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Evolution: By Chance or by Design?

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This is yet another book which seeks to present the "Argument from Incredulity" as evidence for unnatural influences in the development of life on this planet. According to the short summary on the back cover, Frank Bork is a former advertising executive who subsequently decided to argue against nature, not to mention a couple of centuries worth of discoveries in the fields of biology, paleontology, biochemistry, evolution and several other sciences without any qualifications in any of them. Essentially he says that there are some totally amazing creatures in the world and he can't understand how they could have evolved naturally so there must have been a god involved in the process.

The book is organised as a series of vignettes, each about 2 to 5 pages long describing some peculiarity in the natural world. The examples he chooses are wondrous but at the end of each Bork makes outrageous and unsupported assertions in arriving at his inevitable conclusion that the observed phenomenon could not have arisen by natural means. Many of these assertions display Bork's complete lack of understanding of biological sciences and even cosmology. Some of my favourites are:

1) From the introduction: "... there is still no proof that any species has gradually developed from another. On the contrary, the fossil record indicates that species appear fully formed, persist nearly unchanged for millions of years and then disappear just as suddenly to be replaced by new species." This of course is so far off the mark as to not even qualify as being wrong.

2) Boek uses up quite a lot of ink saying that science does not explain how life got started. While this is true, Bork goes to the trouble of setting up straw men to knock down. This is also from the introduction where he talks about planetary conditions amenable to life: "... unless these planets possess certain atoms and molecules on which life depends, and these elements are compelled to join together in precisely the right order, there would be no life -- only billions of sterile planets spinning uselessly around innumerable useless stars. This is an unlikely situation since nature uses little or nothing without a purpose. Rather the complex structures of atoms and molecules and their joining together into ever more complex structures capable of supporting life indicate planning from the very beginning." Well there are a few things wrong here. Firstly, the universe as we observe it is extraordinarily wasteful. Consider that of all the energy emitted by the sun, only the tiniest fraction strikes the surface of any of its planets; the rest just streams off uselessly into space. Hardly an efficient plan. Secondly, it is highly likely that most planets do not support life. In our own solar system we only know of one for sure. There may be or may have been others but the chances are that Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Neptune are "sterile planets spinning uselessly" around the sun. If there is design, then what purpose do they serve? Thirdly, what does it really take for life to get started? All that is needed is a single molecule which can make a copy of itself from materials in its environment. There is a certain minumum complexity for a self-replicating molecule but it does not have to be DNA and indeed the earliest replicators on Earth were almost certainly something simpler. Fourthly, see how Bork asserts nature has purpose and yet the entire book is devoted to dismissing nature as without purpose in favour of a designer god. He wants to win whether the coin lands heads or tails.

Bizarre Engineers is a vignette about spider webs in which Bork really displays a lack of imagination. He says "It is difficult to see how web building could have evolved slowly, or in piecemeal fashion, as Darwin's theory proposes. The spider's new-found silk must have proved useful from the beginning, and the spider must have been endowed with complete instructions for using it." This is a common and egregious folly, that of assuming that something less than a complete spider web such as we see today would not have given its ancestor some competitive advantage over its peers. A glow worm makes do with a single pendant thread.

Flying Computers really shows how little Bork knows about living systems. He talks about nocturnal insect-eating bats and says that bats would always have had to fly at night and without sonar (echolocation) they would have starved therefore flight and sonar had to be developed at the same time and echolocation could not have developed gradually. In doing so he makes the assumption that bats have always occupied their current ecological niche; that there could never have been a day or twilight flyer which could (for example) find its prey by sight, or by listening passively for the sound made by the insects in flight. He then uses this lack of imagination to assert that "the bat must have received its dual gift of flight and an internal sonar system at the same time, programmed into its genetic code from the very beginning. ... In the course of millions of years, natural selection may have helped to strengthen both characteristics after they appeared but it could never have formed them."

"Evolution By Chance or by Design" is so weak on science and reason that it is not even good Creationist propaganda.