by TC Lo (盧天賜) December 10, 2011 (latest revision, 1/3/12)
The Eye
“…There is no fear of God before his eyes” Psalm 36:1
Michael Behe in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” shows us the irreducible complexity of human cell, which biological evolution cannot explain. Darwin argued that a human eye evolved from simple one, and yet he set aside the essential question of its origin. Behe not only observes Darwin’s avoidance of this question but tackles it by describing the chemical changes that are set in motion to generate sight. From this moment a photon hits the retina to the end result of an imbalance of charge that causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain, resulting in sight, a series of chemical reactions have taken place that in evolution’s mechanism would have been impossible. Thus Behe concluded that the irreducible complexity of the human cell reveals that biologically macroevolution is impossible and Darwinism false. (Ref. 1)
You need Enzyme to make gene, you need gene to make cell, and the human eye has 7 million cells. It took one in ten to the power of 40,000 chance to evolve into an enzyme. Do you know what is “ten to the power of 40 thousand”? It is the number of atoms in the known universe.
In his book–Origin of Species, chapter 6–Difficulties of the Theory, a section– Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication, Darwin said in his own words:
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” (Ref. 2)
Irreducibly Complex System
There’s evidence for design in molecular machines that defy explanation by Darwinian natural selection. These integrative, complex systems in biological organisms—which microbiologist Michael Behe calls “irreducibly Complex”—include signal transduction circuits, sophisticated motors, and all kind of biological circuitry.
You see, these biological machines need all of their various parts in order to function. But how could you ever build such a system by Darwinian process of natural selection acting on random variations? Natural selection only preserves things that perform a function—in other words, which help the organism survive to the next generation. That’s survival of the fittest.
The problem with irreducibly complex systems is that they perform no function until all the parts are present and working together in close coordination with one another. So natural selection cannot help you build such systems; it can only preserve them once they’ve been built. And it is virtually impossible for evolution to take such a huge leap by mere chance to create the whole system at once.
Of course, this forces the question: how did the biochemical machine arise? Behe says maybe these biological systems look designed because they really were designed. After all, whenever we see irreducibly complex systems and we know how they arose, invariably a designer was the cause. (Ref. 3; p.79)
Mousetrap
Holding a mousetrap and you can see the interdependence of the parts for yourself.
1. First, there is a flat wooden platform to which the other parts are attached.
2. Second, there’s a metal hammer, which does the job of crushing the mouse.
3. Third, there’s a spring with extended ends to press against the platform and the hammer when the trap is charged.
4. Fourth, there’s a catch that releases when a mouse applies a slight bit of pressure. And,
5. Fifth, there’s a metal bar that connects to the catch and holds the hammer back when the trap is charged.
Now, if you take away any of these parts—the spring or the holding bar or whatever—then it’s not like a mousetrap becomes half as efficient as it used to be or it only catches half as many mice. Instead, it doesn’t catch any mice. It is broken. It doesn’t work at all. You don’t just need to have these five parts, but they also have to be matched to each other and have the right spatial relationship to each other. An intelligent agent put these parts in the right place.
But in the cell, who tells the parts where they should go? Who put the parts in the right places? Nobody—they have to do it on their own. You have to have the information resident in the system to tell the components to get together in the right orientation, otherwise it’s useless.
We just use the mousetrap to illustrate how irreducibly complex biological systems defy a Darwinian explanation. Evolution can’t produce an irreducibly complex biological machine suddenly, all at once, because it’s much too complicate. The odds against that would be prohibitive. And you can’t produce it directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor system would be missing a part and consequently couldn’t function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection chooses systems that are already working.
If the creation of a simple mousetrap requires intelligent design, then we have to ask, “What about finely tuned machines of the cellular world? If evolution can’t adequately explain them, then scientists should be free to consider other alternatives. (Ref. 3; pp.197-199)
Michael Behe develops this approach in his book Darwin’s Black Box. He quotes Darwin, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” (Ref. 5). I can understand, because in Darwin’s time, people thought the one-cell organism was rather simple and “What would Darwin think today?” is a good question?
Philosophical Pre-commitment
Though Darwin was an intelligent man, if he had already pre-committed to the denial of the existence of a Creator and yet felt the need to explain the origin of life in scientific framework, what else could his choice have been? He had to say that life must start from some very simple things and gradually build itself up to its present complexity against all odds. Because God was pre-supposedly not there, the building up process had to be a random walk. This unguided random process must take time—very long time—because chances were sometimes it went up and sometimes it went down. This is the core of Darwinian evolution. To ensure it had more going up than going down, he had to introduce the concept of “natural selection”. So far so good! But there are questions demanding answers:
• Darwin tried to explain life entirely by naturalistic framework in order to avoid supernatural possibility, but he based his explanation on a non-scientific premise—“God is not needed”—which cannot be proven scientifically. So how scientific was his scientific theory right at the starting point?
• Where was that “some very simple things”— which starts the evolution process—coming from? Darwin offered no explanation on the issue of origin (the first cause).
