The Big Book of Evolution: On the Origin of Specious

The following is a compilation of what over the years I have regarded, perhaps optimistically, as philosophically  useful thought on what I have refrained from calling Chuckie D. and the Darwin Caper. It is a bit lumpy, consisting in part of articles published elsewhere. It is also criminally long. For this I apologize, and ask the reader’s patience. My childhood made me do it.

The intent of this essay is not to debate with the ardent of evolutionism. To do so would be pointless. Nor is it to present any religious point of view as I am a thoroughgoing agnostic. Rather my aim is to investigate the theory of evolution against the background of the nature of science and its philosophical assumptions. We Americans are not a contemplative people, more given to practical concerns and the quotidian than to considerations of the foundations of our beliefs.

There being millions of things in the world about which to know, and limited time and energy with which to know them, it is not surprising that few really have much grasp of evolutionary theory, and so accept it because, well, everybody does. Further, its more ardent advocates, who do know much about it, can be vicious in its defense, to the point of forcing dismissal of colleagues who express doubt. Overall people accept it as they accept that the earth is round. Yet there is in fact much doubt and often disbelief about many of its elements, much of it among mathematicians and physicists. 

 The dispute over evolution is one of underlying sets of mind, of why people believe and disbelieve things. The greatest intellectual divide is not between those who believe one thing and those who believe another, but between those who  need to believe something fervently and those who can say, “I don’t know.” The former group comprises those Darwinists and Creationists who hurl imprecations at each other like fans of rival football teams. Each refuses to concede the slightest possibility that its doctrine might be other than infallible. To my mind they constitute the best evidence that we did not descend from monkeys, but have not yet ascended to them.

It is important to note that the theory of evolution is unlike any other scientific theory–if indeed it is scientific. It is an emotionally held creed, wrapped around science. Criticism of no other theory results in such fury, in censorship and court cases and dismissals from universities and denial of academic freedom. It is the only scientific–“scientific”–theory that cannot be questioned. This is not science. It is censorship.

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts of the tenets of evolutionism which has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me by his readers. Characteristically  of  the type, he did not say why I was wrong, only that he would not allow me to say why I was right. The pressure from such as he, and they are many, to conform to approved thought on Darwin has seemed to me hardly in the tradition of science.

I write here for those who can look at the world with curiosity and calm, divining what can be divined and conceding what cannot, without regarding themselves as members of warring tribes.

Since anyone who doubts Darwin is thought to be at least  slightly mad and since much of what follows consists of ideas with which many will be unfamiliar, we will begin here with an example of the sort of doubt espoused, usually very quietly, by many scientists. The example will, I hope, persuade the reader that what follows may be interesting.

Irreducible Complexity

Perhaps the most easily grasped objection to orthodox evolution is irreducible complexity. Many of the points made in this monograph can be argued, if not convincingly. Others require knowledge the reader may not have. Irreducible complexity is a stark, clear and (I assert)  inarguable objection to doctrinaire evolution.

Before considering examples, let us make sure we understand the principle of gradualism, the bedrock of Darwinian theory.

Supposedly new features come about by the gradual accretion of slight modifications due to mutations that are beneficial to the organism or, perhaps, at least neutral. Evolutionists agree that most mutations are harmful and die out quickly, but from time to time a favorable mutation occurs, and increases the fitness of the organism, as for example by increasing muscular strength or resistance to disease. This gives the possessor a higher chance of surviving, reproducing, and passing on the new and beneficial trait. The next mutation furthers the process, gradually leading to an increasingly fit organism. This at any rate is the theory.

The likelihood of this accounting for the increase of  qualities like strength depends on such elements of population genetics as mutation rates, population size,  rate of reproduction, and number of sequential favorable mutations needed to produce the feature. The first and last are seldom known. However, that a series of beneficial mutations must occur is agreed.

Irreducible complexity refers to the observation that a great many features occur in nature that cannot have evolved gradually because many parts would have to appear simultaneously, the entire system being useless if one element were missing.

Darwin himself foresaw this possibility, saying, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” (The Origin of Species)

In this he was more honest than his followers. In fact many such examples can be found. We will examine several throughout this monograph, but start, carefully,  with a hornet.

The Hornet’s Sting

Perhaps the clearest example of irreducible complexity is the stinging system—it is in fact a system—of the hornet. This consists of several distinct parts: (1) a biochemical mechanism to produce the venom, (2) a sac to hold it, (3) muscles to express the venom through the stinger, (4) the stinger itself, (5) muscles to force the stinger into the victim, (6) nerves to control both sets of muscles, (7) muscles to retract the stinger if it is to be used more than once, and (8) the instinct to use the sting. These must exist simultaneously and function in coordination in order to work. Absent any one, the system is useless.

The question for the Darwinist is how the system can have evolved gradually. The answer is that it cannot have: All components would have to have appeared at once, which is impossible by gradual accretion of mutations.  (We will hear ignore the additional observation that the various parts themselves cannot be the result of single mutations. One mutation, meaning an accidental change in DNA, cannot produce a long, perfectly “machined” hollow tube precisely integrated into the venom sac and attached to the necessary muscles, which themselves would require mutations.)

Evolutionists sometimes argue that the stinging system evolved from the ovipositor of other insects. The evidence offered for this is that both stinger and ovipositor are tubes used for depositing something somewhere, and both exist only in females. This makes no sense for the same reason of requiring multiple simultaneous mutations, some to produce the venom, others to produce its sac, others to attach the sac to the ovipositor. At this point the insect could not lay eggs as it would have a stinger but no ovipositor, and so would need a simultaneously appearing alternative means of reproducing. People offering this “explanation” are engaging in liberal-arts evolutionism, regarding Darwinism as a vague force for improvement while ignoring practical impossibility.

And of course if the sting, or other examples of irreducible complexity, had evolved gradually, there would be many intermediate forms, which there are not.  Insect fossils in  particular are common and well preserved in amber as well as in other media. No sting intermediates.

The whole argument over the completeness of Darwinian evolution rests on the foregoing case of the sting.  Hundreds of books, hundreds of thousands of pages and articles have been written  on evolution, full of passion, politics, weasel-wording, religious babble, smokescreening and forty-weight righteousness. The sting however is the perfect test case. What some judge says, or this or that Biblical whatever, or dozens of infuriated biologist or lawyers is irrelevant. If the advocates of evolution can explain the evolution of the sting by gradual accretion of slight steps, then it will be reasonable to assume that all instances of irreducible complexity can be explained. If they cannot so explain, then Darwinism fails or is at least incomplete. The question is that simple, embodying no argumentative sleight of hand or esoteric knowledge. If you know a Darwinist, preferably an evolutionary biologist, as him for his explanation. Don’t let him change the subject or dance away from the question.

Scientists are not immune to the foibles of human nature.

Why do so many biologists refuse to answer such questions as the foregoing? Because they cannot. The failure would bring into doubt their entire understanding of the world and of their discipline. We tend to think of them, and often they encourage us to think of them, as rational searchers after truth, “following the evidence wherever it leads,” to use one of their favorite phrases. This may be true as long as their emotions remain uninvolved, or their desire to believe that they understand the universe. Otherwise they can be as irrational as any itinerant preacher in the mountains of North Carolina.

“A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling. This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for.”

Among scientists as well as everybody else, the tendency is to insist on a familiar theory even when it no longer serves. From Max Planck (he of the constant): “Scientific theories don’t change because old scientists change their minds. They change because old scientist die”

  Just so.

Who This Monograph Is For

The following is meant for the intelligent general reader with fairly little technical background. In recent decades a great many doubts have arisen regarding Darwinism among specialists, but a grasp of these requires much reading in paleontology, genetics, and even mathematics. Relevant books on these will appear in the bibliography. The current effort focuses on aspects of evolutionary theory and ideology accessible without prior scientific study.

For convenience, “Darwin,” “Darwinism,” and “evolution” are often used interchangeably to refer to the overarching theory. “Evolutionism” ending in -ism  implies the extrascientific ideology surrounding the theory.

However, while evolution is the central theme of this monograph, it will touch upon broader questions of the nature of science and of our understanding of the universe in which we inexplicably live. In  pusillanimous submission the author’s laziness, the arguments and thoughts will be presented as bits and pieces, introduced by bold type, often independent of their surroundings. Some will be, it is hoped, factual, and others unabashedly speculative. These, it is also hoped, will at least be interesting. I avoid two types of argument. First, those involving Aristotle, Platonic ideals, the elán vital, and other notions from formal philosophy, these being so ill-defined as to seem to me pointless. Second, those involving detailed biochemistry. These are beyond my competence and, probably, that of the reader.

In foresighted self-defense, I note that in the following I assert little, but chiefly ask questions. They are questions that I have asked many times over many years in sites inhabited by many and intelligent Darwinists, such as the Unz Review, without getting answers. If Darwinists could answer these questions, they would. They have not.

Prologue: How This Essay Came About

I was in high school when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. They gave real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.

