Evolution is Still Not a Theory in Crisis, but Neo-Darwinism Might Be

Faith & Science Conversation
65

@Eddie,

I think the problem goes a little deeper than public relations problems.

When I read ridiculous paragraphs like the following:

"As a preliminary point, it’s important to note that human/ape common ancestry is compatible with ID. Nonetheless, ID proponents are interested in taking a scientific approach to these questions, and the evidence suggests that even modest changes requiring two or more mutations before conferring any adaptive benefit could not arise via Darwinian evolution under any reasonable timescale involving human/ape common ancestry. As a result, questions about human/ape common ancestry should be on the table for people who really want to follow the evidence where it leads. "

“The basic issue is this: Despite the fact that human/ape genetic similarities are often overstated, YES, in many instances it is true that humans and chimps have very high levels of genetic similarity. Does this functional genetic similarity bolster neo-Darwinian evolution and human/ape common ancestry? Not at all. In fact, we could have predicted these similarities without any knowledge of Darwinian evolution simply by observing that humans have similar body plans to apes. If similar morphology implies similar genetics, then we could predict these high levels of similarities without even thinking about considerations pertaining to common ancestry.”

It is insidious writings like this that EARN Discovery Institute the reputation for disingenuous that is frequently highlighted on the Boards of BioLogos.

Yes … humans and apes walk on 2 legs … but that is not the driving factor for a shared broken gene responsible for the ability to make Vitamin C !!!

Below is the link for the article from which the 2 paragraphs come:

Human Evolution and Common Ancestry: Following The Evidence
Casey Luskin, Discovery Institute,May 25, 2012

67

Referring to comments on this thread - regarding irreducible complexity.

Irreducible complexity can be shown to be the primordial condition of life. It is the necessary material condition that enables the organization of the cell. Without it, you have nothing. I fully recognize that these are fighting words among the people here. This is particularly true for those who draw their perceptions about IC from socio-politics and judges decisions, instead of from physical systems themselves. But either you accept the fact, or you are basically forced to ignore the universal observations of physics.

To organize the heterogeneous cell requires the ability to specify a thing among alternatives and to place it under temporal control. This is what protein synthesis accomplishes. The ability to specify a thing is a pragmatic utility that the system gains by virtue of having an informational medium and the capacity to translate that medium into physical effects.

But an informational medium is the product of organization, a very particular organization. It requires one arrangement of matter to serve as the representation, and a second arrangement of matter to establish what is being represented.

The system is able to function because it’s organized in a way that preserves the natural discontinuity (arbitrariness) between the arrangement of the medium and the determination of its effect. This is explicitly what makes a representation a representation.

By preserving the discontinuity, it establishes a relationship within the operation of the system, making it possible to specify something in a material universe where nothing inherently represents anything else. All informational mediums share this distinction, and the genetic system is no exception.

After all, ‘present leucine for binding now’ is not something that can be derived from the physical properties of a codon. In other words, it is not the arrangement of the codon that determines that leucine is to be added to a protein, it requires the leucyl-tRNA synthetase to independently establish that relationship – which is a systematic relationship that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Thus, like every other instance of translated information ever known to exist, the system requires one arrangement of matter to evoke an effect, and a second arrangement of matter to determine what the effect will be. Also like all other instances of translated information, the system must preserve the natural discontinuity between the representation and its effect. (note: The cell accomplishes this by physically separating the establishment of the code from the reading of the codons).

So, without these IC relationships, the system could not physically accomplish what must be done, and the living cell could not be organized. It is a dictate of physical law.

Irreducible Complexity: the primordial condition of biology

An Easy Understanding of Semiosis
.

1 Like
68

@gbrooks9, very well stated!

Yes, your two-point example is exactly the kind of thinking that I wish more people would consider when they get so demanding with questions like, “So do you think God intervenes in his creation or not?” I certainly believe that the kenosis of Jesus Christ in the incarnation was an “ultimate intervention” of a sort, but I feel uncomfortable with the implications of speaking in terms of “constant intervention” in that it seems to imply that (1) God’s creation was somehow not operating as God had intended, and (2) therefore, God has to constantly guide, tweak, correct, repair, and “fix” what he didn’t get right the first time. So in the case of the 6 miles-wide meteor, I personally prefer a “stronger” form of #2 which I’ll dub #3: “Creating the universe with laws of physics in such a way that God’s plan for that meteor and planet earth would eventually be at the same place at the same time.”

Of course, it is virtually impossible for us to avoid having to use anthropomorphic scenarios and language when describing God’s dealings with his creation. Yet I tend to view the “ever vigilant, always-supervising God who constantly has to intervene in order to prevent the universe from doing something it shouldn’t” as a very weak kind of creator. It implies that God didn’t get it right the first time and was unable to create a universe that DOESN’T need constant tweaking to stay within the plan.

