Sunday, 18 May 2025
Saturday, 17 May 2025
Why Darwinism's aspirations to hard science status are doomed.
How Darwinism Became a Pseudoscience
Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein has a reputation for some pretty wild ideas outside his area of expertise that I might not want to defend. But when it comes to some comments he made a few months ago, within his own field of expertise, he was spot on when he provided a disturbing reality check on the current state of Darwinism. As a scientist, I have my own reasons why this is so. He stated,
In my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood … I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I’m annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a Creationist worldview was always a threat … and so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation, as it was presented, than it ever was …1
s a biophysicist specializing in the information encoded in the DNA of protein-coding genes, and how that information prescribes the 3D structure of proteins, I have my own reasons for agreeing with Weinstein on this issue. Although he thinks he knows “more or less how to fix it,” my knowledge of the extreme difficulty (a colossal understatement) of locating sequences that will code for a functional protein with a stable 3D structure, tells me that neither he nor anyone else is going to fix it (although I would be fascinated to hear his proposed solution).
That said, there are some phrases in his statement that deserve to be pointed out: “telling a kind of lie,” “broken,” and “lying to themselves.” Note, also, the motive for promoting this broken theory.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that Darwinists are conspiring to deliberately corrupt science and mislead people, although such corruption and misleading is certainly happening. Rather, scientists who should know better, but continue to promote Darwinism, are living in denial, motivated by their own a priori commitment to materialism and scientism driven by an antagonism against any possibility that there is an intelligent mind behind the software encoded in the genomes of life.
Three Predictions of Darwinian Evolution
About 35 years earlier, I sat in the office of a professor of evolutionary biology at a major Canadian university. I had noticed three predictions of Darwinian evolution that appeared to be consistently falsified by experimental evidence, so I asked him about it. To my shock, he admitted that all three were major problems for which we had not yet found satisfactory answers. Keep in mind that this was 35 years before Bret Weinstein’s interview. The main difference between then and now is that advances in science have made the problems even more obvious.
Eugene Koonin, an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, published a paper in 2007 admitting that even RNA replication, a proposed stepping stone to life, was so impossibly improbable, that it was unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe.2 His solution was to propose an infinite multiverse, which would offer an infinite number of opportunities to solve this problem. It is especially interesting to read the reviewers’ comments. They expressed the fear that intelligent design might be seen as a better explanation for the origin of life. Consequently, the concluding sentence of Eugene Koonin’s paper absurdly states that his hypothesis of an infinite multiverse “leaves no room whatsoever for any form of intelligent design.” One might think that a mind, which we know exists given that we all have one, might be a better “Ockham’s Razor” option than proposing an infinite number of untestable universes3 but rational deliberation is often sidestepped in pseudoscience.
If one wonders what the driving force behind Darwinism is, and what the motive might be for Darwinists to be “telling a kind of lie,” as Weinstein puts it, one might want to think about both Koonin’s denial of any kind of intelligent design behind life, and what Weinstein said about the so-called “threat” of the theory of intelligent design as an explanation for the origin and diversity of life. This “threat” and denial have resulted in Darwinists lying to themselves and the public. The result is that Darwinism has degenerated into pseudoscience.
Variation vs Darwinism
The average person tends to understand the word “evolution” as the theory that the full diversity of plant and animal life has descended from a very simple cell that somehow arose in the past and began to self-replicate. People are often confused to learn that evolution is often defined as variation in a population of plants or animals over time, via a combination of genetic drift, mutations,4 and natural selection. (Note: In this article, “mutation” includes insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations.) Since we observe variation throughout nature, a Darwinist can look you in the eye and confidently state that “evolution is a fact!” But defining evolution as simply genetic variation over time is misleading. To avoid using the term “evolution” in a misleading way, I will refer to variation within a population over time as, simply, variation. As for the neo-Darwinian theory of common descent, we will describe that belief as Darwinism.
How Can We Tell the Difference?
Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of rigor in evolutionary biology when it comes to distinguishing between variation and Darwinism. I often observe Darwinists insisting that the two are the same thing, but as science advances this belief has become obviously false. Rigor must be an essential component of good science and using the word “evolution” to refer to two very different concepts is no exception. There is, in fact, a central, objective quantification of genetic change that allows science to clearly distinguish between variation and Darwinism. Absolutely central to life and its survival, reproduction, and variation, is the functional information encoded in the DNA of organisms.
Functional Information
The concept of functional information as required by biological life was first proposed by Jack Szostak in a short article in the science journal Nature in 2003.5 Four years later, he coauthored a more extensive technical article in PNAS with Robert Hazen et al. further defining functional information.6 That same year I published an article in TBMM laying out how we can estimate the amount of functional information from actual data for protein families.7 I used a more complete equation than Hazen et al. used, but for the general cases they discussed, the equation I used reduces to the identical one they proposed. To confirm this, I contacted both Robert Hazen and Jack Szostak directly, showing them the derivation of their equation from the more extensive one I used for protein families, and they each confirmed that I was correct and that we are all using the same general equation for measuring functional information.8
The Difference Between Variation and Darwinism
When we quantify the observed change in functional information in genetic variation within a population over time, we observe that there is none. If there is any change, it is usually a loss of information if the deleterious mutations are not compensated for at the same rate as beneficial mutations. A statistically significant increase in functional information has never been documented.
Darwinism requires novel protein families and gene regulation systems, all of which require enormous increases in the functional information encoded in the DNA of the new type of plant or animal. Some Darwinists will point to the gain of a new function as positive evidence for Darwinism; however, when the functional information required for these gains is calculated, it turns out that a gain of function can occur without any increase in functional information. Therefore, gain of function fails to correlate with whether or not there has been a corresponding gain of functional information.
To summarize, functional information is the key distinguishing factor between variation and Darwinism — the latter requires significant levels of new, protein-coding information, while variation within a population over time does not.
Categories of Pseudoscience
There are different categories of pseudoscience, but the type relevant to Darwinism occurs when a legitimate scientific theory makes predictions critical to that theory that are subsequently falsified, but the theory continues to be promoted as science, often with creative story-telling and the use of technical terms mixed with words and phrases such as “over time,” “is conceivable,” “probably” and many others which can be described charitably as words and phrases one uses when confirming data is unavailable. Those scientists who promote this sort of pseudoscience are “telling a kind of lie” to themselves and to the public. Once you start to see this, you cannot unsee it. Much of the origin of life literature is rife with it.
