Biologic Institute

One of Biologic Institute’s research projects goes public this week, with a paper in PLoS ONE describing a new model for studying protein evolution [1] and a project at SourceForge.net providing the software to implement it [2] (both free of charge).

Okay—it’s not free beer, but here’s why we think it’s an exciting development anyway.

The challenge Darwinism currently faces is about broad explanatory principles—what kinds of things can be produced by undirected causes and what kinds of things can’t (even in billions of years). So, while the main goal is to explain the things of biology, it should be possible to advance that goal by examining things that are like the things of biology in some important way.

Computer models may prove very useful here.

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Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience.

So Darwin’s suggestion that genius and diligence are optional if patience is plentiful is a stretch for most of us. Richard Dawkins put it this way:

It took a very large leap of imagination for Darwin and Wallace to see that, contrary to all intuition, there is another way and, once you have understood it, a far more plausible way, for complex ‘design’ to arise out of primeval simplicity. A leap of the imagination so large that, to this day, many people seem unwilling to make it. [1]

I doubt anyone, Dawkins included, would generally recommend sweeping aside all intuition to accommodate leaps of imagination, particularly when the intuition is your own and the leap is not. If Darwinism really is plausible, it must instead be the case that Darwin leapt to something of substance—something that really explains how, contrary to our intuitions, the remarkable gadgets we see in biology can be chalked up to mindless inevitability. What exactly is this explanation? It needs to be compelling, whatever it is, since the intuition we’re being asked to abandon is so tied to real-world experience—the very stuff of science.

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