Flat tires notwithstanding, OOL science's clown car rolls on?

Error Catastrophe: Manfred Eigen’s Show-Stopper Is Still Stopping the Origin-of-Life Show
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

NASA recently put out another over-hyped announcement that makes it sound like they have actually solved the riddle of life’s origin by unguided natural processes. Actually, Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) pointed out a hurdle that shouts, like Gandalf, “You shall not pass!”

A leading physical chemist and Nobel laureate, Manfred Eigen died last month. He often had evolution on his mind. An obituary in  Nature honored him as “a creator of the new field of evolutionary biotechnology.”

From the early 1980s, he developed these concepts into evolutionary biotechnology at the MPI. His colleagues built ‘evolution reactors’ that drove the evolution of viruses and other replicating molecules under controlled conditions to investigate how pathogens evade the immune system, or to search for new drugs. Eigen helped to found two companies to exploit this technology.

What Molecules Wish For

Controlled conditions, needless to say, were not available to molecules on the early Earth before life. Molecules are incapable of wishing to evolve into living organisms, and nothing will “drive” their chemical evolution toward that lofty goal. It appears that Eigen was a staunch believer in chemical evolution anyway, having written popular books about how it might have happened. The summary of his book Steps Toward Life (1992) on Amazon says:

This fascinating work, co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning scientist, extends Darwin’s ideas on natural selection back into evolutionary time and applies them to the molecular “fossil record” that preceded the origin of life. Using the techniques of molecular biology, the book demonstrates that life on Earth is the inevitable result of certain chance events that took place in the unique history of our planet. Furthermore, researchers can not only precisely formulate the laws governing the emergence of life, but also test them under controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the authors show how it is perfectly possible to construct evolutionary accelerators that optimize the conditions for certain events and which can be used to demonstrate their theoretical conclusions in laboratory experiments.

The Problem of “Error Catastrophe”

We are nearing a half-century since Eigen wrote about that paradox, and it “still challenges theoretical biologists.” Often called the problem of “error catastrophe,” it’s the show-stopper that stops the Evolution Show before it starts. Stated succinctly above, molecules cannot gain enough information by chance until accurate replication starts. The reason is that errors inevitably creep in, destroying whatever genetic information an emerging replicator stores. You can grant a chemical evolutionist all the RNA molecules he or she wants, but error catastrophe will stop the show. Darwin’s house of cards collapses before it’s built

Natural selection is no help, because natural selection presupposes accurate replication. Before you have error-correcting enzymes, there is no natural selection. It’s all chance. Illustra Media’s film Origin, co-narrated by Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger, shows what chance is like.Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Stephen Meyer discussed this problem on pages 279-280 of Signature in the Cell (2009). Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Meyer Wasn’t the First

Meyer was not the first to point this out. He shows that notable scientists like Freeman Dyson, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Shapiro have also criticized Eigen’s model, pointing out that his theoretical cycles “are more likely to lose or degrade information over time” (p. 280). William Dembski also dealt with this paradox at length in No Free Lunch (2002), as had A.E. Wilder-Smith in The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution (1981, ten years after Eigen proposed the paradox). Now Eigen has passed on, never seeing a resolution to the show-stopping chasm he found. His “paradox still challenges theoretical biologists,” Nature admitted after his death. (Note: Leslie Orgel, Stanley Miller’s colleague, had also thought about the problem; sometimes it is called “Orgel’s Paradox.”)

You wouldn’t know this by reading the effervescent announcements bubbling over in NASA press releases and popular media. Reporters leap over the Error Catastrophe Chasm with flights of fancy, like magicians in

The Origin of Life Circus (Susan Mazur’s book title). How do they leap over it? Well, actually, they don’t. They ignore it. They imagine ways across, because “After all, we’re here, aren’t we?” Somehow, life must have found a way. Case in point is NASA/JPL’s press release, “NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor.” A casual reader might think, “It’s not only possible; it’s been done in the lab!” Not only that, “It must be happening all over the universe!”

Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.

Cooking Up “Green Rust”

Basically, they created an artificial hydrothermal vent, and cooked up “green rust” that contained some alanine and lactate. That’s it. Alanine is one of the simplest of the amino acids. But researcher Laura Barge boasted, “We’ve shown that in geological conditions similar to early Earth, and maybe to other planets, we can form amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids from a simple reaction under mild conditions that would have existed on the seafloor.” The show resembles Stanley Miller’s spark-discharge play. Maybe even red-rusty Mars has some green rust!

Readers will look in vain for the important concepts that collapse all their hopes: complex specified information, accurate replication, and error catastrophe. Nor will they find these concepts in the PNAS paper on which the hype is based: “Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems.” Lead author Laura Barge is a follower of Michael Russell, one of the leading proponents of chemical evolution in hydrothermal vents. He doesn’t talk about error correction, either. But does ignoring the problem make it go away? Only in one’s imagination.

Barge, Russell and the other chemical-evolution magicians who fly over the chasm of error catastrophe get rewarded by funds from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Affirming the impossible is a ticket to stardom at JPL. Michael Russell occasionally speaks to the employees at the famous NASA lab, making life look easy. All you need is energy flow, he says, and life happens. But if promoting the show is a ticket to stardom, critiquing the show is a ticket to expulsion. Anyone pointing out the show-stopper is likely to get frowned on. And anyone arguing that complex specified information and error correction provide evidence of intelligent design is at risk of a career-ending move, as indicated by the fate of David Coppedge. 

The show must go on! And it does — in the Theater of the Imagination.

To save the planet:Who you gonna call?

Darwinsplainin'? II

Insect Evolution: Another Illustration of How Darwinism “Explains Away”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Evolution News put it concisely the other day, “Where Design Explains, Darwinism Explains Away.” An illustration from paleontologist Günter Bechly: the evolution of insects, which he describes in a fascinating new ID the Future episode with host Andrew McDiarmid.

Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Dr. Bechly notes three contradictions at odds with Darwinian gradualism: Insects pop into existence at one blow, as do insect wings, as does the phenomenon of metamorphosis. None of these is led up to by the expected gradual evolutionary process. As with the Cambrian explosion, Darwinians have theories to explain away the problems.

Meanwhile the completeness of the fossil record grows more evident, and so the reliance on theories and excuses grows with it. But only a design inference explains such abrupt transitions. That’s how new ideas, in our own daily experience, get instantiated in physical reality — abruptly.

Iconoclast v. gatekeeper?

Bullet Points for Jerry Coyne
Michael Behe

As noted here earlier, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne reviewed Darwin Devolves for this past Sunday’s  Washington Post.  As you might expect, it’s written in the venerable style of Richard Dawkins’s review of The Edge of Evolution for the New York Times back in 2007: long on sneering, smearing, and assertion; short to nonexistent on telling readers what the book’s actual arguments are. Alas, Coyne’s piece has too little intellectual content to sustain any real engagement. So I’ll simply proceed from its beginning to its end, with lines from his review in bullet points and italics. My comments follow directly after each. 

“intelligent design” arose after opponents of evolution repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds to get Bible-based creationism taught in the public schools. … : intelligent design, which scientists have dubbed “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”

Good idea — let’s link the author to a scorned group right at the start and smear his motives.

Milk that Epithet

Behe does not rely on the Bible as a science textbook. Rather, he admits that evolution occurs by natural selection sifting new mutations and that all species are related via common ancestors.

But we’ll call him a “creationist” anyway, to milk that epithet for all it’s worth.

Scientists … pointed out numerous scenarios in which a system fitting Behe’s definition of “irreducible complexity” could evolve in a step-by-step manner (one is the hormone pathway studied by my Chicago colleague Joe Thornton).

