition heats up, however, when the operations of the brain, are added to its structural complexity, involving as they do hugely complex protein-protein (proteomics) and electro-chemical interactions. When will this research be done? Probably not soon, though some scientists may already offer estimates.

 

But our main point here is that there are other candidates for critical thresholds of complexity in the hierarchical construction process of the tree of life. Consider, for example, the relatively innocuous process of cell replication in complex organisms. The first step in the replicative process, initiation, alone has five component steps, each pretty impressive in its own right.

 

Eukaryotic DNA replication is regulated to ensure all chromosomes replicate once and only once per cell cycle. Replication begins at many origins scattered along each chromosome. Except for building yeast, origins are not defined DNA sequences and probably are inherited by epigenetic mechanisms. lnitiation at origins occurs throughout the S phase according to a temporal program that is important in regulating gene expression during development…the mechanism of initiation is conserved and consists of origin recognition, assembly of pre-replication (pre-RC) initiative complexes, helicase activation, and replisome loading. Cell cycle regulation by protein phosphorylation ensures that pre-RC assembly can only occur in G1 phase, whereas helicase activation and loading can only occur in S phase. Checkpoint regulation maintains high fidelity by stabilizing replication forks and preventing cell cycle progression during replication stress or damage.[198]

 

One really has to say it; isn’t this exactly the kind of language one expects NASA to use to describe a lunar module or some piece of intricate scientific equipment? Yet, neo-Darwinists stubbornly insist there is no justification for the intelligent design inference from nature. But I digress.

 

The question is, can accident cross this threshold of complexity or others that are vastly more severe, even if abiogenesis and initial biotic protein construction win the race for most complex? Not necessarily. It is not about which steps are the most complex; it is about which steps are complex enough. In theory, accident can fail all of the major steps in the evolution of life, and certainly appears to be a high risk of doing it given the current complexity data from genetics and microbiology. Even so, Charles Darwin himself admitted that it only takes the inability of an accidental process to generate any one of these steps to refute the accidental theory of evolution. Why go to such trouble to belabor the obvious? Because it just might happen that one of these days science will in fact be able to engender a living cell from nonliving chemicals: abiogenesis. I don’t expect it, but my point is, should such a thing occur it will not save accidental evolution from being disproved by the failure of an accident to achieve the other steps in building the tree of life. It may turn out that there are many steps more complex than creating the simplest living cell. And if there are not, we will be looking Michael Denton square in the face, because that will mean that an enormous amount of information is packed into the forms of biotic proteins. If natural law dictates their production in a well-ordered and highly probable fashion, then, once again, we are looking at a very potent form of self-organization that implies intelligent design.

 

When, where, and why can such thresholds be crossed, and at what probability cost if the process is presumed accidental? Which thresholds pose the highest difficulty factor for an accidental process, and which are more difficult than the simplest form of abiogenesis? Can a 1500 gene compliment reproduce all of the features that we know our human tripartite basic, developmental, and transpositional genomes include (almost certainly not)? What further features of the genomes are yet to be discovered that will increase complexity barriers even further? We don’t know the answers to these questions, and so we cannot yet assume that the hardest part is done with abiogenesis.

 

Neo-Darwinists may counter, well we certainly know abiogenesis is the hardest step, or at least that it provides the greatest reduction in difficulty level to further advancements of life because, by physically constraining all operations within the cell wall, all kinds of uncontrollable variables that might abort systems development are excluded. The ability to work in a controlled and protected environment with informational transposition capability is all evolution really needs to get rolling after all. Natural selection handles the rest. Sounds pretty good on the surface, but we don’t actually know it to be true. In fact it is a gross oversimplification, and it unjustifiably anticipates the nature of future research.

 

But let’s, for the sake of argument, say they are right about that much. If they are right, then Strickberger’s bowl of letters, representing, as it does, processes occurring within living systems after first life is achieved, becomes even more of a rigged game. The hard part is already done when the first genome-enabled living cell appears on the scene with DNA/RNA sequence transpositional capability in a protected environment. So, once again, “Cats in the Hats” and “alphabet soups” are fully insufficient defenses of an accidental evolutionary process because the “hat” and the “soup” are admitted to be machine-building machines that have already crossed the most difficult complexity hurdles of the life-building process.

 

OK, so right now the accidental theory doesn’t look so good. What happens when the rest of the information comes in? If the full information content of matter and energy imposed at the Big Bang could be fully traced down to the electromagnetic properties of molecules at the atomic level (for that is apparently where the trail of information leads) it is possible that the combination of natural law and the informed state of matter and energy would say that life must form, and in relatively short order. (The natural law-Big Bang tag team so far does not say that life must form; it only says that it may form). Once we have elucidated that further information content and laid it out for inspection, it might well strike us as a cut-and-dried case for an intelligent designer of life and the cosmos. Conclusion: we are not entitled to anticipate the implications of such a future harvest of data until we see the details of it. It remains possible that such information may turn out to be the strongest argument intelligent design theorists will ever have.

 

Evolutionist Simon Conway Morris has been saying for quite a few years now that life is inevitable (on Earth). Michael Denton in his latest book, Nature’s Destiny, pretty much stamps that hypothesis “CONFIRMED” by saying that natural law has stacked the deck with the key elements of life, at least as high probability outcomes. Denton, in his article for the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms,” gives a concrete example, and an enormous one, of a new discovery that reveals much more complexly informed directionality in the natural laws of physics and biology than has been previously elucidated (predefined parameters for protein folds, proteins which ground the larger part of the meaningful side of biological systems). This is precisely the kind of thing neo-Darwinians would have to point to give force to the explanation of life arising via natural law alone, but it is also precisely the kind of thing that suggests intelligent design. It constitutes a funnel that directs natural processes inexorably towards the formation of life, and thus a tool a designer might use. Neo-Darwinists have always loudly denied the existence of such a funnel because, by giving direction to evolution, it makes the process nonaccidental, which then opens the door to the ID hypothesis. They can’t have it both ways: direction is direction.

 

Certainly we must allow the neo-Darwinists this much: further exposition of both natural law and the information content in matter and energy may prove Denton and Morris quite correct (they don’t necessarily agree with each other on all aspects of theory). In other words, we can allow that the neo-Darwinists may well have accurately anticipated that future facts will support self-organization; but we cannot allow either their interpretation of the meaning of those facts prior to seeing the actual data or their implicit assumption that self-organization and accident are compatible events. In any case, a world where life is inevitable is certainly more than merely compatible with the thesis of the intelligent design of life; it is fully evocative of it.

 

The 1st grader trying to repair the electronic console at the nuclear power plant can, in theory, assemble and connect all the correct wires, circuit boards, transformers and microprocessors to avoid a meltdown, but must he or she do it? More to the point, should we expect it in the available time, and is it a credible scientific theory that the 1st grader will succeed? The evolutionary question everyone has ignored so far in preference to “Could it conceivably have happened?” is “Is the theory that the 1st grader will succeed at accidentally fixing the electronic circuitry of a nuclear power plant with limited resources and limited time a good scientific theory?” And of course, it is not a good theory, though it may be just barely theoretically possible. Yet accident has less design capability than a 1st grader, and the processes of life are more complex than the processes of a nuclear power plant.

 

“Can we conceive of such a thing happening as the slimmest possibility?” is a far different question than “Is it a good scientific theory?” And, if the young man or woman does inexplicably succeed in the repairs for several years running with no critical mistakes, aren’t we entitled to infer that it is far more probable that he or she has gotten some intelligent help along the way than that the child acted alone?

 

Science today unanimously affirms in all its many separate branches that the most probable explanation is the best—with one exception: evolutionary science. What our neo-Darwinian evolutionists are currently doing is by definition not scientific. Our conclusion: Until the hypothesized new information content and organizing capacity in natural law are specified, empirically demonstrated, and laid out for inspection we are quite simply neither bound to believe such a capacity exists in natural law nor safely assured of what its implications might be for the intelligent design debate.

 

The Explanatory Requirement for Purpose

The bottom line is that we cannot explain the complex structures of life without recourse to a directional/purposeful process. Every bit of experience and evidence we human beings have on the subject of complex design construction shows that it must be a purpose-driven process to succeed. Neo-Darwinists, naturally, object that natural selection has been "demonstrated" to favor the best designs in nature. Be that as it may, the fact remains that natural selection does not build anything, it only selects the best from among those designs already built. In Darwin’s time when we thought biological machines were easy to build the tag team of accidental construction and natural selection made sense; today it doesn’t. Neo-Darwinists say that natural selection and accidental mutations build complex machines, but they fail completely when it comes to demonstrating it.

 

In a typical instance of neo-Darwinian oversimplification, in The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins says that tossing airplane parts around randomly will construct an airplane as quickly and efficiently as tossing rocks around will achieve the specific configuration of a mountain that is formed substantially by large rocks. He says that the probabilities of achieving either by accident are roughly the same as the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just not so. Dawkins has only computed one of three major factors effecting probability for construction of three dimensional structures.

