Evolution’s Revolution
WANTED: A REPLACEMENT FOR DARWIN
THE SCRAMBLE IS ON FOR NEW ANSWERS
EVOLUTION “is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years.” So said a report on a meeting held in Chicago last October. Some 150 specialists in evolution held a four-day conference on the subject “Macroevolution.”
Science, the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reported the mood: “Clashes of personality and academic sniping created palpable tension . . . the proceedings were at times unruly and even acrimonious.” Many frustrated scientists complained that “a large proportion of the contributions were characterized more by description and assertion than by the presentation of data.” However, has not assertion instead of data long been the tactic of evolutionists?
Darwin had said that life evolved very slowly by small changes from a single-celled organism into all life on earth, including man. The fossil record should show these transitions, but he admitted it doesn’t. One hundred and twenty years ago, he said the record was incomplete, but he felt that more fossils would be discovered in time to fill in the gaps.
“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He believes new species arise, not from gradual changes, but in sudden bursts of evolution. The many transitional forms needed for Darwinian evolution never existed—no fossils will ever bridge the gaps.
Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard agrees with Eldridge. At the Chicago meeting he declared: “Certainly the record is poor, but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change.” Everett Olson, UCLA paleontologist, said: “I take a dim view of the fossil record as a source of data.” Francisco Ayala, a former major advocate of Darwin’s slow changes, added this comment: “I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.”
Science summed up the controversy: “The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution [small changes within the species] can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution [big jumps across species boundaries]. . . . the answer can be given as a clear, No.”
This revised view of evolution is called “punctuated equilibrium,” meaning one species remains for millions of years in the fossil record, suddenly disappears and a new species just as suddenly appears in the record. This, however, is not really a new proposal. Richard Goldschmidt advanced it in the 1930’s, called it the “hopeful monsters” hypothesis, and was much maligned for it then. “Punctuated equilibrium” is a much more impressive designation.
This theory is somewhat of a boon to evolutionists, for it does away with the need to come up with transitional forms. It makes changes happen too fast, the evolutionists contend, for fossils to record the events—but not fast enough for us to see them happening. However, it is also a liability. When creationists pointed to the intricate designs in nature that required a designer, evolutionists enthroned natural selection as the designer. Now the role of natural selection has been eroded, and chance is ensconced in its place—creationists have long held that evolutionists must depend on chance.
Gould recognizes that natural selection has lost ground to chance: “Substantial amounts of genetic change may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through populations at random.”
David Raup, curator of geology, writes in the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin for January 1979, on “Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology.” Raup says the fossil record shows change, but not “as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection. . . . it goes on in nature although good examples are surprisingly rare. . . . A currently important alternative to natural selection has to do with the effects of pure chance. . . . We are thus talking about the survival of the lucky as well as the survival of the fittest.” He thinks perhaps that “the mammals were not better than the dinosaurs but just luckier,” and concludes his article by saying of Darwin: “The part he missed was the simple element of chance!”
With chance in the dominant role guiding evolution, the thorny question of design returns: How can chance accomplish the intricate and amazing designs that are everywhere? The eye, Darwin said, made him shudder. Moreover, it is not just once that such miracles of design by chance have to occur, but they must happen again and again in unrelated species.
For example, the octopus is no relative of ours, but his eye is amazingly “human.” Unrelated fish and eels have electrical shocking equipment. Unrelated insects, worms, bacteria and fishes have luminous organs giving off cold light. Unrelated lampreys, mosquitoes and leeches have anticoagulants to keep their victims’ blood from clotting. Unrelated porcupines, echidnas and hedgehogs are said to have independently evolved quills. Unrelated dolphins and bats have sonar systems. Unrelated fish and insects have bifocal eyes for vision in air and under water. In many unrelated animals—crustaceans, fishes, eels, insects, birds, mammals—there are amazing abilities for migration.
Even more than all of this, evolutionists would have us believe that three different times warm-blooded animals developed from cold-blooded reptiles; three times color vision developed independently; five times wings and flight developed in unrelated fish, insects, pterodactyls, birds and mammals.
Could chance repeat these feats over and over again? The mathematics of probability shouts, No! Evolution’s revolution may have helped it live with the gappy fossil record, but it has handed chance a role to play that is far beyond its powers to perform.
[Blurb on page 10]
The “hopeful monsters” hypothesis reappears as “punctuated equilibrium”
[Blurb on page 11]
Before you can have survival of the fittest, chance must bring about arrival of the fittest