The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution
More than Myth
February 20, 2015
[Editor’s Note: The following article is Casey Luskin’s chapter, “The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution,” contributed to the volume More than Myth (Chartwell Press, 2014). It has been posted with permission of the book’s editors, Robert Stackpole and Paul Brown. A PDF of this article can be downloaded here.]
Excerpt: Darwin Skeptics Abound
Drs. Axe, Gauger, and Seelke are by no means the only scientists to observe the rarity of amino acid sequences that yield functional proteins. A leading college-level biology textbook states that “even a slight change in primary structure can affect a protein’s conformation and ability to function.”42 Likewise, evolutionary biologist David S. Goodsell writes:
[O]nly a small fraction of the possible combinations of amino acids will fold spontaneously into a stable structure. If you make a protein with a random sequence of amino acids, chances are that it will only form a gooey tangle when placed in water.43
Goodsell goes on to assert that “cells have perfected the sequences of amino acids over many years of evolutionary selection.” But if functional protein sequences are rare, then it is likely that natural selection will be unable to take proteins from one functional genetic sequence to another without getting stuck in some maladaptive or non-beneficial intermediate stage.
The late biologist Lynn Margulis, a well-respected member of the National Academy of Sciences until her death in 2011, once said “new mutations don’t create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.”44 She further explained in a 2011 interview:
[N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.45
Similarly, past president of the French Academy of Sciences, Pierre-Paul Grasse, contended that “[m]utations have a very limited ‘constructive capacity'” because “[n]o matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”46
Many other scientists feel this way. Over 800 Ph.D. scientists have signed a statement agreeing they “are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”47 Indeed, two biologists wrote in Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics: “it remains a mystery how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well optimized functions. This problem is particularly acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts…”48 Perhaps it would be less mysterious if the theoretical conceptions could be expanded beyond unguided evolutionary mechanisms like random mutation and natural selection to explain the origin of complex biological features. More.