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by Robert Locke I AM NOT A CREATIONIST, and must confess that
until recently, I treated people who questioned evolution with polite
dismissal. But there has recently emerged a major trend in biology
that has been suppressed in the mainstream media: evolution is in
trouble. More importantly, this has absolutely nothing to do with
religion but is due to the fact that the ongoing growth of biological
knowledge keeps producing facts that contradict rather than confirm
evolution. These two books – Michael Denton’s
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
and Michael J. Behe’s
Darwin’s Black Box
– describe this phenomenon.
The first surprising thing Denton points out is that there has
always been a dissident faction of highly distinguished scientists, of
impeccable credentials and no religious motivations, who have declined
to concede that evolution has been proved. This is inconvenient for
evolutionists who would like to dismiss their opponents as
Bible-thumping hicks and claim that questioning evolution is
tantamount to questioning the value or validity of science. He also
points out biologists like Richard Owen, who were prepared to allow
that evolution had taken place but thought that other causes were
involved in bringing about the origin of species.
The first big problem with evolution is that the fossil record
increasingly does not, honestly viewed, support it, a fact that famous
Prof. Steven Jay Gould of Harvard has described as "the trade secret
of paleontology." Evolutionary theory claims that there once existed a
whole series of successive forms of the various organisms alive today.
These supposedly changed by infinitesimal amounts with each generation
as they evolved into the present varieties, so the fossil record
should show these gradual changes. But it doesn’t. Instead, it shows
the sudden emergence of new species out of nowhere, fully complete
with all their characteristics and not changing over time. It is
almost entirely devoid of forms that can plausibly be identified as
intermediates between older and newer ones. This is popularly known as
the "missing link" problem, and it is massively systematic across
different species and time periods. Worse, this problem is getting
worse, not better, as more fossils are discovered, as the new fossils
just resemble those already found and don’t fill in the gaps. In
Darwin's day, it was easy to claim that the fossils were there but had
not been discovered. Problem is, we now have hundreds of thousands of
well-catalogued fossils, from all continents and geologic eras, and we
still haven't found these intermediate forms. As Denton puts it,
"Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every
corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and
hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still
not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as
it was when Darwin was writing the Origin."
The quantity, quality, and range of the recovered fossils is
impeccable. But the more we dig, the more we keep finding the same
forms over and over again, never the intermediates. Various ad hoc
explanations for the gaps in the fossil record, like a temporary
dearth in the environment of the chemicals needed for organisms to
produce the hard body parts that fossilize well, do not stand
scrutiny.
The usual response of evolutionists at this stage in the argument
is a theory they call punctuated equilibrium, Gould’s great
contribution, which basically says that evolution occurs not gradually
but in spurts. This would explain why there are gaps and not
continuity in the fossil record. The problem with this theory, which
is too complex to go into in detail here, is that while it explains
away the non-existence of small gradations, it still requires there to
be large ones (the individual spurts) and even these aren't in the
record. Furthermore, for punctuated equilibrium to have occurred, a
very precise set of conditions have to have obtained throughout the
entire past period represented in the fossils, and this is unlikely.
Another development that has undermined evolution is the spread of
computers into evolutionary biology. Basically, computers have shown
that the neat evolutionary trees that get drawn up are in fact based
on imaginary relations of similarity and difference that owe more to
the human mind’s tendency to perceive patterns than to the raw
biological data. Computers have shown that when the characteristics of
different living things are encoded in numerical form and the computer
is asked to sort them into
sequences based on their similarities and differences, the
computer can find any number of ways of doing so that have just as
much support in the data as those drawn up by humans to fit an
evolutionary tree. The data say "no evolution" just as loudly as they
say "evolution"; it’s just the pattern-craving human mind that gives
prominence to the former way of viewing it. This is known as phenetic
analysis. When the computer is constrained to push the data into an
evolutionary tree, (this is called cladistic analysis) it tends to
generate trees with all species as individual twigs and no species
forming the crucial lower branches of the tree that evolution demands.
As a result of this, many biologists have in practice stopped using
the idea of ancestors and descendants when classifying new species.
When the British Museum of Natural History did this a few years ago,
they started a small war in scientific circles.
Evolution also suffers from the problem that many putative
sequences which look logical based on the progression of one set
of anatomical characteristics suddenly look illogical when attention
is switched to another set. For example, the lungfish superficially
seems to make a good intermediate between fish and amphibian, until
one examines the rest of its internal organs, which are not
intermediate in character, nor are the ways in which its eggs develop.
And if different species have common ancestors, it would be reasonable
to expect that similar structures in the different species be
specified in similar ways in their
DNA and develop in similar ways in their embryos; this is
frequently not so. So evolutionary relationships depend upon an
arbitrary choice of which characteristics of the organisms in question
are considered most important, and different relationships can be
"proved" at will.
Furthermore, Denton argues, the classic cases printed in biology
textbooks to show the evolution of present-day organisms from their
supposed ancestors are in fact highly conjectural if not downright
false. We read the same examples coming up again and again in textbook
after textbook because there are only a few species for which an even
remotely plausible fossil genealogy can be propounded out of the
100,000 fossil species known to paleontology. He takes the horse as an
example and points out that several of the standard claims about the
pattern of equine evolution, such as the gradual reduction of the side
toes, are extremely questionable and that the morphological distance
covered from the earliest horse to the present horses is so small,
compared with the vast changes that evolution must encompass, that it
is questionable whether the series, even if true, proves much at all.
