[00:00:00] Foreign the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:11] Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. In the early 20th century, Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations was combined with Mendelian inheritance and population genetics to to form what's known as the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory. It's sometimes called Neo Darwinian theory or Neo Darwinism. According to this synthesis, the basis for heredity is in DNA molecules that pass information from generation to generation. And according to the synthesis, the vehicles that change that DNA include natural selection, random mutation, genetic drift and gene flow.
[00:00:53] Now, in order to understand why this modern evolutionary synthesis cannot account for the origin and diversity of life on Earth, I want to focus here on the aspects of the theory that are supposed to drive macroevolution. How a new design or body plan could arise from random mutations, and how species are supposed to have evolved into new species.
[00:01:15] So I'm putting aside population genetics, since that's a theory about micro evolution in action, about how genes are distributed in a population, not how they originated in the first place. As Dr. Stephen Meyer points out in an article I'm going to read to you shortly, as a mechanism for the production of novel genetic information, it's important to remember that natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA based sequences. It can only preserve such sequences if they confer a functional advantage and and once they have originated, the part of the evolutionary mechanism that gets credited with generating functional DNA based sequences is random mutational processes.
[00:02:00] So the all important question, do random mutational processes have the power to generate new base or amino acid sequences for natural selection to act upon within the time available to it in the history of life on Earth? I thought I'd read to you today from a few of our scholars who address that question in detail. I began thinking of this topic as I pondered the randomness of neo Darwinian evolutionary theory. I wanted to know what part of this theory was really random and what part of it was, as they say, non random. The first thing I thought about was Stephen Meyer's 2016 debate with Lawrence Kraus. During the debate, when he wasn't lobbing ad hominem attacks on Meyer from across the stage, Krauss argued that natural selection was not a random process, while Meyer contended that it did depend on an inelimitable element of randomness. After the debate, the famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins felt compelled to come to the aid of his friend Krauss to insist that natural selection was indeed a non random process.
[00:03:07] This got me thinking, is it random or isn't it? Now, after Dawkins weighed in, Dr. Meyer wrote a response to him and I'd like to read that for you today. It puts into focus exactly what part of the selection mutation mechanism is random and why a random search would fail to generate the necessary new information to power the diversity we see in the history of life. And you may know that Dawkins doesn't typically deign to interact directly with intelligent design scientists and scholars. I think he's afraid of our arguments. But in this case he did weigh in more directly, and that shows you how important this question is to proponents of Darwinian evolution. Just how random is this process? And can a random mutational process actually do what they say it can do? Here's Dr. Meyer on the Dawkins dilemma. Misrepresent the mechanism or face the math recently at the University of Toronto, I had the opportunity to debate atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and theistic evolutionist Dennis Lamoro. The subject was what's behind it, God, science and the universe. Later I was flattered to learn that famed biologist Richard Dawkins felt it necessary to come to the aid of his friend Dr. Krauss in Krauss dispute with me about whether the evolutionary process depends upon an inelimitable element of randomness. How odd, however, that Professor Dawkins would weigh in for the purpose of defending an obviously incomplete and therefore indefensible caricature of the standard neo Darwinian evolutionary mechanism. In review of my talk in Toronto, Dawkins wrote at evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne's blog, he says Meyer was terrible. When will these people understand that calculating how many gazillions of ways you can permute things at random is irrelevant? It's irrelevant, as Lawrence said, because natural selection is a non random process.
[00:05:08] Yes, of course natural selection is a non random process. As Dawkins correctly insists, rates of reproductive success correlate to the traits that organisms possess. Those with fitness advantages will, all other things being equal, out reproduce those lacking those advantages. Got it understood.
