The Metaphysics of Evolution
by
Fred Reed
I
was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then
just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what
they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate
regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I
liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences
as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.
The
question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations
that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, "In primeval
seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in
a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey."
I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn't been true, scientists
would not have said that it was.
Remember,
I was fifteen.
In
those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist,
the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English.
I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculation
as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical
accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed
to fit varying attempts at explanation.
For
a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow
water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools
with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another
solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered
as the home of the first life. Today (Feb 24, 2005) on the BBC website,
I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. ("There is evidence
that life evolved in the deep sediments," co-author John Parkes,
of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website. Link at bottom.)
The
frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began,
why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which really
worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup.
Forty-five years later, it still does.
Questions
Arise
I
was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to
me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life.
In particular:
(1)
Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early
seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted?
Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or
really, really wish.
The
answer was, and is, "no." We have no dried residue, no remaining
pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn't nearly good enough
to provide a quantitative analysis.
(2)
Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory?
No, it hadn't, and hasn't. (Note 1)
(3)
Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about?
No, we didn't, and don't.
(4)
Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would
form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn't, and can't. (At least
not without cooking the assumptions.) (Note 2)
Well,
I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don't
know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary,
and can't reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can't show
it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it
happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?
My
point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply
didn't see the evidence. While they couldn't demonstrate that life
had begun by chemical accident, I couldn't show that it hadn't.
An inability to prove that something is statistically possible is
not the same as proving that it is not possible. Not being able
to reproduce an event in the laboratory does not establish that
it didn't happen in nature. Etc.
I
just didn't know how life came about. I still don't. Neither do
evolutionists.
What
Distinguishes Evolution from Other Science
Early
on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it
from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First,
plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And
of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that
are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.)
Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something
might have happened was equivalent to establishing how
it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused
annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.
As
an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose
by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they
cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I.
Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a
good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible,
is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such
as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility.
Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas
to be able to question them.
Consequently,
discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are
said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can't
see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos
are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction
here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find
each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings
seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard
a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could
easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos
were at the top of their food chain, and didn't have predators.
Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But...is
any of this established?
Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science.
The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved
intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but
believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious
liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have
noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed,
they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer
if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established.
Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. Invariably
the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge
of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever
substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why
Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And
of course almost anything can be made believable by considering
only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.
Third,
evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with
which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar
to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology,
even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the
world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest
attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists.
We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations
of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.
I
found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They
refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer
questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot
recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification
of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of science,
of Darwin, of progress.
This
tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist"
is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing
discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the
political correctness of science.
The
Lair of the Beast
I
have been on several lists on the Internet that deal with matters
such as evolution, have written on the subject, and have discussed
evolution with various of its adherents. These men (almost all of
them are) have frequently been very bright indeed, often Ivy League
professors, some of them with names you would recognize. They are
not amateurs of evolution or high-school principals in Kansas eager
to prove their modernity. I asked them the questions in the foregoing
(about whether we really know what the primeval seas consisted of,
etc.) I knew the answers; I wanted to see how serious proponents
of evolutionary biology would respond to awkward questions.
It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam. I got everything but
answers. They told me I was a crank, implied over and over that
I was a Creationist, said that I was an enemy of science (someone
who asks for evidence is an enemy of science). They said that I
was trying to pull down modern biology (if you ask questions about
an aspect of biology, you want to pull down biology). They told
me I didn't know anything (that's why I was asking questions), and
that I was a mere journalist (the validity of a question depends
on its source rather than its content).
But
they didn't answer the questions. They ducked and dodged and evaded.
After thirty years in journalism, I know ducking and dodging when
I see it. It was like cross-examining hostile witnesses. I tried
to force the issue, pointing out that the available answers were
"Yes," "No," "I don't know," or "The question is not legitimate,"
followed by any desired discussion. Still no straight answer. They
would neither tell me of what the early oceans consisted, nor admit
that they didn't know.
