Debugging Before, During, and After Completed Assembly

            Even though the mechanical and robotics engineers, production assembly-line experts, and project engineers may have designed several automobile manufacturing assembly-lines in the past, new innovations in the automobile require additional changes in new assembly-lines.

            Such things as power steering, anti-lock brakes, fuel injection, engines placed in the rear-end of the car, GPS screens built into the dashboard, hands-off backwards steering for parallel parking, Bluetooth© telephone systems, openable sun-roofs, hybrid gas-and-electric fueling, all-electric cars, and a number of other innovations…add new features to be considered and analyzed in terms of the debugging of the mass-production assembly-lines to manufacture new models of automobiles.

            Genetic mutations in living plants and animals, defined as random accidental mistakes (manufacturing assembly-line bugs) being put-out as variant traits to be chosen or rejected by natural selection, is the hallmark, common ancestry feature ofDarwinism, the essence of the theory of macroevolution. 

            But as covered briefly in the essay Are Science and God in Conflict, Dr. Michael J. Behe has written a book entitled Darwin Devolves[1] in which he discusses the recent discoveries in molecular biochemistry that now more accurately describe the mutation/selection processes in biology. 

            Thanks to the recent progress made in gene mapping, scientists can now identify the genetic mutations on the DNA strand and track these specifically to the beneficial traits they put-out to be chosen by natural selection. 

            This explains the variations in finch birds on the Galapagos Islands that Darwin observed in the 1830’s, being innovative variations that do not extend farther than the two lowest taxonomic categories of genus and species.

            This evidence from molecular biochemistry now limits Darwinian evolution to devolution.

            This is an extremely important finding that demonstrates at the gene molecular level of specifically how each living organism puts-out variant traits to better adapt to different ecological environments.

            This scientific discovery that Darwinian evolution is in actuality a process of devolution, shows-up the fallibility of mankind in our original perceptions and assessments. 

            At the same time, it reveals the unimaginable brilliance of design in the creation of the natural world which compellingly argues for the existence of an Intelligent Agent God.

            The sun appears phenomenally to go around the earth, and human intellect can take credit for eventually finding the right answer with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, that the earth spins as it rotates around the sun. 

This gives the true explanation for the appearance that the sun is going around the earth, from the vantage point of someone standing upon the earth watching as the sun hourly travels across the sky from east to west.

            The stars in the night sky appear to be unmoving, the universe giving all indication of being static and therefore intuitively eternal and unchanging.

            “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) was confirmed by the discovery of the Big Bang creation of the universe at a moment in time about 13.7-billion years ago. 

            The reality of a Big Bang beginning of the universe that existed from the first moments of creation was waiting for science and technology to invent new telescopes large enough to peer deep into outer space.  This produced the empirical evidence to overturn the conventional wisdom of a static and unchanging universe, which was wrongly based upon phenomenal appearances.

            Since Darwin, the controversial but growing consensus in biology was that genetic mutations could go in a positive direction, accumulating over time to form the creative masterpieces of winged flight, the eyesight of a night owl, the running speed of a cheetah, the bi-pedal upright walking of human beings, human speech, the singing of birds, and human intellectual and moral reasoning.

            Prior to this new Age of Information, it was assumed that genetic mutation and natural selection must have the creative power to sustain the ever-growing proliferation of the vast diversity of life we now see in the natural world.

            Like the incorrect orbital arrangement of the planets in our solar system started by Aristotle through the phenomenal observation of the apparent movement of the sun, and like the appearance of the static and unchanging nature of the universe based upon looking up at the stars of the night sky, Charles Darwin created the momentum of the macroevolutionary thinking of major innovative change over time in biology.

            This produced a blind-spot to the entirely counterintuitive idea that intelligent agency could intentionally build into the manufacturing assembly-line process of life a small number of “bugs” brilliantly designed to produce a limited amount of beneficial variation.  These bugs facilitate adaptability within species through the actual “breakage” or degrading of existing genes.

            Until the very recent time that science and technology could empirically question the Darwinian orthodoxy that beneficial mutations were entirely random, I do not believe that anyone including theists anticipated this new development coming from the field of molecular biochemistry.

            The idea that the mutation/selection process was not a result of mindless and undirected processes based upon the phenomenal, observed output of beneficial traits, but counterintuitively could intentionally have been the built-in product of intelligent agency…was a concept that escaped everyone.

            Previously stuck for decades in the theoretical paradigm of Darwinian macroevolution of always progressing incrementally forward from the simple to the complex, this new concept of devolution of how genes could be broken in order to put-out beneficial mutations…is engaging scientific researchers to this day. 

            Intelligently designing-in “breaks” in the DNA, of damaged genes randomly placed throughout a population of organisms to produce the in-built variation in the finches that could then adapt and survive on the varied islands of the Galapagos Archipelago…is novel ingenuity “squared.”

            It runs entirely counter to the mass-production assembly-line trial-runs to debug the process of the manufacture of numerous identical products.

            Human manufacturing of identical repetitive products attempts to identify and remove bugs through trial-runs, but it now appears that cells intentionally use broken and degraded genes to produce beneficially adaptive variant traits, the opposite of what we might expect.

            This goes back to the lessons-learned over the course of the Scientific Revolution thatwe have to dig deeper beyond obvious phenomenal appearances to discover the real truth about things.

            This reveals a Creator God in the Bible that has set-up the natural world in such a way as to provide not only an orderly and intelligible environment to scientifically investigate, but also our innate capacity to be able to conduct science in an effort to find real and genuine truth, no matter how phenomenally counterintuitive things initially appear going in.

             That modern scientific investigation could discover at the molecular level that genetic mutations are the cause of the beneficial physical variation within species, as a result of the breakage and loss of information on the DNA double-helix strand of genetic code, is mind-boggling to contemplate.    

            This discovery takes macroevolution off-the-board as a viable player, as a purely materialistic explanation for the origin and diversity of life.

            This elevates a true reality that has always been there in the natural world, the existence of an Intelligent Agent God who created a world of reality that often requires digging deep to find real truth.

“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.”                                                   (Jer. 29:13)

            Mother Nature could never take the proactive debugging of mass-production, manufacturing assembly-lines and morph this into beneficial genetic mutations chosen by natural selection to better facilitate adaptation.

            Here is where the modern industrial manufacturing idea of debugging before, during, and after the assembly of products on mass-production assembly-lines inside large factories sets-up the backstory context for understanding the counterintuitive quality of the recent discovery in molecular biochemistry…that evolution is actually a process of devolution.  

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[1] Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2019).