Beyond Natural Selection

All we need are a few of the standard challenges to natural selection, and we are on our way. We could adapt our argument concerning the Great Explosion to the Cambrian, but that might be counterproductive, and our style of argument probably falls out of range, although the core issues of evolutionary progress and directionality remain vexatious, on any level of discourse, and might profit from our discussion.

There was never any mystery in the limitations of evolutionary theory. In general, severe, almost certainly fatal, mathematical challenges have always stood in the way of selectionist assumptions. In a now classic text, Evolution From Space, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe give one version of this objection.

Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle on the theory.[i]

This viewpoint has been ‘refuted’ so many times that we forget genetic research has essentially confirmed it with the discovery of new developmental structures and processes. The full random run is in fact ‘compressed’ by the existence of some other process of development. In general, be wary of statistical reasoning applied to evolution. Even the suspicion of a directional process will throw any calculations here out of kilter. The amount of sophistry attempting to counter Hoyle, strewn over the Internet, is remarkable.

Algorithmic complexity We might note our spontaneous use of the term ‘compressed’ and consider, beyond ‘laws of evolution’ (or of history), the middle ground between laws and empirical histories. We can see in the eonic effect this ‘graduating from laws’ into ‘histories with some compression’.

Current thinking has quietly shifted to claims for the emergence of some ‘evolutionary toolkit’. Now it is claimed this arises by chance alone. There we can leave the matter, for the moment, since we have no reliable statements here. We have what we need, a huge question mark near the descent of man, noting that in this field statistical reasoning in a void has proven singularly misleading. The original version of Darwin’s theory has been shown to be incorrect, in part. In any case, we see the element of compression, speed up, in the rapid appearance of man. Developmental processes and mutations would almost certainly have to be a factor in this situation. But we must suspect that even that would not be sufficient.

The most confusing aspect of the study of evolution is the nature of the first step, natural selection. Here the debate rages at its loudest. Yet the very proposition of natural selection would seem implausible. First impressions count for something, and over and over the first critics of Darwin saw a problem here. We can hardly suspect, early in school, as we embark on complex study, that it is the first step that might be wrong, or at least, not established, nor recover clarity if we take this as an established foundation.

The literature critiquing natural selection is considerable, and we will assume some familiarity with such. We can cite a few key texts. Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, is one of the most cogent. Some parts of this text may be out of date, but the attempts to dismiss this book, sometimes in a kind of frantic rage, are revealing. Study the reviews of this book, they seem terrified and always miss the point. In general, the standard peer-reviewed literature is not reliable here.

Beside Soren Lovtrup’s Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, already cited, we have Robert Reid’s Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis, where the author notes, “I thought my failure to understand selection theory fully was the result of the specialization of the subject beyond my simple comprehension. Confident that every aspect of natural selection was for the best, I little knew that it had long been criticized for just that Panglossian felicity”. The Darwin paradigm stays in place, in part, because thought is paralyzed by the dogmatic destruction of intuition at the first step. One ceases to be able to reason on evolution at all. Anyone who has something like Reid’s suspicion gets immediate shock treatment, loses social status as a pariah, and is subjected to immense pressure to submit logic to conformity.

In Beyond Natural Selection, Robert Wesson gives a naturalist’s second opinion of the gritty details that mount up and cast a shadow on the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, noting, “Natural selection is credited with seemingly miraculous feats because we want an answer and have no other. There probably cannot be another general answer. Biologists, it seems, must do without a comprehensive theory of evolution.” Wesson summons up an impressive list of oddities that current theories simply disregard. Simple things, like the absence of selective advantage in dreaming, the failure of sexual selection in practice to feedforward intelligence, the six-leggedness of insects, host of discrepancies. “Many very simple facts, such as that all the millions of species of insects, and no species of non-insects have six legs, might well might well be considered to disprove natural selection as a generalization.”[ii]

The history of the development of evolutionary theory is often misleading. We associate T. H. Huxley with the triumph of Darwinism, yet forget that his views were complex. “Huxley’s views about evolution ‘evolved’ over time. Initially a saltationist, he eventually adopted Darwin’s gradualist position. In time, he also accepted the doctrine of progressive development after arguing against it for many years. However, he remained skeptical his entire life of the power of natural selection to create new species. What were his reasons, and can he still be called a Darwinian in spite of his reservations concerning the most basic tenet of Darwin’s theory? In Huxley’s famous Times review of the Origin, he stated that while Darwin’s theory explained a great deal about the natural world, he personally preferred to adopt Goethe’s aphorism ‘Thatige Skepsis’, or active doubt. He did not deny that natural selection existed in nature, but could it account for all the effects that Darwin ascribed to it?”[iii]

As S. Kauffman notes in At Home in the Universe, “Since Darwin, we turn to a single, singular force, Natural Selection, which we might well capitalize as though it were the new deity. Random variation, selection-sifting. Without it, we reason, there would be nothing but incoherent disorder. I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong. For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that selection comes into play, further molding and refining.” [iv]

Notes: Exobiology One can bypass both Darwin dogma and the problems of controversy in being a Darwin critic by adopting the perspective of exobiology, just before the point of drawing any important conclusion on the nature of life and cosmos. The exobiologist stands back, and asks, what is the place of life in the universe? Does it arise at random, is it universal or confined to a contingent sequence on earth? This procedure implicitly takes a scientific perspective even as it provokes all the mischief of the Darwin critic with none of the confusions with Darwin/anti-Darwin fanatics. We could adjust this viewpoint for the study of the evolution of civilizations, as branch of exobiology, to avoid the ‘anti-science’ trap.[v]

Karl Popper on evolution: We should note in passing the classic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher Karl Popper who saw here a ‘metaphysical research program’. This was controversial, and instantly exploited in confusing fashion. Popper did not fully state the case for his own idea, and his point was lost. In our terms, the point is that our sense of history has suddenly shown the necessity of centuries-level verification, and thus left deep time high and dry, the object of speculative hypothesis. To assume that the ‘free will’ to construct civilization occurred via natural selection, and this without proof, is certainly a metaphysical research program, one of the most extravagant![vi]

[i] Cf. F. Hoyle & N. Wickrmasinghe, Evolution From Space (London: Dent, 1981), p. 148.

[ii] Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), p. xii.

[iii] Sherrie Lyons, Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: Prometheus, 1999), p. 231. Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), Robert Reid, Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis (New York: Cornell, 1985), Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (New York: Adler & Adler, 1985).

[iv] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 8.

[v] David Koerner, Simon Levay, Here Be Dragons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[vi] Popper’s essay, “Darwinism as a Metaphysical Research Program”, can be found in his intellectual biography, Unended Quest, (New York: Open Court, 1976).