Why Darwin Matters (14 page)

Fourth, to turn the tables on Intelligent Design theorists, how does Intelligent Design explain micro and macro forms? Did the Intelligent Designer personally tinker with the DNA of every single organism in a population? Or did the ID simply tweak the DNA of just one organism and then isolate that organism to start a new population? When and where did the ID intervene in the history of life? Did the ID create each genus and evolution then create each species? Or did the ID create each species and evolution create each subspecies? Most Intelligent Design theorists accept natural selection as a viable explanation for microevolution—the beak of the finch, the neck of the giraffe, the varieties of subspecies found on earth. If natural selection can create subspecies, why not species, genera, families, and on up the classification scale to kingdoms?

Last, just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. And if those mechanisms turn out to be natural forces, then no supernatural force is necessary, and they can simply change their name to evolutionary scientists and get to work.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics makes evolution impossible
.

According to the laws of physics, entropy increases—systems change from hot to cold, from ordered to disordered, and from complex to simple. Yet evolutionists state that the universe and life move from chaos to order and from simple to complex, the exact opposite of the entropy predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Creationist Henry Morris stated the argument thus: “Evolutionists have fostered the strange belief that everything is involved in a process of progress, from chaotic particles billions of years ago all the way up to complex people today. The fact is, the most certain laws of science state that the real processes of nature do not make things go uphill, but downhill. Evolution is impossible.”
⁴⁸

Yet on any scale other than the grandest of all—the three-billion-year history of life on earth—species do not evolve from simple to complex, and nature does not simply move from chaos to order. The history of life is checkered with false starts, failed experiments, small and mass extinctions, and chaotic restarts. It is anything but the textbook foldout of linear progress from single cells to humans.

Further, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed, isolated systems. Since the earth receives a constant input of energy from the sun, it is an open-dissipative system, and entropy may decrease and order increase (though the sun itself is running down in the process). The earth is not strictly a closed system, and life can evolve without violating natural law. As long as the sun is burning, life may continue thriving and evolving, just as automobiles may be prevented from rusting, burgers can be heated in ovens, and all manner of things in apparent violation of Second Law entropy may continue. As soon as the sun burns out, entropy will take its course—and life on earth will cease.
⁴⁹

In addition, an open-dissipative system such as we find on the earth slips in and out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The sciences of nonlinear dynamics and of chaos and complexity theory show that systems can spontaneously self-organize into more complex systems when they are in states of thermodynamic nonequilibrium. When a system is out of balance, energy flowing in and out of the system triggers the parts of the system to interact with one another locally, and these coupled interactions reverberate throughout the system to sustain it. Autocatalysis, or feedback loops within the system, can cause it to grow in complexity. From these self-organized autocatalytic interactions emerge complexity and order.
⁵⁰
All of this happens without any top-down input. Evolution no more breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics than one breaks the law of gravity by leaping into the air.

Evolution is random, and randomness cannot produce complex specified design
.

It seems obvious that even the simplest of life forms are too complex to have come together by random chance. Take a simple organism consisting of merely 100 (10
²
) parts. Mathematically there are 10
¹⁵⁸
possible ways for the parts to link up. There are not enough molecules in the universe, or time since the Big Bang, to account for these possible ways to come together in even this simple life form, let alone to produce human beings. It is the equivalent of a monkey randomly typing
Hamlet
, or even just the sentence “To be or not to be.” It cannot happen by chance.

An understanding of evolutionary theory, however, makes clear that natural selection is not “random,” nor does it operate by “chance.” Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes. The eye evolved from a single light-sensitive cell into the modern complex eye through thousands of intermediate steps,
many of which still exist in nature. Yes, in order for the monkey to type the first thirteen letters of Hamlet’s soliloquy by chance, it would take 26
¹³
trials (approximately 10
¹⁸
times 2) to guarantee success—a number sixteen times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the lifetime of the solar system. But if each correct letter is preserved and each incorrect letter eradicated, as happens in natural selection, the process operates much faster. How much faster? My friend and colleague Richard Hardison constructed a computer program in which letters were “selected” for or against, and it took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence of letters
TOBEORNOTTOBE
, which on his computer took less than ninety seconds. The entire play can be generated in about four and a half days!
⁵¹

The icons of evolution are fallacies, fakes, or frauds
.

Creationists of yore used to bleat about how the history of evolutionary science is nothing more than a catalogue of mistaken theories and overthrown ideas. Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Calaveras Man, and
Hesperopithecus
—all once claimed by scientists to be proof of human evolution—have all been shown to be mistakes or frauds. Clearly science cannot be trusted.

Intelligent Design theorists have modernized this argument through Jonathan Wells’s book
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong.
⁵²
Wells identifies ten “icons” of evolution, presented regularly in textbooks, that he says are mistakes, myths, or frauds:

1.
The Miller-Urey Experiment
, which demonstrates the chemical origins of the building blocks of life.

2.
Darwin’s Tree of Life
, which shows that all living organisms come from a common ancestor.

3.
Homology in Vertebrate Limbs
, such as the similar bone structure of the forelimb of humans, bats, and whales, as examples of common ancestry and descent with modification of basic body plans.