I showed in the Appendix that no evidence beyond handwaving has been published since Darwin’s Black Box. Again, not even a mention by Coyne that I dispute his claim.

Jerry Coyne, Theologian

these systems … embody an absurd, Rube Goldberg-like complexity that makes no sense as the handiwork of an engineer but makes perfect sense as a product of a long and unguided historical process.

Wow, the great theologian Jerry Coyne has determined that God wouldn’t have done it that way — no need for actual evidence that Darwin’s mechanism can do the job. We all anxiously await the unveiling of Coyne’s superior designs for a clotting cascade and a flagellum.

Behe’s rationale for designed mutations is circular. He claims that biochemical pathways are designed rather than evolved because they’re based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” But which arrangements are those designed with a purpose? They’re simply the pathways that Behe sees as too complex to have evolved.

    So Coyne can’t think of a purpose for an eye? Or for the leg gears of the planthopper? Or for the supercharged flagellum of the magnetotatic bacterium MO-1? That’s funny — the authors of the science papers on those systems that I cite in the book seem to have had no trouble identifying their purpose.

Perhaps Behe’s most ludicrous claim is this: Evolution within the lowest levels of biological classification — genera and species — might be purely Darwinian, but the origin of higher level groups — families, orders and so on — requires designed mutations. Yet as every biologist knows, groupings above the level of species are purely subjective.

                 Can Coyne tell the difference between a plant and an animal? Between a bird and a fish? A cat and a dog? Sure, as I discuss in the book, a classification system is a human invention and so it inevitably has uncertainties, ambiguities, and mistakes. But implying that biological classification reflects nothing real is disingenuous at best.

                     Behe selectively gives a handful of examples in which mutations have produced broken genes that are nevertheless useful, but he simply ignores the large number of adaptive mutations that do not inactivate genes. These include duplications, in which a gene is accidentally copied twice, with the copies diverging in useful ways (this is how primates acquired our three-color vision, as well as different forms of hemoglobin).

                          

I wrote a section in Chapter 8 titled “Evolution by Gene Duplication Revisited” in which I explain why duplication and diversification by Darwinian processes may account for some things but not for others. I specifically explain why I changed my mind about sophisticated hemoglobin, which would require much more modification starting from a simple myoglobin-like gene than would mere duplication of opsin (color-vision) genes. Coyne doesn’t even let readers know I discuss it.

Separating What from How

Behe also argues that evolution is self-limiting because natural selection “adjust[s] a biological system to its current function” and thus “works to block the system from taking up a significantly different function.” But … Think of how feathers, which probably evolved to conserve body heat in dinosaurs, opened up the possibility of flight — leading to all the diverse birds on Earth.

              It never ceases to amaze me that Darwinists like Coyne are unable to separate the question of what happened from the question of how it happened. Okay, flightless dinosaurs had feathers and birds can now fly. So what exactly is the evidence that it happened by a Darwinian process? What is the evidence that a Darwinian process could even, say, differentiate owls and crows from a common ancestor? I argue at length in the book that unintelligent processes aren’t remotely up to those tasks. Without any substantive counter-argument, Coyne simply responds like a kid on a playground: “Yes they can too do that!”

A Terrible Thing to Waste

Like his creationist kin, Behe devotes his time not to giving evidence for intelligent design but to attacking evolutionary biology.

Gee, Coyne must have missed Chapter 10 in Darwin Devolves, “A Terrible Thing to Waste,” as well as Chapters 8 and 9 in Darwin’s Black Box (“Intelligent Design” and “Questions About Design”) and Chapter 11 in The Edge of Evolution (“All the World’s a Stage”). I explain at length in those chapters and elsewhere that the work of a mind — design — is evinced precisely by the purposeful arrangement of parts, such as is found in abundance in life. For pretty much the entirety of recorded history until Darwin almost everyone thought life was designed exactly for that reason — the arrangement of parts for a purpose — as I discuss in the Preface to the book. Contrary to Coyne, it is Darwin’s audacious assertion — that complex interactive functional structures could be produced by random variation and natural selection — that has gone unsupported by pertinent evidence. Coyne’s unwillingness or inability to grasp the argument for design does not mean the argument hasn’t been made.

