Fact, Fable,
and Darwin By Rodney Stark
I write as
neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows
what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of
the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of
the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had
produced one, and for many decades every competent
evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the
experts have kept quiet when true believers have sworn in
court and before legislative bodies that
Darwin's theory is
proven beyond any possible doubt, that's not what reputable
biologists, including committed Darwinians, have been saying
to one another.
Without
question, Charles Darwin would be among the most prominent
biologists in history even if he hadn't written The Origin of
Species in 1859. But he would not have been deified in the
campaign to "enlighten" humanity. The battle over evolution is
not an example of how heroic scientists have withstood the
relentless persecution of religious fanatics. Rather, from the
very start it primarily has been an attack on religion by
militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of
science.
When a
thoroughly ideological Darwinist like Richard Dawkins claims,
"The theory is about as much in doubt as that the earth goes
round the sun," he does not state a fact, but merely aims to
discredit a priori anyone who dares to express reservations
about evolution. Indeed, Dawkins has written, "It is
absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims
not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid,
or insane...."
That is
precisely how
"Darwin's
Bulldog," Thomas Huxley, hoped intellectuals would react when
he first adopted the tactic of claiming that the only choice
is between Darwin
and Bible literalism. However, just as one can doubt Max
Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis without thereby declaring for
Marxism, so too one may note the serious shortcomings of
neo-Darwinism without opting for any rival theory. Modern
physics provides a model of how science benefits from being
willing to live with open questions rather than embracing
obviously flawed conjectures.
What is most
clear to me is that the Darwinian Crusade does not prove some
basic incompatibility between religion and science. But the
even more immediate reality is that
Darwin's theory
falls noticeably short of explaining the origin of species.
Dawkins knows the many serious problems that beset a purely
materialistic evolutionary theory, but asserts that no one
except true believers in evolution can be allowed into the
discussion, which also must be held in secret. Thus he
chastises Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, two
distinguished fellow Darwinians, for giving "spurious aid and
comfort to modern creationists."
Dawkins
believes that, regardless of his or her good intentions, "if a
reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of
some detail of Darwinian theory, that fact is seized upon and
blown up out of proportion." While acknowledging that "the
extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record" is
a major embarrassment for Darwinism, Stephen Jay Gould
confided that this has been held as a "trade secret of
paleontology" and acknowledged that the evolutionary diagrams
"that adorn our textbooks" are based on "inference...not the
evidence of fossils."
According to
Steven Stanley, another distinguished evolutionist, doubts
raised by the fossil record were "suppressed" for years.
Stanley noted that
this too was a tactic begun by Huxley, always careful not to
reveal his own serious misgivings in public. Paleontologist
Niles Eldridge and his colleagues have said that the history
of life demonstrates gradual transformations of species, "all
the while really knowing that it does not." This is not how
science is conducted; it is how ideological crusades are
run.
By
Darwin's day it
had long been recognized that the fossil evidence showed that
there had been a progression in the biological complexity of
organisms over an immense period of time. In the oldest
strata, only simple organisms are observed. In more recent
strata, more complex organisms appear. The biological world is
now classified into a set of nested categories. Within each
genus (mammals, reptiles, etc.) are species (dogs, horses,
elephants, etc.) and within each species are many specific
varieties, or breeds (Great Dane, Poodle, Beagle, etc.).
It was
well-known that selective breeding can create variations
within species. But the boundaries between species are
distinct and firm--one species does not simply trail off into
another by degrees. As
Darwin
acknowledged, breeding experiments reveal clear limits to
selective breeding beyond which no additional changes can be
produced. For example, dogs can be bred to be only so big and
no bigger, let alone be selectively bred until they are cats.
Hence, the question of where species come from was the real
challenge and, despite the title of his famous book and more
than a century of hoopla and celebration,
Darwin essentially
left it unanswered.
After
many years spent searching for an adequate explanation of the
origin of species, in the end
Darwin fell back
on natural selection, claiming that it could create new
creatures too, if given im-mense periods of time. That is,
organisms respond to their environmental circumstances by
slowly changing (evolving) in the direction of traits
beneficial to survival until, eventually, they are
sufficiently changed to constitute a new species. Hence, new
species originate very slowly, one tiny change after another,
and eventually this can result in lemurs changing to humans
via many intervening species.
Darwin
fully recognized that a major weakness of this account of the
origin of species involved what he and others referred to as
the principle of "gradualism in nature." The fossil record was
utterly inconsistent with gradualism. As
Darwin
acknowledged: "...why, if species have descended from other
species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see
innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in
confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well
defined?"
Darwin
offered two solutions. Transitional types are quickly replaced
and hence would mainly only be observable in the fossil
record. As for the lack of transitional types among the
fossils, that was,
Darwin admitted,
"the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged
against the theory."
Darwin
dealt with this problem by blaming "the extreme imperfection
of the geological record." "Only a small portion of the
surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no
part with sufficient care." But, just wait,
Darwin promised,
the missing transitions will be found in the expected
proportion when more research has been done. Thus began an
intensive search for what the popular press soon called the
"missing links."
Today, the
fossil record is enormous compared to what it was in
Darwin's day, but
the facts are unchanged. The links are still missing; species
appear suddenly and then remain relatively unchanged. As
Steven Stanley reported: "The known fossil record...offers no
evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."
Indeed, the
evidence has grown even more contrary since
Darwin's day.
"Many of the discontinuities [in the fossil record] tend to be
more and more emphasized with increased collecting," noted the
former curator of historical geology at the
American
Museum of Natural
History. The history of most fossil species includes two
features particularly inconsistent with gradualism, Stephen
Jay Gould has acknowledged. The first problem is stasis. Most
species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on
earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same
as when they disappear. The second problem is sudden
appearance. Species do not arise gradually by the steady
transformation of ancestors, they appear "fully formed."
These are
precisely the objections raised by many biologists and
geologists in
Darwin's time--it
was not merely that
Darwin's claim
that species arise through eons of natural selection was
offered without supporting evidence, but that the available
evidence was overwhelmingly contrary. Unfortunately, rather
than concluding that a theory of the origin of species was yet
to be accomplished, many scientists urged that Darwin's claims
must be embraced, no matter what.
In keeping with
Darwin's views,
evolutionists have often explained new species as the result
of the accumulation of tiny, favorable random mutations over
an immense span of time. But this answer is inconsistent with
the fossil record wherein creatures appear "full-blown and
raring to go." Consequently, for most of the past century,
biologists and geneticists have tried to discover how a huge
number of favorable mutations can occur at one time so that a
new species would appear without intermediate types.
However, as the
eminent and committed Darwinist Ernst Mayr explained,The
occurrence of genetic monstrosities by mutation...is well
substantiated, but they are such evident freaks that these
monsters can only be designated as 'hopeless.' They are so
utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest
chance of escaping elimination through selection. Giving a
thrush the wings of a falcon does not make it a better
flyer....To believe that such a drastic mutation would produce
a viable new type, capable of occupying a new adaptive zone,
is equivalent to believing in miracles.
The word
miracle crops up again and again in mathematical assessments
of the possibility that even very simple biochemical chains,
let alone living organisms, can mutate into being by a process
of random trial and error. For generations, Darwinians have
regaled their students with the story of the monkey and the
typewriter, noting that given an infinite period of time, the
monkey sooner or later is bound to produce Macbeth purely by
chance, the moral being that infinite time can perform
miracles.
However, the
monkey of random evolution does not have infinite time. The
progression from simple to complex life forms on earth took
place within a quite limited time. Moreover, when competent
mathematicians considered the matter, they quickly calculated
that even if the monkey's task were reduced to coming up with
only a few lines of Macbeth, let alone Shakespeare's entire
play, the probability is far, far beyond mathematical
possibility. The odds of creating even the simplest organism
at random are even more remote--Fred Hoyle and Chandra
Wickramasinghe, celebrated cosmologists, calculated the odds
as one in ten to the 40,000th power. (Consider that all atoms
in the known universe are estimated to number no more than ten
to the 80th power.) In this sense, then, Darwinian theory does
rest on truly miraculous assumptions.
