Back to index of science pages by Donald Sauter.

Table of contents:

• Evolution FAQ
• Dumb evolution - recent examples from the news media.
• End notes - serves as kind of an intro, actually.
• Evolution in a work of fiction. (Not too redundant!) Just for fun.
• Feedback on the Evolution FAQ, Round 1 - not-so-friendly fire from the talk.origins gang.
• Feedback on the Evolution FAQ, Round 2 - still standing their ground. Anybody who can slog through this wins the Bob Dylan Third Eye award.
• The Beak Of The Finch; a story of evolution in our time, by Jonathan Weiner. My book report.
• A positive comment - (!!!)
• The Neck Of The Giraffe; where Darwin went wrong, by Francis Hitching. Another book report.

• 1. What's all this about evolution?

1. What's all this about evolution?

Well, I'll tell you...

I went through most of my life accepting evolution without any problem. We see Creature A now which is similar to and somewhat more advanced than Creature B, which died out so many years ago and was itself somewhat more advanced than Creature C, which passed from the scene even earlier, etc. etc.

Makes sense, right? Species "evolve" just like an individual organism matures during the course of its life. Why not? What's all the fuss about?

Then, like others before me, I started paying closer attention to what the scientists were saying and realized I couldn't make sense of it. They go on and on about natural selection - the process of a beneficial character trait becoming more pervasive throughout the population of a species. But when you give it a moment's thought, you realize that natural selection is never going to give rise to a new species.

Even in a recent book, Full House, by the evolution guru Stephen Jay Gould, we read such silliness as this (p139): "As the earth enters a glacial age... possession of more than the usual amount of hair becomes a decided advantage. [In general, ] the hairier elephants will be more successful [at living] and therefore [have more] offspring... Since hairiness is inherited, the next generation will contain more elephants with increased hair... Continue this process for a large number of generations, and eventually Siberia will [have] a population of woolly mammoths - the evolutionary descendants of the original elephants."

Well, no. Siberia will have hairy elephants. Maybe. Actually, there is nothing in the above argument to suggest that an ice-age elephant could ever hope to be any hairier than the hairiest elephant from the preceding balmy climate.

In school, we were taught examples like, "the turtle developed a shell because the ones that didn't got eaten and died off," or, "the giraffe developed a long neck to reach the higher leaves and the ones that didn't, died out."

All well and good for a noncritical mind, but then you start to wonder, well, if a long neck is such a great idea, where is the super-giraffe with a neck twice as long? Or wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just develop a longer tongue? Why not longer legs - or simply learn to stand upright? And surely the conditions would have been ok somewhere for giraffes to develop half-length necks. Where are they?

If the shell was so crucial for the survival of the turtle, how come so many shell-less reptiles hung in there? And, now that you mention it, where's my shell? That could really have come in handy now and then for my ancestors, not to mention a pair of wings. How about some gills and flippers, too? Talk about survival - I'd be set!

With a few more seconds thought you're wondering: why aren't all species in transition all the time? Why are there any defined species at all? Why isn't every single organism at its own unique point on some branch of an inconceivably huge and dense evoutionary tree? Why isn't there a great big, confused mess?

If you think I am exaggerating what scientists say about how quickly and easily evolution is supposed to proceed, see the Dumb Evolution section at the end of this discussion.

When these doubts of mine came up in conversation with a friend, he got worried, fearing I was becoming a lost soul to science. He gave me a reading assignment in the hopes of saving me from the clutches of the "other side". It was an essay by Stephen Jay Gould called "Evolution As Fact And Theory" (1981) from the book Hen's Teeth And Horse's Toes. I want to use that essay as a basis for this discussion.

Obviously, tons have been written on the subject of evolution, so you might wonder what is the purpose of responding to a single, puny essay. As I have said, I was directed toward it. It was written by the biggest name in the field. It is addressed mainly to creationists, and so should be overkill for anyone who merely has questions about party line thinking on evolution. Moreover, it sounds so much like the pro-evolution camp in the internet group talk.origins and has a lot in common with the talk.origins FAQ. As far as I can tell, the essay serves as an accurate representation of current thinking on evolution.

Right off (p253) Gould denies that evolutionists have generated any "serious internal trouble" to provoke the new round of attacks on evolution. But a few pages later (p255) Gould concedes, "We have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms... by which evolution... occurred."

It's hard not to see that as a delusion or bald-faced lie. Evolution has always been presented - in my lifetime, at least - as some combination of natural selection and mutation - with no acknowledgment of any uncertainty about this.

Gould goes on: "From the 1940s through the 1960s, Darwin's own theory of natural selection did enjoy a temporary hegemony... While no biologist questions the importance of natural selection, many now doubt its ubiquity. In particular, many evolutionists argue that substantial amounts of genetic change may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through populations at random. Others are challenging [the] linking of natural selection with gradual, imperceptible change through all intermediary degrees; they are arguing that most evolutionary events may occur far more rapidly than [previously] envisioned."

That's not "serious internal trouble"? Gould tosses it all off as healthy, exciting - "and how else can I say it?... fun" (p256). (Does anybody else get a mental image of a bunch of little boys in lab coats romping about in a play room?) He dismisses the doubters' question (p254), "If... scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory [of evolution], then what confidence can we have in it?" Sounds like a reasonable question to me. It's not like we can't haul plants and creatures into the laboratory to test out a theory - or observe the huge observatory in which we are immersed.

Gould insists over and over that evolution is "a fact". By this, Gould means that evolution "is" - just like gravity "is" - never mind the what, how or why. "Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in midair pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered." (p254)

First of all, reasonable people may have valid questions about that statement of "fact." What if, upon closer examination, our ancestors were actually more "human-like" as opposed to apelike? Would it still be evolution?

Moreover, there is an unacceptable circularity here. Gould says, in essence, that evolution is the fact that "humans beings [or whatever] evolved." Nobody can argue with that one - but the statement has no value. It's funny to note that "evolution is evolution" fails the falsifiability criterion of science as badly as creationism.

Gould is like an ancient astronomer triumphantly proclaiming, "The sun goes across the sky! It's a fact!" Ok, man, if you say so. But many of us are keenly interested in how it moves across the sky - in what's going on. Does it move on crystalline spheres... or a giant turtle's back? If you can't come up with a convincing theory, we might start doubting that it even moves at all. Š

This proclamation, "Evolution is a fact," has become ubiquitous in defenses of evolution. It is proclaimed in the talk.origins FAQ and discussions. I suggest Gould and his allies would do themselves a big favor to drop it and return to the old-fashioned usage of "fact" - for example, "the fossil record shows such and such a species existed at such and such a time."

By the way, Gould says something near the end of the essay which puts the lie to his innocent belief that evolution is just "a fact". He says evolution is "one of the half dozen 'great ideas' developed by science." In the previous analogy with gravitation, would he say that falling bodies are one of the "great ideas" of science? One would think the "great ideas" are the theories - the explanations of observed phenomena. (So to speak. We all know that science doesn't explain, it only describes, right?)

Gould says (p257), "We have abundant, direct, observational of evolution in action, from both field and laboratory." He talks about experiments on the fruit fly - but somehow forgets to tell us what the fruit fly evolved into. I'd be fascinated to hear. And he talks about moth populations that change from light to dark. I'll bite, where's the evolution?

Gould writes something I can't make sense of (p258), even after reading it over and over. Maybe someone can help. "Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case."

What gives? Those animals do extremely well at those activities with the bones they have. And how could anyone say they have the same bones??? And what engineer has ever started from scratch on anything? If this is supposed to serve as an argument for evolution over "something else", somebody clue me in.

Gould duly admits (p258), "preserved transitions are not common." He is more exasperated on page 260 when he barks defensively, "Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups." (He doesn't make clear, to me at least, what he means by "larger groups" and how fine the transitions are. Is a frog a transitional form between a fruit fly and a human?)

Gould presents an example of a transition. Paleontologists have dug up animal fossils with double jaw joints, which represent the transitional state between animals with multi-boned jaws and animals with a jaw and ear-bones.

Admittedly, that's very interesting - intriguing even - but far from a knockout punch. It raises obvious questions - which are no less valid for their obviousness.

Why would - and how could - an animal with a multiboned jaw give birth to one with a double jaw joint? Why would - and how could - an animal with a double jaw joint give birth to one with a jaw plus ear-bones? (Again, there's no claim to an original insight here; for instance, Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box deals at length with problems like this, I think.)

In a talk.origins discussion, an annoyed evolutionist said something like, "What do you want from us? For every transition we identify, there will be two new gaps to fill in!" Right. A less polite opponent might respond, "Keep digging!" The fact is, it's your responsibility to show that these complex, new features can be gotten in one-generation-at-a-time increments. Never mind (for now) the boggling question of how the appearance of just one ever-so-slightly evolved creature results in the demise of the entire population of the robust species which bore it.

Gould is annoyed that a writer accuses his punctuated equilibria theory of saying "a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced." He bristles, "Any evolutionist who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage." But is this so much more fantastic than the first birth of an animal with ear-bones?

To his credit, but to the detriment of his position, Gould admits (p261), "It is true that scientists have often been dogmatic and elitist... We derive benefits from appearing as a new priesthood." Good boy. My advice: work on that. (Please visit my web page on the topic of dumb science.)

Gould closes the essay with a whimper. Apparently the "healthy debate" among evolutionists is a little too healthy. Some of Gould's colleagues feel that it gives the enemy too much ammo, and maybe they should stonewall it. But remember (p256): "Amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been led to doubt the fact that evolution occurred"! (Emphasis mine.)

There you have it; an impassioned defense of evolution from the most well-known name in the field - and what do we get? Sounds like a scientific field in shambles, to me.

Where do we go from here? I haven't read all of the discussion in talk.origins, or even much of it, but everything I have seen coming from the evolutionists has been evasive. Here is a representative sample:

Doubter: Demonstrate to me the actual evidence that proves evolution by showing me the evolution of a new body part or organ... if you can.

True believer: Evolution doesn't require this and those of us who know that aren't interest[ed] in arguing against your misrepresentation.

Skeptics are told that they don't understand; that evolutionists "never said that!" They are sent somewhere else - "Go read such and such!" If you ask, why is there something as insanely complicated as sexual reproduction?, you're told, "We never said evolution gives the simplest, most efficient solutions!" If you wonder about the progression toward complexity, you are now told, "You are sorely mistaken! We never said there was any such trend!" How did life get started? "That has nothing at all to do with evolution!" All we get is the mantra, "Evolution is a fact." Evolutionists just won't put up a target.

There can't be a meaningful discussion until this changes. I suggest, for a start, we put aside the question of "how" and concentrate on the "what" of evolution. Take gravity, for example. We might not have a clue as to why bodies come together (curved space blather notwithstanding), but at least we know what happens. The apple starts here. It ends there. It follows a path described by a known equation. It speeds up according to a known formula. No problem. Nothing to argue about.

Taking as an example the grizzly bear to whale transition discussed in talk.origins, what would we see if we captured the whole process in time lapse photography, say? In this thought experiment, suppose we devoted one frame of the film to each generation. The first frame will show all of the grizzlies bears alive now. In fact, it will show only those animals which will reproduce, and it will show them at some standard point in their lives - sexual maturity, say. Imagine that it is not only a photographic image, but contains any and all biological information of interest. (Remember, this is a thought experiment.)

What would the film show, frame by frame, generation by generation? We'll even arrange the animal images conveniently from most grizzly bear-like on the left side to most whale-like on the right. How many frames does it take to get to the first whale? What do the intermediates look like? How many are in each frame? How many transitional stages are represented in each frame? In the last frame, do we have all whales? Whales and grizzly bears? Other creatures, too?

If that example is too overwhelming, take a lesser transition; from non-feathered to feathered, say, or from double jaw joint to ear-bones. Does anyone accept the challenge? After evolutionists have presented a plausible picture of what this "fact of evolution" is, then we can get down to the "how".

1. Leaping lizards (Washington Times, 1997 May) -

A recent study shows that evolution, commonly thought of as operating over eons, can happen over just a few years.

That's nothing new to biologists, who have witnessed remarkably rapid evolution in bacteria, snails, moths and a host of other creatures since Charles Darwin first documented the process in finches. But nobody had ever demonstrated rapid evolution in an actual experiment before researchers took lizards from the Bahamian island of Staniel Cay and introduced them to 14 even-smaller islands nearby.

The smaller islands had sparser, shorter vegetation than Staniel Cay. And since these particular lizards, of the species Anolis sagrei, spend a lot of time sitting on branches, the biologists predicted that the smaller vegetation would lead to correspondingly shorter hind limbs in the lizard.

After introducing lizards to 11 islands in 1977 and to three others in 1981, the researchers returned in 1991 to find exactly what they expected. [End article.]

Leaping Lysenkoism, where does one start??? Because my legs are so long that I almost always take 2 steps at a time, will my descendants have short, stubby legs??? You would think having length to spare would be an advantage.

And exactly how short is this shorter vegetation so that it requires smaller steps from the lizard? Quarter knee-high as opposed to half knee-high? Can we assume all the vegetation on these islands is less than knee-high to a lizard??? And why just the hind limbs? Do these lizards walk upright???

And can we be so sure (haha) it's the vegetation height? Maybe it's the nutritional value of the stunted vegetation. Or maybe the smaller islands themselves give the lizards less running room. (Warning! Sarcasm spoken here!)

The last sentence of the article should set off alarm bells. "[They returned] to find exactly what they expected," indeed. This is what I call the "ouija board effect" in science. In case you don't know, the ouija board pointer goes where the participants nudge it, much as they swear they're not. (Gravity waves, Dr. Weber?) An alert mind will realize that measuring lizard legs is far from a straightforward proposition, allowing for all manner of vaguely conscious nudging.

And we're still left with the biggie: does Anolis sagrei transforming into Anolis sagrei count as evolution?

2. Mother of all nests (Washington Times, 1997 July 20, page D8) -

Several hundred yellow jackets are in the process of rebuilding a monster nest removed by entomologists last week from an abandoned house in Brunswick, Georgia [USA].

About 50,000 insects were removed by scientists from the University of Georgia, along with the 4-by-3-foot nest built into a sofa.

A typical yellow jacket nest is about the size of a basketball.

Entomologist Robert Matthews described the nest as a "real monster" and said it was unusual because it had apparently been growing undisturbed for years.

Mr. Matthews said researchers found at least 100 queens in the nest; a normal yellow jacket nest contains only one. Mr. Matthews called the discovery a "significant evolutionary step." [End article.]

Comments: Yeah, right. And I had a really big sneeze yesterday.

I don't know if there's anything there that the typical evolutionist would defend, but I got a big kick out of the juxtaposition of that article with a neighboring one. About a third of the newspaper page was devoted to "Deformed frogs offer mystery - scientists consider viruses, predators, parasites; chemicals can't be ruled out".

When something big is happening, there's not a single mention of evolution!

Although all the points made here may sound familiar (overly familiar) to talk.origins participants, they were arrived at independently of any prior discussion, either printed or electronic.

My biggest surprise was searching old talk.origins articles after this page was essentially completed and finding A. Pagano taking evolutionists to task for their tautological "evolution is a fact, come what may" position. I thought maybe I was the first to recognize this and worried that no one would understand what I was getting at. Pagano stated the case much better than I do here, but even so, his opponents remained blissfully unaware of how badly ravaged they were. What can ya do?

There is an excellent short story crafted around the idea of big evolutionary jumps in Twilight Zone Magazine (June 1988). It's called "Quantum Leap", by Anita Evangelista. (Of course, copyright laws being what they are, you'll never enjoy it and Evangelista will never make any more money from it. Makes a lot of sense, huh?)

After putting up my "Evolution FAQ" web page, I invited participants of the discussion group talk.origins to look it over. Here are virtually all of the comments that I received. I closed the invitation with, "Thanks for dropping by. Try not to get too worked up." You will see that got some mileage.