Since humans are placed in the same family as other great apes (Hominidae), Behe’s theory predicts that we arose without a designer’s intervention. But here he backpedals, asserting that there are “excellent reasons to suspect those differences [between humans and other apes] are well beyond Darwinian processes.” Sadly, he doesn’t give these reasons, but I’d guess they stem from the Christian belief that Homo sapiens is a special creation of God.

Actually, they stem from our personal awareness that we can reason, speak, think abstractly, and so on — in other words, that we have minds — which arguably is the most profound attribute in the world. By the way, I also wrote in the book that there are good reasons to doubt that giraffes could arise from a shorter-necked relative like the okapi, even though they are in the same biological family. For some reason Coyne doesn’t ascribe my skepticism there to Christian belief.

A Horrible Threat

In 1998, the Discovery Institute drafted the “Wedge Document,” a secret plan (leaked in 1999) to spread Christianity in America by teaching intelligent design and fighting materialism. … Well, now it’s 20 years on, and despite the efforts of Behe and other neo-creationists, intelligent design has been discredited as science and outed as disguised religion.

Yes, the horrible threat of a group trying to persuade people of its ideas by writing books and articles has so far been countered by brave folks like Jerry Coyne, who use the kind of overwhelming evidence and impeccable logic showcased in his book review.

Coyne is quite the prominent evolutionary biologist, and has been antagonistic to intelligent design arguments for decades. If Darwin’s theory were actually the powerful idea it’s claimed to be, Coyne should have been able to counter design easily, simply by summarizing its arguments and showing how Darwin deals with them. Yet he can’t even bring himself to mention what those arguments are. Instead he tries to whip up hysteria against a book that argues for what most people already believe. That speaks volumes about the actual strength of Darwin’s theory.

The Future's so bright?

The future's So bright? II

File under "well said." LXI

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The lame and the blind excepted, who could object?” 
― David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.

In Russia:A ray of light re: religious liberty?

Court Overturns Sentence Against Brother Akopyan in Russia

On March 1, 2019, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria overturned a lower court’s conviction of Brother Arkadya Akopyan. He had been on trial for over a year, wrongfully accused of distributing “extremist” literature and ‘inciting religious hatred.’

Previously, a lower court sentenced 70-year-old Brother Akopyan to perform community service. This recent Supreme Court ruling dismissed the lower court’s sentence.

We thank Jehovah for this victory as we rejoice with Brother Akopyan. We continue to pray that our brothers will faithfully endure.—2 Thessalonians 1:4.

Chance:King of the new gods?

Crying “Chance, Chance” When There Is No Chance
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

“Biology is the study of complex things that appear to have been designed for a purpose,” Richard Dawkins famously asserted. But if design is only apparent and not real, what else is there to create the appearance of design? Natural law might be the answer, but if nobody is guiding that, the results are still matters of chance. 

No Power of Agency

When it comes to biology, life as we know it involves more than just repetitive patterns wrought by natural law, beautiful as they might be. It involves operations based on coded instructions. During the origin of life, before there were coded instructions able to accurately replicate, sequences were purely matters of chance, even if molecules interacted by natural law. Nothing about natural law will sequentially organize building blocks with semantic information and syntax, and then translate that coded information into another code with the power to cause functional information. Natural law doesn’t care about trying to do that. It has no power of agency in the materialist conception.

