BIOCHEMISTRY

"The uniform failure in literally thousands of experimental attempts to synthesize protein or DNA under even questionable prebiotic conditions is a monument to the difficulty in achieving a high degree of information content, or specified complexity from the undirected flow of energy through a system. We must not forget that the total work to create a living system goes far beyond the work to create DNA and protein...

"The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of billions of years during which prebiotic evolution occurred."

"No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have a random beginning ... there are about two thousand enzymes, the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)^2000 = 10^40,000 , an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."

Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario "the myth of the prebiotic soup.""

SOURCE: Thaxton, Charles B., Bradley, Walter L. & Olsen, Rodger L.
The Mystery of Life's Origin; Reassessing Current Theories

With the apparent collapse of the organic soup theories, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor began to play a important role in most origin-of-life explanations. Penn State and SUNNY-Stony Brook researchers recently evaluated the likehood of ammonia formation (NH3) under primitive hydrothermal vent conditions. Ammonia serves as a key starting material in the synthesis of amino acids and other biologically important nitrogen-containing compounds.

"Reduced nitrogen compounds (e.g., NH3 (NH4+), HCN, and Urea) are far more reactive reagents in prebiotic synthesis reactions than N2. Hence, for prebiotic synthesis reactions, such as amino acid formation, to occur in and around hydrothermal systems reduced N-compounds need to be advected or formed in situ. Here we have examined the in situ formation of reduced N-compounds. Reaction path modeling indicates that ammonium is the stable N-species below 350 °C in solutions buffered by any of the common mineral buffers, except hematite-magnetite. None of the conditions yield any other reduced N-compounds at concentrations above 10-9 M. The few available gas data on modern vent systems show, however, that N2 is far more abundant than NH4+. Possible sources for N2 include unreacted N2 dissolved in recharging seawater or mantle-derived N2. We compared molar N:2/Ar ratios for vent solutions to those for MORB (65) and air-saturated seawater (asw) (36). Furthermore, we compared the concentration of dissolved N2 in vents to that in asw. The data suggest that most N2 entrained in the recharging seawater does not react. Therefore, to provide reduced N-compounds for prebiotic synthesis in and around vent systems it is necessary to: 1) advect the reduced compounds or 2) have a more reactive mineral assemblage on the early earth."

This lack of adequate ammonia production under the conditions tested makes the origin of life at deep-sea hydrothermal vents unlikely.

Reference: Reduced Nitrogen Compounds in Hydrothermal Vent Systems: A Critical Evaluation: Martin Schoonen, SUNY-Stony Brook, Oral Presentation, 17 April 2002: Origin of Life/Prebiotic Chemistry

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BIOGENETICS

"We saw mounting problems in the assumptions underlying chemical evolution accounts of the origin of life. We observed how biological structures exhibit the characteristics of manufactured things. We became aware of the enormous difficulties for the chance production of functional information in the message text of DNA.

... The demands of this information cast their shadow on the macro-evolutionary hypothesis that mutations might somehow bring about the elaborate and specific complexity of biological structures. ... Despite vigorous efforts, no new levels of complexity have been achieved in experimental breeds. Instead, changes have been quite limited, and highly bred organisms have often suffered loss of genetic information. ...

The data from a variety of fields have come together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. While many pieces are still missing, there is nevertheless a picture of clusters of organisms, each harboring variation in nondefining traits, and each major grouping separated from others by distinct gaps. ... We must never give the impression that our present scientific knowledge has provided all the answers, but we can say that the data have not served to support a picture of the organic world consistent with Darwinian evolution."

SOURCE: Davis, Percival & Kenyon, Dean H.
Of Pandas and People; The Central Question of Biological Origins

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MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

"There is simply no way of explaining how a uniform rate of evolution could have occurred in any family of homologous proteins by either chance or selection; and, even if we could advance an explanation for one particular protein family, we would still be left with the mystifying problem of explaining why other protein families should have evolved at different rates. The more deeply the problem is examined the less it appears amenable to solution in terms of chance and selection.

On the whole, the new biochemical picture has not had the effect that evolutionary theorists have hoped. It has not blurred the distinction between living and non-living objects. The recently revealed world of molecular machinery, of coding systems, of informational molecules, of catalytic devices, and feedback control, is in its design and complexity quite unique to living systems and without parallel in non-living nature.

