DARWINISM: AN INCOMPLETE THEORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Ron Minarik
(May 2003; Updated October 2005)

In considering only biology Darwinism neglects a vital part of evolution—the prebiotic part. The entire evolution process includes the formation of at least one universe possessing attributes that allow the creation of life in general and humanity in particular. The prebiotic part of human evolution cannot be ignored. It is of major importance regarding scientific confirmation of a natural human evolution.

The foundation of Darwinism rests entirely on the premise that biological evolution results from a process that involves no help from an external source of intelligence.¹ This is a huge assumption. Once the assumption is made the rest of the theory—random mutations and natural selection—is logical if not brilliant. But everything hinges on the basic premise that there were enough prebiotic attempts to start life and evolve humanity by nature alone, a premise that has not been verified by observation or a comprehensive analysis.

Prior observations give important insight but at best they show that only parts of evolution—various biological parts—could have been natural.²

The best way to verify any process is through direct observation. To verify a natural human evolution, experiments must show it is possible to randomly create a universe that has the atoms, solar system, planet and prebiotic molecules suitable to life. Experiments must also isolate these molecules and have them randomly assemble into a form of life that, still without any outside help, mutates to human beings along with the necessary environment.³

Unfortunately, limited resources (mainly time, money, and experimental practicality) makes it difficult if not impossible to perform all the observations needed to justify a natural human evolution. So we must resort to a top-down quantitative analysis for the entire evolution process, not just portions thereof.

We can be confident that biological evolution occurred without external help if we can compute a high probability for the outcome (i.e., humanity). Anything other than a quantitative answer is conjecture. It may be important conjecture that shows how to achieve a quantitative result but without numbers it is still conjecture and should not be mistaken for analytic proof.

Lack of a comprehensive probabilistic analysis is a major deficiency when trying to justify Darwinism. The analysis must determine (1) the number of natural attempts at achieving the outcome and (2) the probability of so doing for each attempt.

The number of attempts at evolving humanity depends on the number of universes suitable to life and the number of attempts in each universe.⁴ The only thing we know for sure is that there exists at least one universe—ours. Could there have been enough attempts in our universe to evolve life and human-level intelligence without external help? We still don’t know if just a single universe of our type could be formed by natural means, (e.g., by a verifiable “theory of everything”) but in order to continue we assume it was.

Starting with the birth of our universe we break the overall evolution process into three parts: forming a planet with the right environment, the formation of life, and evolving this life plus the necessary ecology all the way to humanity.

There does not appear to have been enough attempts in our single universe to obtain a high probability for the natural formation of life, much less the occurrence of the entire process.⁵ To obtain a high probability for the overall process it appears we need more attempts in more universes.

Yet here again we have a problem. We don’t know if multiple universes can be formed and, even if they can, how many natural attempts were made at forming universes suitable to life. Knowing the number of suitable universes is crucial. Even if the probability of naturally evolving humanity in a single universe is infinitesimally small (yet not identical to zero), a sufficient number of suitable universes mathematically guarantees the natural evolution of human-level intelligence in at least one of them.

So even if we cannot scientifically validate Darwinism regarding human evolution, we likewise cannot conclude that external intelligence was involved.

Furthermore, given enough natural evolutionary processes in multiple universes, some processes will sporadically incur brief periods of rapid progress toward the final result. This could explain why biological evolution, presumed to be a slow process, has apparently experienced some quick spurts.⁶

Because we do not know how many universes were created at random we have an agnostic dilemma. Too few universes and natural human evolution would be extremely unlikely with a probability near zero, which indicates that something unnatural (i.e., external intelligence) was involved. Conversely, a sufficient number of suitable universes and natural human evolution seems inevitable with a probability near unity. Then too, parts of human evolution may have been natural while other parts were not.^7,8

From a scientific standpoint this dilemma is not very satisfying. But we might overcome it by expanding the investigation of human evolution to that of overall human existence. (See

1. External intelligence, if it exists, is defined as intelligence that would exist regardless how humanity was formed and which can reside outside our range of observation. (We do not exclude the case that if external intelligence does indeed exist it may be able to appear within our observable range.)

Because of physical limitations our scientific range of observation presently excludes regions external to our universe as well as any unobservable region that cannot be defined in terms of our 4-dimensional space, regardless if it is located outside or inside our universe. Unobservable regions inside our universe could include regions within black holes and fundamental particles. Regions within distant galaxies, however, are not classified as unobservable because humanity may be able to eventually observe or even reach them.

2. In a sense Darwinism assumes the answer to the question of how evolution occurred. That is, if we first assume that life and humanity evolved without help from external intelligence then Darwinism is the way it had to happen.

