The entire cloud of vital dust forms a huge cosmic laboratory in which life has been experimenting for billions of years.21
To de Duve most of the universe exists simply to provide the scaffolding to support life. In his view, the universe is effectively a superorganism in much the same way that, according to James Lovelock, the Earth is. Just on an unimaginably vaster scale.
But what about evolution? Surely the current understanding points in the opposite direction to ideas about life as a universal imperative, or inevitability, good as they may sound. The development of life, especially into anything more complex than a bacterium, is, we are told purely down to chance. If the evolution of life is dependent on random factors, then the idea of design in the universe as a whole is instantly and completely undermined.
Evolution is so often presented to the general public by the Dawkins school as the final coup de grâce, not merely to religious creationism, but also to any idea of design behind the universe, that it may seem perverse even to begin to challenge it. But what happens if you dare do just that? The results are rather surprising, although they won’t turn you into a creationist. In fact, quite the reverse. As we are about to see, the theory of evolution so beloved of Dawkins et al., by no means proves atheism to be right.
Chapter Ten
1 Quoted in Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 417.
2 Ibid., p. 416.
3 De Duve, Vital Dust, p. xv.
4 Watson and Crick, p. 738.
5 See Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, and the Panspermia of the Infinite Universe’, in Findlen (ed.).
6 Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, p. xiii–xv.
7 Quoted in Carey.
8 Quoted on BBC News website, ‘“Life Chemical” Detected in Comet’, 18 August 2009: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8208307.stm.
9 Schueller, p. 34.
10 Quoted in ibid., p. 31.
11 Ibid., p. 34.
12 Quoted in ibid., p. 35
13 Lovelock, Gaia (1979 edition), p. vii.
14 In the documentary, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything: James Lovelock’ in the Beautiful Minds series, produced and directed by Paul Bernays, ARC Productions for BBC Four, 2010.
15 Interviewed in the above documentary.
16 Lovelock, Gaia (2000 edition), p. xv.
17 Ibid., p. ix.
18 Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, p. 15.
19 De Duve, Vital Dust, p. 20.
20 Ibid, pp. 286–9.
21 Ibid., pp. 292–3.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DARWIN’S NEW CLOTHES
Today’s only accepted and acceptable scientific theories about the origins and development of living things reject even the slightest degree of design. Instead, the whole process that has fashioned the dazzling display of animals, plants and micro-organisms that cover the Earth is, we are told, driven ultimately by blind chance.
Evolution has become the really big battleground for the righteous – or perhaps, more accurately, the self-righteous – in the conflict between science and religion, particularly between militant atheists and Christian fundamentalists.
For those who take Genesis literally, evolutionary theory has not only to be rejected but also actively anathematized. The first book of the Bible states that God made all plants, sea creatures, birds and land animals (in that order) ‘according to their kinds’ – as individual, and by implication, fixed species. If, as science now understands it, different species developed one from another, then the biblical account is basically just wrong. Even worse to the Genesis literalists is the notion that humans – to whose creation God is supposed to have devoted special care and attention, making us ‘in his own image’, no less – are part of that scheme, that we have evolved from lower animals.
But scientists have made evolution a battleground too, seeing it as their greatest victory over the forces of superstition and irrationality, and raising the fear that undermining it will see the end of their intellectual triumph. In the last couple of decades there have been good reasons for scientists to be anxious, as the recent political controversy in the USA over intelligent design (ID) has shown. The well-organized and generously-funded ID movement aims to undermine evolutionary theory by picking on its flaws, but it does so as part of a Christian fundamentalist – creationist – agenda. So, if biologists admit that the theory is anything less than cast-iron, their opponents will pounce and, particularly in America, use such admissions for political ends, their immediate objective being control of the education system.
The ID movement emerged as the result of a series of reversals that Christian fundamentalists have suffered since the 1980s, in which attempts to have creationism taught compulsorily in state school science classes were successfully challenged in the Supreme Court. These were ruled unconstitutional because the United States’ constitution – its First Amendment, which dates back to 1791 – explicitly separates Church and State.
Creationists then began to recast their argument in more scientific-sounding terms, basically crossing out ‘God’ and ‘creation’ and replacing them with ‘designer’ and ‘intelligent design’. The phrase ‘intelligent design’ was carefully chosen, as it has occasionally cropped up in the scientific literature over the years. Charles Darwin himself used it.
The ID movement’s strategy is to highlight apparent gaps in Darwinian theory and biological phenomena that are either hard to explain in Darwinian terms or which seem to actively contradict it. It goes for the weak spots and then offer, intelligent design as an alternative. Of course, it is possible to believe in intelligent design without being a Christian fundamentalist; it’s just that virtually all ID-ers are.
