Clough Evolution Lesson 11

Problems of the Evolutionary Hypothesis (3) Natural Selection and Random

We continue now with the problems of the evolutionary hypothesis and now we come to the third problem that Chance encounters as a means of explaining evolution and that is natural selection and random change or mutation. This third area of difficult that Chance encounters, or that the hypothesis of Chance encounters is an area which is described or could be described as orthodox Darwinianism or in a modified form Neo-Darwinianism, namely these two elements, natural selection and random change, have basically been used as the mainline mechanism to explain how evolution must have been accomplished.

Now we have shown that at the heart of the modern day controversy of evolution and the Bible is the basic philosophical question as to the ultimacy of Chance. In other words, those who advocate evolution and modern evolutionary hypothesis are basically asserting the fact that Chance with a capital “C” is the ultimate principle of the universe and that God, if He exists, Himself is a victim of this Chance process. Yet we have seen that when the concept of Chance is used as an explanation for the origin of the universe it doesn’t work out. It doesn’t work out because if Chance really is the ultimate source of the universe, then all rationality is destroyed including modern science.

Then we saw that when Chance was used to explain the origin of living material from nonliving material, there too Chance failed, for here if Chance was used we found a dual problem. First, we found that there isn’t enough time to work out the kind of sequences necessary to produce living material from nonliving material by sheer chance. And yet we also discovered that if this did occur, suppose that living material was suggested and did occur, then we would have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, so that if Chance by some means actually did accomplish the hard and difficult task of working up the ladder from the inorganic to the organic levels, then along the ladder the second law, which operates always to destroy, always to introduce disorder, would have disordered this process before it ever finally came to a conclusion.

Now we come to the last of the three areas which we would like to critique the arbitrary and un-thought-out application of Chance on the part of those who back strong evolutionary positions. And that concerns the ideas of natural selection and mutation for it is these two mechanisms that are primarily responsible, so it is claimed, for the ongoing evolutionary hypothesis.

The first criticism which we would like to make is directed against natural selection. We’ll deal with mutations second. We first wish to deal with natural selection. Now there are some criticisms that can be made of natural selection and they fall into different categories. The first kind of criticism that can be made against natural selection is a logical criticism, namely that natural selection logically is very weak. First, as pointed out by Professor Murray Eden of the MIT Electrical Engineering Department, in the volume, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Morehead and Martin M. Kaplan, put out by the Wistar Institute Press in 1967, and cost $5.00, an excellent paperback volume summarizing a series of papers in which an electrical engineer and a mathematician attacked the Neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. And after you read this volume you get the very definite impression that they made some serious inroads.

Now these men were not arguing for the Bible; they were not arguing for special creationism, they were merely saying that the concept of purely random Chance breaks down and is an insufficient explanation for evolution. Now why this is important for us as Bible-believing Christians is the following reason. If Chance is unacceptable as an explanation for evolution it leaves very, very little room for the unbeliever to come up with another explanation for evolution. In other words, by destroying Chance as an explanation of organic evolution we are left with a very, very, very little room to move and the only real place one has to move, if Chance cannot be the cause of evolution, is a divine design. And it is this thing, the spiritual issue, that is so prominent, and yet is so submerged in a lot of the discussion.

But nevertheless, to return to our logical critique of natural selection, Professor Eden in this volume makes the point that the evolutionary hypothesis is so vague that it cannot be scientifically proved or disproved. And his point is, and he called this a tautology, natural selection, but a later discussion in the paper indicated that what Eden was really driving at was the fact that when you say something has happened by natural selection, it sounds as though there’s some sort of mechanism going on by the name “natural selection.” And yet as Eden shows there is no such mechanism as natural selection going on and this is sheerly the labeling of this mechanism as natural selection is sheerly an exercise in semantics. It has added no new information to the problem under discussion, has contributed no clarification as to what is really going on.

