Theory Of Evolution Spawns It’S Own Complex Questions

`Many states flunk evolution test,” blares the Connections headline on Page A6 of Sunday’s Oct. 1 Spokesman-Review. An accompanying article about a report released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science laments the fact that 19 states are doing an unsatisfactory job of teaching evolution. The author of the report, Lawrence Lerner, asserts that evolution “is not a controversial issue among scientists, nor among most of the world’s educated persons.”

My observation is that those who defend evolution do so by asserting its validity as proven science, supported, not by evidentiary detail, but by the sheer numbers of degreed and published scientists who say it is so. I believe it was Tolstoy who observed, “If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

Contrary to Lerner’s assertion, even among the staunchest evolutionists there is strong disagreement between neo-Darwinists, who maintain that evolution proceed slowly, gradually and progressively, and those who argue that the fossil record proves the contrary.

Martin Brookes, evolutionist and science writer for “New Scientist,” commented on a debate between Steven Pinker of MIT and Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, each a proponent of one of these perspectives. He said, “For an argument about science, you would be hard pressed to find an exchange of views so full of hollow rhetoric, pompous quotations, and insults….” He then observed, “It is precisely because there is so little evidence for either of their views that they can get away with so much speculation and disagreement.”

What - no irrefutable, insurmountable mountain of scientific evidence supporting evolution? One might justifiably ask why this was even considered an “argument about science” if “there is so little evidence” or why Lerner can assert that it “is not a controversial issue”!

The truly scientific discoveries (as opposed to philosophical presuppositions and dogma) that have emerged in recent decades from the research of biochemists and molecular biologists into the complexity of sub-cellular systems and functions, pose major challenges to neo-Darwinian evolution. These discoveries include the structure and function of cilium, the blood clotting cascade, gated transport, antibody diversity and the compliment pathway, to identify just a few.

Often, in this molecular world, a dozen or more unique components may be required to function in concert for a process like blood clotting to occur with controlled effectiveness. The absence or malfunction of a single component can render the entire process ineffective or even fatal to the whole organism.

Michael Behe, biochemist at Lehigh University, in his book, “Darwin’s Black Box,” coined the term “irreducibly complex” to describe such systems, all of whose elements must be simultaneously present and functioning to be effective. Such systems cannot evolve piece by piece, he explains, for there would be no meaningful functionality to the cell or organism.

Russel Doolittle, biochemist, University of California at San Diego, has attempted to explain the evolution of such irreducibly complex system components with terms like “appears,” “is born,” “arises,” “springs forth,” “is unleashed,” without any reference to causative factors or to any model that includes numbers or quantities. Without numbers, there is no science!

Darwin himself said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

For neo-Darwinian evolution to be true, it has to account not only for the alleged transition of dinosaurs to birds, but also for the irreducibly complex molecular structures and processes of life.

In addition to the challenge of irreducible complexity is the equally daunting task of explaining how the high information content (simultaneously complex and highly specific) encoded in DNA could possibly have originated from naturalistic causes. Neither chance nor intrinsic self-organizational models offer any hopeful explanation.

It is amusing to observe that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) would interpret the presence of information embedded in electromagnetic signals from space as evidence for an intelligent extraterrestrial source, but this logical reasoning is abandoned when proposing an explanation for the coded information embedded in DNA.

It appears that evolution, already struggling because “there is so little evidence,” when confronted with the irreducibly complex nature of much of the molecular structure of life and lacking any credible explanation for the information content of DNA, looks a lot like the Emperor’s new clothes and indeed “a foolish thing.”

Note: An excellent review of these issues by Stephen Meyer, Ph.D., of Whitworth College, is available on-line at www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0004/articles/ meyer.html.