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May 3, 2008
Darwin & Co., Ltd.
Just how limited?
by Terry Scambray
Private Papers

A review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. (The Free Press, 2007) which appeared in the Fall 2007 edition of Faith & Reason.

“Buy low and sell high,” is the proverbial path to wealth. But have you ever thought of an opposite pathway? “Buy high; sell low — Make it up on volume!”

In the short run, of course, losses may appear to be gains as the cash rolls into your account as you sell off shares of that once high flying tech stock. But after awhile the appearance of gain is reversed when you run out of stock to peddle.

According to cell biologist Michael Behe in The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, a similar delusion confuses Darwinists who argue that mutations, which are losses of genetic information, can somehow lead to the big gains in genetic information required to drive evolution.

This delusion was originally fueled by the naive notions that even scientists entertained prior to the revolution in molecular genetics of the last sixty years. Behe reminds us that, “Darwin and other early scientists could examine, say, the alterations in finch beaks, but they couldn’t tell what was causing the modifications.” (10) These minuscule changes offered hope that such alterations demonstrated how nature had gradually spawned all the endless assortment of plant and animal life in the world.

Later, scientists observed how certain pernicious forms of bacteria, despite killer doses of antibiotics, were able to adapt and spread, thereby debilitating and even killing people. Almost equally disturbing was the ability of some insects to resist the pesticides applied by farmers to protect their crops. The latter example fired the imaginations of many people, including Hollywood screenwriters, who were enticed by the prospect of poison-proof, elephantine bugs and reptiles, not only surviving but feeding off of each dose of venom administered by white frocked, nerdy scientists.

Nonetheless, here also science remained ignorant of exactly what was causing those damnable bugs and bacteria to survive, seeming to mock their ineffectual human exterminators.

But now, Professor Behe insists, “The only way” to understand such extraordinary developments is to see what happens at the molecular level. (10) “Properly evaluating Darwin’s theory absolutely requires evaluating random mutation and natural selection at the molecular level.” (10) Favored explanations and prevailing paradigms can now be measured against what is seen by looking through high-powered microscopes. As Groucho Marx put it, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Like the proletariat in Marxist mythology, mutations are the change agents upon which greater and more revolutionary biological transformations can build. Or so it is thought. But such mutations are now understood as genetic copying errors, various ways in which DNA is disfigured, deleted or distorted.

Yet, in a strange way, Darwin did guess correctly that such unpredictable changes can enhance survival — though as we shall see, such small change never turns into the big gains that Darwin predicted.

“Far better than Galapagos finches, pretty peppered moths, or other, more appealing examples that capture the public imagination, malaria offers one of our best case studies of Darwinian evolution in action,” Behe informs us. (17) And the story of how this occurs is an intriguing one, providing a model for much of what is said in this ambitious book.

Interestingly enough, people who carry a genetic predisposition for sickle cell disease enjoy a compensation: immunity to malaria, a fact that has fortuitously saved millions of people in Africa. Sickle cell, itself, is caused by a mutation, a disfigured hemoglobin molecule. This changed environment within the human body is inhospitable to the malaria parasite. For when it enters the body, “Like some microscopic Dracula, the diabolical malarial parasite” docks to a red blood cell, orients itself, releases a fusillade of enzymes and proteins, reforms its skeleton and then glides into the red blood cell.  But then the unexpected occurs: a sticky gel submerges the parasite. After which it is swept into the spleen, where, “Ever alert to rid the body of old damaged blood cells, the spleen grabs the warped cell and destroys it, along with the killer hidden inside.” (25)

As one can see, Behe has the wit to turn a description of complicated biochemical reactions into a gory tour of Transylvania, replete with a happy ending!  And Darwinists certainly want to see a silver lining in this process.  For, as Behe writes, Darwinists, “jump directly from this pristine example to the conclusion that all of life — the complex machinery of the cell, the human mind, and everything in between — can be explained the same way.” (29)

Not so, insists Behe. Such Darwinian projections are based on ignorance. To wit: “The defense of vertebrates from invasion by microscopic predators is the job of the immune system, yet hemoglobin is not part of the immune system. Hemoglobin’s main job is as part of the respiratory system, to carry oxygen to tissues.  Using hemoglobin to fight off malaria is an act of utter desperation, like using a TV set to plug a hole in the Hoover Dam. Even leaving aside the matter of where the dam and the TV set came from — which is no small question — it must be conceded that this Darwinian process is a tradeoff of least-bad alternatives.” (30)

