Turning Evolution into a Law of Nature

No, minerals and stars do not
evolve by natural selection

Science Magazine should have blown the whistle on this one. Two guys from Carnegie are trying to use Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law to explain everything in the universe. This is the best example yet that Darwinism is a religion.

Life evolves. So do minerals. How about everything else? (1 Nov 2024, Science Magazine). Reporter Paul Voosen gives good press to Robert Hazen and Michael Wong, two priests of Darwinism at the Carnegie Institute who are trying to convert scientists to their Stuff Happens Religion. “Proposed ‘natural law’ broadening evolution finds support,” Voosen says, which signifies nothing. Any population of humans has some who will support anything.

For Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Charles Darwin didn’t think big enough. Look at the window, he says. “You see the flowers. You see the trees. You see all the buildings, all the things we’ve constructed, the language we’ve constructed.” What can explain why over time, everything on Earth—not just living things—seems to get ever more rich and complex?

Last year, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Hazen and Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at Carnegie, proposed an answer. They say there is a missing “natural law” that broadens the concept of evolution, boosting the complexity not just of life, but of systems in mineralogy, chemistry, and the inner workings of stars.

This has no more validity than inventing a word like “galumph” and claiming that it explains everything in the universe (see Jargonwocky in the Darwin Dictionary, reproduced below*).

Darwin’s “theory” (if Stuff Happens can be called a theory), however, proposed that variations in living things could be “naturally selected” if they improve fitness for reproductive success (see “Fitness for Dummies“). Neo-Darwinism proposed that the variations occur by mutations to genes. Non-biological things like minerals, cave formations and stars have no genes. How can Hazen and Wong extend Darwinism to those?

Put simply, the paper describes how systems made up of diverse interacting components, when put in environments that allow some configurations to persist better than others, will inexorably drive toward states of “increasing functional information.” That is, as time goes on, a system will grow more diverse and complex, enriched in the functions needed for survival, through a kind of natural selection. Biological evolution, with DNA mutations creating the configurations that persist through reproduction and natural selection, would then be only one subset of this broader law.

In a sense, this is merely a logical conclusion of the Stuff Happens Law. If you can explain life by saying “stuff happens,” why not explain everything by the same broader law of nature? Stuff Happens! Darwin vindicated! Lock up the creationists and throw away the key!

Dr Hazen, who presented lectures on Origins of Life for The Teaching Company, found Darwinism in magical crystals. Out of the crystals grow magical trees.

The idea has its roots in the nearly 2 decades Hazen has spent documenting the evolution of minerals—the crystalline building blocks of rocks. Over Earth’s history, they evolvedfrom just a few dozen at its start to thousands today. Earth’s earliest forms of calcite, for example, developed through the watery alteration of meteorites; microbes then began to build other calcite structures 2.5 billion years ago, whereas snails and clams created new combinations beginning only 100 million years ago.

Doesn’t Hazen realize that microbes, snails and claims have highly sophisticated genetic codes and molecular codes that ingest calcite for functional purposes? That’s not Darwinism any more than when you put salt on your Thanksgiving potatoes you are causing the salt to evolve, or by drinking calcium in your milk you are causing calcium to evolve.

When Hazen first floated the idea in 2008, colleagues were skeptical, he says. “It was like a just-so story.” But since then, research tying thousands of minerals to dates when they first appear in the geological record has confirmed they form a tree that has branched over time, like phylogenetic trees in biology.

Voosen goes on to describe reactions by other scientists. Loren Williams at Georgia Institute of Technology calls it an appealing idea. Others don’t think that Stuff Happens is a useful scientific hypothesis, but they are reluctant to call it crazy out of respect for fellow academics.

Some scientists accept Hazen and Wong’s idea but are not sure it necessarily rises to being a new law of nature. “I wouldn’t call it a new law of physics, just to not piss off the physicists,” says Johannes Jäger, a systems biologist leading a project studying the biology of agency at the University of Vienna. Others say it doesn’t easily generate hypotheses to test. “We can’t really use it yet,” says Elisa Biondi, an astrobiologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, who stresses she likes the idea. “Not for the generality they are trying to cover.”

