Debates

Teleological Evolution:
The Difference it Doesn't Make

by Stephen C. Meyer


Excerpted from Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate over Biological Origins, January 1,1999
Discovery Institute


Denis Lamoureux supports what he calls a teleological view of evolution. He
equates the power of God with natural laws and processes, and claims that these
laws and processes are goal-directed and creative. Lamoureux favors the view
that "God organized the Big Bang, so that the deck was stacked"1 to favor the
inevitable evolution of life by natural law. He says further that he supports
natural theology, but unlike other theists who see God revealing himself in the
design of specific living systems or finely tuned conditions, he sees evidence
of God’s handiwork in the natural laws and processes that he alleges can account
for the origin of biological systems. Further, Lamoureux objects to Phillip
Johnson’s critique of Darwinism, because he thinks by focusing his critique on
the dominant materialistic view of evolutionary theory, Johnson gives short
shrift to the version of evolutionary theory that Lamoureux favors. Though
Johnson does not commit himself to a specific scenario involving divine action
at a specific point in natural history, Lamoureux criticizes him for what he
takes to be Johnson’s tacit commitment to some form of Genesis-based special
creation. According to Lamoureux, to invoke a specific instance of intelligent
design or divine action within nature after the initial creation of the universe
would imply a violation of natural law and commit the God-of-the-gaps fallacy.
Indeed, Lamoureux claims that design theorists generally (including Johnson)
base their arguments for design on God-of-the-gaps style arguments from
ignorance, a claim he amplifies by asserting that design theorists have failed
to produce a rigorous theory of intelligent design.

I disagree with Lamoureux‚s position for two main reasons. First, I think that
he mischaracterizes design theory and the arguments of design advocates,
including those of Phillip Johnson. Secondly, I think Lamoureux’s notion of
teleological evolution lacks either explanatory power or theoretical specificity
or both.

In the first place, contemporary design theory does not constitute an argument
from ignorance or a God-of-the Gaps fallacy as Lamoureux claims. Design
theorists infer design not merely because natural processes cannot explain the
origin of such things as biological systems but because these systems manifest
the distinctive hallmarks of intelligently designed systems, that is, they
possess features that in any other realm of experience would trigger the
recognition of an intelligent cause. For example, Michael Behe2 has inferred
design not only because the gradualistic mechanism of natural selection cannot
produce irreducibly complex systems, but also because in our experience
irreducible complexity is a feature of systems known to have been intelligently
designed. Indeed, whenever we see systems that possess irreducible complexity
(i.e., systems with many functionally integrated but necessary parts) and we
know the causal story about how they originated, intelligent design invariably
played a role. Thus, Behe infers intelligent design as the best explanation for
the origin of irreducibly complexity in such things as cellular molecular
motors, based upon what we know, not what we do not know, about the causal
powers of nature and intelligent agents, respectively.

