Evolutionists Show that Nature Fights Evolution

Genetic and developmental systems
protect against variation in numerous
ways to preserve the wild phenotype

 

Background: A few days ago, our post about our 16 Oct 2024 article “Henry Morris’s Evidence for a Worldwide Flood” generated an unusual level of kerfuffle. Atheists and evolutionists dogpiled against CEH on X. They played their usual game of mocking, meming and ridiculing against creation science, posturing themselves with the presumptive authority of the “science” of Darwinian evolution, which (they argued) was peer-reviewed, recognized by the consensus, and unassailable by those outside the expert class. Among those in the dogpile was a developmental biologist, Dr Ralph Marcucio of UC San Francisco, who shared, as an indicator of expertise, that he contributes scientific work on evolution. He asked if we had seen one of his papers as an example of his work, and gave a link to it. We offered to critique it. Further interaction with him about evolution, however, was cut short when he inexplicably left the dialog and blocked us. At least one other participant in the brouhaha was interested in seeing our critique. That became the basis for this article: did Dr Marcucio’s paper support Darwinian evolution?

Dr Ralph Marcucio appears to devote his time to understanding “tissue interactions that control development of the musculoskeletal system.” This is honorable scientific work that can help patients with developmental diseases. The following critique should in no way reflect on his professional expertise in that respectable area, but only serves as a response to his short participation in the fracas with atheists against CEH. We do not assume he has the same feelings as the most vociferous attackers of our post, and wish him well in his usual work as “a dedicated and enthusiastic mentor to dental and medical students.”

The Issue, The Whole Issue, and Nothing But the Issue

Before looking at the paper, readers must understand the real issue in Darwinian evolution: it is molecules to man by unguided natural processes. Let’s abbreviate this m2M. It is not about minor variations within an individual, differences between individuals of a species, or even differences within genera or families. Even the most ardent young-earth creationists accept that much variability. Ken Ham, for instance, teaches that today’s animals look quite different from those Noah took on the ark just a few thousand years ago. Creationist presentations commonly show charts of the large differences between dog breeds that all descended from a “dog kind” (something like a wolf) after the Flood. The point is this: if the most ardent creationists accept variation within created kinds, Darwinians must show that their blind processes of selection are capable of generating the entire biosphere. They must account for the major leaps: dogs from pre-dogs, birds from flightless animals, and (at the extreme) molecules to man—m2M. That is the issue. Does Professor Marcucio’s paper show this?

We’re glad to evaluate the paper, because we can show that it is anti-evolutionary! It provides no evidence whatsoever that Darwinian evolution (specifically, Neo-Darwinian evolution by natural selection of mutations) has any power to turn a bacterium into a fish, a bear into a whale, or an ape into a man. It does the opposite. It shows that nature fights evolution! Highly complex mechanisms in gene regulatory networks and developmental pathways work to prevent drastic swings away from the wild type of a plant or animal, ensuring robustness against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Like a tetherball that endures hard punches, the ball returns to the pole in the end. The rope only lets it go so far and no farther. If a player hits the ball too hard, the tetherball pops or breaks the rope, and the game is over. Similarly, living organisms come with built-in variability, but can only be perturbed to a point beyond which they cannot live. There is a natural principle of regression toward the mean. Without internal mechanisms to maintain stability, life would not persist.

Keep that issue in mind. To succeed in distinguishing their view from that of creationists, Darwinians must show the capacity of natural selection to take organisms past the family level. Darwin and his disciples attempted to convince the public that all of biology involved universal common descent through natural selection. That was the basis of his “tree of life” metaphor. Creationists, by contrast, portray biology with a “lawn” metaphor: sprouts arising separately with variability within each sprout, but discontinuous with other sprouts. The unity of the genetic code and universality of metabolic proteins do not threaten the creation view. Actually, they confirm it: the Genesis record speaks of a single Creator dividing life into forms that reproduce “after their kind.” This gives the creation view an explanation for unity and diversity in biology. It is a result of intelligent design.

