Truth
Evolution and Richard Milton
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, April 27, 2000
Neo-Darwinism
Richard Milton has an interesting website called the Alternative Science Website in which he makes out that science is a big conspiracy against something else, though what it is conspiring against is not clear. Truth, perhaps? Milton seems to enjoy the crude technique of finding scientific controversies, taking the unconventional view and then accusing those with the conventional view of conspiracy. Science makes progress through the struggle of ideas, and controversy is perfectly natural to it. Indeed, it could hardly progress at all without it. But Milton tries to tell us he has discovered that some scientists are trying to halt new ideas from being admitted. In this he is quite correct, but this is not a conspiracy but exactly how scientific method works.
Milton’s favourite subject is the theory of evolution or neo-Darwinism, as he calls it. He tells us that Darwinism is the forbidden subject, not because scientific investigation of Darwinism is forbidden but because public debate of the findings of the research is. His proof is that a crass article commissioned by the UK Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), presumably written by himself (I assume here it was because even if it was not, Milton plainly agrees with it), was later rejected. He thinks it is terrible that the readers of the THES, identified as a large proportion of the university lecturers of Britain, have been prevented from learning of its contents. The THES however, like most newspapers, depends upon people reading it, not throwing it down in disgust, and that is just what they would have done to this article.
Milton seems to think that there are two types of people, those who are aware of complexity in the world and those who think everything is simple—just a machine. The latter are Marxists, Freudians or Darwinians, people who reflect Victorian society with its authoritarian values and institutionalised prejudices. One does not have to be an Einstein to see that Milton is trying to tar Darwinism with the brush of Marxism and Freudianism.
But as Milton himself observes, unlike Marx and Freud, Darwin remains widely esteemed as an original thinker and as a careful researcher, but “the theory that bears his name was transformed in the early years of this century into the mechanistic, reductionist theory of neo-Darwinism: the theory that living creatures are machines whose only goal is genetic replication—a matter of chemistry and statistics.” Despite this, “the evidence for evolution itself remains persuasive—especially the homologies that are found in comparative anatomy and molecular biology of many different species."
Reductionists?
You will always find that those who like to label others as “reductionists” or even “mechanical reductionists” have stopped arguing and instead are tossing around insults. “Reductionists” are simple people who believe simple things, or that is meant to be the implication. Yet, it can confidently be said that no scientists are “reductionists” because every one of them knows from scientific praxis that the world is always more complicated than it looks—and it rarely even looks simple! Those who use the terms “reductionist” are always crudely pretending that they are cleverer than the reductionists, but they rarely are. More often they are themselves simpletons who have lost an argument and are feeling narked.
Reductionists, you see, according to Milton, think that systems are merely the sum of their parts, whereas “We,” meaning clever people like Milton and his readers, who are not reductionists, know better. At school, Milton minor, was naturally not a reductionist because he knew, unlike the rest of us in the physics class, that things were complicated. So, when the physics teacher explained to us the principle of the bob pendulum, it was Milton minor who piped up, “What about the weight of the string?” To omit the weight of the string is reductionist and Milton minor was never to be associated with any such thing!
Science and applied mathematics, is of necessity often reductionist because the problem under investigation is intractible unless it is reduced to something simpler. But to imagine or pretend that mathematicians who do this are not aware of the assumptions they are making defines the critic as the fool.
Milton, criticizing “neo-Darwinism,” accuses the Darwinists as thinking that “a strictly blind process of chance genetic mutation working with natural selection” constitutes the theory of evolution. Yet, no evolutionary biologist believes this, even if they used to. Milton is going to tell us why it is not true, and the evidence he will give is the evidence found by the people he declares to be mechanistic simpletons.
The Fossil Record
He cites with mock reverence the “impressive exhibits” that generations of school children have seen the world over: “the evolution of the horse family; the fossils that illustrate the transition from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal; and the discovery of astonishing extinct species such as ‘Archaeopteryx’, apparently half-reptile, half-bird”.
There is probably no evolutionary biologist who is not aware that the fossil record is incomplete, even when it is good. To be pedantic, it could only be considered complete if every link in an evolutionary chain were known, and that is obviously impossible. If I look into the sky in the morning and see the sun rising then go indoors to make breakfast and write a long letter, then emerge again into the noontide sun, I will see the sun at its zenith. I never saw this sun move continuously across the sky from where I saw it in the morning, but I am confident that it is the same star shining in the sky as the one I saw at dawn. One cannot have the same degree of confidence about the fossil record simply because we cannot make the same detailed observations of it as we can of the sun, but the full gamut of the fossil record, laboratory and field observations of the changes in living animals and the mechanism that explains how it happens in the double helix all give us confidence that evolution happens.
