Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  Later finds and comparisons quickly replaced the original impressive linear progression into a tangled bushlike structure of branches from assumed common ancestors, most of which led to extinction. The validity of assigning the root genus, Eohippus, to the horse series at all had been challenged from the beginning. It looks nothing like a horse but was the name given to the North American animal forming the first of Osborn's original sequence. Subsequently, it was judged to be identical to a European genus already discovered by the British anatomist and paleontologist, Robert Owen, and named Hyracotherium on account of its similarities in morphology and habitat to the Hyrax running around alive and well in the African bush today, still equipped with four fore-toes and three hind ones, and more closely related to tapirs and rhinoceroses than anything horselike. Since Hyracotherium predated the North American discovery, then by the normally observed custom Eohippus is not the valid name. But the suggestiveness has kept it entrenched in conventional horse-series lore. Noteworthy, however, is that Hyracotherium is no longer included in the display at Chicago's Museum of Natural History.

  In the profusion of side branches, the signs of relentless progress so aptly discerned by Victorians disappear in contradictions. In some lines, size increases only to reduce again. Even with living horses, the range in size from the tiny American miniature ponies to the huge English shires and Belgian warhorse breeds is as great as that collected from the fossil record. Hyracotherium has 18 pairs of ribs, the next creature shown after it has 19, then there is a jump to 15, and finally a reversion back to 18 with Equus. Nowhere in the world are fossils of the full series as constructed found in successive strata. The series charted in school books comes mainly from the New World but includes Old World specimens where the eye of those doing the arranging considered it justified. In places where successive examples do occur together, such as the John Day formation in Oregon, both the three-toed and one-toed varieties that remain if the doubtful Hyracotherium is ignored are found at the same geological levels. And even more remarkable on the question of toes, of which so much is made when presenting the conventional story, is that the corresponding succession of ungulates in South America again shows distinctive groupings of full three-toed, three-toed with reduced lateral toes, and single-toed varieties, but the trend is in the reverse direction, i.e., from older single-toed to later three-toed. Presumably this was brought about by the same forces of natural selection that produced precisely the opposite in North America.

  Keeping Naturalism Pure: Orthogenesis Wars

  The perfection and complexity seen in the adaptations of living things are so striking that even among the evolutionists in Darwin's day there was a strong, if not predominant belief that the process had to be directed either by supernatural guidance or the imperative of some yet-to-be identified force within the organisms themselves. (After all, if the result of evolution was to cultivate superiority and excellence, who could doubt that the ultimate goal at the end of it all was to produce eminent Victorians?)

  The view that some inner force was driving the evolutionary processes toward preordained goals was known as "orthogenesis" and became popular among paleontologists because of trends in the fossil record that it seemed to explain—the horse series being one of the most notable. This didn't sit well with the commitment to materialism a priori that dominated evolutionary philosophy, however, since to many it smacked of an underlying supernatural guidance one step removed from outright creationism. To provide a purely materialist source of innovation, Darwin maintained that some random agent of variation had to exist, even though at the time he had no idea what it was. A source of variety of that kind would be expected to show a radiating pattern of trial-and-error variants with most attempts failing and dying out, rather than the linear progression of an inner directive that knew where it was going. Hence, in an ironic kind of way, it has been the efforts of the Darwinians, particularly since the 1950s, that have contributed most to replacing the old linear picture of the horse series with the tree structure in their campaign to refute notions of orthogenesis.

  But even if such a tree were to be reconstructed with surety, it wouldn't prove anything one way or the other; the introduction of an element of randomness is by no means inconsistent with a process's being generally directed. The real point is that the pattern was constructed to promote acceptance of a preexisting ideology, rather than from empirical evidence. Darwin's stated desire was to place science on a foundation of materialistic philosophy; in other words, the first commitment was to the battle of ideas. Richard Dawkins, in the opening of his book The Blind Watchmaker, defines biology as "the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."18 The possibility that the suggestion of design might be anything more, and that appearances might actually mean what they say is excluded as the starting premise: "I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian worldview happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence." The claim of a truth that must be so "in principle" denotes argument based on a philosophical assumption. This is not science, which builds its arguments from facts. The necessary conclusions are imposed on the evidence, not inferred from it.

