Are Humans Descended from Mutant Fish?

It's Time to Take a Closer Look at Darwinism

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.

- Richard Dawkins, High Priest of Neo-Darwinism

Hey Folks,

Crow Qu’appelle here. It’s been awhile since I posted anything here.

So, in case you’re wondering - no, I haven’t been murdered by Mossad, committed to a lunatic asylum, or ironically died of COVID, AIDS, or Monkeypox.

Actually, I was on my honeymoon. I’m planning to write something about my personal life sometime soon, but for now, I’d like to get back in the swing of things by posting something I think y’all loyal Nevermorons will appreciate - a critique of Darwinism.

Like many of you, I formerly accepted the “scientific consensus” on many subjects, such as epidemiology, evolutionary theory, climate change, and so on. I think the COVID era was a major wake-up call to many of us. If we’re being honest, we were forming our opinion about many things based on the opinion of perceived experts, who in many cases turned out to be untrustworthy.

It has come as quite a shock to many of us to learn of the extent to which medical science has been corrupted by pharmaceutical interests, but virology is far from the only field of science which is deeply flawed. Case in point - Darwinism.

I have previously written about Darwinism, to a certain extent. If you’re interested, you can check out on my work on the subject here:

But it was not until I came across an obscure masterpiece called Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson that I was fully convinced that Darwinism is essentially wrong.

By the time I was four chapters in, I was converted. Darwinism does not hold up as a scientific theory. It now makes about as much sense to me as does Mr. Garrison’s explanation of evolution.

So, I thought that I would be doing a valuable public service if I were to share some excerpts from this brilliant work.

Many of you have shown yourselves to be willing to reconsider your previously-held beliefs about COVID, HIV, and viruses in general. I think that the Truth Movement is ready now to consider a paradigm shift with far greater implications.

As I believe I will be able to convince you in this and subsequents posts, Darwinism is basically a massive fraud which has been perpetuated for generations. For those of you are dedicated seekers of truth, I urge you to look into this matter. It is important. Scientific fraud did not begin with Dr. Fauci. It’s been going on for much longer than that, and Darwinism provides a clear example.

Of course, I don’t expect you to take my word for things. I look forward to debating the matter in the comments.

Here’s a question to kick the debate off: If Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific theory, what experiment could confirm it?

Stay tuned for more coming soon!

Crow Qu’appelle

Natural Selection

by Phillip E. Johnson, excerpted from Darwin on Trial (1991)

The story of Charles Darwin has been told many times, and no wonder. His relationship with the lawyer-geologist Charles Lyell, the long voyage on the Beagle with the temperamental Captain FitzRoy, the observations and adventures in South America and the Galápagos Islands, the long years of preparation and delay, the eventual rushed publication of The Origin of Species when Alfred Russel Wallace appeared about to publish a similar theory, the controversies, and the smashing triumph—all these make a great saga that is always worth another retelling.​

My subject is not history but the logic of current controversy; therefore, my interest must be in Darwinism and not Darwin. I am also uninterested in the differences between the theory as Darwin originally proposed it and as it is understood by neo-Darwinists today, who have the advantage of a greater understanding of genetics that science has achieved since Darwin's time. My purpose is to explain what concepts the contemporary theory employs, what significant statements about the natural world it makes, and what points of legitimate controversy there may be.​

Darwin's classic book argued three important related propositions. The first was that "the species are not immutable." By this, he meant that new species have appeared during the long course of the earth's history by a natural process he called "descent with modification." The second proposition was that this evolutionary process can be extended to account for all or nearly all the diversity of life because all living things descended from a very small number of common ancestors, perhaps a single microscopic ancestor. The third proposition, and the one most distinctive to Darwinism, was that this vast process was guided by natural selection or "survival of the fittest," a guiding force so effective that it could accomplish prodigies of biological craftsmanship that people in previous times had thought to require the guiding hand of a creator. The evidence for this third proposition is the subject of this chapter.​