Similarly, Phillip Johnson (following Charles Thaxton and Walter Bradley3 and
me4) has argued that the specified complexity or information content of DNA and
proteins implies a prior intelligent cause, again because ‘specified complexity’
and ‘high information content’5 constitute a distinctive hallmark (or signature)
of intelligence. Indeed, in all cases where we know the causal origin of high
information content or specified complexity, experience has shown that
intelligent design played a causal role. Thus, when we encounter such
information in the bio-macromolecules necessary to life, we may infer --based
upon our knowledge of established cause-effect relationships--that an
intelligent cause operated in the past to produce the information necessary to
the origin of life. Design theorists infer a past intelligent cause based upon
present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships. Inferring design thus
employs the standard uniformitarian method of reasoning used in all historical
sciences. These inferences do not constitute arguments from ignorance any more
than any other well-grounded inferences in geology, archaeology, or
paleontology, --where provisional knowledge of cause-effect relationships
derived from present experience guides our inferences about the causal past.
Indeed, as William Dembski has recently demonstrated, we often infer the causal
activity of intelligent agents as the best explanation for events and phenomena.
Moreover, we do so rationally, according to objectifiable, if often tacit,
information and complexity theoretic criteria. His groundbreaking new book The
Design Inference, published by Cambridge University Press, gives a formal
theoretical account of the criteria by which specialists in many fields reliably
detect intelligent causes. Dembski shows that whenever events are both highly
improbable and specified, we infer intelligent design (not chance, law, or some
combination of the two) as the best causal explanation for the event or artifact
in question. Thus he shows that design inferences are based upon the presence of
particular features implying an intelligent cause, not (solely) upon the absence
of evidence for the efficacy of natural causes. We would not say, for example,
that an archaeologist had committed a ‘scribe-of-the-gaps’ fallacy simply
because he inferred that an intelligent agent had produced an ancient
hieroglyphic inscription. Instead, we recognize that the archaeologist has made
an inference based upon the presence of a feature (namely, high information
content or small probability specification, to use Dembski‚s terminology) that
implies an intelligent cause. We would not say that he had based his inference
(solely) upon the absence of evidence for a suitably efficacious natural cause.
Because Lamoureux does not seem to appreciate this distinction (at least in the
biological case), he mistakenly attributes Johnson’s advocacy of design to a
misguided biblical hermeneutic. Johnson, he says, believes in special
creationism because he is wedded to a flawed interpretation of Genesis chapters
1-11. But this is incorrect. Neither Johnson, nor any of the other design
theorists mentioned above, base their case for design on the book of Genesis.
For design theorists, design is not a deduction from religious authority, but an
inference from biological and/or physical evidence. Indeed, it is an inference
underwritten by the very kind of formal theory that Lamoureux mistakenly says
the intelligent design movement lacks.7

Whether or not design constitutes the best explanation for the origin of
biological data may be debatable. But one thing is certain: teleological
evolution, insofar as it relies on the laws of nature to create, cannot account
for the origin of biological information. Indeed, from an empirical point of
view, the laws of nature do not have the creative powers that Lamoureux‚s
position requires. Because Lamoureux and other teleo-logical evolutionists want
to limit divine action to the initial creation of the universe and its natural
laws (and to the maintenance of those laws thereafter), they must rely
exclusively on natural laws and processes to explain the origin of biological
form and complexity. This includes not only the origin of novel forms from
existing forms, but also the origin of the first life itself. Unfortunately,
however, the laws of nature lack the power to create the information
rich-structures that characterize biological organisms. Natural laws may well be
maintained and have been created by God, as all theists (including Johnson)
believe, but the physical and chemical regularities that scientists describe as
laws do not (by definition) produce the information-rich configurations of
matter that the origin of life requires. God may have created natural law, but
He does not use natural laws to create specified biological information.
To see why consider the problem of the origin of the first life from simple
chemistry. Teleological evolutionists, committed as they are to the proposition
that the laws of nature as originally designed by God are sufficient to produce
life, must argue for some form of self-organizational origin-of-life scenario.
Typically, these scenarios suggest that the forces of chemical necessity (as
described by physical and chemical law) make the origin of life and the genetic
information that it requires (in DNA, RNA and proteins, for example)
inevitable.9 To a materialist such self-organization suggests the self-existence
and creative self-sufficiency of natural law. To a teleological evolutionist
such as Lamoureux, it shows the goal-directed nature of natural laws as
originally designed by God. And, of course, both these views are logically
possible approaches to explaining the origin of life. Both are contradicted,
however, by empirical evidence and information theoretic considerations.
As the physical chemist Michael Polanyi showed in 1967,10 the laws of physics
and chemistry leave open (or indeterminate) a vast ensemble of possible
configurations of matter, only very few of which could have any role in a
functioning biological organism. Specifically, he noted that the chemical laws
governing the assembly of the chemical subunits in the DNA molecule allow a vast
array of possible arrangements of nucleotide bases, the chemical letters‚ in the
genetic code. In other words, the chemical properties of the constituent parts
of DNA (and the laws governing their arrangement) do not determine the specific
sequencing of the bases in the genetic molecule. Yet, the specific sequencing of
the nucleotide bases in DNA constitutes precisely the feature of the DNA
molecule namely, its information content, that origin of life biologists most
want and need to explain.11

