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Note: What follows is a transcript of Perry's high school level presentation on information, evolution and the origin of life. This is intended for a lay audience. A more detailed, college-level version is available here.

 

Randomness, Design, and the Case for Intelligent Evolution

by Perry S. Marshall

Two years ago I was on a bus in rural China going up a mountain. It was really rickety and whenever there was car coming the other way, it had to swerve out of the way and we'd almost go over the side of a cliff.

I'm riding this bus with a very good friend of mine that I grew up with. And we're having an argument.

We both grew up Christians. He was an ultra conservative guy and he considered me a 'liberal'. (Sort-of, anyway.) We would always debate about stuff because he was on the most conservative end of Christianity that you could probably get to.

But this time, various views on Christianity were not the argument we were having. Because he was actually in the process of losing his faith.

Pieces of his faith were going out the window. Baptism is out the window. Resurrection of Christ, out the window. Communion, fellowship of the saints, blah, blah, blah, it's all going out the window. We were arguing because to me this was actually kind of disturbing. It's disturbing when you've had a belief and then one of your friends is saying, “Uh, I'm bailing on this.”

So we get to this discussion about creation and evolution. I said, “Don't you think it's a little far fetched that a whole bunch of random mutations over a long period of time would ever produce anything as complex, intricate and as extraordinary as living things that we have now?”

He says, “Well, I've thought about that and I've read about that. It's actually not so far fetched.” He begins to explain this to me. He says, “Let's say we've got falcons flying around. Let's say we've got millions of falcons flying around and you've got 500 million years of millions and billions of falcons flying around.”

He says, “Don't you think that there's some chance, somewhere along the way, there would be an accidental mutation and one of them would develop a better eye muscle so it could see better and it could see farther and it could catch its prey better? Then the falcons would evolve because this one is better and it beats out all the other falcons.”

I sat there and I thought about it.

I said to myself, “You know what? Maybe he's right.”

I'm the kind of person when a question comes up like that I can't just shrug it off. I've got to find an answer, especially because we're having this discussion and because of this path that he's on. I get plunged into this.

"I am not sufficiently informed to have a strong opinion about this!"

I had never really studied evolution in any great detail. What I did know was that I have an electrical engineering degree, I've worked in various parts of engineering, and I've been in a number of careers. And I know that a lot of things are counterintuitive. There are a lot of things in the world that you would think would work this way, but they actually work that way. So, even though evolution seemed counterintuitive to me (it defies my 'common sense' and seems to violate Murphy's law for example) that didn't necessarily mean it wasn't true.

I knew that I didn't know enough to know. Is that fair enough? I said, “Well, I don't know the answer to this question. So how can I find out?”

Like I said, two years ago this just plunged me into something new. It was like falling backwards over a cliff, and I start investigating all this. I go home from China and what do I do? I do what a lot of you guys do. I get on the internet, and I start looking. I start reading and I start trying to find answers to things.

Evolutionists and Creationists - Screaming at Each Other!

(Fun, Fun, Fun.)

It only took me about ten minutes to discover that mostly what you find is a whole bunch of extreme people screaming at each other. Right?

You've got the Darwinists and those guys saying, “Intelligent Design is nonsense. It's b-a-a-a-a-d science. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Evolution is the most thoroughly proven theory in the history of mankind and everybody who disagrees is just an idiot.”

Then you have all these other people who say [in a solemn, holier-than-thou voice], “The scientific establishment and every biologist at every university have set themselves up to defy the commandments and the oracles of God.”

So these guys just scream at each other. Isn't that a lot of fun?

The thing was is I realized what most of these people, on both sides, are arguing stuff that you could never reach a definitive conclusion on anyway.

99% of the Evolution Arguments Are About Things Nobody Can Ever Prove

They're arguing about some fossil. Well, some guy walks into a room full of fossils and he goes, “See, they tell this story.”

Then another guy walks in the room and he rearranges the fossils. He says, “No you idiot. They tell this story.”

I knew that we could never get to any kind of conclusive answer from that. I said, “Is there maybe a more sensible, sane, rational way to look into this?”

I decided to ask the falcon question that my friend and I were talking about, and approach it the way that an engineer would ask the question. I decided to apply some of my own background.