The question is not whether natural selection occurs. Of course it does, and it has an effect in maintaining the genetic fitness of a population. Infants with severe birth defects do not survive to maturity without expensive medical care, and creatures that do not survive to reproduce do not leave descendants. These effects are unquestioned, but Darwinism asserts a great deal more than merely that species avoid genetic deterioration due to natural attrition among the genetically unfit. Darwinists claim that this same force of attrition has a building effect so powerful that it can begin with a bacterial cell and gradually craft its descendants over billions of years to produce such wonders as trees, flowers, ants, birds, and humans. How do we know that all this is possible?​

Darwinian evolution postulates two elements. The first is what Darwin called "variation," (1) and what scientists today call mutation.​(2)

Mutations are randomly occurring genetic changes which are nearly always harmful when they produce effects in the organism large enough to be visible, but which may occasionally slightly improve the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. Organisms generally produce more offspring than can survive to maturity, and offspring that possess an advantage of this kind can be expected to produce more descendants themselves, other things being equal, than less advantaged members of the species. As the process of differential survival continues, the trait eventually spreads throughout the species, and it may become the basis for further cumulative improvements in succeeding generations. Given enough time, and sufficient mutations of the right sort, enormously complex organs and patterns of adaptive behavior can eventually be produced in tiny cumulative steps, without the assistance of any pre-existing intelligence.​

That is, all this can happen if the theory is true. Darwin could not point to impressive examples of natural selection in action, and so he had to rely heavily on an argument by analogy. In the words of Douglas Futuyma:​

When Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, he could offer no good cases of natural selection because no one had looked for them. He drew instead an analogy with the artificial selection that animal and plant breeders use to improve domesticated varieties of animals and plants. By breeding only from the woolliest sheep, the most fertile chickens, and so on, breeders have been spectacularly successful in altering almost every imaginable characteristic of our domesticated animals and plants to the point where most of them differ from their wild ancestors far more than related species differ from them.​

The analogy to artificial selection is misleading. Plant and animal breeders employ intelligence and specialized knowledge to select breeding stock and to protect their charges from natural dangers. The point of Darwin's theory, however, was to establish that purposeless natural processes can substitute for intelligent design.​

That he made that point by citing the accomplishments of intelligent designers proves only that the receptive audience for his theory was highly uncritical.

Artificial selection is not basically the same sort of thing as natural selection, but rather is something fundamentally different. Human breeders produce variations among sheep or pigeons for purposes absent in nature, including sheer delight in seeing how much variation can be achieved. If the breeders were interested only in having animals capable of surviving in the wild, the extremes of variation would not exist. When domesticated animals return to the wild state, the most highly specialized breeds quickly perish, and the survivors revert to the original wild type. Natural selection is a conservative force that prevents the appearance of the extremes of variation that human breeders like to encourage.

What artificial selection actually shows is that there are definite limits to the amount of variation that even the most highly skilled breeders can achieve. Breeding of domestic animals has produced no new species, in the commonly accepted sense of new breeding communities that are infertile when crossed with the parent group. For example, all dogs form a single species because they are chemically capable of interbreeding, although inequality of size in some cases makes natural copulation impracticable. The eminent French zoologist Pierre Grasse concluded that the results of artificial selection provide powerful testimony against Darwin's theory:

"In spite of the intense pressure generated by artificial selection (eliminating any parent not answering the criteria of choice) over whole millennia, no new species are born. A comparative study of sera, hemoglobins, blood proteins, interfertility, etc., proves that the strains remain within the same specific definition. This is not a matter of opinion or subjective classification, but a measurable reality. The fact is that selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties a genome is capable of producing, but does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process."

In other words, the reason that dogs don't become as big as elephants, much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven't been breeding them long enough. Dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change, and they stop getting bigger when the genetic limit is reached.

