I think Douglas Axe did a pretty good job calculating the probability of a single protein forming naturally and concluded that the proportion of sequences capable of forming a stable, functional β-lactamase fold is roughly 1 in 10⁷⁷. That seems pretty unlikely.
So, I’m not arguing that nature cannot, within physical law, produce very very complex interactions, I’m just asking about specific constructs which, under normal circumstances, would be expected to have been created by someone; The bacterial flagellum, for instance, works like a tiny outboard motor: its basal body serves as the engine and drive shaft, the hook acts as a universal joint, and the filament functions as the propeller, all powered by a proton-driven rotary motor anchored in the cell’s membrane. This isn’t something one would expect to see as a product of wind and water, can we agree on that?
Can you give me an example of a pattern which nature cannot replicate? I think we all have seen the picture of Jesus in a piece of toast, or faces in clouds, pareidolia. All patterns are assessed for their likelihood of origination; chance v design, its the stuff of conspiracy theory, and we all do it, particularly when evidence is less than enough.
So, is it “undetectable”? The statues on Easter island have no known creator, we can guess, but we simply don’t know who or what created them. By your theory, we should default to “there was no guidance” involved in their formation?
If no “useful probabilities cannot be calculated” why should the default be blind luck? Moreover, does your principle apply to all historical anomalies, like the Pyramids or the megalithic structures at Machu Picchu, countless markings on cave walls, pointed stones that look like arrow heads, clearly to the uninitiated , and why is the default “no guidance”?
It seems to me, and generally to most folks, some constructs for whom their origination is unknown defy “no guidance” theories, right?
I’ve researched and actually talked to Dr Tour and it seems pretty convincing he’s debunked abiogenesis as a theory, and if intelligence was needed for the first cell, it seems the default expectation should be; if intelligence at any point, then intelligence at every point, unless proven otherwise? Where is Dr Tour wrong? He did build a protein car and stuff.
Yeah, but what if you tossed those million throws and it came up 6’s every time? Would you think someone rigged them? I would.
Is it your theory that all anomalous constructions must either be a product of human intelligence or unguided Nature? That is, the only intelligence in this universe must be Human? If not human designed, then the default must be unguided nature?
The point being, Intelligence is a source of some productions, we both agree on that I think. Wrt biology though, some things: the first cell, evolving informational systems (so far as we know, they never evolve, they degenerate into non-functional states), random mutation which does not destroy the system long before it enhances it, seems to defy naturalistic explanations.
“It has been explored at great length Or maybe it would be better to say this is the key failing of Intelligent Design; there is no hypothesis for design or a Designer which would allow any distinction between evolution and design.”
I’m not a scientist, which is clearly obvious to everyone here, my perspective here is a meta observation; I don’t need to distinguish between design and evolution to have the expectation that what I’m looking definitely appears to be a product of intelligence; The DNA system itself — digital information written on molecular media, complete with self-correcting code, redundancy, and the ability to reproduce trillions of copies of copies without catastrophic loss — seems to be evidence enough. It functions like engineered code, it repairs itself like engineered systems, and it maintains fidelity across unimaginable scales of replication.
To claim such a system arose without intelligence, and without evidence doesn’t seem like a scientific explanation, more like an article of faith in randomness. The default expectation should be Intelligence, particularly given we have evidence intelligence can replicate; though to a lessor degree such a system and no evidence blind nature can. As such, those who believe that a code can write, error-check, and perpetuate itself without an intelligent coder, it seems to me they shoulder the burden of proof.
Many of your recent posts don’t appear to be a reply to anyone. Could you ensure you’re quoting the people you are responding to so we can keep track of what you’re responding to?
I’m sorry to say but his paper is terrible. The method he used in his experiments is simply incapable of telling him what the probability of a protein forming naturally is. For one thing, he’s not testing for any degree of fitness enhancing function.
I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with the details of his experimental proceduere, because once you understand those it will also become obvious that his experiment simply cannot give the sort of information he’s advertising his paper as showing, and how he deceptively set up the experiment to give numbers that would be less favorable to evolution.
It will reveal he wasn’t seeking truth.
Furthermore, since we know from phylogenetic evidence that β-lactamase evolved from other proteins, it’s also completely meaningless to try to estimate the fraction of sequence space that correspond to “the fold” (itself a misnomer since folds are arbitrary human distinctions as protein structural space is actually fluid).
It is thought, due to strong phylogenetic evidence, that many very complex proteins actually evolved in this way—from other proteins—so their de novo probability is completely irrelevant to how difficult they were to evolve.
Yes it’s a fascinating little molecular machine. But none of that is a good reason to suppose it was designed rather than evolved, exactly because we are not “under normal circumstances” with respect to the flagellum.