4.
Haeckel’s Embryo Drawings
, or “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” showing how in their embryological development (ontogeny) organisms go through similar stages in evolutionary (phylogeny) development.

5.
Archaeopteryx
, one of the best transitional fossils between dinosaurs and modern birds that demonstrates the evolution of flight.

6.
Peppered Moths
, which demonstrate how natural selection works by eliminating solid-colored moths that stand out on mottled tree bark, allowing the camouflaged peppered moths to survive and reproduce.

7.
Darwin’s Finches
, which serve as examples of how speciation happens in nature.

8.
Four-Winged Fruit Flies
, which demonstrate how a change in a single gene can produce dramatic morphological and physical changes.

9.
Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution
, as examples of well-documented evolutionary pathways from simple to complex.

10.
From Ape to Human
, demonstrating the “missing links” between apes and humans.

When these are presented as examples of evolution, Wells argues, “students and the public are being systematically misinformed about the evidence for evolution.” None of them is true, says Wells, and by easily refuting them, Intelligent Design creationists hope to bring down the entire evolutionary edifice.

First, the old creationists’ saw that mistakes in science are a sign of weakness is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of science,
which is constantly building upon both the mistakes and the successes of the past. Science does not just change, it builds cumulatively on the past. Scientists make mistakes aplenty, and in fact this is how science progresses. The self-correcting feature of the scientific method is one of its most powerful assets. Hoaxes like Piltdown Man and honest mistakes like Nebraska Man, Calaveras Man, and
Hesperopithecus
are in time exposed. In fact, it was not creationists who exposed these errors, it was scientists who did so. Creationists simply read about the scientific exposés of these errors, and then duplicitously advanced them as their own.

Intelligent Design theorists do the same thing, trolling through scientific journals and books in search of exposures by scientists of errors by other scientists and claiming them as the results of Intelligent Design research. This is what happened in the case of Wells’s “punctured” icons of the peppered moths and Haeckel’s embryo drawings. In the 1950s, the British evolutionary biologist Bernard Kettlewell correlated the evolution of darker forms of certain moths in England with industrial pollution—darker moths were better camouflaged on darker trees—and noted the reverse with the lightening of trees after clean air acts were passed (lighter moths were better camouflaged on lighter trees). But as later scientists noted, peppered moths do not rest on trees; although Kettlewell’s recording of the changing coloration of peppered moths was accurate, his placing of them on trees was staged for photographic purposes and he was later nailed for it by scientists. In the case of Haeckel’s embryological drawings, they were revealed to be fraudulent first in a technical scientific paper in the prestigious journal
Nature
, and then publicly by Stephen Jay Gould in his popular
Natural History
column.
⁵³

Next: Make that
nine
icons of evolution. The first icon Wells lists deals with the chemical origins of life, which is not generally
considered a part of evolutionary theory. In any case, the science of life’s origin has come a long way since Miller and Urey’s experiments in the 1950s, so it is doubly disingenuous to focus on these primitive incipient research protocols.

Further, despite the high improbability of finding fossils, we have now a reasonably rich record of the history of life from the earliest bacteria fossils of 3.8 billion years ago, to the simple single-celled bacteria 3.5 billion years ago, to fossil archaebacteria 2.9 billion years ago, to the first eukaryotic cells about 2.5 billion years ago, to multicellular eukaryotic fossils 1.7 billion years ago, to fossils of higher algae forms 1.2 billion years ago, to the Ediacaran fauna 650 million years ago, all of which led to the so-called Cambrian “explosion” of about 550 to 500 million years ago. In highlighting this “explosion” as lacking any ancestral history (and therefore claiming it as proof that an Intelligent Designer miraculously sparked the creation of life), Intelligent Design advocates conveniently ignore three billion years of evidence of life’s gradual evolution.

For each of these icons, Intelligent Design theorists also fail to provide an alternative theory to account for the data. For example, homology in vertebrate limbs has a perfectly sound evolutionary explanation: The skeletal structure of humans, bats, and whales is similar because we have similar ancestry—evolution created one basic architectural design from which natural selection shaped the wide variety of types. But even if this is wrong, as Wells says, what is the Intelligent Design explanation for homologies? Why would an Intelligent Designer design a whale’s flipper to have precisely the same set of bones as a human arm and a bat’s wing? And why would the ID make a bat’s wing different from a bird’s wing and an insect’s wing? Evolution’s answer is that a bat is a mammal with a different evolutionary lineage than birds and insects. What answer do Wells and the other Intelligent Design advocates offer?

Finally, there is the underlying assumption that the theory of evolution is founded on these ten icons, and thus that debunking them refutes the theory at large. Not so. The theory of evolution is proved through the convergence of evidence from thousands of lines of inquiry from diverse fields of study quite apart from this list. The vast bulk of data supporting evolution dwarfs these ten examples.