In other words, one might say, by way of illustration, on a rainy day that it is raining; in other words, there’s a mechanism called it is raining. Well, you haven’t added any description of how it is raining, you haven’t even dealt with the problem of condensation, the problem of nucleation, the problem advection of moisture into the vicinity, the problem of temperature lapse rates, the problems of pressure and wind, the problems of distribution of water. These are problems that you have never even touched with your simple label, “rain,” or “it is raining,” and saying we have a mechanism, rain. But by just simply calling out the word “rain” r-a-i-n, you haven’t really advanced the frontier of knowledge. And this was Eden’s point about natural selection, by saying, branding the process or whatever it is, as natural selection contributes absolutely no understanding of what’s going on.

[Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (10¹²) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. He also reported on his extensive investigations into genetic data on hemoglobin (red blood cells). Hemoglobin has two chains, called alpha and beta. A minimum of 120 mutations would be required to convert alpha to beta. At least 34 of those changes require changeovers in 2 or 3 nucleotides. Yet, Eden pointed out that, if a single nucleotide change occurs through mutation, the result ruins the blood and kills the organism! --- It is our contention that if "random" is given a serious and critical interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws--physical-chemical and biological. *Copied from Wistar article on internet]

Another logical criticism of natural selection is that, and I think this is very fundamental, is that it is not a creative process or additive process, that is, it doesn’t add anything new to the system; it doesn’t add anything new to the genetic pool in the biological kingdom. It doesn’t add new things to plants. It doesn’t add new characteristics to animals; rather, natural selection is only a subtractive mechanism, it can only take away what is originally there. And since evolution basically is a process by which new characteristics are produced, one has a tension here between the production of new characteristics demanded by evolution and natural selection which basically does nothing but eliminate poor characteristics.

Wilder-Smith in his book, Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny has a very interesting illustration. If you take a bag of lumps of sugar and a sieve and you filter the lumps of sugar through the sieve, it’s true, you only get certain size lumps of sugar, the very small pieces of sugar, the granules, come through the sieve, leaving the lumps of sugar up on top of the sieve. But still, as he points out, you don’t get sand. You subtract different sizes of sugar with the sieve but after all is said and done and after everything has been finished, you still haven’t wound up with anything but sugar. You haven’t changed it a bit.

So these would be, basically, the logical thrust against natural selection as a mechanism. Basically it doesn’t do anything except subtract so therefore it’s not a crucial mechanism.

Now we have a second category of criticisms against natural selection and I think these are very pertinent to the discussion because they show more than the logical arguments against natural selection. These arguments show on an experimental basis that natural selection, even if allowed to be used in a subtractive way doesn’t even fulfill the bill. In other words, suppose we are talking to our evolutionist friend and he says all right, I grant you that natural selection is only a subtractive process, that’s true, we never claimed anything else for it, basically, than it was a subtractive process. But then we find when we go to the experiment and we actually try an experiment that the natural selection which is reputed to be a mechanism, even now as our evolutionary friend would admit, is only a subtractive process, nevertheless necessary for evolution, we find it doesn’t even do a good job subtracting. So not only is it not an additive and creative process but we find by actual biological experimentation that natural selection doesn’t even do a good job subtracting.

Now I am referring particularly to the work of H. P. Band. Her article appeared in the magazine Evolution, Volume XVIII number III, pages 334 to 404. The title of her article was (quote) “Natural Selection and Concealed Genetic Variability in an Natural Population of D. Melanogaster.” Now what is she talking about? She’s talking about the fruit fly, very famous in evolutionary discussions, particular with mutations, but here we’re discussing natural selection, not mutations. But Ms. Band has taken it upon herself to examine the fruit fly in a natural environment, see the title of her paper is a natural population, in other words, let’s not deal with a captured or a population of fruit flies in the laboratory. Let’s deal with a population of fruit flies out in the open air [tape turns] …free and then let us study the so-called process of natural selection and see what really happens outside of the laboratory. And she found in a natural environment that natural selection does not increase the most viable fruit flies, in other words, the strongest, most virile, most productive fruit flies are not actually increased by natural selection percentage wise in the total population… by natural selection. A very startling finding.

