When the platypus, nicknamed the “watermole,” was first discovered in 1797 by early European settlers near the Hawkesbury River, outside Sydney, it triggered a lasting controversy. The perplexed local governor, Captain John Hunter, sent specimens back to Mother England for study.

The “watermole” was equally mystifying in England. Zoologists George Shaw suggested it was a “freak imposture” sold to gullible seamen by Chinese taxidermists. Suspecting fraud, they tried to pry the “duck’s bill” off of the pelt, leaving marks on the bill that are still visible today at the British Museum in London.

In 1802, an English scientist confirmed that the creature was neither freak nor fraud, and he labeled the specimen “platypus” because of its flat bill and gave it the scientific name Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Since then, the platypus has stood as an iconic conundrum in natural history.

While voyaging on the HMS Beagle in 1836, Charles Darwin recorded his encounter with a platypus, during his travels along Coxs River near the Wolgan Valley in Australia:

In the dusk of the evening I took a stroll along a chain of ponds, which in this dry country represented the course of a river, and had the good fortune to see several of the famous Ornithorhynchus paradoxus. They were diving and playing about the surface of the water, but showed so little of their bodies, that they might easily have been mistaken for water-rats. Mr. Browne shot one.

At the time,  the Platypus official name was Ornithorhynchus paradoxus due to the paradoxical evolutionary status by Johann Blumenbach in 1800 then, later changed to Ornithorhynchus anatinus in 1934 to avoid the evolution controversy.

Not only do these furry animals actually lay eggs like a bird, the young feed on breast milk like a mammal and make venom like a snake. Although the platypus has been an evolutionary conundrum, the structure of the platypus genome has now been deciphered. In comparing the platypus genome with genomes of the human, mouse, dog, opossum, and chicken, researchers found that the platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with these animals.

For egg production, the platypus genome matches for the ZPAX genes that had previously been found only in birds, amphibians, and fish, and it shares with the chicken a gene for a type of egg-yolk protein called “vitellogenin.” For breast milk production, the platypus has genes for the family of milk proteins called caseins, which map together in a cluster matching humans. Lastly, the male platypus has spurs on its hind legs loaded with lethal venom, rising from duplicate reptilian-like genes.

The platypus exemplifies how similar genes in different species produce the same function. The question is how does genetic identification clarify the evolutionary place of the platypus? The answer is it does not.

According to Richard Gibb, Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, concluded, “there is nothing quite as enigmatic as a platypus. You have got these reptilian repeat patterns and these more recently evolved milk genes and independent evolution of the venom. It all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.”

Darwin proposed in The Origin of Species that as new species arise through “successive, slight changes,” there is corresponding extinction. Darwin wrote “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.” The evidence however points to the conservation, not the extinction of variations.

A team led by Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York sequenced microRNAs, which regulate gene expression, from six platypus tissues, and also found a mix of reptile and mammal similarities, concluding that we “have microRNAs that are shared with chickens and not mammals as well as ones that are shared with mammals, but not chickens.

Classifying the platypus into an evolutionary paradigm has been a challenge. In 1992, Australian biologist, Michael Archer wrote, “Indeed, evolutionary scientists are baffled about the ancestry of the platypus.”

As baffling as the platypus was in 1992, it is even more so today, despite the availability of genomic sequencing. Francis S. Collins, past Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, concedes: “At first glance, the platypus appears as if it was the result of an evolutionary accident. But as weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved.”

In a 2008 BBC interview with Helen Briggs, geneticist Mark Batzer, from Louisiana State University notes: “One big surprise was the patchwork nature of the genome with avian, reptilian, and mammalian features.”

What is missing from Collin’s “priceless for understanding” is how the platypus fits into the Tree of Life sequence as Darwin envisioned. No wonder Darwin struggled with the platypus knowing that it contradicting his theory of natural selection—the Platypus should have become extinct. In a 1860 letter to Charles Lyell,  Darwin explains that the

I quite agree with you on the strange and inexplicable fact of Ornithorhynchus having been preserved.

