The Case of the Missing Mechanism

The growing crisis in Darwinian theory is becoming more apparent all the time.
The work of creationists and other non-Darwinians is growing and finding a more
receptive ear than ever before. In this discussion I want to elaborate on what
I believe are the five critical areas where Darwinism and evolutionary theory in
general are failing. They are:
??????????????? 1. The unsubstantiation of a Darwinian mechanism of evolution
??????????????? 2. The total failure of origin of life studies to produce a workable
model
??????????????? 3. The inability of evolutionary mechanism to explain the origin of
complex adaptations
??????????????? 4. The bankruptcy of the blind watchmaker hypothesis
??????????????? 5. The biological evidence that the rule in nature is morphological
stability over time and? not constant change.

?Much of the reason for evolution’s privileged status has been due to confusion
over just what people mean when they use the word evolution. Evolution is a
slippery term. If evolution simply means "change over time," this is non-controversial.
Peppered moths, Hawaiian drosophila fruit flies, and even Galapagos finches are
clear examples of change over time. If you say that this form of evolution is
a fact, well, so be it. But many scientists extrapolate beyond this meaning.
Because "change over time" is a fact, the argument goes, it is also a fact that
moths, fruit flies, and finches all evolved from a remote common ancestor. But
this begs the question.

The real question, however, is where do moths, flies, and finches come from
in the first place? Common examples of natural selection acting on present genetic
variation do not tell us how we have come to have horses, wasps, and woodpeckers,
and the enormous varieties of living animals. Evolutionists will tell you that this
is where mutations enter the picture. But mutations do not improve the scenario
either. In speaking of all the mutation work done with bacteria over several
decades, the great French zoologist and evolutionist Pierre-Paul Grasse’ said:

?What is the use of their unceasing mutations if they do not change? In sum,
the? mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around
a median? position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final
evolutionary effect.

?When I speak of evolution or Darwinism, it is the origin of new biological
forms, new adaptive structures, morphological and biochemical novelties that
I am referring to. This is precisely what has not yet been explained. When people
question the popular explanations of the origin of complex adaptations such as the
vertebrate limb, or sexual reproduction, or the tongue of the woodpecker, or
the reptilian hard-shelled egg, they are usually given a litany of reasons why
these structures are beneficial to the organisms. More precisely, the selective
advantage of these structures is offered as the reason they evolved. But this
begs the question again. It is not sufficient for an evolutionist to explain
the function of a particular structure. What is necessary is to explain the mechanistic
origin of these structures!

Natural selection does explain how organisms adapt to minor changes in their
environment. Natural selection allows organisms to do what God commanded them
to do. That is to be fruitful and multiply. Natural selection does not, however,
explain the crucial question of how complex adaptations arose in the first place.

?The Origin of Life

We have been led to believe that it is not to difficult to conceive of a mechanism
whereby organic molecules can be manufactured in a primitive earth and organize
themselves into a living, replicating cell. In fact, the ease by which this
can (allegedly) happen is the foundation for the popular belief that there are
numerous planets in the universe which contain life. Nothing could be further
from the truth.

Early experiments suggested that it was relatively simple to produce some of
the building blocks of life such as amino acids, the components of proteins.
However, the euphoria of the Miller- Urey experiment of 1953 has given way to
a paradigm crisis of 1993 in origin of life research. The wishful, yet workable
atmosphere of ammonia, hydrogen, methane, and water vapor has been replaced
by the more realistic, but stingy atmosphere of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen cyanide. This is the stuff that volcanoes
belch out. This atmosphere poses a much more difficult challenge. Molecules
relevant for life would be much rarer. Even more damaging is the possibility
of the presence of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere from the break-up of water
vapor. Molecular oxygen would poison any reaction leading to biologically significant
molecules.

Coacervates, microspheres, the "RNA world," and other scenarios all have serious
flaws obvious to everyone in the field except those who continue work with that
particular scenario. Some have privately called this predicament a paradigm
crisis. There is no central competing model, just numerous ego-driven scenarios.
Even the experiments in which researchers try to simulate the early earth have
been severely criticized. These experiments generally hedge their bets by using
purified reactants, isolated energy sources, exaggerated energy levels, procedures
which unrealistically drive the reaction toward the desired product and protect
the products from the destructive effects of the energy sources which produced
them in the first place.

?The real situation was summed up rather well by Klaus Dose:

?More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of
chemical? and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity
of the problem of? the origin of life on earth rather than to its solution.
At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either
end in stalemate or in a confession? of ignorance." [From Interdisciplinary
Science Review 13(1988):348-56.]

