The Torch Magazine

Evolution and “I”

Abraham Rempel

Here is a sincere compliment with a purpose. The “I” in my title, “Evolution and ‘I’,” is for Intelligence, and I am using you, our Torch readers, as an example. What first comes to mind, manifestly, are your academic achievements. But even more obvious are your accomplishments in vocations, marriage partners, family relationships and personal interests. I take what you have accomplished with your lives as a sign of intelligence and purpose. This compliment, sincerely given, will lead to what I believe is a momentous conclusion.

I will begin by making a statement that some of you will have little sympathy for and perhaps find unsettling. The statement: “We are already in a Post-Darwinian Age.” By that I mean that the reigning scientific paradigm of the past 150 years has run its course. I am referring, of course, to the theory of Evolution, which is currently embroiled in a controversy from which it is unlikely to fully recover. While the end of Darwinism may not be evident from within the public arena, a groundswell of voices from professional scientists to well-read laymen are dismissing Darwinism as a failed theory, and as a theory long overdue in succumbing to its one fatal weakness—that that which appears to be designed really is designed.

Intelligence does not have a neat and tidy definition, and neither do Evolution or Darwinism. But allow me to posit that Charles Darwin based his theory on only two pillars, universal common ancestry and natural selection. The first pillar, universal common ancestry, holds that all life-forms, whether living or extinct, have one singular ancestor in common. That is, originating from one very simple living cell, numerous other life-forms evolved with ever increasing complexity. Darwin’s theory is best illustrated by what he called “the great tree of life.” Beginning with the trunk of the tree, all the many life-forms evolved upwards through its limbs, branches, and sub-branches, becoming more and more complex at each division or nodule, and at the apex of the tree of life is the most complex species of all, the human species.

Natural selection, the second pillar, is Darwin’s proposal for the engine or mechanism that drives the theory. Darwin began with a simple observation. Sheep farmers had coaxed into their flocks a variety of hardier and woollier sheep through selective breeding. Other breeders had produced a bewildering array of pigeons, each one more astonishing than the next—the same for dogs, and so on. Therefore, Darwin reasoned, if selective breeding through human ingenuity could result in so much variation, nature could do the same and vastly more over longer periods of time. Accordingly, nature, as the agent of evolution and active over millions and millions of years, has selected the most desirable and inheritable traits in producing an endless variety of life-forms. Hence the term “natural selection.”

From the beginning Darwin had a vexing problem, to which he devoted two chapters in his landmark book The Origin of Species. Even in the 19th century it was already apparent that the fossil record was telling a very different story, and as the science of paleontology (the study of fossils) grew in maturity, the problem only worsened. What troubled Darwin – even causing him to doubt his own theory – is now known as the Cambrian Explosion. There is a vertical column that arranges the fossils found in Earth’s sedimentary layers from simple to complex, somewhat akin to Darwin’s great tree. The first layer to contain fossilized life is known as the Precambrian Period. The fossils there are nearly all single celled and microscopic – microbes, bacteria, algae and sponges for example. The Precambrian Period encompasses about 85% of the Earth’s history, and most of its life-forms can only be found with high-powered microscopes.

This makes the Cambrian Period, when most of the major animal phyla (category or division) first appear in the fossil record, all the more astonishing. Darwin had written that the sudden appearance of multi-celled and complex life-forms presented the gravest challenge to his theory. The magnitude of the challenge only compounded until it came to a resounding conclusion with the discovery of the Burgess Shale Formation in British Columbia in 1909. This amazing depository of petrified life-forms unearthed tens of thousands of fossils with entirely new body plans exponentially distinct from those in the previous Precambrian layer. Because the formation had fossilized an array of soft-body parts, features such as eyes, mouths, intestines, stomachs and digestive glands were preserved in exquisite detail. It was the sudden appearance and the abundance of these multi-cellular and multi-organ life-forms that gave the Cambrian Explosion its name. By 1995, nearly a century and a half after Darwin had written his book, the conclusions suggested by the Burgess Shale Formation were confirmed by an even greater and older array of animal phyla in the Chengjiang discovery in southern China.

The ensuing challenge to Darwinism was three-fold. Primarily, the new organisms or body plans had no antecedents. That is, they had no clear ancestral relationships to those of the Precambrian era. Next, twenty of the twenty-six known phyla arose independently in the Cambrian era, each one quite unique as a type or species. Finally, the explosion of animal life-forms took place in no more than five to six million years, in only one-tenth of one percent of the Earth’s geological history. To recap: the explosion of animal life-forms occurred far too rapidly to be accounted for by a theory of gradual descent; each of the twenty or so basic phyla or animal categories arose independently, contrary to the tree-of-life hypothesis; and none of the new types were related to the primitive life-forms of the preceding era. The last point is the most damaging for Darwinism: there are no transitional fossils bridging the gap between the Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian periods. None.