Perhaps the
most amazing aspect of the current situation is that while
Darwin is treated as a secular saint in the popular media and
the theory of evolution is regarded as the invincible
challenge to all religious claims, it is taken for granted
among the leading biological scientists that the origin of
species has yet to be explained. Writing in Nature in 1999,
Eörs Szathmay summarizes that, "The origin of species has long
fascinated biologists. Although
Darwin's major
work bears it as a title, it does not provide a solution to
the problem." When Julian Huxley claimed that
"Darwin's theory
is...no longer a theory but a fact," he surely knew better.
But, just like his grandfather, Thomas Huxley, he knew that
his lie served the greater good of "enlightenment."
When The Origin
of Species was published it aroused immense interest, but
initially it did not provoke antagonism on religious grounds.
Although many criticized
Darwin's lack of
evidence, none raised religious objections. Instead, the
initial response from theologians was favorable. The
distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Gray hailed
Darwin for having
solved the most difficult problem confronting the Design
argument--the many imperfections and failures revealed in the
fossil record. Acknowledging that Darwin himself "rejects the
idea of design," Gray congratulated him for "bringing out the
neatest illustrations of it." Gray interpreted
Darwin's work as
showing that God has created a few original forms and then let
evolution proceed within the framework of divine laws.
When religious
antagonism finally came it was in response to aggressive
claims, like Huxley's, that
Newton and
Darwin together
had evicted God from the cosmos. For the heirs of the
Enlightenment, evolution seemed finally to supply the weapon
needed to destroy religion. As Richard Dawkins confided,
"Darwin made it
possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Atheism was
central to the agenda of the Darwinians. Darwin himself once
wrote that he could not understand how anyone could even wish
that Christianity were true, noting that the doctrine of
damnation was itself damnable. Huxley expressed his hostility
toward religion often and clearly, writing in 1859: "My screed
was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom...both
of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable
enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve
of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it
is to see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies."
According to
Oxford historian
J. R. Lucas, Huxley was "remarkably resistant to the idea that
there were clergymen who accepted evolution, even when
actually faced with them." Quite simply, there could be no
compromises with faith.
Writing at the
same time as Huxley, the leading Darwinian in
Germany,
Ernst Haeckel, drew this picture:
On one side
spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and
progress stand under the bright banner of science; on the
other side, under the black flag of hierarchy, stand spiritual
slavery and falsehood, irrationality and barbarism,
superstition and retrogression.... Evolution is the heavy
artillery in the struggle for truth. Whole ranks
of...sophistries fall together under the chain shot of
this...artillery, and the proud and mighty structure of the
Roman hierarchy, that powerful stronghold of infallible
dogmatism, falls like a house of cards.
These were not
the natterings of radical circles and peripheral publications.
The author of the huge review of The Origin in the Times of
London was none other than Thomas Huxley. He built his
lectures on evolution into a popular touring stage show
wherein he challenged various potential religious opponents by
name. Is it surprising that religious people, scientists as
well as clerics, began to respond in the face of unrelenting
challenges like these issued in the name of evolution? It was
not as if they merely were asked to accept that life had
evolved--many theologians had long taken that for granted.
What the Darwinians demanded was that religionists agree to
the untrue and unscientific claim that
Darwin had proved
that God played no role in the process.
Among those
drawn to respond was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce,
who is widely said to have made an ass of himself in a debate
with Huxley during the 1860 meeting of the British Association
at Oxford. The
relevant account of this confrontation reported: "I was happy
enough to be present on the memorable occasion at
Oxford when Mr.
Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop arose and in a
light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that
there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then turning to
his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know,
was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he
claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr.
Huxley...arose...and spoke these tremendous words. He was not
ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be
ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to
obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect
was tremendous."
