Intelligent Design’s Evolution

This past year, I have seen headlines flash across the start page of my Microsoft browser’s newsfeed that featured articles about the supposed chemical origin of life. Was it the result of aliens seeding our planet billions of years ago – a theory called Panspermia? Or an asteroid bombardment with trace amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins, DNA, and RNA?

When I was a college student, one of my colleagues re-enacted the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment, originally designed to show how unguided chemical evolution could have occurred on a primordial Earth. After assembling the equipment, he evacuated the air using a vacuum pump, and charged the system with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. This was refluxed in the absence of oxygen for a week while a continuous electric spark was passed through the vapor.

How oxygen-breathing organisms could ultimately evolve by random, unguided processes in an oxygen-free, reducing atmosphere was either not thought through or simply ignored by the original researchers. Also apparently ignored was the disproven theory of spontaneous generation, a close cousin to chemical evolution. It had been believed that life could come from non-life – an idea scientists, among them Louis Pasteur, had shot down a century earlier.

Several days into the project, when I asked him how it was going. He turned to me, laughed, and said, “After this, I think I’ll write the Ten Commandments.”

Despite continuing efforts on the part of origin of life researchers to demonstrate a plausible mechanism for unguided chemical evolution leading to greater complexity and ultimately life, none have been successful – not even close.

Even the original Miller-Urey experiment was not unguided. It had been designed. It had utilized designed glassware. The experiment had been conducted in a designed laboratory. There were intelligent designers who collaborated and conducted the experiment. And there was an agreed-upon goal – a guided direction – that the researchers hoped to achieve. If it demonstrated anything, it showed that intelligence always precedes and then guides matter and energy.

Swiss watches are made by Swiss watchmakers. Computer code doesn’t write itself unless coders have initiated the process – even now with the advent of artificial intelligence.

The Gordian Knot of all origin of life research is that in order to make proteins, and almost all other biomolecules that comprise cells, you need molecular machines – enzymes – to do the job of assembly. These are themselves unfathomably complex ensembles of proteins or RNA in some cases.

If you have watched, “How It’s Made,” on the Science Channel, you get the idea. Not only is it fascinating to watch how things are made, but the things don’t just assemble themselves. They are manufactured on machines – robots in some cases – that were designed and assembled by intelligent designers – engineers – for specific tasks. Once again, intelligence and planning precede then guides matter and energy.

Belief in God as The Intelligent Designer was the starting point for much of scientific inquiry through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

“The great pioneers in physics—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus—devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world,” writes Stephen C. Meyer in The Return of the God Hypothesis, his latest book in which he makes a convincing case for the Judeo-Christin origins of modern science. “The founders…assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos not a chaos.”¹

The contemporary intelligent design movement originated with the 1996 publication of Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box in which the author explains the interdependency of biochemical systems in the cell as being “irreducibly complex,” a term he coined to explain the interdependency of biochemical pathways and the molecular machines that produce the molecules we need for life.

Behe describes in elegant detail the staggering complexity of what were once thought to be simple biological processes. He demonstrates the impossibility of such processes arising gradually through random mutation and natural selection. “If you search the scientific literature on evolution”, he writes, “and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines — the basis of life — developed, you find an eerie and complete silence.” Behe likens these molecular machines to “black boxes — a whimsical term for a device that does something but whose inner workings are mysterious.”

Living cells

In Darwin’s day, very little was known about biochemical processes. Two contemporaries of Darwin, Schwann, and Schleiden, had discovered that plants and animals consisted of small bodies called cells. But even they concluded: “The primary question is, what is the origin of this peculiar little organism, the cell?”

Since the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thompson in the late nineteenth century, and the invention of the electron microscope decades later, a window was opened into the ‘Lilliputian world’ of the living cell. The development of X-ray crystallography occurred shortly after the invention of the electron microscope and was the next step that allowed scientists to look one level deeper — into the next black box.

Behe comments, “What was seen was more complexity. It was thought that proteins would turn out to be simple and regular structures like salt crystals. Upon observing the convoluted, complicated bowel-like structure of myoglobin, however, Max Perutz groaned: ‘Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral an object?'”

By the late twentieth century, biochemists came to realize that there were a series of smaller black boxes, one inside the other. Things that were once thought to be simple — the flagellum of a bacterium for example — were revealed to be driven by an extraordinarily complex biochemical machine consisting of multiple parts.

“This level of discovery,” writes Behe, “began to allow biologists to approach the greatest black box of all. The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his contemporaries could answer. “They knew that eyes were for seeing but how exactly do they see? How does blood clot? How does the body fight disease? The complex structures [involved] were themselves made of smaller components. What did they look like?”

Irreducible mousetrap

Behe introduced the most important concept in his book — “irreducible complexity,” illustrated using a mousetrap, which can be described as irreducibly complex because it requires several essential parts working together if it is to function at all.

The trap is composed of five basic elements: a hammer which impacts and kills the mouse; the spring which drives the hammer; a trigger upon which the mouse steps; a latch which keeps the trap from springing closed until triggered; and a wooden base on which the whole contraption is assembled. A mousetrap is irreducibly complex because in order for it to work, all of its components must be present and assembled in the correct relationships. Remove any one of the five components and you no longer have a functioning mousetrap. Could such a trap evolve from a simpler device?No, for the simpler device would either still have all five components and not be simpler, or it would lack one of the parts and not be functional. In evolutionary terms, if it wasn’t functional, it would have no reason to exist in the first place.

Frustration

Behe extended this simple notion of the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap to a number of complex biochemical systems – vision in the human eye, the clotting of blood and the immune system as examples.

Writing about the cascade of biochemical events necessary for the coagulation of human blood, Behe explains, “The absence of (or significant defects in) any one of a number of components causes the system to fail: blood does not clot at the proper time or at the proper place.”

Writing about the immune system, Behe says, “Whichever way we turn, a gradualistic account of the [evolution of the] immune system is blocked by multiple interwoven requirements. As scientists we yearn to understand how this magnificent mechanism came to be, but the complexity of the system dooms all Darwinian explanations to frustration.”

Will reason ultimately prevail in the origin of life community? Researchers are starting to question seriously neo-Darwinism and some are turning to embrace the theory of intelligent design as the better explanation for the origin of life.

Venki Ramakrishnan was one of three collaborators awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009 for studies in the function and structure of the ribosome, the production site for proteins in the cell. Writing in Gene Machine, The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, his own research led him to ponder the deeper question of life’s origins”

How life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology… the problem [is] that in nearly all forms of life, DNA [carries] genetic information but DNA itself [is] inert and made by a large number of protein enzymes, which [require] not only RNA but also the ribosome to make these enzymes. Moreover, the sugar in DNA, deoxyribose, [is] made from ribose by a large, complicated protein. Nobody [can] understand how the whole system could have started.²

I am an eternal optimist. Just this past week, an article entitled “How Science Suggests God May Have Created the Universe” flashed across my newsfeed. This almost sounds like Genesis 1:1: “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.”

1. Stephen C. Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, (New York, N. Y. Harper Collins, 2021)
2. Venki Ramakrishnan, Gene Machine, (NY: Basic Books, 2018).