Obviously, my stance can be just as prone to majoring on minors----if overblown into anything more than a helpful analogy. That’s why I like your footnote classification of the issue.

I do think that these kinds of discussions on Biologos can help people to understand why many of us don’t like to be pinned down with yes/no questions about “Did God guide evolution?” The word guide implies, in the minds of many of us, a kind of crude intervention that fails to appreciate that God’s sovereignty over his creation is far grander than that.

That is why I’ve never liked the “Did God guide evolution?” question. For me, it is similar to asking, “Does God guide gravity?” While it is true that God willed that baseballs fall to the ground, I don’t think of it as intervention. Instead, I assume that God created a universe where gravity exerts predictable forces on masses. God doesn’t have to intervene (or issue commands to angels, as some theologians in the Middle Ages explained the movement of the planets) to impose his will on baseballs. Likewise, for a Creator who is outside of time because he created time, he need not “wait” until a critical juncture of evolutionary history to nudge along a particular mutation and/or cause a change in a particular allele frequency in a population. No, I believe God’s sovereignty was *always at work" from the very beginning.

Of course, this topic gets us into the whole “random chance” issue, which the Bible is quite clear about. (Randomness may frustrate people but God determines the outcome of the casting of lots, we are told. So the fact that “random chance” is discussed in evolutionary biology textbooks shouldn’t pose any problems for Christ-followers.)

4 Likes
69

This is the best post I’ve ever read on this subject. Yes, yes, and yes.

71

The arguments put forward via laws of science (gravity, evolution, etc) and how God created become pathologically circular - God and laws of science, but cannot prove any of these as they are constantly changing; God works through evolution, but evolution depends on unpredictable chance mutations (but somehow God works through laws that cannot exist, or perhaps cannot be quantified by science, but these people know what it means).

Atheist’s versions of whatever evolution means (e.g. neoDarwinian) is scientifically sound, yet TE/EC insist they can insert God when atheists remove God.

I wonder if God Himself ends up confused if He tries to follow such nonsense?

72

There are precisely TWO choices for people who think God is involved in the process of evolution

"Since all BioLogos supporters (and all “Old Earth” pro-ID folks) agree that God was involved in the ongoing unfolding of the chain of life on Earth, it becomes more of a footnote as to whether God extinguished Dinosaur life on the planet by:

1) divinely changing the trajectory of the 6 mile-wide meteor into collision with the Earth;
or
2) arranging the trajectory of the meteor back at the very creation of the Cosmos, letting the unfolding of natural laws guide the meteor into its inevitable collision with the Earth."

@Eddie, for those who think God does all his “miracles” through the lawful unfolding of natural processes, your sentence is a virtual crime against logic:

"The parallel of evolution with gravity (or other natural forces such as magnetism) is based on a failure to note the distinction between law-governed processes and non-law-governed processes. "

To such believers EVERYTHING is lawful.

George

73

You’re assuming that the informational medium has to be different from the machinery that puts the information into action. On what basis?

74

You’re assuming that the informational medium has to be different from the machinery that puts the information into action. On what basis?

Hello,

The issue is not that an “informational medium has to be different from the machinery that puts the information into action”, the issue is that the arrangement of the medium does not determine the effect it evokes in the system. That relationship is determined elsewhere by an entirely different arrangement of matter, in complete isolation from the reading of the medium. This discontinuity is what makes it physically possible for nucleic representations to result in amino acid effects.

On that front, I am only assuming that our universal observations are correct. The amino acid-to-anticondon association is determined by the structure of the protein aaRS, in complete isolation from the codon-to-anticodon association (which ultimately must describe the structure of the aaRS).

The true assumption would be that life can come from non-life; that the system can work substantively different than the way we find it; that the discontinuity found in semiotic systems is unnecessary to the effect.

76

I dont think that is quite correct. There are two ways it might not be. First is if the law is stochastic, as in quantum mechanics, and more importantly if the law is deterministic but governed by chaotic dynamics, so that prediction is impossible. This is why there are so few truly mathematical laws in biology. I think the best we will able to do is devise inequalities (rather than equations) to fit the reality of life’s complexity.

77

The notions of laws of nature, chaos, probabilities and maths is discussed in an excellent manner by Heller within the context of Science and the Creation in his Book, “The Work of Creation”. Chapter II is titled “Chaos, Probability, and the World”.
One view that is proposed by, for example, J. D. Barrow and J. Silk, The Left Hand of Creation: The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe, London: Unwin, 1983, 213. Is summarised by Heller:

“… It is just possible that complete anarchy may be the only real law of nature. People have even debated that the presence of symmetry in Nature is an illusion, that the rules, governing which symmetries nature displays, may have a purely random origin. Some preliminary investigations suggest that even if the choice is random among all the allowable ways nature could behave, orderly physics can still result with all the appearances of symmetry.”

