As to your complaint about “long posts”: I'm sorry but this one is quite long, too. For my part, I’ve little time for posts so I prefer to be thorough the first time. Further, this is an important topic and I’m not interested in a conversation that needs to be cut into bite-sized pieces. Unless I’ve overestimated you, I suspect you can handle it.
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In no particular order, here are several observations that I believe make the current body of evolutionary theory flawed and the notion of “evolution by random forces” a “non-starter”:
1. The problem of abiogenesis.
There are several well-known experiments that have shown that it is possible to produce amino acids -- and therefore the building blocks of life -- in lab conditions. However, all such efforts have required vigorous controls; thus, even the most successful “origin of life” experiments have really told us nothing about what happens under natural conditions. Furthermore, none has successfully dealt with the issue of “chirality”. Finally, while many have tried, no one has developed a plausible explanation for proto-cellular development that would account for the leap from non-life to life while still remaining within the bounds of known physical and chemical laws.
2. The problem of “vanishingly small” chances.
Computer analysis using information theory has shown that the probability of evolution by chance processes is essentially zero, no matter how long the time scale. The work of Murray Eden, Marcel Schutzenberger, and others, as presented at the Wistar Institute in 1966, all showed quite clearly that the complexity of the biochemical world could not have originated by chance even within the time span of ten billion years. These findings have since been refined and confirmed by application of the first and second laws of thermodynamics to living systems. As Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning thermodynamicist, put it: “The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small.”Let me repeat that: Vanishingly. Small.
3. The problem of DNA
Naturalism and evolutionary theory require that the complex-yet-orderly arrangement of DNA information that comprises living things must arise by natural forces alone, and that it can be explained only in terms of physical-chemical laws. But information theory has consistently shown that both chance and law lead to structures with low information content, whereas DNA has very high information content. In fact, the amount of biological information contained in DNA that is required to construct even a simple organism is staggering. Studies using information theory have shown that it would be impossible -- again, in the absence of vigorous external control -- to construct a simple set of instructions for synthesizing even the simplest form of bacteria. Essentially, there are no known natural laws capable of creating a structure like DNA with high information content.
4. The problem of variation.
Classical Darwinism asserts that the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation suffices to explain the diversity and complexity of life. However, it is a commonly accepted observation that variation does not in fact produce novel types of organisms (this includes selective breeding), and that Darwinian natural selection cannot account for macro-scale complexity. Further, it is also accepted that all variation occurs around a mean, organisms tend to stay true to type, and species tend to appear in the fossil record fully formed and unchanged from their modern counterparts.
5. The problem with relying on mutation.
As I just noted, it is commonly accepted that genetic variation cannot account for major change because variation is simply the reordering of material that is already present -- e.g. a child will always tends to resemble its parents. The only new source of genetic variation is, thus, mutation. There are two major problems with invoking mutation as the primary causal agent driving the massive amounts of change that would be required to progress from simple unicellular to complex multicellular life forms: 1) mutation is quite rare; 2) while mutation may sometimes be neutral in its effect, it is seldom ever beneficial. Mutation -- a chance, rare, often fatally flawed event -- cannot account for the diversity and complexity of life forms living today or in the fossil record. Yet it is still considered to be the spark that ignites the evolutionary engine.
6. The Cambrian problem.
Neo-Darwinism and punctuated equilibrium have each tried to accommodate the above observations via various contortions of natural selection and other principles of classical Darwinism. But consideration of the Cambrian explosion alone repudiates both the claims of neo-Darwinism and punctuated equilibrium. Cambrian fossils have no transitional intermediates linking them to previous time periods, and all display morphological features that have no clear precedent. Considering that the Cambrian fossil record includes the 1st appearance of over 40 separate phyla (the highest taxa in the animal kingdom) and accounts for approximately 2/3 of the body plans seen on earth today, this is a substantial problem for evolutionary theory.
7. The problem of non-evolution.
There are hundreds of known examples of living fossils. These organisms represent both warm- and cold-blooded animals, plants (including both angiosperms and gymnosperms), and insects, and they occupy a wide range of niches. The ancestors of these organisms did encounter events and conditions that should have triggered at least one or more of the 4 mechanisms that drive all evolutionary change. For example, the KT boundary event, various glacial and interglacial periods, continental drift, intercontinental changes in habitat and macro-/micro-scale climate resulting from ongoing orogenic activity and changing hydrology are all events that these “living fossils” have survived without any change. Yet, they are all events that had impact across multiple spatial and temporal scales and which should have produced countless opportunities for migration, genetic drift, and/or natural selection to have occurred. But, the ancestral chain of hundreds of organisms today went through those occurrences completely unchanged.