Since the elucidation of the DNA structure by Watson and Crick in 1953,12 it has
become clear that the coding regions of DNA possess the same property of
sequence specificity‚ or specified complexity‚ or information content‚ that
written codes or languages do.13 Just as the specific arrangement, not the
chemical properties, of the letters in this article account for the
communication function that it performs, so too does the specific sequencing of
the nucleotide bases in DNA account for the function that DNA performs within
the cell. In particular, the specifically sequenced nucleotide bases on the DNA
direct the process of protein synthesis in the cell. The origin of this specific
sequencing in DNA represents a mystery for all current chemical evolutionary
models of the origin of life and defies explanation by reference to the
self-organizational chemical laws that teleological evolutionists must
necessarily favor. To say otherwise is like saying that the law-like forces of
chemical attraction governing ink on this page are responsible for the
sequential arrangement of the letters that give this article meaning.

To see why in more detail consider the following, the accompanying diagram shows
the chemical structure of DNA. It shows that this structure depends upon several
chemical bonds, each of which are governed by laws of chemical attraction. There
are chemical bonds, for example, between the sugar and the phosphate molecules
that form the two twisting backbones of the DNA molecule. There are bonds fixing
individual (nucleotide) bases to the sugar-phosphate backbones on each side of
the molecule. There are also hydrogen bonds stretching horizontally across the
molecule between nucleotide bases making so-called complementary pairs. These
bonds, which hold two complementary copies of the DNA message text together,
make replication of the genetic instructions possible. Most importantly,
however, notice that there are no chemical bonds between the bases along the
vertical axis in the center of the helix. Yet it is precisely along this axis of
the molecule that the genetic instructions in DNA are encoded.14

Further, just as magnetic letters can be combined and recombined in any way to
form various sequences on a metal surface, so too can each of the four bases, A,
T, G, and C, attach to any site on the DNA backbone with equal facility, making
all sequences equally probable (or improbable) given the laws of physics and
chemistry. Indeed, there are no differential affinities between any of the four
bases and the binding sites along the sugar-phosphate backbone. The same type of
‘n-glycosidic’ bond occurs between the base and the backbone regardless of which
base attaches. All four bases are acceptable, none is preferred. As Berndt-Olaf
Kuppers has noted ‘a present day understanding of the properties of nucleic
acids indicates that all the combinatorially possible nucleotide patterns of a
DNA are, from a chemical point of view, equivalent.’15 Thus, ‘self-organizing’
laws or properties cannot explain the sequential ordering of the nucleotide
bases in DNA because: (1) there are no chemical bonds between bases along the
message-bearing axis of the molecule, and (2) there are no differential forces
of attraction between the backbone and the various bases that could account for
variations in sequencing.

For those who want to explain the origin of life as the result of
self-organizing properties or natural laws intrinsic to the material
constituents of living systems, these rather elementary facts of molecular
biology have devastating implications. The most logical place to look for
self-organizing chemical laws and properties to explain the origin of genetic
information is in the constituent parts of the molecules carrying that
information. But biochemistry and molecular biology make clear that law-like
forces of attraction between the constituents in DNA (as well as RNA and
protein)16 do not explain the sequence specificity of these large
information-bearing biomolecules.