Darwinists disagree with that judgment, and they have some points to make. They point with pride to experiments with laboratory fruit flies. These have not produced anything but fruit flies, but they have produced changes in a multitude of characteristics. Plant hybrids have been developed which can breed with each other, but not with the parent species, and which therefore meet the accepted standard for new species. With respect to animals, Darwinists attribute the inability to produce new species to a lack of sufficient time. Humans have been breeding dogs for only a few thousand years, but nature has millions and even hundreds of millions of years at her disposal. In some cases, convincing circumstantial evidence exists of evolution that has produced new species in nature. Familiar examples include the hundreds of fruit fly species in Hawaii and the famous variations among "Darwin's Finches" on the Galapagos Islands.

The time available unquestionably has to be taken into account in evaluating the results of breeding experiments, but it is also possible that the greater time available to nature may be more than counterbalanced by the power of intelligent purpose which is brought to bear in artificial selection. With respect to the famous fruit fly experiments, for example, Grasse noted that "The fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotropical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times." Nature has had plenty of time, but it just hasn't been doing what the experimenters have been doing.

Lack of time would be a reasonable excuse if there were no other known factor limiting the change that can be produced by selection, but in fact, selective change is limited by the inherent variability in the gene pool. After a number of generations, the capacity for variation runs out. It might conceivably be renewed by mutation, but whether (and how often) this happens is not known.

Whether selection has ever accomplished speciation (i.e., the production of a new species) is not the point. A biological species is simply a group capable of interbreeding. Success in dividing a fruit fly population into two or more separate populations that cannot interbreed would not constitute evidence that a similar process could in time produce a fruit fly from a bacterium. If breeders one day did succeed in producing a group of dogs that can reproduce with each other but not with other dogs, they would still have made only the tiniest step towards proving Darwinism's important claims.

That the analogy to artificial selection is defective does not necessarily mean that Darwin's theory is wrong, but it does mean that we will have to look for more direct evidence to see if natural selection really does have a creative effect. Before looking at what the Darwinists have been able to come up with, however, we need to ask whether evidence is even necessary. Strange as it may seem, there are many statements in the Darwinist literature to the effect that the validity of the theory can be demonstrated simply as a matter of logic.

Natural Selection as a Tautology

Many of the most prominent neo-Darwinists have written at one time or another that natural selection is a tautology—a way of saying the same thing twice. In this formulation, the theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, and it defines the fittest organisms as the ones which produce the most offspring. It is important to document this point because many Darwinists have convinced themselves that the tautology idea is a misunderstanding introduced into the literature by creationists and other uncomprehending faultfinders. But here are a few examples collected by Norman Macbeth:​

• J. B. S. Haldane (1935): "... the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' is something of a tautology. So are most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in saying the same truth in two different ways."​

• Ernst Mayr (1963): "... those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition... the fittest ones."​

• George Gaylord Simpson (1964): "Natural selection favors fitness only if you define fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact, geneticists do define it that way, which may be confusing to others. To a geneticist, fitness has nothing to do with health, strength, good looks, or anything but effectiveness in breeding."​

The explanation by Simpson just quoted indicates why it is not easy to formulate the theory of natural selection other than as a tautology. It may seem obvious, for example, that it is advantageous for a wild stallion to be able to run faster, but in the Darwinian sense, this will be true only to the extent that a faster stallion sires more offspring. If greater speed leads to more frequent falls, or if faster stallions tend to outdistance the mares and miss opportunities for reproduction, then the improvement may be disadvantageous.​

Just about any characteristic can be either advantageous or disadvantageous, depending upon the surrounding environmental conditions. Does it seem that the ability to fly is obviously an advantage? Darwin hypothesized that natural selection might have caused beetles on Madeira to lose the ability to fly because beetles capable of flight tended to be blown out to sea. The large human brain requires a large skull, which causes discomfort and danger to the mother in childbirth. We assume that our brain size is advantageous because civilized humans dominate the planet, but it is far from obvious that the large brain was a net advantage in the circumstances in which it supposedly evolved. Among primates in general, those with the largest brains are not the ones least in danger of extinction.​

In all such cases, we can presume a characteristic to be advantageous because a species which has it seems to be thriving, but in most cases, it is impossible to identify the advantage independently of the outcome. That is why Simpson was so insistent that "advantage" has no inherent meaning other than actual success in reproduction. All we can say is that the individuals which produced the most offspring must have had the qualities required for producing the most offspring.​