Now, just as a point of reference, about four years ago I wrote a book called Industrial Ethernet. This is a narrow topic. You'd never find this in Borders or Barnes and Noble. You can buy it in Amazon though, and it's published by ISA, a specialized publisher that serves the manufacturing industries. Ethernet is the blue cable that you plug into your computer that lets all the computers in your office talk to each other or lets you get on the internet. I wrote this book in 2002.

DNA = Information Technology?

So with my engineering background I started to ask the question, “Does Information Technology possibly have something to say about information that's in DNA? Would all the stuff I know from engineering and communication systems also apply to DNA?”

What I found out is a resounding yes. I found out there's all kinds of things that the information technology world deals with every day that can help us to answer the DNA question. So that's what I'm going to talk about today.

What we're going to talk about is, is life random? Is evolution random? Or, is evolution something else? We're going to frame this so that we can discuss it in a slightly different way, a more productive way.

Again, I think people screaming at each other with completely opposite points of view and faith in completely opposite things, they'll never get to a conclusion. It's just a way of selling more books. You sell these guys books that they agree with. You sell these guys books that they agree with. And nobody ever gets to any end point.

A Different Way to Frame The Discussion

The starting point of this is the distinction between patterns and designs . You'll see what I mean by that in a minute.

Tornados and Snowflakes: Not Designed

Let's talk about naturally occurring patterns. What is that a picture of?

It's tornado funnel cloud. Are tornados designed by anybody?

No. They just happen. If you have hot air and cold air and moisture and time, a spinning earth and sunshine and day and night and seasons, you're going to get tornados in the right conditions. You're going to get hurricanes if the conditions are right, and they will happen by themselves.

Nobody has to design them. Nature creates certain kinds of order all by itself without any designer. That's what you have with weather.

Another example of this is snowflakes.

Does anybody have to design a snowflake? No.

Nobody designed these snowflakes. If you have ice crystals and they freeze and they blow up and down in the clouds, eventually when they fall, they come down as snowflakes and every snowflake is different.

Snowflakes happen without anybody's help.

We've got a picture of that individual snowflake and nobody designed that snowflake. It just occurs naturally as a function of the shape of the molecules and so forth.

Music, Computer Codes, and Languages

Now, let's talk about something slightly different. Let's talk about music. Music is designed. is it not? Somebody writes a song. Somebody comes up with a composition. Let's look at what music consists of. There are two versions of music.

There's the idea of the music that gets written down on the left side like you see the notes on the page. Then on the right side I've got a picture of sound waves. You see music on paper, you hear music in the air. You understand that there's a difference between music the way it's conceived and written down versus actually hearing it played.

The point is that when something is designed that there is a plan that precedes the implementation. There's a sheet of music that precedes the playing of the music. Or, even if there's not a sheet of music, it exists as an idea in somebody's head and then they play it. That's music.

So, in a design, there's a plan that comes first. Let's take a computer program like Microsoft Windows. On the right you've got a picture of what the screen looks like. But that can't exist without a program on the left that's got all these ones and zeroes. If you go buy Microsoft Windows CD or a Microsoft Office CD at the store, it's a bunch of ones and zeroes.

Microsoft Windows: Actual 1's and 0's on the left, the implementation (display on your screen) on the right

The code describes the computer program before it's implemented. Once again, it's just like music or it's just like a map. You can have a map of Washington DC and then you have Washington DC . You have a book where things are written down and then you read it out loud and the information exists in different forms. There's a plan first and then there's implementation.

Now was there a plan first before a snowflake? Actually no. Hurricane Wilma, was there a plan of Hurricane Wilma before Hurricane Wilma came along? No. Air currents combined and they created a hurricane and it just happened naturally.

That's the difference between a pattern and a design. Let's talk about the difference here. If we've got patterns on the left side and information on the right side, patterns come from chaos. They're just matter and energy combining together. They require no thought from anybody.

But on the right side, information, whether it's music or a map of Washington DC or Microsoft Windows or the English language or Chinese, it's based on code. It's matter and energy and information. We've added information to the formula and it requires thought on the part of somebody.