Lammert’s, Professor Lammert of Creation Research Society comments on this and I think this is a very important comment that he makes and I will quote from it extensively, found on page 37 of his article. He says that “from the viewpoint of evolving new characteristics, these conclusions are indeed pertinent. The only source of new and distinctive features leading possibly to new species formations are mutations. These must gradually be accumulated in true breeding conditions.” Now catch the force of Lammert’s statement. “From the viewpoint of evolving new characteristics,” see, evolution needs to generate new characteristics, but how does it generate new characteristics. Well, as Lammert says, it generates new characteristics by mutation. And then natural selection acts to gather up these new characteristics in bundles and accumulations, and so it’s very crucial that natural selection help out mutation, that natural selection, in order to cause evolution must take those products of mutation, bundle them up and accumulate them. “And yet Band’s research shows that even the most viable,” I’m continuing to quote Lammert now, (quote) “Yet Band’s research shows that even the most viable homozygotes do not increase in number.” Lammert speaks here of fruit flies who are the good ones, these are the ones that are most successful, these are the ones who are the strongest, these are the ones who by an evolutionist’s criteria are the ones who should ultimately dominate the population. And yet the strange fact is that when taken outdoors, Ms. Band’s experiments evidently have found that this does not happen.

And even more startling than the fact that the viable fruit flies are not increased is this conclusion, and I continue quote Lammert’s, “Furthermore, no improvement in their viability occurs.” So not only do the numbers of stronger, more successful fruit flies, the number not only does not increase, but the strength does not increase. So two things, first the fruit flies do not gradually increase, and two, the strength does not gradually increase. Now Lammert continues, “Since even drastic mutations show no harmful effect if recessive in the heterozygous condition, there is simply no mechanism for eliminating them. Now the ratio of harmful to useful mutations is at least one thousand to one. Quite obviously, if a species really did evolve by natural selection the genetic load of drastic or harmful mutations would become so high in a few hundred generations as to result in all offspring having some defect because of chance mating of identical genotypes and resulting homozygosity. The fortunate fact that this is not true in the human race or in most plant and animal species argues strongly for the special creation of the species unity and especially for its existence for a relatively short time instead of hundreds of thousands or millions of years.”

And what Professor Lammert is saying is that natural selection, not only does not increase the number of viable fruit flies, it not only does not increase the strength of those strongest fruit flies, but it does not eliminate the bad genes. You see, the bad genes that cause defects should be eliminated from the population because if they are not, then the population gradually deteriorates and becomes rotten. And those of you who’ve studied history know one case in point where this actually happened to a group of people. I’m thinking of the royal families of Europe in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries where there was so much intermarriage going on between the Russian royalty, the German royalty, the English royalties and the French royalties and to some degree the Spanish royalty that you had a set of weaklings develop. You had hemophiliacs born, you had people with genetic defects born because by intermarriage and by their refusal to marry outside the royal families they gradually became inbred and inbreeding generally causes an accumulation of bad mutations, bad genes, and so eventually one or two of these bad genes are going to get together and the offspring will have a defect.

And so here Lammert points out that if it is true that species have existed for millions and millions and millions of years, then one would expect an accumulation of bad mutations, such a thorough and great accumulation of bad mutations that the entire population would become freaks and freaks do not produce and the population would thus destroy itself. So I think this is a rather interesting set of comments on the role of natural selection.

Lammert continues his article and the subject turns now from fruit flies and Ms. Band’s experiments over to the concept of penicillin and bacteria. He continues, and this is a good illustration since it is used as evidence for evolution. “With the discovery that strains of bacteria resistant to penicillin, aureomycin, chloromycetin, always showed up when these drugs were used great enthusiasm was aroused for a while among evolution-minded biologists. Here, at least was proof that beneficial mutations really did occur, but enthusiasm was short-lived for it soon became obvious that these mutations did not arise as a result of exposure to penicillin. Rather, they seemed to occur at a constant rate. Associated with the resistance there is always a decrease in viability under normal conditions. Accordingly, under normal conditions they are soon swamped out and either are completely eliminated or carried along as heterozygotes in a very small number of individual bacteria. When a strain is exposed to antibiotics either the mutation rate for these otherwise defective resistant mutations is so high that sooner or later one occurs or an already established one is given the starting advantage of having no normal competitors. Soon the entire population is of the resistant type and new medication is necessary. However, as soon as treatment is relaxed the normal type bacteria take over and the resistant strain is either eliminated or reduced to a minute fraction of a percentage of the population.”