Critical Predictions
For the scientific method, a theory should be testable by making predictions which can be potentially falsified. A critical prediction is one that, if that prediction is falsified, the entire theory collapses. One can find data that can be interpreted as “evidence” for virtually any belief or theory. Evidence in favor of a theory, however, is trumped by falsification of a critical prediction.
As in any theory, one can find evidence supporting Darwinism, which textbooks dealing with Darwinism cover extensively, while at the same time completely ignoring or glossing over the critical predictions and their falsification. In this way, scientists “are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.” Emphasizing the evidence that supports a belief, while glossing over or ignoring the evidence that falsifies it, is another characteristic of pseudoscience.
For example, some aspects of the fossil record, phylogenetic trees, and genetic similarities can be interpreted in a way that supports Darwinism. However, the same observations are also predicted by the theory that there is an intelligent mind behind the software of life. In science, falsification of critical predictions entails that the evidence was misapplied. Due to creative storytelling, the line between science and science fiction has been blurred in Darwinism to the point of being almost indistinguishable. What we need for a critical prediction is something that is both essential and unique to the theory such that if it is falsified, we are forced to declare that Darwinism is, in fact, broken, as Weinstein might put it. Falsification exposes the creative storytelling of Darwinism for what it is — “telling a kind of lie.”
Two Critical Predictions
The mechanisms invoked for Darwinism are the same as for variation, but with a highly significant exception — no significant limits to variation if one wishes to obtain the full diversity of life from a single, simple cell. This gives rise to the first essential and unique prediction:
P1: In general, there must be no limits to variation. There may be limits along a particular evolutionary pathway, but to produce the sheer enormous disparity and diversity of life we observe, those limits must be relatively easy for blind natural processes to work around.
The second critical prediction arises out of the fact that Darwinism proposes that life started as a very simple “minimal” organism with maybe 450 protein-coding genes9 and gradually evolved the functional information to code for approximately 20,000 protein families today.10 To accomplish this feat, the process of mutation and natural selection would have had to start with zero genetic information and create the phenomenal amount of functional information needed to encode at least 20,000 protein families today. The second critical prediction, therefore, is as follows:
P2: The process of mutation must be capable of starting with a level of zero functional information and producing the required level of functional information needed to encode 20,000 functional protein families in the DNA of life.
Note that it is trivially easy to produce non-functional de novo proteins that are not capable of stable, repeatable 3D structures, and the functional information required to produce such de novo proteins is approximately zero. Functional protein families with stable 3D structures are inconceivably rare. They require, therefore, an enormous level of functional information to “define” or encode.7
Testing P1
Darwinism requires many millions of years because Darwinian evolution has no direction “in mind” and has no plan. It is a mindless, blind process that can be described as a random walk. To evolve in any direction, the information encoded within the DNA of that organism must be changed, lost, or added to by the mechanism of random mutations. If that random walk blindly stumbles on a change in information that does something to improve an organism’s ability to produce healthy progeny, that change might spread within a population and be preserved in a commonly observed phenomenon we call natural selection. We can, however, massively speed up this process if we remove the blind, purposeless random walk and replace it with an intelligently guided, selective breeding experiment, where the scientist can observe and select for desirable traits and even speed up the variation by increasing the mutation rate. In this way, we can experimentally test P1 by accelerating the proposed process of Darwinism to accomplish in just years or decades what would take a blind, mindless “watchmaker”11 millions of years. Selective breeding is practiced by labs all over the world, especially in the field of agriculture.
Falsification of P1
In every selective breeding experiment we have performed over the past century, where the objective is to see how far variation will allow us to go in some particular direction, we always hit a limit, every time, no exception. P1 continues to be falsified in ongoing selective breeding experiments all over the world. Now, advances in science reveal why. The problem is that to evolve anything of significance requires a massive leap in functional information to generate a sequence that will encode a novel, stable, functional, 3D protein and its regulatory system. To put a finer point on this, science has consistently falsified this first critical prediction and it has done so in the lab for over a century of countless experiments, no exceptions. Instead, if we go long enough, we end up with endless variations about some sort of average wild type and reach the limits of variation as observed in the famous Lenski Long Term Evolutionary Experiment (LTEE).12 As in the LTEE, we may observe a gain of function if it requires no new functional information (when it is achieved through a process of duplication and refinement of existing functional information).
Why Does Variation Hit a Wall?
In order to get something substantially new, we need new genetic information that will code for novel protein families. Although producing novel functional information is trivially easy for intelligent agents, our expanding knowledge reveals that it is virtually impossible to do by any natural process. This is why we consistently hit a limit as to how far we can push in any direction, in selective breeding experiments. So, how hard is it to randomly change the protein-coding information to fortuitously stumble upon a novel protein family that produces a stable 3D structure that is useful to biological life?
“Finding a New Gene”
In the course of my PhD program in biophysics, I developed a method to take real data from a protein family database and estimate the level of functional information7 required to encode that protein into the DNA by identifying the amino acid patterns for a protein family. Once we know the functional information required, we can derive the probability or target size in search space that we are looking for.13
Absurdly Impossible
It turns out that although it is trivially easy for mutations to produce non-functional novel (de novo) proteins that have no stable 3D structure, those that produce functional, stable 3D-structures, pre-determined by physics,14 are so rare we should not expect to see even one produced in the entire history of the universe.15Instead, mutation of existing genes is vastly more likely to produce misfolded proteins, which can form clumps called amyloids, which can be lethal or severely debilitating (think of mad cow disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, for example). To get a better understanding of just how rare these stable 3D proteins are, if we put all the amino acid sequences for a particular protein family into a box that was 1 cubic meter in volume containing 10^60 functional sequences for that protein family, and then divided the rest of the universe into similar cubes containing similar numbers of random sequences of amino acids, and if the estimated radius of the observable universe is 46.5 billion light years (or 3.6 x 10^80 cubic meters), we would need to search through an average of approximately 10^203 universes before we found a sequence belonging to a novel protein family of average length, that produced stable 3D structures. This is why we observe natural limits to variation in selective breeding experiments — it is because sequences of amino acids that yield novel protein families are staggeringly rare — so rare that it would be absurd to expect a natural evolutionary process to “find” even one, average protein family anywhere in the universe, over the entire history of the universe. It is also another reason why those who promote Darwinism are, in Weinstein’s words, “telling a kind of lie” if they are misleading themselves and the public into the belief that a blind, mindless Darwinist process can stumble upon novel, functional protein families with a stable 3D structure, and perform this astonishing feat around 20,000 times! There might be some pseudoscientific claims that might be somewhat plausible, but this Darwinist belief lies outside the extreme limits of plausibility by an outrageous margin. Yet many Darwinists continue to ignore or gloss over the real-life data — another characteristic of a pseudoscience.
