Charles Darwin Vs Boeing 747 Argument

 Charles Darwin Vs Boeing 747 Argument

   By : Aria Ratmandanu

"The Theory of evolution is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance."

                    “One of Britain’s most famous physical scientists, Sir Fred Hoyle (incidentally the author of The Black Cloud, which must be among the best science-fiction novels ever written), frequently expresses a similar view with respect to large molecules such as enzymes, whose inherent ‘improbability’ that is the probability that they’d spontaneously come into existence by chance is easier to calculate than that of eyes or figs. Enzymes work in cells rather like exceedingly numerous machine tools for molecular mass production. Their efficacy depends upon their three dimensional shape, their shape depends upon their coiling behaviour, and their coiling behaviour depends upon the sequence of amino acids which link up in a chain to make them. This exact sequence is directly controlled by genes and it really matters. Could it come about by chance ?

                     Hoyle says no, and he is right. There is a fixed number of amino acids available, twenty. A typical enzyme is a chain of several hundred links drawn from the twenty. An elementary calculation shows that the probability that any particular sequence of, say 100, amino acids will spontaneously form is one in 20 × 20 × 20…100 times, or I in 20100. This is an inconceivably  large number, far greater than the number of fundamental particles in the entire universe. Sir Fred, bending over backwards (unnecessarily, as we shall see) to be fair to those whom he sees as his Darwinian opponents, generously shortens the odds to 1 in 1020. A more modest number to be sure, but still a horrifyingly low probability. His co-author and fellow astrophysicist, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, has quoted him as saying that the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. What Hoyle and Wickramasinghe miss is that Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point ?

                     Darwin himself had to contend with an earlier generation of physical scientists crying ‘chance’ as the alleged fatal flaw in his theory. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was perhaps the greatest physicist of his day and Darwin’s most distinguished scientific opponent. Among his many achievements he calculated the age of the Earth based on rates of cooling, assuming that it had once been a part of the ‘fires’ of the Sun. He concluded that the Earth was some tens of millions of years old. Modern estimates put the age up in the thousands of millions of years. It is no discredit to Lord Kelvin that his estimate was one hundredth part of the right answer. Dating methods using radioactive decay were not available in his time, and nuclear fusion, the true ‘fire’ of the Sun, was unknown, so his cooling calculation was doomed from the start. What is less forgivable was his lofty dismissing, ‘as a physicist’, of Darwin’s biological evidence: the earth wasn’t old enough; there hadn’t been enough time for the Darwinian process of Physics.

                     Darwin might just as well have retorted (he didn’t) that the biological evidence clearly indicates evolution, therefore there must have been time for evolution to occur, therefore the physicist’s evidence must be wrong!. To return to the point about ‘chance’, Lord Kelvin used the prestigious platform of his Presidential Address to the British Association to quote, with approval, the words of another distinguished physical scientist, Sir John Herschel, who also, by the way, referred to Darwinism as ‘The Law of Higgledy-Piggledy’:

                     “We can no more accept the principle of arbitrary and casual variation and natural selection as a sufficient account, per se, of the past and present organic world, than we can receive the Laputan method of composing books (pushed“à l’outrance) as a sufficient one of Shakespeare and the Principia. Herschel’s allusion was to Gulliver’s Travels in which Swift had mocked the Laputan method of writing books by combining words at random. Herschel and Kelvin, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, my anonymously quoted physical scientists tracts all make the mistake of treating Darwinian natural selection as though it were tantamount to Laputan authorship. To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of ‘chance’.”

                       “It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. ”

                       “The height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes and enzyme molecules. To say that an object like an eye or a protein molecule is improbable means something rather precise. The object is made of a large number of parts arranged in a very special way. The number of possible ways in which those parts could have been arranged is exceedingly large. In the case of a protein molecule we can actually calculate that large number. Isaac Asimov did it for the particular protein haemoglobin, and called it the Haemoglobin Number. It has 190 noughts. That is the number of ways of rearranging the bits of haemoglobin such that the result would not be haemoglobin. In the case of the eye we can’t do the equivalent calculation without fabricating lots of assumptions, but we can intuitively see that it is going to come to another stupefyingly large number. The actual, observed arrangement of parts is improbable in the sense that it is only one arrangement among trillions of possible arrangements.”

                       “Now, there is an uninteresting sense in which, with hindsight, any particular arrangement of parts is just as improbable as any other. Even a junkyard is as improbable, with hindsight, as a 747, for its parts could have been arranged in so many other ways. The trouble is, most of those ways would also be junkyards. This is where the idea of quality comes in. The vast majority of arrangements of the parts of a Boeing junkyard would not fly. A small minority would. Of all the trillions of possible arrangements of the parts of an eye, only a tiny minority would see. The human eye forms a sharp image on a retina, corrected for spherical and chromatic aberration; automatically stops down or up “with an iris diaphragm to keep the internal light intensity relatively constant in the face of large fluctuations in external light intensity; automatically changes the focal length of the lens depending upon whether the object being looked at is near or far; sorts out colour by comparing the firing rates of three different kinds of light-sensitive cell. Almost all random scramblings of the parts of an eye would fail to achieve any of these delicate and difficult tasks. There is something very special about the particular arrangement that exists. All particular arrangements are as improbable as each other. But of all particular arrangements, those that aren’t useful hugely outnumber those that are. Useful devices are improbable and need a special explanation.”

                        “R. A. Fisher, the great mathematical geneticist and founder of the modern science of statistics, put the point in 1930, in his usual meticulous style “An organism is regarded as adapted to a particular situation, or to the totality of situations which constitute its environment, only in so far as we can imagine an assemblage of slightly different situations, or environments, to which the animal would on the whole be less well adapted; and equally only in so far as we can imagine an assemblage of slightly different organic forms, which would be less well adapted to that environment.”

                         Eyes, ears and hearts, the wing of a vulture, the web of a spider, these all impress us by their obvious perfection of engineering no matter where we see them: we don’t need to have them presented to us in their natural surroundings to see that they are good for some purpose and that, if their parts were rearranged or altered in almost any way, they would be worse. They have ‘improbable perfection’ written all over them. An engineer can recognize them “An engineer can recognize them as the kind of thing that he would design, if called upon to solve a particular problem.”

                          “This is another way of saying that objects such as these cannot be explained as coming into existence by chance. As we have seen, to invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation, is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable’s steepest cliff in one bound. And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain? It is the slow, cumulative, one step at a time, non random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection. The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this article. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height. They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts. It was Darwin’s great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain.

                            But is this one of those rare cases where it is really true that there is no smoke without fire? Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. Mustn’t it have done something to provoke “this canard? Well, yes, there is something behind the misunderstood rumour, a feeble basis to the distortion. One stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process mutation. Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random. But Darwinians make the fuss that they do about the ‘randomness’ of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection, the other side of the process. It is not necessary that mutation should be random in order for natural selection to work. Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not. Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random. It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance.”

                             “Even mutations are, as a matter of fact, non-random in various senses, although these senses aren’t relevant to our discussion because they don’t contribute constructively to the improbable perfection of organisms. For example, mutations have well understood physical causes, and to this extent they are non-random. The reason X-ray machine operators take a step back before pressing the trigger, or wear lead aprons, is that X-rays cause mutations. Mutations are also more likely to occur in some genes than in others. There are ‘hot spots’ on chromosomes where mutation rates are markedly higher than the average. This is another kind of non-randomness. Mutations can be reversed (‘back mutations’). For most genes, mutation in either direction is equally probable. For some, mutation in one direction is more frequent than back mutation in the reverse direction. This gives rise to so-called ‘mutation pressure’ a tendency to evolve in a particular direction regardless of selection. This is yet another sense in which mutation can be described as non-random. Notice that mutation pressure does not systematically drive in the direction of improvement. Nor do X-rays. Quite the contrary, the great majority of mutations, however caused, are random with respect to quality, and that means “they are usually bad because there are more ways of getting worse than of getting better.”

                          “One could imagine a theoretical world in which mutations were biased towards improvement. Mutations in this hypothetical world would be non-random not just in the sense that mutations induced by X-rays are non-random: these hypothetical mutations would be systematically biased to keep one jump ahead of selection and anticipate the needs of the organism. But this is the one kind of non-randomness which, contrary to numerous theoretical yearnings, almost certainly has no basis in fact: mutations are not systematically likely to anticipate the needs of the organism, nor is it clear how such anticipation could possibly work. What might ‘anticipation’ mean? Suppose a terrible ice age is closing in on a previously temperate region and the local deer are perishing in their lightweight coats. Most individuals will die anyway but the ”

                           “Where there is sexual reproduction, the phenomenon of mutation is penalized by natural selection, even though individual mutations (a minority of them) may occasionally be favoured by natural selection. This is true even in a time of stress where you can make a superficially plausible case for increased mutation rates. The predilection to mutate is always bad, even though individual mutations occasionally turn out to be good. It is best, if more than a little paradoxical, to think of natural selection as favouring a mutation rate of zero. Fortunately for us, and for the continuance of evolution, this genetic nirvana is never quite attained. Natural selection, the second stage in the Darwinian process, is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. Mutation, the first stage in the process, is random in the sense of not pushing towards improvement. All improvement is therefore, in the first place, lucky, which is why people mistakenly think of Darwinism as a theory of chance. But mistaken they are.”