As I pointed out in a previous Spectator article, “What is the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design?”  it takes a lot of faith to not believe there was intelligent design (ID) involved in the origin of life or the evolution of human intelligence. For a person to hold this belief, he essentially has to believe that four unintelligent forces of physics could have rearranged the fundamental particles on Earth into computers, spaceships, and smart phones. In my article, I linked to a new video A Mathematician’s View of Evolution which dramatizes this point.

Many people are not impressed by my argument.  They believe science already has a pretty good understanding of how civilizations can arise on barren planets.  But here are four problems which, at a minimum, must be solved by science to explain this without ID:

1. (Origin of life) How did chance chemical reactions produce the first living thing?
2. (Reproduction) How are these living things able to self-replicate, passing their current complex structures on to their descendants, generation after generation, without significant degradation?
3. (Evolution) How did the accumulation of replication errors over millions of years result in more and more complex plants and animals?
4. (Evolution of intelligent humans) How did this process eventually produce intelligent, conscious humans, who are able to design computers and spaceships and smart phones?

Let’s look at each of these problems.

Problem 1. Almost all scientists recognize that we don’t yet understand how the first living organism arose from non-living matter. The debate between Rice University chemist James Tour and origin of life researchers, for example, is over whether or not we are “clueless” as to how this could have happened.

Problem 2.  We see living things self-replicate all the time so we may feel we understand how this happens, and we take self-replication for granted when trying to explain evolution. But even with all our advanced technology we are still not close  to constructing self-replicating machines ourselves, as my 2023 BioCosmos article documents.  When we add technology to such a machine, to move it closer to the goal of reproduction, we are only moving the goal posts, as now we have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So we really don’t understand how living things are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants, much less how they evolve even more complex structures.

Problem 3.  It is widely believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection of random replication errors (mutations) explains evolution. But in fact, Darwin’s implausible theory becomes more implausible with every new biological and biochemical discovery.

In 1960 Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”

If you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like you will understand why we generally don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development of new organs through their initial useless stages obviously cannot be explained by natural selection, since new features present no selective advantage before they are useful.

Features which are useless until they are well developed, or almost perfect, are said to be “irreducibly complex,” a term that was introduced by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box.  Irreducibly complex features and processes are ubiquitous in living things, especially at the microscopic level, as Behe documented in great detail in this now-classic book.

In fact, the development — gradual or not — of new organs or other irreducibly complex features through their useless stages could only be guided by a process with foresight, able to think ahead and envision their future uses. In other words, a mind. Indeed, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose is the title of a 2019 book by Brazilian chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, which carries the endorsement of three Nobel prize winners.

The first part of the video Why Evolution is Different has further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of  “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History,  for the assertion that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did. Here is a segment from the report on the 1980 meeting:

Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups, but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.

A 2022 article in The Guardian, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?”  retells the traditional Darwinian story for how eyes evolved and then says

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.  For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place…

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

In 2004, Michael Behe and David Snoke published a paper in Protein Science whose conclusions are summarized on p. 242 of Steve Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt:

[T]hey assessed how long it would typically take to generate two or three or more coordinated mutations.  They determined that generally the probability of multiple mutations arising in close (functionally relevant) coordination to each other was “prohibitively” low — it would likely take an immensely long time, typically far longer than the age of the earth.

This explains why Darwinists have always insisted that evolutionary progress must be assumed to have always been very gradual, despite the evidence that it was not.

Problem 4. Explaining how intelligent, conscious, humans evolved is particularly difficult, and the most effective way I have found to make this clear is used in point 5 of my video A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design:

Here is a picture of three children in the 1950’s.   One of them is me, the other two are not.  I saw the world from inside one of these children.  I saw every picture that entered through his eyes, I heard every sound that entered through his ears, and when he fell on the sidewalk, I felt his pain. How did I end up inside one of these children?

This is a question that rarely seems to trouble evolutionists.  They talk about human evolution as if they were outside observers and never seem to wonder how they got inside one of the animals they are studying. They consider that human brains are just complicated computers, and so to explain how we got here they just have to explain how these mechanical brains evolved.

But even if they could explain how animals with mechanical brains evolved out of the primeval slime, that would leave the most important question — the one evolutionists never seem to even wonder about — still unsolved: How did I get inside one of these animals?

Conclusions

From the video A Mathematician’s View of Evolution:

 Mathematicians are trained to value simplicity. When we have a simple, clear argument, and a long, complicated, counterargument, full of unverified points, we accept the simple argument even before we find the errors in the complicated argument.  We know the errors must exist and if we look for them, we will eventually find them.

I trust the very simple, clear argument of this video for Intelligent Design, knowing that there must be errors in the long, complicated, counterargument, which is full of unverified points, to put it very mildly.

READ MORE from Granville Sewell:

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