Vindicated by Behe: Devolution Is Natural, Evolution Is Not.
Granville Sewell
I know many other mathematicians and engineers who share my low
opinion of Darwinism, but most are reluctant to express their views
publicly because they feel that the issue is simply outside their area
of expertise and they will not be taken seriously. I also tend to defer
to specialists on scientific issues outside my discipline — until those
specialists try to tell me something clearly absurd, for example, that
unintelligent forces alone could have reorganized the basic particles on
Earth into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. Then I don’t
hesitate to jump into the debate. I have done so, for example, in a 2000
Mathematical Intelligencer opinion piece, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and in a 2017 Physics Essays article, “On ‘Compensating’ Entropy Decreases.”
A Very Simple Principle
It is really not necessary to be a biochemist or a paleontologist to
understand the main issue in the debate between Darwinism and
intelligent design. That is because it is a very simple principle, as I
keep emphasizing: natural (unintelligent) causes do not create order (or
information). They destroy it. That is the main theme of the first half
of my video “Why Evolution Is Different.”
While every other natural process tends to turn order into disorder,
Darwinists have always believed that natural selection is the one
unintelligent process in the universe that can create spectacular order out of disorder. So I feel vindicated by Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves,
which disputes this belief, and argues that despite all the claims
about the creative powers of natural selection, it has never actually
been observed to produce anything new and complex, only “devolution”:
Darwinian evolution proceeds mainly by damaging or breaking genes,
which, counterintuitively, sometimes helps survival. In other words, the
mechanism is powerfully devolutionary. It promotes the rapid
loss of genetic information. Laboratory experiments, field research, and
theoretical studies all forcefully indicate that, as a result, random
mutation and natural selection make evolution self-limiting….Darwin’s
mechanism works chiefly by squandering genetic information for
short-term gain.
Only Devolution Occurred
As another illustration that selection and mutations can only degrade, in this interview on German TV, geneticist
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig recounts (minutes 24:00 to 28:00, turn on English
subtitles if you don’t speak German) the well-funded attempts at, among
other places, his own Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research,
to speed up evolution in plants using radiation and advanced artificial
selection techniques. Lönnig reports that only devolution occurred: the
only progress observed before this effort was given up was that the
genes that made some plants toxic were damaged, making these plants more
useful as animal fodder.
That it seems even superficially plausible that random mutations
could produce major improvements relies completely on the observed but
inexplicable fact that while they are awaiting rare favorable mutations,
living species are able to preserve their complex structures and pass
them on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation
after generation.
To appreciate how astonishing this is, imagine that it were possible
(though it is far beyond our current technology) to construct a fleet of
cars that contained completely automated car-building factories inside,
with the ability to construct new cars — and not just normal new cars,
but new cars containing automated car-building factories inside them. If
we left these cars alone and let them reproduce themselves for many
generations, is there any chance we would eventually see major advances arise through natural selection of the resulting duplication errors?
Of course not. We could confidently predict that the whole process
would grind to a halt after a few generations without intelligent humans
there to fix the mechanical problems that would inevitably arise. And
we don’t need to know the details of how these cars work and reproduce
to predict this, because there is a simpler principle involved here:
devolution is natural, evolution is not.
The Argument Could Not Be Clearer
I am very grateful that there are biologists like Michael Behe and
W.E. Lönnig who doubt Darwinism, because doubts expressed by
mathematicians like me would otherwise never be taken seriously. But you
really do not have to study the biochemical details to understand why
the accumulation of genetic accidents cannot produce human brains and
human consciousness. And you do not really need to study mutations for
thirty years, as Lönnig has done, to predict that bombarding plant
chromosomes with radiation would not lead to major agricultural
advances.
The argument against Darwinism, or any other attempt to explain what
has happened on Earth without intelligent design, could not be simpler
or clearer: a few fundamental, unintelligent, forces of physics alone
cannot rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into computers and
airplanes and Apple iPhones. And any attempt to explain how they can must break down somewhere, because they obviously can’t
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