Review of Darwin's Proof, part 1

I am reading Darwin’s Proof: the triumph of religion over science, by Cornelius G. Hunter, a book promoting intelligent design. It was recommended by a local pastor to discuss, and I thought it would be fun to dissect it. I will be posting a series of reviews here. They will be detailed chapter by chapter reviews, partly because I sometimes just like dissecting arguments in great detail, but also because I can then use these posts as working notes if I ever discuss the book with pastor Eckstein.

The first chapter is mostly just an overview of the book and a summary of what Hunter believes he proved in his previous book. Since I don’t have the other book (Darwin’s God), I cannot say anything about his claims. The one sentence I would take to task from this chapter is “evolution is considered to be a fact because Darwinists believe they have disproved the alternative: divine creation.” This is simply false. First, there are other alternative besides divine creations, such as Lamarckian evolution, orthogenesis, and mutationists theories. Second, evolution is supported by a wide variety of positive evidence in support, not just by negative evidence against creation. Since creationists argue almost entirely by negative attacks, this might be hard for them to understand. I would be willing to make a prediction already at this point: the book will be completely lacking in positive evidence for creation.

Chapter 2 is titled Swallowing a Camel, the fundamental argument against evolution, part 1. It was a disappointing fundamental argument—simply the standard creationists method of showing how complicated some biological process is, and thinking that is an argument against evolution. It’s the argument from personal incredulity. It doesn’t fail as standard creationist fair, complete with quote mining and arguments from chance.

It starts with the standard comparison of living things with a designed artifact, in this case a space ship. I discussed one aspect of that argument in the previous post. I should also point out that all such arguments boil down to: artifact X is complex and is designed, therefore all other complex things are designed. It doesn’t follow. Design is one way to get complexity, but not the only way.

The rest of the chapter is a Michael Behe style summary of basic molecular biology—DNA to store information, transcription, translation, gene regulation, and protein folding. Most of it is just a summary, with an emphasis on how complicated it is, with very little attempt to actually present an argument. It is assumed that showing it is complicated is sufficient. You might think that Hunter would first present the evolutionary explanation for the origin of this system, and then show what is wrong with it, but he does not present the case at all. And he most certainly does not offer an alternative explanation, other than the implied “God did it.”

I will address some of his specific arguments, misrepresentations, and rhetorical methods. Hunter repeatedly suggests that evolution claims complex structures arise spontaneously rather than by a slow process. I count four uses of “spontaneously” and another of “on their own”. He frequently uses anthropomorphic words to describe processes or molecules, including the following: search rapidly, patiently, stagehands, a reader “looking”. Does he think the molecules themselves have intelligence, or does he accept that they are acting by random collisions? He presumably is arguing that processes arose by intelligence, not that the molecules themselves are intelligent, and it is lazy to conflate the two.

At one point, he argues that “Living things don’t look like they evolved”. It is not at all clear what he thinks things would look like if they evolved, and he does not attempt to explain it. I hope he does not think that what something “looks like” is an argument. I would argue that they don’t look designed but cobbled together by evolution. He says the evolutionary explanation for the eye is “not very convincing”, apparently meaning not convincing to him.

He has a bizarre side track in the discussion of DNA, taking Francis Crick for task for saying “we have discovered the secret of life”. Hunter spends a page arguing that DNA isn’t really the secret of life, as if Crick’s phrase was anything more than a metaphor to emphasize the importance of DNA. This has nothing to do with evolution or design at all.

It is in his discussion of the regulation of DNA expression that Hunter finally attempts to do more than just say “this is complicated”. He claims that evolutionists have little more than speculation to explain how such a system arose, but fails to site any literature or summarize the explanations available. A quick search on “evolution of lac operon” on Google Scholar returned nearly 8,000 hits. Instead, Hunter quotes a genetics textbook that he feels fails to give a detailed description of the evidence or variations that would lead to the evolution of the lac operon. It is a genetics textbook with an aside about evolution and it is not the goal of the text to give a detailed account of the evolution of the process.