Language and Design: Product of a Mental Process

Patterns                                                                      Designs

Let's talk about DNA for a second. I don't have time for a big biological lecture here. But every cell in your body has a strand of DNA which is a plan for you.

It consists of a helix with two sides and in between the helix is letters. The letters are chemicals Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine. Those four letters A, C, G, and T encode the information necessary for life. In real DNA it's anywhere from a half a million to three billion letters. Your body requires three billion letters strung together to represent you. That's a lot of letters.

The simplest microorganism that you can find uses half a million letters of code. The pattern in DNA is a code. That's why we have the term “genetic code” because DNA contains that code. Every cell in your body has a strand of DNA . That strand of DNA represents you. But that one strand of DNA is not you. It's just a plan for you. A plan represents something that gets built.

Which is DNA more like?

Is DNA more like stalagmites and stalactites and hurricanes and tornadoes and snowflakes?

Or, is DNA more like music and maps and computer programs and Chinese?

It is decidedly the latter.

The pattern in DNA is a code. It's a language. It's a plan, where the plan comes first and then the thing gets built - a human body, a rabbit, a grasshopper, what have you. (And by the way it is not like a code. It literally is a code. It has been defined that way everywhere in biology for the last 40 years.)

Now the question is where do codes come from? Well, like we said, patterns like snowflakes and hurricanes occur naturally. But random processes don't create codes.

I've looked high and low. I've debated with lots of people. I've had this conversation many, many times. Nobody's ever been able to think of a single random process that produced a code, where somebody actually saw it happen.

No one has ever discovered a code outside of living things that was not designed by somebody. Computer codes, Morse code, Bar Code, Zip Code. When you surf the internet and send an email to somebody or you push the button on your garage door opener and your garage opens and your neighbors garage doesn't. All of that is because of codes. Nobody has ever seen a code that wasn't designed.

This led me to what I call the Atheist's Riddle. The Atheist's Riddle is:

Show me a code or a language that doesn't come from a mind.

As I like to say, this is so simple any child can understand it. It's so complex no atheist can solve it.

Where does the code come from? That's the fundamental question.

We've got all these guys that are arguing about fossils and stuff. Well, there's merit to that. But you'll never get to a definitive answer because the evidence is so fragmentary. When you frame it in terms of codes, you get a much better answer.

"A Christian and an Atheist go to the Zoo"

The second part of this is what I call “A Christian and an Atheist go to the zoo.” Actually just the Christian and the Atheist all by themselves are more entertaining than the zoo. They argue with each other and we get to listen to it.

Everybody gets really emotional if you say, “Was your daddy a chimpanzee?” Or, “Was your daddy a Neanderthal?” and all that kind of stuff. I'd rather ask it this way: Did the antelope evolve into a giraffe?

Did the giraffe come from something that had a short neck and needed a long neck, so random mutations helped it grow a longer neck over millions of years? Did that happen?

I don't know about all of you guys, but I'm not particularly emotional about this question. I'm open to either view. I don't think Christian theology has any inherent problem if an antelope evolved into a giraffe. I don't think that the problem from a spiritual point of view, but it's a great question to ask. Can it happen? Could it have happened?

Again, if we argue about fossils, it's just antidotal evidence. It's very subjective and people argue about it. We've got to reduce the question to first principles. Here's how I did it.

Bill mentioned that I do a lot of work with Google. I help companies figure out how to advertise on Google. On the left side are the free listings. People don't have a lot of control over them. But on the right side, those are ads. Some person is advertising red wagons on eBay or they're advertising red wagons at www.ToyAvenue.com or www.CouponCabin.com or whatever.

This is an interesting thing because Google's system for this is very, very, very Darwinian. In a nut shell, here's how it works. If you write an ad that people like to click on, it will move up. If your ad is popular, it'll move up and it'll get clicked on more and more and more.

If you write a stupid ad that nobody is interested in, it will move down and it will cost you more and more.

The good ad will move up and cost you less. The bad ad will move down and cost you more. It's a popularity contest. It's a survival of the fittest. It's exactly Darwinian.

I'll give you an example. This is a real actual Google campaign that I worked with. We have two ads.

There's an ad on the left and there's an ad on the right. What's the difference between the two? One word, easy personal protection training, fast personal protection training.

Do you think that that one word makes a difference? Oh yes it does! I'll show you how much of a difference it makes. The left one got 0.8% of the people to click on it. The right one got 1.3%. That's actually a huge difference. That means the ad on the right is almost 50% better than the ad on the left. The one on the left is 50% more expensive if you want to keep it running.

The ad on the right, over time, is going to win. The ad on the left is going to lose. Survival of the fittest.

Now what I said was, “Can we write better Google ads with a random mutation program, instead of having a person rewrite the ads?”

Probably this morning, at least 1,000 people woke up and went into their Google account. They checked their ads and they wanted to see where are the winners and where are the losers. That's what's going on every day. Most of you don't see it happening but it's happening.

The Random Mutation Generator is Born

I said, “Can a random mutation do this?” I hired a programmer to write a program for me. This program is at www.RandomMutation.com (opens in a new window). You can paste in some text. You can write anything you want. You paste it in, you click the mutate button, and it will mutate for you.

It'll show you what a random mutation actually looks like. It'll just pick a letter somewhere and it'll change it to some other letter randomly, which is exactly what Darwinian evolution says is going on that causes evolution, by the way. It's exactly what they're saying is happening.

If we apply this to this ad, can we make it better with the Random Mutation Generator? This is our ad:

Simple Self Defense

For Ordinary People

Easy Personal Protection Training

www.tftgroup.com

 

Then, after one mutation, it looks like this.

Simple Self Defense

For Ordinary People

Easy Personal Protect0on Training

www.tftgroup.com

 

What happened? In protection, the i turned into a zero. Did that help?

After five mutations it says:

Simple Self Def4nse

For Ordinary Peopla

Easy Personal Protect0ov Traininf

www.tftgroup.com

 

After ten mutations it looks like the web site changed. Now says

Simple SPlf Def4nse

For Ordinary Geopla

Emsy Personal Protect0ov Traininf

ww8.tftgroup.com

Hey look there, what's ww8? If we go there, are we going to get to a real web page? No. Now when you click it's not even going to take you to a real web page. The address doesn't exist.

After 50 mutations it looks like this:

3iCpBxgfelf dezensqo

a3r OrdinausRmeopRe

BbsyM7ersonel NjiLeStBon0Tnaaning

wwwJEdtgroup63Om 5

It's not even recognizable as English anymore.

I fully acknowledge that we've only got a few minutes here and I've moved through this very fast. I would encourage any of you who are skeptical that I'm guiding the lily a bit to just go play with this yourself. What you will find is if you had a very minor spelling error that one in a million times - yes, random mutation could help you fix the spelling.

However, you will always arrive at a point where it is completely impossible to get your sentence to say anything significantly different without destroying what you have first, which makes your ad go extinct before it has a chance to improve. Why? Because you can't re-write a sentence one or two letters at a time without wrecking your spelling and creating nonsense.

Furthermore, the longer your sentence is, the worse it gets. It's nearly impossible with just one little sentence. To evolve just one page of text (not to mention the DNA of a micro organism with a million plus characters) would take longer than the history of the universe.

Again, if you're a skeptical, that's fine. I don't expect you to buy this just because I said this and showed you this in five minutes. You need to play with it and you can see for yourself. Go ahead and see if you can get it to say something else - something sensible, something more meaningful - without first producing a jumble of mis-spellings that drive your message into extinction.

Dobzhanski's Failed Fruit Fly Experiments

There's a biological version of what I just described here, and it's exactly the same. Back in 1906 a guy named Theodosius Dobzhanski started experimenting. He said, “I've got a hypothesis.”

Dobzhanski was a die-hard evolutionist from cradle to grave. He said, “Alright, if random mutation can cause new species to emerge, then I ought to be able to bombard fruit flies with radiation. Eventually I should get a new species of fruit fly from the mutations.” He did these experiments for decades, for about 30 years.

Here's what happened. He got no new species, ever. He never got anywhere with this. Missing organs, deteriorations, sterility, reduced wings or legs, he had some with feet growing out of their mouth. But he got no improved fruit flies.

