The Forbidden Universe (36 page)

The basic principles of natural selection are familiar and straightforward enough. If a new trait appears in an individual animal or plant that gives it an edge in the survival game – helping it be more efficient at finding food, dodging predators or attracting a mate – it will out-perform the rest of its species. It will live longer and produce more offspring that, inheriting the new trait, will also be one step ahead in the survival stakes. Eventually, after many generations, only those with the new feature will remain,
the species having evolved into something new and better. Many more generations later, it will have become a new species entirely, unable to breed with members of the ‘parent’ species. Conversely any new traits that hamper an organism’s ability to survive or reproduce will be
self-evidently
eliminated.

As to what causes the changes on which natural selection works, it is all down to changes in DNA. When this miraculous molecule replicates during cell division, it nearly always reproduces itself perfectly. Extremely rarely a change is introduced, and when this happens it changes something in the organism’s physical form or in one of the biochemical processes that sustains it.

Changes in even a single gene can have the most profound effect. One mutation, for example, results in a mammal’s hind legs remaining vestigial within the body. Although an animal with such a handicap wouldn’t last very long, there are rare situations in which the mutation can actually be useful: it would help streamline
semi-aquatic
mammals, for example. In fact, fully aquatic whales and dolphins have been shown to have exactly that mutation.

Natural selection is not the driving force of evolution; genetic mutation is. Natural selection is more of a steering force, either gifting a change to the rest of a species or simply eliminating it. But what causes the mutations? According to the consensus, they arise from random and unpredictable copying errors that occur during replication. So, although the genetic system is beautifully elegant, life in all its myriad forms owes its existence to the
imperfections
in this system.

The process of random genetic mutation and natural selection, we are told, accounts for all of the enormous diversity of life on Earth. Everything that lives – microbial, animal or vegetable – has evolved over the course of billions
of years from a single original organism, the ‘cenancestor’. (Otherwise known as the more zappy LUCA, ‘Last Universal Common Ancestor’, a term presumably chosen because the more apt ‘First Universal Common Ancestor’ would result in a somewhat inappropriate acronym.)

As Francis Crick wrote (his emphasis), ‘
Chance is the only true source of novelty
’.
²
Similarly, in the 1960s the Nobel-prize winning biologist Jacques Monod uncompromisingly put man in his place. With typically French existential angst he wrote:

Put so depressingly, it’s hard to see much of a choice.

But does chance alone really explain everything in the natural world? Copying errors do happen – as is proven by genetic disorders – but if every individual tweak to the genetic code is random, can they alone explain all the vast number of changes needed to transform LUCA into human beings, E. coli, broccoli, whales and duck-billed platypuses?

Introducing errors into any system isn’t usually a clever idea. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe astutely observed that ascribing all the variety of the animal, vegetable and microbial worlds to random mutations is like saying a computer program can be improved by
introducing
random mistakes.
⁴
And Paul Davies writes in
The Cosmic Blueprint
(1988) that logically:

The standard response to this is that the vast majority of DNA mutations are indeed harmful, but natural selection weeds them out by killing off the afflicted animal or plant. The number of mutations that just happen to be beneficial might be minuscule, but they are enough, we’re told confidently, to account for everything that ever evolved. But this is by no means solid fact: it is actually just an assumption.

The problem for evolutionary scientists is that the factors involved are impossible to quantify. Mutations during DNA replication are extremely rare. According to John Maynard Smith, one of the late twentieth century’s foremost geneticists, each time DNA replicates, the chance of a change in a base pair is one in a thousand million.
⁶
Most mutations have no effect anyway because the genetic system has a clever error-correcting mechanism. And the vast majority of mutations that do have an effect on the individual organism make no difference in evolutionary terms. The only changes passed on to the next generation are those which happen in the ‘germ line’ cells – sperm and eggs and the cells from which they develop. Only a minute percentage of
those
produce a beneficial change in the organism; most do damage. It is impossible to put precise figures on any of this.

The other side of the equation involves the speed of evolution, or how long it takes one particular species to evolve from another, which entails identifying the genetic changes responsible. As evolutionists can rarely, if ever, determine either of these with anything approaching certainty, there is ultimately no way they can prove that chance and chance alone was responsible.

Evolution is dependent on so many factors – the appearance of ‘good’ mutations, the size of a species’
population
, competition from other animals, its environment and the speed of environmental changes to which it has to adapt or die. The origin of each species, every branch in the evolutionary tree, is a special, unique case, as Francis Crick asserts:

Ever since Darwin, the physical changes on which natural selection works have been
assumed
to be purely random. The reason is obvious: if these changes aren’t the result of chance alone, then some other factor or factors are responsible, and there is no conceivable way to account for such factors without invoking the supernatural.

In order to make this assumption work, evolutionary theory relies on an egregiously circular argument, which basically goes as follows: No matter how unlikely it seems that a particular characteristic should evolve through random mutations, it must have done, because it now exists – and only random mutations can make things evolve. Frankly, this is outrageous. If non-Darwinists used similar (non) logic, we would be hammered – and quite right, too.