Despite the fact that no convincing explanation of how random evolutionary processes could have resulted in such an ordered pattern of diversity, the idea of uniform rates of evolution is presented in the literature as if it were an empirical discovery.

... wherever we find significant empirical discontinuities in nature we invariably face great, if not insurmountable, conceptual problems in envisaging how the gaps could have been bridged in terms of gradual random processes. We saw this in the fossil record, we saw it in the case of the feather, in the case of the avian lung and in the case of the wing of the bat. We saw it again in the case of the origin of life and we see it here in the new area of comparative biochemistry.

... Yet in the face of this extraordinary discovery the biological community seems content to offer explanations which are no more than apologetic tautologies."

SOURCE: Denton, Michael
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

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PERISHABLE DARWIN

"Biochemistry has pushed Darwin's theory to the limit. It has done so by opening the ultimate black box, the cell, thereby making possible our understanding of how life works. It is the astonishing complexity of subcellular organic structures that has forced the question, How could all this have evolved? ...

The beginnings of modern biochemistry came only after neo-Darwinism had been officially launched. Thus, just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry. The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life. ...

Mathematicians over the years have complained that Darwinism's numbers just do not add up. Information theorist Hubert Yockey argues that the information needed to begin life could not have developed by chance; he suggests that life be considered a given, like matter or energy. ...

Many scientists are skeptical that Darwinian mechanisms can explain all of life, but a large number do believe it. Since we have just seen that the professional biochemical literature contains no papers or books that explain in detail how complex systems might have arisen, why is Darwinism nonetheless credible with many biochemists? A large part of the answer is that they have been taught as part of their biochemical training that Darwinism is true. To understand both the success of Darwinism as orthodoxy and its failure as science at the molecular level, we have to examine the textbooks that are used to teach aspiring scientists. ...

Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature--in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books--that describe how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that--the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.

"Publish or perish" is a proverb that academicians take seriously. If you do not publish your work for the rest of the community to evaluate, then you have no business in academia (and if you don't already have tenure, you will be banished). But the saying can be applied to theories as well. If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished. Despite comparing sequences and mathematical modeling, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be. In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish." ...

SOURCE: Behe, Michael J.
Darwin's Black Box; The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

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PALEONTOLOGY

"We do not know how the immensely complex organ systems of plants and animals could have been created by mindless and purposeless natural processes, ... Darwinian theory attributed biological complexity to the accumulation of adaptive micromutations by natural selection, but the creative power of this hypothetical mechanism has never been demonstrated, and fossil evidence is inconsistent with the claim that biological creation occurred in that way.

According to Steven Stanley, the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming contains a continuous local record of fossil deposits for about five million years, during an early period in the age of mammals. Because this record is so complete, paleontologists assumed that certain populations of the basin could be linked together to illustrate continuous evolution. On the contrary, species that were once thought to have turned into others turn out to overlap in time with their alleged descendants, and "the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another".

... the fossil record shows a consistent pattern of sudden appearance followed by stasis, that life's history is more a story of variation around a set of basic designs than one of accumulating improvement, that extinction has been predominantly by catastrophe rather than gradual obsolescence, and that orthodox interpretations of the fossil record often owe more to Darwinist preconception than to the evidence itself."

SOURCE: Johnson, Philip E.
Darwin on Trial

"One can't help wondering how much of the fossil record might be the result of the direct influence of environment on the phenotype without any change in the genotype. We know the form and shape of teeth is strongly influenced by diet. Similarly, the form of bones is strongly influenced by the forces to which they are subjected during growth. Many of the fossils that have made the news as "missing links" consist mostly of teeth. Most of the rest are bones. What kind of support can fossils of bones and teeth, then, give to the randomness postulate of the neo-Darwinian theory? ... we see that what has been recognized as clear examples of evolution could have been the result of the environment acting on the developing embryo. It may have nothing at all to do with genetic variation or natural selection.

"A theory built on random events must be checked against the probabilities of those events -- that's the first check that should be made. Why wasn't that check made? When the theory was established in the 30's and 40's, the molecular basis of mutations was unknown.The DNA as the repository of genetic information was not discovered until a decade later. Indeed, the neo-Darwinians did not think there was a problem with the probability of mutations. But there is a big problem with it.

