"Evolution Refuted" video, from Answers in Genesis

The Evolution Refuted video, from Answers in Genesis, (AIG) a leading Young-Earth Creationist organization, was published in 2011, but I hadn't seen it until recently. (The video is a little over two and a half minutes long.) I'd like to muse about it.

Evolution Refuted makes two claims:
1) "Fact One: There is no known observable process by which new genetic information can be added to an organism's genetic code."
2) "Life has never been observed to come from non-life."
Let me consider these claims, in reverse order.

Life from non-life
My own position is that life would not be present on earth without God's activity, however and whenever that was.

The second claim is true, but trivial. Either life has always been present, since the beginning of the universe, or it somehow came to be, from non-life. Few, if any, people believe the first alternative. The second is true, whether or not anyone observed this. The claim, quoted above, includes not only natural processes (if any such exist) but God's creative actions. Neither of these have been observed. Does AIG wish to claim that God didn't create, because no one observed it? Surely not.

The claim stands in for a more specific, less trivial claim, which was not expressed in the video. That claim is that life can't come from non-life by natural means. Perhaps not. Perhaps it can. We can't observe the entire biosphere all the time. Far from it. It is possible that, somewhere, perhaps in an ocean, a microscopic new living thing has just come into existence, from non-living precursors. If that were to happen, how would we know this? How could we be sure, in the very unlikely event that we found the resulting living organism, that it didn't descend from some previously unknown type, that's been around for a long time? If a new living thing really came to be, in this way, most likely it would not be as good at obtaining energy, reproducing, and protecting itself, as organisms that have been around for a while in the same location, and subject to adaptation and natural selection. So, most likely, it would quickly go extinct, and we would never know of its existence.

(For all we know, God is creating some new form of life right now, somewhere, as far as that goes. We can't really disprove that!)

Can life come from non-life by natural means? As I said, maybe, maybe not. If it did, it couldn't be through natural selection, the mechanism of evolution. (Natural selection really does exist. There's no reasonable argument about that, but there are arguments about its power. See below.) Natural selection requires reproduction, and variety in the offspring. Non-living entities don't reproduce. 

What AIG is really against is not exactly evolution. Evolution, through natural selection, is a fact, for example in the descent of different racial groups from the original human stock. The Bible teaches that. AIG is really against two ideas. One of them is the idea that the earth is billions of years old, rather than a few thousand years old. The other is naturalism. (See here and here for a discussion of the Young-Earth part of Young-Earth Creationism.) Naturalism should be opposed, and is opposed by most Christians, and others. Even if things take place through natural processes, that doesn't mean that God didn't create the processes.

So, for the first claim, the video is really against the possibility of living things arising from non-living by natural means. As indicated above, the claim that this has never been observed is correct. But AIG accepts God's creative activity, and that hasn't been observed, either. But what if natural processes really can be observed to bring about life from non-life? What if, in some yet-to-be-invented experimental system, life is observed to come from a mixture of non-living substances? So what if this did happen? The Bible doesn't rule this out, and it was God who planned for the Carbon atoms that are central to life, and, somehow, brought them into being. It was God who planned for, and brought into existence, the processes, the energy, the substances, necessary for life. Such a discovery would not rule out God's creativity and intelligence.

New genetic information
What about the second claim, which is that new genetic information can't be added to an organism's genome?

One proposed mechanism for this is by duplication, followed by mutation. For example, there are four different globin proteins in humans, including hemoglobin. This article has a table, comparing the amino acids (building blocks of protein) found in all four of them. The table indicates that the four different proteins are similar in their make-up, and scientists believe that all four of them descended from an organism that had only one gene for hemoglobin, but, over time, that gene was duplicated, due to some error in copying, and, once a second (or, eventually, in another organism, a third or fourth) copy existed, it was not critical to the organism, since the first one was still present, so changes in the second copy weren't selected against, and, eventually, it produced a protein with a somewhat different function, because changes eventually led to organisms with these changes were selected for. There are a number of genetic systems where the same thing seems to have happened. New genes, with new genetic information, have become critical to the life of organisms. Can we prove that God didn't specially create these four hemoglobins? No, of course not. But natural processes can explain the existence of similar, but different, functional genes from a single gene ancestor. The AIG claim is really that there is no way this could have happened, without a miracle. All that is needed to refute that claim is to show that there are such mechanisms.

Besides new genes arising by duplication, it is also possible for new functions, from new or modified genes, to arise by mutation. One example is the rise of the ability to use citrate (see also here) in an experimental population of bacteria.

See here for more on the addition of information to an organism's genome.

AIG's claim is really that there is no way that genetic information could be added to an organism's genome, except by Divine action. That claim is false.

