I see where the Creationists have gotten into the news again lately,
slapping labels on biology textbooks and generally doing whatever they can to
devolve our modern educational curriculum. Jeez, I thought those guys would’ve been sated
back in 1925, by the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. (Since
my wife was born and raised in Tennessee, I have to be a bit careful here. But
I have to say -- as much as I’ve always liked that State’s terrain and
geography -- much of its sociology strikes me as strictly pre-Neanderthal...)
I’ve done a wee bit of web research into the latest "Intelligent Design"
(ID) tack of the Creationists. I should prefix this by saying that I’m
strictly a layman in terms of both evolutionary theory and Creationism. Most
of what I know of evolution I learned in 1964 from my H.S. biology teacher,
Ms. Sudler, and from a few books written by Jay Gould since then. What I
learned about Creationism was limited to church bible school quite a few years
antecedent to that, and some supplemental religious studies along the way. I
must say that I always had a hard time believing Bishop Usher’s calculation
that the Earth was created on October 22, 4004 BC. I also had a hard time
believing that fossils were planted deep in the earth by Satan, in order to
deceive us.
There is a current claim that "Intelligent Design" should be taken as a
"scientific" alternative to evolution. I say "bushwah" to that. From all I can
read and determine, ID is definitely, unequivocally non-science and
non-sense, and is not worthy of a picosecond’s worth of intellectual
consideration in our schools. But at the same time, while the Darwinian Theory
of Evolution passes some of the tests of a "true science", it is fraught with
difficulties -- at the very least, it’s significantly incomplete. I see
Darwinian Evolution as rather like Newtonian physics, awaiting anxiously for
the birth of an Einstein to complete and fulfill it. But that doesn’t mean
that Darwinian evolution theory should be expunged or shoved aside -- since
it’s the best science has to offer right now.
One of the things I’ve noted is that almost all the Intelligent Design
gurus seem to be connected with
a
conspiratorial movement. Most of ID’s major proponents have not-too-well-hidden connections
to evangelical Christian organizations. Their claimed excuse is often: "Well,
those are the only institutions that will give us the support we need for our
scientific work." That’s pretty lame. What scientific work? If I were
doing real science, would I prostitute myself (or my reputation) by
taking money from, say, the Flat-Earth Society? If you’re doing real science,
real science groups will support you. I just can’t for the life of me
determine what kind of "science" these guys are actually doing.
Nor would I elevate the open-mindedness of the "sanctioned" scientific
community much above the Creationists. I’d characterize them in terms of the
old story about the group of blind men, each feeling different parts of an
elephant and pontificating on what the beast must look like. The scientific community is about the most politicized, closed-minded
fraternity that's ever existed on the planet. The revision of existing
scientific dogma is about as hard as adding a Station of the Cross to the
Roman Catholic Church. That’s why people who have the tenacity to accomplish
that seemingly impossible task get the Nobel Prize, and are immortalized in
textbooks. But always, real science will out in the end.
One problem with evolution as a "science" is that so much of it depends on
analysis of paleontology data. These data do behave nicely and sit still on a
slab, but their interpretation and chronological organization are very
subjective. If what you see on the slab doesn’t jibe with what the
reigning hypotheses may be, it’s too easy to shove the sample back into the
drawer and ignore it. And if you don’t think that’s a routine practice in this
field, read Forbidden Archeology
by Cremo & Thompson (Bhaktivedanta Book Publ., 1993).
You just can’t do experiments in evolution in the same way you can do
physics experiments. That’s a distinct weakness. Sure, you can do short-term
experiments on, say, genetic changes in fruit flies -- but that doesn’t say a
whole lot about what it was that made a fruit fly fly in the first
place. You can do 20-year observational studies of a species on the Galapagos
Islands – but of what significance is that, when you’re trying to explain how
1.5 billion years of biological development proceeded on this
planet?
Here is my main rub against the Theory of Evolution: The data say that ALMOST ALL of the
animal phylum that comprise our natural world sprang forth within a relatively
tiny slice of time (at most, 10 million years) at the start of the Cambrian age,
about 500 million years ago. This event is known as the "Cambrian Explosion".
Prior to that time, there were just sea stars, crustaceans, and worms. There
has been only one single new animal phylum that has developed since
then, in all those 500 million years – but even that one is a questionable case.
In the total span of Earth’s biological time, that’s a mighty slim sliver
indeed, to have produced essentially all the basic body structures of the
myriad, teeming forms of life we see on our Earth.
Standard Darwinian evolutionary theory posits that natural changes take
place gradually, over time. So it bombs out badly there against the Cambrian
evidence. "Neo-Darwinian" theory grants spurts or "saltations" in evolution --
but the Cambrian "spurt" was unprecedented and unique in the entire natural
history of the Earth. And 500 million years is a sufficiently long time to
wait for new phylum to evolve, with lots of environmental opportunities
prevailing. Why did it happen? Lacking any better evidence or hypotheses,
scientists point to a period of global greenhouse warming that was known to
have occurred during the period in question. Is this a sufficient
explanation? It seems kind of flimsy to me, since other greenhouse events have
occurred since. On the other hand, the ID folks want to point to this
rapid design proliferation as evidence of intervention by the Finger of a
Divine Designer. But is the lack of a solid scientific explanation for this anomalous event
really sufficient motivation to make you want to leap off the scientific
toboggan altogether? To do so would be to embrace an
argumentum ad ignorantium. Just because something can't be
scientifically explained at the present time is not proof of its scientific
impossibility.
As geologic time progressed, there was a pattern of increasing diversity at
lower taxonomic levels relative to the higher taxa. Today there are far fewer
classes and orders than existed four- to five-hundred million years ago, while
there are probably eight to ten times the number of species. This lower-level
species proliferation is obviously the work of classical "Darwinian" natural
selection. But what of the almost spontaneous genesis of so many varied
basic and dramatically different forms of animal life in such a
short period of time in the Cambrian era? To me at least, evolutionary theory
doesn’t deal with that fact in a very persuasive manner.
Note: The "Cambrian Explosion" was followed by a "Cambrian
extinction" period where many of the new, unique phylum ceased to exist.
Great global extinction episodes have happened at least 5 times since the
initial introduction of these wonderfully varied Cambrian life forms,
probably caused by environmental catastrophes like asteroid hits,
"super-volcanoes", quick climatic shifts, etc. Most of the phylum existing
in the Cambrian era no longer survive. (The Chordata phylum that we
vertebrates belong to, emanating also from that Cambrian Explosion,
fortunately did. I wonder what the ones that didn’t make it would have
looked like today, had they survived the Cambrian Extinction and continued
to evolve? Perhaps we humans would have become their pets…)
Despite this major exegetical flaw in evolutionary theory – and despite my
respect for the Jesuit Priest
Teilhard de Chardin‘s idea of "directed evolution" – I have to stop short of believing that a
teleological principle was involved in the development and progression of life
on the planet. I truly wish there was an
"Omega point" that we were destined to achieve – starting from our Cambrian
creche and culminating in an ultimate apocatastasis with the
Godhead, somewhere at the end of our evolution. That would place us humans in
a truly glorious context, progenitors to great super-beings -- and in that
sense even proto-gods ourselves. I think this is the notion that really
lies in the recesses of the Creationist’s minds, carefully repackaged in order
to hide this "unscientific" message in the "scientific" Intelligent Design
initiative. Of all the thousands of biological species extant in His creation,
God favors Man alone, and therefore leads him along a special path back to
Himself.
Well, maybe so. But from what I have seen of Man -- more
particularly, of his behavior -- I can hardly understand why.
Regardless, this thought is strictly in the
realm of Religion, or at best Metaphysics. You can of course invoke the
Anthropic Principle to support the notion, a tautology that says there must
be something particularly fortunate or "blessed" about Man, since he's the only one around
smart enough to be asking the questions and studying the universe around him.
And the universe, or more particularly the conditions of the Earth and its
local environment, have developed "just so" to allow him to do that. To
me, this is not an extremely satisfactory line of thought-- mostly since I'm
not sure what you do with it. Like the old CSN&Y song, you've got
to "love the one you're with". If it had so happened that -- through a
stroke of bad environmental luck -- the Chordata phylum now occupying our
intellectually elevated position had suffered early extinction back in the
Cambrian (like so many of his fellow new phylum), who's to say it wouldn't have been
the descendant of another Cambrian "design
experiment" who would now be sitting on the same throne as Man? More
critically, would they think that God loved them any less?
Rupert Sheldrake, in A new Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative
Causation (Blond & Briggs Ltd. 1981), has made an interesting and
persuasive case that life is influenced by a "morphological field" that
constrains and governs the manifestations of natural form, function and design
organization. Sheldrake believes that the existence and maintenance of this
field can be studied and analyzed in a scientific way. As a lower level
analogy to this idea, consider that the laws of physics & chemistry provide
only so many ways that proteins may fold, and extending that, so many ways
that flesh may grow. Sheldrake’s field operates in a similar fashion, except
that it impacts not only biological form but also individual behavior,
learning and development. More recently, some serious efforts are now
underway at Princeton University
to explore particular aspects and effects of a "global consciousness"
phenomenon; some of the results to date are quite astounding. This
global noosphere, if it exists, may lend credence to Sheldrake's morphological
field hypothesis.
Experiments with bacterial cultures and flies subjected to controlled mutational
conditions show that the same types of mutations always seem to occur, repeatedly. In
essence, there are only so many ways to skin a cat. Or rather, so many ways
that a cat can be a cat. I see no reason to invoke a higher entity to
explain why that is, at
least at this level of focus. To me, Darwinism is a rather threadbare, humble
attempt to explain how we came to be what we are. More modern evolutionary
theory has tried to patch the holes. It’s at least a partially
"verifiable" theory -- albeit not on the level of the "harder" scientific
theories found in physics or chemistry. But eventually, the moldering body of Darwin will fossilize
enough so that we can stand more firmly on his shoulders, there to see a lot
farther. I daresay, with a glance in the other direction, we'll also
spy the Creationists, in their new "Intelligent Design" cloaks, plodding doggedly backwards toward their pre-Cambrian
reward.
Back to Polemics & Essays...
Some of this material was extracted from Fredric J. Heeren,
Was the First Craniate on
the Road to Cognition?. This is a very interesting paper and
one of the few that I found of any value referenced on the Intelligent Design
websites. Most of the rest are just evolution-bashing articles written by
nimrods, or more argumentum ad ignorantium. That’s
not what I call "science".
Look at the fossils and artist's reconstructions of some of the novel,
incredible creatures that sprouted forth in the Cambrian Explosion at the
paleontology site of the
National Museum of Natural History.
The implication that
no intervening or "crossover" evolutionary forms have been found to connect the
novel phylum arising in
the Cambrian Explosion to pre-Cambrian life-forms is debated by many of the
experts. New data keep coming in -- or perhaps, new people are looking
more imaginatively at the same old fossils. For example, see this article by Glenn R.
Morton,
Phylum Level Evolution.
Lastly, is
this another possible "triggering event" for the Cambrian
Explosion?
Postscript: Possibly inspired by the time I've been putting
into this page, Chris just bought me The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,
by Stephen Jay Gould (Belknap Harvard, 2002). It must've been Jay's swan
song, since he died in 2002. Hmmm, only 1433 pages of text, with very
few illustrations. I'd better get started if I want to finish this book
before the Heat Death of the
Universe ensues...
