A question that never ceases to fascinate is that of how life
originated, and how and why it has progressed as it seems to have. The official
story and de
rigueur explanation
is that that life came about through spontaneous generation from seawater.
Believing this is the mark of an Advanced Person, whether one has the slightest
knowledge of the matter. In academia researchers have been fired and careers
ruined for questioning it. If you doubt that scientists can be ideological herd
animals, as petty, intolerant, vindictive, and backstabbing as professors,
read Heretic, by
the PhD biotechnologist and biochemist Matti Leisola, who fell on the wrong
side of the herd. Ths establishment’s continuing effort to stamp out heresy
looks increasingly like a protracted desperatoon.
The
other, more intuitive view of life is that of Intelligent Design. When one sees
an immensely complicated system all of whose parts work together with effect
and apparent purpose, such as an automobile or a cell, it is natural to think
that someone or something designed it. There is much evidence for this,
certainly enough to intrigue those of open mind and intelligence. Those of a
philosophic bent may note that Freud, Marx, and Darwin are equally relics of
Nineteenth Century determinism, and that Darwin wrote when almost nothing was
known about much of biology. Note also that the sciences are tightly
constrained and limited by their premises, unable to think outside of their
chosen box. Others, wiser, wonder whether there are not more thing in heaven
and earth.
The
theory of ID is seen by the official story as a form of biblical Creationism of
the sort holding that the world was created in 4004 BC. This is either wantonly
stupid or deliberately dishonest. There is of course no necessary connection
between ID and Buddhism, Islam, or the Cargo Cult. There are scientists who are
not proponents of ID but simply see that much of official Darwinism does not
make sense or comport with the evidence. Some IDers are Christians, which does
not affect the validity, or lack of it, orf what they say. To judge by my mail,
many people have serious doubts about the official explanation without being
zealots of anything in particulr.
(For
what it is worth, I am myself a complete agnostic. Faith and atheism both seem
to me categorical beliefs in something one doesn’t know. ID certainly provides
no support for the existence of a loving Sunday School god, given that in
almost all places and all times most people have lived in misery and died in
agony.)
To
me, though, things look designed. By what, I don’t know.
Two
difficulties affect the presentation of ID to the public. First, most of us
have been subjected to thousands of hours of vapid “science” programs and
mass-market textbooks. These tell us that doubters must be snake-handling
forest Christian with three teeth. The second is that following the argument
requires more technical grasp than most have. Trying to explain the question to
a network-news audience is hopeless and makes those attempting it seem foolish.
Yet
discussion has to be fairly technical to avoid degenerating into vague
generalities. Following many of the authors requires familiarity with, or the
ability to pick up quickly, such things as the nature of information, both in
the Shannon sense of a reduction in uncertainty and of specified information as
found in DNA and computer code. Some experience of programming helps as does a
minor familiarity with organic chemistry and a nodding aquaintance with early
paleontology.
And,
alas, much of dispute turns on the mechanics of cell biology: DNA’s structure,
codons and anticodons, polymerases and transcriptases, the functions of
ribosomes, chirality of alpha amino acids, microRNA, protein folding, ORFans,
developmental gene regulatory networks, Ediacaran and Cambrian paleontology (so
much for 4004 BC BC), and similar technoglop, It isn’t rocket science, but it
takes a bit of study to pick up. Most of us have other things to do.
The
less one knows about cellular biology the easier it is to believe in
spontaneous generation. Darwin knew nothing. Since then knowledge of
biochemistry and molecular biology has grown phenomenally. Yet, despite a great
deal of effort, the case for the accidental appearance of life has remained one
of fervent insistence untainted by either evidence ofrtheoretical plausibility.
What
are some of the problems with official Darwinism? First, the spontaneous
generation of life has not been replicated. (Granted, repeating a process
thought to have taken billions of years might lack appeal as a doctoral
project.) Nor has anyone assembled in the laboratory a chemical structure able to
metabolize, reproduce, and thus to evolve. It has not been shown to be
mathematically possible.
This
is true despite endless theories about life arising in tidal pools, on moist
clays, in geothermal vents, in shallows, in depths, or that life arrived on carbonaceous
chondrites–i.e., meteors. It has even been suggested that life arrived from
Mars, which is to say life came from a place where, as far was can be
determined, there has never been any. Protracted desperation.
Sooner
or later, a hypothesis must be either confirmed or abandoned. Which? When?
Doesn’t science require evidence, reproducibility, demonstrated theoretical
possibility? These do not exist. Does not the ferocious reaction to doubters of
the official story suggest deep-seated doubt even among the believers?
