The Origin of Specious Ideas: Did Darwin Explain Speciation?

Even though Darwin’s best seller was titled On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Albert and Schluter in Current Biology¹ claim his title was deceptive: “Darwin’s book is about adaptation and the origin of varieties and has surprisingly little to say about selection and ‘the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries’.”  Is the mystery better understood today, 146 years later? This is their “primer” article, “Selection and the origin of species.”

Natural selection is the differential survival or reproductive success of individuals differing in phenotype within a population. Sexual selection, by contrast, is the differential mating success of phenotypically different individuals. These two processes are the most potent drivers of evolutionary change within populations. Here we shall consider some of their contributions to the buildup of reproductive incompatibilities between populations – the origin of species. [Emphasis added in all quotes.]

They argue that, surprisingly, natural selection and sexual selection actually have little to do with speciation (the divergence of a population into non-interbreeding groups), but rather only with morphological differences within populations or between individuals. Instead, “speciation is environment driven,” they claim, with selection only incidental to the process. It can modify traits that lead to reproductive isolation (and thus, speciation). They provide some examples of populations that have diverged into non-interbreeding groups, including Darwin’s finches, fruit flies and flowering plants.

Geneticists try to detect reproductive isolation in the genes (bottom-up approach), and biologists try to determine it from morphology (top-down approach). Do these approaches meet in the middle?

Our understanding of the process of speciation has increased greatly since Darwin first proposed a central role for natural selection. Much of what we now know has come from research conducted over the past two decades. The picture emerging is that speciation is a process that results from the same forces responsible for most change within species: natural and sexual selection. Nonetheless, there are still many areas that require investigation.

The ‘top down’ or phenotypic approach to studying speciation has found evidence for selection on ordinary phenotypic characters shown also to underlie premating and postmating isolation. This approach has yielded little, however, about the genetic basis of reproductive isolation. For example, we do not know yet if species differences are based on many genes of small phenotypic effect, or if few genes of large effect are most important in causing divergence and reproductive isolation. This has made it difficult to pinpoint exactly how natural selection has led to divergence in most cases. Recent studies of speciation in monkeyflowers and other taxa are helping to overcome this gap.

The ‘bottom up’ or genetic approach to studying speciation has hunted down genes responsible for premating and postmating isolation, and then shown that the gene sequences exhibit signatures of recent selection. But this approach has told us little about the nature of that selection. Is selection divergent or has divergence occurred under uniform selection? Was selection in response to environmental differences? Was it natural or sexual selection?

Finally, we still know little about how mate preferences evolve within and between populations during the process of speciation. Sexual selection by mate choice might be a near-universal process in speciation, but what drives the divergence of mate preferences to begin with?

Speciation study is in the midst of a surge of research effort, and part of the reason is that answers to many of these questions appear at last to be within reach. We expect that a combination of phenotypic and genetic approaches will soon close the gap between the genes and the mechanisms of selection, and yield a fuller account of how most species in nature have formed.

¹Arianne Y.K. Albert, and Dolph Schluter, “Primer: Selection and the origin of species,” Current Biology, Volume 15, Issue 8 , 26 April 2005, Pages R283-R288, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2005.04.015.

Who needs the primer, the readers or the authors? This is nothing more than another “check’s in the mail” whitewash like the one on 04/15/2004 and many others. Articles like this should make the peasants who have suffered under the Darwin monarchy angry enough to revolt.

Here we have tolerated the intellectual revolutionaries who swept into the scientific institutions in the 1860s, promising a new age of enlightenment, and while tolerating a few extremists along the way (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot–see 04/22/2004 entry), we kept thinking that at least the new leaders had science on their side, that they were making policy based on reality and scientific evidence. But when the evidence is always nothing more than promises of future discoveries, how much longer do we give them till calling time out? We can’t, because they built future promises into the very definition of science. In essence, we handed the Darwinists a blank check to run Big Science with no accountability, with no obligation to produce the goods (see 12/22/2003 commentary and footnote*).

Notice how Charlie and his disciples have gotten away with this ruse for 126 years, since they say much of what we “know” (sic) has come from research over the last two decades. What were the Darwinists doing in the 1900s, 1920s, 1940s and 1960s about this central issue? We were told that natural selection was the be-all and end-all of evolution: it was the thing that made Charlie a world-wide celebrity, because while many freethinkers had desired to justify an evolutionary worldview, his predecessors like Erasmus and Kingsley and Lamarck failed to produce a plausible mechanism. Natural selection, with a little sexual selection where needed, was supposed to be the skeleton key that unlocked all the natural history of life. Darwin wrote a book about the origin of species by natural selection, but now, these two scientists admit that, if anything, natural selection is only incidental to the process of speciation.

Look carefully at this paper for any hint of something big that they know natural selection has done. The evidence is vague and inconclusive. On the contrary, the unknowns outnumber the knowns. Look at the questions in their ending quote: these are big issues. Even their proudest examples of natural selection in action leave key questions unanswered: was selection caused by the environment? Can speciation be allopatric, sympatric or both? What effects are caused by natural selection, and what by sexual selection? In short, the whole story of natural selection and speciation is futureware, issues that “will require future investigation.” After all this time, how many of you are willing to believe their promise that answers are “within reach” and that they are now “closing the gap”? When put on trial, they can’t make a case strong enough to convince a jury (see 04/15/2003 commentary).

Most shameful of all is that this Darwinist hand-waving explanation about natural selection and speciation fails utterly to explain the biggest problem: the origin of complex functional systems. The only examples they provide are about fruit fly mutations, finch beak size, stickleback fish spines (see 04/15/2004 entry) and plant polyploidy.

• Fruit flies are organisms possessing extreme technology in materials, flight hardware and software, and networking (re-read the 12/08/2003 entry and marvel); they utterly defy a Darwinian explanation (see 05/18/2004 entry).
• Evolutionary stories about finch beaks are quibbles over trivial details. Finches already had beaks, eyes, wings, ears, sexual organs, feathers, hollow bones, avian lungs and feathers before the story of their beak evolution was told; evolutionists grasp at wind when trying to explain how the complex interacting structures evolved (see 08/20/2003 entry).
• In plants, the origin of just one sugar in the cell wall defies evolutionary explanation (see 10/26/2001 entry), let alone how trees figured out how to pump water 367 feet into the sky (see 06/26/2003 entry). Are monkeyflower studies filling in these gaps? Read the 11/13/2003 entry and see if you are impressed. Plant speciation is a postmodern synthesis, not a a scientific theory (see 08/19/2003 entry).

So the very thing that made Darwin famous is still a “mystery of mysteries” after 146 years. When the Darwinists are pushed to the wall with this kind of rebuttal, they retreat into their “rules of science” castle* that disallows design explanations by fiat. It’s time to storm the castle and throw the usurpers out.