An Open Letter to Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Axe

A couple days ago

Until about three years ago I believed that Darwin had it right with his version of evolution, including random mutation as primary driver of change (coupled with natural selection). I recall watching the PBS version of the Dover trial and being annoyed at the hypocrisy of ‘Christians’ apparently prevaricating on the provenance of the Intelligent Design textbook, Of Panda’s and People. Although this and other aspects of the trial (the film thereof anyway) served to reinforce my pro-Darwin view, I remember watching a pro-evolutionist ‘debunking’ irreducible complexity by wearing a mousetrap as a tie clasp and thinking, ‘Well that’s a bunch of hogwash’ (it didn’t prove anything) – while the judge (and the filmmakers) nodded smugly, impressed by the guy’s ‘clever’ point. Having already learned not to trust PBS, I made a mental note to look into Dr. Behe and his notion of irreducible complexity. (The ‘irreducible complexity’ link explains the mousetrap reference.)

A few weeks later I watched a Youtube presentation by Dr. Behe and immediately saw his point, which resulted in my reading his second book, The Edge of Evolution, then, over the next few months, Dr. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and, more recently, Dr. Axe’s Undeniable; How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Was Designed. (Since then I’ve read most of the books produced by Discovery Institute members.)

As it turns out, my faith in Darwinism was based on ignorance.

Consider this letter my thank you for your work, and for putting up with the travails of going against mainstream science. What immediately follows is my recent correspondence with Carl Zimmer, a science correspondent for The New York Times and other magazines; he is the author of several books on evolution. He also teaches science writing and is a visiting scholar at major universities. As a hard core Neo-Darwinist, he probably does the most damage in his writing courses.

I had contacted him about my interest in how it came to be that humans have one less pair of chromosomes than the great apes – I had been able to find only scarce literature on this matter, which I found puzzling. How did such a radical and seemingly disadvantageous ‘one-off’ mutation become fixed in our genome? Although Mr. Zimmer’s response was not illuminating, he did take the time to attach a relevant paper (which dealt with when, not how, the mutation took place).

My more recent correspondence with Mr. Zimmer was regarding irreducible complexity and is self-explanatory. I’m hoping you find my observations of value.

Via email, I wrote:

Hi Mr. Zimmer,

As I hope I made clear previously, I’m not an ‘Intelligent Design’ advocate, in the sense of belief in the existence of a ‘Designing being’ of some sort, nor do I have theoretical problems with common ancestry or change over time (macro-evolution). But I still maintain that Neo-Darwinism has not shown that random mutation can account for the diversity of life, nor for the changes in body plans evidenced by ‘evolution’ (by my definition).

I believe I can make the case for Behe’s irreducible complexity using one of the ‘poster children’ of the concept, the eye, with an argument I came up with myself – anyway, I have not come upon it elsewhere. (If you’ve heard it before, please alert me to this.)

Depending on how you respond, I intend to expand upon what follows in a blog post. I hope you’ll agree to a Q & A. I’ve taken both sides as an example of how it might go – I suspect you’ll do better than I in backing up random mutation’s case (as far as I take it):

AW: Mr. Zimmer, as an advocate of Neo-Darwinism, including random mutation as primary driver of change over time, I’d ask you to respond to my assertion that the eye as we know it could not have evolved as claimed by Darwin and his modern followers.

CZ?: Okay, Allan, give it your best shot.

AW: First, let me quote from an article you wrote for the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine:

‘The earliest eyes were probably just simple eyespots that could only tell the difference between light and dark. Only later did some animals evolve spherical eyes that could focus light into images.’

Would you please define what you mean by the phrase ‘tell the difference’…

CZ?: That’s short hand for ‘light sensitive,’ ‘sensitive’ being defined as ‘able to react to environmental stimuli; in this case, light.

AW: How does the eyespot do that?

CZ?: Chemically, the basic light-processing unit of eyes is the photoreceptor cell, which contains a light sensitive specialized protein called opsin. A primitive eyespot permits organisms to gain only a very basic sense of the direction and intensity of light, but not enough to discriminate an object from its surroundings.

AW: Okay… Let’s assume the sudden appearance of a light sensitive spot on a simple organism’s skin, or outer membrane, depending on its complexity. What’s the selective advantage?

CZ?: As mentioned, the organism (assumingly aquatic) can tell where the light is coming from.

AW: I’ve studied about a score of different (Neo-Darwinian) scientists’ theories about the evolution of the eye and they all use words like ‘tell’ or ‘know,’ or ‘discriminate,’ referring to the very simple, in some cases brainless, organisms they posit. As if they were processing information.

CZ?: I suppose that in a very simple sense, they do.