 

He ignores the fact that precise physical control, guided by intelligent thought, is required to place and hold the closely matched parts of an airplane in physical proximity to each other for the welding, soldering, bolting, screwing, and riveting operations to be successful. This is not the case for rock mountains which, due to their weight, simply fall into place and gravity holds them there. He also ignores the production process for the airplane parts, an enormous factor in the proper estimate of improbability. Nature can build rocks easily enough, but for nature to build an airplane by accident is an unthinkable thing. It involves trillions of options to be explored before the close facsimile of an intelligently manufactured part built to close specifications comes out of the process. Producing many hundreds of such parts by an accidental event sequence in nature is trillions of trillions of trillions of times less probable than a given configuration of rocks falling together to form a mountain.

 

Dawkins focuses exclusively on the number of surfaces of the components of the structures, their superficial variations, and points of interface, etc., as if that was all there was to probability computation. Once again, the hard part is assumed to be already done, and not even counted. On that basis, the number of options for already manufactured airplane parts to fall together in a reasonably stable structure (as if they could fall together) may seem in the same mathematical neighborhood as the number of options for irregularly surfaced rocks to fall together. But airplane parts can’t fall together; they require precise physical control extending over time with the use of specially manufactured tools. Very precise force vectors must be applied, usually modern tools and trained craftsman; nature has no substitute for these, and therefore the increased probability for doing it the hard way is enormous. Thus, Dawkins argument from the rock mountain to accidental airplane construction, and by implication, the accidental construction of a human being, fails miserably by way of as grossly broken an analogy as has ever been offered in the history of modern thought by a competent thinker.

 

No amount of tossing and shaking will build an airplane. Only Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis agree with Dawkins on this (except perhaps Willy Wanka). Human beings, robots, are required to get an airplane together, and we have already know how improbable the creation of a human being is. I will say it again: guided, controlled, and directed action from an intentional being, after precise manufacturing of the parts, is required to assemble airplanes and other complex machines. Accidental tinkering will only move the situation further from the goal, not towards it.

 

A certain ratio of competence, one might say, must be maintained between he or she (or it) who is attempting a task and the complexity of the job. Professor William Dembski, a consummate mathematician with five graduate degrees, calls this the Law of Conservation of Information (which it is). You can’t get more information out of a process than you put into it. In the Air Force we called it “being smarter than the machine.”

 

My son is currently a Raptor Crew Chief at the Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards, AFB, CA. I was a USAF Munitions Systems Technician, and after retirement from the Air Force, achieved certification as a Novell computer network engineer. My son and I (and anyone else who has worked in the aerospace industry) can both certify that the operations of assembling and maintaining a properly functional airplane, guided missile, or computer system, etc., are enormously more complex and improbable than forming a mountain by tossing rocks. Dawkins’ analogy is so seriously broken that the tasks are not even in the same ball park of complexity, yet millions of readers have unthinkingly taken him at his word because he is a famous evolutionist with impeccable academic credentials. Yet, what he has so authoritatively offered as a defense of the accidental evolutionary process makes not one bit of sense whatsoever. To be blunt, his math stinks. That is not the way probabilities are computed for the processes he discusses.

 

All one has to do to assemble Dawkins’ rock mountain (after many days at the gym plus a few creatine/protein milkshakes and the excellent Humagro athletic supplement) is shake and re-toss the rocks until they settle. Can blindfolded Olympic weightlifters build an airplane the same way, in the same time, with the same amount of resources expended? Of course, not.

 

Dawkins ignores a myriad of relevant features of aircraft design, such as bolt torque specifications, pressurized hydraulic fluid (critical to operating brakes and the powerful control surfaces of the wings and tail), jet fuel, high pressure air cartridges, and (in some models) explosive bolts. How do you “toss” hydraulic fluid around and get it to fall into the proper reservoirs within the same time needed to toss rocks around to fall into place in a mountain. How do you toss grease into miniature fittings that require a practically perfect seal from a closely fitted nozzle of a grease gun with a precisely focused pressurized delivery system in order to fill the lubrication port and reservoir on the landing gear? Literally tossing the necessary fluids alone, in the real world as opposed to the imagination where the neo-Darwinians do their work, is practically an irreversible slide into ever increasing disorganization. The proper analysis by fluid dynamics scientists, accounting for increasing entropy, practically ensures success will never occur in this universe—never! Unless…unless what? Unless a whole bunch of other steps accidentally occur to produce something very similar to a grease gun and a trained human to wield it first, thus dramatically multiplying improbability with each step along the way.

 

Which accidental forces hold a component in place by exerting forward pressure while simultaneously applying clockwise “torque” a bolt to a precisely specified foot-pound or inch-pound torsion value. How do you “toss” air into a highly compressed cylinder or jet fuel into the tank? How do you “toss” bundles of wiring and miniaturized electronic circuit boards together? How do you “toss” explosive cartridges together and then toss them into place without setting them off first? You don’t obviously, not in real historical time frames.

 

Consider, too, that complex living systems don’t just have to be created; they have to be scrupulously maintained. Biological maintenance systems are as complex as the structural design and function. In stark contrast, mountains comprised of a large configuration of rocks require very little maintenance to preserve their organizational structure, which involves no moving parts. Here again Dawkins’ oversimplified analogy dramatically fails.

 

Rock mountains do not require any of this, and all of this requires a myriad of additional steps to occur in advance. So the probabilities between constructing a workable airplane and a rock mountain are, in fact, very much different, contrary to what Richard Dawkins tells us.

 

Once again the neo-Darwinians 1) skip all the hard parts; 2) oversimplify; 3) fail to describe the system before computing probabilities for it; and 4) keep the discussion in the abstract fully disconnected from the physical events involved. This is a scandal in science because the big name neo-Darwinists are acknowledged to be our best evolutionary scientists, and their academic credentials really are impeccable. Are we supposed to believe that our most expert scientists are so naïve as to make these same monumental mistakes over and over, when they make very few others, mistakes that are always in favor of their clear personal preference for the materialistic worldview? There seem to be only two alternatives: they are not really experts at scientific reasoning or they have allowed their personal philosophical preferences (perhaps unknowingly) to prejudice their work.

 

The human body is demonstrably many orders of magnitude more complex than an airplane; it has its own unique points of difficulty vis-à-vis accidental construction. Dawkins admits this and tries to avoid the dilemma by saying that the process of evolution is not accidental at all, for accident could clearly achieve nothing of the kind (as we mentioned earlier, G. G. Simpson admitted the same thing)—but, he goes on to say, neither is it on purpose.[199] In chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins attempts to coherently pose a third alternative to chance and purpose/intelligent design, which he calls “cumulative selection,” which is intended to allow the retention of an accidental worldview while demonstrating the process of evolution itself to be nonaccidental. In discussing Professor Monroe Strickberger’s bogus lottery earlier, among other related topics, we discovered that “cumulative selection” is not a valid alternative to chance and purpose; it is a cheat on the proper computational rules of standard probability theory. “Game over!” The neo-Darwinian defense of accidental evolution fails.

 

Richard Dawkins, in his unique genius, has created what my grandfather would call an “odd bird.” In this case, the bird is very odd: a “nonaccidental”-accidental world. Dawkins says that an extraordinary series of selections occur that key upon survival fitness. These selections are made upon very small variations, each of which is simple enough that accident could achieve it. He asserts that those small steps then all fall together in sort of a modular fashion. Walla Booby, a complex biological machine has been constructed! Not quite. Which machine? What steps? He doesn’t say. But we can rest assured that it all happens over long periods of time and endless selection events. “Cumulative selection, don’t you see it?” Right.

 

This is a wonderful idea…in the abstract. It is in fact exactly Charles Darwin’s original concept: a long series of gradual small changes put something together that benefits and advances a creature in its environment. Natural selection then preserves a number of these advancements long enough for accidental to combine them to create the next step on the tree of life. This sounds very good, so it must be true, right? Well, it does sound very good in the abstract. And, really there are only rather small downsides to it: 1) it contradicts everything we know about genetics and microbiology; and 2) the math says it couldn’t happen in a trillion, trillion, trillion…lifetimes of our universe. Neo-Darwinian theory is still a protoplasm era theory!

 

In the mid nineteenth century Darwin and his contemporaries didn’t know there were microscopic machines in the cell—they didn’t know there was a genome, the complexity of which we are still discovering. They didn’t know amino acids and proteins were intricately involved and that proteins were so complex that an accident couldn’t find a functional alteration in a million years. They didn’t know. They thought the cell was full of nondescript goo, and nothing stood in the way of small spontaneous accidental variations being tolerated while design modifications evolved. They were wrong.

