Perspectives : The Mechanics of Evolution

It saddens me to see the degree of polarity that has emerged in recent decades over any number of issues, and the debate over our origin is one of them. I wish to put down in writing my current position on the matter. Whether or not it offends one side or the other is not really my concern. Rather, I want to have a record of my own beliefs, that in future I may return and either refine or dispense with them entirely.

Quite commonly, those who do not believe in evolution as the primary driving force for the diversity and complexity of life are quickly lambasted as dunces who do not wish to face up to the evidence. The fossil record, phylogenetics, molecular biology on and on it goes. The conservative Christian is left feeling as though he or she has to grasp at ever more unrealistic straws to say that God created the world in seven days.

That 'alternative' camp is not entirely satisfactory either. To bottle oneself up in a shell and refuse to face the facts rings of a blind faith, divorced from reality and not at all consistent with the degree of reality that God encourages us to pursue.

O veritas, why are you so elusive?

I encourage you not to be tainted by a sense of motivational fallacy as you read what follows. I am not here to address every argument and angle that has been thrown up on the issue, though I have ideas on them nonetheless. My position might best be described as something like theistic microevolution. God gave us these mechanics that species would be able to adapt to various environmental changes.

I have learnt on a superficial level what goes into the complexity of life. An organism made of interrelated systems, composed of organs, made of tissues, constituted of cells. All in highly regulated processes that maintain homeostasis. Life, in its entirety seems so vulnerable to disorder that it is a wonder that it has continued for as long as it has.

A single cell in itself is a wonder to behold. Substances of many kinds diffuse in the cytoplasm or are bound to a tightly organised membrane system; ions, carbohydrates, amino acids, enzymes, proteins colliding and interacting in a flabbergasting chemical symphony.

Information is encoded in an elegant system of four nitrogenous bases, interpreted by a host of enzymes to produce proteins, some of which are enzymes themselves. The interpretation is influenced by another, perhaps more complex, layer of regulation as epigenetic factors silence or promote the expression of certain regions. The enzymes eventually get around to replicating the DNA itself and life goes on.

Then cells interact with other cells; with neurotransmitters, membrane proteins, hormonal factors, interleukins, cytokines, on and on the list goes. Books and books have been written and still we know precious little about the full mechanisms involved.

Tissues and organs work together to balance a hundred factors, pH in the blood, electrical activity of the heart, the transport of potassium in the kidneys, the level of glucose in the blood, calcium levels, oxygenation, blood pressure, temperature, renal output, muscle tone, hormonal levels, growth and development, maintaining immune functions and antibody levels, once again, on and on one can go, enough to exhaust the space on hundreds of pages and barely scratch the surface.

Things extend in the other direction as well. A single enzyme is a carefully arranged sequence of amino acids, folded in a precise way, maintained in the right pH and temperature range to support its function, produced, transported, modified and degraded by a committee of other enzymes. Biological molecules are made of atoms, atoms of quarks and leptons. It is stunning that the simple laws of mathematics at the heart of this reality, the geometry of three dimensions and the strengths of various forces, allow for the functional complexity that is ribosome reductase.

We know more about the human body, about life in general, than at any other time in history, yet we are also more powerfully blinded to the marvel of it all because each successive discovery is gradually integrated into a framework that tells us that we are nothing more than self-conscious stardust, that all the information we have discovered is something that a bunch of monkeys would one day type out given a typewriter and enough ink.

That is my major contention: Information does not arise spontaneously. As a creative and imaginative being, I see already how difficult it is for me to compose in the medium I am most familiar with, the English language. The time that goes into my diction, punctuation and the inspiration for my posts is not insignificant, but I daresay that if I had not written this post, no other individual in the world would string together the exact same words to convey the same sentiments. There is a reason why sites like Turnitin have any success after all. To say that this post would arise from random generation is even more futile. Leave a blank page alone, and perhaps it will acquire a tea stain, inadvertent creases, grow damp with humidity and eventually disintegrate, but it is not going to give you the line 'What a piece of work is man.' We never see information arise in our experience except from intelligence. Intelligence both creates and interprets information.

There is a marvellous website that may be proposed as a counter to this enshrinement of creativity: The Library of Babel. It even has prose of my own original composition which I have not shown to another human soul. Yet it relies on a system that generates text in the first place. It relies on an even more complex system of a language that has evolved over the millennia to give us odd contradictions like the words 'restful' and 'restive' for the text in the library to have any significance to any of us.

Modern evolutionary theory admits the need for a driver, a creator of information, and we put this down to mutation. Mutation it says, gave us the language of life. Yes, mutation is overwhelmingly detrimental, but occasionally, it gives us something useful it says. The eye is used as a prime example, proceeding from a simple structure into the full organ that gives us the ability to sense wavicles of the electromagnetic force.

To me mutation will only result in the loss or modification of information. To me, a strain of wolf that has been domesticated and gradually selected for meeker and tamer characteristics until it becomes a shitzu has not gained information. The information contained within those genes has been from its original expression, absolutely. The strain of this organism has adapted to a new environment, certainly. The two animals look nothing alike and behave in ways that are not alike, indubitably. But there is no new information. There is only information that has been altered. Both are still Canis lupus. They still have the same enzymes or variations of those enzymes. We see the same phenomenon in human populations. The Hapsburg jaw is just as unnerving a phenotype as the pudgy profile of a bulldog. One only has to look at diversity among Homo sapiens to see how much potential there is for intra-species variation.