Other
serious problems with the official story: Missing intermediate fossils–”missing
links”– stubbornly remain missing. “Punctuated equilibrium,” a theory of sudden
rapid evolution invented to explain the lack of fossil evidence, seems unable
to generate genetic information fast enough. Many proteins bear no resemblance
to any others and therefore cannot have evolved from them. On and on.
Finally,
the more complex an event, the less likely it is to occur by chance. Over the
years, cellular mechanisms have been found to be ever more complex. Darwin
thought that in a warm pond, bits of goo clumped together, a membrane formed,
and life was off and running. Immediately after Watson and Crick in 1953, the chemical
mechanics of cellular function still seemed comparatively simple, though nobody
could say where the genetic information came from. Today thousands of proteins
are known to take part in elaborate processes in which different parts of
proteins are synthesized under control of different genes and then spliced and
edited elaborately. Recently with the discovery of epigenetics, complexity has
taken a great leap upward. (For anyone wanting to subject himself to such
things, there is The Epigenetics Revolution. It is not light
reading.)
Worth
noting is that that the mantra of evolutionists, that “in millions and millions
and billions of years something must have evolved”–does not
necessarily hold water. We have all heard of Sir James Jeans assertion that a
monkey, typing randomly, would eventually produce all the books in the British
Museum. (Actually he would not produce a single chapter in the accepted age of
the universe, but never mind.) A strong case can be made that spontaneous
generation is similarly of mathematically vanishing probability. If
evolutionists could prove the contrary, they would immensely strengthen their
case. They haven’t.
Improbabilities
are multiplicative. The currents of exponentiation seem to be running ever more
heavily against the monkey. If this is not true, evolutionists have not shown
it not to be true.
Herewith
a few recommendations for those who may be interested. Whatever one might
conclude after reading the various authors on ID, you will quickly see that
they are not “pseudoscientists,” not lightweights, and have serious technical
credentials. They try to explain their subjects as they go along. Some succeed
better than others.
The
most accessible are Darwin’s Black Box, which I highly
recommend, and The Edge of Evolution, both by Michael Behe,
professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. He puts the heavy-duty tech in
the end notes. The intelligent reader will have no problem with these.
Also
clearly written and carefully explained, are Signature in the Cell (mentioned
aabove) and Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer
(geophysicist, PhD in history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University.)
The (again) intelligent reader will find these good but challenging. A third
possibility in Undeniable, by Douglas Axe (Underrgad
biochemistry, Berkeley, PhD. CalTech, chemical engineering) While very sharp,
he uawa analogy so much to keep things simple that the science can be lost. Ann
Gauger, Science and Human
Origins, has a degree in biology from MIT, a PhD in
developmental and molecular biology from the university of Washington, and has
done postdoc work at Harvard (on the drosophila kinesin light chain, which I
don’t know what is.)
Anyway,
Meyer takes the reader clearly and comprehensively through the question of the
origin of life from, briefly, ancient times through the research of Watson and
Crick and then into the depths of the cell in detail. Of particular interest is
his discussion of the the probabilistic barriers to spontaneous generation.
Right or wrong, it is, again, assuredly not “pseudoscience,” and is extensively
documented with references.
Should
you order any of these books, ask Amazon to ship them in boxes labeled Kinky
Sex Books or Applied Brestiality so nobody will know that you are reading ID.
Here,
allow me a thought that the writers above do not mention: Maybe nature is more
mysterious than even the ID people think: The insane complesity of life might
suggest a far deeper level of non-understanding than even the ID folk suspect.
Suppose
that you saw an actual monkey pecking at a keyboard and, on examining his
output, saw that he was typing, page after page, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with no errors.
You
would suspect fraud, for instance that the typewriter was really a computer
programmed with Tom. But no, on inspection you find that it is a genuine
typewriter. Well then, you think, the monkey must be a robot, with Tom in RAM. But this too
turns out to be wrong: The monkey in fact is one. After exhaustive examination,
you are forced to conclude that Bonzo really is typing at random.
Yet
he is producing Tom Sawyer. This being impossible, you would have to conclude that
something was going on that you did not understand.
Much
of biology is similar. For a zygote, barely visible, to turn into a baby is
astronomically improbable, a suicidal assault on Murphy’s Law. Reading
embryology makes this apparent. (Texts are prohibitively expensive, but Life Unfolding serves.)
Yet every step in the process is in accord with chemical principles.
This
doesn’t make sense. Not, anyway, unless one concludes that something deeper is
going on that we do not understand. This brings to mind several adages that
might serve to ameliorate our considerable arrogance. As Haldane said, “The world
is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Or Fred’s
principle, “The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.”
We
may be too full of ourselves.
(Republished from Fred on Everything by
permission of author or representative)
