Charles Darwin was a man of his time. His groundbreaking book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, took the world by storm. Since then, Darwin and his work have remained among the most influential figures in human history.
In an era when advanced scientific knowledge in molecular biology, cell biology and genetics was either rudimentary or absent, Darwin’s theory of evolution was zealously patronised by atheists and materialists worldwide. They hailed it as the new gospel of life and supplanted the Judeo-Christian worldview, commensurate with God instantaneously creating the universe, ex nihilio.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory rests on the stochastic process of random mutations within an organism, acting on natural selection and engendering the macroevolutionary formation of new species. The keyword here is ‘random,’ denoting unguided, mindless, and highly probabilistic chance events that occur over aeons and aeons of time. And unlike the axiomatic discipline of science, where tests and results are indispensable parameters of validation, macroevolution is not observable.
On the contrary, microevolutionary changes, better known as adaptations, to changes in the environment, like fur density, variations in beak size among finches in the Galapagos islands, colour changes in Peppered Moth during Industrial Revolution in England, germs developing resistance to antibiotics and insects becoming immune to insecticides, have been empirically researched and documented.
Darwin’s theory of progressive evolutionary changes from simple to complex organisms received a setback when discovering Cambrian Period fossils in various geological sites worldwide. Prominent among them were at Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, Utah, south China, Greenland and Siberia, where non-mineralised fossils were remarkably preserved. The Cambrian Explosion exemplifies an event in the history of life when complex, fully formed animal body plans arise abruptly without any discernable connection to ancestral forms.
Running up and down the sedimentary rock column, there is unmistakable evidence of complex morphological innovation belying the slow, gradual Darwinian process. Suddenly, fishes appear, dinosaurs appear, and the first birds and mammals, winged insects, and flowering plants appear. According to generous estimates, these life forms emerged within a span of 10- 20 million years, representing a mere blip in geological time.
Population Genetics estimates the quantum of evolutionary change in a given period of time based on mutation rate. These mathematical calculations present insurmountable challenges to the explanatory and creative power of the Darwinian mechanism of slow, incremental accretions.
In the Darwinian model, the waiting time for two or more coordinated mutations is hundreds of millions of years, whereas in the Cambrian era, fully formed animal body plans appear in a whiplash of time. This conundrum is exacerbated by missing intermediate fossil records for the pre-Cambrian strata. Darwin himself was acutely aware of this problem, forcing a disclaimer in his Origin of Species:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
Two American palaeontologists, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, tried to circumvent this impasse by proposing the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. It states that organisms undergo millions of years of stasis, followed by rapid bursts of change, leaving few transitional fossils behind.
They argued that evolution happens at the edge of a population and, therefore, a small group of new speciation could have been geographically separated and evolved at a different location. Scientific research on Punctuated Equilibrium concluded that such a phenomenon is an exception rather than the rule and extremely infrequent.
Darwin hypothesised that all living organisms developed from a single-celled organism, which was functionally and anatomically simple and made of a homogeneous jellylike substance of undifferentiated protoplasm. This primordial life form later replicated into complex organisms with the passage of immeasurable time, aided by random mutations and natural selection. In The Origin of Species, Darwin illustrated its evolution as the iconic Tree of Life—a bottom-up conceptual model depicting biological evolution—with a single cell at its base.
The Tree of Life didn’t account for the origin of life but presupposed it. Darwin surmised a warm pond where life originated in a primordial soup through the synthesis of prebiotic chemicals. His theory resembled the ancient Babylonians, who believed that life and gods mysteriously popped out of a stinking pond.
In 1952, two American chemists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, conducted the famous Miller-Urey Experiment to produce building blocks of life through chemical synthesis in a laboratory, simulating prebiotic and primordial earth environment. It was an attempt to ratify Darwin’s origin of life argument, which in scientific parlance is termed abiogenesis – hypothetical naturalistic origins of life and formation of its fundamental molecules from non-living matter. The experiment only yielded a few non-functional, racemic amino acids.
The protocols adopted for the Miller-Urey experiment and ever since towards the Origins of Life (OOL) project are invariably similar and strikingly unconvincing. Researchers buy highly purified chemicals, mix these in highly controlled environments in high concentrations, derive a mixture of compounds, publish peer-reviewed papers and celebrate these as big breakthroughs. Such controlled experiments are far removed from the chaotic early earth conditions when life could have emerged.
Revolutionary advancements in molecular biology and synthetic organic chemistry led to the discovery of the DNA molecule’s three-dimensional double helix structure. Led by English physicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson, it paved the way for a whole new understanding of the chemistry of life and unveiled the secret of its constitution.
The formation of life is contingent on four classes of molecules, namely nucleotides, lipids, carbohydrates and proteins. In 1958, Francis Krick proposed the Sequence Hypothesis. It states that nucleotides running along the spine of the DNA molecule are sequenced linguistically and function like alphabetical characters in a written text or analogous to zeros and ones governing a digital code in a computer program. DNA in a gene is arranged in the form of a chemical code known as bases, and there are four bases in a DNA molecule, denoted by the acronym ACGT – adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.
DNA is essentially an information storage system within a cell that is replete with specific instruction sets to synthesise large molecules like proteins. Proteins are, in turn, made up of amino acids. To put things into perspective, the human body uses combinations of 20 amino acids to build a full protein. The consensus among scientists is that 20,000 proteins perform various functions.