You can find the original postings easily enough by searching Deja for "talk.origins", "evolution faq" and "sauter". Keep me honest.

[DS: My responses to the feedback are in brackets like this.]

howard hershey: Why get worked up? It's merely the same old clap-trap, cant, and nonsense (misrepresentation, misinterpretation) presented by someone with a decidedly superficial understanding of the biosciences, although I will admit it was presented in a nicely sarcastic fashion with the unstated arrogant implication that the writer actually knows something (clearly contradicted by the content) that "real" scientists do not. Have you been taking lessons from Peter Nyikos? So I would rank it fairly high (B, perhaps) on style but only a gentleman's D for content (graded on a curve; it is darn sight better than most of what passes for anti-evolutionary "FAQs" but still doesn't pass muster.) [DS: Just a B? I know I'm no great shakes as a writer, and I hate to scrounge for points, but aren't those links that hop you down the page a single line good for a B+ ? And I'm giving all of the responses an "incomplete", since none of them addressed my main point.]

Larry Moran: Calm down, Howard, you're being very unfair to young Donald. He's probably just a child. Besides, he states clearly in the Forward to his web pages that he doesn't know anything about science. Here's what he says,

"This collection of pages came out of my own head with no research into the sorts of things other people put in their websites."

See? He doesn't even pretend to have studied evolution or any other topic. These are just the ramblings of a uneducated mind.

Adam Noel Harris: Larry's right on the mark. Donald seems to be one of those people who thinks he can debate and solve all the world's problems just by hashing it out in his head. Never mind if he's got his facts wrong to begin with, he can work through it!

Take, for example, his "criticism" of a report on evolution in lizard leg length after introduction to new islands. He speculates about the kinds of measurement errors which can be made and gaffaws when he asks questions about the height of vegetation growing on the islands. But does he bother to look up the original research paper to get answers to his questions or to find out how the measurements were made? No, that won't be necessary, because in Donald's mind it was probably done all wrong and no facts are necessary. [DS: I'm not budging on this - if scientists can't convey what they mean to say to the public, I say sit down and shut up. I'm fed up with nonsense science stories in the media. See my web page on dumb science.]

Still, this is more interesting than Donald's previous forays into this group. I didn't think Donald could discuss things other than how if there were life on other planets, it would have contacted us already. [DS: Still waiting to hear a vaguely plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. I get a kick out of finding other people who have also independently discovered it. For example, at a talk at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Alan Bean, the 4th man on the moon, made the statement, "Humans don't realize how special they are." He concluded there was nothing like us for hundreds of light-years, or so, because, if they were out there, they would be helping us cure cancer, etc., rather than hiding out. After all, humans would be glad to help alien races where possible. And mosey around my website, Adam, for discussion of many other topics - guitar, Beatles, justice, democracy, scrabble, football, antarctica, breakfast cereal, etc. Recently added a page on how to make ice water.]

FROM MY FAQ: If the shell was so crucial for the survival of the turtle, how come so many shell-less reptiles hung in there?

Tedd Hadley: Has it ever occurred to you that different environments have different predators, different food sources, different energy requirements and that in some environments a shell may be more of a detriment than others? [DS: Turtles share the exact same environment with numerous shell-less animals.]

[DS: Bonz wrote the most extended rebuttal to my FAQ. You can read the entire thing further below. Here, I respond to the points which I think are most in need of response.]

Bonz: Why do turtles have shells? In the natural course of having trillions of babies, some were "shellier" than others, just as some humans are taller than others. And the shellier they were, the more they prospered. [DS: Humans must have surpassed a trillion babies by now. So have rabbits.]

FROM MY FAQ: If the shell was so crucial for the survival of the turtle, how come so many shell-less reptiles hung in there?

Bonz: You're not going to like the answer, but - no particular reason. [DS: Oh.]

FROM MY FAQ: And, now that you mention it, where's my shell? That could really have come in handy now and then for my ancestors, not to mention a pair of wings.

Bonz: Possibly so. So what? Evolution has no interest in whether humans make it or not. [DS: But it did with elephants? The weather gets a bit nippy and they turn into woolly mammoths?]

Bonz: So if I raise a population of mice that doesn't interbreed with the original population I took if from, it's a separate species. Explain to me why this cannot happen. [DS: Sure, humans have the wherewithal to fiddle around with the DNA, ensure that the newly created mice breed and flourish, and even exterminate the entire population of the parent species and bury them somewhere so that their fossils can be dug up some time in the future. Exactly what position are you arguing?]

Bonz: And if you don't know that bats and porpoises and rats have the same bones, you need a course in remedial anatomy. [DS: ...or a new dictionary. According to the American Heritage, "same" means "conforming in every detail."]

FROM MY FAQ: All well and good for a noncritical mind, but then you start to wonder, well, if a long neck is such a great idea, where is the super-giraffe with a neck twice as long? Or wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just develop a longer tongue? Why not longer legs - or simply learn to stand upright? And surely the conditions would have been ok somewhere for giraffes to develop half-length necks. Where are they?

Tedd Hadley: Has it ever occurred to you that there are constraints on evolution just like there are constraints on everything else in this world? Every feature carries a cost in terms of energy consumption which has to be balanced with the advantage.

Victor Eijkhout: Or to put the ball back in [Sauter's] court: if evolution doesn't explain this, what's the creationist explanation of the absence of super-giraffes? [DS: A very telling question there, Victor. It doesn't exactly drip with confidence in evolutionary explanations. You'd do better to ask a creationist, but I'm guessing he'd say that super-giraffes were never created.]

Boikat: That's not a FAQ. It's an admission that you do not understand evolution. Maybe this will help (but I doubt it):

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html

I WROTE: Thanks for dropping by. Try not to get too worked up.

Boikat: Not a problem. We see people that don't understand the basics all the time. We're used to it.

Wesley R. Elsberry: Checked [the FAQ] out briefly. I stopped after finding this gem.

And surely the conditions would have been ok somewhere for giraffes to develop half-length necks. Where are they?

Check the encyclopedia for "okapi".

I WROTE: Thanks for dropping by. Try not to get too worked up.

Scott Chase: You're welcome. No problem, I needed the laugh. You're amazing. How many misconceptions about evolution can be crammed into a couple of webpages?

FROM MY FAQ: With a few more seconds thought you're wondering: why aren't all species in transition all the time? Why are there any defined species at all? Why isn't every single organism at its own unique point on some branch of an inconceivably huge and dense evoutionary tree? Why isn't there a great big, confused mess?

Tedd Hadley: This is exactly what you see, actually. Species is a man-made concept. If you geographically split two populations of the same animal and wait a few hundred years, you will find considerable genetic and physical differences between those two populations. Wait a thousand years and they probably won't even be able to interbreed. All animals are, in fact, points on a vast, extremely bushy evolutionary tree.

Jthomford (to Tedd Hadley): No kidding. In fact, it's so accurate[,] in light of everything else I'm wondering if the whole thing isn't a troll.

Tedd Hadley: [There were] many more misconceptions which would be fun to go over if Sauter is interested.

All in all, an exhibition of ignorance. I'd say Donald Sauter is an intelligent person who has not allowed himself to make any serious attempt to understand evolution, perhaps for fear it will prove incompatible with other beliefs.

[DS: Here is Bonz's complete rebuttal to my FAQ. I've already responded above to what I thought were his most important points. Like everyone else, he made no attempt to describe any transition in generation-by-generation steps. He also used analogies that I don't get. But see what you think.]

I WROTE: Thanks for dropping by. Try not to get too worked up.

Bonz: Not worked up at all. But you have some serious misapprehensions about evoluton.

FROM MY FAQ: I went through most of my life accepting evolution without any problem. We see Creature A now which is similar to and somewhat more advanced than Creature B, which died out so many years ago and was itself somewhat more advanced than Creature C, which passed from the scene even earlier, etc. etc.

Bonz: No, NOT "more advanced". Organisms gain limbs, lose limbs... one generation to the next is SIMILAR. There is no notion of "advanced".

Just different.

FROM MY FAQ: Then, like others before me, I started paying closer attention to what the scientists were saying and realized I couldn't make sense of it. They go on and on about natural selection - the process of a beneficial character trait becoming more pervasive throughout the population of a species. But when you give it a moment's thought, you realize that natural selection is never going to give rise to a new species.

Bonz: Let's give it another moment's thought. We know new species can arise today because we see them all the time. Hel, we had to have a Supreme Court ruling in the US over whether companies that produce a new species can patent it. (They can.)

Now. What would make a population of mice a new species of mouse? Let's look at what makes all the species of mice we already have separate species: they don't interbreed.

So if I raise a population of mice that doesn't interbreed with the original population I took if from, it's a separate species.

Explain to me why this cannot happen.

FROM MY FAQ: Even in a recent book, Full House, by the evolution guru Stephen Jay Gould, we read such silliness as this (p139): "As the earth enters a glacial age... possession of more than the usual amount of hair becomes a decided advantage. [In general,] the hairier elephants will be more successful [at living] and therefore [have more] offspring... Since hairiness is inherited, the next generation will contain more elephants with increased hair... Continue this process for a large number of generations, and eventually Siberia will [have] a population of woolly mammoths - the evolutionary descendants of the original elephants."

Well, no. Siberia will have hairy elephants. Maybe. Actually, there is nothing in the above argument to suggest that an ice-age elephant could ever hope to be any hairier than the hairiest elephant from the preceding balmy climate.

Bonz: Absolutely correct. We get THAT information from living organisms today, and apply it to fossil life in the past. We know, without any doubt, that tiny changes in living orgamisns can make LARGE changes in, for instance, how much hair something has. Humans and chimps have the same NUMBER of hairs, for instance, ours are just thinner and shorter.

FROM MY FAQ: In school, we were taught examples like, "the turtle developed a shell because the ones that didn't got eaten and died off,"

Bonz: Then you either had a terrible teacher, or you misunderstood. Turtles, or any other organism, cannot see the future, plan for it, and develop things to protect itself.

Why do turtles have shells? In the natural course of having trillions of babies, some were "shellier" than others, just as some humans are taller than others. And the shellier they were, the more they prospered.

Because we know that "not getting eaten for lunch" is a good thing from the standpoint of getting older and laying more eggs, the defensive explanation makes sense.

FROM MY FAQ: or, "the giraffe developed a long neck to reach the higher leaves and the ones that didn't, died out."

Bonz: Same misunderstanding as above.

FROM MY FAQ: All well and good for a noncritical mind, but then you start to wonder, well, if a long neck is such a great idea, where is the super-giraffe with a neck twice as long?

Bonz: How much good would that do? Are there really, really tall trees where giraffes live? Nope. Were there dinow with really, really long necks when there were really, really tall ferns? Yep.

FROM MY FAQ: Or wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just develop a longer tongue?

Bonz: Not necessarily. Giraffes, like everything else, have to make do with what they have. If you have logs, you build log houses. If you have sod, you build sod houses. If you have ice, you build igloos.

A longer tongue would have worked. So would the ability to climb, or to fly, and hey, the ability to live without food at ALL would be GREAT. The ancestors of giraffes didn't have the raw materials for any of these. They did have the raw materials for long necks.

FROM MY FAQ: Why not longer legs - or simply learn to stand upright? And surely the conditions would have been ok somewhere for giraffes to develop half-length necks. Where are they?

Bonz: All over the place. Look at the okapi. A short necked giraffe, alive and living today in Africa right alongside the giraffe. And medium length giraffes are in the fossil record as well.

FROM MY FAQ: If the shell was so crucial for the survival of the turtle, how come so many shell-less reptiles hung in there?

Bonz: You're not going to like the answer, but - no particular reason. Why didn't I win the lottery? Why did one kid die from the flu, and another stay healthy?

FROM MY FAQ: And, now that you mention it, where's my shell? That could really have come in handy now and then for my ancestors, not to mention a pair of wings.

Bonz: Possibly so. So what? Evolution has no interest in whether humans make it or not. You had the raw materials for a big brain and grasping hands. Turtles got a better deal. Live with it.

Are you asking why turtles are so much more successful than humans are? Unless everything is the same, some have to be more successful than others. Turtles won, we lost. {shrug}

FROM MY FAQ: How about some gills and flippers, too? Talk about survival - I'd be set!

Bonz: No.. because there is a COST to having all those things.

Why doesn't a soldier carry three spare rifles, a million rounds of ammuntion, a bazooka with a thousand rounds, and a thousand fragmentation grenades into battle? He'd be SET!

FROM MY FAQ: With a few more seconds thought you're wondering: why aren't all species in transition all the time?

Bonz: They are. Every species that is now or ever has lived is a transitional species - unless, of couse, it goes extinct.

FROM MY FAQ: Why are there any defined species at all?

Bonz: There aren't all that many. We consider lions and tigers separate species, even though they can mate and have offspring.

It gets VERY blurry when you have species that look alike, ring species. hybrids, and the like. How separate is separate? If one population is 100% infertile with another, we KNOW they are different species. But how about 99.9%? 92%? 89.8%?

FROM MY FAQ: Why isn't every single organism at its own unique point on some branch of an inconceivably huge and dense evoutionary tree?

Bonz: It is.

FROM MY FAQ: Why isn't there a great big, confused mess?

Bonz: There is. You've never seen taxonomists argue, have you?

I've read the rest of your page, and all it shows is your poor understanding of what evolution is.

Suppose you went to a NASCAR rally and heard everyone talking about "gas". Price of gas, running out of gas, gas tank... and you get suspicious. So you sneak over to a car, look into the "gas tank".... and there is no gas there! It's a LIQUID!!!

So you run over to your friend from London and tell him what you've found. HE goes over, and actually sticks his finger inside, and comes back. "You're right," he says, "there is no gas there. It's just bloody petrol."

So you and he get a web page exposing the nutty NASCAR drivers who can't tell a gas from a liqiud called petrol.

Let me help you out here.

ANY change in the genetic makeup of a population from generation to generation is evolution. If you have 50% green eyes in this generation, 75% in a later generation, then 50% in a still later generation, you have seen evolution.

Now here is where YOU go nuts. :) I can almost hear you - "Yeah, they always say that, but that doesn't explain how {whatever} and that doesn't mean {whatever}.

No, it doesn't. It's not SUPPOSED to.

If you can start a car, move it around for a mile or two, then brake, and park it, I would say you can "drive".

Doesn't mean you can win the Indy 500. It doesn't even mean you can get a license. But you CAN drive. It is a definition. That's all. It says nothing at all about whether you're a good driver or a bad driver.

Describe 99% of life on Earth: single cells.

What do we know from this? Mostly, almost no organisms change a whole lot, at least in the ways you are talking about. Billions of years ago, 100% of life was single celled, and now 99% is.

Why isn't everything transitional? Everything IS transitional. It's just that most things aren't dramatic, even when they ARE transitional. Most people don't become multibillionaires out of nowhere. Bill Gates did. He's newsworthy. You're not, even when you get a promotion.

Why is that? Because people like flash. They like THE FIRST. That has nothing to do with how evolution works, it has to do with what people like to read in the newspaper.

You also seem to have difficulty separating "evolution" from "the theory of evolution":

FROM MY FAQ: Gould insists over and over that evolution is "a fact". By this, Gould means that evolution "is" - just like gravity "is" - never mind the what, how or why. "Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in midair pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered."

First of all, reasonable people may have valid questions about that statement of "fact." What if, upon closer examination, our ancestors were actually more "human-like" as opposed to apelike? Would it still be evolution?

Bonz: Yes, of course. Any change in heritable genetics between generations is evolution.

But listen to yourself. Since, at one time, humans did not exist, and now we DO exist, and since evolution takes place in small steps, then our RECENT ancestors HAVE to be "apelike".