(3) The experimental evidence should be the most telling of all in favor of a theory. Unfortunately, there is no direct experimental evidence of large-scale evolution. Of course, there is fossil evidence, but at best the fossils only show that there has been changes in living organisms in the past. They don't tell us how those changes took place. They don't even tell us that the later forms of life descended from the earlier forms. To say that they did descend is an inference that must depend upon a theory. So we're back to the question of whether the theory is any good. One cannot say that the fossils support the theory unless we beg the question and assume the theory to be correct."

SOURCE: Dr. Lee Spetner
Not By Chance

"The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life." (Stephen Jay Gould,"The Evolution of Life") The Cambrian Explosion has long been an enigma for biology. The more we learn about the introduction of complex animals on earth, the more puzzling the Cambrian event becomes for evolutionary biologists. The authors of the reference identified 182 possible skeletal designs, and of these 182 possibilities, 146 appeared during the Cambrian Explosion. That is, over 80% of all possible skeletal designs appeared suddenly in less than 3 million years based on recent evidences. (The unrepresented skeletal designs include land animals and vertebrates which do not appear in the Cambrian layer.)

Reference: R.D.K. Thomas, Rebecca M. Shearman, and Graham W. Stewart, "Evolutionary Exploitation of design options by the First Animals with Hard Skeletons," Science 288 (2000): 1239-42

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NEANDERTAL

Many past and present text books propose that Neandertal fossils are evidence, and possibly even proof, of the evolution of the human species from primates. But recent findings tend to refute this conclusion! Analysis of Neandertal DNA by Kahn and Gibbons(1) indicates that homo sapiens, the human race, is neither descended from, nor in any way related to the Neandertal species.

After much painstaking work the research team was able to extract and match pieces of Neandertal DNA strings from the very first Neandertal skeleton ever found, which was dug from a limestone quarry in Neandertal, Germany in 1856. When these fragments were compared with DNA sequences from living humans the differences were enormous. An average of 26 nucleotide links in the DNA chain differed completely. While other studies have found that modern humans differed from one another by an average of only eight links of the chain, and these differences are very slight. Also analysis of an ancient human skeleton (estimated to be 10,000 years old) found only one nucleotide base pair differed from the DNA of modern Europeans.

Their conclusion is also backed up by careful examination of Neandertal skulls by Schwartz and Tattersall (2). From examining carefully more than a dozen skulls they noted that the nasal bones and sinus cavities of Neandertal were many times larger than that of modern humans and that there were no tear ducts. These large anatomical differences they concluded, eliminated the Neandertal from the line of human ancestry.

In the future much will undoubtedly be learned by new techniques concerning the "origin" of the human species. Recent studies have indicated based on mitochondrial DNA that this origin was less than 150,000 years ago (1), and at less than 49,000 years ago based on Y-chromosome analysis (3). We anxiously wait to see how long it will take for those who propose the evolutionary origin of humans to modify their texts based on the above conclusions and how they will modify their proposed "family tree" for the human species!

REFERENCES: (1) Patricia Kahn and Ann Gibbons, "DNA From an Extinct Human," Science, 277 (1997), pp. 176-178.

(2) Jeffrey A Schwartz and Ian Tattersall, "Significance of Some Previously Unaccompanied Apomorphies in the Nasal Region of Homoneandertalenses," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 93 (1996), pp. 10852-10854.

(3) I. Simon Whitfield, John E. Sulston, and Peter N. Goodfellow, "Sequence Variation of the Human Y-Chromosome," Nature, 378 (1995), pp. 379-380.

"Richard Klein, professor of anthropological sciences, in his new book, The Dawn of Human Culture (John Wiley & Sons, April 2002), proposes a plausible theory for the latest stages of human evolution. "It's a nontestable hypothesis," Klein admits. "The book is about human evolution as I understand the record. My genetic explanation for the major behavioral change 50,000 years ago is the most plausible one, but I can't prove it." For Klein this neural mutation hypothesis is the most economical explanation of why anatomy and human behavior drifted apart. Fossilized skulls reveal little about the brain underneath. But a gene mutation may have changed critical neural processes such as speech and language.

