Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
Darwin has failed. Darwin's book on the Origin of Species does not successfully explain the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local big picture circumstances - not to fine tuning of existing species neither to the emergence of new body forms.
Darwin tries to explain the fur of creatures or the shape of the beak of a bird or of a feather. Darwin explains those things theoretically in terms of mutation and natural selection but when he says we can go from little changes – using the same mechanism - to explain why there are antelope and crabs he fails. Can these mechanisms explain the question of where species came from or male and female sexual reproduction?
Darwin’s book the Origin of Species was well argued on the basis of evidence and the knowledge of biology that was known in the nineteenth century. But not by what we have learned mostly in the 20th and 21st century.
A subject more fully discussed in the relevant chapter is the fossil record, particularly that of the Cambrian Explosion dating some half a billion years ago. The striking variety of new organisms including the first ever animals, with novel body parts, pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a 70 million years without any predecessors. This was a problem that even Darwin was aware and he wrote that it was inexplicable. But he felt that the future fossil finds would fill in the missing ancestral forms.
The age of the earth of four and a half billion years it is very abrupt biologically. There is a mathematical branch of Darwinian theory called population genetics that allows us to calculate how much evolutionary change we ought to expect in a given amount of time if we know things like the mutation rate the generation time and sizes. We then find that 70 million years is a blink of an eye in terms of those calculations. This is a really unexpected event both biologically mathematically and geologically on a Darwinian view of things. Generating a new form of life entails generating a new shape of protein. This is step number one and step number two in inventing a new protein means inventing a new gene.
We can explain the genetics in terms that would be familiar today. If we want to give a computer a new function a new program is needed to accomplish that new function - you have got to give it new code. The big discovery of 20th century biology following Watson and Crick (who first mapped out DNA) lead to what is now called the molecular biological revolution. As is true in life forms, if you want to invent new forms of life you have got to have new code in the form of the information inscribed along the spine of the DNA molecule, and simultaneously other forms of information and cell structure is needed to build the protein molecules, and then you need additional information to arrange the cells into the body plans. So the Cambrian explosion is an explosion of biological form and it is also an explosion of biological information. So we have to grapple with a question that Darwin did not have because we know something about what it takes to generate information in our high-tech digital world of computing.
For Darwin it was good enough to imagine that the basic unit of life a cell was like a
little blob of jelly, undifferentiated, uncomplicated, and according to the belief in Spontaneous Generation prevailing at the time (see in later chapter) you could imagine putting many of these blobs together into getting different body parts, different body functions and different forms of life. Much like playing with Lego blocks – without pondering where the myriad of different shaped blocks came from.
It is fair to say what was good enough for Darwin is not good enough for us in this age. The cell is a complex bit of machinery unfathomably complex and we have not understood its complexity. Every time we look there seems to be an additional layer of complexity that needs to be factored in to our theories. Keep in mind that the goal is to explain the emergence of this complexity and if we are continually behind the
curve because the complexity is increasing every time we look the goal is also receding. Those who believe in evolution tend to think they have arrived, or at least look down on the sceptics as if they have arrived.
Protein molecules are assembled because of codes in the nucleus of cells that spell them out character by character codon by codon, and this codon means this amino acid and the next one means that. The mathematics underlying these codons is very simple, and Darwin could perfectly well have understood if he had the facts. Each one of these positions has to be occupied by one of 20 amino acids. If you pick one of 20 amino acids for this position and one of the 20 for the next position this sounds like building a string of beads. Building a protein out of amino acids occurs by choosing the amino acids one by one by one by one by one. There are several hundred of these ‘choices’ for a small protein and the number of ways you can arrange the amino acids grows exponentially as the string gets longer. Even when the string is short there is an astronomical number of choices and Darwin could easily have computed that had he known about the amino acids. In the vastness of the universe the number of combinations that would produce a useful protein that will fold correctly is exceedingly rare. And we did not know this until the last couple decades.
To take the string of beads analogy further, a string of beads is functional only when extended linearly and joined end-to-end in a circle. Bunched in the hand has no functionality. A protein of say 150 amino acids can be folded in over 22 thousand ways, and has to be folded at at least 149 places. But only one exact way is functional. And prior to that is a physical folding machine that is also largely made from proteins that were assembled and folded and constructed into a machine.
For a short protein of 150 amino acids long the ratio between the formation of a protein that will fold into a functional structure and a gibberish protein is 1 to 10 to the 77 (10 followed by 77 zeroes). To get a grip on the size of 10 to the 77th, there are only 10 to the 80th atoms in the known universe. Functioning proteins are extremely rare and given those astronomical numbers it is not even possible to imagine random mutations leading to functional proteins. To then take it further and imagine that one specie can randomly mutate into another specie is for the playground.
Mutations are rare and successful ones even scarcer. Darwinists know this and to balance that out Darwinists suggest that there are many organisms and a staggering immensity of time. Your chances of winning might be infinitesimal but if you play the game often enough you win in the end. Correct? The question is do you play it often enough? Does the history of life with which Darwin was concerned allow you enough chances to make it at all probable or even possible that you will hit on one of amazingly rare proteins and it folds in the one correct useful and functional form of many possible incorrect forms that can be stuck in a cell that does not yet exist.
Harmful mutations occur more often than useful mutations. However, for the sake of discussion, let us assume that these mutations occur at the same rate. For these useful mutations to help create a brand new form of organism a mutation must affect a gene that does its job early in the development of the life form and controls the expression of other genes that come into play as the organism grows. Too many things downstream depend on those early cell divisions. A bad mutation could be defined as one that cannot integrate with the rest of the genes, and would result in death. Evidently there are no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole that are not fatal. To repeat, they are all fatal.
If major genetic changes come late in development they're not going make a difference if the organism is already constructed.
Further, should a beneficial genetic mutation eventually occur, it would have to occur identically in another individual in the same locality of opposite gender to be able to propagate the benefit. Not only that, but there would have to be the same simultaneous beneficial mutation in a sizeable portion of the population for that benefit to advance in the natural selection process. To put it bluntly, the emergence on the tip of India of one rat with long webbed fingers may be beneficial for some hours till its demise - perhaps a great success story in the imaginative mind of the evolutionist.
The DNA molecule encodes information in a roughly digital or alphabetic or typographic form. In computer science we use characters zeros and ones (Off and On) Crick in 1957 realized that the information in DNA or the chemical subunits of DNA called nucleotide bases were functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like the zeros and ones in a section of computer code. That is to say
It is not their chemical properties that gave them their function but rather their specific arrangement in accord with an independent symbol – which we call the
genetic code. We have genetic text functioning according to a code, so it was pure information and a genuine information storage system We know from experience that information, whether we find it in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal or in a section of computer code,
whenever we find information and we trace it back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process. Undirected evolutionary/Darwinian mechanisms that have been proposed as an explanation for the origin of information fail for various reasons because it cannot search the space when it is so vast that the odds are overwhelmingly against it. So from a materialistic evolutionary standpoint we do not have any explanation for the origin of the information that is necessary to build new biological forms. And yet we do know from our uniform and repeated experience which is the basis of all scientific reasoning of a source of information as a cause of the origin of information that that cause is intelligence or mind. What we are seeing in life is evidence of the activity of a directing mind in the history of life. If you see a turtle on its back on a fencepost, you know it did not get there by itself.
Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a world view and an emergency religion for the many troubled souls who need one. Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument.