Posted on 03/09/2005 12:36:05 PM PST by Heartlander
Darwinian Doubts
By: David Berlinski
March 9, 2005
Original Article
NOTE: The article below is the full version by Dr. Berlinski. The Wichita Eagle opted to shorten the piece to only 400 words.
The defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. It is not a strategy calculated in induce confidence in the scientific method. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington concluded that the events taking place during the Cambrian era could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design – hardly a position unknown in the history of western science. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceeding’s papers, but in the case of Steven Meyer’s "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.
Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all. And peer review?
The hell with it.
“If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism,” Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, remarked, “it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak.” Scott’s understanding of ‘opposition’ had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."
Everyone else had better shut up.
In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin’s theory retains an almost lunatic vitality.
Look – The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences – quantum electrodynamics, say – is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.
Look – Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak to non-existent selection effects.
Look – Darwin’s theory is open at one end since there are no plausible account for the origins of life.
Look – The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.
Look – A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors and depart for Valhalla leaving no obvious descendents.
Look – Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.
Look – Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.
Look – The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives – differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?
But look again – If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin’s theory since it’s otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?
These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are “no valid criticisms of Darwin’s theory,” as so many recent editorials have suggested.
Serious biologists quite understand all this. They rather regard Darwin’s theory as an elderly uncle invited to a family dinner. The old boy has no hair, he has no teeth, he is hard of hearing, and he often drools. Addressing even senior members at table as Sonny, he is inordinately eager to tell the same story over and over again.
But he’s family. What can you do?
David Berlinski holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the author of On Systems Analysis, A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, Newton’s Gift, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, and, most recently, Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics. He is a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
With all due respect, I read both sides, and I know whos's nutty and who's witty. Check Panda's Thumb response to Berlinski.
People see what they want to see and disregard the rest...[simon and garfunkle]:
Yet another alleged early human ancestor unearthed
by guest columnist Peter Line, Ph.D.
11 March 2005
It seems these days that there are precious few ordinary human or ape fossils unearthed, rather they all have to be a missing link between the two. The latest contender for ‘apeman’ fame, this time as the ‘world’s oldest early human skeleton’ or ‘oldest walking hominid’,1 consists of bones from a site in the northeastern Afar region of Ethiopia, ‘dated’ at between 3.8 to 4 million years ago. The remains include a complete tibia and shoulder blade, as well as parts of a femur, ribs, vertebrae, collarbone and pelvis, as well as an ankle bone. The fossil remains of up to 11 other individuals are also reported to have been found. As the finds have not been published in a journal, nor been reviewed by outside scientists, it is difficult to make an assessment of the find at this stage, except what can be interpreted from a few quotes from ‘hominid’ fossil experts released to the media.
It is stated that ‘Scientists are yet to classify the new find, which they believe falls between A. ramidus and A. afarensis. The fossils would help “join the dots” between the two hominids, said Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an Ethiopian scientist and curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History as well as a co-leader of the discovery team’.2 Falling between Australopithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis (e.g. ‘Lucy’) hardly boosts its status as a missing link hominid. According to Peter Andrews, of London’s Natural History Museum, the thin enamel on the teeth of ramidus ‘is more of what you’d expect from a fossil chimp’, and the features of an upper arm bone ‘suggests knuckle-walking, chimp-style’.3 Even the team that discovered ramidus admits that the specimen ‘shows a host of characters usually associated with modern apes’.4
As for the younger and hence supposedly more evolutionarily advanced afarensis, it had a brain the size of an ape; a skull that was apelike; a body similar in shape and stature to apes; and other parts of its skeletal morphology indicate that it was specialized for climbing in trees, as well as knuckle-walking, as are apes.5 Much has been made of skeletal features indicating afarensis may also have had limited ability for (non-human-style) bipedal locomotion. However, similar limited bipedal ability also existed in apes not considered human precursors, such as Oreopithecus bambolii, ‘evolutionary dated’ to earlier than the supposed human and chimpanzee split. According to the authors who studied the specimen, parts of the pelvis of bambolii resembled that of afarensis, and its femur showed ‘a pronounced diaphyseal angle combined with condyles of subequal size, similar to Australopithecus and Homo and functionally correlated with bipedal activities’.6 According to Henry Gee, ‘This creature is thought to have become bipedal independently and was only distantly related to hominids’.7 Apes evolving a form of bipedal locomotion once is difficult enough to believe or imagine; that it must have independently happened multiple times, in order to ‘rescue’ evolutionary theory, reveals evolution to be a collection of just-so-stories that can be accommodated to almost any scenario, no matter how unlikely.
This brings us to the big claim concerning this new fossil find. That is, that the ‘ankle bone … , with the tibia, proves the creature walked upright, said Latimer, co-leader of the team that discovered the fossils’.2 Whether this is the case or not cannot be assessed on the information available. Even the morphology of the skeleton is not known, but since the specimen is placed between ramidus and afarensis then one must assume that it was essentially apelike. Hence, even if this creature had some form of limited bipedal ability, as may have been the case with afarensis, it proves very little, as this trait, as indicated by the nonancestral ape bambolii, was not unique to these supposed hominids. One should also be wary of claims that this or that skeletal feature ‘proves the creature walked upright’, as usually some other evolutionist fossil ‘expert’ will debunk or dispute the claim. As examples of this, Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba and Orrorin tugenensis come immediately to mind.5
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