R. Dawkins boxing outside his weight, Protein, and the evolution of a pastor

[My intellectual journey from Darwin back to Darwin, meeting Jesus Christ and Richard Dawkins along the way. I say little of Jesus, but Dawkins really helps, though not in the way he intends.]

I was trained in what was called "Neo-Darwinian Biology" at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s.  I concentrated in Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and Anthropology, taking a major in Zoology.  I studied with a sophomore's testosterone-induced rage for E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology"  and Ethology with Richard Alexander.  I read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.  I took upper-level undergraduate classes in Genetics, I discussed the popular, sexist paraphrase attributed to an anthropologist in recent news that men wage war because women are watching. I took a graduate level class in biochemistry. This undergraduate training was the foundation of my worldview until after I turned 30 when I began to doubt the reductionist view of Neo-Darwinism.

Philip Johnson's book Reason in the Balance was assigned to me for graduate exams in the year of its publication, 1996.  In it, he posed a challenge for reductionist genetics.  He posed the problem of the folding and abiotic replication of proteins.  What follows in this paragraph is my understanding of the challenge and not Johnson's. (If you are uninterested in reading my formulation of technical problems, skip the bracketed text down to the final two sentences of the next paragraph).

 [I understood and continue to understand that proteins were incredibly unlikely to spontaneously arise by chance because their constituent amino acids had to be assembled in a certain order (and in a certain surrounding physical and chemical matrix) to fold into a structure that had adaptive significance for a living organism.  This problem of "origins biology" made sense to me from my undergraduate study of biology and biochemistry two decades prior.  Assembly of folded molecular proteins required some informational mechanism to guide any re-assembly, or evolution through natural selection could never "take off." In other words, proteins' originating by chance in a primordial, abiotic environment were improbable in a mathematically factorial sense.  Second, an even more complex system of information transmission for reassembly/replication had to be developed by chance IN CONCERT with the independent assembly of the protein.  Both of these processes were resulting from chance and not by biotic, metabolic evolution. Organic Evolution proceeds toward a threshold metabolic complexity if there is adaptive significance of an element (protein, structure, RNA, etc.) to a living organism. There is no "partial" adaptive value to either a partially folded protein or a partially instituted information transmission system in abiotic isolation. At least that's how I was trained.  I recognized a problem with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis: it could not even plausibly venture to explain the origins of life. To my understanding,  Evolutionary biologists since the 1920s dismiss this line of probabilistic reasoning as Hoyle's Fallacy.  However, it is not at all clear to me how partial proteins have adaptive significance outside of a cell or protocell.  More about this below.

[Since then, "self-assembly" of proteins and protocells have been proposed, but that does not seem satisfactory to me as a scientific explanation.  Remember, I am in the mid-1990s struggling with the chemistry of the origin of pre-biotic proteins and RNA and I am in my philosophy, not a Christian, not a theist. I am an educated, though not professional, Darwinian and Naturalist 20 years out of practice.  You may dismiss me as naive, amateur, and "unbright.", but it might be argued that my undergraduate training (graduated with the Bachelor of Science "with Distinction") at the University of Michigan did not meet the challenges of my layperson future.  My naturalism was shaken to the core by the implausibility of chance spontaneously generating this dual track, non-Darwinian system of single protein replication. And chance had to do this hugely improbable assembly of a single protein over and over until a hereditary mechanism could co-assemble and somehow harmonize with the protein's structure and amino acid kinematics in pre-biotic conditions. I then thought about the magnitudes of improbability due to randomness involved in the creation of a single protocell with metabolism and an information system that was heritable across generations.  Evolutionary Biologists, used to this incredulity, claimed that the origin of the cell was irrelevant to the truth of Natural Selection operating on extant organisms, which I still believe is established scientific fact.]

However, the problem of the origin of life and the neo-Darwinist failure to solve that problem or even propose a plausible research program shook my naturalism to the core.  A critic might term my intellectual doubts a fall into "creationism, intelligent design delusion." Or, perhaps more charitably, I could be seen as seduced by the "god of the gaps" for a divine explanation during that interim science had or has not yet adequately and experimentally settled. Yet the origin and maintenance of life is to me a qualitatively different philosophical puzzle than the operation of differential death and failure to reproduce--the culling or weeding out of the weak and maladapted.  How chance as a life-giving force in the generation of adaptive mutation and necessity of staving off reproductive failure or death is not solved by the wave of hand proposal of "self-organization."  When I tried this move with the wonderful Herman Daly, he said earnestly in a moment that I'll always remember, "I don't know what self-organization means."  He left it at that.