The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper at one time wrote that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory because natural selection is an all-purpose explanation which can account for anything and therefore explains nothing. Popper backed away from this position after he was besieged by indignant Darwinist protests, but he had plenty of justification for taking it. As he wrote in his own defense, "some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring," citing Fisher, Haldane, Simpson, "and others." One of the others was C. H. Waddington, whose attempt to make sense of the matter deserves to be preserved for posterity:​

"Darwin's major contribution was, of course, the suggestion that evolution can be explained by the natural selection of random variations. Natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable but previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (defined as those which leave most offspring) will leave most offspring. This fact in no way reduces the magnitude of Darwin's achievement; only after it was clearly formulated could biologists realize the enormous power of the principle as a weapon of explanation."​

That was not an offhand statement, but a considered judgment published in a paper presented at the great convocation at the University of Chicago in 1959 celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. Apparently, none of the distinguished authorities present told Waddington that a tautology does not explain anything. When I want to know how a fish can become a man, I am not enlightened by being told that the organisms that leave the most offspring are the ones that leave the most offspring.​

It is not difficult to understand how leading Darwinists were led to formulate natural selection as a tautology. The contemporary neo-Darwinian synthesis grew out of population genetics, a field anchored in mathematics and concerned with demonstrating how rapidly very small mutational advantages could spread in a population. The advantages in question were assumptions in a theorem, not qualities observed in nature, and the mathematicians naturally tended to think of them as "whatever it was that caused the organism and its descendants to produce more offspring than other members of the species." This way of thinking spread to the zoologists and paleontologists, who found it convenient to assume that their guiding theory was simply true by definition. As long as outside critics were not paying attention, the absurdity of the tautology formulation was in no danger of exposure.

What happened to change this situation is that Popper's comment received a great deal of publicity, and creationists and other unfriendly critics began citing it to support their contention that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory. The Darwinists themselves became aware of a dangerous situation, and thereafter critics raising the tautology claim were firmly told that they were simply demonstrating their inability to understand Darwinism. As we shall see in later chapters, however, in practice natural selection continues to be employed in its tautological formulation.​

If the concept of natural selection were really only a tautology, I could end the chapter at this point, because a piece of empty repetition obviously does not have the power to guide an evolutionary process in its long journey from the first replicating macromolecule to modern human beings. But although natural selection can be formulated as a tautology, and often has been, it can also be formulated in other ways that are not so easily dismissed. We must go on to consider these other possibilities.​

Natural Selection as a Deductive Argument

Visitors to the British Natural History Museum will find prominently on sale the museum's handbook on evolution, written by paleontologist Colin Patterson. When he considers the scientific status of Darwinism, Patterson writes that the theory can be presented in the form of a deductive argument, for example:​

1. All organisms must reproduce;

2. All organisms exhibit hereditary variations;

3. Hereditary variations differ in their effect on reproduction;

4. Therefore, variations with favorable effects on reproduction will succeed, those with unfavorable effects will fail, and organisms will change.​

Patterson observes that the theorem establishes only that some natural selection will occur, not that it is a general explanation for evolution. Actually, the theorem does not even establish that organisms will change. The range of hereditary variations may be narrow, and the variations which survive may be just favorable enough to keep the species as it is. Possibly the species would change a great deal more (in the direction of eventual extinction) if the least favored individuals most often succeeded in reproducing their kind.​

That the effect of natural selection may be to keep a species from changing is not merely a theoretical possibility. As we shall see in Chapter Four, the prevailing characteristic of fossil species is stasis—the absence of change. There are numerous "living fossils" which are much the same today as they were millions of years ago, at least as far as we can determine.​

Patterson is not the only evolutionist who thinks of natural selection as a matter of deductive logic, although most who have used this formulation have thought more highly of the theory than he appears to do. For example, origin-of-life researcher A. G. Cairns-Smith employed the syllogistic formulation (substantially as Darwin himself stated it) to explain how complex organisms can evolve from very simple ones:​

