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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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INTELLIGENT DESIGN UPROAR President Bush stirred up controversy recently when he remarked to reporters that children should learn that there are “different schools of thought” on the origins of life. “Both sides should be properly taught…so people can understand what the debate is about,” he said. He referred, of course, to the century-plus argument over Darwin’s theory of evolution, the teaching of which has achieved the status of holy writ in both public schools and universities. For his advocacy of academic objectivity (is that a non sequitur?) Mr. Bush has taken a rhetorical thumping reminiscent of the one endured by Harvard President Lawrence Summers, earlier this year. Mr. Summers suggested that if women are not reaching the highest academic levels of science and mathematics it might be because their abilities therein are innately inferior to men’s. Both Mr. Summers’ and Mr. Bush’s views constitute rank heresy among the chattering classes. Some commentators joked that Mr. Bush might want to re-open the Scopes monkey debate – a reference to the 1925 “Monkey Trial” in which famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow debated evolution for seven days with three-time presidential candidate and orator-extraordinaire William Jennings Bryan. Ostensibly, the trial was held to determine the guilt or innocence of John Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher who had taught evolution in disobedience of a local law. Before it ended, the trial had drawn a crowd of 5,000 spectators and international attention. Mr. Darrow, for the defense, made a circus of the proceedings (things really haven’t changed all that much), grandly arguing that “Scopes isn’t on trial, civilization is on trial!” But he lost the main argument. His client was convicted and fined $100. Indeed, Darrow, himself, requested the “guilty” verdict so he could appeal to a higher Tennessee court. He became a liberal folk hero for supposedly defending “scientific enlightenment” against “ignorant religiosity”. (Tragically, Bryan died six days after the conclusion of the highly publicized trial.) Following Mr. Bush’s innocuous (I thought) remarks about Intelligent Design, I heard columnist Charles Krauthammer criticize the president for trying to insert religious belief into the teaching of science where (he said) it does not belong. Mr. Krauthammer called evolution “settled science” and the “foundation of biology”, while admitting that it had “gaps”. Mr. Krauthammer had a medical education, so his views could be expected to carry some weight. In this space I have not written on evolution. Although I had some scientific education, I am not an expert in biology. Whole libraries of books have been written about Darwin’s theory by people far more qualified than I, so I thought it best to leave it to them. How much can one accomplish, anyway, in a short column-piece such as this? I reconsidered this view on two counts. First, because the issue has now reached the level of popular discourse. Writers of opinion – not necessarily scientists – are holding forth on whether teaching religious beliefs alongside “scientific fact” is proper. This cannot go unanswered. My second reason relates to mathematics, which I do know something about. I expect that my readers will let me know if I have added light (and not merely heat) to the debate. Modern journalists – mostly educated after the teaching of evolution had hardened into non-debatable dogma – tend to be very careless with the term fact. Although adherents claim that evolutionary theory is so obviously supported by fact that doubters must be either ignorant or dishonest, in reality it is supported by very few facts. Even Darwin acknowledged that his theory was based on “inference and analogy”. He expected facts to follow, but this has not occurred. Essentially, Darwin started by observing changes that could be produced by selective breeding of living animals – pigeons, for example, which he bred extensively to produce wide variations. Noting how much change could be produced in a short time, he then extrapolated backward, through the eons of time, to infer that changes made at a constant rate must certainly have produced a progression of species. But in all his pigeon-breeding, Darwin never produced anything except varieties of pigeon. There was no indication that another kind of bird – or an entirely different animal – might emerge. Similarly, the many varieties of dogs have been produced by selective breeding, over thousands of years, from a single species: wolves. All dogs – from Great Dane to Chihuahua to nondescript mongrel to wolf – can breed with each other. They are genetic variations, but they are all still dogs. It is fact that such variations can (and have been) observed, but this is not evolution across species in the way that Darwin projected, and these are not the facts he looked for. The fatal flaw in Darwin’s inferential reasoning is mathematical. He assumed that a constant rate of change in species must have occurred across the eons of time, and was certain that present animals (and plants) thus came from earlier, simpler forms via random selection. Modern experiments have shown that Darwin’s assumption of a constant rate of change is incorrect. Change is fairly rapid at first. Soon, however, it levels off, then reaches a limit which cannot be crossed. The life-form remains true to type. All changes are from gene-selection. For example, when botanists began to experiment with increasing the yield of sugar beets, the sugar-content was only 6%. Over seventy-five years of selective breeding, scientists increased the sugar-content to 17%. But further efforts could produce no additional increase. 