The now widely accepted "Out-of-Africa-2" hypothesis is based on the appearance of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans on a small patch in Eastern Africa as recently as 50,000 years ago. All of a sudden these early modern humans developed a new repertoire of hunting skills, novel forms of social interaction and a sense of art. They became creative innovators expanding their mental and technical capabilities. These new achievements drove the early modern humans out of Africa to spread over Europe and Asia. Within a short period of only about 15,000 years they supplanted the Neanderthals in Europe and other nonmodern humans in other parts of the world.

... "What about Neanderthal language? The truth is that we don't know. One clue may be the position of the voice box (or larynx )... The position of the voice box is related to the shape of the skull base ... On the three Neanderthal skulls that are well enough preserved to show the base of the skull base, it appears to have been flat, and this might mean that neanderthals could not have produced speech as we know it. ... fossil evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans had long been on separate evolutionary tracks, justifies their assignment to the separate species Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens respectively."

The cause for the drastic change in behavior in the early modern humans is unknown. But the most plausible explanation for the success of modern humans is a sudden biological change.

"A fortuitous mutation may have promoted the fully modern brain,"
Klein says. As human brains reached today's size hundreds of thousands of years earlier and skull size didn't change drastically, this mutation would have affected cognitive power rather than overall brain structure. Some of the new (and old) evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, or even contradictory, but this is inevitable in historical science, which has more in common with a criminal trial than it does with a physics experiment."

(Stanford Report, April 26, 2002, "Anthropologist explores the dawn of human culture in new book" by Christian Heuss and "The Dawn of Human Culture" by Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar, 2002)

Note: "A fortuitous mutation" , the basis for the entire "theory of evolution", multiplied over and over, from organic slime to the modern human!! "It's a nontestable hypothesis", dosen't this also apply to and describe the entire "theory of evolution"?

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PHILOSOPHY

"Although we cannot analyze the real world so easily, we do see that the experimental work of the past few decades have raised many similar objections as to why carbon-based life could not simply pop up out of nowhere.

... To have a viable theory of abiogenesis, we at least need to find the minimal life-form that can reproduce enough to have a fair shot at evolving. Right now, as far as we can see, a naked gene doesn't have much of a chance at that. Probably an RNA-enzyme system doesn't have much of a chance in the real world either.

So it would seem that the idea of abiogenesis in the real world is fraught with difficulties, perhaps even more so than it was for our viruses. In short, "one must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present." Certainly it would appear that these difficulties will not go away anytime soon.

Furthermore, the philosophical commitments of Darwinism seem to be poisoning it from within. Darwin's hypothesis is undeniably linked to the idea that atomistic materialism is absolute truth, because it posits that materialism not in the laboratory, but in history. Therefore Darwinism demands a degree of philosophical commitment which ordinary science does not. That makes Darwin's hypothesis philosophically fragile. It requires belief. Despite the fragility of this idea, it has become the scientist's paradigm, and he is rarely ready to admit that it is fragile and charged with philosophy.

... scientists should take great pains to found any theory of evolution in a philosophically neutral way. ... if you base a theory on a philosophical truism, you only end up in a philosophical conundrum, because your theory is ascientific to begin with, and you're forever damned to be arguing philosophical issues while trying to maintain a non-philosophic, scientific posture. That is exactly what present day evolution faces,...

Artificial life seems to offer us the machinery to go about formulating a theory of evolution that does not start with philosophical truisms, and does not aim to provide an answer to everything. It offers us the ability to analyze evolutionary scenarios much more clearly and deeply than possible in the real world."

SOURCE: Ludwig, Mark A.
Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution

"According to that dogma, mutations are random, and the kind of mutations that occur are independent of the environment. If mutations are really nonrandom in the sense that the environment can stimulate adaptive mutations, then the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, which has dominated the biological sciences for close to 150 years, must be replaced. ... Discoveries in the last fifty years, and particularly in the last twenty, have been forcing evolutionists to patch in changes to the NDT (neo-Darwinian theory). With the natural conservatism of good science, they have been trying to keep these changes minor. The changes nevertheless are stretching the bonds that hold the theory to the facts. That bond has been stretched to the breaking point, and evolutionists will soon have to acknowledge that the bond has already snapped. They shall soon have to make a major innovation that will change the theory fundamentally, and force a basic change in the philosophy of evolution. ...

