EVOLUTION'S WORKSHOP: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands - Review

Species that don't over-produce young have evolved too, so huge numbers of dying offspring are not necessary for natural selection. Insights like this tend to muddy the Darwin-versus-God debate. The natural system hardly seems perfect--there are all those baby finches that die--but it's not heartless either. It seems to be seeking the greatest possible amount of life, which sounds rather like a higher goal.

The Origin of Species

Though the public debate about evolution and faith continues to center on fringe creationist claims that Darwin should be rejected, among specialists, the question of the moment is not whether species evolve but why there are species in the first place. Darwinian mechanics only describe how creatures that already exist change in response to environment; selection theory is silent on how life began, and contemporary biology can offer no explanation. Darwin famously mused that in prehistory a "warm little pond" of chemicals may have been struck by lightning, but he admitted this was weak tea. One clue came in the Miller-Urey experiments of the 1950s, in which elements representing the ancient atmosphere formed amino acids when subjected to simulated lightning.

But nothing in Miller and Urey's test tubes came to life. Follow-up experiments, including a recent effort by the Carnegie Institution and NASA, have shown that certain important properties of organic compounds can arise naturally--but why shouldn't God employ compounds with natural properties? The Carnegie-NASA tests did not produce anything even remotely alive, either. Lately researchers have been toying with the notion that the first living substance was RNA, a relative of DNA. But RNA doesn't reproduce, and attempts to make it do so in the lab have failed.

How chemicals advanced from inanimate reactions on the barren rock faces of ancient Earth to extremely precise self-replication by the billions of DNA points is a much more interesting question than how the beaks of finches adapt to the shapes of various seeds. Here the "intelligent design" camp becomes relevant. This group's basic contention is that the leap from inanimate to animate seems unimaginable without guidance, and it's a haunting point.

Consider that Darwinian theory asserts a single common ancestor for all living things. The genetic structures shared by many creatures do show a web of interrelationship--your chromosomes contain more segments identical to fruit-fly DNA than you might care to know. But supposing the origin of life was wholly natural, why could it have happened just once, in the dawn of the common ancestor? If a natural process causes inanimate compounds to start living, this should happen all the time.

Perhaps origins of life are in fact happening unnoticed every day, since existing, specialized organisms might crowd out any new kids on the block. Nevertheless if the origin of life was wholly natural, then it should be possible to create life in a laboratory: It's odd to posit that life once began unaided in a harsh, sterile environment containing zero knowledge, but today cannot begin under ideal conditions controlled by researchers possessing elaborate information. And no researcher has even come close to manufacturing life. Until such time as biology grad students can create life whenever they wish, higher influences cannot be dismissed.