17% was the limit. And they were still sugar-beets. The fruit fly is also a favorite tool of instruction for demonstrating evolution. The fly reaches sexual maturity in five days, so several generations can be observed within a typical semester. By selection, red-eyed or green-eyed flies can be produced. Also, white flies, flies with fuzzy wings, and other variations. But millions of students have never produced anything except fruit flies. The supreme quest of evolution’s devotees has been to find proof in the “fossil record” that a species-crossover has occurred somewhere in history. These are the “gaps” Mr. Krauthammer spoke of. They remain unfilled. The “facts” Darwin anticipated are still missing. No trace of a so-called “missing link” has ever been found. Occasionally a jawbone or fragment of a hip – or the like – has been eagerly proclaimed as evidence of the long-sought link between apes and humans. Inevitably, though, these hopes are dashed by additional discoveries which trace to one species or another, but not to an intermediate. Often the original report stands uncorrected. The fossil record consistently contains fully formed organisms. There may be variations around a “mean”, but never any transitional stages of the kind Darwin expected. Some famous discoveries thought to be missing links, like the skull of Piltdown Man – supposedly a primitive ancestor of man, found in England in 1912 – turned out to be elaborate frauds. This is not a comprehensive treatise, of course, so I shall pass by favorable genetic mutations – another pillar of evolutionary theory. I merely note that changes sufficient to transition across species would require not just selection of recessive genes (cf. fruit fly experiments), but a string of favorable genetic mutations whose probability of occurrence is minute beyond comprehension. This mathematical reality bears on a modern biological construct known as “irreducible complexity” – a concept first developed in 1993 by a Lehigh University professor of biochemistry named Michael Behe. Prof. Behe explains the concept using the mousetrap as a model. The device, he points out, cannot be assembled gradually. You cannot start with a wooden platform, catch a few mice, add a spring, catch a few more mice, add the hammer-device, etc. – each new addition making the device more effective. Unless the trap is fully assembled, with all the essential parts in place, it will not function at all. It is irreducibly complex. Most organisms are like this. They must have all their parts in place, fully functional, in order to survive. Thus, a fish which happened to develop lungs would not survive. It would drown in water. To live on land it would need all the other parts of a land creature in place, too. Just the lungs would not do. The eye, is a classic example of irreducible complexity. It is complex beyond the understanding of all but the most highly educated scientists – and barely so for them. The organ is useless unless all of its parts are fully formed and functional. The slightest alteration from its correct form destroys its functionality. How could it possibly evolve by slight alterations over time? Even though less understood in Darwin’s era, the eye was cited then as proof against his theory. A passage from How Now Shall We Live – written by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey – mentions an effort by contemporary Darwinist Richard Dawkins to trace the evolution of the eye: “…[start] with a light-sensitive spot and [move] to a group of cells cupped to focus light better, and so on through a graded series of small improvements to produce a true lens. But, as Behe points out, even the first step – the light-sensitive spot – is irreducibly complex, requiring a chain reaction of chemical reactions starting when a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which changes to trans-retinal, which forces a change in the shape of a protein called rhodopsin, which sticks to another protein called transducin, which binds to another molecule…and so on. There are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control groups of cells. Each of Darwin’s steps is itself a complex system. Adding them together doesn’t answer where they came from…” (italics added) Nothing in the Darwin theory explains how irreducibly complex organisms came into existence. Only the theory of intelligent design can account for them. Darwin, himself, realized that irreducible complexity could crash his theory: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Scientists not married to evolution by financial or career considerations are now beginning to agree that irreducible complexity has indeed caused the theoretical breakdown Darwin predicted. The probability of the eye developing spontaneously has been estimated at 1 chance in 10e123 (i.e., 1 with 123 zeroes following) – a probability of essentially zero. The gigantic denominator far exceeds the number of nanoseconds in the postulated age of the universe (i.e., 3.15 x 10e26) or the number of molecules in the universe (i.e., ~10e78). Many scientists now say they can more easily believe that the eye was designed by a “creative intelligence” than that it developed by chance with such an infinitesimally small probability. (One said it is easier to believe that the Bible came into being by an explosion in a print-shop than to hang onto Darwinian theory quantified at these probabilities.) An automated factory with its computers, robots and machinery all timed and coordinated, is less complex than the workings of a single cell. That scientists did not comprehend this in Darwin’s time is one of the reasons his theory gained acceptance. That people making decisions about education do not comprehend this now is why the theory still hangs on. Although I have barely scratched the surface, I have tried to show that evolutionary theory has serious problems, at least mathematically. It cannot be considered “settled science” with such objections unanswered. Schoolchildren should know this. Adults should, too.
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