The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology seemed weak, however. They ran to, “In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a membrane formed, and life began its immense journey.” Still, I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn’t been true, scientists would not have said that it was.

Remember, I was fifteen.

In those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist, the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English. I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculations as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed to fit varying attempts at explanation.

For a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered as the home of the first life.  February  24, 2005 on the BBC website, I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. (“There is evidence that life evolved in the deep sediments,” co-author John Parkes, of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website.”)

The frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began, why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup. Sixty-three years later in 2023, it still does.
Again,in the following, we will think in sections, with one not necessarily connected with the next. The subject of evolution and its woes is complicated, involving everything from chemistry to the psychology of belief, and seems best ingested in morsels. I hope the reader finds this approach congenial.

What Distinguishes Evolution from Other Sciences

Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way. Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it did happen. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

As an example, consider the view that life arose by chemical misadventure in the primeval oceans. (We will have more to say on this shortly.) By this they mean, I think, that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them. Or to notice that others do question, and with reason.

They defend  the evolution of life in earth’s seas as the most certain of certainties. Yet in the November, 2005 Scientific American, an article argues that life may have begun elsewhere, perhaps on Mars, and arrived here on meteorites. That is, life began where, as far as many Mars rovers have been able to determine, there has never been life.  May have, perhaps, might. Somewhere, somewhere else, anywhere. Onward into the fog. Evolutionary thought is ever fascinating.

Consequently, discussion often relies on vague and murky assertion, or ignores obvious questions.

Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening evasiveness. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Crucial premises are not firmly established. Fundamental assertions do not tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions in the reign of Nicholas II substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked. This is the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.

Evolution and Religion

Many evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. By characterizing rational and scientific doubt as stemming from scientifically nonsensical faith in Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, or perhaps the Great Pilot in the Cargo Cult, they deflect attention from legitimate questions. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to Creationist ideas. Nobody does—except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions—overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn’t a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use)—of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.

Darwin as a small part of Darwinism

Darwin began with the idea that life originated as an agglomeration of goo in a warm pond, not a foolish idea in light of what he knew–nothing–about cells. But then came DNA, mRNA, tRna, nc RNA, microRNA, two-part ribosomes, the nucleus, active transport, post-transcriptional modification,, endoplasmic reticula, nucleotides, amino acids, methylation of cytosine, acetylation of histones, deactivation of X chromosomes, introns, exons, replication complexes, reading frames, and so on for pages. These were things Darwin’s philosophy–for that is what it was–could neither imagine nor explain.

Ancient Oceanic Origins: Spontaneous Generation

Let us begin with the belief, unestablished and apparently unestablishable, that life began spontaneously in ancient oceans. Without this theoretical pillar, the theory, at least as a unified and self-sufficient structure , fails. Even if all the rest of orthodox Darwinism could be established, a failure to explain the very origin of life would be philosophically devastating. This seems to account for the dogged insistence in the face of grave doubts. Let us consider:

(1) Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish. We do not. No trapped pools exist, no dried residues. The science of planetogenesis  can give only crude guesses. Bear in mind that chemical reactions depend crucially on molarity, pH, chirality,  temperature, half-life of intermediates. Note that when people emotionally desiring a particular conclusion are faced by almost no evidence, they are free to interpret hard.

2) Do we know what seas would be necessary for life to come about? No, we don’t. This is especially so since we don’t know what it is that we think came about.

(3) Has the creation of a living cell, or even a metabolizing, reproducing molecule, been replicated in the laboratory? No, it has not. Here the evolutionist will say, “But, Fred, how can you repeat in the laboratory something that took millions and millions of years and billions and billions of gallons of sea water?” You can’t, but am I to believe it happened on the grounds that it can’t be proved?

(4) Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that life would form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn’t, and can’t. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.)

(5) Have biochemists designed a replicating chemical entity that plausibly might have evolved into organisms such as we now have? No.

6) This next I ask, knowing that no answer is possible, to make a point: The more complex we postulate the First life to have been, the less likely that it would form accidentally. The less complex, the harder to explain why such life has not been designed in the laboratory. With every passing year, the failure becomes harder to explain as the discovered complexity of the cell increases. Think epigenetics.

Why is this story not called what it is, pseudoscience? If we don’t know what conditions existed, or what conditions would be necessary, and can’t reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can’t show it to be statistically probable, and can’t construct something that might have evolved—in short, if there is no evidence for it–why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence? And how many more years without an answer being found will pass before we suspect that there isn’t one?

Too Many Soups

To see the desperation of the search for plausible beginnings of life, look at this list, from the Wikipedia (I forget the date), of the wildly differing hypotheses, guesses, theories, and lunges, none of which have worked out. Does it make you confident that evolutionists know what they are talking about? Note that, as always with evolutionism, the question is how, not whether, a thing evolved.

Current models
3.1 Origin of organic molecules
3.1.1 “Soup” theory
3.1.1.1 Reducing atmosphere
3.1.1.2 Monomer formation
3.1.1.3 Monomer accumulation
3.1.1.4 Further transformation
3.1.2 Eigen’s hypothesis
3.1.3 Hoffmann’s contributions
3.1.4 ⦁ Wächtershäuser’s⦁ hypothesis
3.1.5 Zn-World hypothesis
3.1.6 Radioactive beach hypothesis
3.1.7 Ultraviolet and temperature-assisted replication model
3.1.8 Models to explain homochirality
3.1.9 Self-organization and replication
3.2 From organic molecules to protocells
3.2.1 ⦁ Deep sea⦁ vent hypothesis
3.2.2 Coenzyme world
3.2.3 RNA world
3.2.4 “Metabolism first” models
3.2.4.1 Iron-sulfur world
3.2.4.2 ⦁ Thermosynthesis⦁ world
3.2.4.3 Bubbles
3.2.4.4 Pumice raft

One hypothesis, as mentioned before, is that life swooped in from outer space on carbonaceous chondrites, or began on Mars (where it conspicuously has not been discovered by a platoon of itinerant Mars landers) and drifted to the earth. That is, life began where apparently there has never been life.

Organic Compounds Discovered in Outer Space, or Somewhere

Here a point worth making briefly: The press often excitedly reports that “organic compounds” have been found on meteorites, or comets, or interstellar space, or in bottles of chemicals through which an electric spark has been passed. The unfortunate name “organic” suggests origins in living creatures, or the likelihood of turning shortly into living creatures. Actually, “organic chemistry” is, roughly, the chemistry of carbon chains. No living origins nor living intentions are implied. DDT is an organic compound, as is 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, TNT.

Where Evolution Fits In to the Larger World

Here we must make a lengthy detour into wider realms of thought and possibility. We will eventually return to our central topic. I ask the reader’s patience.

If you look at evolution from other than the perspective of an ideological warrior who believes that he is saving the world from the claws of primitive Christians in North Carolina, difficulties arise. Chief among these is the sheer complexity of things. Living organisms are just too complicated to have come about by accident. This, it seems to me, is apparent though not provable. It is not a provable objection to the theory since the ardent of evolution can always say, “Yes, but given enough time….” But think about it. (Later we will look further at examples of complexity that cannot possibly have evolved, but here we will be satisfied with the more general case.)
Everywhere in the living world one sees intricacy wrapped in intricacy wrapped in intricacy. At some point the sane have to say, “This didn’t just happen. Something is going on that I don’t understand.” But an evolutionist cannot say that there is anything he can’t understand, only that there are things he doesn’t yet understand.

Read a textbook of embryology. You start with a barely-visible zygote which, (we are told) guided by nothing but the laws of chemistry, unerringly reacts with ambient chemicals to build, over nine months, an incomprehensibly complex thing we call “a baby.” Cells migrate here, migrate there, modify themselves or are modified to form multitudinous organs, each of them phenomenally complex, all of this happening chemically and flawlessly on autopilot. We are accustomed to this, and so think it makes sense. The usual always seems reasonable. I don’t think it is. It simply isn’t possible, being a wild frontal assault on Murphy’s Law.
Therefore babies do not exist. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Unless Something Else is involved. I do not know what.

Complexity upon complexity. In virtually invisible cells you find endoplasmic reticula, Golgi apparatus, ribosomes, nuclear and messenger and transfer RNA, lysosomes, countless enzymes, complex mechanisms for transcribing and translating DNA, itself a complex and still-mysterious repository of information. Somehow this is all packed into almost nowhere. That this just sort of, well, you know, happened is too much to believe. It began being believed when almost nothing was known about the complexity of cellular biology, after which, being by then a sacred text, it could not be questioned. And cannot.

The foregoing is only the beginning of complexity. The many organs formed effortlessly in utero are as bafflingly elaborate as cells themselves. Consider (a simplified description of) the parts of the eye: The globe of three layers, sclera, choroid, and retina. Cornea of six layers, epithelium, Bowman’s membrane, substantia propria, Dua’s layer, Descemet’s membrane, endothelium. Retina of ten layers. Lens consisting of anterior and posterior capsule and contained proteinaceous goop. The lens is held by delicate suspensory ligaments inside the ciliary body, a muscular doughnut that changes the shape of the lens to focus. An iris of radial and circumferential fibers enervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in opposition. A pump to circulate the aqueous humor. On and on and on. And equally on and on for all the other organs, which last for seventy years, repairing themselves when damaged.

