Darwin's dysfunction

Or, how the fossil record fossilised our brains

“How does the sequence of bases on the DNA direct the construction of protein molecules?” Stephen C. Meyer

Seattle, 2019 : The Discovery Institute I have come to investigate is closed

Nanotechnology may be an even greater source of business and innovation for Japan as things get smaller and smaller. Even a current Iphone has as much computing power and more than all of Nasa’s computers combined when we went to the moon. Hi-tech means super small these days. How small can you think? Do you know about this tiny machine I am about to describe? It is 40 nanometres in size. A human hair by comparison is about 80,000 nanometres wide. Imagine it looks like those high speed Sentinel machines in the Matrix movie. With their long whip-lashing tails they would swoop down on the heroes’ ship to bore through its hull and so destroy it.

And now visualize something like this machine above. It is designed to propel itself even through the thickest and muddiest of liquids, like in a swamp but with just one long tail, whose grey beginning can be seen at the top above the universal joint. Its drive mechanism is a system of rotors like you find in any rotary engine today, complete with bushings, bearings, stators, a drive shaft, and that U joint all of which powers that massive, whip-like tail propelling it forward at incredible speed in any direction, up or down left or right. Its drive mechanism turns at 100,000 rpm in one direction and can reverse that direction within one quarter of a turn! Just think about the level of engineering needed to do that! It can move at 130 kph freely turning in any direction without disintegrating from the G force. What a marvel! It has an onboard signal transduction system that acts like a short term memory to inform it if the upcoming environment is favourable or hostile to its existence. Much like the Sentinels in the Matrix it could instantly detect any threat in the environment and thus change direction just as easily as it could locate the throbbing heartbeats of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar to target. What kind of design genius came up with this blueprint and then created it at such an infinitesimally small size? A super nano-motor! Did the Japanese do it?

Well, er, according to the prevailing scientific theory of evolution called random mutation there was no designer. It just appeared one day out of the quantum flux of a mindless, chaotic universe on one of its godzillions of random planets. Each bushing and every bearing, the powerful whip which never breaks down and the incredibly useful transduction system all belong to the bacterium called a flagellum. Yes, just like you would find in e-coli, that stomach churning pest. You are stock full of such engineering wonders the greatest of which is of course DNA itself. Naturally, the late great Charles Darwin had absolutely no idea of the unbelievable complexity inside a human cell because he did not have access to our technology. Thanks to electron microscopy, microbiology has unveiled extraordinary discoveries in the last two decades. All of that was made possible by Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA around the time I was born. But it was not until the Discovery Institute was founded in Seattle in 1991 and developed its centre for science and culture (that is now both famous and infamous for its intellectual stance called Intelligent Design) that the information I am now sharing became available. Simply put you cannot have a design without a designer. Or can you? That is the question..

But wait! Hasn’t Darwinian theory proven that evolution happened over very long periods of time allowing random changes to make such design marvels possible? It turns out that if you challenge Darwinian theory these days you risk losing your academic reputation and your position. But thanks to YouTube lectures and the publishing industry books like Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe and Signature in the cell by the above quoted Meyer and their highly informative research team I was able as a layman to seriously doubt that ‘done deal’ theory of random mutation. This would not have been possible without nanotechnology’s rapid ascent and the incredible intellectual resilience of Intelligent Design research team. But rather than involve the reader in all of the fascinating arguments against life forming in all its varieties simply by chance (and there are so many it is a marvel people still believe in Darwinian evolution) I will stick to the one absolutely certain to give you cause for concern.

It is not scientifically challenging at all and requires no knowledge of biology. It is quite simply a numbers game. How likely is it that a flagellum, that tiniest and yet most complex of bacterial engines could have appeared by chance? Here we go..

Stephen Meyer has a degree in the philosophy of science from Cambridge and speaks eloquently about the very real problems of random changes in living organisms actually degrading the possibility of improvement over time i.e. devolution is far more likely than evolution. What does he mean?

In his own words, “Random mutation can explain the survival but not the arrival of the fittest. It can explain the small scale variations or changes (to existing species) but not where major innovation comes from in the history of life.”

