Is Darwinism a ‘Potemkin’ Theory of Evolution? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Headlines about evolution can give you whiplash. “Was Darwin Wrong?” teased a cover of National Geographic in 2004. But turn the page and you’re conked over the head: “NO. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming”! Now jump to a recent book review in the journal Nature: “A new vision for how evolution works is long overdue…. [it] challenges a dearly held orthodoxy among evolutionary biologists.”

How could the evidence have been overwhelming but now orthodoxy is being challenged?

The short answer is that Darwin’s theory is a mishmash of multiple logically separate ideas. To avoid confusion, those independent notions have to be teased apart. A couple of strands of Darwinian thought are pretty well supported. Others are close to hopeless. Depending on whether a particular magazine article wants to lecture the rubes that science is in charge, or whip up excitement that something new might be in the air, it emphasizes one or the other.

The aspect of Darwin’s theory that confounds most people — stick with me here — is that it tries to account for opposite features of creatures: their similarities and their differences. Unless you keep that prominently in mind, you aren’t fit to survive (at least not for discussions of evolution).

Similarities are the easy part. They’re addressed by Darwin’s idea of common descent. We all know that babies look like their parents. Well, suppose that, for some odd reason, over many generations the descendants of one of the kids and his wife gradually started to change in some way — maybe developing thorns on the tops of their feet. Now suppose the same happened to descendants of another of the kids and her husband; they started to look different in other ways — maybe growing spiral fingers. Even though both lineages acquired some differences, other parts (eyes, ears, elbows) might still look like those of the original parents. The similarities — the parts that stayed the same would be due to descent from a common ancestor.

That sounds reasonable — mostly because it’s trivial. All the notion of common descent says is that resemblances were already there in the ancestor and the descendants inherited them. It doesn’t even try to explain where the ancestors came from, or how they first got the original features, or how any differences between the two lineages arose. By itself, common descent just declares that the ancestors had some features and the descendants kept ‘em.

Differences can be the very, very hard part. The existence of similarities says nothing about what may have caused changes. Differences demand answers to the bottom-line question, how in the Sam Hill could such a fantastic thing happen? In our thought experiment, what accounts for thorns on feet or spiral fingers? As an example from the real world, bats and whales both have mammary glands, so maybe they somehow descended from the same ancestor that already had that feature. But that’s not the big mystery! The killer question is, what could build cool new features, such as bats flying or whales living in the ocean? What could drive the construction of animals that had never before been seen on earth?

It’s right about here that Darwin boosters go mute (or start to question your common ancestry). As one prominent evolutionary biologist wrote in a leading science journal just a few years ago, “Modern evolutionary theory … has little to say about the actual history of life, especially the emergence of new levels of biological complexity, and nothing at all about the origin of life.” But those are exactly the most intriguing questions! Why, after more than a century and a half, does Darwin’s theory still fail to account for the mysteries it had promised to explain?

The stumbling block is that the mechanism Darwin proposed to account for differences — “natural selection” sifting random mutations — is quite the feeble tool. It can only work, in Darwin’s words, “by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” that is, one single aimless step at a time. If that first mutation is helpful, then great, it can grope for another step. But when a long line of coordinated changes is required to build an intricate system, selection has no power to look ahead.

This myopic mechanism seemed reasonably promising way back in Darwin’s day, when comparatively little of life’s complexity was known, and when the foundation of life, the cell, was thought to be a simple glob of jelly, dubbed “protoplasm.” Maybe protoplasm could be expanded smoothly here, shrunk there, and molded a little at a time into whatever shape was needed, the way a potter might shape soft clay on a wheel.

Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. In the case of reproductive cells, they contain the tremendous number of complex machines (yes, actual machines, made of molecules) and instructions needed to build whatever kind of plant or animal they generate. Just try to think up a realistic way to retool a computer-controlled factory that is making cars into one that makes helicopters or submarines — one nut or bolt, one line of computer code, one tiny, random alteration in the factory at a time. That’s the magnitude of the problem facing Darwinian explanations for bats and whales and many other creatures.

