Darwinisn vs. Darwinism II

 

On darwinian apologists sleight of hand

 Evolutionary Flimflam: Watch Out for These Common Parlor Tricks in Science Reporting

Jonathan Witt

I suspect the average person comes to accept modern evolutionary theory, not through a series of careful arguments, but through a near-constant drip of pro-evolution propaganda. The propaganda comes in many forms and from many directions. Here I want to focus on just one source, popular news stories about evolution, and specifically on a couple of parlor tricks often embedded in these articles.

Bait-and-Switch

Probably the most common trick begins with a news headline or lead sentence promising a new discovery of evolution in action. The article then highlights an actual, observed species changing over time. But the example it cites is mere microevolution, such as a change in fur color or minor changes in beak size or leg length. 

That won’t do. If Charles Darwin had argued that nature can produce modest variations in existing species, the collective response would have been, now tell us something we don’t know. Evolutionary theory needs to provide evidence of its distinctive claim, namely, that purely natural mechanisms can and do produce major innovations — something like the first wings, the first eyes, new molecular biological machines, or novel animal body plans. 

A recent example of this bait-and-switch begins with the headline, “Long-term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology.”1 The headline gives the impression that maybe the lizards in the study, refusing to play by the restrictive rules of standard evolutionary theory, hauled off and evolved in a much more daring way than conventional thinking had allowed. But then we learn that the study’s big finding helps explain cases where evolution doesn’t generate anything impressive — that is, cases of stasis, where a species remains largely unchanged for millions of years. 

Hmm, that sounds like the opposite of impressive evolutionary daring-do, doesn’t it? 

Troubled by this inconsistency but undaunted, we read on and are soon informed that the researchers have solved a big evolutionary conundrum. The news story invites us to wonder how there could be so many cases of stasis in the history of life when we see evolution doing amazing stuff right before our eyes all the time. The article doesn’t mention any of these amazing broad-daylight transformations. Instead it informs us that the study found that the lizards varied in minor ways (e.g., longer or shorter legs) and that the changes, rather than accumulating into something dramatically novel, canceled each other out. Voilà — an explanation for stasis.

That’s it. That’s the study’s big finding. No macroevolution. Just the observation of what was the common view before Darwin’s theory of evolution — that healthy members of a species can vary a bit, but only within strict limits.

To sum up the parlor trick: Promise to demonstrate bigtime evolution. Demonstrate minor changes and hope the audience doesn’t notice the difference. 

An Audacious Use of Stasis

A particularly brazen variation on this bait-and-switch appears in an article out of Ireland. The lead sentence announces, “Palaeontologists at UCC have discovered X-ray evidence of proteins in fossil feathers that sheds new light on feather evolution.”2 What is the discovery? That, contra expectations, the protein in question has not evolved for tens of millions of years. In other words, the findings suggest more stasis in the history of life and diminished evidence for evolution. 

So now it’s not microevolution (minor changes) standing in for macroevolution (big innovations). It’s a discovery of stasis (basically, no change) standing in for macroevolution. Laughable if you’re paying attention, but if you’re just skimming headlines and articles, well, the word “evolution” appears three times, and the scientific paper being reported on appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Sounds like a whole lotta evolution goin’ on. 

Drip, drip, drip. So works the propaganda.

Dazzle and Distract

A second parlor trick used to the same end is a tad harder to spot. It involves reporting on a discovery that sheds light on how some complex biological process works, and then promises that the finding gives us important insights into how the process evolved. How so? The teaser turns out to be yet another of evolutionary theory’s many promissory notes, one you will grow old waiting on for payment.

We shouldn’t take the promise on faith, since it’s far from automatic that discovering how a given biological mechanism works will help biologists understand how the process evolved. Certainly it wouldn’t if evolution did not actually generate the mechanism in question. But even if we grant for the sake of argument that the biological process did evolve, and did so through blind material forces, it’s perfectly possible that gaining a better understanding of how a mechanism works would in no way reveal how the process it’s embedded in evolved. 

