Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

10: The Darwin Wars

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

Jacques Monod

Stephen Gould and Punctuated Equilibrium

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) and Richard Dawkins had much in common. Gould “filled the same role for North America as Dawkins does for Britain.”¹ Both were evolutionary biologists, deeply involved as students, researchers and teachers in the academic world; they were talented, prolific and successful writers; and they were critical of Charles Darwin even when professing their appreciation of him. Gould, who declared his “love for Darwin and the power of his genius,” has been called “America’s leading evolutionary biologist” and “North America’s Darwinist-in-chief.” He has written a great number of books which are still widely read, and therefore continue to be influential with the experts as well as among the informed public. Some of these books are selections from the essays he regularly published in the science magazine Natural History. Ever since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb, Wonderful Life, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes and Rock of Ages are a few of the titles by this cultured writer.

Gould is best known for his hypothesis of “punctuated equilibrium.” This at first sight mystifying term is not a symptom of the labile sense of balance typical of people under the influence. The theory it covers is a direct criticism and contradiction of a pillar of Darwin’s theory of evolution: gradualism. “[Niles] Eldredge and I coined the term punctuated equilibrium in a paper first presented in 1971,” wrote Gould. “Our original article on punctuated equilibrium (Eldredge and Gould, 1972) emerged as a result. … I did coin the term punctuated equilibrium, but the basic structure of the theory belongs to Eldredge.”²

In the evolution of species “discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent … The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates. Indeed there are rather few cases of continuous series of gradually evolving species,” states Ernst Mayr, one of the stalwarts of neo-Darwinism.³ This does not agree with Darwin’s original theory which posited that “as natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps. … If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. … Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.”⁴

Darwin’s conviction could not be expressed more clearly. (Equally clear is the fact that, if a theorist holds the opposite view, he cannot claim to be a Darwinian.) However, the gaps in the fossil record are undeniable. They were already a constant headache for Charles Darwin himself. His theory of variations and natural selection demanded that “an interminable number of intermediate forms must have existed … infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species … The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain [geological] formations, has been urged by several paleontologists as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.”⁵ Darwin knew how essential this point was for his theory, for in the Origin he returned to it again and again, trying to justify the gaps in the fossil record by the lack of relevant paleontological discoveries or the destruction of the fossils through natural causes.

Stephen Gould was an expert in paleontology, who taught it and worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He found that, 150 years after the publication of the Origin, the insufficiency of the fossil record, “the best kept trade secret” in biology, could no longer be adduced as an argument to explain the gaps. He lashed out at the theory of gradualism, which originally was a geological theory and against which Thomas Huxley and Alfred Wallace had cautioned Darwin from the start. Gould wrote that the “assumptions of gradualism had stymied and constrained our comprehension of the earth’s much richer history.” He found himself “forced to question the necessary basis for Darwin’s key assumption that observable, small-scale processes of microevolution could, by extension through the immensity of geological time, explain all patterns in the history of life.”⁶

In the fossil record Darwin’s “infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species” were not there. “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa [branchings-off] appear suddenly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution. A great many sequences of two or a few temporally intergrading species are known, but even at this level most species appear without intermediate ancestors, and really, perfectly complete sequences of numerous species are exceedingly rare.” In other words: transitions from one species to another are very rarely embodied in intermediary variations: species appear nearly always suddenly. Moreover: “The geological record is extremely spotty … extremely imperfect … The fossil record may, after all, be 99 percent imperfect.”⁷

“Eldredge and Gould looked at the fossil record. What happens? It’s absolutely startling! You don’t get one species turning into another. A species emerges, it lasts for several million years, and it disappears. Five hundred million years for some of these species, a few million for others. Species emerge suddenly, not slowly. Punctuated equilibrium keeps these problems of emergence in focus.” (Brian Goodwin⁸) Punctuated equilibrium “merely honoured the firmest and oldest of all paleontological observations.”⁹ Looking objectively at the available fossils, the gaps in the hierarchical classification had always been there, but they had been overlooked or denied by prejudice inspired by the Darwinian dogma.

“Punctuated equilibrium makes the strong claim that, in most cases, effectively no [variational or mutational] change accumulates at all. A species at its last appearance before extinction does not differ systematically from the anatomy of its initial entry into the fossil record, usually several million years before.”¹⁰ Should it differ? According to the Darwinian doctrine it should, for the simple reason that natural selection is omnipresent and continuous. As Darwin wrote: “Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest.”¹¹ The fact that species remain the same during millions of years, from their appearance to their extinction, Gould and Eldredge have called “stasis”, a Greek word which means something like ‘steadfastness’.

