What Science Now Knows — and the Public Rarely Hears
To make good decisions on any question the public needs to be well-informed, something not so easily accomplished in America’s schools. That is a key point made by Michael Kent, a recently retired bio-scientist from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
Kent is passionate about the debate over the origins and nature of our universe, and over the past 20 years he has developed slide presentations on “12 recent discoveries which have changed the debate about design in the universe.” Now he is turning those presentations into videos.
In his introductory video, Kent elaborates:
These are discoveries of science that are not controversial. They are findings of science that are very strongly supported. Scientists may disagree about the implications or the conclusions to make from these findings, but there is little or no debate about the discoveries themselves … My goal is for people to be knowledgeable about the subject so that the philosophical decisions will be in their own hands and not made for them, or imposed on them, by someone else.
In a recent interview with Discovery Institute’s Andrew McDiarmid, Mike argued that “people should be informed and the decision about design should be in their own hands. This is really important because what you believe about where the universe came from affects your entire worldview.” And thus your political views, I would add.
Although there are many scientists who are aware of all the recent discoveries discussed by Kent and who still will not even consider design as a possible explanation, no one could possibly watch these videos and not at least understand why some good scientists are convinced that design is real. But as Kent says, “Many of the basic facts are not known by the public. That in itself is surprising and something to think about.”
The first 10, plus an introductory video and two videos on the philosophy and history of science, are all viewable here. Several videos require some knowledge of biochemistry to fully understand, but even those topics are presented in such a way that the main ideas can be appreciated by non-scientists.
Here is the current video list:
- The universe (space-time, matter, energy) had a beginning.
A great deal of evidence indicates that the universe came into existence from nothing about 14 billion years ago. Since there were no natural causes before Nature came into existence, we cannot expect to find a “natural” explanation for this “big bang.”
- The laws of physics, the fundamental constants, and the initial conditions of our universe are fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life.
The universe that came into being from nothing is not arbitrary but is exquisitely tuned to allow life to exist and flourish. It is now known that the values of many basic physical constants, such as the strengths of the four fundamental forces, the masses and charges of the basic particles of physics, the speed of light and Planck’s quantum physics constant, etc., had to be almost exactly what they are in order for any conceivable form of life to exist in our universe. As physicist Stephen Hawking wrote “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Even more remarkable are the finely tuned initial conditions of the early universe as indicated by the cosmic microwave background radiation.
- Amino acid sequences that correspond to functional enzymes are incredibly rare.
Discoveries 3,5,6, 9, and 10 all show that every living cell is incredibly complex, far beyond what Darwin could have imagined when he proposed his simple mechanism of evolution. That complexity is best described as integrated and coordinated systems of machines and of information processing. Biochemist Michael Denton said, ”Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.”
The sequence space of proteins is inconceivably great (20300 for a protein of 300 amino acids which is an average length). Functional proteins form a miniscule fraction of this sequence space. This combinatorial problem, which has no analogue in the world of the machines that we build, must be successfully navigated to produce functional enzymes and molecular machines. This is the reason that humans cannot design molecular machines or enzymes, or even antibodies to block viruses, which is far, far simpler than creating molecular machines or enzymes. Humans can create supercomputers, nuclear submarines, and jet airplanes but are nowhere close to being able to build protein-based molecular machines from scratch.
- The number of genes in the simplest free-living organism is about 450.
There is no such thing as a simple form of life, at least not now. So attempts to explain the origin of life without input of information from an intelligent agent imagine that much simpler chemical forms of life existed in the past and have since disappeared. However, without the constraints provided by a living cell, chemistry moves away from life.
Two authors called the phenomena of alternative splicing “perhaps the biggest surprise in the history of molecular biology.”
- Life is based on a digital information processing system.
At the heart of life’s digital information processing system is the genetic code and a set of enzymes that have the genetic code written into them. No one knows how these enzymes or the code could have come about by unintelligent processes.
- Molecular machines and sophisticated software algorithms are essential to all life-forms.
Most if not all molecular machines are irreducibly complex, meaning that most or all of the parts are absolutely required for the machines to function. Also, the machines are integrated into coherent higher-level systems. Logical operations are carried out by highly specific and conditional molecular interactions between proteins, DNA, and RNA.
- Random mutation + natural selection has severe limitations as a creative mechanism that are now well understood.
While in the last century the simplest living cells were discovered to be far more complex than previously imagined, containing colossal amounts of functional information, the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection proposed by Darwin to explain the origin of life’s complexity has been shown to be weak and severely limited. Scientists can no longer assign God-like creative powers to mutation plus natural selection.
- So many highly improbable factors make Earth habitable that it is unlikely that another truly “earth-like” planet exists in our galaxy.
In the recent past technological advances have led to the discovery of planets outside our solar system, with news reports occasionally heralding the discovery of many “earth-like” planets. However, these reports considered only one or a few required habitability factors. Scientific analysis has revealed that many factors are required for a planet to support complex living things, and it has become clear that our planet is highly exceptional.
Author David Waltham, in his book Lucky Planet, states, “The Earth is a precious jewel in space possessing a rare combination of qualities that happen to make it almost perfect for life.… Personally, I no longer have doubts. The evidence points towards the Earth being a very peculiar place; perhaps the only highly-habitable planet we will ever find.… Almost too good to be true.”
- The “junk DNA” paradigm has been shown to be false. Most, if not all, noncoding DNA has function.
It was long thought that most DNA in higher organisms was useless junk, and this was used to argue against an intelligent designer. In the last 25 years, most of this “junk” DNA has been found to have useful function after all. The noncoding DNA has been shown to correspond to various types of RNAs that are critically important in regulating gene expression.
- Extensive post-translational processing (editing) of genes occurs in eukaryotes (which includes all plants and animals) by molecular machines called spliceosomes. It is commonly the case that a particular gene will make different proteins in different cell types or in the same cell type but at different times.
Two authors called the phenomena of alternative splicing “perhaps the biggest surprise in the history of molecular biology.” Another author stated that the spliceosome may be the most complex macromolecular machine in the cell.
Video number 11, “The Cambrian (and other) explosions in the fossil record are not consistent with the Darwinian model of gradual evolution,” is not yet available. While you are waiting for this video, I recommend my own video “Why Evolution is Different,” which, among its topics shows why the fossil record is not consistent with gradual evolution.
Kent’s videos 1, 2 and 5 deal with the three discoveries focused on by Stephen Meyer’s 2021 best-seller Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. Meyer’s book has been endorsed by many top scientists, including Nobel Prize-winner Brian Josephson, a Cambridge University physicist, who says “This book makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.” I believe Michael Kent’s videos also make that clear.
READ MORE from Granville Sewell:
A Mathematician’s View of Evolution