 “Random mutation” might be the answer, but that is pure chance embedded in a fancy phrase. In short, they can only invoke chance for sequential information, and they can only invoke chance for random mutations. Chance plus chance equals chance. And yet life does appear designed for a purpose. Everyone acknowledges that. The only way out of this dilemma is to believe in fake chance: random processes mystically imbued with agency. Evolutionists imagine a personified chance wanting to evolve upward in complexity. Or they can invoke the post-hoc fallacy, saying, “We’re here, therefore we evolved.” This absolves them of having to explain how chance could create a coded information system. Any gambler watching  Illustra’s film clip from Origin on the improbability of a single protein self-organizing would agree, “Not a chance!” In Darwinland, the vast improbabilities are swept away by philosophical bias. They cry “Chance, chance,” but there is no chance. There is only fake chance, endowed with purpose and choice.

Demon Lingo

To see how this is done, consider a book review by Timo Hannay in Nature, where he comments on Paul Davies’s recent book, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life (Allen Lane, 2019). Hannay’s review, titled “Maxwell’s Demon and the Hunt for Alien Life,” echoes the demon lingo. It sounds like agency, but we know neither writer is talking about real mind-directed design. How will they imbue chance with agency in this case?

Hannay is mostly kind to Davies, though we know that the book’s author often thinks outside the box. Hannay is glad that Davies is “certainly no believer in a vital force distinct from physics or chemistry” (emphasis added), but he worries that Davies tiptoes at the edges of real design, not just apparent design. 

Davies claims that life’s defining characteristics are better understood in terms of information. This is not as absurd as it may seem. Energy is abstract, yet we have little trouble accepting it as a causal factor. Indeed, energy and information are closely related through entropy.

    

Turning Chance into an Agent

Information “is not as absurd as it may seem,” he says. That’s an interesting way to put it, given that intelligent design theory relies substantially on the concept of information. ID proponents do not compare information to raw, unguided energy, though. Information is superior, because it can commandeer energy. It can take energy and force material to decrease entropy by organizing it in ways natural law alone would never do (i.e., natural law cannot arrange building blocks with sufficiently improbable complex specified information). But can unguided chance use energy to do it? Watch how both writers make chance into an agent:

Davies explains this connection by referring to Maxwell’s demon. Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s celebrated thought experiment features a hypothetical miniature beast perching at an aperture between two containers of gas, where it allows only certain molecules to pass, depending on their kinetic energy. The demon can thus create a temperature gradient between the containers: a reduction in overall entropy, apparently breaking the second law of thermodynamics. The resolution to this paradox seems to lie in the fact that the demon must gather information about the properties of each molecule, and for this it requires a recording device, such as a brain or a miniature notebook. When its storage space eventually runs out, the information must be deleted, a process that necessarily produces an increase in total entropy.

From this perspective, living systems can be seen as composed of countless such ‘demons’ (proteins and other cellular machinery) that maintain local order by pumping disorder (often in the form of heat) into their surroundings. Davies adroitly brings Schrödinger’s account up to date by way of Claude Shannon’s information theory, Turing machines (universal computers), von Neumann machines (self-replicating universal constructors), molecular biology, epigenetics, information-integration theories of consciousness and quantum biology (which concerns quantum effects in processes from photosynthesis to insect coloration and bird navigation).

Notice, though, how this account dodges the issue by appealing to virtual agents (Maxwell demons) as well as real agents, like Turing. To the materialist, all these agents emerge by a long series of chance events, direct things for a while, then delete themselves. How did that happen?

Cheating with Fake Chance

Sure, the Second Law is not violated, but Davies and Hannay have cheated with fake chance. They speak as if Maxwell’s demon emerges by chance, uses purposeful intelligence for a goal, then vanishes by chance. Now watch them dig a deeper hole:

What practical difference does it make to see life as informational? We don’t yet know, but can speculate. For one thing, if the essential characteristics of life are entropic, extraterrestrial searches based on chemistry could be misguided. It might be more useful to look for phenomena such as ‘anti-accretion’ — in which matter is regularly transferred from a planet’s surface into space. Earth has experienced this since the 1950s, when the one-way traffic in asteroids and meteorites plunging into the globe was finally counteracted by the launch of the first artificial satellites. Arguably, such situations are not merely consistent with the presence of life, but almost impossible to explain in any other way