We have seen that random mutations do not put information into the genome. The mutations that contribute to macroevolution are nonrandom -- they are triggered by the environment and lead to adaptive phenotypes. The potential for adaptivity to the environment already exists in the genome. The environment just triggers it. ...

Darwinian evolutionists see the nonrandom interpretation of these expermental results as obviously incorrect because they contradict the neo-Darwinian dogma. I, on the other hand, see this interpretation as confirming, on the bacterial level, the nonrandom variation indicated by many examples in plants and animals -- examples that Darwinian evolutionists have largely ignored because they do not fit in. Resistance to the nonrandom-variation intrepretation stems from a refusal to abandon the Darwinian agenda that must confirm that life arose and developed spontaneously. With that agenda, nonrandom adaptive variation, arising from an environmental signal turning ON an already present set of genes, is hard to account for. One's tendency to accept the nonrandom intrepretation of the experiments on bacterial evolution depends on how strongly one insists on the necessity of the Darwinian agenda. ..."

SOURCE: Dr. Lee Spetner
Not By Chance

..."are current self-organization scenarios for the formation of the first living matter plausible? Most mathematicians normally regard anything with a probability of less than one in 10^50 as mathematical impossibility. The probabilities calculated under the requirements of molecular biology demonstrate mathematical impossibility for the proposition that accidental or chance processes produced the first living matter. Similarly, the probabilities of the precision of values in particle astrophysics required for the formation of such a universe by accident are too vanishingly small to be considered mathematically possible. The problem in self-organization scenarios is in their failure to distinguish between order and complexity and in the absence of a plausible method of generating sufficient information content into inert matter. ...

An objective, reasonable person who follows mathematical and other logical thought processes and the principles of the scientific method will not favor a proposition which has a very low probability over a proposition which has an extremely high probability. Because a person's metaphysical assumptions frequently influence his or her interpretation of data, many otherwise rational persons make unwarranted conclusions, which are based not on evidence and logic, but are made in the absence of evidence and contrary to mathematical probabilities, because of their faith in the ideology of materialism. ... Their conclusions are actually products of their faith in the ideology of materialism, because the selection of a low probability proposition without evidence is not an objective exercise consistent with the methods of science."

SOURCE: Dean L. Overman
A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization

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GRADUATE LEVEL

"... one has to conclude that there is no evidence that a "hot dilute soup" ever existed. In spite of this fact adherents of this paradigm think it ought to have existed for philosophical or ideological reasons ... It is universally the case that text books written for college undergraduates present the primeval soup paradigm as an established fact ... I have emphasized that in science one must follow the results of experiments and mathematics and not one's faith, religion, philosophy or ideology. The primeval soup is unobservable since, by the paradigm, it was destroyed by the organisms from which it presumably emerged. It is most unsatisfactory in science to explain what is observable by what cannot be observed. Since creative skepticism and not faith is the cardinal virtue in science one would expect that proponents of the primeval soup paradigm would be actively searching for direct geological evidence of such a condition of the early ocean. The power of ideology to interpose a fact-proof screen is so great that this has not been done (perhaps for fear that its failure may be exposed)."

SOURCE:Yockey, Hurbert P.
Information Theory and Molecular Biology

"Dr. Hubert Yockey, the world's foremost authority on information theory in molecular biology, ... He shows how information theory can be used to analyze and test ideas about the structure of genetic code."

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GENOMICS

"Comparative genomics" is a new field of science research made possible by recently acquired capabilities to chart all the nucleotides in all the genes of an organism. To date only a limited number of different species have been mapped out. However, it is possible to reach some important preliminary conclusions from this limited data.

Mycolplasma genitalium contains only 470 genes, the smallest number yet discovered for any species. Arcady Mushegian and Eugene Koonin (1) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information have reasoned that whatever genes this simplest of organisms has in common with more complex species are likely to be essential for basic cell functions and necessary for life. They have located 240 such genes and believe that an additional 22 genes are critical for cell survival, and they also trim out 6 which appear to be redundant. The result is a preliminary "ballpark" figure of 256. Realizing that they may possibly have overlooked some essential genes.

The conclusion is that the simplest of known bacterial organisms is not really so simple! And that there is a very large gap between non-organic structures and living organic structures!!!