Even in the context of the gene-centric Modern Synthesis theory, genetics seems to play an array of confounding evolution roles. In the butterfly, similar genes are associated with different forms and functions. In the octopus, different genetics results in similar forms and functions. In the platypus, the same genes in different species are associated with the same functions.

Genes are independent, not sequential. As Richard Gibb points out in the Nature journal, it “all points to how idiosyncratic evolution is.”

In Notebook D, Darwin wonders, “when will Ornithorhynchus come in circle?” noting, “Such difficulties will always occur if animals are thought to have been created.” For Darwin, his theory followed an ideology, not the scientific evidence.

After 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, the Platypus continues to strike terror in the evolution industry. Jerry Coyne, the consummate neo-Darwinist, in Why Evolution is True never even mentions the Platypus—for good reasons.

According to Alan Love of the University of Minnesota, in Evolution, The Extended Synthesis, published by The MIT Press, “The vigor of these kinds of controversies has led one researcher [Massimo Pigliucci] to ponder whether an extended evolutionary synthesis is just around the corner or simply an impossible chimera.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in a crisis without a theory.

References available upon request

Even Darwin knew that the arguments in The Origin of Species would not stand the test of time. Critical of his own work, in a letter to H. Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote, 

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.

By the end of the nineteenth century following the failure of the HMS Challenger mission to discover the theoretical “innumerable” missing links and evidence in The Origin of Species was acknowledged as fraudulent, Darwin’s theory was emerging as scrap yard re-cycling material.

“Things did not look any better for the Darwinian view of evolution at the onset of the twentieth century, when the re-discovery of Gregor Mendel’s work and the beginnings of genetics appeared to deal a blow the theory,” writes Massimo Pigliucci in his new book entitled Evolution-The Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press.

Not only was the fossil record not cooperating, Mendel’s work patently contradicted Darwin’s central premise of inheritance through “gemmules”, “blending”, and Lamarckism. Mendel demonstrated that inheritance occurs through discrete units; evidence that excludes Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes. The evidence signaled the end of the First Wave of evolutionary thought.

Enter the Second Wave—neo-Darwinism. Mathematically oriented biologists, including Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright by incorporating Mendel’s laws with progressive genetic mutations extended the basis of emerging neo-Darwinism. The sentinel milestone in Second Wave of evolutionary thought was Fisher’s 1918 paper, “The Correlation between Relatives on the Suppositions of Mendelian Inheritance.”

Neo-Darwinism extended into what is known as the Modern Synthesis through the classic work of Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) by Julian Huxley, and Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) by Ernst Mayr. Dobzhansky succinctly described fundamental tenet of the emerging Modern Synthesis:

Mutations and chromosomal changes … constantly and unremittingly supply the raw materials for evolution.

Once again, howeer, the fossil record debate reignited. In 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould broke rank throwing a wrench into the Modern Synthesis theory by introducing the concept of punctuated equilibrium. For Gould, “no fossil evidence exists at all” for Darwin’s “slight, successive” changes.  

While evidence from genetics became the driving force for developing the Modern Synthesis through the twentieth century, the astounding scientific advances from the last two decades soundly demonstrates genetics the “Central Dogma” driving  Modern Synthesis, “one gene, one protein,” is now known to be wrong.

Pigliucci recognizes that the fundamental tenets of Modern Synthesis “are being challenged as either inaccurate or incomplete” and “all these molecular processes clearly demolish the alleged central dogma.” Over the last two decades, the evidence has been signaling the end of the Second Wave of evolutionary thought.

Enter the Third Wave—Extended Synthesis. The theory of evolution has now evolved into the consummate emperor—without clothes. To address the crisis, Pigliucci and Gerd Muller in the summer of 2008 convened a workshop at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg near Vienna, Austria.