This marvelous
anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of
Darwin and of
Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of
evolution. In his celebrated Apes, Angels and Victorians,
William Irvine
used this tale to disparage the bishop's snobbery. In his
prize-winning study, James Brix went much farther, describing
Wilberforce as "naive and pompous," a man whose "faulty
opinions" were those of a "fundamentalist creationist" and who
provided Huxley with the opportunity to give evolution "its
first major victory over dogmatism and duplicity." Every
writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation.
Trouble is, it
never happened. The quotation above was the only such report
of this story and it appeared in an article titled "A
Grandmother's Tales" written by a non-scholar in a popular
magazine 38 years after the alleged encounter. No other
account of these meetings, and there were many written at the
time, made any mention of remarks concerning Huxley's monkey
ancestors, or claimed that he made a fool of the bishop. To
the contrary, many thought the bishop had the better of it,
and even many of the committed Darwinians thought it at most a
draw.
Moreover, as
all of the scholars present at
Oxford knew, prior
to the meeting, Bishop Wilberforce had penned a review of The
Origin in which he fully acknowledged the principle of natural
selection as the source of variations within species. He
rejected Darwin's claims concerning the origin of species,
however, and some of these criticisms were sufficiently
compelling that Darwin immediately wrote his friend the
botanist J. D. Hooker that the article "is uncommonly clever;
it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and
brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite
splendidly." In a subsequent letter to geologist Charles
Lyell, Darwin
acknowledges that "the bishop makes a very telling case
against me." Indeed, several of Wilberforce's comments caused
Darwin to make
modifications in a later revision of the book.
The tale of the
foolish and narrow-minded bishop seems to have thrived as a
revealing "truth" about the incompatibility of religion and
science simply because many of its tellers wanted to believe
that a bishop is wrong by nature. J. R. Lucas, who debunked
the bishop myth, has suggested that the "most important reason
why the legend grew" is, first, because academics generally
"know nothing outside their own special subject" and therefore
easily believe that outsiders are necessarily ignorant, and,
second, because Huxley encouraged that conclusion. "The
quarrel between religion and science was what Huxley wanted;
and as Darwin's
theory gained supporters, they took over his view of the
incident."
Since then the
Darwinian Crusade has tried to focus all attention on the most
unqualified and most vulnerable opponents, and when no easy
targets present themselves it has invented them. Huxley "made
straw men of the 'creationists,'" as his biographer Desmond
admitted. Even today it is a rare textbook or any popular
treatment of evolution and religion that does not reduce
"creationism" to the simplest caricatures.
This tradition
remains so potent that whenever it is asked that evolution be
presented as "only a theory," the requester is ridiculed as a
buffoon. Even when the great philosopher of science Karl
Popper suggested that the standard version of evolution even
falls short of being a scientific theory, being instead an
untestable tautology, he was subjected to public condemnations
and much personal abuse.
Popper's
tribulations illustrate an important basis for the victory of
Darwinism: A successful appeal for a united front on the part
of scientists to oppose religious opposition has had the
consequence of silencing dissent within the scientific
community. The eminent observer Everett Olson notes that there
is "a generally silent group" of biological scientists "who
tend to disagree with much of the current thought" about
evolution, but who remain silent for fear of censure.
I believe that
one day there will be a plausible theory of the origin of
species. But, if and when that occurs, there will be nothing
in any such theory that makes it impossible to propose that
the principles involved were not part of God's great design
any more than such a theory will demonstrate the existence of
God. But, while we wait, why not lift the requirement that
high school texts enshrine
Darwin's failed
attempt as an eternal truth?
Rodney Stark
was professor of sociology at the
University
of
Washington
for many years and is now university professor of the social
sciences at
Baylor
University.
He is author of For the Glory of God
(Princeton
University
Press) and other acclaimed books on science and
religion.
The
Miracle of Creation
Freeman
Dyson, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for
Advanced Study, is a preeminent mathematical physicist, and
one of the most wide-ranging thinkers and writers in modern
science. These observations are drawn from interviews with
Monte Davis and Stewart Brand.