30 years of hitting fruit flies with radiation, which would cause their DNA to randomly mutate, and this is all he got. Birth defects, cancer and death is basically what he got.

This produces a new insight:

Random mutation + natural selection = time = extinction.

Randomness destroys fruit flies. It destroys text ads and language and computer programs, anything you want to stick into the random mutation generator.

Engineering has a name for random mutation. Communication engineers and people who have the kind of background that I have, we have a name for this.

You know what we call it?

Noise.

Mutations and noise - same thing. If you turn your TV to channel 86 and there's no station there, what do you see? Snow, right?

Snow on a TV screen, that's exactly what random mutation looks like. The question is, how much random mutation do you add to a TV picture to make it better? How much noise is good? Well, if you live 50 miles away from a TV station and the picture is kind of snowy and you can watch the TV show but it's hazy and static-y, that's random mutation.

Is there ever any point where you can take a snap shot and say, “Wait? That picture was better. Wait, for a split second we had an improvement.”

Noise and Mutation: An Irreversible Downhill Slide

Really, no, you cannot improve the picture with noise. In the world of engineering, there's nothing good about this. It's only a downhill slide. In fact, Claude Shannon in 1948, in one of the most important papers in the field of electrical engineering, said “Noise in a signal is the mathematically same as entropy in heat energy.”

Entropy is when energy goes from being usable to non-usable. It's an irreversible process. You can never get the exhaust in your car to go back into the engine and turn into gas. It only goes one way. Once you add noise to a signal, you can never get it out. Once you add snow to a TV picture, you can never get a clear picture again. Once you mutate DNA, the information is destroyed and you never get it back.

Simply put, saying that random mutation causes new, improved species to evolve is just like saying that the further you go from the TV station, the better the picture gets. Saying that Natural Selection will eventually find a better version and select it is like waiting for the noise to make the picture clearer. It's just not going to happen, because noise can only destroy information.

How We Use the Word "Evolution" in Everyday Conversation

I want you to think about something. We use the word "evolution" in every day language. Isn't the word evolution a household word? We talk about the evolution of the stock market. Or the evolution of the cell phone market. Or, the evolution of political ideas. Or, the evolution of your own personal knowledge of something, your skills. We use the word evolution all the time.

Well, naturalistic Darwinian evolution is the only use of that word where the word "evolution" refers to a random, blind process. Every other time that we use the word evolution, we're talking about something that's intelligently directed.

Let's take the cell phone market. Somebody comes up with a new cell phone that's got a better camera on it or some new feature. Is that a random process? No, it's designed. Then they put it out in the stores and they see if people buy it. That's evolution.

All forms of evolution that we talk about in everyday life refer to intelligent activity. Darwinian evolution is the only kind of evolution that some people say is random. But real-world evolution is not random. Real-world evolution is chaos resolved by intent.

You don't know if somebody is going to buy your new cell phone, but you come up with the best design that you can. You put it in the stores and you advertise it. You do everything else you can do and hopefully people buy it. Hopefully people accept it and that's how we get better computers, better cell phones, better cars, and better ideas. That's evolution.

To The Extent Evolution Happened, it was Designed to Happen

This leads me to the next conclusion, which is if evolution happened, if the antelope evolved into a giraffe, for example, then it didn't just happen randomly. It happened because it was designed to adapt. Or because it was designed to be able to happen. [You can read more about this in the Q&A section below.]

As you see, I frame the question a little differently. It's not creation versus evolution. It's naturalism versus design. It's randomness versus design.

Language, DNA and Spirituality

I would like to point out here that in Genesis chapter one, the first chapter of the Bible, every act of creation is preceded by this statement, “And God said….” The word ‘Said' indicates language.

John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with God, the WORD was God.”

In the Christian worldview, all creation is preceded by words and language and codes. Language is the basis of all creative acts. These things were written 2,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago. Long before the dawn of modern science, we have this perfect correspondence to what we know today. What we see in the world matches up to what we already knew from theology: Anything that's designed is preceded by a plan. A plan that is expressed in terms of language.

So back to my friend that I was telling you about. He's gone along and he came really close to being an atheist for a while. He would not describe himself as a Christian right now.

