National Geographic Ignores The Flaws in Darwin's Theory

In the November 2004 issue of National Geographic, David Quammen answers this question with a resounding "NO. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming."

In Quammen's view, most people who reject Darwin's theory of evolution do so out of ignorance, so he proceeds to lay out some of the evidence for it. But the evidence he lays out is exaggerated, and the problems with it are ignored.

Quammen explains that Darwin's theory has two aspects: the "historical phenomenon" that all species of living things are descended from common ancestors, and "the main mechanism causing that phenomenon," which is natural selection. The evidence presented by Darwin, he continues, "mostly fell within four categories: biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology."

The first category includes evidence from similar species in neighboring habitats, such as finches on the Galápagos Islands; the second includes evidence from the fossil record, such as extinct horse-like animals that preceded modern horses; and the third includes evidence from similarities in early embryos that supposedly point to their common ancestry.

All three categories are rife with problems that Quammen overlooks. For example, the Galápagos finch story is complicated by the fact that many of what were originally thought to be thirteen species are now interbreeding with each other -- even though Darwinian theory regards inability to interbreed as the distinguishing feature of separate species.

The fossil record of horses is also much more complicated than Quammen makes it out to be; actually, it looks like a tangled bush with separate branches rather than a straight line of ancestors and descendants. Even worse, Quammen ignores the Cambrian explosion, in which many of the major groups ("phyla") of animals appeared in a geologically short time with no fossil evidence of common ancestry -- a fact that Darwin himself considered a "serious" problem that "may be truly urged as a valid argument against" his theory.

Finally, embryos fail to show what Darwin thought they showed. According to Quammen, the evidence for evolution includes "revealing stages of development (echoing earlier stages of evolutionary history) that embryos pass through before birth or hatching." Darwin (as quoted by Quammen) thought "the embryo is the animal in its less modified state," a state that "reveals the structure of its progenitor." This idea -- that embryos pass through earlier stages of their evolutionary history and thereby show us their ancestors -- is a restatement of German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel's notorious "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," a false doctrine that knowledgeable experts discarded over a century ago.

It is actually Quammen's fourth category, morphology (i.e., anatomical shape), which Darwin himself (as quoted by Quammen) called the 'very soul' of natural history, that provides the basis for the other three. In each category, similarity in morphology ("homology") is interpreted as evidence for evolutionary relatedness. According to Darwin, features in different organisms are homologous because they were inherited from a common ancestor through a process he called "descent with modification."

The biologists who described homology a decade before Darwin, however, attributed it to construction or creation on a common archetype or design. How can one determine whether homology in living things comes from common ancestry or common design? Simply pointing to the similarities themselves won't do, as biologist Tim Berra inadvertently showed when he used different models of Corvette automobiles to illustrate descent with modification in his 1990 book, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. Although Berra wrote that "descent with modification is overwhelmingly obvious" in Corvettes, we all know that automobile similarities are due to common design rather than common ancestry. Only by demonstrating that a Corvette can morph into another model by natural processes could someone rule out the need for a designer. Similarly, the only scientific way to demonstrate that similarities in living things are due to common ancestry would be to identify the natural mechanism that produced them. According to Darwin's theory, that mechanism is natural selection.

So the four categories of evidence on which Darwin relied to support his theory of the historical phenomenon of evolution rely, in turn, on his theory about the mechanism of evolution. But what is the evidence for Darwin's mechanism?

The principal evidence Quammen cites is antibiotic resistance. "There's no better or more immediate evidence supporting the Darwinian theory," Quammen writes, "than this process of forced transformation among our inimical germs." Perhaps so; but then Darwin's theory is in serious trouble. Antibiotic resistance involves only minor changes within existing species. In plants and animals, such changes had been known for centuries before Darwin. Nobody doubts that they can occur, or that they can be produced by selection. But Darwin claimed much more, namely, that the process of selection could produce new species -- indeed, all species after the first. That's why Darwin titled his magnum opus The Origin of Species, not How Existing Species Change Over Time.