• The random walk turns out not being totally random. It had to be biased to favor the upward movement. Darwin called it “natural selection”. The problem is what causes the favoritism of the going upward (evolution) over the going down (devolution) movement? More fundamentally, how does the blind nature know what is up and what is down? The blindness of the process wouldn’t know that, would it?
• Who is “nature”? Instead of saying “natural selection”, I can equally say “God’s selection”? Why one way of saying is acceptable while the other way is not?
• Had Darwin known that a strand of DNA contains 3 billion bits of information in the cell; would he still propose the theory evolution?
• Do we agree that behind any information (the codes, or the computer programs), there must exist a mind?
Final Comment
I, to some degree, do agree on “survival of the fittest”. When I first came to the United States, I almost immediately discovered that those who spoke English well and knew how to drive survived the new environment better. I called it “adaptive variation.” If you really wanted me to use revolution terms, I would say, “I believe in microevolution.” The funny thing is: few hours before the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, the low level animals fled to the jungle and survived while the high level human beings perished by a great number.
As to the macroevolution (monkeys became men), I disagreed due to lack of evidence. In fact, all the evidences cited in the literatures espousing evolution were evidences of adaptation. We have not yet seen a single cogent evidence for macroevolution (Ref. 4).
Monkeys evolved into men as claimed by evolution; it follows that men could also possibly be reverted back to monkey because evolution is a random walk: it could go up but it could go down also; it was the natural selection that ensured that going up was more than going down but nevertheless it could go down, i.e., devolution. We found no cogent evidence in either case.
Closing words: Arguing against the existence of God is not due to the lack of evidences but the suppression of evidences. So this to me, is a moral issue rather than intellectual issue.
References:
1. “The Real Face of Atheism” by Ravi Zacharias; page 39.
2. “遊子吟” by里程; page 226.
3. “The Case For a Creator” by Lee Strobel.
4. The “Piltdown Man” is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex, in England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized skull fragments of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s dawn-man原始人”, after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 (40 years later) as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan ( 猩猩) that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. (extracted from Google search)
5. “Is Your Church Ready?” edited by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler; p.140.
中譯: 高玪 (12/27/11)
眼睛
米高·贝河在他的《达尔文的黑盒子》这本书里向我们展示了人体细胞「 无可简化的复杂性」，这是用生物进化论无法解释的。达尔文认为一个人的眼睛是由简到繁演变而来，但是对于演变的起始这个最基本的问题却只字未提。贝河不仅注意到达尔文对这个问题的有意迴避，而且还从视觉产生过程中的化学变化来挑战进化论：当光子击中视网膜底部，引起电荷不平衡而产生电流，电流通过视觉神经传送到大脑，因而产生视觉。这样一连串的化学反应，根本无法从进化论的机制来解释。因此贝河得出结论，由於人体细胞的「无可简化的复杂性」，生物意义上的宏观进化不可能发生，因而进化论是错的。（参1）