This
is the behavior not of scientists, but of advocates, of True Believers.
I used to think that science was about asking questions, not about
defending things you didn't really know. Religion, I thought, was
the other way around. I guess I was wrong.
Practical
Questions
A
few things worry those who are not doctrinaire evolutionists. (Incidentally,
it is worth noting that by no means all involved in the life sciences
are doctrinaire. A friend of mine, a (Jewish, atheist) biochemist,
says "It doesn't make sense." He may be wrong, but a Creationist
he isn't.)
To
work, a theory presumably must (a) be internally consistent and
(b) map onto reality. You have to have both. Classical mechanics
for example is (so far as I know) internally consistent, but is
not at all points congruent with reality. Evolution has a great
deal of elaborate, Protean, and often fuzzy theory. How closely
does it correspond to what we actually see? Do the sweeping principles
fit the grubby details?
For
example, how did a giraffe get a long neck? One reads as a matter
of vague philosophical principle that a proto-giraffe by chance
happened to be taller than its herdmates, could eat more altitudinous
leaves than its confreres, was therefore better fed, consequently
rutted with abandon, and produced more child giraffes of height.
This felicitous adaptation therefore spread and we ended up...well,
up – with taller giraffes. It sounds reasonable. In evolution that
is enough.
But
what are the practical details? Do we have an unambiguous record
of giraffes with longer and longer necks? (Maybe we do. I'm just
asking.) Presumably modern giraffes have more vertebrae then did
proto-giraffes. (The alternative is the same number of vertebrae,
but longer ones. I have known giraffes. They were flexible rather
than hinged.) This, note, requires a structural change as distinct
from an increase in size.
Evolution
is said to proceed by the accretion of successful point mutations.
Does a random point mutation cause the appearance of an extra vertebra?
If so, which mutation? (It would have to be a pretty vigorous point
mutation.) How can you tell, given that we have no DNA from proto-giraffes?
If not one, then how many random point mutations? Which ones? What
virtue did these have that they were conserved until all were present?
Did this happen once per additional vertebra – the multiply repeated
chance appearance of identical mutations? Or did they appear all
at once? If so, the heart must have changed simultaneously to get
blood way up there.
[After
I posted this a reader wrote to say that giraffes do have longer
instead of more vertebra. Same questions hold.]
There
may be perfectly good, clear, demonstrable answers to a few of these
questions. I'm not a paleontological giraffologist. But if evolutionists
want people to accept evolution, they need to provide answers –
clear, concrete, non-metaphysical answers without gaping logical
lacunae. They do not. When passionate believers do not provide answers
that would substantiate their assertions, a reasonable presumption
is that they do not have them.
The
matter of the giraffe is a simple example of a question that inevitably
occurs to the independently thoughtful: How do you get evolutionarily
from A to B? Can you get from A to B by the mechanisms assumed?
Without practical details, evolution looks like an assertion that
the better survives the worse; throw in ionizing radiation and such
to provide things to do the surviving, and we're off to the races.
But...can we get there from here? Do we actually know the intermediate
steps and the associated genetic mechanics? If we don't know what
the steps were, can we at least show unambiguously a series of steps
that would work?
Lots
of evolutionary changes just don't look manageable by random mutation.
Some orchestrated jump seems necessary. How does an animal evolve
color vision, given that doing so would require elaborate changes
in eye chemistry, useless without simultaneous elaborate changes
in the brain to interpret the incoming impulses, which changes would
themselves be useless without the retinal changes?
Or
consider caterpillars. A caterpillar has no obvious resemblance
to a butterfly. The disparity in engineering is huge. The caterpillar
has no legs, properly speaking, certainly no wings, no proboscis.
How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into
one that did? Pupating looks like something you do well or not at
all: If you don't turn into something practical at the end, you
don't get another chance.
Think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily
was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing
sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs,
since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this
to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar.
(Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it
to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?)
It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to
undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly.
Death is usually a discouragement to reproduction.
Tell
me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity
gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm
to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism
that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the
theory fails.
