Science turns the Tables on Dawkins | Myles Harris
Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at LeHigh University in America, is not popular among his colleagues. He thinks Darwin's theory of natural selection does not explain the origin of life. In saying so not once but twice – he wrote a book about it nine years ago and has just published another – he has caused an enourmous row. Darwinism is the lynch pin of western secular society. If Darwin's theory is wrong we would have to believe in God or some sort of designer. If we abandon Darwin then we abandon the west's idea of freedom. There is no freedom under religion.Behe is not an amateur. He is the author of a respectable body of scientif work on DNA. Nor he is a lone voice. A growing number of scientists are worried about Darwin's theory. So many that Cambridge University Press thought it worth while to publish the pros and cons of natural selection in a book called Debating Design. Of you thought that Darwin Doubters were drawn exclusively from the ranks of foam-flecked Christian Fundamentalists this book will come as a surprise.
As I write I can hear the Defenders of Darwin, like the book burners in the film Fahrenheit 451, sliding down the poles of their fire houses. No dissent from the great theory, however small, must go unanswered. Darwin's theory is one of those things that are just true – and complete. Anybody who says the converse is either a fool or a liar. Give an inch to the anti-Darwinists and there will be a hell-fire preacher in every laboratory in the globe.
So serious is this threat that in October the Council of Europe decreed that the teaching of creationism in schools as science was an abuse of human rights. It can only be a matter of time before any form of Darwinism Denial from intelligent design to simple scientific doubt, goes on the European statute books – along with abjuring climate change. In which case Michael Behe, who is not a creationist, might want to rethink any plans he might have for holidaying in Europe:
“When the defendant was stopped at Heathrow he was found to have several books and pamphlets about his person asserting Darwin's Theory of Evolution to be untrue. It is the prosecution's case that Professor Behe was entering this country to teach this pernicious doctrine as science to the country's young people, thus denying them their human rights and disturbing the peace of Her Majesty.” Gasps of horror from the body of the court.
This has all happened befor. At the turn of the 20th century scientists were absolutely certain that there was nothing more to be discovered in theoretical physics. Max Planck, recalling the mood of optimism and conviction at that time, wrote:
“When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Phillipp von Jolly... he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed almost fully metured science... Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection wich, for example, geometry has had already for centuries”.
This complacency was shattered by the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics, Theoreticians such as Einstein poked at tiny cracks in the fabric of classical physics and found they rapidly developed into fissures, chasms, then entire valleys. Beyond classical theory lay a world that nobody had ever imagined. It bore out the statement of the biologist J B S Haldane that, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” Such an about face led Karl Popper to propose his theory of falsification. Popper declared that scientific theories are irreducibly conjectural, can never be proved anf live out their lives waintinf ofr death by falsification. A single fault is logically decisive in causing its demise. Lika wasps that are born to live only a single summer, all scientific ideas, without exception, face an inevitable winter of progress.
While physics has learnt this lesson, a number of non-mathematical sciences have not. Just befor the end of the 19th century three new theories, Marxism, Freudianism and Darwinism, made their appearance. They were different from disciplines like physics, geology, chemistry and other “hard” sciences in that they were unfalsifiable and, I believe, are not science at all. For as non- science they require acts of faith: The Origin of Species, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The Meaning of Dreams. Lacking the strict accounting of mathematics the new “soft” theories went on to create churches and recognize heretics. Carl Jung was anathematised by Freud, Trotsky was ice-picked in Mexico, William Paley was pilloried as the Holy Fool of Christian belief.
Two of the three theories, Marxism and Darwinism, were quaintly mechanical. Victorians grew up surrounded by machines that drew wagons, bashed inert metal into engines or ratcheted loads up gradients. It was not surprising that they should devise theories of human existence that closely paralleled the new machines.
But while the common descent of animals and plants was well received by the Victorians, its mechanism, natural selection, only came to be fully accepted in the 1930’s. By then the excitement of the Russian Revolution had gripped western liberals. They envisaged the human race as the final product of an evolutionary ratchet. Over millions of years primitive life had dragged itself up the cogwheels of natural selection until it found itself Morris Dancing in working men’s institutes or chattering in Fabian drawing rooms. And once Homo sapiens had evolved into universal Homo emptor, ‘Shopping Man’, the economic engine of dialectical materialism would pull him to the Elysiam fields of the Marxist Millennium. There all goods were free. For spiritual refreshment there were to be frequent stops at Dr Freud’s psychic wells. Humankind was sufficient unto itself.