He cites the Cambrian explosion of new species over 500 million years ago, all at the same time and with no precursors to mutate from, as one such arrival period. He correctly notes that random changes inevitably degrade the information in a DNA sequence. It is for the same reason that random changes inevitably degrade information in a section of computer code or English text.” Think of mutants and gobbledegook...

He goes on to tell us that for every sequence of 12 letters in the English language that does convey a meaning there are a hundred trillion other possible ways of arranging those same characters that don't! And the same thing turns out to be true in the case of a modest protein of about a hundred and fifty amino acids long. Our bodies are put together by proteins as most people now know. For every system like the skeletal, the muscular or the vascular there are very specific assembly instructions that only the DNA/RNA in proteins can provide. Instructions means information. Track any jot of information and what do you inevitably find at its source? Intelligence of course..

He continues, “For every sequence that produces a functional protein there are about 10 to the 77th other possibilities (ten followed by seventy seven zeros is a BIG number) that don't. What that means is there's a huge search space that has to be gone through by any random mutation mechanism to try to find the functional sequences in that vast array of possibilities. It turns out when you do the math there isn't enough time even assuming a four billion year history of life on this planet to have enough replication events, enough copying events to search that space effectively!”

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

So there goes the idea that with enough time anything is possible. Even if life started with the famous big bang 13 or 14 billion years ago, there would still never be enough time to produce you. Hard mathematics wins the argument every time.

This time problem can be compared to trying to unlock even a simple bicycle combination lock with four numbers by randomly moving them. That could be done with non-stop patience by a dedicated thief but when you increase the number it gets far trickier. “The reason a bike lock works,” explains Meyer, “is that there are vastly more ways of arranging those numeric characters that will keep the lock closed than there are that will open the lock.” Most bicycle locks have four dials with ten digits. So for a thief to steal the bike, he would have to guess correctly from among 10,000 possible combinations. No easy task. But what if the lock had ten dials? A hundred dials?

I have spent time with some of the teaching staff at an innovative educational facility in the heart of Devon in the UK. Schumacher College was founded by the noted ecologist Satish Kumar to provide students with alternatives to the ‘done deal’ theories we take so much for granted. Personally I like to take on the big done deal ones like the Big Bang theory and this Darwinian theory of evolution. Note that word theory. It matters because the entire structure of science and progress is built on theories which were, sooner or later, proven wrong.

One of the instructors there had a degree in mathematics from Oxford I remember but was also a teacher of holistic science at the college. I fondly recall how derisively he laughed when I asked him if he believed in Darwinian evolution. I did not understand it at the time but since then other mathematicians have expressed the same feeling. That is how I began to realise how highly irrational it is that we can blandly accept that 4 billion years or so is enough time for life to spring from no life and then magically organize itself into our brains, one of which later created Darwin’s famous theory .

To use an oft repeated allegory, that is like taking all of the six million or so individual component parts of a jumbo jet and spreading them over our planet randomly. Then we wait for wind and weather and continental shifts and trampling by mastodons, for growing plants to displace them and for all manner of luck and accident to whoosh them all together in the same place. Then comes the piece de la resistance! They begin to assemble themselves in the precise manner that RNA messengers tell proteins to, down to the tiniest sequence detail (you cannot put the seats in until the fuselage is built right?) and then, according to random mutation theory, after a few more million years of magical fiddling voila!

One of those Darwin doubters par excellence has an almost frightening resume to a layman like me, one I share here directly from the website of the institute:

David Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Berlinski has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels.

He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. In addition, he has held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France.

If only Darwin and he could have gone over that theory in minute detail! The theory assumed something completely erroneous that had nothing to do with biology at all. It had to do with something far more fundamental and decidedly more difficult to sidestep with any amount of sophistry. Time. Numbers. Duration.

To me and hopefully a growing band of others the universe is clearly made of intelligence when we consider these odds. But of course all advanced ‘ancient’ people believed this implicitly. They knew the cosmos has a soul and that they did too. They even believed that their individual soul would one day become pure light, become a star. They spent entire lifetimes preparing themselves for that eventuality because it is not by random chance or simple hope that it happens. It has to be planned. It requires intelligence. They had it. They were the Egyptians..