Here
the evolutionist will say, "Fred, caterpillars are soft, squashy
things and don't leave good fossils, so it's unreasonable to expect
us to find proof." I see the problem. But it is unreasonable to
expect me to accept something on the grounds that it can't be proved.
Yes, it is possible that an explanation exists and that we just
haven't found it. But you can say that of anything whatever. Is
it good science to assume that evidence will be forthcoming because
we sure would like it to be? I'll gladly give you evidence Wednesday
for a theory today?
Note
that I am not asking evolutionists to give detailed mechanics for
the evolution of everything that lives. If they gave convincing
evidence for a few of the hard cases – proof of principle, so to
speak I would be inclined to believe that equally good evidence
existed for the others. But they haven't.
Evolution,
Like Gaul, Is Divided Into Three Parts
Evolution
breaks down into at least three logically separable components:
First, that life arose by chemical accident; second, that it then
evolved into the life we see today; and third, that the mechanism
was the accretion of chance mutations. Evolutionists, not particularly
logical, refuse to see this separability.
The
first, chance formation of life, simply hasn't been established.
It isn't science, but faith.
The
second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then
evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks
you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega,
that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to
have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however
driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared
magically from nowhere, one after the other.
The
third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation,
though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account
for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent
characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus
far, it hasn't accounted for them.
It
is interesting to note that evolutionists switch stories regarding
the mechanism of transformation. The standard Neo-Darwinian view
is that evolution proceeds very slowly. But when it proves impossible
to find evidence of gradual evolution, some evolutionists turn to
"punctuated equilibrium," (2) which says that evolution happens
by sudden undetectable spurts. The idea isn't foolish, just unestablished.
Then there are the evolutionists who, in opposition to those who
maintain that point-mutations continue to account for evolution,
say that now cultural evolution has taken over.
Finally,
when things do not happen according to script – when, for example,
human intelligence appears too rapidly – then we have the theory
of "privileged genes," which evolved at breakneck speed because
of assumed but unestablished selective pressures. That is, the existence
of the pressures is inferred from the changes, and then the changes
are attributed to the pressures. Oh.
When
you have patched a tire too many times, you start thinking about
getting a new tire.
The
Theory of Implausibility
As
previously mentioned, evolutionists depend heavily on plausibility
unabetted by evidence. There is also the matter of implausibility.
Suppose that I showed you two tiny gear wheels, such as one might
find in an old watch, and said, "See? I turn this little wheel,
and the other little wheel turns too. Isn't that cute?" You would
not find this surprising. Suppose I then showed you a whole mechanical
watch, with thirty little gear wheels and a little lever that said
tickticktick. You would have no trouble accepting that they all
worked together.
If
I then told you of a mechanism consisting of a hundred billion little
wheels that worked for seventy years, repairing itself, wouldn't
you suspect either that I was smoking something really good – or
that something beyond simple mechanics must be involved?
Evolution
writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously
invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write
all the books in the British Museum.
If
something looks implausible, it probably is.
More
Questions on the Fit with Reality
Does
the theory, however reasonable and plausible (or not), in fact map
onto what we actually see? A principle of evolution is that traits
conferring fitness become general within a population. Do they?
Again,
consider intelligence. Presumably it increases fitness. (Or maybe
it does. An obvious question is why, if intelligence is adaptive
– i.e., promotes survival it didn't evolve earlier; and if it is
not adaptive, why did it evolve at all? You get various unsubstantiated
answers, such as that intelligence is of no use without an opposable
thumb, or speech, or something.)
Those
who deal in human evolution usually hold The Bell Curve
in high regard. (So do I. It's almost as good as Shotgun News
or, more appropriate in this context, the Journal of Irreproducible
Results.) A point the book makes is that in the United States
the highly intelligent tend to go into fields requiring intelligence,
as for example the sciences, computing, and law. They live together,
work together, and marry each other, thus tending to concentrate
intelligence instead of making it general in the population. They
also produce children at below the level of replacement. Perhaps
fitness leads to extinction.