Gaps in the fossil record of, say, the horse do not deter us from believing modern horses evolved from “Eohippus” a small animal that lived about 50 million years ago. We cannot say with certainty that any of the fossil Eohippus remains we have found are in the direct line of the horses of today, but we can be confident that one of its kind, or a similar animal was. Milton wants to know what it is that connects these isolated species on the chart if it is not fossil remains? The answer is the detailed anatomical comparisons of the creatures which show they are either related or that Nature or God spontaneously creates almost identical forms over an over again. Scientific parsimony demands that the changes are not made by spontaneous acts of creation but by change of one into another. There is no problem in accounting for such changes by genetic mutation and natural selection. Such evolution has been observed, even though no one has written us accounts of these pre-horses from millions of years ago.
Milton says archaeopteryx could not have been descended from dinosaurs because the dinosaurs had no collar bones whereas the archaeopteryx had. Though these statements were true, Milton’s conclusion is not. Lost attributes can appear again in animals, though usually when they do they are not advantageous to successful procreation and rapidly die out again—having died out once, they rarely find any purpose if they reappear as a genetic throwback. But “usually” does not mean always, and if the species has started to behave in a particular way that the atavism favours then it could well be retained. The archaeopteryx could have been an atavistic coelurosaur.
Alternatively, because the fossil record is, as Milton insists on reminding us, incomplete, it is quite possible that some branch of dinosaur-like reptiles retained their collar bones, but lived in such small numbers that they rarely were fossilized. Consequently we observers of the fossil record 200 million years later have never seen one of these rare specimens. Development of some form of flight however gave them an advantage that gave their population a growth spurt that shows up as the sudden appearance of fossils. So, the sudden appearance of the archaopteryx in a form so close to existent species but possessing a feature that they do not have, actually suggests that a favourable mutation has occurred or that a rare species has suddenly acquired a behavioural habit that its previously unsuccessful form was suitable for.
DNA
Analysis of DNA, the genetic blueprint, of plants and animals shows how closely or distantly they are related. Studying DNA sequences allows us to draw up the family tree of living things and shows us how they are related by common ancestry. Milton rightly says this is a very important claim but proceeds as ever to take it further than most biologists, and then show that it is not true.
Consider a computer. By testing what they do and how they look we might consider two computers as closely related types and classify them as the same or closely related species. Yet they might differ completely at their core by having quite different and incompatible CPUs. Dolphins, for example, might once have been classified as fish, but no longer are. It might come as a surprise, reading Milton, that biologists know this. Nevertheless, most animals with a fish-shaped body are fish!
Now the same considerations apply to DNA because it is the DNA that determines the gross features of animals. Certain DNA sequences are characteristic of certain features and animals with that DNA have those features. Nevertheless, there is a lot of additional DNA that determines differences among groups of animals too. It should therefore be plain that, in overall DNA, a group of animals like the fish will differ considerably, yet because they have fundamental DNA in common they are all of the same type of creature.
Milton tells us that animals, according to neo-Darwinists, are closely related, like two reptiles, when they have greater similarity in their DNA than animals that are not so closely related, such as a reptile and a bird.
Milton then refutes this by telling us that the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles—a snake and a crocodile—which are said by Darwinists to be closely related, differs more than the alpha haemoglobin DNA of a bird—a farmyard chicken—does from the reptiles. The two reptiles had least in common, and the crocodile and the chicken actually had most in common. For Milton this is proof that evolutionary theory is wrong, but it is actually a valuable experimental finding that shows to us that birds were descended not from any body of generalized reptiles but specifically from the same creature that also yielded our crocodiles. This finding actually verifies the indistinct fossil record which shows us the dinosaurs were descended from early crocodilians and the birds are the only variant of the dinosaur branch that have lived until today. Snakes were a quite separate branch of the reptile family.
Similarities and Differences
Milton, who is perpetually puzzled because nature does not conform exactly to the discoveries of Darwin, is baffled because different genetic coding can give rise to animals that look outwardly similar and show similar behaviour, while creatures that look and behave differently can have much in common genetically. You will perhaps note that the “reductionist” biologists are not surprised that such a vast field as evolution should be complicated but Milton, who professes to acknowledge complexity, thinks scientific hypotheses should explain such complexity precisely.
He notes there are more than 3,000 species of frogs, all of which look like frogs, but among which is a greater variation of DNA than there is between the bat and the blue whale. There is nothing in the least difficult to understand about this.
