Does life on earth look designed by an intelligence? Science says no, and evolution explains why.

We’ve been recently looking at Creationist pushback against evolution, an attempted end-run around science to encourage Joe Citizen to put on a lab coat and decide the matter for himself. I summarize the problems with that approach here.

But there’s another way to respond to this version of the Design Argument, which states that nature appears designed by a cosmic Designer. While the bacterial flagellum is a favorite bit of nature that Creationists love to marvel at, DNA itself is even more so. This version of the argument is often expressed like this:

1. DNA is information
2. Information only comes from designers
3. Therefore DNA was designed
4. Therefore evolution is inadequate to explain life
5. Therefore God.

I’ve summarized this argument before, but I’d like to do it again. In my recent blog post series, I responded by attacking Jim Wallace’s approach. Now I want to set that aside and attack this version of the Design Argument. I will show that DNA is not evolution’s Achilles’ heel but rather a powerful rejection of this argument.

What is the Design Argument?

The Design Argument says that nature looks like it was the product of a Designer. We’ll take humans as our example designers. We know what their designs look like—artwork, airplanes, computers, skyscrapers, and so on. So the claim has become: nature looks like it was the result of human designers who had superhuman capabilities.

Now consider the kinds of constraints these designers work under. By understanding these, we can get an idea of the telltale signs of design and try to find it (or its lack) in DNA. One constraint might be cost: this wristwatch should cost as little as possible. Another might be strength: this bridge should be as strong as possible. Others could be light weight, durability, low maintenance or operating costs, safety, quick completion, long life, beauty, and so on.

Not every design will be burdened by every constraint. For example, cost wasn’t a constraint on the Apollo program, and beauty isn’t a constraint for a circuit board.

How do we attack the Design Argument?

But note one very important omission from the list: junk. No finished design will ever deliberately have unwanted, useless junk in it. A critic might label one element as junk—maybe they didn’t like some architectural ornament—but “junk” would have never been a deliberate part of the design. That makes junk the vulnerable point in the Design Argument. If we can find junk in DNA, we will defeat this argument. In fact, DNA has plenty of junk, in at least five categories.

1. DNA has junk

Human DNA is made up of 3 billion base pairs. Some mammals have less and some more. For example, cows, mice, and bats have more. The axolotl salamander has 32 billion base pairs, and other salamanders have much more. There are grasshoppers, beetles, ticks, worms, and snails with more DNA than humans. There are plants with more. The record holder is an amoeba, with 670 billion base pairs.

There are two explanations. One is that these lifeforms need all their DNA—and the axolotl salamander really needs ten times the DNA that humans have, and the Amoeba dubia really needs 200 times more—but this seems unlikely. The other option is that much of the DNA in earth life is junk.

Just because a stretch of DNA isn’t used for anything now doesn’t mean that it can’t be fodder for evolution to create some future improvement, but this isn’t what we’d expect if life is the way it is because of a designer. However, DNA full of junk is exactly what evolution would predict.

2. DNA has pseudogenes (broken genes)

Human DNA has 20 thousand protein-coding genes, but it also has nearly that many pseudogenes. My favorite example of a pseudogene is that for vitamin C. All but a handful of mammals synthesize their own vitamin C with this gene and don’t need vitamin C in their diets. About 61 million years ago, the ancestors of some primates, including humans, lost this ability when the working gene became a pseudogene. Every cell in your body contains this useless, nonworking pseudogene.

Another example is humans’ 390 genes for smell. There are also 480 pseudogenes for smell. These pseudogenes look similar enough and are in roughly the same place compared to other animals’ working genes that the evolution from gene to pseudogene is clear.

DNA full of pseudogenes is what evolution would predict, not what a Designer would create.

3. DNA has endogenous retroviruses

Viruses can’t reproduce on their own and must force a cell to do it. Sometimes a virus will infect the DNA in a germ cell (an egg or sperm). If that viral DNA is inactivated by mutation, the genome is passed down to future generations with a record of this viral invasion. Human DNA has roughly 100,000 nonworking fragments of these viruses, a record of millions of years of viral attacks, composing 5 to 8 percent of the total number of base pairs.