Suspensory ligaments attaching the lens of the eye to the ciliary body. They form perfectly, all by themselves, and pull on the lens to change its curvature in focusing. This pulling requires complex communication with the optical cortex in the back of the brain.  How did this happen by gradual steps?

The  Details (Wherein Lurketh the Devil)

At every level, complexity mounts. The following simplified description of the biochemical functioning of the retina is from Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael Behe. The book, which I recommend, is accessible to the intelligent laymen, for whom it is written. The author includes the following technoglop to give a flavor of what is involved in vision. The sensible reader will skip through most of it. Try to imagine how it evolved by the step-by-step accretion of beneficial mutations.
When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.)
GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to “cut” a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, just as a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub. Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision. If the reactions mentioned above were the only ones that operated in the cell, the supply of 11-cis-retinal, cGMP, and sodium ions would quickly be depleted. Something has to turn off the proteins that were turned on and restore the cell to its original state. Several mechanisms do this. First, in the dark the ion channel (in addition to sodium ions) also lets calcium ions into the cell. The calcium is pumped back out by a different protein so that a constant calcium concentration is maintained. When cGMP levels fall, shutting down the ion channel, calcium ion concentration decreases, too. The posphodiesterase enzyme, which destroys cGMP, slows down at lower calcium concentration. Second, a protein called guanylate cyclase begins to resynthesize cGMP when calcium levels start to fall. Third, while all of this is going on, metarhodopsin II is chemically modified by an enzyme called rhodopsin kinase. The modified rhodopsin then binds to a protein known as arrestin, which prevents the rhodopsin from activating more transducin. So the cell contains mechanisms to limit the amplified signal started by a single photon. Trans-retinal eventually falls off of rhodopsin and must be reconverted to 11-cis-retinal and again bound by rhodopsin to get back to the starting point for another visual cycle. To accomplish this, trans-retinal is first chemically modified by an enzyme to trans-retinol— a form containing two more hydrogen atoms. A second enzyme then converts the molecule to 11-cis-retinol. Finally, a third enzyme removes the previously added hydrogen atoms to form 11-cis-retinal, a cycle is complete.

I can perhaps imagine an Airbus 380 assembling itself. I cannot begin to imagine the foregoing evolving on its own. Or working flawlessly for more than a millisecond. Remember that as it evolved, each complex biochemical step would have to provide improved function. The idea, I submit, is absurd.

Equally mysterious—equally impossible, I would say—is how biological systems can function at all, no matter how they came into being. The workings of every detail of, say, a human body can indeed be explained mechanistically, in terms of chemistry and physics, and this is the result that comes out of experimentation. In the laboratory you can show, or seem to show, that enzyme A binds to enzyme B, activating enzyme C and allowing enzyme D to do whatever enzyme D does. (You can show that a massive federal program makes sense in detail. But does it work in practice?)

Consider the ear with its eardrum and three ossicles, malleus, incus, stapes, somehow staying perfectly aligned for seventy years. Explaining their evolution in functional steps seems impossible but their functioning at all for so long also looks inexplicable. The retina is a very think membrane of some ten layers and, says all intuition and experience with complex mechanisms, ought to gum up and stop. It doesn’t. This is hard to swallow—unless something is happening that we do not understand.

But to believe that 180 pounds of infinitely complex, interacting chemical reactions (me, for example) can go on for seventy years without utter collapse requires powers of belief beyond the wildest imaginings of religious faith. The whole is less possible than the sum of its parts.

Something is going on that we do not understand. This brings us to the consideration of the grave limitations of the sciences.

More Irreducible Complexity The Horn of the Rhinoceros

Consider the horn of the rhinoceros, which, a Darwinian would say,  evolved to protect the beast from predators. Note the commingling of two distinct ideas, first that the horn protects the rhiho, which is  obvious, and second that it evolved, which it cannot have. We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the Darwinian gospel that we assume that anything serving a purpose must have evolved to do so.  (“evolved to….:) always the language of purpose)

To a layman, even at the macro level the the horn’s evolution makes no sense.  The horn is made of keratin, the protein of hair and skin, not of bone. This seems to imply that the horn must have formed from congealed hair. This would require (excuse the flip tone, but it has the virtue of being compact) a Hair Sticke’m Together mutation, assuming that one mutation would suffice. But why on the forehead and not all over, or on the left hind leg? So now we need a highly specific Hair Sicke’m Together Laterally Centered on Forehead mutation. Presumably we would then have a clump of clotted hair of no use whatever to the semi-rhino. Next, a Stuck Hair Grow Like Crazy mutation, since the thing would be of no value until long enough to poke lions. Then we need another mutation to give it a perfectly ovoid shape, not an obvious measure for survival, and then a Grow Faster In Middle mutation, to give the aborning horn a point. Presumably there is a Don’t Grow Too Much mutation to keep from growing and growing and turning the rhino into a unicorn.

Since Darwinian evolution works through the accumulation of many small beneficial changes, each of which must favor survival, there should be many intermediate fossils in different states of hornization. I can find nothing online about these intermediates,I strongly doubt that there are any but, should they exist, they would establish the fact of the horn’s evolution, though not the mechanism. (Remember, it is the mechanism that the thousand scientists specifically doubt.)

To show that the horn might have evolved through the accumulation of mutations, would it not be necessary to show which and how many genes code for the horn? And thus how many mutations and which? If, reuctio ad absurdem, one mutation could do it, then the nutational theory would be plausible. If a hundred and fifty mutations were necessary, it would be mathematically infeasible. And of course each of these mutations would have to be beneficial enough to become fixed in the population.

Protein Synthesis

My own question: Since evolution proceeds by the accumulation of small changes, all of them reproductively beneficial, in principle it should be possible to trace these changes back step by step to seawater. In practice this would be impossible in the case of, say, a blue whale, or even of Archaea. But consider something far simpler (in its basics anyway). the synthesis of proteins.

A protein of course is a concatenation of amino-acid residues. DNA codes for aminos via codons, groups of three nucleotides. Since there are four nucleotides, A,T,C, and G, there are four-cubed or sixty-four possible combinations of three. These can code for the twenty aminos with sufficient left over for control codons and some degeneracy.
This I think is high-school biology. But, according to Darwin, the three-nucleotide codon system must have evolved from something simpler. What? Two nucleotides per codon? This would allow only sixteen aminos with no control codons. This seems to me a clear, simple, and reasonable question about a simple and well understood coding system. Why is this not irreducible complexity?

 Computational Aspects of the Murder Hornet: Implausible Engineering Mastery:

As the reader may have guessed, I am a partisan of insects in general, and hornets in particular, as exemplars of the most varied, imaginative and sometimes, in a correct use of an overused word, weird design and engineering in the live world. There is more of the unlikely, preposterous, and inexplicable in our six-footed co-citizens than in all the vertebrates combine. By comparison, we humans are a mundane and unimaginative lot.

A complete description of a murder hornet would be sufficient to allow an engineer of enough ability to construct one from the description alone. The description would consist of layer upon layer of great complexity, biochemical, molecular biological, cellular, and, subsuming all, genomic. We will today consider only the anatomical, physiological, and IT aspects.
The murder hornet represents a high degree of precision, miniaturized, optimized, multidisciplinary integrated engineering with a autonomous maintenance and energy management. Human endeavor has produced nothing resembling the hornet’s elegance of design.

Consider some of its systems individually:

First, the hornet perfectly controls six multi-jointed legs, allowing it easily to walk over uneven surfaces, even while hanging upside down. This requires coordination and sensory feedback. Any robotics engineer will attest to the difficulty of doing this.
Second, its flight system allows it to hover, engage in aerobatics, and fly at forty miles an hour. This requires adjusting the rate of wing beat and angle of attack of the wings. This is not simple. It also requires precisely located muscles anchored to the body and attached to the wings. These latter are seen to consist of a thin flight membrane reinforced by a network of supporting elements. The design produces a wing both strong and light.
Third, the sting. As noted earlier,this consists of a biochemical mechanism to produce the venom, a sac to hold it, muscles to express the venom through the stinger, muscles to force the stinger into the victim, and the stinger itself. These must exist simultaneously and function in coordination in order to work. Absent any one, the system is useless
Fourth, the digestive system with its components and its complex biochemistry.
Fifth, vision. We tend to think of eyes as being of little interest since we all have them and most of us have a very simple idea of their function and complexity. This is illusory.
The hornet’s compound eyes consist of large numbers of intricately designed ommatidia, I don’t know how many the hornet has—quite a few as its eyes are large–but the dragon fly has thirty thousand.