He fails to understand the processes by which molecules can evolve. He believes positive control of gene regulation is problematic (such as CAP activation of the lac operon), because instead of just knocking out a gene, we have to have an already existing dormant gene become activated. First, this is simply false. He assumes the system had to be assembled all at once. The genes of the lac operon would not have been dormant without CAP, rather they would have been constitutively on. CAP helps to insure that the genes are not on when glucose is available and is an additional but dispensable layer of regulation. Furthermore, most genes aren’t entirely on or off—they have degrees of activation. Turning a gene “on” now could have originally just been slightly increasing its activity, and over time it became more binary.

Hunter does not consider that genes have multiple or different functions during evolution and they need not always do what they are doing now. A great example of that is in the lac operon that he discusses. The beta galactosidase gene is cobbled together from other genes that originally functioned in glucose metabolism. He criticizes the genetics textbook for suggesting that such a shift in function might have occurred for a regulatory protein as rampant speculation. Even if we do not have direct evidence for it happening in this particular case, there are hundreds of documented examples of proteins changing functions, so it is not rampant speculation to suggest that it happened here.

This brings me to another problem. A critic can always find some system for which we currently do not have a detailed explanation of its evolution. The lack of current explanation does not mean it cannot be explained. Have we identified the pathways by which a similarly complex system arose? Yes, there are many such examples, including the ID poster child, the bacterial flagellum. There is no reason to think that any new molecular pathway is somehow different from these. The lac operon is less complicated than a flagellum. We should try to find a solution, but we do not claim to know the evolutionary origin of everything. Hunter also claims we should be able to construct the detailed step by step process by which a pathway arose, similar to Behe in the Dover trial. We can know that something has evolved because of an accumulation of evidence without knowing absolutely every step in the process.

A creationist book wouldn’t be complete without quoting out of context. Hunter quotes Alberts et al.: “The complexity of a process with so many interacting components has made many biologists despair of ever understanding the pathway by which protein synthesis evolved.” I knew from experience that the next sentence would contain a “however”. I looked it up, and it does. The next sentence is: “The discovery that RNA molecules can act as enzymes, however, has provided a new way of viewing the pathway.” They then summarize the evidence for an RNA world.

The most irrelevant discussion in the chapter is the discussion of protein folding. It doesn’t matter how complicated the process of protein folding is. The process of protein folding is a thermodynamic process, not an evolutionary process. It did not evolve. All that evolves is the primary sequence of proteins. If they happen to fold into a useful shape, they will be selected. The folding process itself does not evolve.

It is in this section that the inevitable misrepresentation of chance occurs: “You would need to search through many billions of sequences to find one that is functional. In other words, finding a sequence of amino acids that provide a useful function is like the proverbial needle in a haystack.” He goes on to show that if evolution started randomly searching when the universe began, it still wouldn’t have found a functional sequence. How many times do we have to do this, how many times will they use the same argument that has been shown to be a misrepresentation of evolution over and over? Evolution isn’t a random search.

The final section is rather bizarre. Hunter says that examples like insecticide or antibiotic resistance seem impressive, but they only occur because a “clever adaptive machine is at work”. In other words, when we do get evolution, it’s because we have an evolution machine! This machine must have been designed. He then strongly seems to endorse a Lamarckian or teleological view that organisms are striving to adapt and that mutations arise because this machine makes them arise. The evidence is overwhelming that mutations are random and not directed, but he implies otherwise. He explicitly and falsely states that mutations are concentrated in areas that produce helpful results, rather than randomly.

It is interesting how he misrepresents an example of evolution. He says that in one case of pesticide resistance of an insect, a gene that has been present all along was made more active. A special signal “was inserted into the gene” to lift production constraints. Notice the way he describes mutation. What really happened was that the DNA sequence was mutated to lift production constraints. His wording implies that something outside of the organism inserted a sequence. He also implies that such changes of gene regulation are contrary to what evolution predicts, rather than being long recognized as the most common way that evolution proceeds.