RAFI AAMER

This is in response to Farzana Hassan's posting By Harun Yahya

Being a big fan of the theory of evolution, it disappoints me to no end to see that there is one entity where there are no apparent signs of evolution and that entity is the creationists’ arguments against the theory of evolution. I have been sparring with creationists for more than a decade now in a sincere effort to understand their viewpoint and present mine. I’m a novice when it comes to the theory of evolution. People with monumental knowledge and skills have been answering these creationist arguments for ages it seems but the arguments are still there refusing to grow and improve. That is why I found Mr. Ziauddin Ahmad’s essay “Nature on Nature” so refreshing. It didn’t resort to the same old rehashing of old and tired arguments.  Once again, I am up against rehashed arguments of creationism in shape of this article by Harun Yahya.

The argument is very simple and it’s based on personal incredulity. In simplest words possible, it is, “how can something happen that I can not fathom?” How can natural selection, an unguided and blind force can give rise to such complex mechanisms? Unbelievable, hence false. And yet these very same people find no trouble in believing that there is a deity that said “Be” and everything “Became”. That they find no trouble comprehending but simple mathematics is unbelievable. I say simple mathematics because that’s almost all there is to complexity in nature. Maybe because most of us don’t think in exponential terms so the idea of accumulative exponential growth seems strange to grasp.

When I was teaching computer sciences (and corrupting young minds in the process), I used to give certain assignments to my students who were learning to write computer programs. I designed these assignments to challenge their programming expertise as well as their mental notions. One of my favorite assignments in the early part of their training used to be the following.

A normal page of paper is 0.1 mm thick. That’s one-tenth part of a one thousandth of a meter (or 0.0001 meter). The distance of moon from earth is 384,400 KM (or 384.4 million meters). Every time you fold a paper, its thickness gets doubled. Lets suppose that we have a page that is unimaginably wide and long, how many times would I need to fold it so that it touches moon?

Before they started working on the assignment, I used to ask them to venture guesses. Their guesses usually ranged somewhere between 10,000 and 384 million times (except for some occasional brainiac who’d ruin my fun with guessing a number close to the actual answer). And then I used to see their faces with amusement when they wrote the programs and found out that the answer is 42. Just 42. In fact 42 folds would take the paper 50,000 KM beyond the moon. Most of them would look at the result with disbelief and checked if they made an error in their programs. Why? Because they had never thought about the power of accumulative exponential growth.

The argument from personal incredulity that I described very much forms the basis of the main creationist thought and that is quite visible in Mr. Yahya’s essay. Lets deal with the essay now.

The article purportedly deals deathblows to the theory of evolution and the philosophy of materialism. I don’t care much about the philosophy of materialism, or any philosophy for that matter, so I wouldn’t spend much time on that part.

The author starts by presenting the example of DNA by comparing it to a book full of information. I would rather compare DNA with a recipe book instead of informational book. One might consider that a difference of semantics which it is not. For current discussion, lets not get into that. Here is what Mr. Yahya writes,

It is information which separates a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica from a "book" formed by randomly arranged letters like ABICLDIXXGGSDLL. Both have paper, ink and binding, but one has information while the other does not. The source of information is the author of that book, a mind with consciousness. Therefore we can't deny that an intelligent being placed the information in DNA there.

That's quick. Just because DNA is useful information and not junk like ABICLDIXXGGSDLL, there’s got to be a writer and that’s that. One must give credit where it’s due. I have seen the argument of intelligent design presented hundreds of times but this is the shortest form of it ever. Anyway, the analogy with the Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t serve author’s purpose. A large part of DNA is junk, not used by the body, and it’s called parasitic or non-coding DNA. To establish the analogy of the Encyclopedia Britannica with DNA, we’d have to say that of the 12 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 contain meaningful information while the rest of the 10 contain gibberish like ABICLDIXXGGSDLL. Taking a lead from the argument above, we must maintain that whoever placed the information in DNA must be half mad. But lets resist the urge of oversimplification.

