the origin of species and
THE TROUBLE WITH DARWIN
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
____________________________________________________
One
general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings,
namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest
die.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
I’ve
been having problems with Darwin lately. And The Creator hasn’t
spoken to me.
As Charles
Darwin, the Father of Evolution, would have it, the shaping of
life on the planet earth, or why all life forms are as they are,
is a result of a weeding out process commonly referred to as natural
selection or survival of the fittest. Random mutations are preserved
(selected) or eliminated (selected out) according to their suitability
in a given environment. If during an extended dry spell a yellow
field of soya turns brown, the yellow butterflies that would normally
be camouflaged from aerial predation will become visible, and
in all likelihood be eliminated, while the freak (mutated) brown
butterflies (now rendered invisible) will survive and multiply.
Thus, in a contest of the fittest, the brown butterfly triumphs.
However,
survival of the fittest plays only a minor role regarding species
attributes because nearly all adventitious (chance) mutations
are neutral, that is neither selected nor selected out, until
a change in environment directly engages the mutation. Taking
Homo sapiens as an example, we can hypothesize an infinite number
of radical mutations, none of which would significantly impact
his relationship with his non-mutated co-frères: having
a sixth finger, a third eye looking out from the back of a head,
a thigh muscle-tendon combination that would allow him to run
significantly faster. And while the extra finger would provide
the mutant with a decided advantage during a Bach competition
or on the pitching mound, he will not prevail over or replace
his 5-fingered counterpart. They will co-exist side by side.
Let us
recall that life on earth began as one cell, but when this single
cell mutated into a multi-cellular organism, single cell life
didn’t disappear or was found unfit in favour of multi-cellular
life. They were able to share and thrive in the same environment
while multi-cellular life enjoyed certain advantages in more stressful
environments.
If from
the outset of life on earth it were either/or, the advantaged
mutated organism would always be selected at the expense of the
unmutated one (the two-celled organism survives, the one-celled
doesn’t; the organism with vision survives, the unseeing
one doesn’t), and there would be no variety of species,
but simply a single evolution of one life form. Most mutations
are not tested in a crucible of fitness, which accounts for the
incredible variety of life on earth and its estimated 8 million
species.
“There
is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to
be a butterfly,” writes architect, inventor Buckminster
Fuller, a musing that implicitly casts doubt on Darwin’s
theory of evolution.
With
the approach of winter, monarch butterflies begin their annual
3,000 mile migratory trip from Canada to Mexico. Once in Mexico,
they reproduce then die (an event not related to incontinent tortilla
consumption), leaving their offspring to make the long and danger-fraught
return trip to El Norte, an undertaking that, in consideration
of the numbers, must boggle the mind. The Mexican-born butterfly,
weighing approximately .5 grams, and with a brain no larger than
the head of a pin, manages to find its way back to a faraway country
it has never seen, and to the exact same address where its progenitors
dwelled.
But there
was a time when butterflies were not required to migrate, when
climate was favourable to a sedentary existence. This all changed
with the dawning of the ice-age that favoured butterflies with
the innate ability to perceive the danger posed by the coming
cold, and endowed with the strength and navigational savvy to
find their way to a warmer climate; butterflies without these
traits perished. As the ice advanced, the butterfly was pushed
farther and farther south; as the ice-age receded, the butterfly
followed the warming temperatures northward. What Darwinism doesn’t
explain is the migratory instinct. Why would butterflies, comfortably
ensconced in an hospitable southern environment, want to leave
and undertake a harrowing month-long journey of 3,000 miles, only
to stay for no more than half a year, and then undertake the harrowing
journey back? Following the warmth, or escaping the cold makes
good evolutionary sense, but Darwinism cannot account for the
migratory instinct and neither does the homing instinct because
butterflies that undertake the migratory voyage are born in Mexico
and are already at home and would have evacuated their comfort
zone only under dire stress. However, we know that as prolific
pollinators, they are needed in the north, and sure enough, in
response to this need, they incredulously find their way there
and northern flowers and fruit trees are handsomely provided for.
Among the defenders of Darwin, some will argue that the plants,
for their own survival, must have evolved something in their nectar
that when consumed by the butterfly alters its DNA, compelling
it (that is the offspring) to return to Canada when the temperature
warms up. We must suppose in the age of secularism, any answer
is better than deity.