4. DNA has atavisms

The novel and movie Jurassic Park imagine finding dinosaur blood fossilized in ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber. In the blood is fragmentary DNA, intact enough to reconstruct dinosaurs. It doesn’t work like that back here in the real world, but biologists might be able to do it the other way around by (for example) reactivating genes for tooth formation in dinosaurs’ modern descendants, birds. Birds don’t have teeth, but their theropod dinosaur ancestors did.

When archaic genes are switched on in nature, those are called atavisms. Snakes can have legs, dolphins can have a hind pair of limbs, and humans can have tails.

5. DNA has vestigial structures

Vestigial structures are structures like the human appendix or tailbone that have lost most or all of their ancestral function. That doesn’t mean that they’re useless, just that they aren’t used for what they were originally used for. For example, ostrich wings are vestigial because they can’t be used to fly (that’s what wings do), but they’re still useful.

Other examples are eyes in blind mole rats or cave fish, the pelvis (for nonexistent legs) in the baleen whale, and goose bumps (to raise nonexistent fur) in humans.

What this shows (and doesn’t show)

The success of this argument doesn’t prove that God didn’t create DNA. He might have his own ways of design that are beyond our capabilities to appreciate. It also doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. God could still exist while letting evolution shape life.

But this does defeat the popular DNA version of the Design Argument, which says that DNA looks like it was designed. If God’s handiwork is so bizarre that it doesn’t look like anything that any conceivable designer would likely create, then Christians should rethink the Design Argument.

Related posts:

• Argument from Design BUSTED!
• “DNA is a Program, and Programs Demand a Programmer”: a Response

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Image from Colin and Sarah Northway, (CC BY 2.0)
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How do we separate natural from designed? The last post critiquing the Creationist project of Christian apologist Jim Wallace looked at some of the cases that make this sorting project so difficult. Now, let’s pull back and look at the bigger picture. This is just one of a number of similar challenges.

The first post in this series is here.

Other difficult category challenges

Separating things into natural vs. designed is just one of many similar problems. Here are a few more we’re all familiar with. Bang your head against a few of these to remind yourself that making these distinctions is often easy, but that’s only for things we already have an answer for. For each category, add your own ambiguous cases that should encourage humility in anyone who thinks this is easy.

I bring up these familiar questions only to remind you of that familiar feeling of not knowing which bin something belongs in. Wallace wants to imagine that these questions are easy, but read this list to remember that they are not.

Arthur C. Clarke observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is the challenge that we find in lots of areas—separating real from fake, life from nonlife, and designed from natural.

1. Real vs. hoax, lie, or fake. Is the Venezuelan poodle moth real? Yes and no. What about the Mpemba effect, which claims that hot water can freeze faster than an equal amount of cold? Or the Voynich manuscript, hundreds of illustrated, handwritten pages written 600 years ago. If it’s just a joke, it’s an extremely elaborate one, but if it’s not, then what the heck does it say? And what do we make of the Wenatchee child abuse panic of 1994—were there 29,726 incidents of child sex abuse, as officially charged . . . or were there actually zero?

2. Stage magic vs. real magic. We all know that magic shows are just illusions. But even knowing this, we still pay to see them because we still can’t conceive how the tricks were performed.

Imagine a team of stage magicians summarizing the audience experience for five of their most impressive tricks. Now they make another list. This time, it’s for five tricks with a similar wow factor that they don’t know how to do as illusions. They mix the two lists and give them to you to separate back into two piles, stage magic and impossible.

3. Right vs. wrong. Christians insist that objective moral truths exist, and yet they never get beyond the insisting part. They point to shared or strongly felt moral claims. Yes, those exist, but that doesn’t make them objective. More to the point, Christians can’t even agree among themselves which things are right and which wrong. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, same-sex marriage—you’ll find Christians on different sides of each of these. More.

4. Science vs. pseudoscience. It’s easy to dismiss flat earth claims, ESP, and even the popular horoscope as pseudoscience without much pushback, but what about claims about weight-loss diets? Does echinacea cure colds? Is apple cider vinegar a health panacea? Is homeopathy effective?