Humans are in the ape family. We are African Great Apes, along with gorillas and chimps. In this context, "apelike" means "more like the other apes."

FROM MY FAQ: Moreover, there is an unacceptable circularity here. Gould says, in essence, that evolution is the fact that "humans beings [or whatever] evolved." Nobody can argue with that one - but the statement has no value. It's funny to note that "evolution is evolution" fails the falsifiability criterion of science as badly as creationism.

Bonz: I wish SOMEONE would tell Creationists that there is nothing wrong with circularity. Definitions are SUPPOSED to be circular. My father is my male parent.

Rain is rain. Gravity is gravity. A rock is a rock. Evolution is evolution. You can do that with everything.

We know that the Earth is billions of years old. We know that no humans existed a billion years ago. We know that organisms evolve, and that all of the organisms today, bunnies and antelope and ostriches and whales and pine trees and sharks and mosquitos and corn and mushrooms are descended from critters that lived a billion years ago, when they did not.

THAT they did is not at question. HOW they did is of infinite value to us, because it is still happening today.

You seem to have an odd notion of how it happened yourself,

FROM MY FAQ: Is a frog a transitional form between a fruit fly and a human?

Bonz: What in the name of Billy blue blazes makes you think that either fruit flies or frogs are ancestral to humans at all? [DS: See my question in context in the FAQ for the point I was making.]

And if you don't know that bats and porpoises and rats have the same bones, you need a course in remedial anatomy.

My evolution "FAQ" took a unanimous drubbing from the 11 people who posted responses. However, not a single person responded to the whole point of my page. All of the responses fell into the "evasive" category which I devoted a paragraph to in the FAQ. They were along the lines of:

"You're ignorant."

"You don't understand."

"Go read this."

"Anything that happens is 'evolution'."

"Well, what's your theory???"

In a follow-up posting to talk.origins, I took another shot at explaining what I was after. I said:

Forget about the definition of evolution. Forget about how evolution happens. Forget about why evolution happens. Forget about the word "evolution" itself. Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

In my page I mentioned transitions from not feathered to feathered; single jaw joint to double jaw joint; double jaw joint/no ear bones to single jaw joint/ear bones; and grizzly bear to whale.

Talk.origins participants are knowledgable about an animal called the okapi. They indicate that it is in every respect identical to a giraffe except its neck is half as long (and, presumably, it does not mate with giraffes, at least normally.) If you'd like, use the okapi to giraffe transition.

I have trouble envisioning it. Although some respondents are adamant that one is not allowed to apply his own accumulated knowledge and common sense to the matter, I will try to explain my difficulty.

For a jumping off point, let's consider a 1-generation transition. An okapi bears a giraffe. The giraffe species becomes established.

That such a mutation could occur is hardly conceivable. And if it did happen, it is harder to conceive how the new giraffe species could become established. The first giraffe has no giraffes for mates and so must mate with an okapi - in spite of this being itself either impossible or very rare. (Zoologists?) Ultimately, the first giraffe must produce at least 2 giraffes. If it doesn't produce any, the new species dies. If it produces only one, then that giraffe is in the same predicament of having to produce at least 2 giraffes without the benefit of a giraffe mate.

The probabability of these 2 nearly inconceivable events occurring is near-zero**2 . (** = exponentiation.)

All right, then, the answer is smaller steps in the transition, right? Suppose there are 99 intermediate species between the okapi and the giraffe, each with a neck 1 cm longer than the species from which it emerged.

But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times. Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

On top of this is some unimaginable guidance overseeing the whole process. Let's suppose we managed to get through the first 20 stages (probability = near-zero**40 ). How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions? What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

No wonder some evolutionists have had to back off and start thinking about near-instantaneous, big jumps. Near-zero**2 is a lot easier to swallow.

And given how hard it is to swallow near-zero**2 , it's no wonder someone like Senepathy theorizes the first members of each species walked independently out of the primordial soup-bowl - without the benefit of parents, even. According to him, the probability of giraffe DNA coming together randomly in the broth is astronomically more probable than getting from okapi DNA to giraffe DNA via random mutations.

If everything I've said above is wrong or confused, don't waste your energy on it. Just clear the table and describe the okapi to giraffe transition in generation-by-generation steps. If it wasn't the okapi the giraffe came from - no problem. Start with the akopi or the opaki or whatever the predecessor was.

Talk.origins participants indicate that there are no defined species; they all melt into each other in one big rubber-sheet continuum. Each individual creature in fact has its own branch on the evolutionary tree. Can we take that with a grain of salt? I haven't walked the whole world wide, but it doesn't seem to jibe with what I see. Can we assume the okapi was an established species before the transition occurred, meaning that there was a sizable population of animals that looked okapi-like and behaved okapi-like and bred almost exclusively with other okapis? In any case, clearly describe what you believe to be the starting conditions for the emergence of the giraffe.

If you're an up-to-date evolutionist who never once no not ever said anything about increasing complexity, progress or advancement, feel free to go the other way - describe the giraffe to okapi transition.

Use diagrams, graphs, equations or whatever it takes to describe the transition, generation by generation. Take another look at my web page where I solicit a description of the grizzly bear to whale transition if you don't understand what I'm after. Part of me wants to say I'll only accept an answer reviewed and approved by a majority of "name" evolutionists; part of me thinks it would be very interesting to get them all in separate rooms and see how their answers compare.

Here's the deal. Describe this or any transition in generation by generation steps clearly and compellingly, and I'll add it to my web page. [End of post to talk.origins.]

You've noticed in the first round of feedback the shellacking I took for not being aware of the okapi. My damage control was to calmly work the okapi into the discussion, and make it part of the problem. It should be pointed out, though, to anyone who was given the impression that the okapi is like a giraffe with a half-length neck that that's not the case at all. There is nothing at all noteworthy about the length of the okapi's neck. In the pictures I've seen, the okapi's neck has about the same proportion to body and head size as a horse's, dog's, person's, bird's, turtle's, you-name-it... What's the big deal? In any case, my posed question remains the same whether there were 0, 1, 2, 3, or many intermediates between the giraffe and its short-necked predecessor.

This time around, a few people took a stab at what I was asking for. None of it sounded any more compelling (to me) than the familiar explanation of random mutations and natural selection working like an incredibly well-orchestrated team.

Describing once again my own problems with that explanation is not what I had in mind, and will surely be redundant to some extent with what I've already said and what many others have said, but it's only fair that I respond to the people who responded to my challenge. Putting it here saves the trouble of repeating myself several places below. Here goes.

It is inconceivable that a tiny, 1 centimeter or less, increase in neck length of the "okapi" (that is, the pre-giraffe) could give even an infinitesimal increase in survival advantage. If I accepted that, I'd have to believe that all the females, being naturally shorter, died. Now there's a big problem for emerging giraffes.

I have very nearly as hard a time believing that even a "whopping" increase in neck length - 10 centimeters, say - would increase the survival advantage. I'm willing to bet that there are much greater variations than that in the height of okapi - without the shorter ones keeling over with starvation. If they did, young okapis - even those with the abnormal neck - would be doomed.

I even have more than a little difficulty imagining the first freak okapi with this 10 centimeter longer neck. For instance, I've seen millions of people and I've never seen any mutation like that. I see a big range of heights, but never (as far as I've seen) as the result of one abnormally long body part. I suspect a bit of sleight of hand in trying to pass off a longer-necked okapi as being as mundane and expected as a taller okapi.

But supposing I do accept the first occurrence of these mutations, and somehow swallowed that after many generations this minor difference spread to the rest of the population (via natural selection), we come to the next barrier. This one, as far as I can see, is insurmountable. We need the same, or very similar, random mutation to happen again! Not longer legs, not bigger brains, not better vision, and on and on and on and on... but another little tweak to the neck length. No way. Forget it.

My understanding is that humans in the U.S. are on the average a few inches taller than they were a few hundred years ago. Is that all due to the appearance of one 5 foot, 9 inch (1.73 meter) "giant" 12 generations ago in 1776? This one person's "deformity" gave a survival advantage and therefore spread throughout the population? But it doesn't happen that fast, you say, it takes maybe 30 generations! So I'm to believe our current average height traces back to one individual 5' 9" freak from 1460?

Ok, so I'm being a pain in the neck harping on very small height differences with their tiny survival advantages (although I claim that's what you all are doing in the okapi to giraffe transformation.) Let's take an extreme case - like Wilt Chamberlain. Now here we have a major deviation in height, and an unquestionable survival advantage. He may have had hundreds of times as many offspring as the average human. Will the population eventually all become 7 feet tall because of one Wilt Chamberlain? Or will we just continue in that direction as long as basketball maintains its popularity? (Did the drought that gave the first longer-necked okapi a survival advantage last for all the hundreds of thousands of years it took for the transformation to giraffe to be completed?) Even if basketball remains popular, isn't it hard to imagine that other pressures and effects - billions of them - wouldn't come into play, disrupting the straight-ahead march to a population of 7 foot people?

And continuing the analogy with what we are supposed to swallow regarding the hundreds or thousands of intermediate step transformation from the okapi to the giraffe, are we to believe that Wilt Chamberlain is just the first step in an evolution to 100-foot people? (I can hear your cries now - "after a certain point, height becomes a disadvantage because it actually gets harder to sink a basket way down there!")

And to reiterate, all of the preceding scenarios, as ridiculous as they sound, are actually much more plausible than bizarre transformations to single body parts. Height variation is easy - nobody is surprised to see it in humans, or within other species of animals.

And how come we aren't all beautiful? What single quality could provide more of a direct and immediate survival advantage? There are lots of good-looking people; why don't we all become gorgeous within a few generations? That makeover should be a breeze. It doesn't require speciation, or any new body parts at all. It should be much easier and faster than changes in the length of lizard legs, for example.

And to those who have heard all of this a million times before from a million kooks, keep in mind that someone of the stature of Stephen J. Gould doesn't hide his doubts about natural selection. I'm sure he must get sick of being latched onto by skeptics, but how could he expect not to?

For example, he writes, "Darwinian theory is fundamentally about natural selection. I do not challenge this emphasis, but believe that we have become overzealous about the power and range of selection by trying to attribute every significant form and behavior to its direct action." (The Flamingo's Smile, page 53.) He summarizes his theory of punctuated equilibrium on page 241: "...the pattern of normal times is not a tale of continuous adaptive improvement within lineages. Rather, species form rapidly in geological perspective (thousands of years) and tend to remain highly stable for millions of years thereafter. Evolutionary success must be assessed among species themselves, not at the traditional Darwinian level of struggling organisms within populations."

If what everyone in talk.origins is saying is so trivially self-evident, how come someone who's given it as much thought as Gould doesn't get it either? (At least on some days; other times he'll turn an elephant into a woolly mammoth at the drop of a snowflake. Yes, I see the irony in latching on to Gould here; it was his essay that set me off and provoked my original "FAQ".) Snicker if you must, but if you say he's the dummy, how come your name's not the one in lights?

I can't imagine anyone plowing through all of the discussion that follows, so a quick overview is in order. Admittedly, it's sprawling, unfocused and repetitive, but I can't risk editing what other people said. You will see that all of the responses attack, with varying degrees of civility, what I have said above. What I really wanted was a detailed model of some transition in generation-by-generation steps, and this time a few people took a stab at that (search for "Colin Peters" and "Kalandros M"). To my mind, these explanations were just more hand-waving, but you decide.

You might notice that even though everyone appears unified in their opposition to me, they don't all necessarily say the same things. But I just don't have any more energy for pulling together a "big analysis", or even for organizing the comments in a helpful way. In some places, I forwent the obvious comment of my own since even I get tired of hearing myself say the same thing over and over.

Now, on to the feedback generated by my second posting to talk.origins.

I WROTE: Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

David Johnston: Sure thing. But first, you recite your genealogy for the last 6,000 years. [DS: Humans bore humans for about 333 generations, at which point I was born.]

I WROTE: Suppose there are 99 intermediate species between the okapi and the giraffe, each with a neck 1 cm longer than the species from which it emerged. But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times.

David Johnston: Right. After all, as we all know, it's impossible to breed one breed of dog to another, right? [DS: I might be missing your point, but, dogs breeding with dogs have always given rise to dogs, so far. I think you're alluding to the controlled breeding of dogs by more intelligent beings (humans) to maintain various desired traits. If so, I think you had better be careful with that argument. I doubt that dogs, left to themselves, would be so picky about their mates.]

I WROTE: Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

David Johnston: No mutations are required for such a change, even though some will occur. [DS: Mutations not required? Is there general agreement on this? How, then, does a new feature first appear?]

I WROTE: On top of this is some unimaginable guidance overseeing the whole process. Let's suppose we managed to get through the first 20 stages (probability = near-zero**40 ). How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions? What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

David Johnston: Hey, it's your phony scenario.

I WROTE: If everything I've said above is wrong or confused, don't waste your energy on it. Just clear the table and describe the okapi to giraffe transition in generation-by-generation steps. If it wasn't the okapi the giraffe came from - no problem. Start with the akopi or the opaki or whatever the predecessor was.

David Johnston: {Shrug} Most of the shorter necked ancestors starve before reproducing. Longer necked ancestors survive. Eventually they end up with really long necked offspring. [DS: You're saying that if an okapi were born today with a 1 cm longer neck, all the others would keel over dead? If one lousy cm is so crucial for survival, how do you explain the continued existence of the females?]

I WROTE: Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

Honus: Generation by generation? Surely you're not serious. (Or I'm really misunderstanding what you mean?) Can you provide us with generational evidence that you're a descendant of Adam? [DS: Is there any reason to doubt I descended from the first humans?] And remember...no gaps, or we'll assume said gap to be evidence that you're NOT related to him. I sure hope that none of your ancestors were ever blown apart in an explosion, leaving no remains behind. You'd have to disappear in a puff of smoke. You couldn't exist, and everyone would have to ignore you. :) [DS: You may use modelling.]

Bonz WROTE: Evolution has no interest in whether humans make it or not.

I WROTE: But it did with elephants? The weather gets a bit nippy and they turn into woolly mammoths?

Honus: And it's stuff like this that makes me believe that your drubbing was well-deserved. Everyone that told you to read up a bit on the subject wasn't picking on you...they were trying to do you a favor. Trust me. By the way... the vast majority of species (+90%) didn't make it. Bonz was right. ;) He meant (obviously by extension) that evolution doesn't care whether anything makes it or not. [DS: Then how come we never hear the end of finch beaks evolving to just the right size and shape for what they need to do; and moths evolving to just the right color to keep them camouflaged; and lizard legs evolving to just the right length for the new vegetation. And all of that in just a few generations. Geez, you'd think all of evolution theory is contained in Bob Dylan's lyric, "If he needs a third eye he just grows one."]

I WROTE: [Alan Bean] concluded there was nothing like us for hundreds of light-years, or so, because, if they were out there, they would be helping us cure cancer, etc., rather than hiding out.

Honus: Or eating us for breakfast. Shees. [DS: Ok, so why is nobody eating us for breakfast?]

I WROTE: Visit my website, Adam, for discussion of many other topics - guitar, Beatles, justice, democracy, scrabble, football, antarctica, breakfast cereal, etc. Currently working on a page on how to make ice water.

Honus: Put baseball in instead of football, and you'd be an alright kinda guy. ;) [DS: Take a closer look, Honus - although I doubt you'd be too pleased with my baseball page either.]

I WROTE: Suppose there are 99 intermediate species between the okapi and the giraffe, each with a neck 1 cm longer than the species from which it emerged. But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times. Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

Geoff Sheffield: Read "The Beak of the Finch" by Jonathan Weiner to see how small changes can happen in a population in a relatively short period of time. [DS: How about a book that describes the transition from one species to another in generation-by-generation steps?]