Darwin persuades us that the seemingly purposeful construction of living things can very often, and perhaps always, be attributed to the operation of natural selection. If you have things that are reproducing their kind; there are sometimes random variations, nevertheless, in the offspring; if such variations can be inherited; if some such variations can sometimes confer an advantage on their owners; if there is competition between the reproducing entities; if there is an overproduction so that not all will be able to produce offspring themselves—then these entities will get better at reproducing their kind. Nature acts as a selective breeder in these circumstances: the stock cannot help but improve.​

In fact, the stock is often highly successful at resisting improvement, often for millions of years, so there must be something wrong with the logic. This time it is the confusion generated by that word "advantage." Advantage in the proper Darwinist sense, as George Gaylord Simpson explained for us, does not mean improvement as humans measure it. Ants and bacteria are just as advantaged as we are, judged by the exclusive criterion of success in reproduction. In any population, some individuals will leave more offspring than others, even if the population is not changing or is headed straight for extinction.

Natural Selection as a Scientific Hypothesis

Up to this point, we have been disposing of some simple fallacies to clear the field of distractions, but now we get to the important category which deserves our most respectful scrutiny. I am sure that today most evolutionary scientists would insist that Darwinistic natural selection is a scientific hypothesis which has been so thoroughly tested and confirmed by the evidence that it should be accepted by reasonable persons as a presumptively adequate explanation for the evolution of complex life forms. The hypothesis, to be precise, is that natural selection (in combination with mutation) is an innovative evolutionary process capable of producing new kinds of organs and organisms. That brings us to the critical question: what evidence confirms that this hypothesis is true?

Douglas Futuyma has done the best job of marshalling the supporting evidence, and here are the examples he gives of observations that confirm the creative effectiveness of natural selection:

1. Bacteria naturally develop resistance to antibiotics, and insect pests become resistant to insecticides, because of the differential survival of mutant forms possessing the advantage of resistance.​

2. In 1898, a severe storm in Massachusetts left hundreds of dead and dying birds in its wake. Someone brought 136 exhausted sparrows to a scientist named Bumpus, I imagine so they could be cared for, but Bumpus was made of sterner stuff and killed the survivors to measure their skeletons. He found that among male sparrows, the larger birds had survived more frequently than the smaller ones, even though the size differential was relatively slight.​

3. A drought in the Galapagos Islands in 1977 caused a shortage of the small seeds on which finches feed. As a consequence, these birds had to eat larger seeds, which they usually ignore. After one generation, there had been so much mortality among the smaller finches, who could not easily eat the larger seeds, that the average size of the birds (and especially their beaks) went up appreciably.​

Futuyma comments: "Very possibly the birds will evolve back to their previous state if the environment goes back to normal, but we can see in this example what would happen if the birds were forced to live in a consistently dry environment: they would evolve a permanent adaptation to whatever kinds of seeds are consistently available. This is natural selection in action, and it is not a matter of chance."

Natural Selection as a Scientific Hypothesis

Up to this point, we have been disposing of some simple fallacies to clear the field of distractions, but now we get to the important category which deserves our most respectful scrutiny. I am sure that today most evolutionary scientists would insist that Darwinistic natural selection is a scientific hypothesis which has been so thoroughly tested and confirmed by the evidence that it should be accepted by reasonable persons as a presumptively adequate explanation for the evolution of complex life forms. The hypothesis, to be precise, is that natural selection (in combination with mutation) is an innovative evolutionary process capable of producing new kinds of organs and organisms. That brings us to the critical question: what evidence confirms that this hypothesis is true?

Douglas Futuyma has done the best job of marshalling the supporting evidence, and here are the examples he gives of observations that confirm the creative effectiveness of natural selection:

1. Bacteria naturally develop resistance to antibiotics, and insect pests become resistant to insecticides, because of the differential survival of mutant forms possessing the advantage of resistance.

