Chapter 3
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Chapter 3 CRITIQUES OF THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTING
I. Introduction. Even apart from the evidence against natural selection, the evidence supporting it is insufficient to support the conclusion that natural selection theory is likely to ever be confirmed. That this is the case appears from the following circumstances: 1. After 140 years and a billion fossils, the transitional species predicted by Darwin have not been found. 2. Punctuated equilibrium, now the majority view among evolutionists, is the object of withering criticism from within the evolutionist community. 3. Origin-of-life theory - the effort to explain how the earliest single-cell organisms could have arisen from non-living material - is at an impasse. Nearly 50 years after Stanley Miller's experiments, the puzzle of the origin of life is seen as more mysterious, more resistant to solution than ever. A. Generally. The history of most fossil species includes two features, particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed."2 The common ancestors and transitional links are still only theoretical entities, conspicuously absent from the fossil record even after long and determined searching. . . . That 130 years of very determined efforts to confirm Darwinism have done no better than to find a few ambiguous supporting examples is significant negative evidence.3 [N]one of the stratomorphic intermediates have intermediate structures. Although the entire organism is intermediate in structure, it's the combination of structures that is intermediate, not the nature of the structures themselves. Each of these organisms appears to be a fully functional organism full of fully functional structures. Archeopteryx, for example, is thought to be intermediate between reptiles and birds because it has bird structures (e.g., feathers) and reptile structures (e.g., teeth, forelimb claws). Yet the teeth, the claws, the feathers and all other known structures of Archeopteryx appear to be fully functional. The teeth seem fully functional as teeth, the claws as claws, and the feathers as any flight feathers of modern birds. It is merely the combination of structures that is intermediate, not the structures themselves. Stephen Jay Gould calls the resultant organisms "mosaic forms" or "chimeras." As such they are really no more intermediate than any other member of their group. In fact, there are many such "chimeras" that live today (e.g., the platypus, which lays eggs like a reptile and has hair and produces milk like a mammal). Yet these are not considered transitional forms by evolutionists because they are not found as intermediates in stratigraphic position. . . . The total list of claimed transitional forms is very small . . . compared to the total number of mosaic forms. . . . The very low frequency of stratomorphic intermediates may be nothing more than the low percentage of mosaic forms that happen to fall in the correct stratigraphic position by chance. . . .4 C. Apes to humans. From Darwin's time to the present the "descent of man" has been a cultural certainty begging for empirical confirmation, and worldwide fame has been the [promised] reward for anyone who could present plausible fossil evidence for missing links. The pressure to find confirmation was so great that it led to one spectacular fraud, Piltdown Man - which British Museum officials zealously protected from unfriendly inspection, allowing it to perform forty years of useful service in molding public opinion.6 Some experts in good standing doubt . . . that A. Afarensis and A. Africanus were really distinct species, and many deny that there ever was such a species as Homo habilis.7 Solly Zuckerman, one of Britain's most influential scientists and a leading primate expert, is a good scientific materialist who regards the evolution of man from apes as self-evident, but who also regards much of the fossil evidence as poppycock. Zuckerman subjected the Australopithecines to years of intricate "biometric" testing, and concluded that "the anatomical basis for the claim that [they] walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable." Zuckerman . . . remarked that the record of reckless speculation in human origins "is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is yet to be found in this field at all. . . . Zuckerman's . . . factual premise was that the variation among ape fossils is sufficiently great that scientists whose imagination was fired by the desire to find ancestors could easily pick out some features in an ape fossil and decide that they were "pre-human." Granted these two premises, it followed that all candidates for "ancestor" status should be subjected to a rigorous objective analysis, and rejected if the analysis was either negative or inconclusive.8 (1) There is no reason to doubt that peculiar circumstances can sometimes favor drug-resistant bacteria, or large birds as opposed to small ones, or dark-colored moths as opposed to light-colored ones. In such circumstances the population of drug-susceptible bacteria, small birds, and light-colored moths may become reduced for some period of time, or as long as the circumstances prevail. (2) None of the "proofs" provides any persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species, new organs, or other major changes, or even minor changes that are permanent. The sickle-cell anemia case, for example, merely shows that in special circumstances an apparently disadvantageous trait may not be eliminated from the population. That larger birds have an advantage over smaller birds in high winds or droughts has no tendency whatever to prove that similar factors caused birds to come into existence in the first place. Very likely smaller birds have the advantage in other circumstances, which explains why birds are not continually becoming larger.9 The "evolution in action" of J. Huxley and other biologists is simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries! Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of the genome, does not imply evolution, and we have tangible proof of this in many panchronic species [i.e. living fossils that remain unchanged for millions of years]. . . .10 This conclusion seems so obviously correct that it gives rise to another problem. Why do other people, including experts whose intelligence and intellectual integrity I respect, think that evidence of local population fluctuations confirms the hypothesis that natural selection has the capacity to work engineering marvels, to construct wonders like the eye and the wing? Everyone who studies evolution knows that Kettlewell's peppered moth experiment is the classic demonstration of the power of natural selection, and that Darwinists had to wait almost a century to see even this modest confirmation of their central doctrine. Everyone who studies the experiment also knows that it has nothing to do with the origin of any species, or even any variety, because dark and white moths were present throughout the experiment. Only the ratios of one variety to the other changed. How could intelligent people have been so gullible as to imagine that the Kettlewell experiment in any way supported the ambitious claims of Darwinism?11 [T]he successes of [the neo-Darwinian synthesis] are limited to the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place.12 Ernst Mayr has been universally acknowledged as the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th