Black sub-Saharan Africans (say many evolutionists) have a mean
IQ somewhere near 70, live in wretched poverty, and breed enthusiastically.
White Europeans, reasonably bright at IQ 100 and quite prosperous,
are losing population. Jews, very bright indeed at a mean IQ of
115 and very prosperous, are positively scarce, always have been,
and seem to be losing ground. From this I conclude either that (a)
intelligence does not increase fitness or (b) reproduction is inversely
proportional to fitness.
I'm
being a bit of a smart-ass here, but...the facts really don't seem
to match the theory.
In
human populations, do the fit really reproduce with each other?
It is a matter of daily observation that men prefer cute, sexy women.
It then becomes crucial for evolutionists to show that cute and
sexy are more fit than strong, smart, and ugly. Thus large breasts
are said to produce more milk (Evidence? Chimpanzees have no breasts
yet produce ample milk.) and that broad hips imply a large birth
canal. (But men are not attracted to broad hips, but to broad hips
in conjunction with a narrow waist.) Curvaceous legs are curvaceous
because of underlying muscle, important for fitness.
Of
course Chinese women do not have muscular legs or buttocks, wide
hips, or large breasts, and seem to reproduce satisfactorily. (White
and Asian women are more physically delicate than African women,
as witness the lower rates of training injuries among black women
in the American army. Thus European women, said to have emigrated
from Africa and evolved to be Caucasians, lost sturdiness. Why?)
Then it is said that ugly woman are hypertestosteronal, and therefore
have more spontaneous abortions. A sophomore logic student with
a hangover could point out the problems and unsaid things in this
argument.
There
is an air of desperation about all of it. Transparently they begin
with their conclusion and craft their reasoning to reach it.
Fast
and Faster
To
the evolutionarily unbaptised, it seems that evolution might occur
slowly, by the gradual accretion of random point-mutations over
millions of years, but certainly could occur rapidly by the spread
of genes already available in the population. For example, genes
presumably exist among us for the eyes of Ted Williams, the endurance
of marathon runners, the general physical plant of Mohammed Ali,
the intelligence of Gauss, and so on. (This of course assumes genetic
determinism, which not all geneticists buy.) Are, or were, these
becoming general? Perhaps. Show me. If not, one must conclude either
that these qualities do not confer fitness, or that fitness does
not become general. It seems odd to believe that massive structural
changes can occur slowly through the accumulation of accidental
changes, but much more rapid increases in fitness do not occur through
existent genes. Can we get answers, please? Concrete, non-metaphysical,
demonstrable answers?
Consciousness
With
evolution the sciences run into the problem of consciousness, which
they are poorly equipped to handle. This is important. You don't
need to consider consciousness in, say, physical chemistry, which
gives the correct answers without it. But evolution is a study of
living things, of which consciousness is at least sometimes a quality.
Evolutionists know this, and so write unwittingly fatuous articles
on the evolution of consciousness. They believe that they are being
scientific. But...are they?
Obvious
questions: What is consciousness? Does it have a derived definition,
like f = ma? Or is it an undefined primitive, like "line" or "point"?
With what instrument do you detect it? Is something either conscious
or not, or do you have shades and degrees? Is a tree conscious,
or a rock? How do you know? Evolution means a continuous change
over time. How do you document such changes? Do we have fossilized
consciousness, consciousness preserved in amber? Does consciousness
have physical existence? If it does, is it electromagnetic, gravitational,
or what? If it doesn't have physical existence, what kind of existence
does it have?
If you cannot define it, detect it, or measure it, how do you study
its evolution, if any? Indeed, how do the sciences, based on physics,
handle the physically undetectable?
Speculation
disguised as science never ends. For example, some say that consciousness
is just a side-effect of complexity. How do they know? Complexity
defined how? If a man is conscious because he's complex, then a
whole room full of people must be even more conscious, because the
total complexity would have to be more than any one fellow's complexity.
