42
“You ever read Darwin’s journal from his time on board the HMS Beagle?” Finney asked.
“Many times,” Dr. Fetaya said, shifting to get more comfortable. He leaned back in his chair as if Finney were a lightweight. Which I am, Finney thought.
“Do you remember a statement in that journal where Darwin said he was amazed at the amount of ‘creative force’ displayed on the small, barren, and rocky islands of the Galápagos?” Finney stole a glance at Dr. Kline, who seemed to be enjoying this spectacle way too much. She jotted some notes with her right hand and propped her left elbow on the table, her fist resting against her cheek. The Swami, sitting next to her, gave Finney a thumbs-up.
“I don’t recall those exact words, Judge Finney. But in any event, Darwin later realized that the creative force you’re referencing was the process of evolution—mutations, natural selection, and survival of the fittest.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. It may surprise you to know that even judges sometimes read books like The Origin of Species.”
Fetaya smirked. “Is there a question there?”
“Sometimes I like to warm up a little.” Finney walked over to the counsel table for a sip of water. The witness was feisty; Finney liked that. His competitive instincts started chasing away his nervousness. After all, Fetaya might be a scientist, but this was a courtroom. Home turf.
“Let me ask if you recognize this statement from The Origin of Species,” Finney said, checking his legal pad. “‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’”
“Darwin said that,” Fetaya agreed.
“Have you heard of a concept called irreducible complexity?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind explaining it?”
“Sure.” Fetaya leaned into the task. “The phrase was popularized by Michael Behe, a biochemist from Lehigh University, who wrote a book in 1996 titled Darwin’s Black Box. Behe defines a system or device as being irreducibly complex if it has a number of different components that all work together to accomplish a task, and if you removed any one of the components, then the entire system would no longer function. Moreover, the different components, if they evolved one at a time, would have no value by themselves and therefore no chance of survival. According to Dr. Behe, something that is irreducibly complex is highly unlikely to be formed through evolution because the odds are against a large number of simultaneous mutations. The illustration Dr. Behe likes to use is the mousetrap.”
“So an irreducibly complex structure, according to Darwin’s own admission, would cause his theory to absolutely break down?” Finney asked, picking up confidence.
“If one existed,” Fetaya confirmed. He gave Finney a quick and phony smile. “Unfortunately for you, none does. They only appear to be that way at first glance.”
Finney saw a lecture coming. “Then let me ask you about—”
But the witness appealed to the judge. “May I finish my answer, Your Honor?”
“Yes,” Javitts said. “Judge Finney, you know the rules.”
Fetaya smiled, and Finney wanted to strangle the little man. “As I was saying, when natural selection acts on chance variations, evolution is capable of scaling peaks that appear impossibly high. In fact, Richard Dawkins wrote a book about this process called Climbing Mount Improbable. On the front side, a complex biological structure might look like a sheer cliff that cannot be scaled in one big bound, but on the back side, there is a gradual slope that permits much easier climbing. Sometimes we’ve discovered that path; sometimes we have yet to discover it. It might, for example, consist of DNA mutations that we have yet to unveil.”
“Are you done?”
“Yes.”
Finney checked his notes, ignoring the fact that Kareem was trying to get his attention. There was a certain rhythm to cross-examination. Stopping before questions to consult with a colleague gave the witness too much time to think. “Let’s talk about some of those sheer cliffs that Dr. Behe cites in his book,” Finney said. “Cliffs where no scientist will ever discover a gradual path up the back side because none exists. They include things like the development of the human eye, complicated microscopic contraptions like cilia and flagella, and the biosynthesis of large amino acids. Even the blood-clotting process—which is the one I would like to focus on, since it’s the only one I even begin to understand.”
“I don’t agree with the premise of your question,” Fetaya said, “but I’m happy to talk about blood clotting.”
“If your blood clots in the wrong place—like the brain or the lungs—you can die. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“If the blood-clotting process takes too long, you can bleed to death.”
“Of course.”
“And if a blood clot isn’t confined to your cut, if your whole system coagulates, then you die that way too. Correct?”
Dr. Fetaya graced Finney with a condescending smile. “Right again.”
Finney moved over next to Kareem as he read the following question directly from his notes. “So the system of blood clotting has no margin for error. It involves a highly choreographed cascade of ten steps that use about twenty different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn’t work. Isn’t that right, Dr. Fetaya?”
“No. That’s not correct.”
Finney held up his forefinger and conferred quickly with Kareem. “You were trying to get my attention?” Finney whispered.
“I was.”
“Because?”
“I was going to tell you to stay away from the blood-clotting example,” Kareem said with a frown.
“Oh.” Finney stood back up.
“May I explain, Judge Finney?” the witness asked.
Kareem’s eyes darkened into an I-told-you-so stare.
“Sure,” Finney said.
The witness proceeded to lecture Finney about the blood-clotting cascade in dolphins and porpoises. One of the components cited by Behe—the Hageman factor, to be precise—was found to be missing in dolphins and porpoises, but the blood still clotted.
This prompted another quick conference with Kareem, after which Finney recovered nicely. So maybe it was ten cascading steps and nineteen different components, as opposed to twenty. But could the witness cite any examples of other mammals that had fewer molecular components than those present in dolphins and porpoises where blood clotting took place? He could not, the witness admitted, but that only meant the precise evolutionary process had yet to be discovered. You couldn’t infer that no such process existed.
And so it went, back and forth. Finney held his own with several examples of irreducible complexity, primarily because he sat down next to Kareem and let his Muslim friend whisper each question in his ear.
Except the last few questions. Finney stood back up and handled those on his own. “So even though we haven’t discovered any gradual, step-by-step evolutionary paths to these complex organisms, Dr. Fetaya, you still believe that such paths exist?”
“Yes, of course. The evidence of evolution is overwhelming. The fact that we have not yet observed or reproduced the precise process for these molecular organisms does not worry me. History is on our side, Judge Finney. Given enough time, science tends to explain the most baffling things.”
“The evidence of things unseen?” Finney asked. “There’s a word for that in the Bible, Dr. Fetaya. It’s called faith, not science.”
“Is that a question?” Dr. Fetaya asked.
Later that afternoon, a medical doctor was flown to the island to conduct biopsies, blood tests, and urine tests on all the contestants except Victoria Kline. For Dr. Ando, the physician used a portable X-ray machine to track the progression of Ando’s disease.
At one point during his examination, Finney casually asked the doctor what island they might be on. The man looked directly into the camera and smiled. “I believe that’s confidential information,” the doctor said.
“I know,” Finney said. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“And neither will I,” the doctor said.