3. If there are multiple natural ways to achieve the outcome—in this case humanity—then even if we experimentally demonstrate a complete natural human evolution path through experiment (a formidable task in itself) we could not be sure we had duplicated the actual evolution steps that may have taken place. Still, by demonstrating at least one path we would show that natural human evolution was possible. (Another possibility, however, is that there were enough attempts to evolve humanity by natural means yet external intelligence was involved anyway. An analogy is that biological molecules can be produced either naturally or in the lab with help from human “external intelligence.”)

4. System_Definition
To quantitatively analyze human evolution we define a system consisting of one or more universes that are specified in space and time. If our universe is the only one that exists then the system consists of only one universe. If there are multiple universes then the overall system consists of multiple subsystems, each with its own timeline.

The system space consists of the volume occupied by the universe(s) and the (composite) timeline starts with the birth of one or more universes and runs through the onset of inquisitive intelligence, the kind of intelligence that asks questions and which in our case we have called “humanity.” The system has a large enough number of components (particles with and without mass) to permit statistical methods, particularly the assignment of probabilities to various outcomes.

There could be processes required for human evolution that lie outside the defined system, e.g., processes leading to the formation of one or more universes. But until we can verify such processes we restrict the analysis to the above system definition.

5. Although an exact probability computation may be unrealistic for the overall evolution process, it may be possible to compute an extremely low maximum probability for just one of the evolution steps: the probability of forming life in our single universe by purely natural means, i.e., through a random collision of molecules. A low probability would mean that natural evolution was impractical for a single universe. (Initial analysis, to be given in a separate paper, indicates a very low probability for the natural formation of life in our single universe.)

6. Darwinism states that beneficial mutations to a species occur relatively slowly. However, Darwinism has major components that occur at random, specifically random mutations (along with random environmental interactions) that ultimately lead to natural selection. If there are enough attempts to obtain the outcome of a process that involves random components then some steps (e.g., some beneficial mutations) could occur relatively quickly.

7. In addition to our DNA-based humanity there might be other ways to produce inquisitive intelligence by a natural process. It would seem that the number of different ways would increase with the number of different type universes, although there may be different ways in our single universe. Furthermore, it could be that our specific kind of inquisitive intelligence was irrelevant—if it had a different form we would not be aware of it. We would still call ourselves “human.” Multiple ways of evolving inquisitive intelligence would increase our chance of evolving with no external help. This further complicates the problem of trying to compute whether or not our evolution was natural.

8. Semantic Issues
If we define a natural process as one that involves no intelligence of any kind then elements of Darwinism may not be natural in the strict sense of the word. A Darwinistic evolution would eventually produce organisms that survived by making decisions, at which point a form of intrinsic intelligence becomes involved. On the other hand, we could define human evolution to be natural if the process involves no external intelligence. This definition permits intelligence that evolved inside our universe to perform “natural” acts that benefit evolution. For example, it would be natural for an intelligent species to aid survival by hiding from predators or making weapons for protection. But how far do we extend this notion? Carrying it to the extreme we might say that automobiles are formed by a “natural” process, that is, it is natural for evolution to eventually produce intelligent beings who seek a better mode of transportation.

Similar rationale applies to the word random, where the biological evolution of advanced organisms may have led to intelligent (i.e., nonrandom) decisions that benefited human evolution. So to minimize semantics issues the word random is used sparingly, regarding processes that involve no intelligence. These include postulated (though probabilistically unsubstantiated) processes leading up to the formation of life and the process of random mutations that permits natural selection. (It is acknowledged that these processes must adhere to the “nonrandom” laws of physics and chemistry. But the processes also contain random components. For example, a collection of simple molecules can form the building blocks of life but the chemistry occurs through random molecular collisions and perhaps a fortunate occurrence of suitable stimulation such as UV radiation. Furthermore, such random collisions would not only produce biotic molecules but also molecules that are not required for life and may even be detrimental to it.)

Instead of using the terms natural or random we could say that Darwinism and related theories presume an isolated process, one that occurs in a system that does not interact with external entities. Although we might argue that no system is ever completely isolated, the isolation can be good enough such that flow across the system boundary has an insignificant effect on system properties and the outcome of internal processes.

We do not want to get bogged down in semantic debates. Fortunately, a quantitative analysis can avoid semantic problems. Regardless whether we refer to Darwinism as “natural,” “substantially random,” “unplanned,” “unassisted” or “a process that takes place in an effectively isolated multi-component system,” the key point is that various aspects of evolution can be regarded as statistical processes that can be analyzed in terms of probabilities. We may not be able to compute some probabilities due to system unknowns and computational complexity. But we can always obtain a credible range for a probability, even if we can only say that the range is near-zero to near-unity and that we cannot draw any conclusions.

Copyright © 2003, 2005-2008 by Ron Minarik

R. Minarik, Darwinism: An Incomplete Theory of Human Evolution, searchforexistence.com website, September 2005.