After this loss of confidence in naturalism, it took me 5 more years to advance to Trinitarian Christianity, for which I take no intellectual or spiritual credit. My calling to Christianity was effected by God's initiative, and I may write about that another time. I've testified to it in my congregation.

[But back to the protein folding problem.  Dawkins' discipline terms doubt like mine about the pre-biotic assembly of complex molecules a variety of Hoyle's Fallacy.  Dawkins accordingly proposes a "thought experiment," the "Weasel Program" to give an explanation to the pre-biotic operation of chance AND SELECTION in the creation of complexity (though not the massively (emergently?) more complex structure and assembly linked kinematically with heritable.informatics, e.g. proto ribosomal RNA)  He "demonstrates" the validity of this thought experiment with a computer program, the computer program selecting for the assembly of letters and spaces by selection and random copying errors the phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.  This computer simulation leads to the evolution of the phrase in some relatively small number of digital iterations from a randomized start.  The reliance on scale of so-called Hoyle (im)probabilities in Dawkin's interpretation is demonstrated a fallacy by this computer-aided thought exercise.

[I am not a professional biologist, but this demonstration is absurd. I won't argue the particulars about the homological features shared and unshared between a partially assembled, folded protein and its surrounding abiotic environmental matrix compared with the partial assembly of complex of binary digital bits situated in a biologically inert silicon matrix with selection operating abiotically.  The physiochemical properties of a digital switch operating in human-designed hardware seem qualitatively vastly less meaningful and are not even remotely homological to the caustic and non-ecological (reducing atmospheric environment, etc.) properties of proto-biochemistry operating in a non-binary ontology.  I am unconvinced by the thought experiment on first principles of "Hardware" regarding "abiotic selection" even before the computer is turned and connected to a power supply.]

But here's the main point, and I haven't seen it argued before, but I can't believe it has not been. When I was taught biology by the professors at the University of Michigan, they emphasized over and over that science in general, and biological evolution in particular, is "non-teleological."  That is, there is no metaphysical form or biological ideal that evolution proceeds toward. (See especially Ernst Mayr (1988), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Essay 3.)   Yet, a computer software program evaluating the outcomes of artificial selection and random copying errors for partial matches according to a template in the software--selecting the computer runs for any partial matching of the template letters and starting a new iteration preserving (selecting for) the facts of any partial match of the template until a full match is produced--is an (inanimate) teleological system! The designed goal is acting to feedback on the inanimate intermediate steps! Teleological design characterizes both the hardware (likely) and the software (certainly) of this experiment!  Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science (sic!), seems on the face of it to make a teleological system a demonstration of a scientific mechanism, even an evolutionary principle of the non-living matter!

"It takes a lot of brass," to quote Bill Clinton, to append the epithet "fallacy" to a person's last name  (i.e. Hoyle) as Dawkins does in two of his books in concert with his misapplication of his own thought "experiment."  This compound fallacy ought to have some culturally and philosophically admonitory label applied to it. Or, and I'm being serious, Dawkins' Weasel Program supports "teleological selection," in other words "pre-planned design," though of a more Platonic eidos than a J (Genesis 1) metaphysics. Dawkins was not the first to use the term "Hoyle's Fallacy." But I'm reasonably sure he has not earned the warrant to repeat it.

Dawkins, of course, is one of the public celebrity atheists. He has, according to this source [with links to Dawkins publications], flirted with the idea of empowering the state to prevent "child abuse" by religious-indoctrinating parents, so I admit viscerally and existentially disliking his politics. But if Dawkins gets science as both an enterprise and a research program of methodological, non-teleological naturalism confused at the pinnacle of his very public role as the heuristic and intellectual authority of the entire scientific venture, why would anyone pay any attention to his theological assertions, in which he has little or no training or collectively-attested accomplishment, little or no reflective spiritual  sense of the numinous or metaphysical? He seems to me to have an  abrasive confidence in his celebrity and a publishing contract.  For me, Dawkins' Weasel Program "demonstration" reveals a cautionary tale about lack of philosophical discernment. I don't know that he can think "emergently" as the complexity theorists more recently have been proposing in biological models but are instead stuck in an outmoded and sterile reductionism.  Not a great basis for a theological research program.

Dawkins thus proposes in simplistic fashion what some portion of "bright" naturalists seem to believe, that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other". Stephen Hawking also seems to believe this is a reasonable research program, and he argues that science disproves the existence of a creator god.  

I cannot understand these acclaimed scientist's obdurate proposal of God/god as a scientific specimen.  Science proceeds methodologically by atheistic investigation. It a priori rules out guided creation or Sovereign revelation or supernatural mechanisms as part of its method.  I wish I could remember who first said this, but it seems to me irrefutable that "to use methodological atheism to prove metaphysical atheism is foolish."  Science cannot methodologically prove the non-existence of God just as it (and I) cannot prove the supernatural.  Scientists who claim to prove God's non-existence are, as Philip Johnson notes, "bluffing."

So, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science cannot give me a useful biotic demonstration of the evolution of hemoglobin's assembly non-teleologically much less a hint of an explanation of the pre-biotic biochemical origin of life.  Much less the origin of self-consciousness and the sense of the numinous. He slips into teleology when carrying out a simplistic computer experiment (in the process seemingly satirizing what he cannot understand with his test phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL).  I cannot theologically or scientifically or rationally prove the existence of a divine creator. I can testify to a consistent and loving force in my own life that accords with the testimonies of Hebrew and Christian Biblical authors and answers most of my questions and accounts for more of my experiential observations in a way that is more existentially profound, elegant, and ethical than alternative reductionist explanations.  Dawkins does not have to accept my testimony.  Whether it's because his rationality is "brighter" than mine, I'll let others make up their own minds.

For the record: I don't believe Intelligent Design is a science. I don't believe it should be taught in primary education, and in secondary education only as philosophy or theology.  I don't believe intelligent design is methodologically compatible with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, yet nor do I believe arguments from design are inherently  "anti-evolution." I do not hold with all intelligent design proposals, nor with all Darwinian hypotheses.  However, even though I assert that the two research programs, while incompatible methodologically (and politically and culturally for many), they are for me complementary.  I learn from both.  I am a professing Christian and I accept the complementarity of Science and Faith and understand the reality of both imperfection in humanity and nature and of the goodness of God from both.  To some, that makes me a liberal Christian and enemy to objective truth. To others, I am an expounder of intellectual bad faith because I believe in a god of their own creation which they've already rejected.

So I'll put it another way.  Darwin was a pre-eminent scientific thinker.  I believe that my theology of both creation and of the natural human urge to self-glorification and self-replication is broader and more nuanced by findings in Darwin's research program and evolutionary mechanics.  Moreover, my theology is more pastoral and compassionate because of Darwin's advances in intellectual history. Darwin added perspective to the major theological problem posed by Malthus, the tragedy of nature when resources limit the prospects of offspring of animals. Gerd Thiessen in Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach [1984] proposes an impressive Biblical theology of the Darwinian condition to which humankind is subject and which Jesus submits to in his ministry and on the cross.  

 E.O. Wilson has changed his views. He recently notes that the relative ecological success of social species, including humans, include processes of "group selection."  In the 1970s of my training, group selection was taboo for undergraduates to discuss. Dawkins today is scandalized that the taboo is broken in Wilson. But now, biological processes potentially can include moral mechanisms beyond just differential survival of individuals measured in the F1, kin selection, and gross reproductive and material resource amassing success. This biological evolution of groups is complementary with some of my theology of social action, intergenerational and trans-species care and responsibility, and economic justice.  I am in some sense coming home to biology, but the biology of groups is also coming part way toward my morality if I understand the development of  E. O. Wilson's thought.

 I look forward to new discoveries and naturalist understandings. Nonetheless, I'll venture to say that in my struggles with understanding, the problem of suffering (theodicy) is less of a problem for my Christian faith than the problem of the origin of life leading to the reproducing cell seems to be for Dawkin's reductionist neo-Darwinism. I'd think, considering his endowed public role, it behooves him to work more intensively through the intellectual assumptions and problems of his discipline's research program and leave theological and philosophical research programs alone for the time being.  Unless he wants to convert to the arguments from design, as teleology implies.  Dawkins seems like a moth to a flame when it comes to boxing with gods, throwing stones at the moon, and reveling in the ring of celebrity.

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