8. The problem of missing miscreants in the family tree
From a common ancestor we are to believe we now have oak trees, bacteria, fish, and people. Ignoring the massive pileup of improbabilities resulting from the above observations for a moment, such a feat would have required an exponential increase in complex life forms. Given the importance of mutation in the process, such expansion should have been accompanied by a tremendous number of “false starts” -- those necessary intermediary organisms with mutant features that didn’t survive the “selective cut”. In every single branch of the phylogenetic tree there should be a related chain of unsuccessful false starts and miscreants somewhere in the fossil record. To date, no such evidence has been found.
9. The problem of fitness.
Some of the living fossil species have had hundreds of millions of years to deal with the challenge of “survival of the fittest”. And yet, some of these species are hardly the “fittest” of their group. For example, the Quercus genus is known for its ability to suppress the growth of other nearby species. After 100 min years, “survival of the fittest” would predict that the oak trees reproducing today would be as fit as they could be -- meaning, they would not only be efficient at suppressing other plant growth, but they would also be extremely efficient in their reproductive strategy and therefore dominant where ever they occur. But oaks are actually not very good competitors and in healthy plant communities, they exist in mixed settings not huge monocultures.
10. The problem of the Ouroboros.
Finally, functional relationships between form and external environment -- for example, mimicry and camouflage -- are all over creation, but they cannot be accounted for by mutation (which, again, is rare, accidental, and usually harmful). There is plenty of discussion out there about the role of co-evolution and/or convergent evolutionary processes in explaining these phenomena, but despite lofty language they do come up short. Achievement of, for example, protocryptic character requires an “awareness” of external environment and control over genetic expression of expressed morphology and other features that is impossible (not mention silly to suggest unless you’re into biosemiotics) through mutation. The character of these relationships precludes their development from a chaotic and random process that is centered at the genetic level and which is under the control of nothing more than chance mutation and which has no awareness, either of the external environment or of the impact of its own activity on the organism.
So, for all that I expect complete disagreement from you given that we are diametrically opposed on the most basic issues, I suppose there’s a list for you.
A problem for chemistry, and one that has made quite a bit of progress. What is the alternative?
2. The problem of “vanishingly small” chances.
No one asserts that biodiversity arose through chance. Change and diversity arises through variation, superfecundity and selection. Variation merely explores the limited universe of changes possible at any given moment -- a number possible to observe in laboratory experiments.
The problem of small chances assumes that variation has a prespecified goal. No one has ever observed such a tendency, and lots of people have looked.
Essentially, there are no known natural laws capable of creating a structure like DNA with high information content.
The origination of DNA is the problem of biogenesis. Once replicators exist, variation, superfecundity and selection comprise an algorithm that could be describes as intelligent. Hubert Yockey, the most influential writer in this field, has investigated this process at length. He would agree with you that the origin of life is an unsolvable problem, but he also asserts that common descent via Darwinian processes has been proven beyond doubt.
4. The problem of variation.
This is an interesting claim, since the first paper on natural selection was titled, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type, written not by Darwin, but by Wallace, in 1858. Your claim is rubbish. Reversion to the mean only affects large populations that never get separated into separate breeding populations.
5. The problem with relying on mutation.
Your paragraph is factually wrong at every point. Mutations are common. Statistically speaking, you carry several alleles not carried by either of your parents. Living and developing systems are not so fragile that change automatically causes death. Most changes in alleles produce subtle somatic changes, exactly the kind of change required by evolution.
Not that death is uncommon. Sperm cells are the product of many more generations of divisions than egg cells and have more mutations. The majority are non functional. Less than one in a billion are capable of fertilizing an egg. In humans, as many as two thirds of conceptions are naturally aborted. Superfecundity and selection.
6. The Cambrian problem.
Creationist rubbish. As more fossils are found it becomes obvious that most phyla predate the Cambrian. The problem with dating the first appearance of body plans is that accent life forms had no hard parts to fossilize.
The rest of your list just repeats previous arguments from incredulity. Basically, if you aren't smart enough to deduce the origin of things from first principles, then you are obviously smarter than all the tens of thousands of biologists who have ever lived. Quite a claim.
We now hear less about “irreducible complexity,” with good reason. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are “trivial” and “modest” notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as “trivial” the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?
The crucial passage in “The Edge of Evolution” is this: “By far the most critical aspect of Darwin’s multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.”
What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a “modest” idea, nor is descent with modification.
But let’s follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an “edge,” beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random mutation may explain the malarial parasite’s resistance to chloroquine, but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility.
Don’t evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs — every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.
If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?
The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.