It’s a self-assembling genetically encoded assemblage of proteins, the majority of which are known to be evolutionarily related to other proteins, particularly within the flagellum itself many of the proteins show significant similarities that support it’s gradual evolution as a protein secretion system.
Particularly the rod, hook, and filament proteins all appear to be derived from ancient secreted adhesins. They are similar to each other, and to adhesins.
Isn’t it just too weird a coincidence that the proteins secreted by the flagellar secretion system (fT3SS) and go on to make up the rod/driveshaft, hook, and filament, are similar to adhesins, which are also secreted proteins exported by non-flagellar type three secretion systems? Why would a designer intentionally create the structural components of the flagellum to look like they are evolutionarily related to, and derived from each other, and from adhesins?
There are many interesting and curious details about the flagellum and it’s proteins which, when known, make it all the more obvious how it is a product of evolution.
But it wasn’t created by wind and water. It isn’t a rock that was weathered or eroded into a specific shape. The best evidence we have is that it is the product of evolution.
You have several posts here that have the form of a reply to someone and yet are not labeled as replies. Nor can I in most cases determine from context whom you are replying to or, in fact, what you are talking about. This is a problem.
I will note in passing that the statues on Easter Island do have known creators, i.e. the people of the island; there is no mystery about how they were made or by whom.
And I would say that treating intelligent design as a scientific hypothesis has the main problem that it’s too vague to be testable, because there is no clear feature of a designed organism that clearly distinguishes it from an undesigned one.
Sorry but James Tour is rather ignorant about the field of abiogenesis. He knows very little biology too, and it’s obvious this field is actually a huge blindspot to him. He appears to be so opposed to what is going on in the field that he’s having a hard time comprehending or characterizing what they are doing, why, what we know, and so on.
Edit: Just to be sure, it’s not that everything Tour says on the topic is just wrong or foolish. Many scientists agree that there is a problem with sensationalistic statements both in science journalism more broadly (not unique to the field of abiogenesis at all, or anything related to “origins” science, as Tour often seems to insinuate), and in their press releases and introductions to papers. Much of the field is definitely speculative and hypotheses are rather vague and take many things for granted that are largely unknown, or poorly supported.
But all that aside, just to pick one quick example where Tour is completely off the mark, Tour claims in one of his recent videos that proteins made of amino acids “without any of the ten with reactive side chains” can’t fold, and according to him, therefore can’t function.
First of all it isn’t clear which ten amino acids he’s thinking of (all amino acids except glycine have side chains with some degree of reactivity), but it’s also irrelevant.
There is good evidence that the first proteins were made of reduced protein alphabets (perhaps as few as 5 different amino acids out of the ~20 we find in extant life), and that these proteins were both foldable and functional.
But it’s also untrue that a protein has to be able to adopt a stable fold in order to function, as we know of intrinsically disordered proteins that can’t fold into stable structures, yet are still able to function. Even unfolded amino acid chains can still bind to various surfaces, and other molecules with matching hydopathic profiles, which are bona fide biological functions.
This is an example where James Tour appears to have been “educated” by reading creationist literature, rather than getting an actual real education in biochemistry and molecular biology. And he’s been misinformed about these things, and it leads him to just be perpetually wrong about what is possible about the origin of life.
OMG… like… even if it is true that only those ten are reactive (can’t tell which he is talking about) hasn’t he heard of cofactors or coenzymes (almost half of our enzymes rely on these)? One of the hypotheses being discussed in orgins of life is that the first proteins or precursors of them are short peptides that form ‘nests’ for metal or ion cofactors. These nest are still found in some of the most ancient enzymes motifs, but the hypothesis is that the nests by themselves can bind onto the cofactors and function. (see here and here).
Bad example. We may not know the exact identity of the who carved them. But we know that human beings capable of creating stone statues exist, so the conclusion that this is how the statues came to be is well-justified.
Whereas we know of no intelligent being who can create a bacterial flagellum, and certainly not one who existed thousands of years ago when the flagellum first came to be. So intelligent design as an explanation is a non-starter.
Tour is only convincing to people who are already biased against the idea that life could arise wthout God’s direct action. No one in the field of origin of life research, and few in biology in general, take him seriously.
In any event, your logic is seriously flawed. If we conclude that a stone statue was created by intelligent design, it does not follow that the rock it was carved from was also the result if intelligence.
I presume this in response to my comment. To answer: Yes, one would conclude that the dice had been tampered with in some way to make them only come up 6’s. But that is irrelevant to my point. If a single die came up 6 exactly 1/6 of the time, there would be no reason to suspect anything but chance as the explanation. Right?