To be fair to evolutionary biologists, their inability to prove the quintessential importance of chance does not necessarily mean the theory is wrong. There are, however, many events in evolutionary history that are not merely difficult, but impossible to explain in neo-Darwinian terms. In fact, astoundingly,
most
of the major steps in the
advancement of life, from the primeval to the complex, fall into this category. Even mainstream biology acknowledges that processes outside the normal neo-Darwinian mechanism are required for these steps, or else pronounces itself completely baffled.

The first big mystery is how DNA itself came into being. After all, the entire variation of life on earth is essentially the result of the shuffling and reshuffling of its basic code. As one researcher put it recently, DNA ‘has multiplied itself into an incalculable number of species, while remaining exactly the same’.
⁸

There is a fundamental Catch-22 situation about the origin of life. In order to replicate, DNA requires certain proteins in the form of enzymes to act as a catalyst, but no protein can be produced without DNA in the first place. At present, there are only theories that seek to explain how this came about, which because of their very nature are untestable.

In the mid-1980s a suggestion by British molecular biologist Graham Cairns-Smith that the earliest ‘genes’ evolved from clays attracted considerable interest. A
current
favourite is the ‘RNA world’ theory, which proposes that in the early stages, when only primitive single-celled organisms existed, life was based on RNA rather than DNA. We also mentioned earlier the PAH world hypothesis, according to which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons once predominated, leading to the development of RNA. However, although it makes sense that PAHs came first, were followed by RNA and then DNA, this theory is also rather vague.

All of these hypotheses, naturally, assume that the process of development from ordinary chemicals to the fully-fledged genetic system was entirely due to blind
chemical reactions and chance. But that’s just an assumption, and it gets worse: there are only the vaguest ideas about exactly how this happened. As Christian de Duve comments in
Life Evolving
(2002):

Life, and therefore DNA, appears to have been here almost as soon as the planet had reached the right conditions. There seems suspiciously little time for it to have evolved through random events.

And there is a further twist: DNA seems to have evolved twice. Until the 1970s it was thought that all life could be divided into two ‘domains’, depending on their type of cell. These were bacteria and the more complex ‘eukaryotes’ – everything that isn’t bacteria, including all the really complex stuff such as animals and plants. Basically the eukaryotic cell has a nucleus, whereas the bacterial cell doesn’t.

Then in 1977 American microbiologist Carl Woese made an apple-cart-upsetting discovery at the University of Illinois. It turned out that some ‘bacteria’ were actually something else entirely. Although these organisms were, like bacteria, single-cell microbes without nuclei, they are as genetically distinct from bacteria as bacteria are from eukaryotes. Woese named this new, third type of organism
archaea, from the Greek meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘primeval’.

Unexpectedly, molecular biologists discovered that bacteria use different enzymes to replicate their DNA from those used by eukaryotes and archaea – revealing that there are two entirely different systems of DNA replication.
¹⁰
Since DNA controls its own replication, this means there are two quite separate and independent types of DNA. Basically, as geneticist Anthony Poole of Stockholm University noted: ‘What it really looks like is that DNA has evolved twice.’
¹¹
There was therefore not one but two LUCAs, one the ancestor of bacteria, and the other of everything else. Assuming it is all due to chance, something with extraordinarily long odds actually happened twice – both times very early in the Earth’s history – and never happened again.

Some scientists, such as Carl Woese, now acknowledge that it is impossible to explain the evolution of the genetic code in purely Darwinian terms, and are exploring alternative mechanisms for the origin of DNA.
¹²

So nobody knows. Not even a little bit. All the ideas put forward are still too clunky to count. Leading
palaeontologist
Simon Conway Morris laments that scientists’ inability to discover the origin of life is ‘one of the great scientific failures of the last fifty years’.
¹³
Even Dawkins stays out of the mix, but only, he is keen to point out, because the search for the origin of life, being a question of chemistry, is outside his field of expertise.
¹⁴
It’s frustrating and sobering to realize that although we know what must have happened for life to get started, we haven’t the faintest idea how. It certainly suggests that evolutionists who declare dogmatically that the origin of life owes nothing to non-random factors are vaingloriously jumping the gun. They just can’t be sure.

Although DNA is the prerequisite for life, there are other key milestones in the journey from single-celled microbes to today’s complex life forms. And without these, no further progress up the evolutionary tree could ever have been possible.

Many of these landmark events are obvious, such as the development of vertebrae, but some are more unexpected, including the appearance of the anus, sometimes called somewhat eye-wateringly the ‘anal breakthrough’, which apparently occurred some 550 million years ago. Without an anus, mouths couldn’t evolve – or if they did
without
benefit of a rectum, animals would explode after a couple of meals – and without mouths heads couldn’t evolve, and without heads we couldn’t have sizeable brains. This prompted one of our favourite quotes in evolutionary literature, from Oxford zoologist Thomas Cavalier-Smith: ‘The anus was a prerequisite for intelligence.’
¹⁵
(Given the pronouncements of certain dogmatists, we always
suspected
as much.)