David Klinghoffer recently recounted that it was a year ago that Stephen Meyer went on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss intelligent design, the meaning of life, and many other topics. Many ID critics were unhappy with the exposure that ID was receiving, and after Meyer’s Rogan appearance, a YouTube “skeptic” named Forrest Valkai (I’m assuming that’s a real name), a self-described “biologist” and “science communicator,” posted a video response. Most of Valkai’s comments aren’t worth responding to. They revolve around repeatedly calling Meyer “dishonest,” asserting (totally inaccurately) that Meyer fails to provide any positive evidence for design (which Valkai repeatedly and inaccurately equates with “creationism”), alleging that Meyer “doesn’t care how science works,” or claiming that intelligent design is akin to “magic” which “kills excitement and squashes potential” interest in science. Valkai also makes some very strange claims about computers — such as his notion that computer programmers write code by making random changes, or that it’s inappropriate to compare information in DNA to computer code (many authorities would disagree!). 

Worth Addressing Here

Of much more interest is that the video attacking Meyer includes a statement from an eminent biologist, Gerd Müller, emeritus professor at the University of Vienna. Müller’s comments are in direct response to Meyer’s arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast, and they are worth addressing here because this gets at the heart of whether evolutionary mechanisms can produce new complex body plans. Below is Professor Müller’s statement in full — it’s just over 500 words long:

I expected that it would be easy to point out how Meyer is misrepresenting the arguments I gave in my [2016] Royal Society lecture, but he doesn’t actually misquote me. He speaks about our dissatisfaction with neo-Darwinism and the explanatory shortcomings of the conventional mutation-selection mechanism, how this does a good job at fine tuning and optimizing existing forms by generating small scale variation, but does a poor job of explaining the origin of the forms that undergo variation. If one wouldn’t know what his true intentions are, one could believe he is an evolutionist himself. Of course he is using the Royal Society meeting and my lecture to indicate that even conventional evolutionary biologists disagree about the mechanism of evolution, in order to sow doubts about biological evolution itself. But disagreements about the theory of how evolution works do not call the facts of biological evolution into doubt. This is where most intelligent design advocates make a jump in their arguments that simply is not warranted. 

Having said this, it is obvious that Meyer makes many mistakes in his representation of evolution, which could be part of the reason why he thinks evolution cannot be true (besides his religious beliefs, which no one will be able to change). He says that if you want to build a new form of life you always have to have “new code” first (no), new anatomical structures require new cell types (no), for a new function you also have to provide new code (no), etc. But especially his computer analogy is most definitely wrong: because random changes in computer code cannot lead to a new digital function or operating system (since the digital code degrades long before this would happen), he believes that random changes in DNA must also be deleterious. He says “it’s like in a computer world” (no, it is not), and based on the experience in the computer world one would expect that degradation will also happen with biological code (and therefore evolution by random mutation and selection cannot be true). In the end he mentions gene regulatory networks but stops short of making the obvious argument that [via] mutations in these gene regulatory networks you don’t need so many random mutations to create an important change of the phenotype.

In a sense, Meyer argues like a gene reductionist and then concludes that this doesn’t work and consequently evolution by natural means must be wrong. This, of course, is very different from our argument which doesn’t assume that mutation and selection don’t take place but that for the creation of specific complex phenotypes (e.g., morphological novelties) other mechanisms are causally responsible (cellular physics, dynamics of multicellular interaction, tissue self-organization, topological factors, etc.). In our scenario the function of genetic evolution is to harness generically originating structures by streamlining and fixating the molecular mechanisms that faithfully reproduce them in subsequent generations. 

So in the section of the interview I can access, Meyer is quite careful not to misquote me. But, of course, he doesn’t use my criticism of the standard theory in the sense in which it was intended.

There are many things to say in response. 

First, thanks to Professor Müller for responding to Stephen Meyer. In Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer writes quite positively about Müller’s intriguing ideas about evolution, and we welcome the opportunity for engagement with him. 

Second, it’s worth noting from the outset that Müller acknowledges that Meyer quoted him correctly on neo-Darwinism. This is interesting because Valkai repeatedly calls Meyer “dishonest” but Müller acknowledges that Meyer did not in fact misquote him. On the contrary, Müller says Meyer “is quite careful not to misquote me.” 

“No Theory of the Generative”

What exactly are Müller’s views? In a 2003 MIT Press book he co-edited with Stuart Newman, Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology, Müller and Newman note that “the neo-Darwinian paradigm still represents the central explanatory framework of evolution.” But they lament that it has “no theory of the generative.” In their view, neo-Darwinism “completely avoids [the question of] the origination of phenotypic traits and of organismal form.” 

Likewise, in the 2010 volume Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, Müller notes that “The Modern Synthesis … essentially avoid[ed] the problem of how complex morphological traits originate and how specific combinations of traits become stabilized as body plans.” He further points out that the great 20th-century biologist Ernst Mayr “called innovation ‘a neglected problem … in spite of its importance in a theory of evolution’.” He continues:

Schmalhausen, among others (e.g., Rensch 1959), acknowledged the problem of “new differentiations” and suggested considering developmental “tissue reactivity” as its source (Schmalhausen 1949), but the overwhelming success of the population genetic approach during the decades following the Modern Synthesis all but sidelined the issue of innovation. It was more rewarding to calculate the variation of the existing rather than to puzzle over the origination of the unprecedented. 

Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, p. 307

Müller maintains that the advent of evo-devo “has made it possible to begin to address a suite of problems at the phenotype level of evolution that were excluded by the Modern Synthesis approach, such as the origin of structural complexity, biased variation, rapid change of form, and others, the problem of innovation figuring prominently among them.” (p. 308) We’ll address these claims shortly. 

All of this is similar to what Müller said in his lecture at the 2016 Royal Society meeting. There, he maintained that the standard neo-Darwinian model “does not explain” what he called “complex levels of evolution” — things like “the origin of these body plans,” “complex behaviors,” “complex physiology,” “development,” and the origin of “novel characters.” Müller further said that the modern synthesis is “focused on characters that exist already and their variation and maintenance across populations, but not on how they originate.” He said the theory is “not designed” for addressing such questions. Thus, he notes that in recent decades “a number of challenges to the standard view have arisen.” 

These are important statements that get at the very heart of the viability of evolutionary models. Now Müller’s view is that evo-devo-based models of evolution can solve these problems. This is seen in his comment that via “mutations in these gene regulatory networks you don’t need so many random mutations to create an important change of the phenotype.” I would like to focus this response on the crucial and central issue that Müller raises — the “origin of these body plans” and new “complex levels” of biology, as he puts it.  

Misrepresenting Stephen Meyer

Thus, the third point in response is to note that Müller claims both in his lecture and in his response to Meyer that other models he affirms are sufficient to solve the evolution of new body plans. In particular, Müller argues that evo-devo-based models of evolution can explain the origin of new biological forms. 

As a fourth point, however, I must note that Müller actually misrepresents Meyer as not adequately addressing dGRNs and evo-devo-based arguments. That’s because Müller apparently doesn’t realize Meyer extensively addressed dGRNs and evo-devo models in Darwin’s Doubt. In fact, in that book Meyer addresses the very issue that Müller raises — whether “mutations in these gene regulatory networks” can lead to “important change of the phenotype.” In a post tomorrow I’ll look at what Meyer writes in Darwin’s Doubt.