Falsification of P2
Mutations must, on average, slowly increase the amount of genetic information over millions of years if Darwinism is going to produce novel protein-coding genes. However, our observations reveal that mutations are doing exactly the opposite. The study of deteriorating genomes of various organisms indicates that nature is relentlessly destroying all life through the steady degradation of the functional information encoded in the DNA of all organisms. Darwinism predicts that if we were to plot functional information encoding protein families, vesus time, the graph would show an average net increase in functional information over time. The reality is the opposite: gene loss due to mutations and deletions appears to be steadily and systematically destroying the genetic information of all biological life from bacteria16 to the famous fruit fly17 to humans18. This is the exact opposite of what Darwinism requires, falsifying P2.
A Darwinist response to this is to point out that, yes, mutations can be harmful, but if it renders the organism unable to survive and reproduce, it will be eliminated by natural selection, leaving only those mutations that are not harmful enough to prevent survival and reproduction. Thus, the worst mutations are weeded out with each generation.
This is obviously true for lethal mutations, but most mutations are, in the short term, only slightly deleterious, or even neutral. Unfortunately, they accumulate generation after generation, creating a mutational load that increases with each generation resulting in steadily reducing the percentage of viable offspring, generation after generation, until there are insufficient viable offspring to continue the species and it goes extinct.19 This process is occurring across biological life.
Summary
For Darwinism to be true, nature must provide an arena where novel, functional, stable, 3D proteins are relatively easy to find, and the rate of production of novel functional information encoded in the genomes of life is greater than the rate of destruction. The reality is that neither is true. The laws of physics determine that stable 3D protein structures are unimaginably rare and the natural process of mutation leads to a net deterioration of whatever functional information is already out there. This is why every selective breeding experiment hits a limit if we try to see how far we can go. Nature ensures that the two critical predictions of Darwinism will continue to be thoroughly and consistently falsified. Darwinism began as a fascinating theory, but the falsification of its critical predictions means that those who continue to promote it are promoting a pseudoscience. They are, as Weinstein put it “lying to themselves” and “telling a kind of lie” to the public.
Ending on a Positive Note
As Weinstein stated, “modern Darwinism is broken.” I am often asked what I have to offer as an alternative. My response is that we should go where the science points. In this case, the science shows that protein-coding genes require an impressive level of functional information, which is already encoded in the genomes of life. The only thing science has ever observed that can produce functional information are minds; we do it every time we message someone, write an essay, or write computer code. The fingerprints of an intelligent mind are all over the genomes of life in the form of the functional information encoded in the DNA. Science has no other observable, repeatable option; to ignore this is bad science. The ability to produce statistically significant levels of functional information is unique to intelligent minds. The key word here is “unique”; no other such process has ever been observed by science. Even genetic algorithms require an intelligent mind to design the fitness function and are, thus, examples of intelligent design in action. I have written a short introductory article, “Why This Scientist Believes that Intelligent Design Was Required for Biological Life,” presenting a positive, scientific method to test the hypothesis that the functional information found in life requires an intelligent mind. The job of science is to reverse engineer20 the cell with its information-processing and gene-regulatory systems to understand how it all works.
Questions
From past experience, I would anticipate that this article will result in a less than enthusiastic response from committed Darwinists who are uncomfortable with having their beliefs challenged. However, if you have a question, please feel free to contact me and I will try to respond within a few days. If you just wish to find out more about me or my peer-reviewed publications, you can go to the “About Kirk” page on my website
Notes
Bret Weinstein, February 2025, Joe Rogan Experience. The statement begins at the 1 hour and 55 minute mark.
Koonin, E.V. The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life. Biol Direct 2, 15 (2007).
See my article on “Fantasy Science.”
Loewe, L. (2008). Genetic mutation. Nature Education, 1(1), 113.
Szostak, J. W. (2003). Functional information: Molecular messages. Nature, 423, 689.
Hazen, R. M., Griffin, P. L., Carothers, J. M., & Szostak, J. W. (2007). Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity. PNAS, 104(Suppl 1), 8574–8581.
Durston, K. K., Chiu, D. K. Y., Abel, D. L., & Trevors, J. T. (2007). Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 4, 47.
Personal email correspondence.
Hutchison, C. A., Chuang, R.-Y., Noskov, V. N., Assad-Garcia, N., Deerinck, T. J., Ellisman, M. H., Gill, J., Kannan, K., Karas, B. J., Ma, L., Pelletier, J. F., Qi, Z.-Q., Richter, R. A., Strychalski, E. A., Sun, L., Suzuki, Y., Tsvetanova, B., Wise, K. S., Smith, H. O., Glass, J. I., Merryman, C., & Venter, J. C. (2016) Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Science, 351(6280), aad6253.
Mistry, J., Chuguransky, S., Williams, L., Qureshi, M., Salazar, G. A., Sonnhammer, E. L. L., Tosatto, S. C. E., Paladin, L., Raj, S., Richardson, L. J., Finn, R. D., & Bateman, A. (2021). Pfam: The protein families database in 2021. Nucleic Acids Research, 49(D1), D412–D419.
Richard Dawkins used the term “blind watchmaker” as a metaphor to emphasize his belief that Darwinian evolution can produce amazing biological phenomena, all the while having no plan or goal or oversight other than natural selection. See Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Blount, Z. D., Borland, C. Z., & Lenski, R. E. (2008). Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli. PNAS, 105(23), 7899–7906.
