The Forbidden Universe (39 page)

But
why
didn’t the living fossils change even a tiny bit over such an extraordinary length of time, when most species quite clearly have? Unsurprisingly nobody knows for sure. It is often said that the non-changers are just perfectly adapted to their environment (‘evolutionary complacent’, as British comedian David Mitchell puts it), but this is simply putting too positive a gloss on it. The evolutionary explanation is rather that it is because these smug species are so finely attuned to their environment that the slightest change means they can’t survive in their own little niche, so no changes ever get a chance to get going. They are trapped in an evolutionary dead end they can never break out of.

But many of these animals and plants are found in different habitats and live alongside other species that
have
continued to evolve. Sharks live in all the oceans of the world alongside a host of fishy creatures that have evolved way beyond them, and horsetails grow alongside other much more advanced plants. To say chance mutation has never thrown up genetic improvements for these species begs the question of why it obliged for most others.

And there’s no question that the conditions in which some of these living fossil species exist have changed dramatically during their existence. Fossil dragonflies from 325 million years ago look exactly the same as today’s. Dragonflies are considered to be among the first, if not
the
first, insects – indeed, the first creatures – to develop flight. And they have carried on happily unchanged, seeing the rise and fall of the dinosaurs 230 to 65 million years ago, the appearance of mammals 190 million years ago and birds 150 million years ago.

Today’s dragonflies have to survive against predators, chiefly birds and web-spinning spiders, but as the first creatures to take to the air, they didn’t have to contend with
them originally. There were simply no birds, flying dinosaurs or mammals. Spiders with the ability to spin suspended webs to catch flying prey only appeared 200 million years ago. But dragonflies nevertheless survived throughout that time, and the appearance of those predators,
without ever adapting
. In other words, dragonflies 325 million years ago were fully adapted to life in the twenty-first century. This flatly contradicts the conventional notion of evolution being an ‘arms race’ between predators and prey.

All these examples demonstrate that evolutionary theory is so flexible that it, too, has the ability to adapt itself to any given situation. If two species in similar environments are different, that’s divergent evolution; if they are the same, that’s convergent evolution; if a species hasn’t changed at all, that’s stasis. It’s all OK. It all fits. Actually it doesn’t, but it will have to. Nothing is as evolutionarily complacent as evolutionary theory itself.

There are more examples of this reasoning. Many species have adapted so specifically to a particular habitat that they can survive there and there only. The evolutionary explanation is that the species has carved out its own unique niche and it alone is capable of exploiting it. This means that the species has no competition, and so it thrives. On the other hand, there are animal and plant species living in a wide variety of environments. In these cases, we’re told, evolution has favoured flexibility because that increases the chances of survival, as adaptation that is too specific puts all the species’ eggs in one basket.

So which is it to be: evolution tending towards increasing specialization or greater versatility? Naturally, the standard answer is that different things work for different species, so each case has to be judged on its own merits. It’s here that we begin to see the infamous circularity at work. Survivors survive. The eminent philosopher of science, Karl Popper, noted scathingly (his emphasis):

This sloppy reasoning also prompted Popper to say (his italics), ‘I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a
metaphysical research programme
– a possible framework for testable scientific theories’.
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He argued that Darwinism became universally accepted because:

Labelling natural selection metaphysical is, of course, an exquisite irony.

Even John Maynard Smith, a self-confessed ‘unrepentant neo-Darwinist’,
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declared his own distaste for the ‘belief that if some characteristic can be seen as benefiting a species, then all is explained’.
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But sadly that’s all we get from his peers.

Even being generous, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is nowhere near as solid as its proselytizers
pretend. It has many more gaps and areas of astounding vagueness than they would ever admit to the public. It is, in fact, a startlingly anaemic theory, manifestly failing to explain
any
of the really major events in the development of life on Earth. Its ‘explanation’ of much of the rest is no more than a description, backed up with circular reasoning that assumes the correctness of the theory in the first place. This is analogous to physicists claiming to have a theory of everything that was absolutely complete – except for its failure to explain gravity or the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Evolutionary biology is, surely, unique among the sciences in that it uses gaps in its knowledge to
support
its fundamental theory, arguing that, since nobody can prove it wrong, the theory must stand. It is less a theory than a default position.

Undeniably, molecular biology has made huge strides in understanding what makes living things tick, particularly the workings of DNA and genes. Although a multitude of mysteries still remain unsolved, the essential laws of genetics – how genes determine the form of an organism and govern its survival, and its role in heredity – have been thoroughly tested scientifically.