These facts also raise a very difficult question for teleological evolutionists
such as Denis Lamoureux and Howard van Till. Both Lamoureux and van Till insist
that God‚s direct, discrete or special creative activity played no role after
the initial moment of creation at the Big Bang. Both imply, therefore, that the
laws of nature acting on elementary particles were sufficient to organize matter
into the complex forms we see today. Yet if the chemical subunits of DNA lack
the self-organizational properties, or latent creative potential, necessary to
produce the informational sequencing of DNA, it is difficult to see how the far
less complex and biologically specific elementary particles (present just after
the Big Bang) possessed the intrinsic properties and potential necessary to
arrange themselves (by natural law) into fully functioning organisms. Where are
the self-organizational laws and properties that can explain the assembly of the
subunits in sequence-specific DNA molecules? Where are they for functioning
proteins? Or for signal transduction circuits? Or molecular motors? Where are
they for the many specific and highly improbable arrangements of matter that
characterize the structures of living organisms? These chemical laws and
properties clearly do not exist in the chemistry of the DNA molecule. And if
they don’t exist there, it seems implausible in the extreme to assert that such
creative law-governed properties existed in far simpler constituent parts of
atoms or elementary particles.

Lamoureux and other teleological evolutionists might, of course, object that any
such negative argument constitutes a God-of-the-gaps fallacy or an argument from
ignorance. ‘Never say never,’ they say. Yet this objection fails here. There are
strong in-principle information-theoretic objections to any attempt to attribute
information-rich structures or sequences to the laws of nature. Scientific laws
describe (by definition) highly regular phenomena or structures, ones that
possess what information theorists refer to as redundant order. To say that the
processes that natural laws describe can generate complex informational
sequences is essentially a contradiction in terms. The patterns that laws
describe are necessarily highly regular, repetitive, and periodic. But the
arrangements of matter in an information-rich text, including the genetic
instructions on DNA, possess a high degree of complexity or aperiodicity, not
redundant order.
To illustrate the difference compare the sequence ABABABABABAB to the sequence
"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." The first sequence is
repetitive and ordered, but not complex or informative. The second sequence is
not ordered, in the sense of being repetitious, but it is complex and also
informative. The second sequence is complex because its characters do not follow
a rigidly repeating, law-bound pattern. (It is also informative because, unlike
a merely complex sequence such as: ‘sretfdhu&*jsa&90te’‚ the particular
arrangement of characters is highly exact or specified17 so as to perform a
(communication) function. In any case, informative sequences have the
qualitative feature of complexity (aperiodicity), and thus are qualitatively
distinguishable from systems characterized by periodic order that natural laws
generate.

Both teleological evolutionists and self-organizational theorists claim that we
must await the discovery of new natural laws to explain the origin of biological
information. Manfred Eigen has argued, "our task is to find an algorithm, a
natural law, that leads to the origin of information." But this claim betrays a
categorical confusion. According to classical information theory, the amount of
information present in a sequence is inversely proportional to the probability
of the sequence occurring. Yet laws necessarily describe highly deterministic or
predictable relationships between conditions and events. Laws describe patterns
in which the probability of each successive event (given the previous event and
the action of the law) approaches unity. Yet information content mounts as
improbabilities multiply. Information is conveyed whenever one event among an
ensemble of possibilities (as opposed to a single necessity) is specified. The
greater the number of possibilities, the greater is the improbability of any one
being specified, and the more information is transmitted when a particular
possibility is specified. If someone tells you that it is raining,‚ he will have
conveyed some meaningful information to you since it does not rain (or have to
rain) every day. If, however, he also tells you that today the raindrops are
falling down, rather than up, he will not have told you anything informative
since, presumably, you already know that rain always falls down (by natural
law). As Dretske has explained:

As p(si) [the probability of a condition or state of affairs] approaches 1 the
amount of information associated with the occurrence of si goes to 0. In the
limiting case when the probability of a condition or state of affairs is unity
[p(si)=1], no information is associated with, or generated by, the occurrence of
si. This is merely another way to say that no information is generated by the
occurrence of events for which there are no possible alternatives.19
Natural laws describe situations in which specific outcomes follow specific
conditions with high probability. Yet information is maximized when just the
opposite situation obtains, namely, when antecedent conditions allow many
possible and improbable outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a sequence of symbols
or events results from a predictable law-bound process, to that extent the
information content of the sequence is limited or effaced (by redundancy).
Natural laws do not generate complex informational sequences. Thus, they cannot
be invoked to explain the origin of information, whether biological or
otherwise.