Functional information is a measure of how much uncertainty must be reduced in order to achieve the desired function. Uncertainty is a function of probability or target size. So if any outcome will suffice to satisfy the function in question, there is no information required to achieve the function — success is certain. But if the “target” one is aiming for is extremely minuscule in comparison to the overall space of possibilities, then there is a lot of room for uncertainty in the outcome. This uncertainty can be reduced to zero if one has sufficient information about how to achieve the functional by “hitting” that extremely minuscule target. Functional information is a measure of how much uncertainty must be overcome for success. So if one knows the amount of functional information required to properly encode a protein family, then one can derive the probability of finding a sequence that will code for a protein in that family, which is another way of describing the target size vs the overall search space.
Anfinsen, C. B. (1973). Principles that govern the folding of protein chains, Science, 181, 223-230. It is, essentially, the laws of physics that determine the physicochemical interactions between a sequence of amino acids. Thus, Darwinian evolution would have to “find” these sequences that code for functional, stable 3D protein structures. This can be challenging even for supercomputers, but evolutionary processes, plodding along at incredibly slow (by comparison) reproduction rates, form a vastly underpowered search engine to explore protein sequence space, looking for stable 3D, functional proteins.
Since I published my paper on estimating the functional complexity (functional information) required to code for protein families, two other groups of scientists have also published papers using two different methods. All three methods, using real data, show that the target size, or probability, of any sequence at all that will code for an average protein family is vanishingly small. My method is the most optimistic, but I did not include interdependencies between sites in the amino acid sequence of a protein family, which yields an overly optimistic chance of finding a functional stable 3D sequence, and I state this in my paper. More recent work reveals that the probabilities are similar to, or smaller than, what I estimated. The two other papers are: Tian, P., & Best, R. B. (2017). How many protein sequences fold to a given structure? A coevolutionary analysis. Biophysical Journal, 113(8), 1719–1730 and Thorvaldsen, S., & Hössjer, O. (2023), Estimating the information content of genetic sequence data, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), 72(5), 1310–1338.
Mira, A., Ochman, H., & Moran, N. A. (2001). Deletional bias and the evolution of bacterial genomes. Trends in Genetics, 17(10), 589–596.
Petrov, D. A., & Hartl, D. L. (1998). High rate of DNA loss in the Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila virilis species groups. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 15(3), 293–302.
Lynch, M. (2010). Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 961–968.
Sharp, N. P., & Agrawal, A. F. (2012). Evidence for elevated mutation load in low-quality genotypes. PNAS 109(16), 6142–6146.
Chikofsky, E. J., & Cross, J. H. (1990). Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy. IEEE Software, 7(1), 13–17.
Friday, 16 May 2025
Tuesday, 13 May 2025
More an explaining away of design than an explaining of origins?
Dan Stern Cardinale: Comparative Biology, Invincible Ignorance
Current mechanistic accounts of the unfolding of life can all be styled as Potemkin theories of evolution, because a façade of similarities among creatures that can reasonably be ascribed to mere common descent is used to hide the utter lack of a plausible mechanism to account for the most fantastic differences. That recent argument of mine at Evolution News1 has triggered a calumnious response2 from Daniel Stern Cardinale, an evolutionary biologist and lecturer at Rutgers University who posts on a YouTube channel called Creation Myths. Here I’ll show that Stern Cardinale’s nearly thirty-minute video response itself nicely confirms my argument. In brief, he mistakes descriptive studies of comparative biology for mechanistic studies of evolution, and he exhibits a seemingly invincible ignorance (meaning, in this context, an apparently complete inability to comprehend)3 of the most basic features of life that need to be explained.
Early, Petty, Misguided
An early, petty, misguided complaint of Stern Cardinale’s concerns the title of my piece at Evolution News, “Darwinism Is a Potemkin Theory of Evolution.” The “Darwinism” label is misleading, he grouses, because of all the progress that’s been made since 1859; only design proponents use the woefully outdated term.
He should tell that to J. B. S. Haldane, who invented the “darwin” as a unit of evolutionary change in 1949.4Tell it to Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote “On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology” in 1968.5 To Richard Dawkins, author of the essay “Universal Darwinism” in 1983.6 To National Geographic, which in 2004 asked “Was Darwin Wrong?”7 Or to the authors of a recent paper in Nature Chemical Biology, who investigated “directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation.”8
The words Darwinism, Darwinian, darwin, neo-Darwinian, and more are all cognates of the name of the man who proposed that adaptive evolution occurs mainly by natural selection acting on heritable random variation. They are routinely used to refer to that process, whether or not the selection occurs in subtler ways than Darwin knew or the variation by processes unknown to him (which isn’t hard, since Darwin and his contemporaries were clueless about how inheritance occurs). Exactly no one reading my piece would think it concerned only 19th-century evolutionary thought.
Genomics
Stern Cardinale gestures at major advances in modern biology, including all that has been learned about molecular biology and especially the amazing recent progress in DNA sequencing technology, which in turn allows the study of genomics and related topics. He then pretends that I am trying to hide those widely known advances (which I have discussed extensively in my books) from the yokels who read Evolution News. He concludes (reluctantly, of course) that I am a lying liar.9
Stern Cardinale seems oblivious to the fact that by themselves gene and genome sequences concern only common descent — that is, the similarities that I wrote were the easy part of Darwin’s mechanism. Uncovering a sequence of DNA in one organism that is more or less similar to that in another organism may be evidence that the two shared a common ancestor, but by itself it says nothing about how the ancestral sequence arose, how it came to differ in the descendants, or especially whether it explains the “cool new features” — the major differences — that I said constituted the “big mystery,” the “killer question” of life. By itself, genomics is essentially an exercise in comparative biology, noting in what ways the genes of various organisms are similar to and different from each other — nice for drawing phylogenetic trees, but indicating nothing about what process is building the major functional features of life.
Changes Happen “Through Evolution”
Stern Cardinale claims that a modern understanding of biology easily shows how transformations can occur. Riffing off a thought experiment in my essay where I write that “for some odd reason” descendants of separate lineages of a common ancestor developed thorns on their feet versus spiral fingers, Stern Cardinale asks in high dudgeon, “What do you mean ‘for some odd reason,’ Mike? We know how changes happen — through evolution.”
