Evolution’s Fatal Flaw: The Information Problem - FAS2608

SPEAKER A Can evolution be scientifically refuted? Today we're examining why Darwinian evolution violates the laws of information. Just as water cannot flow uphill, information cannot arise from unintelligent matter. Werner Gitsch shows us why evolution is like a perpetual motion machine—scientifically impossible. Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. John. SPEAKER B Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER A Dr. John has written a book, "The Big Argument: Does God Exist?" And in today's program, we'll be drawing on some insights from this book. Now, why is evolution compared to a perpetual motion machine that violates natural laws? SPEAKER B Okay, well, perpetual motion machines, yeah, violate natural laws because essentially it's a machine that can keep going, and machines, you know, produce energy without using energy. And so, yeah, yeah. So, and so, and the restraints are that we try to come close in that we set the machine up, but there's always some sort of friction, there's always some sort of energy loss. And therefore, yeah, you can't generate work, force over distance, perpetually. You have to keep putting energy in, feeding it for it to, to go. And so what essentially Professor Wernher Gitter's saying is that perpetual motion machines defy the laws of nature, and therefore they're false. We know from the laws of nature that apply that they are false. We can never have a perpetual motion machine. And essentially he argues that because living systems require information to function and information cannot be produced from non-material sources, you have to have, I mean, from material sources. Information can't be produced from material sources, then there must be a non-material source of information. But evolutionary theory is a materialistic theory. It's based on input solely from energy and existing matter. And so essentially the argument is very simple. From the laws of information theory, because DNA encodes information, which informs the structure and repair of the cells of living organisms, this is impossible from the laws of nature involving information theory. And those laws are that information is non-material. And you cannot produce non-material things from material things. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B So this is a— these are very important. So there's now laws of nature. We have to understand what law of nature is. The law of nature is something that is repeatedly observed, always occur the same wherever it is, and there are no known exceptions. Once you have a single exception to that, it's no longer a law of nature. SPEAKER A Yeah. Right? Falsified. SPEAKER B So what we could, yes. And it has to be capable of being falsified. And that's why, for example, you know, certain theories like inflation theory and the Big Bang and this sort of thing can't be falsified. And therefore, yeah, they can't be laws. They can't really even be a scientific theory, really. But the— when we look at the claims of the evolutionary model, and of course some people will say, no, no, evolution involves living organisms changing. Well, hang on, let's be real about this. You have to start with the first living organism. How did that start? And people argue, oh, well, maybe it came from outer space. Well, it doesn't matter where it comes from. Right? It still had to start somehow. And we know, right, that these, well, we assume that the universe operates with the laws that we observe here operate across the entire universe. And if that's the case, again, you can't produce a non-material entity from just material aspects. So it doesn't matter where. It occurs in, if it occurred in the universe and came here some way, which again, there are many other reasons why that is highly impossible to occur, or impossible to occur. But so that's the important point. So essentially says that evolution defies these basic laws that have never been observed. And this is quite fundamental. There's a whole lot of research done in the area of abiogenesis. And we need to understand that there's no breakthroughs. Every now and again you see headlines, scientists, you know, have found an explanation that will lead to understanding how life first arose. And we see these headlines come up and it's sort of like they're trying, you know, the advocates of this are trying to reassure themselves, yes, one day we will find a solution. But when we look at the chemistry that's involved in this, it's highly specific. So, and I think even just with, if we just take a simple glucose molecule and the number of ways we could arrange 6 glucose molecules in a chain is something like in the order 10 to 95 billion, 10 to the power 95 billion. And people don't realize this. And even 6 of them would make a different molecule. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so many combinations. Just because of the different forms? Yeah, yeah. And the different— and the different stereoisomers. And that's another aspect of living organisms, that they have right and left handedness or chirality. Yes. Stereo aspects. Wow. There's all these particular functions. And often when we're, you know, for example, joining these molecules or or amino acids and, and we want to join them, even just a couple together is extremely difficult to do in the laboratory in such a way that it would be a building block for a living organism. And I don't know if anyone— and that's, you know, using specific chemicals in laboratories and this sort of thing to be able to join two peptides together and make them work is extremely difficult. Let alone, you know, chains of peptides, these sort of things. And so when we look at the