Other mutations are also known to scuttle malaria. But each is damaging. “All are diminishments, none are constructive.” (38)

Then there is the E. coli bacterium whose “genetics and biochemistry are better understood than any other organism, duplicating about seven times a day.” (15) It is as threatening as it is persistent, especially for children and the aged whose digestive systems are more vulnerable.  The bug is frighteningly prolific; it has been grown continuously for over thirty thousand generations which is the equivalent of about a million human years, showing that the number of generations and not time is the main factor in assessing change. And what has this telescoping of evolution wrought? “Mostly devolution,” Behe concludes. (16)

And that’s because this bacterium, much like a retreating army, throws away its machinery, in this case sophisticated, molecular machinery in the form of its own DNA. It makes these deletions in order to preserve its own energy and thus survive. But, in doing so, it adds nothing which resembles any of the elegance it jettisons. “The lesson of E. coli is that it is easier for evolution to break things than to make things.” (16)

Another candidate for demonstrating the power of evolutionary change is a variety of fish in Antarctica. A mutation in these fish has led to the development of a kind of antifreeze in their bodies which serendipitously protects the fish in the frigid waters down there.

This adaptation developed, “By chance in one of the fish, when the cell’s machinery stuttered when copying the second, extra gene.” (79-80) Then a descendant of one of the lucky mutants stuttered again, making a newer and improved version of the anti freeze protein which enhanced its ability to survive in even more chill water. The population of the protected fish then becomes dominant after which the change becomes permanent when, “a deletion mutation removed the original coding region perhaps making the antifreeze protein more stable.” (80)

This is amazing stuff, showing how blind, natural processes can provide a lifeline for an otherwise doomed creature. It is certainly suggestive, once again, of Darwin’s argument, that tiny incremental changes are the creative force which explains how life originated and flourished.

But, Behe soberly writes: “Rare examples such as Antarctic fish set Darwinian pulses racing. But to more skeptical observers, they underscore the limits of random mutation rather than its potential. It turns out that the antifreeze protein in Antarctic fishes isn’t really a discrete structure comparable to, say, hemoglobin.... The antifreeze protein is not so much a molecular machine as it is a blood additive.” (81-2) Far from leading to greater things, like an isthmus opening on to another continent, the antifreeze protein marks a limit, more like the cliff at the end of a peninsula, a deafening conclusion.

Other mutations repeat some of these same deletions or substitutions in the DNA of an organism.  As one eminent geneticist says, Darwinian evolution is “a tinkerer,” not an engineer. (119) Behe agrees: “Tinkering means looking for quick fixes, features that work for the moment — incoherent, patchwork change, doctoring machines with chewing gum and duct tape, stopping an invader by burning a bridge or breaking a lock...” (119) Thus Darwinism cannot be expected to produce coherence where several parts must be coordinated for a purpose. It is not “biologically reasonable to suppose random mutation” could construct such complexity. (119)

In this way, Behe contrasts his geneticist’s view with the view of the notable Darwinian philosopher and zoologist, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins thinks that biological change is best explained as an arms race, directed, or shall we say, “undirected” by the Blind Watchmaker, the god of time and chance. But Behe calls such explanations, “just so stories” based on “wishful thinking.” (41) And each of Dawkins’ books is based on such fantasies, with his recent Ancestor’s Tale being a particularly entertaining example, making his work more akin to science fiction than to science.

Behe, thus, is a killjoy, spoiling many popular speculations on how life developed in random ways, perhaps in dull, soupy ponds and then on up to the British royal family.  For as he explains, “The arms race metaphor is misconceived . . . Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers . . .For there is no thinking amid the mud and cold of nature’s trenches.” Expediency is the rule; throw anything against your enemy, “including the kitchen sink — there is nothing progressive about that. If you have to destroy your own bridges to win, fine. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress — it leads back to the Stone Age.” (42-3)

By contrast, Darwin required accelerators to account for all the diversity that he saw during his travels on the Beagle and what he had gleaned from his other copious studies.  In this way his views are woven into the fabric of 19^th-century progressive ideas, ideologies that sought change agents for many of their heady, not to mention, goofy ideas.