The universe has got to be more complex than anything in it, so
it must be motingator conscious.
Ah,
but the crucial questions, though: (Again, the possible answers
are, "Yes," "No," "I don't know," or "The question doesn't make
sense.")
First,
does consciousness interact with matter? It seems to. When I drop
a cinder block on my foot, it sure interacts with my consciousness.
And if I consciously tell my hand to move, it does.
Second,
if consciousness interacts with matter, then don't you have to take
it into account in describing physical systems?
Vague
Plausibility Revisited
Humans
are said to have a poor sense of smell because they evolved to stand
upright in the savanna where you can see forever and don't need
to smell things. This makes no sense: Anyone can see that the better
your senses of smell and hearing, especially at night but even in
daytime if you have lions that look like dirt and know how to sneak
up on things, you are better off. I note that horses have good vision
and eyes at about the same altitude as ours, but they have great
noses.
Then
the evolutionist says, well, people's noses retracted into their
faces, and there wasn't room for good olfaction. How much olfactory
tissue does a house cat have? They can sure smell things better
than we can. Oh, then says the Evolutionist, a large olfactory center
in the brain would impose too much metabolic strain and require
that people eat more, and so they would die of starvation in bad
times. Evidence? Demonstration?
My
favorite example, which does not reach the level of plausibility,
is such artifacts as the tail of a peacock which obviously make
the bird easier to see and eat. So help me, I have several times
seen the assertion that females figure that any male who can survive
such a horrendous disadvantage must really be tough, and therefore
good mating material. The tail increases fitness by decreasing fitness.
A Boy Named Sue.
Traits
That Ought To Be Dead, But Don't Seem To Be
Supposedly
traits that kill off an animal die out of the population, and things
that help the beast survive spread till they all have them. That
makes sense. But does it happen?
That
it does is certainly an article of faith. I once asked a doctor
why Rh negative people stayed in the population. Fifteen percent
of white women are negative, so they are usually going to mate with
positive men, with the consequent possibility that children will
suffer from hemolytic disease. Well, said the doctor, being Rh negative
obviously must have some survival value, or it wouldn't exist. (Then
why hasn't it become general? Or is it doing so?) She simply believed.
She
then rolled out sickle-cell anemia, the poster child of evolution,
which is caused by a point mutation on the beta chain of hemoglobin
and, when heterozygous, helps people survive malaria.
Maybe
Rh negativity does have some survival value, which can be shown
to be greater than its non-survival value. Maybe asthma does too,
and fatal allergies to bee stings, and migraines, schizophrenia,
panic, cluster headaches, anaphylactic shock in general, homosexuality
in males, allergies, a thousand genetic diseases, suicide, and so
on. (I suppose you could argue that being a suicide bomber ensures
wide dispersal of one's genetic material.)
For that matter, why are there so many traits that have no obvious
value? For example, kidneys have well developed nerves. Kidney stones
are agonizing. Yet there is absolutely nothing an animal can do
about a kidney stone. How do those nerves increase fitness?
Evolutionists
don't ask. Always the question is How does this fit in with evolution,
instead of, Does this fit in with evolution?
Intelligent
Design
An
interesting thought that drives evolutionists mad is called Intelligent
Design, or ID. It is the view that things that appear to have been
done deliberately might have been. Some look at, say, the human
eye and think, "This looks like really good engineering. Elaborate
retina of twelve layers, marvelously transparent cornea, pump system
to keep the whole thing inflated, suspensory ligaments, really slick
lens, the underlying cell biology. Very clever."
I gather that a lot of ID folk are in fact Christian apologists
trying to drape Genesis in scientific respectability. That is, things
looked to have been designed, therefore there must be a designer,
now will Yahweh step forward. Yet an idea is not intellectually
disreputable because some of the people who hold it are. The genuine
defects of ID are the lack of a detectible designer, and that evolution
appears to have occurred. This leads some to the thought that consciousness
is involved and evolution may be shaping itself. I can think of
no way to test the idea.
