Evolution’s Brute Spontaneity

As Michael Ruse and others have pointed out the language evolutionists use can be telling, but what is not discussed is that the language evolutionists do not use is also telling. Anyone familiar with the evolution genre cannot help but notice the curious use of design language. Teleology abounds as natural selection is described as “solving” this or that “problem.” As Ernst Mayr pointed out in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, “The use of terms like purposive or goal-directed seemed to imply the transfer of human qualities, such as intent, purpose, planning, deliberation, or consciousness, to organic structures and to subhuman forms of life.” Of course for Ruse, Mayr and the evolutionists these are merely interesting asides. The persistence of teleological language in the literature is nothing more than a commentary on how we think and do science. Perhaps it reveals a certain laziness of thought, or perhaps it is a useful way of problem solving, but either way it is nothing more than a fiction. Sure the world looks designed, but we all know that such primitive teleological thinking has long since been exposed and rejected. After all, evolution is a fact.

This brings us to that language that evolutionists do not use. They explain that evolution is a fact, and they give long, flowery descriptions of this process. Organic chemicals coalesced in warm little ponds or along deep sea concentration gradients. Single celled organisms emerged and natural selection proceeded to act on naturally occurring biological variation. The drama unfolded as volcanoes, lightning and comets created just the right mix. Neutral and positive mutations produced innovative solutions to the challenges of the evolving biosphere, resulting in common ancestors and clades. Evolutionists display beautiful, detailed murals depicting this epic history.

But what is not said is that all of this just happened to occur, all on its own. In short, the world arose spontaneously. While evolutionists readily adopt design and teleological language, they eschew accurate, objective descriptions of what their theory actually claims. Evolutionists insist it is a fact that the world arose spontaneously, but they avoid such stark terms. They avoid this because such clarity reveals the absurdity of evolutionary thought.

Spontaneous action is an important concept in science. Everything from thunderstorms and snowflakes to proteins arise spontaneously. Indeed evolutionists often appeal to this phenomena as support. Snowflakes and proteins arise spontaneously, so why not everything else? As I have pointed out this argument fails badly, and in fact merely points out yet more problems for evolution.

But yet another fundamental problem for evolutionists is that the spontaneous formation of things like thunderstorms, snowflakes and proteins occurs within a context. Yes proteins fold spontaneously, but only in the right type of aqueous solution. Even more important, you need an unfolded protein to begin with. That is, you need hundreds of amino acids to be covalently bonded, one to the next, by peptide bonds. And furthermore, it must not be just any arbitrary sequence of amino acids, but from a special class of sequences which, yes, spontaneously folds.

So the right type of amino acid sequence needs to be specified, those amino acids need to be held together by peptide bonds, and the resulting unfolded chain needs to be placed into the right kind of aqueous solution. Then, yes, it will fold spontaneously.

The same logic applies to thunderstorms, snowflakes and everything else. There is a context within which these things spontaneously form, and the context is crucial. These things don’t just happen spontaneously without the proper context. And so whenever we speak of spontaneous action in science, it is understood that there is an implied context. Molecules A and B spontaneously bond to form molecule AB, but it is understood that molecules A and B are mixed together in the same test tube, at an appropriate temperature, concentration, and so forth.

So in science spontaneous action is not action that is free of context. There is no such thing, we might say, as brute spontaneity. Unless, that is, you are an evolutionist. Here we have yet another absurdity of evolutionary theory. You won’t find this in their beautiful murals or flowery textbook descriptions, but evolutionary thought is based on context-free, brute spontaneity.

Evolutionists appeal to changing allele frequencies, genetic mutations and other means of biological variation as their sources of innovation. And while such mechanisms show little evidence of being capable of designing nature’s incredible array of species, even if they could they would rely on the context of molecular biology—a context which according to evolution arose via, yes, evolution.

But it does not stop here. Molecular biology must have evolved within a context. A terrestrial environment, providing the right mix must have led to the origin of molecular biology, cellular life and the underlying biochemistry.

And again, the terrestrial environment must have evolved within a context of an early earth. And the earth must have evolved within a context of an evolving solar system. And the solar system evolved from a cloud of gas. And the gas evolved from, well, you get the idea.

