Introduction
In this age of narrow specialization and the proliferation of technical vocabularies virtually incomprehensible to outsiders, the role of science books written specifically for a general audience is absolutely critical. In order for scientific progress to make an impact on humanity, it must be translated by scientists into language and concepts that society can generally absorb. This may be very difficult, in some cases impossible, but even Wittgenstein attempted to express what he thought he knew.
The alternative would be to retain all scientific knowledge within the technical community, so that any relevant scientific advances inform applied scientists and engineers only, who then utilize this knowledge to improve medical treatment, transportation, communication and killing machines, keeping the rest of us scientifically ignorant.
As a reasonably well-informed student of intellectual history, I believe that all thinkers must develop the capability to understand what they consider fundamental, and not simply accept the judgment of others, regardless of their authority. In my case, two of the most important scientific questions include:
1) how did life originate
2) how do biological forms evolve complex organic structures
There is no rational doubt that evolution has taken place, and continues to take place. Futuyma writes that…
…we can be confident today that all known living things stem from a single ancestor because of the many features that are universally shared. These features include most of the codons in the genetic code, the machinery of nucleic acid replication, the mechanisms of transcription and translation, proteins composed only of “left handed”…amino acids, and many aspects of fundamental biochemistry. Many genes are shared among all organisms…and these genes have been successfully used to infer the deepest branches in the tree of life.
Douglas Futuyma, Evolution
He adds elsewhere that
…evolution is a scientific fact. That is, the descent of all species, with modification, from common ancestors is a hypothesis that in the last 150 years or so has been supported by so much evidence, and has so successfully resisted all challenges, that it has become a fact.
Douglas Futuyma, Evolution
The fact of evolution is indisputable. How evolution takes place, however, in particular the source of variation and the evolution of complex biological structures, remains problematic. The current Neo-Darwinist view of evolution depends on random/chance-driven variation and natural selection to explain the existence of complex and diverse biological forms, as Grinspoon points out:
Chance seems to be behind so much evolutionary innovation.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
In evolution, the continual, random meandering of forms and species is largely fueled by competition.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
It appears that the scientific community accepts the current view as definitive and final. If this is so, the community will apply very little, if any, energy or resources towards understanding the nature of evolution. Students won’t select the topic for special study, career-minded academics will steer clear of the subject, and research grants will neither be applied for nor awarded.
“Given variation…” Unless I am mistaken, we don’t know how variation creates the complex structures that pervade the natural world. Through chance? Random mutations? Genetic drift? Sexual recombination? Horizontal gene transfer? This is precisely the point where Neo-Darwinism is weakest, both theoretically and empirically. To my knowledge, we have no detailed theory or working model of how this might happen within the genetic structure of an individual organism or within a population, and what steps might incrementally create the complex organic structures and systems that we find in nature.
To consider the case closed, as Grinspoon suggests below, given our incomplete understanding of the process that drives speciation, seems a bit premature, and I am unwilling (or intellectually unable) to simply accept at face value Grinspoon’s conclusions (or Mayr’s, or Dawkins, or Dennett’s, or Gould’s).
Grinspoon demonstrates in many places the provisional nature of our current understanding, and it’s reliance on vast improbabilities (all emphasis mine):
These were early instances of evolution by symbiosis, in which once-separate organisms begin living in close association and then, somehow, merge into large unified organisms….Somehow these little guys gave up their individuality to become the energy-processing parts of the collective eukaryotic cell.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
Somehow, in the metazoan contract, individual cells ceded the power of reproduction to the centralized cells residing in specialized reproductive organs.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
When we look over the history of life on Earth, a gnarly question leaps out at us: If multicellularity is so cool, why did it take so long?
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
I’ll admit I find this disturbing. If life always self-organizes into more complex entities, why did it get stuck? What kept us for so long at the stage where individual cells were the greatest show on Earth?
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
However it happened, it is clear that in just a few million years, in barely the blink of a cosmic eye, one lineage of primates went through an intense metamorphosis, and Earth acquired thought and self-awareness.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
As a spokesman for the scientific community, Grinspoon seems to reflect this perspective when he writes:
I find the logic and the evidence of evolution to be completely convincing. A deep look at the world, digging into the rocks and dirt, shows a record of change and adaptation. The mechanisms described by Darwin, tweaked with 150 years of subsequent insights, marvelously equip us to understand this process. Given variation, death, and heredity, there is no escaping that evolution will happen. Fossils and numerous other clues show clearly that it has. For the scientific mind, guided by Occam’s razor, there is no reason to invoke any other force in evolution, and the case is closed.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
These comments reveal the tenuous nature of our understanding of evolution. Science can only provide what Grinspoon characterizes in a different context as ‘historical observation’, as opposed to scientific explanation. That would make ‘closing the case’ at this juncture unreasonable.