QUESTION: How do
we understand the universe at all? Do you agree with Carl
Sagan that humans find the mathematics of gravitation so
simple and elegant because natural selection eliminated the
apes who couldn’t understand?
DYSON: Not at
all. For apes to come out of the trees, and change in the
direction of being able to write down Maxwell’s equations, I
don’t think you can explain that by natural selection at all.
It’s just a miracle.
QUESTION: You
have written that “as we look out into the universe and
identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have
worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the
universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
Is that a playful suggestion?
DYSON: It’s not
playful at all.
QUESTION: Then we
seem to be talking about sentiments that most people would
consider religious. Are they religious for you?
DYSON: Oh
yes.
QUESTION: The
dominant tendency in modern science has been to assert that we
occupy no privileged place, that the universe does not care,
that science and religion don’t mix. Where do you fit into
those ideas?
DYSON: The
tendency you’re talking about is a modern one, not old. I
think it became almost a dogma only with the fight for
acceptance of Darwinism, Huxley versus Bishop Wilberforce, and
so on. Before the nineteenth century, scientists were not
ashamed of being religious, but since
Darwin, it’s been
taboo.
The biologists
are still fighting Wilberforce. If you look now, the view that
everything is due to chance and to little bits of molecular
clockwork is mostly propounded by biologists, particularly
people like Jacques Monod—whereas the physicists have become
far more skeptical about that. If you actually look at the way
modern physics is going, it’s very far from that. Yes, it’s
the biologists who’ve made it so hard to talk about these
things.
I was reading
recently a magnificent book by Thomas Wright, written about
1750, when these inhibitions didn’t exist at all. Wright was
the discoverer of galaxies, you know, and he writes:
“I can never
look upon the stars without wondering that the whole world
does not become astronomers; and that men, endowed with sense
and reason, should neglect a science that must convince them
of their immortality.”
QUESTION: There’s
a provocative sentence in your book Imagined Worlds: “The laws
of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the
universe as interesting as possible.” What do you mean by
that?
DYSON: It’s the
numerical accidents that make life possible. I define an
interesting universe as one that is friendly to life, and
especially one that produces lots of variety.
QUESTION: What
accidental numbers make that possible?
DYSON: If you
look at just the physical building blocks, there’s a famous
problem with producing carbon in stars. All the carbon
necessary for life has to be produced in stars, and it’s
difficult to do. To make carbon, you’ve got to have three
helium atoms collide in a triple collision. Helium has an
atomic weight of 4, and carbon is 12. Beryllium, at 8, is
unstable, therefore you can’t go from helium to beryllium to
carbon; you have to make helium into carbon in one jump. This
means three atoms colliding together.
QUESTION: Which
statistically is not so often.
DYSON: No. But
Fred Hoyle, who discovered this process, came up with one of
the most brilliant ideas in the whole of science. He said that
in order to make carbon abundant as it should be, there must
be an accidental, coincidental resonance. This means that
there’s a nuclear state in the carbon nucleus at precisely the
right energy level for these three atoms to combine smoothly.
The chance of having that resonance in the right place is
maybe 1 in 1,000. Hoyle believed it must be there in order to
produce the carbon. Of course, the nuclear physicists then
looked for this resonance, and found it!
There are other
famous cases: The fact that the nuclear force is just strong
enough to bind a proton and a neutron to make the heavy
isotope hydrogen, but not strong enough to bind two protons to
make helium with an atomic weight of 2. Just two protons stuck
together is a rather narrow range of strength. So the nuclear
force is fine-tuned so that hydrogen doesn’t burn to helium
right away. If the two hydrogen nuclei did bind, all the
hydrogen would burn to helium in the first five minutes. The
universe would then be pure helium and a rather boring place.
Whereas, if the force were a little bit weaker, so that the
neutron and the proton didn’t bind, you wouldn’t get any heavy
elements at all. You’d have nothing but hydrogen. Again, this
would make for a boring universe.
