The Mythos of Random Mutation

On the Myriad Metaphysical Fallacies of Darwinism

Hey Folks,

I’m big on Mythos.

About two years back, I did a series about the respective Mythos of a few different belief systems.

In that series, I compared the answers that anarchism and Marxism offer to the three questions every Mythology must address. Those questions are:

• What are we?

• Where did we come from?

• Where are we going?

At the time, I meant to extend this analytical framework to other belief systems, such as Buddhism, Christianity and woke ideology. It didn’t occur to me, at that time, to apply it to Darwinism. At the time, I don’t think I really thought of Darwinism as an ideology.

Now that I have learned more about it, however, it is clear to me that Darwinism is an ideological position which is held on faith.

Now, to be fair, Darwinism is only one part of a larger belief system, which one might called scientism, scientific materialism, or simply materialism.

This belief system holds that human beings are the accidental result of billions of years of random mutations of single-celled organisms. Those single-celled organisms somehow became animate due to as-of-yet unidentified chemical reactions or something. (This part of the story has always been especially iffy).

This was possible because the universe had already accidentally popped into being out of nothing because of the laws of physics or something. (This part of the story is generally held to be incomprehensible to people who aren’t math whizzes.)

This is the creation story that is taught to millions upon millions of children today.

Think about that. That’s a pretty piss-poor creation story, isn’t it? Can’t we do any better than that?

Now, some of you are probably don’t how see a scientific explanation of the history of the universe is similar to mythology. But it is.

The Big Bang supposedly happened 14.7 billion years ago (which is kinda oddly specific, if you ask me). It cannot be observed. It is not evident to the senses. That it occurred is not provable through scientific experiments. There is no evidence for the Big Bang. It is just a story someone made up.

But I’m getting a little off track here. My subject today is Darwinism, not the Big Bang.

I guess my main point today is that the whole notion that random mutations explain everything that need to be explained when it comes to the origins of life is simply hogwash.

First of all, it is mathematically impossible to prove that anything is random. Yet Darwinists are quite insistent that genetic variations in successive generations are not teleological (purpose-driven), but occur for no deliberate reason. This is not a position that can in any way be scientifically demonstrated. When we are dealing with something as complex as biology, there is no logical reason to decide ahead of time that all intergenerational change must be random. Seemingly random patterns could easily be evidence of a deeper, as-of-yet undiscovered pattern. But Darwinism does not allow for this. It is a paradigm which is founded upon certain quite explicit principles, which are essentially theological (or anti-theological) in nature.

More importantly, however, the whole idea of gradual change caused by genetic mutations simply don’t provide a plausible mechanism as to how organisms could develop marvels such as eyes or wings.

And on that note, it is my pleasure to present to you an excerpt from Phillip E. Johnson’s 1991 masterpiece Darwin on Trial, which is all about the subject of mutations.

This is the second chapter I have excerpted from that extremely illuminating book. The first is available here:

I also encourage you to check out the following lecture by Dr. Johnson. If you aren’t already skeptical about Darwinism, I urge you to give him a fair hearing.

Anyway, I hope you find this exploration interesting, and I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

for the wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

Mutations Great and Small

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

"Evolution" is a concept broad enough to encompass just about any alternative to instantaneous creation, and so it is not surprising that thinkers have speculated about evolution ever since ancient times. Charles Darwin's unique contribution was to describe a plausible mechanism by which the necessary transformations could occur—a mechanism that did not require divine guidance, mysterious vital forces, or any other causes not presently operating in the world. Darwin was particularly anxious to avoid the need for any "saltations"—sudden leaps by which a new type of organism appears in a single generation. Saltations (or systemic macromutations, as they are often called today) are believed to be theoretically impossible by most scientists, and for good reason. Living creatures are extremely intricate assemblies of interrelated parts, and the parts themselves are also complex. It is impossible to imagine how the parts could change in unison as a result of chance mutation.​

In a word (Darwin's word), a saltation is equivalent to a miracle. At the extreme, saltationism is virtually indistinguishable from special creation. If a snake's egg were to hatch and a mouse emerge, we could with equal justice classify the event as an instance of evolution or creation. Even the sudden appearance of a single complex organ, like an eye or wing, would imply supernatural intervention. Darwin emphatically rejected any evolutionary theory of this sort, writing to Charles Lyell:​