Michael Burleigh’s edifying, recent book, Earthly Powers, deepens our understanding of Europe in the 19th century and its role as a prelude to modernity. He explains how the decline of religious belief, the universalism of Christianity, was replaced by the cult of the state and a series of other utopian offshoots. Many, besides Marx and Engels were, “looking for a new doctrine, preferably combining moral passion and scientism into one eschatological romance . . .” (247) Besides the latter two, Burleigh investigates a panoply of impassioned quacks like Auguste Comte, founder of sociology, and utopians like Charles Fourier and Robert Owens, each of whose schemes incorporated a belief in the almost infinite malleability of the individual, a belief which has caused a lot of suffering down to our own day. Certainly Darwin’s speculations on the malleability of nature were deeply influenced by all of this. And then, of course, Darwin returned the favor by endowing such speculation with a scientific patina.

In this environment of sky-is-the-limit progress, it is not surprising that a contrarian like Gregor Mendel and his monumental discovery of genes was ignored. Even though his original paper was published in 1866, only seven years after the publication of Origin of the Species, his ideas on genetics were not “rediscovered” until 1900. The zeitgeist could not handle the truth of Mendel’s discoveries: that there are genetic limits which offspring can never surmount. The prevailing gospel of Victorian progress had achieved its comfortable basis in “Darwinian science”; it was not going to even acknowledge, let alone examine, anything that would spoil the party.

Nonetheless, to Behe’s mind, “Darwin deserves a lot of credit. Although it had been proposed before him, he championed the idea of common descent.” (83) He also proposed the ideas of random variation (mutation) and natural selection (survival of the fittest) both of which explain well the circumscribed examples described earlier.

Darwin, however, was wrong when he thought that this dynamic could assemble “the elegant, sophisticated molecular machinery that undergirds life.” (83) For the only way to account for such complexity, for such synchronicity, is for multiple, random, coherent mutations to have occurred — which is unlikely, if not impossible.

Behe enriches his discussion by considering a series of alternative explanations, each of which attempts to explain biological complexity, including E.O. Wilson’s consilience and various anthropic, fine tuning arguments. All rely on purposeless accidents to explain the origin of life and of complexity. But Behe, once again, is knowledgeable enough to know that events dependent upon a lot of variables and don’t just happen. Like Vito Coreleone, Behe knows when the fix is in, when intelligence is directing an operation, especially when it comes to what goes on in his own Lilliputian neighborhood of cell biology.

Behe, thus, concludes, “that another possibility is more likely. The elegant, functional, coherent systems upon which life depends are the result of deliberate intelligent design.” (166) Design begins where accident leaves off, Behe argues. “All unintelligent processes give very limited benefit.” (164) Natural selection, the survival of the fittest is “an innocuous concept, a truism.” (164) Rather the question is, how do organisms become fit and where did they come from in the first place?

The 18^th-century naturalist theologian William Paley argued that the existence of something complicated like a watch means that there must be a Watchmaker who purposely designed such a complicated artifact. However, generations of students have been told that David Hume, who lived before Paley, had delivered a lethal blow to such an argument. First, argued Hume, given enough time, nature could self assemble anything. Secondly, human artifacts have wheels, cogs and gears; nature was categorically different than a watch with its discrete parts. Nature apparently was a swirl of things that somehow functioned.

Hume’s first rationale against design was undercut by the Big Bang and the findings of modern paleontology, both of which severely restrict the amount of time available for natural forces to get working.

And then professor Behe came along and showed in his first book, Darwin’s Black Box, that a naturally occurring object like the bacterial flagellum with its propeller, shaft, o-rings and dozens, even hundreds of other precisely tailored parts, all of which function harmoniously, are not merely comparable to, but exactly like a humanly designed engine. Behe introduced the phrase “irreducible complexity” to describe such unimaginably sublime complexity, symmetry and harmony.

Since then, “irreducible complexity” has gained wide usage in the way that the word “existential” became a staple among the cognoscenti since the end of WWII. But a profound difference separates the two expressions, a difference which illustrates the major divide in modernity. For “irreducible complexity” suggests a world of ordered complexity which can only be the product of a purposeful mind — or Mind; whereas “existential” suggests a contingent world, where meaning is an afterthought, congealed accidentally from colliding atoms. The contrast between these words reveals the basis for much of the contentiousness and conflict in the 20th century.

Perhaps Dr. Behe’s second penetrating book will clarify for an even larger audience exactly where “the edge of evolution” is and, thus, contribute another phrase that defines an era.

Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California.