Science, December 1981

1

• Science, December 1981
• Biologists have no doubt that evolution occurred.
  They even know what drives it.

How Does Evolution Occur?
2
Natural SelectionSurvival of the Fittest
How Does Evolution Occur?
3
Survival of the Fittest

• Small, random, heritable changes
• Result in difference chances of survival and
  reproductionsuccess for some, death without
  offspring for others
• This natural culling leads to significant
  changes in shape, size, strength, chemistry, and
  behavior among the descendants.

4
Survival of the Fittest

• Excess population growth drives the competitive
  struggle.
• Less successful competitors produce fewer
  surviving offspring
• The useless or negative variations tend to
  disappear
• The useful variations tend to be perpetuated and
  gradually magnified throughout a population
• Quammen, David (2004), Was Darwin Wrong?,
  National Geographic, 20652-35, November

5

• Julian Huxley
• Actually, this is a meaninglessly large figure,
  but it shows what a degree of improbability
  natural selection has to surmount, and can
  circumvent. One with three million noughts No
  one would bet on anything so improbable
  happening and yet it has happened! It has
  happened, thanks to the working of natural
  selection and the properties of living substance
  which make natural selection inevitable!

Evolution in Action (New York Harper and Row,
1953), pp. 45-46
6
Stephen Jay Gould The essence of Darwinism
lies in a single phrase natural selection is the
creative force of evolutionary change. No one
denies that natural selection will play a
negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian
theories require that it create the fit as well.
The Return of Hopeful Monsters, Natural
History, vol. 86 (June/July 1977), pp. 28.
7
Channelview High School 2005 Biology Textbook,
p. 280
In a particular environment, some individuals of
a population or species are better suited to
survive and have moe offspring (natural
selection) Over time, the traits that make
certain individuals of a population able to
survive and reproduce are spread in that
population.
Biology (Holt, Rinehart and Winston),2004,
Chapter 13, The Theory of Evolution, p. 280
8
Scientists Admit Survival of the Fittest is Not
the Answer

• statistically impossible - 1000 x 101000000
• How big is this number?

9
How Big is 1000 x 101,000,000 ? 1 with 3 million
zeroes

• 10 1 x 101
• 100 1 x 102
• 1,000 1 x 103
• 1 million 1,000,000 1 x 106
• 1 billion 1,000,000,000 1 x 109
• 1 trillion 1,000,000,000,000 1 x 1012

Odds of finding 1 marked quarter in a 3 stack of
quarters covering Texas on the first try -
1 x 1018
10
Scientists Admit Survival of the Fittest is Not
the Answer

• statistically impossible - 1000 x 101000000
• outside mathematical theory
• random processes dont work in same direction
  for very long
• changes do not accumulate
• circular reasoning
• no evidence to explain micro to macro evolution

11
Roger Lewin, Science The central question of
the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms
underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to
explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the
risk of doing violence to the positions of some
of the people at the meeting the answer can be
given as a clear, No Species do indeed have a
capacity to undergo minor modifications in their
physical and other characteristics, but this is
limited, and with a longer perspective it is
reflected in an oscillation about a mean to a
paleontologist looking at the fossil record, this
shows up as stasis.
Evolutionary Theory Under Fire, Science, vol.
210 (November 21, 1980), pp. 883-887.
12
Henry Gee, Chief science writer at Nature We
also have good reason to suspect that to use
natural selection to explain long-term trends in
the fossil record may not be a valid exercise,
because natural selection is a random, undirected
process, unlikely to work in the same direction
for long.
In Search of Deep Time (New York Free Press). P.
127., 1999
13
Francisco Ayala, PhD Genetics, Associate
Professor of Genetics, University of California,
on Darwinian Evolution, The paleontologists
have convinced me small changes do not
accumulate.
As reported by Roger Lewin, Evolutionary Theory
Under Fire, Science, vol 210, Nov 21, 1980, p.
883-887. fff
14
C.H. Waddington, Geneticist, Edinburgh University
There, you come to what is, in effect, a
vacuous statement Natural selection is that some
things leave more offspring than others?, and
you ask, which leave more offspring than others
and it is those that leave more offspring and
there is nothing more to it than that. The whole
guts of evolutionwhich is, how do you come to
have horses and tigers and thingsis outside the
mathematical theory. Moorhead P.S. and M.M.
Kaplan, eds. (1967), Mathematical Challenges to
the neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,
Monograph 5, (Philadelphia, PA Wistar
University Press).
15
Patterson, Colin, Senior Paleontologist at the
British Museum of Natural History No one has
ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural
selection. No one has ever gotten near it We
have access to the tips of a tree the tree
itself is theory and people who pretend to know
about the tree and to describe what went on with
it, how the branches came off and the twigs came
off are, I think, telling stories.
Interview by Brian Leek, interviewer Peter Franz,
March 4, 1982, BBC.
16
Francis Hitching Darwinism, as Darwin wrote
it, could be simply but nonsensically stated
survivors survive. Which is certainly a
tautology and tells us nothing about how species
originate, as even Darwins supporters admit
Hitching, Francis (1982), The Neck of the
Giraffe (New York Ticknor and Fields). P. 84
17
Who survives? The fittest.
Who are the fittest? The survivors!

