Richard Dawkins, the Koala, and the Giraffe
Editor’s note: We are pleased to offer this Abstract from Part I of a new paper by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Richard Dawkins, the Koala, and the Giraffe: How Evolutionists Overlook Signatures of Design, Part I.”
Abstract: Key Points of the Contents
Referring to science broadcaster Robyn Williams (Australia), Richard Dawkins believes that the koala’s pouch opens downwards due to its ancestry from a wombat-like animal instead of upwards as in the kangaroo — “a legacy in history.” A similar legacy, he assumes, also accounts for the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe.
The Australian Koala Foundation contradicts him on this: The pouch “faces straight outwards rather than backwards” (emphasis added). The IFAW (Australia) agrees that, as compared with kangaroos, koalas “have a more centrally located opening.” And that is for good reasons: “The pouch protects young koalas, called joeys, from injury while the mother climbs among trees.”
Now, Darwin correctly observed that “false facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure.” I consider the statement about the backwards opening pouch of the koalas to be “a false fact” to bolster neo-Darwinism — a false fact still widely repeated in many public statements. Check Google on the pouch of the koala.
A series of links to videos and pictures shows the enormous differences between koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) and wombat (Vombatus ursinus) babies emerging from their pouches. This is likewise for good reasons: koalas are fully arboreal whereas wombats live on the ground and especially underground.
As for the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, see here.
I remind the reader of a massive contradiction within the theory of evolution itself: “The genetic message, the program of the present-day organism…resembles a text without an author, that a proof-reader has been correcting for more than two billion years, continually improving, refining and completing it, gradually eliminating all imperfections” (Nobel laureate Francois Jacob). I give similar assertions by other authors in the text. And now, as a result of limitless, omniscient, and omnipotent natural selection over millions of years, “gradually eliminating all imperfections,” how are we to account for the koala’s imperfection, a pouch that “opens downwards, instead of upwards as in a kangaroo,” or an entirely superfluous long detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe?
I cite thirty special adaptations in the arboreal/tree-living koala. Most of them are problematic from the perspective of gradual evolution, but, according to Dawkins, “evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” I subsume the overall system of synorganizations (the term used by evolutionist A. Remane), or “co-adaptations,” under the subheading “Signatures of Design in the Koala.”
Applying neo-Darwinism to the koala’s “two thumb adaptation” is shows — when starting with a hand/front paw like that of the wombat — the following result: After discussing several presuppositions and implications of gradualism, thousands of steps in millions of years would be necessary for the specific adaptation of the koala’s hand alone. And, just to emphasize the point: according to population genetics, here also “each new successful evolutionary step would imply the substitution of an entire Phascoarctos-like population.”
In summary: According to evolutionary biologist Danielle Clode in her book about the koala (2023), “Koalas are singular creatures: idiosyncratic and inimitable. They are sometimes described as being ‘like bears,’ ‘like wombats,’ ‘like sloths,’ or ‘like pandas.’ They share some parallels, some traits with these creatures, but they are not in any way ‘like’ them. Koalas are simply unlike anything else we know of”
Photo: the koala’s hand in action grasping a twig, by W.-E. L.
Now, if one is free to break away from the prohibitions of materialistic philosophy, one could, for example, accept the following reasoning. According to Austrian cell physiologist Siegfried Strugger, professor of botany at the University of Münster: “In comparison to the cell, all automation of human technology is only a primitive beginning of man in principle to arrive at a biotechnology.” Well, if the first steps on the path to the ingenious level of cybernetic complexities of the cell, i.e., the “primitive beginning” in Strugger’s formulation, demands conscious action, imagination, perception, intelligence, wisdom, mental concepts, spirit and mind — all being absolutely necessary for the basic start — how much more so does this have to apply to the origin of the thousand times more complex cybernetic systems of the many complex life forms themselves. And those include the specified and irreducibly complex structures inescapably necessary for the koala and countless other organisms
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