I WROTE: On top of this is some unimaginable guidance overseeing the whole process. Let's suppose we managed to get through the first 20 stages (probability = near-zero**40 ). How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions? What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

Geoff Sheffield: The "unimaginable" process is called natural selection. If a longer neck provides a survival advantage, that mutation will be favored. If a very long neck provides a survival advantage, a series of mutations may lead to a very long neck, each step along the way being favored over its shorter necked ancestor. [DS: The probability of the first random mutation occurring was near-infinitesimal. That such a tiny change should prove to be so advantageous is hardly thinkable. That the whole process of the same tiny change randomly popping up again and giving the same large survival advantage is repeated many times over is flat-out not thinkable.]

The alternative mutations you describe would not provide a survival advantage - in fact, things like purple hair would be a disadvantage, so those mutations would be selected against. [DS: I pulled those 3 examples of possible mutations out of the air to make a point. I leave as an exercise to the reader to list a million random mutations that are just as likely as an extended neck, but would give an even greater survival advantage. Remember, mutations are random - let your imagination go wild. By the way, purple hair might be extremely attractive to a mate. And what's so bad about thumbs or extra eyes?]

But this raises another issue. In making an honest argument against a particular point of view, one is responsible for making an honest representation of the opponent's best argument. In the case of evolution, natural selection is one of the most important elements of the theory. [DS: See Stephen Jay Gould's above comments downplaying the role of natural selection in evolution.]

Since you are so certain that evolution does not occur, you must be familiar with natural selection. Your failure to mention natural selection in the above passage implies either ignorance or deceit. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and attribute that failure to ignorance, but in either case I see no reason to attach any value to your opinion of evolution. [DS: To reiterate, my contribution to the discussion is only to ask for a description of some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. When there is good agreement on that, we can start to discuss how it happens.]

I WROTE: My evolution "FAQ" took a unanimous drubbing from the 11 people who posted responses. I'll survive, but I am more than a little miffed that not a single person responded to the whole point of my page. All of the responses fell into the "evasive" category which I devoted a paragraph to in the FAQ. They were along the lines of: "You're ignorant." "You don't understand." "Go read this." "Anything that happens is 'evolution'." "Well, what's your theory???"

mel turner: You consider those responses "evasive"? Sounds like they're to the point, and potentially helpful if you'd only "go read that"...

I WROTE: Forget about the definition of evolution. Forget about how evolution happens. Forget about why evolution happens. Forget about the word "evolution" itself.

mel turner: Why? This is the neresing stuff, whereas your challenge below is just silly. [DS: It's silly to get a grip on what happens before tackling how and why?]

I WROTE: Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

mel turner: That'd be just as silly as someone asking for detailed accounts of all members of all populations of any currently extant species. "Tell us about each and every one of the raccoons in the SE USA..." [DS: I suppose they all look and behave raccoon-like, have raccoon DNA, and came from a long line of raccoons. If raccoons were in the process of evolving into raccoonaphants, I'll bet many "silly" scientists would be observing the transition in as much detail as possible.]

How about if we ask you for detailed biographical documentation of every one of your ancestors back to Adam and Eve, with photographs and/or skeletons, please... [DS: All of my ancestors back to the first humans were humans. They looked like humans and had human skeletons.]

You want to know what happens during speciations? There are lots of studies. You want to know about changes in characteristics in a population over time? There are lots of studies and some well-accepted models. It all has to do with the stuff you asked us to "forget about" above... By the way, what makes a transition "interesting"? [DS: Whatever is interesting to you. Personally, I'm bored with tiny variations in beak sizes.]

I WROTE: In my page I mentioned transitions from not feathered to feathered;

mel turner: And how about them new feathered dinos? Neat, huh? Just as we'd have predicted. There are discussions of the likely structure of scale/feather intermediates... [DS: What happened between the intermediates?]

I WROTE: ...single jaw joint to double jaw joint; double jaw joint/no ear bones to single jaw joint/ear bones;

mel turner: And intermediate fossils do exist. The therapsid "reptile" to mammal series is a very nicely worked out one indeed. [DS: That series is the one I'm referring to. Based on what I understand from Gould, it seems like the smallest gaps in the series still represent large jumps.]

I WROTE: ...and grizzly bear to whale.

mel turner: Oops! Sorry, but bears aren't considered at all closely related to cetaceans, which are part of the hooved animal group. There are indeed good fossils of intermediate stages in the series from land animal to whale. [DS: Enough intermediates so that we could make a good model of the whole transition in generation-by-generation steps?]

I WROTE: Talk.origins participants are knowledgable about an animal called the okapi. They indicate that it is in every respect identical to a giraffe except its neck is half as long (and, presumably, it does not mate with giraffes, at least normally.) If you'd like, use the okapi to giraffe transition.

mel turner: Okapis and giraffes are members of the same family, but modern okapis aren't the ancestors of giraffes. The last common ancestor of both did undoubtedly have a shorter neck like an okapi, however. [DS: I gave full permission to use whatever short(er)-necked ancestor you want to start from.]

I WROTE: I have trouble envisioning it. Although some respondents are adamant that one is not allowed to apply his own accumulated knowledge and common sense to the matter, I will try to explain my difficulty.

mel turner: Nothing wrong with applying those things, so long as "knowledge and common sense" is not just an euphemistic renaming of "smug ignorance and stubborn incredulity"...

I WROTE: For a jumping off point, let's consider a 1-generation transition. An okapi bears a giraffe. The giraffe species becomes established.

mel turner: That's a ridiculously false assumption right there. No biologist thinks species transitions are events of single generations (apart from some important exceptional cases like allopolyploid speciation in plants...) Why don't you try it with say 50,000 generations instead... [DS: I used this "jumping off point" precisely to show how hard it is to imagine.]

I WROTE: That such a mutation could occur is hardly conceivable.

mel turner: Species differences aren't single mutations. [DS: They require multiple mutations working in harmony? Not thinkable - until somebody explains that mutations are not random, but are somehow made-to-order.]

I WROTE: And if it did happen, it is harder to conceive how the new giraffe species could become established. The first giraffe has no giraffes for mates and so must mate with an okapi - in spite of this being itself either impossible or very rare. (Zoologists?) Ultimately, the first giraffe must produce at least 2 giraffes. If it doesn't produce any, the new species dies. If it produces only one, then that giraffe is in the same predicament of having to produce at least 2 giraffes without the benefit of a giraffe mate.

mel turner: You're badly misinformed. That's not the way it works. An exact analogy to your spurious argument: Linguists understand that Spanish, Italian and French, etc. are "new species" descended from a common "ancestral species" in Latin. So, then who did the first French speaking person have to talk with? Clearly, two or more individuals in the same Latin-speaking village must have spontaneously started talking French at the same time. Too bad they couldn't converse with their parents... [DS: Again, I am trying to show how hard the single, huge-jump mutation scenario is to swallow. Moreover, I have a very difficult time accepting analogies between the evolution of languages and the evolution of species. Languages do not have anything at all like DNA, random mutations and sexual reproduction.]

New biological species typically arise by the gradual divergence of whole breeding populations over thousands of generations. There's no assumption that geographically isolated sub-populations of an ancestral species must change and become reproductively isolated all at once. (This explains why the old "chicken-or-egg" question is biological nonsense.) [DS: How so?]

I WROTE: The probabability of these 2 nearly inconceivable events occurring is near-zero**2 . (** = exponentiation.) All right, then, the answer is smaller steps in the transition, right? Suppose there are 99 intermediate species between the okapi and the giraffe, each with a neck 1 cm longer than the species from which it emerged.

mel turner: There are presumably lots of genes affecting neck length. Why do you assume each slight change would be a "species"? [DS: I'm presuming we have to get all of the population up to the latest, longest neck length before proceeding to the next. Otherwise, we would see a whole spectrum of giraffe neck lengths.]

I WROTE: But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times.

mel turner: Since neither "problem" is real, there's no problem. Why would you assume that each slightly different individual couldn't have mated freely within its breeding population? Don't you suppose that the dialects that became modern French and Spanish and Italian couldn't have gradually diverged from the ancestral Latin over time without individual villagers ever being unable to talk with their parents and neighbors?

Rest of the confusion snipped...

I WROTE: The probabability of these 2 nearly inconceivable events occurring is near-zero**2 . (** = exponentiation.)

John Wilkins: 1 generation mutations causing speciation are well documented in plants. Since plants are sometimes self-fertilising, a species can arise with a single individual. [DS: I have no problem with that. In fact, in the case of self-fertilising organisms, the problem is flip-flopped in my mind: Why aren't there unbelievably fantastic new species appearing all the time? Millions and millions of them? Every day?] Often, though, the phenotypic "distance" is greater relatively than the genetic "distance". In fact, genes are quite forgiving in their ability to recombine. Mostly the problem arises in development - if a gene is activated too early, the zygote may be inviable.

However, Darwin thought that incipient species first arise as varieties within species. Consider the dog (Canis familiaris) - high degree of morphological variation, low degree of genetic variation. If proto-giraffe and proto-okapi are members of the same species, and the proto-giraffe morphology is genetically dominant (or even if it is recessive so long as there are enough copies in a given population), then that morph can exist long enough to breed up a respectable-size population of "true" proto-giraffes, and they can remain "true" if separated geographically, ecologically or behaviourally until they lose the ability to breed back.

So your "calculations" of probability of these events is unnecessary. The probabilities are quite high: that variations will occur and that they will spread, in the right conditions of population structure, through a breeding population.

Furthermore, the probability of a major phenotypic change occurring is also high, given any viable mutations at all. Many phenotypic changes are just a matter of how long a given gene is turned on in growth. If there is a single "homeotic" gene (a control gene that activates other genes during development) that controls neck growth, and it suffers a mutation that leaves it on for much longer, a giraffe's neck is very likely to occur. [DS: You make this sound so likely as to be inevitable. Consider humans. You've seen millions of them. They vary somewhat in height. But you've probably never seen anyone with a natural neck even 10 cm longer than the average.]

So your probabilities should rather read

    pr(long neck) * pr(viable development and reproduction)

As I have argued, both of these are well within conceivability. Given that mutations occur all the time, and that each individual carries some mutations of gametes, if you replace the first assignment by

    pr(mutation)

then the probability that some phenotypic change will occur in a population of appreciable size is almost 1. [DS: But we're not talking about some mutation, we're are talking about one, specific mutation - another increase in neck length of 1 centimeter. The probability of that is pr(single, specific, desired mutation) = 0.000000000000000000000+]

I WROTE: All right, then, the answer is smaller steps in the transition, right?

John Wilkins: I'll be interested in your reaction to the more biologically plausible account I have given.

I WROTE: Talk.origins participants indicate that there are no defined species;

John Wilkins: On species: they are almost universally held to be well-defined at a given time and place. [DS: In the first round of discussion, Tedd Hadley and Jthomford disagreed vehemently. In this round, see Mark Issak below.] There are some exceptions, as is the only reliable rule in biology. But what evolution says is that the overall makeup of a species is subject to change unless prevented, usually by stabilising selection. Since you only get to see part of a species segment at any one time or place, they appear, correctly, stable. At that resolution they are indeed stable. Occasionally enough, though, they are not, and we have observed this in action, particularly in plants and unicellular organisms and a few short-lived animals.

On "akopis" :-) consider the scenario above - that the changes occurred in a polytypic species (one with many variants maintained in the overall species range either as persistent varieties or as geographical variants). I know squat about that family of organisms, but the dynamics are pretty well universal.

(Many think that "generalist" species are less evolutionary than "specialist" species. Elisabeth Vrba has documented how the gazelles have had a mixed evolution, with those that have a restricted lifestyle being subject to more speciation than those that eat and live everywhere.)

I WROTE: If you're an up-to-date evolutionist who never once no not ever said anything about increasing complexity, progress or advancement, feel free to go the other way - describe the giraffe to okapi transition.

John Wilkins: How would okapi to giraffe transition be an increase in complexity? It's certainly an increase in the size of neck bones and various muscles, but that's no more an increase in complexity than the transition from a Maserati to a Mack truck. [DS: Admittedly, I was trying to get a little dig in. Still, some people, such as truck builders, might consider a Mack truck with a 200-foot bed to be more complicated than a Mack truck with a normal 20-foot bed.]

I WROTE: Use diagrams, graphs, equations or whatever it takes to describe the transition, generation by generation.

John Wilkins: Maybe someone will take the time, or be able to refer you to a journal article that does this. [DS: No one did.] If they do, I hope you will take the trouble to mosey into your local university zoology library and make a copy. You may find that your difficulties are not well founded. As a non-biologist, I love doing this, mainly because it makes me feel like a Real Scientist for a few minutes.

{Old and new Donalds deleted.}

Paul Smith: Questions: Do giraffes and okapis have the same number of neck vertebrae?

Bonz: Yup. Same as you and I or your dog do.

Splifford (patjames): So far as I know, all mammals have seven neck vertebrae. Some merely have longer neck vertebrae than others. Other vertebrates don't seem to have this limitation. Some birds have a dozen and more neck vertebrae.

mel turner: Nearly all mammals have seven. Oddly, most of the exceptions are in the group including the sloths and anteaters. The range there is 5 to nine, depending on the species. The only other exception I know about are manatees, with 6.

In some vertebrate groups like plesiosaurs, longer necks involved forming more numerous vertebrae. In giraffes, the same ancestral number of vertebrae were elongated.

howard hershey: All mammals with the exception of (I believe I remember this correctly) the sloths have seven cervical vertebrae. Sparrows, on the other hand, have significantly more than 7 (the number 23 rings a bell, but I would not swear to it). The okapi and giraffe certainly do have the same number of neck vertebrae (but they differ in length).

[DS: I think I detect big sighs of relief in the above responses to Paul Smith's question. Not having to come up with more neck bones makes the transition to the giraffe so much "easier". But should extra neck bones slow you down a bit? Remember, there was a time when no life forms had any bones.]

Paul Smith: Do humans with differing neck lengths have a variable number of vertebrae in the neck...

Bonz: Not generally, no. You can have an extra vertebra and have the same length neck, too. Consider people with extra digits. They DO have a different number of bones than I do, because I have only 10 fingers.

Paul Smith: ...or would a difference in this count constitute a more major genetic aberration?

Bonz: Nope. You run across that sort of thing now and then, if you see enough people. I know a healthy guy who is 4F for the military because he is "backwards". His heart is on the right side, for instance. He's healthy as a horse, but they don't want him showing up at a MASH with everything on the wrong side.

Paul Smith: If one is born with a "deformed" skeletal structure, such as an extra vertebra in the neck, will that individual's descendants share the deformity in most cases?

Bonz: In MOST cases, no.

howard hershey: Depends on whether the "variation" (to use a less loaded term than "deformed") is genetically based. And further depends upon whether the "variant" allele is dominant, recessive, additive, or what in the heterozygous state. If recessive, its expression in descendants may depend on the extent of inbreeding in the population.

Paul Smith: As an ignoramus in biology, I really don't know the answers to these questions, but I do imagine those answers could change the perspective of evolutionary paths required to produce certain species as descendants from certain other species. Can someone enlighten me? Thanks.

I WROTE: Talk.origins participants indicate that there are no defined species; they all melt into each other in one big rubber-sheet continuum. Each individual creature in fact has its own branch on the evolutionary tree. Can we take that with a grain of salt?

Mark Isaak: No.

Your argument assumes that you get from one species to another by a quantum jump. That doesn't happen (except sometimes with plants). Instead, you get gradual changes from one generation to the next, but those changes accumulate eventually to the point that you have a species different from one that started from the same parents but which accumulated different changes. You can find plenty of examples of species in all stages of reproductive isolation - from those which interbreed but not commonly, to those which can have offspring but only if they're forced to mate, to those which can't interbreed at all. Start taking a close and extended look at grasses or leafhoppers for some examples.