 

Modern research tells us that the genome and the amino acids are much too sensitive to tolerate tinkering and that the new configurations needed for an evolutionary advancement that natural selection could act upon are out of reach of an accidental search and implementation process. Can life be built in steps so small an accident could achieve them? No. An accumulation of small random changes to amino acids will destroy the functionality of a protein whenever more than three amino acids are affected.[200] An average protein may consist of 100 amino acid residues (some go as large as 10,000). Being restricted to altering less than four amino acids, accident cannot produce a change to biological components substantial enough to affect survival fitness. Thus, accident can provide natural selection nothing to select upon.

 

Upon recourse to the actual facts of biology, Dawkins’ model is seen to be merely an ingenious fiction, an imaginary process created wholly in the realm of abstract thought—and it doesn’t work with real biological components. Trying to chain a long series of amino acid substitutions through lateral transfers does not alter the impassability of the 4 amino acid barrier. Whenever the sequential accidents add up to 4 amino acid substitutions the affected protein becomes dysfunctional and the creatures progeny are selected against; the altered gene line is eventually lost to history. Symbiosis might seem to solve that problem, but it only does so much for evolution. As Peter Kassan has told us, stringing 10,000 cockroach genomes together doesn’t give us a human being; it gives us a colony of cockroaches.

 

The second downside to Dawkins’ view is that gives no real explanation. Saying that it all just falls together in a bunch of small accidental steps without specifying which steps, and without observing, testing and replicating those steps under scientifically controlled conditions doesn’t add anything to “It just happens.” Can this be our best scientific explanation, one that is hailed as an indisputable fact?

 

The neo-Darwinian case, as Appendix 1 clearly shows, is nothing more than a hodgepodge of ad hoc fallacies and conceptual confusions strung together to try to save a scientifically dead but politically loved theory. The next confusion/fallacy on this string of beads can be found in Dawkins’ general view of the process of mutation. It involves reducing the focus of random change to a shorter segment of the genome than actual biological change of macroevolutionary proportions requires. Doing this would speed up the process of reaching the 4-amino-acid/2-protein barrier, yes, but there is still no way of randomly breaching that barrier once it is encountered. Thus, reaching is confused with breaching, and our focus is shifted from real units of biological change to artificial ones.

 

The only way to save Dawkins’ cumulative selection process is to say that the four-amino-acid-barrier just so happens to be consistently overcome by sheer chance in contravention of what experimental studies show. But the odds of doing that to the tune of the tens of thousands of new proteins that must be generated for the tree of life equates to an improbability so immense as to, once again, be an unscientific hypothesis. Could it happen on the wildest fluke roll of the evolutionary dice? Yes. Is it scientific to expect it to happen? No—not by a longshot.

 

Alternatively, one can simply say that the evolutionary process is somehow directed, guided, controlled or constrained such that the proper amino acid changes are always offered in contravention of what a random process would do. Yes, one can say it, and many competent scientists are now saying it. But such a scenario is one of intelligent design! It is a directed process, and the probabilities reach into the arena where only intelligent design has ever gone in our living experience. The burden of proof shifts at this point. One cannot say that the process is directed and guided and simultaneously deny intelligent design without offering a concrete alternative source for the direction, guidance, and specified complexity within the same level of improbability. Intelligent design is the only thing we know that can take us there within the probability thresholds of scientific credibility. Dawkins recognized the need for specifying the alternative, but the alternative he offered in The Blind Watchmaker, “cumulative selection,” fails on mathematical grounds as we have shown.

 

One might object that not all airplanes have explosive bolts, and that people certainly don’t, which is true—at least not all of us. But this only highlights the need to closely describe a system before computing the complexity and probability of its being achieved by accident. Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists have not done this in regards to the human body and the total tree of life.

 

Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, do describe the systems, and they do the math. Their probability estimates are properly grounded in the facts of microbiology and genetics. The only thing Richard Dawkins achieves with the “cumulative selection” concept is to help Emile Borel’s monkeys reach the works of Shakespeare more quickly in the artificial world of pure mathematics. But, who cares; we don’t live in that world. That world will never produce a living creature. It is not the world evolution occurred in. None of the real-world barriers to random construction of biological machines are overcome by the “cumulative selection” hypothesis for the simple reason that it does not address the facts of biology, the actual limits of time and physical resources of our universe, or the standard probability theory that defines what falls into the realm of the scientific credible and what does not.

 

Dawkins’ view is, however, truly insightful some ways. By narrowing the focus of mutation to repeatedly alter the same small segment of code vice spreading the same number of alterations over an entire genome, evolution is enormously aided. This part of Dawkins’ discussion (the “Methinks it is a weasel” segment) is both ingenious and ingenuous. Dawkins did not invent the idea, however. Drake’s quote on Localized Genetic Instabilities offered above in the section on Punctuated Equilibrium, essentially shows that nature does, at least at times, use this time saving device of focusing mutations on a small segment instead of spreading them so thinly around the massive genome that their effect would be negligible. Narrowing the focus of mutations to hot spots does in fact save evolution enormous amounts of time, and therefore, such a procedure is almost certainly a prime player in the actual event of evolution. Hot spots have been documented in evolutionary research since before Drake’s book, The Molecular Basis of Evolution, hit the presses in 1970. However, for the process to have an opportunity to proceed past the 4 amino acid barrier and get a chance to accomplish the larger bulk of evolution’s work, the targeting of nucleotides and amino acids must be made fully nonrandom, and, thus outside the neo-Darwinian accidental model. Simply approaching the 4-amino-acid-barrier with speed, as this mechanism does, adds nothing to help surmount it.

 

While neo-Darwinian theory gives us a fatally flawed answer to the origins question by focusing exclusively on the one single thing in all of creation that by definition embeds no ordered information, accidental mutations, and therefore is the least likely to account for the origin of ordered systems, intelligent design theory comprises a genuine explanation of life's origin. One can say that we cannot absolutely prove intelligent design to be true, but the fact remains that it is nonetheless the best explanation, and the only one that accounts for order in the universe of the magnitudes we have found in life and the cosmos.

 

ID theory answers the hard questions: "Where does the design information first come from?" “How could this have happened in real evolutionary time?” “How can we keep from prostituting our probability standards for scientific credibility in evolutionary science?”

 

Ultimately, we must come to grips with the fact that, without purpose or intelligent design, we have absolutely no scientifically acceptable answer to these questions. Both components of the known sources of order in our world, natural law and the initial state of energy and matter at the Big Bang, appear literally "from nowhere," in a fraction of a second, in an event acknowledged to be a complete mystery to science. That event looks an awful lot like divine creation. This is why Pope Pius XII celebrated Big Bang theory as proof of creation, not because of his faith alone, but because objective rational evaluation of the scientific evidence says that this is the best explanation: “Let there be light!” 

 

OK, OK. I Give Up. How Can Accidental Evolution Be Demonstrated?

The whole point of the intelligent design argument, of course, is to argue that no such proof can be expected. Accidental mutations carry no information and therefore can, themselves, produce none. The inherent improbability and destructivity of an accidental process has been made clearly manifest in thousands of mutational studies. But, if Darwinists were to make a more credible effort than they have to date, perhaps (with my tongue in my cheek) the demonstration would go something like this:

 

Evolutionary News You Can Use☺

Quick sellout at playoffs. Airport gridlock inexplicably linked to genetically evolved gum.

 

MP (Misappropriated Press)

1 April 2010

 

 

Government Chewing Gum Scientists Announce Startling Breakthrough on Evolution!

 

Undisclosed National Laboratory:

Evolutionary scientists today announced the long awaited results of a tri-decade, multibillion-dollar totally unbiased study on evolution jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Science, American Atheists, and CSICOP. In this study genetic material was garnered from a host of clearly beneficial accidental mutations, then massively copied via bacterial plasmid “factories” and distilled into a line of pleasant tasting chewing gums intended for public consumption. In this way anyone who doubts accidental evolution can demonstrate for themselves the enormous capacity for beneficial change that is resident in an accidental process simply by imposing a selected modification on his or her own genome. A few of the more popular flavors are

 

Embelish-Mint – Said to be the most popular flavor among mainstream evolutionary scientists, this genetic alteration impairs the rational ability to evaluate evidence in such a way that minimal data is exorbitantly overstated. Further study of evolution is then deemed unnecessary. This is clearly beneficial because it allows for a politically expedient proof of the fiction of accidental evolution with a minimal cost to the taxpayer.

 

Imped-O-Mint – These accidental mutations interfere with brain function such that one cannot properly read a blueprint or follow assembly instructions. The saving grace for evolution in this genetic line is that the gum itself is genetically modified. While dating, the gum lodges between the teeth producing a dark discoloration with an odor so unpleasant as to cause the relationship to be broken off entirely. This reduces population stress, thus optimizing the evolutionary process.

 

Gov-O-Mint – An unpleasant mix of random flavors that never reach agreement. This alteration achieves no productive result, but is marketed at ten times its value. It clearly demonstrates that neo-Darwinian theory can be successfully applied to social processes as well as biology. This mutation is said to prove once and for all that inefficient processes wasteful of both time and resources are absolutely common in nature. Young consumers will be so affected that they inevitably gravitate to careers in Congress.