[00:05:29] Yet clearly there is more to the evolutionary mechanism than just natural selection. Instead, the standard neo Darwinian evolutionary mechanism comprises 1 natural selection and or 2 genetic drift acting on 3 adaptively random genetic variations and mutations of various kinds. Moreover, as conceived from Darwin to the present, natural selection selects or acts to preserve those random variations that confer a fitness or functional advantage upon the organisms that possess them. It further selects only after such functionally advantageous variations or mutations have arisen. How could it do otherwise? Selection does not cause novel variations. Rather it sifts what is delivered to it by the random changes, that is the mutations that do cause variations.
[00:06:26] Such has been neo Darwinian orthodoxy for many decades. All this means that as a mechanism for the production of novel genetic information, natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base or amino acid sequences.
[00:06:42] Rather, it can only preserve such sequences if they confer a functional advantage once they have originated. In other words, adaptive advantage only accrues after the generation of new functional genes and proteins after the fact, that is of some presumably successful random mutational search. It follows that even if natural selection considered separately from mutation constitutes a non random process, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends precisely upon an inelimitable element of randomness, namely various postulated or observed mutational processes. Nor is any of the above particularly controversial within evolutionary biology. No less friendly partisans to Krauss and Dawkins as Professors Larry Moran and PZ Myers both criticized Krauss for mischaracterizing the neo Darwinian mechanism as wholly non random, with Moran specifically blaming Krauss uncritical reliance upon Dawkins as the source of his misinformation. In any case, the need for random mutations to generate novel base or amino acid sequences before natural selection can play a role means that precise quantitative measures of the rarity of genes and proteins within the sequence space of possibilities are highly relevant to assessing the alleged power of the mutation selection mechanism. Indeed, such empirically derived measures of rarity are highly relevant to assessing the alleged plausibility of the mutation selection mechanism as a means of producing the genetic information necessary to generating a novel protein fold. Moreover, given the empirically based estimates of the rarity conservatively estimated by Dr. Douglas Axe at 11077 and within a similar range by other people, the analysis that I presented in Toronto does pose a formidable challenge to those who claim the mutation natural selection mechanism provides an adequate means for the generation of novel genetic information, at least again in amounts sufficient to generate novel protein folds. Why a formidable challenge? Because random mutations alone must produce or search for exceedingly rare functional sequences amongst a vast combinatorial sea of possible sequences before natural selection can play any significant role. Moreover, as I discussed in Toronto and show in more detail in Darwin's doubt, every replication event in the entire multi billion year history of life on Earth would not generate or search but a miniscule fraction 110 trillion trillion trillionth to be exact, of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold.
[00:09:34] The number of trials available to the evolutionary process corresponding to the total number of organisms, 10 to the 40th that have ever existed on Earth, thus turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched.
[00:09:50] The threshold of selectable function exceeds what is reasonable to expect a random search to be able to accomplish given the number of trials available to the search. Even assuming evolutionary deep time, as with a hypothetical thief who is confronted with many more combinations than he has time to explore in my offending bike lock analogy, the mutation and selection mechanism is much more likely to fail than to succeed in generating even a single new gene or protein in the known history of life on Earth. It follows that the neo Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on a random mutational search to generate novel gene sequences, is not an adequate mechanism to produce the information necessary for even a single new protein folder, let alone a novel animal form in available evolutionary deep time. Or, to put the point differently, the hypothesis that a random search aided after the fact by natural selection, did produce the genetic information necessary to morphological innovation in the history of life is overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true.
[00:10:57] That's one reason why so many mainstream evolutionary biologists are now abandoning neo Darwinism and looking for other evolutionary mechanisms to account for fundamental innovations in the history of life. Readers who want to know more about the mathematical challenges posed to the neo Darwinian mechanism may enjoy watching the Information Enigma video in which I and Doug Axe discuss these issues in greater detail. So that was Dr. Stephen Meyer addressing the question of the randomness of the selection mutation mechanism in in modern evolutionary theory and whether it has the power and the time to produce the diversity of biological life on Earth that we see today. Now, before I close today, I wanted to share insights from a few other ID thinkers with you on this topic.