Here a point that could be made of any of the insect’s systems. On examination, the hornet’s eyes are complicated and exquisitely engineered. The description below largely is from the Wikipedia and heavily edited to remove technical details, which makes it a bit awkward. Follow the link for the whole thing.

“The compound eyes of … insects are composed of units called ommatidia (singular: ommatidium). An ommatidium contains a cluster of photoreceptor cells surrounded by support cells and pigment cells. The outer part of the ommatidium is overlaid with a transparent cornea. Each ommatidium is innervated by one axon bundle (usually consisting of 6–9 axons, depending on the number of rhabdomeres) and provides the brain with one picture element. The brain forms an image from these independent units…

“Ommatidia are typically hexagonal in cross-section…. At the outer surface, there is a cornea, below which is a pseudocone that acts to further focus the light. …
“Each ommatidium consists of nine photoreceptor cells (primary and secondary pigment cells. and organized into a different tier. These “R cells” tightly pack the ommatidium. The portion of the R cells at the central axis of the ommatidium collectively form a light guide, a transparent tube, called the rhabdom.

“A hexagonal lattice of pigment cells insulates the ommatidial core from neighboring ommatidia to optimize coverage of the visual field…affecting the acuity.
The “…advantage of this arrangement is that the same visual axis is sampled from a larger area of the eye, thereby increasing sensitivity by a factor of seven, without increasing the size of the eye or reducing its acuity. Achieving this has also required the rewiring of the eye such that the axon bundles are twisted through 180 degrees (re-inverted), and each rhabdomere is united with those from the six adjacent ommatidia that share the same visual axis. Thus, at the level of the lamina – the first optical processing center of the insect brain – the signals are input in exactly the same manner as in the case of a normal apposition compound eye, but the image is enhanced…..”

Again, complex, miniaturized, optimized, integrated, elegant.
Sixth, the respiratory system consisting of spiracles, openings along the body, through which air enters and is pumped in and out by muscular contractions under control of timing and coordinating circuitry.
Seventh, the circulatory system, simple but requiring muscular contractions to pump hemolymph , as well as control circuitry.
Eighth, other sensory systems such as the antennae and auditory receptors, nerves detecting touch, three simple eyes (ocelli), etc.
Fitting all of these systems into an insect two inches long is a feat of engineering compaction orders of magnitude beyond current human possibility. Yet more astonishing, and hard to explain, is the IT aspect, the system integration and control to allow them to function seamlessly together.
To begin, the brain (for so we will call it) receives tens of thousands of what amount to pixels from two eyes and melds them to form an image. The brain must map this two-dimensional retinal information onto a three-dimensional world in real time since hornets do not characteristically run into things. This is not mathematically trivial.
Then the brain must interpret this information to decide what is going on in its environment, decide what to do about it, coordinate the action of legs, wings, perhaps stinger, mouth parts, housekeeping tasks such as respiration and digestion, on and on. This is a lot of computation.
How hard is a hornet’s information processing? Programmers working in assembly language think of processing in terms of lines of code. How many assembly language instructions would be needed to control the six legs, wings, armament, respiration, etc., and the integration of all of these to adapt to differing circumstances? While a hornet doesn’t use assembly language, the question points to the level of computation needed.
Finally, information storage. These insects come out of the egg knowing a great many things: How to build a fairly complex nest in cooperation with others, to include knowing how to make wood paste and how to place it. How to care for young and the queen, quite complicated. How to hunt and what to hunt (honey bees, for example). When and how to react to perceived threats to the nest.

Each of these breaks down into further complexity. The phrase, “Caring for the young and the queen” consists of seven words, but in practice involves many sub-tasks. Mating, done while flying (Think airline pilots and stewardesses) requires both agility and knowing how to do it.
Further, the brain allows considerable learning. Hornets fly far from the nest, often through forests, and return, necessarily having learned the way.

In IT terms, how many bits would be required to hold this information? Note that much of it must be graphic. Hornets know what honey bees look like, for example, and what other hornets look like and many other things. The brain and nervous system must be a quite good graphics processing unit. How is this storage accomplished? Note that this information is not learned, though they can learn things, but inborn. Stored how?
We have all heard the expression, “He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” The hornet can fly complexly, walk, process visual inputs, control its respiratory rhythm, envenom enemies, process other sensory inputs, all effortlessly and in coordination to manage housekeeping. They clearly have something paralleling the human autonomic nervous system. Does it break, as ours does, into sympathetic and parasympathetic branches? The hornet clearly has a voluntary system, being able to decide what to do according to environmental inputs.
Now, hardware. A hornet’s brain, somewhat distributed, consists of very little tissue. Wikipedia: A hornet’s brain “may contain fewer than one million brain cells, compared with the 86,000 million that make up a human brain.”

Nerve impulses in any organism travel at speeds orders of magnitude lower than those found in computers. The insect has slow wiring and little of it. How does such a minor brain manage to manage a highly complex insect?

Something is going on that we do not understand.

The Bot Fly: More Irreducible Complexity

The Bot fly is a squat, ugly, hairy fly that catches a mosquito, lays its eggs on said mosquito after positioning it correctly, and attaches them with a kind of glue. It releases the mosquito. When the little feathery syringe lands on, say, a human, the eggs drop off, hatch, and burrow into the host. These make nasty raised lumps with something wiggling inside them. Later they exit, fall to the ground, and pupate.

How did this evolve? Did a grab-a-mosquito gene occur as a random mutation (assuming that a single mutation could cause such complex behavior)? It would have to be a grab-a-mosquito-but-don´t-cripple-it gene. That is an awful lot of precise behavior for one mutation. At this point the bot fly would have a mosquito but no idea what to do with it. It would need simultaneously to have a stick-eggs-on-mosquito mutation. This would seem to require another rather ambitious gene.

Catching the mosquito without laying the eggs, or squashing the mosquito in the process, or laying eggs in mid air without having caught the mosquito, would seem a losing proposition. Yet further, the glue mechanism for making the eggs drop off onto the host instead of before or not at all, would also have to be present, caused by yet another complex simultaneous mutation. None of these awfully-lucky mutations would be of use without the others. How do you evolve this elaborate dance by gradual steps?

Survival of the Survivors

Most people think that, “fitness” meaning “suitability for a purpose,” survival of the fittest means that the smarter, stronger, and faster survive and produce more offspring than the stupid, weak, and slow. It does not. The study of such things is called population genetics and, as a professor of it says, “In population genetics, fitness means the rate of successful reproduction, nothing else.” That is,survival determines fitness rather than fitness determining survival. Fitness does not promote survival, but is survival. The circularity is well known: Why do they survive? Because they are fit. How do you know that they are fit? Because they survive.
If fitness means the rate of successful reproduction, we encounter the interesting conclusion that a woman with a genetic IQ of sixty and twelve retarded children by forty-five drive-by fathers is more fit than a Harvard math professor who runs Triathlons but has two children.

If instead of “fitness” with its almost inescapable overtones of “superiority,” we used “reproduction rate,” clarity would follow. Perish forbid.

A Problem of Populations

A staple of evolution is that evolution works to maximize the number of offspring, thus passing on successful genes. This is plausible and probably demonstrable in oysters but, in the case of us, counter to observation. The populations of advanced countries, all of which could easily support larger numbers of people, are actually falling. For example, Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia. In Mexico, as the standard of living rises, the birth rate falls sharply. How one passes on one’s genes by not passing them on is a mystery of population genetics.

Meanwhile the population of black Africa, the civilizational equivalent of the unwed mother with an IQ of 60, grows rapidly. Which is to say that in advanced countries, reproduction is inversely proportional to circumstances favoring it–intelligence health, wealth, and education. Among nations, as noted, a similar phenomenon exists.

When this is pointed out, evolutionists hem and haw, sometimes saying that evolution no longer applies to humans, “Why not?) though others simultaneously insist that evolution is ongoing and rapid. That is, what evolution is or isn’t,  and does or doesn’t, depends on the argument being made.

No, Contraception Does Not Cause Falling Populations

Some blame falling populations on contraception, as if this were an outside force, like drought or a new predator. But saying that contraception causes falling populations is like saying that spears cause hunting. People wanted to eat, so they invented spears. They wanted not to have children, so they invented contraception. Not passing on one’s genes is now almost a preoccupation, certainly among teenagers. In any event, the desire not to have children must have evolved, as where else could it Darwinianly have come from. It comes close to being an evolved desire not to evolve.

Metamorphosis: You Can’t Get There from Here: Even Irreducibler Complexity

Straight-line evolution, for example in which Eohipppus gradually gets larger until it reaches Clydesdale, is plausible because each intervening step is a viable animal. Darwin himself pointed this out. In fact it is just selective breeding. Yet many evolutionary transformations seem to require intermediate stages that could not survive. Metamorphosis in insects is perhaps the most baffling example.

Consider. There are two-cycle bugs that lay eggs that hatch into tiny replicas of the adults, which grow, lay eggs, and repeat the cycle. The four-cycle bugs go through egg, larva, pupa, adult. Question: What are the viable steps needed to evolve from two-cycle to four-cycle? Or from anything to four-cycle?