More than the chemical characteristics of the symbols ACGT—governed by an independent symbol convention—it is the sequencing of these four-letter codes in the right order, as instructed in the DNA, that accounts for the myriad functions of an organism’s development, maintenance, survival, and reproduction. DNA contains highly specified information.
The human genome contains a staggering three billion sequenced letters. Whenever there is specified information – as observed in the anthropomorphic world – whether it is a software program, hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt or chapters of a book, it immediately points to intelligence and mind as its source. The probability of a Darwinian chance event to produce precise, inerrant information systems that contain billions of letters of chemical code, orderly arranged, is infinitesimally tiny and defies rational explanation.
New body plans require new pre-specified information and a new chemical code. What would be the likely outcome if you interpolate random code (errors) into an old Microsoft Windows XP version? Will it produce the latest Windows 11 by deteriorating the original code? Random mutations are the deterioration of a system, irrefutably destabilising the status quo equilibrium.
The probability of creating a functional protein with 150 amino acids by chance alone is mind-boggling. Out of the 20 amino acids, one could construct a protein molecule in 10 to the power of 195 possible ways. However, this is not the only predicament. In nature, biological molecules exhibit mirror image forms. In all life, amino acids are exclusively left-handed, whereas sugars are right-handed. Therefore, one cannot superimpose a right-handed amino acid onto a left-handed one, and in that eventuality, the protein molecule is ruined.
In laboratory experiments, amino acids come as both left and right-handed, as in the case of the Miller-Urey experiment and are known as a racemic mixture. Mathematically, the probability of getting all 150 amino acids to be left-handed – given a 50% chance – is one chance in 10 to the power of 45. This problem of handedness or chirality being resolved by chance in the evolutionary scheme of things, bereft of any external intervention or pre-specified design parameters, is hopelessly inconceivable.
The single celled organism is found to be incredibly complexed through pathbreaking advances in molecular biology and biotechnology, E-coli is a single celled organism that lives in the gut. It has a hair-like bacterial flagellum that functions as an outboard motor for locomotion.
Though seemingly simple, it is a 30-part rotary engine of intricate design and an engineering marvel. The cell is an archetypical mechanical engine composed of parts resembling a shaft, bushings, rotor, stator, universal joint, drive shaft, and propeller. It could rotate five times faster than a Formula One engine and change direction in one-quarter of a turn with the same speed.
Moreover, all its parts have to work synchronously, which belies the Darwinian evolution of incremental improvements in form and function. If intermediate stages confer no functional advantage to an organism, what’s there for natural selection to select on the way from simple to complex?
The American biochemist, Michael Behe coined the term “Irreducible Complexity” to define such complex, integrated nanomachines that if you remove or incapacitate any part, it ceases to operate. A classic analogy would be an automobile, conceptually defined as the sum of its parts, constituting an internal combustible engine, breaks, transmission, tyres, and interior and exterior features. It results from a predictive manufacturing project built from a design blueprint and a product roadmap.
Top-down information has to be prior infused, meticulously detailing organisation, human and physical resources, supply chain selection, production scheduling, testing, and rollout. If you remove any part of the value-chain activities, it fails to deliver a finished automobile.
But when intentionality and teleology are evoked, then moving parts and its physical processes serve no adequate explanations of its origin. To comprehend the purpose, one has to conjure up human agency in Henry Ford or Karl Benz.
With greater understanding of cell biology and synthetic organic chemistry, scientists concur that time is an adversary of neo-Darwinian evolution. Biomolecules are kinetic or unstable and decompose rapidly when exposed to an oxidizing environment.
Hypothetically, even if one combines organic molecules— proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleotides—in a lab, controlling critical parameters of temperature, pressure, light, pH, oxygen and moisture, still the likelihood of creating a new living cell is zero. The irredeemable constraint is the lack of genetic code to sequence them. Information inevitably precedes biology.
Neo-Darwinism infringes upon the fundamental property of the universe, the second law of thermodynamics. The law states that the degree of disorder in a closed system increases with time, contravening the evolutionary principle of complexity and sophistication, which increases with the passage of time.
Evolutionists have countered this argument with theories stating that Earth is an open system receiving energy from the Sun; therefore, the law of decay doesn’t apply. John Ross, scientist at Harvard University emphasises, that such propositions are unscientific and counterintuitive. He confirms that entropy is equally applicable to closed and open systems, and there are no known violations of this law yet.
Scientists who advocate a broader and inclusive scientific framework to consider design and intelligence are often derided and witch-hunted in the scientific community. Evolution has transformed itself into an inviolable gospel of secular culture and a deeply held worldview akin to authoritarian regimes beyond the scope of criticism and reform.
Oxford University zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins believes that the universe is the creation of a blind watchmaker, a euphemism for the dominion of chance events, with no design, no purpose, no evil or good but pitiless indifference. It baffles rational minds as the precision observed in the impeccable fine-tuning of the cosmological constant, fundamental physical constants and complex genetic code could be the handiwork of a blind watchmaker. David Berlinski, the eminent mathematician, writes:
The theory of evolution is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks.”
Microbiology and biochemistry have provided revolutionary insights into life and its foundational unit of cells being ultra-sophisticated and magnificently complex nano machines warranting order, precision, intelligence, information, and finesse. It has raised existential questions on the origin of life and information. Biological evolution is grossly inadequate to explain creativity, purpose and intelligence that lies at the heart of a living cell.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
