Darwinian materialists love insisting that living things are poorly designed. “Junk DNA,” so-called “vestigial” parts like wisdom teeth, the tail bone, or the appendix, and supposedly bad adaptations like the panda’s “thumb,” have all been touted as features no engineer would tolerate. These, we are told, are evidence that life has no purpose or design. It’s just a happy accident with clear signs of evolution’s many mistakes. Yet time and again, it turns out these allegedly useless features do have a purpose (even a critical one!) and that the problem was scientists’ ignorance of that purpose, not the design of living things.
So-called “junk DNA” may be the most dramatic example. Mainstream scientific opinion once held that upwards of 90% of our DNA was composed of useless bases—leftover rubbish from the evolutionary process that we no longer need. But after a series of dramatic discoveries in the 2000s and 2010s, a total reversal took place, and scientists now understand that “junk DNA” performs vital regulatory functions in organisms, almost like the operating system in a computer.
More and more, it appears that life is well-designed—perhaps even optimally designed. And this is strong support for the idea that living things are the work of a Designer.
But what is “optimal design,” and how can we tell? Writing at Evolution News, Emily Reeves summarized a new paper by a Princeton physicist who argues that we can mathematically quantify optimal design in living things.
William Bialek looked at what he called “optimization of information flow” in the development of organisms and used fruit flies (a common scientific test subject) as his example.
These fast-reproducing insects can grow from a single cell to a functioning individual in just hours. Through something called “fluorescence microscopy,” researchers can watch this process happen. They have discovered that the moment a female fly lays an egg, it kicks off a series of inputs around the egg that essentially tell the embryo where the top, bottom, and middle are. These trigger a “gap gene network” that produces proteins in differing amounts across the embryo to regulate the expression of genes that build its segmented body.
This sounds complicated, but in reality, it is incredibly, elegantly simple. Bialek translated these observations into mathematical equations and discovered that the flow of information from momma fly through the gap gene network to the structure of her offspring’s body is within one to two percent of a theoretical optimum. In other words, the information-to-insect process could physically not be much more efficient.
This is important because, as we’ve seen with all the supposed examples of “bad design” in nature, this isn’t what Darwinists expected. As Reeves put it, “highly optimized systems have not historically been a prediction of Darwinian evolution, but rather of intelligent design theory.”
Unguided evolution predicts messiness and inefficiency for the simple reason that natural selection doesn’t require optimal designs, just designs that work slightly better than the competition. And since accidental mutations are supposedly the source of new information in Neo-Darwinism, one would expect nature to be littered with suboptimal, clunky designs. But when specific aspects of nature are investigated mathematically, as Bialek did, that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.
In truth, the natural world has proved to be so efficient and well-designed that human engineers have often copied the features of living things to improve our inventions. There’s a whole field known as biomimicry that starts with the assumption that nature’s approach to aerodynamics, materials, information storage, traffic flow, and other problems is better than anything we’ve dreamed up.
But of course, nature doesn’t “approach,” much less “solve” any problems, because as Reeves pointed out, nature has no foresight or intent, much less the ability to produce information. Instead, as Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer has put it, our uniform and repeated experience suggests that foresight, intent, and information are always hallmarks of a mind, not a material process.
As science advances, we are finding more and more that the world we live in is filled with good designs—so good, in fact, that they can approach mathematical optimization. Faced with such a world, observers using fluorescence microscopy or just their eyeballs must ask: which theory’s predictions fit best with our observations? And is it scientific to hold on to the theory that keeps getting it wrong?
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Published Date: December 9, 2024
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
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