The eggs of the two-cycler would have to evolve toward being caterpillars, which are enormously different structurally and otherwise from adults. Goodbye legs, chitinous exoskeleton; head, thorax, and abdomen, on and on. Whatever the first mutation toward this end, the resulting newly-hatched mutant would have to be viable—able to live and reproduce until the next mutation occurred.

Let us consider this question carefully.

We begin with a two-cycle bug, that for convenience we will call a roach, which will endeavor to evolve into a bug that, also for convenience, we will assume to be a butterfly. The roach has the insect’s standard body plan of head, thorax, and abdomen, and the usual chitinous exoskeleton. From a spirit of charity we will assume that it is a flying roach to give it a head start toward butterflyhood.

To achieve that exalted state, our roach would first have to evolve into a caterpillar–that is, a larval form. It is difficult to see how this could occur at all, or why. To become a caterpillar, our roach would have to lose its jointed legs, exoskeleton, and body plan. Since not even the most hopeful evolutionist could attribute such sweeping changes to one mutation, the transformation would have to proceed by steps involving at least several and probably many mutations. Losing the exoskeleton would leave it unarmored and unable to walk, not an obvious selective advantage. Or do we believe that head, thorax, and abdomen first merged mediated by a long chain of accidental mutations under mysterious selective pressures , and then it lost its exoskeleton and became, well– bait?

But if these things did happen, they would lead to a free-standing race of caterpillars, a new species, necessarily being able to reproduce. Then, for reasons mysterious to me, these would have to decide to pupate and become butterflies. And the butterfly would have to lay eggs that became caterpillars.

Which could not possibly work. Metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is very complex and if you don’t get it right the first time, it’s curtains. It would depend on a great many steps which would have to appear simultaneously. First, our caterpillar would have to use its spinnerets (of mysterious provenance, but never mind) to make a cocoon, in which it would proceed to die because it hadn’t yet evolved metamorphosis. Why a caterpillar would think of doing this is not clear. To turn successfully into a butterfly, it would need the biochemical machinery to transform a mushy, legless, wingless, head-thorax-abdomenless worm into an utterly different creature. Where would it have gotten the impossibly complex genetic blueprint of the butterfly?
Methinks something is going on that we do not understand.
Note that the questions posed by these bugs are not merely pleasant musings on a slow afternoon. Either the Theory of Evolution can explain them, or the theory fails.

Liberal Arts Evolutionism

Liberal arts evolution ism, vaporous and metaphysical and sometimes held by actual dimwits, dominates nature shows on television, and can be found in high-school textbooks, and thrives among the often-highly-educated but technically illiterate denizens of collegiate faculty lounges. Never examine, it resembles a Masonic handshake, demonstrating membership in the class of advanced thinkers. It portrays nature as a purveyor of uplift: We are getting better and better. In this it serves as a semi-kinda-sorta religion, or at least as assurance that existence has good intentions.

But evolution of course does not say that organisms become more advanced, but only that they become better adapted to their environments. Thus tapeworms and cockroaches are pinnacles of evolution. People are not.

In liberal-arts Darwinism, it is common to look at a feature, invent some barely plausible explanation, and casually accept it as fact, no matter how silly. For example, the Chinese have smaller and flatter noses than whites. I have seen it said that the flatness evolved to prevent frostbite. This may or may not sound plausible But is there any evidence that frostbitten noses reduce reproduction? How would such noses do it? By leading to gangrene and death? Nowhere, so far as I am aware, in Beowulf or the various Nordic Eddas is there mention of frozen probosces, much less consequent death or infertility.

My own theory, which I regard as established fact, is that in the windy north of Asia, large noses act as sails, causing a tendency to face downwind and thus become vulnerable to predators evolved to hunt from upwind. See? I can do it too.

While we are in China, we may as well look at another favored toy of pop-evolution, the epicanthic fold that makes many Asians “slant-eyed,” I have seen it said, solemnly and with  no apparent expectation of disagreement, both that it evolved to protect the eyes from frigid winds and that it conserves energy. Is there research to show that it does either of these things? Show me. Is it due to a single-nucleotide polymorphism?  Did it require one mutation, or thirteen? Show me the evidence.

What beneficial effects could each of these have had, sufficient to provide advantage in survival? Do we really believe, assuming that the fold appeared all at once, that it produced sufficient benefit to result in more offspring? If not, then evolutionarily it doesn’t exist, and amounts to hobbyist speculation.

A Suggestion for the Reader

The curious  may find it interesting to ask not whether but how features evolved. In particular, ask what small, beneficial steps could have produced a given feature.  For example, skunks have dedicated glands to produce and eject their noisome defensive material. How did this evolve by small beneficial steps? Did simple flatulence in some primordial skunk with hereditary intestinal problems save its life by revolting a predator of delicate sensibilities…..?

An Inexplicable Altruism

Another evolutionary peculiarity is populational altruism. Countries with declining populations intentionally import more-fecund genetic groups. Sweden for example imports black Africans. In the United States, the white population feeds and clothes huge numbers of genetically utterly distinct blacks, and actually seems to be growing them. America  permits–some would say encourages–the immigration of many tens of millions of genetically distinct Latinos. The Darwinian advantage of this is elusive. Yet the desire to do so must have evolved, as how else could it have come about?

Current Human Evolution

Here we encounter another evolutionary mystery. The genes already exist in the population for the astonishing vision of Ted Williams, the endurance of marathon runners, the general physical plant of Mohamed Ali, the intelligence of Gauss, and so on. These would seem strongly to favor survival. Are they proliferating in the population?

It seems not.  Reading Xenophon, Juvenal, Vergil, the work of Archimedes suggests that people were as smart in classical antiquity as they are now. So it goes with the other qualities. If these have not increased, one must conclude either that they do not confer fitness, or that fitness does not become general.

Current Human Adaptation contradicts Observation

Evolutionists insist that human evolution continues today at a rapid pace. There is nothing illogical in this to the extent that it is a matter of selective breeding and that evolution is defined  as change in the gene pool.

Consider for example cognitive stratification, in which very smart people tend to go to Ivy universities, marry each other, and produce smart children. The children will tend to regress toward the mean but, as they interbreed, the mean will rise. Thus a fairly distinct and intellectually superior subpopulation comes about. Yet it is also an observed fact that the highly intelligent have few children. That is, high intelligence would seem to lead to extinction.

Problems arise in the evolutionists’ casual attribution of traits to evolutionary change. Traits are regularly attributed to genes that have not been demonstrated acted upon by selective pressures that cannot be quantified to produce results that cannot be correlated with the pressures. The second is that results are ofteninversely related to what would seem to be obvious selective advantage.
Often it seems that evolution is driven less by selective pressure than by the absence of selective pressure.

Anti-evolutionary Phenomena  in Modern Society

Before the advent of modern medicine, people with inferior genetic endowments– low resistance to disease, sickle cell anemia, various coronary defects, fatal anaphylactic reactions to wasp stings, severe retardation, or possession of genetic diseases such as diabetes, , etc.–tended to die before reproducing. This selective pressure served to keep those diseases at a low level in the population. Today the defective are kept alive to reproductive age, have children, and thus rapidly increase the prevalence of those diseases in the population.

This is sometimes said to represent a breakdown of Darwinian selection. But can Darwinian selection break down? Note that both the tendency to organized curiosity leading to modern medicine and the desire to keep alive the defective must have evolved. That is, we have evolved a desire to encourage the proliferation of the unfit. This seems most curious.

There is the odd fact that traits of very little obvious value flourish, while those seemingly important do not. Consider again the epicanthic fold, which makes the Japanese and Chinese slant-eyed. The fold has become universal in the populations, suggesting that powerful selective pressures must have been responsible.

But what pressures? Do we really believe that the fold provides enough protection to the eye, if it provides any at all, to result in its possessor having more children than others?  Do foldless Vikings go blind? Where is the evolutionary noise level? At what point is the selective advantage, if any, so slight as to make no difference?

Which brings us to a baffling question. Why does a trait with very little or no reproductive value–the fold–become universal, when traits such as high intelligence, physical prowess, astonishing eyesight, and so on do not even become common? As previously noted, the genes for all of these already exist in the population without the need for mutations.

If traits that conduce to reproduction become evermore prevalent, it follows that traits that do not become prevalent do not conduce to reproduction. These would seem to include the aforementioned–intelligence, strength, and so on–as these seem no more common now than in antiquity. Here we have a baffling question: Why does a trait with little if any survival value, such as the fold, become universal while high intelligence does not?

If human evolution continues today at a rapid pace as evolutionists say (and indeed it may) it follows that selective pressures must be fairly intense. It is reasonable to ask, what pressures to what end? Cognitive stratification–the self-selection of people with IQs of perhaps 130 and up–qualifies and may lead to a blurry-edged yet distinct subpopulation.