Note the artfully deployed passive voice. One-way traffic “was finally counteracted by the launch of the first artificial satellites.” Who counteracted it? Did not intelligent engineers use design to launch satellites? It’s hard to exaggerate how ludicrous the thought could be that satellites are mirror images of the same chance processes that pockmarked the Earth with craters. This is fake chance, endowed with purposeful agency, but like Hannay said, to the materialist, “such situations are not merely consistent with the presence of life, but almost impossible to explain in any other way.”

Iconoclasm and Vitalism

Hannay takes issues with a few of Davies’ “iconoclastic” ideas in the book, but since Davies doesn’t cross the line into “vitalism” (a favorite epithet some Darwinians use to describe intelligent design), he ends with a compliment: “On the contrary, if only more of us were wrong in such thought-provoking ways, we might more readily uncover the truth.”

And so Hannay, with Nature’s pulpit, preaches about thoughts and truths. Those are ponderous demons to have to emerge from bouncing molecules, only to disappear after temporary violations of the Second Law. Presumably the truths that emerge on another planet would be quite different. Maybe, even, the truths that emerged here on the materialists’ unguided, naturalistic Earth are the real falsehoods. “Who” could ever judge the difference?

Argument by cliche?

Coyne: “The Tuxedo Is Fraying”!

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Over the weekend I took a look at the hysterical attempt, via the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to link Mike Behe and Darwin Devolves with a measles upsurge and catastrophic climate change. That’s one approach to dealing with a book you don’t like.

Now biologist Jerry Coyne weighs in at the Washington Post with his own review. It’s an improvement over the Science review, at least, as I count two whole paragraphs seeking to rebut the main thesis of the book that unguided Darwinian evolution is “self-limiting.”

I’ll let others respond on that. While Coyne has nothing to offer to compare with madly tarring Behe with global health threats as the AAAS does, he offers a gem in his own way. It’s not too often you see a denser collation of cliché taunts directed at intelligent design. It’s all here, from the “Wedge Document” to Behe as a “pious Catholic” to ID as “rejected…by judges” and “outed as disguised religion,” “derived from religion,” to “Who, exactly, is the designer?” to “neo-creationism,” “a mere re-labeling of creationism” (quoting Judge Jones), to “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”

The potted false history is not left out, how ID “arose after opponents of evolution repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds to get Bible-based creationism taught in the public schools,” nor the expected complaint about Behe’s choice of a publisher.

The Hoariest Cliché of All

The “tuxedo is fraying,” warns Professor Coyne, a delightful attempt to spruce up the hoariest cliché of all. I dare you to tell me what’s missing. Actually, there’s one ultra-hackneyed attack he leaves out. He forgets to demand, as if this settled the whole matter, “Who designed the designer?” Even Coyne nods.

Professor Coyne’s headline is perfectly juvenile: “Intelligent design gets even dumber.” Uh huh. Meanwhile, as I write, the current top story at his own website, Why Evolution Is True, informs the science community with the news that “Maru plays the drums,” referring to the Japanese cat and YouTube star who “has been on the Internet for eleven years.” Wow, eleven years. Has it really been that long? And the cat can play a drum with its tail!

Why does it matter? From my perspective as a science consumer, ID’s case could be wrong and it could be right. But credit it with this: the argument it presents, in the work of ID proponents like Behe, Meyer, Axe, Dembski, and others, is continually building. It’s dynamic, highly substantive, evolutionary you might say. It doesn’t depend on appeals to religion, but also not to emotion, to demonization, to cultural stereotypes, to clichés. ID has that over its opponents.

If the evidence of design is worth addressing at all, it’s worth addressing adequately on its own terms. And those terms are not static and stale, as the critiques from Darwinists overwhelmingly tend to be. Come on, guys. Let’s do better.