The evolution of complex biological structures has yet to be convincingly explained. Perhaps we need to focus elsewhere, as everything that happens in an organism begins in the cell:
The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon – such as sight, digestion, or immunity – must include its molecular explanation.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
Behe goes on to point out what we find most striking when examining the intra-cellular processes, when he asserts that…
…life is based on machines – machines made of molecules! Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along “highways” made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes, and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
He goes on to explain further:
As strange as it may seem, modern biochemistry has shown that the cell is operated by machines – literally, molecular machines. Like their man-made counterparts…molecular machines range from the simple to the enormously complex: mechanical, force-generating machines, like those in muscles; electronic machines, like those in nerves; and solar-powered machines, like those of photosynthesis.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
These observations should give us pause. Machines? How is that possible? And this is not a recent development. Most, if not all the critical complex processes within a living eukaryotic cell first appeared billions of years ago.
The cell – life – once enacted became the perpetual motion machine. It can grow, consume, repair itself and multiply – forever. Imagine the effort that would be required to sterilize the planet – eliminate every living organism. Even if you destroyed the planet, it’s likely some dormant form would still exist floating out in space.
Imagine humans attempting to build something as eternal. Once manufactured, never in need of human attention again. A machine that could improve, program itself, repair damage, grow, expand its capabilities, adjust to changing circumstances, and evolve into increasingly complex machines. We couldn’t do it, not today. It would take a Terminator future, or a manifested Matrix to realize such a machine-dominated world.
Life is essentially immortal. Life will never die a natural death. Again, how is that possible?
Grinspoon relates the current orthodoxy:
The story goes as follows: Chemical evolution led inexorably to self-replicating molecules, which in turn evolved into the first primitive cells. Through Darwinian selection, these cells evolved into modern organisms.
This statement seems so reasonable and consistent with what we know about the natural world that we scientists accept it as true. The problem is, it’s difficult to prove. No one has succeeded in creating life from nonlife in the laboratory.
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
He goes on to say on the next page:
Though we don’t want to admit it, our belief that chemical evolution can lead to life is still an article of faith. Let’s call it informed faith…
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
Characterizing the current state of our understanding of evolution as “informed faith” seems perfectly fair and reasonable. If this attitude was widely accepted, it might lead to further research and critical debate. Why it doesn’t is partially explained by the political and cultural web that enmeshes the scientist:
The creationism-versus-evolution debate has unfortunately pushed science into a defensive corner from which we exude overconfidence, pretending to have certainty in places where we really have only reasonable inference. Instead of saying, in effect, “We have proof whereas you only have faith,” we could, more honestly, say, “At least our faith is testable in principle, and wherever tested has been borne out by observation.”
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
Richard Dawkins carries the torch of certainty when he writes in The Blind Watchmaker that, “…the anti-evolution propagandists are always religiously motivated.” Unfortunately, anyone who criticizes the Neo-Darwinist Dogma gets lumped in with the creationists and no distinction is made (by thinkers such as Dawkins) between superstitious hyperbole and genuinely reasonable criticism. The defensiveness noted in Grinspoon comment pervades our society and limits further scientific inquiry:
Anybody familiar with the history of science should know better. Major new discoveries and shifting paradigms depend on imagination and courage:
When sciences such as physics finally uncovered their foundations, old ways of understanding the world had to be tossed out, extensively revised, or restricted to a limited part of nature. Will this happen to the theory of evolution by natural selection?
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
As a reasonable a-theological intellectual, with no academic career, and no religious affiliation or faith, I am confident that there is a perfectly natural explanation for some unknown creative element in biological variation—we just don’t know yet what it is. If that’s a real possibility, then the scientific community should get out of its defensive corner and openly admit as much. Grinspoon puts the case perfectly in a slightly different context when he writes:
Looking at the history of science, how many times have we thought we had a complete understanding of some aspect of nature, only to find out later that we were looking at a tiny fraction of some larger truth?
Lonely Planets, David Grinspoon
The history of plate tectonics serves as a perfect example. Prior to the early sixties, few scientists believed that the continents actually moved, yet within a decade, after they took the idea seriously, the notion was quickly proven beyond any rational doubt.
Darwinism has suffered a different fate. First systematically presented to the world in 1859, bolstered by the rediscovery of Mendel’s work some fifty years later, and further strengthened by the discovery of DNA in the fifties, Neo-Darwinism has existed in its current form for at least five decades, and yet, it remains informed speculation at best, undemonstrated and unproven. While it’s possible that someday the current orthodoxy will gain empirical support, the more likely possibility is that Neo-Darwinism stands as a “tiny fraction of some larger truth”.
As for how it all started, there doesn’t exist an accepted model for the beginning of life on Earth. Many theories exist, none of them convincing.
One of the most difficult challenges in explaining the origin and the evolution of early life, one that we will explore in detail later, is the presence of complex molecular processes necessary for any form of life we know. How these processes, necessarily greatly simplified, could have achieved the replication necessary for evolution, along with the construction of the molecular machines crucial to life, remains a profound mystery:
The ‘simplest’ self-sufficient, replicating cell has the capacity to produce thousands of different proteins and other molecules, at different times and under variable conditions. Synthesis, degradation, energy generation, replication, maintenance of cell architecture, mobility, regulation, repair, communication – all of these functions take place in virtually every cell, and each function itself requires the interaction of numerous parts…
…cells makes the complexity of a motorcycle or television set look paltry in comparison.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
As Behe points out, delving into the bio-molecular world has revealed immense complexities never before imagined:
…as biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity, with dozens or even hundreds of precisely tailored parts.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box
It is this (relatively) new world of biological complexity that I intend to explore, and for the following reasons:
It is certainly not immediately obvious that the beauty and complexity of life on Earth all came about through billions of years of random variation and selection. Our prescientific forebears can be forgiven for their intuitive inference that such a wonderful design requires a super-human designer. Science has given us reason to doubt this need, but science has also revealed the design to be far more intricate, complex, and finely tuned than anyone imagined hundreds of years ago. Modern thinkers, too, are reasonable to doubt that natural selection could come up with all this. If you have never, ever, doubted it, then you’ve never really thought about it, only accepted the ideology and authority of your teachers. Within each living cell, from the paramecia to paramedics, is a chemical factory far more complex and elegant in design than the most sophisticated chemical plant ever built by humans.
Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology
It’s absolutely appropriate to doubt that natural selection came up with all this, because we have yet to explain or demonstrate in any credible manner how random variation and selection might have created the incredible diversity and complexity in the nature world, except in the simplest of cases. We don’t need God or aliens to explain evolution. What we need is to admit we don’t know how it happens, and treat the question with the respect it deserves, and energetically pursue a rational, empirical explanation for perhaps the single most significant question humans have yet to answer: how did life originate, and how has it evolved to the forms in which it exists today? The answer may ultimately be the most meaningful contribution science can make to humanity.
My contribution to the discussion, in the form of this site, doesn’t require fantastically long odds for the original creation of life, or improbable explanations for evolution.
Up until now, all bio-chemical explanations are tactical, local, and largely mechanical. Sure, I can put my foot on the gas to make the car go, but there is a broader and deeper explanation beyond the mechanics of the car – in the same way that the explanation of life processes goes beyond covalent bonds and molecular signals – as to why my foot is there in the first place, and why the car moves.
In general, we don’t see inanimate objects behaving as if animated. A protein molecule is an animate object, in that it moves, creates, reacts to signals, is born (constructed) and dies (deliberately disassembled). What are we missing? An overhead signaling network of some kind that we haven’t detected? Command and control, communication, coordination – all missing from our scientific explanations.
As far as we know today, life doesn’t have to exist, and may not exist anywhere else. Intelligence doesn’t have to exist — at least as far as we know. In other words, life, unlike the physical universe, requires special explanation. There is nothing in the physical and chemical world that indicates the possibility of biological life. It doesn’t appear as if life simply emerges from the physical and chemical substrate, absent very special circumstances as yet unexplained, and it seems clear that the current neo-Darwinian explanation fails to account for the evolution of complex biological structures.
Compare an internal combustion engine with a molecule. Unlike an intake manifold, say, we can’t say what a proton looks like, it’s shape, or color. Just a mass and a charge. We can’t see it, make a drawing of it, relate it to physical objects in our macro world. A proton, gravity, electrons, quarks – all exist in a world we don’t have direct access to. A world I call the Vicarian Domain.