In Darwin’s theory, evolution by natural selection was to be by many small increments over long periods of time, with the emphasis on “many” and “small.” Large-scale changes in animal traits or genetic makeup were not expected or thought feasible; hence the requirement for timeframes in the hundreds of millions of years. Moreover, the required variations would arise from random events. Whether by chance, accident, or even luck, the variations that would eventually result in new body plans are essentially undirected, according to the theory. Nature could select from the many variations possible, but not direct or guide the process. It was Darwin’s insight—some have said genius—to altogether remove design as a cause from the process of evolution.

One of the greatest discoveries in the history of science came in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick determined the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. Their momentous discovery allowed biologists to understand how genetic information is transmitted, utilized, and stored within living cells. Significantly, it also spelled out the occurrence of genetic mutations. The latter was very encouraging for Neo-Darwinism, the modern version of Evolution, which combines natural selection with genetics. Herein, they thought, was the mechanism that drives the process of evolution. They reasoned that random mutations bearing novel genetic information—again over very long periods of time—would lead to new body plans and the vast number of disparate species. Mutations, the Neo-Darwinists proposed, underlay the process of Evolution.

Much of the experimental work in genetic mutation has been focused on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The hyper-fertile Drosophila can lay up to a hundred eggs per day, eggs that mature in only ten to twelve days. Subjected to X-rays, more than 3000 mutations have been documented since the early 1900s, resulting in flies with different colors, flies with extra wings, flies with legs growing from their heads, and so on. And yet, in over a century of experimentation, under the guidance of many highly capable scientific minds, and multiple millions of fruit fly generations, no new viable fruit fly has ever come forth. All the laboratory-induced mutations caused either infertility or fruit flies that could not survive in nature.

The Neo-Darwinian hope for an explanatory mechanism in Evolution was short lived. There was a crucial problem with the number of mutations required to generate actual changes and new species. The nature of the problem was driven home by the Wistar Conference in Philadelphia in 1966, a gathering of many distinguished scientists that also included engineers and mathematicians. First, the engineers demonstrated that even a few random changes in the digital characters of a computer program trigger the program to malfunction and crash. Second, the mathematicians calculated the number of random mutations required to generate distinctly new life-forms, and that number was unbelievably high. It exceeded the number of atoms contained in the entire universe, or, conversely, an age for the universe of many trillions of years, theoretically a nonexistent timeframe. Although many scientists simply ignored the conclusions of the Wistar Conference, informed dissatisfaction with Neo-Darwinism had been amplified.

By the end of the 20th century, the evolutionary debate had taken a turn. It was certain that most living things made their appearance in the fossil record fully formed and highly complex. In addition, the new and burgeoning field of molecular biology was demonstrating just how complex living things truly are. And not just the living things themselves—every cell in every living creature was complex. Biologists have compared the structure of a cell with the complexity of a modern-day city, complete with streets, a city hall, factories, libraries, police and fire stations, power generators, storage units, recycling plants and a sewage system, not to mention legislative assemblies, fertility clinics and restaurants. The comparison is intriguing, and may also be significant. Complex cities never originate through a series of unguided events. They require a great deal of intelligence, foresight and planning.

We also now know that not even a city can match the amount of information held in the nucleus or “brain” of a typical cell. In a report in Science (August 2012), two scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute crammed 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA. Using binary code to preserve text, images and formatting, the researchers made 70 billion DNA copies of a book to be published later in the year (Church, Gao, and Kosuri). The amount of information in a cell, any part of a cell, or even just a single string of DNA, is truly incomprehensible. Therein lies Microsoft’s Bill Gates’s frequently quoted verdict that “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created” (188). The real sticking point for Darwinists: in every other circumstance, information is associated with intelligence.

    By early in the 21st century, new terminology had entered into the vocabulary of scientific thinking. Michael Behe first used the term "irreducible complexity" in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, using as an example the flagellum of E. Coli bacterium, the propeller-like component that gives the cell its mobility. He compares the flagellum to a mouse trap, insofar as not one of its five parts can be removed without rendering the trap inoperative. For Behe, that invalidated the standard view of Evolution where components can be added one at at a time until an organism becomes functional. The term “specified complexity” was coined by William Dembski to distinguish the complex information within cells evincing purpose and design from information that appears to be random or undirected. The letters in a Shakespearean sonnet, for example, are both complex and specified. Stephen Meyer, another modern proponent of Intelligent Design, likes the term “specified information” as a synonym for functional information, “because the function of a sequence of characters depends upon the specific arrangement of those characters” (168).

