In the fourteen years that I’ve been teaching high school biology, I’ve been asked a lot of weird questions about evolution. But, until recently, I’ve not been asked whether Charles Darwin could make you rich. Is evolution good for business? In a recent debate, Bill Nye, the popular science educator, argued it is.
Actually, Nye first offered this argument against creationism in a Big Think interview from August, 2012 entitled, “Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children”. Nye claimed that evolution deniers promote a worldview that is not just ignorant and inaccurate, but positively harmful—especially for children. Since creationism interferes with the public’s understanding of a fundamental and well-established scientific fact, Nye argued, it undermines our economic competiveness. “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future [and] we need engineers that can build stuff– solve problems.”
Eight days later, the Creation Museum published a video response.
Here, Nye’s recent debate opponent, Ken Ham, portrayed science as a house divided. On one side are observational scientists doing useful work. On the other are historical scientists (e.g. evolutionary biologists) who recklessly claim to discover pre-biblical events. Ham mocks the idea of crossing this imagined divide. According to Ham, if evolutionary principles were applied to technological challenges, such as designing an aircraft, “we would be in real trouble.”
Would we?
It turns out there are more than twenty high tech companies for whom Darwin’s central insight is a cornerstone. Perhaps the most commercially important application of evolutionary principles so far, is a technology called SELEX. Invented in 1990 by Larry Gold and Craig Tuerk, and by Andrew Ellington and Jack Szostak, SELEX (the “Systematic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential enrichment”) has produced medicines, diagnostic products, and thousands of research tools.
What is SELEX? It is nothing more than natural selection in a test tube.
Scientists at NeXstar Pharmaceuticals used SELEX to invent an FDA-approved drug for treating the most common cause of blindness in people over fifty — macular degeneration.
Since the invention of Macugen, the economic value created by SELEX has risen steeply. Ophthotech Corporation (OPHT), with a market capitalization of $1.2 billion, also relies on SELEX to make drugs for eye diseases. OPHT closed at $37.65 on March 4, 2014— an increase of more than 70% since its September, 2013 IPO.
SomaLogic, Inc., uses SELEX to manufacture aptamer microchips. These chips contain over one thousand different aptamers— each specific for a different human protein. So, clinicians and researchers can substitute a single test, such as SOMAscan, for hundreds of costly alternatives. As the SomaLogic aptamer library continues to expand, so too does their ability to revolutionize health science research and disease diagnosis.
Regado Biosciences (RGDO), with a market capitalization of $160 million, uses SELEX to lower the risks from open-heart surgery, and other cardiovascular problems. Investors in Regado’s IPO have enjoyed an 89% gain since August, 2013. Only time will tell whether investors will see such returns for NOXXON Pharma AG, Aptamer Sciences, Base Pair Technologies and more than a dozen other aptamer companies. Nevertheless, estimates of the dollar value of aptamer technologies are in the billions.
But SELEX is just one technological spin-off of evolutionary biology. Darwin’s big idea was natural selection, and this idea has spawned the broader idea of “genetic” or “evolutionary” algorithms. The broad idea is simply that highly functional designs can be generated by a process of repeated cycles of variation followed by selection, followed by reproduction. Biologists, chemists, computer scientists, economists, physicists and yes, even engineers, have applied the evolutionary algorithm to produce a wide range of valuable technologies—far too many to describe here. (For an answer to Ham’s precise question– how evolutionary principles have been applied to aircraft design– see articles like this or this. More general summaries can be found in books, encyclopedias, journal articles, and in on-line course materials.)
What economic value has resulted from creationism-based technologies? To be sure, creationists can, and often do, learn the evolutionary algorithm. They may even use this knowledge to produce valuable technologies. However, when we look for technological applications of creationism itself, we come back empty-handed. How does one apply belief in divine intervention to laboratory work?
Ever since the February 4th 2014, debate, Bill Nye has been catching a lot of flak. The latest headlines deride Nye for triggering a fund-raising bonanza for Ken Ham. It seems, the debate may have helped Ham’s Creation Museum secure funds for a financially troubled Noah’s Ark theme park. This post-debate windfall might sound impressive, but if you really want to bring home the bacon, you won’t listen to Ham.
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Dan O’Connell is a biology teacher and coach at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, where he lives with his wife and three children. He relocates his clan to Colorado each summer, where he performs laboratory research at SomaLogic, Inc. At the time this article was written, he owned stock in Ophthotech, Inc.
*Image credits: Darwin illustration by the author (with help from memegenerator.org), natural selection illustrations courtesy the University of California Museum of Paleontology’s Understanding Evolution.
The problem is, applied artificial “natural selection” via computed “genetic algorithms” is exactly the sort of hands-on, operational science that Ham was referring to. Not only “can” creationists “learn” how to work with them (just as evolutionists do), but they are perfectly compatible with creation and do not illustrate or rely on either Darwin’s ideas (except in the broadest, general sense of variation with negative selection) nor on what creationists actually object to: jumping to the conclusion that all forms of life arose from single-celled life by the natural version of this process.
Note in the illustration that it starts with various bugs/RNA molecules, and ends with one of the variations. Not many aircraft companies are going to pay you for a program that refines the efficiency of a wing if it produces a design for a pontoon float instead. They will also not pay you if you write a “HELLO WORLD” program and start mutating it in the hope that it will eventually evolve into a wing-refining program — in that way, these programs all DO use “creation theory” — the theory that if you want something truly complex, starting from scratch, you need an intelligent agent to create it.
There are actually thousands of creationists “bringing home the bacon” by doing science, medicine, and related matters. Some have contributed to scientific advances (after Darwin, before whose time only a handful of scientists were not creationists) such as chemical engineering, human and veterinary medicine, human powered flight, and MRI.
What you call “creation theory” is far broader than evolution theory. It would be just as easy for me to name “hard work theory” and then take credit every time a useful product came about via people’s hard work.
In contrast, natural selection is a narrow and specific idea and SELEX puts this idea to work in a direct way. The direct technological fruits of creation theory would surely pale in comparison to those that are consistent with “hard work theory.” But that doesn’t make the idea of hard work immediately useful in any narrow technical sense. There are plenty of scientists who have worked just as hard as those who invented SELEX. However, their hard work was not enough to make something useful. Likewise, belief in the vague notion that complexity requires intelligence is not much help to the struggling inventor.
Also, I take issue with the idea that creationists only object to the conclusion “that all forms of life arose from single-celled life.” If you listen to the videos I cited, you will find Ken Ham objecting to far more than this. Instead, he objects broadly to the practice of “historical science.” He also objects to the idea of applying evolutionary principle to technological challenges. I understand that many creationists are much slicker and better educated than Ken Ham. Still, I’m suspicious of those who say they embrace nearly every aspect of evolutionary biology, but who make an exception for humans and other complex forms evolving from simple forms? Is their embrace of science sincere or strategic?
“but they are perfectly compatible with creation and do not illustrate or rely on either Darwin’s ideas”
That comment disproves any notion that the commenter has even a basic comprehension of Darwin’s ideas.