In
any event, to anyone of modest rationality, the evolutionist's hostility
to Intelligent Design is amusing. Many evolutionists argue, perhaps
correctly, that Any Day Now we will create life in the laboratory,
which would be intelligent design. Believing that life arose by
chemical accident, they will argue (reasonably, given their assumptions)
that life must have evolved countless times throughout the universe.
It follows then that, if we will soon be able to design life, someone
else might have designed us.
In
Conclusion
To
evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you
can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube,
and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that
reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely
the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life.
I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed.
But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and
secular theology."
I
once told my daughters, "Whatever you most ardently believe, remember
that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put
yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force
yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that,
think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better,
and you may be surprised."
Notes
(1)
An example, for anyone interested, of the sort of unlogic to which
I was exposed by evolutionists: Some simple viruses are strings
of nucleotides in a particular order. In 2002 Eckhard Wimmer, at
the University of New York at Stony Brook, downloaded the sequence
for polio from the Internet, bought the necessary nucleotides from
a biological supply house, strung them together, and got a functioning
virus that caused polio in mice. It was a slick piece of work.
When
I ask evolutionists whether the chance creation of life has been
demonstrated in the laboratory, I get email offering Wimmer's work
as evidence that it has been done. But (even stipulating that viruses
are alive) what Wimmer did was to put OTS nucleotides together according
to a known pattern in a well-equipped laboratory. This
is intelligent design, or at least intelligent plagiarism. It is
not chance anything. At least some of the men who offered Wimmer's
work as what it wasn't are far too intelligent not to see the illogic
– except when they are defending the faith.
(2) Many Evolutionists respond to skepticism about life's starting
by chance by appealing to the vastness of time. "Fred, there were
billions and billions of gallons of ocean, for billions
of years, or billions of generations of spiders or bugs or little
funny things with too many legs, so the odds are in all that time...."
Give something long enough and it has to happen, they say. Maybe.
But probabilities don't always work the way they look like they
ought.
Someone
is said to have said that a monkey banging at random on a typewriter
would eventually type all the books in the British Museum. (Some
of the books suggest that this may have happened, but never mind.)
Well, yes. The monkey would. But it could be a wait. The size of
the wait is worth pondering.
Let's
consider the chance that the chimp would type a particular book.
To make the arithmetic easy, let's take a bestseller with 200,000
words. By a common newspaper estimate of five letters per word on
average, that's a million letters. What's the chance the monkey
will get the book in a given string of a million characters?
For
simplicity, assume a keyboard of 100 keys. The monkey has a 1/100
chance of getting the first letter, times 1/100 of getting the second
letter, and so on. His chance of getting the book is therefore one
in 1 in 100 exp 1,000,000, or 1 in 10 exp 2,000,000. (I don't offhand
know log 3 but, thirty being greater than ten, a 30-character keyboard
would give well in excess of 10 exp 1,000,000.)
Now,
let's be fair to the Bandar Log. Instead of one monkey, let's use
10 exp 100 monkeys. Given that the number of subatomic particles
in the universe is supposed to be 10 exp 87 (or something), that
seems to be a fair dose of monkeys. (I picture a cowering electron
surrounded by 10 exp 13 monkeys.) Let's say they type 10 exp 10
characters per second per each, for 10 exp 100 seconds which, considering
that the age of the universe (I read somewhere) is 10 exp 18 seconds,
seems more than fair.
Do
the arithmetic. For practical purposes, those monkeys have no more
chance of getting the book than the single monkey had, which, for
practical purposes, was none.
Now,
I don't suggest that the foregoing calculation has any direct application
to the chance formation of life. (I will get seriously stupid email
from people who ignore the foregoing sentence.) But neither do I
know that the chance appearance of a cell does not involve paralyzing
improbabilities. Without unambiguous numbers arising from unarguable
assumptions, invoking time as a substitute for knowledge can be
hazardous.
March
9, 2005
Fred
Reed is author of Nekkid
in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
Copyright
© 2005 Fred Reed
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