Scientists do not have to depend upon the fossil record to study genes—they can do it in great detail in the laboratory. For advanced animals like frogs and mammals, the genetic make up is complicated. Much of it controls the minutiae of development, or might even be redundant for long periods of time. It is precisely the mutations of these elements of DNA that bring about gross change. The longer that a species survives, the more its DNA will have mutated from the original stock. Yet, if the broad form of the creature is well adapted to a variety of environments then variations from the form will most probably not be selected and will die out, leaving mutations accumulating in parts of the genetic code that are not expressed in the appearance of the organism. After millions of years frogs will have retained the broad appearance of frogs because it is a robust form for the environment of frogs, but their DNA will have altered in other respects by the long history of mutations they have endured.
On the other hand mammals were for long a relatively small variety of rat-like creatures that scurried beneath the feet of the dinosaurs. They had a form that was less restrictive than that of the frogs, because they did not need water to breed in, but were confined in their environment by the much more successful dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs died out, the mammals were able to radiate into a wide variety of environments, which is to say that the environments were now empty of a dominant species and they could try it out without competing with better adapted rivals.
Those mammals with particularly suitable adaptations through the genes they possessed bred more successfuly and over tens of millions of years they evolved into forms well adapted for their different environments. Note though that the period of mammalian adaptive radiation was only tens of millions of years compared with the frogs that have lived on earth for hundreds of millions of years. Mutations occur at a fairly regular rate, and so long established successful animals like frogs have more of them in their DNA than mammals. The reason for this is that the mammals have evolved rapidly from a restricted gene pool into a wide variety of forms whereas the frogs have been confined to particular types of habitats for much longer periods but ones for which their forms are evidently eminently suited.
Mankind is a particularly good example of this because human gentic material is remarkably uniform, suggesting that human beings have a most restricted origin. It seems that at some stage in the not too distant past, our precursors almost died out, leaving few individuals with a restricted number of genes. Soon after, however, the survivors found they had such great advantages that they became highly successful and eventually highly populous. So, though human beings can survive in most niches available to other creatures, they have a limited genetic makeup. And that scarcely differs from the chimpanzees that, to us, are a rather different looking animal, and nothing like as successful.
Milton can understand none of this and despite his dedication to complexity and his disparagement of scientists he keeps on putting forward his own pseudo-scientific and reductionist theories as straw men that he says ought to be true so that he can knock them down and pretend that he has scored some sort of victory over the scientists. Thus, he tells us, confessing his own and not the scientists’ ignorance, “if neo-Darwinist evolutionary ideas of gradual genetic change were true, then one would expect to find that simple organisms have simple DNA and complex organisms have complex DNA.” he means, of course, that he would expect it, not that any evolutionary biologist would. One good reason, among others, is that already explained above—long lived varieties have a longer time to evolve genetic complexity than varieties that live only for a few million years.
On Milton’s hypothesis, mankind, which he takes to be the most advanced of creation, should have the most chromosomes but actually humble animals like the goldfish and even the garden snail (which he ignorantly describes as little “more than a glob of slime in a shell") have more, and some species of rose bush have more still. You will note that this disproves Milton’s hypothesis but he then blames it on to scientists! “So the simple fact is that DNA analysis does not confirm neo-Darwinist theory. In the laboratory, DNA analysis falsifies neo-Darwinist theory.” You might now be getting some idea why the THES rejected this puerile article.
Selection a Tautology
A more valid question is: how can biologists (or anyone else) tell what characteristics constitute the animal or plant’s “fitness” to survive? How can you tell which are the fit animals and plants? The answer is by means of a post-hoc rationalisation—the fit must be “those who survived.” This is a valid criticism and arises because evolution is the study of what has already happened, and what has happened in circumstances that we do not usually know.
Even if we had every available fact, it might not be easy to make predictions that are succesful simply because Nature is so complicated and the relevance of all the factors will not often be clear, even when we are aware of them. It is rather like racehorse owners who will study or select the bloodlines of their purchases but will not necessarily come up with a winning horse. It is not necessarily their theory that is wrong but simply that they do not have all the facts, nor their relative importance. Nevertheless, it is plain that a three-legged horse is unlikely to be a winner, so it is plain that gross defects will be eliminated from a bloodline and will only re-emerge through mutation.
The complaint is that because such factors cannot be examined, evolutionists have identified the “fittest” members of a line to be those that subsequently emerge as a new species. Or, as C H Waddington put it: “The fittest individuals in a population (defined as those who leave the most offspring) will leave most offspring."
Now, Waddington, might have a point about the carelessness of some Darwinians for not being careful about what they meant but his tautological definition simply exposes human frailty, not a fault in the meaning of the “fittest.” There is nothing wrong in saying at the outset of a horse race that the best horse will be the winner. The “best horse” is defined in terms of a certain clear outcome.
