Origin of the Specious

Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin?

Ronald Bailey from the July 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Berlinski also argues that mathematical calculation shows it is absurdly improbable that life could have arisen by a chance combination of chemicals in the primordial soup. Berlinski asserts that randomness overwhelms any other process if we try to maintain the perspective of naturalism. Therefore we are treated to calculations that show the number of all possible proteins is far greater than the number of atoms in the universe or the number of seconds that have passed since the Big Bang. These calculations are supposed to overwhelm our capacity to believe that life could arise spontaneously. But is life really so improbable? Investigations into complexity theory by Stuart Kauffman and other scientists at the Santa Fe Institute indicate otherwise: that spontaneous order may be part and parcel of the universe.

The other new anti-Darwin champion is Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe argues that many cellular systems are "irreducibly complex." An irreducibly complex "system needs several components before it can work properly." He uses the humble mousetrap as an example--one cannot catch mice with only a platform, then catch more with the addition of a spring--all the pieces must be there for it to work. Behe then proceeds to describe in great detail examples of what he thinks are irreducibly complex biological systems, e.g., bacterial flagella, the cascade required for blood to clot, and the chemical chain that must fire in order to for us to see. ln each case, he asserts that there is no way that such a complex structure could have arisen gradually--all the links must be there in order for the systems to operate properly.

Behe, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, frankly acknowledges that his is "a distinctly minority view among scientists on the question of what caused evolution." But Behe wants it clearly understood that he is no biblical literalist: "In the book I specifically say I am not a creationist, agree that the universe is billions of years old, [and] believe in descent of life from a common ancestor."

Unlike Berlinski, Behe more or less concedes that Darwinian evolution occurred once the biochemical systems operating inside of cells were "designed." In his view, the flowering of the various species we find in the fossil record and in the world today were potential in the original "designed" cells that came into existence 3.5 billion years or so ago.

Behe is addressing the origins problem--how did the whole show get started in the first place? It is true that no satisfactory answer for the question of how life began has yet been devised; it is a question that scientists are only beginning to address in an organized manner. Richard Dawkins, the arch-Darwinist author of The Selfish Gene (1976) and last year's Climbing Mount Improbable, accuses Behe of intellectual laziness on the question. "The role of a biochemist is to work on problems," he says, "not just throw up his hands and say that since it's not obvious how some biochemical cascade may have evolved, then it must therefore be the result of design."

Among those working on the origins question is biologist and Nobel laureate Christian De Duve, who has outlined a theory of how life might have arisen. He dubs his theory the "thioester-iron world," after the chemicals he thinks could have reacted together to create "protometabolisms" that could evolve. He admits his theory is very speculative, but believes that one day biologists may find traces of the prior existence of these protometabolisms in the biochemistry of contemporary organisms.

Another promising approach is complexity theory. Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute argue that life is practically the inevitable result of the laws of physics and chemistry. According to Stuart Kauffman, life bootstrapped itself into existence through autocatalytic sets of chemicals that were in the primordial soup. Kauffman postulates that if a chemical soup has enough different types of compounds, they will begin to act in metabolic ways and be able to reproduce and evolve. (See "Who Ordered That?" February 1996.)

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University and author of Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986), explains how Kauffman's theory might be checked out: "You take what you think are a nice set of chemicals and you put them together. You decide what the appropriate energy source is and you just follow it. If a network of reactions à la Kauffman sets itself up--A catalyzes B, B catalyzes C, C catalyzes D--and you don't get all tar or an equilibrium mixture where nothing changes, but energy is being used productively ...with certain chemicals taking over the mixture and others disappearing," then you will have established a base from which to proceed. "Now you play with initial ingredients and see how broad the base is of chemicals which will support this pre-biotic simulation." If the chemical reaction networks remain open-ended, then biochemists may have developed a plausible example of how such networks began to evolve into living things.

In fact, a German scientist, Günter Wächtershäuser, has recently published a paper in Science magazine describing his efforts to uncover such plausible protometabolisms. He has found an open-ended chemical cycle that produces an active form of acetic acid, thought to mirror an ancient metabolic pathway in bacteria. Such a protometabolism, he argues, could have existed billions of years ago on metal sulfide surfaces found at hot deep ocean vents, and could have been one of the first steps in the evolution of life.

Kauffmanesque spontaneous self-organization would be a different source of order from that yielded by the process of Darwinian natural selection. Of course, Kauffman's work needs to be validated, but it is the kind of scientific theory that could make Behe's claims moot and undermine Berlinski's mathematical improbability argument. Berlinski's counterargument against the work of the Santa Fe Institute, by the way, is simple denial. "I find nothing of value in various theories of self-organization," he wrote in his reply to the Commentary correspondence, "the very idea is to my mind incoherent; but I leave it to others to make the case." Why not him? Berlinski thinks life's too short. "[S]oon the night comes, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, wherein no man can work."

So if Darwinian evolutionary biology is still a viable scientific theory, is it nevertheless a "harmful truth" in the Straussian sense? Does it necessarily undermine the moral order? Is it necessarily in conflict with religion? Kristol thinks so. According to him, it undermines even "the belief that there is such a thing as a moral code."

Last summer, the Divine Action Conference, held biannually at the pope's summer palace near Rome, brought together a group of scientists and theologians to address the issue of what science and religion may have in common. The conference topic was evolution.

The Divine Action Conference is jointly sponsored by the Vatican and the Center for Theology and Natural Science. The head of CTNS, Robert Russell, is both a physicist and an ordained minister in the Church of Christ. Asked about evolution, Russell said, "As a Christian, I believe in God as creator....All of nature articulates God's grace as creator and redeemer. So evolution, which we discover through science, is in fact the way God goes about being creator." Another conference participant, the Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy from the Fuller Theological Seminary, said: "I think it is a terrible misconception to see evolutionary biology and Christian theology as in competition. Ever since the rise of modern science, Christians have had to come to terms with some understanding of God working through natural processes. And God's action in natural biological processes should not be an exception to that."

These views are called "compatibilism." They see no necessary contradiction between evolutionary theory and belief in a divine creator. Russell and Murphy are "theistic evolutionists." In fact, during his lecture at AEI, Irving Kristol revealed that he is probably a compatibilist: "I accept evolution. Something like that happened." Compatibilism is scorned by some scientists; Richard Dawkins, for example, wonders, "Why deliberately set [life] up in the one way that makes it look like you don't exist?"

Still, it received a big boost in October when Pope John Paul II issued a statement that said, "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just an hypothesis." The pope even suggested that humans arose from animal ancestors but added that, "If the human body has its origin in living material which pre-exists it, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God." The pope's statement added, "The convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of results of studies undertaken independently from each other constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."