On Evolution

With the sudden resurfacing of the Hillary Clinton email scandal in connection to an investigation of Anthony Wiener, the polls tightening and the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency seeming all too appallingly possible, I was moved to type into Google the question "Why are Americans so stupid?" Very many articles immediately popped up – other people's stupidity is of interest to many. It sometimes seems that everyone in the States thinks everyone else is stupid. Trump supporters think Hillary supporters are stupid; Hillary supporters think Trump supporters are stupid. Everyone is stupid. So are there any smart people around at all? Well, yes, if we look at it from the liberal point of view. Smart people know the world has been around billions of years and that all its flora and fauna have evolved gradually over time as the result of Darwinian natural selection. Stupid people think the world was created by Jehova over the course of six days in 4004BC.

And yet it is possible for a person to be so smart that he goes over to the stupid camp, at least partway. This is the topic of this post. In it I am going to discuss a logical flaw in the Darwinian Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection and argue that this leaves open the possibility of a more mystical view of the world. I don't know whether my readers will be interested in this argument but I am going to try to share it anyway.

Although literature has always been my first love, when I was school I was very good at biology, especially genetics and Evolution. I didn't just know a lot about these subjects– as an atheist I put all my faith in Darwin, in rationality and science. I read and took on board completelyThe Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. In 2005, at the age of twenty-five, I took a paper in the Philosophy of Science and was first exposed to theorists that sought to refute Darwin, those proposing Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity. Michael Behe's theory of Irreducible Complexity is not, by the way, stupid, not unsophisticated, adducing as evidence such things as the flagella of bacteria; naturally, though, I thought Behe's argument must be rubbish. People like Behe, I thought, were fundamentalist Christian apologists, seeking to cast doubt on Darwin's theory in order to justify their own faith and to proselytize to others – I thought Intelligent Design a kind of sophistry. I went to some lengths in an essay at the time to try to show that Darwin's theory was robust enough to withstand Behe's criticism. My faith in Darwinism remained unshaken. As I grew older, even during difficult periods in my life, even though I have thought that we try to explain too much through genetics, I still sustained the sure conviction that Darwin was right. But then in early 2013 everything changed. I had an epiphany. The revelation was so devastating that, that evening, when the flaw in Darwinian Evolution occurred to me, I even hallucinated that the moon, rather than being behind the clouds, was projected onto them.

My argument is complicated. Before I discuss it, I need to remind the reader what Evolution via Natural Selection actually is. Suppose we have a population of organisms, all of the same species. By chance sometimes an individual is born with a small mutation. Almost always this mutation is detrimental but, occasionally, it is advantageous, allowing that individual to live longer and produce more offspring than its rivals. Over time the mutation comes to prevail throughout the whole population and, in this way, the whole species over time gradually changes, incrementally evolves. Mutations are presumably always occurring. This is Darwin's theory in a nutshell. It is so simple as to seem unassailable.

When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, no-one knew anything about genetics. The double helix structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953 by Watson and Crick. We now know much more than Darwin did about the mechanisms of Evolution. We know that humans have 46 chromosomes, donkeys 62 and horses 64. The offspring of a horse and a donkey, a mule, has 63 chromosomes and is consequently pretty much infertile – an organism needs an even number of chromosomes to produce viable offspring. Different species tend to have different numbers of chromosomes; one way of defining a species is to say that two organisms are of the same species if they can mate and produce viable offspring, something that can only occur if the two organisms share the same number of chromosomes.

The fundament issue is this: how do new species come into being, how does 'speciation', as it known, occur? How can a species with 62 chromosomes evolve into a species with 64? First we need an individual to be born with 64 rather than 62 chromosomes. A mutation of this enormity is incredibly improbable. Note that if an individual is born with only one extra chromosome it will be unable to produce viable offspring: it needs those two extra chromosomes to reproduce. Furthermore, all this extra genetic material has to be beneficial to the survival and procreation of the organism,  in order for the variation to be selected for, in order for the mutation to propagate over time throughout the whole population. The mutation must not only be very large but also be beneficial and this makes is even more incredibly improbable.

We now hit a second snag. Suppose, as we are hypothesizing, an individual is born with 64 chromosomes instead of 62 – suppose a horse is born of two donkeys. With whom can it mate? If the horse mates with one of the donkeys, it will only produce an infertile mule. In order to mate and produce viable offspring, another horse must also have been born at the same time, in the same location, as the one we are considering. These two, call them Adam and Eve, must find each other and mate, and then their offspring must mate (incestuously) with each other. Only in this way can the new species appear. So we need two similar gigantic mutations to occur in the same population at the same time and place and for the natural kingdom's instinctive aversion to incest to be suspended.  All this seems so unlikely that it seems impossible to imagine it occurring over and over again, as it must have, during the billion-year time frame in which Evolution has taken place.

Essentially my argument rests on the idea that speciation of this sort through blind chance is so incredibly unlikely as to be impossible. We don't see it happen now and so one wonders how it ever happened.

Now, I imagine my readers, being good secular liberals, will want to pick holes in this reasoning. I can only think of one piecemeal solution, one counter-argument, which can save Darwin. This is that different species can and do sometimes mix and produce viable offspring, that new species can appear as the result of miscegenation or, to use the more accurate term, hybridization. The problem with this counter-hypothesis is that this type of interbreeding almost never occurs in the natural world that we observe. What one cannot accept is that a change of this magnitude can occur through tiny increments. One cannot accept the idea that a species can evolve from one with 62 chromosomes to one with 64 through a series of tiny mutations – 62, 62 and a bit, 62 and a quarter and so on, because during through all these transitional forms individuals would probably be infertile.

Basically I am saying that chromosome number is Irreducibly Complex. I concede the argument could be wrong. I have meant for years to find a professor of biology to talk to about it. I feel obliged to say one thing though – I am not a Fundamentalist Christian seeking to cast doubt on Darwin's theory to justify some kind of religious faith. It is rather the reverse: the argument occurred to me first and caused me to question my atheism. When it appeared fully-formed in my head in 2013, it was so persuasive that it stunned me, made me wonder maybe there was a God after all. I am not now saying there is a God, I'm definitely not saying that we should accept Creationism, rather all I am saying is that the science is, if not flawed, incomplete. It is possible to accept science and mysticism at the same time. Yes, we might say, Evolution occurred and is still occurring but the process is not arising purely out of blind chance but is rather being steered by some kind of higher power perhaps. I am not a Christian. I have said that before. But I have had inklings of the supernatural… It may be that these inklings might be an interesting topic for a future post.