Darwin's Black Bog

The Case for Blind Evolution Remains Stuck

Atheism says the universe is an accident and there is no higher purpose to your life or to anyone else's. You're born. You eat. If you're lucky, you get lucky and reproduce. You die. You turn to dust. End of story. As atheist biologist Richard Dawkins argues, while plants and animals certainly look as if they are the results of the work of a Creator, modern Darwinism's joint mechanism of random genetic mutations and natural selection gives us a designer-free explanation for these natural marvels, meaning there's no need to invoke a divine designer to explain the origin of living things. "Darwin," he says, "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

How intellectually fulfilling remains an open question. The neo-Darwinian mechanism is said to have evolved into being all the variety of life we find on earth, and yet it has never directly demonstrated the ability to create even a single fundamentally novel form, such as bird wings, a new animal body plan, or even tiny molecular machines such as the outboard motor known as the bacterial flagellum.

Or to take another  example, a famous decades-long laboratory experiment headed by evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski, involving hundreds of millions of E. coli bacteria over tens of thousands of generations, hasn't produced a single fundamentally new bacterial form. Random mutations have broken a few things in interesting ways, as biologist Michael Behe shows in The Edge of Evolution (2007) and Darwin Devolves (2019). In a few cases, these minor devolutionary changes have created niche advantages for the bacteria—like the car that gets slightly better gas mileage after the back seats are tossed out. But Behe shows that nothing new was engineered. Instead, these niche advantages came at a cost to overall fitness, and there are strict limits to how far E. coli bacteria can evolve.

Behe also shows that studies of the AIDS virus and the malaria parasite suggest the same thing: the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism can tinker with what's already there, but it can't build anything fundamentally new. This follows on Behe's earlier work in Darwin's Black Box (1996), which argued that blind evolution couldn't build irreducibly complex biological machines and systems, microscopic marvels that Darwin knew nothing about because the microscopes of his day were too weak to reveal them.

A Protein Puzzler

Or consider what is arguably the smallest functional biological unit, a protein properly folded and ready to go to work.

Think of each protein type as a distinct miniature tool or machine. The living world needs thousands of different protein types to do all the amazing things cells and larger organisms do. And each protein type requires its own distinct "software module" in the form of a long strand of amino "letters." Most protein types require a hundred or more amino acids.

The amino acids of life come in a twenty-character alphabet, and the particular amino-acid sequence for a particular protein type matters in much the same way that the particular sequence of letters matters to the meaning of this paragraph, or to the function of a computer software module. So how did the "software modules" for all these different protein types get created in the first place?

Caltech-educated protein chemist Dr. Douglas Axe did research on proteins while working at a lab in Cambridge, England, and he published his findings in the prestigious Journal of Molecular Biology. That peer-reviewed research showed that blind evolution can't change one type of protein into a fundamentally different type. As Axe explained:

It's a bit like trying to change this highlighted sentence into a dramatically different sentence through a series of random single or double-point changes, but where only changes that give us a meaningful sentence are accepted.

A random switch in the sentence above that changed the b in bit to an f would give us a new English word, fit, but it would also give us a nonsensical sentence and so would be rejected, in the same way that natural selection discards mutations that destroy the function of a protein. Some small random changes to the sentence might result in something acceptable. For instance, a double-point change eliminating the word "us" wouldn't spoil the meaning of the sentence.

Or the s in the second changes might get shifted over to give without spoiling anything—no, wait; actually, we'd need are to be simultaneously changed to is in order for the noun and verb to match. So now we'd need five simultaneous random changes just to manage this very minor adjustment to the sentence—and it doesn't even affect the basic meaning. And even if we let that noun–verb agreement error slide by and just made do with the simpler change/gives switch, you see the problem. It's impossible to make any significant headway toward a fundamentally new sentence.

Return now to protein evolution. Some skeptics of neo-Darwinism long suspected that what applies to human language, as illustrated in the sentence-­example above, also applies to biological information—namely, that the blind evolution of new information isn't possible. Geneticist Michael Denton made this argument back in 1985 in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. What Douglas Axe did was to demonstrate it experimentally.

Many found Axe's peer-reviewed results surprising, but notice that those findings mesh neatly with what we find in laboratory and field observations of various microbes: that is, evolution can tinker, but it doesn't produce any fundamentally new functional forms.

And if evolution can't build even a single new protein form, it certainly can't code for something like the first wings in the history of life, or a brand-new body plan, such as the phylum that contains humans, bears, bunnies, sharks, and glass catfish—i.e., Chordata. It can't because to code for this much biological novelty requires thousands of new protein types.

Of Bogs & Bluffs

Evolutionists have not even been able to provide a detailed hypothetical pathway from one biological form to another. Nothing even close. What they offer instead are a few just-so stories, long on imagination and hand-waving and short on detail. Biologist Jonathan Wells dissects these in his books Icons of Evolution (2000) and Zombie Science (2017).

If evolutionists had discovered a detailed hypothetical pathway anytime in their more than a century and a half of searching, we would have found it ballyhooed in every biology textbook and on every atheist street corner. We don't find any such ballyhooing because the Darwinists haven't discovered any such detailed evolutionary pathway. There is no pathway for blind evolution. There is only a bog, one that allows blind evolution to make minor evolutionary movements, but not to make any dramatic progress.

On the other hand, intelligent agents have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to create fundamentally new functional forms and new information—from cars, computers, and computer programs to bicycles, boats, and motors.

This joint body of evidence (negative and positive) would seem to rule out blind evolution's mechanism of small random mutations and natural selection as the source of all the living forms we find around us, and to decisively favor intelligent design as the preferred explanation for the origin of life's great diversity.

There is, in other words, a perfectly logical way out of the bog.