The workshop was entitled “Toward an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis?” Evolutionary academians from sixteen universities participated in the workshop. The workshop became known as the “Altenberg-16” and dubbed “The Woodstock of Evolution.”

The workshops, behind closed doors, drew only scant media coverage. The journal Nature ran an article entitled “Postmodern Evolution” with the sub-title “This summer a group of high profile researchers met in Altenberg, Austria, to try and plot the future course of evolutionary theory” written by John Whitfield.

Whitfield highlights how the Altenberg workshop ruffled the feathers of the heirs to the Darwinian intellectual estate. Pugliucci’s attempt to bridge the divide between the scientific disciplines has not gone unchecked—especially from the geneticists who once controlled the holy grail of evolution.

Evolutionary development biology, known as evo-devo, is working to bridge the gap between the theory of evolution and the scientific evidence.

Old Modern Synthesis guards are particularly resistant to the extended evo-devo movement, however. Jerry Coyne, evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago has little time for “evo-devotees” claiming “these notions [extended synthesis] haven’t forced us to change the neo-Darwinian paradigm.”

“Originally, the idea was that evo-devo was going to be the synthesis between evolution and development—now it is a part of what needs to be done to get there,” according to Alan Love, one of the Altenberg-16 from the University of Minnesota. “There is still a lot of outstanding work to do on fitting the pieces together, but there is no consensus on how to go about that right now.”

The Extended Synthesis, the Third Wave, has the evolution industry asking the question, when will the real theory of evolution stand up? The clock is ticking—midnight is seconds away.

The Third Wave of evolutionary theory understands why the evidence demands a new evolutionary theory. With “no consensus” on the horizon, at least the Altenberg-16 should have re-released a statement extending Darwin’s 1862 dilemma -

We look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the modern theories of evolution will be proved to be rubbish; but we expect and hope that the philosophical framework will stand.

Vestiges  are tauted as evidence for biological evolution based on the Larmarckian concept of “use and disuse” that Charles Darwin reluctantly, yet fully accepted by the 6^th edition of The Origin of Species in 1872.

In the 1^st edition Darwin wrote that“use and disuse seem to have produced some effect” that was later changed to “use and disuse seem to have produced a considerable effect” in the 6^th edition. For Darwin, the importance of “use and disuse” increased from “some effect” to “considerable effect.”

In this series, we are examining the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure through the process of “disuse.” Vestiges are thought to be biological elements that have lost their function through “disuse.” At issue is—what is the evidence that the process of “disuse” can actually produce vestiges?

In the decade following the publication of the 6^th edition, German biologist August Weismann, at the University of Freiburg, launched the first scientific inquiry to directly challenging Darwin’s theory. Now known as the “Weisman Barrier” in 1883 Weismann cut off the tails of mice from twenty-one generations. Seeing that the twenty-second generation still had tails, Weismann concluded that the evidence contradicted Darwin’s theory of “disuse” and that despite obvious reasons for change in the mice, “continuity” was observed, not new variations.

The concept of the Weismann Barrier became central to the emerging  Modern evolutionary synthesis. “Disuse” alone simply does not result in vestige structures. Ernst Mayr, known as Darwin’s bulldog of the twenty-first century, called Weismann “the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the nineteenth century, after Charles Darwin.”

Evidence from the Weismann Barrier continues to stand unchallenged, now for over 100 years. Even more to the point, after thousands of years of circumcision, “disuse” has failed to any effect on human anatomy. Without scientific experimental evidence demonstrating that “disuse” can result in any biological changes, the concept of vestige as evidence for evolution remains untenetable.

Other known vestige problems for evolution include, 1) the appendix is not found systematically found through nature, even in mammals; 2) “vestige” structures are now known to be functional. These evolutionary contradictions for vestiges continue to undermining evidence for evolution.

In the up-coming posts, we will continue to explore why these last two problems have completely undermined the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure.