Says a smiling scientist, Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, “It’s really incredible what evolution can do. It can produce completely new structures, completely new organisms. This is the engine of variety and variability. The complexity of life that we see today is all down to the power of evolution.”
That, from the latest episode (#2, “Need to Feed”) of the NOVA PBS Evolution documentary series, summarizes the view of all involved. No demonstration is provided for the claim that unguided, unintelligent evolution can do all that. As evolutionary biologist Richard Buggs put it about the BBC’s version, the exclusion of design “is not supported by any of the scientific evidence that [presenter Chris Packham] describes in the series.”
There is only a compelling story, beautifully illustrated with plenty of AI imagineering and more scientists testifying to their evolutionary faith.
No Energy, and No Life, Without Them
The specific test case here is the evolution of eating and digestion. For animals there is obviously no energy, and no life, without them. “We are all literally feeding machines,” says another scientist, a depressing thought for the young people who will be the audience for the series when it hits schools.
The narrative takes us back to the Ediacaran where a tale unfolds of how the enigmatic biota of the time, feeding on microbial mats, were eaten out of existence by a competitor: the first worm. This worm bore an evolutionary innovation, a through-gut with a portal for food at one end and for expelling waste at the other.
“Evolution has transformed it,” says the narrator. Sad scenes are depicted of Charnia and Dickinsonia that have passed away under this assault.
There’s a lot of “transforming” that has been going on since then. “With enough mutations and enough time, evolution can transform one body part into something completely new with a whole new function.” Evolution “innovates.” Things “become” other things. “Parts are used and reused and reused for different purposes.”
Much Borrowing and Re-borrowing
This is language borrowed from intelligence, agency, and design (transforming, innovating, using and reusing for “different purposes”), yet we’re told, “If you were designing something from scratch you wouldn’t think of doing it this way.” But designing “from scratch,” from absolutely nothing that came before, isn’t the way human designers generally do it either. All of technology has a history that includes much borrowing and re-borrowing.
As I look around my workspace, every single item I can see (the desk, the lamp, the laptop, the monitor, a printer, the books, the stationery, the eyeglasses, some pictures on the wall, etc.) has a history of related objects that came before them. Each was designed. None arose or was designed “from scratch.” That’s not how design, or engineering, works.
The context here, seeking food and digesting it, is telling. Stuart Burgess has a chapter in Ultimate Engineering on “The Digestive System.” It’s not just a matter of food goes in, waste goes out, but instead “a fine-tuned process involving the coordination of at least twelve elements, each requiring a complex system in its own right,” a “system of systems.” On page 184, he lists 14 of them, starting with “Generat[ing] a desire for food through feelings of hunger,” and ending with “Control[ing] the digestive system through the enteric nervous system (ENS).”
It’s not just that it’s complex, but irreducibly complex. As Dr. Howard Glicksman wrote here, the “gastrointestinal system demonstrates irreducible complexity because every component has to be present for it to be able to do its job.” Human engineering has produced nothing to measure up.
Evidence for Design in Digestion
Proponents of intelligent design have detailed the evidence for design in this area across a variety of books and articles, dealing not just with humans but with non-human creatures including the fantastic Venus flytrap (“masterfully engineered moving traps, chemical and electrical sensors, and digestive chemicals to kill and consume spiders, insects, protozoans, crustaceans, lizards, mice, rats, and various other small invertebrates and vertebrates”).
Other works to consult include Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts by Eric Cassell and the textbook Discovering Intelligent Design. As physicist Eric Hedin observes, “Complex, functional systems do not arise without intelligent guidance and direction.”
Yet even a seemingly elementary innovation like hunger or appetite is taken for granted by the Evolution series. I find not even a mention of it apart from a couple of light-hearted references: Gill arches and gill filaments bestowed on Metaspriggina “an edge in evolution’s hunger games,” “What’s in here [a cave with cockroaches and bat guano] might not whet your appetite.”
It’s too bad that NOVA fails to grapple with serious challenges to the evolutionary story, skipping over them in favor of creatures essentially popping out of nowhere as if by magic. They even use that word: “that’s what makes evolution so magical.”
Well, so much for hunger, feeding, and digestion, as the series moves on next week to the “surprising evolutionary journey that led to the majestic elephant.” Here’s the “science.” Trust me, Bro.