The ID Report

“The evolution of sex is a major puzzle in modern evolutionary biology.”

So reads Wikipedia’s opening sentence on the topic “Evolution of Sex”. This wonderful understatement masks a gaping hole in Darwinian theory: how to explain not only one purposefully complex living being, but a mating pair. Look it up for yourself; search the Darwinian scriptures to find a plausible evolutionary explanation for male and female, and you are likely to discover, as did Darwin’s devoted disciple Richard Dawkins, “There are many theories of why sex exists, and none of them is knock-down convincing.”

Understatements abound, and not surprisingly, because “why sex exists” is one fact unexplainable by materialist theories of origins such as Darwinism. Another fact, one for which Darwin didn’t even attempt an explanation, is the origin of life in the first place. Like bookends to bulging volumes of evolutionary human history, the origin of life and the origin of sexuality stubbornly resist materialist explanations. With no plausible alpha or omega in their evolutionary story of human existence, Darwinists are left to fanciful imaginations to keep their neatly shelved fiction from tumbling down.

Darwinists know that the requirement of male and female to produce offspring is evolutionarily inefficient and costly. Selfishly maximizing progeny is greatly hindered by rendering one half of the species incapable of reproduction and imposing energy-expending searching requirements on both sexes, including the cost of attracting the opposite sex by being attractive in very evolutionarily-unattractive ways. It seems that sex, whether noun or transitive verb, is a very anti-evolutionary thing.

But beyond the evolutionarily costly aspects of sexual reproduction, the fact of a male and female of virtually every race and kind presents a much more difficult problem for Darwinists. Mating pairs of a species mean that for any given species, both a male and female of that species are required for the continuation of the species. One of species is useless. Two of a species is useless unless they are opposite sexes and happen to appear at the same time in the same place (and decide to mate). Three of a species is impossible without that first mom and pop dating, mating and successfully creating number three. Can Darwinism really account for this?

Think of it this way: before the third human being could breath the air of this earth, there had to be the first two, male and female. This simple fact may be the only truly unifying principle of biology, unifying because it is a fact of evolution on which we can all agree. Everyone—materialists, Darwinists, creationists, and even atheists—everyone believes that if you rewind time and go back to the beginning of the human race there must logically and inescapably have existed at the same time and in the same place the first common mother and father of all six billion human beings on earth today. Not the first male only or the first female only, but both. After that first tango the race was on and the rest is history: we all evolved from that first pair. On this we are all evolutionists.

Darwinists and designists simply disagree over how the first male and female got here in the first place. Designists rely on the clear evidence for design, the astronomically impossible odds of unguided processes to achieve purposefully mating pairs, and a good dose of common sense to infer purposeful intelligent design. Darwinists, on the other hand, deny the clear evidence for design (dismissing it in question-begging dogma as “apparent” design), largely ignore the staggering odds associated with evolution of the sexes (the above-mentioned disciple willing to “tackle” the problem only after he can “summon the courage”), and suppress common sense to refute purposeful design. After all, they reason, we are here so “evolution happened” somehow. But the “somehow” of sexuality is not so easily explained if details are to replace “just so” stories. Consider Darwin’s tree of life. According to this tree all Homo Sapiens descended from a common ancestor not only of apes, but of every living thing, plant or animal. Darwin says we have a common ancestor with snakes, ferns, stinkbugs and seaweed—yes, if you trace your ancestry back far enough you will find a common Gramps (or Grammy) with seaweed. Sometime between most recent ancestral fork in the branches and today there had to evolve two human beings contemporaneously, one male and one female. Evolving these necessary beings at the same time in history has not been explained in Darwinian terms; it is at best highly improbable. In fact, by any reasonable estimation, it is impossible.

And that’s the point: In real life mating parts of a working whole are always and without exception designed purposefully, each intelligently crafted with the other in mind. Imagine Thomas Edison going door-to-door hawking his new light bulb to candle-lit households. Without a mating socket in the house, Edison would be sent packing, his invention worthless. For this reason Edison set to work inventing not only the light bulb but a suitable socket along with a multitude of other supporting necessities. By design the light bulb and socket work together to provide light to millions. Either bulb or socket alone is useless, and neither would have survived long in the absence of the other. Neither would even have been invented without a compatible mate in mind. Of course, this is real life, not the imaginings of Darwinists.

Darwin’s “descent with modification” explains the great diversity in the human race. Not only do we have great variation in external appearance, we also have different levels of resistance to bacteria, different susceptibilities to disease, and different physical adaptations related to continued survival. In this sense evolution is an uncontested fact. Again, everyone believes that both the third and the six billionth human being trace their ancestry back to that first human couple, and the odds that number three looked much like number six billion are slim. This is “evolution” of the kind on which we can all agree.

But Darwinism’s strong claims of “atoms-to-Adam” evolution of the human species from the first living organism is hardly believable based on the evidence, and practically reaches fairy tale status with the recognition of the requirement of a contemporaneous “atoms-to-madam” evolution. Imagining the first human to evolve by unguided, purposeless processes of nature from a non-human ancestor is difficult enough to believe. But that poor collection of atoms would no doubt be lonely; struggling to survive long enough to find a date, with its only chance being among non-humans. Assuming Adam arrived first, his union with a non-human would then have to produce “madam” and he and she would quickly need to produce number three. Believable? Hardly.

But belief is what it’s all about. No one of us was there; all we have is the present-day evidence from which to build a historical narrative. One such narrative holds that the present-day evidence of purposeful design actually suggests neither, and this non-intuitive notion drives an unreasonable reliance on astounding chance and astonishing probabilities. Boy (and girl), are we ever lucky. Another narrative holds that the present-day evidence of purposeful design is just that—purposeful design—and this intuitive notion drives a reasonable reliance on material evidence and common sense. Like a lock designed with a key in mind, the female appears designed for the male, and together the first mates unlocked the entire human race.

Both narratives require a first pair, male and female, from which we all evolved. Both provide evidence on which to base belief. At some point, the “puzzle” of human sexuality can be solved only by an evidence-based appeal to reason: Between unguided, purposeless chance or design, which is more reasonable to believe? Discard reason and truth can only be chanced upon, and chance is a very inefficient puzzle solver. But depend on reason and puzzles are largely temporary, because reason is to puzzles as keys are to locks.

Roddy Bullock is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, available from Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright 2006 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex

Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996) p. 85.

Regarding the term "designists" (and "adesignists") see, http://idnetohio.cinti.net/pages/designist-or-adesignist.php