Evolutionists Are Now Saying They Have Solved the Problem of Evolvability

More Government Waste

It is remotely possible that Joel Lehman’s and Kenneth Stanley’s new paper on evolvability might have some useful, practical application. Perhaps it could help in designing better self-learning systems. Or maybe it could lead to improved training software. I certainly hope it leads to something useful because I paid for it—me and my fellow taxpayers. Unfortunately the paper appears to be yet another waste of taxpayer’s hard earned money in support of the unscientific, religiously-driven belief that the entire world of biology, and everything else for that matter, arose by itself.

One of the fundamental scientific problems with evolution is that in order for evolution to occur, there must be something already existing to evolve. Darwin imagined how one species could evolve into another, but from where did the first one come?

Evolutionists have usually handled this existence problem by either ignoring it or by using vague speculation about how life somehow first began. And if you can go that far, then from there it is all about mutations randomly altering DNA nucleotides and sometimes getting lucky with a better design.

What that simple-sounding narrative doesn’t fully explain is the context of those DNA mutations. For DNA exists in a genome, and genomes are immensely complicated. And furthermore the evolution of new species occurs within populations.

So the existence problem is more than some heritable material in some sort of self-replicating organism. There are genomes, genes, and populations as well.

But that is only the beginning of the existence problem. For in recent decades evolutionists have had to construct a far more bizarre version of evolution in response to scientific findings. For instance, if evolution is true then it must occur via profoundly complex molecular machines and mechanisms. These include horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks.

In other words, we must believe that evolution created unbelievably complex designs which then created more evolution.

Evolutionists call it evolvability, and that is the topic of Lehman’s and Stanley’s new paper. It has been a huge problem for evolutionists to explain this serendipity on steroids, but according to Lehman and Stanley the whole problem is actually rather trivial.

In recent years evolutionists have tried to explain how evolvability evolves because it is needed. In other words, evolvability arises as a consequence of competition. Of course that doesn’t actually explain how horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks evolved.

And so fortunately for evolutionists, Lehman and Stanley have now solved the problem. The answer is that evolvability just kind of happens by itself (sound familiar?):

The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse. When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past. The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.

Well that was easy. Thankfully a devastating theoretical problem for evolution has now been resolved. And how did Lehman and Stanley make their profound discovery? Well they, err, wrote a computer program that used a simplified simulation of the evolutionary process. No actual real-life species were modeled.

In fact, those thorny mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks were not explicitly modeled either.

Instead, they used a conceptual algorithm.

That is not to say it was not a complex computer program. The team had to work hard at designing and developing the program. And of course it was written in a language. A language for which there is an interpreter within the computer that translates the program into a low-level set of instructions the computer can understand.

And of course the entire experiment required the computer itself. It also required the electrical energy to run the computer.

In short, a tremendous level of technology, design and labor were required to demonstrate that the most complex structures known, indeed all of biology, required no such technology, design or labor. The biological world just happened to arise, all by itself.

So problems such as evolvability are now known not to be problems after all. That even though the experiment bears little if any resemblance to the real world that evolution would have had to work in. Here is the paper’s final conclusion:

In this view increasing evolvability may simply be an inevitable result of open-ended exploration of a rich genetic space. Importantly, in nature this passive drive towards evolvability may have bootstrapped the evolution of the genotype-phenotype map itself. That is, the genotypic code and biological development themselves are encoded within organisms, and mutations that alter the structure of the genetic space or genotype-phenotype map may also lead to more or less phenotypic possibilities. In this way, the emergence of a complex evolvable genotypic code and biological development may have been bootstrapped from far simpler reproductive processes by similar non-adaptive mechanisms. In other words, there may be no selective benefit for development or a complex genetic system, which may do no more than potentiate greater phenotypic possibilities. In this way the story of biological evolution may be more fundamentally about an accelerating drive towards diversity than competition over limited resources.

Evolvability may be an inevitable result of open-ended exploration of a rich genetic space? I recently paid my taxes and it is disturbing to see public funds wasted on such junk science.