The Octopus Eye: A Case for God - FAS2619

SPEAKER A A muscle is useless without a nerve. A nerve is useless without a brain. So which evolved first? This is the problem of irreducible complexity. Today, from the muscles of a mouse to the eye of an octopus, we're looking at biological systems where nothing works unless everything works. Does survival of the fittest have an answer for this? 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 called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? In today's program, we'll be drawing on insights from his book. This is particularly from chapter 6, which is contributed by Dr. Ariel Roth. In the book, it uses the story of a friend with spinal injury. And how does Dr. Roth illustrate the concept of interdependent parts in the human body with this story? SPEAKER B All right, yeah, so he tells the story of a friend who was injured in a car accident, had lower part of his spine severed, which meant that he lost the use of his legs, was confined to a wheelchair. But what he found was that the fact that his legs were there dangling all the time that he couldn't use, couldn't do anything with, he realized it was quite a hindrance. Particularly dressing, all these sort of things were more difficult because they were there. And so as a result, later he made the choice to have his legs amputated. And that made it actually a lot easier for him. So I guess what he says is that the whole argument is that you can have a particular organ evolved sort of thing. And say for example, an eye, eye cell, I mean, it's very complicated, but let's say it did evolve. It's useless until you can actually see. Until those nerve pathways are connected to the brain and part of the brain is actually programmed then to interpret those nerves as sight. And so the eye is a particularly vulnerable part of the body. But if it's there and you can't see, then you're not going to naturally be able to protect it. You won't have that reflex. So it does, evolving an eye or, you know, something like evolving a leg, you know, earlier on you've got this appendage hanging out until all the nerves and muscles form that enable you to operate that leg. It's gonna be getting in the way. So if you're a worm sort of thing and you're evolving a leg to become some sort of reptile or fish or whatever, however the path is, it's gonna be in the way. It's gonna be a problem until it's complete. So that was the illustration that he was trying to say, that this person found that having those legs there that he couldn't use was a problem. And I mean, an amputation of the legs would be quite painful, at least for a while until everything healed up. But he chose to go through that. And so this is the point, you know, that we say that, you know, evolution, you know, fish had fins and they evolved into something else. In the step while you've got all these leg bits starting to form, unless there are muscles, nerves, joints evolving all at the same time, plus a mental system, you know, a brain system program to use this data, it's not going to work. SPEAKER A Which is interesting because I guess when, when it's said just, I guess, in science class or something that, you know, oh, this evolved to that and there were intermediate species and then eventually they could, they could become this creature. And we don't actually think often about what that would mean in that intermediate stage. And this story illustrates the fact that, as far as our common life experience tells us, if you have something that's not fully functional, it's going to be a hindrance until it is. SPEAKER B That's right. SPEAKER A So that's quite a reversal of benefit. You know, we thought that intermediate stage, you know, would enhance survival. But while it's in that phase, it's not. It's probably going to get taken out. SPEAKER B Yeah. So natural selection, of course, is the main answer to these sort of things, that obviously the, the superior part survived. And of course, so when Darwin was developing his theory, they essentially looked and said, well, organisms overproduce, there's competition for food, and therefore the ones that are best suited to that particular environment are going to, you know, survive best. But also you have to make sure that a number of the species all develop this new part. And there's enough to interbreed. So there's a lot of problems in that solution, but it's hard to understand with a lot of these so-called changes that are going to occur, how it's going to work, how it could confer an advantage so it would survive over and above the other species. And particularly, you know, a lot of things are extremely extremely complicated. Even if you look at something as simple as a bacteria, right, with its little flagella, which, you know, propel it along and this sort of thing, it's not going to be much use until it has a detection system that can identify where there is more food. And so bacteria have a little system in them where they can actually identify gradients of nutrients in wherever they are, and they can then direct the flagella towards them. Now we're looking just at about bacteria here, this is a very, very simple organism. But the control system for that flagella that has forward and reverse and all this sort of thing has to form, right? Otherwise you've got the, for the little bacteria, it's got this little tail hanging off that, you know, is it gonna be a hindrance? Is it better without one? You know? So there's so many examples of this that we could look at. You know, why would this part continue to, be there rather than die out and offer a hindrance. SPEAKER A Yeah, and the fact that the intermediate phases could be taken out by natural selection because of the hindrance that's supposed to help them stay alive and improve later. SPEAKER B