 

Pep-O-Mint – Perhaps the flavor with greatest long-term sales potential, this mutation randomly tinkers with the sex hormone regulation of the elderly and is augmented with a dose of Viagra and caffeine so intense as to guarantee that the wife will visit relatives for the entire three weeks of the playoffs. Recommended dosage, four times a year, or as needed.

 

Many of the elder statesmen of evolutionary biology could not be reached for comment, and, in an odd coincidence, were all observed shuttling from the airport to Ticket-Master.

 

-----------(MP International)

 

 

Summary of Other Stories in the Evolutionary News:

 

Richard Dawkins announces discovery of accidentally evolved airplane!

 

“It’s only a phylogenetic inference for now, but there is no doubt intermediate fossils will be found.”

 

Local pawnshop owner stymies police detective with cutting edge science.

 

“These watches evolved spontaneously in the back lot,” the shop owner asserts. “Everyone knows William Paley has been refuted by Richard Dawkins. I just walked out back and picked them up like fishing worms.” After several evolutionary scientists testified, the Federal Appeals Court was forced to agree, tosses out conviction. Judge Smith opined: “My hands were tied by Kitzmiller. The detective’s case invoked the concept of intelligent design, assuming those watches could not have spontaneously arisen in the back lot of the pawn shop by sheer accident. It was not properly scientific. Council for the defense produced expert witnesses from the best universities in the country. They all agreed that anything can happen given sufficient time.” Lead attorney for the defense, Melvin Wellae cinched the case with his usual brilliant closing argument: “Well, I mean, shit happens. Just look at the Congress. If chaos can come from intelligence, intelligence can come from chaos.” The case was dismissed.

 

What to watch for in your neighborhood: Everyone is winning at Monroe Strickberger’s Lottery!

 

+Bonus Story:

Monkey typists do it again: three consecutive best sellers!

 

 

--------------------------

 

 

Of the opinion that things could never get that bad, that propagandized exaggeration would never supplant rigorous science? Perhaps you’d better read this: Dr. Michael Behe on the Theory of Irreducible Complexity. What Professor Behe tells us, in essence, is that politicization of science is not confined to fiction; it has already occurred, in this case in the April 7 2006 issue of Science, the nation’s leading scientific publication. The same problem occurs throughout the neo-Darwinian rhetoric of several decades. (And, when you are done, read the classic novels Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis.) 

 

Behe’s analysis of the Bridgham article reveals that fully insignificant data is being hyped as proof of the evolutionary potential of random mutations. In this case, a mutation has reduced the biological efficiency of a protein from its ancestral origin. Because the ancient and modern proteins compared in the article are so similar, inheritance is confidently assumed and the claim is then made that random mutations caused the “evolution” of the less efficient from the more efficient. One wants to say, “Well yes, I suppose it did, but whoop de do!” This is not progression, however, but regression. And that is precisely what random mutations always do, degrade efficiency! It is all they can do. It will never be difficult to scan the spectrum of biological substances, find similar ones, and locate destructive mutations that have degraded the original gene into a less efficient form. But instances of regression cannot prove progressive evolution. Thus, the Bridgham study represents flagrantly invalid evolutionary logic.

 

The fact that this insignificant modification is touted in the nation’s premier science journal as substantial evidence for neo-Darwinian theory tells us that this is truly the best neo-Darwinists can do. They do not have bonafide examples of accidental mutations having generated progressive complex biological designs.

 

For degradation of efficiency to evidence evolution requires the (so far) demonstrably false assumption that the entire process of life’s development began at a higher level of efficiency and was then degraded by random mutations to achieve the taxonomic inventory of species we now observe who represent a lower level of order and efficiency in design. This contradicts even the Darwinian principle of natural selection itself, which selects on increasing manifestations of improved biological efficiency over time. It contradicts absolutely all of the fossil record which shows real advances in complex design! I say “so far” because we have yet to find evidence of a master genome or other information bank that might have been present early on and possibly unfolded via something like symmetry breaking (the application of entropy) to a very information rich RNA master library. Such a concept equates to having the design at the beginning, and watching it slowly fall apart, not incrementally building design as evolution is purported to have done.

 

Of course, Susumu Ohno’s master genome hypothesis could in theory reconcile the better parts of the two views, with a more perfect set of design information (for the entire tree of life!) being present at the beginning of the Cambrian and then unfolding under the pressure of entropy just as the structures of the cosmos unfolded under the same pressure after the Big Bang in so-called “symmetry breaking” events. But we have yet to find the master genome, and if we did, it would strongly suggest intelligent design and refute the theory of natural selection as the primary engine of progressive evolution. It would be a case of design first later modified by accident, as opposed to a case of an accident building designs from scratch.

 

Another reminder that one must take particular care to sort out language in the evolutionary debate. On purely linguistic grounds it is proper to call a degenerative event “evolution.” But it is not proper to call it “design construction by accident.” There are known instances of degenerative evolution, and studying those cases are valid as an exposition of the total process of life’s development. However, instances of degeneration do not show us how to build the tree of life.

 

There is nothing wrong with the scientific data of the Bridgham article, only the conclusions that are drawn from it. The data does reveal a relationship between an ancient and a modern protein. But we cannot permit transparently invalid logic to masquerade as the best science can do. This sends all the wrong signals to our science students. It is, in effect, a message that it is OK to subvert science to politics. Unfortunately, as Appendix 1 demonstrates, it is a practice we have too long gotten use to in the arena of evolutionary thought.

 

Completing the Steps in the Chain of Large Scale (macro) Evolution

Very few studies even look at completing the bridge between microevolution and macroevolution. Perhaps that is because it would reveal just how precious few of the steps have been described. In practically none of those few steps we do have can we confidently say that, yes, the small variation probably happened through a particular chain of biochemical steps. Forget about adding up the small steps to explain the big changes; we just don’t have that information. Until a biomechanical bridge between the radically different body types on the tree of life can be established with confidence, the sparse evidence we have of small changes within a few species, are not properly construable as evidence of macroevolution. Further, they are only evidence of microevolutions of the specific types actually seen; they are not evidence that such changes have occurred absolutely everywhere else across the full spectrum of subsystems in all living creatures, especially in contexts involving much greater complexity and interactive requirements.

 

Niles Eldridge, one of our leading evolutionary theorists, informs us that even now little work is being offered in the direction of completing the bridge between micro and macroevolution. “Little work is geared to bridging the conceptual gap between microevolution and macroevolution, the latter taken simply as large-scale, long-term accrual of adaptive change.”[201] In other words, Darwinian scientists are in the noncritical habit of simply assuming microevolution will add up to macroevolution. Even in this admission, Eldridge’s remarks camouflage the significance of the problem. The gap is not merely a conceptual one; it is a physical biochemical gap that is both quantifiable and enormous.

 

Identical footsteps leading up one side of the Grand Canyon and away from the other side are insufficient to prove a man leaped across, known information being so clearly to the contrary. The appearance of the occasional treetop at random intervals along the route of the canyon is insufficient to provide a genuine path. Yet this is comparable to the amount of the biochemical chain of events of evolution that has actually been demonstrated.  The obstacles to an accidental process getting the job done are clear. Ultimately, a bridge is not a bridge until it spans both sides and all the planks in between are reliably installed.

 

Yet, there are undeniable similarities in the genomes across the tree of life. And, yes, they do argue heavily for inheritance. But they can only do that if we grant the validity of the probability argument in the first place. The only argument for inheritance (since we haven’t actually seen the ancestral links and cannot demonstrate them with certainty from the historical record) is that it is too improbable that such extreme similarity would occur without it having been inherited—although, in theory, as the neo-Darwinists love to say, anything can happen by accident. Once we grant the probability argument (as science does everywhere else), however, accidental evolution loses scientific credibility, and we are obliged to acknowledge the plausibility of intelligent design.

 

The possibility that the fractional data we currently have on the steps of evolution might be misleading on some important aspect is undeniable. In the absence of a biochemical pathway, to call accidental evolution an indisputable fact as neo-Darwinists so prematurely assert, is to anticipate the bulk of the biochemical and genetic data (which remains to be elucidated). Projecting from the larger bulk of the data on a topic to a high probability expectation that the remaining fraction will be similar is not proof, but it is scientific. The converse, however, is not valid. Projecting what the vast bulk of the data on a topic will turn out to be in the future by working from a miniscule fraction of the relevant information is unscientific.

 

Fossils may have given us the gross superstructure of the event outcomes in the history of life (once again only within probabilities), but they have not given us the biomechanics. To date we have nothing of substance of the biomechanical pathway of accidental evolution.[202] Everything we do see visibly proclaims it impossible. We are simultaneously witnessing a rapid accumulation of indicators for a guided, directed and self-organizational process, one that is clearly not accidental. In some few cases we know enough about the similarity between two or more genes that by combining that knowledge with our understanding of how the transpositional genome, developmental genome, and DNA error correction and repair functions work, we can visualize a series of steps that would be sufficient to produce the transition between ancestor gene and “progeny” gene. What we can’t do is call the generation of those steps by a living machine-building machine an accident.