Other scientists quoted by Voosen, however, are getting all excited about this blurring of the line between life and non-life. According to Hazen and Wong, anything that persists or gets more complex, whether a star, a mineral, or computer code, is a product of Darwinian selection. And what is the “functional information” that evolution produces? Survival! In short, if it exists, it evolved!

Perceptive CEH readers may doubt that intelligent scientists could be so thoroughly duped as to conflate minerals with biological evolution and use the e-word evolution to refer to any kind of change. Well, read on.

There are even echoes of it in computer science research into artificial life, says Blaise Agüera y Arcas, chief technology officer of technology & society at Google. “I’m totally down with it,” he says. “What persists, exists.”

During the workshop, Agüera y Arcas presented work his team has done using minimalist programming languages to create random sequences of computer instructions in a virtual soup, released as a preprint on arXiv in August. In each round, two sequences of code are put together, executed, and broken apart. No mutations are added and the environment has no fitness pressures. At first, the result was nothing, just errors when the combined codes were run. But over millions of rounds, complex code emerges—as if a natural evolutionary law were at work.

It was tricky to figure out what these complex looping code snippets were doing, he said. “But of course, what they were doing was reproducing.”

Why, then, are Google and Apple spending so much money hiring the brightest minds in computer science to engineer their products? Just put random sequences of computer instructions in a virtual soup and let them evolve. Better yet, use random letters, not computer instructions. No sense giving the Law of Nature a head start by “using minimalist programming languages” in the soup. And don’t let computer scientists interfere in any way. Otherwise, critics might compare the result to the debunked claims of a talking horse named Clever Hans. No; the computer simulation must run without any intelligent design at all. If the power goes out, a fire burns the computer center, or the program crashes due to a bug, well, that’s evolution. Stuff happens.

I once subjected myself to the mental torture of listening to Robert Hazen’s entire Teaching Company course “Origins of Life” just so I could be fully aware of the best arguments for believing in a lost cause, as presented by a Harvard-trained PhD who taught at a major university (George Mason U) who knows all the players in the OoL field. It was torture not because Hazen is a poor lecturer; he is engaging, personable and likeable as a human being. But trying to defend OoL by chance is like trying to convince a car buyer that a pebble will become a Ferrari if you give it enough time, so you should pick it up and buy it and take it home. Throughout the lectures, Hazen offered only hope in futureware. Over and over, he admitted major hurdles to the origin of life, but kept promising that scientists may figure it out some day over the rainbow. Now that 10 leading OoL researchers failed to answer Dr James Tour’s easy challenge, Hazen should have quit his job and taken up something functionally useful, like finding a cure for cancer. Instead, he is out there as an evangelist for Darwin, trying to round up disciples for the religion of selectionism. A sadder account of Romans 1:18-23 could hardly be found. We hope he will repent over his abuse of scientific ideals. And any creationists who are still trying to defend natural selection as a real natural process had better pay attention to this article and see the evil fruit of selectionism.

Recommended Resource: Creationist presentation on the origin of life presented today (13 Nov 2024) by Dr Jonathan Sarfati for Logos Research Associates.

*Jargonwocky, from the Darwin Dictionary:

In the land of Jargonwocky, a scientist named Niwrad came up with a theory of everything he called Galumph. With frabjous joy, he investigated all the creatures of the borogoves with his apprentice, Ecallaw. He found that the Jubjub birds had round eyes and the mome raths, though similar, have square eyes. That’s because of Galumph, he explained. The Bandersnatch and Jabberwock, though looking very different, both have round eyes. “Galumph triumphs again!” Niwrad chortled. “But how can that be?” burbled Ecallaw with uffish look. “They are so very different in other respects.” “Callooh! Callay!” exclaimed Niwrad frumiously. “’Tis only to demonstrate the power of Galumph. The former is a case of Parallel Galumph. This one, a case of Convergent Galumph. Do you see? Galumph explains all. We must away and tell Yelxuh, our mimsy publicist, to announce our scientific triumph to the townspeople! We have slain the mystery of Jargonwock with Galumph. Galumph has wiped the brillig from our slithy toves, and given us Enlightenment!”