Now, let’s apply this to evolutionary biology. We know that beneficial mutations are much less likely than are neutral or detrimental mutations. So, if our observations was that only beneficial mutations occurred over the course of the history of life, we would have to conclude that there were some factors involved that we do not yet understand (Note that the jump to the conclusion that intelligence is involved is still not warranted).
But that is not the case. Our observation is that neutral, detrimental and beneficial mutations occur at more or less the frequency that would be expected. Also, the subsequent course of how frequent they become in a population and whether they are eventually fixed or disappear from the population is accurately described by the equations of population genetics.
That leaves no reason to suspect that anything is involved other than the natural, biological processes that are already well understood.
However, our observation is also that unguided evolutionary processes can produce systems of immense complexity, beyond anything that humans have yet produced. Also, our observation is that all beings capable of intelligent design only come into existence thru the DNA system. So, the most logical conclusion, following your reasoning, is that the DNA system could not have been created by an intelligent being.
So, I’ve reviewed some of this book, and here is the issue I’m seeing. Perakh’s discussion in Why Intelligent Design Fails (Young & Edis 2006, ch. 6) treats the openness of living systems; continuous energy and matter exchange with the environment, as sufficient to permit “local decreases in entropy” and therefore the spontaneous rise of “information.” This reasoning conflates thermodynamic entropy, a measure of energy dispersion (S = k ln Ω), with Shannon informational entropy, a measure of signal uncertainty (H = –Σ p log p). While an open thermodynamic system can maintain or even increase physical order through energy throughput, there is no empirical or theoretical corollary by which energy flow alone can create or preserve functional information. In fact, all evidence indicates the opposite: unless an informational system is specifically designed to withstand the noise induced by the increase or decrease of energy—through coding, redundancy, and error-correction mechanisms—energy fluctuations invariably accelerate the entropic (Shannon) degradation of stored information.
What is remarkable in biology is that genetic information endures massive environmental flux: genomes survive asteroid impacts, volcanic winters, intense cold, heat, radiation, and chemical perturbation. Such resilience strongly implies a pre-engineered robustness within the informational architecture itself—error-correction, repair, and redundancy mechanisms tuned to withstand vast energetic disturbance. Far from suggesting spontaneous origin, the capacity of the genetic system to remain coherent through planetary-scale catastrophes underscores the sophistication of its design.
We have no evidence whatsoever that a data-storage and replication system of comparable durability, reliability, and self-repair could ever arise by undirected physical processes.
As Brillouin cautioned, the analogy between entropy and information “must not be taken for identity” (Science and Information Theory, 1956, p. 12). Yockey demonstrated that “the genetic code is not an analogy but an exact communication system” and cannot arise by thermodynamic ordering alone (Information Theory and Molecular Biology, 1992, p. 313). More recently, Walker and Davies (2013, J. R. Soc. Interface 10:20120869) emphasized that the origin of life is “algorithmic, not thermodynamic”: living systems persist by maintaining and transmitting semantic information against noise, not by merely exporting heat. Thus, while Perakh correctly observes that open systems can exhibit local negentropy, we possess no evidence that such systems can originate or sustain informational order without prior intelligent or algorithmic design; empirically, unstructured energy tends to destroy informational coherence rather than generate it.
Over 400+ million years, any theory which relies on unguided creation of such code, still existing, after trillions and trillions of copies of copies, enduring massive cataclysmic events and still functional, seems absurd on its face.
An environment can only reward what already works. Fitness cannot operate in a void; it presupposes a system that is already capable of performing a coherent function. The moment that point is granted, a preexisting informational substrate has been introduced, and the argument becomes circular. It assumes the very functionality it needs to explain. That is the first error, the question begging.
Even if one allows this built in “fitness” standard, the problem does not go away. A functional protein still has to be found within an ocean of non functional possibilities, and once found it must be integrated into a larger system that can use it. Each of those steps reintroduces the same statistical barrier that Axe quantified. The issue is not whether selection can refine what works, but how the first working element appears at all.
This brings us back to abiogenesis and to Dr. James Tour’s work on the origin of life. The issue is not the chemistry of simple molecules but the informational barrier of the first functional cell. Before there can be any concept of fitness, there must already exist a system that can store, read, and apply information toward its own survival. That system must include encoded instructions, decoding machinery, and the coordinated chemistry to execute those instructions. None of this follows from random reactions in a prebiotic soup. The problem is not making amino acids; it is organizing them into a self-referential, information-driven process.