probability, the probabilities and the potential combinations, and there's a lot of, you know, quite fascinating aspects to somehow combine all these molecules together to form the living structures because the stereochemistry is so important for reactions to occur. And, you know, and this all gets very complex. We can look at the probability. It's absolutely impossible from a probability, you know, perspective. There's only 10 to the power 90 particles estimated to be in the known universe. So, and the probabilities are way, way, way higher than that. And, but the other fascinating things is even if we took, say, a bacteria that had freshly died, right? All the components are already there. We can't start it up again. How can we make it alive? What we would have to do is set in place hundreds of biochemical reactions in a state of disequilibrium by just the right amount all at once. So there's not only the information issue that underpins the impossibility of abiogenesis, and that is how can the code form? The code, a code has to form that is relevant to the structure that is going to survive in that particular environment. So it can't just be any random code. It's gotta be a code that is purposefully suited to create a structure that can survive and reproduce in that particular environment. And the probability of that is astronomical. Then once even that code forms, you've got to have a code reader. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B And again, it has to be a specific code reader for that code system. Now, existing DNA use codes of, you know, little words made up of 3 letters and so forth, combinations of these. And it has a specific code reader that can interpret that code and use that code to assemble amino acids in a particular order. That are going to make sense for that particular environment. So it's very specific. Yeah. Yeah. And it requires scientists with all our minds, with all our knowledge of DNA. We can't write new codes. But again, the code reader has to be specific as well. Yeah. Just as when I ordered the letter Z, I, V, I, S, you didn't know what that meant. It's the same. And this— the code reader is specific to that particular code. It's not going to work either. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B And of course, the code reader machines, you know, ribosome, 300,000 atoms in a ribosome that has to be assembled as well. And just the amazing design of that. We still don't, although we have determined through, you know, X-ray structure studies and that, the structure, we still don't fully know how it works. You know, and the same with a much more simpler system such as photosystem II, which, uses light to split water into hydrogen ions and oxygen. There are so many of these molecular machines, and these are machines, and they all work together as well. They constitute, they are formed by codes that are carrying the information that informs the structure of those machines. And this, we know that random material processes can't produce this. That kind of thing. It has to be a mind beforehand who has superior knowledge. And that's why our human knowledge, we don't have enough knowledge to build and design those systems. And so what it points to is an intelligence that is way far superior to the, to the human mind. And so that's why this claim that living organisms can arise, that evolution can occur, is sort of like the, you know, perpetual, you know, motion machine. Now, some people claim, well, hang on, if that's the case, we do observe some evolution occurring. For example, antibiotic resistance has been observed in this thing. One of the things that we need to understand is, again, that this amazing designer has built-in repair mechanisms, also built-in mechanisms for variation. In other words, there was a lot of excess code there. And this has allowed for diversity. As bits of code have been eroded away, knocked off, damaged, right? This has changed the remaining code. And we— this allows for variation. Different colors in hair, different colors in fur length, different colors in leg length, all these sort of things, height. These sort of variations are encoded. And so we can observe what we see, microevolution, where environmental factors can damage DNA, can— and also this mechanism where environmental factors can actually switch on parts of DNA, can influence parts of DNA to be activated and so forth, switching on and off genes as we talk about. But this is all within a constrained framework that constitutes that particular organism. And that's why we don't see, you know, bacteria evolving into yeast and these sort of things. We've never observed major new body parts, major new biochemical systems evolving. Right? Because they are all constrained and the complexity is so huge, the amount of code that would actually work is so huge just to produce a minor new functional body part. That it's never been observed as well. So we can observe these small changes within a confined system, but no, we don't observe new body parts, new organisms. So the whole theory of evolution essentially is proved false from information theory laws. SPEAKER A Right, that's very interesting. And I'm glad you made that distinction between what they call microevolution and macroevolution, and the latter being the one that information theory is just really quickly, easily deeming impossible. SPEAKER B Exactly. SPEAKER A So yeah, thank you for making that really clear and fascinating to think through all of the factors involved in that, all of these processes as well. So thank you. We look forward to exploring this a little bit next time. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? 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