Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
Psalm 139:14 NLT
"A scientific paper this week about a similarly complex operation, DNA Proofreading, was just published in Science Magazine. Let’s watch their feeble attempt at maintaining their view that cells emerged by blind, unguided natural processes, and that life went from goo to you by way of the zoo without a master Designer.
Evolution of error correction through a need for speed (Ravasio et al., Science, 19 Feb 2026). Seven molecular biologists and biochemists primarily from the University of Chicago try their hand at evolving repair processes like this one. The team includes Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, a leader in origin-of-life research, who could not answer Dr James Tour’s challenge in 2023. Get your Baloney Detector fired up; let’s look at their reasoning about how such complex operations might emerge by chance. This should be fun.
The Editor’s Summary shows that the authors intend for their hypothesis to explain all complex operations in biological processes by evolution only:
"Life expends substantial effort correcting errors introduced by the forces of disorder. Molecular machines, from polymerases to the ribosome, use elaborate proofreading schemes to double-check their work, reducing errors at the cost of time and energy. Such mechanisms may not evolve easily because they devote precious
resources to fixing mistakes. However, mistakes themselves also impose a time penalty, an effect known as stalling. Ravasio et al. present a theoretical analysis showing that because of stalling, error-correction mechanisms can in fact evolve to accelerate biological processes. The researchers found experimental support for this conclusion across a wide range of systems, from genome replication to the assembly of complex molecular structures."
That’s the sales pitch: “Our notion is that such complex things can evolve! Watch this!”. OK, let us watch how they do this trick.
Q: Can a hat emerge and pull a rabbit out all by itself without a magician?
The Darwinian authors understand what they’re up against:
“Error-correcting mechanisms are ubiquitous in biology and are found whenever a process must select a correct substrate over alternative, incorrect substrates.”
The above is true for DNA synthesis, DNA replication, tRNA aminoacylation, and ribosomal assembly, and more.
“In many cases, the fidelity achieved by biology exceeds that expected from equilibrium thermodynamics, that is, from differences in binding energy between correct and incorrect substrates.”
“Large genomes need error correction to avoid the error catastrophe, yet canonical error-correcting machinery itself seems to require sizable, information-rich genomes.”
Error correction creates a “chicken-and-egg problem for fidelity.”
Q: How could a cell do without it from the beginning?
“Error catastrophe” refers to the outcome of errors accumulating in an informational system. Without high fidelity duplication, information quickly collapses into gibberish. So how do they get around these design requirements? Answer: they separate speed from fidelity. They propose that selection for speed came first, and fidelity second. But watch for the magic words and question-begging assumptions:
"In the context of the origins of life, the speed-first route to error correction suggests a way around the chicken-and-egg problem for fidelity. Large genomes need error correction to avoid the error catastrophe, yet canonical error-correcting machinery itself seems to require sizable, information-rich genomes. Our results suggest a resolution of this tension by showing that simple error-correcting mechanisms could evolve before the evolution of complex ribozymes such as an RNA replicase. The key mechanism is that misincorporations stall growth, so that variants with even rudimentary error correction replicate faster and become more abundant, even before other information-rich function-encoding sequences emerge.
Once such speed-selected error correction mechanisms are in place, the resulting incidental increase in fidelity can be co-opted to maintain and evolve increasingly information-rich sequences. For example, high-fidelity RNA replication would enable the evolution of new advantageous ribozymes, creating a secondary selective pressure to retain and refine the error-correcting mechanisms that initially evolved “for free“. This two-step dynamic—speed advantage first, functional payoff later—is an example of a complexity ratchet: Nonequilibrium machinery becomes entrenched not because complexity was needed, but because selection for speed favors it and subsequent functions lock it in place. Accordingly, the evolutionary path to error-correcting ribozymes and, by extension, to large, information-bearing genomes may be smoother than previously thought."
Let’s get this straight. Stalling is bad, because it brings life to a halt. Therefore life “needed” a way to avoid stalling. Presto! A hat emerged to meet this need! Then “selection pressure” produced a rabbit that the hat could pull out of itself. These wonders evolved for free! No intelligence required! What a smooth magic act. Szostak holds up a sign saying, APPLAUSE.
Clear-thinking heads must shame these charlatans out of science. Even in the most charitable version of this tale, it won’t wash. Imagine some mindless machine trying to copy DNA. It’s fast but has low fidelity. What’s going to happen? It will produce strands of gibberish long before some “subsequent functions” or a “functional payoff” arrives (or emerges, one of the Darwinists’ favorite miracle words). The hat will evaporate before the rabbit emerges, leaving behind the smoke of error catastrophe.
A need cannot pull a solution from nothing. Just because it would be nice to have a fast, high-fidelity molecular machine, nothing in nature requires that it materialize. The laws of probability guarantee that it never will."
CEH
