I’ve just been watching a video posted on the One Life Network, titled, “Experts DESTROY Darwin’s Theory in 16 Minutes”, in which Peter Robinson (who is best known for writing President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this wall!” speech in 1987, and who is currently the host of the current affairs show Uncommon Knowledge) interviews David Gelernter, David Berlinksi, and Stephen Meyer on the possibility of life originating from non-living matter (abiogenesis) and on the possibility of new animal body types arising as a result of unguided mutations.

The “meat” of the interview is from 5:40 to 10:15, for readers who have little time to spare.

One viewer who went under the handle @TenMinuteTrips made a highly pertinent comment:

Here’s my issue with this discussion. You have three “experts” in their particular fields, discussing mathematical odds that supposedly prove that evolution could not possibly have happened the way Darwin described. We have a professor of computer science, a Princeton PhD who taught mathematics, and someone who specializes in something called, “the philosophy of science.” Where, pray tell, is an actual evolutionary biologist to defend their contributions to research in the field?

Taking an Axe to Darwinism

In the course of the discussion, Stephen Meyer fleshes out David Gelernter’s assertion [3:06] that “the number of throws we’ve had is too puny even to talk about” – in other words, there haven’t been enough mutations in the history of life on Earth to make Darwinian evolution plausible, let alone probable. Meyer comments [5:40 to 6:27]:

Here’s a precise way of cashing out this probabilistic argument. If you have 1 over 10⁷⁷ as your ratio, but then you have every organism in the history of the planet – we can estimate that: about 10⁴⁰ organisms – every time one of those replicates, there is a possibility of a mutation. You can search the space of possibilities. So you’ve got 10⁴⁰ possible mutations against a search space: 10⁷⁷ strong. So if you do your exponential math, what it means is that you can search one ten-trillion-trillion-trillionth of the possible combinations. So, in that case, are you more likely to succeed or fail?

This argument is wrong on several counts. First, the figure of 1 in 10⁷⁷, cited by Meyer and taken from the writings of chemical engineer Dr. Douglas Axe, has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution. Rather, it has to do with abiogenesis: the origin of life from non-living matter. In brief: Dr. Axe claims that all cellular organisms contain at least some long-chain proteins that are 150 amino acids in length, and that if we look at the space of all possible sequences that are 150 amino acids in length, we find that only an infinitesimal fraction (1 in 10⁷⁷) are capable of performing any biochemical function at all. Since we haven’t had that anything like many rolls of the dice in Earth’s history, we may safely conclude that abiogenesis is a practical impossibility. Meyer cites a figure of 10⁴⁰ cellular organisms (mostly bacteria) that have existed during the long history of life on Earth, but this figure is not the number he is looking for, which is the number of amino acid sequences that have been explored during the four-billion-year history of life on this planet. Meyer would have done better to cite the estimate by Dryden, Thomson and White (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, August 6, 2008; 5(25): 953–956) that only around 4×10⁴³ different amino acid sequences could have been explored since the origin of life, and the true number is probably closer to 4×10²¹ different sequences. My point here is that even if Axe’s argument against abiogenesis is correct, that in no way disproves the notion that Darwinian evolution is adequate to explain how the first living cell (once it appeared on Earth) could have given rise to the diversity of life that we observe today. Darwinian evolution is a process that transforms already-living organisms. It was never intended to explain the origin of life on Earth.

Second, as Skeptical Zone contributor Rumraket pointed out in an article on TSZ titled, “Axe, EN&W and protein sequence space (again, again, again)” (October 12, 2016), the figure of 1 in 10⁷⁷ is based on faulty science: it is, as he demonstrates with numerous examples, “wrong by at least 60 orders of magnitude.” As he puts it, the central flaw in Axe’s argument is that “Axe only tested for one function, not all possible functions.” In other words, Axe is over-generalizing (bolding is Rumraket’s):

Axe’s number … is a number that represents an estimate of a single very particular thing, which is the frequency of sequences 150 amino acids in length, that adopt the known Beta-lactamase fold and catalyze break down of ampicillin. For that reason it is NOT an estimate of the frequency of all functional proteins in all of 150 amino acid sequence space.

Readers are invited to peruse Rumraket’s detailed discussion of three different categories of experiments reported in the scientific literature, which crushingly refute Axe’s 1 in 10⁷⁷ estimate.

Third, Axe’s 1 in 10⁷⁷ estimate is based on the assumption that even the earliest living organism that arose on the primordial Earth must have contained at least some proteins that were 150 amino acids in length. This assumption is almost certainly mistaken, as I pointed out in a 2016 critical review of Axe’s book, Undeniable, which cited the testimony of three professors, all of whom are Christians, two of whom are biologists and one of whom is an organic chemist (scroll down to the section titled, “The odds against building a 150-amino-acid protein by chance.”) One of these professors quoted some comments on Axe’s claim that were made by a colleague who is an expert in protein structure (bolding is mine – VJT):

I think it’s fair to argue that modern proteins (50 to 1000’s of amino acids in length) probably didn’t come into existence in one fell swoop by selection from huge sequence pools, as the probability of success would be vanishingly small. Nevertheless, there is no reason that I can see that primitive proteins had to be very large. For example, protein monomers of 10-15 residues could assemble into four-helix bundles or higher oligomers. The sequence information required for stable four-helix bundles is pretty minimal, largely having hydrophobic residues at buried positions. Michael Hecht’s work at Princeton has shown that randomized sequences designed to adopt a four-helix bundle topology (albeit in this case, all of the helices were covalent connected) frequently have primitive enzymatic activity. I assume that once a useful cellular activity arose by chance, then mutagenesis, recombination to fuse protein segments, and selection would provide a path to the proteins and enzymes we now find.