So, the lecturer instructs us, changes happen … through evolution! Feeling enlightened yet? That profound insight makes one wonder why Darwin worried so much about the vertebrate eye and other “organs of extreme perfection.”
But wait, there’s more. Stern Cardinale continues, “You’ve got recombination. You’ve got mutation. You’ve got horizontal gene transfer. We know how new things occur in a lineage.” Later in the video he adds gene duplication and some other processes. Yet, (leaving aside horizontal gene transfer) for explaining the development of complex functional structures, simply ticking off molecular mechanisms that can alter the genetic patrimony of a species isn’t any improvement on Darwin’s bare 19th-century invocation of “variation” as the fodder on which selection acts. Darwin would speculate that unidentified random heritable variations allowed the development of whatever he was writing about — maybe thorns on the feet of one lineage, spiral fingers in another, and the vertebrate eye in a third. Stern Cardinale’s list just indicates in effect that unidentified variation can be supplied by various now-known processes — and leaves it at that.10
Precise, Detailed Questions
But how does a lineage go from random variation to a specific major functional feature (say, thorns on feet, spiral fingers, or the vertebrate eye)? To move beyond Just-So storytelling, a purportedly modern scientific evolutionary explanation would have to answer precise, detailed questions such as: Exactly what point mutations, what gene duplications, what recombination events caused each step in the particular proposed pathway leading to a particular, identifiable, actual complex functional feature? What factors favored each step of the change at both the macroscopic and molecular levels? What factors opposed each step of the change but might be overcome? What was the selection coefficient for each step? What was the population size of the species? Are all these events statistically consistent with random changes? Were simpler adaptations available — such as the much more frequent adaptive degradative changes I discussed in Darwin Devolves — that would have short-circuited more complex pathways? Is there experimental evidence that changes building a complex structure can occur in the absence of investigator interference? (Spoiler alert — no, there isn’t.) And many other questions.
Wouldn’t answering all those questions be really hard? Of course! But one can’t brush aside critical questions and simply assume one’s theory is correct. That’s a prescription for living in a dream world — one that is based on wish fulfillment, not empirical facts. Physicists worked for decades and built billion-dollar accelerators, all to test whether the Higgs boson existed or not. If instead they complained it was too hard to experimentally confirm their theories, and just decided to assume their latest ideas were true, then that would effectively be the intellectual end of their discipline.
In the absence of such precise, detailed, pertinent studies, mechanistic evolution remains a Potemkin theory, with its façade of similarities obscuring the absence of knowledge of how complex functional structures arise.
An Entire Day
Stern Cardinale loses it at the point in my essay where I note that Darwin-boosters go mute when asked how complex new traits evolve (such as, say, those of bats or whales). The utter mendacity, he snorts (in less polite words)! Why, “I teach evolutionary biology … and we spend an entire day of class on how do new traits evolve.”
So … of the approximately forty lecture-days in a typical semester-length course, Stern Cardinale spends a grand total of one — maybe an hour, maybe two or three percent of the course — on the most basic, most fascinating, most contentious question in the field. I think that little fact can help us understand a couple of points about why it is so difficult for Darwin-enthusiasts such as himself to comprehend Darwin-skeptics such as myself.
The first point is that the state of Stern Cardinale’s syllabus roughly reflects the state of the field in general, in that thinking rigorously about pathways for the origin of complex functional traits is at best a tiny, essentially negligible part of the academic field that goes by the name of “evolutionary biology.” The majority of biologists simply assume that Darwinian or other unguided mechanistic processes somehow account for major changes, but almost no one even attempts to demonstrate that they can.
In his video, Stern Cardinale explicitly denies this. He claims there is a large amount of work being done to explain how macroevolution occurs. To show his good faith, Stern Cardinale double-dares the viewer to enter “bat wing evolution” on Google Scholar, to find all the many books and papers on the topic. In a wonderfully clarifying video, my Discovery Institute colleague Cornelius Hunter does just that — and turns up a raft of comparative studies of organisms that simply ascribe differences to presumptively Darwinian evolutionary processes.11 None of the papers even tries to show that an unguided evolutionary mechanism could accomplish the transformation.
For example, in a typical paper (with the juicy title “Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution”12) that Hunter analyzed, among similar sorts of results mouse embryo development is compared to bat embryo development. Quite unsurprisingly, the study shows that the time for limb development is greater in bat vs mice embryos, and transcription factors regulating the process have a larger range in bats (Figure 2 of reference 12, “Differences in signaling centers between bat and mouse limb development”).
Interesting work. Yet, as the content of that and other papers he invited us to peruse demonstrates, evolutionary biologists in the mold of Stern Cardinale seem unable to grasp that the general statement “A differs from B in a certain aspect” does not warrant the conclusion “A differs from B in a certain aspect because of Darwinian processes.” And it most certainly does not justify the grossly extrapolated conclusion that a complex new structure of which the aspect is a tiny part was built by Darwinian processes.
The statement in my essay where I wrote, that for questions of how major complex functions could be constructed, “Darwin boosters go mute” greatly disturbed Stern Cardinale. Undoubtedly he thought of many interesting papers he had read or heard about, written by persons he perhaps admires, and that led to his Google Scholar challenge. But, of course, by “mute” I meant that the Darwin boosters had nothing pertinent to say. It’s not that there haven’t been many good studies of the comparative biology of organisms that, as evidenced by their similarities, likely descended from a common ancestor. There just haven’t been any studies showing that such a phenomenon could be driven by a Darwinian process.13
The Second Point
This leads to the second point. By working diligently on the 97 percent to 98 percent of other topics covered in Stern Cardinale’s evolution course syllabus, most practitioners of evolutionary biology convince themselves that the field as a whole simply must have a handle on a mechanism for how life developed. After all, with all that hard work being done by really smart people, somebody must know! So they sincerely believe that folks who say otherwise are ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked like me).
Regrettably, as with the blind spot of the vertebrate retina that some Darwinists invoke to avoid thinking seriously about how undirected mutation and selection could build a real eye, many evolutionary biologists themselves have a blind spot for what it would take to provide an actual mechanistic evolutionary explanation for a real complex system. Instead of working to address that question, they immerse themselves in studies of the comparative biology of many marvelous aspects of life, or microevolutionary processes, or abstract models, or other interesting topics. They cannot comprehend that they are actually oblivious to how complex functional systems arose.