    The case for Intelligent Design is hardly new. In 1802, William Paley presented the classic argument in his book, Natural Theology. In his famous analogy, no one could doubt that a watch found on a heath was designed by a craftsman. Its complexity and intricate purpose would distinguish it from the stones against which Paley may have stubbed his foot. So also, for Paley, a bird’s wing and the antennae of an earwig were manifestations of design. Current-day theorists cite the human eye, the aforementioned E. Coli flagellum, and the blood-clotting mechanism as examples whose individual elements could do little were they acquired one-by-one incrementally over time, but are functional when occurring simultaneously. These examples of “irreducible complexity” seem recognizably artifacts of intelligent design. The modern arguments for Intelligent Design are less theological than Paley’s, much more scientific, and decidedly compelling.

    Intelligent Design as a scientific thesis has not been well received by the adherents of Neo-Darwinism. Evolutionists agree that things in the natural world, both living and non-living, do have the appearance of design, but are adamant that it is just that, an appearance. As Edward Humes wrote in his 2007 book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul:

Darwin's brilliance was in seeing beyond the appearance of design, and understanding the purposeless, merciless process of natural selection, of life and death in the wild, and how it culled all but the most successful organisms from the tree of life, thereby creating the illusion that a master intellect had designed the world. (119)

And so the counter argument goes on. To help us understand, we need to go back to the Greek philosophers of the 5th century B.C. and the origin of materialism. Those atomists taught that matter is the only true reality, and that all natural phenomena and processes can be explained in terms of physical events. In one way or another, materialists reject the existence of anything non-physical, such as spirit, mind or intelligence. Materialism is also deterministic, and rejects the notion of real choices, maintaining that free will and design are only appearances.

Consequently, in our relatively modern definition of science, there are no intelligent causes anywhere in the universe. Speaking for the scientific community in a 1997 book review, a Harvard biology professor famously remarked:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (Lewontin)

The “divine foot in the door” is not entirely a religious reference. Our modern and materialistic approach to life has zero tolerance for such mind related functions as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, value, and purpose. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory rejected the notion that design played any role whatsoever in the formation of the natural world and all living things, and resolutely emphasized that “natural selection” was arbitrary, unplanned, undirected, indiscriminate, and even haphazard. If we can understand this one pillar in Evolution, then we have understood the theory in its essence as a strict and unwavering materialistic philosophy.

It is an open question how much influence the proponents of Intelligent Design will have on the scientific community. By and large, they have already been rejected by those in the mainstream. Nonetheless, some working hypotheses for intelligent causes are already established in the scientific domain. A pathologist needs to determine if the cause of death was natural, accidental or perpetrated by an outside agency with purpose in mind. An archeologist needs to determine if an artifact has been designed by weathering and such or crafted by a human hand. Similarly, a cryptologist determines if etchings on stone are accidental or purposeful. Even in the SETI program, there is no doubt in the minds of those searching for intelligent life that random events are meaningless in their pursuit—they are unequivocally looking for signs of intelligence. In such contexts, many scientists have already acknowledged that intelligent causes are identifiable.

Fellow Torch readers, many of you can look back on a long life of fulfillment. As you reflect on your accomplishments, whether academic, professional or personal, very few of you (if any at all) will claim that those treasured accomplishments came by chance. In the course of your lives choices were made, plans activated, diligence applied, and no doubt many errors corrected. But the end result came, and with it a certain modest pride that you did it, you made it happen. Therefore, the momentous conclusion I alluded to at the beginning of this paper is just this: each of us as individuals and collectively as associates is an intelligent cause. We make things happen and find fulfillment in what we achieve. Intelligence is surely at the apex of how we define ourselves as human beings and trumps the now discredited theory of undirected and random events in telling us who we are.

Note

(1) “The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory no doubt were somewhere accumulated before the Silurian [Cambrian] epoch, is very great... I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks” (The Origin of Species, Chapter 9). Reader, take note: The microorganisms of the preceding Precambrian epoch were unknown in Darwin’s time.

Works Cited

Church, George M., Yuan Gao, and Sriram Kosuri. “Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA.” Science, 28 September 2012: 1628. Published online 16 August 2012.

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Humes, Edward. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America’s Soul. NY: Ecco, 2007.

Lewontin, Richard. “Billions and Billions of Demons.” Review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan. New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997. Nybooks.com.

Meyer, Stephen C. Darwin’s Doubt. NY: Harper One, 2013.