 

Science is faced with a choice here. It can hold to the rigorous traditional methods and objective standards of science, observation, test and replication, confirmability, refutability—the elements that have gotten science this far, the cornerstones of its success and integrity—or it can throw them away for politics. The overall health and integrity of science requires us to exercise more caution in our views of evolution than we have historically expressed. We should have simply and humbly said “We don’t yet know the process of evolution.” This seems imminently preferable to pulling the epistemological integrity out from the under the whole of science.

 

The neo-Darwinists are slippery, however. When approached with this challenge, they will say that evolutionary science ruled out an accidental process years ago with Hugo de Vries, that we are simply uninformed of the history of science and naïve in our estimate of their professional intellectual prowess. No professional would make such an elementary mistake as to claim that an accident could build a complex machine. (They actually say this!) What that means in neo-Darwinian-speak is that in their view, although the world is still accidental, and the mutations that cause the biological form changes are still accidental, the process of evolution is not accidental because the Richard Dawkinses, Monroe Strickbergers, and G. G. Simpsons of science have invented (in their minds) “cumulative selection.” For them it is self-evident that cats in hats and bowls of letters analogies can somehow (seemingly by magic) take the accident out of an accidental world just long enough to build the most complex machines in the world, and then put it back in. No professional, of course, would make such an elementary mistake of claiming an accident could make a complex machine! But that is precisely what they do with “cumulative selection.” “Cumulative selection” is not a problem when viewed as the result of a flowering of design information, but “accidental cumulative selection” is a problem. It’s nothing but a word game, an incoherency, and a self-contradiction. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the realities of biology.

 

The world remains accidental in the neo-Darwinian view even while they claim the process of evolution is not. Maybe they believe their own self-contradictory contrivances, but you and I should not.

 

But, you may object, don’t the neo-Darwinists have a response, a “come-back” for this—they always seem to in the public discussions? Yes, of course, they always have a come-back, and they always sound good, but there is no substance to them. They are only verbal artistry built around a small seed of truth. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, in Ever Since Darwin,[203] introduces the concept of “preadaptation” as a creative solution to the lack of intermediates. He says that there is no need for intermediate functions to be approved by natural selection because there are no intermediate functions, just intermediate forms. In other words, using Gould’s own example of a fish’s fin, as the fin of the early fishes evolved towards the limb of the first limbed-creature for crawling on land there was nothing with an intermediate function required to exist between the two. The fin just evolved as a fin until it was a limb doing the job of a fin. Then the creature was able to crawl ashore using the limb-like fin. That may be true, but it gets the big “Whoop-de-do!” for explanatory content. How does this explain the missing intermediate fossils and the missing biochemical pathways for accidental evolution. How far does it go to covering the real distance of evolution between nonliving chemicals and living systems with tripartite genetic information systems and super-complex structures like the brain? Not very. It is what one might call the “I’ll show you an inch and take a mile fallacy.”

 

What explains all the intermediate steps between a bacterium and a man under this scenario of “preadaptation?” Nothing that I can see. Could a simple limb have evolved by from a simple fin? Sure, why not? Once the genetic system of the fish was already constructed, in place, and transposing significant and meaningful segments of DNA all over the place, it would be a piece of cake (or sushi). Gould could be correct in the superficial aspects of his description of the sequence of some relatively simple evolutionary events, but he skips all the hard parts, and there is nothing in the underlying biomechanics of the living systems of fishes and their genomes that suggests that an accidental world is behind the larger event of evolution.

 

There may be a few simple form and function enhancements an accident can reach (after life is achieved), but not many. Color change in a moth? Perhaps. Change the length of a shark? Possibly. But to create and integrate an internal functional change that must interact with complex organs and systems that is big enough to affect survival or reproductive fitness, no—it sure doesn’t look that way. In a mammal this requires several genes, many proteins and often wholly new cell types, along with corresponding changes to epigenetic system driven physical structures like microtubules. For all this to be developed and integrated in a time synchronized way is beyond the reach of an accident.

 

There are four good evidential reasons to consider the classic Darwinian model of gradualism (accumulated small random changes) defeated (five, if you count the incontrovertible evidence for punctuated equilibrium). In contravention of the normal practice of good science, neo-Darwinists ignore the fact that we are now seeing all four of these reasons (plus punctuated equilibrium) as clear trends in the current evidence.

 

The first trend is that only microevolutions corresponding to very simple biochemical changes are seen in the directly observable evidence where truly random mutations are the source of the change. Almost all of these are in bacteria, and they don’t add up to anything of macroevolutionary substance. In fact, they don’t even lead to complex microevolutions.

 

The second trend is that we are not seeing the creation/configuration of substantial increments of new complex meaningful biological information in mutation studies, which suggests, in close conformance with probability theory, that accidental mechanisms are not responsible for the genome.

 

The third trend in the evidence is that the microevolutions science has so far observed have not required the integration of any complex new feature or functionality into a complex subsystem. Longer wing, sleeker torso, shorter beak, overall size change, color change, a single bacterial enzyme change that functions as a defense mechanism outside the organism, other simple changes affecting only the organism’s external environment, etc.: these very simple mutations are the only “evolutions” we have observed to have occurred. There is a clear pattern and message in those observations: a complexity barrier exists beyond which accident cannot go.

 

Finally, from the perspective of the central question of how to originate radically new body types and different types of creatures, what we have seen in observed variations are evolutionary dead ends. We may be able to trace them through several branches of the tree of life. We may show how they have been altered over time to do slightly different functions, through epochs perhaps. But we cannot establish that any of these observed variations, singly or in combination, have led to macroevolution.

 

We don’t know what has generated macroevolution, and we have never actually seen it occur. Under normal, non-politicized conditions, the default position of science would be that we therefore don’t know that it has occurred. In the case of evolutionary science, however, because the political philosophy and worldview of materialism hangs in the balance, science has proclaimed macroevolution from accidental variations an undisputed fact for decades.

 

Yes, most professional scientists assume that evolution did occur, and we can pretty much deduce that the Hox genes,[204] the transpositional elements, and other parts of the developmental genome are somehow responsible, probably acting in close concert. But we certainly do not know that it is accident that is working through these complex mechanisms to make one type of creature out of another. And it seems fully impossible that an accident would make such mechanisms in real evolutionary time in the first place.

 

The current mode of evolutionary explanation, by assuming the existence of complex genomes with transpositional capabilities before the explanation even begins, is not a true explanation of the origin and development of life, not in the sense that laymen and philosophers seek an explanation (the sense that you and I seek an explanation). “Explanations,” such as Ernst Mayr gives of peripatric speciation based macroevolution[205] and Stephen Jay Gould gives of punctuated equilibrium, are useful to science in portraying mechanisms for inherited variations, but my point is that they are doing precisely that: they are portraying mechanisms, not accidents. Those mechanisms may harness random components within the system, but that does not prove the system itself was not intelligently designed.

 

I am not so much criticizing science here as describing its current limitations. Scientists may well be doing their best to discover the biochemical pathways, but until they do we are still minus an explanation. We won’t know how far the process is predetermined in its results, how far it is guided and directed, or to what extent randomness enters the equation until the day that the actual pathways become known. The much vaunted explanatory power of accidental evolutionary theory remains a complete fiction until that day arrives.

 

It is no mystery as to why neo-Darwinists keep their theory in the abstract: it cannot be tested there. The past theories of evolution that were formulated concretely enough to make testable predictions have all been refuted! They don’t make that mistake anymore. In the best of current neo-Darwinian research, the biomechanical steps of evolution that are allegedly first selected and preserved by natural selection and then accumulate to form macroevolutionary advances reside solely in the academically informed (and too often politically formed) imagination of the researcher. They cannot be shown to have occurred in the real world, and they don’t form a viable biomechanical path between two creatures that a pure accident mediated by only natural selection could navigate—they don’t form a complete path at all.

 

It is the visible lack of successful tests that give neo-Darwinian theory away as a fraud. If the steps in the evolutionary chain were so truly simple that an accident could produce them, science would have no trouble replicating substantial sequences of those steps of evolution in the lab. This absolutely cannot be done. Steps so simple that an accident could achieve them would not take great lengths of time to be accomplished and therefore should have been observed, and observed in sets that, at least at times, added up to selectable levels of progressive form change involving complex internal functions and systems. This has never been seen, and certainly cannot be replicated on demand as the scientific method of replication and test requires. Application of proper scientific method requires us to conclude that accident is not the driving force of the form change proposals that have built the tree of life.

 

I do not point this out by way of asserting that evolution did not occur; evolution from nonaccidental causes apparently did occur. Rather, I am warning against politicized overstatements about what we actually know concerning evolution, overstatements that go well beyond the bounds of good science.

 

Neo-Darwinists have felt comfortable using accident as the unproven default explanation because the only alternative was felt to be God, an alternative not tractable to science. Now that intelligent design theory has proposed an alternative that both fits the evidence closely and is scientifically tractable, there is no reason to defer to a default explanation that has otherwise so miserably failed.

 

With intelligent design theory we can accept the punctuated fossil record with its large jumps as it is without having to constantly hedge about (millions) of critical missing links. With ID theory we can explain life’s origin and development, not just describe it. Description is the vital core of science, but it shouldn’t be confused with causal explanation.

 

How can I, a good Catholic, be so caustic about the dearth of support for classic neo-Darwinian theory when our late and much beloved Pope John Paul II, himself, has said that “evolution” is “more than a theory.” The Pope did not call evolution an absolute fact. Nor did he specify a given version of evolution as valid, which suggests he meant only basic evolution, descent with modification—minus the accidental worldview that neo-Darwinists have tacked on. In fact, the Pope explicitly ruled out the accidental and materialistic versions of evolution.

 

Unfortunately, His Holiness’ comments have often been misconstrued by the neo-Darwinists who apparently do not know that there is plenty of corroborative ground between “more than a theory” and “established fact.” Our Pope was not therefore saying that evolution was an established fact that could never be refuted (nothing in science holds this exalted status). Rather, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution was more than a theory he was implying that it was an institutionally entrenched scientific axiom, one that we could yet let go of, but only at the cost of a major rework of many theoretical models in the several disciplines.

 

Scientific axioms are “more than a theory,” but they can also be less than an “established fact.” A generalized concept of evolution has come to be a veritable axiom of science in the same way as thermodynamic law or Einstein’s relativity theory is an axiom. Einstein felt thermodynamic law to be so well-established that it would be the last of our natural laws that would ever be refuted. Nonetheless, it can in theory be refuted, and must be refutable to be scientific. Very little of what is important to modern science can be literally called an established fact; all our core theories are merely very high probabilities. Thus evolutionary theory too can be refuted, and, as we have seen, the accidental version has been refuted by precisely the probabilities.

 

Pope John Paul II was saying that it is true that at this point, much like the situation with thermodynamic law, if evolution goes, a very large chunk of our scientific theoretical base goes with it because it has all been intricately interwoven—at least in the biological and social sciences (rightly or wrongly). We now have the subdisciplines of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and many others.[206] Other primary disciplines of science have implemented evolutionary models at points as well. That does not mean that future evidence would never entail a radical rework of our conceptual framework; it could happen. And, in some areas it should happen. It certainly would not be a catastrophe for explanation if such a rework were to occur to the effect that randomness was removed as the conceptual foundation of evolution; it would be a victory for rational thought!

 

Even basic evolution, as entrenched as it has become across many of the subdomains of science, could be dispensed with without a catastrophic impact on the theoretical structure of science. We could live with the loss of evolution a whole lot easier than if we were to lose thermodynamic law. This tells us there is probably a major difference in the veracity of the two theories. Yet it is true that basic evolution is “more than a theory” in the axiomatic sense that much past and ongoing research, study, analysis, and theorizing is now predicated upon the truth of one kind of evolutionary concept or the other—and most scientists simply assume it to be true. But this axiomatic honor does not extend to the accidental version of evolution, only to basic evolution: inheritance with modification.

 

There would be a high intellectual cost entailed in letting all of the evolutionary models go, yes, but the implementation of intelligent design does not require this. ID theory only requires that the evolutionary models we retain match the evidence. Doing this increases the overall explanatory quality of evolutionary science by leaps and bounds and relieves of the current intellectual scandal of violating standard probability theory for political reasons and claiming that an accident has made the most sophisticated machines known to man.

 

Given the many and enormous biochemical obstacles to macroevolution of the entire tree of life from a single ancestor that are already known to science, all sorts of radical variations on the classic neo-Darwinian concept remain possible. Alternative views might involve multiple independent origins of life with many major discontinuities in the trunk and branches of the tree of life. Some of these alternatives might entail a view of the development of life so different from the classical theories of evolution that we might be reticent to call them evolution at all, yet they would more closely match the evidence and be more explanatory than the accidental scenario that underlies neo-Darwinian theory.

 

Intelligent design theory is one such option. ID much more closely matches the modern data than does the classic gradualist accidental conception. Consequently, “evolution” in the way it is commonly thought of by the public and in the classic sense that the neo-Darwinists use the term, gradual and accidental, cannot be deemed a fact at all.

 

There are important methodological problems inherent in entrenching mere assumption into science as if it were a fact and then, upon that basis alone, virtually locking competing theories out of research opportunities. Pursuing such a course, consciously or unconsciously, avoids encountering situations that might genuinely refute the currently favored theory. This makes a theory in a sense untestable via political protection.

 

Contrary to the political protectionism we are currently practicing in science, we be looking to prove or disprove that microevolution can lead to macroevolution via accidental mutations, not simply assuming it. We would then encounter situations, should they exist, that demonstrate that accumulated accidentally spawned microevolutions typically do not chain to produce macroevolution, but rather that macroevolution is an event of a wholly different kind produced by entirely different and more complex mechanisms. Bottlenecks, impassible obstacles, quantifiably unachievable magnitudes, and apparent biomechanical impossibilities, all these would be revealed and documented in a rigorously controlled and peer-reviewed scientific setting. Then, one way or the other, we would have a properly scientific foundation to evolutionary theory.

 

In contrast, at the present time we only have personal philosophical preferences for materialism masquerading as science. True, most studies follow experimental controls and protocols well enough to be called science in microcosm, but stepping back from the specific study and looking at general research strategies, funding constraints, and theoretical assumptions reveals that we are not doing proper science at those levels. What should be an unbiased search and discovery operation is really just an ongoing list of opportunities to further elucidate and, if possible, confirm a single theoretical alternative: accidental evolution (or a very quiet form of noncommittal evolution, so quiet the public will not alert on the difference).

 

Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory essentially means that if it could be shown that microevolution cannot lead to macroevolution via a series of small random variations at any known point in the development of the tree of life his theory would break down; it would be refuted. By tacit agreement, in modern mainstream science no one ever looks to test the very criterion for failure that Darwin himself established. In avoiding a proper search for these refuting instances via merely assuming their absence, neo-Darwinists have rigged the game. The integrity of science is lost in such a procedure, and political bias is implied.

 

But Doesn’t Homology Indirectly Prove the Tree of Life Correct?

If you are willing to grant that it is short of absolute proof, then, yes I will agree that homology establishes the tree of life to high ranges of probabilities. This doesn’t give us a gap-less tree or biomechanical pathways amenable to accidental events, however. Homology, in the most general sense is similarity. This might be similarity of structural patterns, similar (not necessarily identical) genetic sequences, common cellular processes, common developmental processes, common anything really.[207]

 

Homology does strongly suggest basic evolution, though it does not prove it. Homology is fully compatible with intelligent design. The classic example of homology, the pentadactyl (five-pronged) limb, provides a beneficial, if not optimal, skeletal structure for hands, feet, wings and fins and is therefore a logical feature for an intelligent designer to use across a large taxonomic span of bioengineering applications that perform similar tasks in similar environs.

 

Neo-Darwinists feel that a living biological inheritance is necessary to explain the substantial similarities observed among very disparate creatures.[208] In other words, they feel it would be too improbable that such complex similarities could be achieved through independent multiple routes by accident.☺ Obviously, this could well be true, but the reader should by now recognize that their reasoning is the identical logic of the intelligent design probability argument. Therefore, when neo-Darwinists dismiss the ID probability argument out of hand they are contradicting their own argument for basic evolution! They can’t have it both ways. Inheritance is a likely explanation of homology, but arguing in this way, from probabilities, also corroborates the probability argument for intelligent design. If accident can’t achieve parts of the tree of life, how can it achieve all of it?

 

What about the Progression from Simple to Complex?

The order of the main groups in the fossil record does reflect a rough and irregular progression from the simple to the complex, although it is not a universal theme. This hardly refutes intelligent design. The logical sequence of building algae and simple plants first in order to produce the oxygen-rich atmosphere needed for complex animal life makes as much sense for intelligence as for an accident. Preparing food sources before introducing the creature makes perfect sense as well.

 

Most machines that humans put together (by intelligent design) are done the same way: logical steps or modular increments moving from the simple to the complex. Indeed, it can hardly be done any other way. Using less than full modules or subsystems would typically generate a situation where the builder would have to take the machine apart and put it back together to get each piece of a module into place at random times, as opposed to simply inserting the complete module in once and being done with it. Simple to complex, where modules are involved, is not a dumb process, it is a smart process, and, therefore, is often, if not always, the approach that an intelligent designer takes for good reasons of efficiency. Accident, however, does not proceed in such a way, but, rather, haphazardly, having no consistency in its approach, and no efficiency whatsoever.