Notes
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/04/darwinism-is-a-potemkin-theory-of-evolution/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RttY_vjW25w
In honor of the election of Pope Leo XIV, I’m borrowing this poignant phrase from the Catholic lexicon. The meaning I give the phrase here is a shade different from that in theological circles, but it’s close enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignoranc
Haldane, J.B.S. 1949. Suggestions as to quantitative measurement of rates of evolution. Evolution 3, 51-56.
Dobzhansky, T. 1968. On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology, in: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (Eds.), Evolutionary Biology: Volume 2. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp. 1-34.
Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In: Evolution from molecules to man, ed. D. S. Bendall. Cambridge University Press.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/was-darwin-wrong
Ma, L. and Lin, Y. 2025. Orthogonal RNA replication enables directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation in mammalian cells. Nature Chemical Biology 21, 451-463
As the video proceeds, Stern Cardinale’s reluctance to question my honesty morphs into enthusiasm. Near the end, he latches onto a sentence near the finish of my essay: “As a succession of sages over the centuries wrestled futilely with the question of what mechanism could possibly account for the elegant structures of life, various monikers have been attached to the notion of evolution: Lamarck’s theory, Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.” From that sentence, Stern Cardinale reasons on camera that, not only does he himself know that the names refer to different mechanisms, he knows Behe knows they refer to different mechanisms — yet Behe dishonestly lumps them together. Stern Cardinale states that he doesn’t want to insult my intelligence, so instead he insults my character. Since I lump those disparate ideas together, he declares, then it’s clear I am intentionally lying. Stern Cardinale needs to work on his reading comprehension. The quoted sentence plainly states that sages wrestled with the question of a mechanism, which is demonstrated by the fact that Lamarck, Darwin, etc. proposed different mechanisms. The sentence also plainly states that the mechanisms all concern the notion of evolution (i.e., Lamarckian evolution, neo-Darwinian evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, etc.), which of course all of them do. The obvious point being made is that none of the various mechanisms ever proposed for evolution has successfully explained the complex functional structures of life. (I hate to be so pedantic, but apparently it’s necessary for some people.) Stern Cardinale mistakes his own incomprehension for someone else’s dishonesty. That is sadly typical of internet culture. Nonetheless, it is reprehensible conduct for an academic. It is certainly no behavior for an instructor to model to his students.
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/05/professor-stern-cardinale-stumbles-on-bat-wingevolution
Sadier, A., Urban, D.J., Anthwal, N., Howenstine, A.O., Sinha, I., Sears, K.E., 2021. Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution. Genet Mol Biol 43, e20190146.
That same kind of misdirection was featured in the 2005 Kitzmiller versus Dover federal trial to which Stern Cardinale alludes. In a courtroom stunt, twenty years ago attorneys for the plaintiffs dumped a pile of books and papers on the witness stand where I was sitting to show all the wonderful work that was being done on the evolution of the immune system (not the blood clotting cascade, as Stern Cardinale mistakenly states). However, just as with the bat wing literature, nothing in the pile contained any serious detailed Darwinian proposals for how the immune system developed, only comparative studies and speculation. The distinction was lost on the judge, a college political-science major and former head of the state liquor control board. Today, twenty years after the trial and thirty years after the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, the situation remains unchanged. For discussions of the trial, the clotting cascade, immune system, and many other topics, see my responses-to-critics book, A Mousetrap for Darwin.
Monday, 12 May 2025
Sunday, 11 May 2025
Saturday, 10 May 2025
There isn't enough serendipity to power Darwinism?
Lost In (Search) Space: Why Randomness Challenges Neo-Darwinian Theory
On a classic episode of ID the Future, Dr. Paul Nelson talks with Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, retired geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany, about randomness in natural selection and why randomness is such a controversial topic.
Dr. Lönnig argues that randomness is an inescapable component of natural selection, particularly within the neo-Darwinian framework. He contends that the immense number of offspring produced by many organisms results in a vast elimination of individuals through random chance, not necessarily due to superior fitness, especially during juvenile stages. Lönnig suggests that the idea of randomness as a primary driver for the origin of complex structures is unintuitive and implausible when considering the intricate design of living things: “To explain them by an endless series of accidental mutations,” says Dr. Lönnig, “doesn’t seem reasonable…” These remarks between Drs. Nelson and Lönnig serve to highlight the controversy surrounding randomness in evolutionary explanations and its perceived conflict with the appearance of design in biology. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Friday, 9 May 2025
Neanderthals might be smarter than darwinists?
Slow-Witted? Neanderthals Invented Their Own Tech — Didn’t Copy
Here is another instance of Neanderthals, once thought to be comparatively slow-witted, taking the lead in developing a technology. At Ars Technica, science writer Kiona N. Smith notes:
Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago — which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a Neanderthal.
The point (or in paleoarchaeologist Liubov V. Golovanova and colleagues’ super-technical archaeological terms, “a unique pointy bone artifact”) is the oldest bone tip from a hunting weapon ever found in Europe. It’s also evidence that Neanderthals figured out how to shape bone into smooth, aerodynamic projectiles on their own, without needing to copy those upstart Homo sapiens. Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp.
“NEANDERTHALS INVENTED THEIR OWN BONE WEAPON TECHNOLOGY BY 80,000 YEARS AGO,” MAY 2, 2025
Not Grandpa’s Neanderthal Anymore
The bone tip was found in Mezmaiskaya Cave (pictured at the top) in the Caucasus Mountains. From the paper’s Abstract:
The results suggest an independent invention of bone-tipped hunting weapons by Neanderthals in Europe long before the arrival of Upper Paleolithic modern humans to the continent, and also show that the production technology of bone-tipped hunting weapons used by Neanderthals was in the nascent level in comparison to those used and introduced to Eurasia by modern humans.
