When I go to the public
library and select a book dealing with human origins, I often feel
rather like someone in a Star Trek episode who might be
transported inside one of those cubic spaceships of the Borg Collective, and who then might seek out a fresh, individualistic
opinion from one of the inhabitants. It sometimes seems that the
community of evolutionary biology professors is some kind of Borg
Collective or hive mind, enforcing the same rubber-stamp thinking
with robotic efficiency, with the same lack of individualism as a
division of North Korean soldiers. So if you pick up a book on
biological origins, you will expect that with high probability you
will get the same old “just so stories,” the same old
requirements underestimations, the same old exaggerations of the
significance of peripheral or borderline evidence, the same old
worshipful kneeling to Darwinian authority, the same old claims that
the not-at-all-creative principle of natural selection is a magic
wand that explains practically all of the wonders of biological
innovation.
I was therefore quite
surprised to find on my public library bookshelf the book Why Us?
How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by physician
James Le Fanu, who has written extensively in mainstream media and
journals such as the British Medical Journal and the Journal of the
Royal Society of Medicine. Although he shows no religious motive, Le
Fanu is very much a skeptic about the explanatory value of Darwinism.
Le Fanu does not seem to doubt that life on Earth is very old, and he
seems to favor the idea that humans have somehow evolved from other
species. But he rejects the claim that Darwin's idea of natural
selection can explain the origin of mankind or the more impressive
cases of biological complexity.
On page 39 Le Fanu states,
“The more one reflects on what is involved in standing upright or
acquiring a large brain, the less convincing Darwin's proposed
mechanism of natural selection appears to be.” He calls the
reader's attention to the problem that while knuckle-walking like a
gorilla (with four limbs) works well, and walking like a man works
well, if there were to be evolution from four-limb walking to bipedal
walking, it would require passing though an intermediate stage that
wouldn't work well at all, with organisms being prone to topple over
when they walked (and be devoured by predators). So the progression
over many thousands or millions of years would be:
4-limb walking (works
well) → Intermediate stage (works poorly) → Bipedal walking
(works well)
The problem is that this
progression is unbelievable under a theory of natural selection,
which should stop any progression that works against survival value.
The issue with the brain pointed out by Le Fanu is that to a creature
in the wild, a much larger brain doesn't have much value, and has a
negative value of making the birth delivery of a child much harder
and more dangerous, due to the difficulty of passing a large brain
though the narrow birth canal. Le Fanu states acidly on page 57, “It
has taken just a few pages to draw out the contradictions, at every
turn, in the prevailing scientific certainty of 'natural selection'
as the driving force of the Ascent of Man.”
On pages 92-95 Le Fanu
discusses the evolution of the eye, eventually concluding on page 95
that “there is not a single empirical discovery in the past 150
years that has substantiated Darwin's proposal that natural
selection, 'taking advantage of slight successive variations,'
explains the 'puzzle of perfection' epitomised by so many different
types of eye – which remain yet more puzzling than it was in 1859.”
He would have made this point more powerfully if he had also pointed
out the incredibly elaborate proteins and brain changes involved in
vision.
Another doctor (Joseph A.
Kuhn) does just such a thing in a scientific paper, noting the
inadequacy of Darwinian explanations for the eye. He states:
However, biochemists
have shown that even a simple light-sensitive spot requires a complex
array of enzyme systems. When light strikes the retina, a photon
interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges
within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of the
retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein
rhodopsin. The protein then changes to metarhodopsin II and sticks to
another protein, called transducin. This process requires energy in
the form of GTP, which binds to transducin.
GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II then binds to a protein called
phosphodiesterase, located on the cell wall. This affects the cGMP
levels within the cell, leading to a signal that then goes to the
brain. The recognition of this signal in the brain and subsequent
interpretation involve numerous other proteins and enzymes and
biochemical reactions within the brain cells. Thus, each of these
enzymes and proteins must exist for the system to work properly...In
summary, the eye is incredibly complex. Since it is unreasonable to
expect self-formation of the enzymes in perfect proportion
simultaneously, eye function represents a system that could not have
arisen by gradual mutations.