How did most biologists come to believe that Darwin solved the riddle of life, despite the limpness of his theory? A campaign of arm-twisting from about 1930 to 1950 curdled an abstract, mathematized version of Darwin’s theory (dubbed “neo-Darwinism”) into place in academia as the default explanation for evolution. Since math can be intimidating, neo-Darwinism has been entrenched there ever since, handed down from professor to graduate student, entirely through intellectual inertia.

Notice that this occurred before the greatest discoveries of modern biology — before the understanding of what a gene consists of, before Watson and Crick’s work on DNA, before the realization that proteins form cellular machines, before the cracking of the genetic code, and much more. In the ensuing years, precisely zero of those astounding discoveries has been accounted for in terms of Darwin’s theory by anything other than cartoonish “Just So” stories.

The colossal and growing mismatch between life’s observed sophistication and Darwin’s crude mechanism has pushed a restless minority of biologists to cast about for something — anything — more plausible. (That’s what the book recently reviewed in Nature is about.) The motley notions are often grouped under an umbrella term as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), but are connected mostly by their shared disdain for Darwinism.

Nonetheless, their sales pitch to the complacent majority is that proponents of EES don’t deny the importance of neo-Darwinism, not even one little bit. They just want to improve it, extend it, stretch it — so that it covers both things that Darwin knew nothing about and things his theory hasn’t accounted for all these many years. So far, they’ve been a lot better at pointing out problems than at identifying solutions.

One approach taken by several EES notions is to enlist life’s pre-existing machinery, in the hope that current biology will somehow explain evolution rather than vice versa. An example is styled “developmental plasticity.” Some organisms already possess the ability to grow in alternative ways depending on their environment, such as land versus water. So if, as EES fans speculate, one of the alternative developmental paths begins to help a creature in more circumstances, then maybe a mutation will show up to freeze the pathway into place so that all of the species’ descendants develop that way.

Maybe so. But, of course, the scenario explains nothing new. The pathway was already available, where it came from is not addressed, and the change works by eliminating the existing ability of the organism to develop in an alternative way. That doesn’t account for how sophisticated systems originated.

Another EES idea is “Natural Genetic Engineering.” Advocates of NGE point out that many of the tools molecular biologists use to manipulate DNA in a lab (to clone it, sequence it, and so on) are harvested from life, because cells are already endowed with a sophisticated box of tools to build and propagate life. If humans can use those cellular tools for their own purposes, the thinking goes, maybe cells can use them to direct their own evolution — to rearrange and improve their own DNA.

But the elegant tools are already there — where did they come from? And exactly how is an apparently unconscious cell supposed to direct itself to evolve when intelligent humans can barely make simple changes to cells without unexpected, damaging side effects? Meanwhile, in lab experiments where cells are allowed to grow and evolve on their own, over many generations they invariably change by degrading genes they already had, not by building complex new ones. When biologists observe life closely rather than invent stories, they see evolution working mainly by de-volution.

Other EES ideas go completely off the rails. One, called “neutral evolution,” hopes that some mutations that don’t have any influence on survival when they first occur may suddenly kick in with helpful effects millennia later. We can call that the “cross-your-fingers” theory; it’s not much different from the proverbial tornado passing through a junkyard assembling a jet plane by luck. And if tornados seem insufficient, go sci-fi — another EES idea invokes an infinite multiverse to get around hyper-astronomical odds against the origin of life.

And these are the best alternatives to a moribund Darwinism.

The Thin Facade of Darwinism

As a succession of sages over the centuries wrestled futilely with the question of what mechanism could possibly account for the elegant structures of life, various monikers have been attached to the notion of evolution: Lamarck’s theory, Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

At this point, the most fitting epithet might be Potemkin’s theory of evolution. As with the legendary fake villages, evolutionary theory consists of a thin façade cloaking a lack of substance. The frontage of the theory is the bare premise that similarities among even the most diverse groups of life arose from common ancestry, which at least is distantly grounded in our experience that children resemble their parents. Yet if you search behind the veneer, there is neither convincing reasoning nor anything remotely based on experience to explain profound differences.

The reality is that, no matter what headline you may read, the prospects for a mechanistic accounting of the unfolding of life remain as distant now as they ever were.

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