But the late 20th century showed Freud’s theories to be fraudulent and Marxism to impoverish everything it touched. Only Darwinism, possibly because it has no practical application save creating academic snuggle blankets, has survived. Unfortunately its supporters share the same proselytising zeal as those who once so enthusiastically preached the gospels of Marx and Freud. Like them they are prepared to persecute anybody who dares oppose them. It is why although Professor Behe is only a smallish fish in the scientific sea, some very big guns have been wheeled out to destroy him. His latest book The Edge of Evolution (Free Press) was given the Dawkins treatment in the New York Times. In a review called ‘Inferior Design’ the celebrity professor describes Behe as ‘the poster boy’ of the creationist movement. He exults over a disclaimer of Behe’s views published by his university.
“While we respect Professor Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.”
Reading this scandalous statement one not only feels sympathy for Behe but begins to wonder if he might be on to something. To be attacked by Dawkins is an accolade. Dawkins the showbiz scientist and media star has a huge appeal for the sort of people who believe all you need to have a thorough understanding of biology is to watch a couple of David Attenborough’s TV wildlife shows.
The Edge of Evolution on the other hand is well reasoned and, unlike the crude and abusive style of Dawkin’s review (which made me, reading it in The New York Times, ashamed to be English) courteous. Contrary to Dawkin’s assertions Behe is not a seven day creationist. He believes all animals have evolved along Darwinist principles from common ancestors, a process that has taken many millions of years. Where he parts company with the Darwinists is over the cell. The mystery of the cell was the theme of his first book, Darwin’s Black Box. Behe maintains it is too complex to have evolved by blind selection, yet modern disciples of Darwin have not hesitated to press the Master’s theory into the inner workings of the cell and the origin of life itself. The nub of Behe’s latest book is that while Darwinian selection works fine to breed faster cheetahs and as a consequence, faster gazelles to outrun them, then faster cheetahs ad infinitum, cells could not possibly be selected by such a mechanism. One design change, a tiny cog out of place, and the cell collapses. Cells, says Behe, must have been designed.
I do not find this hard to accept. Cell design presupposes an intelligence sufficiently advanced to design a cell. Could such an intelligence exist? Take a look in your bathroom mirror. Human beings have mastered the technique of altering cell design and are a step from creating them. I doubt if we alone in the universe in being able to do this. But the unanswered question remains, who ‘bootstrapped’ the first cell from simple chemicals? They are extraordinarily complex. There are more in the tip of your thumb than there are people on earth. Cells keep your body at precisely the same temperature, cause your heart to beat at a steady rhythm for 80 years, move your muscles, carry your thoughts, see and hear, taste, lust and feel fear. They repair and duplicate themselves. Special cells merge with the cells of others to create new individuals.
If a cell were a jumbo jet it would not just be able to fly, it would process its own aviation fuel, store the entire contents of every known book ever written in its computer banks, defeat the greatest chess champions in the world in four or five moves on its in-flight video screens, and carry out any surgical operation you care to name on sick passengers. It would also repair itself in mid air, cook any possible dish on its galleys and at the end of a long flight, clean its interior so it was surgically spotless.
For his text Behe chooses the cilium, a tiny hairlike cell that occurs frequently in nature. Cilia can be thought of as nature’s answer to brooms. They move dirt and debris around. Behe describes how in 1993 a student called Keith Kozminski videoed the cilium of a tiny piece of algae. Just below the surface of this particular cilium, which was about 5 thousandth of a mm long, he saw a series of tiny bumps moving from the base of the hair to its tip. The bumps went twice as fast coming down as they did going up. These ‘bumps’ were are similar to the cradles you see moving up and down the sides of skyscrapers carrying repair gear, machinery and window cleaners. Not only do they carry new parts, they also remove broken debris. Behe describes how not only are the building materials brought to the base of the hair in the same way that materials are brought to a construction site but around the base of the hair is a tiny fence which filters out potentially disruptive materials.
Behe says that cells don’t redesign themselves when challenged, they tend to become more primitive. He uses the parallel of trench warfare. Just as everything is thrown at an advancing enemy so cells tend to adapt to hostile conditions by throwing out something they can just about manage without. He talks about throwing the kitchen sink at the enemy rather than making a tactical advance. He supports this with vivid descriptions of the struggle between the malaria parasite and man. Behe asks why, with the malaria parasite outnumbering man by billions to one over aeons, it has not succeeded in wiping us out. Both have tried to adapt to defeat each other. Some races in malarious areas have developed a new type of red blood cell that the parasite cannot nest in. But most new red cells are not an improvement on their ancestors, but cruder. The parasite has developed resistance to most drugs, but again this is not an improvement, but a poorer version of a previously far more efficient killing machine.
Dawkins sneers at this. The speed of natural selection, he says, has nothing to do with chance mutations in cells. Cells might mutate, that is change their design by a chance rearrangement of their DNA, but the frequency at which they do so bears no relationship to the rate at which new species evolve. All we can say is that those qualities that enable animals to survive, will survive. Dawkins writes ‘From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to Dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs — every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.’