The argument is still a form of personal incredulity. It is, “since I can not fathom how such complex information could have been created thru an unguided, unintelligent process, there must be a God”. Please note there are no other possibilities presented or pondered. Why haven’t I ever seen someone saying, “this DNA thing is too organized to have come up randomly so there must be a superior alien civilization somewhere in the universe that created us”? Or, “this DNA thing is eerily similar to computer programs. That damn movie Matrix must be right”. Not only that, if a Christian looks at the apparent design, he/she doesn’t go, “hey, there is definitely a design which opens up the possibility that Vishnu exists”. I haven’t seen anyone saying that because the flow of the logic is not to deduce a conclusion from argument but to shape the argument to reach a pre-decided conclusion. There is apparent design so there must be a Yahweh/God/Allah who talked to Moses/Christ/Muhammad so I must believe in Old Testament/New Testament/Koran. Does that seem like a logical flow of deductions to you?  Isn’t it interesting that the same evidence that leads Philip Johnson to believe that Jesus was Son of God, leads Harun Yahya to believe that he was just a prophet and leads Gerald Schroeder to believe that both Johnson and Yahya are wrong? I suspect that all the intelligent design proponents are doing is trying to validate their pre-held beliefs but making it sound like they are reaching there thru some intellectual discourse (I used to do that with salt analysis in chemistry labs. First ask/bribe the assistant what salt was it and then perform the experiments to “find out”). I don’t know whom they are trying to deceive, others or themselves. Many people have told me that they first looked at evolution and didn’t find the theory probable and then they compared the religions and found that x was the best option out there when they know that that’s not how it happened. They didn’t FIRST look at evolution and while they were looking at it (if they ever actually did), their God was looking over their shoulders to make sure they don’t spend enough time finding out all the details. And when they rejected it, they, quite miraculously, ended up adopting the religion that they were born into in the first place. Anyway, back to the article.

The argument is that DNA is organized like a book containing information and since every book leads to an intelligent author and not an unintelligent process, there must be a God. This makes my life very easy. All I have to do is to write a book thru a process that has no intelligence pertaining to the contents of the book. I will demonstrate how it can be done. In fact, what I am going to do is to write every book in the history, and that includes future as well, on all the topics like psychology, architecture, mechanical engineering, things that I know nothing about.

Is that a crazy claim? Apparently yes, but not with enough resources. Here is how. 

Lets say that an average book contains 100 pages and an average page contains 500 letters (letters, not words). That would mean that an average book contains 50,000 letters in it. Please note that these are arbitrary numbers and you can replace them with other numbers and it won’t affect the end-result.

Lets establish a character set. A character set is a set of characters that can possibly be in a book. Lets say the set contains all the English alphabets, A to Z, all the digits, 0 to 9, all punctuation marks, all currency signs, all scientific signs and a character that we call space. Lets say, for the arguments sake that the set totals 256 characters.

Now, lets write our first book. Pick the first character in our set and write it down 50, 000 times. Lets say that first character is A. Our first book contains 50,000 A’s; a stupid book but a necessary start to our process.

Our second book will resemble very closely to our first book with only a single difference. Instead of 50,000 A’s, it will contain 49, 999 A’s. The last character in our book will be B. The next book will be exactly the same except for the last character, which now will be C. After we exhaust the 26 alphabets, lets proceed to the other characters in our character set. Following is a table to save me from typing

If you look at it closely, its like the odometer of your car. Only that instead of 5 or 6 wheels, this odometer has 50,000 wheels and instead of 10 digits per wheel, every wheel has 256 characters. Rest is the same. So when you drive this car with this imaginary odometer for 256⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰ miles or kilometers, you’d have scrolled thru all the 100 pages books that were ever written or will be written in future.

If I program a computer with that kind of computing power and ask it to print every one of those 256⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰ volumes, you’ll have a library that will contain every book in history. Most of it would be junk (like our DNA) but not all. Did I say every book? What about a book of 200 pages? Well, it won’t be there in one volume but there will be a part one, containing first 100 pages and a part two containing rest of the pages somewhere in this cosmic library. That’s still not every book. What about a book written in Persian? True, it won’t be there, but its English translation would be. And if you want it to include the Persian books, all you need to do is to increase the character set and you’ll have all the Persian books.

So this library contains all the books written on Psychology by Dr. Khalid Sohail, including the ones that he hasn’t even thought about writing so far by a process that knows not the first thing about Psychology. This library would contain the translations of Quran without knowing who Muhammad was. Not only that, it would contain all the possible twisted and turned interpretations of religious scriptures that people do to satisfy themselves that what they believe in is the truth. You can’t blame me for not thinking about my religious friends.

You might be thinking that this process requires incredible amount of time and resources. That’s true, it does. Nature had those kinds of resources and 4 billion years to come up with the biosphere we are looking at today which, in my opinion, is complex but not flawless. The process that I described to create the cosmic library is not very efficient. Natural Selection, the force that leads evolution, is much more cost effective than my process. Please note that I didn’t impose any “selection pressure” on the books. Neither is there kinship between books or an arms race between them or aggression towards other books. All of these factors help natural selection to make the process much more efficient to produce much better results with lot less resources. With a little tweaking, I can introduce some of that in the process but I think I have flogged that horse enough for now.

Creationists at this point like to talk about the intelligence of the process. Well, that’s a whole another debate. I just wanted to tackle the claim that a book can’t come about without an intelligent author thru a blind process and the process that wrote those books is not intelligent by any definition of the word. If that process is intelligent than the odometer in my car is also intelligent.

Mr. Yahya writes:

“Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." …The gene is a package of information, not an object... In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality... This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms”

I fail to see what Mr. Yahya means. Evolutionary biologists do not realize that gene is information as well as a physical object? What the heck have I been reading all these years? You mean Mayr, Dawkins, Gould, Ridley, Patterson and the plethora of the evolutionary biologists have only been pretending that they know that gene is a package of information as well as a physical reality? The author must be talking about evolutionary philosophers who say crazy things, not biologists. And what is “reductionism”? I have seen this term bandied about but never understood what it means. It seems like some philosophical insult because once somebody is pronounced “reductionist”, it seems to settle the argument in the favor of “non-reductionist”.

If you go to a pebbly beach, you will see a certain order in which the pebbles are arranged. The waves would throw the pebbles in a somewhat organized manner. You will see that the similar size pebbles will end up together. This must be because of the intelligent design, right? The waves must be carrying some information (at atomic level like the atomic weight of water), which interacts with the information stored at the atomic level in the pebbles on how to order the pebbles which makes the waves and pebbles information carrying physical objects. I don’t think so. I think its happening because of simple laws of physics. But then I must be a reductionist.

Mr. Yahya than spends most of the article dealing with materialistic philosophy, which I am not interested in to respond. As for evolutionary biology, there are two remaining points that I would like to answer.

Mr. Yahya quotes from Philip Johnson and labels him “a leading critic of Darwinism”. This is the second time Philip Johnson, an evangelical Christian lawyer, has found his way into this discussion (first he was quoted by Mr. Don Joshua) so I think he deserves my attention. Regardless of what an author believes in or his/her ideological position, the most fundamental trait that I look for in an author is honesty. I am really sorry to say that Philip Johnson lacks that fundamental trait. I have, in front of me, his most famous book “Darwin on Trial” and I am just going to quote two instances of his dishonesty.

1- on page 9 in the first chapter of his book, Johnson writes, “according to [Colin] Patterson, Darwin's theory of natural selection is under fire and scientists are no longer sure of its general validity”. On the next page he writes, “Patterson suggested that both evolution and creation are forms of pseudo-knowledge”. For reference Philip Johnson points to a speech Colin Patterson made at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 1981. This museum is my usual stomping ground and I went to their library and read the speech referred by Johnson. The speech was not about theory of evolution at all. It didn’t even mention theory of evolution. Its about taxonomy. Its about the science that allocates names to species. That is why Philip Johnson refrained from giving actual quotes from the speech and instead provided his own dishonest summary.

2- I don’t have to go too far for the next one. On page 11, Johnson quotes Stephen Jay Gould and says that the neo-Darwinian synthesis, according to Stephen Gould,  “as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." The quote is taken verbatim from Gould’s article in Paleobiology from its June, 1980 issue. Any evolution student will fall out of his chair reading this. Gould, one of the most vocal proponents of neo-Darwinism, is proclaiming it dead? Not really. Here is the full quote, including the starting part of the sentence that Philip Johnson omitted:

“if [biologist Ernst] Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.” Here is the quote from Mayr that Gould is talking about, “The proponents of the synthetic theory maintain that all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes, guided by natural selection, and that trans-specific evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species.” What Gould is referring to is the last part of the Mayr’s sentence that deals with “trans-specific evolution” That is a disagreement based on what we call “Punctuated Equilibrium” that deals with the mechanism of evolution but Philip Johnson is treating it as Gould had issued a sentence of death to the theory of evolution.

If this is the quality of arguments of “a leading critic of Darwinism”, one can only guess what would be the state of arguments from the non-leading critics.

Mr. Yahya writes:

“The discovery of this fact [information in DNA] has sent materialist philosophy and Darwinism, its application to the natural sciences, into a dead end”

Oh really? And what maybe the reason of that?

“because materialist philosophy claims that matter forms all living things alone and that genetic information appeared somehow by "chance." This is like saying that a book could be formed from a random assemblage of paper and ink”

What’s wrong with the above assertion? Lets read again with the added emphasis

“The discovery of this fact [information in DNA] has sent materialist philosophy and Darwinism, its application to the natural sciences, into a dead end, because materialist philosophy claims that matter forms all living things alone and that genetic information appeared somehow by "chance."”

First of all, saying that evolution claims that genetic information appeared by “chance” shows author’s ignorance about theory of natural selection but that’s not the biggest blunder in the above sentence.