?But all of these difficulties together, as staggering as they are, are not
the real problem. The major difficulty in chemical evolution scenarios is how
to account for the informational code of DNA without intelligence being a part
of the equation. DNA carries the genetic code: the genetic blueprint for constructing
and maintaining a biological organism. We often use the terms of language to
describe DNA’s activity: DNA is "transcribed" into RNA; RNA is "translated"
into protein; geneticists speak of the "genetic code." All these words imply intelligence,
and the DNA informational code requires intelligent preprogramming, yet a purely
naturalistic beginning does not provide such input. Chemical experiments may
be able to construct small sequences of nucleotides to form small molecules of DNA,
but this doesn’t make them mean anything. There is no source for the informational
code in a strictly naturalistic origin of life.

The Inability to Account for Complex Adaptations

?Perhaps the single greatest problem for evolutionary biologists is the unsolved
problem of morphological and biochemical novelty. In other words, some aspects
of evolutionary theory describe accurately how existing organisms are well adapted
to their environments, but do a very poor job of explaining just how the necessary
adaptive structures came
about in the first place.

?Darwinian explanations of complex structures such as the eye and the incredible
tongue of the woodpecker fall far short of realistically attempting to explain
how these structures arose by mutation and natural selection. The origin of
the eye in particular, caused Darwin no small problem. His only suggestion was to look
at the variety of eyes in nature, some more complex and versatile than others,
and imagine a gradual sequence leading from simple eyes to more complex eyes.
However, even the great Harvard evolutionist, Ernst Mayr, admits that the different
eyes in nature are not really related to each other in some simple-to-complex
sequence. Rather, he suggests that eyes probably had to evolve over forty different
times in nature. Darwin’s nightmare has never been solved. It has only been made
40 times more frightening for the evolutionist.

In his 1987 book, Theories of Life, Wallace Arthur said:

?One can argue that there is no direct evidence for a Darwinian origin of a
body? plan–black Biston Betularia certainly do not constitute one! Thus in
the end we? have to admit that we do not really know how body plans originate.

?In 1992, Keith Stewart Thomson wrote in the American Zoologist that:

While the origins of major morphological novelties remain unsolved, one can
also view? the stubborn persistence of macroevolutionary questioning…as a
challenge to orthodoxy:? resistance to the view that the synthetic theory tells
us everything we need to know about evolutionary processes.

?The ability to explain major morphological novelties is not the only failing
of evolutionary theory. Some argue that molecular structures are even more difficult
to explain. The molecular architecture of the cell has recently described by
molecular biologist Michael Behe as being irreducibly complex systems which must
have all the components present in order to be functional. The molecular workings
of cilia, electron transport, protein synthesis, and cellular targeting readily
come to mind. If the systems are irreducibly complex, how do they build slowly over
long periods of time out of systems that are originally doing something else?

?While publishing hundreds of articles pertaining to molecular homology and
phylogeny of various proteins and nucleic acids over the last ten years, the
Journal of Molecular Evolution did not publish one article attempting to explain
the origin of a single biomolecular system. Those who make molecular evolution their
life’s work are too busy studying the relationship of the cytochrome c molecule
in man to the cytochrome c molecule in bacteria, rather than the more fundamental
question of where cytochrome c came from in the first place!

Clearly then, whether we are talking about major morphological novelties such
as the wings of bats and birds, the swimming adaptations of fish and whales,
the human eye or the molecular sub- microscopic workings of mitochondria, ribosomes,
or cilia, evolutionary theory has failed to explain how these structures could arise
by natural processes alone.

The Bankruptcy of the Blind Watchmaker Hypothesis

In his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins states, "Biology is
the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed
for a purpose." He explains that

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead,
does ?not plan consequences, has no purposes in view. Yet the living results
of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design
as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Darwinism critic, Philip Johnson, has quipped that the watchmaker is not only
blind but unconscious!

Dawkins later suggests just how this process may have brought about the development
of wings in mammals. He says:

How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to bough, and sometimes?
fall to the ground. Especially in a small animal, the whole body surface catches
the air? and assists the leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil.
Any tendency to? increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help, for example
flaps of skin growing? out in the angles of joints…(It) doesn’t matter how
small and unwinglike the first? wingflaps were. There must be some height, call
it h, such that an animal would just break? its neck if it fell from that height.
In this critical zone, any improvement in the body? surface’s ability to catch
the air and break the fall, however slight the improvement, can? make the difference
between life and death. Natural selection will then favor slight,? prototype wingflaps.
When these flaps have become the norm, the critical height h will? become slightly
greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps will make the? difference
between life and death. And so on, until we have proper wings.

