Why Universal Common Descent Remains Outside of Science

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The concept of universal common descent remains outside of science for the simple reason it remains untestable. It remains untestable because we still do NOT know what determines biological form. And given the abstract of the paper, the problem will remain unsolved:

Embryonic development, which inspired the first theories of biological form, was eventually excluded from the conceptual framework of the Modern Synthesis as irrelevant. A major question during the last decades has centered on understanding whether new advances in developmental biology are compatible with the standard view or whether they compel a new theory. Here, I argue that the answer to this question depends on which concept of morphogenesis is held. Morphogenesis can be conceived as (1) a chemically driven or (2) a mechanically driven process. According to the first option, genetic regulatory networks drive morphogenesis. According to the second, morphogenesis results from an invariant tendency of embryonic tissues to restore changes in mechanical stress. While chemically driven morphogenesis allows an extension of the standard view, mechanically driven morphogenesis would deeply transform it. Which of these hypotheses has wider explanatory power is unknown. At present, the problem of biological form remains unsolved.

With Intelligent Design both of those are incorrect, yet still part of the system. With ID morphogenesis is software driven, carried out mechanistically via chemical processes. But I digress...

Dr. Michael Denton once wrote:

To understand the challenge to the “superwatch” model by the erosion of the gene-centric view of nature, it is necessary to recall August Weismann’s seminal insight more than a century ago regarding the need for genetic determinants to specify organic form. As Weismann saw so clearly, in order to account for the unerring transmission through time with precise reduplication, for each generation of “complex contingent assemblages of matter” (superwatches), it is necessary to propose the existence of stable abstract genetic blueprints or programs in the genes- he called them “determinants”- sequestered safely in the germ plasm, away from the ever varying and destabilizing influences of the extra-genetic environment.

Such carefully isolated determinants would theoretically be capable of reliably transmitting contingent order through time and specifying it reliably each generation. Thus, the modern “gene-centric” view of life was born, and with it the heroic twentieth century effort to identify Weismann’s determinants, supposed to be capable of reliably specifying in precise detail all the contingent order of the phenotype. Weismann was correct in this: the contingent view of form and indeed the entire mechanistic conception of life- the superwatch model- is critically dependent on showing that all or at least the vast majority of organic form is specified in precise detail in the genes.

Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes as Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a small fraction of all known genes, such as the developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene- Michael Denton “An Anti-Darwinian Intellectual Journey”, Uncommon Dissent (2004), pages 171-2 

 We do NOT know what makes an organism what it is. That is we do not know what determines   biological form. That alone makes it really difficult to say one form can evolve into another, regardless of the underlying mechanisms. And it squashes the notion that you can say anything about evolutionary relationships via genetic comparisons. 

More importantly it proves the concept of universal common descent is untestable. And because it is untestable it is outside of science.