"If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. ... I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."​

Darwin aimed to do for biology what Lyell had done for geology: explain great changes on uniformitarian and naturalistic principles, meaning the gradual operation over long periods of time of familiar natural forces that we can still see operating in the present. He understood that the distinctive feature of his theory was its uncompromising philosophical materialism, which made it truly scientific in the sense that it did not invoke any mystical or supernatural forces that are inaccessible to scientific investigation. To achieve a fully materialistic theory, Darwin had to explain every complex characteristic or major transformation as the cumulative product of a great many tiny steps. In his own eloquent words:​

"Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure."​

T. H. Huxley protested against this dogmatic gradualism from the start, warning Darwin in a famous letter that "You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting natura non facit saltum so unreservedly." The difficulty was hardly unnecessary, given Darwin's purpose, but it was real enough. In the long term, the biggest problem was the fossil record, which did not provide evidence of the many transitional forms that Darwin's theory required to have existed. Darwin made the obvious response, arguing that the evidence was lacking because the fossil record was incomplete. This was a reasonable possibility at the time, and conveniently safe from disproof; we shall return to it in the next chapter.​

The more pressing difficulty was theoretical. Many organs require an intricate combination of complex parts to perform their functions. The eye and the wing are the most common illustrations, but it would be misleading to give the impression that either is a special case; human and animal bodies are literally packed with similar marvels. How can such things be built up by "infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being"? The first step towards a new function—such as vision or the ability to fly—would not necessarily provide any advantage unless the other parts required for the function appeared at the same time. As an analogy, imagine a medieval alchemist producing by chance a silicon microchip; in the absence of a supporting computer technology, the prodigious invention would be useless, and he would throw it away.​

Stephen Jay Gould asked himself "the excellent question, What good is 5 percent of an eye?" and speculated that the first eye parts might have been useful for something other than sight. Richard Dawkins responded that:​

An ancient animal with 5 percent of an eye might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as likely that it used it for 5 percent vision. And actually I don't think it is an excellent question. Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. So is 1 percent vision better than total blindness. And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series.

The fallacy in that argument is that "5 percent of an eye" is not the same thing as "5 percent of normal vision." For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction.

What we have to imagine is a chance mutation that provides this complex capacity all at once, at a level of utility sufficient to give the creature an advantage in producing offspring.

Dawkins went on to restate Darwin's answer to the eye conundrum, pointing out that there is a plausible series of intermediate eye designs among living animals. Some single-celled animals have a light-sensitive spot with a little pigment screen behind it, and in some many-celled animals, a similar arrangement is set in a cup, which gives improved direction-finding capability. The ancient nautilus has a pinhole eye with no lens, the squid's eye adds the lens, and so on. None of these different types of eyes are thought to have evolved from any of the others, however, because they involve different types of structures rather than a series of similar structures growing in complexity.

If the eye evolved at all, it evolved many times. Ernst Mayr writes that the eye must have evolved independently at least 40 times, a circumstance which suggests to him that "a highly complicated organ can evolve repeatedly and convergently when advantageous, provided such evolution is at all probable." But then why did the many primitive eye forms that are still with us never evolve into more advanced forms? Dawkins admits to being baffled by the nautilus, which in its hundreds of millions of years of existence has never evolved a lens for its eye despite having a retina that is "practically crying out for (this) particular simple change."

The wing, which exists in quite distinct forms in insects, birds, and bats, is the other most frequently cited puzzle. Would the first "infinitesimally small inherited modification" in the direction of wing construction confer a selective advantage? Dawkins thinks that it would, because even a small flap or web might help a small creature to jump farther or save it from breaking its neck in a fall. Eventually such a proto-wing might develop to a point where the creature would begin gliding, and by further gradual improvements it would become capable of genuine flight. What this imaginative scenario neglects is that forelimbs evolving into wings would probably become awkward for climbing or grasping long before they became very useful for gliding, thus placing the hypothetical intermediate creature at a serious disadvantage.​

