Normally in a post with a title like that, I would be linking to some intelligent design web site, like Evolution News. But in this case, I didn’t even find this story at Evolution News, I found it at Science Daily. The author of the article definitely takes the side of Darwinian evolution. But remember, as we discussed with Dr. Günter Bechly, evolution has to work gradually, if it is going to work at all.
If you remember the episode of Knight and Rose Show with Dr. Bechly, he talked about how natural mechanisms could only introduce change very gradually, and that sudden leaps of complexity in the fossil record are better explained by intelligent design. Why? Well, consider the task of writing an essay on paper with a pen. You can understand how a human could come up with a 1000 word essay in an hour, but you wouldn’t be able to get the same result by dripping ink into a running fan.
A new study about work genetics
Check out this article (archived) from Science Daily entitled “Defying Darwin: Scientists discover worms rewrote their DNA to survive on land”. The subtitle is “A comparative genome study of earthworms and their marine relatives could challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution by showing that worms colonized land in evolutionary jumps.”
Now for some excerpts, and please pay attention to the bias of the author. There’s a lot of could have, would have, should have in there. And a lot of assuming a mechanism that there is no evidence for. Remember, only designers can dump out functioning words and code in a short time. Natural mechanisms can’t do it.
The article says:
[…][A] research team led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a mixed research centre belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), points for the first time to a mechanism of rapid, massive genomic reorganisation which could have played a part in the transition of marine to land animals 200 million years ago. The team has shown that marine annelids (worms) reorganised their genome from top to bottom, leaving it unrecognisable, when they left the oceans.
I remember Dr. Bechly telling us in the podcast that naturalists cannot help themselves to jumps in complexity, because natural mechanisms can only work if there are no jumps at all. The latin phrase from philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is “natura non facit saltus” which means “nature makes no jumps”. Naturalists sometimes like to help themselves to jumps, and call it “punctuated equilibrium”, but punctuated equilibrium is not a mechanism for the rapid generation of genetic complexity. Rather, it merely describes what we find in the fossil record – long period of statis, and VERY short periods of huge jumps in complexity. Or “biological big bangs” as Dr. Bechly called them in his article about it.
The Science Daily article explains the findings of the study:
The analysis of these genomes has revealed an unexpected result: the annelids’ genomes were not transformed gradually, as Neo-Darwinian theory would predict, but in isolated explosions of deep genetic remodelling.
“Isolated explosions of genetic remodeling”. I can do that at work, when I refactor the code. But I’m an intelligent designer. Evolution can’t do refactors like that.
Evaluating the Science Daily article
I asked Grok whether the article explained any specific naturalistic mechanism that explained the “isolated explosions” in genetic complexity, and Grok said:
In short, the article uses vivid phrasing to describe the fossil record and genetic findings but does not articulate a clear, plausible naturalistic mechanism for the sudden genetic changes beyond the general idea of genomic rearrangement.
About the supposed designing ability of “punctuated equilibrium”, Grok said:
Punctuated equilibrium is primarily descriptive. It characterizes the fossil record’s pattern—long periods of little change punctuated by rapid bursts of morphological innovation. It does not, by itself, provide a detailed mechanistic explanation for how sudden jumps in genetic complexity occur.
The theory posits that rapid evolutionary change happens in small, isolated populations over relatively short geological timescales (thousands to tens of thousands of years), which may not leave many transitional fossils. However, it relies on standard evolutionary mechanisms (mutation, selection, drift) operating faster in these contexts, without specifying unique genetic or molecular processes to account for dramatic increases in complexity.
Keep in mind that the best experiments on the speed of naturalistic mechanisms, such as the LTEE experiments by Richard Lenski, show that mutation and selection produce steady, incremental changes, not sudden explosions of complexity.
The best explanation for biological big bangs
In the article about biological big bangs, Dr. Bechly says:
The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record.
The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses.
This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.
I do think it’s important for everyone to be clear on what the science shows. Naturalists have to have the evidence that naturalistic mechanisms can do all the creating credited to them in the brief time available. We know that intelligent agents can make explosions of specific complexity (functional information) in brief periods of time. But we don’t know that naturalistic mechanisms can do it.
If you would like to watch a nice lecture featuring Dr. Bechly explaining the fossil record, and the biological big bangs, then you can find that here:
If you want something to listen to, check out our podcast episode on the fossil record with Dr. Bechly.