Yet pressures would otherwise seem to be low now. In modern human populations, in which almost no one dies in infancy, almost everyone marries, and almost everyone has the same small number of children, the number of offspring is not determined by life-or-death selection. The football captain gets the prom queen, but the class nerd gets the nerdette and can have as many children. Almost everyone lives past reproductive age, so there is little culling effect as the slow are eaten by wolves. The genetically sickly are kept alive and allowed to reproduce by medicine. Consequently it is hard to imagine Darwinian selection occurring with much ferocity.

Nor can I see evidence for more than minor changes in the 2500 years since Fifth-Century Athens. Statues by Phidias and Praxiteles and later Roman copies show people exactly like us. It is impossible to give IQ tests to the long dead, but Plato and Archimedes seem very like the best minds of today, and the writing of such as Xenophon are indistinguishable in complexity, clarity, and quality of mind from good modern writers. Nothing suggests that the ancients were any less athletic, bellicose, or agile than we are, or that they had senses any less acute. The 2500 years of rapid evolution appear to have produced a net of zero.

Inexplicable Adaptation

An interesting question, though probative of nothing, is why a brain that evolved for poking mammoths with pointed sticks is so well adapted to computational fluid dynamics and the writing of concertos. Why did thousands of these pointed-stick minds spend years in intercontinental cooperation deep in chemistry, optics, elaborate mathematics, and electronics to produce something as evolutionarily pointless as the James Webb telescope?

The Two Cop-Outs

Traits often arise for which there is no evolutionary explanation, and others that remain in the population when they should disappear. Evolutionists here have two escape hatches, (1) conservation of energy, and (2) sexual selection. For example, if one points out that humans are weak and would be more survivable if they were as strong as, say, chimpanzees, the response is that having larger muscles would require a higher caloric intake to maintain them, and lead to starvation if there were a drought.

If peacocks have hugely conspicuous tails that would attract predators, the explanation is that all the girls love a good tail, so the guy leaves more children before being eaten.

Let’s look at these notions.
Conservation of energy. Human beings are conspicuous in the natural world for being weak and slow, and for having poor senses of smell and hearing. Why? Evolutionists have multiple stories. One is that because humans walk upright, they can see farther on open veld and thus have substituted vision for other senses that just are not necessary, such as olfaction.

This makes no sense which, as so often in matters evolutionary, doesn’t matter. Obviously being able to detect approaching predators at night by smell would be a great advantage. Lions are the color of dirt and dead vegetation and take advantage of both. Horses, which have good vision, and eyes at about the level of a human’s, have an excellent sense of smell. This story doesn’t live up even to the usual evolutionary standard of vague plausibility.

Dismal Human Olfaction Explained

Another explanation of the poor olfaction of humans is that a more acute sense would require larger olfactory regions in the brain and, since a surprisingly large proportion of the body’s energy is expended by the brain, these larger olfactory regions would increase the need for food and cause starvation in time of famine. So goes the story.

Does this make sense? No.

Consider. Rats have a much better sense of smell than do humans, which they use in finding what they regard as food. A rat’s brain weighs two grams, a human’s about 1350. Let us assume that a rats entire brain is dedicated to smell, which of course it isn’t. Adding all of a rat’s brain to the human would increase its size from 1350 to 1352 grams, an increase of 2/1350 or .15%. Since the brain uses 15% of a human’s energy budget, the overall increase in energy requirements is 2/1350 X 100 X .15, or .02%. Not 2%, but .02%. This minute increase cannot possibly offset the advantages of an acute sense of smell.

The same reasoning applies to other senses, such as hearing. And of course people already have olfactory regions. They just don’t do much.

A Question of Breasts

Many other things would seem to work against survival, yet persist in nature: huge antlers not usable in combat, and large breasts in humans, among many others. Why do women have conspicuous breasts? They are not needed to produce adequate milk, and they are a substantial physical disadvantage in running (thus we have sports bras). One would expect breasts to disappear.

The headgear above is useless for defense as the animal would have to stand on its head to present them to an enemy. They cannot help balance or speed. We are to believe that they serve as sexual attractants because otherwise they are inexplicable. (I favor option B.) Since it is unlikely that headgear so glorious sprang from a point mutation, they must have begun as mere bumps. But why two, symmetrically placed? And all the girls swooned? Why did they even start to evolve?

Why big breasts? The answer again  is sexual selection: men are attracted to large breasts, so those women with them mate and have more children. This suggests that women with modest endowments will have trouble getting laid, which in turn suggests that evolutionists need to get out more.
The problems with sexual selection are twofold. First is that sexual selection requires a pre-existing attraction to large breasts. Otherwise in a cave society when the first woman through mutation appeared with big ones, we would hear one cave man say to another, “Geez, Urk Urk, what’s wrong with Sally?” “Beats, me, Ralph. Maybe it’s cancer.” But why would there be a preference for large breasts when there were no large breasts to prefer?

The second problem is that if sexual selection favored large breasts, by now most women would have them, which visibly is not the case. (Again,  Greek statues of 2500 years ago look like us.) And of course when the sexually-selected trait became general in the population, it would cease to be of advantage.

There Must Be a Virus

When people have engaged in bitter ideological war over a theoretical ship dear to them, they tend to overlook the cracks and stains and leaks in the planking. Evolutionism is full of such. An unaffiliated skeptic can point them out in droves.

In evolution, traits which conduce to survival, and thus to the passing on of genes, are supposed to flourish, while traits that work against this happy passing on, or simply do nothing, are supposed to be eliminated. Does this happen?

Often, yes. Not infrequently, no.

Male Homosexuality

An obvious problem is male homosexuality. Homosexuals seldom have children. As we have asked time and again in this monograph, how does not passing on one’s genes contribute to passing on one’s genes? The condition would seem to be a prime candidate for elimination by evolution, yet it has apparently been with us forever. If this cannot be explained away, then something is wrong with the theory in at least this case.

Here evolutionists fall back on their Maginot Line, vague plausibility. For example Greg Cochran, a physicist of immoderate pomposity at the University of Utah, says that a virus or other pathogen causes homosexuality. The evidence for this virus? Homosexuality. Yet the chief characteristic of the virus unfortunately seems to be indetectability: No one can find it. Without this virus, the theory of evolution would fail, at least at this point. Therefore a virus must, must, must exist. We infer reality from the needs of our theory.

Then why does homosexuality in males not disappear? Judging by ancient literature, it is as common now as it was then. ? I can invent desperate and imaginative answers. Maybe homosexuals are homozygous in some undiscovered gene that is highly beneficial when heterozygous. So far as I am aware, there is no evidence for this, understandable because I just invented it, but why let such considerations inhibit a good story?

Other  traits suffer from similar inexplicability: what is the reproductive value of suicide, masochism, schizophrenia, and so on? Should these not be filtered from the gene pool? Must we invoke viruses to explain these too? Schizophrenia: A Neanderthal who thought that the CIA put transmitters in his teeth and tried to shake hands with Kodiak bears might limit his reproductive opportunities. While a suicide who blows himself up with a bomb may be said to be disseminating his DNA, doing so would seem to have  little reproductive purpose. Yet all of these things have been with us forever.
I therefore propose the existence of a virus for each of these peculiarities. And perhaps one for sun spots.

Again, the problem is Domain Bloat, insisting that one’s theory explain what it can explain but also what it can’t.

Vengeance is Mine,, Saith–Well, Not Darwin, but His Myrmidons: A Brief Excursion into Absurdity and History

I suspect that few people realize the vengefulness  and malevolence of Darwinists, the desire to destroy the careers and reputations of those who question them. The hostility and, yes, nastiness exist in academia, professional organizations, and museums. Examples in a moment. The intensity of emotion, the malignity and mercilessness are found only in evolutionary biology and related fields. Those questioning general relativity, electromagnetic theory, whether Fermat’s Last Theorem had really been proved,or the constancy of Hubble’s Constant would doubtless be asked for evidence, hotly debated, or even regarded as mildly obsessed. A degree of personal animosity might arise if the truth of the matter proved difficult of determination.  but would he be fired or be personally attacked? No. In evolution, yes.

or well over a century, the theory of evolution has roiled passions as few other matters of science have. Much of the antagonism has arisen between literalist and usually poorly educated Protestants who believe every word of the Bible to have come from God himself and therefore to be infallible. Other Protestant  denominations (I think) and Catholics have come up with workarounds such as saying that the six days of Christian creation are figurative for billions of years of evolution.  During the years since publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Protestants and Darwinists have clawed at each other with surprising savagery.

The quarrel came to a head in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 in Dayton,Tennessee  when  Scopes, a young biology teacher, spoke of Darwin in his class. A furor erupted. Scopes was brought to trial, Clarence Darrow argued the defense, and William Jennings Bryan spoke for the Prosecution. The trial became a nationwide media circus with reporters pouring in from everywhere and fundamentalist Christians coming out of the mountains in support. Scopes was convicted. Nothing much happened to him as few if any were out for blood but, technically, Darwin lost.

It was an indication of the intensity of feeling that wuld dog the two sides in their support of their competing creation myths.