Anyone proposing that there was a naturalistic origin of life due to "spontaneous generation" must explain how 256+ genes plus all the other chemical components and structures necessary for survival could come together via non-organic processes. And how then does this fortuitous random collection of non-organic chemicals become a living organism and acquire the capability of species reproduction???

REFERENCE:
(1) Arcady R. Mushegian and Eugene V. Koonin, "A Minimal Gene Set for Cellular Life Derived by Comparison of Complete Bacterial Genomes," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, volume 93 (1996), pp. 10268-10273.

"No one knows of an inherent drive in living things toward greater complexity, yet if the life of today had evolved from some simple form, then evolution must have built up a lot of information and complexity. Today's life is very much more complex than whatever simple form of life is supposed to have sprung up from inorganic molecules some four billion years ago. If life as we see it today has evolved, then it must have grown in complexity. Any theory that is supposed to explain Darwin's concept of descent must explain the growth of information and complexity.

... there is no evidence that genetic information can build up through a series of small steps of microevolution. Mutations needed for these small steps have never been observed. By far, most observed mutations have been harmful to the organism. We have seen that there are some point mutations that, under the right circumstances, do give the organism an advantage. There are point mutations that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics. There are some that make insects resistant to insecticides. There are some that increase quantitative traits in farm plants and animals. But all these mutations reduce the information in the gene by making a protein less specific. They add no information, and they add no new molecular capability. Indeed, all mutations studied destroy information. None of them can serve as an example of a mutation that can lead to the large changes of macroevolution.

The NDT (neo-Darwinian theory), based on random variation, cannot account for large evolutionary changes. It can account for only a limited class of small changes. There is no evidence that random mutation and natural selection played any role in the origin of any of the major groups of organisms, including species. ... The NDT dosen't account for the origin of the phyla, the classes, or the orders. It dosen't even account for the origin of species, except in special cases that we may well call trivial compared to the great sweep of life, and which are cases that cannot be extended to include macroevolution."

SOURCE: Dr. Lee Spetner
Not By Chance

"Domain shuffling aside, it remains a mystery how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well-optimized functions. This problem is particularily acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts, such as ligands, receptors, and the downstream regulatory factors with which they interact. In these systems it is not clear how a new function for any protein might be selected for unless the other members of the complex are already present, creating a molecular version of the ancient evolutionary riddle of the chicken and the egg."

SOURCE: Thornton and DeSalle, "Genomics meets phylogenetics",
Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 2000, p. 64

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COMMENTARY

"The Deniable Darwin"

"For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin's doctrine. ... Unable to say what evolution has accomplished, biologists now find themselves unable to say whether evolution has accomplished it. This leaves evolutionary theory in the doubly damned position of having compromised the concepts needed to make sense of life--complexity, adaption, design--while simultaneously conceding that the theory does little to explain them."(1)

" ...point to another misunderstanding. In writing that living creatures appear to offer at least a temporary rebuke to the second law of thermodynamics, my operative word was "appear." ... Living systems do constitute an open system, the sun affording them energy which they then degrade. But the sun shines alike on the living and the dead. And so the question inevitably returns to its old familiar haunts: how did living creatures acquire the mechanisms needed to exploit all that free energy? I have no idea; but then neither does anyone else.

In general, the relationship between the principles of biology, if there are any, and the laws of physics seems to me wide open. There are, after all, three possibilities. Those principles may prove consistent with the laws of physics; inconsistent; or independent. We have no idea at the present which version of events is true. ...

There is no widely accepted, remotely plausible scenario for the emergence of life on earth." ...

"What makes the situation so strange is that evolutionary biologists seem utterly determined to maintain positions from which physicists have long fled. It is the physicists, after all, who have been struck by evidence of design in the cosmos; books pour from the press explaining how this or that feature of the physical world--the fundamental constants, for example--simply could not have been an accident. The biologists will have none of it. Theirs is a world unyieldingly material,... prepared to extend natural selection to the very firmaments themselves, whole universes mutating joyfully or winking out of existence after having failed to make the cosmic cut." (2)

REFERENCES:
(1) David Berlinski, "The Deniable Darwin",Commentary, June 1996, pp. 19-29.
(2)David Berlinski and Critics, "Controversy-Denying Darwin", Commentary, September 1996, pp.4-39.

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