A famous example of stasis is the coelacanth, a species of fish which originated 400 million years ago and which is still alive and swimming. The coelacanth predates the dinosaurs by more than 200 million years and was thought to have become extinct with them, as its most recent fossils dated from 65 million years ago. A living specimen of the coelacanth was discovered in 1938, in the waters close to the Comoro Islands. Afterwards more living specimens were found, and in 1987 coelacanths were filmed from a submersible in their natural habitat. The discovery of the coelacanth was considered “the biological find of the century.” One reason for this hyperbole was that at the time many biologists thought the coelacanth to be the crucial link between fish and amphibians. Another reason was that the amazing coelacanth seems hardly to have changed in all those millions of years, a permanence contradicting the continuous effect of Darwinian natural selection. Of this stasis, the coelacanth is now known to be only one example among many.

Little by little the theory of evolution has made room for “macroevolution” side by side with “microevolution.” The latter, evolution in small (micro) steps, is the only one Darwinism and neo-Darwinism accept, for its mechanism is the selection of variations, later on found to be genetic mutations. Macroevolution, on the contrary, is evolution by big (macro) steps, causing the appearance of new species suddenly. Remember the words of Ernst Mayr: “New species appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.” According to Gould’s thesis “new species originate in a geological ‘moment’.” The scale of geological periods covers many millions of years. The ‘moment’ in which a new species takes shape may last from thousands to several million years. “Species appear to change little, or not at all, during their lifetimes … Each speciation event occurs quite rapidly in geological terms, so rapidly that it has sometimes been called ‘quantum speciation’, on analogy with the ‘quantum jumps’ that occur in atoms and molecules.” (Burton Guttman¹²)

The meaning of “punctuated equilibrium” should now be clear. Species do not change markedly during their existence, their shape remains static; and instead of the theoretical evolutionary change required by natural selection, there is stasis, which is a form of equilibrium. On the other hand, the fossil record shows that species appear suddenly, at a geological moment in time; the existing equilibrium is punctuated by short-term formations of new species. This, again, is in contradiction with the classical Darwinian doctrine, which requires that they should evolve gradually, in small steps, causing small variation after small variation which finally lead, “over time,” to a fully formed new species. In the Darwinian view time is the magician who produces and explains all biological wonders.

The reason why Charles Darwin stuck doggedly to his tenet of gradualism was that he could not imagine another way for organisms to change. If an evolutionary ‘mechanism’ existed to cause “modification” – and if the creation of new species was not an intervention by an non-material, supernatural Creator or Intelligence – it could, Darwin thought, only work in very small steps, gradually. (How this ‘mechanism’ actually functioned was not known, and its existence was therefore nothing but guesswork. “Very small” meant mechanically possible and therefore supposedly feasible by nature; not “very small” seemed to require a miracle.) That speciation has happened in big sudden steps, by macroevolution, seems to be the only correct interpretation of the fossil record. But how could such big steps, requiring astronomical numbers of simultaneous genetic and physical modifications, come about at once, in a geological moment, even if this moment lasted for thousands or a few millions of years? However strongly Stephen Gould affirmed that he was “an old-fashioned materialist,” his thesis smelled of creationism and was consequently violently attacked – though at present, it seems to have gained the upper hand.

Mass Extinctions and the Dinosaurs

The thesis of Gould and Eldredge was mainly based on the data of paleontology. That it drew the attention away from genetics and molecular biology in general, was another reason of the adverse reactions it caused. Although the fossil collections had been considerably augmented since Darwin’s day, the record as a whole remained “extremely spotty.” But even in its spottiness it supported some striking facts. One was the phenomenon of “the Cambrian explosion”, called “the most remarkable episode in animal evolution.”

The geological period called the Cambrian lasted from 542 million to 488 million years ago. To the astonishment of the paleontologists, practically all “body plans” originated then. A body plan in biology is the basic way in which organisms have been built, e.g. with or without a backbone, or bodies made like those of spiders, or wasps, or worms, or mainly consisting of ‘jelly’.

Another striking fact was the scale of the extinctions of organisms that have taken place on our planet. Beside frequent minor ones, five major extinctions have caused the disappearance of no less than 99.9 percent of all living beings which have ever existed. Those five catastrophes, occurring each time towards the end of the respective geological periods, happened in the Ordovician (-440 million years, 85 percent of all life forms), the Devonian (-365 million years), the Permian (-251 million years, the most devastating, no less than 96 percent of all life forms perished), the Triassic (-205 million years, 76 percent), and the Cretaceous (-65 million, 75 to 80 percent, including the dinosaurs).