In 20 a role reversal occurred. In a Philadelphia court, science teachers  sued to have mention of Creation banned from schools on grounds of separation of church and state. They won.The dispute was grinding interfaith odium of no practical import as mention of Genesis was unlikely to cause students to abandon interest in the sciences.  As a matter of general pedagogy, Christianity until very recently was the intellectual basis of European civilization and thus crucial to historical, philosophical, and artistic schooling. But evolutionists are not concerned with such things and so, regarding Genesis, mum became the word. That scientists should engage in such herd censorship is not encouraging.

The Question of Consciousness

Then there is the vexed matter of consciousness.  What is consciousness? Does it have a derived definition, like f = ma? Or is it an undefined primitive, like “line” or “point”? With what instrument do you detect it? Is something either conscious or not, or do you have shades and degrees? Is a tree conscious, or a rock? How do you know?
In an evolutionary context, did the first (probably imaginary) living molecule have a teeny weeny itsy bitsy consciousness, just a smidgien? Or did awareness not evolve until the time of trilobites? Why would it evolve at all?
Does consciousness have physical existence? If it does, is it electromagnetic, gravitational, or what? If it doesn’t have physical existence, what kind of existence does it have? Does it interact with matter? It would seem so. If I drop a cinder block on my foot, it affects my consciousness. If I will my hand to move, it does.

Pain

Next, consider pain. If you step on broken glass, it hurts, so you stop doing it, and don’t end up crippled and eaten by wolves, and so you can pass on your genes upon encountering an amiable maiden. This makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is the agonizing pain caused by many circumstances about which, before medicine, the victim could do nothing. Kidney stones, for example, are paralyzingly painful. A choroidal hemorrhage, behind the retina, is hideous. The agony has no utility since the premodern sufferer could do nothing about it. For that matter, the contribution of migraines to survival is not apparent, as a person rolling on the ground and clutching his head might be  vulnerable to ingestion. On and on. Why the abundant pain receptors with no function? Why do they not, like Marx’s state, wither away?

Perhaps instead of asking, “How does evolution explain a thing?” we should occasionally ask “Does evolution explain it?”

The Theory of Impossibility

When I was in college, before the invention of fire, sophomores quoted Gödel’s Theorem as saying that in a logical system of sufficient complexity, there were questions that could not be answered within the system. Whether the theorem actually says this, I forget, but we said it,, and felt very wise.

Perhaps there are questions that can’t be answered within the logical system, if such it is, in which we live, and therefore won’t be. This cannot be a comforting thought to a new-minted chemist as he rushes forth from CalTech, which may be why anything suggesting inherent unanswerability is rejected. But it may be that we just aren’t smart enough to understand everything, or maybe even much of it.

Much of what we believe, at least regarding living things, is at best improbable and likely impossible. This news may not be well received by science, which will just have to survive it.

As we explicate the Theory of Impossibility, we must begin with particle physics. This will give the monograph a touch of class. Specifically, the Fundamental Theorem of Quantum Mechanics states, “If a thing makes no sense at all, wait until you get used to it, and then it will.” For example, the idea that a particle can simultaneously be a wave and a particle  seems actually absurd, but is now everywhere accepted, like potatoes.  Of course, the evidence supports the idea, which just makes things more confusing. The EPR effect, holding that if one of a pair of entangled photons, in Scarsdale, changes polarity, its entangled partner, in Alpha Centauri, will simultaneously change polarity, is ridiculous. How would it know? Neither of these things can happen. But they do, so we regard them as reasonable.

Here we enunciate and underlying principle: A thing is not necessarily possible merely because it happens.

Unless something is going on that we do not know about.

Now, impossibility. Suppose I showed you a pair of tiny gears and said, “See? When I turn this one, it meshes with the other and makes it turn too.” You would respond with a lack of surprise. Suppose I then showed you fifty such little gears in an old-fashioned Swiss watch in which they all turned to make the hands move. You might say, “Isn’t that ingenious.” Suppose that I then told you that someone had assembled, literally, a cubic mile of such tiny gears and that they meshed perfectly for fifty years to do many complex things. You would ask me whether I was smoking Drano again.

Even though each step in a cubic-mile process could be shown to be possible—gear A turns gear B, which turns gears C and D—you would sense that the entire complex wouldn’t work, however plausible each sub-process might be. You would be unconsciously applying the law that the improbability of the whole is greater than the sum of the improbabilities of the parts. The improbability is not a linear function of the number of parts but increases without limit as the number of parts goes above, say, one thousand.

Does that sound dreadfully portentous, or what? One day it will be the foundation of ponderous overpriced textbooks to extract money from sophomores. At least I hope so. I could use the money.

Why There Aren’t Any Cells, Unless They Are Cheating

The textbook description of a cell seems the mapping of a robotic Japanese factory onto a swamp. For example, in what sounds like a computer-controlled assembly line, enzymes uncoil the DNA, others unzip it, complementary nucleotides snap into place, a zipper-upper enzyme glues them together, click, click, click, whereupon the mRNA rushes purposefully off to a ribosome where, click, click, click. This is probably AP biology in decent high schools, if any, and has been verified thousands of times by biochemists. But…it sounds like mechanical engineering, not mindless undirected glop in solution.

You don’t have to know anything about biochemistry to know that the foregoing is impossible. Too many little wheels. You’ve got mRNA and microRNA and rRNA all rushing about, or sometimes holding still, and doing complex and purposeful things, and tRNA codons and anticodons coupling like drunken teenagers, and busybody enzymes editing this or that on the fly in the manner of bioschoolmarms or splicing this and some other thing and ribosomes and lysosomes and spliceosomes and palindromes and maybe aerodromes and really twisty long molecules with names like 2,4-diethyl-polywannacrackerene—and all of this is said to run with the efficiency of a Mexican drug cartel. All of this in a tiny space where everything ought to bang into everything else and just lie there in smoking rubble.

To us barbarians on the outside, the cell looks like a microscopic globule of goop with sticky stuff diffusing mindlessly about. I do not doubt that biochemists, whom I respect, have shown all of this to happen by careful experiments. I just don’t believe it. It’s the cubic mile of gears again. You have hundreds of reactive species in close proximity doing extraordinarily complicated things for sometimes a hundred years with what sounds like precisely coordinated purposefulness–instead of congealing immediately into a droplet of disagreeable mush. I do not doubt that lab folk have proved that it happens. I just don’t think it is possible. Unless something is going on that we don’t understand.
The foregoing is not orthodox biochemistry and may encounter initial resistance in the trade.

The Retina Revisited, and Associated Unlikelihoods

Consider again  the retina, a very thin membrane consisting of ten distinct sublayers engaging in appallingly complex biochemistry, somehow maintaining position and function for, occasionally, a hundred years. These layers consist of millions of cells doing the impossibly tricky chemical dance mentioned above, more or less perfectly. In the rest of the eye you have the three layers of the eyeball, sclera, choroid, retina, and the five layers of the cornea, epithelium, Bowman’s membrane, stroma, Descemet’s membrane, and posterior lamina. And a lens consisting of a proteinaceous goop contained in a capsule, attached to the muscular ciliary body by suspensory ligaments, and an iris of radial and circumferential fibers innervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic subsystems of the autonomic nervous system. No way exists of explaining how this purportedly evolved—or how it works for many years without the layers of intricacy, biochemical through mechanical, collapsing. (I know this stuff because I have eye problems connected with Washington’s foreign policy.)

The intricacy of life is layered. We start with a zygote which, being a cell, is bogglingly complex. This little time bomb develops into a baby, which is impossible. Again, if you don’t think so, try reading a textbook of embryology. The migration of cells, this control gradient, that control gradient, DGRNs, perfect inerrant specialization to form implausibly precise and complex things like incus, malleus, stapes, tympanum in the ear and (very) numerous other examples, all impossible individually and more so in aggregate.Impossible, at least, unless we can come up with an auxiliary explanation. Magic seems a good candidate. But assuredly something is going on that we do not understand.
All of the organs of the baby are in varying degrees impossibly complicated and, even more impossible, almost always all of them are perfect at once. Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will. A baby should bring joy to Murphy because the opportunities of disaster are nearly infinite—yet things almost never go wrong. It is like writing a five-terabyte program that runs the first time with no bugs.

The functioning of said baby is as mysterious as its formation. Babies grow. Children grow. How does this happen? For example, the baby has various small, hollow bones which grow year after year into large hollow bones. For this to work, cells (osteoclasts) eat away the bone from the inside, making the hollow larger, while other cells (osteoblasts) lay down new bone on the outside. Complex and wildly implausible communication between blast and clast purportedly makes this work. Medical researchers, honest people, no fools, assure me that this happens, and I believe them. Sort of. The idea that this evolved by random mutation is, if I may use a technical term, nuts. So, according to Impossibility Theory, is its precise, inerrant functioning. We come back to magic.

