Archive for July, 2009

“Natural selection could perhaps be invoked as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types and orders, can only leave one dumbstruck.”  Giuseppe Sermonti, Italian geneticist

After returning with the HMS Beagle in 1836, Darwin never left the shoreline of England again. Darwin took the enlightenment and unrelenting and grueling hardships of the voyage to construct a new purpose for life—writing. In his autobiography, Darwin explains: “As far as I can judge of myself, I worked to the utmost during the voyage from the mere pleasure of investigation, and from my strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in Natural Science.”

 Darwin goal was to achieve a noticeable place in history: “But I was also ambitious to take fair place among scientific men – whether more ambitious or less so then most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion.” Without question, Darwin has met that goal. Darwinism is today’s most contentious cultural and scientific topics.

The scientific method was not in Darwin’s toolbox, however. While Newton had demonstrated the value of the scientific method, for Darwin science stood in the way of the theory: “My error has been a good lesson to me never to trust in science to the principle of exclusion.” For Darwin, the evidence was an obstacle, not a trump card.

Recognizng Darwin’s shroud of science, Richard Owen from the Royal College of Surgeons that had originally surveyed Darwin’s work declared that the Origin of Species was strictly an “abuse of science.” Actually, Darwin clearly acknowledged, “I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.”

Had Darwin not gone “beyond the bounds” and adhered to the scientific method, would Darwinism have lead to such a stormy and contentious history?

Cambridge University

Without question, Darwin had a distain for Christianity. Darwin wrote, “I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlasting punishment. This is a damnable doctrine.” This is a remarkable statement for someone formally educated to be a clergyman in the Church of England.

Perhaps Darwin’s angst against Christianity stemmed from his father’s insistence that he attend Christ’s College at Cambridge University. Or perhaps, Darwin’s angst stemmed from speculating based the perspective of uniformitarianism that championed by Charles Lyell. While on the Beagle Darwin read Lyell’s book, entitled Principles of Geology. Lyell’s theory contradicts any concept of a global flood. 

Yet, like Lyell, once the scientific method had been abandoned, Darwin was free to explore concepts beyond the evidence. Two years before the publication of the Origin of Species, in an 1857 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote, “I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.”

Ironically, even Darwin’s “bulldog,” Ernst Mayr, by the end of the twentieth century came to the same conclusion that “biology, even though it has all the other legitimate properties of a science, still is not a science like the physical sciences.”

Darwin had evidence, but the analysis was not bassed on the scientific method. Now 150 years later, the irresolvable issues could have been avoided had Darwin’s not reached “beyond the bounds of true science.” The convening of the Altenberg Summit in Austria this last summer highlights our entrance into the postmodern evolution era.

Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University and author of “Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind”, in the Opinion section of Wall Street Journal February 11, 2009 writes, “Neither evolution nor Darwin ever promised anything like perfection.”

 Yet, in percieving perfection in nature, Darwin wrote, “the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is enough to stagger any one.” Darwin suggested, “There is no logical impossibility in the acquirement of any conceivable degree of perfection through natural selection.”

 Marcus may have been confused, since Darwin was confused had contradicted himself by writing in The Origin of Species, “Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature.”

The anticipation around Charles Darwin’s 200^th birthday celebration passed nearly unnoticed. Few media venues ventured to highlight the day. Perhaps, the struggling economy naturally selected the sullenness.

While researchers in Germany, announced completion of the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the hoped for links to human evolution are still missing.

 The genome team led by geneticist Svante Paabo after isolating 3.7 billion base pairs could only conclude:  ”We’re currently analyzing if we see evidence in the Neanderthal genome of contribution from human ancestors,” Paabo said. “That question I think is still totally open.”

Again, this big golden nugget of evolution, like the fossil record, continues as the emperor without clothes. In the Guardian, palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris writes:

 “[P]erhaps now is the time to rejoice not in what Darwin got right, and in demonstrating the reality of evolution… “Isn’t it curious how evolution is regarded by some as a total, universe-embracing explanation, although those who treat it as a religion might protest and sometimes not gently. Don’t worry, the science of evolution is certainly incomplete.”

Even the New York Times writer, Carl Safina, in an essay for the science section entitled “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live” concludes, “So let us now kill Darwin.”

 After 150 years, since the natural mechanism of evolution that Darwin was looking for is still missing, in this post-modern evolution era the birthday party fizzled.

Darwin’s “holy grail” centers on natural selection. Natural selection acts to select new things (variations). The question is, then—how do new variations arise? How does selection produce a species?

 In 1982, the late English paleontologist Colin Patterson, however, placed the origin of variations into perspective: “No one has ever produced a species by the mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it, and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question: how a species originates. And it is there that natural selection seems to be fading out, and chance mechanisms of one sort or another are being invoked.”

 Actually, Darwin agrees: “But we are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown causes of variation.” Darwin continues: “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied.”

 On a scale of 1 to 10, how closer are we today in answering the question—how do new variations arise?

Writing made Darwin. Ironically, writing was never easy and Darwin admitted that there “seems to be sort of a fatality in my mind leading me to put first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form.”

 Darwin never became a skilled writer. Even one of Darwin’s greatest champions, Thomas Huxley, had to struggle through Darwin’s “awkward form.” Huxley concludes: “Exposition was not Darwin’s forté.”

 Rising to the challenge of writing, though, unquestionably became Darwin’s most enduring endevour. The Origin of Species was translated in Darwin’s lifetime into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish, and it has appeared in an additional eighteen languages since. Darwin described the book as just “one long argument from the beginning to the end.”

 Today though, The Origin of Species is only rarely included in academic science curriculum. Huxley writes that not only is the Origin difficult to read, it “is one of the hardest books to understand thoroughly that I know of” and “the Origin of Species is one of the hardest of books to master.”

 Have you, or anyone you know, read The Origin of Species from beginning to end?

Darwin

February 12, 1809, on the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, Darwin was born into aristocracy at the Mount. Since Darwin’s mother died when he was only eight years old, his father sent him to Butler’s boarding school. By his own admission, Darwin considered himself a “below average” student.

 Then at the age of sixteen, Darwin started college at Edinburgh University to become a physician, because that is what his father wanted him to do. But Darwin was repulsed but what he saw. Transferring to Christ’s College at University of Cambridge to become a minister, Darwin developed life-long associations with Professors Henslow and Sedgwick.

 After receiving an offer of a lifetime after graduation following Henslow’s recommendation, Darwain joined the HMS Beagle as a volunteer naturalist. Leaving Plymouth, England in December 1831, the Canary Islands were the first to be explored and while nearly “utterly homesick,” the thirty-five days on Galápagos Islands cumlinated the voyage. While it was Captain FitzRoy Legacy gave Darwin the opportunity of a lifetime, he later deeply regreted the decision, eventually committing suicide.

 Impressions from the voyage eventually paved the way for the publication of The Origin of Species, more than 20 years later. In 1882, in the area of Westminster Abbey known as Scientists’ Corner, Darwin was laid a few feet from the burial place of Sir Isaac Newton and next to that of the astronomer Sir John Herschel.