What about Creationism and ID, young earth, and the historicity of Jesus? What about the historicity of other figures from history (here, here, and here)?

There’s Bigfoot, Nessie, and other cryptids. There’s are the supposedly nefarious Illuminati, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission. There are conspiracy theories like chemtrails, Paul is dead, and the moon landing “hoax.” And there’s always the things that go bump in the night like haunted houses, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, and alien abductions. Skeptics will likely have the same opinions, but millions will disagree.

5. Life vs. nonlife. What is life? Bacteria are living, but what about viruses? What about prions? If a kind of life relied on an information storage technique other than DNA and RNA, could we detect it? We keep being surprised at extremophiles, microorganisms that live in environments with extreme temperature, pressure, salinity, radiation, and so on.

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission launched a few weeks ago. One goal is to bring samples back to earth to test for life. But if we don’t even understand the scope of life on earth, we risk missing clues to life on Mars.

6. Science consensus vs. speculation. On the topic of life on Mars, a five-pound meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica in 1984 might hold fossil evidence of life on Mars from the earliest days of the solar system. But so far this argument is scientific conjecture. The jury is out on this and many other important questions.

And there are more categories where debate continues—what is art?, coincidence vs. the hand of God, and so on.

Of course, these are different categories than the one brought up by Christian apologists, designed vs. natural, but I hope these other categories remind us how difficult it can be to reach an overwhelming consensus on sorting problems like these.

Continue: Final Thoughts on the Problem of Sifting Natural from Designed

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Image from Senjuti Kundu (copyright free)
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The last few posts have poked holes in a checklist from Christian apologist Jim Wallace. His eight tests claimed to separate natural and designed things, and he wanted to use this list to label the bacterial flagellar motor as designed. (Hmm—I wonder who’s on the short list for being the Designer?)

The series begins here.

The underlying problem was that the checklist wasn’t the result of brainstorming from lots of science-minded people, sharpened by hundreds of tests, and made quantitative so that reasonably smart people would all get similar results. If that were its pedigree, Wallace would no doubt have made that clear.

We can help. We’ve gotten some of the vegetables out of the way with the previous posts, and now it’s time for dessert.

Test cases: let’s have some fun

Let’s move on to examples that you are less likely to know about. These should a bit more puzzle-ish. You’ll likely have additional examples, and you’re welcome to add them in the comments.

Remember that if the checklist is good for anything, it must teach us new things. If your response to every verdict of the checklist, whether it identifies something as natural or designed, is, “Oh, yeah—I knew that,” then the exercise is pointless. For example, this rules out an exhaustive list of every single thing we can think of. Such a list would be unable to fulfill its purpose, which is to correctly label something that’s completely new to us.

Some of the following items are tricky, and some are unknown (for example, maybe the cause is life or maybe it’s geology). Use the links to investigate ones that are new to you. As you read each one, consider whether it’s natural or made by some intelligence and think of the rules you’d need to put it in the correct bin.