Circular Reasoning
18
Natural Selection

• Darwins multivaried finches were still
  finches
• The fact that an organism is adapted to its
  environment tells us absolutely nothing about how
  it came to be adapted.

19
Proofs of Evolution
20
Proofs of Evolution

• Fossils
• Homology (anatomical similarities)
• Comparative Embryology
• Vestigial organs
• Adaptation

21

• Goldschmidt, Richard B., An Introduction to a
  Popularized Symposium on Evolution, Scientific
  Monthly, vol. 77 (October 1953), pp. 182-189.
• p. 184
• Fortunately there is a science which is able to
  observe the progress of evolution through the
  history of our earth. Geology traces the rocky
  strata of our earth, deposited one upon another
  in the past geological epochs through hundreds of
  millions of years, and finds out their order and
  timing and reveals organisms which lived in all
  those periods. Paleontology, which studies the
  fossil remains, is thus enabled to present
  organic evolution as a visible fact.

22
Dunbar, Carl O., Historical Geology, 2nd ed. (New
York John Wiley Sons, 1960). p. 47
fossils provide the only historical, documentary
evidence that life has evolved from simpler to
more and more complex forms.
23
Channelview High School 2005 Biology Textbook,
p. 283 The Fossil Record
Fossils offer the most direct evidence that
evolution takes place.
Biology. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston),2004,
Chapter 13, The Theory of Evolution, p. 283
24
Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, 1859,
Cahapter 11, On the imperfection of the geologic
record. intermediate links? Geology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic change, and this is perhaps the
most obvious and serious objection which can be
argued against the theory.
25
Ager, D. V., The Nature of the Fossil Record,
Proceedings of the Geological Association, vol.
87, no. 2 (1976), pp. 131-159. Presidential
Address, March 5, 1976. It must be
significant that nearly all the evolutionary
stories I learned as a student have now been
debunked. (p. 132) The point emerges that,
if we examine the fossil record in detail,
whether at the level of orders or of species, we
findover and over againnot gradual evolution,
but the sudden explosion of one group at the
expense of another. (p. 133)
26
Agers Debunked Story Uniformitarianism

• present is the key to the past
• gradual, predictable, uniform change
• current rates can be extrapolated back to
  provide clues to age of the earth.
• Why is it no longer popular?

