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January 10 - January 24, 2018
modern species don’t evolve into other modern species, they just share ancestors: they are cousins. This, as we shall see, is also the answer to that disquietingly common plaint: ‘If humans have evolved from chimpanzees, how come there are still chimpanzees around?’
The American zoologist Raymond Coppinger makes the point that puppies of different breeds are much more similar to each other than adult dogs are.
The general case is the non-random survival of randomly varying hereditary equipment.
When you notice a characteristic of an animal and ask what its Darwinian survival value is, you may be asking the wrong question. It could be that the characteristic you have picked out is not the one that matters. It may have ‘come along for the ride’, dragged along in evolution by some other characteristic to which it is pleiotropically linked.
IF the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.
Quite apart from all the other reasons to object to this remarkable explanation, there could only ever be a statistical tendency for mammals, for example, to be on average better at escaping the rising waters than reptiles. Instead, as we should expect on the evolution theory, there literally are no mammals in the lower strata of the geological record. The ‘head for the hills’ theory would be on more solid ground if there were a statistical tailing off of mammals as you move down through the rocks. There are literally no trilobites above Permian strata, literally no dinosaurs (except birds)
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J. B. S. Haldane famously retorted, when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!’
All the fossils that we have, and there are very very many indeed, occur, without a single authenticated exception, in the right temporal sequence. Yes, there are gaps, where there are no fossils at all, and that is only to be expected. But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved. That is a very telling fact (and there is no reason why we should expect it on the creationist theory).
Monkeys and frogs share an ancestor, which certainly looked nothing like a frog and nothing like a monkey. Maybe it looked a bit like a salamander, and we do indeed have salamander-like fossils dating from the right time. But that is not the point. Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one.
3 ‘Monkeys are cleverer [or prettier, have larger genomes, more complicated body plans, etc. etc.] than earthworms.’ This kind of zoological snobbery is a mess when you start trying to apply it scientifically. I mention it only because it is so readily confused with the other meanings, and the best way to sort out confusion is to expose it. You could imagine a large number of scales along which you might rank animals – not just the four scales I have mentioned. Animals that are high on one of these ladders may or may not be high on another. Mammals certainly have larger brains than
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Cladistically inclined zoologists avoid the word ‘reptiles’ altogether, splitting them into Archosaurs (crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds), Lepidosaurs (snakes, lizards and the rare Sphenodon of New Zealand) and Testudines (turtles and tortoises).
Fish are all the vertebrates except those that moved on to the land. Because all the early evolution of vertebrates took place in water, it is not surprising that most of the surviving branches of the vertebrate tree are still in the sea. And we still call them ‘fish’ even when they are only distantly related to other ‘fish’.
In almost every particular, Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link – perfect, because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer. We have the fossil. You can see it, touch it, try to appreciate the age of it – and fail.
But there was an earlier exodus from Africa, and these erectus pioneers left fossils in Asia and Europe, including the Java and Peking specimens. The oldest fossil known outside Africa was found in the central Asian country of Georgia and dubbed ‘Georgian Man’: a diminutive creature whose (rather well-preserved) skull is dated, by modern methods, to about 1.8 million years ago.
Think about the first specimen of Homo habilis to be born. Her parents were Australopithecus. She belonged to a different genus from her parents? That’s just dopey! Yes it certainly is. But it is not reality that’s at fault, it’s our human insistence on shoving everything into a named category. In reality, there was no such creature as the first specimen of Homo habilis. There was no first specimen of any species or any genus or any order or any class or any phylum. Every creature that has ever been born would have been classified – had there been a zoologist around to do the classifying – as
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Homo ergaster/erectus, of which we have many fossil specimens, is a very persuasive halfway link, no longer missing, between Homo sapiens today and Homo habilis two million years ago, which is in turn a beautiful link back to Australopithecus three million years ago, which, as we saw, could pretty well be described as an upright-walking chimpanzee. How many links do you need, before you concede that they are no longer ‘missing’?
The details of how the laws of chemistry determine the tertiary structure of a protein are not yet fully understood: chemists can’t yet deduce, in all cases, how a given sequence of amino acids will coil up. Nevertheless, there is good evidence that the tertiary structure is in principle deducible from the sequence of amino acids. There’s nothing mysterious about the phrase ‘in principle’. Nobody can predict how a die will fall, but we all believe it is wholly determined by precise details of how it is thrown, plus some additional facts about wind resistance and so on.
Lake Victoria is extremely young. The lake basin was formed only about 400,000 years ago, and it has dried up several times since then, most recently about 17,000 years ago. This seems to mean that its endemic fauna of 450 or so species of cichlid fishes have all evolved over a timescale of centuries, not the millions of years that we usually associate with evolutionary divergence on this grand scale.
think what the geographical distribution of animals should look like if they’d all dispersed from Noah’s Ark. Shouldn’t there be some sort of law of decreasing species diversity as we move away from an epicentre – perhaps Mount Ararat? I don’t need to tell you that that is not what we see.
Why did all the penguins undertake the long waddle south to the Antarctic, not a single one to the equally hospitable Arctic?
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? Why would he put lemurs in Madagascar and nowhere else?
‘The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist.’
The swim bladder, then, is a coopted lung, which is itself a coopted gut pouch (not, as you might have expected, a coopted gill chamber). And in some fish, the swim bladder itself is yet further coopted into a hearing organ, a kind of eardrum.
the lexicon of words at my disposal for writing, and the identical, or at least heavily overlapping, dictionary at your disposal for reading, all reside in the same vast neuronal database, along with the syntactic apparatus for arranging them into sentences and deciphering them.
