Twelve Steps Forward

The Trends in Science Continuing to Aid Intelligent Design

I have been asked to produce a second edition of my 2005 book, By Design or by Chance? So much has happened in recent years that I certainly won't be staring at a blank screen for long. ID has grown in depth and sophistication—and Darwinism seems to have shrunk. It's still taught in schools, to be sure, but schools are the last place to look for innovation. More and more science media releases tell me that new findings in the life sciences are "unexpected" and "challenging"; fewer than ever claim to prove Darwin right.

But which events in the onrushing tide have mattered most? Let me begin by asking, what science discoveries—had they occurred—would make ID untenable? How about these: Life forms turn out to be much simpler than we thought. An infinite number can randomly swish into or out of existence quite easily on an infinite number of planets in the multiverse we now know we live in. Not only that, but an easily detected psychological quirk explains why some humans attribute these inevitable random movements to the operation of a superior intelligence. Human intelligence turns out to be an illusion anyway. Human consciousness has been shown to be a mere mechanism of a complex brain that maximizes its own survival by generating apparently meaningful information.

Science did not go there. So let me note a few—well, actually a dozen—places it did go. Each could be a chapter in a book.

1. Gene Surprises

The year 2000 saw a huge push to complete the human genome map. The first big surprise to sink in was that humans have only about 20,500 genes. Water fleas have 31,000. Humans have 46 chromosomes, but ferns have 630. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, in recent years, much of the vast mass of "junk DNA" celebrated by Darwinians as evidence for their theory has been shown to have functional elements. Perhaps most "junk DNA" is functional. We should not, of course, expect all of our genetic library to be functional because any active system will have some non-functioning elements at any given time.

As if that weren't enough, we began to hear about "de novo" genes—genes that arise with no apparent ancestors. "Orphan genes pose a tough evolutionary problem," notes Thomas Deane of Trinity College Dublin. "They don't look like other genes, so where do they come from? One idea is that they can originate seemingly from nothing: over long, evolutionary timescales, a completely novel gene can emerge de novo out of a region in the genome that is made up of junk DNA."¹

As a result of such discoveries, conventional "evolution" mantras have not aged well in the age of genome mapping. Consider: "We are 98% chimpanzee. Rats and mice differ more genetically than humans and chimps." If so, a great deal that we need to know about a life form is apparently not found in its genome. And what is found there may not support conventional assumptions about evolution.

2. Unexpected Change Mechanisms

The evidence for evolution is not what we were told to expect. For example, life forms, especially simpler ones, can simply transfer information horizontally, sometimes across species (horizontal gene transfer). Genes sometimes change as an organism ages or encounters stresses and are then passed on in a changed form (epigenetics).²

Devolution plays a large role in the history of life as well, as Michael Behe has noted in Darwin Devolves (HarperOne, 2019). That is, life forms often improve their survival chances by breaking or blunting complex equipment, thereby becoming simpler. But then where did their original complexity come from? The opposite trajectory—natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism)—seems far more prominent in rhetoric than in demonstrated examples.

3. The Time Crunch

As we learn more about the history of life, we run into crunch time. Systems that we thought were of comparatively recent date turn out to have appeared much earlier in Earth's history. For example, green seaweed plants have recently been dated to a billion years ago, 200 million years earlier than previously thought.³ We run into the same situation with animals.⁴

If we assume that our current dating methods are correct, Earth is actually less than four and one-half billion years old. And if Darwinism is correct, natural selection acting on random mutations has to have produced complex, interlocking systems within that shorter period of time. Was it enough? The probability is becoming specific enough for calculation—likely with dismal results for Darwinism.

4. Cellular Time Crunch

We seem to be discovering new layers of interlocking complexity in life forms every year, for example, in cell systems and brain systems. This year we learned about an "elaborate system" for repairing DNA in cells. "The findings further challenge the belief that broken DNA floats aimlessly."⁵ And even the axons in our nerve cells are "smart PCs."⁶

Again, the odds of these systems developing within the existing time frame, with no purpose or foresight, are looking worse all the time.