Darwinism is not the application of materialist philosophy to the natural science. It’s not the application of any philosophy. Its hard science. I know that philosophers like to think that they are the holders of supreme knowledge but I take exception to that idea. The only thing hard science follows is facts, not this or that philosophy. The only way you can falsify a scientific theory is thru facts, not some philosophical word-play. The main assertion that somehow the DNA information is a lethal blow to Darwinism is so naiive that it borders on the ridiculous.  DNA actually answered the questions Darwin himself struggled with and conceded that he had no answers at that time. Don’t take my word for it. Ernst Mayr, Professor Emeritus in the museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University writes in his book “What Evolution Is” on page 112 [emphases added]

“In 1953 Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, and after this major discovery followed the other, culminating the discovery of the genetic code by Nirenberg in 1961. Finally, every step in the translation of genetic information in the course of the developing organism was understood in principle. Unexpectedly, the basic Darwinian concepts of variation and selection were not affected in any way. Not even the replacement of proteins by nucleic acid, as the carriers of genetic information required a change in the evolutionary theory. On the contrary, an understanding of the nature of genetic variation greatly strengthened Darwinism.”

Well, maybe, since I do not know, Mr. Yahya’s biological credentials are more impressive than Ernst Mayr so lets ask ourselves this question: if the discovery of double-helix DNA was such a profound blow to Darwinism, the people who discovered the double helix (James Watson and Francis Crick) and got a Nobel prize for that must be the first one to realize that. Well, that’s a NO. Pick up Watson’s book “DNA: The Secret of Life” and Crick’s “What Mad Pursuit?” to see for yourself.  Writing in Nature magazine in May 1973, Crick wrote: “Darwinian evolution was only a theoretical frame-work before 1953. We validated it as a fact by our discovery of DNA”. 

As for his co-discoverer, James Watson, the following is what he said in an interview to Academy of Achievement in October 1991

“Evolution only occurs by creating variants, and a lot of variation is harmful to the individual who carries it. So evolution is not a kind thing, and we're all products of evolution. Well society, you know, says we're products of God. We're products of evolution and it's very different. You know, a just God wouldn't have done anything, which didn't have a purpose. But I think like most biologists, we don't think there's anyone to answer our prayers and change the course of destiny. So, I mean, scientists and doctors, you know, have this right of change -- have this ability to change the future. In that sense we are the gods, and people are, of course, afraid of evil gods, and then for some people, you know, my way of speaking right now is just totally inappropriate and sacrilegious, and you know, in some countries they'd shoot me, or just -- You know, saying there's no one up there in the heaven telling us what to do, but I don't think there is. “
 

I  guess Watson and Crick, even after almost 40 years of their discovery and even after the human genome project, didn’t realize the implication of their discovery and remained evolutionists. It was only up to Mr. Yahya and Philip Johnson to break the news to them.

Mr. Yahya goes on:

“Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder who studied physics and biology in universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),”

Did he? Schroeder is not trained in biology. Anyway, I need not say anything regarding his claims since Mark Perakh has written a very good review of his books at http://www.talkreason.org/articles/schroeder.cfm

And obviously, I don’t feel any particular urge to comment on the part that deals with the preserved tablet. Apparently, Quran can tell you whatever you want it to. It serves as the conjurer’s hat in the hands of intellectuals who keep pulling all sorts of rabbits out of it.

In the conclusion, the discovery of DNA, far from what Mr. Yahya claims, gave a resounding affirmative answer to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin was frustrated when he was asked how the variation happened. He always answered that he didn’t know how it happened. DNA’s discovery answered that question; it happens thru mutation in genes, a simple copying error in the mechanism of duplication. Currently, there are many raging debates going on between evolutionary biologists on topics such as Punctuated Equilibrium that we visited earlier but they are all within the framework of the general theory of evolution. Taking advantage of those conflicts to state that the evolutionary biologists don’t know anything what they are talking about is unfair and, to some extent, dishonest. In their frustration, creationists tend to equate evolutionary theory with religion saying that since both are unproved entities, they must be equally faith-based. Sorry, but I don’t see the parallel. Whenever I am presented with a theory, the first thing I see is what it offers as tools of its own falsification. If you read “Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, you will find him telling you on many places how can he be proven wrong. He states many times that if you discover a modern mammal fossil from more than 500 million years ago, his theory would absolutely break down. If you prove that acquired characteristics are inherited, or you see a species that can’t be perfectly nested within its taxonomical group, theory of evolution will be proven wrong. Darwin has provided many breakdown points like that in his book. Show me a religious scripture doing that. One of my creationist friends once told me that if someday its shown how spontaneous life can emerge, he would stop believing in creationism. I asked him if he was sure and wouldn’t he say that, yes, life was born spontaneously but that is how God meant it to be? His answer was a smile and that’s it. That’s the power of faith. No matter how many times evolutionists deal with these rehashed arguments, faith is not going to breakdown. But, to repeat what I wrote earlier, the only thing that can prove evolution wrong is scientific facts and not some fancy philosophy because that’s not where evolution is based; its based in hard scientific facts.

Thanks

Rafi Aamer

rafiaamer@comcast.net

  Send questions or comments to Pervaiz Salahuddin