Why darwin was wrong

Some recent studies of the evolution of African lake fish suggests that there may be a predetermined pattern. And both times, the outcome has been much the same. Natural selection works. But its role may be large or small, depending on circumstances. The ways that this may come about are being mapped out. The laws of development ontogenesis , if laws there be, still elude discovery. But the origin of species phylogenesis surely depends as much on them as on selection. But if so, the term is deeply unfortunate because it implies that evolution is guided by intention, by an inscrutable agent, not by impersonal laws.

As a hypothesis it is untestable. But they are wrong to insert an intelligent agent as a solution and still claim they are doing science. Appealing to intelligent design just begs the question of how development actually works. It is not science, but faith. As he knew, but many of his fans do not, it is incomplete. Instead of paying attention to the gaps, and seeking to fill them, these enthusiasts have provided a straw man for opponents to attack.

Darwin was closer to the truth than his critics — and closer than some simple-minded supporters. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Please read the Duke Wordpress Policies. Contact the Duke WordPress team. The New Behaviorism. Skip to content. Response to Vicky: Is racism everywhere, really? Was Darwin Wrong?

Posted on April 22, Leave a comment. Or have critics — and some fans — missed the point? This is an updated version of a piece that originally appeared in Intellectual Takeout Christopher Booker is a contrarian English journalist who writes extensively on science-related issues.

Their discussion provided all the ingredients for a conspiracy novel: [T]hey had come up against a wall of hostility from the scientific establishment. The logic of evolution There are three parts to the theory of evolution: The fact of evolution itself.

The fact that the human species shares common ancestors with the great apes. Small divergences became large ones as one species gave rise to two and so on.

Variation : the fact that individual organisms vary — have different phenotypes , different physical bodies and behaviors — and that some of these individual differences are caused by different genotypes , which are heritable and so are passed on to descendants.

Selection : the fact that individual variants in a population will also vary in the number of viable offspring to which they give rise. If number of offspring is correlated with some heritable characteristic — if particular genes are carried by a fitter phenotype — then the next generation may differ phenotypically from the preceding one.

Notice that in order for selection to work, at every stage the new variant must be more successful than the old. Some of this variation is heritable, passed from one generation to the next have different genotypes.

Some heritable variations phenotypes are fitter produce more offspring than others because they are better adapted to their environment. Ergo, each generation will be better adapted than the preceding one. Organisms will evolve. The direction of evolution Darwinian evolution depends on not one but two forces: selection , the gradual improvement from generation to generation as better-adapted phenotypes are selected; and variation : the set of heritable characteristics that are offered up for selection in each generation.

Evolution explains the vast diversity of life on earth, with single species becoming many as they adapt to different environments. Wilson, "although his masterwork was entitled On the Origin of Species , Darwin really didn't pay much attention to how one species splits and multiplies into many. But understanding the process would have to wait for the work of Wallace in the mids. Wallace, working in an area with tens of thousands of islands, showed that a single butterfly species could slowly become many as it adapted to the specific conditions encountered on each island.

But that was something that Darwin held back a little. Darwin knew that plant and animal species could be sorted into groups by similarity, such that birds clustered into songbirds and raptors, say, with each group subdivided again and again down to dozens or hundreds of distinct species.

He also saw that the individuals within any given species, despite many similarities, also differed from one another—and some of those differences were passed from parents to their offspring. And Darwin observed that nature had a brutally efficient method of rewarding any variation that helped an individual live longer, breed faster or leave more progeny. The reward for being a slightly faster or more alert antelope?

The lions would eat your slower neighbors first, granting you one more day in which to reproduce. After many generations and a great deal of time, the whole population would run faster, and with many such changes over time eventually become a new species. Evolution, Darwin's "descent with modification through natural selection," would have occurred.

But what was the source of variation and what was the mechanism for passing change from generation to generation? Darwin "didn't know anything about why organisms resemble their parents, or the basis of heritable variations in populations," says Niles Eldredge, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In Darwin's era, the man who did make progress on the real mechanism of inheritance was the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel.

In his abbey garden in the late s and early s, Mendel bred pea plants and found that the transmission of traits such as flower color and seed texture followed observable rules.

For instance, when plants with certain distinct traits were bred with each other, the hybrid offspring did not have a trait that was a blend of the two; the flowers might be purple or white, but never an intermediate violet.

This surprising result helped point the way toward the concept of "units" of inheritance—discrete elements of hereditary information. An offspring inherits a set of these genetic units from each parent.

