Evolution: a theory in crisis.

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton (Adler & Adler, 368 pp., $19.98)

CONTRARY TO the general belief, there is very little factual support for the theory of evolution. In 1981 Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, remarked at a public lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that there was "not one thing" he knew about evolution. "Question is," he went on, "can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence."

Patterson seems not to have recanted. In a recent issue of the Creation/Evolution Newsletter he writes: "The awful question: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution . . .' Well, I still think it's a reasonable one. Ed Wiley [of the University of Kansas] answered that it generates hierarchy, but I find that a bit too vague. My own current answer would be, 'I know that the majority of change in the information transmitted (DNA) occurs in spite of natural selection, not because of it.'"

In 1984 I interviewed Patterson in London and asked him if, in the voluminous mail (much of it irate) he had received in response to his heretical comments, anyone had pointed to unequivocal evidence for evolution. He told me that someone had claimed, "We do know that the polar bear evolved from the brown bear."

"Do we know that?" I asked.

"No."

MICHAEL DENTON'S Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is the best summary of the case against evolution since Norman Macbeth's minor classic Darwin Retried (1971). Denton includes a good chapter on the cladists, a recent school of taxonomists with which Patterson is associated. (Cladists have insisted that taxonomy should be more regorous, and they make the interesting point that a whole set of evolutionary statements thought to have been established by observation--e.g., "vertebrates evolved from invertebrates"--are in fact tautologies.)

Dr. Michael Denton teaches in the Department of Clinical Chemistry at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Australia, specializing in microbiology. "to my mind," writes MIT emeritus professor Dr. Murray Eden, currently with the National Institutes for Health, Denton's book "should be required reading for anyone who believes what he was taught in college about evolution." I mention this to stress that this is a scientific work, and a highly readable one, not an essay in Biblical fundamentalism.

Charles Darwin's main claim to fame was that he allegedly discovered the mechanism of evolution--natural selection, or "the survival of the fittest" as Herbert Spencer called it. This amounts to nothing more than the observation that species exhibit variety; some survive to leave offspring, others not. Those that do are called "the fittest." In short, trial and error. Bertrand Russel said that natural selection was nothing more than "the application of laissez-faire economics to the animal and vegetable kingdoms."

Nonetheless it was thought in Victorian times that Darwin had made a discovery of profound importance. Victorians, after all, equated change with progress, as we decidedly do not. Thus Darwin's claim to have discovered the machinery of evolution greatly advanced the belief that evolution had in fact taken place.

If anything Denton is too deferential to Darwin and at times seems to make too much of the meager evidence for evolution by natural selection. He cites, for example, the famous balack and speckled moths in Britain's once polluted Midlands. After the soot killed the lichens growing on the trees, the speckled variety became conspicuous to predator birds and the camouflaged blacks prospered. But this does not constitute evidence for evolution, because the black moths were all along present in the population. They merely increased disproportionately--until pollution-control devices were installed (when things returned to normal). As the Columbia University geneticist Thomas H. Morgan once said, "Evolution means producing new things, not more of what already exists."

The main problem for evolutionists, as Denton points out, is that the "envelope" of variability surrounding the species does not extend very far. At the end of all the experiments on fruit flies in the early decades of this century, in which they were subjected to heat, cold, X-rays, et cetera, the experimenters were left with . . . fruit flies. A rose is a red rose or a white rose or a yellow rose but never a blue one. You can push a rose only so far. Much experimental frustration suggests that it is the same with all other species. As such, they should be presumed fixed (within narrow limits) unless the evolutionists can demonstrate otherwise. To point triumphantly to the bones of extinct animals is to beg the question whether we or anything else evolved from them.

In his most important chapter, "A Biochemicl Echo of Typology," Denton provides up-to-date support for the Platonic theory of archetypes. Evolutionary theory would suggest that the major taxonomic groups should form a biochemical sequence. But now that numerical data are available (from the cytochrome C protein, which has a different amino-acid sequence in different species), the surprising finding is that the major groups are not so much sequential as equidistant from one another. The molecular evidence suggests that a carp differs from a horse to the same extent that it differs from a turtle or a bullfrog. It suggests not that wheat is somehow intermediate between bacteria and animals, as one might have thought, but that humans, wheat, yeast, sharks, and fruit flies are all "equidistant" from bacteria.

"an extraordinary mathematical exactness in the degree of isolation [of one group from all others] is apparent," Denton writes, calling this "one of the most astonishing findings of modern science. . . . There is no avoiding the serious nature of the challenge to the whole evolutionary framework implicit in these findings." Nonetheless we may anticipate that the professional community of government-funded biologists will avert its gaze both from the findings and from Denton's book.

When evolution is challenged, what is at stake is not just a particular scientific theory that can be replaced by another, as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system was replaced by the Copernican, but the far more fundamental ideology of materialism itself: the belief that the universe consists of atoms and molecules in motion and nothing else. As Denton says, evolution is really a deducation from materialism. If materialism is true, then evolution is true. It follows that if evolution is false, then so is materialism. And if that god be proven false, is it not a fearful prospect to consider that another might be true? Why, the "wall of separation" and the ACLU might threaten to cut off one's research funds!