No transitional fossils! No evidence!
27
Raup, David, (Curator, Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago), Conflicts between Darwin and
Paleontology, Field Museum of Natural History
Bulletin, Vol 50 (1), 1979, p. 22-29 most
people assume that fossils provide a very
important part of the general argument made in
favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history
of life. Unfortunately, this is not true the
fossil record doesnt tell us whether it was
responsible for 90 percent of the change we see,
or 9 percent, or 0.9 percent.
28
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Return of Hopeful
Monsters, Natural History, vol. 86 (June/July
1977), pp. 22-30. All paleontologists know
that the fossil record contains precious little
in the way of intermediate forms transitions
between major groups are characteristically
abrupt The extreme rarity of transitional forms
in the fossil record persists as the trade secret
of paleontology.
29
Raup, David M., Conflicts Between Darwin and
Paleontology, Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural
History, vol. 50 (January 1979), pp. 23. Raup is
Curator of Geology at the Field
Museum. Instead of finding the gradual
unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwins
time, and geologists of the present day actually
find is a highly uneven or jerky record that is,
species appear in the sequence very suddenly,
show little or no change during their existence
in the record, then abruptly go out of the
record. and it is not always clear, in fact its
rarely clear, that the descendants were actually
better adapted than their predecessors. In other
words, biological improvement is hard to find.
30
Raup, David, (Curator, Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago), Conflicts between Darwin and
Paleontology, Field Museum of Natural History
Bulletin, Vol 50 (1), 1979, p. 22-29 Well, we
are now about 120 years after Darwin, and
knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly
expanded... Ironically, we have fewer examples of
evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's
time.
31
Patterson, Colin, Senior Paleontologist at the
British Museum of Natural History in London in a
personal letter to L. Sutherland. I fully
agree with your comments on the lack of direct
evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of
any, fossils or living, I would have certainly
have included them I will lay it on the line
there is not one such fossil for which one could
make a watertight argument.
32
Ridley, Mark, Who Doubts Evolution? New
Scientist, vol. 90 (June 25, 1981), p 831. Ridley
was in the Department of Zoology at Oxford
University. This is a terrible mistake and
it springs, I believe, from the false idea that
the fossil record provides an important part of
the evidence that evolution took placeIn any
case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or
punctuationalist, uses the fossil record as
evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as
opposed to special creation.
33
Patterson, Colin (1999), Evolution (Ithaca, NY
Cornell University Press), Second edition. p.
109 Fossils may tell us many things, but one
thing they can never disclose is whether they
were ancestors of anything else
34
Proofs of Evolution

• Fossils
• Homology (anatomical similarities)
• Comparative Embryology
• Vestigial organs
• Adaptation

35
Homology

• The greater the similarity of structure, the
  closer the relationship, and, wherever close
  relationship is found, a common ancestry is
  indicated (1947, p. 629).
• Strausburg, P.D. and B.R. Weimer (1947), General
  Biology (New York John Wiley Sons).

36
Homology
The phenomenon of homology has remained the
mainstay of the argument for evolution right down
to the present day. Denton, Michael (1985),
Evolution A Theory in Crisis (London Burnett
Books). P. 144
37
Channelview High School 2005 Biology Textbook,
p. 286 Anatomy and Development Section
As different groups of vertebrates evolved,
their bodies evolved differently. But
similarities in bone structure can still be seen,
suggesting that all vertebrates share a
relatively recent common ancestor.
Biology (Holt, Rinehart and Winston),2004,
Chapter 13, The Theory of Evolution, p. 286.
38
Its Not the Facts Its the Interpretation of
Them
Evolutionist - similarities prove common
ancestry Creationist - similarities prove common
design
39
Pick Choose
The concept of homology is fundamental to what
we are talking about when we speak of evolution,
yet in truth we cannot explain it all in terms of
present-day biological theory. Hardy,
Alistair (1965), The Living Stream (New York
Collins). P.211.
40
Whats Good for the Goose
If, then, it can be established beyond dispute
that similarity or even identity of the same
character in different species is not always to
be interpreted that both have arisen from a
common ancestor, the whole argument from
comparative anatomy seems to tumble in ruins
Morgan, T.H. (1923), The Bearing of Mendelism
on the Origin of Species, Scientific Monthly,
March. P. 246
41
Is Good for the Gander!
If the law of similarity can be used to show
evolutionary relationships, then dissimilarities
can be used to show a lack of relationship
Wysong, R.L. (1976), The Creation-Evolution
Controversy (East Lansing, MI Inquiry Press). P.
393-394
42
Similarity Proves Ancestry?

• Pigs heart
• Octopus eye
• Milk of the ass
• Hemoglobin in the crustacean, Daphnia
• Concentration of red blood cells in man is
  closer to frogs and fish than to a sheep.
• The plague bacterium Pasteurella pestis afflicts
  only man and rodent
• Wysong, R.L. (1976), The Creation-Evolution
  Controversy (East Lansing, MI Inquiry Press). P.
  394

43
Homology
Like so much of the other circumstantial
evidence for evolution, that drawn from
homology is not convincing because it entails too
many anomalies, too many counter-instances, far
too many phenomena which simply do not fit easily
into the orthodox picture. Denton, Michael
(1985), Evolution A Theory in Crisis (London
Burnett Books). P. 154