Ultimately evolution has no starting point except for nothing. For evolutionists there can be no Prime Mover. Everything we see must have arisen from nothing. And while one might, with sufficient wine or song, dream of such unlikely possibilities, evolutionists insist that all of this is a scientific fact that must be acknowledged by all rational parties. Evolution’s absurdity is exceeded only by its confidence.

But in their insistence, evolutionists will never use such clarity. Like the cult that hides its true beliefs to newcomers, evolution covers over its absurdities with beautiful murals and descriptions. They scoff when they hear their theory accurately described. For that is the language that evolutionists do not use.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Gene Expression Evolution: Your Daily Teleology …

Here is a new paper that claims to show the rate of gene expression evolution in a range of different mammalian species. Of course the paper shows no such thing. What it does show are gene expression rates in extant species. And what they found is that those rates are all over the map. The rates are often similar, but in other cases the rates not only vary between species, they also vary between organs and even chromosomes. As usual, the evolutionists describe the findings using teleological language to cover over what evolution really says:

We show that the rate of gene expression evolution varies among organs, lineages and chromosomes, owing to differences in selective pressures: transcriptome change was slow in nervous tissues and rapid in testes, slower in rodents than in apes and monotremes, and rapid for the X chromosome right after its formation.

Of course there is no such thing as “selective pressure.” This phrase is commonly used to envision an active process that responds to environmental challenges. If natural selection shapes and designs the species according to need, then it sounds more plausible. In reality, all natural selection does is kill off the bad designs.

Although gene expression evolution in mammals was strongly shaped by purifying selection, …

Translation: The evolutionists found that many cases similar genes have similar expression rates.

we identify numerous potentially selectively driven expression switches, which occurred at different rates across lineages and tissues and which probably contributed to the specific organ biology of various mammals.

In other words, the evolutionists also found some similar genes that have significantly different expression rates. So the evolutionists must infer a new kind of evolution. Instead of mutations grinding away which, on rare occasion, provide a slightly better design (in terms of reproduction of course), the new kind of evolution states that the genes and their regulation mechanisms are generally already in place. What changes is their expression rates. So evolution created all these genes and regulation mechanisms, no knowing that it had just created the building blocks for all massive biological complexity. All that was needed was some expression rate changes.

Aside from being unlikely, evolution calls for massive serendipity. As usual, it is presented in teleological terms.

Response to Comments: Does Natural Selection Help?

According to the theory of evolution the biological world arose via random biological variation, such as caused by mutations. By “random” evolutionists do not mean completely random. Perhaps mutations occur more often in summer. Or perhaps they occur more often in the daytime, or on Tuesdays. Perhaps mutations occur more often in one part of the genome. Such trends are clearly not random. So what do evolutionists mean by random? They mean that the biological variation is random with respect to need. Mutations are not, for instance, biased in ways that help the organism adapt to environmental challenges.

As an aside, this is yet another evolutionary expectation that has been falsified. We now know, no thanks to evolution, that biological variation very much is not random with respect to need. In fact, we observe rapid, non random, adaptations arising to cope with changing environments. Evolutionists, after resisting the findings, subsumed them within evolution. Such amazing adaptive capabilities, claimed evolutionists, were created by evolution. After all, populations that can rapidly adapt to challenging conditions would be better off, and so preserved by natural selection.

That was not entirely an aside because it raises the question of selection. Given that biological variation is random with respect to need, does natural selection help to explain how those amazing adaptive capabilities, or the other thousands of fantastic biological designs, arose?

According to evolutionists it certainly is. Breeders select for the traits they desire and Darwin argued that nature—by virtue of differential survival rates—effectively selects for the more fit designs.

Evolutionists often refer to selection “pressure” to indicate the powerful and effective role of natural selection in the evolution of biological designs. But in fact there is no such thing as selection pressure. Remember, according to evolution biological variation is random with respect to need. And selection is powerless to change this. It does not coax the needed mutations to occur. Natural selection is merely the consequence of (i) some mutations not working and so disappearing from the population and (ii) others having a neutral or positive effect and so perhaps surviving. We might say that selection kills off the bad designs. It certainly does not induce certain designs to arise.