5. Too Little Progress

Eminent chemist James Tour in 2016 summed up what everyone really knows about origin-of-life research: we're just stymied. "Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed," Tour wrote. "Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today."⁷

This wasn't supposed to happen, folks. We were supposed to be making rapid progress, once we adopted a purely materialist approach.

6. Information Horns In

The role that information plays in life has become ever clearer, but we lack any clear way of making information coincide with matter and energy in a way that preserves materialism. As Sara Walker and Paul Davies put it in 2013, musing on the origin of life:

The manner in which information flows through and between cells and sub-cellular structures is quite unlike anything else observed in nature. If life is more than just complex chemistry, its unique informational management properties may be the crucial indicator of this distinction. Unfortunately, the way that information operates in biology is not easily characterized.⁸

7. Wanting: The Inexplicable Superpower

The origin of life issue raises philosophical issues as well. Life forms want to stay alive. How did "wanting" things emerge? Rocks don't resist becoming sand but plants resist, by many subtle strategies, becoming insect food. Why? At New Scientist, we are now told that wanting things is a "superpower" that physics can't explain.⁹

8. Still Talking About Adam & Eve

Adam and Eve are not merely dismissed as myth. The arguments today center on specific assertions about them. A recent reviewer at the Nature: Ecology and Evolution blog of S. Joshua Swamidass's book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve (IVP Academic, 2019), which argues for their existence (albeit along with evolved humans), notes, "Given the surprisingly recent date at which shared genealogical ancestors arise in populations, it was well worth exploring how this might fit with the age-old belief in Adam and Eve. Joshua Swamidass does this in a highly detailed and truly inter-disciplinary manner."¹⁰

The remarkable thing is that, after all this time, we are still talking about Adam and Eve. Clearly, materialist visions of human origins have not put forward anything that convincingly replaces an original pair. And in fact, as Ann Gauger outlined in "Mom Genes" in Salvo 51, she and Ola Hossjer have developed a mathematically based population genetics model showing that a single couple—i.e., Adam and Eve—could indeed have been the sole progenitors of the whole human race.

9. The Tough Nut of Consciousness

With the human mind, as with so much else, modern science has betrayed the materialists. Neuroscience has given us people who live with only part or half of a brain,¹¹ showing that the human mind is not divisible, like a machine. Consciousness, meanwhile, has been renamed the "hard problem" of consciousness. Reporting on a conference, a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education asked in all seriousness if the current direction was doing "real harm to the field of consciousness studies."¹² Possibly, but what else has materialism (naturalism) got?

10. Fine-Tuning Has Evidence

The fine-tuning of the universe and of Earth for life has become ever clearer in the past decade and a half simply because that's the pattern and we know more about it.¹³ Materialists respond by doubling down on the assertion that there could be infinite universes that (randomly) have no life. So we must decide between masses of evidence for fine-tuning and no evidence for infinite lifeless universes (but we can retain materialism).

We are constantly being told that cosmology is undergoing one crisis or another. But perhaps the main crisis is a refusal to face the burden of the evidence.¹⁴

11. New Atheism Fades

New atheism, a key movement that promoted Darwinism over design for decades, to broad public acclaim, seems to be fading now. One disappointed atheist, Scott Alexander, laments that the joining of atheism to various social justice causes around 2012 was at first greeted with much fanfare, but then:

As far as I can tell, it eventually ended with the anti-social-justice atheists stomping off to YouTube or somewhere horrible like that, while most of the important celebrity members of the public-facing movement very gradually turned into social justice bloggers.¹⁵

It doesn't sound as though the "important celebrity members" felt that atheists had a message of their own any more. Indeed, Alexander complains that atheist blogs have just turned into "'blogs by atheists about social justice.' The whole atheist movement is like this."

12. Alternatives Being Sought

Lastly, relative to fifteen years ago, a number of new voices in science are looking for alternatives to a Darwin-dominated academy. Many have become involved with the Third Way, seeking alternatives to Darwinism that are not really design. Suzan Mazur, an independent journalist, has been providing considerable on-the-ground coverage of their work and thinking.¹⁶

Meanwhile, Scientific American has been giving space in recent years to op-eds and interviews promoting panpsychism (all matter is conscious).¹⁷ That trend looks like evidence of desperation with the materialism of which Darwinism has been such an emphatic and widely promoted element.