Century. Stephen Jay Gould and other naturalists have cited his work as having shaped their thinking on evolution more than any other. Yet Mayr describes punctuated equilibrium as the "hopeful monsters" theory and states that it "is equivalent to believing in miracles."13 Michael Denton (a critic of the theory of evolution) succinctly explains the problems faced by this approach: While Eldredge and Gould's model is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the gaps between species (and, in my view, correct), it is doubtful if it can be extended to explain the larger systematic gaps. The gaps which separate species: dog/fox, rat/mouse, etc., are utterly trivial compared with, say, that between a primitive terrestrial mammal and a whale or a primitive terrestrial reptile and an Ichthyosaur; and even these relatively major discontinuities are trivial alongside those which divide major phyla such as molluscs and arthropods. Such major discontinuities simply could not, unless we are to believe in miracles, have been crossed in geologically short periods of time through one or two transitional species occupying restricted geographical areas. Surely, such transitions must have involved long lineages including many collateral lines of hundreds or probably thousands of transitional species. . . . To suggest that the hundreds, thousands or possibly even millions of transitional species which must have existed in the interval between vastly dissimilar types were all unsuccessful species occupying isolated areas and having very small population numbers is verging on the incredible!14 IV. Prebiological evolution. Just as the effort to document Darwin's theory of the development of living forms into other living forms has failed, so also has the attempt to imagine a way in which the earliest, simplest living organisms could have arisen from non-living materials. Indeed, as molecular biology has revealed the appalling complexity of the simplest living systems, the intractability of this problem has become distressingly plain. Although the origin-of-life experiments of Stanley Miller at first produced great optimism that the secret to life would soon be known, today that optimism has yielded to a pervasive discouragement. Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, lamented: An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have been satisfied to get it going.15 Johnson describes the disillusionment with Miller's experiment in the following way: Geochemists now report that the atmosphere of the early earth probably was not of the strongly reducing nature required for the Miller-Urey apparatus to give the desired results. . . . Perhaps the most discouraging criticism has come from chemists, who have spoiled the prebiotic soup by showing that organic compounds produced on the early earth would be subject to chemical reactions making them unsuitable for constructing life. In all probability, the prebiotic soup could never have existed, and without it there is no reason to believe that the production of small amounts of some amino acids by electrical charge in a reducing atmosphere had anything to do with the origin of life. . . . The simplest organism capable of independent life, the prokaryote bacterial cell, is a masterpiece of miniaturized complexity which makes a spaceship seem rather low-tech. Even if one assumes that something much simpler than a bacterial cell might suffice to start Darwinist evolution on its way - a DNA or RNA macromolecule, for example - the possibility that such a complex entity could assemble itself by chance is still fantastically unlikely, even if billions of years had been available.16 1. Miller used methane; whereas, "In an early earth's atmosphere subjected to ultraviolet radiation, methane would have been converted to higher-molecular weight hydrocarbons, forming an oil slick up to ten meters deep." So why did Miller posit methane? Because, as he said, in order for amino acids more complex than glycine to have been produced naturalistically, methane would have been necessary. 2. Miller also used ammonia; whereas, ammonia is quickly destroyed under ultraviolet irradiation. 3. He assumed, as he had to do, an atmosphere lacking oxygen but containing substantial amounts of hydrogen; but water vapor is easily dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen quickly escapes into space. "In fact, a consensus has developed since the late 1970s that the early earth's atmosphere never contained significant amounts of ammonia, methane or hydrogen. Rather, it most likely consisted of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor." Origin-of-life experiments with atmospheres of that composition have been complete failures.17 Behe quotes Klaus Dose: More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.19 Michael Behe finds the argument against design theory based on vestigial organs to be unconvincing for three reasons. First, because we have not yet discovered a use for a structure does not mean that no use exists. The tonsils were once considered to be useless organs, but an important function in immunity has been discovered for them. A python pelvis might be doing something useful of which we are ignorant. This point also applies on the molecular scale; hemoglobin pseudogenes and other pseudogenes, although they are not used to make proteins, may be used for other things that we don't know about. A couple of potential uses that spring to mind as I sit here at my desk incude bonding to active hemoglobin genes during DNA replication in order to stabilize the DNA; guiding DNA recombination events; and aligning protein factors relative to the active genes. Whether any of these are actual duties of the pseudogene for hemoglobin does not matter. The point here is that Miller's assertion rests on assumptions only. The second reason why Miller's argument fails to persuade is that even if pseudogenes have no function, evolution has "explained" nothing about how pseudogenes arose. In order to make even a pseudocopy of a gene, a dozen sophisticated proteins are required: to pry apart the two DNA strands, to align the copying machinery at the right place, to stitch the nucleotides together into a string, to insert the pseudocopy back into the DNA, and much more. In his article Miller has not told us how any of these functions might have arisen in a Darwinian step-by-step process, nor has he pointed to articles in the scientific literature where we can find the information. He can't do that, because the information is nowhere to be found. Folks such as Douglas Futuyma, who cite vestigial organs as evidence of evolution, have the same problem. Futuyma never explains how a real pelvis or eye developed in the first place, so as to be able to give rise to a vestigial organ later on, yet both the functioning organ and the vestigial organ require explanation. I do not purport to understand everything about design or evolution - far from it; I just cannot ignore the evidence for design. If I insert a letter into a photocopier, for instance, and it makes a dozen good copies and one copy that has a couple of large smears on it, I would be wrong to use the smeared copy as evidence that the photocopier arose by chance.20 Punctuated equilibrium does not merely win by default, however. Another contender has entered the ring: design. Endnotes 1Quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), at p. 46. © 2002 Thomas O. Alderman |
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