 

Appendix 2 to this book argues in terms of numbers a principle we already know from direct experience: an accidental process is wasteful. To illustrate this, let the reader suppose for a moment that he or she is an art student. We have all been there, if only in kindergarten, with mixed success. So we saunter in and slide into our desk and find out that today’s assignment is to paint or to do origami (Japanese paper cutting). We choose origami and are told to cut a triangle, or a circle. Fine, there it is, another job well done. (We’ll slip the scraps from our failures into our textbook, like that…and…no one will see them.) Well, it’s going to be a good day after all. What’s next?

 

But the instructor is writing on the board again—not a good sign. “Now,” the teacher announces, “let’s all make ten hierarchically embedded levels of design in our art. The first level must have 3,000,000,000 attributes (corresponding to the human genome), and the others several millions each. The ten levels correspond to the minimum vertically integrated levels of complexity of a living animal’s biological system: gene; gene regulation system; cellular subsystems; cells; organs; tissues; inter-organ communication/regulation systems; systems with body-wide functions such as the respiratory, glandular and circulatory systems; functional body parts; and the total body plan. How many sheets of paper will go into the trashcan before you meet the instructor’s specifications?

 

Given infinite time and resources, you might do it? Well, maybe, maybe not. Given finite time and finite resources? The question then becomes, “Well, how much time and how much resources?” What if the instructor wants the project turned in before class lets out? And this is with intelligence on your side. Is a pure accident going to get the job done? No.

Have the instructor tell you to do the same project blindfolded, without aide of memory, and using no preconceived design concept, and what are your chances? Nil, or nearly.

 

But your teacher, Mr. Dawkins insists, “Just keep trying; you’ll inadvertently hit upon it.” How many more materials will be wasted prior to success? Here you see the basic gist of Professor William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, based upon the “probability bound.” There aren’t enough hours and “sheets of paper” available in the history of the universe to give you a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent of probability of success. In this situation the teacher flunks, not the student. 

 

The assumption that all the biochemical steps in the enormous evolutionary chain can be accomplished by accident is unreasonable/unscientific for precisely the same reason. The biomechanical trail of evolution may not be missing from modern science for the sole reason that they just haven’t gotten around to it—the steps might be missing because it is an impossible job. However, if accident could achieve the steps of evolution, they would have to be both simple and small, so simple and small, in fact, that it would be child’s play for our best scientific minds to replicate those steps in the laboratory. Yet they can’t begin to approach the task, and it is visibly because of the complexity level.

 

Three examples of “reasonably complete” fossil sequences spanning the hypothesized developmental distance between 1) a reptile and an early mammal; 2) land mammals and whales; and 3) ancient man and modern man are given in Mayr’s book, What Evolution Is.[209] Futuyma similarly depicts the sequence from reptile to mammal and touts it as the most beautifully and fully documented example of the evolution of a major taxon.[210] The main intermediates between the modern horse and its ancestors are likewise well known. Clearly these patterns of incremental change do suggest evolution, but they don’t constitute the gap-free tree required by the accidental-gradualist process or a biochemical pathway accessible to an accidental dynamic.

 

Simply put, we are missing too much to throw the full confidence and integrity of science behind even basic evolution without some provisos and reservations being issued, let alone the accidental model. Throwing a few chemical compounds together to get a handful of amino acids as is currently described in origins of life research hardly compares to the enormity of the task of coding and translating biological information for the entire tree of life, or manufacturing a multileveled time-synchronized hierarchy of sophisticated biological machines moving within machines.

 

Distinguished Italian scientist, Marcello Barbieri, explains in his fascinating new book, The Organic Codes, that a code system requires not only the text of the message being sent, but a translation mechanism.[211] The translation system must be at least as complex as the message. In living organisms the primary components of the DNA translation system are messenger RNA, transfer RNA, ribosomes and a complex system of enzymes. The assembly instructions for cellular machines are complex and assembly has to take place in real time in moving systems in three dimensions. Therefore an unimaginably complex set of information must exist in order to express physical-temporal control of this construction extravaganza. The complexity and difficulty is beyond anything our own intelligence can currently imagine (in full). It is so far beyond the reach of an accident that an unbiased rational thinker must simply dismiss the thought.

 

Information, plus translation, plus three-dimensional construction, plus time synchronization, is, therefore, the real problem an accidental process must overcome—not merely two-dimensional binary computer program code. And the information has to be task-specific to a monumental degree of precision, not just a hodge-podge of trivial and irrelevant data points. This is the central explanatory task of evolutionary theory. In starting their theoretical models of evolution in the middle of the history of life after the genomes are present, that is, after this central problem has already been solved, neo-Darwinists are not explaining life at all; they are only explaining to what extent the design of life permits or pursues its own variation after life first been constructed.

 

In the face such vast complexity, what do all the observed random mutations add up to: nothing, nothing of substance to the real task of evolutionary explanation. They are trivia.

 

We are probably on the verge of a demonstration of substantial macroevolutionary events via the transpositional mechanisms within the genomes,[212] but those systems are not random. Until such time as that actually occurs, science is merely “pulling your leg” when they tell you they currently “know” what the mechanism of evolution is.

 

As late as 2002 the best direct examples neo-Darwinists could present for even generic evolution were related types of flies interbreeding on a common food source to produce a new race within the same species, another fly’s wing length changing in response to climate-related selection pressures, and a fish becoming slimmer to enhance access to a specific food source.[213] The origination of complex new genetic information and integration of complex new functions into internal mechanisms was not involved in any of these events. The neo-Darwinists have taken these simple microevolutions, events that in fact portray the limits of accidental mutations, and used them as an argument that there are no limits. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

 

Niles Eldredge and company will cry foul, of course, claiming I have grossly understated the case for evolution. They will cite tons upon tons of “nested similarities” all tidily bound up in a professional looking chart. They will cite common genetic sequences that just keep on coming. Real “experts” “know” this proves evolution beyond any doubt. While granting that the accumulated data certainly represents a lot of hard work by dedicated researchers, and that basic evolution may well be a fact, this category of evidence, as voluminous as it may be, is not logically supportive of an accidental process.

 

Perhaps surprisingly, even the minimal claim of inheritance is not established with full certainty by nested similarities or homologies alone. A similarly impressive chart of functional, structural and compositional similarities can be drawn between human-manufactured equipment and machines: a dump truck, an army tank, a fork lift, a bulldozer and a school bus. They are all related, but accidental mutation and inheritance is not the origin of their similarities. The similarities in those vehicles originated in the minds of intelligent designers.  The designer had somewhat different purposes for each, but similarity was unavoidable. The designer was constrained by the physical necessity of the vehicles all having to do similar tasks on the same planet. And where options were available, why reinvent the “wheel” when one is ready to hand? Should we demand that intelligent designers be devoid of practical wisdom?

 

The various hypothetical trees of life Darwinists have constructed by tracing structural, functional, and genetic similarities are, I confess, a good bet to be the actual path evolution took. They are the best bet we have. Still, the methods of phylogenetic inference vary widely among researchers and are far from fully proved; there are loose ends, contradictions, unanswered questions, and, above all else, less than full certainty. Assumptions have to be made to even get the process started, and the level of confidence we can vest in phylogenetic inferences fully depends upon answers to deeper philosophical and scientific questions for which we do not currently have answers. Consider this quote from a superbly written article by Harvard Professor Gonzalo Giribet.        

 

The existence of parameter dependence in multiple sequence alignments was recognized early (Fitch and Smith, 1983;Williams and Fitch, 1989); alternative alignment parameters result in different alignments, and these may result in alternative phylogenetic trees. Dependence in analytical parameters is independent of the tree-construction methodology of choice and thus is a central conundrum of phylogenetic analysis. Dependence theoretically affects pairwise-distance–based alignments (Higgins and Sharp, 1988; Jeanmougin et al., 1998), parsimony-based alignment methods (Wheeler and Gladstein, 1994; Wheeler, 1995), and maximum likelihood–based alignments (Thorne et al., 1991). The fact that alternative alignments may result in alternative trees was elegantly presented by Morrison and Ellis (1997).[214]

 

So, yes, phylogenetic inference construction based upon genetic sequence comparisons is a rigorous science, and perhaps a fine art and a fascinating craft as well. But the exact nature of the family tree of life that process produces depends upon starting assumptions. Three large questions remain presently unanswered that, when answered, could radically affect our view of the reliability of a particular approach to sequence analysis, which in turn affects phylogenetic inferences: 1) convergence—the extent to which convergence upon same or similar sequences can be (and has been) achieved through different physical-historical routes; 2) the possibility of the presence of Susumu Ohno's "Pananimalia" or an even more potent "master genome" at the pre or early Cambrian; and 3) the question of where true chance mutations can be expected to drive form change, and to what extent, vice closely managed events of the transpositional genome. Thus, a certain amount of humility is called for in even science’s confidence in the phylogenetic tree(s) of life. At a minimum, having these trees full of largely reliable educated guesses does not argue one whit for an accidental process because the gaps between taxonomic entries are frequently large and nongradual.