LIUBOV V. GOLOVANOVA ET AL, ON THE MOUSTERIAN ORIGIN OF BONE-TIPPED HUNTING WEAPONS IN EUROPE: EVIDENCE FROM MEZMAISKAYA CAVE, NORTH CAUCASUS, JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE (2025). DOI: 10.1016/J.JAS.2025.106223
Science writer Bob Yirka comments at Phys.org, “The finding of the spear tip upends theories suggesting that Neanderthals never advanced past stone tools. It also shows, the team suggests, that Neanderthals were able to plan ahead, not only in making the tool, but in the way it was used.”
Neanderthals cannot be the missing link that many paleontologists are looking for. But if the human mind has no history, there is no missing link.
Wednesday, 7 May 2025
The fall of reductionism foreseen?
Flannery: What Werner Heisenberg Foresaw
The new bookPlato's Revenge : The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer, details in accessible form the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg. But others before Dr. Sternberg had also foreseen the recognition of Platonic forms as realities in modern science. Historian of science Michael Flannery cites quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg as an example
mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy consists of a “series of footnotes to Plato.” Now what Whitehead said of philosophy may be applied to science. Plato’s Revenge is about the teleologically ordered biological systems theory that Richard “Rick” Sternberg calls the immaterial genome. It is an ancient story that dates back to the atomists on the one hand and the teleologists on the other — Leucippus vs. Anaxagoras. The argument between reductionist evolutionists like Charles Darwin and design-oriented evolutionists like Alfred Russel Wallace harkens to these pre-Socratic sources, proving King Solomon’s wise adage, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
With Darwin the triumph of chance and necessity was considered complete. But one of the greatest teleological proponents of all history, Plato, now has his revenge as we find that design and purpose have won the day. The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg understood this, saying, “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact these smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” Now Sternberg, as told eloquently by David Klinghoffer, expresses this in the language of life. This book unites the best elements of metaphysics with cutting-edge science to put the threadbare materialist reductionisms of the neo-Darwinists to shame. [Emphasis added.]
MICHAEL A. FLANNERY, AUTHOR OF NATURE’S PROPHET: ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE AND HIS EVOLUTION FROM NATURAL SELECTION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY AND AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN POET-PHILOSOPHER: THE THOUGHT OF JOHN ELOF BOODIN IN HIS TIME AND OURS
Get your copy of Plato’s Revenge now and find more information and endorsements at Discovery Institute Press.
Tuesday, 6 May 2025
Richard Sternberg's body blow to reductionism
Spooked by Sternberg: From the Introduction to Plato’s Revenge
Editor’s note: We are glad to offer an excerpt from the first pages of the new book from Discovery Institute Press, Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer.
My view is not the view that most people have of intelligent design.
RICHARD STERNBERG
When I first heard biologist Richard Sternberg describe his immaterial genome hypothesis, reviving the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato in a modern and scientific context, another biologist on hand took in her breath. “If that’s true,” she said, “it changes everything.” I felt similarly. The idea spooked me. All familiar thinking about the genome assumes that it is, of course, purely material: the twisting strands of DNA and a few other physical structures in the cell. The proponents of intelligent design (ID) have, in large part, accepted this premise and argued according to its terms.
Sternberg goes further. He argues — sometimes from common-sensical and accessible evidence and sometimes from highly technical mathematical and biological realities — that the material resources of the physically instantiated portion of the genome are woefully inadequate to shape life from generation to generation. The conclusion still gives me a shiver: An immaterial source exists, in company with DNA and the other material sources of biological information. That source extends not only beyond us, but beyond physical reality.
A Meeting in Seattle
I vividly recall the meeting. It was 2012, a time of great strain in my life. In a small conference room in Seattle, several of us, including scientists and non-scientists like me, gathered to listen to Sternberg sketch an argument he had been developing, rooted in his observation that there simply is not enough information physically in the cell — including the DNA and epigenetic (from the Greek, meaning beyond genetic) sources — to account for the development of an organism. According to him, this finding applied not only to the more complex organisms, such as whales and humans, but also to the relatively simple ones, such as yeast.
He also spoke of those who had influenced him — in particular, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen (1934–1998) and the men who had first devised the idea of a gene. As Sternberg explained, they saw it in terms that might not be material.
The nature of genetics and heredity is inherently of more intimate interest to some people than are many other scientific topics. The law of gravity says nothing about me as a person, except how fast I would fall if pushed off a tall building. Heredity promises to say much about who I am. As I am writing this, I have just put a tube of spit in the mail to the DNA ancestry company 23andMe. On the top of the test kit you get from Amazon is the message to the customer: “Welcome to You.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who teaches medicine at Columbia University, begins his book The Gene: An Intimate History by detailing why the subject is painfully personal for him: Behind his narrative of scholarly discovery lies his father’s family with its history of a mental illness, schizophrenia. In that family history he is himself implicated, as are any children he might have. “Madness,” he writes, “has been among the Mukherjees for at least two generations.” It is “buried, like toxic waste,” in the genetic inheritance.
In 2012, heredity was on my mind. That year, my birth mother, Harriet Lund, had come to live near me in the Seattle area, bringing emotional turbulence with her. She was suffering from dementia and, with it, episodes of rage and paranoia. It was at this time she told me that, in Los Angeles in 1965, my birth father, George Thomas, raped her. And this was how I was conceived.
The Crucial Point
She was Swedish-born, from a long line of Lutheran pastors. She was a social worker at the time, and George, a Mayflower descendant from Kansas, was her supervisor. I had first met her in 1993 and, charmed, wrote a book about her in relationship to my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Yet she had not told me the crucial point about George Thomas until 2012, right around the time I first heard Sternberg’s immaterial genome idea. Harriet sounded perfectly lucid when she said it: “Your father raped me! You’re the son of a rapist!”
Later, after Harriet had already slipped away, present in her body but not in her mind and thus incapable of answering questions, a cousin of hers contacted me. The cousin revealed, with credible details, that Harriet had kept another secret as well: Harriet’s own father — my grandfather, the Swedish filmmaker Oscar A. C. Lund — had sexually molested Harriet when she was a girl.
Before she became ill, Harriet had wanted to save me from the truth about my heredity. Only in the throes of dementia did she tell me the point about my birth father. Now I knew it all. As they put it at 23andMe, welcome to you. That is the first reason that Sternberg’s discussion moved me.