After mentioning whale
evolution, where the fossils seem to show dramatic evolution of
structure moving way too fast to be accounted for by random
mutations, Le Fanu states on page 120, “By 1980 the logical
implications of such biological 'insolubilia' seemed inescapable: the
central premise of Darwin's evolutionary theory of gradualist
transformation was no longer tenable....Some other dramatic
mechanism, as yet unknown to science, must account for the
extraordinary diversity of life as revealed by the fossil record.”
On page 229 Le Fanu scolds
scientists for their overconfident knowledge pretensions, and accuses
them of “persuading us that we know so much more than we really do,
or can.” On page 231 he states that the “proposed mechanism of
natural selection as the 'cause' of the diversity of living things is
contradicted at every turn by the empirical evidence of science
itself.” Speaking of Darwinism on page 255, he says “As time has
passed its anomalies and inconsistencies have proved ever more
pressing, and now, with the crushing verdict of the genome projects,
we are left to stare into the abyss of our ignorance of virtually
every aspect of the complexities of the living world and its
evolutionary history.”
Defenders of Darwinian
orthodoxy are constantly trying to make it look as if everyone
accepts Darwinism but the religiously motivated. A book like Le
Fanu's helps to show otherwise, for he seems to have no religious
motivation at all. While many claim that we must choose between
Darwinism on one hand and creationism or intelligent design on the
other hand, Le Fanu's book reminds us there is another major
alternative: the simple alternative of saying, “We don't know the
answer to this mystery.” You may refer to this position as origins
agnosticism.
Why does someone like Le
Fanu differ so strongly from the professors of evolutionary biology?
Is it because he knows less about biology than such persons? Not at
all; doctors know just as much about biology as biology professors,
and probably more. I think the difference is that when you
train to be a doctor, you do not undergo the years of social
conditioning that our evolutionary biology professors are subjected
to, in which they are placed in club-like “high peer pressure”
social environments in which adherence to Darwinian dogma is
constantly demanded. You can get to be a doctor without becoming a
thought-robot of the hive mind or Borg Collective that is the
community of evolutionary biology professors. Surveys indicate that
skepticism about Darwinian orthodoxy is much higher among physicians
than among professors, and the author of this scientific paper is
another doctor doubtful about Darwinism.
A
superb writer, Le Fanu is a critic of great insight, and his book is
very thought-provoking. On page 108 of his book, he makes a comment
that the modern scientist should print out and tape to his office
wall: “The greatest obstacle to scientific progress, after all, is
not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” True indeed – our
scientific progress may be accelerated when overconfident scientists stop
pretending to understand mysteries that they do not really
understand, mysteries that may take mankind a thousand years to solve.
Postscript: There's an interesting new book called Cracking the Aging Code by theoretical biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD and Dorion Sagan. The book is mainly on theories of aging. But on page 31 Mittledorf writes this:
I found that neo-Darwinism doesn't work very well as a description of real life. Several big things about life in general just don't add up in the context of neo-Darwinism: There's aging and death -- I'll try to show you in the coming chapters why I don't think you can account for the basic facts about aging within the framework of neo-Darwinism. But in addition, neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction or for the structure of the genome that seems actually "designed" to make evolution possible; neo-Darwinism also does not have a place for the recently established phenomena of epigenetic inheritance or horizontal gene transfer.
On page 84 the authors state this: "Natural selection cannot be observed in the wild, because it requires huge areas and thousands of years." On the same page the authors state this: "But evolutionary biology today is a uniquely sick science, missing the vibrancy, the audacity, and the commitment to empirical truth that form the core of the scientific method."
Postscript: There's an interesting new book called Cracking the Aging Code by theoretical biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD and Dorion Sagan. The book is mainly on theories of aging. But on page 31 Mittledorf writes this:
I found that neo-Darwinism doesn't work very well as a description of real life. Several big things about life in general just don't add up in the context of neo-Darwinism: There's aging and death -- I'll try to show you in the coming chapters why I don't think you can account for the basic facts about aging within the framework of neo-Darwinism. But in addition, neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction or for the structure of the genome that seems actually "designed" to make evolution possible; neo-Darwinism also does not have a place for the recently established phenomena of epigenetic inheritance or horizontal gene transfer.
On page 84 the authors state this: "Natural selection cannot be observed in the wild, because it requires huge areas and thousands of years." On the same page the authors state this: "But evolutionary biology today is a uniquely sick science, missing the vibrancy, the audacity, and the commitment to empirical truth that form the core of the scientific method."
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