Of course, explaining the origin of genetic information by reference to laws or
properties of physical-chemical necessity does not exhaust the logical
possibilities. One can also invoke contingency or chance, either of the directed
or undirected variety. For example, many chemical evolutionary theorists have
invoked chance alone or chance in conjunction with pre-biological natural
selection in an attempt to explain the origin of information. Neo-Darwinists
invoke random mutations in DNA to explain the origin of novel biological
information in pre-existing organisms. Some theistic evolutionists, such as
Gordon Mills, have also suggested mutations as mechanisms of evolutionary
change, but have suggested that the improbability of producing functional
variations via such mutations is so great as to suggest that these apparently
random events must have been directed by a guiding intelligence.20
Unfortunately, none of these approaches represent live options for the committed
teleological evolutionist such as Lamoureux. For by invoking contingency or
chance, whether singly or in conjunction with natural law, the teleological
evolutionist runs the risk of qualifying his position out of existence. If, for
example, the teleological evolutionist seeks to avoid the information-theoretic
difficulties discussed above by invoking undirected chance to explain the origin
of genetic information, his position becomes indistinguishable from standard
materialistic versions of evolutionary theory (either biological or chemical)
that Johnson and many others have criticized on empirical, methodological, and
theological grounds. (In any case, it should be noted that neo-Darwinism has
failed every bit as much as chemical evolutionary theory to provide a mechanism
that can explain the origin of specified genetic information, whether the
information required to build novel genes, cell types, organs, molecular
machines, developmental programs, or body plans that have arisen during the
history of life on earth). If, on the other hand, the teleological evolutionist
invokes directed contingency (i.e., the active and intelligent guidance of
genetic variation during the course of biological history), then he violates his
own injunction against employing divine action or intelligent design as a cause
during the history of life. At that point the teleological evolutionist will
have violated Van Till”s doctrine of the "functional integrity of creation"
every bit as much as any design theorist. He will also have committed the very
kind of argument that Lamoureux explicitly repudiates as a God-of-the-gaps
fallacy.

Thus, barring an empirically unsupportable and theoretically incoherent
commitment to the view that the laws of nature can create novel specified
information, it is difficult to see what empirical content Lamoureux’s
teleological evolution has or how it differs in substance from standard
Neo-Darwinism with its denial of any evidence of actual, as opposed to merely
apparent, design. To cite C. S. Peirce’s maxim "for a difference to be a
difference, it must it make a difference." One must ask: does the teleological‚
in the phrase teleological evolution‚ make any scientific difference? No one
doubts that Lamoureux and Van Till believe in God as designer. But for that
designer to play some role in a scientific theory, such as Lamoureux’s
teleological evolution, the designer must also play some discernible role in the
history of life. The Creator must do something. Yet Lamoureux is unwilling to
specify any such role (beyond the causally necessary but insufficient one of
creating or maintaining natural law) lest he violate his own self-imposed
prohibition against invoking divine action. But if God’s activity remains
forever superfluous or undetectable (except through the eyes of faith), then it
also becomes scientifically irrelevant. Thus, Johnson has, unfortunately, been
right to give Lamoureux’s version of evolutionary theory short shrift.
Excerpted from Phillip Johnson, Denis Lamoureux, et al., Darwinism Defeated? The
Johnson-Lamoureux Debate over Biological Origins (Vancouver: Regent College
Publishing, 1999).