Tour’s demonstrations highlight that even with unlimited lab control and intelligent intervention, the assembly of such a system has never been achieved. The origin of the first functional cell therefore remains not a chemical question but an informational one. The very existence of a “fitness” test presupposes that this informational architecture was already in place. Without it, selection, replication, and adaptation are meaningless terms.
The appeal to human manufacture as the only valid reference for design is disingenuous. Intelligence has recognizable hallmarks. We use human design as a standard only because it is the form of intelligence we know intimately, not because it is the only kind that could exist. To say that something shows the traits of design does not require that the designer must be human, failing that it must be blind unguided nature. When we find a shaped stone that serves a purpose, bears the marks of percussion, and has balanced symmetry, we do not hesitate to infer that someone, not something, made it. The inference is drawn from the evidence of purposeful arrangement, not from the identity of the maker.
The same logic applies to biological systems. The bacterial flagellum and countless other molecular machines display coding, coordination, error correction, and functional integration, that in every other known case, comes only from intentional design. The absence of a known manufacturer does not erase the signature of purpose; it only reminds us that the designer is not yet identified.
The hallmark of design is the reversal of both thermodynamic and informational entropy. In nature, energy disperses and information decays toward noise, yet living systems move against that current. They preserve, repair, and transmit coherent information while resisting the disorder that physics would otherwise impose. That behavior is not natural, it is purposeful organization acting within nature but cannot be explained by it.
Functional information capable of resisting both forms of entropy is unnatural on its face. It maintains structure and meaning against the very forces that destroy them. Such resilience, along with the capacity for error correction and adaptation, marks the presence of intelligence. A system that moves with intention, that preserves and builds order rather than letting it collapse, is not a product of chance. It bears the unmistakable signature of design.
The dismissal of Ewert’s dependency-graph work misses the point of what he was demonstrating. His model parallels what we see in every field of human design: a web of shared components and reused information rather than a simple branching tree of descent. The same engine can power cars, boats, and generators. The same software code can serve in phones, televisions, and computers, and, both human driven evolution and biological evolution, and we constantly see new hardware being integrated in novel ways. Yet it is not the hardware that matters most; it is the software which enables useful function.
This distinction exposes the core problem for naturalistic explanations. Where unguided processes might by chance produce a physical sub-system, there is no evidence that the corresponding informational system; the “software” that activates and coordinates it, can arise naturally. A flagellum or any other molecular structure might conceivably assemble by accident, but without the regulatory code that governs its timing and operation it is inert, like a novel computer processor with no OS able to run it is useless. Nature can produce amazing things using matter and energy, but it has never been shown to produce functional software.
That is what Ewert’s model reflects: systems of intentional reuse and integration, suggests guided evolution rather than blind descent. Biological organization, like human technology, shows coding, coordination, and outcome-based preference. Life does not merely persist; it strives, repairs, and preserves order against both physical and informational decay. That continual bias toward function and survival is not the signature of accident but the mark of mind acting within and upon nature.
The demand for falsifiability misses how science actually works in many established disciplines. Archaeologists infer design when they find artifacts that bear marks of intention — symmetry, proportion, repetition, or purposeful alignment; not because they can “falsify” a natural origin in the laboratory, but because design is the most probable explanation of the evidence. The same logic applies when a geologist distinguishes a flint-knapped arrowhead from a naturally fractured stone.
Inference to the best explanation is a standard scientific method, and probability is its guide. If the structure or information we observe fits the known patterns of purposeful arrangement far better than those of undirected processes, design is the rational conclusion. It would be absurd to call an arrowhead a “natural formation” simply because we cannot falsify every possible natural scenario that might produce it. The same principle holds for biological systems: the presence of coordinated, information-driven machinery warrants the same inference. Design is not a retreat from science; it is the consistent application of scientific reasoning wherever purposeful pattern is most probable.
No it doesn’t. There is nothing that indicates that functional information can’t be created by “energy flow”. Since we know functional information can evolve, and evolution is itself a process that can only take place in case there is an energy flow (in a disequilibrium), we know that in fact energy flows can create functional information.
Literally all of these sentences are mere assertions.
But we do have that. It’s the evidence we have that life as we know it is the product of a physical and chemical process. This immediately implies that the capacity to transmit information across generations could in fact arise by “undirected” physical processes.
Nobody claims it arose by “thermodynamic ordering alone” and that isn’t a requirement for abiogenesis.
This too is a mere assertion, and is contradicted by the evidence we have that life as we know it, with all it’s complexity and intricacies (including the capacity to replicate genetic sequence information at high fidelity) is in fact a product of physical and chemical processes.
, and why is the default “no guidance”?
Or maybe it would be better to say this is the key failing of Intelligent Design; there is no hypothesis for design or a Designer which would allow any distinction between evolution and design.”