My latest “Eureka!” moment while arguing that Charles Darwin’s famous theory of common descent with modification is actually a rather pathetic explanation for the modern diversity of life came when I realized that the work of Gregor Mendel had been purloined by evolutionary biologists and made the centerpiece of their argument. Clearly, Mendel’s research into genetic recombination demonstrated how descent with modification produced variety in plants, and it stood to reason to assume that the same sort of variety was produced by sexual reproduction by animals.
Indeed, anyone brave (or foolish) enough to express skepticism at the idea that Charles Darwin’s theory explains the origin of new species had better be prepared for an unprecedented degree of anger, scorn, ridicule, and frequent suggestions to consider remedial biology classes. The question remains: does Mendel’s work truly explain the origin of new species, or is that explanation flawed? The idea sounds preposterous on the surface, sort of like the plot of a bad science fiction movie titled Planet of the Furless Apes. Darwin famously scribbled “Monkeys make men” in one of his notebooks to capture the idea that modern evolutionary biologists might call “changes of accumulations in allele frequency changes”, which is a fancy way of saying that humans evolved from apes when certain DNA patterns become dominant while others become recessive.
Humans lost their fur, grew physically smaller but developed bigger brains, simply because we could. It is theoretically possible, and the only other potential explanation in the absence of intelligence and the beauty of design. My question for the advocates of common descent is simple: how did monkeys make men? That business about the frequency of alleles doesn’t really answer my question. Where the rubber meets the road, how did something not human evolve into a human being? Common descent means that at some point, a breeding population of animals that were not human beings began giving birth to human beings, and they nurtured those aberrant children instead of shunning or killing them (as dumb animals typically do to weak or sick offspring.) The theory of common descent claims that every living organism on the planet is literally related. Apes are allegedly our cousins, and bananas are slightly more distant cousins (probably from your father’s side of the family.)
The argument for common descent is relatively simple and straightforward: we can use comparative anatomy (meaning, we look) on monkeys and men, and see the similarities in body plans: two arms, two legs, brain, heart, lungs, opposable thumbs, etc. Both species are classified as mammals. The fossil record provides evidence that has been interpreted to show a series of intermediate steps from prehistoric Old World apes to modern apes and humans through Australopithecus and other fossil specimens of alleged intermediate species. Finally, DNA analysis allegedly shows only about a one percent difference between the genomes of humans and bonobo apes or chimpanzees, and that has also been interpreted to conclude that humans and apes share a common ancestor by descent.
If so many evolutionary biologists are convinced that Darwinism is the only game in town, what criticisms of the theory of natural selection, extrapolated to explain the origin of species, could exist? How could we doubt that sexual reproduction, genetic isolation, and time adequately explain how monkeys (gradually) evolved into men?
The first problem is that the farther back in time we look, comparative anatomy becomes essentially useless. If monkeys make men, then fish make monkeys and men, and single-celled organisms ultimately evolved into everything that exists, slowly over lots of time. The “tree of life” is literally a tree, and you’re related to it via descent through sex because the earth has been around for billions of years, and apparently enough time makes anything possible. Just for the record (with apologies to Monty Python), your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries.
So, with some effort and a whole lot of “careful conjecture”, the fossil record can be interpreted to show that life began simply and evolved from single-celled organisms to progressively more complex plants and animals over lots of time, except the fossil record actually reflects evidence of a theory called punctuated equilibrium. Except Niles Eldridge and Stephen J. Gould’s theory shows repeated cycles of explosive diversity, a long period of stasis with little change, followed by a mass extinction, as opposed to slow and gradual change over long periods of time. In other words, the fossil record doesn’t really show a record of slow and gradual change as much as it shows a record of rapid diversity, long periods with little change, and some cataclysmic event wiping out most existing life, before the cycle repeats.
A second, more serious problem is that the theory itself is predicated on the success of an unproved, and unprovable hypothesis called abiogenesis: the idea that something dead can suddenly become alive without the need for divine intervention. Any synthetic chemist with a scintilla of credibility will admit that the origin of life is a virtually impossible problem to solve, yet the theory of common descent requires that life can be created without a Creator, and life cannot evolve until it exists. Elementary logic dictates that humans evolved from previously existing species in a universe that has not always existed (the Big Bang), then life has not always existed. The arguments that a) life exists, so we can safely assume it happened, and b) it only had to happen once are both woefully inadequate and impossibly optimistic. It’s not unlike a religious person claiming “God” solves all problems, except God is not pseudonymous with Yahweh or Allah. These secular gods are named Time and Luck.
According to the theory of common descent, the earliest common ancestor of humans, whales, bears, dogs, and monkeys was a shrew-like mammal that lived approximately 160 million years ago, which sounds like an awfully long time. But when we start to ask for specific details about how we got from a shrew to a human or a whale when the only known biological process involved is sex, we’re informed that we need to take more biology classes so that we might better understand what “changes of accumulations in allele frequency changes” actually means. However, if we abandon this stubborn, dogmatic belief that Luck and Time destroy any idea of Intelligent Design and consider that DNA is nothing more than a tool employed by a Designer. Does it really make more sense that a fish evolved into an amphibian about 368 million years ago, went onto land, split off into reptiles less than 30 million years later and mammals about 200 million years after that, only for the whale lineage to evolve back into an animal that must live in salt water to survive?
DNA is complex, highly organization information stored inside a living cell…to argue otherwise would be silly. Anyone who has ever watched a television program about forensic science knows that an experienced Crime Scene Investigator can uniquely identify a victim or suspect associated with a smear of blood by analyzing the DNA in the blood. Without having the intelligence to process that raw data (blood) into useful information (the identity of a specific individual) it’s just a mess that needs to be cleaned. In case any doubt remains whether or not DNA is an organic mechanism for storing information, scientists have even been able to prove that DNA stores information about 100 times more efficiently than your computer’s hard drive.
Gregor Mendel’s work supports the argument for common design far better than arguments for common descent because it gives some rational explanation for apparently sophisticated technology found in organisms that allegedly exist only due to enormous amounts of luck and chance. Granted, the “how?” answer isn’t much more gratifying because we can only say that “intelligence did something” that organized raw data as random nucleotides into structured information in an elegant double helix and caused life to exist. Even so, while biologists insist our eyes deceive us with a beguiling illusion of an intelligent design, the engineers steal their best ideas by (poorly) mimicking nature and are called geniuses for their inventions. Perhaps the illusion is actually our reality.
Physicists who properly understand the problems associated with the Big Bang will inevitably agree that our universe should not exist, as far as the statistical probability of this universe is concerned. Synthetic chemists will invariably say pretty much the same thing about the origin of life–it shouldn’t exist, and we shouldn’t be here.
The odds against your existence aren’t one in a hundred, or one-in-a-million, or even one-in-a-billion. The odds against our existence are represented by a number so absurdly small that it’s practically impossible to comprehend or represent visually, unless you can conceive of a decimal point followed by several trillion zeroes, and finally a one.
Yet we are here, very likely due to some grand design.
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