?

This can sound rather seductively convincing at first. However there are three
faulty assumptions being used.

The first doubtful assumption is that nature can provide a whole chain of favorable
mutations of the precise kind needed to change forelimbs into wings in a continuous
line of development. What is the larger miracle, an instantaneous change or
a whole series of thousands of tiny changes in the proper sequence?

The other assumption is "all things being equal." These mutations must not have
secondary harmful effects. How is the creature’s grasping ability compromised
while these wingflaps grow? These little shrew-like animals may slowly be caught
between losing their adaptiveness in the trees before they can fully utilize
their "developing" wings. Or there might be some seemingly unrelated and unforeseen
effect that compromises survivability.

A third faulty assumption is the often used analogy to artificial selection.
"If artificial selection can do so much in only a few years," so the refrain
goes, "just think what natural selection can do in millions of years." But artificial
selection works because it incorporates foresight and conscious purpose, the absence
of which are the defining qualities of the blind watchmaker. In addition, artificial
selection actually demonstrates the limits to change since an endpoint in the
selection process is usually reached very quickly.

The blind watchmaker hypothesis, when analyzed carefully, falls into the category
of fanciful stories that are entertaining–but which hold no resemblance to
reality.

The Prevalence of Stasis over Mutability

Rather than observing organisms gradually evolving into other forms, the fossil
record speaks of "sudden appearance" and "stasis." New types appear suddenly
and change very little after their appearance. The rarity of gradual change
examples in the fossil record were revealed as the trade secret of paleontology by
Steven J. Gould of Harvard. Gould also refers to stasis as "data" in the paleontological
sense. These are significant observations.

?Darwin predicted that there should be innumerable transitional forms between
species. But the reality of paleontology (the study of fossils) is that new
forms appear suddenly with no hint of the "gradual" change predicted by evolution.
Not only that, but once these new forms have appeared, they remain relatively unchanged
until the present day or until they become e
xtinct.

Some animals and plants have remained unchanged for literally hundreds of millions
of years. These "living fossils" can be more embarrassing for the evolutionist
than they often care to admit. One creature in particular, the coelacanth, is
very instructive. The first live coelacanth was found off the coast of Madagascar in 1938.
Coelacanths were thought to be extinct for 100 million years. But most evolutionists
saw this discovery as a great opportunity to glimpse the workings of a tetrapod
ancestor. Coelacanths resemble the proposed ancestors of amphibians. It was hoped
that some clues could be derived from the modern coelacanth of just how a fish
became preadapted for life on land, because not only was there a complete skeleton,
but a full set of internal organs to boot. The results of the study were very disappointing.
The modern coelacanth showed no evidence of internal organs preadapted for use
in a terrestrial environment. The coelacanth is a fish–nothing more, nothing
less. Its bony fins are used as exceptionally well-designed paddles for changing
direction in deep-sea environment, not the proto-limbs of future amphibians.

Nowhere is the problem of sudden appearance better demonstrated than in the
Burgess Shale found in the Canadian Rockies. The Burgess Shale illustrates that
in the Cambrian period (which evolutionists estimate as being over 500 million
years ago) nearly all of the basic body plans (phyla) of animals existing on earth
came into existence in a geological instant (defined as only 20-30 million years),
and nothing that new has appeared since that time. The Cambrian explosion as
it is called is nothing less than astounding. Sponges, jellyfish, worms, arthropods,
mollusks, echinoderms, and many other stranger-than-fiction creatures are all
found to suddenly appear in the Cambrian without a hint of what they descended
from nor even how they could all be related to each other. This is the opposite
expectation of Darwinism which would have predicted each new body plan emerging
from pre-existing phyla over long periods of time. The Cambrian explosion is
a direct contradiction of Darwinian evolution.

If Darwin were alive today, I believe he would be terribly disappointed. There
is less evidence for his theory now than in his own day. The possibility of
the human eye evolving may have caused him to shudder, but the organization
of the simplest cell is infinitely more complex. Perhaps a nervous breakdown
would be more appropriate!

?

? 1993 Probe Ministries

About the Author

Raymond G. Bohlin is executive director of Probe Ministries. He is a graduate
of the University of Illinois (B.S., zoology), North Texas State University
(M.S., population genetics), and the University of Texas at Dallas (M.S., Ph.D.,
molecular biology). He is the co-author of the book The Natural Limits to Biological
Change and has published numerous journal articles. Dr. Bohlin has been named
a 1997-98 Research Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal
of Science and Culture. He can be reached via e-mail at rbohlin@probe.org.

What is Probe?

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