Since the early s, those units of inheritance have been known as genes. Mendel knew Darwin's work—his German copy of Origin was sprinkled with handwritten notes—but there's no evidence that Mendel realized that his units of inheritance carried the variation upon which Darwinian selection acted.

But what if he had? Today, comparative genomics—the analysis of whole sets of genetic information from different species—is confirming the core of Darwin's theory at the deepest level. Scientists can now track, DNA molecule by DNA molecule, exactly what mutations occurred, and how one species changed into another.

Darwin himself made a stab at drawing a "tree of life," a diagram that traces the evolutionary relationships among species based on their similarities and differences. There have been plenty of evolutionary surprises in recent years, things that Darwin never would have guessed. The number of genes a species has doesn't correlate with how complex it is, for example. With some 37, genes, rice has almost twice as many as humans, with 20, And genes aren't passed only from parent to offspring; they can also be passed between individuals, even individuals of different species.

This "horizontal transfer" of genetic material is pervasive in bacteria; it's how antibiotic resistance often spreads from one strain to another.

Animals rarely acquire whole genes in this way, but our own DNA is packed with smaller bits of genetic material picked up from viruses during our evolutionary history, including many elements that regulate when genes are active or dormant.

Do these surprises challenge the central idea of Darwinian evolution? Truly one of the most remarkable traits of Darwinism itself is that it has withstood heavy scientific scrutiny for a century and a half and still manages to accommodate the latest ideas. Another growing field of biology is shedding further light on the origins of variation.

Evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, focuses on changes in the exquisitely choreographed process that causes a fertilized egg to mature.

Behind one series of such changes are the so-called homeotic genes, which dictate where legs or arms or eyes will form on a growing embryo. These central-control genes turned out to be almost identical even in animals as different as worms, flies and human beings. Many researchers now think that much of evolution works not so much through mutations, or random errors, in the major functional genes, but by tweaking the ways by which developmental genes control other genes.

These kinds of connections were at the heart of descent with modification. Carroll says he thinks Darwin would be thrilled with the evolutionary details scientists can now see—how, for example, changes in just a small number of regulatory genes can explain the evolution of insects, which have six legs, from their ancestors, which had even more.

From there, it's a short step to solving some of the mysteries of speciation, working out the mechanics of exactly how one species becomes many, and how complexity and diversity can be built up out of very simple beginnings. Perhaps the most surprising discovery in recent years has to do with one of Darwin's predecessors in evolutionary theory. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, developed his own theory of biological evolution in the early 19th century.

He suggested that acquired traits could be passed along to offspring—giraffes that stretched to reach leaves on tall trees would produce longer-necked offspring. This "soft inheritance" became known as Lamarckism and soon proved susceptible to parody: Would clipping the tail off a rat lead to tailless pups?

Woese convinced many biologists that Archaea are so distinct from bacteria that they deserve their own label. But Archaea do not pose a challenge to Darwinian theory, our understanding of how species originate and evolve. I would compare Archaea to a revision in our model of galaxy formation in the early universe, which does not threaten the basic big-bang framework. Horizontal gene transfer, the other discovery on which Quammen focuses, arguably does pose a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory.

It involves different species passing genes directly to each other, usually via bacterial or viral infections. Tentative evidence for horizontal gene transfer emerged almost a century ago, but only in the past few decades have biologists recognized its influence on the evolution of multicellular organisms as well as Archaea and bacteria.

The tree metaphor, it turns out, is inaccurate, or incomplete. Scholars disagree on just how revolutionary horizontal gene transfer is. In W. Quammen, too, accuses New Scientist of sensationalism. To answer the question posed in my headline: Nah. Far from being wrong, Darwin is as right as ever when it comes to his big idea, natural selection.

Now we know that variations have many causes, including mutation, endosymbiosis, genetic drift, sexual recombination, epigenetic factors and, yes, horizontal gene transfer. But all variations, whatever form they take, serve as fodder for natural selection, which remains the primary evolutionary force, and which Darwin and Wallace discovered.

Each paradigm constantly undergoes revisions and extensions. All of biology since Darwin has been normal. Evolution by natural selection resembles capitalism. Both paradigms have an uncanny ability to absorb opposition, just as one microbe swallows another via endosymbiosis.

That said, I find the discoveries on which Quammen reports fascinating. One subtheme of his book concerns how horizontal gene transfer might influence our self-conceptions. What are you? I just wrote a book about the quest to solve the mind-body problem , which asks, Who are we, really? As Quammen reports, for every cell that is, strictly speaking, ours, our bodies contain roughly three bacterial cells—in our guts, mouths and elsewhere.

Bacteria are much smaller than human cells and yet still account for as much as three percent of our total mass.