There is a good skeptical discussion of the bird wing problem in chapter 9 of Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Denton describes the exquisitely functional avian feather, with its interlocking hooks and other intricate features that make it suitable for flight and quite distinct from any form of feather used only for warmth. Bird feathers must have evolved from reptilian scales if Darwinism is true, but once again the intermediates are hard to imagine. Still more difficult a problem is presented by the distinctive avian lung, which is quite different in structure than that of any conceivable evolutionary ancestor. According to Denton:

Just how such a different respiratory system could have evolved gradually from the standard vertebrate design is fantastically difficult to envisage, especially bearing in mind that the maintenance of respiratory function is absolutely vital to the life of an organism to the extent that the slightest malfunction leads to death within minutes. Just as the feather cannot function as an organ of flight until the hooks and barbules are coadapted to fit together perfectly, so the avian lung cannot function as an organ of respiration until the parabronchi system which permeates it and the air sac system which guarantees the parabronchi their air supply are both highly developed and able to function together in a perfectly integrated manner.

Whether one finds the gradualist scenarios for the development of complex systems plausible involves an element of subjective judgment. It is a matter of objective fact, however, that these scenarios are speculative. Bird and bat wings appear in the fossil record already developed, and no one has ever confirmed by experiment that the gradual evolution of wings and eyes is possible. This absence of historical or experimental confirmation is presumably what Gould had in mind when he wrote that "These tales, in the 'just-so' tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything." Are we dealing here with science or with rationalist versions of Kipling's fables?​

Darwin wrote that "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

One particularly eminent scientist of the mid-twentieth century who concluded that it had absolutely broken down was the German-American geneticist, Professor Richard Goldschmidt of the University of California at Berkeley. Goldschmidt issued a famous challenge to the neo-Darwinists, listing a series of complex structures from mammalian hair to hemoglobin that he thought could not have been produced by the accumulation and selection of small mutations.

Like Pierre Grasse, Goldschmidt concluded that Darwinian evolution could account for no more than variations within the species boundary; unlike Grasse, he thought that evolution beyond that point must have occurred in single jumps through macromutations. He conceded that large-scale mutations would in almost all cases produce hopelessly maladapted monsters, but he thought that on rare occasions a lucky accident might produce a "hopeful monster," a member of a new species with the capacity to survive and propagate (but with what mate?).

The Darwinists met this fantastic suggestion with savage ridicule. As Goldschmidt put it, "This time I was not only crazy but almost a criminal." Gould has even compared the treatment accorded Goldschmidt in Darwinist circles with the daily "Two Minute Hate" directed at "Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people" in George Orwell's novel 1984. The venom is explained by the emotional attachment Darwinists have to their theory, but the ridicule had a sound scientific basis. If Goldschmidt really meant that all the complex interrelated parts of an animal could be reformed together in a single generation by a systemic macromutation, he was postulating a virtual miracle that had no basis either in genetic theory or in experimental evidence. Mutations are thought to stem from random errors in copying the commands of the DNA's genetic code. To suppose that such a random event could reconstruct even a single complex organ like a liver or kidney is about as reasonable as to suppose that an improved watch can be designed by throwing an old one against a wall. Adaptive macromutations are impossible, say the Darwinists, especially if required in any quantity, and so all those complex organs must have evolved—many times independently—by the selective accumulation of micromutations over a long period of time.​

But now we must deal with another fallacy, and a supremely important one. That evolution by macromutation is impossible does not prove that evolution by micromutation is probable, or even possible. It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate attention to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micromutations postulated by neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words of Richard Dawkins, "virtually all the mutations studied in genetics laboratories—which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists wouldn't notice them—are deleterious to the animals possessing them." But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term project of producing a complex organ.

The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micromutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micromutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened.

Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded, "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred."

The Darwinists were trying to be reasonable, but it was as if Ulam had presented equations proving that gravity is too weak a force to prevent us all from floating off into space. Darwinism to them was not a theory open to refutation but a fact to be accounted for, at least until the mathematicians could produce an acceptable alternative. The discussion became particularly heated after a French mathematician named Schützenberger concluded that "there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology." C. H. Waddington thought he saw where this reasoning was headed, and retorted that "Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation." Schützenberger (and anonymous voices from the audience) shouted "No!," but in fact the mathematicians did not present an alternative.