So if selection pressure is a fiction then what role is there for natural selection? The answer is not much. In fact, starting at that warm little pond almost four billion years ago, evolution must have created humans via a very long sequence of random biological changes. Humans, and everything in between, arose by an astronomically long series of lucky shots. Selection merely eliminated the wrong turns.

Evolutionists are wrong to appeal so strongly to natural selection as the driving force behind evolution’s brilliance. The secret in the soup is evolution’s heroic claim about the nature of chemistry, physics, biology and life itself. Simply put, evolutionists imagine that from a lifeless pond to a human being, there is a long, gradual sequence of tiny, simple changes, each of which confers a slightly positive improvement in the ability to reproduce.

Each of these tiny, simple changes consists of a modest chemical modification, drawn from a small population of possibilities. For example, there are only four letters in the alphabet of DNA. If changing a particular DNA nucleotide to one of the other three letters confers a reproductive enhancement, then is it not likely to occur randomly at some point, and then be selected? Sure, but natural selection is not the key to this story.

The key to the evolution miracle is not natural selection, which itself is relatively uncontroversial, but the unfounded and unspoken assumption that the nature of matter, chemical bonds, chemistry’s periodic table, physic’s universal laws, and all of biology conspire together to form spontaneously a most unlikely thing: life. That is, starting from no life at all, the millions and millions of species and their incredible designs all spontaneously form via gradual, tiny chemical changes that just happen to occur at random. All this because there is an astronomical number of ever improving designs, all linked by those tiny changes. These never-ending lineages of nearly identical species form a myriad of pathways in biology’s immense design space. These pathways lead to each and every species we observe.

This is the heavy lifting behind evolutionary theory, not natural selection. Evolutionists tout selection and selection pressure, but these merely provide cover for the real absurdity. It would be like claiming that jet aircraft could be constructed by a long sequence of intermediates, each of which could fly.

But we need not depend on analogies or intuition. Biology gives us little doubt that there is no such evolutionary magic. Perhaps evolution’s many pathways leading to the many species are real, but there is no scientific evidence for them. Experiments consistently reveal limitations to change, not the sort of biological elasticity evolution requires. Even a mere, single protein molecule cannot be evolved from scratch. And biological designs give us little reason to think they are one in a long line of gradually changing designs, each working a bit better than the previous.

But evolutionists deny the science and insist that with natural selection, evolution becomes feasible. They resist acknowledging the fact that there is no such thing as selection pressure, and that their theory relies on random biological variation coupled with a fanciful notion of life.

For example, an evolutionist recently asked this question:

Let’s have CH clarify: when creationist debaters try to convince people that modern evolutionary theory is a theory of adaptation by pure random mutation, are they misleading their audiences? Is that a problem for CH?

The professor’s concern is that these creationists do not tell their audiences about natural selection and its role in evolutionary theory. Sure, if we want to describe evolution we need to include natural selection. But in that case we need to describe it accurately. We need to explain its limitations. And we need to explain evolution’s unlikely assumptions about the nature of biology and life. If evolutionists are concerned about self-serving, scientifically faulty descriptions of their theory, then perhaps they should look closer to home.

Anthropomorphic Terminology: Obstacle or Enabler?

As Bioessays Editor-in-Chief Andrew Moore reports, the lack of public acceptance of evolution is a fundamental misunderstanding of its core concepts. In fact, in the latest Bioessays Jacques Dubochet contends that many people think of evolution as producing modifications with an aim. They think of eyes as having evolved in order to see, and legs having evolved for walking, rather than in terms of directionless variation, and natural selection without motivation, design or strategy. “It is about time,” warns Moore, “that we stopped such anthropomorphic terminology and thinking, and confronted the likelihood that – far from being ‘excusable shorthand’ – it is an important contributor to a false impression of evolution among many non-scientists.” But Moore has it backwards.