I WROTE: Forget about the definition of evolution. Forget about how evolution happens. Forget about why evolution happens. Forget about the word "evolution" itself. Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

catshark: Forgeting a lot already, aren't we?

I WROTE: For a jumping off point, let's consider a 1-generation transition. An okapi bears a giraffe. The giraffe species becomes established.

catshark: Huh? What gives you the idea that an okapi bore a giraffe? Anymore than a Chimp bore a homo Sapiens or vice versa? (They are "cousins" - much removed - not progenitors!) And as far as okapis and giraffes having common ancestors (a point you don't seem to grasp), you seem hung up on the length of their respective necks. Tell me, how many cervical vertebrae do giraffes have? (Hint: it is the same number you do!). In short, you seem to think that because me and my first cousin don't look much alike, we must not have had the same grandfather! Wrong!

I WROTE: If it produces only one, then that giraffe is in the same predicament of having to produce at least 2 giraffes without the benefit of a giraffe mate.

Thomas Paine: If this is an example of what's on your web page, no wonder you were trounced. If you can "invent" a single generation okapi/giraffe transition... [DS: I was showing how hard it is to imagine a single generation transition.] I can add to your fantasy by stating that single generation transitionals can mate with either their own or the parent species. [DS: Sure, but my requirement stands that one giraffe ultimately parent 2 giraffes, whether its mate is its own offspring, parent, or a non-giraffe.]

Now.. Getting back to reality. There is no such thing as a single generation transition.

I WROTE: The probabability of these 2 nearly inconceivable events occurring is near-zero**2 . (** = exponentiation.) All right, then, the answer is smaller steps in the transition, right? Suppose there are 99 intermediate species between the okapi and the giraffe, each with a neck 1 cm longer than the species from which it emerged. But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times.

Thomas Paine: Why?

Why wouldn't the ability to sucessfully mate with the parent species gradually diminish? Why couldn't something happen, as on Darwin's island, an isolated group of okapis gradually changed together... while, in other areas, other okapi didn't change.

I WROTE: Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

Thomas Paine: What's not obvious to you is logic and reasoning. For example... what the hell is this "zero**200" crap? Zero to any power is zero. That's why mathematicians use zero and never "zero**X. You can't get more zero than zero.

I WROTE: On top of this is some unimaginable guidance overseeing the whole process.

Thomas Paine: Unimaginable? You mean like physics? Chemistry? Adaptability?

I WROTE: Let's suppose we managed to get through the first 20 stages (probability = near-zero**40 ). How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions?

Thomas Paine: Who said they didn't? We'll never know how many random mutations died. We only see evidence of the successful mutations.

I WROTE: What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

Thomas Paine: Apparently your knowledge of science is just as confused as this whole paragraph.

I WROTE: No wonder some evolutionists have had to back off and start thinking about near-instantaneous, big jumps. Near-zero**2 is a lot easier to swallow.

Thomas Paine: "near zero**2" has no meaning - no substance. Fantasies are always easy to swallow - that's why the ignorant fight to keep them alive. [DS: I said near-zero**2, not near zero**2.]

I WROTE: And given how hard it is to swallow near-zero**2 , it's no wonder someone like Senepathy theorizes the first members of each species If everything I've said above is wrong or confused, don't waste your energy on it. Just clear the table and describe the okapi to giraffe transition in generation-by-generation steps. If it wasn't the okapi the giraffe came from - no problem. Start with the akopi or the opaki or whatever the predecessor was.

Thomas Paine: Why?

One would doubt that you would accept the facts, or even understand them anyway.

(bullsnip)

I WROTE: But now the two big problems described above must be overcome 100 times. Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

Colin Peters: The point is, however, that the two 'big' problems are nowhere near as large for an intermediate with a neck 1-cm longer.

First: finding a mate will be difficult. Even for the single-generation mutant this is not a huge problem. Perhaps okapi would find very long-necked okapi unattractive, but other than that (and that is by no means guaranteed) a single mutation that changes neck length is unlikely to interfere with reproduction (in my opinion). The chances that a long-necked mutant would be able to find a viable mate are probably somewhere around 100% (or at least the same as the chances for any 'normal' okapi). [DS: I wasn't talking about a long-necked okapi finding a mate, I was talking about a brand-new, never-before-seen giraffe, complete with giraffe DNA.]

Second: producing more of the same mutant as children of a mutant-'normal' mating is unlikely. Not true. Let's say the mutation was a point mutation on one chromosome. How many of the mutant's offspring will have this mutation? On average half. If we reason that a species producing at replacement rates will have two offspring per pair that survive to reproduce themselves the chance of at least one of these being a 'mutant' as well is 75%. Pretty good odds. If both of them are 'mutants' (25% chance, not bad) then next generation will have more of that mutant strain and much less chance of disappearing through simply not being passed on to offspring. In a second generation with two mutants the chance of the mutation disappearing is roughly 6%. [DS: See previous discussion initiated by Paul Smith about the likelihood of a parent passing along a "deformity" to an off-spring.]

Furthermore this assumes that the mutation doesn't make any difference to the animal's survival rate. If a 1-cm longer neck is an advantage [DS: sounds like a very big "if" to me] then the chances of both (or one) of the offspring being a mutant goes up. Remember that every animal will have many more than two offspring initially. The ones we were talking about above were only the ones which survived and mated in the next generation.

Thirdly: mutations producing 1-cm longer necks are rare. Not as rare as you might think. There was a thread in talk.origins some time earlier about the rate of mutations. It turns out that every human being probably has a half dozen mutations or so - most mutations have no visible effect (a 1-cm longer neck is not really visible either if you think about it, at least on an okapi).

Furthermore, I don't think one has to go that far. It is not inconceivable that the mutations may have been larger; 5 cm, even 10 cm. The whole way is probably out of the question, but this is because such a long neck would be a disadvantage without other changes, not because large mutations are rare in themselves. [DS: What I hear you saying is, it wouldn't be at all remarkable if a horse were born with a 10-foot neck, just that it might have trouble surviving.]

So... Chance of a small mutation occuring: in any reasonably sized population there will be many small mutations available for natural selection to act against. Chance of being transmitted to the next generation (all other things being equal): 75% initially, quickly rising with each generation. Unless a mutation is significantly detrimental it is unlikely to be wiped out simply by the action of drift for some time.

In other words the chances are pretty_good**200, and even that is too low, see below.

I WROTE: On top of this is some unimaginable guidance overseeing the whole process. Let's suppose we managed to get through the first 20 stages (probability = near-zero**40 ). How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions? What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

Colin Peters: Not at all. There are plenty of other mutations and they have no particular impact on the overall process. Those that are disadvantageous disappear, those that are neutral drift, and those that are advantageous increase. If a slightly longer neck is an advantage it will quickly spread to a large proportion of the population. The chances that a second neck lengthening mutation will occur in that population rapidly approach the chances of the initial occurence. [DS: Near zero.] The other mutations going off in other directions are not important, if purple hair is an advantage it will be selected. If purple hair and long necks are both advantages they may be selected in different populations (leading to speciation?) or the same one (more likely). If a short neck mutation occurs it will be a disadvantage and it will not be selected (or else we could not expect long necks to evolve anyway).

So there is no reason to expect, or be awed by, any "control" over the set of mutations that occurred. We simply see the results of a hundred independent acts of selection on the population. If evolution had gone in a different direction (purple hair instead of long necks, or both instead of just one) we would be looking at a different set of choices and wondering how they could have all occured "just so". It is like wondering how you possibly could have been dealt the particular poker hand you got, given the chances of that hand are less than one in two million.

The idea that the chance has to be p**100 would only be correct if we were looking for a specific set of 100 mutations instead of any set that works. [DS: But we are looking for the same, specific mutation to happen over and over - or, more accurately, a string of mutations in which each one is an exaggeration of the previous one.]

I WROTE: If everything I've said above is wrong or confused, don't waste your energy on it. Just clear the table and describe the okapi to giraffe transition in generation-by-generation steps. If it wasn't the okapi the giraffe came from - no problem. Start with the akopi or the opaki or whatever the predecessor was.

Colin Peters: The request for a generation to generation description is going to be hard to fulfill, since that level of detail is impossible to obtain even in field studies of living animals except for very small groups over very limited number of generations. In broad outline though, here is a possible scenerio:

Generation 1 - Okapi population

Generation 2 - A mutant with a slightly longer neck (1, 5, 10 cm, whatever)

Generation 3 to 30 - The mutation spreads through the population, since long necked animals have a better chance to survive in the particular environment where these particular okapi live. [DS: It's hard to swallow that even the extreme, 10 cm increase would make any difference.]

Generation 31 - A mutant with a slightly longer neck. [DS: Near impossible to swallow that the same random mutation strikes again.]

Generation 32 to 60 - The mutation spreads through the population. Our proto giraffes now have significantly longer necks than the originals. [DS: 2 cm is "significant"?]

Generation 61 - A mutation of some related part (neck muscles, neck tendons, heart, whatever). [DS: Even more just-what-the-doctor-ordered random mutations. Hmmm...]

Generation 62 to 90 - The mutation spreads through the population. At the same time the animals are moving into parts of the area where original okapi don't do so well, but where long necked okapi do better. [DS: Isolation of populations is often put forth as a required part of the evolutionary process. This explains why there is only one species of sea life.]

Generation 91 - A mutant with a slightly longer neck. The above process 2 to 90 repeats. [DS: Sorry, I didn't made it through the first 90.]

Continue repeating until there is no longer any advantage to having a longer neck or it is balanced by some other selective pressure. You have your giraffe and it only took, perhaps, a few hundred generations, a few tens of thousands of years should suffice.

Do you need more detail than that? If so, why? [DS: I was hoping for someone to take the explanation beyond the realm of "hand-waving". Even if I were satisfied with your account of the first 91 generations, and could swallow that it could repeat itself many more times, I still don't get the big picture. What did we get out of this? Just giraffes? Giraffes and okapis? Giraffes and okapis and all of the possibly thousands of intermediates? What about all the okapis that had slight birth defects at the same time the first one with a 1-cm longer neck was born? Did they all spawn a different "target" species? Or perhaps a target species with thousands of intermediate species as well? This would get us into millions of millions of new species descending from the okapi alone, in a few tens of thousands of years. If you say I am being ridiculous, listen to how natural and simple all of you make it sound for the tiniest birth defect to spread to the rest of the population. Of course, you will say that all those other birth defects wouldn't be beneficial like a slightly longer neck. But, be honest now, couldn't we all list any number of mutations that would be unquestionably more advantageous than a slightly longer neck?]

Oh, I should have also mentioned the other mutations that occur in the long necked population, and, since they no longer mix with the original okapi as much, lead to infertility in hybrids. This is why the two can't interbreed, not because a long neck mutant okapi (with only a long neck mutation) couldn't breed with a normal one.

I WROTE: Use diagrams, graphs, equations or whatever it takes to describe the transition, generation by generation. Take another look at my web page where I solicit a description of the grizzly bear to whale transition if you don't understand what I'm after.

Colin Peters: Grizzly bear to whale? Okay, I'm nitpicking, but the whales pretty much definitely didn't evolve from anything much like bears. Mesonychids is the currently best supported ancestral group. Considering the process occurred millions of years ago you are never going to get a generation-by-generation account. However, why do you need such a thing? [DS: That's the way it had to have happened.] Do you need a centimeter by centimeter account to accept that I walked to work this morning? [DS: I understand that a line is a continuum of points.] Do you find films hard to believe because of all the gaps between the frames? [DS: I know that each frame of a film is not created by a random alteration of the previous frame.]

Mike: Stage One: For the sake of argument, lets assume that okapis are the ancestors of giraffes (as opposed to common ancestor). In our population there is naturally a range in neck lengths, some longer, some shorter. This range alone is most likely larger than the 1cm increments you are proposing. This shouldn't be too hard to swallow, since we see similar variation in the human population. (I'm 5'6", my brothers 5'9", I have friends over 6' as well as shorter than me.)

Stage Two: Now lets say that the climate begins changing in one area where the okapi live. A drought begins. In the beginning, everyone is doing fine. Then, as the drought continues, most of the vegetation is picked from the bushes. The okapi that are taller have access to food that the shorter okapi can't reach (i.e. they can eat from taller bushes). ON AVERAGE more of the tall okapi survive than the shorter okapi. The next year, the population is on average taller. As this continues for a few years, the the population continues to get taller. A similar trend was observed on one of the Galapagos islands, where the average size of a finch's beak increased during a decade of droughts.

Stage Three: Eventually, the cost of growing longer necks is outweighed by the benefit of reaching more food (as tall as most trees, maybe?). Now our population looks pretty much like giraffes, and not okapis. [DS: At the end of Stage Two you had tall okapis (and not even necessarily longer-necked okapis!) At the beginning of Stage Three you had giraffes. You left out the good stuff!]

Stage Four: If we assume that the droughts were (relatively) local, i.e., okapis in the next valley did not suffer as severe a drought, then they may not have changed at all. If they cross to the giraffes' valley, they will very likely not be recognized as being the same species. Again, a similar pattern is observed in Galapagos finches, where beak size is the main factor in recognizing ones own species.

Thus we now have two separate species. Happy? While this is, for the most part, a just-so story, I have tried to keep it in line with real-world observations.

I WROTE: In my page I mentioned transitions from not feathered to feathered; single jaw joint to double jaw joint; double jaw joint/no ear bones to single jaw joint/ear bones; and grizzly bear to whale.

Jim Acker: I'm coming a bit late to the discussion (as usual) and I like to talk about archaeocete fossils, but whenever someone asks about how a pretty-much terrestrial animal starts to become progressively more adapted to the water, I like to show them the nutria, the capybara, and the beaver. [DS: If you want to do beaver-to-whale, fine with me.]

Dr. Fidelius: ...and from the reconstructions I've seen, otters and pinnipeds also offer good analogies. [DS: Otter to whale? Go for it.]

I WROTE: For a jumping off point, let's consider a 1-generation transition. An okapi bears a giraffe. The giraffe species becomes established.

Matt Silberstein: You have done an excellent job in showing that a one generation transition from an okapi like antelope to a giraffe like antelope is quite unlikely. So how about show you [?] analysis for a 1,000 generation transition? One in which one or more mutations spreads through a sub-population at a time. [DS: I went on to explain why that is even harder to conceive. The reason for the difficulty is contained in your own last sentence where you refer to mutations - plural. How can one conceive of a thousand random mutations working in perfect coordination to produce a single, more-or-less sensible change in anatomy?]

I WROTE: Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

Pim van Meurs: You are just limiting yourself so that you do not have to look at the data.

I WROTE: I have trouble envisioning [the okapi to giraffe transition.]

Pim van Meurs: That's hardly an argument.

[Control genes and] Hopeful Monsters:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/hopefulmonsters.shtml

Scientists have discovered what they believe may be the molecular basis of evolution [Hsp 90]:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_222000/222096.stm

I WROTE: Just describe some interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps. Account for all of the descendants of all of the members of the source species until you arrive at an established population of the destination species.

Bonz: How do you determine what a "destination" species is? In the simplest example, the generation before yours is the starting point, and your generation is the destination. [DS: In the transition of your choice, the destination species is the 2nd one.]

I WROTE: In my page I mentioned transitions from not feathered to feathered; single jaw joint to double jaw joint; double jaw joint/no ear bones to single jaw joint/ear bones; and grizzly bear to whale.

Bonz: You cannot get from grizzly bear to whale. Whales are already here, and grizzly bears are not in their ancestry. You could, if you wanted to, change London to LOOK LIKE Paris. You could tear down buildings, build others, etc., but no matter how much you do, it will never BE Paris. [DS: Start with whatever land mammal whales evolved from.]

I WROTE: Talk.origins participants are knowledgable about an animal called the okapi. They indicate that it is in every respect identical to a giraffe except its neck is half as long (and, presumably, it does not mate with giraffes, at least normally.) If you'd like, use the okapi to giraffe transition.

