Dissing Darwin

Timothy Birdnow

E. Calvin Beisner says:

I like this line "Its beauty is important. Beauty is often a telltale sign of truth." Now why should that be? In my estimation that supports Intelligent Design. We often see that in Science, where a theory is elegant or beautiful. How do we have such a standard of beauty in such things? Isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? No; it's something built into the Universe, and we know it when we see it. Such beauty bespeaks Truth, but what Truth? Ultimately that there is a God.

I would add that we have no theory of Evolution, but rather a vague hypothesis that SOUNDS good but in fact explains little Darwinian Natural Selection (which is what differentiates Darwin from earlier theories of evolution, like those of Lamarck) argues in circles; it says evolution proceeds based on survivability, and when asked why a given trait was selected for survivability it is said "because the creature survived". We never get a why. Why was it beneficial to whales to go back into the sea? Why was it beneficial for some birds to be flightless? It's basically a tautology. And one without the evidence Darwin himself expected to find (like the transitions between fossils).

I would add that Darwin and Wallace arrived at the theory at the same time and for the same reason; they both read Thomas Malthus and adopted his economic theories to biology.

Personally I don't think Intelligent Design will work as a theory. I believe God did in fact use natural mechanisms to create all life - and probably a form of evolution. But I think Darwinian evolution is pure sophistry, but it is defended viciously by atheists who can't bear to give it up because it is a primary weapon in their arsenal against belief in God; they can say it's possible to explain everything without invoking God with Darwin and the Many Worlds hypothesis.

Darwinian Evolution cannot account for abiogenesis - the creation of life from non-life. It flies in the face of the  laws of entropy. Darwin cannot account for the fossil record. Life seems to spring from one form to the next almost immediately rather than slowly, leading Stephen J. Gould to postulate "punctuated equilibrium" in which there is a sudden burst of evolution. Of course, there is no mechanism offered to explain punctuated equilibrium. Darwin cannot explain how certain things came into existence that required complexity - such as the eye. The eye couldn't have formed in the way suggested, a clump of cells somehow figuring out how to perceive light and then forming into a highly complex organ that cannot function without everything working. (This is the concept of irreducible complexity.)

I've had a mouse infestation in my house. There are two kinds; gray mice and speckled brown mice. I see the brown ones always in pairs. Never have seen pairs of gray mice. Question; why are there two different kinds of mice in my house? They are both local mice, from the same enviromnent here in Missouri and as such should logically be the same. But they aren't. If environmental pressures kill off the less fit then one of these guys should be gone. Like Neanderthals, they should have given way long ago to the more successful species.

I would point out that Lamarckian evolution said there was something in a species that mutated under environmental pressure. Darwin said no, that the mutations were random but that there were beneficial mutations that survived and usually killed off the older species. Lamarckianism has been revived in recent years throug epigenetics - the theory that genes can be dormant but brought back "on line" at times. So there is at least two kinds of evolution? No, they say; Darwin's evolution changes the genes but they lie dormant.

It starts looking like the argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

And gene mutations are usually not good for the species. Again, that pesky law of entropy rears it's ugly head.

And then there is this from the article:

Mutations

How to make proteins is our first question. Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a "modest-sized” chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. A chain of amino acids is a polypeptide—"peptide” being the type of chemical bond that joins one amino acid to the next. But this chain is only the starting point: chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves into helices; others straighten out, and then, sometimes, jackknife repeatedly, like a carpenter’s rule, into flat sheets. Then the whole assemblage folds itself up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.

Imagine a 150-element protein as a chain of 150 beads, each bead chosen from 20 varieties. But: only certain chains will work. Only certain bead combinations will form themselves into stable, useful, well-shaped proteins.

So how hard is it to build a useful, well-shaped protein? Can you throw a bunch of amino acids together and assume that you will get something good? Or must you choose each element of the chain with painstaking care? It happens to be very hard to choose the right beads.

Inventing a new protein means inventing a new gene. (Enter, finally, genes, DNA etc., with suitable fanfare.) Genes spell out the links of a protein chain, amino acid by amino acid. Each gene is a segment of DNA, the world’s most admired macromolecule. DNA, of course, is the famous double helix or spiral staircase, where each step is a pair of nucleotides. As you read the nucleotides along one edge of the staircase (sitting on one step and bumping your way downwards to the next and the next), each group of three nucleotides along the way specifies an amino acid. Each three-nucleotide group is a codon, and the correspondence between codons and amino acids is the genetic code. (The four nucleotides in DNA are abbreviated T, A, C and G, and you can look up the code in a high school textbook: TTA and TTC stand for phenylalanine, TCT for serine, and so on.)

Your task is to invent a new gene by mutation—by the accidental change of one codon to a different codon. You have two possible starting points for this attempt. You could mutate an existing gene, or mutate gibberish. You have a choice because DNA actually consists of valid genes separated by long sequences of nonsense. Most biologists think that the nonsense sequences are the main source of new genes. If you tinker with a valid gene, you will almost certainly make it worse—to the point where its protein misfires and endangers (or kills) its organism—long before you start making it better. The gibberish sequences, on the other hand, sit on the sidelines without making proteins, and you can mutate them, so far as we know, without endangering anything. The mutated sequence can then be passed on to the next generation, where it can be mutated again. Thus mutations can accumulate on the sidelines without affecting the organism. But if you mutate your way to an actual, valid new gene, your new gene can create a new protein and thereby, potentially, play a role in evolution.

Mutations themselves enter the picture when DNA splits in half down the center of the staircase, thereby allowing the enclosing cell to split in half, and the encompassing organism to grow. Each half-staircase summons a matching set of nucleotides from the surrounding chemical soup; two complete new DNA molecules emerge. A mistake in this elegant replication process—the wrong nucleotide answering the call, a nucleotide typo—yields a mutation, either to a valid blueprint or a stretch of gibberish.

Building a Better Protein

Now at last we are ready to take Darwin out for a test drive. Starting with 150 links of gibberish, what are the chances that we can mutate our way to a useful new shape of protein? We can ask basically the same question in a more manageable way: what are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?

It’s easy to see that the total number of possible sequences is immense. It’s easy to believe (although non-chemists must take their colleagues’ word for it) that the subset of useful sequences—sequences that create real, usable proteins—is, in comparison, tiny. But we must know how immense and how tiny.

The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20¹⁵⁰. In other words, many. 20¹⁵⁰ roughly equals 10¹⁹⁵, and there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe.

What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10⁷⁴is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10⁷⁷.

In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is—so far—a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.

Molecular biology is pretty punishing to the theory.

Darwin is a theory that has more holes than swiss cheese, but it is clung to religiously to avoid religion. I fear we will never have a theory of evolution, since nodody wants to give this up and anybody challenging it is destroyed by angry mobs.

I used to write a bit about this but stopped because I grew tired of fighting with enraged numbskulls. It is an unwinnable argument because reason doesn't matter to the devotees of Darwin. This is a religious argument masquerading as a science debate.

BTW Two Scandinavian mathematicians recently published a paper mathematically testing Intelligent Design Theory and the claim of "fine tuning". They said it falls within the realm of scientific methodology.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:20 AM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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