This does not answer the question of cell design. Where did the complex molecules, the first building blocks of the cell that made up these animals, come from? For years schoolchildren have been told the story of how millions of years ago a primeval pond of fairly simple chemicals was struck by lightning. From that strike, like Frankenstein awakening to the turning of a Wimshurst machine in a Hammer House of Horror movie, sprang an extraordinary molecule.
Dawkins describes it in The Selfish Gene.
“At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it ‘The Replicator’. It may not have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.”
This is pure fantasy. For years Behe and his fellow critics have been pointing it out. In The Edge of Evolution, he likens the creation of such complex molecules by blind selection to a drunk — who happens to be also blind — trying to walk from Los Angeles to Chicago without tripping and who has to reach a higher point at each step. A single fall or a step down means starting the journey all over again.
There is some movement toward Behe’s position by conventional biologists. In the June edition of the Scientific American Dawkin’s Replicator is rejected as ‘fundamentally flawed’. The author, Robert Shapiro, using a simile similar to Behe’s, declares the appearance of a Replicator to be as unlikely as that of a golfer ‘.... who, having played a ball through an 18 hole course, then assumes that the ball could also play the round in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law would have to be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are immense.’ Shapiro, (whom, I suspect, would want to distance himself from Behe by the width of the cosmos — if only to preserve his career) suggests an alternative theory, not of intelligent design, but one based on physical chemistry. He thinks that very simple chemicals if separated from each other by a suitable barrier might create an energy cell, a type of biological battery sufficiently powerful to ignite life. Like Behe’s explanation and Darwinism it remains a theory. Speculation (by all parties in the evolutionary row) irritates a lot of scientists in other disciplines. Show one of them a book on evolution and he is likely to cast it aside after a few chapters. One said to me: ‘They are butterfly collectors. Nothing they tell you is verifiable. How do I know any of this is true? Where is the maths?’
In his anxiety to slay Behe in print, Dawkins is keen to tell us that the maths is there. ‘If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J B S Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?'
If I had to choose between Maynard Smith and Behe I would chose Behe. Maynard Smith, 1920-2004, Professor of Biology at Sussex, enjoys Christ-like reverence among Darwinists but one of his pupils, writing in The Spectator in the eighties, told how the great man threatened him with the sack if he tried to publish research work that contradicted a minor aspect of Darwin. This single act of scientific dishonesty is, if true, enough to falsify Maynard’s Smith’s entire canon. Smith keeps posthumous company with the already mentioned J B S Haldane, an evolutionary geneticist greatly admired by modern Darwinists, who despite his perceptive insight into the impossibility of understanding nature, thought Stalin, who liquidated 13 million of his fellow Russians and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 47 million more, ‘…was a very great man who did a very good job’. Haldane’s admiration for the world’s second greatest mass murderer — the first was Mao — wisely did not extend to emigrating to the Soviet Union. Stalin sent Darwinists to the gulags.
We need keener intellects than starry eyed thirties idealists. The type of mathematics required to punch a hole in the mystery of cell complexity is likely to be very different from the statistics Dawkins quotes. They would have to be mathematicians of the calibre of the late Sir Fred Hoyle, who was denied the Nobel Prize for his shared discovery of how (among other elements) carbon, the building block of living matter, was created in the stars. Although Hoyle did the pioneering work his two co-discoverers, who were not so unwise as to suggest an element of design in the universe, were given the prize. The problem was that the discovery, described as ‘monumental’, also pointed to the problem of the extraordinary sequence of coincidences that is required for life to exist. They make it appear the universe is designed for us, rather than the other way about.
Hoyle took up the challenge:
“Would you not say to yourself, ‘Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.’ Of course you would . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
An atheist, Hoyle said that this suggestion of guiding hand led him to be ‘greatly shaken’
I was reminded of this when, soon after Dawkin’s book The God Delusion came out, I travelled up to central London on the tube. Opposite me a man was reading it with obvious delight. I could see him thinking ‘How easy it all is, how simple to understand the origins of life!’ Dawkin’s Delusion would be a better title. The idea that the origin of life is based on a mere mechanical principle is arguably more destructive than Marxism or the fables of Dr Freud. In our mind’s eye we now consider all living things, including ourselves, to be DNA wind up toys.
The origin of this hoax was a generation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century rationalists who out of arrogance and lust for intellectual power thought they had a blueprint for progress. There was no mystery to nature, nobody was its steward, we were its masters. Like children playing with a toy we began to take it apart. On a dying, burning planet we see the results.
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Publicado na Edição de Primavera da Revista Salisbury Review
Por Gilles Gomes de Araújo Ferreira @ 00:25
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