Why The Brain Could Not Have Evolved By Chance
By DONALD DeMARCO
Pope St. John Paul II noted the following in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae: “Through the words, the actions, and the very person of Jesus, man is given the possibility of ‘knowing’ the complete truth concerning the value of human life” (chapter II).
The “complete” truth is omitted by the various secular messiahs while their partial truths abound. It is precisely because the partial truth contains some germ of truth that it has appeal. Nevertheless, because it does not include other truths, it can be seriously misleading. Man is more than matter, more than a temporal being, more than feeling, and more than a mere individual. He is a synthesis, a composite, a whole that is an amalgam of many parts.
“The thing from which the world suffers just now more than any other evil,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “is not the assertion of falsehood, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.”
Sartre emphasized freedom, but denied morality; Freud stressed instinct, but suppressed the spiritual; Nietzsche glorified the individual, but disdained the community; Marx celebrated the community, but rejected the individual; Darwin was enamored with empirical science, but excluded metaphysics. It is an all-too common theme. G.K., himself, we are happy to note, was not speaking in half-truths.
More contemporaneously, Richard Dawkins has joined the throng of those who pitch half-truths to a naive public by separating blind chance from intelligent design. Two sentences from his best-selling book, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), capture the author’s view about cosmic evolution, one that he has consistently maintained throughout his career:
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
There are many holes in this position, but I would like to direct attention to the unsupportable notion that the human brain, to focus on a single phenomenon, could possibly have evolved by sheer chance.
One of the great stumbling blocks for Darwin and other chance evolutionists is explaining how a multitude of factors simultaneously coalesce to form a unified, functioning system. The human brain could not have evolved as a result of the addition of one factor at a time. Its unity and phantasmagorical complexity defy any explanation that relies on pure chance.
It would be an underestimation of the first magnitude to say that today’s neurophysiologists know more about the structure and workings of the brain than did Charles Darwin and his associates.
Scientists in the field of brain research now inform us that a single human brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on the entire planet!
According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the brain’s complexity is staggering, beyond anything his team of researchers had ever imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief.
In the cerebral cortex alone, each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses that result, roughly, in a total of 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies! A single synapse may contain 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A synapse, simply stated, is the place where a nerve impulse passes from one nerve cell to another.
Phantasmagorical as this level of unified complexity is, it places us merely at the doorway of the brain’s even deeper mind-boggling organization. Glial cells in the brain assist in neuron speed. These cells outnumber neurons ten times over with 860 billion cells. All of this activity is monitored by microglia cells that not only clean up damaged cells but also prune dendrites, forming part of the learning process.
The cortex alone contains 100,000 miles of myelin — covered — insulated — nerve fibers. The process of mapping the brain would indeed be time consuming. It would entail identifying every synaptic neuron. If it took a mere second to identify each neuron, it would require 4,000,000,000 years to complete the project.
What makes all of this even more astonishing is the fact that the brain is 60 percent fat. In addition, a person’s brain, in all its unified complexity, evolved from a single, microscopic cell! The human brain is hardly what we would expect chance to produce.
It is supremely ironic that Dawkins relies on his brain to deny the implications of its unified complexity. This is like seeing yourself in the mirror and then denying that you exist.
Darwin, as we noted earlier, had a problem with irreducible complexity. He admitted that his theory could not begin to explain how a complex organ could develop in any other way than by numerous successive, slight modifications. The complex structure of the brain could not possibly have developed one factor at a time until it reached trillions of factors that somehow all worked in synchrony and provided its attendant organism with the ability to cogitate and philosophize about the brain itself as well as about the entire cosmos.
The notion of intelligent design is the logical complement of scientific research. It offers a truth that has the salutary merit of not being a half-truth.
