One way of detecting an ideological, as opposed to scientific commitment to a theory is when very obvious shortcomings are simply glossed over for long periods of time.
Regarding evolutionary science I can think of a few instances over my lifetime, which may serve as examples. As I’ve recounted before, from the time I first studied zoology at school I never had any ideological objection to evolutionary theory in principle, but as a Christian even then neither was I committed to it as necessary for making materialistic naturalism intellectually respectable. I could always live with Darwin (as he was then taught), but I could equally live without him if the evidence pointed in a different direction. I guess “How God does stuff” was my interest.
My first, naive, questioning of the then ubiquitous gradualist variation + natural selection paradigm was that which had persisted since Darwin first presented the theory: that nobody had ever been able to originate a species from another experimentally. The response I got to that was always that we should not expect to be able to emulate in Darwinism’s short history (110 years then) what nature had taken millions of years to do. Yet even then it seemed to me that intense selective pressure on a rapidly reproducing species – a bacterium, perhaps – should have been able to do something that the random changes of nature could not.
Darwin’s critics in 1859 could point to the long history of domestication of plants and animals (selective breeding being, of course, Darwin’s principal model for evolutionary adaptation), though they were far less aware than we are of just how long that history is – maybe 25,000 years or more for dogs, and of course orders of magnitude more generations for, say, body lice. What they did know, and pointed out forcefully, is that one of the main lessons of selective breeding is that invariably it ends up banging up against a species boundary of viability rather than smoothly transitioning to something new and equally viable. Intense breeding always, in the end, breaks something.
I was unaware of this at school, but it had been known to science for a century. Yet it didn’t make any impact on the claim (still made by a few professional Old Stagers at BioLogos when I was active there just a decade ago) that we can take for granted that macroevolution is just microevolution writ large. Ignore experience – trust the untested extrapolation. My point is not that knowledge has now progressed beyond that, as indeed it has, but that existing knowledge was completely ignored for 150 years because it demolished the Theory. If any doubt remains, Lenski’s 73,000 generations of selective pressure on E. coli produced only E. coli, and not a single E. lenskii or E. novus mirabilis, before COVID shut down the experiment.
A little later in my life, when I learned at university more of the role of DNA, proteins and mutations according to 1970 wisdom, it was clearly taught that 1 gene = 1 protein, and that this knowledge was the key to understanding the tree of life. Almost my first thought was that it was rather daft to claim that churning out a pile of proteins, however remarkable their properties, explains how that pile forms a living plant or animal, let alone how such organisms change so radically over time. Understanding an assembly-line for transistors and capacitors leaves a giant hole in your knowledge about how a computer is designed and manufactured.
Yet, I remember, it was not that my teachers ever admitted how deficient our knowledge still was on that question, but rather I had the impression of being treated as rather stupid for asking it. And so, until just recently, and no doubt still in our schools, we were told by people as eminent as Francis Collins that the genome (understood purely in protein-coding terms) is the “blueprint for life”. Once again, it’s not that the complexities of control networks, epigenetic mechanisms and so on have only now given us greater insight, but that it was bloody obvious even fifty years ago that a pile of proteins is not a living organism.
When I was first asking such questions, the science of “Evo-devo” was barely beginning, and even in the early 1990s Arthur Jones reminded me that we have no good theory of biological development, without which no theory of evolution can really explain anything. Evolution has to account not just for new species, but for new species-assembly processes, which are tricky to conceive as evolving by natural selection on the finished product. As Sean Carroll famously described in Endless Forms Most Beautiful in 2005, evolutionary developmental biology has discovered some cool stuff – but not because the mainstream of evolutionists was clamouring to fill a major hole in the Darwinian paradigm. For decades, “1 gene = 1 protein” seemed sufficient: if we could only sequence the human genome, we could build a person. Yeah, right: get 1% wrong and you’ll get a chimp, apparently…
Evo-devo itself hits massive obstacles when it comes to extrapolating the way genes are utilised, together with other fascinating stuff like diffusion gradients, to turn a fertilised cell into a chicken rather than a petunia. It was soon found that attempting to tinker, however subtly, with the genes governing early development never leads to a different fruitfly, but to a damaged fruitfly or a dead fruitfly – usually the latter. The boundaries for developmental change are even more constrained than the species boundaries of artificial selection.
None of this was known when I was at school, of course. But when doing embryology I did notice something that poses a problem both to Evo-devo, and to evolutionary theory overall. And that was the surprising truth that the embryological processes we studied between the frog, the chicken, and the rat – all vertebrates chock-full of the homology we were sold as evidence for natural selection – are fundamentally different between the three. Now, at the time I thought that interesting rather than problematic, but it should have been a major headache for professional evolutionary biologists, and it seems not to have been.
For, as Evo-devo reminds us, what macroevolution really has to achieve is to adapt the process for manufacturing a Pakicetus, say, into the process for the manufacture of a whale, in easy stages. Bear in mind homology again – whales are said to be descended from quadrupeds because the organs are adaptations of the same basic forms. Much as, in a car factory upgrading a model, you might expect some different components on the assembly line, and maybe some tweaks to the process, you would not expect the whole assembly line to be replaced with (perhaps) individuals producing entire cars in a workshop.
It might make sense for Gibson’s custom-shop to hand-build a special version of a guitar usually churned out on a line, because human luthiers are undertaking a teleological task: it is the end result that they have in view, not the process. But if evolution is blind, then fundamental changes to the developmental process, such as we see in the frog, chicken and rat, ought to leave no traces of homology in the final organism.
In fact, recent research shows how, when damage inflicted during development doesn’t actually kill the organism, the processes are adapted by the organism in order to produce, as far as is possible, the “normal” result. In other words, biological development itself is a teleological, not a blind, process, and logically therefore Evo-devo provides no support for undirected Darwinian evolution.
All this is not only obvious now, but as I have suggested was obvious back in the 1960s when I was at school. And yet only rarely is the obvious conclusion drawn, in the profession, that both development and macroevolution (if it occurs) simply must be teleological. And the only likely reason for that blindness is that the commitment to blind evolution, broadly seen as Darwinian even amongst the “young bloods,” is held not for scientific, but for ideological reasons.
If the theory must be true, than all kinds of magic will have to be attributed to it if it is , in reality, false.