Scientists at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) are currently running experiments to identify the mechanisms that permit organisms to adapt to new environments with heritable epigenetic variations. One example concerns blind cave fish, where loss of vision leads to the boosting of other senses, and may be reversible if the fish return to a lighted environment. Such variability, they argue, was intelligently designed for robustness, and requires engineering specifications such as sensors, switches and programmed logic. These engineering requirements had to be programmed with foresight for environments that the organism was likely to encounter, similar to how engineers of the Mars rover had to foresee cliffs and build the rover to sense a steep grade and stop or turn around.

What is the issue, again? It is m2M: molecules to man by unguided natural processes (such as natural selection). That is very different from the engineering model embraced by the creation science community that explains life by intelligent design and foresight. Both views include variability, but creation sets limits—limits that are observable in nature and in the fossil record, and also in the “evolutionary” paper to which we now turn.

The Developmental-Genetics of Canalization (Hallgrimsson et al., Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology, mss 24 May 2018, publ. April 2019). We normally critique new papers, not ones six years old, but since Dr Marcucio linked to this paper as an example of evolution, we check to see if it supports Darwin’s theory. The paper mentions evolution 19 times not counting the references. It mentions selection ten times (directional only once), and heritability/inheritance 8 times. Adaptive gets four mentions, and novelties once, but it says nothing about innovation. Mutant/mutation is mentioned 36 times, but never in the sense of something beneficial. Already this does not look like a strongly pro-Darwinism paper. For brevity, since Dr Marcucio is one of the corresponding authors, and is the individual in the X tumult who suggested its relevance to evolution, let’s call it the Marcucio paper.

Some Terms

Canalization, or robustness to genetic or environmental perturbations, is fundamental to complex organisms.

1. Canalization refers to an organism’s tendency to revert to the mean (the wild type) against perturbations. We might think of it as the organism getting stuck in a rut that prevents its “evolvability”—its availability for further evolution. The Marcucio paper is all about canalization, which is a concept opposed to Darwinian evolution!

Canalization, or the tendency to buffer variation, is about the modulation of phenotypic variance due to factors other than the genetic or environmental variance, per se. Phenotypic robustness is a more general concept that includes developmental stability and canalization. Whereas canalization refers to the minimization of variation among individuals, developmental stability is the tendency to minimize variation among replicated structures within individuals. Developmental stability is most often measured via random, normally distributed departures from symmetry where symmetrical development is expected, or fluctuating asymmetry. [Italics in original; bold added.]

Unless one is prepared to define “evolution” as something that we each do as we age, developmental stability has nothing to do with Darwinism. It speaks, rather, to built-in robustness against embryonic changes that might kill the organism. As for departures from symmetry, a child might be born with one arm longer than the other (against the “expected” symmetry), but is still fully human and capable of living a fairly normal life. Again, that has nothing to do with Darwinism. Canalization—the tendency to buffer variation—is actually anti-Darwinian. It inhibits evolution! Creationists would say canalization is due to design for homeostasis. For example, a design might achieve canalization (robustness against perturbations) through redundancy: having multiple copies of a gene or protein such that a single mutation does not kill the organism. The authors acknowledge that redundancy acts as a contributing factor to robustness against mutations.

2. Epistasis refers to the observable fact that changes to one gene are likely to affect other genes. Mutations, therefore, cannot be considered in isolation. The old Neo-Darwinist paradigm tended to focus on the power of rare beneficial mutations at the gene level to be “selected” for progress. The bad news for Darwinians is that even if some benefit came from mutating one gene, it would likely break something else, yielding a net loss for the organism’s viability. A broken radiator fan might make your car less noisy, but would overheat the engine and leave you standing by the road with your thumb out, standing next to a plume of smoke emerging from under the hood. If single beneficial mutations are extremely rare, how likely are the epistatic gene changes to be cumulatively beneficial for the organism?

Today’s cell biologists recognize the complexity of gene regulatory networks, epigenetic mechanisms and non-coding RNAs as regulators. See my article at Evolution News about the Nobel Prize for the discovery of microRNAs and how these small RNA regulatory molecules appear to be responsive to the environment. If so, they play important non-Darwinian roles for coordinating responses to environmental perturbations. That would imply engineering foresight for robustness, not sheer dumb luck.