  Left to themselves, the facts tell yet again the ubiquitous story of an initial variety of forms leading to variations about a diminishing number of lines that either disappear or persist to the present time looking much the same as they always did. And at the end of it all, even the changes that are claimed to be demonstrated through the succession are really quite trivial adjustments when seen against the background of equine architecture as a whole. Yet we are told that they took sixty-five million years to accomplish. If this is so, then what room is there for the vastly more complex transitions between forms utterly unlike one another, of which the evidence shows not a hint?

  Anything, Everything, and Its Opposite: Natural Selection

  Dissent in the Ranks: Logical Fallacy and Tautology

  Norman Macbeth's concise yet lucid survey of the subject, Darwin Retried, began when he used some idle time while convalescing in Switzerland to read a volume of essays commemorating the 1959 centenary of Origin's publication. His conclusion after the several years of further research that his first impressions prompted was that "in brief, classical Darwinism is no longer considered valid by qualified biologists." 19 They just weren't telling the public. One of the most startling things Macbeth discovered was that while natural selection figured almost as a required credo on all the lists of factors cited in the experts' writings as contributing to evolution, the importance they assigned to it ranged from its being "the only effective agency," according to Julian Huxley, to virtually irrelevant in the opinions of others—even though it was just this that formed the substantive part of the title to Darwin's book.

  The reason for this backing off from what started out as the hallmark of the theory is that while mechanisms showing the effectiveness of natural selection can be readily constructed in imaginative speculations, any actual example of the process in action in the real world proceeds invisibly. Early Darwinians were carried away into concluding that every aspect of an animal down to the number of its spots or bristles was shaped by natural selection and thus was "adaptive," i.e., relevant to survival. Purporting to explain how the selective value of a particular, possibly trivial characteristic arose became something of a game among the enthusiasts, leading to such wild flights of just-so-story fancy and absurd reasoning that the more serious-minded gave up trying to account for the specifics, which were observable, while retaining undiminished faith in the principle, which wasn't.

  Put another way, it was claimed that natural selection worked because the results said to follow from it were evident all around. But this is the logical fallacy of saying that because A implies B, B must imply A. If it rained this morning, the grass will necessarily be wet. But finding the grass wet doesn't mean necessarily that it rained. The sprinklers may have be
en on; the kids could have been playing with the hose; a passing UFO might have vented a coolant tank, and so on. Confirming the deductions from a theory only lends support to the theory when they can be shown to follow from it uniquely, as opposed to being equally consistent with rival theories. If only naturalistic explanations are allowed by the ground rules, then that condition is satisfied automatically since no explanation other than natural selection, even with its problems, has been offered that comes even close to being plausible. But being awarded the prize through default after all other contenders have been disqualified is hardly an impressive performance.

  The Darwinists' reaction to this entanglement was to move away from the original ideas of struggle and survival, and redefine evolution in terms of visible consequences, namely that animals with certain features did well and increased in numbers, others declined, while yet others again seemed to stay the same. Although perpetuating the same shaky logic, this had the benefit of making the theory synonymous with facts that couldn't be denied, without the burden of explaining exactly how and why they came about, which had been the original intention. In the general retreat from what Darwinism used to mean, "evolution" became a matter of the mathematics of gene flows and population dynamics, in a word differential reproduction, in the course of which "natural selection" takes on the broader meaning of being simply anything that brings it about. 20 So evolution is defined as change brought about by natural selection, where natural selection, through a massive circularity, arrives back at being anything that produces change. What Macbeth finds staggering in this is the ease with which the leaders of the field not only accept such tautologies blithely as inherent in their belief system, but are unable to see anything improper in tautological reasoning or the meaninglessness of any conclusions drawn from it. 21

  Moth Myths. The Crowning Proof?

  A consequence of such illogic is that simple facts which practically define themselves become celebrated as profound revelations of great explanatory power. Take as an example the case of the British peppered moth, cited in virtually all the textbooks as a perfect demonstration of "industrial melanism" and praised excitedly as living proof of evolution in action before our eyes. In summary, the standard version of the story describes a species of moth found in the British Midlands that were predominantly light-colored in earlier times but underwent a population shift in which a dark strain became dominant when the industrial revolution arrived and tree trunks in the moths' habitat were darkened by smoke and air pollution. Then, when cleaner air resulted from the changes and legislation in modern times and the trees lightened again, the moth population reverted to its previous balance. The explanation given is that the moths depend on their coloring as camouflage to protect them from predatory birds. When the tree barks were light, the lighter-colored variety of moths was favored, with darker barks the darker moths did better, and the changing conditions were faithfully mirrored in the population statistics. Indeed, all exactly in keeping with the expectations of "evolution" as now understood.

