2 of 4

From our IDM viewpoint, this example—hyped in textbooks and TV programs as proof that the Darwinian mechanism has actually been observed—tells us nothing about how birds or other animals might have come into existence. It is not merely a matter of saying that small changes do not necessarily add up to large changes, although the fallacy of extrapolation is a notorious path to absurdity. The more important point is that variation of the finch beak sort involves no increase whatsoever in genetic information or adaptive complexity. When evaluating such an example we have to make allowances for the limited time available for observation, but a process that never gets started isn't going to reach a distant objective no matter how much time we give it.

Besides the experimental failure, there is a theoretical reason to conclude that a combination of random mutation and natural selection cannot create new complex organs or organisms. Even the simplest of living organisms, the bacterial cell, is a miniaturized chemical factory far more complex than an airplane or a computer. Such a complex entity requires an enormous quantity of information in the form of instructions that tell the many parts just what they are to do and in what order they are to do it. Even the archmaterialist Richard Dawkins agrees that a single cell requires a program with more information than all the volumes of the encyclopedia, and a complex organism like ourselves contains trillions of cells working in concert. The genetic information, like the information in a book or computer program, is complex, specified, and non repeating, which means that it cannot be the product either of random movement (which produces disorder) or chemical laws (which produce simple, repetitive order). (For a more complete explanation, see my review of The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/fifthmiracle/).

How do Darwinists argue that their mechanism is information-creating, given the absence of any biological examples? One of the main arguments is a computer analogy most famously employed by Dawkins. Here is how Pennock describes it:

In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins beautifully illustrates the power of cumulative selection with an example that considers the probability that a monkey banging at a keyboard would type out a line from Shakespeare at random. The chance of our monkey hitting upon the line "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" from Hamlet is tiny if we require him to get all 28 characters right in a single step. But switch now to a Darwinian monkey who be gins with a random string of 28 characters, produces multiple replications of this sequence with some chance of a copying error each time, and then repeats the process starting for the next set of copies with whichever of the copies is closest to the target sequence as the original. If he continues in this way, in a surprisingly small number of generations he hits the target [emphasis added].

Of course, the "Darwinian monkey" is really a computer that generates random letters and then produces the target text by retaining the correct letters when they appear in the correct places in the sequence, as they are eventually bound to do. Careful readers of The Blind Watchmaker will know that Dawkins admits that the computer analogy "is misleading in important ways," and Pennock seeks to disarm criticism by citing the warning. This concession has not prevented Dawkins or Pennock from misusing the analogy repeatedly to exploit the very feature that is misleading about it: it smuggles intelligence into an argument whose purpose is to illustrate how a text can be written without intelligence. It is not cumulative selection that writes the target text; the program designer writes the text into the computer's memory along with the instructions for retaining the correct letters and discarding the incorrect ones. The reference to Darwinian monkeys and copying errors serves only to distract attention from the fact that the computer program would require less intelligence if it bypassed the cumulative selection charade and printed the target text directly from its memory. The example illustrates intelligent design, in the form of programmed instructions.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page