I do not know anything of Intelligent Design, but recently I have become quite skeptical of the evolution theory and I read (again) one article from The Unz Review. It had this Intelligent Design in the title, but in the comments somebody raised the question of the Cambrian explosion, claiming that anti-evolutionists do not even know that there is a problem with this event and that for sure they do not have any solution.
That was provocative, so I spent some hours thinking of the Cambrian explosion and how it could happen, to find some solution to this odd numbered question.
The Cambrian explosion refers to the time around 525 million years ago (ybp) when all phyla, the main branches of the tree of life, appeared in a relatively short time. How could it happen according to the evolution theory and how could one explain it with Intelligent Design (that does not mean how creating happens according to the Bible).
A bit before the Cambrian time, around 600 million ybp multicellular life developed and that is a good starting point. It seems that multicellular life is caused in all phylas by the same gene, retinoblastoma. Thus, this gene developed once and then selection started to work on multicellular animals and we get further.
But first we should explain how evolution took it to the multicellular stage. Before this about 600 million years ago life contained only single cell organisms, that I for simplicity call bacteria, though there were viruses and before them were archeons and even before them cells that did not have nucleon but DNA or RNA was just spread everywhere. I skip over those and just call them bacteria, not meaning only bacteria.
How many bacteria there could have been? A very rough upper bound can be obtained by calculating how much there is water. The earth is about a ball with the radius of 6000 km and 60% is water. Let us take water up to the depth of 100 m. Then there is
0.6*3.14*(6000 km)2*100m=0.6*1023 ml
of water. There can be quite many bacteria in a milliliter, say 100 billion=1011. This gives a high upper bound of 1034 bacteria in the world. (I do not much care that this upper bound is too high, most of the bacteria are supposed to have lived in shallow water on the shores.)
But of course all these bacteria cannot be different as bacteria multiply and only some strains survive. The number of species on the earth is currently 8.7 million. We can put a lower bound to different bacteria species before 600 million ybp as, say 107. So, the number of different bacteria was something between 1034 and 107.
Assume a bacterium has 1000 genes, each gene 1000 base pairs (bp) and the mutation rate is 0.5 *10-9 mutations per bp per year. This means that a gene of 1000 bp mutates completely in 2 billion years.That is, each bp mutates in 2 billion years and they mutate independently.
The mutation rate is correct. Humans, for instance, have 20,000 genes, each about 1000 bp, and additionally they have 99% of the genome so called Junk DNA that nobody knows what it does. (more precisely 93%, but I want simple numbers in this simple calculation.) Thus, humans have in each cell
20,000*1000*100=2*109 base pairs.
With the given mutation rate we have one mutation per year in each cell, but the only cells that really count are the sex cells. In a generation of 20-30 years we collect 20-30 mutations. Thus, in each generation human genome gets 20-30 mutations, but most are in the Junk DNA. It is interesting to notice that our all cells get these mutations and if we live to 100 years, it is very likely that most of our cells have a mutation in the active part of the DNA. That is bad, and that is likely the reason we seldom can live over 100 years.
But back to the topic.
So, we have these bacteria, each with 1000 genes, in total we have maximally 1034*103 genes and minimally 107*103 genes. This is the number of combinations for the 1000 bp gene that were in existence before the multicellular gene was found. The number may seem impressive, but it is not that impressive. There are four bases, so the possible number of combinations of 1000 bp is 41000=22000. This is why I was so generous with the upper bound. It simply does not matter. The number of possible combinations is huge. So, one multicellular gene was found: retinoblastoma. Not for instance 10 or 100 or zero. That is odd. That is, if in this huge number of possible combinations are only few working multicellular genes, we should expect to find zero in so few trials, while if there are very many multicellular genes, we would expect that many were found. Just one was found. That looks like it was not found by a random way at all. Some intelligent way found this one multicellular gene.
Assuming we got this far, there is still a problem to get all different phyla. Multicellular organism are bigger than single cell organism and there cannot be so many of them, not so many different mutations. Besides, there is not much time. The new phylo appeared in a short time. I suggest their new genes came from the bacteria genome. There were all these different bacteria, which had developed for 2 billion years and collected mutations. It is just to get these mutated genes to the new multicellular organisms. Fortunately they are bacteria or viruses or such, which infect animals. Sometimes the infection transfers genes form the bacteria or virus to the host. This way the new species could get new genes.
I have so far skipped the problem how mutations could gather in bacteria. Mutations sometimes are rather neutral and the mutated gene can still work, but if there are many of them, the gene stops working. Thus, I suggest that what happened was that a gene got multiplied, made a copy of it. There still was the working version doing the job of the gene.
The mutated one become Junk DNA and could accumulate random mutations without any selection. This way the bacteria got all these mutated genes. Most of them did not work, but one, the multicellular gene retinoblastoma, worked and was turned on. So it returned to the active DNA from having been some 2 billion years in Junk DNA.
This proposal implies that Junk DNA is not useless for us. It is the place where new genes develop.
So, that was the theory according to the evolution theory, or my version of it. The problem is that this explanation does not seem believable. Especially unbelievable part is that random mutations found exactly one multicellular gene. It looks like design.
Next, what would be an Intelligent Design alternative? I would do it like this: there has to be mutations, since the DNA must be changed to get new species, but the mutations cannot be random. Most mutations are caused by cosmic radiation. They are said to be random, that is, for us they are random. But what is deciding which base pair gets changed in a mutation? Thinking deterministically we would say that it must be the bp that is hit by a cosmic particle, but what is deciding the trajectory of a cosmic particle? That’s it: the trajectory is not determined. Thin about a nucleus breaking up and emitting a particle. To which direction is the particle going? To any. It is not determined. We can only by observing the effects say that the cosmic particle traveled along this path: it left a bubble track to a bubble detector.
What if we had a mind which can by “faith” or “power” decide where the cosmic particle hits, a mind that could decide it with an unbreakable rule. Setting such a rule at any time would force the history to change so that the rule is in force.
It would be similar as in the ERP paradox: there is an unbreakable rule of the Heisenberg inequality. It is unbreakable probably because it is just logic. This unbreakable rule must be in force, so if we try to measure the position of one of two coupled particles, we cannot measure the momentum of the other particle. In this experiment it seems that an observation is changing history, and that is how I explain it. The history must change so that an unbreakable rule is in force. The system originally had an unfixed degree of freedom and the observation fixed it. In a similar way a mind can by decision determine what the outcome must be and the history must change by selecting a suitable value for an unfixed degree of freedom. So, theoretically, mind can effect material, but not our minds: we can only observe.
This was the Intelligent Design type solution: we only need a mind that can decide the outcome and then these mutations are not random. The mind can decide that the cosmic particles hit exactly correct base pairs and cause exactly correct mutations and this way we get the multicellular gene.
I understand what you think of this, I would probably earlier thought the same, but please read both alternatives carefully and make your own improvements, which method is the less believable, the less scientific?