But kind of by accident, he stumbled on a whole bunch of stuff that I had about this on the internet. I hadn't wanted to argue with him, you know how you get in a heated argument with a good friend? It can get to be too much. But then he found my website.

A few weeks ago he called me up and he said, “I wouldn't have said this yesterday, but after reading all your stuff on your website, I'd have to say intelligent design is a very reasonable explanation for all this. When you were debating with all those guys I was actually surprised how silly some of their arguments actually were.”

And then just a few days ago we were talking and he said, “For awhile I went to an extreme, and I was just about to the point of being atheist. But more and more I see these issues as being something where faith and science have to talk to each other. I guess I'm becoming more and more open to this.”

Faith VS. Science

or

Faith AND Science?

I would suggest to you that it's the latter. If you have a person who says, “I got my faith and don't tell me about science,” that is a very big problem. Faith should not be about sticking your head in the sand. And if you have a person that says, “I got my science. Don't talk to me about faith,” that's a very big problem too. Because you can't even do science without faith in something, faith in rationality, faith that you can get to answers. Science cannot explain itself.

What I propose to you today is that the way that we make the most progress in knowledge and our evolving understanding of how the world works is that faith and science are not enemies. They're friends and they have to talk to each other. They don't scream at each other. We look for answers and we look for the most reasonable explanation of things. Then we try to move things forward.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Q&A from the Audience

Announcer: Perry, I love the statement that you made. “Instead of creation versus evolution, is naturalism versus design a better way to phrase this question?” Is it easier to talk about? Is it more to the point?

If you've got a question, approach the microphone.

Question: My question is, if evolutionary theory has so many problems, why is it backed by the scientific academy?

Perry: It's been the default position within most scientific circles that supernatural explanations are not permitted. Realistically, isn't there some value to that? If a person does a chemistry experiment and it turns from clear to green or something, you don't really want to say, “Well, God made that happen,” because science is about finding naturalistic causes for things.

Science in the carrying out of its methods tends to exclude any discussion of a supernatural explanation for specific events. But let's remember at the same time that science still operates on the assumption that there's a discoverable order in the universe, that the universe does operate according to rational laws. What science cannot answer is where those laws come from.

There's a certain amount of merit to the fact that scientists don't just say, “Oh, God made that happen that way.” Nevertheless what we are seeing, one of the reasons that this issue is being so hotly debated, is that there's ever been more evidence for design than there is right now. The laws of physics describe how DNA operates but they do not in themselves account for where the information came from. Evidence for design continues to come in.

Scientists will try to force a theory to work as long as they possibly can, because there's simply no alternative theory to evolution at this time. The problem as I see it is this: if you completely exclude the possibility of a spiritual explanation for anything from the outside and you only go for a naturalistic explanation, eventually you'll hit a brick wall.

And the Origin of Life question has been a huge brick wall in science for the last 100+ years. The problem has only grown more perplexing with each passing year. In the 1800's Darwin and his contemporaries thought a cell, the simplest unit of life, was just a simple blob of scum. Today we know it's vastly more complex than a Pentium chip or a jet airplane engine. It's getting harder and harder to maintain a position that it just happened by accident. Random processes cannot explain the existence of information.

There's another issue as well: I heard a story on National Public Radio in the fall of 2005 where the reporter said she had talked to over a dozen biologists at universities who did believe Intelligent Design, but they refused to be interviewed in public because it would destroy their careers.

There is enormous peer pressure in academia to be "Politically Correct," and there are few places more guilty of group-think than colleges and public universities. Anybody who's worked at a university (like I have) knows how petty the politics are.

Well, it just so happens that evolution through random mutation is Politically Correct and Intelligent Design is not. But regardless of the politics, the fact is there are a lot of things that random mutation simply cannot explain.

Question: You mentioned the experiment of fruit flies and he took over 30 years to hopefully do something. How many generations of fruit flies did he go through? Do you know?

Perry: Fruit flies have a gestation period of only 12 days. So in 30 years we're talking about a lot of generations of fruit flies. You can go read about this, the guy's name is Theodosius Dobzhanski.