And even the emergence of one species from another has never been
directly observed by science.
Another problem with evolution that continues to worsen is that it
remains incapable of explaining how anything could evolve that doesn't
make biological sense when incomplete. The wings of birds are the
classic example: what good is half of one? Other examples abound. This
is a problem that evolutionary theory has promised a solution to for a
long time and not delivered. Worse even than visible examples like
wings are the complex chemical reactions and molecular structures that
living things are made of. This is the principal point of
Darwin's Black Box
(these micro-processes are the black boxes), a book too
technical to be satisfying reading for the layman but that
convincingly argues that many of these micro-processes make sense
either complete or not at all. There are no plausible accounts of how
they could have evolved from other simpler processes because as one
hypothesizes back down the hypothetical chain of complexity, one comes
to a point at which the process simply won’t work if it gets any
simpler. At this stage, the process couldn’t have evolved from
anything else because there is nothing simpler for it to have evolved
from. And at this stage, the process is still far too complex to have
been thrown together by any known non-living chemical event. At one
time, knowledge of the complex processes of living things was limited
enough, and hopes for the discovery of intermediate processes that
they could have evolved from wide-open enough, that evolutionists
could ignore this problem. But as biological research has progressed,
this gap too has been filled with more and more inconvenient facts. As
in the case of the other problems challenging evolution, the key thing
here is the intellectual direction: research is consistently
making the problem worse, not better.
Another similar example: one of the things that has happened since
evolution was first proposed is that biology has achieved a precise
cataloging of the thousands of different
proteins that make up organisms. It was hoped that a thorough
cross-species comparison of these would reveal the kinds of
relationships of graded similarity that evolution implies. But it
hasn’t. Instead, it has given the same picture of distinct species
that examination of gross anatomy does. It’s the same old story of a
tree with all twigs and no branches! Worse, analysis of the closeness
and distance between different species reveals bizarre results. For
example, according to the
sequence difference matrix of vertebrate hemoglobins in the
standard Dayhoff Atlas of
Protein Structure and Function, man is as close to a lamprey
as are fish! This problem repeats itself with other characteristics of
organisms that have been brought within the scope of evolutionary
comparison since Darwin’s day.
Another problem with evolution that has only gotten worse with
increasing biological knowledge is the question of how life initially
emerged from dead matter. As recently as the early 50's, it was still
possible to hypothesize that discoveries would reveal the existence of
entities intermediate between single-celled organisms and complex
lifeless molecules. The existence of these intermediates (certain
kinds of viruses were candidates for the role) would imply the
possibility of an evolutionary transition from dead chemicals to
intermediates to life. Unfortunately, the discovery of
DNA in 1953 killed this hypothesis in its simplest form, and
subsequent discoveries have only made the matter worse. Vast numbers
of microorganisms are now known, as are vast numbers of complex
molecules, but nothing in between. Furthermore, even the simplest
possible cell imaginable within the limits of biology, let alone the
simplest actually existing cell, is far too complex to have been
thrown together by any known non-living chemical event. So even if
evolution has an explanation of how species evolve from one to
another, it has no way to "get the ball rolling" by producing the
first species from something that is not a species.
There are even distinguished philosophers of science, like
Sir Karl Popper, a man
of impeccable credentials and no religious ax to grind, who have
openly questioned whether evolution is a science at all, in
principle and not just in practice, because its assertions are not
potentially falsifiable. A true science, like physics, makes claims
that can be tested and thus potentially falsified; this vulnerability
is what makes it worthy of belief when despite this, the falsification
does not happen. But evolution does not make claims of this kind.
Furthermore, it is one of the touchstones of science that it is based
on repeatable experiments. The data used to support evolution are
neither experiments nor repeatable, nor can they be, since the origin
of species on earth was a unique event. This doesn’t necessarily make
evolution nonsense, but it strongly suggests it doesn’t have the right
to demand the kind of acquiescence that physics demands on the
strength of its being straightforwardly a science. What exactly
evolution is, if Popper is right and it is not quite a science in the
conventional sense, is an open question. It is probably not without
significance that what is now called biology used to be called natural
history, an older and perhaps more appropriate concept.
Anyone who doubts that the bulk of the scientific community could
be wrong about a fundamental question like this should consider the
case of Newtonian physics, which was thought to be unshakable until
Einstein disproved it. (Lest anybody quibble about the approximate
validity of Newtonian physics at non-relativistic speeds, may I point
out that Newtonian physics was formerly thought to be valid at all
speeds, throughout the universe, and this Einstein refuted.) Evolution
is not a fraud being perpetrated upon the public, but it is a theory
that has far too many problems to be treated as something that
everyone is obliged to believe in on pain of being classified as a
fool, as if it were the claim that the earth goes around the sun. Its
credibility will continue to wane (or wax) with additional
developments in biology over the coming years, but the absolute
prerequisite for solving this intellectual puzzle is for free debate
on the issue to be permitted again. I am quite happy to change my
position if new facts come out, and I urge my readers that this is the
only rational view.
Robert Locke resides in New York City. You can e-mail him at
lockerobert@hotmail.com.
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