Unpluggable gaps?

Earlier this month I wrote a piece on the accusation that ID resorts to a version of the “God of the Gaps” fallacy (whilst repeating my belief that the fallacy is itself largely a fallacy).

Anyway, I’ve since come across a useful review article by palaeontologist Günter Bechly, showing how the best ID people actually argue about the serious shortcomings of current evolutionary theory.

Bechly is an interesting example of a leading mainstream palaeontologist (specialising in the phylogeny of insects), who became an Intelligent Design proponent when asked by his museum to set up a display demonstrating how the Origin of Species outweighed all the ID creationist nonsense (literally – the books were placed on a set of rather ironically loaded scales).

Most unprofessionally, he decided it would intellectually honest actually to read the things before he weighed them in the balance – and to his surprise found their argumentation persuasive. Needless to say, once his “conversion” was known, he was sacked and ostracised, Darwinian biologists being the crown group of the now popular cancel-culture clade. Nevertheless he continues to research new fossil insects, and his ID pieces, such as his Fossil Friday series in Evolution News and Views is refreshingly detailed and technically instructive.

Bechly’s three favourite knockdowns for Neodarwinism all fail to match the “God of the Gaps” charge, unless that be taken so broadly that it is meaningless.

• The waiting time problem uses the universally accepted maths of population genetics, and the measure rates of mutation, to demonstrate that the time needed for even just one coordinated pair of neutral mutations to arise randomly, that will produce a useful (and therefore selectable) trait – a situation common in nature – is by many orders of magnitude too great to account for even a fraction of the biological world. Michael Behe famously explored this with reference to the history of chloroquine resistance in malarial parasites. But the scientists who set out to refute Behe, although they denied his billions of years estimate for a single pair of such mutations in humans, came up with an equally non-Darwinian figure of hundreds of millions of years, whereas huge numbers of such changes must have occurred if humans diverged from the chimp lineage just 6 million years ago.
• The species pair challenge is based on the fact that the fossil record shows that major changes in morphology have commonly occurred over geologically insignificant periods of a few million years. Ape to man, once more, would be one example, but Bechly’s classic example is the evolution of truly aquatic whales from walking artiodactyl ancestors in just 4.5 million years. Bechly then compares pairs of living species that are so closely related that the changes in their genomes can be measured, and finds their time of divergence calculated from the standard “molecular clock” used throughout evolutionary biology to date the history of genes. In every case, these species – usually virtually indistinguishable to the non-specialist – are calculated to have been separated for far longer than the fossil examples of rapid and far-reaching change. Since it is a central tenet of Neodarwinian theory that macro-evolution is only population genetics on a long time scale, the disparity between the modern data and the claims for fossils refutes the theory – there must have been a different mechanism at work, for which there is no serious contender, other than design being the most parsimonious explanation.
• Bechly’s third “pillar” is what he calls the collapsing tree problem. If Neodarwinism is true, then (as often advertised) species in the tree of life should fit neatly into “nested hierarchies.” To put it bluntly, they hardly ever do. For a start, palaeontological data hardly ever fits estimations from genetic studies. But even within each discipline, studying the history of any gene, or set of genes, invariably produces dramatically different trees from that predicted by another set of genes. And the same is true for morphological features used in cladistics to create phylogenies: major disagreements are the rule, not the exception, and at every level from species to phyla. The explanations used to account for these anomalies are, as Bechly correctly observes, ad hoc epicycles. Darwinism needs to be validated by its nested hierarchies, but it seldom finds them in an unequivocal manner.

Before reading Bechly on this, I’d long noted it myself. If I see a species of wildlife unknown to me, it’s fun to look up the phylogeny and find that, almost universally, there are problems. This weekend I thought I’d found an exception when I saw a relatively uncommon “long-winged conehead” cricket (Conocephalus discolor) on my window. A lovely thing. The phylogeny section on the “crickets” page of Wikipedia seemed unusually unambiguous until I noticed the familiar comment: “a high degree of conflict exists between the molecular and morphological data.”

For myself, I’d add a fourth line of attack, in the form of the stasis-saltation pattern of the fossil record, which is the opposite of what Darwin predicted (or to be precise, it is one of his own “fail points” for his theory). We can be pretty sure that the fossil record is tolerably complete. Although Bechly himself contrasts the (now) 350,000 described fossil species with an estimated 5-50 billion that have existed, he seems unaccountably to ignore the fact that the latter figure is entirely an estimate based on Darwinian gradualist assumptions. The fact that modern species are nearly all represented by fossils at the level of the genus, or at least the family, and that most fossil species are represented by many essentially identical specimens, suggests that the fossils are reliable, and that gradualism is false.

And as more than one evolutionary biologist has pointed out, if evolution is not gradualist, but saltational, then evolutionary theory is not only wrong, but scientifically useless anyway. Ancestors can’t tell you anything useful about descendants if children don’t closely resemble their parents, of even if undocumented promiscuity (aka “horizontal gene transfer”) is rampant.

It is no coincidence that more and more mainstream biologists are replacing the “random mutation and selection” of Darwin with teleological concepts, of which the rising star seems to be “cellular cognition,” which is to say that cells know what they’re doing when they evolve – a more Lamarckian than Darwinian theory.

Needless to say, the existence of such cellular cognition is entirely speculative, and its main purpose seems to be to keep the bogeyman of intelligent design at bay. If you’re tempted to follow this barely-naturalist theoretical path, though, consider just how much cognition, and of what kind, would be needed. Somehow, those little grey cells in an artiodactyl need to work out in advance that a fully marine lifestyle is the way to go, and to be able to predict, and program, all the complex and cunning changes that are necessary to change themselves into a whale. You’ll have to excuse me for finding the creative word of God a more plausible explanation.