Much Ado About Microevolution

A bragging scientist fools himself
about finding natural selection in lizards

 

Is a Darwin-adoring biologist enjoying a vacation in a tropical paradise or really doing legit science? You be the judge of whether his detailed work lizard-hunting is bringing the coveted “understanding” that King Charles promised his disciples.

Amid a tropical paradise known as ‘Lizard Island,’ researchers are cracking open evolution’s black box – scientist at work  (The Conversation, 25 March 2025). James T. Stroud from Georgia Tech is proud enough of himself being promoted by The Conversation (aka ‘the monologue in the echo chamber’) to include three selfies of the “scientist at work” promoting Darwin. Five times he claims that his team is bringing “understanding” of biology to the world. But is he deceiving himself? Is he doing minimal work while spending most of the time loafing in a tropical paradise?

Every morning in Miami, our fieldwork begins the same way. Fresh Cuban coffee and pastelitos – delicious Latin American pastries – fuel our team for another day of evolutionary detective work. Here we’re tracking evolution in real time, measuring natural selection as it happens in a community of Caribbean lizards.

As an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Georgia Tech, my journey with these remarkable reptiles has taken me far from my London roots. The warm, humid air of Miami feels natural now, a far cry from the gray, drizzly and lizard-free streets of my British upbringing.

Good job if you can get it. Spend 10 years in a tropical paradise sipping Cuban coffee and enjoying Latin American pastries for a few hours each day collecting lizards with tiny lassos made of dental floss. Bring them back to the lab in Miami, measure their feet and take photos, then go out for a few more on Lizard Island at night. Nature, naturally, jumps at publishing any paper praising Darwin. How hard was this job? If Stroud collected one lizard a day five days a week, he should have 2,600 specimens by now, but he only goes to Lizard Island to catch and release anole lizards in the merry month of May. Presumably this gives his students at Georgia Tech the illusion that they are involved in real science.

To understand how species evolve, researchers need to crack open this black box of evolution and investigate natural selection in wild populations.

Stroud looked into evolution’s black box, but did he see what Michael Behe saw? Did he see irreducible complexity and molecular machines and features that shout intelligent design? No: Stroud saw what his philosophy told him to see: mindless, blind, unguided, purposeless processes giving the world organisms of exquisite beauty and capability by accident. Stuff Happens, he believes, and so animals with fast-moving legs, sharp eyes, skeletal systems, multiple senses, digestive systems, reproductive systems, circulatory systems, immune systems and much, much more, simply “emerged” over millionzzzz of yearzzzz for no good reason at all long before this “scientist at work” showed up to look at them.

My colleagues and I are doing this by studying the anoles in exquisite detail. Last year was especially exciting: We ran what we called the Lizard Olympics.

How is this different from horse racing or poodle dog judging? He started with anole lizards, and he ended with anole lizards. Where is the evolution? Even when he put them through training for his so-called Lizard Olympics, the anole lizards remained anole lizards. No new organs were found. No feathers formed on their forearms. No wings allowing the creatures to fly through the trees developed. Ken Ham is yawning.

Here, the real Olympic trials begin. Every athlete goes through a comprehensive evaluation. Our portable X-ray machine reveals their skeletal structure, and high-resolution scans capture the intricate details of their feet. This is particularly critical: Like their gecko cousins, anoles possess remarkable sticky toes that allow them to cling to smooth surfaces such as leaves and maybe even survive hurricanes.

Stroud repeats his chant: ‘See no design, Hear no design, Speak no design.’ Remarkably sticky toes that allow the lizards to survive hurricanes? Stuff happens.

After making sure the lizards were free of performance-enhancing drugs, he makes them do track and field events. He puts them on lizard racetrack and sees how fast they could run, whispering ‘might makes right’ to himself:

These aren’t arbitrary measurements – each represents a potential evolutionary advantage. Fast lizards might better escape predators. Strong bites might determine winners in territorial disputes. Excellent grip is crucial for tree canopy acrobatics.

He commits the Non-Sequitur fallacy here, presuming that speed and strength equates to “reproductive success” (read here why this is a tautology). He should have listened to Solomon, who lamented, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

Each measurement helps us answer fundamental questions about evolution: Do faster lizards live longer? Do stronger biters produce more offspring? These are the essential metrics of evolution by natural selection.

Stroud says his team has discovered a trend over their long-term measurements of these lizards. Is this evolution in action?