Bonz: Same answer. Today's okapi cannot be ancestral to the giraffe. No Elvis impersonator can BE Elvis. [DS: Then start with the effarig.]

I WROTE: For a jumping off point, let's consider a 1-generation transition. An okapi bears a giraffe. The giraffe species becomes established.

Bonz: No. Evolution does not occur with individuals. A population of okapis would give birth to a population of giraffes. [DS: Well, that certainly speeds things up.]

You seem to be conflating "transitional" and "ancestral".

I WROTE: That such a mutation could occur is hardly conceivable. And if it did happen, it is harder to conceive how the new giraffe species could become established. The first giraffe has no giraffes for mates and so must mate with an okapi - in spite of this being itself either impossible or very rare. (Zoologists?) Ultimately, the first giraffe must produce at least 2 giraffes. If it doesn't produce any, the new species dies. If it produces only one, then that giraffe is in the same predicament of having to produce at least 2 giraffes without the benefit of a giraffe mate.

Bonz: Assume that there are 1 million okapis. Ten thousand of them live somewhere - a caldera of an extinct volcano, let's say - where they very seldom encounter one of the others. Over generations, the ones living in the caldera get longer necks and change their mating behavior a little. [DS: That's my challenge. Describe how the longer necks came about in generation-by-generation steps.]

A huge storm comes along and tears down the walls of the caldera. Now you have one population again, but one part of it does not mate with the other part. You have seen a speciation. [DS: Good. Where did the long necks come from?]

I WROTE: Even if the random mutation which gives a smaller change in neck length is not quite as unlikely (and that's not obvious to me), the probability of all these events occurring and arriving at an established giraffe species is near-zero**200 .

Bonz: There is no "goal". To establish a species, all that has to happen is that the parts of the population do not interbreed significantly. [DS: Ok, but besides not interbreeding there are many other interesting differences between a tulip and a panda.]

I WROTE: How did that happen so neatly - with no other random mutations going off in other directions? What about the tail disappearing? Growing an eye in the top of the head? Thumbs? Purple hair? No, just a sequence of completely random mutations giving successively 1 cm longer necks - nothing else.

Bonz: The tail may or may not disappear. {shrug} The giraffe's or okapi's tails may yet disappear. Or get longer. [DS: Wanna describe the tail disappearing in generation-by-generation steps?]

I WROTE: No wonder some evolutionists have had to back off and start thinking about near-instantaneous, big jumps. Near-zero**2 is a lot easier to swallow.

Bonz: The biggest problem is, you don't have a clue as to how real biologists think it happens. [DS: Check.]

I WROTE: And given how hard it is to swallow near-zero**2 , it's no wonder someone like Senepathy theorizes the first members of each species walked independently out of the promordial soup-bowl - without the benefit of parents, even. According to him, the probability of giraffe DNA coming together randomly in the broth is astronomically more probable than getting from okapi DNA to giraffe DNA via random mutations.

Bonz: He may or may not be right. Since it is a calculation of something that isn't thought to have happened, who cares?

I WROTE: If everything I've said above is wrong or confused, don't waste your energy on it. Just clear the table and describe the okapi to giraffe transition in generation-by-generation steps. If it wasn't the okapi the giraffe came from - no problem. Start with the akopi or the opaki or whatever the predecessor was.

Bonz: A population of organisms in the past were separated by some feature such that they did not encounter each other very often. Populations change slightly over time. If they interbreed freely, the changes get distributed over the whole population, and you get a single population with a lot of diversity. [DS: Why?]

If the population[s?] do NOT interbreed freely, the various changes accumulate in the respective populations. The longer the populations stay separate, the more changes accumulate in each sub population. [DS: Why?]

I WROTE: Talk.origins participants indicate that there are no defined species; they all melt into each other in one big rubber-sheet continuum.

Bonz: In a way, that's true. Some species look exactly like other species. Only an expert (or another member of the species) can tell them apart. Lions and tigers can breed and have viable offspring in captivity, but they occupy different habitats and don't mate much, if at all, in the wild.

It is likely that you can take a sperm or egg from a house cat and the complement from a lion and start an embryo. The difference in size and habit will keep them from mating in nature - and it is very likely that the embryo will spontaneously abort because it will get conflicting signals. It can grow a kitty leg or a lion leg, but there is no "blending", ever, in genetics.

I WROTE: Can we assume the okapi was an established species before the transition occurred, meaning that there was a sizable population of animals that looked okapi-like and behaved okapi-like and bred almost exclusively with other okapis?

Bonz: Nope. [DS: Even if I was using "okapi" as a convenient name for the short-necked ancestor to the giraffe?]

I WROTE: In any case, clearly describe what you believe to be the starting conditions for the emergence of the giraffe.

Bonz: Neither okapi nor giraffes existed back then. Their ancestors did. One population got longer necks than the other. We call the long necked ones the species of giraffe; the others we call the species of okapi.

I WROTE: If the shell was so crucial for the survival of the turtle, how come so many shell-less reptiles hung in there?

Tedd Hadley WROTE: Has it ever occurred to you that different environments have different predators, different food sources, different energy requirements and that in some environments a shell may [be] more of a detriment than others?

I WROTE: Turtles share the exact same environment with numerous shell-less animals.

Bonz: No, they do not. Two species competing for the same resources cannot co-exist for long. Imagine that you and I are species. We are locked in a huge room with a constantly replenishing supply of 1000 sandwiches. We do rather well, since it takes only 200 sandwiches a year for each of us each year. Then I have 6 children and you have 5. NOW we have a problem.

Next generation, each of my kids have 6 kids, and each of yours has 5.

Either you get good at killing my kids, or you starve and eventually go extinct.

I WROTE: Once again, my position in this is that we take a step back from "explanations" and solidify what happens in the emergence of new species. When we have good agreement on that, then we can more productively discuss the whys and hows.

Bonz: No problem. Anything that tends to inhibit free mating between the populations is a step toward speciation. It can be a change in behavior (you can't do the mating dance "right"); a change in morphology (the embryo gets conflicting orders at some stage and aborts); a change in smell (your "I'm ready to mate" pheromone doesn't work as well) or anything else. [DS: All well and good, but that's a long haul from describing how long necks come about, or eyeballs, or feathers, or whales...]

A talk.origins participant recommended I read this, so here goes. (Note: For some passages in the following discussion, it was too much trying to find or make a good transition, so I just wrote, "Moving on...")

Getting through this one was a chore. I had to renew the book from the library twice - the maximum - and even then it went overdue before I could force myself to finish it and write up this report.

If you expect to find any description or explanation of the evolution of new body parts, these 300 pages will be a waste of your time. Don't expect to read of evidence - or speculation, even - of how the 13 Galapagos finch species got their different beak shapes. All of the so-called evolution which the author and the main characters gush over is limited to tiny shifts within the bounds of variations that already exist within a species.

Peter and Rosemary Grant and other members of their team have been making detailed observations of finches on one island in the Galapagos since 1973. The main measurements they take are dimensions of the finch beaks. They are very precise measurements, indeed:

(Page 5) "Beak length, 14.9 millimeters," Peter recites. Beak depth, 8.8. Beak width, 8 millimeters."

I hope all of the team members are in agreement as to where the beak starts, exactly.

As in all writings on evolution, it seems, you will find loads of ammo from the skeptics' camp. Here are some passages early in the book; there are more further down.

(Page 6) The Origin Of Species says very little about the origin of species. Darwin's full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Yet the book does not document the origin of a single species, or a single case of natural selection, or the preservation of one favored race in the struggle for life.

(Page 7) Fossils argued that evolution has happened. Logic argued that natural selection can make it happen. But neither bones nor logic could demonstrate the one leading to the other, natural selection causing evolution. In 1893, in an essay entitled "The All-Sufficiency of Natural Selection", the German biologist August Weismann confessed "that it is really very difficult to imagine this process of natural selection in its details; and to this day it is impossible to demonstrate it in any one point."

(Page 8) In 1990, in a one-volume Encyclopedia Of Evolution, a physical anthroplogist wrote that the "complaint of a half-century ago holds good: The number of experimental tests of natural selection is pitiful; the few that have been conducted still do heavy duty as examplars."

What Weiner intends to show is that

(Page 8-9) Biologists are observing year by year and sometimes even day by day or hour by hour details of life's unrolling and opening, right now.... [Darwin] vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.

(Page 16) With the conditions of life on this planet changing everywhere faster and faster, the pressures of natural selection are everywhere increasing in intensity, daily and hourly, even on islands as remote as the Galapagos. Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.

During the period of the finch watch, there were 2 extraordinary meteorological events: an extreme drought in 1977; and extreme rainfall due to El Nin~o in 1983. Only one in 7 finches survived the drought, with more of the smaller finches getting killed off. The larger finches - with larger beaks - survived better. Their offspring also had larger beaks... Natural selection! Evolution! In Weiner's words:

(Page 78) And what made the difference between life and death was often "the slightest variation," an imperceptible difference in the size of the beak, just as Darwin's theory predicts.

Something tells me you'd get much the same result if you put human beings on a thousand mile forced march. I'll bet you the offspring of the hardier humans who survived would have bigger noses.

The 1983 El Nin~o was probably the strongest of the 20th century (page 100). It had the opposite effect of the drought; the larger finches died. The explanation of why the big birds had a rough time with a superabundance of small seeds sounded strained to me. My mouth handles potatoes, and it handles rice grains, too.

In any case, the net effect was to undo the effects of the drought. The author enthuses:

(Page 106) Not only can evolution push a species fast in one direction. Evolution can reverse directions and push it back just as swiftly.

As for me, I'm disappointed that we don't seem to be getting anywhere.

(Page 192) The width of the [medium ground finch] beak... is measurably narrower [in 1991] than the beaks of the generation before them - down from 8.86 millimeters at the time of the flood to 8.74 millimeters now. That does not take [medium ground finches] back where they were at the start of the Grants' watch, but nearly so.

The author unwittingly details another recent, major catastrophe in the lives of the finches.

(Page 145) To find out what the [Galapagos] finches were eating, [American ornithologist Robert] Bowman shot them by the hundreds and inspected the contents of their stomachs.

But, no, there isn't a single word about how evolution responded that upheaval. Another instance of a major change for one of the finch species was a big decrease in the number of cacti.

(Page 192) In spite of all this selection pressure [that is, diminished numbers of cacti], the cactus finches have not changed in the last ten years. By all the Grants' measures, their beaks and bodies are the same now, on the average, as before the flood. This too makes sense in terms of the adaptive landscape, because in evolutionary terms these birds have nowhere to go.

Very convenient... It makes perfect sense when a species evolves in response to such changes; and it makes perfect sense when it doesn't.

Given the fuzziness of the notion of species in general, it's no surprise that there is some fuzziness as to whether the 13 Galapagos finch species are really separate species.

The Grants have focused on the ground finches because they are easy to watch. Three species of the ground finches are the large, medium and small ground finches. They have, respectively, large, medium and small beaks (surprise!) Page 42: "Within each of these three species, the beaks of the individual birds are variable." Thus, the largest small ground finches (and their beaks) are as big as the smallest medium ground finches. Likewise, with the largest medium ground finches and the smallest large ground finches. How they can tell themselves apart is a good question, one which the Grant team devoted some effort to.

Still, the 13 species rarely interbreed. At least that was the case before the floods of 1983. For some reason, after the floods, there has been much more interbreeding. The extent of this hybridization caused a gear shift in the thinking of the finch watchers. Where natural selection had been the be-all-and-end-all up to that point, now they think hybridization is a big part of the evolutionary picture.

(Page 158) As [the Grants] contemplate the rise of the hybrid finches, they are beginning to suspect that selection and crossing [between existing species] work together as part of the same creative process.

Besides giving the impression of another "theory du jour", this all remained a little unclear to me - partly because I wonder how you can have hybrids until you've developed different species or breeds in the first place. In any case, it sounds like hybridization is undoing a lot of evolution:

(Page 206) Roughly one out of ten birds born on [the island] now are hybrids, and the hybrids are doing better than any of the others on the island. In a blink of evolutionary time, all of Darwin's finches could run together and congeal...

Again, it would have been a lot more fascinating to read about the appearance of new and fantastic finches on the island. I liked this little typo:

(Page 141) [Darwin's] vision had nothing to do with... the matings of hybirds.

Moving on...

(Page 19) "Peter Grant's service to biology has been extreme," says William Hamilton, an evolutionist at Oxford university. "He has shown that the most important and pervasive theory that biology has really does work, and that almost all of the varied and fine details of evolution that he has found occurring are understandable by this theory, and, so far, seem to need no other.... I think it can be claimed that the [Grant group's] work as a whole give the most detailed unified support to the Neo-Darwinian view of evolution that the theory has yet received."

What rankles me about that passage is that nowhere in the book are we told what "neo-Darwinism" is, or how it relates to Darwinism. As I've expressed elsewhere, it seems that evolutionists won't hang up a stationary target.

Moving on...

(Page 39) Variation is both universal and mysterious, one of the deepest problems in nature, and for Darwin it was for a long time completely bewildering. He wondered why, if his thinking was right, we see any species at all. Why not a continuous spectrum from tiny individuals right on up the scale to kingdoms? Why for instance do we find a vampire finch and a vegetarian finch?... Why not a whole smooth series of omnivores between the two, with a perfect series of intermediate beaks? Why not a blur, a chaos, an infinite web... of continuous variation?

(Remember that there are those in talk.origins who say that this is exactly what we do see.) Weiner explains it this way:

(Page 39) When we look around us... the species of animals and plants we see are survivors. Varieties in between them have died off and disappeared...

Does that work for you?

There was a discussion (page 91) of a study of the colorful spots on guppies. The guppy spots attract mates and predators. Over the course of generations the spots "evolve" to more or less gaudy depending on the type of predators around, and the mottling of the stream bed.

That's all very interesting, but I still wonder why Darwinism wouldn't give rise to a thousand other solutions. Why wouldn't females start to prefer the drabbest males? Why don't the males evolve shells, poisons, or killer teeth?

There is a story (page 107) which seems to me another example of what I call the "ouija board" effect in science - an unconscious massaging of the data until it says what you want it to. Jamie Smith observed natural selection in song sparrows over a period of years. He analyzed the data and concluded there was no evolution. But Dolph Schluter was determined to find evolution - and he did! Even though the birds ended up the same as when they started, he managed to find tiny variations year by year.

(Page 108) Dolph says, "A species looks steady when you look at it over years - but when you actually get out the magnifying glass you see that it's wobbling constantly. So I guess it's evolution in action. The world is not as stable as you think!"

No doubt if you had gone over your grandparent's generation with a pair of calipers you would've found some measurement which differs slightly from your own generation (if not in actuality, at least as a artifact of the measuring process.)

Well into the book there is more ammo for the skeptics. I was more than a little surprised myself to see how badly Darwinism had fallen out of favor earlier in this century. (Made me wonder if talk.origins is the only surviving bastion of support, and why I went to the trouble to write that little essay in the first place...)

(Page 129) After Darwin's death, many biologists found it easy to accept evolution and impossible to accept Darwin's chief explanation for it. Evolution, yes; selection, no. William Bateson, the founder of modern genetics, wrote an elegy for Darwinism in 1913, calling it "so inapplicable to the facts that we can only marvel... at the want of penetration displayed by the advocates of such a proposition."

Nordenskiold's History Of Biology dismissed Darwinism forever in 1924:

To raise the theory of selection, as has often been done, to the rank of a "natural law" comparable in value with the law of gravity established by Newton is, of course, quite irrational, as time has already shown; Darwin's theory of the origin of species was long ago abandoned.

