In opening the magazine we might expect that we would be treated to some very particular and convincing biological facts, or perhaps view a just-discovered archeological cache of valuable hitherto missing fossils linking the species. Something real, in other words.

Instead the scientists at Michigan State end up being computer scientists, and the creatures whose “evolution” they are so triumphantly parading as proof that evolution works are “digital organisms—strings of commands—akin to computer viruses.”

That’s it? Computer organisms?

Afraid so, which leads us to make what would seem to be an obvious point. What kind of desperation or fundamental confusions would lead anyone to identify the “evolution” of computer organisms with the evolution of actual organisms?

Let’s begin with the desperation. As we have just seen in a recent issue of National Geographic, evolutionary scientists and their defenders are feeling the sting of the rising number of scientists and philosophers who dare to point out the gaps in the reasoning and evidence of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise). (see tothesource article below: Has Darwin Become Dogma?)

Suddenly, they feel the need for public defense.

The confusion is related to the desperation. The turn to computers arises out of the need to assure people that evolution is demonstrably true, a way to shore up the gaps in the actual evidence with digital bits. But herein lies the confusion, and the confusion leads to a strange kind of illusion that computer generated images are, somehow, metaphysically identical with real animals and flowers.

Witness the following. The author of the piece Carl Zimmer assures us that the “digital bits” of the heralded computer program “can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates.” The software program that allows this evolutionary prestidigitation is called Avida.

After more than a decade of development, Avida’s digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life. “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off,” says Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State and a member of the Avida team. “Does this, does that, does this. Metabolism? Maybe not quite yet, but getting pretty close.”

Mr. Pennock is, by the way, one of the most strident critics of those who criticize evolution. That he seems nearly oblivious to the distinction between a living thing and digital ephemera on a computer screen does not bode well for his position. What could cause such a confusion?

The confusion is in great part the result of reductionism. Remember the rather unsophisticated kind of reductionism you experienced in high school science class? “You’re only worth $1.59,” the teacher would announce with an impish grin. “That’s right! If you reduced your body to its chemical constituents—hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on—it would be worth about $1.59 to a chemist!”

Well, the scientists at Michigan State are espousing a more sophisticated form of reductionism, one that assumes that there is really nothing else to a living thing than the chemical compound, DNA.

How so? DNA contains the genetic code. The genetic code is the cause of everything that the organism is or does. Therefore, all that we need to simulate life and its mysterious workings—we are assured—is to simulate the genetic code in a computer code. As Zimmer confidently states,

It may seem strange to talk about a chunk of computer codes in the same way you talk about a cherry tree or a dolphin. But the more biologists think about life, the more compelling the equations become. Computer programs and DNA are both sets of instructions. Computer programs tell a computer how to process information, while DNA instructs a cell how to assemble proteins.

The problem with this confusion is that…well, it’s confused. First and foremost, the reductionist belief that DNA is the secret of life, the chemical genie that magically produces organisms out of a linear computer-like code, is false. As biologist H. F. Nijhout states,

The most generally useful hypothesis about the function of genes is the following: Genes are passive sources of materials upon which a cell can draw, and are part of an evolved mechanism that allows organisms, their tissues and their cells to be independent of their environment by providing the means of synthesizing, importing, or structuring the substances (not just gene products, but all substances) required for metabolism, growth and differentiation.

In sum, DNA is not a genie. DNA is itself a wonderfully complex, but passive source of material used by the far more wonderfully intricate living cell. The cell simply cannot be reduced to DNA. (I refer to Nijhout here, so as not to be accused of using an anti-evolutionist in making this point about DNA.)

Therefore, a computer program that allegedly imitates some aspect of DNA tells us very little…except about the unfounded presuppositions of those who believe that they have created life by creating a computer program.

But that isn’t the only confusion. At the heart of their efforts to “prove evolution works,” is the conviction that merely random, natural processes alone can produce life through evolution. This is not a neutral conviction. It is formed as a denial that an intelligent agent, God, created life in all its splendor and complexity. The computer program was designed to show that we don’t need a Divine Designer.