Yet no one has ever observed the origin of a new species by selection, natural or otherwise. Bacteria should be the easiest organisms in which to observe this, because bacteria can produce thousands of generations in a matter of months, and they can be subjected to powerful mutation-causing agents and intense selection. Nevertheless, in over a century of research no new species of bacteria have emerged. Quammen cites Darwinian biologists who claim to have produced "incipient species," but this merely refers to different strains of the same species that the researchers believe -- on theoretical grounds -- might eventually become new species. When the truth of the theory itself is at stake, such a theoretical extrapolation hardly constitutes "overwhelming evidence" for it.

So the evidence Quammen presents for Darwin's theory falls far short of confirming it. Biogeography, paleontology, embryology and morphology all rely on homologies, and the only way to determine whether homologies are due to common descent rather than common design is to provide a natural mechanism. Yet Darwin's mechanism, natural selection, has never been observed to produce a single new species. Scientific theories (Quammen acknowledges) should not be accepted as a matter of faith, but only on the basis of evidence. And given the evidence, any rational person is justified in doubting the truth of Darwin's theory.

As Quammen points out at the beginning of his article, public opinion polls conducted over the past twenty years have consistently shown that only about 12% of Americans accept Darwin's theory that "humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god." The reference to "god" is significant, because it shows that science is not the only thing at stake here: Darwinism also makes religious and philosophical claims. Most importantly, Darwinism is committed to naturalism, the philosophy that nature is all that exists and God is imaginary -- or at least unnecessary. It is not surprising, then, that many people reject Darwinism on religious grounds. Nevertheless, Quammen maintains, most Americans are antievolutionists only because of "confusion and ignorance," because "they have never taken a biology course that deals with evolution nor read a book in which the theory was lucidly described."

As someone with a Berkeley Ph.D. in biology, I dispute Quammen's characterization of Darwin's doubters as confused and ignorant. On the contrary, Quammen's article makes it abundantly clear why it is quite reasonable to doubt Darwinism: The evidence for it is "underwhelming," at best.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires every state to formulate standards for science education. As a guide to interpreting the law, Congress also passed a Conference Report recognizing "that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.''

In other words, students should be encouraged to distinguish the actual evidence for Darwin's theory from the naturalistic philosophy that accompanies it. Furthermore, students should be taught not only the evidence for the theory, but also why much of that evidence is controversial. Congress recommends this; the American people overwhelmingly support it; and good science demands it.

Quammen claims that evolution is "more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to our understanding of the world, than ever before." Yet no country in history has made more contributions to human welfare and medical science than America. Is it just a coincidence that the vast majority of citizens in the most scientifically successful nation on Earth are skeptical of Darwin's theory? I think not. As a scientist myself, it seems to me that a healthy skepticism is essential to good science. This caveat applies to all theories, including Darwin's.

If Quammen's article had accurately presented not only the evidence for Darwin's theory, but also the problems with that evidence, it might have made a valuable contribution to scientific literacy in America. As it stands, however, the article is nothing more than a beautifully illustrated propaganda piece. The readers of National Geographic deserve better.

Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture Discovery Institute

At some point, that which is clearly silly (ID) can be reasonably brushed aside in favor of that which is clearly reasonable.

The problem is, that ID is not "clearly silly." In fact, it is a quite reasonable theory.

Consider: we humans have been engaged in Intelligent Design for thousands of years. What else would you call the results of selective breeding and, more recently, direct genetic manipulation, if not Intelligent Design?

As humans gain increasing facility in genetic

What seems to me "silly" is your willingness to cast aside real, hard evidence to the effect that ID is at least a viable theory: human experience provides abundant evidence of its efficacy.

Are you really being reasonable here, or are you being "scientific" only in the ideological sense of the term?

> Consider: we humans have been engaged in Intelligent Design for thousands of years.

What evidence do you have for some Intelligent Designer intentionally and specifically manipulating Every Single Species Ever over the course of more than a billion years?

Your example, instead of supporting ID, in fact bolsters basica evolutionary principles. Selective breeding is no different from evolution, in that certain inheirited characteristics are passed on preferentially over others.

> ID is at least a viable theory

Your example shows that purely natural forces can change a species. You have not provided a shred of evidence that someone actually "bred" or gengineered every single species ont he planet.

ID remains no more than Poofism with a gloss of pseudoscience.

"Well, science should now immediately show how human consciousness and morality came from mindlessness."