3. Pleiotropy is a related term to epistasis, meaning that a change to one gene is likely to have multiple effects on the organism’s appearance, or phenotype. How likely is it that mutating a gene for one benefit is likely to score wins on all the other affected traits?

We remember evolutionists boasting that the mutation for sickle-cell anemia confers some resistance to malaria, as if that is a prime example of a beneficial mutation. The possessors of that genetic mistake would likely be fitter without it. If the individual marries another heterozygous spouse with the mutation, some of their children are likely to be afflicted and die from sickle cell disease.

Once again, mutations cannot be considered in isolation. Trusting that progress will occur by chance from random mistakes from molecules to man requires more faith than that of a staunch fundamentalist. Imagine believing that a man who can remain standing after being punched from all directions by criminals on the street will, as a result of the punches, end up at the top of a flight of stairs as Superman. That would be less absurd than belief in m2M by unguided material processes.

Waddling from Waddington

The Marcucio paper builds much of its content on the words of C.H. Waddington from the 1950s. Waddington, an avowed Marxist who called Marxism a “profound scientific philosophy,” invented the term canalization and speculated about its relationship to Darwinism. He was not the first to recognize organisms’ tendency to regress to the mean despite perturbations, but believed (as a Marxist and materialist must) that the processes involved are stochastic, i.e., chancy and not intelligently designed. What Marcucio’s paper does not tell you is that Waddington recognized that “natural selection” is a tautological phrase, empty of meaning. He said in 1960,

Darwin’s major contribution was, of course, the suggestion that evolution can be explained by the natural selection of random variations. Natural selection, which was first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable although previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (defined as those that leave the most offspring) will leave the most offspring. Once the statement is made, its truth is evident. [Waddington: Evolution After Darwin, Univ of Chicago Press, 1960.]

Norman Macbeth, in his book Darwin Retried (1971, pp 47-48) was incredulous that Waddington, after admitting this major logical flaw in natural selection, immediately afterward praised Darwin’s theory for its “enormous power of the principles as a weapon of explanation.” Macbeth wrote,

Why do I find this staggering? Because a man who is astute enough to see that differential reproduction is a tautology is unable to see anything improper in a tautology. Because a man who reveres Darwin reduces Darwin’s major contribution to a tautology, yet asserts that this does not reduce the magnitude of Darwin’s achievement. Because a man who must know how weak natural selection is in explaining hard cases, and who has his finger on the reason for this weakness (the tautology), still speaks of the enormous power of natural selection as a “weapon of explanation.” [Macbeth, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason, The Harvard Common Press, 1971, p. 48).

How much insight did this tautologist give to the authors of Marcucio’s paper? “More than seventy years after Waddington articulated his ideas, we still do not have a generalizable understanding of the mechanistic basis for canalization.”

The Understanding Never Comes

One of Darwin’s great promises in his “abstract” of a theory (see Darwin’s Bluff) was to bring understanding to biology (28 May 2021). His theory of natural selection would explain the unity and diversity of all life within a unifying concept of universal common ancestry by natural selection. This idea, as we have just seen, is a tautology (see also our article “Fitness for Dummies“). Did it succeed? We look inside the Marcucio paper for the coveted understanding Darwin promised. It never comes. The authors resign themselves to playing the roles of the Blind Men and the Elephant.

• For evolutionary biology, understanding how canalization arises is important because, by modulating the phenotypic variation that arises in response to genetic differences, canalization is a determinant of evolvability.
• Understanding canalization at a mechanistic level will depend on conceptual and methodological approaches that integrate quantitative genetics and developmental biology.
• More than seventy years after Waddington articulated his ideas, we still do not have a generalizable understanding of the mechanistic basis for canalization.
• The statement, for example, that an observed reduction in variance is explained by canalization simply means that the observation groups with a set of similar patterns that we don’t understand but have chosen to label as canalization. If that grouping is not sensible, it is unlikely to map on to mechanisms in a tractable way. The problem with viewing canalization as simply the inverse of plasticity is that plasticity is a much more general phenomenon. Accordingly, the term canalization is likely to cover such a heterogeneous set of patterns that attempts to explain all in mechanistic terms are futile.
• The resultant diversity of approaches and perspectives has advanced understanding of robustness in biology. However, diversity, often originating in different disciplines, has also created a situation reminiscent of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each tends to be concerned with a particular aspect of the problem, making it difficult to contextualize this progress in terms of a more general understanding of the mechanisms of canalization in development.

Job Security for Storytellers

Instead of bringing understanding or enlightenment, Darwinism has yielded a never-ending quest for insight akin to a snipe hunt. Readers of the Marcucio paper will learn some facts about epigenetic mechanisms, the history of evolutionary thought, and the complexity of life. All these are worthwhile things to know. Understanding of how blind unguided mechanisms could drive molecules to man (m2M), however, is just as hopeless as the snipe hunters who haven’t yet figured out there’s no snipe out there.

In particular, it has proven immensely difficult to incorporate the role of interactions above the gene level, to paraphrase Waddington. Recent work advancing the ability to measure and manipulate physical forces in development is one key to this, but much needs to be done in order to incorporate cell and tissue-level phenomena into the molecular interactomes that are currently the raw material of systems biology. Much work, therefore, needs to be done for the systems biology of robustness to be amenable to mechanistic explanation.

They’re looking for light but only see flashes in their imaginations:

How this occurs is a long-standing question to which there is not yet a satisfactory answer. Recent work, however, is beginning to shed light on this question. This essay will discuss the current state of knowledge of the developmental basis for canalization and place this in the context of complex trait genetics and evolutionary developmental biology.

In their concluding paragraph, they repeat:

Canalization is a fundamental property of complex organisms relevant to both evolutionary biology and the genetics of complex traits. We have reviewed past and current thinking on the mechanistic basis for this phenomenon. Canalization is unlikely to be due to a single mechanism, even in a particular biological context. Rather, the modulation of variance likely reflects the effects of multiple mechanisms, some of which might be specifically evolved to restrict the range of phenotypic outcomes, while others are embedded or emergent features of development. Understanding their relative contributions will depend on advances in systems biology that allow for multi-scale integration of imaging and molecular data as well as the development of theoretical models to make sense of the large and complex datasets that such approaches generate. As such approaches develop and mature in coming years, they are likely to enrich our understanding of the mechanistic basis for robustness. In so doing, this work will significantly illuminate the developmental-genetics of complex traits.

But if they keep at the search, someday they might find the snipe, explain the elephant, and achieve understanding. It’s out there waiting to be found in Futureware. We have labeled this vain quest Job Security for Storytellers.

The authors mention systems biology half a dozen times as an approach “that is leading investigators to tackle increasingly complex, emergent properties in quantitative models.” Are they aware that systems biology is of great interest to advocates of intelligent design? (See this list of articles.) If biology is a multi-level system of coordinated processes, it would be reductionist to simplify it to a mechanistic process that amounts to a tautology. Maybe Dr Marcucio and his colleagues should open their eyes to the Systems Biology Revolution as an approach that can unite engineers and biologists in a multidisciplinary effort to understand the workings of life at all levels. That’s what all scientists should desire. Success will come from looking for understanding in the light, not in the darkness of a snipe hunt, or in the blindness of feeling one’s way around an elephant. Once one considers life as having been designed for a purpose, it gives the investigator access to the explanatory power of a cause that is necessary and sufficient for the observations: intelligence.

Final note: We often distinguish between individual scientists who do respectable work on observable, repeatable phenomena, and the Big Science Cartel that enforces consensus on matters of origins and is driven by leftist politics. To the extent Dr Marcucio and his colleagues concentrate on the former, we wish them success. It’s a shame that the dialogs on X degenerated into anti-creation mockery by some. We insist on civility and tried to maintain civil dialog, but some refused and lost our three-strikes policy. We did not block Marcucio; he blocked us. As someone researching skeletal development, he surely is acutely aware of the complexity and functional sophistication of biological processes at all levels, and the severe challenge that biological reality poses to blind, unguided material processes. We hope he will give intelligent design serious consideration.