In summary, at best, the claims of the AIG video are over-simplistic. At worst, one of those claims is false. Thanks for reading.

Did Pasteur disprove spontaneous generation?

Louis Pasteur is often celebrated as the scientist who disproved spontaneous generation. Did he?

First, it is necessary to determine what is meant by spontaneous generation.

The Free Dictionary says:
spontaneous generation

The supposed development of living organisms from nonliving matter, as maggots from rotting meat. The theory of spontaneous generation for larger organisms was easily shown to be false, but the theory was not fully discredited until the mid-19th century with the demonstration of the existence and reproduction of microorganisms, most notably by Louis Pasteur. Also called abiogenesis.

Merriam-Webster, however, does not give a definition for spontaneous generation, but links from a search for it to abiogenesis, which is defined as follows:
the supposed spontaneous origination of living organisms directly from lifeless matter . . .

There is some disagreement, then, about the very term, spontaneous generation. For the purposes of this post, spontaneous generation and abiogenesis are the same thing.

Spontaneous generation was studied by Pasteur, in the 19th century. If it actually happened, living things would just appear, as opposed to coming from pre-existing living things. Supposed examples of spontaneous generation included the appearance of thin worms, called horsehair worms, in horse drinking troughs. Some people believed that they spontaneously generated from horse hair, fallen into the water. Another supposed example was the appearance of mold and bacteria on food.

Pasteur's research, showing that, under some conditions, it was possible to prevent the invasion, by microorganisms, of environments that would have been conducive to their growth, led to the eventual rejection of spontaneous generation by scientists, and was important in establishing the germ theory of disease. An egg, or a small worm, must have gotten into the horse trough. A spore, or an airborne bacterium, must have gotten into the spoiled food. Infectious disease must have come from exposure.

The most important case of abiogenesis would have been the appearance of the first living things.

Did Pasteur disprove spontaneous generation? Not exactly. He did contribute to the downfall of the idea, but, in the sense that he ruled out all possible spontaneous generation by experiment, he didn't.

What do I mean? Suppose you asked me to prove that witches can't fly. I would try to find someone who is supposed to be a witch, and throw her off a high building. Surely, under such conditions, a witch would fly. (Let us not worry about petty details such as my murders of reputed witches.)

After, say, a hundred such experiments, in which flight was never observed, have I proved that witches can't fly? Well, no. In the first place, how can I be sure that my hundred women were, indeed, witches? Perhaps they were just people that someone else wanted to get rid of, so the someone else's contacted me, giving me false information.

Or, as is well known, witches need a broom to fly. If I threw my witches off a building with no broom, no wonder they didn't fly. Or, if I did, I wasn't giving them the right type of broom. Or, if I did give them the right type of broom, the buildings were somehow such that witches can't fly off of them, for example if the building was blessed during construction. Or, a skeptic could say, witches can only fly on certain days, and certain hours, and I didn't perform my experiments at the right time. Or certain rituals must be performed before flight is possible, and the rituals weren't performed, or were performed in the presence of a skeptic, which makes them invalid.

I have not, and can not, rule out the possibility that witches really can fly, if the moon is in the right phase, and all other conditions are correct. I have simply not tried the experiment under the proper conditions. However, I can still doubt that witches can fly, and my experiments may convince other people of the same thing.

In a similar way, it is impossible to prove, by experiment, that spontaneous generation can't occur. It is always possible to argue, for example, that it occurred, 8 kilometers under the surface of Iceland, on February 29, 2000, when the moon was in the right position. How can I show, by experiment, that it didn't? I can't. I wasn't there at the time. However, I can still doubt that it did. Pasteur's work helped to persuade scientists that spontaneous generation didn't occur. It didn't completely rule it out.

Whether Pasteur ever considered the implications for origins, I don't know. Perhaps he did. But, clearly, if abiogenesis of all types could be ruled out, living things could not have arisen from non-living material, but must have been supernaturally produced. Naturalistic theories of origins suppose that abiogenesis of this type did, in fact, occur, and, of course, rule out supernatural origins.

Some experiments have given support to the idea that life arose by abiogenesis, although we can't be completely sure what conditions were like on earth a few billion years ago. So abiogenesis may have occurred, and caused the appearance of the first living things. In fact, if you follow my argument above, you will see that it is impossible to experimentally rule out the possibility. I can doubt it, and, in fact, do doubt very much that that's how life began, but I can't scientifically prove that it didn't. I refer you to my earlier post on Hebrews 11:3, which speaks of the connection between faith and origins.

In sum, I don't think it is correct to say that Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation hadn't occurred. It is legitimate to doubt the possibility, in the present, or in the distant past, but it can't be disproved.

Thanks for reading.