You're jumping into the metaphysical once more. Consciousness and morality are ill-defined concepts, much like pornography. As the good justice said, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. Science deals with cold, hard facts. When it tries to get outside of that which can be observed (at some point, not necessarily right this second), then it's junk science. That's the challenge of ID for scientists. No good scientist wants to discard a plausible explaination, but you can't test for intelligent design in any manner of scientific fashion. "Why does animal x have organ y? Becuase God wanted it that way."

"Obviously scientism has the answer"

Science doesn't claim to have all the answers. Science, like theology, is a method of searching for the truth. It's a method that's served us well with many things, but I've never heard any scientist claim that science holds the key to every secret in the universe. Stephen Hawking, a master of science, has specifically stated time and time again that science can never answer a lot of questions. Whenever someone tries to talk about what happened prior to the Big Bang, he immediately laughs it off as a pointless discussion for the realms of science because everything prior to the Big Bang doesn't make any sense in terms of the laws of the universe as we understand them.

"Do the non-resistant bugs outproduce the others? or the other way around? Or does the ratio stay the same?"

Considering that the 'others' are dead, I'd say yes for at least one generation. Now, there may very well be mutations or other genetic changes in the next generation that cause some of the bugs to not have their parents' immunity to that particular spray. In that case, their ability to reproduce, in the absense of the spray that would kill them, could be greater or less than that of those who have carried over that immunity. That would depend on exactly how their genetic traits serve them in their current environment. Any genetic change can have consequences ranging from nothing to death.

The reproductive potential of one organism in a species as compared to another merely depends on how fit they are for their environment. The changes that allow for the immunity to the spray may have other consequences that decrease the reproductive potential for those who have the immunity, or it may increase that potential. That's the fun part of genetics - trying to figure out how specific changes fit into the grand scheme of things in terms of the organism, its genetic traits, and its fitness for its environment.

This is still incredibly simplistic, but accurate in a general sense. It makes sense when you think it through.

Look, I don’t see the law of gravity, cosmology, mathematics, or physics becoming a somewhat of a secular fundamentalist ‘world view’ but why does evolution attempt this?

Anyone familiar with evolution is familiar with Richard Dawkins:

There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific criticism: these are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are unaccountably ready to let them.
I suppose it is gratifying to have the pope as an ally in the struggle against fundamentalist creationism. It is certainly amusing to see the rug pulled out from under the feet of Catholic creationists such as Michael Behe. Even so, given a choice between honest-to-goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic Church on the other, I know which I prefer.
When Religion Steps on Science's Turf

Yes, I missed it.

Do you have a link?

The human eye is a bit of interest to me lately, as I've just had eye surgery, on each one, to repair retinal tears, three in each.

As we age, the fluid inside the eye tends to shrink a bit, causing less pressure that holds the retina against the back of the eyeball. As the eye rotates, the edges of the retina can snag on this fluid ball and detach in small places. If not corrected, this can lead to a detached retina and blindness in the affected area.

When you go to the specialist for a more detailed checkup (from suggestion of your eyeglass person), you do NOT expect to be told that hey want to operate to repair problems with your eyes; RIGHT NOW! (It'll take your breath away and cause you to think REALLY hard, REALLY quick!)

They can use a laser to basically spot weld the loose edges of the tear to the underlying structure, but since mine were so far at the sides of the eye, I had to get an older technique, which uses supercold Nitrous Oxide gas to spray on the outside surface of the eye, which is so thin that the cold penetrates to the interior and freezes the retina to the structure.

Even with painkillers and anesthetics, the pain is superlatively exquisite! Think ice cream headache, multiply by 6 and increase the time of it by 15 minutes: for each eye!

Thankfully, my 6 month checkup reported good healing and no further problems are anticipated.

Just like the 'information' in the fossil record, this data is NOT there.

However, by using the same techniques as "E" folks, one can assume that A&E were the producers of Cain's wife (just like in Appalaichia, sometimes)

Connect the dots......

Biologists tend to worry than a small population of a certian creature (cheetahs, for example) will go extinct, due to too small a 'gene pool'.

I find it FANCINATING that on the EARLIER end of this 'population' (the "E" end), NO ONE ever uses the same argument to state that the CHEETAH would never get bumped into existance from the pre-cheetah, because of 'too few individuals'.

