The Forbidden Universe (38 page)

There is only one known species that is, quite literally, immortal, barring accidents and disease. This is a tiny, 5 mm hydrozoan,
Turritopsis nutricula
– a sort of jellyfish native to the Caribbean – whose special biological talent was only discovered in 2009.
T. nutricula
’s trick is to revert to its sexually immature stage after reproducing, going through an endless cycle of infancy and adulthood. Although apparently unique, it does demonstrate that immortality can evolve. But why isn’t it more common, especially since obviously the ultimate in natural selection would not be mere survival but actual immortality?

As with sex, it’s easy to see the advantages that ageing has for a
species
, and for the progress of life in general. It avoids over-population and therefore competition for resources. Just imagine what would happen if a species were both immortal and fertile! It also retains the
all-important
genetic diversity by renewing the entire population periodically. If older generations didn’t die, and were able to mate with younger generations, then a species would never be able to eradicate its old genes. No new, improved genes would ever get a chance to catch on.

It is tempting to speculate that senescence developed specifically in response to the evolution of sex, in order to avoid these problems. Without death, after all, the benefits of sex for the faster spreading of life-improving genes throughout a species would be lost. The only drawback to this neat explanation is that Darwinian theory doesn’t allow for it.

The avoidance of overpopulation and the clearing out of the gene pool was, around the turn of the twentieth century, the most popular explanation even among Darwinists for the development of ageing. But it then dawned that this explanation actually contradicts Darwinism as it assumes that the species as a whole somehow knows what is good for it in the long run. Getting rid of the older generations is advantageous to a species as a whole, but can hardly be said to be much good for an individual, and it is changes in the individual that drive evolution. It’s another one of those awkward catch-22 situations that make us feel as though we’re missing something vital, somewhere.

Almost incredibly, neo-Darwinism also has difficulty in explaining – of all things – the origin of species …

The theory of speciation says that when a beneficial mutation occurs, over the course of many generations
natural selection carries the new trait to the rest of the species. Eventually so many changes from enough mutant individuals accumulate that a new species comes into being. The new species is genetically distinct from the original, to the point that it cannot breed with any members of the original species that might still be around. Given the air of confidence with which such matters are discussed in the public domain it’s surprising that evolutionary biologists can’t agree about how the processes governing speciation occur.

Different schools of evolutionary biology have proposed different models of exactly how speciation happens, but none of them can prove theirs to be correct. This is not surprising: it’s another of those areas where it is virtually impossible to acquire hard data. Evolution is such a long, slow process. After all, you can’t watch it happening in a lab, at least not where the likes of elephants, rubber plants or quantum physicists are concerned. There have been some instructive experiments on the micro level, with bacteria – particularly a long-running series with E. coli at Michigan State University – where different strains have changed their genetic make up over many generations. However, such experiments involve primitive species in glorious isolation facing limited survival problems, which hardly mimics the conditions of the real world.

All the scientists really have to work with is observation of the natural world and analysis of fossils, both of which are severely restricted. Contrary to expectations, the fossil record is not much help for the neo-Darwinian model, since many things that the theory would predict to be there are conspicuous by their absence. Darwin himself, in the words of palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, ‘viewed
palaeontology
more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory’.
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And eminent neo-Darwinian Ernst Mayr
acknowledged
in the late 1980s that following the fossil record:

More recently, Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London, has stated that the fossil record ‘can look anti-Darwinian’, meaning many of the things that should be there just aren’t.
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These absences are contrary to all Darwinian
expectations
. After all, the most dramatic changes should take the most time to manifest, and should leave more fossil traces. Yet they are not there. It has to be assumed that this anomaly is due to the fragmentary nature of the fossil record.

True, we are left with the remains of a tiny fraction of all the animals and plants that ever lived, representing a tiny fraction of all the species that have ever evolved. Only about a quarter of a million different species have been found in fossils, whereas the number of species ever to live is
probably
up there in the billions. The fossil record is really a random sampling of evolutionary history. How random and how big a sample nobody really knows – palaeontologists are left floundering in a statistical gloom.

Others are not so sure that the leaps in the fossil record can be brushed aside quite so easily. Although most biologists maintain Darwin’s original view that evolution is a slow and gradual process, for a minority in the field – mostly palaeontologists – it happens in short, sharp bursts. These are the theories of quantum evolution proposed by George C. Simpson in the 1940s (which still has supporters such as Thomas Cavalier-Smith), and punctuated
equilibrium
put forward by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the early 1970s. While the two theories agree the story of
each species consists of long periods of stasis with short bursts of rapid evolution, their proposed mechanisms are quite different.

Critics of punctuated equilibrium have called it a theory of evolution by jerks; Gould responded that theirs is a theory of evolution by creeps. But punctuated equilibrium and quantum evolution do at least suggest why the fossil record offers scant evidence of the gradual metamorphosis of one species into another.

The major objection to quantum evolution and
punctuated
equilibrium is that they require a mechanism over and above ‘classic’ neo-Darwinism, implying that the current theory is incomplete – hardly music to the ears of most evolutionists.
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Other biologists argue the theory is missing something vital. British biologist Brian Goodwin declares:

Most of the problems highlighted above would be solved if there were some way that natural selection could operate at the level of species, or even higher. Something that could see the big picture, in other words. But there is no place in
neo-Darwinian theory for this. A species evolves because the individuals within it evolve. Natural selection does not work at the level of the species, or the gene, but the individual.
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We are told, with confidence edging into arrogance, that neo-Darwinism can explain everything in the biological world, and there’s no need to invoke anything else. However, as we have seen, it totally fails to explain:

• The origin of life itself, specifically the origin of DNA.
  
• The appearance of the nucleated, eukaryotic cell without which multi-celled life would be impossible. (A ‘special case’, the result of a process outside the usual neo-Darwinian model.)
  
• The origin of sexual reproduction, another thing without which complex organisms couldn’t evolve. (Another special case that required a non-Darwinian process.) Not to mention how sex caught on, given all its disadvantages.
  
• How ageing, the clearing out of the gene pool without which evolution couldn’t advance, came into being.
  
• And – irony of ironies – Darwinism can’t really explain exactly how species originate.
  

Frankly, the Emperor is just plain naked. Nude. His only suit is the one he received on his birth day.

No doubt Richard Dawkins will be sighing as – or rather if – he reads this, ‘Here we have yet more non-scientists picking holes in Darwinism just because it can’t explain everything … so far at least …’ But there is an elephant in the room that is particularly difficult to miss. In fact, there are so many glaring flaws in the logic of neo-Darwinism that there is a whole herd of deliberately unnoticed pachyderms crammed into that one little space.

Darwinism performs a neat sleight of hand by using
observations as explanations. Although perhaps an
oversimplification
, there is nevertheless some truth in the way that the great iconoclast of scientific theorizing and collector of strange phenomena, Charles Fort sums up the
evolutionary
message: ‘survivors survive’.
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It’s not so very different from the logic behind the quip: ‘Statistically, people who have the most birthdays live longest.’

Neo-Darwinians do have a penchant for seeking to explain all biological phenomena simply by describing them. Take for example convergent evolution – perhaps ‘parallel’ might be a more apt term – where two species widely separated on the evolutionary tree have
independently
developed exactly the same anatomical solutions to the same survival problems, without having inherited them from a common ancestor.

There is a plethora of impressive examples across the animal and plant kingdoms where organisms that look virtually identical are in fact completely unrelated genetically. Many of the most obvious are found in Australia, which because it has been cut off from the other continents for around 50 million years, has developed its own idiosyncratic flora and fauna. In particular, marsupials rule, whereas in the rest of the world mammals with placentas have won the day. This has resulted in many Australian creatures that, fitting the same ecological niche as placental mammals, have evolved a very similar anatomy. There are marsupial moles, which look like moles from elsewhere, marsupial mice that look like non-Australian mice, and even an equivalent of the flying squirrel, the flying phalanger. Since marsupial and placental mammals diverged far back down the evolutionary tree, all of these have evolved completely independently.

But evolutionary theory also recognizes divergent
evolution
, where different species facing the same survival problems in similar environments come up with
different
 
solutions. Yet both types of evolution – convergent and divergent – are regularly cited as definitive proof of Darwinism. For example,
New Scientist’s
biology features editor Michael Le Page, wrote of divergent evolution in a 2008 article intended to counter the claims of the intelligent design movement, that ‘there is no reason why a “designer” would not have mixed up these features’.
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Dawkins also argues that the absence of shared features in distantly related species is evidence against intelligent design – no mammal has feathers, even though they would be useful to flying mammals such as bats.
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But convergent evolution is just the kind of mixing up that Le Page says never happens; according to his and Dawkins’ logic, convergent evolution must be evidence for design.

Even more bizarrely, Dawkins uses convergent evolution as an argument against intelligent design. He counters creationist claims that complex organs such as the camera eye of mammals – which is made up of separate
components
that individually do nothing but work perfectly together – could not have evolved by chance. Dawkins points out that the camera eye has actually evolved independently at least seven times (and eyes of any kind, based on other principles, at least forty).
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Not only is this a non sequitur – surely it just makes the problem seven times worse – but it also contradicts his argument that the lack of shared features in distantly related species disproves the existence of a designer.

Besides divergent and convergent evolution adapting a species to its environment, there is a third option: no evolution at all, or stasis. Judging by the fossil record, some species – ‘living fossils’ as Darwin put it – have hardly changed over vast tracts of time, including sharks, crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and horsetail plants. According to Ernst Mayr: ‘Some species are extraordinarily young, having originated only 2,000 to 10,000 years ago, while
others have not changed visibly in 10 to 50 million years.’
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