Moore laments the use of anthropomorphic terminology in the evolution literature and rightly points out it misrepresents evolutionary theory:

There have even been meetings organized under titles such as “Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution.” This and other examples impose a fallacious sense of direction of causality in evolution, and that is completely consistent with a common misconception of evolution facilitating organisms towards certain aims or goals. Another concept that arises from the “anthropomorphisation” of evolution is the “problem”: in other words, an organism or system evolves towards what we, retrospectively, identify as a barrier, or “problem” that had to be “solved,” and we wonder how it was overcome. Nature doesn’t solve anything. “Evolved towards” is another trap: we can only say “towards” in retrospect. The system cannot actually evolve towards anything.

But why would Moore think that such an error has led to the lay public rejecting evolution? I know people who are skeptical of evolution, and believe me this misconception (whether they hold it or not) is not the reason.

In fact, quite the opposite, it is precisely non evolutionary language that makes evolution more palatable. Anthropomorphic and Lamarckian terminology allows us to escape evolution’s foundational claim, and ultimate absurdity, that the biological world spontaneously arose by itself. Indeed, that very phrase, spontaneously arose by itself, while a scientifically accurate description of evolutionary thinking, is almost universally rejected by evolutionists as a straw man rendition of their theory. It is always interesting to see how evolutionists react when confronted with their own ideas, sans the euphemisms.

Consider this example conclusion from research involving the third eye:

A G_o-mediated phototransduction pathway might already be present in the ciliary photoreceptors of early coelomates, the last common ancestor of lizard (vertebrate) and scallop (mollusk), because both have this pathway. Later, the ancestral vertebrate photoreceptor acquired a second G protein, either gustducin or transducin, for chromatic antagonism and perhaps other purposes. The parietal photoreceptor evolved subsequently and retained these ancestral features.

This anthropomorphic and Lamarckian language is important in the evolutionary genre. Imagine if evolutionists reported that random biological variation produced a phototransduction pathway, and then produced myriad new proteins, which fortunately just happened to include a second G protein, which fortunately just happened to ... well you get the point.

Andrew Moore is correct that anthropomorphic and Lamarckian descriptions are misleading accounts of evolution. But he underestimates their important role as a necessary literary device to suppress the underlying absurdity. Far from an obstacle, they help enable acceptance of evolution.

The Fly’s Adaptive Aerodynamics

Recent experiments have revealed that when perturbed in flight, a fruit fly can recover its heading to within 2 degrees in less than a tenth of a second. Here’s how the researchers describe the results:

Just as the Wright brothers implemented controls to achieve stable airplane flight, flying insects have evolved behavioral strategies that ensure recovery from flight disturbances.

This is yet another example of evolutionary euphemism. Recovery from flight disturbances is a complex, fine-tuned capability integrating sensors, algorithms and actuators. Not the stuff of random mutations. So the evolutionary euphemism compares it with the Wright brothers and their flying machines.

Pioneering studies performed on tethered and dissected insects demonstrate that the sensory, neurological, and musculoskeletal systems play important roles in flight control.

Indeed, sensory, neurological, and musculoskeletal systems need to be tightly coordinated.

High-speed video and a new motion tracking method capture the aerial “stumble,” and we discover that flies respond to gentle disturbances by accurately returning to their original orientation. These insects take advantage of a stabilizing aerodynamic influence and active torque generation to recover their heading to within 2 degrees in less than 60 ms. To explain this recovery behavior, we form a feedback control model that includes the fly’s ability to sense body rotations, process this information, and actuate the wing motions that generate corrective aerodynamic torque.

The fly’s sensors are tiny sensors known as halteres, structures that evolutionists have considered to be rudimentary—evolutionary leftovers. Now we’re told they just happened to evolve fantastic gyroscopic sensing capabilities, which just happened to be sent to the fly’s neurological circuits, which just happened to compute meaningful flight control maneuvers, which just happened to be sent to the fly’s musculoskeletal system. No wonder evolutionists resort to euphemisms.

Thus, like early man-made aircraft and modern fighter jets, the fruit fly employs an automatic stabilization scheme that reacts to short time-scale disturbances.

An automatic stabilization scheme for short time-scale disturbances that just happened to arise? Religion drives science, and it matters.