There was something else about Sternberg that struck me. Given that he is a man decorated with two PhDs in biology — one in molecular (evolutionary) genetics and another in mathematical biology — and has held a scientific post at the Smithsonian National Museum, it’s natural to expect him to have little interest in classical history. Here, surely, is a man oriented toward science, natural history, and the vanguard of discovery. But when you meet him in person, you quickly sense that a more complex description will be required. He is a man as interested in the history of science and philosophy as he is in the latest scientific evidence and ideas.
I confess that I find this very relatable. As a college student at Brown, studying Greek and Latin, I was narrowly diverted from an academic career in comparative literature. After graduation I was set to start in September in the Classics Department at Columbia to work towards a PhD. That summer, though, I was offered a job as assistant literary editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
A Form of Archaeology
I deferred grad school for the coming academic year but then never went. The journalism virus had infected me. Yet I continued to find the Greeks, the picture of life that they offered, and their difficult language enchanting. More than this, I have remained fascinated by intellectual life as a form of archaeology, digging for insight and wisdom in ancient sources.
My children grew up hearing me say many times over that there are two kinds of people. There are those who see modern opinions as the product of an upward-driving, almost teleological evolutionary process, with a kind of natural selection picking out the very best concepts from what has come before: the more modern, the better.
And then there are others like me who look around at contemporary existence, with its increasing surrender to mental illness as a philosophy of life, and conclude just the opposite. Jewish tradition calls this yeridat ha’dorot, the devolution of the generations. Human beings are not getting wiser. This is not only an axiom but is evident just from observing the world around you.
So I was naturally sympathetic to Sternberg, for though he grounds his argument for the immaterial genome in the latest discoveries of molecular biology, he is also by temperament sufficiently suspicious of novelty that he mined the history of philosophy and science to excavate intimations and intellectual forbears of his argument. In the process he turned up a line of thinkers and scientists from Plato to Rosen.
Monday, 5 May 2025
The irreducible complexity of Logos vs. Darwinism
Communication, in Human Life and Beyond: An Irreducibly Complex Design
Communication is something that we can easily take for granted, and yet this pervasive attribute of living things represents bedrock evidence for intelligent design.
Communication, to be effective, always includes three features.
Expression
Reception
Comprehension
Effective communication necessitates and relies upon the operation of all three features. A lack of any one of these causes communication to fail. In short, effective communication is irreducibly complex.
When we refer to communication, we usually imagine people talking and listening, or someone reading what another has written, or maybe we’re listening to a music performance. Beyond ourselves, however, communication saturates the animal kingdom in myriads forms. Insects also communicate. Even within biological organisms, at the cellular level, communication forms an integral part of sustaining our physical being.
The Example of Blood Pressure
For instance, the physiology controlling blood pressure within our circulatory system utilizes all three features of communication. Complex hormonal chemicals, such as epinephrin and angiotensin, when emitted, interact with sensors and receptors throughout our bodies to regulate blood pressure and maintain it within required tolerances. Communication occurs unconsciously, but without it, we’d go unconscious!
Let’s look in more detail at the form of communication we’re most familiar with — human speech. Creating sounds with vocal chords, pharynx, tongue, mouth, and lips is just the first step in the communication process. The multitasking capabilities of the pharynx have been highlighted in a previous post by Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann.
The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience.
All the coordinated anatomy that allows us to form sounds corresponding to words would be wasted and in vain if we didn’t also possess a marvelously attuned sense of hearing. Even a cursory description of the delicate structures of the ear required for us to hear sounds over a thousand-fold range of acoustic vibrations reveals intricately interrelated details surpassing human engineering abilities.
More than Anatomy
And yet, hearing is much more than anatomical structures precisely arranged to transform acoustic vibrations to electrical nerve impulses. We must also have the ability to interpret impulses in the auditory nerve, to comprehend the electrical signals channeling to our brains, for any communication to occur.
The brain takes signals, and turns them into words and sentences and, then eventually, into ideas. In a few tenths of a second, a sound from your ear can become an idea in your mind. Your ears and brain need to work together to make this happen properly.
The complexity of interpreting auditory signals within the brain has challenged our understanding.
For neuroscientists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions. How does the brain translate sounds — vibrations that travel through the air — into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize as speech, or laughter, or the footsteps of an approaching friend?
Independent Complex Systems
Perhaps we let this incredible phenomenon of communication go unappreciated by virtue of its familiarity to us. Three independent complex systems are required: speech, hearing, and cognitive interpretation. Having (or, to use the evolutionary view, evolving) one feature provides no guarantee the other two will arise. No partial benefit to communication comes from, say, speech and comprehension without hearing. Or hearing and comprehension without speech. All three features of communication are needed. Each of the features entail specific, complex biochemical and neurological functionality. Together, the three essential components of communication comprise a system of irreducibly complex systems.
In the animal kingdom, we can recognize many examples of communication. Even though squirrels may not be discussing politics or theories of cosmology, they use a variety of vocalizations for their own benefit.
Vocal communication is an important method squirrels (Sciuridae) use to transfer information from one individual to others….vocal communication is important to the development, reproduction, and survival of squirrels…
Most research emphasizes the evolutionary origin of animal communication, citing its obvious benefit for enhancing survival. While the survival benefit of communication ability should be obvious, the irreducible complexity of any communication system defies explanation from evolution.
The independent complex features required for effective human communication are mirrored in animal communication (expression, reception, comprehension), and they even appear in the plant world. For example, research indicates that trees engage in communication.
[Trees] are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.
The national park service reports:
It has been known for at least a couple of decades that trees and plants can communicate by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Again, an irreducibly complex system is involved in arboreal communication: the message must be expressed and received. But this is not enough — the message must produce the intended result, otherwise the whole system is a waste.
Considering again the example of physiological communication within the body, the importance of this process for life has not been lost on the scientific community, expressed with the presupposition of evolution.
In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.
Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.
Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.
In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.
Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.
Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.
Suspending Disbelief
How is it possible to assume that the myriad forms of sophisticated communication between and within living things just happened to evolve? How can one conclude that each essential feature happened to come online in parallel, through undirected processes whose only raison d’être is enhanced procreation? Doesn’t such a hypothesis require an unbearable suspension of disbelief?
The implication of the irreducible nature of communication is clear, but by holding the wrong assumptions it’s possible to hear the signal and miss the message.
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