Well, that's right. SPEAKER A Which is like, yeah. SPEAKER B Become more vulnerable to, you know, to other organisms. Yeah. One of the classic examples that was discussed just recently was the claim that some of the apes in the development, in the evolution of humans, that ape-like creatures began to walk. But one of the things that was pointed out was that these ape creatures were much safer living in trees because once they began walking, they were then more vulnerable to the big cats and all sorts of other things that found them, you know, a little tasty delight sort of thing. So you've got to have a complete system for it to work, you know. SPEAKER A Now the chapter gives the example of an octopus and that, you know, if an octopus would evolve muscles to move its eye before it had a brain system to direct those muscles, you know, how is that going to work? And how does that challenge the idea of step-by-step evolution, the fact that you need You have the muscle, you need the muscles to control the eye, but then you need the brain to control the muscles. SPEAKER B Yeah, well, it's a big problem for an octopus because it's a soft body organism. So it's very vulnerable to being eaten. Yes. You know, by fish bigger than it. And one of its protection mechanisms is the eye. It has extremely good sight. The octopus have very large eyes for the rest of their body and this sort of thing.— and quite a complex muscle system controlling those eyes. A massive number of enzymes control the biochemistry that's associated with those eyes. And again, unless it has really developed, well-developed eyes, it's not going to function. Now, one of the things is that that belongs to a family of organisms that we go right back to very low, very early on in the evolutionary cycle. You know, down into the Cambrian, these sort of creatures or similar creatures were found. So there's a major problem for evolution in this area there. SPEAKER A Yeah, how did they come to have such a complex system? SPEAKER B Complex system so early on where there are a lot of predators around that would easily knock these systems off. SPEAKER A Yeah, with the interdependent parts. Now, there's another thing mentioned in the book, the Gilbar-to-ear-bone theory. Tell us a bit about that and what is the difficulty with adding two new bones to her ear system gradually without in the process ruining the hearing process. SPEAKER B Yes, that's a standard picture. With the, with the gill bar, I wasn't, you know, very familiar with that, but I was more familiar with the scenario that the— well, according to the gill bone theory, these gill bar developed into the jaw bones of some of the fish. They then developed into the jaw bones of early reptiles. Those early reptile jaw bones then developed into the the anvil-type bones in the ear. So this seems to be a long stretch of the bow here. And there's a couple of interesting factors here that when we look at, for example, the bones in the jaw of, you know, a reptile, as the reptile grows, these bones get bigger and bigger and bigger. When we look at these bones in the ear, so not only do we have the problem that you've got to have additional bones evolve somehow by code, by a blind code, that all puts them in the right place, just the right size, just the right amplification factor. But one of the fascinating things is, at least in humans, that when, and I think in most of the other mammals as well, that when the mammal is born, those bones actually don't grow anymore. The mammal grows. So, yeah, yeah. So when a baby is born, those ear bones are fully grown. They don't grow anymore. Now, that's very different to the jaw bones in a reptile, which continue to grow through the life. Whereas if that happened in the, you know, in the human ear, it'd have massive problems. Yeah. Which would distort our hearing. So all these are tiny little clues that tell us, hang on, this system can't have arisen by blind natural processes. You know, what is it that, okay, it can grow up to this time, up to birth, and then turn off? Whereas in all these other organisms, it doesn't. So when it has these different functions. So this is, you know, highly selective design features of these things. And so what we find is in the evolutionary story, People look at these anatomical structures and they make up stories about them. They haven't actually observed these changes. They haven't actually observed these mechanisms. If we look at the fossil record, for example, we don't find huge numbers of intermediate species showing us these intermediate steps, right? We find fully functional organisms that were fully capable of surviving in their environment because they were fully complete. They didn't have missing, parts, they had fully developed systems. Because we know that of all living systems, the whole systems are so interdependent, you know, from your muscles, nerves, brain function. But there's minor functions, there's enzymes that control different hormones, that control different functions at different times. For example, effects of different heat, different part times in the reproductive cycle, all these sort of things. All carefully regulated as, for example, the organism is growing. So all— there's so many of these systems that are interdependent, that are designed to be just perfect, that it's absolutely impossible— I wanna use that word absolutely— absolutely impossible for them to have arisen by blind chance, random mutations. SPEAKER A Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, It's good to see all of these examples of creatures that the irreducible complexity is very evident, that you have to have everything together in order to have them even survive. And so, yeah, thank you for sharing those points. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers.