RIP Günter Bechly

I’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death (in a road accident) of my favourite palaeontologist, Günter Bechly, over in Austria. You can see a report and an appreciation over at Evolution News and Views.

Since childhood, it has always seemed to me that the purest data-source for unraveling the pageant of life is the fossils, and my first ambition, after discarding the ideas of being an engine driver or a dustman, was to dig them up and learn about the amazing life-forms that once existed. Somehow I got diverted into medicine instead. And so I have looked forward to Bechly’s weekly Fossil Friday columns that look in (Germanic!) detail at specific taxa, and the intractable problems they cause for Darwinian theory.

He himself was an expert in fossil insects, having had more than one species named after him and many published articles. As you’ll see from the linked piece, Bechly was a latecomer to Intelligent Design. He was tasked with building an anti-ID exhibit at his museum, which included a pair of (loaded!) scales, on which a copy of Origin of Species outweighed a whole pile of ID books.

Being unfashionably curious, he decided that in good conscience he ought to read the books he was dismissing, and once he did so, instead became convinced that their arguments were sound. Needless to say, once he voiced his support for design arguments, he lost his job (some readers might not be aware that cancel culture began within science, and especially within evolutionary biology, where it has been pursued since the “Modern Synthesis” first gained traction by silencing its opponents back in the 1930s).

What is fascinating is to observe where such an expert taxonomist, who can no longer take the Darwinian model seriously, takes his theorising. It is unsurprising that, once design enters the picture, Bechly was steadily edging towards Christian theism (Lord, have mercy on his soul!). But scientifically, it seems that like his colleague Richard Sternberg, he was forced to embrace a concept of Neo-platonic forms in nature – which is essentially the position of the pre-Darwinian taxonomists like Linnaeus.

To briefly expand on that, Darwin gradualism predicted a strict system of nested hierarchies in nature, which do not in fact exist, the legion exceptions requiring endless epicycles of convergent evolution, horizontal gene transfer, incomplete lineage sorting, gaps in the fossil record and many more largely speculative face-saving devices. As Richard Dawkins pointed out, if Darwinian evolution is not gradualist, it loses its naturalistic explanatory power. And so Bechly, like others including myself, found that the actual evidence for gradualism is weak, and that therefore, by Dawkins’s reasoning, there is no strong Darwinian naturalistic explanation for life.

To Linnaeus, though, the creation of platonic forms as the broad template for individual taxa also predicts nested hierarchies, but these will often be discontinuous at the macro-level and micro-level alike, as we find in nature. Linnaeus, as a believer in the old philosophical “principle of plenitude,” expected that God would create every form that could be created. Hence gaps in the patterns of taxonomy might well be filled by exploring far-flung parts of the world, or even of other worlds – one of the most influential concepts opened up by the Copernican revolution.

It is an interesting point that Darwin’s dictum natura non facit saltus (“Nature doesn’t do jumps”) was in fact an expression of the old principle of plenitude, and that Darwin can be seen to be attempting to fill Linnaeus’s gaps in deep time, rather than in deep space.

Now, since, as Günter Bechly concluded, gradualism is simply wrong, perhaps the principle of plenitude is a mistake as well. After all, it does not seem hard to refute the mediaeval idea that God would be unjust not to create everything possible. Does he not have the liberty to create some things, and not others?

“Is it not lawful for me to do what I want with what is my own?” (Matthew 20:15)

But I rather like the speculation of another unconventional ID proponent, Michael Denton, who holds a form of the principle of plenitude that says God creates every form that is not internally contradictory or against the natural laws he has chosen. Denton’s forte is to show how the whole cosmos, from fundamental forces to individual anatomy and physiology, forms a mutually interdependent and therefore, in some sense, inevitable unity. And so there are many variations on the rodent, giraffe, ceratopsian or annelid themes, but those variations are not infinite because, like a marsupial with half a placenta, some things are incompatible with survival and flourishing.

Such a scheme predicts that nature will do jumps, and so it is not troubled by all the gaps in the fossil record, ubiquitous Orfan genes, the non-homologous similarities spirited away as “convergences” and so on. It fits the actual evidence, without the need for multiple epicycles, but of course strongly suggests, behind its physical connections, an immaterial mind. (Not “minds,” note, because the very unity of the cosmos it explores excludes the rivalries of polytheism.)

As an introduction, and tribute, to Günter Bechly I recommend this presentation from a recent conference in Cambridge – possibly his last lecture in English.