Here's the problem: once you've degraded a fruit fly and it's got birth defects, it doesn't matter how many more generations you go. You've got a very compromised fruit fly and it never improves. You can read about that in the literature. There was also a guy named Goldschmidt that did the same thing with moths.

Now what's interesting is that it's very hard to get people on the Darwinist side to ever talk about this. When you search the subject of these fruit flies, you'll find very little in secular literature because it doesn't fit their paradigm. It doesn't make any sense to them. It's a blind alley.

But I think it's reasonable to ask, “Why couldn't they get something to happen?” I think it's a good question.

Question: You stated that random mutations never create anything that's improved. But we have a bacteria or viruses that are being killed off by antibiotics, they seem to mutate and change to become more resistant to antibiotics.

Perry: Right.

Question: How do you explain that? Is it really not random mutation?

Perry: That is a great question. I'll give you a really short answer, and if you want to talk later, I can give you more details.

There is a biologist at the University of Chicago named James Shapiro who has done a whole bunch of research on microorganisms. Here's what he discovered.

He discovered that a protozoa, a very small microorganism, when it's put under extreme stress, it will splice its own DNA into over 100,000 pieces. Not randomly but in a very precisely engineered fashion. It will rearrange those 100,000 pieces of its own DNA and it will adapt so that its offspring is actually dramatically different than it was. Our own immune systems do this.

This is like a computer program that rewrites its own code. That is not a random mutation! It's about as far from a random mutation as you could possibly get. What he says is: evolution is not a random process. It's an engineered process. It's utterly remarkable.

Now... if we approach the evolution question and we say, “Is evolution an engineered process? Does that explain the data better than evolution is a random process?”

Personally, I think it does. It's a great hypothesis, and it's a testable hypothesis. Shapiro's paper is called A 21st Century View of Evolution. He says, “We have to discard this randomness stuff. We say, ‘No. This has an ingenious program inside that adapts to changing circumstances.'”

I think that's a very productive direction of inquiry. Again, it matches up to engineering and Information Technology and other disciplines. Oh, and it also gives us something to study that will eventually teach us how to write better computer programs.

Question: So you would say, when you look at all the cases of microevolution, you would say those are all somehow designed into the DNA ?

Perry: Yes. Have you ever heard of the phrase “God of the gaps”? People say “Oh, that's just a God of the gaps argument.” What they mean is, every time I find a gap, then if I just stitch it together with God, I'm avoiding scientific inquiry.

My observation is the gaps they tend to move backward in time. And… every time they move back, they get bigger. It's one thing to have a gap where random processes cannot explain what we see. Then we find out that DNA can reengineer itself so that the bacteria overcome the antibiotics.

So now we have an even bigger question than we had before. ‘Wait a minute. How did that little program that knows how to rearrange DNA where did that come from? You're going to tell me that adaptation program happened randomly?' Now you're really stretching things!

Every answer science discovers produces three more questions. The gaps get bigger with each passing year.

I will be here if anybody wants to talk. There's lots of stuff I didn't cover. Thank you for your attention and for your trip on a cold morning.

Read or listen to the "College Version" of this presentation:

If You Can Read This, I Can Prove God Exists - The same communication technology that gave us our modern digital age shows that language is proof of the existence of God, and that all evolution is driven by intelligent processes.

Software Tool:

The Random Mutation Generator - Paste text into the box and MUTATE it! A useful tool you can play with that visually demonstrates that random mutation can only destroy information, not create it

Other Articles

Perry Marshall vs. 30+ Skeptics: From August 2005 to the present, I have successfully advanced the Information Theory argument for Intelligent Design on Infidels, the world’s largest atheist discussion board.

The Intelligent Evolution Quick Guide - Proof that DNA was designed by a mind; a 21st century update to Paley's design argument, and 3 kinds of evolution - all on a single sheet of paper

Q&A about DNA and Information Theory - Frequently Asked Questions on what the information sciences tell us about God

The Atheist's Riddle - "So simple, any child can understand; So complex, no atheist can solve." An airtight inductive proof for the existence of a Superintelligence

New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God - a landmark presentation by Dr. Hugh Ross on the convergence of modern astronomy with ancient theology

©2006 Cosmic Fingerprints