The difficulties with both the micromutational and macromutational theories are so great that we might expect to see some effort being made to come up with a middle ground that minimizes the disadvantages of both extremes. Stephen Jay Gould attempted something of the sort, both in his 1980 scientific paper proposing a "new and general theory," and in his popular article "The Return of the Hopeful Monster." Gould tried to rehabilitate Goldschmidt while domesticating his monster. Goldschmidt did not really mean that "new species arise all at once, fully formed, by a fortunate macromutation," Gould explained, and what he did mean can be reconciled with "the essence of Darwinism."

Suppose that a discontinuous change in adult form arises from a small genetic alteration. Problems of discordance with other members of the species do not arise, and the large, favorable variant can spread through a population in Darwinian fashion. Suppose also that this large change does not produce a perfected form all at once, but rather serves as a "key" adaptation to shift its possessor toward a new mode of life. Continued success in this new mode may require a large set of collateral alterations, morphological and behavioral; these may arise by a more traditional, gradual route once the key adaptation forces a profound shift in selective pressures.

We have to do all this supposing, according to Gould, because it is just too hard to "invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms—that is, viable, functioning organisms—between ancestors and descendants in major structural transitions." In the end, we will have to accept "many cases of discontinuous transition in macroevolution." The kind of small genetic alteration which Gould had in mind (and said Goldschmidt had in mind) was a mutation in the genes regulating embryonic development, on the theory that "small changes early in embryology accumulate through growth to yield profound differences among adults." Indeed, they must do so, because otherwise Gould could not see any way that major evolutionary transitions could have been accomplished.

Gould published a major article in the scientific journal Paleobiology which expressed his endorsement of Goldschmidt even more explicitly, and in which he pronounced the effective death of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. In place of the dead orthodoxy, he hailed as "the epitome and foundation of emerging views on speciation" a passage by Goldschmidt which insisted that "neo-Darwinian evolution... is a process which leads to diversification strictly within the species... The decisive step in evolution, the first step towards macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary method than the sheer accumulation of micromutations." With respect to the evolution of complex organs, Gould disavowed reliance on "saltational origin of entire new designs," but proposed instead "a potential saltational origin for the essential features of key adaptations." In short, he tried to split the difference between Darwinism and Goldschmidtism.

And so the hopeful monster returned, but its hopes were soon disappointed once again. Ernst Mayr, the most prestigious of living neo-Darwinists, wrote that Gould had entirely misrepresented Goldschmidt's theory in denying that Goldschmidt advocated impossible, single-generation systemic macromutations. "Actually, this is what Goldschmidt repeatedly claimed. For instance, he cited with approval Schindewolf's suggestion that the first bird hatched out of a reptilian egg..." Mayr thought that some mutations with large scale effects might be possible, but he could find no evidence that any great number of them had occurred and he saw no need to invoke them because he considered the mechanisms of neo-Darwinism capable of explaining the emergence of evolutionary novelties.

Richard Dawkins wrote scornfully of Goldschmidt in The Blind Watchmaker, and criticized Gould for trying to rehabilitate him. For Dawkins, "Goldschmidt's problem... turns out to be no problem at all," because there is no real difficulty in accounting for the development of complex structures by gradualistic evolution. What Dawkins seems to mean by this assertion is that the step-by-step evolution of complex adaptive systems is a conceptual possibility, not that there is some way to prove that it actually happens. He uses the bat, with its marvelous sonar-like echolocation system that so resembles the product of an advanced technological society, as the paradigm example of how natural selection can explain the development of a complex system that would otherwise be taken as evidence for the existence of a "watchmaker" creator. Dawkins is right to argue that if Darwinist evolution can craft a bat it can make just about anything, but what he neglects to do is to prove that Darwinist evolution can do anything of the kind. It is conceivable that bat sonar evolved by some step-by-step process, in which the first hint of an ability to locate by echo was of such value to its possessor that everything else had to follow, but how do we know that such a thing ever happened, or could have happened?

Despite his generally rigid adherence to Darwinist gradualism, even Dawkins finds it impossible to get along without what might be called modest macromutations, meaning mutations that "although they may be large in the magnitude of their effects, turn out not to be large in terms of their complexity." He uses as an example snakes, some contemporary examples of which have more vertebrae than their presumed ancestors. The number of vertebrae has to be changed in whole units, and to accomplish this "you need to do more than just shove in an extra bone," because each vertebra has associated with it a set of nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and so on. These complicated parts would all have to appear together for the extra vertebrae to make any biological sense, but "it is easy to believe that individual snakes with half a dozen more vertebrae than their parents could have arisen in a single mutational step." This is easy to believe, according to Dawkins, because the mutation only adds more of what was already there, and because the change only appears to be macromutational when we look at the adult. At the embryonic level, such changes "turn out to be micromutations, in the sense that only a small change in the embryonic instructions had a large apparent effect in the adult."

Gould supposes what he has to suppose, and Dawkins finds it easy to believe what he wants to believe, but supposing and believing are not enough to make a scientific explanation. Is there any way to confirm the hypothesis that mutations in the genes which regulate embryonic development might provide whatever is needed to get evolution over the unbridgeable gaps? Creatures that look very different as adults are sometimes much more alike at the early embryonic stages, and so there is a certain plausibility to the notion that a simple but basic change in the genetic program regulating development could induce an embryo to develop in an unusual direction. In principle, this is the kind of change we might imagine human genetic engineers to be capable of directing one day, if this branch of science continues to advance in the future as it has in the recent past.

Suppose that, following a massive research program, scientists succeed in altering the genetic program of a fish embryo so that it develops as an amphibian. Would this hypothetical triumph of genetic engineering confirm that amphibians actually evolved, or at least could have evolved, in similar fashion?

No, it wouldn't, because Gould and the others who postulate developmental macromutations are talking about random changes, not changes elaborately planned by human (or divine) intelligence. A random change in the program governing my word processor could easily transform this chapter into unintelligible gibberish, but it would not translate the chapter into a foreign language, or produce a coherent chapter about something else. What the proponents of developmental macromutations need to establish is not merely that there is an alterable genetic program governing development, but that important evolutionary innovations can be produced by random changes in the genetic instructions.

The prevailing assumption in evolutionary science seems to be that speculative possibilities, without experimental confirmation, are all that is really necessary. The principle at work is the same one that Waddington, Medawar, and Mayr invoked when challenged by the mathematicians. Nature must have provided whatever evolution had to have, because otherwise, evolution wouldn't have happened. It follows that if evolution required macromutations then macromutations must be possible, or if macromutations are impossible then evolution must not have required them. The theory itself provides whatever supporting evidence is essential.

If the Darwinists are at all uncomfortable with this situation (actually, most of them don't seem to be), the anti-Darwinists are in no better shape. The great geneticist Goldschmidt was reduced to endorsing a genetic impossibility, and the great zoologist Grasse could do no better than to suggest that evolving species somehow acquire a new store of genetic information due to obscure "internal factors" involving "a phenomenon whose equivalent cannot be seen in the creatures living at the present time (either because it is not there or because we are unable to see it)." Grasse was all too aware that such talk "arouses the suspicions of many biologists... [because] it conjures up visions of the ghost of vitalism or of some mystical power which guides the destiny of living things..." He repeatedly denied that he had anything of the sort in mind, but suspicions of vitalism once aroused are not conjured away by bare denials.

We can see from these examples why neo-Darwinism retains its status as textbook orthodoxy despite all the difficulties and even the imputations of moribundity. If neo-Darwinist gradualism were abandoned as incapable of explaining macroevolutionary leaps and the origin of complex organs, most biologists would still believe in evolution (Goldschmidt and Grasse never doubted that evolution had occurred), but they would have no theory of evolution. Materialist scientists are full of scorn for creationists who invoke an invisible creator who employed supernatural powers that cannot be observed operating in our own times. If evolutionary science must also rely upon mystical guiding forces or upon genetically impossible transformations, a philosophical materialist like Charles Darwin would call it rubbish.

Until now, I have avoided discussing the fossil evidence in order to concentrate on the theoretical and experimental difficulties that surround the reigning neo-Darwinist synthesis. But evolution is at bottom about history; it aims to tell us what happened in the past. On that subject, the fossils are our most direct evidence, and it is to them that we turn next.