Darwinsplainin' ?

Where Design Explains, Darwinism Explains Away
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Look at the photos in an article on Live Science. They report: 

Hundreds of stone structures dating back thousands of years have been discovered in the Western Sahara, a territory in Africa little explored by archaeologists.

The structures seem to come in all sizes and shapes, and archaeologists aren’t sure what many of then were used for or when they were created.

Immediately you know these structures were designed. How should you know that? How did the scientists know that? The discoverers didn’t know who made them. They didn’t know why they made them. No obvious purpose for the structures came to their attention, yet they knew someone made them intentionally. 

A new book documenting hundreds of rock structures in the Western Sahara has been published: The Archaeology of Western Sahara: A Synthesis of Fieldwork, 2002 to 2009 (Oxbow Books, 2018). The article explains that the region has long been too dangerous for research because of a state of war between Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Because of that, this region remains mysterious and largely unknown, and research has been “extremely limited.”

Like the archaeologists, people living in the area intuitively knew the structures were designed. (See additional photos in a slide show on Live Science.) Rocks on their own don’t arrange themselves like these ones are put together.

The stone structures are designed in a wide variety of ways. Some are shaped like crescents, others form circles, some are in straight lines, some in rectangular shapes that look like a platform; some structures consist of rocks that have been piled up into a heap. And some of the structures use a combination of these designs. For instance, one structure has a mix of straight lines, stone circles, a platform and rock piles that altogether form a complex about 2,066 feet (630 meters) long, the archaeologists noted in the book. 

We’ve seen other design inferences like this in Brazil, Jordan, Israel, and Arabia. After concluding that structures are designed, archaeologists often pursue additional questions. The makers must have had the ability to mobilize many people to do the work. Perhaps powerful rulers drove their subjects to make elaborate tombs or grave markers. In some cases, structures can be correlated with rock art. A design inference does not, therefore, stop the science. It stimulates additional questions for investigation. And it is falsifiable: something originally thought to be designed can turn out to be a natural phenomenon.

The Design Inference

Books by intelligent design leaders clarify the nature and extent of the design inference. Douglas Axe, in his book Undeniable, explains why our intuition that things are designed is corroborated by biochemistry. Stephen Meyer, in his books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, shows that intelligent design uses the same form of explanation Darwin and Lyell used to appeal to causes known from our uniform experience. William Dembski, in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch, provides mathematical rigor to the design inference. The point is that, while intuitive, the design inference can withstand all the rigor necessary for scientific reasoning. 

Darwinism Explains Away

While intelligent design explains the origins of things by reference to causes known to be in operation, Darwinism usually explains things away. All Darwinians accept the appearance of design, but they have limited themselves to undirected causes by embracing methodological naturalism (MN). They may as well limit themselves to wind and erosion to explain the structures in the Western Sahara — or Mount Rushmore, for that matter. Insistence on MN often leads to very counter-intuitive stories. For instance, when similarities appear in species that Darwinians insist are unrelated, they posit that the species evolved the similarities independently. 

Argument by Assertion

MN takes the rigor out of biological explanation. Since Darwinian scientists limit themselves to undirected causes, and MN disallows intelligent causes, there’s only one category of explanation in the toolkit. Darwinians, therefore, can feel satisfied with argument by assertion: whatever it is, it evolved. For example, in news from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, the biologists say that “Desert ants have an amazing odor memory.” The article describes the odor memory in detail, but when it comes to explaining where it came from, here’s the answer: “Desert ants have evolved impressing abilities to survive in the salt pans of the Tunisian Sahara, which are pretty barren habitats.” End of story. The desert ants are far more complex than the Saharan archaeological finds, but that’s all you get: the ants’ impressive abilities “have evolved.” 