What has not been proven, and it is hard to see how it ever could be, is the proposition that random mutations in genes, and random mutations alone, drive evolution. Ever since Darwin, the basic argument has been that chance is responsible for evolutionary change because it
must
be, since self-evidently no non-chance factors can possibly exist. If some other factor was involved it would have to be, by definition, supernatural and everything must be
explicable
in mechanistic terms? There can be no suggestion of purpose, let alone design. From his ivory tower of certainty, Richard Dawkins writes in the final chapter of
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986) (his emphasis):

The reason for this public show of certainty and the unwillingness to admit that there are gaps in current knowledge are understandable – at least to some extent. Evolutionary biologists would probably be more candid about the weak spots in their discipline if it was not for the fact that vested religious interests are ready to pounce at any sign of wavering.

One consequence of this approach is that evolutionary theory has become the bedrock of scientism – science as an ideology as opposed to a method of investigating the world. As Simon Conway Morris observes, ‘More than one
commentator
has noted that ultra-Darwinism has pretensions to a secular religion.’
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Backsliding and expressing honest doubts about the completeness of the theory is simply not tolerated in biology in the same way it is, for example, in physics.

There is no question, however, that the biblical model should be rejected. God did not make all species complete as they are today in a week. Evolution, in its widest sense, is an established fact, even though many of the details about the precise mechanisms and forces that drive it remain highly debatable. The evidence for natural selection alone deals a deathblow to creationism, although mutation does potentially allow God to slip back in to decide what changes will (or might) work so that tweaks can then be made to DNA. But it is surely something of a demotion, and rather demeaning to an allegedly all-powerful deity. Why should
the God of Judeo-Christian tradition be restricted to working in this way?

Rejecting the God of Genesis does not preclude some form of ‘soft’ design, an active but
limited
creative force at work. In fact, certain aspects of evolutionary history would be easier to explain if such a force existed. Everything considered, neo-Darwinism is neither the coup de grâce to all design theories, nor the atheist epiphany it is supposed to be.

According to Dawkins, once you properly understand neo-Darwinian theory, you
know
there is neither God nor any kind of supernatural force at work in the universe. However, the man who originally formulated the
neo-Darwinian
synthesis – of which Dawkins is the eager acolyte – saw it very differently. In fact, this largely unacknowledged genius would have had no problem with the thrust of this part of the book …

It comes as something of a shock to discover that Darwin’s ideas were far from the overnight success most people believe them to be. As science is no exception to the rule that history is written by the victors, today we have the impression that the publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
changed everything at a stroke. In fact it took almost a century for his ideas to become the scientific givens that they are now. Until as late as the mid-1930s
most
biologists and palaeontologists considered that Darwin was, at best, half right, and factors other than natural selection played a part in evolution. Although a number of influential biologists quickly embraced natural selection, many either rejected it or regarded it as an interesting but unproven hypothesis. Palaeontologists in particular refused to accept Darwin’s theory because it failed to fit the fossil record.
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A great irony is that the rise of genetics in the first decades of the twentieth century was originally thought to demolish Darwinism. The whole basis of genetics was that genes are fixed and unchangeable units of heredity – the biological equivalent of atoms – while Darwinism required them to vary. The neo-Darwinian synthesis was the result of reconciling genetics with Darwinism, laying the foundation for everything that has come after. It was the recognition that genetic mutation was the cause of the small, individual variations that natural selection seized on and honed.

Ernst Mayr and science historian William B. Provine sum up the rapidity of the change in attitude in their
introduction
to
The Evolutionary Synthesis
(1980):

The momentum has carried on ever since. But just what happened over those dozen years, and why did Darwinism come out on top after nearly a century in the wilderness?

The surprising difficulty in answering this question is shown by the number of conferences called to discuss the events of those years.
The Evolutionary Synthesis
was a collection of the papers delivered at one such event organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. A similar gathering was held in 1981 at Bad Homburg in Germany to discuss the rather syntactically tortured question: ‘How complete and how stable is, and has been, the evolutionary synthesis, or “neo-Darwinism”?’

It was there that Stephen Jay Gould delivered his paper on ‘The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis’, which covered the crucial 1936–47 period. After surveying the process of theory-hardening, he came to the more important, but problematic, question of
why
it had happened in the first place, admitting: ‘I now arrive at the point where I should give a conclusive and erudite explanation of why the synthesis hardened. Yet truly, I do not know.’
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