I was recently informed of a video posted on the YouTube channel Creation Myths titled “Creation Myth: ‘Information’ Requires ‘Intelligence’.”
The video specifically references a clip of Stephen Meyer detailing the
design implications of the Cambrian Explosion. Meyer states that the
information required for the sudden appearance of radically new animals
could only have originated from a mind.
The critic responds to this claim by arguing that experiments have
demonstrated that information can be created by natural processes, and
he cites two research studies to support this assertion. His argument
ultimately fails since it is founded on a misunderstanding of the
evidence for design associated with biological information. This error
is so common that it deserves special attention.
The Research Studies
The first cited article is a 2017 study by Neme et al. that
purportedly demonstrated the creation of new information with ease. The
researchers inserted randomly generated sequences of 150 base pairs
into the DNA of E. coli. They reported that 25 percent of
random sequences enhance cells’ growth rate. The experiment purportedly
yielded new information without intelligent direction.
The second cited article is a 2018 study by Yona et al. that explored the difficulty of randomly generating a 100-base-pair DNA sequence in E. coli that would bind to an RNA polymerase. The study demonstrated that 10 percent of random sequences adjacent to the genes in a lac operon would
bind to the polymerase in such a way as to initiate transcription. This
study also purportedly demonstrates that information can be created by a
random process.
The Misunderstanding
Upon close inspection, both studies fail to challenge the design argument that is based on biological information. Neme et al. misinterpreted their results, as Weisman and Eddy explain in their critical review of the study. Douglas Axe summarizes the experimenters’ error as follows:
They merely showed that if you
burden bacteria by forcing them to churn out RNA and protein from random
inserts, it’s fairly easy to find sequence-dependent effects on growth —
not because anything clever has been invented, but because the burden
of making so much junk varies slightly with the kind of junk. That means
any junk that slows the process of making more junk by gumming up the
works a bit would provide a selective benefit. Such sequences are “good”
only in this highly artificial context, much as shoving a stick into an
electric fan is “good” if you need to stop the blades in a hurry.
In short, the sequences performed no new function, so no new information was created.
The Yona et al. experiment did show that a DNA sequence can
be randomly generated that can perform simple functions, such as binding
to a polymerase. Yet this achievement is not relevant to Stephen
Meyer’s full argument. Meyer is not claiming that random processes
cannot generate small quantities of information. He is arguing that
random processes cannot generate the quantity of information required
for anything comparable to creating a new protein with a novel
structure. Axe and others have decisively demonstrated that the
information associated with even modest proteins is typically greater
than what could be produced by any undirected process (here, here, here).
The Challenge for Evolution
The central challenge for evolutionary theory is creating sufficient
information to produce something truly novel that functions at a level
that would benefit an organism. In the case of the lac operon,
the specificity required for it to function is not the difficulty of an
RNA polymerase binding to the promoter region. The specificity and thus
the information reside in the sequences that encode the repressor that
acts as an on/off switch and the genes that encode the proteins that
break down lactose. The minimal required information for the operon to
function is vastly greater than that associated with the region that
binds to a polymerase. The amount is almost certainly beyond what any
undirected process could produce.
German paleontologist Günter Bechly is co-author (with Stephen Meyer) of
the chapter titled “The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry” in
the book Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. On a classic episode of ID the Future with host Sarah Chaffee, he moves on from the Cambrian explosion (see here)
to discuss “life’s second ‘big bang.’” He then touches on other
biological explosions, including the Avalon explosion, the Triassic
explosion, the origin of flowering plants, and the origin of placental
mammals. “There’s no reasonable way,” Bechly concludes, “to get from
bacteria to mammals via evolutionary processes.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
In the many years of vehement debate between proponents of unguided
evolution and intelligent design, it sometimes may look like all has
already been said and there are no new arguments on either side.
However, this is not the case at all. Intelligent design theory has
greatly developed since its early beginnings and many new arguments have
been added in support of the design inference. Here, I want to
introduce another new argument and formulate a challenge to my Darwinist
colleagues. This challenge is by no means rhetorical and could be
easily met with simple research in publicly available data bases. Here
it is.
As I have laid out in various publications (e.g., Bechly & Meyer 2017) and lectures,
the fossil record demonstrates that the history of life was not a
series of gradual transformations by an accumulation of small changes
over long periods of time. Instead of conforming to this gradualist
prediction of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fossil record
consistently documents a series of saltational transitions with abrupt
appearances of new body plans within very short windows of time. This
implies a fatal problem for Darwinism called the waiting time problem,
because population genetic calculations and simulations show that the
windows of time established by the fossil record are orders of magnitude
too short to accommodate the required genetic changes for these body
plan transformations.
Some examples of abrupt body plan transitions are the origin of
photosynthesis; the origin of eukaryotes; the origin of the Ediacaran
biota (Avalon Explosion) and Cambrian animal phyla (Cambrian Explosion)
such as the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than
13 million years (Daley et al. 2018, Bechly 2018);
the origin of efficient eyes in arthropods, cephalopods, and
vertebrates; the terrestrialization of plants (embryophytes), arthropods
(tracheae), and vertebrates (tetrapod limbs); the origin of wings in
insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds (including the origin of pennaceous
feathers from filamentous precursors); the origin of secondarily marine
vertebrates such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, manatees, and whales; the
origin of echolocation in bats and whales; the origin of complex new
reproductive systems (angiosperm flowers, dragonfly secondary copulatory
apparatus, holometabolic insect metamorphosis, amniote egg, and
eutherian placenta); the origin of distinct new body plans in
vertebrates (e.g., snakes, turtles, bats, and whales); and even the
origin of our own genus Homo and of a globular braincase correlated with the “Creative Explosion” of symbolic thinking within Homo sapiens.
The Lifespan of a Single Species
An additional fact that underscores the waiting time problem in cases like whale origins (see this Long Story Short 2020 video) is the average longevity of larger mammal species and especially artiodactyls at only 4.1-4.39 million years (Prothero 2014).
Whales are thought to be nested in and derived from artiodactyl
ungulates. The fossil record shows that the transition from quadrupedal
whale ancestors similar to Raoellidae (such as Indohyus) and
Pakicetidae to fully marine pelagicete whales like Basilosauridae
happened in just 4.5 million years. This implies that the body plan
transition from a pig-like animal to a dolphin-like animal happened
within the lifespan of a single species. Of course, this does not
exclude the possibility of several successive speciation events within
this time period, but it is still a fact that illustrates the biological
abruptness of this major anatomical re-engineering.
Finally, there is also another related problem that has been hitherto
largely overlooked: The morphological similarity of modern species
pairs, which have diverged in a similar time frame, poses a severe
problem. That is because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes
that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth
history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent
in the origins of all of the millions of living species. To explore this
issue, I surveyed TimeTree.org (Hedges & Kumar 2009, Hedges et al. 2006, 2015, Kumar et al. 2017),
which is a databank of 97,085 living species of different groups of
organisms, with molecular clock estimates of their time of divergence
based on 3,998 studies. When probing any pairs of species, even those
with longer divergence times than available for the development of the
body plan differences between pakicetids and basilosaurids, we find
without exception that their morphologies are hardly distinguishable for
laymen and they often still can hybridize.
So Much for the Theoretical Prelude
Now let’s look at some more-or-less random examples from TimeTree to see what I mean.
Firs (Abies spec.) and cedars (Cedrus spec.) belong
to the same subfamily of conifer trees but separated already 141
million years ago. That is more than 30 times the time available for the
origin of marine whales, but there is hardly any difference in body
plan. Of course, this might just be a case of evolutionary stasis as in
living fossils, but the next examples will make you think again.
The common house fly (Musca domestica) and the small house fly (Fannia scalaris)
diverged about 48 million years ago. For laymen they look basically
indistinguishable. Hmmm, that’s strange, but could still be a fluke.
My favorite animals are dragonflies and damselflies. The northern damselfly (Coenagrion hastulatum) and the azure damselfly (Coenagrion puella)
diverged 11.8 million years ago. Even as an expert on these insects, I
have to resort to a determination key to distinguish them. Can you?
Northern damselfly, Gilles San Martin, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0).Azure damselfly (Loz, Wikimedia / GFDL).
What about amphibians? The European common frog (Rana temporaria) and moor frog (Rana arvalis) diverged 21.4 million years ago. They look almost identical. Do we start to see a pattern?
“Reptiles” show the same pattern. The Galapagos land iguanas (Conolophus spec.) and marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus spec.)
diverged 18.2 million years ago. The marine iguanas can excrete salt
from a gland at their nostrils and have a more flattened tail, but
otherwise still look very much like their cousins.
Birds rank among the best studied groups in terms of speciation. The green warbler (Phylloscopus nitidus) and Bonelli’s warbler (P. bonelli) diverged 15.2 million years ago (but at least 4-7 million years according to Helbig et al. 1995). They look identical and may still be able to hybridize.
Here is another avian example to show this is a common pattern among recent bird species. The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and tree sparrow (Passer montanus)
diverged 10.2 million years ago. They have some minor differences in
color pattern but indeed hybridize even in the wild. Still thinking
evolution can achieve miracles in a few million years? Where the heck is
the evidence?
Well, let’s move on to mammals. The common house mouse (Mus musculus) and house rat (Rattus rattus) diverged 20.9 million years ago (at least 12 million years according to Kimura et al. 2015). Apart from the size difference they look very much alike.
Did you ever taste beefalo steak? Beefalos are hybrids between European bison (Bison bonasus) and cattle (Bos taurus)
that diverged 4.88 million years ago, which is about the same time
frame as in the whale example. Some archaic breeds of cattle like the
Scots highland cattle look even more similar to the bison and the
aurochs.
Horse (Equus caballus) and ass (Equus asinus)
diverged 7.7 million years ago and can still hybridize as mules. Their
wild ancestors looked even more similar than most of their modern
domesticated breeds.
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta africana) diverged 25.9 million years ago (at least 7.6 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007),
and they mainly differ in the tip of the trunk, ear size, and shape of
their withers. Even the two almost identical African species of the
savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) diverged 7.6 million years ago (at least 4 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007). Not really a new body plan.
The South American spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and Asian black bear (Ursus / Selenarctos thibetanus) diverged 16.5 million years ago. They look very similar and can hybridize in captivity (Mondolfi & Boede 1981).
River otter (Lutra lutra) and brown fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus)
diverged about 40 million years ago. They indeed look quite different,
but still a far cry from the difference between pakicetids and
basilosaurids in a tenth of the time. This example is interesting
because some experts thought that otters represent the closest related
group to pinnipeds, or at least assumed stem pinnipeds like the Miocene Puijila darwini were
very similar to otters. Therefore, this case seems to be a pretty good
analogue to the early amphibious stem whales, which made a much bigger
transition in terms of body plan in just a few million years.
In modern phylogenetic reconstructions hippos are consistently
recovered as the sister group of whales. So, we might expect to find a
comparable evolutionary disparity within this group. However, even
though the river hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and pygmy hippo (Choeropsis liberiensis)
diverged 9.6. million years ago, they share the same body plan and only
differ somewhat in size and proportions. Still not convinced?
Now, let’s have a look at modern cetaceans. Maybe they are different? The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus)
diverged 3.99 million years ago. This represents about the timeframe
available between pakicetids and basilosaurids and shows what blind
evolution at best can achieve with whales in this time: only very minor
differences!
Finally, what about great apes and humans. Chimp (Pan paniscus) and gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) diverged according to TimeTree 9.06 million years ago and humans (Homo sapiens)
from chimps 6.7 million years, which agrees with the hominin fossil
record. There are two possibilities: Either you follow those scientists
who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as
marginal. Then this example would just confirm the pattern described
above. Or, you consider humans as very different from chimps, based on
their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity
and cultural achievements. In the latter case humans would represent the
only exception to the pattern that I could find, which would be a
remarkable confirmation of Judeo-Christian human exceptionalism.
These examples could be expanded endlessly but should be sufficient
to establish the point. There are clearly limits to what unguided
evolution can do within a few million years, and these limits are far
below the level of any major body plan transitions. Thus, we can safely
conclude that there are two indisputable facts that require an adequate
explanation:
1.) There are many examples of fossil species pairs with very
different body plans that diverged within a window of time of 5 (±5)
million years. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there
are only about 350,000 described fossil species (extrapolated based on
data in Teichert 1956, Valentine 1970, Raup 1976, and Alroy 2002), which represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 5-50 billion species that have ever lived on Earth (Raup 1991).
2.) There exist no living species pairs with even remotely similar
differences in body plan that are dated to have diverged in a similar
time frame. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are
an estimated 8.7 million living species (Mora et al. 2011, Strain 2011, Sweetlove 2011), of which more than 2 million are described (IISE 2012). Previous estimates of the total number of living species varied from 3-100 million species (May 1988, Tangley 1997, Chapman 2009), but if microbes are included, it could even be up to a trillion living species (Locey & Lennon 2016, Latty & Lee 2019).