• Stones that move. A dry lakebed in Death Valley has heavy stones that leave tracks in dried mud. Apparently, they move after rain makes the ground slippery. What moves them? It can’t be gravity, because the lakebed is flat. Is it mundane natural action, or is some intelligence behind this? The mystery has been solved (here and here).
• Mima mounds. There’s a prairie near Olympia, Washington covered in grassy mounds made of dirt and gravel. The biggest are two meters tall. What causes them? Natural causes like wind scouring or earthquakes? Or is it something intelligent like Native American burial monuments or thousands of years of gopher activity? More.
• Other circular structures. Desert regions of Namibia and Australia have fairy circles and South Africa has heuweltjies (“little hills”). Arctic regions have frost heaves and pingos. Some of these might have the same cause as the Mima mounds. Are the actions of plants or animals a factor?
• Solar system puzzles. The moon orbits the earth in a little over 27 days, and it also rotates once in the same amount of time. The result is that we always see the same side of the moon. Is this the hand of God or does it have a natural cause? Why do we see three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons orbit in lockstep, with Io making exactly two orbits for every one of Europa, and Europa making exactly two for every one of Ganymede? (More.) Have you wondered why earth has both lunar and solar eclipses? It’s because the sun is 400 times wider than the moon and the sun is 400 times farther from earth. Coincidence? Or not?
• Carved faces. Rushmore looks designed, but so did New Hampshire’s Old Man in the Mountain. If you’d said that its stone face had been carved, I would have believed it.
• Atlantis. The Yonaguni monument is a structure in shallow water off the coast of a small Japanese island. It’s a rock formation with square corners that appears to hold steps, terraces, and roads. Is it a natural sandstone formation, or is it an elaborate manmade structure covered by rising seas after the last ice age? More.
• Potholes. Exposed bedrock is sometimes cut by a pothole. Sometimes there’s only one (photo), and sometimes they look like lunar craters (photo). What causes them?
• Heart-shaped features. Humans are gifted with (or burdened with) pareidolia, which means that interesting shapes seen in nature (like hearts) will stand out. Here’s a list of ten reefs, lakes, meadows, forests, and islands shaped like hearts. Some are natural, and some are manmade. Once you’ve got those sorted, scan these and see if you can spot any manmade ones. And now that you’re primed for patterns, here is an odd-shaped cluster of islands (more), and here is a curious pattern of trees (more).
• Ancient pyramid. The Visočica pyramid in Bosnia is claimed by some to be manmade, though others say it’s natural. (More.)
• Carved by water. Scroll through this post and you’ll find two terrain maps. They both show large geological features carved by water, but why are they so different in appearance?
• Nuclear reactor. In 1972, a French mining company found the fraction of U-235 in a uranium sample mined in Gabon to be significantly lower than expected. Only a nuclear reactor could have caused this. (More.)
• Math in nature. Cicadas are insects that live underground and emerge to mate, and one genus remains underground for a prime number of years—either 13 or 17. Sequential Fibonacci numbers can be found in plants. Chaotic systems can be deterministic and yet inherently unpredictable. Some say that the fact that nature can be described by mathematics shows the hand of God (more).
• Pile of rocks. Cairns are manmade piles of rocks, and they have meaning to cultures across the world. Some are just heaps, some are shaped into cones, and the inuksuk is a stone marker in Inuit culture, often roughly shaped like a person. Remember our goal: the checklist must differentiate manmade cairns from rocks collected naturally.
• And a few more. What formed the stone spheres of Costa Rica? What moves glacier mice? How do moss piglets (tiny eight-legged animals) survive dehydration, extreme temperatures, and radiation? What caused this artistic undersea sand pattern (more)? What do you make of hexagonal convection cells in miso soup (video) or the surprising Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction (video)? A cloud is natural, unless it comes from a power plant, in which case it comes from intelligence. So then a cloud that forms naturally over a city that wouldn’t be there except for the city is . . . what? An ecosystem can be incredibly complex, like the workings of a cell, but does being made of living things make it living?

What additional puzzling examples can you add?

Wrapup

If someone wanted to make a serious attempt at a checklist, step 1 would be to make a list of rules that correctly separates test cases into natural or designed. The list must reliably put the things you’ve just considered (in the list above) into the correct category. It should distinguish natural crystals from fake ones, snowflakes from snow angels, nebulae from jewelry, and a rainbow made by a storm from a rainbow made by a prism.

Step 2 is to revisit these examples (and myriad more) with naive eyes, imagine you’ve never seen them before, and use the list of rules without bias to see where it puts them. (By “naive eyes,” I mean that you must avoid, “Oh, this one—I know where this one goes” but rather do what the list tells you.)

The resulting rules would be debatable. That means that if the best possible list of rules only makes an educated guess for the tough novel cases, Wallace’s checklist is imperfect as well.

Continue: Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think (2 of 2)

Further reading: the Skeptoid blog and podcast are excellent resources for understanding weird claims.

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Image from Anne Nygård (license)
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The last few posts have responded to a book chapter from Christian apologist Jim Wallace. With a list of tests that claims to separate natural things from designed things, he hoped to show that bacterial flagellar motor couldn’t be natural and thereby overturn evolution (part 1).

How dependable was that checklist? Did he exercise it with hundreds of test cases, some of which were obviously natural or designed, plus many in the gray area? By all indications, he didn’t. I suspect it was created backwards, starting with the interesting features of the flagellar motor to create a test that the motor couldn’t fail to pass.