[00:11:44] The difficulty for the selection mutation mechanism also comes into sharp focus when you look at systems that exhibit irreducible complexity.
[00:11:53] Biochemist Michael Behe has studied such systems and written about them extensively in his books Darwin's Black Box and the Edge of Evolution.
[00:12:03] Behe coined the term irreducible complexity to describe systems which require many parts and thus many mutations to be present all at once before providing any survival advantage to the organism. According to Behe, such systems cannot evolve in the step by step fashion required by Darwinian evolution. As a result, he maintains that random mutation and unguided natural selection cannot generate the genetic information required to produce irreducibly complex structures. Too many simultaneous mutations would be required an event which is highly unlikely to occur and observation of this problem is not limited to Darwin critics. A paper by a prominent evolutionary biologist in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the U.S. national Academy of Science acknowledges that simultaneous emergence of all components of a system is implausible.
[00:13:01] Likewise, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a staunch defender of Darwinism, admits that natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism.
[00:13:18] Even Darwin intuitively recognized this problem. As he wrote in the Origin of Species, 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. And you know, that's one of my favorite quotes by Darwin because it shows that he knew exactly what it would take to falsify his theory. Even back then and year after year, modern biology continues to uncover more and more examples where biological complexity seems to outstrip the information generative capacity of Darwinian evolution. I report on these examples often on this podcast, and we write about them
[email protected] In a chapter in the volume More Than Myth, Dr. Casey Luskin identifies 10 scientific problems with scientific and chemical evolution. His problem number three relates to our discussion today and it's step by step Random mutations cannot generate the genetic information needed for irreducible complexity. Let me share a few things from his chapter here.
[00:14:27] Luskin notes that it's not just multi part machines which are beyond the reach of Darwinian evolution. The protein parts themselves which build these machines would also require multiple simultaneous mutations in order to arise.
[00:14:43] As Dr. Meyer mentioned in the article I just read, Dr. Douglas Axe published experimental research in 2000 and 2004 that found the amino acid sequences which yield stable functional protein folds, may be as rare as 1 in 10 to the 74th sequences, suggesting that the vast majority of amino acid sequences will not produce stable proteins and thus could not function in living organisms.
[00:15:10] Because of this extreme rarity of functional protein sequences, it would be very difficult for random mutations to take a protein with one type of fold and evolve it into another without going through some non functional stage.
[00:15:24] Rather than evolving by numerous successive slight modifications, many changes would need to occur simultaneously to find the rare and unlikely amino acid sequences that that yield functional proteins. To put the matter in perspective, Axe's results suggest that the odds of blind and unguided Darwinian processes producing a functional protein fold are less than the odds of someone closing his or her eyes and firing an arrow into the Milky Way galaxy and hitting one preselected atom.
[00:15:57] Proteins commonly interact with other molecules through a hand in glove fit, but these interactions often require multiple amino acids to be just right before they occur. In 2004, Behe, along with University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke, simulated the Darwinian evolution of such protein protein interactions. Behe and Snoke's calculations found that for multicellular organisms, evolving a simple protein protein interaction which required two or more mutations in order to function would probably require more organisms and generations than would be available over the entire history of the Earth. They concluded that the mechanism of gene duplication and point mutation alone would be ineffective because few multicellular species reached the required population sizes.
[00:16:48] Four years later, during an attempt to refute Behe's arguments, Cornell biologists Rick Durrett and Dina Schmidt ended up begrudgingly confirming he was basically correct. After calculating the likelihood of two simultaneous mutations arising via Darwinian evolution in a population of humans, they found that such an event would take greater than 100 million years, given that humans diverged from their supposed common ancestor with chimpanzees only 6 million years ago. They granted that such mutational events are very unlikely to occur on a reasonable timescale, and the difficulty doesn't get any easier in single celled prokaryotic organisms like bacteria either. Dr. Axe, as well as Dr. Ann Gager and biologist Ralph Seilk have all done research on bacteria too, and found that Darwinian evolution seems to get stuck when needing more than one mutation to confer a benefit. These kinds of results consistently suggest that the information required for proteins and enzymes to function is too great to be generated by Darwinian processes on any reasonable evolutionary timescale. The late biologist Lynn Margulis, a well respected member of the National Academy of Sciences until her death in 2011, once said New mutations don't create new species, they create offspring that are impaired.