  The reality, however, is apparently more complicated. Research has shown that in at least some localities the darkening of the moths precedes that of the tree barks, suggesting that some common factor—maybe a chemical change in the air—affects both of them. Further, it turns out that the moths don't normally rest on the trunks in daylight in the way textbook pictures show, and in conditions not artificially contrived for experiments, birds in daylight are not a major influence. The pictures were faked by gluing dead moths to tree trunks. 22

  But even if the facts were as presented, what would it all add up to, really? Light moths do better against a light background, whereas dark moths do better against a dark background. This is the Earth-shattering outcome after a century and a half of intensive work by some of the best-known names in science developing a theory that changed the world? Both light strains and dark strains of moth were already present from the beginning. Nothing changed or mutated; nothing genetically new came into existence. If we're told that of a hundred soldiers sent into a jungle wearing jungle camouflage garb along with a hundred in arctic whites, more of the former were still around a week later, are we supposed to conclude that one kind "evolved" into another, or that anything happened that wouldn't have been obvious to common sense?

  If that's what we're told "evolution" in the now-accepted use of the word means, then so be it. But now we'll need a different word to explain how moths came into existence in the first place. Yet along with such examples as Archaeopteryx and the horse series, the peppered moth is offered as proof that sets the theory on such incontestable grounds that to question it is evidence of being dim-witted or malicious. While other sciences have progressed from sailing clippers to spaceships, Morse telegraph to satellite nets, steam engines to nuclear reactors, these constitute the best evidence that can be mustered after a hundred and fifty years.

  The Origin of Originality?

  Genetics and Mutation

  Recombination: Answering the Wrong Question

  Natural selection in itself originates nothing. It can only select out of what is already present to be selected from. In order to be the driving engine of evolution, it needs a source of new raw material to be tested and either preserved for further experimentation or rejected. Much is written about genetic transposition and recombination—the insertion, deletion, and duplication of the genes carried by the chromosomes, and their rearrangement into new permutations. And it is true that an enormous variety of altered programs for directing the form that an organism will assume can be produced in this way—far greater than could ever be realized in an actual population. Lee Spetner, a former MIT physicist and information scientist who has studied the mathematics of evolution for forty years, calculates that the number of possible variations that could occur in a typical mammalian genome to be in the order of one followed by 24 million zeros. 23 (Yes, I did get that right. Not 24 orders of magnitude; 24 million orders of magnitude.) Of this, the fraction that could be stored in a population of a million, a billion, ten billion, or a hundred billion individuals—it really doesn't make much difference—is so close to zero as to be negligible. And indeed this is a huge source of potential variety. But the attention it gets is misleading, since it's the same sleight of hand we saw before of presenting lots of discussion and examples of adaptive variations that nobody doubts, and assuming evolutionary transitions to be just more of the same. The part that's assumed is precisely what the exercise is supposed to be proving. For all that's going on, despite the stupendous number of combinations it can come up with, is reshuffling the genes that already make up the genome of the species in question. Recombination is a very real and abundant phenomenon, taking place through sexual mixing whenever a mating occurs and well able to account for the variation that we see—it's theoretically possible for two siblings to be formed from exactly complementary gametes (the half set of parental genes carried by a sperm or egg cell) from each parent, and thus to not share one gene in common. But it can't work beyond the species level, where inconceivably greater numbers of transitions are supposed to have happened, that we don't see.

  Random Mutation: Finally, the Key to New Things Under the Sun

  The source of original variation that Darwin sought was eventually identified as the mechanism of genetic mutation deduced from Mendel's studies of heredity, which was incorporated into Darwinian theory in what became known in the 1930s as the neo-Darwinian synthesis. By the 1940s the nucleic acid DNA was known to be the carrier of hereditary information, and in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick determined the molecule's double-helix structure with its "cross-rungs" of nucleotide base pairs that carry the genetic program. This program is capable of being misread or altered, leading the molecular biologist Jacques Monod, director of the Pasteur Institute, to declare in 1970 that "the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded." 24 Let's take a deeper look, then, at what was securely founded.