Biological Fine Tuning?

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Categories : Intelligent Design

Editor : PaV

published: jeudi 11 janvier 2007 21:46:15

It seems that every day there some new news item from science detailing how scientists in search of an optimal solution to their problem at hand, end up finding their solution in biological nature. This latest from PhysOrg.com shows how, in the nano-world, engineering solutions abound. Is it a marvel of natural selection?

Here you’ll find one instance of what I think, taken together, poses a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy that it can’t meet.

Here’s what I mean. In the face of “highly-conserved DNA” that is non-coding, evolutionary biologists have been seemingly forced to abandon the Modern Synthesis and its reliance on small genetic mutations and such in bringing about novel life forms. Instead, they now rely on “evo-devo”, which, to my knowledge (cf. Kirschner and Gerhart’s “The Plausibility of Life”) relies on the presence of so-called Hox genes. As the latest article points out, however, this optimization of a ‘gluing’ compound occurs in bone. Therefore positing that there are Hox genes–present already from an ancestral past–that determine, within the overall development of biological form, the location and properties of “bone”, this would therefore imply that “nature” had stumbled upon this “optimized” solution very early on. But this then means that NS had very little time to discover an “optimal” solution. This now gets us back to the Cambrian Explosion, which, even according to Darwin himself, is completely opposed to the biological gradualism he proposed. Hox genes are a way of getting around the problems of the Cambrian Explosion, but they do so only by positing a sort of “tool box” for biology, yet, it cannot explain the origin of the “tools” in the “tool box”. ‘Bone’ is one such “tool”. If evolutionary biologists are left with only RM+NS to explain the origin of the “tools”, and there are countless numbers of “tools” needed–since everything at the nano-level ooks optimized–what are the odds that RM+NS could produce these tools? As I say, I don’t think Darwinism can rise to the challenge that our growing knowledge of biology presents with each passing day.

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