And Singer's A Short History Of Biology killed Darwin with kindness in 1931:

...natural selection by the survival of the fittest, is certainly far less emphasized by naturalists now than in the years that immediately followed the appearance of Darwin's book. At the time, however, it was an extremely stimulating suggestion.

As part of the 1981 permanent exhibit "The Origin Of Species" at the British Museum's Natural History Building, a film loop tells visitors:

(Page 130) The Survival of the Fittest is an empty phrase; it is a play on words. For this reason, many critics feel that not only is the idea of evolution unscientific, but the idea of natural selection also.... The idea of evolution by natural selection is a matter of logic, not science, and it follows that the concept of evolution by natural selection is not, strictly speaking, scientific.

That sparked a year-long debate in Nature magazine.

(Page 130) Even Darwin himself admitted twinges of doubt. He asks in the Origin: "Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, an organ of trifling importance, such as the tail of the giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and, on the other hand, an organ so wonderful as the eye?" And though he answers in the affirmative, the question is more than rhetorical, for in a letter to a friend, Darwin confesses:

"I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

If you expect the author to come charging back in shining armor on a white horse to slay these doubts, here's what you get:

(Page 131) Watching natural selection in action is one way to get beyond the debates and abstractions that have wrapped this subject in a century and a half of philosophical fog. The Grants can look and see. And this year [1991], with the help of hybrids, they hope to see a little more than they have seen before.

A scientist named Robert Bowman made an interesting observation:

(Page 145) Time and again Robert Bowman watched the sort of mixed flocks that Darwin himself had noticed when he first got off the Beagle. Time and again he saw four or more species of ground finches feeding in the very same bush, small peaceable kingdoms of ground finches. "And since there is no evidence that competition is occurring at the present time," Bowman declared in his thesis, "I see no logical reason to assume that it must have occurred in the past."

To argue that the absence of competition is proof of its power seemed to Bowman infuriatingly circular [?] reasoning.

The invoking of computer modeling may cause a twinge of embarrassment.

(Page 153) Peter Grant had asked [Dolph Schluter] to find a way of pulling together all the group's work on beaks and seeds in one framework; to create an all-embracing mathematical model that would help the finch watchers understand what they were seeing. Dolph decided to draw their data in terms of adaptive landscapes, with the aid of computers...

Dolph fed in all of the information on beak sizes and seed sizes.

(Page 153) Then he programmed the computer to calculate how many finches a hypothetical island could support....

Dolph assumed it would draw a peak corresponding to the best of all possible beaks, that is, the beak that would produce the maximum number of finches on that idealized Galapagos island.... The valleys on either side of the peak would represent all the miscellaneous beak sizes that were relatively unfit.

He set the computer going, and he was thrilled by what he saw. The computer did not draw a single peak. Instead it drew three peaks, with deep valleys between them.

What the computer noticed was that there are three categories of seeds - soft, medium and hard - and came up with a beak for each. Hooray for computers.

Similarly, on page 205, we read about the "succinct mathematical formula" that takes into consideration heritabilities of beak dimensions and seed abundances. The researchers plugged in the 1984 values, and the formula predicted the 1987 beak dimensions - to within a hundredth of a millimeter! Whew, that's some formula! Take that, you who criticize natural selection on the grounds that it doesn't submit to quantitive predictions.

Moving on...

(Page 180) How did blind creation make so many new kinds of tools?... As one of Darwin's early critics writes, it is hard "to see how such indefinite oscillations of infinitesimal beginnings can ever build up a sufficiently appreciable resemblance to a leaf, bamboo, or other object, for Natural Selection to seize upon and perpetuate."

No one has ever put this problem more forcefully than Darwin himself, in the Origin. "To suppose that the eye with all its [complexity] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree," he writes.

(Page 181) Richard Dawkins defends Darwin's position vigorously in his book The Blind Watchmaker.... Dawkins argues that selection on even the slightest nubbins and rude beginnings can build up instruments as complicated as watches, telescopes, or the human eye. As long as each stage in the evolution of a complex adaptation is adaptive for its own sake, it is likely to be preserved within each generation and embellished by the next, by Darwin's process of natural selection.

"Likely to be... embellished"??? Surely such a phrase implies some sort of guiding force. How can random mutations be likely to embellish anything when they can head off in any number of directions with equal probability?

Moving on...

(Page 218) But every living thing carries its [genetic] code in the same invisible characters, always the same four letters [G, A, T, C], because ultimately every living thing shares the same ancestor, about four billion years back, near the birth of the planet.

That does not follow logically. There may be reasons why life appearing at different times and places always uses the same "four letters".

Moving on...

(Page 231) But evolutionists are forever dividing and subdividing into schismatic sects, Kingdoms of Either and Or. Do new species arise in [geographic isolation], or do they arise among neighbors? Is the origin of species fast or slow? Is the mechanism natural selection or sexual selection? And so on.

But Weiner assures us that "none of these questions really have to be framed either-or." Thanks.

On the subject of the isolation of species - generally, or in the Galapagos - here are 3 passages of interest:

(Page 141) But Darwin's finches are not marooned, each species to its own island. On average there are 7 or 8 species to each island in the archipelago. Beyond that there is the constant traffic of visiting finches. The birds may have diverged - or begun to diverge - in isolation, but they are not in isolation now.

(Page 138) So there are endless streams of wanderers between the islands.... [Darwin's finches] are still wandering and straying across their islands, all across the archipelago. The Rothschild expedition at the turn of the century spotted a single specimen flying many kilometers out at sea.

(Page 246) Around the world almost one hundred species of birds are known to have gone extinct since the 17th century, together with more than 80 subspecies; more than 9 out of 10 of these lost species and subspecies lived on islands.

Taking a look at microscopic life, here may be what was for me the most interesting passage in the whole book:

(Page 258) It is easy to start a resistance movement in the most common bacteria in the human gut, E. coli. First, one establishes a colony of E. coli in a Petri dish. The bacteria multiply so rapidly that a single microscopic cell can grow into a visible pile of 10 million E. coli between morning and mid-afternoon....

Next, one doses the colony with an antibiotic. As fast as it grew, the colony disappears. Only a few cells in the colony have survived - the one or two or three cells that carry a rare resistance gene for that antibiotic. These several survivors multiply and pass their successful gene to their descendants. Soon there is a new colony in the dish, a colony in which virtually every member cell is resistant to the antibiotic.

And to think that in a few hours some of the resistant bacteria could be parenting new colonies half-way around the world, having flown there in the gut of some businessman. Fascinating! BUT... notice, as in the case of the moths "evolving" from light to dark and back again depending on the soot on the trees, we haven't gotten any new creature that didn't already exist.

Weiner gives another interesting example: how elephants are becoming more tuskless where they were being poached for their tusks. The tuskless elephants avoid being poached, and then pass on their tusklessness.

Moving on...

(Page 55) It was some time after [British ornithologist David] Lack got home to England [about 1938] that, like Darwin before him, he did a double-take. As he looked over his data he noticed that the species of finches whose beaks are most nearly identical do not live together on any of the islands in the archepelago.... Lack had never seen breeding colonies of both cactus finches (G. scandens and G. conirostris) on any one island. What is more, if two finch species with rather similar beaks do share an island, their beaks are more divergent in their measurements on that island than they are elsewhere. That is, the longer beak is longer than average, and the shorter beak is shorter than average, almost as if they were consciously trying to get out of each other's niches. Lack found these patterns in case after case, not only in his own data books, but also in measurements of the thousands of museum specimens that had been collected since Darwin.

(Page 145) Lack pointed out that on Santa Cruz the small beaks [of the small-beaked species] are small and the medium beaks [of the medium-beaked species] are medium. On Daphne, where there are very few small beaks, the medium beaks have become smaller. On Los Hermanos where there are very few medium beaks, the small beaks have become larger. Lack saw this pattern with many other pairs of finches on the islands...

Admittedly, all quite interesting, too. It's almost enough to get you wondering about the notion of "niches". For half a second. If the circularity of the concept isn't obvious, notice you've just shifted the problem from explaining the creation of species to the creation of "niches" - and why there isn't one for a medium ground finch with 360 degree vision and a 195 IQ.

Comments on the above book report:

In June 2000 I invited talk.origins participants to read the above book report on "The Beak Of The Finch." Here is a brief discussion of the most significant comments. If desired, you can track down the complete postings using deja.com. I used the subject line, "Welcome to my evolution FAQ - round 4."

Matt Silberstein and Mark VandeWettering were both miffed that I didn't mention the book winning the Pulitzer Prize for science writing. Silberstein wrote: "You did know that, didn't you?" Well, no, actually. I did notice in the acknowledgments that the Grants were very reluctant to have the book written.

Silberstein wrote: "And you did notice that the book was not about the evolution of 'new body parts' (whatever that means)..."

New body parts are anatomical features present in a given species which the ancestors of that species did not possess. It would seem to me that someone who can't fathom "new body parts" is obliged to believe in the completely independent origins of the species.

Regarding the observation that the beak sizes of the survivors of a terrible drought were larger than the preceding average, I wrote "Something tells me you'd get much the same result if you put human beings on a thousand mile forced march. I'll bet you the offspring of the hardier humans who survived would have bigger noses."

To Silberstein, this was ridiculous. He wrote: "Why?"

To VandeWettering, it was self-evident. He wrote: "Well, yes. That is an example of natural selection and evolution as well."

Oh well, the important thing is to keep up the attack. I'm reminded of my earlier argument in talk.origins that the human race is "special"; that there couldn't be alien races out there as advanced as humans - else, we'd know about them. Half of t.o. screamed, "The galaxy is sick with intelligent populations, you moron!" The other half hollered, "Just because we're the only ones, how does that make us special??? Somebody has to win the lottery, you nitwit!"

Silberstein wrote: "Yep, Darwin did fall out of favor. But with the modern synthesis (something you don't know about, but ignorance does not seem to be a barrier for you) Darwin rose again."

I presume modern synthesis is the same as "Neo-Darwinism", or forms part of it, or overlaps with it. The word appears twice in the Pulitzer Prize award-winning "The Beak Of The Finch", but without a single sentence explaining or defining it.

Hooray for your evolution page. Make sure you read Neck of the Giraffe (I think the author is Francis Hitching, a Brit), for a professional biologist and museum curator that's on your side!

The sleight-of-hand goes like this: Microevolution is self-evident fact. The only known "cause" for microevolution is selective pressure. Macroevolution is probably true. Therefore, macroevolution happened via natural selection. Incredible that nobody sees the holes in this logic.

Microevolution happens by shuffling existing genes between individuals of a given genus, like Mendel explained and every goatherd since before Moses has observed. Macroevolution involves (AT LEAST) the creation of whole new chromosomes filled with all new genes. How in the name of hell can this occur via gradual accumulation? Did the deer with 34 chromosomes evolve into a giraffe with 36 chromosomes via a creature with 35.07713 chromosomes?

Your thought experiment with bears and whales is similar to one in Neck of the Giraffe: The idea that a drought made high-up leaves the only good food source, influencing giraffes-to-be that were a few inches taller to have a selective advantage over the average ones, is rubbish. How did any females survive, given that they are a whole meter shorter than the males? How did the adolescents survive, given that they're even shorter? Enough environmental pressure to cause ANY males to starve would wipe out adolescents and females, making the race extinct. Besides, geology proves that the climate was warm and rainy, so where was the drought?

Thanks for the recommendation, Rick. "The Neck Of The Giraffe" was a real eye-opener. After reading it, I searched the web for "Francis Hitching" and I found many attacks on the person, but very little on what he actually wrote. For instance, someone claims to have found that the Royal Archaeological Institute says it has no member by that name. And Stephen Jay Gould says he never talked to a Francis Hitching. But does Gould disavow any of his numerous quotes in this book?

If Hitching made it all up, it would seem an incredibly stupid thing to do (unless "Hitching" is a pseudonym and the author's true identity is well-protected.) Moreover, there are tons of references given - names of scientists, institutions, journals, and symposia. The parade of people with distinguished-sounding (at least) positions in many fields who have big doubts about Darwinism is so overwhelming that you might find yourself wondering, "So who believes it anyway? Why am I wasting my time reading this?"

I want to pass on some of the highlights and other points of interest to me. Where you recognize a bald-faced lie, shoot it down. (Page numbers are from the 1982, Ticknor & Fields hardback edition.)

Right near the beginning (page 12), Hitching writes: "Evolution and Darwinism are often taken to mean the same thing. But they don't. Evolution of life over a very long period of time is a fact, if we are to believe evidence gathered during the last two centuries from geology, paleontology (the study of fossils), molecular biology and many other scientific disciplines. Despite the many believers in Divine creation who dispute this... the probability that evolution has occurred approaches certainty in scientific terms."

Further on (page 250), Hitching gives Darwin a demerit for mixing up the "fact of evolution" and his "theory of how it took place." Philosopher Marjorie Grene (page 250) explains that "for many people the idea of evolution means natural selection still."

As expressed in my own FAQ, I still don't get what the big deal is. Who can seriously argue that "evolution" and "natural selection" haven't gone everywhere hand-in-hand from before we were all born? Hitching himself says (page 49), "It is fair to say that this explanation of evolution... called neo-Darwinism... has utterly dominated biological science for the last fifty years." When he gets around to discussing alternative theories in chapter 7, "Patterns of life", they sound completely unfamiliar and almost completely unfathomable (to me, as presented in this book.)

The bizarre thing is, if the pro-evolution gang insists on taking credit for whatever the correct answer turns out to be, no matter how far off-base they are now, they are allowing that evolution could be creation (whether divine or not, and whether creation took place all at once or at different times.) Would somebody with more of a reputation than me please tell the world how stupid this "evolution is fact" business is.

Hitching (page 15) says "Darwin's theory is in fact quite good at explaining minor changes." He had just mentioned the breeding of dogs, horses and vegetables; moths becoming darker as the trees become blackened with soot; and mutant fruit flies produced by x-rays. But even here, Hitching was overgenerous to Darwin; only the 2nd example of the 3 has anything to do with natural selection.

Hitching writes (page 19): "When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there; at least not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don't exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, isn't, or might be, transitional between this group and that.

"Yet there are lengthy periods of history when there is every reason to expect plenty of intermediates. At such times, geological strata straddling an evolutionary change hold an abundance of evidence - the fossils are of good quality, and their timespan on Earth is known with a high degree of accuracy.

"Museums have, for instance, countless piles of fossils of the early invertebrate sea creatures, and an equally large number of ancient fishes. Between the two, covering a period of about 100 million years, there ought to be cabinets full of intermediates - indeed, one would expect the fossils to blend so gently into one another that it would be difficult to tell where the invertebrates ended and the vertebrates began.

"But this isn't the case. Instead, groups of well-defined, easily classifiable fish jump into the fossil record seemingly from nowhere: mysteriously, suddenly, full formed, and in a most un-Darwinian way. And before them are maddening, illogical gaps where their ancestors should be."

Not to belabor this, but to give an idea of Hitching's technique, here is a quote (page 20) from David M. Raup, the curator of "one of the world's finest natural history museums", the Field Museum in Chicago:

"Probably most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is made in favour of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true. Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record."

Hitching raises the question (page 20), "How did fish become amphibians? The most important body changes here are that the fins must develop to support the amphibians weight. (There are many associated changes of enormous complexity and difficulty, such as gills being transformed into lungs, but these, being soft tissue, might not show up as fossils.) On the basis of gradual Darwinian evolution, you would expect a wealth of transitional forms showing the development of the appropriate fins, the loss of others, and the slow strengthening of the pelvic bones.

"There are none that show a continuous chain or series..."

Hitching reports (page 25), "Rodents appear in the fossil record with startling suddenness, without any apparent predecessors."

Hitching quotes (page 22) Professor N. Heribert-Nilsson of Lund University, Sweden. After 40 years in paleontology, the professor wrote:

"It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

And Hitching has Stephen Jay Gould (page 23) calling the fossil gaps "the trade secret of palaeontology."