As to the dinosaurs, the common notion is that they were destroyed when an asteroid hit the Earth in the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence which made the explanation supposedly irrefutable was provided by Walter Alvarez. “No one now seriously doubts that there was a meteor impact at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. But there is still a lot of debate on its significance. After all, if that is all that happened, why did crocodiles, turtles and even frogs go through relatively unscathed?” asks Kim Sterelny.¹³ “It was a physicist [Alvarez] who pushed most dogmatically the view that the dinosaurs were killed off in a discrete event by the simple cause of the collision with Earth of an asteroid … To paleontologists, however, that seems absurdly oversimplified,” writes Henry Bauer.¹⁴ And in Gribbin we find: “The dinosaurs dwindled over a span of at least 10 million years, from 30 genera to 13 found in the fossil beds of Montana and southern Alberta. And the ‘terminal event’ was not all that terminal. … The dinosaurs did not die out overnight … There was a gradual decline in the number of dinosaur (and other) species over millions of years.”¹⁵ Francis Hitching mentions no less than six possible events which may have caused the dinosaurs’ disappearance. Which means that in biology another legend was added to the substantial list we have already encountered.

Of Human Arrogance

“I am an old-fashioned materialist,” said Stephen Gould. “I think the mind arises from the complexities of neural organization, which we don’t really understand very well.”¹⁶ The accumulating data of the fossil record may have contributed to his increasingly dark view about the meaning of the whole shebang, of human life no less than of a cuckoo’s egg and the countless beings that have peopled and are peopling our planet. Gould’s view of the evolution and the place of humanity in it is the logical one when all values have evaporated. Still, it is noteworthy that the devaluation of the human existence, based on “the Copernican principle” or “the principle of mediocrity,” runs in the biological sciences parallel to its re-evaluation in physics, where the “anthropic principle” is presently one of the hot topics. The former wants to counter the age-long human arrogance of occupying a special spot in the evolution of life on Earth, while its existence is scientistically speaking a matter of pure chance; the latter, after having arduously tried to do as much, has recently been awestruck by the magnitude of pure chance in the history of the universe, of which the existence of our species is the result.

“We are here,” Gould is quoted as saying, “because an odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer – but none exists.”¹⁷ “The earliest known vertebrate located in the Burgess shale [in the middle Cambrian] is a two-inch and rather elegant creature named, after an adjoining mountain and also for its sinuous beauty, Pikaia gracilens. It was originally and wrongly classified as a worm (one must never forget how recent much of our knowledge really is), but in its segments, muscularity, and dorsal-rod flexibility, it is a necessary ancestor of Homo sapiens … Millions of other life forms perished before the Cambrian period was over, but this little prototype survived. To quote Gould: ‘… If Pikaia does not survive, we are wiped out of future history – all of us, from shark to robin to orangutan.’”¹⁸

If there are no values, it is not possible to evaluate “progress” in the unfolding of life. “Gould was adamantly opposed to progress, speaking of it as ‘a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, untractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history’. It is a delusion engendered by our refusal to accept our insignificance when faced with the immensity of time.”¹⁹ That evolution is not progressive became one of the main themes of his work, as zealously preached as the gospel according to Richard Dawkins. In this he was once more an apostate from Darwinism, for the Master had written towards the end of the Origin: “We may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” True to character, however, the Master had also uttered his doubts: “Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development …”²⁰

That a biologist, and one with authority, does not necessarily have to turn into a zealot for the scientist faith, is shown e.g. by Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of neo-Darwinism and a Russian Orthodox Christian. He wrote: “Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to a relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism’s surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.”²¹

The Darwin Wars

“There is no more contentious, querulous bunch of professionals on earth than evolutionary biologists,” writes Arthur Shapiro, who is an evolutionary biologist himself.²² It is safe to say that in the history of science no new discovery, concept or theory has seen the light of day without being attacked, at times viciously. What has come to be called the Darwin wars “are not between believers and disbelievers in evolution, or in Darwinism. They are about the scope and proper limits of Darwinian explanation.”²³ Nonetheless, if the controversies have been so nasty that “the enmities made in that struggle persist to this day,” their stakes must have had deeper than theoretical roots. Andrew Brown is of the same opinion, for the subtitle of his book The Darwin Wars is “the scientific battle for the soul of man.”

The first confrontation in the Darwin wars was triggered off by the publication of Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology. We know the extremist, totalitarian ambition of Wilson’s scientism. He saw in science, the ultimate explanation of existence, a substitute for religion, and in evolution the foundation of all animal behaviour, including that of the human animal. Science, for sure, is at its core a search for Truth. However, the mistake it has made and continues making time and again is that a partial discovery of that Truth is held to be its totality, although even a casual glimpse of the history of science should teach anybody that “the path of science is lined with the corpses of dead theories.”

