Life, Evolution, and Design

Evolution at Face Value

The Unintended Road to Everything
“More to the heart of the matter, scientific reductivists assume the inherent ontological state of things to simply be what they are and do what they will requires no suppositions before single cell organisms and no explanations after random adaptation. The whole world, then, can be reasonably deduced from blind energy and dumb luck. Buildings logically follow from bricks, and it is in tidying up the job site where we will discover not only how bricks became their own bricklayers but also why they should want to build anything at all. Reductivists, with the faith of the converted, write such difficulties off as being the domain of yet to be discovered scientific law. But this leads one to incredulously ask: Why should blind laws conveniently favor order over chaos, especially given Chaos Theory prides itself on providing theorems that show chaos is not only inevitable, but determined?” ~from Omar's letter, Chapter Twenty-six of Icarus Transfigured

If we had the luxury of running the evolutionary film forward instead of backward, without knowing what we are looking at, and only seeing things as they evolve blindly forward into the future with no conceivable goal in mind—and no way of anticipating what the end result will be—, then the conclusion we would reach would likely be the opposite one we started with: that is, either through an Intelligent Creator or a metaphysical force, blind atoms became a sow’s ear, and a sow’s ear became a silk purse. Queerly, the complexity of life on Earth is often given as proof that only blind chance could create such diversity, yet without explaining how so many variables, like uncooperative pelting grains of sand in a sandstorm, should lead to anything other than irredeemable confusion. Nor is it explained how such an unpromising beginning should lead not merely to a workable solution to a given problem in each species, but reliably to the same types of solutions regardless the species.

We know more about physics and chemistry than we know about biology, for we know next to nothing about biology’s first principles. From this shaky foundation we strike out into evolutionary biology, which at least can employ a detective’s cold case trade in deducing motives from bones. Natural Selection, as the case is made in the fossil record, is not gradual as Darwin supposed, but either punctuated or static as the evidence shows. Regardless, Evolution is easier to conceive and map within a few degrees of separation, even though the quantum leap required to get from an existing species to a new one is neither accounted for as a mechanism within Darwinism, nor convincingly demonstrated as having occurred in the fossil record.

This is only the beginning of the problems.

Evolution cannot explain how the robustness of organisms should arise entirely from a mechanism of base randomness, or why, in light of the relative simplicity of the human genome,* randomness, as a discordant and undirected pursuit, should be more complex on paper than is order. (Paradoxically, order in practice displays infinitely more complexity than randomness.) Many within the evolutionary camp are troubled by the anemia of means when looking at the rich diversity of ends. And this bemusement begins well before we reach the complexity of mind and culture that, by extension, must be secondary, unintended luxuries of simple chance life.

Evolution relies on a field theory to find a mean norm through incalculable variations and their effects, thus allowing it to construct a narrative by which it can prioritize data and leave out aberrant results. In this way it is like quantum physics in using a simpler model to explain a more complex model, though what is left out is more than superfluous. The genius and preferences in Natural Selection are simply absorbed into a storyline without being accounted for in any detail; and with the hope that either through the discovery of algorithms, genetic mechanisms, or compelling retrofitted theories, these beneficial traits will be explained. Even allowing for explanations that get at Darwinism’s happy-go-lucky falling backwards through doors, there is still the unfathomable beginning to the story, which precedes the resourcefulness of a taken-for-granted gene. Naturally, this part of the story should not contradict with the latter part, but would it be clear that either part is seen in a true light because contradiction is avoided?

Imagine being a scientist, and looking at the Earth from a great distance and seeing the teeming elements on its surface as being only atomic in nature. If one could superimpose a structure onto these phenomena, which could be explained by mathematics, this account would not require any assumption about self-directed intelligence among the in-play dots, especially as these dots would be mixed in with natural elements like weather and plate tectonics. Indeed, these secondary natural (undirected) patterns would crisscross and create new patterns with those that are unnatural (self-directed), thus obscuring the distinct identity of each. If we make a purely physical interpretation of this picture, and reason exclusively from our cursory level of magnification about it, then one could either argue for a wholly natural mechanism in what one sees, or a wholly unnatural mechanism. Clearly, as physical science stands, both conclusions are inaccurate.

Yes, if one wants to be technical, even self-directed beings can be explained by the natural elements within their bodies, and thus one can get at a proof that, though it leaves out consciousness, it is self-consistent in explaining all phenomena by a natural definition. Consciousness would doubtless leave an anomaly in the evidence, which our field theory could confidently bypass in view of a pragmatic need to explain what it can with hopes for a better explanation later. However, what is left out is arguably the most important part, and should one always assume that only natural elements are required to explain phenomena, would always be left out.