Nor is it enough to show that the newly understood mechanism is useful to the biological system it’s a part of. Yes, natural selection tends to favor the useful over the useless in the evolutionary process, but that doesn’t allow evolution’s blind process of gradual change to magically look ahead so as to bring together various parts to assemble an intricate new mechanism. The act of looking ahead (foresight) and planning for a distant goal is the exclusive domain of minds. Mindless evolution, lacking this capacity, requires a series of small, functional, random mutations (blind baby steps) in order to evolve, say, the first bat sonar or the first air-breathing animals. The evolutionist should detail a plausible stepwise path of this sort, and then we can talk.

This second parlor trick, to summarize, runs like this: (1) Highlight a fresh insight into how a biological mechanism works. (2) Tout the discovery as shedding important light on how a system or process evolved. (3) Don’t actually demonstrate #2, but instead dazzle and distract the reader with the challenging technical details of the discovery highlighted in #1.

The Curious Case of TCOF1

An example of this second parlor trick appears in a Science Daily news piece titled, “Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved.”3 What did the researchers learn? “Biologists discovered that a scaffolding protein called TCOF1 is responsible for the formation of a biomolecular condensate called the fibrillar center, which forms within the cell nucleolus.”

We could challenge the phrasing there. The language makes it sound like the scaffolding protein single-handedly forms the fibrillar center, when we can be sure the protein is just one crucial player in a process involving many other factors without which we would have no fibrillar center. But set that quibble aside. 

The article further informs us that “biomolecular condensates perform many critical functions” in cells. Then we encounter a refreshing note of humility: “It is not well understood how proteins and other biomolecules come together to form these assemblies within cells.” Then an overdue qualifier: “The findings could help to explain a major evolutionary shift, which took place around 300 million years ago, in how the nucleolus is organized.” 

So we’ve gone from “Study Explains” in the headline to “The findings could help to explain.” 

Then another concession: “Biologists do not yet fully understand why this shift happened.” Although a welcome injection of honesty, the sentence also subtly implies that biologists mostly understand why the shift happened, just not fully. But the article doesn’t give us the mostly. It just implies that the understanding is out there and leaves us to accept the implicit claim on faith. 

What the article does explain is quite different from what the headline promised:

“If you look across the tree of life, the basic structure and function of the ribosome has remained quite static; however, the process of making it keeps evolving. Our hypothesis for why this process keeps evolving is that it might make it easier to assemble ribosomes by compartmentalizing the different biochemical reactions,” says Eliezer Calo, an associate professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.

So, the ribosome presents another striking case of stasis, but at least the process of how it is made keeps evolving, or so we are told. But how do they know the process evolved, and evolved through mindless material mechanisms, as the theory of evolution holds? Just showing that nature has more than one way of making ribosomes doesn’t demonstrate that these methods evolved one from another, or from a common ancestral method. After all, the various methods might each have been separately designed, as the various methods for assembling cars were separately designed.

What of the researcher’s specific evolutionary hypothesis summarized in the block quote above? It’s at best an extremely partial explanation. He is saying that the assembly method evolved because the innovation might make the assembly go smoother. In other words, the explanation of how it evolved boils down to pointing out a possible functional improvement in the method. But usefulness is only a necessary condition of evolution by natural selection; it’s far from a sufficient condition, just as being able to dribble a ball is a necessary condition of being an NBA basketball player, but far from a sufficient one.

If the researchers had identified a definite functional improvement as an explanation for how the assembly method evolved, that would be weak tea; but they didn’t even do that. They only identified a possible functional improvement. And from all this we get the breathless headline, “Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved.”

And so it goes. Drip, drip, drip.

Notes

Catherine Barzler, “Long-term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology,” Phys.org (October 9, 2023). 

“Dinosaur Feathers Reveal Traces of Ancient Proteins,” University College Cork, Ireland (September 22, 2023).

“Study Explains How Part of the Nucleolus Evolved,” Science Daily (August 15, 2023).