Wilson’s sociobiology was a form of social Darwinism, which had also engendered eugenics. After the global wave of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century, and after the horror of its excesses by the Nazis had become known, social Darwinism was hastily abandoned by the biologists who were its proponents. But Wilson’s stance in 1975 was a clear reintroduction of the same evolutionary and biological principles. The reaction of the leftist fringe in American science, lead by the very able geneticist Richard Lewontin and the zoologist Stephen Gould, was immediate, fierce, and waged in the media. Gould “hated sociobiology” for its deterministic view of the human species, contradicting his humanitarian socialism for which progress, if not evolutionary, was politically possible. One of the highlights of this battle of the intellectuals was “the ice water incident” when in 1978 leftist hecklers emptied a pitcher of water on Edward Wilson’s head.

Now that we know of Dawkins’ launch of the meme theory, intended as a reaction against absolute genetic determinism, and how much Gould and Dawkins, American and British self-professed descendants of Darwin, had in common, it seems difficult to comprehend that they became the leaders of the opposing camps in the second phase of the Darwin Wars. But we have already seen that Dawkins’ reasoning rested mainly on theories about the genes, their “lineages” and their alleged action in the extended phenotypes, while Gould’s vantage point was primarily the study of the fossil record. (The various disciplines assembled under the umbrella of ‘biology’ are quite different. Anatomy is a matter of dissection of organisms, taxonomy of their classification, ethology of their behaviour, genetics of their heredity, paleontology of their history, etc.) Moreover, the intellectual backgrounds of Dawkins and Gould varied significantly, for the revolutionary 60s, in which they reached their maturity, had been mainly an American phenomenon.

In the Dawkins camp there were Edward Wilson, William Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Peter Atkins … – names known from the covers of popular science literature. “Most are passionately anti-religious, or at least passionately opposed to modern Protestantism, which, like its adherents, they take to be the only true religion.” On Gould’s side there were Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and many of the younger scientists who had grown up during the turbulent years of the Vietnam War and leaned towards the left. These were “more ecumenically atheist. They do not even believe in science as an expression of religious yearning … The fact remains that the parties do exist, and that Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins are not only their most visible proponents but also essential to defining them … Both sides claim to be the true heirs of Darwin.” (Andrew Brown²⁴)

Gould and Dawkins agree on one point: that they are both the best writers in the business, the best popularizers of science. Dawkins’ evaluation of Gould is that he actually does not know what he says; that if he knows what he says he does not mean it; and that his theory of punctuated equilibrium is in fact purely Darwinian, such as Dawkins himself has been explaining it all the time. “Gould seems to be saying things that are more radical than they really are,” Dawkins alleges. “He pretends. He sets up windmills to tilt at which aren’t serious targets at all.”²⁵ Elsewhere he explains: “The extreme Gouldian view – certainly the view inspired by his rhetoric, though it is hard to tell from his own words whether he literally holds it himself – is radically different from and utterly incompatible with the standard neo-Darwinian model. It also has implications which, once they are spelled out, anybody can see as absurd.”²⁶

The history of science, like history in general, is replete with ardent polemics, in some of which even the greatest scientists were involved. The research of entire lives, the esteem of colleagues or the public, and many careers have depended on them. The quotes in the previous paragraph will give an idea of the bluntness of the controversy, and of Dawkins’ “assurance in ridiculing [Gould’s] ideas,” as he states in Unweaving the Rainbow, which contains one of his main attacks on the American. The quotes are also chosen to show the level on which “the scientific battle for the soul of man” was and is being waged.

The sudden “macromutations” necessary for the macroevolution of the punctuated equilibrium theory remained unexplained. This was an occasion for another of Dawkins’ attacks on Gould: the big jumps, required for a macromutation and the sudden appearance of new organs or whole species, were simply accumulations of the small steps required by Darwinism. Consequently punctuated equilibrium was nothing new and little more than a publicity stunt. “What needs to be said now, loud and clear,” Dawkins wrote, “is the truth that the theory of punctuated equilibrium lies firmly within the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It always did.”²⁷

But knowing the ambiguity of Dawkins’ reasonings, one will not be surprised to find him writing some years later that the Gouldian view was incompatible with the standard neo-Darwinian model. But then again he wrote: “A key feature of evolution is its gradualness … There may be punctuations of rapid evolution, or even abrupt macromutations … Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes.”²⁸

Behind the media hype about the genes, the genome and the wonders soon to be expected from the discoveries resulting from their study, many key problems in the science of biology remain unsolved. Most buzzwords, now as in the past, are only labels, pasted on empty jars. From the past we remember ‘spontaneous generation’, ‘preformation’, ‘phlogiston’. A brief look will tell us whether ‘gene’, ‘genome’ or ‘meme’ belong in the same category, or not.