Argument by Extrapolation

Another method Darwinians use to explain away the appearance of design is argument by extrapolation. With this technique, they provide examples of biological change by “evolution” that would not worry an ardent young-earth creationist. Then, they extrapolate their claimed success to the whole natural world. It’s like saying, “Butterfly wings change color; therefore, humans evolved, unguided, from bacteria.” 

An example of this technique got lots of fanfare recently. Science Magazine took a case of coat color in mice and made a mountain out of a molehill. Harvard University, on Phys.org, trumpeted this as “Evolution, Illustrated,” calling it “one of the clearest pictures yet of evolution in vertebrates.” What evolved, actually? Very little. Under controlled conditions, some fur in one species of mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) changed shade from light to dark or vice versa, to fit in with the background:

What do you get when you put together several tons of steel plates, hundreds of mice, a few evolutionary and molecular biologists and a tiny Nebraska town near the South Dakota border?

Would you believe one of the most complete pictures ever of vertebrate evolution?

This demonstration of evolution took years in the field, we are told, which is to say years of intelligent design. All kinds of things went wrong during the experiment. As Ed Yong at  The Atlantic remarked, “Nature itself seemed eager to select against the team.” But in the end, they got the results they wanted: the mice that fit their background survived better against predators, and showed a change to one gene, named Agouti.  Yong turns this episode into a colorful story of success against great odds: determined evolutionists brave the cold and wind to (at long last) vindicate Darwin.

That’s another reason evolutionary explanations work: Darwinians are great storytellers.

But let’s take stock of this claimed success, “The Wild Experiment That Showed Evolution in Real Time.” The experiment began and ended with one species of mice. Nothing evolved. Many mammals already show variation in coat color. A litter of dogs can have multiple coat colors, depending on the parents. This is simple Mendelian inheritance. Is it any wonder that owls picked off the ones that were easier to see? 

As for the Agouti gene, variations exist in many genes. But proving that the variants in this gene causedthe owls to not prey on them? That’s a stretch. What they really say in the paper in Science is, “we find allele frequency changes at the Agouti locus consistent with selection [as opposed to neutral drift], and thus, patterns at the genetic level parallel the change observed at the phenotypic level.” And thus, humans evolved from bacteria. If this sounds like a new peppered mice story, it is: and about as rigorous and overblown, too. Why didn’t they consider epigenetic effects? Why could not the variations in Agouti represent pre-programmed variation for survival, like in the adaptive immune system, or in the quasispecies concept? Why must it be explained by natural selection?

The design inference is clear to all, even to Richard Dawkins, who said, “Biology is the study of complex things that appear to have been designed for a purpose.” Intelligent design explains design with references to causes now in operation that we know from our universal experience are necessary and sufficient. Doug Axe used his rigorous research into biochemistry to show “How biology confirms our intuition that life is designed.” Darwinians must explain away that intuition, using clever methods of assertion, extrapolation, and storytelling.

Afterword

The article in The Atlantic reveals that 160 years after The Origin, common people still maintain their design intuition. When the locals in the sand hills heard about what the researchers were up to, the researchers had to walk on eggs.

Roughly a third of Nebraskans believe that living things were created as they are now. Another third think that evolution occurs, but through God’s design. Given those beliefs, I asked Barrett whether he ever encountered resistance when talking to his new friends about his work. “In the early trips, when first meeting people, I would talk generally about genetics and natural selection. I wouldn’t use the E word,” he said. “It’s one of those trigger words where, in certain parts of the U.S., people just stop listening to you.”

A little storytelling helped put the locals at ease:

But he added that all of them comprehended the essence of evolution, even if they explicitly rejected it. “A lot of them are farmers, who have a very good understanding of inheritance, and genetics,” he said. “A lot of them hunt, so they’ve got the survival-of-the-fittest thing down. They understand variation, and they know that a slow deer is easier to shoot than a fast deer. Inheritance, variation, fitness … all the pieces are there.”

There you go: slow deer are easier to shoot than fast deer. Survival of the fittest is proved. And humans evolved, unguided, from bacteria.