Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution PDF
Preview Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
DARWIN'S BLACK BOX THE BIOCHEMICAL CHALLENGE TO EVOLUTION MICHAEL J. ВЕНЕ FREE PRESS New York London Toronto Sydney TO CELESTE CONTENTS PREFACE IX THE BOX IS OPENED 1. LILIPUTIAN BIOLOGY 3 2. NUTS AND BOLTS 26 EXAMINING THE CONTENTS OF THE BOX 3. ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT 51 4. RUBE GOLDBERG IN THE BLOOD 74 5. FROM HERE TO THERE 98 6. A DANGEROUS WORLD 117 7. ROAD KILL 140 WHAT DOES THE BOX TELL US? 8. PUBLISH OR PERISH 165 9. INTELLIGENT DESIGN 187 10. QUESTIONS ABOUT DESIGN 209 11. SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION 232 AFTERWORD 255 APPENDIX 273 NOTES 295 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 313 PREFACE IX PREFACE It is commonpAla cMe,O aLlmEoCsUt LbaAnRal ,P tHo EsaNy OthMatE sNciOenNce has made great strides in understanding nature. The laws of physics are now so well understood that space probes fly unerringly to photograph worlds billions of miles from earth. Computers, telephones, electric lights, and untold other examples testify to the mastery of science and technology over the forces of nature. Vaccines and high-yield crops have stayed the ancient enemies of mankind, disease and hunger—at least in parts of the world. Almost weekly, announcements of discoveries in molecular biology encourage the hope of cures for genetic diseases and more. Yet understanding how something works is not the same as understanding how it came to be. For example, the motions of the planets in the solar system can be predicted with tremendous accuracy; however, the origin of the solar system (the question of how the sun, planets, and their moons formed in the first place) is still controversial.1 Science may eventually solve the riddle. Still, the point remains that understanding the origin of something is different from understanding its day-to-day workings. Science's mastery of nature has led many people to presume that it can—indeed, must—also explain the origin of nature and life. Dar- X win's proposal that life can be explained by natural selection acting on variation has been overwhelmingly accepted in educated circles for more than a century, even though the basic mechanisms of life remained utterly mysterious until several decades ago. Modem science has learned that, ultimately, life is a molecular phenomenon: All organisms are made of molecules that act as the nuts and bolts, gears and pulleys of biological systems. Certainly there are complex biological features (such as the circulation of blood) that emerge at higher levels, but the gritty details of life are the province of biomolecules. Therefore the science of biochemistry, which studies those molecules, has as its mission the exploration of the very foundation of life. Since the mid-1950s biochemistry has painstakingly elucidated the workings of life at the molecular level. Darwin was ignorant of the reason for variation within a species (one of the requirements of his theory), but biochemistry has identified the molecular basis for it. Nineteenth-century science could not even guess at the mechanism of vision, immunity, or movement, but modern biochemistry has identified the molecules that allow those and other functions. It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed. Vision, motion, and other biological functions have proven to be no less sophisticated than television cameras and automobiles. Science has made enormous progress in understanding how the chemistry of life works, but the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science's attempt to explain their origins. There has been virtually no attempt to account for the origin of specific, complex biomolecular systems, much less any progress. Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand, or will be sooner or later; but no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature. More importantly, there are compelling reasons—based on the structure of the systems themselves— to think that a Darwinian explanation for the mechanisms of life will forever prove elusive. Evolution is a flexible word.2 It can be used by one person to mean something as simple as change over time, or by another person to mean the descent of all life forms from a common ancestor, leaving the mechanism of change unspecified. In its full-throated, biological
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