Let me use a non-biological example. The Bible is a book that singularly has more translations, copies, versions and languages than any other book in the world. Do I believe that all of them are accurate and absolutely free of error? No, I do not. The Message is quite a different creature from the English Standard Version, and both are in turn different from Jerome's Vulgate. The text in Hebrew and Greek are still the ultimate authority, and we go back to them when there are translational issues. In a way, the versions of the sacred text are all mutations of the original, adapting themselves to different communities so they can be read and understood, appreciated and applied. Some bible translations are more faithful to the original than others, and some are so compromised that they should really not be touted as bibles at all. Translations that are so inaccurate that they fall into the latter category are like organisms with mutations so severe that they are incompatible with life. Can those books still be read? Surely they can, just as a baby with anencephaly can be born.

To say that the information of life, not just DNA, but the complex interactions that occur between other compounds, between cells, between tissues, organs and the environment, in between male and female, organisms and species, ecosystems and climates all come from mutation and not from intelligence, requires a level of faith that I cannot sustain. It is not just a matter of information, but that there should be systems in place to interpret and apply that information at all. A string of DNA is not going to produce anything on its own.

This is becoming quite the disorganised rant. In summary, my point is that, if evolution had been proposed as the driving mechanism for the development and diversification of life in a world that new as much about life's complexity as we do today, it would seem laughable. It was compatible in a world of aqua vitae and widespread belief in spontaneous generation, not so much in a world of phospholipase C and voltage gated potassium channels. It is only because each successive discovery has boarded the sinking Titanic that the Titanic is full while the Noahic Ark seems empty. To continue to propose so is, to me, akin to reading the prolific works of Voltaire and insisting that they were in fact generated by mechanical random letter generators and editors over the entire span of human history instead of a remarkably gifted and incisive mind. This may sound a little irreverent, but: 'Oh look, they have common themes, it must have been 'convergent evolution', definitely not because they were written by the same intelligent individual!'

Let me now move on to what I do believe that modern science has given us. Yes there are genes, yes there are mutations, yes there is variation in a population, yes there are populations that get behaviourally and sexually isolated and diverge in characteristics. Yes the fittest survive and the less well adapted die out in extinction. There are ways that we can construct phylogenetic trees and observe the variations of a single enzyme across multiple populations that gives rise to distinct phenotypes. Yes we can apply the Hardy-Weinberg principle to conceptualise changes in populations. I accept all these things because that is what the evidence demands, to deny these points is to be ignorant and dogmatic. The evidence however, does not demand that I have to buy that mutation is somehow the author of the corpus of information that assaults me in every nature reservation. In fact, I feel it demands quite the opposite.

What if God, in His wisdom, created species, or as the Bible phrases it, kinds, with the genetic potential for adaptation to all the environments this world would offer? I do not see why an omnipotent God could not have placed genes, dormant, in the equivalents of Adam and Eve for the otter, the gecko, the salmon, the cockroach or even the beloved finch, to allow them to acclimatise themselves to very different conditions. Changes in diet, temperature, humidity, ecosystems and micro-organismal milieu and so on would have been foreseen by a God who foresaw that His Son's executioners would cast lots for His robe. His creation is not so fragile to be upset by such disturbances, but learns, reorganises and modifies itself in a remarkable way to show the degree of compensation that has been incorporated into the design from the very beginning.

To me, all that the mechanics of evolution prove is that our God is a far more ingenious author than we first supposed. There is no artificial system that does what the natural system of genes and enzymes does to any degree of comparison, not without constant new input and maintenance from the intelligent human designers. On the other hand, the game plan for natural life has been tremendously successful and resistant to stresses over thousands of years, without God having to say, 'Oh excuse me, let me send out the latest patch.' On the other hand, the 'bugs' that we observe in the programme of life, the effects of thalassemia, atrial septal defects and cerebral palsy are precisely what mutation and mistakes cause. These conditions were not part of the original design in my worldview.

I would like to end off with another final point. The purely materialistic evolutionary worldview limits the 'function' of an organism to its ability to perpetuate its selfish genes, id est, surviving from conception to reproduction. Many other structures that appear to have no role in this are dismissed as accessory and vestigial. Other aspects of the human body we have no logical reason for. The palmaris longus, the decussation of nerve fibres in the spinal cord, I can go on.

What if our bodies were designed with more in mind? Is it so hard to accept that perhaps our bodies were designed to be beautiful and organised? To go beyond that, that our bodies were designed so that we could investigate them and discover how they work, designed to be comprehensible? What if the spinal column is organised in a way that allows us to test its function and relations to the nerves at each level, that we can draw charts of dematomes and myotomes and predict with accuracy the functional loss that comes from a lesion of a certain vertebral level. Taking this further still, that when God put in the palmaris longus, He knew that He was putting in a structure that would be able to serve as a source of reserve tendon tissue for repair operations without the need to worry for immunological effects? It lends even more credence to the idea that as we study nature, we get glimpses into the mind of the creator that complement the revelation of His character in the bible and in our daily experience. Do you think that God intended for us not to know about our own bodies, or that He did not anticipate every advance and development of modern medical technology?

We are too quick to judge something as significant and another structure as insignificant. We are too quick to pronounce evidence of 'unintelligent design' when we do not even know the purpose of the means by which it is constructed. We flaunt our definitions of purpose, value and utility onto a human body that is intricate beyond belief, and in doing so, discredit its ongoing miracle.

It is almost tragically ironic, that the psalmist, who probably didn't even know that the heart pumps blood, could declare 'I am fearfully and wonderfully made' while our information saturated societies have such discomfort from the implication that there is a Maker.