Catch the contradiction? In order to demonstrate that the development of life doesn’t need intelligence to create and guide it, several very intelligent scientists get together and design a complex program run on an ingeniously designed computer…to demonstrate that intelligence and design play no part in evolution.

Perhaps Avida does prove something after all—the necessity of a intentional designer to make both digital and real organisms.

"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins

The scientists at Michigan State aren’t the first to make much ado about a computer program that allegedly “proves” evolution. In his bestseller The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Richard Dawkins championed his computer- generated “biomorphs” as a way of demonstrating that we live in a God-less universe.

The cell simply cannot be reduced to DNA

Unfortunately, reductionism is the rule among biologists, rather than the exception. But some notable biologists, such as molecular biologist Franklin Harold, have rejected such reductionism. As Harold points out, the normal procedure of molecular biologists is (oddly) to destroy that which they are studying, a rather vivid kind of reductionism:

When [we] biochemists set out to tackle a problem, our first step is commonly to grind the intricate fabric of cells and tissues into a pulp (a homogenate, as we say in the trade). This is a significant act, representing a drastic reduction in the level of organization. It allows us to treat living matter as a mixture of chemicals,…To be sure, something is sacrificed by this violent procedure—not only life itself, but all the spatial order that impresses anyone who inspects a photomicrograph [of a cell]. But never mind: biochemists still cherish the premise that nothing irretrievable is lost by homogenization, and that given the macromolecules, all the essentials are present and accounted for. We know quite well that this cannot be true, but the focus on the molecules defines that layer of knowledge that we designate as biochemistry or molecular biology, and undergirds our professional identity.

Yet, even though such reductionism is all too readily accepted, Harold argues that biology must move back to the obvious—living things are real, and not reducible to their chemical parts.

During the past half-century, the program of analyzing the structure of cells in search of their common denominators has been pursued to the molecular level with notable success and with mounting zeal. This single-minded concentration on the relatively tractable problems of chemical structures and interactions has been accompanied by neglect of the higher levels of biological order, often to the point of absurdity. Surely, one plain lesson to be read in the prevalence of cellular architecture [in all living things] is that organized complexity is one of the essential characteristics of life. From this viewpoint, the significance of cells is that they represent the minimal level of organization capable of displaying the activities we associate with life, including self-reproduction…. [C]ells can only be understood as organized systems, and…the physiological and molecular levels of inquiry are necessarily complementary… That this self-evident proposition should remain in practice so much of a minority view never ceases to astonish me.

Of course, if that is true for the single cell, then it is all the more true of every plant, animal, and human being. We aren’t just a buck and a half’s worth of chemicals.

DNA is itself a wonderfully complex, but passive source of material used by the far more wonderfully intricate living cell.

Metaphors employed to make scientific data accessible sometimes take on lives of their own. In his book, What Genes Can't Do, Lenny Moss reveals the oversimplified but widespread belief that "genes are self-contained units of information determining traits—that they are, in other words, blueprints for organisms."

"The empirical fruits of several decades of research in molecular, cell, and developmental biology have revealed that what distinguishes one biological form from another is seldom, if ever, the presence or absence of a certain genetic template but rather when and where genes are expressed, how they are modified, and into what structural and dynamic relationships their "products" become embedded. If genes are to be both molecules which function as physical templates for the synthesis of other molecules and determinants of organismic traits and phenotypes, then somehow genes would have to, in effect, provide their own instructions for use. They would have to be able to specify when and where their templates would be put to use, how such products would be modified and targeted, as well as in what structural and dynamic relationship they would reside. Indeed, it is just this sense of genes being able to do this which appears to be conveyed with references to genes as information, as programs, as blueprints, as encyclopedias of life, and the like.

Thus was born the "gene (or genetic program) envisaged as context-independent information for how to make an organism." The way we speak of genes today, he goes on to say, has been determined "not by those whose hypotheses were successful but rather by those whose metaphors were successful." And the chief aim of Moss' book is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the hypotheses thought to undergird the gene as both marker for observable traits and precise, molecular cause of those traits."

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