Breaking News from the Academy: There’s Plenty of Time for Evolution! — January 14th, 2011 by Douglas Axe
If you search the current issues of professional science journals, I doubt you’ll find any papers titled “The Moon Orbits the Earth” or “Copper Conducts Electricity.” Assertions like these would work as section headings in an elementary science textbook, but no scientist would consider them newsworthy, for the simple reason that they aren’t.
Things are different in evolutionary biology, though. Here is a field that somehow never outgrew the need to reiterate its most basic tenets, as though its practitioners never had enough confidence in them to let them stand on their own two feet.
I think it has to do with evidence-envy. If someone were to claim not to believe in gravity or electricity, we could devise any number of ways to impress upon them the realities to which those words refer. No stern lecturing. No scolding. No indoctrinating. Just a simple demonstration followed by the words, “We call that electricity.” Even dogs and cows seem to get it.
Lacking recourse to anything comparably compelling, Darwinists have always relied heavily on mere repetition of their core beliefs. If you can’t prove something, sometimes you just keep asserting it with an authoritative tone in prominent places, hoping that it will catch on. From what I can tell, that appears to be the most plausible explanation for a paper by Herbert Wilf and Warren Ewens titled “There’s Plenty of Time for Evolution”, which just appeared in the highly regarded Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1].
Think about it. The paper’s title amounts to an assertion that Darwinism is plausible. Leaving aside the question of whether it really is plausible, what are we to make of the fact that an esteemed science journal considers such an elementary assertion to be worthy of publication? If the experts responsible for approving the paper really considered the plausibility of Darwin’s theory to be an open question when the paper was received for review (just three months ago), then reasonable caution ought to dictate that they still do. After all, we’re talking about a 2½-page document that cites a mere two pieces of prior work, neither of which deals directly with the main subject. Surely no one would take such a slim contribution to be the final word on this hotly debated subject.
I suspect instead that all of the people involved (authors, editors, and reviewers) have been faithful Darwinists for some time. If so, then the paper was never really meant to be scrutinized the way most scientific papers are. That would explain how Wilf and Ewens manage to pass their paper off as refuting “an evolutionary model often used to ‘discredit’ Darwin” without actually citing any cases where that model was used. Needless to say, a gaping omission like that would be unacceptable under normal circumstances.
But desperate times call for desperate measures, and it seems that Darwinism has fallen on desperate times. So here we have a new research paper that reads very much like a mathematically embellished version of the simplistic “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” argument put forward twenty-five years ago by Richard Dawkins [2].
In case you missed it the first time around, here’s my two-sentence synopsis. Although it would take eons for unassisted random typing to generate the Shakespearean line METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, the task becomes very manageable if something can select the best line from among the many lines of random gibberish, where ‘best’ means most resembling METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL (however slight that resemblance may be). Couple this with the ability to breed slight variations on what was just selected, and voilá!— a line from Shakespeare materializes right before our eyes.
It’s an old argument with an embarrassingly obvious flaw. Yes, meaningful text can evolve very rapidly if selection has foresight or (equivalently) if miraculously helpful fitness functions can be assumed. But alas, neither of these happy circumstances follows from the impersonal kind of selection that Darwinists are committed to.
Dawkins’ illustration makes this abundantly clear, in spite of his intent. He proposed (in my antique copy of his book, it’s on page 48) that this:
WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P
is somehow manifestly more fit than this:
WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P
but I can’t imagine why it would be, unless the selector (like Dawkins) knows exactly where he wants to go with it. If he does… well, that’s called intelligent design.
In the end, whether evolution has plenty of time or not depends on what you want to ascribe to it. It copes well with the most favorable adaptations conceivable (those offering substantial benefit after a single nucleotide substitution), but even slightly more complex tasks involving just two or three mutations can easily stump it [3,4]. The key question, then, is this: What, of all life’s marvels, can be accounted for in terms of the single-change adaptations that Darwinism explains? And the answer, if we take Dawkins’ illustration seriously, is: Nothing that approaches the complexity of a six-word sentence.
You don’t need a biology degree to see that this leaves Darwinism in a difficult position. In fact, oddly enough, it seems that biology degrees only make it harder to see.
[1] doi:10.1073/pnas.1016207107