Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:01Evolution.
2. 0:03You learned about it in high school.
3. 0:05It goes like this: Life started out with very simple forms and then gradually, over hundreds
4. 0:10of millions of years, morphed into all the forms we see today.
5. 0:14Bacteria to Beethoven.
6. 0:16Not a straight line, of course…but that’s roughly how it went.
7. 0:20This was the theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, and, with some modification, it has
8. 0:24been embraced as unassailable by the science community over the last century.
9. 0:30As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says, “If you meet somebody who claims not
10. 0:34to believe in evolution, that person is either ignorant, stupid or insane.”
11. 0:39But is that right?
12. 0:40Are there no scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary account of life’s origins?
13. 0:45In November 2016, I attended a conference in London convened by some of the world’s
14. 0:49leading evolutionary biologists.
15. 0:51The purpose: to address growing doubts about the modern version of Darwin’s theory.
16. 0:57Let’s look at just two scientific reasons to doubt this theory.
17. 1:01First, the Cambrian Explosion.
18. 1:03A weird and wonderful thing happened 530 million years ago: A whole bunch of major groups of
19. 1:09animals—what scientists call the “phyla”—appeared abruptly within a geologically short window
20. 1:14of time—about ten million years.
21. 1:17These novel animal forms—exhibiting proto-types of most animal body designs we see today—emerged
22. 1:24in the fossil record without evidence of earlier ancestors.
23. 1:27Did you catch that?
24. 1:29A huge number of diverse animals appeared, with no discernible antecedents.
25. 1:34So where did they come from?
26. 1:36This question really bothered Darwin.
27. 1:38And he acknowledged that he could give it “no satisfactory answer.”
28. 1:42Nor can scientists today.
29. 1:44The renowned biologist Eugene Koonin, of the National Center for Biotechnology Information,
30. 1:50describes the abrupt appearance of the Cambrian animals and other organisms such as dinosaurs,
31. 1:55birds, flowering plants and mammals as a pattern of “biological Big Bangs.”
32. 2:00So what caused all these new forms of life to arise?
33. 2:04That question leads to a second big doubt: the DNA enigma.
34. 2:08In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick made a startling discovery: The DNA molecule
35. 2:14stores information as a four-character digital code.
36. 2:18Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals inside the DNA helix store the instructions—the
37. 2:25information—for building the crucial proteins that cells need to survive.
38. 2:30Unless the chemical “letters” in the DNA text are sequenced properly, a protein molecule
39. 2:35will not form.
40. 2:37No proteins; no cells.
41. 2:38No cells; no living organisms.
42. 2:42Bill Gates has said, “DNA is like a software program.”
43. 2:45Let’s think about that for a second.
44. 2:47For computers to run faster and perform more functions, they require new code.
45. 2:52Well, the same is true for life: To build new forms of life, the evolutionary process
46. 2:57would need to produce new genetic information—new code.
47. 3:01But this raises questions about the creative power of natural selection and mutation.
48. 3:05Natural selection is a simple sorting process.
49. 3:09Species keep favorable mutations that allow them to survive but eliminate bad mutations
50. 3:14that cause their members to die out.
51. 3:16No one doubts that natural selection is a real process and that it produces minor variations,
52. 3:23but many biologists now doubt that it produces major innovations in biological form.
53. 3:28To see why, think again about software.
54. 3:31What happens if you introduce a few random changes into computer code?
55. 3:35You’ll likely mess it up, right?
56. 3:37Though it might still work—if you don’t make too many changes.
57. 3:41But if you make enough random changes, your program will stop functioning altogether.
58. 3:45You certainly can’t keep doing this and expect some cool, new program to pop out.
59. 3:50There’s a mathematical reason for this.
60. 3:53In all codes and languages, there are vastly more ways of arranging characters that will
61. 3:57generate gibberish than there are arrangements that will generate meaningful sequences.
62. 4:02And this applies to DNA.
63. 4:04Remember, natural selection only “selects” sequences that random mutations generate.
64. 4:10Yet experiments have established that DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins
65. 4:15are extremely rare—and, thus, really hard to stumble on randomly.
66. 4:21How rare?
67. 4:22While working at Cambridge University, molecular biologist Douglas Axe showed that, for every
68. 4:27DNA sequence that generates a relatively short functional protein, there are 10 to the 77th power
69. 4:34nonfunctional sequences.
70. 4:36Now consider that there are only 10 to the 65th power atoms in our galaxy.
71. 4:42So finding a new DNA sequence capable of building a functional protein is like searching blindfolded
72. 4:48for a single marked atom among a trillion Milky Way galaxies.
73. 4:53Talk about a needle in a haystack!
74. 4:55As I show in my book Darwin’s Doubt, even 4 billion years of life’s history is not
75. 5:00enough time to overcome a search problem this big.
76. 5:03So, two serious doubts about modern Darwinian theory: The Cambrian Explosion—the sudden
77. 5:09appearance of new animals, which evolutionary theory has failed to explain; and the DNA
78. 5:14enigma—the implausibility of random mutations producing the information needed to build
79. 5:20new forms of animal life.
80. 5:23Scientists who know about these problems are not “ignorant, stupid, or insane;” they
81. 5:27are just appropriately skeptical.
82. 5:31I’m Stephen Meyer, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, for Prager University.