Why darwinism is wrong

Science-lovers should be grateful for the persistence of these mysteries. As long as they endure, so will our quest for self-knowledge. Dear John,. I thought for a while that you actually agreed with me that we are unable to escape the limitations of language and culture that box in any set of sentences we humans might utter, scientific or otherwise…that we are trapped in the chatter of us as slightly hairy apes trying to figure out our circumstances, but, alas, I see you are backsliding.

BTW, such a post-modernist take on science hardly excludes glory days ahead for science! The stories science tells are perhaps the greatest stories ever told and stunning testimony to human achievement. Who knows what lies ahead if we get a handle on dark matter, the origins of life, or even, pace Horgan, consciousness. Secondly, I think Quammen is still correct that, all told, the successive discoveries surrounding Archaea, horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, the microbiome and all the rest constitute a new view of life and a rewriting of the story of evolution, perspectives very different from those found in The Origin of Species.

Put simply, changes in quantity have produced a change in quality, and in my view we live in a different world now regarding our understandings of life and its meanderings. Scientists across a broad range of disciplines genetics, taxonomy, paleontology, etc. There is grandeur in this new view of life, so why force it into the Procrustean bed of nineteenth-century theorizing? Your friend, Jim. Further Reading :. Science, History and Truth at the Faculty Club. Thomas Kuhn Wasn't So Bad.

Mind-Body Problems free online book, also available as Kindle e-book and paperback. Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began.

The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. He called this The Biogenetic Law: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It is best for things that evolved later to be programmed to develop later in the embryo. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one.

First, fossil embryos are extremely rare, 20 so the reformulated law has to rely on embryos of modern organisms that are assumed to resemble ancestral forms. Theory first, observation later — just as von Baer had objected. Second, the idea that later evolutionary stages can simply be tacked onto development is biologically unrealistic.

A human is not just a fish embryo with some added features. A house represents a higher grade in the evolution of a residence, but the whole building is altered — foundations, timbers, and roof — even if the bricks are the same. Third, and most important, vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their earliest stages. In the s, Haeckel made some drawings to show that vertebrate embryos look almost identical in their first stage — but his drawings were faked.

Not only had he distorted the embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are, but he had also omitted earlier stages in which the embryos are strikingly different from each other. A human embryo in its earliest stages looks nothing like a fish embryo. Only after vertebrate embryos have progressed halfway through their development do they reach the stage that Darwin and Haeckel treated as the first.

If ontogeny were a recapitulation of phylogeny, such a pattern would be more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry. Modern Darwinists attempt to salvage their theory by assuming that the common ancestry of vertebrates is obscured because early development can evolve easily, but there is no justification for this assumption other than the theory itself. But Coyne is not ashamed. Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that the widespread occurrence of vestigial organs—organs that may have once had a function but are now useless—is evidence against creation.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin cited the human appendix as an example of a vestigial organ. But Darwin was mistaken: The appendix is now known to be an important source of antibody-producing blood cells and thus an integral part of the human immune system.

It may also serve as a compartment for beneficial bacteria that are needed for normal digestion. So the appendix is not useless at all. Another Canadian biologist, Bruce Naylor, countered that an organ with some function can still be considered vestigial. Whatever the validity of this theological claim, it certainly cannot be defended as a scientific statement, and thus should be given no place in a scientific discussion of evolution.

The appendix contains patches of tissue that may function as part of the immune system. It has also been suggested that it provides a refuge for useful gut bacteria. But these minor benefits are surely outweighed by the severe problems that come with the human appendix.

Furthermore, if vestigiality were redefined as Coyne proposes, it would include many features never before thought to be vestigial. For example, if the human arm evolved from the leg of a four-footed mammal as Darwinists claim , then the human arm is vestigial.

And if as Coyne argues the wings of flying birds evolved from feathered forelimbs of dinosaurs that used them for other purposes, then the wings of flying birds are vestigial. Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. In the s, however, molecular biologists discovered that most of our DNA does not encode proteins.

From the point of view of the individual organism this seems paradoxical. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA. From this we can make a prediction. In other words, there should be vestigial genes. In contrast, the idea that all species were created from scratch predicts that no such genes would exist.

This gives us a unique tool to study evolution when we realize that the normal function of a gene is to make a protein—a protein whose sequence of amino acids is determined by the sequence of nucleotide bases that make up the DNA.

And once we have the DNA sequence of a given gene, we can usually tell if it is expressed normally — that is, whether it makes a functional protein — or whether it is silenced and makes nothing.

Virtually every species harbors dead genes, many of them still active in its relatives. This implies that those genes were also active in a common ancestor, and were killed off in some descendants but not in others. Out of about thirty thousand genes, for example, we humans carry more than two thousand pseudogenes.

Our genome — and that of other species — are truly well populated graveyards of dead genes. Every month, science journals publish articles describing more such functions. Theological arguments are also prominent in The Origin of Species.

For example, Darwin argued that the geographic distribution of living things made no sense if species had been separately created, but it did make sense in the context of his theory. But Darwin knew that migration cannot account for all patterns of geographic distribution.

Yet there are many cases of geographic distribution that neither migration nor vicariance seem able to explain.

Since the birds are flightless, explanations based on migration over vast oceanic distances are implausible. After continental drift was discovered in the twentieth century, it was thought that the various populations might have separated with the landmasses. But ostriches and kiwis are much too recent; the continents had already drifted apart when these species originated. So neither migration nor vicariance explain ratite biogeography. An illustration of our evolution from organic molecules.

Image courtesy: Answering Genesis. When Darwin's Theory was first published, it was the Bible and not fossil data that was widely seen as the authority on the Earth's age. The Earth was thought to be just 6, years old in the 19th century, which Darwin thought was too little time for all the diverse species on Earth to come to be. But just years later, in the s, geologists and astronomers came up with a scientific estimate: the Earth is somewhere between tens and a hundred million years old.

To Darwin, this seemed like a reasonable amount of time for life on Earth to evolve to its current form. We know today that those calculations of Earth's age are off by 4. The Earth is roughly 4. The diversity of flora and fauna on Earth today is because along the course of history, many new species sprouted from related one. This new species will have unique traits that make it different from its relatives. This is particularly common in one or more groups of animals that get separated or isolated from the rest of their herd for many generations.

The same species under different conditions will be exposed to different environments and adapt accordingly. So, while an elephant in Africa has larger ears so it loses more heat from its body surface, Indian elephants don't have this adaptation. To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life.

Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? But what if you can't establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place? In the book, they made an argument that — however obnoxious at first glance — seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection.

Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce.

Evolutionary psychology argues that there's no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it — a "rape gene", in the words of some media stories following the book's publication — because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn't.

Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was — to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin — "natural". Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations.

If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned. For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.

It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah. Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings — often better described as speculations — came to be believed. We're not exactly saying it's right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what's really been going on. They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" — spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was — and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was.

That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn't seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research. And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate — of nature versus nurture — suddenly become shaky. It's not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless.

What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants? All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods's ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods's golfing abilities.

Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.

The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere. We're stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" — such as nature and nurture — "that we have. Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk's disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems.

As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention.

Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.