 

So, once again, while these phylogenetic inferences are well-supported generally, they do not tell us how the steps between creatures were biomechanically achieved. We cannot replicate these jumps in the laboratory from random mutations. One cannot, therefore, safely assume that they are so simple as to be the product of an accident. To Niles Eldredge, then, we must say, “Nice piece of comparative analysis, but it does not save the accidental thesis from fatal mismatches with the irreducible complexity data and the mathematics of standard probability theory.”

 

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[143] Richard Dawkins takes care to point out that the true theory of punctuated equilibrium as originated by Gould and Eldredge does not assert that there are large non-gradual gaps in the steps in evolution, but, rather, that at times evolution speeds up while still maintaining its gradual character. For my part, I concede only that this is the definition of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, not that it is the character of the fossil record, which does in fact show large gaps and a nongradual process.

[144] Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts and James D. Watson, Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd edition (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 392-395, 1058.

[145] W. E. Lonnig, “Dynamic Genomes, Morphological Stasis, and the Origin of Irreducible Complexity,” in Dynamical Genetics, edited by Valerio Parisi, Valeria De Fonzo and Felippo Aluffi-Pentini, Dr. S. G. Pandalai Managing Editor, Kerala, India: Research Signpost, 2004.

[146] Quoted from the book’s jacket. John W. Drake, The Molecular Basis of Mutation (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970).

[147] ­ Drake, Molecular Basis of Mutation, 184.

[148] Bruce Alberts, et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 394. W. E. Lonnig and H. Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 36 (2002): 389-410. Scott F. Gilbert, John M. Opitz, and Rudolf A. Raff, “Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,” Developmental Biology, vol. 173, no. 2 (1996): 357-372. Gilbert et al. say that the emerging synthesis in evolutionary biology is that the classic Darwinian model for macroevolution that says population dynamics can explain macroevolutionary events has failed. They cite segments of the developmental genome, called “morphogenetic fields,” as the primary source of macroevolution.

[149] Michael J. Behe, “Self-Organization and Irreducibly Complex Systems: A Reply to Shanks and Joplin,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 67, no. 1 (2000): 133-155.

[150] Darwin, Origin, 210

[151] Paul Nelson, “Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of the Genome,” Access Research Network, Literature Survey 19:1, published to the Internet at  http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od191/ls191.htm; Svetlana A. Shabalina and Nikolay A. Spiridonov, “The Mammalian Transcriptome and the Function of Non-coding DNA Sequences,” Genome Biology, vol. 5, no. 4 (2004): 4.

[152] Kidwell, Margaret G. and Damon R. Lisch, “Transposable elements and host genome evolution,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution, vol. 15, no. 3 (2000): 95-99.

[153] James A. Shapiro and Richard von Sternberg, “Why Repetitive DNA is Essential to Genome Function,” Biological Reviews, vol. 80, no. 2 (2005): 243; Christopher D. Smith, ShengQiang Shu, Christopher J. Mungall, and Gary H. Karpen, "The Release 5.1 Annotation of Drosophila melanogaster Heterochromatin," Science, vol. 316, no. 5831 (2007): 1586-1591.

[154] Gang Fang, Eduardo Rocha, and Antoine Danchin, “How Essential Are Nonessential Genes?” Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 22, no. 11 (2005): 2147.

[155] Shapiro, “Repetitive DNA,” 228.

[156] Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, “Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry,” Philosophy of Science vol. 66, no. 2 (1999): 268-282.

[157] Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus, “Mutations Affecting Segment Number and Polarity in Drosophila,” Nature, vol. 287, no. 5785 (1980): 795-801.

[158] David D. Pollock and John C. Larkin, “Estimating the Degree of Saturation in Mutant Screens” Genetics, vol. 168, no. 1 (2004): 489-502.

[159] Paul Nelson, International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, ISCID, Transcript from February 5, 2003 9:00-10:15 PM Eastern:  http://www.iscid.org/paul-nelson-chat.php.   

[160] Meyer “Biological Information,” 219; Axe, D. D., “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, vol. 301, no. 3 (2000): 585-595.

[161] Rensberger, Life Itself, chap. 12.

[162] Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 131.

[163] Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 202.

[164] Michael Behe, “Darwin’s Breakdown: Irreducible Complexity and Design at the Foundation of Life” in Dembski, Intelligence, 94.

[165] Cristina Tufarelli, “The Silence RNA Keeps: cis Mechanisms of RNA Mediated Epigenetic Silencing in Mammals,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 361, (2006): 67-79.

[166] Schroeder, Science of God, 26.

[167] Robert E. Krebs, Scientific Laws, Principles and Theories (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001) 2, 4, 6, 10-11.

[168] John Gribbin, Quantum, 417.

[169] David Chandler, “Too Close for Comfort,” New Scientist, vol. 186, no. 2505 (2005): 37. Also see the current impact risks at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Website at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/.           

[170] Robert Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” Scientific American, vol. 296, no. 6 (2007): 50.

[171] Mark Ridley, The Cooperative Gene (New York: The Free Press, 2001); Michael J. Sanderson, "Reconstructing the History of Evolutionary Processes Using Maximum Likelihood" in Douglas M. Fambrough, ed., Molecular Evolution of Physiological Processes (New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1994), 13-26.

[172] Simpson, View, 202; David B. Wilson, "The Origin of Life," in Did the Devil Make Darwin Do It?, edited by David B. Wilson (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1983), 96; D. D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, vol. 341, no. 5 (2004): 1295-1315.

[173] A final note on this question should go to those who object that Karl Popper showed that the probability of all scientific theories is near zero. Popper computed probabilities in an entirely different manner and for a different purpose than we have been doing here in this book based upon standard probability theory. What Popper was doing was computing the percentage of successful tests as a measure of a theory’s degree of confirmation by computing the ratio of successful tests to all possible tests. He considered the total number of possible tests for any theory to be infinite. Therefore, the degree of confirmation for any scientific theory according to Popper was effectively zero. Not an encouraging view of scientific reliability. See Del Ratzsch, Science and Its Limits, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 33-37.

   What the intelligent design theorists are doing (and what I do here in this book) in applying standard probability theory, however, is quite different. We are not computing the degree of confirmation of a theory, but the statistical rate of occurrence a given event has within a well-described physical system. For example, gaming dice can be fully described in physical terms as concerns the event options that will result when rolling them on a gaming table. The statistical frequency of a given number coming up on the top face of a die is precisely one chance in six. What intelligent design theorists are saying with the probability argument I discuss here is not that the degree of confirmation of accidental evolution is small (yes, it is vanishingly small but that is a different kind of argument).  What they are saying is that the physical system of our universe has been described to have only so much time and physical particle events available in its history. The complexity of living systems has recently been much more completely described as well. So, contrary to Darwin’s gross lack of information, modern evolutionary theorists are dealing with a well-described system, and that system only offers accidental evolution one chance in (much) greater than 106,549,203 rolls of the dice to succeed. Since the accidental creation of life is not a reasonable expectation in our system, science should not be affirming it. Neo-Darwinists want to ignore the probability impacts of the massive increments of system description that have been added since Darwin, showing astronomically greater complexity.

[174] W. Ford Doolittle, “Evolutionary Creativity and Complex Adaptations: A Molecular Biologist’s Perspective,” in Creative Evolution, edited by John H. Campbell and J. William Schopf (Boston: Jane and Bartlett Publishers, 1994), 52.

[175] Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).

[176] For a concise historical synopsis of the antiquated and fully incorrect protoplasm theory see Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 44-50.

[177] Robert C. James and Glen James et al., Mathematics Dictionary, 5th ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 330-331; James W. Armstrong, Elements of Mathematics, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976), chap. 9; Amir D. Aczel, Probability 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998), chap. 11.

[178] For more background on the monkey typist theorem than you probably care to know, see the Answers Encyclopedia Web site article at http://www.answers.com/topic/infinite-monkey-theorem and the CBS News story describing a failed test of the literal version of the theorem at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/12/national/main553500.shtml.  The best by far though is Lloyd Garver’s hilarious article at  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/21/opinion/garver/main554967.shtml.

[179] See Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life; Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny, and Stephen Meyer, “Biological Information.”

[180] Monkeys are known to have a sense of humor.

[181] See fallacy #41 in Appendix 1.

[182] Thomas Robson, “Creationism and Pseudomathematics,” published to the NCSE Website at http://www.natcenscied.org/resources/rncse_content/vol20/3604_creationism_and_pseudomathemat_12_30_1899.asp, accessed on 10 October 2008.

[183] Douglas J. Futuyma, “Natural Selection: How Evolution Works,” ActionBioscience, published to the Internet at http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/futuyma.html.

[184] See http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mm92496.htm, Michael Behe, “Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference,” Access Research Network.

[185] Meyer “Biological Information,” 219; Axe, “Functional Sensitivity.”

[186] William Dembski, The Design Revolution (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2004), chap. 10.