One could equally argue that, given the feeble penetration of our example’s inquiry, all natural elements are made up of being: and perhaps being that supersedes the individual being of each self-directed consciousness to spill over into all things. This is a metaphysical view best expressed in a scene from the movie, Picnic at Hanging Rock, where a schoolgirl looks down upon a party of picnickers from a height and speculates as to whether they could serve a “purpose” they themselves are not aware of. Indeed, a philosopher, if not a scientist, would suspect as much where everything in Creation begins to run together under the microscope.

(*The human genome is comprised of only 23,000 genes, which is less than many plant species. It goes without saying that many in science gloated in this revelation, since some evolutionists never miss an opportunity to trivialize Man for the sake of undermining any scheme where Man is seen as endowed by a Creator with inalienable qualities. Moreover, a simpler genome bolsters the conceit that blind Evolution could achieve something as extraordinary as the human brain by surprisingly meager means.

This simplicity of means, however, misses the point where something as exceptional as the human brain issues from a gene count that does not differ significantly from that a chicken. Numerical reduction obviously sheds little light on the phenomenon of a complicated human mind, just as an autopsy of Einstein’s brain matter shed little light on his genius. Numerical reduction of this kind is further undermined by its own criteria for evaluation, since the number of neural firings in the mind potentially outnumbers the number of atoms in the known universe. For the reductivist, matter is the only thing that matters. Yet if one insists quantity describes the quality of anything, atoms must surely trump genes.)

Defect, Chance, and Luck in Evolution
Reductivists insist there is a link between random gene mutation and advantageous evolution of species as they adapt to their environment. Chance provides the mutation, and luck matches the mutation to the environment. It stands to reason a vast majority of mutations, being random, produce nothing beneficial. Such mutations can be made analogous to, let’s say, cancer, although it is unclear how anything like cancer would function in Natural Selection as a creative mechanism, since the disease affords little advantage to its victims. In the classic defense of Darwinism, we are told Natural Selection weeds out defects in genes that are not advantageous to life, while keeping those that are. However, it is infinitely easier to explain how a defect may lead to a dead end for a species than it is to explain how a defect can be turned into something eminently useful, like an optical eye or a digestive system. (Need it be pointed out, mutations in countless generations of laboratory fruit flies have only created mutated fruit flies.)

Still, for mutations to yield benefits there would need to be a lot of them; and as it is, there are quite a lot of them.

The difference between the concepts of traits and mutations is significant, and to borrow Mark Twain’s analogy, it is the difference between the right word and the almost-right word: i.e., the difference between “lightning” and the “lightning bug”. In reductive evolutionary thinking, the tendency is to blur the distinction. For example, as water dries up, chance provides the trait where a creature can breathe on land. If the emphasis is on mutation, a species may die off before chance allows a land-breathing mutation to occur. In this light a gene mutation has many more barriers than a trait. A trait, appearing at a higher scale of objectification in the human imagination, is readily molded into the idea of a talent or tendency, which an organism can employ in seizing its moment in a changing environment. Given life on this planet is only a few billion years old, there does not seem to be enough time for haphazard chance to be lucky so often and so reliably, especially given the vital organism in each case must wait on random chance to provide it with the talent before it can take advantage of the talent. Interestingly, the vitality, will, and resourcefulness of the organism is secondary, as only random mutation can be the prime mover.*

Beyond this curious inversion of will and opportunity, we have an inversion of mathematical odds. If we were to liken Evolution, as an end-in-itself, to gambling, then the odds would be consistently stacked in favor of the players over the house. Even though the house has more opportunities to foil players than players would have at winning, players, evolutionary speaking, have won—and have won convincingly.

(*Random mutation is perhaps too haphazard a mechanism to produce such fine and critical adaptations, so perhaps variation, which constitutes a smaller step between cousins, is a better, more controlled way to get from here to there—at least at the level of reasonable conceptualization. However, variation is weak tea compared to bolder mutation, and where time is critical in a changing environment, we gain no masterstroke with our timidity.)

Adaptive Change versus Consequential Change in Evolution
Intelligent Design works this question from a another angle: Evolution can make a case for small adaptive changes, as where, for example, a particular insect that does not possess a camouflaging color* gets eaten more readily than its cousins that do, thus leaving one branch of the family to procreate while the other vanishes. However, there are many orders of magnitude difference between a bug having an advantageous color in its environment and possessing (let us say) the ability to fly away from predators. Yet Evolution routinely leaps from the simpler illustration, which appeals to blunt logic, to the unimaginable illustration of a creature one generation not having wings and the next either having wings or some intermediate feature that will shortly become wings. Getting from the logic of a freak color to a freak wing is never really explained, yet speculative evolutionists engage in this slight of hand with befuddling ease.