Footnotes:

Quoted in Joe Woodward, “The End of Evolution,” Alberta Report December 1996,
33. See footnote 7 below.
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New
York: Free Press, 1996).
Charles B. Thaxton and Walter Bradley, “Information and the Origin of Life” in
The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, ed.
J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 173-210.
Stephen C. Meyer, “The Explanatory Power of Design: DNA and the Origin of
Information,” in Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design ed.
William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998) 114-47;
“The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism,” The Intercollegiate
Review31 no. 2 (1996):24-43; “DNA by Design: An Inference to the Best
Explanation for the Origin of Biological Information,” Rhetoric and Public
Affairs(Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press) 1, no.4
(1999):519-555.
The term ‘information content’ is used variously to denote both specified
complexity and unspecified complexity . Yet a sequence of symbols that is
merely complex but not specified functionally (such as
‘wnsgdtej38ejdfmcksdnenmd’) would not necessarily indicate the activity of a
designing intelligence. Thus, it might be argued that design arguments based
on the presence of information commit the fallacy of equivocation by inferring
design from a type of ‘information’ (i.e., unspecified information)that could
result from random natural processes. Ambiguities in the definition of
information and information content do leave open this possibility. One can
foreclose this possibility, however, by defining information content as
equivalent to the joint properties of complexity and specification. Though the
term is not used this way in classical information theory, it has been—used
this way by biologists from the beginning of the molecular biological
revolution. As Sarkar points out, since the mid-1950s Francis Crick and others
have equated ‘information’not only with complexity, but also with what they
called “specificity”—where they understood specificity to mean “necessary to
function.” This response will also use the term ‘information content’to mean
specified information, or specified complexity, not just complexity. See
Sahotra Sarkar, “Biological Information: A Skeptical Look at Some Central
Dogmas of Molecular Biology,” in Sahotra Sarkar, ed., The Philosophy and
History of Molecular Biology: New PerspectivesDordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publisher, 1996), 191.
In the most general sense, a specification is a pattern or description of an
event that is conditionally independent of the event that it describes. Thus,
an event is pecified it it conforms to a conditionally independent pattern or
description. In both a linguistic and biological context, a specification is a
match or convergence between an event and an independent functional
requirement. For a formal account of specification, see William A. Dembski,
The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-66,
136-174.
For other recent technical books advancing the intelligent design position,
William A. Dembski, edt. Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design.
(Downers Gorve, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998); Michael Behe Darwin’s Black
Box.
Note, for example, Lamoureux’s criticism of progressive creationism in a
recent issue of the Alberta Report: “But progressive creationism, the theory
that God had to intervene at different steps along the way—from matter to
life—suggest that he couldn’t get it right the first time. But if he’s God,
why couldn’t He have organized the Big Bang, so that the deck was stacked
entirely in favour of life? So that the intelligent design was already built
into matter? This would be evolutionary creationism, more in line with what
the fossil record suggests” (quoted in Woodard, “The End of Evolution.”).
See, for example, Christian DeDuve, “The Beginnings of Life on Earth,”
American Scientist 83 (1995): 437.
Michael Polanyi, “Life’s Irreducible Structure”, Science 160 (1968):
1308-1312, esp. 1309.
Berndy-Olaf Kuppers, Information and the Origin of Life(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1990), 170-172; also Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen,
Information and the Origin of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990),
170-172; also Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, The Mysteries
of Life’s Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984), 24-38.
James Watson and Francis Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nuceleic Acid”,
Nature 171 (1953):737-738.
Charles Thaxton and Walter Bradley, “Information and the Origin of Life”,
173-210.
Bruce Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell (New York: Garland, 1983),
105.
Bernd-Olaf Kuppers, “On the Prior Probablity of the Existence of Life,” in The
Probablistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Kruger et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1987) 364.
R. A. Kok, J. A. Taylor, and W. L. Bradley, “A Statistical Examination of
Self-Ordering Amino Acids in Proteins,” Origins of Life and Evolution of the
Biosphere, 18 (1988(, 135-142.
See footnote 5 above for a definition of specification; see also Dembski, The
Design Inference, 1-66, 136-174.
Manfred Eigen, Steps Toward Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12.
Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981), 12.
Gordon Mills, “Similarities and Differences in Mitochondrial Genomes: Theistic
Interpretation,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 50, no. 4
(December 1998): 286-292.