But – and this is an important point – many of the ID movement’s claims about Darwinism’s weaknesses aren’t its own, but are lifted from the works of bona fide scientists. The notion that some creative, guiding and purposeful factor influences biological evolution has been proposed by dispassionate and objective thinkers with no religious axe to grind. Indeed, that great proponent of the ‘intelligent universe’, Sir Fred Hoyle, could have given Richard Dawkins a run for his money in the anti-organized religion stakes. The ID movement is cynically twisting such challenges to serve its own agenda.
Given such resolute opponents, small wonder that the scientific community sees any attempt to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy as dangerous and religiously motivated. Anyone who argues against it is assumed to be hiding a creationist agenda. This makes the whole subject a minefield for those who fully intend to get to the bottom of the subject, no matter where it might lead.
Of course there will be many who disapprove of non-specialists investigating the subject in the first place. But often those who devote decades to one aspect of a complex discipline end up simply not being able to see the wood for the trees. We, on the other hand, can stand back and see the wider picture. One way of doing so – especially where academic sacred cows like evolution are concerned – is to revert to childhood. One specific, fictional childhood in particular will provide some much-needed perspective. We are assuming the role of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, the lone critic of the Emperor’s ‘new clothes’. In this tale, everyone agreed they were magnificent – except for the young outsider who saw that they were, in fact, completely nonexistent. Following his lead, we also find ourselves standing towards the back of the crowd, ignoring the cheering to see what is really there.
CHANCE WOULD BE A FINE THING
Famously, the cornerstone of evolutionary theory is natural selection, or survival of the fittest, as proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82), most prominently in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, which has since become the bible of modern biology. Actually ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer as a way of avoiding the implication of design in the phrase ‘natural selection’. Even back then people were cautious about giving ammunition to creation
ists.
In Richard Dawkins’ hands, natural selection has been moulded into a quasi-religious revelation. To him natural selection also achieves a very rare thing: it proves a negative by showing that God does not exist. Natural selection provided Dawkins with his atheist epiphany, as well as being the catalyst that ‘raised his consciousness’,1 to use one of his favourite phrases.
To Darwin’s natural selection, modern biology has added genetics, the mechanism of heredity first proposed by – another irony – a Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel, in 1865 (although the term ‘gene’ was only coined in the first decade of the twentieth century), and since the discoveries of Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the 1950s known to operate through DNA. ‘Neo-Darwinian theory’ or ‘Neo-Darwinian synthesis’ is basically natural selection plus genetics.
The basic principles of natural selection are familiar and straightforward enough. If a new trait appears in an individual animal or plant that gives it an edge in the survival game – helping it be more efficient at finding food, dodging predators or attracting a mate – it will out-perform the rest of its species. It will live longer and produce more offspring that, inheriting the new trait, will also be one step ahead in the survival stakes. Eventually, after many generations, only those with the new feature will remain, the species having evolved into something new and better. Many more generations later, it will have become a new species entirely, unable to breed with members of the ‘parent’ species. Conversely any new traits that hamper an organism’s ability to survive or reproduce will be self-evidently eliminated.
As to what causes the changes on which natural selection works, it is all down to changes in DNA. When this miraculous molecule replicates during cell division, it nearly always reproduces itself perfectly. Extremely rarely a change is introduced, and when this happens it changes something in the organism’s physical form or in one of the biochemical processes that sustains it.
Changes in even a single gene can have the most profound effect. One mutation, for example, results in a mammal’s hind legs remaining vestigial within the body. Although an animal with such a handicap wouldn’t last very long, there are rare situations in which the mutation can actually be useful: it would help streamline semi-aquatic mammals, for example. In fact, fully aquatic whales and dolphins have been shown to have exactly that mutation.
Natural selection is not the driving force of evolution; genetic mutation is. Natural selection is more of a steering force, either gifting a change to the rest of a species or simply eliminating it. But what causes the mutations? According to the consensus, they arise from random and unpredictable copying errors that occur during replication. So, although the genetic system is beautifully elegant, life in all its myriad forms owes its existence to the imperfections in this system.
The process of random genetic mutation and natural selection, we are told, accounts for all of the enormous diversity of life on Earth. Everything that lives – microbial, animal or vegetable – has evolved over the course of billions of years from a single original organism, the ‘cenancestor’. (Otherwise known as the more zappy LUCA, ‘Last Universal Common Ancestor’, a term presumably chosen because the more apt ‘First Universal Common Ancestor’ would result in a somewhat inappropriate acronym.)
As Francis Crick wrote (his emphasis), ‘Chance is the only true source of novelty’.2 Similarly, in the 1960s the Nobel-prize winning biologist Jacques Monod uncompromisingly put man in his place. With typically French existential angst he wrote:
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.3
Put so depressingly, it’s hard to see much of a choice.
But does chance alone really explain everything in the natural world? Copying errors do happen – as is proven by genetic disorders – but if every individual tweak to the genetic code is random, can they alone explain all the vast number of changes needed to transform LUCA into human beings, E. coli, broccoli, whales and duck-billed platypuses?