Not Essential After All?

So far, I have isolated twelve trends that are making a difference—hardly an exhaustive list, to be sure. These trends do not prove design in nature; they point to design as a reasonable assumption in science.

As it progresses, science is creating more such trends. Which, in turn, raises the question of why, exactly, the assumption that the universe and life forms are not designed is supposed to be essential for science's progress. If you enjoy watching antiquated establishments squirm, the next few years should be a good deal of fun.

Notes
1. Thomas Deane, "De novo genes far more common and important than scientists thought," Phys.org (Feb. 17, 2020): https://bit.ly/2wKyMHy.
2. For a survey of ways in which life forms can change over their history, see Denyse O'Leary, "Conclusions: What the Fossils Told Us in Their Own Words," Evolution News and Science Today (Oct. 20, 2015): https://bit.ly/38zzAMP.
3. Virginia Tech, "One billion-year-old green seaweed fossils identified, relative of modern land plants," ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2020): https://bit.ly/2PUlOxV; Madison Dapcevich, "Scientists Unearth World's Oldest Forest in a New York Quarry," IFLScience! (Dec. 19, 2019): https://bit.ly/2wCvsyl.
4. Katherine J. Wu, "World's Oldest Scorpions May Have Moved From Sea to Land 437 Million Years Ago," Smithsonian Magazine (Jan. 16, 2020): https://bit.ly/2wD7nrk; University of Cologne, "Compound eyes: The visual apparatus of today's horseshoe crabs goes back 400 million years," ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2019): https://bit.ly/3aEXmbB; Katherine J. Wu, "Lizard-Like Fossil May Represent 306-Million-Year-Old Evidence of Animal Parenting," Smithsonian Magazine (Dec. 23, 2019): https://bit.ly/2W8GeHx.
5. University of Toronto, "Genome stability: Intricate process of DNA repair discovered," ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2020): https://bit.ly/2xnMPDu.
6. Harvard Medical School, "Once seen as nerve cells' foot soldier, the axon emerges as decision-maker," ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2019): https://bit.ly/39DtZpY.
7. James Tour, "Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist," Inference Review, Volume 2, Issue 2 (May 2016): https://bit.ly/3353vew.
8. Sara Walker and Paul Davies, "The Algorithmic Origins of Life," J. Royal Society Interface (2013): https://bit.ly/38zyFfw.
9. Richard Webb, "Your decision-making ability is a superpower physics can't explain," New Scientist (Feb. 12, 2020): https://bit.ly/2vI2g9f.
10. Richard Buggs, "Adam and Eve our ghostly ancestors?", Nature Research: Ecology and Evolution Blog (March 4, 2020): https://go.nature.com/2Iz5xKw.
11. "I have only half a brain," BBC Stories (March 1, 2017): https://bit.ly/3aGP9Uw.
12. Tom Bartlett, "Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?", The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 6, 2018): https://bit.ly/2l0L2e8.
13. J. Warner Wallace, "Four Ways the Earth Is Fine-Tuned for Life), Cold Case Christianity (Nov. 4, 2015): https://bit.ly/2TKMimA.
14. Matthew Francis, "The growing crisis in cosmology," The Week (Feb. 20, 2020): https://bit.ly/2TzPFOb.
15. Scott Alexander, "New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed," Slate Star Codex (Oct. 30, 2019): https://bit.ly/3cL52uH.
16. See, for example, Suzan Mazur, Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing "the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin" (Caswell Books, 2015).
17. For example: Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, Edward F. Kelly, "Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?", Scientific American (June 18, 2018): https://bit.ly/39CrWme; Bernardo Kastrup, "Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind," Scientific American (March 25, 2019): https://bit.ly/2IusE91; Gareth Cook, "Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?", Scientific American (Jan. 14, 2020): https://bit.ly/2TM52Ca.