So I think the counterargument to the ID folks is not that sequence populations of 10E80 needed to be searched to find a 100-mer with robust enzyme activity, but rather that random populations of a few million relatively small proteins could contain a few molecules from which to start the evolutionary process.

In a similar vein, Dryden, Thomson and White, in an article which I briefly alluded to above, titled, “How much of protein sequence space has been explored by life on Earth?” (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, August 6, 2008; 5(25): 953–956), marshal both theoretical and experimental arguments in support of their assertion that “the actual identity of most of the amino acids in a protein is irrelevant,” and cast doubt on the common assumption that “a protein chain needs to be at least 100 amino acids in length” by suggesting that “as few as approximately 50 amino acids” may be sufficient. Finally, they hypothesize that the earliest living things may have been built from “a reduced alphabet of amino acids” – possibly only around four or five, instead of the 20 we have today. Taken together, these proposals drastically reduce the size of the protein sequence space that would have needed to be explored by life on Earth, bringing it well within the upper limit of 4×10⁴³ different amino acid sequences that could have been explored since the origin of life, four billion years ago.

Fourth, even if Meyer’s argument on the improbability of abiogenesis were correct, it overlooks the fact that “researchers estimate about 50 sextillion potentially habitable planets in the universe” (“How many planets in our universe could support life?” by Kate Kerschner, HowStuffWorks, updated March 7, 2024). That’s 5×10²² planets. And that’s just the observable universe. A recent analysis conducted by a team from the University of Oxford indicate that the actual universe is at least 250 times wider, meaning that its volume is over 15,000,000 (1.5×10⁷) times bigger. And there are scientists who believe it could be many orders of magnitude bigger than that. This is an important point, because the question that concerns us here is not “How likely is the origin of life on Earth?” but “How likely is the origin of life in the universe?”

In short: there are no good scientific grounds for dismissing the plausibility of abiogenesis, at the present time.

Can neo-Darwinism explain the origin of animal body plans in the Cambrian period?

Later in the interview, Robinson approvingly quotes a passage from a review by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter of Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, titled, “Giving Up Darwin”, which appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. In the passage, Gelernter attempts to show that the neo-Darwinian explanation for the origin of new animal body plans (which occurred about 30 times during the early Cambrian period, between about 540 and 520 million years ago) cannot possibly work:

To help create a brand new form of organism, a mutation must affect a gene that does its job early and controls the expression of other genes that come into play later on as the organism grows… Evidently there are a total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.

David Berlinski elaborates [9:45 to 10:15]:

If you talk about major changes, if they come late in development, they’re not going to make a difference. The organism is already constructed… If they come early, they can’t make a difference, but inevitably, they destroy the organism… So we are faced with a real destructive dilemma: late, no good; early, no good. Well, when?

Biologist Jerry Coyne, who is Professor of Ecology and Evolution, emeritus at the University of Chicago, forcefully rebutted this argument in an article in Quillette titled, David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching Darwin (9 September 2019 ):

This assertion is based on a survey of genes affecting fly development in the fruit fly Drosophila. But that survey, which garnered a Nobel Prize for Eric Weischaus and Christine Nüsslein-Volhard, was designed to detect only mutations that were fatal, so Gelernter’s conclusion is trivial and misleading. Those experiments say nothing about whether genes involved in early development can be viable and can change by natural selection.

There’s also plenty of experimental evidence that Gelernter’s breezy assertion that mutations that affect early development are invariably fatal is factually wrong. To cite Professor Coyne once again (bolding is mine – VJT):

First, there are tons of mutations affecting early development that are not lethal, refuting Gelernter’s claim for the inevitable fatality of such mutations. If you want examples of nonfatal mutations, go to the FlyBase site and look up the Drosophila mutations gt¹, h², en^spt, kn^iri-1 (there are many others)…

We also know that there have not only been evolutionary changes between species in genes affecting early development, but also that those evolutionary changes were driven by natural selection. This can be demonstrated by either statistical analysis of DNA sequences of early-acting genes, or by actually making ancestral DNA, inserting it into organisms, and measuring its effect on fitness.

So, what can we say of Gelernter, Berlinksi and Meyer’s ambitious attempt to destroy Darwin’s theory in 16 minutes? I think we can fairly conclude that it fell flat on its face. To adapt a quote of Twain’s, reports of Darwinism’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

What do readers think?