Testing the very small

The first micro test case that this list tackles can’t be the flagellar motor, since that’s the punch line of Wallace’s argument. There are hundreds of cellular structures and mechanisms that could be tested—maybe the citric acid cycle (Krebs cycle), or the various steps in how DNA makes proteins, how DNA copying errors are repaired, or how enzymes work.

But there’s the problem: to me, any component within a cell is there because of evolution, and evolution is natural. But Wallace is just trying to illustrate what he already assumes is true, that evolution is crap. I’d label all these micro test cases as natural, and he’d label them all designed.

I rarely get into the evolution vs. Creationism/ID controversy because it’s easier and more reliable to point out that evolution is the overwhelming consensus of biologists. Evolution is our best theory for why life is the way it is. Case closed.

That means that it may be impossible to create an objective checklist that both sides will accept. But set that aside, and we still have an interesting project.

Revisiting those tests—are there more?

I’m not impressed with the eight tests in Wallace’s list, the giveaways that something is designed rather than natural. Maybe we need to add more rules like the following. The object in question may be designed if it:

• has strict size tolerances on parts (for example, the dimensions of ball bearings must be precise to minimize wear)
• has interchangeable parts such as screws
• contains language (such as instructions or warnings) or a picture equivalent (an arrow to indicate “up”)
• maintains time (such as a wristwatch or cell phone) or is otherwise adapted to the movement of heavenly bodies (such as the Antikythera mechanism or possibly Stonehenge).

I propose these rules only as idea fodder. Our goal should be an ageless list, and I’m probably reflecting my period in history. Traits like precision machining or interchangeable parts were important to the Industrial Revolution, but who knows if they’ll seem as fundamental in a thousand years. Or a million years.

Crowdsourcing would be the next step, where smart people would toss in their ideas, and these would be sharpened or discarded by the group.

Test cases

We need test cases to stress the rules. In particular, we need tricky ones in the gray area—crude or unskilled designed things and precise or elegant natural things.

• Think of rules to reliably distinguish these stone objects as designed or natural: an ugly or uninteresting rock, a geode, a primitive stone mortar and pestle, rough-cut marble flagstone, a simple stone tool, a waste flake from the process of making a stone tool, and a shaped stone spearpoint. Then categorize natural diamond, synthetic diamond, and imitation diamond.
• This gray area fools us, too. Pareidolia is when we see intelligence that isn’t there—faces in clouds, voices in static, or Mary’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich or as a 60 feet tall iridescent outline on the side of a building. How do you tell which ones are real? And how do you reliably distinguish undesigned pareidolia people from designed but abstract ones, like Pablo Picasso’s cubist painting Three Women?
• How do we avoid calling delicate crystals (like the bismuth crystal we saw before) designed, and how do we avoid calling a hand-shaped clay lump or sand pile natural? How do we avoid calling weird clouds, sun dogs, or other atmospheric optics designed, and how do we avoid calling a tree moved to make a bridge or Jackson Pollock’s Number 30 natural?
• How do you separate a striking Christo art project (examples: Valley Curtain, Wrapped Trees) from a striking natural site (examples: slot canyon, Zhangye badlands)? How do you separate sponge cake from fungi?

Again, you may have no problem separating natural from designed in these examples, but that’s cheating. You can’t override the process by saying, “Okay, I know the checklist scores this particular item as 6 out of 10 natural, but I happen to know it’s designed, so I’ll call it designed.”

You may already know these examples or things like them, but for this test to work, it must be brainless. It must guide a medieval scholar or an intelligent alien as reliably as it would an objective modern human.

We could make a long list if specific examples (“If it’s a painting, that’s designed; if it’s a crystal found in nature, that’s natural; . . .”) but now we’re cheating again. We might as well use an encyclopedia. The whole point of this exercise is to create a tool to determine natural vs. designed for things we honestly don’t know ourselves.

Continue: Real Examples to Puzzle Over: the Natural vs. Designed Checklist

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Image from Julen Iturbe-Ormaetxe (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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