Photo credit: P199, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Imagine vast areas with rolling hills and valleys, or rugged terrain with steep mountains and impassable valleys. Now imagine these scenes plotted on a three-dimensional graph. What you have in mind might be similar to the virtual fitness landscapes that biologists generate to visualize population fluctuations of some species. In a new episode of ID the Future, we welcome Dr. Brian Miller to discuss the evolutionary fitness landscape and how they strengthen design conclusions in living organisms. Dr. Miller also discusses how the state of fitness relates to the work of bioengineer Stuart Burgess and the discussion made by Dr. Stephen Meyer about the epigenetic information at the heart of life. .
In a fitness environment, the higher the level of an organism, the better adapted it is to that environment and the more likely it is to produce offspring. However, the extent to which a group of organisms can traverse a landscape depends on whether the terrain is flat or rugged. For example, consider a smooth landscape depicting the changing size of a finch’s beak. There are two rolling hills, one representing a small finch beak and the other representing a larger, sharper hill. As beneficial mutations accumulate, finch populations can move from the base of one rolling hill to the top of another. But what about major changes caused by credit evolution, such as turning amphibians into land animals? These fitness environments would be rugged, with deep valleys and steep mountains. “What’s actually happening is that almost all mutations that produce really significant changes, such as those required to change the fundamental structure of an organism, are deleterious,” Miller says. And that’s a big problem.” Evolutionary exploration almost always ends up at peaks that represent suboptimal designs, making it impossible for organisms to travel long distances over rugged terrain full of hills and non-functioning intermediates. It will be possible.
In an evolutionary framework, the fitness landscape suggests that nature is filled with evidence of bad design. However, in reality we find exactly the opposite. Life is chock-full of optimal designs. Dr. Miller explains how bioengineer Dr. Stuart Burgess’ research proves this. Evidence for optimal design in living organisms challenges evolutionary assumptions and points to intelligent design as a more satisfactory explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. Find and listen to the podcast here.