The common
cow, vitula eligans, doesn’t have four stomachs
per se but four digestive compartments. But there was
a time when the cow had only one compartment. According to Darwinism,
the prototype of a 2nd inchoate stomach one day appeared and since
it was a neutral mutation, there was no reason for it to be eliminated
by natural selection. So cows with one stomach and cows with a
stub of a second stomach were living together, just as at one
time in the history of life on earth unseeing organisms were sharing
the same environment with the prototype of a seeing one. Over
time the stubbed stomach evolved into a functional digestive compartment,
which gave the 2-stomached cow an advantage over cows with a single
compartment, and then again with the third over the second and
so on. What Darwinism doesn’t explain is why the one, two
and three stomached cows didn’t survive since the cow with
a single stomach didn’t disappear when the inchoate stub
of a second stomach emerged. In our present age, both seeing and
unseeing organisms co-exist, unspeaking chimps and speaking humans
co-exist, dumb and intelligent creatures co-exist, so why don’t
single, doubled and tripled stomached cows co-exist? Evolutionary
theory forces the conclusion that something in the cow’s
diet changed which decisively favoured the emerging two-stomached
cow, and then the three-stomached one -- and so on.
In respect
to the evolution of language, why didn’t Homo Habilis or
Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon survive when they had a
decided communication advantage over non-speaking apes? Noam Chomsky,
who is not a creationist, writes:
“Evolutionary
theory is informative about many things, but it has little
to say, as of now (1972), about questions of this nature .
. . In the case of such systems as language . . . it is not
easy to imagine a course of selection that might have given
rise to them.”
Since
the transitional species mentioned above were vastly more evolved
and fit than the apes, they should have easily survived. The argument
that they weren’t as intelligent as Homo sapiens and were
selected out doesn’t hold because intelligence wasn’t
necessary otherwise the apes wouldn’t have survived.
The mere
existence of the missing link theory implies that natural selection
cannot explain the evolution of life from the single cell to something
as complex as vision and sentience. The theory – the theological
equivalent of agnosticism – implies tens of thousands of
links, or necessary mutations that culminate in human intelligence.
Except
in survival of the fittest contests, and consistent with the extraordinary
variety of life on earth, the superseded species (the one-celled
organism) usually survives, albeit having lost a taxonomical position
(to the multi-celled organism) in the pecking order. As marine
species evolved into amphibious and then land dwelling creatures,
marine life didn’t disappear. There is no evidence, paleontological
or otherwise, that at some point in the evolution of the cow only
those with two digestive compartments were found fit and those
with one were selected out, and the same regarding the three and
four stomached cow. Smarter and more capable than the surviving
apes, Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus disappeared but we don’t
know why and Darwinism can’t explain it. If volcanic ash
blotted out the sun for a couple of years, the prototype of Homo
sapiens would have also been demised.
Shouldn't
Darwin's devotees be asking: To what are we conceding if we grant
that the disappearance of intermediary species is as much a mystery
as the evolution of species attributes?
In the
accusing light of the insufficiency of Darwinism as an explanation
of why all life forms on earth are as they are, all attempts to
explain the unexplainable are equally valid in the eye of the
beholder. The theist is convinced that God is responsible for
the way we are, for the way the cosmos runs, its origins. Anthropology
proposes that Homo Erectus was lazy and was wiped out by Homo
sapiens. Germ theorists hypothesize that there might have been
a particular species-specific lethal germ that would have left
the apes intact but decimated Homo Habilis and then Homo Erectus,
but not those mutants that eventually evolved into Homo sapiens.
These same germ theorists predict that in the event of a nuclear
holocaust, those individuals possessed of exceptional immunity
to radiation will survive and evolve into the next species.
Darwin’s
grand theory of evolution works best in either/or situations,
however it cannot account for the thousands of random mutations
resulting in something as specialized as the eye. At every point
in the evolution of vision, the next mutation could have been
other than what it was – and most of those mutations would
have been neutral, that is not selected out. What happened to
them all? Reiterating what Chomsky said earlier in respect to
language, “it’s not easy to imagine a course of selection
that would have given rise to it.”
Perhaps
the prudent position to take is to give Darwin his due when and
where it is due, and no less the same to what cannot be accounted
for, just as we should remind ourselves that all theories collapse
before the fact that we still don’t know how the inorganic
evolved into the organic, how something dead became something
living.
Human
beings are uniquely endowed with the competence to wonder about
things, and among the possible things over which wondering can
casts its wide net is its origins. And if at the end of the day
the sum of world knowledge and ingenuity is left wanting in accounting
for that improbable faculty (to wonder), it shouldn’t deter
us from making it the signature value that provides for the ascent
of man both as an anthropology and ontology.