AW: Given this, could you please explain how it works, showing how the eyespot gives selective advantage. Let’s assume – although it could go either way – that the organism would better survive in darkness because light is damaging to its DNA. Or because there is more food or less predators in the dark. Take your pick.

CZ?: As the organism moves away from the light, it will sense the light getting dimmer and continue going in that direction–

(AW laughs, interrupting CZ): I’m sorry, but I just thought of an old joke: A thermos keeps cold things cold and hot things hot, right? Well… how does it know?

I realize that this is only a metaphor; it’s not directly comparable but still… how does the organism know it will do better if it moves away from the light?

CZ?: That would depend on the specific organism.

AW: As I say, take your pick of an organism and advantage/disadvantage of light intensity. We are assuming that the organism has never before had an eyespot and now a ‘random mutation’ has given it one. I would submit that as a Neo-Darwinian who believes in random mutation as change-driver, you must be able to show even just in theory how the organism, any organism, is going to gain selective advantage from the ‘light sensitive’ spot it was just now randomly blessed with.

Mr. Zimmer: This is where I run out of possible responses and am hoping you will fill in the blank.

In wondering how it might have gone with an organism’s first ‘glimpse’ of light. I’ve looked into how humans who were blind since birth react when suddenly given sight – and this is after being told they would experience something new and amazing, a new way to perceive the world around them (how do you prepare them for seeing?). From an article in The New Yorker:

In 2011, Dr. Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience at M.I.T., published his answer to an almost-four-hundred-year-old philosophical problem. The philosopher William Molyneux, whose wife was blind, had proposed a thought experiment in the seventeenth century about a person, blind from birth, who could tell apart a cube and a sphere by touch: If his vision were restored and he was presented with the same cube and sphere, would he be able to tell which was which by sight alone? The philosophical camps on Molyneux’s question divided roughly through the centuries into those who believe that certain qualities, such as the roundness of spheres, are innate and shared among the senses (the Yeses), and those who insist that, to understand roundness, the eyes must have already seen roundness (the Nos).

I was immediately in the ‘No’ camp, and I was right. It took weeks for the newly sighted to ‘understand’ what visual images represented, what they meant. (They had to learn to tell a cube from a sphere, for example, which they could do perfectly when blind, by their sense of touch.)

You may be thinking that this is not relevant to our situation but at the very least the above is a reminder that you – as a Neo-Darwinian – have to show how a sudden new sense would lead to altered behavior, and how that behavior would be of selective advantage.

At the level of phenotype, you need to show the physical connection between the eyespot and the nervous system (no matter how primitive) and then in turn with the mode of movement of the organism (wiggling, a flagellum, whatever), in order to merely show the physical possibility of altered behavior, let alone the selective advantage. (If you’re going to use words like ‘know,’ ‘tell,’ or ‘discriminate’ I suggest you need to show the species’ past ‘learning’ history that will apply to the new sense of sight the organism suddenly possesses.)

Once you see it this way, you realize how astronomically improbable (physically impossible) it would be to have all the mutations necessary to occur by random chance, since they would all have to occur simultaneously. (A ‘light sensitive’ cell or group of cells with no means by which to affect behavior is not sufficient to afford selective advantage.) 

‘Have you ever seen a mutation simultaneously affecting two separate components of the body and producing structures that fit one another precisely? … have you ever beheld three, four or five simultaneous mutations with matching structures producing coordinating effects? … These are vital questions that demand an answer. There is no way of getting around them, or evading the issue. Every biologist who wants to know the truth must answer them, or be considered a sectarian and not a scientist. In science there is no “cause” to be defended, only truth to be discovered. How many chance occurrences would it take to build this extraordinary creature [or organ, such as the eye?] [Myrmelion formicarius]’? [I lost the link but no matter]

Keep in mind that – unlike the ID folks — I am not making any assertions as to how evolution works. I am merely showing you that your base assertion (random mutation as change mechanism) does not account for what we observe — at least regarding the evolution of the eye, although the above argument could apply to other situations/organs/organisms (such as the bacterial flagellum) . Yes, the essence of my argument is irreducible complexity, and the observation that the Neo-Darwinist view has not thought through the complexity.  What makes the case of the eye particularly interesting is that for Neo-Darwinism it represents a problem on still another level, that of the sudden appearance of a new mode of sensing the world (sight).

Thank you for your past communications (other than the ‘Beaver issue’) [I’ll add the ‘Beaver issue’ at the end of this]. I hope you find my emails stimulating and not annoying. I do find it odd that no one has pointed out the above ‘devil-in-the-details’ issue in the conflict over evolution’s machinations. If I’ve just flat missed something I trust that you will point it out.

Allan Weisbecker

A few hours later Mr. Zimmer emailed back:

To which I replied:

Mr. Zimmer,