PNAS Authors Resort to Teleological Language in Failed Attempt to Explain Evolution of Irreducible Complexity
Summary: A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) purports to explain the evolution of a relatively small molecular machine in the mitochondria that transports proteins across a membrane, thereby allegedly refuting irreducible complexity. Phrases and assertions like “'pre-adaptation' to bacteria ahead of a need for protein import,” “parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together,” “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them,” or intelligently "engineered" macromutations are part and parcel of this latest failed attempt by critics of intelligent design (ID) to answer Michael Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity. As would be expected, when evolutionists are forced to resort to such goal-directed and teleological language and mechanisms, this shows that inherently, blind and unguided materialist explanations are not sufficient to produce irreducible complex systems. As discussed in more detail below, this latest attempt to answer irreducible complexity unwittingly shows the need for intelligent design.
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Rather than giving a careful account of C2-C5, the PNAS paper's authors offer an explanation that sounds that quite teleological: “Together with the LivH amino acid transporter, these component parts would have provided ’pre-adaptation’ to bacteria ahead of a need for protein import.” Likewise, the Wired article takes care of this problem by asserting that these parts evolved, were just “ready to snap together,” and suddenly performed an entirely new function:
The process by which parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together is called preadaptation. It’s a form of “neutral evolution,” in which the buildup of the parts provides no immediate advantage or disadvantage. Neutral evolution falls outside the descriptions of Charles Darwin. But once the pieces gather, mutation and natural selection can take care of the rest, ultimately resulting in the now-complex form of TIM23.
Wired even quotes one of the scientists who co-authored the study saying, “But when you think about it in a neutral evolutionary fashion, in which these machineries emerge before there’s a need for them, then it makes sense.”
Does it really “make sense” that the evolutionary rebuttal to irreducible complexity is sheer dumb luck, where for absolutely no apparently reason the parts for this machine just happen to be “preadapted” and “ready to snap together” and the “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them”? If this is the answer to Michael Behe, then it seems Behe’s arguments still stand.
Terms like “ready to snap together” or “pre-adaptation” sound highly goal directed, and a blind and unguided process like materialistic evolution is not supposed to be goal directed. Of course when all of these proteins are intact and functioning together, they yield a function that gives an advantage. But where did these parts suddenly come from, fully formed, in the first place, "ready to snap together" to perform this new function? When evolutionists invoke explanations like “preadaptation,” Scott Gilbert seems very right to make the critique that “[t]he modern synthesis is good at modelling the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.” “Preadaptation” or “ready to snap together” or “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them” are not unguided materialist explanations of evolution — like it or not they're unwittingly appealing to a goal directed process. And there’s only one goal-directed process I know of in town: intelligent design.
These teleology-laden responses give me more confidence than ever in the potency of the challenge of irreducible complexity to evolutionary biology. It’s responses like these that made me a skeptic of neo-Darwinism and a proponent of intelligent design in the first place.
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Conclusion
The Wired article asserts that the mitochondrial transport system “seems to pose a cellular chicken-and-egg question: How could protein transport evolve when it was necessary to survive in the first place?” As can be seen, however, studies are showing that even in the "reduced" mitochondrial transport systems, “all major essential functions are represented” and many proteins are necessary to fulfill the job. The main difference is the lack of redundant systems and fewer total proteins. Wired has not solved this “chicken-and-egg question” because even the allegedly simpler system is still complex, containing multiple functional multi-protein transport machines as well as a number of required additional proteins for the transport process.
What is most revealing is that these evolutionists are forced resort to goal-directed explanatory language like “preadapted,” “parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together,” or “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them." Additionally, in the one case where they tried, they found it necessary to radically and intelligently "enginee[r]" a prokaryotic homologue of a transport protein to make it function in a eukaryote. No ID proponent has ever claimed these particular systems are irreducibly complex, but if these evolutionists' arguments are any indication, then even here intelligent design seems to have the upper hand, and blind and undirected processes appear insufficient. If this paper's explanation for the evolution of this machine, in their own words, "provides a blueprint for the evolution of cellular machinery in general," then it's clear that Darwinian evolutionary explanations for the origins of cellular machinery are deficient.
The PNAS article rightly states, "How these molecular machines evolved is a fundamental question." One would think that such a fundamental question would demand a detailed, rigorous answer. Unfortunately, the PNAS authors treat this "fundamental question" as if it is solved and irreducible complexity refuted through some pretty shallow investigation and a lot of explanations that sound teleological. They want to win the debate without having one.
They are right that this is a "fundamental question," and irreducible complexity — in the cases where ID proponents have actually argued for it — still holds much merit.
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