2. In 1898, a severe storm in Massachusetts left hundreds of dead and dying birds in its wake. Someone brought 136 exhausted sparrows to a scientist named Bumpus, I imagine so they could be cared for, but Bumpus was made of sterner stuff and killed the survivors to measure their skeletons. He found that among male sparrows, the larger birds had survived more frequently than the smaller ones, even though the size differential was relatively slight.

3. A drought in the Galapagos Islands in 1977 caused a shortage of the small seeds on which finches feed. As a consequence, these birds had to eat larger seeds, which they usually ignore. After one generation, there had been so much mortality among the smaller finches, who could not easily eat the larger seeds, that the average size of the birds (and especially their beaks) went up appreciably. Futuyma comments: "Very possibly the birds will evolve back to their previous state if the environment goes back to normal, but we can see in this example what would happen if the birds were forced to live in a consistently dry environment: they would evolve a permanent adaptation to whatever kinds of seeds are consistently available. This is natural selection in action, and it is not a matter of chance."

4. The allele (genetic state) responsible for sickle-cell anemia in African populations is also associated with a trait that confers resistance to malaria. Individuals who are totally free of the sickle-cell allele suffer high mortality from malaria, and individuals who inherit the sickle-cell allele from both parents tend to die early from anemia. Chances for survival are greatest when the individual inherits the sickle-cell allele from one parent but not the other, and so the trait is not bred out of the population. Futuyma comments that the example shows not only that natural selection is effective, but also that it is "an uncaring mechanical process."

5. Mice populations have been observed to cease reproducing and become extinct when they are temporarily "flooded" by the spread of a gene which causes sterility in the males.

6. Finally, Futuyma summarizes Kettlewell's famous observations of "industrial melanism" in the peppered moth. When trees were darkened by industrial smoke, dark-colored (melanic) moths became abundant because predators had difficulty seeing them against the trees. When the trees became lighter due to reduced air pollution, the lighter-colored moths had the advantage. Kettlewell's observations showed in detail how the prevailing color of moths changed along with the prevailing color of the trees. Subsequent commentators have observed that the example shows stability as well as cyclical change within a boundary, because the ability of the species to survive in a changing environment is enhanced if it maintains at all times a supply of both light and dark moths. If the light variety had disappeared altogether during the years of dark trees, the species would have been threatened with extinction when the trees lightened.

There are a few other examples in Futuyma's chapter, but I believe they are meant as illustrations to show how Darwinism accounts for certain anomalies like self-sacrificing behavior and the peacock's fan rather than as additional examples of observations confirming the effect of natural selection in producing change. If we take these six examples as the best available observational evidence of natural selection, we can draw two conclusions:

1. There is no reason to doubt that peculiar circumstances can sometimes favor drug-resistant bacteria, or large birds as opposed to small ones, or dark-colored moths as opposed to light-colored ones. In such circumstances, the population of drug-susceptible bacteria, small birds, and light-colored moths may become reduced for some period of time, or as long as the circumstances prevail.

2. None of the "proofs" provides any persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species, new organs, or other major changes, or even minor changes that are permanent. The sickle-cell anemia case, for example, merely shows that in special circumstances, an apparently disadvantageous trait may not be eliminated from the population. That larger birds have an advantage over smaller birds in high winds or droughts has no tendency whatever to prove that similar factors caused birds to come into existence in the first place. Very likely, smaller birds have the advantage in other circumstances, which explains why birds are not continually becoming larger.

Pierre Grasse was as unimpressed by this kind of evidence as I am, and he summarized his conclusions at the end of his chapter on evolution and natural selection:​

The "evolution in action" of J. Huxley and other biologists is simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries! Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of the genome, does not imply evolution, and we have tangible proof of this in many panchronic species [i.e., living fossils that remain unchanged for millions of years].​

This conclusion seems so obviously correct that it gives rise to another problem. Why do other people, including experts whose intelligence and intellectual integrity I respect, think that evidence of local population fluctuations confirms the hypothesis that natural selection has the capacity to work engineering marvels, to construct wonders like the eye and the wing? Everyone who studies evolution knows that Kettlewell's peppered moth experiment is the classic demonstration of the power of natural selection, and that Darwinists had to wait almost a century to see even this modest confirmation of their central doctrine. Everyone who studies the experiment also knows that it has nothing to do with the origin of any species, or even any variety, because dark and white moths were present throughout the experiment. Only the ratios of one variety to the other changed. How could intelligent people have been so gullible as to imagine that the Kettlewell experiment in any way supported the ambitious claims of Darwinism? To answer that question we need to consider a fourth way in which natural selection can be formulated.