你可以由酶组成基因，由基因组成细胞，而人的眼睛由七百万个细胞组成。进化产生酶的机率是十的四万次方分之一。你知道“十的四万次方”有多大吗？它是这个已知宇宙中所有原子的总和。
在《物种起源》这本书第六章“自然选择学说的难点和异议”中，有一节叫“完善且复杂的器官”，达尔文写道：“眼睛有调节焦距、允许不同采光量和纠正球面象差和色差的无与伦比的设计。我坦白地承认，认为眼睛是通过自然选择而形成的假设似乎是最荒谬可笑的。”（参2）
无可简化的复杂系统
在设计分子机器中，有足够证据来挑战达尔文的自然选择学说。生物器官中错综复杂的系统，米高·贝河称之为“无可简化的复杂系统”， 它们是由信号传导线路、精密的马达和各种生物回路构成。可见，这些生物机器需要每个部件都发挥作用才能运作。这样的系统怎么可能根据达尔文的自然选择学说来随机组合而成呢？自然选择只能把这些有功能的东西保存下来，换句话说，就是帮助器官存留到下一代。那就是“适者生存”。
无可简化的复杂系统无法发挥功用，除非每个部件都出现，而且大家相互密切协调地工作。所以自然选择过程不能帮你建造这样的系统，只能在它们建好后把它们保存下来。几乎不可能由进化随机偶然地产生巨大的飞跃、一下子生成这样的系统。
大家不禁要问：那么这些生物机器是怎样形成的呢？贝河说：这些生物机器看上去像是经过精心设计的，或许正是因为它们确实是经过精心设计的。每当我们看到这些复杂的生物机器并且知道它们怎样形成，我们不约而同地得出结论：设计者才是它们的第一因。（参3，79页）
捕鼠器
手里拿着捕鼠器，你就可以了解各个部件是怎样互相依赖的。
1. 首先，一块木板把所有的其他部件连接在一起。
2. 其次，一个金属小锤头用来把老鼠打死。
3. 第三，一个弹簧，当捕鼠器设置好后， 弹簧的两端分别用劲儿拉住木板和小锤子。
4. 第四，一个触发器，只要老鼠稍微一碰就打开。
5. 第五，一个金属杆，但当捕鼠器设置好时，它用来向后拉住小锤子。
如果你拿走任何部件，无论是弹簧或是金属杆或是其它什么部件，并不是这个捕鼠器变得效率减半，或者说只能逮着半数的老鼠了；而是它不可能逮着任何老鼠，它坏了，它根本没法发挥功用了。而且仅仅有这五个部件是不行的，他们必须互相匹配、互相关联。只有智能才能把它们放在正确的地方，把捕鼠器设置好。
那么，对于一个细胞来说，谁来告诉每个部件该去哪里，谁让部件各就其位呢？没有人–它们必须自己来做。这个系统中必须有内住信息来告诉每个部件该放在哪里、该怎样摆置，否则这个系统就百无一用了。
我们用捕鼠器说明了无可简化的生物复杂系统是怎样挑战了达尔文的学说。进化过程不可能突然一下子就生成这些无可简化的生物复杂系统，因为它太复杂了，生成的它的可能性就像大海捞针。并且，你也不可能用逐渐完善的方法，多次渐进地改进初级体来产生它。因为初级体部件不全，不能发挥功用，它们不可能生存下来，自然选择只会选择那些有功用的系统。
如果一个简单的捕鼠器都需要智能设计，那么我们不禁会问：“那些调置精良的细胞界的机器又如何呢？如果进化论无法给予合理的解释，科学家就应该有自由考虑别的解释。（参3；197-199页）
哲学的预先承诺
尽管达尔文很聪明，但是如果他预先否定神的存在，并且还想在科学的框架下解释生命的起源，那么他还有什么选择呢？他必须说，尽管几率微小，生命是从很简单微小的东西逐渐演变成今天的复杂系统。因为已经预先假设神不存在了，所以这个演变的过程只能是随机的；这个没有主导的随机过程必须很长–非常长–因为往往有进退起伏。这就是达尔文进化论的核心所在。为确保进化大于退化，他必须引进“自然选择”的概念。这些看起来还行，但是有些问题仍然有待回答：
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达尔文试图用纯自然来解释生命，避免任何超自然的可能性；但是他的解释是建立在“不需要神”这个非科学的前提下，这个前提不可能用科学来证明。那么他的“科学理论”从起始就有多么科学呢？
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在进化的起始，那些“非常简单的东西”是从哪里来的呢？达尔文没有解释他们的起源。
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随机过程其实并未完全随机，它必须倾向于进化。达尔文称之为“自然选择”。那么是什么导致进化过程多于退化过程？更基本的问题：盲目的自然界怎样知道什么是进化、什么是退化？盲目的过程不应该知道这些，对不对？
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“自然”是谁？你可以说“自然选择”， 是否我也可以同样说“神选择”？为什么一种说法是可接受的而另一种就不可接受？
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如果达尔文当时知道在一个细胞中，一个DNA链包含30亿比特的信息；那么他仍然会提出进化论吗？
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我们是否都同意在任何信息（密码，或计算机程序）的后面都有一个设计者？
最后的评论：
我在某种程度上赞同“适者生存”。当我刚来美国时，我马上发现英文说得好和会开车的人在新环境中生活得比较好。我称之为“适应性变异”。如果你一定要我用进化论的词汇，我会说“我相信微进化”。有趣的是：在2004年印尼海啸中，在海啸發生前數小時, 低等动物跑到森林里躲过一劫，而高等动物的人类却死伤无数。
至于宏观进化（猴子变成人），因为缺乏证据，我无法赞同。事实上，在所有支持进化论的文献中所引用的证据都是适应性的变化。我们从来没有看到一个具有说服力的宏观进化证据。（参4）
再者, 進化論如真實. 人变回猴子的可能性是應該存在的. 因為進化論說, “進多過退”, 並無說 “有進無退”. 如果只有進而無退, 為何要需要那麼長時間呢? 我們不但看不到有說服力的進化證據, 也看不到有說服力的退化證據.
结语：
对于神是否存在的讨论并不是缺乏证据，而是证据遭到压制。我认为这是道德问题而不是智力问题。
参考文献：
1.《无神论的真实面目》39页。作者：拉维·撒迦利亚
2.《游子吟》226页。作者：里程
3.《造物主论据》。作者：李·史博特
4. 皮尔当”人是一个著名的骗局。1912年在英国东萨塞克斯郡尤克菲城附近的村庄皮尔当的砾石坑里，发现了一些古人类颅骨与下颚骨碎片。这些碎片被当时的专家宣称为某种前所未见的早期人类遗骸化石。该样品被赋予拉丁名
Eoanthropus dawsoni ，即“道森的原始人”，是由它的收藏者查尔斯·道森命名的。之后，这些样本的重要性成为考古学界的争论主题，并持续到1953年（40年后）才发现它们其实是赝品。它们是由一只猩猩的下颚骨和一颗完全发育的现代人的颅骨拼凑而成。（摘录自谷歌搜索）