[00:18:17] She further explained in a 2011 Neo Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change, led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
[00:18:38] And More recently, in 2022, Dr. Luskin
[email protected] on a study published in the journal Nature that found evidence against long held assumptions about mutation in evolution. In evolutionary biology, it's generally thought that mutations are random in two number one mutations occur with equal likelihood across the entire genome. In other words, they are randomly distributed across the genome.
[00:19:05] Mutations occur without regard to the needs of the organisms, meaning they are random and not directed for or against what the organisms need to survive. This study conducted large surveys of de novo mutations in the plant Arabidopsis taliana. The authors found that essential genes, such as those basic genes responsible for translation, for example Converting the information and DNA into proteins, had lower mutation rates compared to other genes that had more specialized functions.
[00:19:37] Luskin explains the results of the study.
[00:19:40] Mutations don't occur randomly in the sense that some parts of the genome are less likely to experience mutations than other parts of the genome. Instead, in a sense, mutations do occur with respect to the needs of the organism. I don't mean that the non randomness of mutations identified in this study could help organisms build new complex traits. That's not indicated. Rather, the non randomness of mutations seems to be designed to minimize mutations in the places where they would do the most damage to the organism's basic functions. The implications, says Luskin, for evolutionary biology are profound. If mutations aren't equally distributed across the genome and aren't random with respect to the needs of the organism, then two basic tenets of the standard Neo Darwinian model are are false. This also could spell trouble for Neo Darwinism because it suggests that mutation rates are lowest in areas where mutations would presumably be needed to foster evolution. For example, they are lowest in the genes.
[00:20:43] If mutation rates are low in the gene coding DNA, then it will take even longer for new complex traits to arise by mutating functional genes.
[00:20:54] This exacerbates what Darwin skeptics call the waiting time problem, where it takes too long for necessary mutations to arise, far longer than the amount of time allowed by the fossil record.
[00:21:06] I'll stop there for today's commentary and reading, but I encourage you to continue probing this yourself and in the show Notes for this episode, we'll include links to some of the articles I read from today, as well as helpful videos such as the episode of Uncommon Knowledge that brought together Stephen Meyer, mathematician David Berlinsky, and Yale polymath David Gerlenter to discuss the mathematical challenges to Darwin's theory of evolution. I'll also include a link to a short documentary video that was mentioned in Today's episode from Dr. Meyer and Dr. Axe called Information Enigma. You know, if you want the confidence to be able to tell your friends, family and associates why modern evolutionary theory fails to account for the origin and diversity of life on Earth, you've got to, as Michael Behe says, bite the bullet of complexity and learn why evolution's selection mutation mechanism does not earn the credit for producing the new information needed to produce the diversity of life we see around us.
[00:22:08] Remember, this is a two pronged argument. The first prong is being able to communicate why Darwinian evolution can't do it. The second prong is being able to communicate some of the many lines of evidence that demonstrate that there is a mechanism sufficient to produce the new information needed to fuel the history of life on Earth. And that's Intelligent design. Well, if you have questions about today's episode or you have a suggestion for someone we should interview for ID the Future, you can get in touch with me by email@AndrewD the future.com that's Andrew D. The future.com thanks for adding ID the future to your week. You know, we put out two brand new episodes a week and we repost a third from our vast archive of content. So all week there's something to listen to and learn from. And if you like the show, please do us a favor and share it with a friend. Share a link to this episode from idthefuture.com also available on YouTube or simplest of all, hit the Share button in your podcast app. Thanks in advance for your help. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:23:20] Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
