OK… to bring up an age old topic mentioned in the interview that seems to have divided people as much as anything ever has… the origins of life.
Decades ago I was an enthusiastic undergraduate “scientist” at the time fully committed to the philosophy of atheism. I had taken tons of biology courses including all the 3rd year pre-med biochemistry, genetics etc., although I didn’t end up pursuing medicine beyond that.
I decided to finally pull together the evidence to once and for all formulate the proof to show those ridiculous creationists how they have no logical basis for their beliefs. Demonstrate exactly the genetic mechanism by which evolution can occur based off of random mutation, to progress a species to new and more complex forms (as if I was the first person to try to do that LOL). I was partly driven to satisfy myself since I always quest better understanding of things. I took organic chemistry and actually really liked it so I wanted to take that to the next level and understand the chemical mechanism by which a new protein could be coded, seemingly out of nothing.
I presumed this knowledge must be out there and that I had just not been exposed to it in my many undergraduate biology courses.
So off I went and searched out the science. I didn’t devote my entire existence to it at the time or anything, but I spent maybe a year perusing journals and reading some prominent authors on the subject. I was expecting this evidence to be clear, ubiquitous, and obvious. But what I quickly found was the opposite and I came up empty. What I found was four lines of evidence: 1) on the macroscopic scale, we have genotypic / phenotypic mathematical models describing new genes emerging into a population and establishing themselves – you know, all the p and q statistics, yadda yadda yadda.
They all make sense and are observable in populations but they say nothing about the biochemical mechanisms by which new genes and traits emerge. It’s merely descriptive, which is fine. This can be understood as the Darwinian model of biological evolution via natural selection going back hundreds of years.
And 2) on the other end, we have the microscopic or biochemical scale; the more modern knowledge we have gained from technology that allows us to pull apart and understand the nuts and bolts of DNA and genetics and biochemistry describing how organisms function in real time at a biomolecular level. It is a reductionist approach which models biological entities as machines – very complex machines whose nuts and bolts go all the way down to individual atoms and molecules. What I found was that this knowledge doesn’t describe or provide models of how new genes emerge from mutation, how organisms change; it merely postulates how organisms function using a deterministic machine model. It describes how a car works, but it says nothing of how engineers design a new model of car.
And of course, on a third level, bringing in the 4th dimension of time, we have a very robust fossil record showing the progress of complex life over the last billion years.
And on the 4th level, we have all the genomic analysis of the remaining extant life forms clearly showing their lineages and relationships which aligns very well with the fossil record.
All of these lines of evidence stand up well and describe their respective subjects l but it quickly became apparent that something was glaringly missing, which is an actual biochemical “mechanical” mechanism linking them together. It’s like people can talk all about these individually but then bringing them together requires some magic hand waving and Voila! Look what science did! Well, hand waving isn’t science.
I couldn’t find anything, which I was very shocked by. I was expecting this to be prominent in the journals and texts, and well understood, since all the atheist scientists seemed very secure in their beliefs. But I found (almost) nothing. There was one line of research into the genetic mechanics of the emergence of a new nylon-eating strain of bacteria.
I pondered this for a while, and was finally forced to question what I had previously believed. The problem is this – the math doesn’t add up. Never mind the lack of clear chemical models and real life examples. So I started some math. I wanted to estimate the chances that a random mutation can create a new useful trait in a complex organism. I wasn’t interested in evidence THAT it occurs since we all know it happens all the time all around us. I wanted the math behind HOW it happens.
How many base pairs are in a typical gene? Let’s be conservative and say 10,000 including all the other introns, exons, junk DNA etc. (forgive me if my genetics is a little rusty, it’s been a while).
What is the required “perfection” in that sequence needed to code for a functional protein? I don’t know, maybe 98%?
How “unique” must the new protein be? As in, coding for a different wavelength of reflected irridescence in a butterfly’s wing – can this be done by slightly tweaking an existing protein? Not really. It generally must a be a unique new protein to further advance the complexity of a species given how specifically proteins must fold themselves when being built.
What are the typical mutations that we are told cause new beneficial traits to spontaneously arise out of existing genetic material?
Deletions, substitutions, translocations etc… These are “primitive” processes.
What are the chances that one of these mutations would be detrimental to the organism?
What are the chances that one of these “primitive” mutations could create a new functional and beneficial protein? Based on the necessary “irreducible complexity” needed to create a 98% accurate protein? (anything less than a functioning new protein would be a nothing-burger and be quickly lost in the population – the gene must be expressed positively phenotyically immediately. It only has one shot)
What are the mutation rates typically observed?
Based on a comparison of the necessary amount of mutation needed to create a beneficial new phenotype, as compared with the level of complexity we see arising out of the common genetic mutations mentioned above, how often would that occur? Furthermore, what would happen to the rest of the genome with that rate of mutation before a positive phenotype was created? Would it turn the rest of you into Swiss cheese first? Then how could it be a beneficial mutation if it destroys the rest of your genome first?
How many individual organisms would be required to reproduce to see these changes? It’s one thing to talk about a Coronoavirus that can multiply trillions of times in one infection but how does it work in a population of 10,000 frogs on a mountain?
I started the math and I didn’t get very far before realizing that it’s ridiculous. It’s beyond impossible. It is astronomically absurd. You’d never see a beneficial mutation once in the history of the universe, yet we see them all around us all the time.
So I was forced to conclude, as I still do today (maybe some Earth shattering evidence has since come forward that I’m not aware of), that Atheism is not consistent with science. But beyond this, rejecting Atheism as a belief system does not require one to reject any 4 of the lines of evidence I summarized above, since the evidence for each is clear and undeniable. It is about admitting that the theory of evolution is woefully incomplete despite all our amazing technological advances that have allowed us to peep into every corner of genetics. Rejecting Atheism does not mean one must believe that the world is 5000 years old. It does not even require that you believe in the existence of some big guy in the sky who is doing “intelligent design” from some other parallel dimension and shuffling our DNA for us while we are asleep to make new genes for our unborn children, although that may be happening for all I know. Rejecting atheism simply means that I reject the belief, or rather the steadfast assertion based on some imaginary nonexistent evidence, that biological complexity can emerge, directed by nothing more selection pressure, from random genetic mutation – and most importantly, that biological organisms are just really complicated machines, and nothing more.
How does biological evolution work then? I don’t know. That’s the problem I see these days. Everyone has an opinion because they can feel only their one small part of the elephant and formulate their wider beliefs by extrapolating that to the whole. But an analysis of the whole doesn’t support that. Furthermore, raising these questions will alienate you from anyone who holds a steadfast rigid view, because it calls into question dogmatic adherence to any belief system on the origins of life.
I’d like to learn more. I find the stagnation of this topic over the last few decades symptomatic of the same problems discussed in this video. I think that to satisfactorily address this topic would require a level of scientific and cultural openness light years beyond where we are now. We are instead spending our “intellectual” efforts fighting over the most appropriate and least offensive pronoun to address people with. I fear that this issue, as always, will be another one used to further wedge and divide society. It is a stagnation of our philosophical, spiritual, and scientific progress as a species.
I’d go so far as to say that we hit “Peak Humanity” in the 90’s sometime and it’s been downhill since then. Our mechanical scientific understanding of genetics has progressed markedly since then, but it has contributed basically nothing to a wider philosophical understanding of what life is. I think quantum mechanics has contributed more to the philosophy of life over that time than biochemistry has.
