March 20, 2025
Neo-Darwinian evolution is the accepted explanation for the variety of life forms that populate the planet. Darwin made a case that natural selection ensured that beneficial traits that fostered the survival of organisms would be passed on to their offspring, and the science of genetics later explained exactly how those beneficial traits were passed on and how mutations could produce additional new beneficial traits that could also be passed on. Evolution in the broadest sense is “descent with modification,” and empirical observation seems to confirm this. Geological strata that bear no fossilized remains of animals alive today do bear fossilized remains of animals long gone extinct; the bone structures of a human hand, the wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale bear remarkable similarities that seem to point to a common precursor. A field associated with evolutionary biology is origin of life research, sometimes referred to as the study of “chemical evolution.” Before an organism can begin to evolve, it has to first come into existence, and origin of life research seeks to explain how molecules could come together in such a way as to produce what would become a living organism.
As widely accepted as Neo-Darwinism is, however, it has its critics, and they raise valid points. Although Neo-Darwinism can explain how finches came to have different shapes of beaks, is it really capable of doing the heavy lifting required to explain how a single-celled organism could eventually evolve into a human being? Or is that simply an article of faith? And why after all this time hasn’t origin of life research been able to coax those stubborn molecules into becoming something that’s actually alive? An alternative to mindless evolution is the concept of “intelligent design,” and although many of its adherents are people of faith, they do not invoke divine revelation but rather dispassionately point out that some kind of intelligence, as opposed to blind chance, is a better explanation for the complexity of life. Dr. James Tour, a synthetic chemist at Rice University, is one of the foremost exponents of intelligent design, and he has posted numerous videos on the subject on YouTube.
Of course there’s going to be pushback from the other side, and the most staunch opposition to Tour’s videos comes from Dave Farina, a popular science content creator whose YouTube channel is called Professor Dave Explains. In this video titled “Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis,” Professor Dave attempts to downplay the astronomical probabilities of molecules randomly linking up to form the chemical building blocks necessary to sustain life. He uses an example of 10 people at a get-together who all have different birthdays. The probability of each person having a particular birthday is of course 1 in 365. But the probability of all 10 of those people having those particular birthdays is 1 in 36510 or 1 in 42 trillion trillion. Professor Dave blithely sums up: “The odds are unthinkable, and yet there they are, sitting in that room.”
I was truly astonished when I heard that. The reason those 10 people were all sitting in that particular room was that someone had planned the get-together and had invited those specific people to the get-together. So did someone plan to create something like an amino acid and then muster the appropriate molecules required for the synthesis?