Hitching describes (page 26) another puzzling gap preceding "the explosion of life forms at the beginning of the Cambrian period [600 million years ago]. Here, in the space of about ten million years, a curtain was raised on a stage teeming with living things. After 3,000 million years in which nothing more complicated than bacteria and slime lived upon our world, came the dawn of life. Billions upon billions of fossils have been found, showing a marine life that suddenly became rich and abundant: clams, snails, octopuses, crustaceans with hard shells and jointed legs, spiny-skinned animals such as starfish, sea urchins and sea lilies. The dominant life form was the now-extinct sea creature known as a trilobyte, up to a foot long, with a distinctive head and tail, a body made up of several parts, and a complex respiratory system.

"But although there are many places on Earth where 5,000 feet of sedimentary rock stretch unbroken and uniformly beneath the Cambrian, not a single indisputable multi-celled fossil has been found there. It is the 'enigma of palaeontological enigmas' according to Stephen Gould."

Hitching says (page 27) that we have been told there are "literally thousands of transitional forms, and more are discovered every year." He goes on:

"It takes a while to realize that the 'thousands' of intermediates being referred to have no obvious relevance to the origin of lions and jellyfish and things. Most of them are simply varieties of a particular kind of creature, artificially arranged in a certain order to demonstrate Darwinism at work, and then rearranged every time a new discovery casts doubt upon the arrangement.

"The family tree of the horse is a good example of the trouble museums get into when they try this sort of thing. Once portrayed as simple and direct, it is now so complicated that accepting one version rather than another is more a matter of faith rather than rational choice. Eohippus, supposedly the earliest horse, and said by experts to be long extinct and known to us only through fossils, may in fact be alive and well and not a horse at all - a shy fox-sized animal called a daman that darts about in the African bush... [DS: Does that eliminate it from contention as the ancestor of the horse?]

"All the most popular examples [of intermediates] have become discredited, one way or another. The so-called 'walking catfish' of Florida, frequently cited as living half-way fish-amphibian creatures, do not, in fact, walk. They slither along on their bellies using the same motion as when they swim."

There is a 2.5 page discussion (page 34) about the Archaeopteryx and whether or not it represents an intermediate - a reptile with feathers - or maybe an already full-fledged bird. All the while I'm reading this, I'm screaming mentally, "What real difference does it make???" Hitching showed himself to be a writer of no small telepathic abilities. He responded to me in the last paragraph:

"The further point might be made that even if Archaeopteryx is in fact a half-way form from reptiles to birds, it is still not very enlightening about the process of evolution, nor in any way evidence of Darwin's hoped-for gradual transitions. For that, we would have to see in the fossil record the slow development of feathers (perhaps from scales, perhaps from some other origin) and the hierarchical change of amphibian dinosaurs into delicate, light-boned creatures that could soar above the Earth. And here, characteristically, the rocks are mute."

I took a beating for asking, "where is the half-necked giraffe?", so I had to chuckle when I read (page 44), "There are no intermediate fossils showing a three-quarter length giraffe neck." By the way, in spite of the title, the neck of the giraffe is not a big issue in the book.

We read (page 45), "Professor Anthony Hallam, of the Department of Biological Sciences at Birmingham University, England, told a conference on evolution in Chicago in 1980 that his studies of Jurassic [180 to 135 million years ago] bi-valves showed emphatically that over periods of 10-12 million years they changed hardly at all, except in size. After this period of stasis they became, or were replaced by, a markedly different species.

"The growing realization that a pattern of stasis and extinction is the rule rather than the exception shows not just that the fossil gaps are real (which more or less everybody now accepts); but also that they are highly mysterious, significant, and very unhelpful to Darwinism."

Hitching discusses the origin of flight (page 94). "Winged insects appeared suddenly and plentifully alongside wingless insects in Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago. Before that there are no fossil insects at all, flying or otherwise, so any suggestion as to how they evolved the capacity of flight is sheer guesswork."

"Dinosaurs, bats and birds each evolved the ability to fly... at different times in Earth's history. None of the transitional stages are preserved in the fossil record." (Page 95.)

As an example of evolution seen in the natural world, Hitching spends more time (page 52) with the peppered moth changing from light to dark. He notes that this phenomenon, called "industrial melanism, has now been established in more than 100 kinds of insects in Britain, and there are many other examples in Europe and North America." How widespread the phenomenon is surprised me, but not as much as Hitching's summation. After mentioning the few examples, if they count, of bacteria, houseflies, rats and rabbits becoming resistant to some of our poisons, he says (page 53), "So far as living showcase examples of evolution are concerned, that is about it." I figured that, as feeble an example of evolution that is (since no new species came out of it), there should be many more similarly lackluster examples for biologists to put forth. I don't know if the lizard leg experiment has received enough independent verification to join the ranks of darkening moths.

About selective breeding, Hitching says (page 54), "It is now absolutely clear that there are firm natural limits to what can be done. Remarkable achievements can be made by crossbreeding and selection inside the species barrier, or within a larger circle of closely related species, such as wheats. But wheat is still wheat, and not, for instance, grapefruit. Between 1800 and 1878, the sugar content of beets was raised from 6 to 17 per cent. A half century of further breeding failed to make any difference.

"Although Darwin and his successors have invoked these and other examples as evidence of evolution, breeders with practical experience flatly disagree. Luther Burbank, perhaps the most famous plant breeder in the history of the United States, once pointed out that nobody had succeeded in growing black tulips or blue roses, because the genetic material was simply not there. 'I know from experience that I can develop a plum half an inch long or one two-and-a-half inches long, with every possible length in between, but I am willing to admit that it is hopeless to try to get a plum the size of a small pea, or one as big as a grapefruit... In short, there are limits to the development possible.'"

Hitching allows (page 55) that, "recent advances in genetics... show that genes tend to interact among each other in a startling and unpredictable way, [but] every series of breeding experiments that has ever taken place has established a finite limit to breeding possibilities. Genes are a strong influence for conservatism, and allow only modest change." He points out that "breeding of wild varieties of grass" and "domesticated dogs arrived about [10,000 years ago.] Yet in the whole of this time period, there is no hint of wheat or dogs changing into anything except different kinds of wheat and dogs."

Hitching asks (page 55), "Can speeded-up mutations demonstrate how one kind of creature turns into another?" In bombarding tens of millions of fruit flies with x-rays since the early 1900s, thereby increasing their mutation rate up to 150 times the normal, "all the fruit flies have remained fruit flies." Mutated eyeless fruit flies were interbred, and after a few generations, their eyes started to come back! "Somehow the genetic code had a built-in repair mechanism that reestablished the missing genes."

Hitching explains why we believe that all life came from the same source (page 62). "All things, plant and animal life alike, are kept alive by coded messages from the genes that are transmitted by the same method: a ceaseless one-way stream of instructions from DNA via its 'messenger' molecule RNA to the proteins that form the chemical basis of life.

"There are many other biochemical universals (the term given to properties shared by all living things). All proteins are made up of the same twenty amino acids, in different proportions. All life is structured from cells of about the same size, which divide and renew themselves in a remarkably similar way. The spiral structure of DNA, with its links consisting of just four nucleotide acids, is also common to everything alive.

"These shared properties confirm in the minds of virtually all biologists that everything which lives is derived ultimately from a common source. 'In all likelihood, life arose only once,' Theodosius Dobhzansky said in 1963."

If I can stick my 2 cents in, these universals say nothing about how many times life arose. If there's only one kind of life, you're going to get it whenever and wherever it appears.

In chapter 4, Hitching gets around to the difficulty of the formation of complicated organs (page 85). "For the eye to work the following minimum perfectly coordinated steps have to take place (there are many others happening simultaneously, but even a grossly simplified description is enough to point up the problems for Darwinian theory.) The eye must be clean and moist, maintained in this state by the interaction of the tear gland and movable eyelids, whose eyelashes also act as a crude filter against the sun. The light then passes through a small transparent section of the outer coating (the cornea), and continues via a self-adjusting aperture (the pupil), and a similarly automatic lens which focuses it on the back of the retina. Here 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones cause photochemical reactions which transform the light into electrical impulses. Some 1,000 million of these are transmitted every second, by means that are not properly understood, to a brain which then takes appropriate action.

"Now it is quite evident that if the slightest thing goes wrong en route - if the cornea is fuzzy, or the pupil fails to dilate, or the lens becomes opaque, or the focussing goes wrong - then a recognizable image is not formed. The eye either functions as a whole or not at all. So how did it come to evolve by slow, steady, infinitesimally small Darwinian improvements? Is it really possible that thousands upon thousands of lucky chance mutations happened coincidentally so that the lens and the retina, which cannot work without each other, evolved in synchrony? What survival value can there be in an eye that doesn't see?

"Small wonder that it troubled Darwin. 'To this day the eye makes me shudder,' he wrote to his botanist friend Asa Gray in February 1860."

If you do your search for Hitching on the web, you will find him getting scolded for that last paragraph. Apparently, Darwin went on to say something like, "... but I can only conclude that natural selection gave us the eye, too." I mention this to give another example of how picky the criticisms leveled against this book are. Also, I've always been baffled by how much energy is spent arguing whether or not Darwin disavowed his own theory. C'mon, people, that's not relevant! An idea takes on a life of its own once it's been thought up. If the guy who thought of it changes his mind, that's all very interesting - maybe even humorous - but it doesn't give his objections any more weight than anyone else's.

Back to the development of the eye, I want to point out that, even without all the complexity, the creation of a new body part via Darwinian evolution is hardly imaginable. Let's assume animals have only one eye of a simple and regular shape and made up uniformly of some simple substance throughout - glass, say. There, what could be simpler? Now tell me how you can get from a non-eyed to an eyed creature in generation-by-generation steps via Darwinism. Be careful - that first mutation is a doozy!

Hitching points out (page 90) that the fantastic transformations needed to turn a small, earthbound mammal into a huge whale had to have happened in "at most five to ten million years - about the same time as the relatively trivial evolution of the first upright walking apes into ourselves."

Another bafflement is the incredible complexity of the mammalian ear (page 90). "The organ of Corti alone... contains some 20,000 rods and more than 30,000 nerve endings.

"Yet within this complexity lies a further paradox. Although nothing as remotely complicated can be found in the ear of reptiles, living or extinct, it is far from certain that we hear significantly better than they do. So where is the special advantage that, according to theory, would be naturally selected?"

By about page 103, Hitching has finished laying out all these problems with Darwinism. He revisits the eye and quotes Stephen Gould: "We avoid the excellent question, What good is five per cent of an eye? by arguing that the possessor or such an incipient structure did not use it for sight."

Hitching continues: "But if not sight, what else? It is unreasonable to ask for a speculative evolutionary scenario for every single novel creature and organ that appears in the fossil record [DS: I think it's perfectly reasonable], but the most obvious and daunting ones continue to stare us in the face, unexplained.

"At this point a disinterested outsider might fairly conclude that evolutionary theory has reached an impasse. In three crucial areas where neo-Darwinism can be tested, it has failed:

1. "The fossil record reveals a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than gradual change.

2. "Genes are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving.

3. "Random step-by-step mutations at the molecular level cannot explain the organized and growing complexity of life."

And so Part 2 begins, where Hitching discusses "Alternatives". Chapter 5 is devoted to creation. Hitching doesn't accept creation. The irony, of course, is that in the big battle of "Evolution vs. Creation", everything he said in Part 1 would be enthusiastically embraced by creationists to show how implausible evolution is.

Hitching concludes the chapter with the observation (page 136), "One comes back repeatedly to the conclusion that the creationists would not be making so much of the running were not neo-Darwinism defended to the teeth as the only viable alternative. Paradoxically, the greatest service which the creationist movement may yet perform is to spur on a basic re-evaluation of the laws underlying evolution."

Chapter 7, "Patterns of life", gets into some alternative theories of evolution, which I've already admitted didn't make much sense to me - and as far as I know haven't taken over the biology world in the 20 or so years since this book was written.

Is there a key to be found in the "phenomenon of parallel evolution?" (page 176.) "The most striking example of this can be seen in the similarity between marsupials (those mammals with pouches to carry their young) and placental animals (most other mammals, including ourselves.)

"Their joint ancestors were small, shrew-like creatures which lived in the Cretaceous, when the Earth was dominated by dinosaurs. As the continental plates drifted inexorably apart, some of these little animals were left stranded, about 150 million years ago, in what is now Australasia; and by a quirk of evolution, their manner of giving birth became one of nurturing their newborn progeny in a pouch on the mother's belly.

"The extraordinary thing is that, this oddity apart, the marsupials of Australia have evolved in a remarkably similar way to the placental animals in the rest of the world. Wolves, cats, squirrels, ground hogs, anteaters, moles and mice all have their look-alike counterparts, in spite of the millions of years they have been raised apart, and in spite of the greatly differing environmental challenges that each has to meet."

The last chapter, "Darwin's Legacy" is a lot of fun if you don't already know too much about Darwin, forerunners to his theory, and how he was eventually prodded into publishing.

As much wholesale copying as I've done here to try to give an accurate impression of the book, remember that Hitching generally had more to say, pro- and/or anti-Darwinism, on each topic I've lifted. Track down a copy and read the whole thing.

If I had read "The Neck Of The Giraffe" earlier, I wonder if I would have ever written my FAQ. After all, what sense does it make to ask for a description of an interesting transition in generation-by-generation steps when the fossil record doesn't show such things, we don't observe them happening in nature, and we can't make them happen in the laboratory?

When I posed the challenge I couldn't imagine how someone could give a compelling answer, but I didn't rule out the possibility. It would have meant egg on my face, but it would have been worth it. After the first round of feedback, it started dawning on me that, if there were an answer, there would have been some hint of it by now. I'm feeling quite secure now that an explanation of how you can get from nothing to something using mutations and natural selection is not forthcoming.

The main value in this whole exercise, as I see it, is that there is excellent agreement between what can't be explained logically, and what isn't observed. That's good.

Hitching describes (page 82) the "often ill-tempered" symposium at the University of Pennsylvania called "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution" in 1966:

"Here it became clear that doubts among biologists were doubled and redoubled by physicists, mathematicians and engineers, some of whom were openly incredulous at the lack of a testable scientific basis for evolutionary theory. [DS: I don't get that. I thought the test was the fossil record, and observing it in nature and in the laboratory.] Few biologists expressed any uncertainty, on this occasion, about natural selection being the supreme explanatory law...

"Computer scientists, especially, were baffled as to how random mutations alone could possibly enrich the library of genetic information. A mutation, they repeatedly pointed out, is a mistake - the equivalent of a copying error. And how could copying mistakes build up into a new body of complicated and ordered information? Murray Eden, Professor of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology... concluded this was so implausible that 'an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws - physical, physico-chemical and biological.'"

Are you listening, talk.origins? You can wave your hands to the end of time, and you can laugh your heads off at the stupidity of anybody who can't "get" your "explanations" of evolution. That's a lot of people with a lot of intellectual credentials.

Or you could take a fresh, impartial, open-minded look at what you're saying and recognize that it's no bad thing to admit that maybe we don't know everything yet. Who would argue that we do? That in the year 2000, man finally knew everything last thing there is to know? That's crazy.

Who'd like to be the one that makes the big breakthrough that allows you to write a book called "The Origin Of The Species"? Unlike an earlier book by that title, this one would explain the origin of the species. It would have an impact like no other book ever written.

And hurry up about it. I'm dying to know and I only have another 30 or 40 years.

Contact Donald Sauter: send an email; view guestbook; sign guestbook.
Back to Donald Sauter's main page.
Rather shop than think? Please visit My Little Shop of Rare and Precious Commodities.
Back to the top of this page.

Parents, if you're considering tutoring or supplemental education for your child, you may be interested in my observations on Kumon.