Darwin's Doubt I

Recently, I watched an interview with Stephen Meyer on Vimeo. In the interview, he discusses his latest book 'Darwin's Doubt'. Meyer is a member of the Discovery Institute and promotes the idea of 'Intelligent Design'. Now, I, as a molecular biologist, know for a fact that life is very poorly designed. Consider us, humans: we suffer backaches, headaches, joint pains, women run tremendous risk when giving birth and we need to wipe our asses after we poop. All results of piss-poor design. Our body plan doesn't suit our upright gait and our brains are too big. On the molecular level it gets even worse. Seemingly simple tasks are executed by hugely complex molecular machines and there's a lot of wasteful cycling of components. All this is easily explained from our origins. We gradually developed through evolution to become the diabolical master minds that we are today.

Since gradual evolution, through mutation and selection, is such a blatantly obvious process and such a beautiful and explanatory theory, I decided to read the book and try and discover what Meyer's problem with the theory of evolution was. I knew from the interview that he was wrong on many issues but Meyer struck me as too intelligent a man to be simply ignorant. He was clearly educated, so how could he be so wrong? I don't readily attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance, but perhaps he had a hidden agenda? Or was there something else to his theories?

Short answer: no. Meyer speaks with eloquence and authority about a subject he doesn't even begin to understand. In the next blog posts, I aim to enlighten my readers about Meyer's mistakes while I'll try to explain why he's wrong and what's the right way of interpreting the data. I fully understand that not everyone is a trained molecular biologist and so the intricacies of the evolutionary process may be hard to understand. Unfortunately, the headlines don't help you much, as the media frequently over-states the conclusions from scientific research. Even the actual research papers won't help you much, as scientists nowadays are inclined to over-state their conclusions too. It's understandable, since otherwise we can't convince journal editors or peer-reviewers to publish our work. Thus, the only way to really determine what can and can not be concluded from scientific research is to dig into the data and find out for yourself what they say. Data never lies (unless it's fabricated, but that's not so easily done anymore).

So is Meyer just ignorant then? Well, no, not really; he could have asked for an explanation of the data, so ignorance is no excuse. Fact is, as he reveals in the last chapter of his book, that he lives in mortal existential terror. He's simply afraid that is he wasn't created by some creator for some purpose, his life is meaningless and therefore worthless.

Since I was born and raised without religion and never felt the need for any gods in my life, this attitude always puzzles me a bit. Yet, I've have, through my travels, frequently encountered true believers who were simply afraid of divine punishment if they didn't fulfill their duties as good Christians, Muslims, Buddhists or what have you. This is perfectly understandable in rural areas where petty farmers are completely dependent on random natural forces for their existence. The only thing the can do is pray and hope their gods will listen. Yet, in modern society, this need for faith seems a bit redundant.

Why would your life be meaningless, unless there was a god who created you? Your life has as much meaning as you give it. The odds of you being alive today are negligible and yet, here you are! Bravo, I say! Now go and make the best of it. You'll never have another chance. It also doesn't really matter how you live your life, as long as you live it well. The only important thing is that everybody else has as much of a right to a good life as you do, so do well to others. Not for a divine reward, but simply out of respect. Is that so hard? Does that really require divinity?

In episode 20 of season 6 from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise crew discovers a series of clues hidden in the DNA of distinct alien races that lead them to uncover that all of those races had a common ancestor. The figure in white is a projection of this ancestor revealing her message, as hidden in the DNA of humans, klingons, cardassians, romulans and some other spcies. It's a good episode!

Either way, Meyer doesn't want to preach in his book, so instead he constructs an elaborate argument on why Darwinian evolution can't explain the Cambrian explosion (the sudden appearance of many animal life forms in the fossil record some 540 million years ago) and that this must have been a creation event. He's careful not name his creator, lest he offend some god or another, I suppose, so I'll make a logical assumption that explains the creator: Life on Earth was seeded by an alien race who carefully programmed the DNA of early life forms to evolve into us today. This is how I chose to interpret the theory of intelligent design and it's a fair interpretation. Those aliens themselves, of course, evolved through random Darwinian mechanisms, but since the odds of this occurring are quite rare, they found themselves rather lonely. Thus they seeded some other planets with life, in the hopes of having someone to talk to eventually. Bit of a stretch, but it's also the plot of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode and more likely than divine creation, so I'll go with it.

Over the next few posts, whenever I find the time and motivation, I'll go over Meyer's arguments and explain exactly how wrong he is (every single time). Nothing personal, of course, everyone is free to believe what they want to believe, but when they start telling lies on my turf, I get a little cranky. I won't tell you how to read your Bible either and I won't have you converting the innocent with pseudoscience.