The whole baby does this sort of thing. The skull grows. Kidneys grow. The heart grows. All, with rare exceptions, perfectly. Meanwhile, kidneys excrete, endocrine glands secrete, neurons weirdly but correctly link up, skin grows in perfect layers, nervous system deploys—perfectly. Do you believe this? It isn’t possible.
Unless there is something we haven’t figured out, and perhaps can’t.
I don’t know much about anything (readers delight in assuring me of this). However, I don’t know less about computers than I don’t know about biology. I want an engineering information-flow analysis of cells and a baby. Probably there are courses and books about this, and I just haven’t heard of them.

Consider a drill, perhaps in a factory, controlled by a computer. The total information involved in this transaction presumably consists of information flowing from sensors on the drill to the computer, and from the computer to the drill. Digital bits are easy to understand if you have at least two fingers. Cells are dauntingly analog.

The Impossibility of Ants: A Deep Look

I will now offer a formal proof of the nonexistence of ants. First, we will consider the implausibly tiny picnic ant which literally can pass through the eye of a needle, unlike camels. We will further note that there is almost no ant there. We will now ponder the size of its brain, to include distributed parts of it. If an ant is so small that it almost isn’t there, and most of an ant consists of legs, chitin, digestive things, and so on, then its brain, to include all of its nervous tissues, is greatly more isn’t-there.

We will now consider what an ant can do. First, it can walk. If you think this is no great shucks, talk to a robotics engineer with a cable-connected supercomputer. Ask him how easy it is to make six legs with multiple joints each work together while climbing over things. If you think about the amount of sensory feedback necessary to know where these legs are at a given moment, and what the pressures and angles are, you will get dizzy. The ant does it effortlessly, with about as many brain cells as a congressman has IQ points. This would suggest perhaps three brain cells.

There is worse, much worse. That same ant, with only three congressional brain cells, can interpret the data from both eyes.  Now, the guys who wrote PhotoShop could merge those inputs and come up with something reasonable as an image, but doing it in real-time, in the equivalent of about six lines of code, with three brain cells for processing power—they would run screaming to the nearest bar and begin living under a park bench.

The same ant knows, somehow, to dig a nest properly, to run like hell when it is scared, and to care for the queen and the eggs and larvae. It manages its internal organs and antennae. It knows how to groom itself, putting it ahead of many teenagers, and how to find food, which requires operating the senses used to do this. I could go on. But since each of these things is impossible, so is the ant. Therefore, ants do not exist. QED.

(I suspect that the total  impossibility of several things in one nonexistent ant is the product of the individual impossibilities. I will leave this matter of multidimensional impossibilities to the reader as an exercise.)

If I may lapse momentarily into unwonted seriousness, I claim these picnic micromonstrosities pose a baffling question of cybernetics. They must be doing something far beyond the grasp of our tiny boiling imaginations. Replicating an ant in hardware of the same size is out of the question. Molecular computing? Well, the little beast does it some way. Humans with our quart-and-a-third of mushy brains can do much more than ants can, but not proportionately more. The nerve tissue of how many ants would be needed to fill one human cranium?

Design

Many years have passed since Watson and Crick elucidated the design of DNA in 1953. Biochemistry is now a mature and sophisticated science. How many more years, decades, or centuries must pass without these questions being answered before we suspect that they can’t be? How long can we be told that the check is in the mail before we conclude that there is no check? 

If the Darwinian explanation of origin and complexity of living systems  is wrong, what explanation is right? I can answer with certainty : “I don’t know.” Many will concur with me. Others suspect what is called Intelligent Design. This is the view that someone, or somebody, or something, designed the universe, or at least the living part of it.

This is not unreasonable. Richard Dawkins, a popularizer of Darwinism, entitled one of his books The Blind Watchmaker, frankly conceding the strong appearance of design in living things and spending the rest of the book attempting to explain how all evolved by chance. The section in this monograph, Computational Aspects of the Murder Hornet, describes the many complex, apparently optimized interacting systems of the insect. It very much looks engineered.

Darwinists agree that things look designed, but insist that the appearance is deceptive. The religious unsurprisingly find ID congenial, and attribute things to their particular deity. Without intention of offending anyone, though I doubtless will, I note that from the point of view of a religious agnostic the Bible looks like a pastiche of superstition, contradictory tall tales of swallowing by whales and regurgitation, and immorality. If anybody or anything designed life, it wasn’t Yahweh. Given that through most of history, most people have lived in misery and dies in agony, the idea of a loving god seems wishful thinking.

Note that the question of whether Darwin is wrong is independent of what, if anything,  one may believe to be right, and that suspecting design does not require being religious. Suspecting design does not even require certainty regarding design, only suspicion.  The earth may be the petri dish of some space alien teenager and the end may come when his mother tells him to get his science project out of her refrigerator. Or, has often been suggested in this monograph, things may be going on that we simply don’t understand. Queerer than we can suppose….

Note, though, that whether something evolved is a question of fact: it did, or it didn’t. If it did not evolve, how it came about it is a matter of speculation. Determining that it did not evolve imposes no obligation to know how it did happen. I can say with perfect confidence that my eight-month-old granddaughter did not kill Jimmy Hoffa. This certainty does not require that I know who, if anybody, did kill him.

The Case for Intelligent Design

Here, briefly and inadequately, we come to the evidence for intelligence. This is a voluminous and vexed matter, and we can only glance dimly at it.
How can we tell whether intelligence was involved in the design of things? We can’t, at least not with certainty. We can examine the ideas involved, turned them over in our minds, and come to such conclusions, or lack of conclusions, as suit us. Candidates run from the twin implausibilities of doctrinaire Darwinism and doctrinaire Christianity through a sense while pondering the immense incomprehensibility of the cosmos that intelligence, somehow, must be involved. How, who, what, where, but…it didn’t just happen.

However, one suspecting Design might say that if something looks designed and can’t have evolved…what is left? Read again the section on the sting of the hornet.

The mathematician William Dembsky has said that if an event is highly improbable, yet comports with an independent standard, then intelligence must have been involved. As an example easily grasped and not controversial, consider SETI, the search for extraterrestrial Intelligence, which has been going on for years.

SETI uses antennas to receive radio signals from outer space. These consist of random noise, static, and regular signals from pulsars, and so on. There is no sign of intelligence in these.

Then suppose that one day you receive the first one hundred prime numbers in order. This is vanishingly unlikely by chance. It can easily be mathematically shown that it would not happen in a billion times the accepted age of the universe. Here we have the first half of Dembsky’s assertion: Extreme improbability.

Yet the numbers conform to an independent standard: the definition of a prime number. Here is the second of Dembsky’s criteria. Your conclusion is that they have in intelligent source.  This has nothing directly to do with evolution. The genetic code does.

Very briefly and considerably simplified, the DNA or genome of an individual human consists of a chain of some three billion base pairs. These form “codons,” groups of three base pairs. A codon represents one of the twenty amino acids that make up proteins, which do most of everything that happens in a cell. If you are unfamiliar with all of this, the important takeaway is this: Twenty codons, representing the twenty amino acids that constitute proteins, can be regarded as “letters,” like the letters of English. You write English words with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, you “write” proteins with sequences of codons. Just as letters ordered on paper form a novel, codons representing amino acids form your genome, explaining why you are a human being and not a scorpion or giraffe.

Now, suppose you come home and find the letters of your Scrabble set scattered on the floor. . You would see nothing of intelligence in this, just random letters. Perhaps the cat knocked the box from the table.

But suppose that the letters were arranged: WENT TO STORE BACK SOON. This would meet Dembsky’s criteria, being extremely improbable by chance, and conforming to an independently existing standard (the English language). You would conclude that intelligence had to be involved.

Mathematically minded skeptics of Darwinism argue that the ordered codon “letters,”representing the extreme complexity of a human being, are astronomically improbable by chance, yet conform to the independent standard of the protein code, and therefore must be the product of intelligence.

This can be debated, or maybe it can, and quickly gets into more difficult matters such as Shannon information and specified information and where information comes from.

Here we are compressing a hundred pages of theory and mathematics into a couple of paragraphs, and also encountering the fascinating question of whether information ought to join space, time, matter, and energy as a fundamental component of reality.

A Final Word

To evolutionists I say, “I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don’t expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology.” 

I once told my daughters, “Whatever you most ardently believe, remember that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that, think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better, and you may be surprised.”

Bibliography

For those curious about the many, many objections to orthodox evolutionism, chemical, mathematical, and paleontological, held by many more scientists than CBS will tell you, I recommend the following books:

Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University Probably the best book for those unfamiliar with the subject, clear, accessible to the intelligent layman, with the technical detail in the appendices.

The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Evolution, by Michael Behe. It contains among other things an accessible introduction to what mutations can and can’t do, and why.
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, , by Stephen C. Meyer. Meyer, a physicist by training, received his doctorate from Cambridge University in the philosophy of science.

Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer

Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed by Douglas Axe
“After completing his PhD in chemistry at Cal tech ,Axe held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Medical Research Council Centre.

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