Darwin's black box: the biochemical challenge to evolution.

New York, Free Press, 1996, 307 p.p. h.c., $25.00 US, $35 Can. REVIEWED BY DONALD DeMARCO "Black box" is a fanciful expression that refers to anything whose inner workings remain unknown and mysterious to us. Darwin's black box was the cell, the fundamental building block of life. At the time he published his revolutionary theory of evolution, in 1859, the cell was a virtual black box. Nineteenth-century biologists thought it was merely undifferentiated protoplasm, a kind of homogeneous jelly. Modern biochemistry, which arrived in the 1950's with Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, has proved otherwise, and with a vengeance. We now know that the nucleus of each cell contains a digitally coded data-base that has more information than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of the body put together. Here is a structural complexity of mind-boggling proportions! Biochemistry, in opening Darwin's black box, has revealed an order of organic intricacy and complexity that offers a formidable challenge to his theory of evolution. In fact, it makes the Darwinian explanation of the evolution of the species seem naive and superficial, like a child imagining that he might construct an airplane out of cardboard boxes and pieces of wood. Darwinian theory holds that by a process of natural selection, simpler organisms evolve into more complex ones. But Darwin himself feared that if certain biological structures were irreducible, they could not have evolved from simpler forms. In his Origin of the Species, he writes: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." This is the challenge that modern biochemistry poses for Darwinian evolution, for it has mounted impressive evidence that if certain biological structures were any simpler, the host organism would have perished. In the history of human thought, highly imperfect ideas survive as a matter of course. We are still wrestling with intellectual errors that Aristotle and Plato refuted more than 2,000 years ago. But grossly imperfect organisms, whether plants or animals, because their survival depends on how realistically they can adapt to their environment, will perish. Ideas are not perishable, even bad ones. Therefore, they do not cease to exist upon being refuted. But biological organisms will die, once for all time, if they are not properly suited to the struggle for existence. Darwin's ideas have survived, but his biota, had they been the embodiment of his ideas, would have long since passed into oblivion. Consider the biochemical complexity of the blood-coagulating process. The mathematical probability of the right genetic factors getting together to help insure successful blood clotting is one in 30,000⁴. If lottery ticket holders had this kind of chance of winning, and one million bought tickets each year, it would take an average of 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand billion or one trillion) years, roughly a hundred times the current estimate of the age of the universe, before anyone would win. And yet, the genetic aspect is but part of the total complexity of the blood-coagulation process. How can a process of this degree of complexity evolve by natural selection? It either works altogether or it does not work at all. It is of no survival value to an organism, for example, if the clotting agents work but are not switched off at the right time and in the right way so that the entire vascular system is not clotted (a situation that would be fatal to the organism). The "switching off" system would not evolve because the organism in which this imperfection resided would have perished. Consider another area illuminated by biochemistry, the immune system, which operates in a way that is analogous to a military defence. A good army must be able to do all of four different things: have an able-bodied and diversified battalion of soldiers, be able to recognize the enemy, be capable of repelling the enemy, and avoid destroying itself (an activity euphemistically referred to in modern warfare as "friendly fire"). If an army cannot recognize the enemy (assuming that the enemy can recognize it), it will not survive long enough so that in time it will develop or evolve this feature. Likewise, the immune system has four essential and necessary operations: diversity, recognition, destruction, and toleration. Obviously the body must be tolerant of itself from the beginning. Although the immune system's ability to avoid self-annihiliation is highly complicated, it could not have evolved from a simpler system that did not allow the organism to stay alive. A minimal requirement for the immune system to work well enough to keep the organism alive is for all four operations to be working in synchrony. Darwinian theory has no explanation whatsoever that might explain how this staggeringly complex immune system, which is essentially irreducible, came to be. The minimal requirements for remaining alive, though exceedingly complex, cannot presuppose simpler systems from which the more complex systems gradually evolved. Biochemistry suggests that living organisms could not have evolved by chance, that they were designed. And where there is design, there is evidence of a designer.