Ankerberg: Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary
biologists are still confidently proclaiming
that it’s possible to build a Cambrian animal
by natural selection and random mutation in
small incremental steps.
But what are some of the problems that you
see with this evolutionary view?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, actually many of
the leading Cambrian paleontologists are now
disputing that view.
There’s a paleontologist at the Smithsonian
named Douglas Erwin who has written a book
with James Valentine from the University of
California Berkeley.
And they take what they call a non-uniformitarian
evolutionary view, which just in plain English
means that whatever caused the Cambrian animals
to emerge, it’s unlike anything, any biological
process we see at work today, including the
mutation natural selection process.
So, there’s a lot of scientists who are
doubting the creative power of the mutation
selection mechanisms.
One of the reasons for that is that natural
selection can only select for a functional
advantage, for an advantageous change in a
protein or a gene at the smallest level.
And yet, we know that the odds of generating
such a new gene or protein by random mutations
alone is extremely small.
And it’s small even when we take into account
the number of opportunities there are for
such an event to occur, given the known history
of life on earth.
So, the idea that mutation and selection have
this amazing creative power is really increasingly
being questioned.
It does a great job of explaining small minor
variations in existing protein folds and structures,
but if you need enough changes to build what’s
called a new protein structure, a new protein
fold, too many things have to go right before
there’s any selectable advantage.
There is no gradual series of steps up the
backside of the mountain.
It’s basically a big-jump proposition where
you need many coordinated changes to occur
before there’s any selectable advantage.
And the number of coordinated changes that
are required are so vastly improbable that
it’s far more likely, as we were saying
in the last program, that such a random search
will fail, than it is that such a mechanism
will succeed.
So the really important, I would say, mathematical
reasons to doubt the creative power of the
mutation selection mechanism with respect
to the problem of building even one gene or
protein, let alone a whole new Cambrian animal
which would require hundreds and thousands
of new genes and proteins.