About the Author

   Born in 1945, Abraham Rempel is a Canadian, Mennonite-Anabaptist, happily married father of two, Brock University graduate in Classical Studies, retired business man, wannabe golfer, and an avid reader with a lifelong goal to write.

    Rempel remembers the story of the “autodidact” who learned how to be a plumber by reading every manual he could find and then undertook to learn scuba diving because his basement had flooded, yet acknowledges that most of what he has learned came from self-study. He has a well-honed personal library of Biblical studies, histories both ancient and modern, and the sciences, mostly natural science and cosmology.

    In November of 2014, he published The Book of Nots in Science & Religion. In the prologue, he wrote:

“I am not an expert in any of the subjects or themes in this book, and those themes cover a very wide range in both science and religion. Despite my endless reading, diligent research, and best effort at careful wording, it is a forgone conclusion that some level of error has crept in. Even as a competent generalist, I can’t claim that everything in the book is exactly right... I’m still learning.”

He became a Torch Club member in 2003 and has served on the club executive almost every year since then. He was the St Catharines Club President in 2010-2011.

“Evolution and ‘I’” was presented to St Catharines Torch Club on October 9, 2014.

In Letters to the Editor, the following two rejoinders to the article above have been received They are listed in the order received.

Dear Editor:

Abraham Rempel’s “Evolution and ‘I’,” which appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of The Torch, contains several serous errors.

Error 1: ID is a Scientific Theory

Rempel claims that Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory. However, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania found otherwise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District), seeing ID as indistinguishable from creationism, a religious teaching.

Evidence presented at trial compared an earlier version of an ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, with the version adopted by the Dover School District, revealing the systematic replacement of the word “Creationism” (and creationist terms) with “Intelligent Design” (and ID terms). This was done to hide ID’s religious origin, creationism having been ruled a religious concept by the Supreme Court in 1987. In practical terms, ID is merely a synonym for creationism (http://ncse.com/rncse/26/1-2/my-role-kitzmiller-v-dover-0).

Further, it was shown that the main tenet of ID, that life is designed, is un-falsifiable (cannot be tested), is not based on evidence (is merely an argument), and that its few testable claims, such as the irreducible complexity of the flagella, the eye, and the blood clotting pathway were false.

While empirical challenges to evolution are fully acceptable, such challengers are based on evidence, not scripture or conjecture. When ID proponents’ claim that biological features have “irreducible complexity” they mean that science has not explained that feature. But they also mean that no such explanation is possible so we shouldn’t bother trying (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design1/article.html). And they don’t.

But in science, evidence matters. When biologists actually looked into the blood clotting allegation they found that whales and dolphins, puffer fish, lampreys and sea squirts are all missing factors in their clotting pathways, yet their blood still clots, in contrast to ID claims (http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/CSHL-2009.pdf). This, along with other falsifications, allows scientists to reject the concept of ‘irreducible complexity’ with its fundamentalist underpinnings on factual grounds.

Error 2: Evolution is Controversial among Professional Scientists

Rempel claims that Evolution is in doubt and is increasingly questioned by professional scientists. This is untrue. Evolution is widely and strongly supported by scientific organizations and their members. There is no controversy among scientists. The controversy is limited to adherents of religious fundamentalism who seek to counter and deny the evidence.

The National Center for Scientific Education, for example, list 110 professional scientific organizations that support evolution and oppose the teaching of ID as science. Their website includes links to the written position papers of each (http://ncse.com/media/voices/science).

Error 3: The Lack of Precambrian Fossils Challenges Evolution

When Darwin wrote ‘Origin,’ no Precambrian fossils were known. Being honest, Darwin included this as a possible challenge to his theories. It took 100 years to locate the missing fossils, largely because paleontologists were looking for macroscopic fossils only. Since then, the fossil record has been pushed back from 540 million years in Darwin’s day, to 3.8 billion years today. So now, the challenge is gone (http://www.pnas.org/content/97/13/6947.full).

Error 4: There Are No Precursors to the Cambrian Fauna

This is incorrect. Not only have metazoan fossils (from organisms composed of tissues and organs) been found, but some appear to be precursors to the Cambrian explosion that followed. The Ediacaran fossils (from soft‑bodied metazoans resembling modern jellyfish, sponges, worms, seaweed, sea anemones and sea pens) are the remains of the ancestors of shelled animals (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/474302/Precambrian-time/69817/Ediacaran-fossils).

The fossil record does not have to be perfect. It only needs to show that precursors and potential precursors existed. The Ediacaran fossils demonstrate that the Cambrian explosion was well underway before the Cambrian. But because the organisms were soft-bodied, they did not fossilize extensively.

