Hoo boy, if there's one thing you don't come after, it's the secular belief in our Lord and Savior Charles Darwin.
Pour one out today for the peeps who look at a Lamborghini and marvel at how the headlights came about by chance:
Before you get out your fedora and your "BUT AKSHUALLYS," dive into this article with me.
You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.
It's amazing. This was literally the conversation I would have with people on random forums in high school, and now it's being published by a major secular media outlet in Europe.
For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn't just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. "The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology," says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. "And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat."
To clear away confusion, it is scientifically observable that creatures do change over time. Certain traits that help organisms survive in different environments become more prominent over time. This is why people who live in sunny equatorial regions have dark skin and mutations that help them combat tropical diseases like malaria (sickle cell disease). It's also why those redheads can produce their own Vitamin D, have cold resistance, but burn the second the sun touches them.
But we aren't talking about microevolutionary adaptations here. We are talking about the evolution of one species into an entirely new species through the unguided selection of genes over long passages of time.
And after more than a century and a half, the evidence is simply not there. The article goes deep into the teaching of "modern synthesis" in biology – a theory that joins the ideas of evolution and heredity to explain how genes change over time. It then talks about how modern synthesis is falling apart.
There are problems with these micro-adaptations that are supposed to take millions of years. On one hand, you have the problem of complexity. A giraffe has multiple valves that restrict its blood pressure in its neck so its head doesn't burst when it goes to take a drink. How did this very complex system – more complex than anything the entirety of humanity has ever made – come about gradually?
One the other hand, complex changes that are supposed to take a very long time are sometimes being observed in a matter of weeks.
Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are "much more content" living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. "They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land," Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir "is adapting to land in a single generation". He sounded almost proud of the fish.
This study of biological "plasticity" in organisms is rapidly taking off, and it's creating divisions in the scientific world.
Dung beetles can simply grow colder wings to fly in colder air temps. Peaceful spadefoot toads raised on meat grow larger teeth and turn into vicious carnivores.
Then there's the study of epigenetics, which is exploring the idea of chemical DNA tracers passed from parent to offspring.
The result is that the entire field of evolutionary biology is now a fractious free-for-all, and I am here for it.
The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. "In my view there is no – can be no – single theory of evolution," he told me. "There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything."
Huh. It almost sounds as if science isn't the answer to everything and it must be joined with a teleology (study of purpose) that goes deeper than the physical world.
Darwinism is dead. Science has moved beyond him.
Moving forward, perhaps it would be easier to come up with a general referent point if there was a standard these theories shared.
If you start with the assumption that the amazingly complex intricacies of life have a master engineer, then all else follows.
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