Considering the fact that windows of time of only 5-10 million years
account for most of the abrupt appearances of new body plans in the
fossil record (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021),
the Bayesian likelihood of not finding a single example of similar
morphological disparity having originated on a similar time frame among
the millions of living species is basically close to zero. I consider
this simple argument as a final nail in the coffin of Darwinian unguided
evolution.
A Public Challenge
Having made my case, I here formally and publicly pose the challenge
again to prove me wrong. My dear Darwinist friends and colleagues,
please find in the vast database of 97,000 species at TimeTree.org just
a single example of any pair of different species that have diverged
about 5 million years ago (give or take a few million years) according
to a consensus of multiple molecular clock studies, and that exhibit a
morphological disparity in their body plans comparable to, say, Pakicetus and Basilosaurus. To be clear, of course no evolutionist ever claimed that Pakicetus was the actual ancestor of Basilosaurus.
It rather represented a side branch of the cetacean stem group. But
what evolutionists definitely do imply is that the stem species was
roughly similar in body plan to Raoellidae and Pakicetidae. Therefore,
this challenge is absolutely valid and reasonable.
An obvious possible objection by Darwinists might be that recent
species pairs do not represent ancestor-descendent lineages but just
cousin lineages that both diverged from a common ancestor. Yes, I get
it. However, this also applies for most fossil examples, and there is a
catch: While differences in ancestor-descendent lineages could only
accumulate in a single evolving lineage, recent lineages could both
evolve differences during the same time in each lineage and thus should
rather present more and not less morphological disparity. Therefore,
this point makes the problem even worse for Darwinists.
Maybe evolutionists will appeal to yet unknown non-Darwinian
processes. However, the great advantage of this new argument is that it
is totally independent of the nature of the transformation process. You
could simply consider that process as a black box. Therefore, it is
totally irrelevant if Darwinists invent some new possible mechanism. The
crucial point is not the process, but the resulting pattern of new body
plans consistently having come into being abruptly in the distant past,
but not in the more recent past.
No Conceivable Reason
There is no conceivable reason why a disparity like that between Pakicetus and Basilosaurus
should be limited to the fossil record, where it can be found in
numerous examples among all groups of organisms, while being totally
absent among the millions of recent species. So, let’s be generous and
not restrict the challenge to the TimeTree database. Just find
any pair of species among the millions of living species to meet the
challenge. Only one! Come on, if unguided evolution really can do its
magic, this should not be too difficult, should it? Well, I won’t hold
my breath, but if the challenge cannot be met, Darwinists should be
asked to explain why.
Here is my explanation. Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only
to the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection
but to any unguided evolutionary processes including those suggested by
proponents of the so-called Extended Synthesis (e.g., Shapiro et al. 2014, Laland et al. 2014, 2015, Garte 2016, Müller 2016, 2017).
There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this
process should have been active over all of Earth history but then
ceased to function within the past 10 million years. Intelligent design
proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative
intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative
activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final
telos. Any further explanation would have to transgress the
methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian
theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the
Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity
after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).
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1O God, keep not thou silence: Hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.
2For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult; And they that hate thee have lifted up the head.
3Thy take crafty counsel against thy people, And consult together against thy hidden ones.
4They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; That the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
5For they have consulted together with one consent; Against thee do they make a covenant:
6The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites; Moab, and the Hagarenes;
7Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre:
8Assyria also is joined with them; They have helped the children of Lot. Selah
9Do thou unto them as unto Midian, As to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the river Kishon;
10Who perished at Endor, Who became as dung for the earth.
11Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; Yea, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna;
12Who said, Let us take to ourselves in possession The habitations of God.
13O my God, make them like the whirling dust; As stubble before the wind.
14As the fire that burneth the forest, And as the flame that setteth the mountains on fire,
15So pursue them with thy tempest, And terrify them with thy storm.
16Fill their faces with confusion, That they may seek thy name, O JEHOVAH.
17Let them be put to shame and dismayed for ever; Yea, let them be confounded and perish;
18That they may know that thou alone, whose name is JEHOVAH, Art the Most High over all the earth.
◄ Psalm 8 ►
American Standard Version
1O JEHOVAH, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth, Who hast set thy glory upon the heavens!
2Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength, Because of thine adversaries, That thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
3When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
4What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?
5For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor.
6Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
7All sheep and oxen, Yea, and the beasts of the field,
8The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
9O JEHOVAH, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth!
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