It is impossible to go into an in depth discussion of probability, uncertainty, and deterministic, but a couple of quotes may prove informative. The first deals with measurements: “Probability is just a measure satisfying one additional condition: the measure of the entire space should be equal to one. Consequently, the measure of any of its subsets is either zero or a fraction between zero and one. If this axiom is satisfied the measure space with its measurable subsets is called probability space, and the measure defined on it the probability distribution. Let us notice that so far there is nothing in our theory that would suggest an uncertainty or indeterminacy we intuitively connect with the idea of probability.”

The next notion is frequency stability in the world, “But the world is frequency stable, and it is clear that without this property the probability calculus could not be applied to analyze the occurrence of events in the world. We can say that owing to its frequency stability the world is probabilistically compressible.A priori we could expect that truly chaotic or random phenomena would evade any mathematical description, but in fact the description of phenomena we call random or chaotic is not only possible but can be compressed into the formulae of the probability theory. The probabilistic compressibility of the world turns out to be a special instance of its algorithmic compressibility, and one would dare to say that it is the most astonishing (or the most unreasonable) instance of it.”

I have commitments that restrict my time, but I plan to look into these aspects in greater depth if time permits, to see if biological events can be treated in this way. The notions of chaos, uncertainty, indeterminacy and frequency, need to be better understood, and hopefully these comments may encourage people to seek a better understanding.

79

You seem to be saying the same thing in different words. Yes, I agree, current life stores genetic information in nucleic acids and carries out (most) chemical processes through proteins; that system is IC. I’m asking why there has to be that separation. You say that universal physical principles require it, but what are they?

I’m sure you know that the interdependence of proteins and DNA is widely understood, and one of the motivations for the suggestion that an RNA world preceded our current DNA-based life. In that world, the nucleic acid both stores information and carries out much of the chemical processing. So what physical principles prohibit the existence of RNA world?

80

Eddie

I mentioned quantum physics only to suggest that there are non deterministic laws of science. But of course, the unpredictability of quantum events is only true at the single particle level. If Patrick were around, he would assure you that for actual large objects, (like lasers and oher modern devices) quantum theory can make extremely good predictions.

You are right that evolution probably has little to do with quantum dynamics, although there is a theory that mutations might be the result of truly stochastic events at the electron level in DNA bases. I dont believe that is true based on data (to be discussed another time).

As for your question about chaos, no that is not stochastic but deterministic, so that if we knew the real starting conditions, (the number and behavior of all the butterflies beating their wings, for example) we could predict the weather for years in advance. But we never will and so we cant.

As for evolution, that is a very good question. There are some aspects of some of the newer ideas in evolutionary biology that could indeed be related to chaos theory, which would explain why we cannot predict evolutionary outcomes. But the key word there is “we”. We are not omnicient. God is. We might never find a predictive law for evolution, but that doesnt mean there isnt one. I believe, (but I would be very happy to see arguments against this) that the deterministic, but non predictable laws of evolution, could be a very strong pointer to the action of an all knowing, all powerful designer.

1 Like
81

@Eddie,

I am fine with your proposal to use the term “ID Evolutionists”.

How many “Old Earth Non Evolutionists” do you think there are in America? I have to wonder if MUCH TOO MUCH is made about a group that may only amount to a few hundred well funded supporters.

George

Side-Note:

The whole issue of labels seems to have suffered from the insistence to argue over labels more than any intent to AVOID the disputes. That is why I am quick to accept your proposed label.

Under one discussion on the term “Old Earth Creationism” (as opposed to my “Old Earth ID”) we find the most confusing of outlines:

Types -
Gap creationism
Progressive creationism
Theistic evolution
Hindu creationism

This is approach seems to be more about POLARIZING discussion rather than helping to reduce the confusion…

84

Really? One hundred people who believe in Creationism, but that also believe the earth is 5 billion years old? If you say so. I have yet to meet a single one. Obviously we move in different circles. I stand corrected.

But as I say above:

I am fine with your proposal to use the term “ID Evolutionists”.

I liked your general discussion on this:

“ID Evolutionist” is not a term that is yet widely used, but because an “ID [E]volutionist” cannot be confused with an OEC, a YEC, or a TE/EC, it seems permissible to use the term. Since you and I agree on this, let’s agree from now on that when we refer to ID supporters who accept both an old earth and macroevolution, we will call them
“ID [E]volutionists,” and that among the ID evolutionists are Behe and Denton.

Most of the ID leaders, under this terminology, will not be “ID [E]volutionists.” They will be either OECs or YECs (in addition to being ID people). Dembski used to be OEC, and, despite a temporary apparent diversion into YEC, may well be one again. Meyer is an OEC. Snoke is I believe an OEC. I’m not sure about Wells or Hunter. The only ID leader that I know for sure to be a YEC is Paul Nelson. It may that Casey Luskin is YEC as well, though I don’t know that.

As you can see from my use of brackets, I fully endorse capitalizing both parts of the new label: “ID Evolutionists”.