Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven

Oct 21, 2019

For a century Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has been as unquestioned as Newton’s theory of gravity. But science never stops asking questions. Or at least it’s not supposed to. Stephen Meyer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, takes up the challenge in this video. Are there questions about the origins of life that Darwinism can’t answer?

New evidence has raised more doubts about Darwin’s theory that natural selection is able to produce major innovations in biological form.: Charles Darwin presented natural selection as having the ability to “transform and create new and different life forms,” as New York University put it in a 2010 report. “But fossils failed to provide the evidence to support this unscientific version of history. If Darwin's theory is correct, there should be untold myriads of different life forms gradually transitioning from one to another. Instead, organisms look distinct, fully formed, and essentially the same wherever they appear, whether in the rock record and or in the living world.”
View source; “Many biologists question aspects of evolutionary theory because many of the main lines of evidence for evolutionary theory no longer hold up," the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer writes. “German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s famous embryo drawings long were thought to show that all vertebrates share a common ancestry. But biologists now know that these diagrams are inaccurate. Darwin’s theory asserts that all living forms evolved gradually from a common ancestor. But fossil evidence shows the geologically sudden appearance of new animal forms in the Cambrian period.”
View source; Related reading: “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal life and the Case for Intelligent Design” – Stephen C. Meyer
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Like Darwin, modern biologists cannot explain the Cambrian Explosion, when diverse groups of animals appeared with no evidence of ancestors.: The Cambrian Explosion is “the unparalleled emergence of organisms between 541 million and approximately 530 million years ago" which was “characterized by the appearance of many of the major phyla (between 20 and 35) that make up modern animal life.”
View source; This explosion of animal forms within this relatively short window of time with no evidence of earlier ancestors has perplexed evolutionary biologists from the beginning, even Charles Darwin saying he could give it “no satisfactory answer.” This “inexplicable” lack of evidence of ancestors for the phyla that appeared in fossil records in the Cambrian period, he wrote in Origin of the Species, “may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”
View source; Related reading: “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang” - Stephen C. Meyer et al.
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Evolutionary theory struggles to explain how purely natural processes could have given rise to the functional specificity of DNA codes.: James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their 1953 determination of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the precise sequence of which provides instructions for producing proteins in the body.
View source; “Various contradictory conjectures have appeared as scientists have attempted to explain how purely natural processes could have given rise to the unlikely and yet functionally specified systems found in biology systems that comprise, among other things, massive amounts of coded genetic information,” the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer writes. “The origin of such information, whether in the first protocell or at those discrete points in the fossil record that attest to the emergence of structural novelty, remains essentially mysterious on any current naturalistic evolutionary account.”
View source; Related reading: “DNA and Other Designs” – Stephen C. Meyer
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DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins are extremely rare—and, thus, extremely difficult to produce randomly.: Natural selection “selects” sequences that random mutations generate, yet recent experiments have shown that DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins are extremely rare. A 2004 study for Cambridge University by molecular biologist Douglas Axe found that for every DNA sequence that generates a relatively short functional protein, there are 1077 power nonfunctional sequences.
View source; WATCH: “Is There a Signature in the Cell?” – Stephen C. Meyer
View source; Related reading: “Intelligent Design vs. Darwinism: Theories in Collision” – Stephen C. Meyer
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Small-scale “micro-evolutionary” change cannot be extrapolated to explain large scale “macro-evolutionary” innovation.: “As a host of distinguished biologists (e.g. Stuart Kauffman, Rudolf Raff, George Miklos) have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale 'micro-evolutionary' change cannot be extrapolated to explain large scale 'macro-evolutionary' innovation," the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer writes. “Leading evolutionary biologists know this distinction poses serious difficulties for neo-Darwinism."
View source; Related reading: “Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” – Stephen C. Meyer
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Biology instruction often gives only part of the scientific picture of evolution, leaving out much evidence that complicates it.: “Current biology instruction presents only half the scientific picture," writes the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer. “For example, none of the standard high school biology texts even mentions the Cambrian explosion, arguably the most dramatic event in the history of life. Indeed, fossil studies reveal 'a biological big bang' near the beginning of the Cambrian period 530 million years ago. At that time, at least fifty separate major groups of organisms or ‘phyla’ (including all the basic body plans of modern animals) emerged suddenly without clear precursors. Fossil finds have repeatedly confirmed a pattern of explosive appearance and prolonged stability in living forms-not the gradual step-by-step change predicted by neo-Darwinian theory.”
View source; Unquestioning commitment to Darwinism is not necessarily the same as commitment to science. Many scientists have found evidence of intelligent design in the evolutionary process. As defined by the Discovery Institute, “the theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”
View source; Related reading: “The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design” – Stephen C. Meyer
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Most modern biology texts openly promote the anti-theistic implications of Darwinism, denying evidence of intelligent design in nature.: “The present crop of biology texts makes no attempt to hide the anti-theistic implications of contemporary Darwinism. Douglas Futuyma’s book tells students that Darwinism makes 'theological explanations' of life 'superfluous,’” the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer writes. “Kenneth Miller’s book insists that 'evolution works without either plan or purpose.’ Indeed, by denying any evidence of intelligent design in nature, Darwinism promotes an anti-theistic philosophy known as materialism.”
View source; Related reading: “Darwin’s Defenders Deny Life’s Evident Design” – Stephen C. Meyer
View source; Related reading: “Scientific Tenets of Faith” – Stephen C. Meyer
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Evolution.

You learned about it in high school.

It goes like this: Life started out with very simple forms and then gradually, over hundreds of millions of years, morphed into all the forms we see today. Bacteria to Beethoven. Not a straight line, of course…but that’s roughly how it went.

This was the theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, and, with some modification, it has been embraced as unassailable by the science community over the last century. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says, “If you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid or insane.”

But is that right? Are there no scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary account of life’s origins?

In November 2016, I attended a conference in London convened by some of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists. The purpose: to address growing doubts about the modern version of Darwin’s theory.

Let’s look at just two scientific reasons to doubt this theory.

First, the Cambrian Explosion. A weird and wonderful thing happened 530 million years ago: A whole bunch of major groups of animals—what scientists call the “phyla”—appeared abruptly within a geologically short window of time—about ten million years.

These novel animal forms—exhibiting proto-types of most animal body designs we see today—emerged in the fossil record without evidence of earlier ancestors.

Did you catch that? A huge number of diverse animals appeared, with no discernible antecedents.

So where did they come from?

This question really bothered Darwin. And he acknowledged that he could give it “no satisfactory answer.” Nor can scientists today.

The renowned biologist Eugene Koonin, of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, describes the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian animals and other organisms such as dinosaurs, birds, flowering plants and mammals as a pattern of “biological Big Bangs.”

So what caused all these new forms of life to arise? That question leads to a second big doubt: the DNA enigma.

In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick made a startling discovery: The DNA molecule stores information as a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals inside the DNA helix store the instructions—the information—for building the crucial proteins that cells need to survive. Unless the chemical “letters” in the DNA text are sequenced properly, a protein molecule will not form. No proteins; no cells. No cells; no living organisms.

Bill Gates has said, “DNA is like a software program.” Let’s think about that for a second. For computers to run faster and perform more functions, they require new code. Well, the same is true for life: To build new forms of life, the evolutionary process would need to produce new genetic information—new code.

But this raises questions about the creative power of natural selection and mutation. Natural selection is a simple sorting process. Species keep favorable mutations that allow them to survive but eliminate bad mutations that cause their members to die out. No one doubts that natural selection is a real process and that it produces minor variations, but many biologists now doubt that it produces major innovations in biological form.

To see why, think again about software. What happens if you introduce a few random changes into computer code? You’ll likely mess it up, right? Though it might still work—if you don’t make too many changes. But if you make enough random changes, your program will stop functioning altogether. You certainly can’t keep doing this and expect some cool, new program to pop out. There’s a mathematical reason for this. In all codes and languages, there are vastly more ways of arranging characters that will generate gibberish than there are arrangements that will generate meaningful sequences.

And this applies to DNA.

Remember, natural selection only “selects” sequences that random mutations generate. Yet experiments have established that DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins are extremely rare—and, thus, really hard to stumble on randomly.

How rare? While working at Cambridge University, molecular biologist Douglas Axe showed that, for every DNA sequence that generates a relatively short functional protein, there are 10 to the 77th power nonfunctional sequences.

Now consider that there are only 10 to the 65th power atoms in our galaxy. So finding a new DNA sequence capable of building a functional protein is like searching blindfolded for a single marked atom among a trillion Milky Way galaxies. Talk about a needle in a haystack!

As I show in my book Darwin’s Doubt, even 4 billion years of life’s history is not enough time to overcome a search problem this big.

So, two serious doubts about modern Darwinian theory: The Cambrian Explosion—the sudden appearance of new animals, which evolutionary theory has failed to explain; and the DNA enigma—the implausibility of random mutations producing the information needed to build new forms of animal life.

Scientists who know about these problems are not “ignorant, stupid, or insane;” they are just appropriately skeptical.

I’m Stephen Meyer, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, for Prager University.

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