Evolution: A Theory in Splices

One of the reasons Darwinism has such staying power may be because it is so flexible.  Any speculation can be spliced in or out, as long as the belief that “evolution is a fact” is not jeopardized.  Here are some recent examples of claims made by certain scientists that everything you know about evolution is wrong (well, almost)), but evolution itself is, nevertheless, not threatened.  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

• What Would Darwin Do?  According to Geerat Vermeij (UC Davis), if you played the evolution tape again, you’d probably wind up with life similar to what we have.  “Many traits are so advantageous under so many circumstances that you are likely to see the same things again and again,” he said.  He illustrated his belief with the speculation that barnacles “desperately want to be mollusks.”  This perspective is diametrically opposed to the position of many 20th century Darwinists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who believed that, since evolution is unguided and without goals, the evolutionary history on Earth would never happen the same way twice.  Surprisingly, Vermeij came to his conclusion by studying 55 unique innovations in living things and determining that they were very ancient.  If they arose early, they must have been nearly inevitable, he concluded.  Ker Than gave this theory good press in LiveScience on March 14.
• Fiddling with Origin of Life (FOOL):  Robert Hazen has a new book out, Genesis, that was reviewed favorably by a rival, Leslie Orgel, in Nature last week.  Orgel and Miller long argued for the primordial soup story.  Hazen, with Harold Morowitz, is more attracted to the “metabolism-first” story.  Orgel says about the only thing researchers agree on is that the earth is old and life evolved by natural selection.  “There aren’t many facts or opinions about the origin of life that are universally accepted,” he began.  The fact of evolution is not disputed, “But almost everything else about the origin of life remains obscure.  Little is known with certainty about the physical environment in which life evolved or about the detailed steps that led from unconstrained abiotic chemistry to the organized complexity of biochemistry.”  This is over 50 years after the Miller experiment had newspapers announcing confidently that we had figured out how life began.  Incidentally, Orgel called his review, “In the beginning,” in honor of Hazen’s title, Genesis.  Plagiarism?
• To Lose Is to Gain:  Surprisingly, an evolutionist thinks humans evolved from apes by losing genes.  A press release from University of Michigan.  This is called the “less is more” hypothesis.  Most evolutionists would have thought that the origin of the large brain, upright posture, language faculty, and many more human characteristics would have required a lot of new genetic information.  Anti-darwinist Lee Spetner would probably jest that this story reminds him of the merchant who lost money on every sale but thought he could make it up in volume.
• Darwin Was Sexist:  Joan Roughgarden is at it again (05/17/2004).  The transsexual biologist seems determined to consign Darwin’s theory of sexual selection to the wastebin.  She (formerly John) preached again in Science (17 February 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 965 – 969, DOI: 10.1126/science.1110105).  “Theories about sexual selection can be traced back to Darwin in 1871,” Joan and two colleagues wrote; “…Since its proposal, problems with this narrative have continued to accumulate, and it is our view that sexual selection theory needs to be replaced.”  They have a new proposal based on game theory.  Boy, she called the idea a narrative (any synonyms come to mind?)  Lest this appear a revolution against evolution, Darwin’s other narrative theory, natural selection, is safe (for now).
• Why Sex, Anyway?  Darwinists still aren’t sure why sex evolved.  A review in Science (17 February 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 960 – 961, DOI: 10.1126/science.1124663) re-entertained the on-again, off-again idea that sex helps protect against mutations.  The impact of the story is even more profound: “Slowly, our weltanschauung in evolutionary biology is changing from a static view of a largely optimized genome to a dynamic view of organisms constantly challenged by selection and struggling with the large genetic load imposed by deleterious and new advantageous mutations segregating in the population,” Rasmus Nielsen said in a review.  The theory seems as dynamic as the genome.
• Heresy on the Rise:  The “heretical” theory of sympatric speciation (01/15/2003) gained points in February.  Science Now summarized two recent papers, one on fish and another on palm trees, that claimed to show how species could split into two in the same population and the same environment.  This flies in the face of classical neo-Darwinism that taught that populations had to be segregated, perhaps by a geographical barrier, before speciation could occur (i.e., allopatric speciation).  The concept of sympatric speciation “was largely resisted by the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr,” said Michael Hopkin in Nature (439, 640-641 (9 February 2006) | doi:10.1038/439640b).
• About the only thing certain in evolutionary theory is that evolutionary theory itself will continue to evolve (by artificial selection, that is); today’s heresy may become tomorrow’s orthodoxy, provided Darwin gets the glory.
      Footnote: there’s a new book out about discredited scientific ideas (but Darwinism is not among them—some would add yet).  The book is Theories on the Scrap Heap by John Losee (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); it was reviewed by Douglas Allchin in Science (10 February 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 781 – 782, DOI: 10.1126/science.1122678).  Allchin raises the issue that there is no one agreed-on criterion of science.  Some well-known flops were falsifiable and made predictions.  Falsification is usually a good thing, but surprisingly, Allchin turned this criterion into a protection for Darwinism:

In 16 cases, single findings were interpreted explicitly as falsifying some claim.  A news item noted that critics of teaching evolution frequently apply such stark falsificationist views.  In far fewer (three) cases, authors deemed such judgments too simplistic.  One cautioned against rejecting a theory prematurely.  Losee agrees, echoing a decades-old consensus among philosophers of science.  He details through historic cases how one set of negative results is rarely decisive, except for quite low-level hypotheses.  Rather, researchers typically finesse the evidence by redefining terms, modifying theories, restricting their scope, or even tolerating unresolved anomalies.  Effective reasoning seems to integrate both counterevidence and evidence, and weaker theories wane.

A question remains, who decides?

We liked Newton’s science better: equations, explanations, predictions, precision, rigor and observability.  Did you know that most 18th and 19th century scientists deplored speculative ideas?  Men like Cuvier, Sedgwick and Verner strongly rebuked the imaginations of the storytellers of their day – Buffon, Lamarck and even Darwin himself.  It’s sad that the storytellers have usurped science and taken over the world.  We need a reformation.  Our headline is a play on the title of a classic book by Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.  Still good; read it.