Now what he is talking about here is something else that has to do with natural selection and that is that basically is a temporary effect. For example, if you take ten different bacteria or let’s say ten bacteria of the same kind, and they’re inside a body, now the probability says that of these ten bacteria some will have different genes, I’m being facetious of course with the low number of bacteria. But let’s just say ten bacteria. Suppose we have ten bacteria; now probability says that some of these bacteria are going to have somewhere on their genetic structures ruined or mutant genes. Some of these mutant genes enable their possessor, the bacteria, to resist penicillin or aureomycin or some of these wonder drugs and so therefore what happens is that when penicillin, for example, would be administered to you and these ten bacteria are in your innards, then the bacteria that happens to have that mutation that gives it an advantage against penicillin is the one that survives. It survives and produces more bacteria and so therefore all the bacteria in your body are now resistant to penicillin, but the point to observe is that the resistance to penicillin is not, repeat, is NOT a new characteristic. It was a characteristic that was there below the surface all the time and all the penicillin did was to eliminate the other characteristics leaving only those which were naturally resistant to penicillin. The penicillin itself did not cause the mutation; the penicillin itself acted only as a system of natural selection of eliminating the other characteristics.

For example, if we had a mix of brown and white bears above the Arctic Circle on a snow covered surface, and we allowed hunters to go in to hunt the bears, gradually all of the bears with brown would be eliminated, leaving only the white ones. Soon, even some of the white ones that had recessive brown genes that would occasionally breed, this brown bear would be eliminated, but nevertheless, carried on the genetic structure of the polar bear or the white bear would be genes of the brown bear. In other words, the color was there, except it’s as a recessive gene, but the color has not disappeared and one would be wrong to say that the pressure of the white snow field and the human hunters caused the white polar bear. It did not cause the white polar bear; the white color was there in the genetic structure to begin with. All the snow and the human beings did was eliminate all other colors, leaving only the white color. Yes, if the snow melted and the hunters disappeared, then we would find reversion back for the colors on the genetic structure. These colors are still there even though in recessive form and would sooner or later come to pass that a baby bear would be born brown and once again he would breed others and soon you would have a brown bear population.

And the point that Lammert makes is that when the wonder drugs are removed from the body site the bacterial population reverts back to their original state; they do so because those bacteria that are resistant to penicillin are a mutation; they are not mainline bacteria, they are freak bacteria and freak bacteria always, as all mutations always do, have some serious defect, some serious weakness. And so therefore these penicillin resistant bacteria are bacteria when competing with normal bacteria are weak and therefore pass off the scene. So the bacteria and the penicillin that Lammert mentions are another illustration that natural selection is basically only a subtractive process; it cannot create new characteristics nor does it cause permanent change.

Now I would summarize our criticism of natural selection in four points. Here are the four criticisms against natural selection from the total point of view; this includes a logical criticism and the experimental criticism.

First, natural selection is a vaguely worded statement that adds no new information to our knowledge of what is going on in the plant and animal kingdoms, and therefore it’s not really a scientific statement.

Two, natural selection is not creative and therefore cannot produce new characteristics.

Three, natural selection does not eliminate the thousands of harmful mutations that build up in the population, and thus we find a sub note on this point, it is rather a strong argument for the recent young state of plant and animal kinds, for if the plant and animal kinds existing today had really lived for millions and millions of years, then the amount of freak mutations would have built up to be so high that by today those populations would have been destroyed. Natural selection then, thirdly, does not eliminate the bad mutations.