Error 5: The Cambrian Explosion Occurred In Six Million Years (Too Short a Time for Natural Selection to Account for)

Rempel writes that it would take hundreds of millions of years to achieve the diversity observed in the Cambrian explosion. He then claims that the Cambrian explosion occurred in six million years. These claims are both inaccurate.

First, while it took over 540 million years to reach our ‘current’ biodiversity and complexity, Cambrian life was much simpler so needed less time. It consisted only of invertebrates and primitive chordates. There were no fish, land animals, or vascular plants. While the Cambrian explosion increased the number of body plans, it did not greatly increase complexity. In other words, we see only variations on a theme (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF12-97Miller2.html).

Second, Rempel shortened the duration of the Cambrian era, claiming it was six million years long. But the actual duration was 40 to 53 million years. Shortening the timeframe by as much as 89 percent makes his arguments seem more plausible, but is wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian).

Error 6: Laboratory Experiments with Fruit Flies Have Never Produced Viable New Species

Rempel claims that none of the breeding experiments on fruit flies have resulted in new viable species. However, according to Jerry Coyne (Why Evolution is True, Penguin Books, 2009, p. 180), More than half of the approximately twenty such studies on fruit flies produced reproductive isolation. Further, Joseph Boxhorn in “Talk Origins Archive” lists several examples of recent speciation (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html#part5).

Speciation, which is characterized by reproductive isolation (the inability to breed with other species), results from various isolating mechanisms including timing (different breeding periods), physical incompatibility (size difference, shape), genetic incompatibility (mismatched chromosomes), physical preference, and behavioral differences. Rempel makes the mistaken assumption that reproductive isolation is limited to genetic incompatibility.

Error 7: Evolution Is Mathematically Impossible

This claim is similar to saying “man will never fly.” It stems originally from William Paley’s watchmaker analogy. The “argument” assumes that evolution is based on purely random events. But this is incorrect. Evolution is driven by natural selection, which is non‑random.

The vast pool of genes resulting from mutation is simply the raw material for natural selection. And by mixing and matching, one can build many styles of “homes” from standard building materials. Natural selection works by making existing populations better, not perfect. It sifts through exiting genes and new ones that come along. And since every organism born, hatched, or germinated carries a load of new mutations, there is a lot to work with (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2011/110612.html).

We know natural selection works and is capable of driving evolution because of field studies, laboratory experiments, and computer simulations. We know the evolution occurred because it is demonstrated by the fossil record, in molecular studies of living species, through biogeography, vestigial structures, atavism (like humans born with tails), and from comparing the physical features of living species. And we know that evolution is mathematically feasible because of computer simulations—all of which counter the “random” argument, thus revealing its faulty and ideologically driven logic.

Conclusion

The arguments presented in “Evolution and I” mirror those from fundamentalist Christian literature. And they demonstrate the same inability to acknowledge scientific evidence found in that literature. The paper ignores the religious underpinnings of ID, rejects the obvious interpretation of the fossil record, alters timeframes to support its thesis, and denies the existence of precursors to the Cambrian explosion. Lastly, it ignores the mountains of evidence and the many mathematical and computer models revealing evolution as fact.

If facts are modified to match ideological principles and religious dogma, then there can be no knowledge. And when scientific facts can be challenged without evidence, then there can be no science.

Larry Zaleski

Hagerstown Torch Club

Dear Editor:

I wish to offer a response to the essay “Evolution and I” by Abraham Rempel in the Spring 2015 issue of The Torch.

Mr. Rempel advances the propositions that (1) Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection is “a failed theory” and that (2) it should be replaced by a “compelling” theory labeled “Intelligent Design.” Neither of these propositions are supported by modern science.

Over the past 150 years, a veritable mountain of factual evidence has accrued from multiple diverse fields including genomics, embryology, paleontology and geology, all of which convincingly affirm the validity of the basic principles laid forth by Charles Darwin. Far from being a “failed theory,” it is the foundation of modern biology.

As to the credibility of “intelligent design”, it was discredited as a scientific theory ten years ago. I refer you to the book Monkey Girl by Edward Humes (2006). This book is a thorough 350-page examination and report of the attempt of a “creationist” dominated school board in Dover, PA in 2005 to impose the teaching of intelligent design to the ninth grade biology class using the text Of Pandas and People. Intelligent design was characterized by this board as a scientific theory that merited a place on equal terms with Darwin’s Theory. A group of parents and science teachers sued to oppose this action. After a six-week trial, Judge John Jones ruled that “Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” As such, it would be a violation of the First Amendment if it were to be embedded in a school science class.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored or denied.” Aldous Huxley.

George Edwin Bunce

Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA