On Thu, 31 Oct 1996 16:20:20 -0500, Brian D. Harper wrote:
[...]
BH>Darwin Under the Microscope
>New York Times Op Ed
>October 29, 1996
>by Michael Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh
>University, is the author of "Darwins's Black Box, The Biochemical
>Challenge to Evolution.
Thanks to Brian for posting this.
[...]
MB>In his statement, the Pope was careful to point out that it is
>better to talk about "theories of evolution" rather than a single
>theory. The distinction is crucial. Indeed, until I completed my
>doctoral studies in biochemistry, I believed that Darwin's mechanism
>- random mutation paired with natural selection - was the correct
>explanation for the diversity of life. Yet I now find that theory
>incomplete.
Agreed. Darwinism is a good theory to explain small-scale chnages:
"On a small scale, Darwin's theory has triumphed; it is now about as
controversial as an athlete's assertion that he or she could jump
over a four-foot ditch. But it is at the level of macroevolution-of
large jumps-that the theory evokes skepticism. Many people have
followed Darwin in proposing that huge changes can be broken down to
plausible, small steps over great periods of time. Persuasive
evidence to support that position, however, has not been forthcoming.
Nonetheless, like a neighbor's story about vanishing buttes, it has
been difficult to evaluate whether the elusive and ill-defined small
steps could exist...until now." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box: The
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", Free Press: New York, 1996, p15)
There is nothing wrong with a theory that explains only a part of
reality. But there is *everything* wrong with taking a theory that
explains only a part of reality and claiming it explains the whole of
reality. Darwinism is at best a half-truth. And as J.I. Packer
said (albeit in a different context):
"a half-truth treated as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth"
(Packer J.I., "Fundamentalism' and the Word of God", Inter-Varsity
Fellowship: London, 1965 reprint, p18)
MB>In fact, the complex design of the cell has provoked me to stake
>out a distinctly minority view among scientists on the question of
>what caused evolution. I believe that Darwin's mechanism for
>evolution doesn't explain much of what is seen under a microscope.
>Cells are simply too complex to have evolved randomly; intelligence
>was required to produce them.
Having read Mike Behe's book, I agree. The fact is that no detailed
evolutionary explanation is given in the scientific literature to
explain the origin of the marvellous machines that make up the
biomolecular world.
MB>I want to be explicit about what I am, and am not, questioning.
>The word "evolution" carries many associations. Usually it means
>common descent - the idea that all organisms living and dead are
>related by common ancestry. I have no quarrel with the idea of
>common descent, and continue to think it explains similarities among
>species. By itself, however, common descent doesn't explain the
>vast differences among species.
Again, like Behe, I provisionally accept "common descent" as the best
explanation of life's profound unity. But I do not accept that the
*mechanism* of Darwinist "blind watchmaker" evolution is an adequate
*mechanism* to explain fully the diversity within that unity.
MB>That's where Darwin's mechanism comes in. "Evolution" also
>sometimes implies that random mutation and natural selection powered
>the changes in life. The idea is that just by chance an animal was
>born that was slightly faster or stronger than its siblings. Its
>descendants inherited the change and eventually won the contest of
>survival over the descendants of other members of the species. Over
>time, repetition of the process resulted in great changes - and,
>indeed, wholly different animals.
No doubt this is true at the microevolutionary level. This is
Darwin's great insight and merits him a place among science's
immortals.
MB>That's the theory. A practical difficulty, however, is that one
>can't test the theory from fossils. To really test the theory, one
>has to observe contemporary change in the wild, in the laboratory or
>at least reconstruct a detailed pathway that might have led to a
>certain adaptation.
Yes. The usual Neo-Darwinist strategy of 1. extrapolation from minor
to major changes (eg. temporary change in moth's colours explains
moths themselves); 2. imaginative "just-so" stories; 3. setting up
strawmen rivals (including creationism) and pulling them down; and 4.
claiming that nothing else could do it; is not the same as actually
testing the theory with a *detailed* reconstruction.
MB>Darwinian theory successfully accounts for a variety of modern
>changes. Scientists have shown that the average beak size of
>Galapagos finches changed in response to altered weather patterns.
>Likewise, the ratio of dark- to light-colored moths in England
>shifted when pollution make light-colored moths more visible to
>predators. Mutant bacteria survive when they become resistant to
>antibiotics. These are all clear examples of natural selection in
>action.
Yes. This is "natural selection in action" but not *evolution* "in
action". Nothing actually changes into anything fundamentally
different, as Grasse points out:
"The "evolution in action" of J. Huxley end other biologists is
simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of
genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned
have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries!
Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of
the genome, does not imply evolution, and we have tangible proof of
this in many panchronic species [i.e. living fossils that remain
unchanged for millions of years]...." (Grasse P.P., "Evolution of
Living Organisms", Academic Press: New York, 1977, p130, in Johnson
P.E., "Darwin on Trial", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove Ill.,
Second Edition, 1993, p27)
MB>But these examples involve only one or a few mutations, and the
>mutant organism is not much different from its ancestor. Yet to
>account for all of life, a series of mutations would have to produce
>very different types of creatures. That has not yet been
>demonstrated.
This huge gap between the actual demonstrated empircal evidence for
what Darwinist mechanisms of random mutation + natural selection can
do (eg. peppered moth colour, sickle-cell anaemia, DDT resistance,
etc) and what Darwinism requires them to do (eg. produce 32 orders
of mammals including elephants, kangaroos and whales from a
rodent-like common ancestor in just 5-10 million years), must be
unique in the annals of science.
MB>Darwin's theory encounters its greatest difficulties when it comes
>to explaining the development of the cell. Many cellular systems
>are what I term "irreducibly complex." That means the system needs
>several components before it can work properly. An everyday example
>of irreducible complexity is a mousetrap, built of several pieces
>(platform, hammer, spring and so on). Such a system probably cannot
>be put together in a Darwinian manner, gradually improving its
>function. You can't catch a mouse with just the platform and then
>catch a few more by adding the spring. All the pieces have to be in
>place before you catch any mice.
Usually Darwinists slide past this "irreducible complexity" problem
by postulating "just-so" stories. They cannot prove these stories
are right, but neither can critics prove them wrong. However in the
case of biomolecular machines, Behe shows that even Darwinists'
imaginations fail. There are *no* detailed explanations in the
scientific literature for how biomolecular systems came to be. For
example:
The origin of Cilia: Only 2 short papers in all journals:
"A quick electronic search of the professional literature shows more
than a thousand papers in the past several years that have cilia or a
similar word in the title. Papers have appeared on related topics in
almost all the major biochemistry journals, including Science,
Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Biochemistry, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Molecular
Biology, Cell, and numerous others. In the past several decades,
probably ten thousand papers have been published concerning cilia.
Since there is such a large literature on the cilium, since it is of
interest to such diverse fields, and since it is widely stated that
the theory of evolution is the basis of all modern biology, then one
would expect that the evolution of the cilium would be the subject of
a significant number of papers in the professional literature....In
the past two decades, however, only two articles even attempted to
suggest a model for the evolution of the cilium that takes into
account real mechanical considerations Worse the two papers disagree
with each other even about the general route such an evolution might
take. Neither paper discusses crucial quantitative details, or
possible problems that would quickly cause a mechanical device such
as a cilium or a mousetrap to be useless...Each points out the
enormous problems with the other's model, and each is correct. What
is fatal, however, is that neither side has filled in any mechanistic
details for its model. Without details, discussion is doomed to be
unscientific and fruitless. The scientific community at large has
ignored both contributions; neither paper has been cited by other
scientists more than a handful of times in the years since
publication. The amount of scientific research that has been and is
being done on the cilium-and the great increase over the past few
decades in our understanding of how the cilium works lead many people
to assume that even if they themselves don't know how the cilium
evolved, somebody must know. But a search of the professional
literature proves them wrong. Nobody knows." (Behe, 1996, pp67-69)
The origin of bacterial flagellum: no paper has ever been published:
"The bacterial flagellum, in addition to the proteins already
discussed, requires about forty other proteins for function. Again,
the The general professional literature on the bacterial flagellum is
about as rich as the literature on the cilium, with thousands of
papers published on the subject over the years. That isn't
surprising; the flagellum is a fascinating biophysical system, and
flagellated bacteria are medically important. Yet here again, the
evolutionary literature is totally missing. Even though we are told
that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no
scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual
evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine." (Behe, 1996,
p72)
The origin of blood-clotting: the world's leading experts don't
know:
"Russell Doolittle, a professor of biochemistry at the Center for
Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, is the most
prominent person interested in the evolution of the clotting cascade
Biochemistry of Blood Coagulation" (1961), Professor Doolittle has
examined the clotting systems of different, "simpler" organisms in
the hope that that would lead to an understanding of how the
mammalian system arose. Doolittle recently reviewed the state of
current knowledge in an article in the journal Thrombosis and
Haemostasis. The journal is in tended for professional scientists
and doctors of medicine who work on aspects of blood clotting.
Essentially, the audience for the journal is those people who know
more about blood clotting than anyone else on earth. Doolittle
begins his article by asking the big question: "How in the world did
this complex and delicately balanced process evolve?... The paradox
was, if each protein depended on activation by another, how could the
system ever have arisen? Of what use would any part of the scheme be
without the whole ensemble?"..let's take a little time to give
Professor Doolittle's scenario a critical look. The first thing to
notice is that no causative factors are cited. Thus tissue factor
"appears," fibrinogen "is born," antiplasmin "arises," TPA "springs
forth," a cross-linking protein "is unleashed," and so forth. What
exactly, we might ask, is causing all this springing and unleashing?
Doolittle appears to have in mind a step- by-step Darwinian scenario
involving the undirected, random duplication and recombination of
gene pieces. But consider the enormous amount of luck needed to get
the right gene pieces in the right places...Recall that Doolittle's
audience for the article in thrombosis and Haemostasis are the
leaders in clotting research -they know the state of the art. Yet
the article does not explain to them how clotting might have
originated and subsequently evolved; instead, it just tells a story.
The fact is, no one on earth has the vaguest idea how the coagulation
cascade came to be." (Behe, 1996, pp91-97)
The origin of intracellular vesicular transport: there is no
explanation in biochemistry literature:
"Because of the medical problems associated with the failure of the
transport system, and because the system is so intricate and
fascinating, we might expect the evolutionary development of
vesicular protein transport to be a busy area of research. How could
such a system develop step-by-step?...Once again, if we looked in the
literature for an explanation of the evolution of vesicular
transport, we would be crushingly disappointed. Nothing is there.
Annual Review of Biochemistry (or ARB)is a book series, very popular
with biochemists, that reviews the current state of knowledge in
selected research areas. In 1992 an article was published in ARB
concerning "Vesicle-Mediated Protein Sorting," The authors begin
their review by stating the obvious: "The transport of proteins
between membrane-bounded organelles is an immensely complex process."
They proceed in professional fashion to describe the systems and
current research in the area. But we can read from one end of the
forty-six-page review to the other without encountering an
explanation for how such a system might have gradually evolved, The
topic is off the radar screen. Logging on to a computer database of
the professional literature in the biomedical sciences allows you to
do a quick search for key words in the titles of literally hundreds
of thousands of papers. A search to see what titles have both
evolution and vesicle in them comes up completely empty. Slogging
through the literature the old- fashioned way turns up a few
scattered papers that speculate on how gated transport between
compartments of a eukaryotic cell might have developed. But all the
papers assume that the transport systems came from preexisting
bacterial transport systems that already had all the components that
modern cells have. This does us no good. Although the speculations
may have something to do with how transport systems could be
duplicated, they have nothing to do with how the initial systems got
there. At some point this complex machine had to come into
existence, and it could not have done so in step-by-step fashion."
(Behe, 1996, pp114-115)
the origin of the immune system: there are only 2 short papers in
all the immunological literature:
"Although great strides have been made in understanding how the
immune system works, we remain ignorant of how it came to be. None
of the questions raised in this chapter has been answered by any of
the thousands of scientists in the field; few have even asked the
questions. A search of the immunological literature shows ongoing
work in comparative immunology (the study of immune systems from
various species). But that work, valuable though it is, does not
address in molecular detail the question of how immune systems
originated. Perhaps the best efforts at doing that so far have been
in two short papers. The first, by Nobel laureate David Baltimore
and two other prominent scientists, is tantalizingly entitled
"Molecular Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System." But it's hard
to live up to such a title in just two pages...Another paper that
gamely tries to account for a piece of the immune system is entitled
"Evolution of the Complement System." Like the paper discussed
above, it is very short and is a commentary article in other words,
not a research article. The authors make some imaginative guesses
about what might come first and second, but inevitably they join
Russell Doolittle in proposing unexplained proteins that are
"unleashed" and "spring forth"...No quantitative calculations appear
in the paper. Nor does an acknowledgment that gene duplications
would not immediately make a new protein. Nor does any worry about a
lack of controls to regulate the pathway. But then, it would be hard
to fit those concerns in the four paragraphs of the paper that deal
with molecular mechanisms." (Behe, 1996, pp136-138)
[continued]
God bless.
Steve
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