The reproductive potential of one organism in a species as compared to another merely depends on how fit they are for their environment. The changes that allow for the immunity to the spray may have other consequences that decrease the reproductive potential for those who have the immunity, or it may increase that potential. That's the fun part of genetics - trying to figure out how specific changes fit into the grand scheme of things in terms of the organism, its genetic traits, and its fitness for its environment.

This is still incredibly simplistic, but accurate in a general sense. It makes sense when you think it through.

The reproductive potential of one organism in a species as compared to another merely depends on how fit they are for their environment. (OH?) The changes that allow for the immunity to the spray may have other consequences that decrease the reproductive potential for those who have the immunity, or it may increase that potential. That's the fun part of genetics - trying to guess how specific changes might fit into the grand scheme of things in terms of the organism, its genetic traits, and its fitness for its environment.

This is still incredibly simplistic, but accurate (?) in a general sense. It makes sense when you think it through. (No, it doesn't)

What evidence do you have for some Intelligent Designer intentionally and specifically manipulating Every Single Species Ever over the course of more than a billion years?

I'm not claiming any such thing. I am merely suggesting to you that ID is not "silly," as you claimed it to be. This is a blatantly obvious point: ID explains the defining characteristics of many of the plants and animals we see and use on a daily basis.

Your example, instead of supporting ID, in fact bolsters basica evolutionary principles. Selective breeding is no different from evolution, in that certain inheirited characteristics are passed on preferentially over others.

Selective breeding is obviously different from evolutionary principals, in that it is guided by intelligent agents, as opposed to uncontrolled natural forces. And, of course, direct genetic manipulation is even more obviously a case for intelligent design.

Your example shows that purely natural forces can change a species.

Quite the opposite, in fact. My example shows that very significant changes within a species can and HAVE been caused by intelligent agents, as opposed to "purely natural forces." Intelligent agents probably WILL create an actual new species at some point in the relatively near future. Which is to say: we KNOW that intelligent agents can and do account for some of what we see in nature, and we can expect more of the same.

You have not provided a shred of evidence that someone actually "bred" or gengineered every single species ont he planet.

Gosh -- perhaps that's because I never made the claim in the first place. In fact, I stated clearly that I was not making that claim. You've created a strawman -- though I hesitate to call it an example of "intelligent design."

ID remains no more than Poofism with a gloss of pseudoscience.

LOL!!!! You can only say that by denying the evidence all around you. Humans are doing ID every day. I'd say that the "poofism" charge sticks better to those who stoutly deny the facts in front of them.

> ID explains the defining characteristics of many of the plants and animals we see and use on a daily basis.

Well, they can also be explained by assumign that we live in The Matrix. However, fantastical explanations, like explaining every single organism in the world as being the product of some VAST bioengineering effort (was it a government or private enterprise project?), require fantastical evidence. What evidence do you have that someone actually genetically engineered, say, the North American Flying Squirrel?

> Selective breeding is obviously different from evolutionary principals

No, it's not. The principles remain entirely the same. Some naturally occuring phenomenon (in this case, human farmers), mean that some characteristics are more capable of successful reproduction than others. Humans simply sped up evolution for some species.

> Which is to say: we KNOW that intelligent agents can and do account for some of what we see in nature, and we can expect more of the same.

Yes, and we KNOW that natural selection accounts for the rest.

Where did you get that?

The reasoning goes as follows. We know from Scripture that Jesus died for our sins and that we are all sinners by virtue of our first parents' sin.

Romans 5:12
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men

This defect of original sin has been inherited by all mankind, although more in a spiritual sense than a material sense. Therefore, we could not have descended from various parents. Otherwise, some of us would be tainted by original sin while others wouldn't.

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As estimated by evolutionary biologists, the development of a new species must take at least thousands of years for a sufficient number of mutations to alter the genetic code sufficiently to identify a new species.
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In a steady state process, such as evolution, time cancels out of the equation. Since speciation should be occuring on a continual basis it should be at ALL stages at any given point in time throughout the biosphere, and we should be able to see it by taking a representative sample.

The fact that we don't is a major predictive problem with the theory of evolution.

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