Fourth, natural selection is not permanent, since when the stress environment, the sieve with the sugar lumps, the snow and the hunters with the bears, the penicillin with the bacteria, when the stress environment, whatever it be, is relaxed the population always reverts back to the original state, or when the population drift beyond the stress environment they also revert back to the original state. For example, if you have bacteria that’s spread from a person who has taken penicillin to a person who has not taken penicillin, when they go into the person who has not taken penicillin there will be a tendency within the bacteria population to revert back to their normal non-penicillin resistant type.

Now our second line of criticism is directed against mutation or random change. And here we wish to summarize by simply saying that all random change in the genetic structure is harmful. Reason: because of the second law again; the second law says that everything tends to decay. Since the genetic structure and the structure of the cell are so highly ordered, are so sophisticated, are so delicate you cannot tolerate random changes in such a delicate thing without destroying it. And thus mutations either always either reduce the survivability or the fertility of the object in which they have occurred.

Lammert, in his article, on page 40 says, (quote) “The picture emerging from the work of molecular geneticists is a marvelously complex code which will stand mightily little in the way of alteration, either addition or subtraction, or change in any of the nucleotide basis. Even a short portion of the gene out of phase causes a completely non-functional message and hence mutations do not survive.”

Once again, to borrow an illustration from Wilder-Smith’s book, one could imagine sandblasting your Swiss watch on your wrist in order to clean the watch. Would it really clean the watch? Probably, but what would it do to the watch? It would smash it. And so similarly bombarding the genetic structure of a cell with radiation to cause mutation is like sandblasting a Swiss watch; it’s too crude a mechanism for the soft delicate structure of the cell.

Now an argument contained in the volume I mentioned before, the paperback volume, Some Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, were put forward by a French mathematician by the name of Dr. Schützenberger. Dr. Schützenberger demonstrated in the course of his paper that you can introduce some good mutations on the gene which can, then, cause evolution, but when you do so you have got to introduce those changes intelligently. In other words, theoretically it might be possible to clean your watch with a sandblasting machine if you sandblasted one grain of sand at a time and carefully aimed each grain of sand at parts in your watch. Theoretically then it might be possible to clean your watch by sandblasting but then once you have agreed to the fact that you can sandblast your watch by this new method you have destroyed Chance for no longer do the sand particles bombard your watch in a chance pattern but they bomb it in an intelligent ordered pattern. And this is Dr. Schützenberger’s simple argument, yes, mutations can be good but when they are good they are always a product of intelligent order, not a product of random change. He used, as an illustration, a program of a computer and showed that if you introduce random changes on the program the probability of producing a program that would really compute was infinitesimal. Similarly with a cell, if you randomly allowed changes to occur in the cell the probability of the cell still working is infinitesimally small. In fact, Dr. Schützenberger found that the chances of randomly producing a program that would actually compute the probability was less than ten raised to the minus one thousandth power. That is one over ten with one thousand zeroes after it.

So therefore we say that the probability of producing a useful mutation, a good mutation, is practically nil and the only way it can be done is by intelligent direction, but the moment you introduce intelligent direction in the mutating process you have destroyed Chance and it’s Chance that is insisted upon by the strong advocates of evolution.

Summarizing our criticism of mutation: First, mutations are always harmful because of the delicate structure of the cell. The most recent biological research into the structure of the cell has convinced many Christian biologists that mutation cannot be used as an explanation of the ongoing process of evolution. It can’t, because the cell has now been found to be so delicate, so involved, such a fine, fine delicate structure that the least tampering with the structure destroys the entire workability of the cell.

A second criticism of mutation is that the only way you can get good mutations is to introduce them intelligently by design and this is exactly what the advocates of evolution do not want.

Thus we come to the conclusion of our critique of Chance. We have shown that employing the explanation of Chance with a capital “C” leads to very serious problems in saying the universe originated out of nothing by Chance. It leads to insurmountable problems if you say living material originated from nonliving material by Chance. And it creates another whole set of insolvable problems if you say that evolution has gone on throughout history by natural selection and random mutation.