Someone now comes along and says, that our definition of the best horse is invalid—it is a tautology because it simply says the winner of the race will be the horse that wins it. If this invalidates the definition of the best horse then lots of people in the world should look out for their positions. It invalidates the best businessmen, the best pupils, the best actors and the best scientists. We use post hoc criteria of success for all forms of endeavour without anyone coming along and saying we are being tautological.
The point is that our criterion is a proxy for the multiplicity of factors that we seek as being responsible for the outcome. Some horses are winners because of qualities that they have. Those horses that have those qualities are winners. In evolutionary terms, some individuals breed more successfully than others because of qualities they have that we will aim to elucidate but in the meantime we can only deduce that they have those qualities because they are successful at breeding. Milton tries to discredit evolutionists by quoting one professor as denying that individual characterististics matter at all, but the case quoted seems to be that of genetic drift not selection. Genetic drift is a random effect that happens in addition to selection—see how complicated Nature can be!
A mutant polar bear with black fur would not breed as successfully as white polar bears because its approach on the snow and ice would look obvious even to the least wary seals. It would therefore be less successful at feeding and therfore at breeding. This again is a gross example, and the real breeding advantage of an individual in a population might be much more subtle or slight, but it is there, and it manifests itself when generations of animals with the genes for that characteristic breed on. Milton tries to have us believe that “the race is not to the swift but merely to the prolific.” His weaselly “merely” is his hack’s way of influencing the reader. The winners are the prolific, and they win because they have real if subtle advantages over others in their environment.
Directed Evolution
Milton now discovers a new thread. Evolution is not blind but rather is “directed.” Micro-organisms can mutate in a way that is beneficial. The astute reader will have noticed that Milton, who hitherto has bashed biologists because they supposedly think evolution is “merely” random, or blind, as Milton prefers to call it, now explains to us that biologists actually do not think that evolution is “blind."
Even at its simplest most “reductionist” level, evolutionary theory is not random or blind exactly because of selection. The fact that some genetic varieties gave rise to macro-forms that were less successful at breeding in their environment means that evolution takes a course. The course might be different in different environments but particular environments will favour particular adaptations. Evolution therefore never was thought of as “blind” as Milton seems to think.
It is true that for long the process of mutation through random mistakes in the DNA helix was thought to be “blind” but the very work Milton cites, among others, has shown to biologists that evolution can have direction at the micro (genetic) level as well as at the macro level. Milton shows us proof of the progress of scientific discovery at work as if it were proof that scientists were idiots.
He also says that some people have the idea that life landed on earth from space, an idea considered as more plausible than it once was, but one that does not alter anything about the theory of evolution. Just as postulating that God is the creator of all begs the question of who created God, so the postulation of life entering the earth from space does not alter the usefulness of experiments on the origins of life, like those of Miller.
Conclusion
Phony critics of science like Milton always quote some scientists against others, as though there are a few good scientists fighting desperately against a lot of bad ones. In practice, of course, there are good and bad scientists. There are also arrogant ones and modest ones and the arrogant ones often shout louder. Milton mentions Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the function of DNA, as if he were on his side, but Crick is certain to be indebted to all of the thousands of scientists who have helped to substantiate his and Watson’s discovery of the double helix, the physical basis of the theory of evolution Milton tries his best to demolish.
On the other hand Milton cites Rupert Sheldrake, a new-agey barn-pot with a crypto-Christian agenda to his unproven speculations. Sheldrake was made famous by the editor of Nature who wrote an editorial recommending Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life, with its wild speculation of morphic resonance, to be burned. John Maddox could not have done better in promoting Sheldrake’s book if he had praised it to the heavens—which is where Sheldrake hopes to end up, having spent his life as a pseudo-scientific missionary for God. Milton seems to think the reaction to the book was a sure sign that Sheldrake was on to something important. It is unlikely, but Milton likes to quote this self-appointed missionary:
Many biologists have one set of beliefs at work, their official beliefs, and another set, their real beliefs, which they can speak openly about only among friends.
Doubtless this is true of all those friends of Sheldrake who believe in God while professing to be scientists. If they are so desperate to believe that a supernatural entity in some other universe will interfere in this world at a whim or a prayer, then they are not scientists, and can only continue the praxis of science through the utmost of cynicism.
Most of Milton’s critique is after the fashion of the Creationist Christian, Rabid Right in the US—a pathetic and deliberately misleading attempt to discredit evolutionary theory and the scientists who have established it so that the missionaries of God can continue to delude the ignorant, as they have done for over 2000 years.