Introducing errors into any system isn’t usually a clever idea. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe astutely observed that ascribing all the variety of the animal, vegetable and microbial worlds to random mutations is like saying a computer program can be improved by introducing random mistakes.4 And Paul Davies writes in The Cosmic Blueprint (1988) that logically:
one would suppose that random mutations in biology would tend to downgrade, rather than enhance, the complex and intricate adaptedness of an organism. This is indeed the case, as direct experiment has shown: most mutations are harmful.5
The standard response to this is that the vast majority of DNA mutations are indeed harmful, but natural selection weeds them out by killing off the afflicted animal or plant. The number of mutations that just happen to be beneficial might be minuscule, but they are enough, we’re told confidently, to account for everything that ever evolved. But this is by no means solid fact: it is actually just an assumption.
The problem for evolutionary scientists is that the factors involved are impossible to quantify. Mutations during DNA replication are extremely rare. According to John Maynard Smith, one of the late twentieth century’s foremost geneticists, each time DNA replicates, the chance of a change in a base pair is one in a thousand million.6 Most mutations have no effect anyway because the genetic system has a clever error-correcting mechanism. And the vast majority of mutations that do have an effect on the individual organism make no difference in evolutionary terms. The only changes passed on to the next generation are those which happen in the ‘germ line’ cells – sperm and eggs and the cells from which they develop. Only a minute percentage of those produce a beneficial change in the organism; most do damage. It is impossible to put precise figures on any of this.
The other side of the equation involves the speed of evolution, or how long it takes one particular species to evolve from another, which entails identifying the genetic changes responsible. As evolutionists can rarely, if ever, determine either of these with anything approaching certainty, there is ultimately no way they can prove that chance and chance alone was responsible.
Evolution is dependent on so many factors – the appearance of ‘good’ mutations, the size of a species’ population, competition from other animals, its environment and the speed of environmental changes to which it has to adapt or die. The origin of each species, every branch in the evolutionary tree, is a special, unique case, as Francis Crick asserts:
Strictly speaking, we can form no firmer estimate about the time needed for evolution than we can for the chance of any particular step … There is no detailed theory of evolution so quantitative that we can calculate just how long any particular stage is likely to require.7
Ever since Darwin, the physical changes on which natural selection works have been assumed to be purely random. The reason is obvious: if these changes aren’t the result of chance alone, then some other factor or factors are responsible, and there is no conceivable way to account for such factors without invoking the supernatural.
In order to make this assumption work, evolutionary theory relies on an egregiously circular argument, which basically goes as follows: No matter how unlikely it seems that a particular characteristic should evolve through random mutations, it must have done, because it now exists – and only random mutations can make things evolve. Frankly, this is outrageous. If non-Darwinists used similar (non) logic, we would be hammered – and quite right, too.
To be fair to evolutionary biologists, their inability to prove the quintessential importance of chance does not necessarily mean the theory is wrong. There are, however, many events in evolutionary history that are not merely difficult, but impossible to explain in neo-Darwinian terms. In fact, astoundingly, most of the major steps in the advancement of life, from the primeval to the complex, fall
into this category. Even mainstream biology acknowledges that processes outside the normal neo-Darwinian mechanism are required for these steps, or else pronounces itself completely baffled.
THE GREAT DNA MYSTERY
The first big mystery is how DNA itself came into being. After all, the entire variation of life on earth is essentially the result of the shuffling and reshuffling of its basic code. As one researcher put it recently, DNA ‘has multiplied itself into an incalculable number of species, while remaining exactly the same’.8
There is a fundamental Catch-22 situation about the origin of life. In order to replicate, DNA requires certain proteins in the form of enzymes to act as a catalyst, but no protein can be produced without DNA in the first place. At present, there are only theories that seek to explain how this came about, which because of their very nature are untestable.
In the mid-1980s a suggestion by British molecular biologist Graham Cairns-Smith that the earliest ‘genes’ evolved from clays attracted considerable interest. A current favourite is the ‘RNA world’ theory, which proposes that in the early stages, when only primitive single-celled organisms existed, life was based on RNA rather than DNA. We also mentioned earlier the PAH world hypothesis, according to which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons once predominated, leading to the development of RNA. However, although it makes sense that PAHs came first, were followed by RNA and then DNA, this theory is also rather vague.
All of these hypotheses, naturally, assume that the process of development from ordinary chemicals to the fully-fledged genetic system was entirely due to blind chemical reactions and chance. But that’s just an assumption, and it gets worse: there are only the vaguest ideas about exactly how this happened. As Christian de Duve comments in Life Evolving (2002):
… we are mostly left with speculative hypotheses to explain the manner in which the basic building blocks provided by cosmic chemistry might have combined into larger molecules, such as proteins and, especially, nucleic acids, not counting the more complex assemblages from which the first biological structures arose. One may well wonder, therefore, whether we will ever succeed in explaining the origin of life naturally or, even, whether this phenomenon is naturally explainable.9
The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God Page 25