So far we have uncovered two fascinating patterns. Initially, it didn’t pay to be different on Lizard Island. Anoles with very average shapes and sizes lived longer compared with those that are slightly different. But when the crested anoles arrived, everything changed: Suddenly, brown anoles with longer legs had a survival advantage.

The Lizard Olympics is helping us understand why. The larger, more aggressive crested anoles are forcing brown anoles to spend more time on the ground, where those with longer legs might run faster to escape predators – allowing them to better survive and pass on their long-leg genes, while shorter-legged anoles might be eaten before they can reproduce.

He doesn’t know any of this. He is imposing his philosophy on these lizards between sips of Cuban coffee and bites of pastelitos. The two types of anoles existed before and after the measurements. There was no origin of species. There was no evolution! How does he know that the slower anoles didn’t survive better? He only says the faster ones “might” escape predators. If his hypothesis was a law of nature, the longer-legged anoles should have evolved to sauropod size by now. The crested anoles should have forced the brown anoles to become Godzilla. After all, these survival advantages should have been pressuring them for millionzzzz of yearzzzz. Stroud enters his daily trance:

Never work on evolutionary biology without performing the required meditation exercise first.

By watching natural selection unfold in response to environmental changes, rather than inferring it from fossil records, we’re providing cutting-edge evidence for evolutionary processes that Charles Darwin could only theorize about.

Some day over the rainbow, in the land of futureware, Stroud’s exercise in futility might bring the coveted prize for Darwin disciples: understanding (28 May 2021).

These long days of observation are slowly revealing one of biology’s most fundamental processes. Every lizard we catch, every measurement we take adds another piece to our understanding of how species adapt and evolve in an ever-changing world.

But they are all still lizards. They are all still anole lizards. Stroud started with anole lizards. He ended with anole lizards. There has been no Origin of Species. There has been no evolution. There has been no understanding (26 Jan 2021). This was all busy work, mere job security for storytellers, with Latin American pastries for pleasure.

Stroud strode into a fallacy.

Update 4/2/25: Is natural selection the only explanation for Stroud’s data? Does support for Darwin jump out of the evidence? Consider this Science Insider item from Science Magazine published 26 Feb 2025: “Even faced with the same data, ecologists sometimes come to opposite conclusions.” Scientists cannot be certain about how ecological relationships came about:

Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t, according to a paper published this month in BMC Biology, which finds that 246 ecologists analyzing the same data sets reached widely varying conclusions, with some finding effects in totally opposite directions.

Stroud fits into this picture of scientists jumping to favorite explanations for things. Subjectivity has plagued psychology for years when the “replication crisis” gained national attention, but the crisis is not limited to one field. One metascientist (researcher who studies scientific practice) said this: “I have noticed an unfortunate hubris in other domains that say, well, we have our house in better order.”

Once again, we demonstrate that evolutionists don’t understand their own theory (27 April 2013, 6 Sept 2021, 21 Nov 2024). Stroud and his gullible students, laboring away between Cuban coffee and pastelitos, think they are doing “science.” They are committing the same fallacies Jonathan Wells exposed in the Peppered Myth back in 2000. Would that these Darwin Disciples at Georgia Tech do something worthwhile with their brief lives, like biomimetics with their observations of anole lizard abilities. Each lizard has trillions of ATP synthase rotary engines. Each lizard has fantastic machinery, with senses, muscles, bones, and a brain packed into a small body. There is plenty of solid science they could work on without attributing these wonders of nature to the Stuff Happens Law.

Even if brown anoles with slightly longer legs were to survive a predator on Monday, that doesn’t mean they would survive on Tuesday. The gold medalist lizard might run faster right into a predator’s mouth. It might present a larger body profile putting it at risk to be blown off the island in the next hurricane. All Stroud can say scientifically is that brown anoles differ in leg length by tiny amounts. Did “natural selection”—the Stuff Happens Law—whistle for genetic mutations to make the legs longer? Why didn’t he consider the possibility of internal genetic engineering giving lizards the ability to adapt, not random mutations and natural selection? Such a thought would never enter his mind. He was on a mission: to praise Darwin from whom all guessings flow.

If the Olympic Committee believed like James Stroud, they would have to conclude that the winners of each event were evolving by natural selection. Perish the thought. It would be another step toward resurrecting eugenics. Let us learn better things from the Animal Olympics.