​Natural Selection as a Philosophical Necessity​

The National Academy of Sciences told the Supreme Court that the most basic characteristic of science is "reliance upon naturalistic explanations," as opposed to "supernatural means inaccessible to human understanding." In the latter, unacceptable category contemporary scientists place not only God, but also any non-material vital force that supposedly drives evolution in the direction of greater complexity, consciousness, or whatever. If science is to have any explanation for biological complexity at all, it has to make do with what is left when the unacceptable has been excluded. Natural selection is the best of the remaining alternatives, probably the only alternative.​

In this situation, some may decide that Darwinism simply must be true, and for such persons the purpose of any further investigation will be merely to explain how natural selection works and to solve the mysteries created by apparent anomalies. For them, there is no need to test the theory itself, for there is no respectable alternative to test it against. Any persons who say the theory itself is inadequately supported can be vanquished by the question "Darwin's Bulldog" T. H. Huxley used to ask the doubters in Darwin's time: What is your alternative?​

I do not think that many scientists would be comfortable accepting Darwinism solely as a philosophical principle, without seeking to find at least some empirical evidence that it is true. But there is an important difference between going to the empirical evidence to test a doubtful theory against some plausible alternative, and going to the evidence to look for confirmation of the only theory that one is willing to tolerate. We have already seen that distinguished scientists have accepted uncritically the questionable analogy between natural and artificial selection, and that they have often been undisturbed by the fallacies of the "tautology" and "deductive logic" formulations. Such illogic survived and reproduced itself for the same reason that an apparently incompetent species sometimes avoids extinction; there was no effective competition in its ecological niche.​

If positive confirmation of the creative potency of natural selection is not required, there is little danger that the theory will be disproved by negative evidence. Darwinists have evolved an array of subsidiary concepts capable of furnishing a plausible explanation for just about any conceivable eventuality. For example, the living fossils, which have remained basically unchanged for millions of years while their cousins were supposedly evolving into more advanced creatures like human beings, are no embarrassment to Darwinists. They failed to evolve because the necessary mutations didn't arrive, or because of "developmental constraints," or because they were already adequately adapted to their environment. In short, they didn't evolve because they didn't evolve.

Some animals give warning signals at the approach of predators, apparently reducing their own safety for the benefit of others in the herd. How does natural selection encourage the evolution of a trait for self-sacrifice? Some Darwinists attribute the apparent anomaly to "group selection." Human nations benefit if they contain individuals willing to die in battle for their country, and likewise animal groups containing self-sacrificing individuals may have an advantage over groups composed exclusively of selfish individuals.​

Other Darwinists are scornful of group selection and prefer to explain altruism on the basis of "kinship selection." By sacrificing itself to preserve its offspring or near relations, an individual promotes the survival of its genes. Selection may thus operate at the genetic level to encourage the perpetuation of genetic combinations that produce individuals capable of altruistic behavior. By moving the focus of selection either up (to the group level) or down (to the genetic level), Darwinists can easily account for traits that seem to contradict the selection hypothesis at the level of individual organisms.​

Potentially the most powerful explanatory tool in the entire Darwinist armory is pleiotropy, the fact that a single gene has multiple effects. This means that any mutation which affects one functional characteristic is likely to change other features as well, and whether or not it is advantageous depends upon the net effect. Characteristics which on their face appear to be maladaptive may therefore be presumed to be linked genetically to more favorable characteristics, and natural selection can be credited with preserving the package.​