The argument for small change cannot be made for consequential change, which is not merely adapted but indispensable to a species’ existence. An example given by Intelligent Design: if sperm do not develop flagella, then the organism that produces the sperm cannot procreate. Indeed, if we remove any consequential feature (trait) from an organism, an insurmountable obstacle is generated that retards not only the organism’s ability to evolve but also the very prospect of its existence. By Intelligent Design’s reckoning, such indispensable traits are not merely fortuitous but miraculous.

Even if we accept evolutionary biology in all its particulars ( and I do accept that Evolution, as a process, is conceivably one avenue of life’s adaptation to this world), then we still have the unscientific notions of extraordinary luck and coincidence. Something more than dumb process and flukes of mathematical probability are needed to account for this luck and coincidence.

(*Of course, the idea of selection for a color is infinitely easier to digest as an explanation than the complicated genetic coding required to bring it about.)

Gene-Switching and The Halting Problem
Most of who we are is genetically inherited, though the “expression” of certain genes, where some sequences are encouraged while others are inhibited, appears to be self-reprogrammable at the genomic level; and these actions are deduced as being reactions to changes in both the gene’s environment and the organism’s environment. Beyond the inscrutable program of gene switching that distinguishes human beings from fruit flies, this secondary capability of switches to self-modify lends credence to the idea of species adaptation—but only after the fact of the initial genetic blueprint and not before. Furthermore, what is made cannot be unmade, since information encoded in proteins flows only one way.

This is not, strictly speaking, the paradoxical halting problem of the computer, where the machine is presented with the conundrum of needing to decide whether or not to carry out an irreversible procedure that terminates its functionality. Genetic expressions are not rigidly set in stone because DNA regulators manage the switchboard from outside, like a computer programmer. However, if one is devout in the belief that all reality flows from natural laws, then, beneath a certain level, genetic programming and computer programming must share the same reductive deterministic properties. If one accepts this, then the halting problem indeed becomes the stone that kills two birds at the same time: i.e., neither scientific discipline gains anything from the comparison.

Switches, regardless it they are in computers or genes, create their own Russell-like paradox in being boxes that define other boxes. Surely the ability of genetic switches to control protein genes comes down to more than just what is there in the genome, for a subtle and precise choreography is taking place: a choreography where switches employ timing and intensity in how and when genes are turned on and off in a sequence; and this makes genetic blueprints infinitely more complex than a simple numbers games. Here we have an exercise of proto-will at the microscopic level, which cannot be atomized as a matter of atomic science or mathematical theorem.

In looking for the whole in the parts, proteins are more part that DNA regulator, but even DNA regulators are parts. Where, then, in the changeable biochemical soup is the whole envisioned or materialized? To say it was never there to begin with, or at least not there at the outset, is only to join the conversation and not initiate it. We all agree on the whole’s appearance by virtue of its functionality. We all agree on what the gene switches are doing to achieve this functional whole. But description is only a crude form of understanding, for no one truly understands what they are witnessing.

Haeckel's Anthropogenie

Parts versus Wholes in Evolution, Part One
Unlike subatomic particles, genes fall well within the observable range of objectified phenomena, and because of this we are able to not only dissect them and study their behavior but also learn a great deal about them by comparing their genomes to other genomes. At the level of embryos and Hox genes sequences, we see a variation on a common blueprint among many species, and accepting this blueprint prima facie,* we can systematically map out how simple life forms evolved into more complex life forms through four nucleobases and DNA sequencing. This is compelling stuff, and when we compare metaphysical, religious, and poetic interpretations of the Natural World to the mechanics of genetics, they seem more contrived than natural. Genetics make Evolution more than a theory about fossils. Genetics is a living history and architecture that “explains” itself. However, this argument ONLY has weight if you begin with genetics and not quanta, since we automatically assume the atomic structure underneath genes but have no clue what “structure” underlies subatomic particles. Science simply assumes it all begins here, like a charging rhinoceros suddenly appearing in the dining room.

Again, I do not refute the fact that species evolve by physical means, as physical means are readily discoverable by scientific method. The question is how these means came about, and how these means became their own ends. Evolution, like genetics, begins in the middle of things, and deduces backwards toward something that may be closer to a beginning, but is still essentially a middle.

For all the rich landscape the genome sketches in by way of traits in species, and for all our powers of deduction in working out its architecture and history as a living document, when science attempts to envision a likely beginning for how the genome’s elaborate modus operandi came into being, it falls back on vague and sometimes fantastical notions, such as our planet being seeded by organisms from meteorites (and as if these organisms need not give account of their own origins). Such scenarios exhibits a degree of frustration with the question, since science clearly wants to skip ahead a few pages to get to the part of the story where it can sound authoritative and empirical about what it knows. This impatience with the details of first causes naturally gives way to fruitful distraction, because invigorated genetics now possesses new powers it has barely begun to test. It is as though a preoccupied Doctor Frankenstein need not dwell on how lightning reanimates corpses since he has hot-wired God’s car and can drive himself wherever he wants to go.

As our understanding of genome improves, we can manipulate it and purposefully implant traits in creatures: e.g., growing an human ear on the back of a mouse, making bacteria that smell like licorice, etc.. The ease of this, as by snapping together toggle blocks in varying combinations, makes the link between desirable traits and random gene mutation seem a straightforward affair with plausibly few steps—but we have only seized the means of self-replication and not its ontological necessity: We are confusing the mechanics of the machine with the ghost inside it.

If one happens upon an automobile in a desert, this does not prevent one from acquiring knowledge about and use of the vehicle, or even reverse engineering it. Yet genes, prior to manifesting traits of any kind, are immensely complex things, and happening upon them in a microscope is as mysterious as finding a complicated, fine-tuned automobile in the middle of the desert. We can tear the car down to the molecular level of rods and pistons, but long before we reach this stonewall, we have another in the form of how rods and pistons came to have function as parts in a larger whole.

Surely we can deduce function from the material design of things, but science insists we cannot deduce design from material function. Ontology, where genetics is concerned, must be defined as “the being is in the doing because the doing is in the being,” although the only thing actually being explained is the being of the doing, and the doing of the being. In other words, “of” is an association of ideas that prefigure an “is”. “Is” is only associative where it is assumed.

(*Latent in these explanations is the idea that more information about phenomena and their processes demystifies them. Consequently, any secondary discussion that tries to do an end run around detailed science gets short-circuited by the absurdity of its simplicity. But does such boggling complexity in scientific explanation, no matter how empirical or rational it may be, really clarify anything? The more we know, it seems, the more we need to know. The more we break things apart, the more parts we have needing explanation.)

Parts versus Wholes in Evolution, Part Two
It is perhaps human nature to see fate in circumstance where only luck is required to explain the situation. However, it is easier to appreciate luck as chance when we look at parts in isolation, and not as parts to wholes; and this applies to not only orders of luck in leading from one to the other but also sequences of luck. Given the fragmented nature of science’s debate against design, it suffers from a lack of imagination when viewing everything in philosophical totality. Again, if we insist on calling all change “random mutation”, then it is not a question that any random mutation will do but that some random mutations are deal breakers: They must either be present or not present. Furthermore, it is not only a question of being reliably lucky with random mutations but of being lucky that they should occur in the right order and at the right time.*

More to the point, genetics that can produce beneficial traits can just as easily produce fatal disease, and chaos, given a little leeway, would quickly make more of the worst than the best. Mathematics may allow, by some scheme, a way for benefits to prosper by the most impossible of toeholds amid the carnage. This type of luck may be reliable given enough opportunities arising from failure, but it never ceases being inconceivable if all that is required to end it all is one well-placed asteroid impact crater.

The road from parts to wholes may be logical on inspection from the pure example of what is in hand, yet this connectivity cannot be logical on reflection. Even if we allow that individuals within a species can actively shape their environment, or be shaped by their environment at an epigenetic level where inherited traits can be passed on, too much is at stake for a blind process alone to produce highly specific complex features over short critical periods of change. Another mechanism must be present where the difficulty can be addressed not by mere parts working out haphazard arrangements between themselves but at a metaphysical level where the whole wills* its own ends—if not at a conscious level then at an unconscious level.

(*With DNA regulators, we see this miraculously occurring in real time, but there is nothing haphazard about biology at the stage of realization. Haphazardness [supposedly] occurred well before we get to this point.)

(*Many use the haphazard nature of the genome as evidence that no “designer” would work in such a way, since much of it appears to be “junk”, while other coding sequences have clearly led to inherited disease and defects. I do not reject the idea that genetics, like the process of evolutionary adaptation, works in spite of all manner of obstacles, and that obstacles make certain pathways more probable than other seemingly more desirable ones. However—again—we have pathways being chosen, and difficulties being worked around in spite of formidable odds. This requires something more that luck. It requires a metaphysical will creating its own luck by working through imperfect means to achieve its ends.)