Extracted from our series, The New Scientific Evidence That Points to the Existence of God, Part 3. Edited for publication.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Stephen, previously you have told us about how the discovery of the digital code in DNA has created a profound enigma, a mystery, for scientists trying to explain the origin of first life by reference to what is known as chemical evolution, the evolution of the first life from simpler chemicals. You also explained why the presence of digital information in DNA points to the action, instead, of a designing intelligence or master programmer.
Now you’re going to talk to us about another explosion of information in the history of life, more proof for intelligent design, if you want. One that doesn’t just challenge chemical evolutionary theories of the first life, but also Darwin’s theory of biological evolution itself, which he formulated to explain the origin of all subsequent forms of life. What is that evidence? What is the Cambrian explosion?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the Cambrian explosion refers to the abrupt appearance of most of the major animal groups, called the phyla—the largest division of animal life, representing novel body plans—in a very narrow window of geologic time. So we have lots of fossils in the fossil record; the famed trilobites are one of the most distinctive or iconic fossils of this Cambrian period. But there are many other animal forms that arose in that period of time, and they did so very abruptly without evidence of ancestral precursors. The transitional intermediates are missing. This is abrupt appearance.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Folks, if you go into the ground, alright, what he’s talking about is you go down far enough, you’re going to finally come to the fact of nothing, no animals at all. When you came to the Cambrian explosion, these are the first animals that showed up. What was the problem with them showing up the way they did?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, they didn’t show up in a manner that matched what Darwin anticipated about the history of life. Darwin depicted the history of life as a great branching tree, where every form of life emerged gradually from a slightly simpler version, going back all the way to the first living cell. So you start with that first living cell, it morphs and changes, and you gradually get more and more complex forms of life until eventually, through a long, gradual process, a series of gradations, you produce the first animals, the complex animals. But in the fossil record, we don’t see the gradations. We just see those animal forms arising very abruptly without evidence of prior precursors.
Dr. John Ankerberg: That’s why they’re calling it a Cambrian explosion.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: They call it an explosion.
Dr. John Ankerberg: It just showed up.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. And it’s not the only such explosion like this in the history of life. Many, many of the new life forms come into existence—the first birds, the first mammals, the first flowering plants—in this explosive manner. And so, this is what we should expect on Darwin’s theory, is a tree-like picture, but we don’t have the little blue dots underneath. We only have the gold dots, if you will.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And the gold dots should be, it’s like Darwin’s Tree of Life: you start off with simpler molecules, and you branch out into more complex. And the fact that when you look at the different animals that showed up, these guys didn’t have any precursors in front of them.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And they’re already very complex.
Dr. John Ankerberg: They’re already complex.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: They are: tightly integrated anatomical systems, multiple systems, the trilobites there on the end had compound eyes very similar to modern insect eyes. Very sophisticated organs already present in these animals from the very beginning. So, it’s not simple to complex, it’s complex from the beginning.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Well, paleontologists, they saw that, they saw all these animals, but the fact is, if you’re thinking about it, if you think about Darwin’s Tree of Life and so on, he was saying you’ve got simple molecules, and all of a sudden you’ve got a gradual evolution going up. And then he had the tree where all the branches went. But you had the precursors in front. These guys all showed up—an explosion. That’s why you call it the Cambrian explosion. What was the problem that all of a sudden they immediately, the paleontologists realized? Or another way of saying it, what’s the deeper problem that is apparent when they found this?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: In my book I talk about two mysteries: the mystery of the missing fossils, and we’ve talked about that a bit already; but there’s a deeper problem that the Cambrian explosion and other similar explosions in the history of life raise. And that problem is, how do you build all this new form? It’s an engineering problem, in a sense. How does the Darwinian process of natural selection acting on random mutations, generate that amount of new form in the time windows that are allowed by the fossil record? And that in turn reflects another mystery that we’ve already talked about, which is the mystery of the origin of information.
If you want to build life in the first place, as we’ve talked about before, you have to have DNA to build the proteins to service the cell. But when you have new animal life arising, what emerges with a new form of animal life are new anatomical systems, new organs and tissues. And those new organs and tissues require new cell types. And each new cell type, for example, if you have a digestive tract, if you have a gut, you need digestive enzymes to service the cells that make up the gut. So where do those enzymes come from? Those are proteins. Well, they would need information to build them in DNA.
So when you have a new explosion of biological form, it in turn requires an explosion of biological information. And the question is, can the mutation natural selection mechanism build the amount of information that’s needed to account for the explosive origin of animal life in the Cambrian period and other similar explosions? Or is it insufficient? And that’s a question that I think is now very much in the forefront of many biologists’ minds, including many people working in evolutionary biology.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes, and it’s a big problem. But we’ve got the Darwinian evolutionary theory, and then, now it’s kind of morphed into the Neo-Darwinian theory. Tell us the difference between those two.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, Neo-Darwinism is just the idea that natural selection is not only acting on random genetic variations, but also mutations, changes, random changes in the code that are essentially errors; they’re random copying errors. And those random copying errors are thought to be the source of new innovation, or new form in the history of life.
And that raises a big problem, and this is really at the forefront of the Cambrian mystery. Think of it in terms of computer science. If you have a section of functioning computer code and it forms a program, and you start randomly changing the digital characters, the zeros and ones, ask yourself a question: Are you more likely to degrade that information, or to generate something fundamentally new?
Dr. John Ankerberg: Everybody here knows you’ve got a big problem.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Big problem. You’re going to degrade that information and cause the original code to be nonfunctional far before you would ever get to a new functioning software program or operating system.
And the same thing has turned out to be true in the biological case. We’ve talked in previous episodes about the way in which DNA contains information in a digital form. And so, if you want to take an existing organism that has DNA for building its proteins and structures, and turn it into a new organism, you’re going to have to change the DNA code. The Darwinian proposal is that that would happen randomly as a series of copying errors. But just as in the computer world, you’re going to end up degrading that information long before you would ever get to a new gene capable of building new proteins and new anatomical structures.
And this has actually been supported by experimental research. There’s an Israeli protein scientist and molecular biologist named Dan Tawfik, recently passed away tragically, but his work was just absolutely fantastic. And what he did was experimentally test this idea. He looked at proteins and randomly changed the sequences of amino acids, which were a product of the DNA instruction. So if you get a change in the DNA, you get a change in the protein sequence. And what he found was that somewhere, in each case between three and 15 changes in the amino acid sequences, would result in a protein that degraded so much it would no longer fold. And that’s not nearly enough change to turn one stable protein structure, called a fold, into another stable and functional protein structure, another protein fold. So you dip into an abyss of non-function before you ever get to something new.
And so the digital character of the information that we now know is necessary to build new form and structure, new animals like in the Cambrian, does not lend itself to random changes in a way that would help us to explain the origin of fundamentally new forms of life.
Continued in Part 2