I am not implying that there is anything inherently unreasonable in invoking pleiotropy, or kinship selection, or developmental constraints to explain why apparent anomalies are not necessarily inconsistent with Darwinism. If we assume that Darwinism is basically true, then it is perfectly reasonable to adjust the theory as necessary to make it conform to the observed facts. The problem is that the adjusting devices are so flexible that in combination they make it difficult to conceive of a way to test the claims of Darwinism empirically. Apparently maladaptive features can be attributed to pleiotropy, or to our inability to perceive the advantage that may be there, or when all else fails simply to "chance." Darwin wrote that "If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection." But this was the same Darwin who insisted that he had never claimed that natural selection was the exclusive mechanism of evolution.

One important subsidiary concept—sexual selection—illustrates the skill of Darwinists at incorporating recalcitrant examples into their theory. Sexual selection is a relatively minor component in Darwinist theory today, but to Darwin it was almost as important as natural selection itself. (Darwin's second classic, The Descent of Man, is mainly a treatise on sexual selection.) The most famous example of sexual selection is the peacock's gaudy fan, which is obviously an encumbrance when a peacock wants to escape a predator. The fan is stimulating to peahens, however, and so its possession increases the peacock's prospects for producing progeny even though it decreases his life expectancy.​

The explanation so far is reasonable, even delightful, but what I find intriguing is that Darwinists are not troubled by the unfitness of the peahen's sexual taste. Why would natural selection, which supposedly formed all birds from lowly predecessors, produce a species whose females lust for males with life-threatening decorations? The peahen ought to have developed a preference for males with sharp talons and mighty wings. Perhaps the taste for fans is associated genetically with some absolutely vital trait like strong eggshells, but then why and how did natural selection encourage such an absurd genetic linkage? Nevertheless, Douglas Futuyma boldly proclaims the peacock as a problem not for Darwinists but for creationists:​

Do the creation scientists really suppose their Creator saw fit to create a bird that couldn't reproduce without six feet of bulky feathers that make it easy prey for leopards?​

I don't know what creation-scientists may suppose, but it seems to me that the peacock and peahen are just the kind of creatures a whimsical Creator might favor, but that an "uncaring mechanical process" like natural selection would never permit to develop.​

What we are seeing in Futuyma's comment about the peacock is the debating principle that the best defense is a good offense, but we are also seeing the influence of philosophical preconception in blinding an intelligent Darwinist to the existence of a counterexample. Julian Huxley once wrote that "Improbability is to be expected as a result of natural selection; and we have the paradox that an exceedingly high apparent improbability in its products can be taken as evidence for the high degree of its efficacy." On that basis, the theory has nothing to fear from the evidence.​

Natural selection is the most famous element in Darwinism, but it is not necessarily the most important element. Selection merely preserves or destroys something that already exists. Mutation has to provide the favorable innovations before natural selection can retain and encourage them. That brings us to our next subject, which requires a separate chapter.

Footnotes:

1. Darwin did not insist that all evolution was by natural selection, nor do his successors. He wrote at the end of the introduction to the first (1859) edition of The Origin of Species that "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification" and later complained of the "steady misrepresentation" that had ignored this qualification. On the other hand, Darwin was vague about the importance of the alternatives, one of which was "variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously." Contemporary neo-Darwinists also practice a tactically advantageous flexibility concerning the frequency and importance of non-selective evolution. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that this imprecision "imposes a great frustration upon anyone who would characterize the modern synthesis in order to criticize it," and I am sure that every critic shares the frustration. Readers should therefore beware of taking at face value claims by neo-Darwinist authorities that some critic has misunderstood or mischaracterized their theory.​

2. "Mutation" as used here is a simple label for the set of mechanisms which provide the genetic variation upon which natural selection can go to work. The set includes point mutations, chromosomal doubling, gene duplication, and recombination. The essential point is that the variations are supposed to be random. Creative evolution would be much easier to envisage if some guiding force caused the right mutations to arrive on schedule. Orthodox genetic theory insists that no such guiding principle for mutation exists, so creatures have to make do with whatever blind nature happens to provide.