The ID Report

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In April of 2008, physicist David Tyler reported on a study that had seemingly diminished the role of the peacock train during courtship (Ref 1). Amongst other things, the study claimed that there was "no evidence that peahens expressed any preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains" after researchers examined the size of the train, the number of eye spots on the train and the duration of the famous 'shivering display' that peacocks perform in front of females (Ref 2). As one review of the study noted:

"The feather train on male peacocks is among the most striking and beautiful physical attributes in nature, but it fails to excite, much less interest, females" (Ref 3)

This finding went against one aspect of sexual selection, expressed under the umbrella of Zahavi's Handicap Theory. Named after Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi, the Handicap Theory tells us that for adaptations that seem to be burdensome and dangerous, such as the elaborate feathers of a male peacock, the very demonstration that the male of a species can carry them is in itself a display of physical prowess (Ref 4, p.140-141). Such a display is after all energetically draining as well as outright dangerous (imagine the ease by which a predator could home in on the exuberant peacock). British zoologist Richard Dawkins who has championed Zahavi's position had this to say on the matter:

"The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will favour skepticism among females (or among recipients of advertising messages generally). The only way for a male to authenticate his boast of strength....is to prove that it is true by shouldering a truly costly handicap- a handicap that only a genuinely strong male could bear. It may be called the principle of authentication" (Ref 4, p.141)

Dawkins employed the same logic to explain the stotting jump of the Thomson's gazelle:

"stotting, rather than being a signal to the other gazelles, is really aimed at the predators. It is noticed by the other gazelles and it affects their behaviour, but this is incidental, for it is primarily selected as a signal to the predator. Translated roughly into English it means: 'Look how high I can jump, I am obviously such a fit and healthy gazelle, you can't catch me, you would be much wiser to try and catch my neighbour who is not jumping so high!'...An individual who jumps high is advertising, in an exaggerated way, the fact that he is neither old nor unhealthy" (Ref 5, p. 171)

And yet as Tyler was quick to comment, the peacock's train is, "a clear example of how a Darwinian hypothesis has become accepted as scientific fact, yet now has been disproved by some rigorous empirical research" (Ref 1). Of course in light of this research, Darwinists will no doubt be looking for other natural selection-based explanations for the encumbering peacock train since they remain convinced that something has to always be selected for and something selected against in order for key adaptations to arise in nature. And so it is that in at least one key aspect Darwinism remains protected from falsification. If the outcome were any different- say, if only male peacocks with short discrete feathers survived- we could just as easily conclude that selection had favored discrete-feathered varieties. After all, what a handicap it is for a peacock to carry its wondrous feathered display of beauty. Likewise for the stotting gazelle that may survive because it is showing itself to be fit or may not survive because, by stotting, it is revealing its exact location for the predator to maul it down.

We can see how traditional Darwinism is truly burdened with a heavy yoke. It is difficult to demonstrate that anything is true if you cannot also show that alternatives are false. That 'anything goes' as evidence for natural selection was clearly demonstrated in a recent review of man's exploitation of farm animals. Cited as an example of how cows and pigs had succeeded in the evolutionary 'rat race' by becoming man's primary resource of meat, the claim brought the apparent explanatory power of Darwinism to new heights:

"The more mankind uses a particular species of animal, the more that species flourishes. There are no rights and wrongs in nature, even when man is involved, but only "blindly immoral evolution," all of those unconscious, pre-programmed survival strategies with the single aim of species perpetuation. The animals we use thus gain our "protection" under a kind of evolutionary "covenant", escaping the inevitable extinction now befalling other species as human mastery expands across the earth. These chosen ones become our "evolutionary co-partners", so that today, for example, no animals are flourishing more than the livestock crowded by the billions into our factory farms, or the research subjects abounding in our labs, or the inhabitants of our game parks. Far from being exploited, the theory runs, these animals are in a sense exploiting us, like so many parasites, their collective survival assured by their utility to the "dominant evolutionary partner". Indeed, factory farming becomes a kind of ultimate good in this scheme, a supreme act of fidelity to our evolutionary "covenant"" (Ref 6, pp.230-231).

Biophysicist Cornelius Hunter wrote that "theories that make general predictions that can accommodate just about any result not only are less useful but are protected from falsification" (Ref 7. p.27). Of course critics would argue that simply because we do not have the ability to predict or pre-state where evolution is going to go next does not mean that evolution is not getting on with evolving new forms and new ways of making a living. This is precisely biologist Stuart Kauffman's counter argument. According to Kauffman, a biosphere- a collective entity of interacting organisms- is, by its very nature, continuously evolving and changing such that it generates new "causal axioms" (Ref 8, p.137) from which new, yet unseen solutions to survival arise. Kauffman tells us that evolution continuously changes the biosphere and thus renders the previously held axioms incomplete. Nevertheless as philosopher William Dembski is quick to note, evolutionary-interesting solutions are so rare that a purely naturalistic search is not going to find them, regardless of whether or not one considers Kaufman's continuously changing biosphere (Ref 9, pp.224-228).

The peacock's train has clearly challenged us to rethink about what we thought we knew about sexual selection. Besides the Sherlock Holmes-like abilities of deduction that Dawkins attributes to peahens, the underlying non-falsifiable aspects of the Darwinian paradigm have been demonstrated to be as relevant today as they were in the time of the renowned philosopher Karl Popper. We are left with the startling conclusion that much of Darwinism is built around a theory that tells us nothing of value and is therefore of little importance to real science.

References
1. David Tyler (2008) Sexual selection falsified in the case of peacock feathers, Access Research Network, April, 2008, See
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2008/04/01/sexual_selection_falsified_in_the_case_o

2. Mariko Takahashi, Hiroyuki Arita, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa and Toshikazu Hasegawa (2008), Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains, Animal Behaviour, 75(4), pp.1209-1219

3. Jennifer Viegas, (2008), Female Peacocks Not Impressed by Male Feathers, Discovery News, March 2008, http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/26/peacock-feathers-females.html

4. Richard Dawkins (2003), A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson London, UK

5. Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK

6. Matthew Scully (2002), Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, St Martin's Press, New York

7. Cornelius Hunter (2001) Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Brazos Press, A division of Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

8. Stuart Kauffman (2000), Investigations, Published by Oxford University Press, New York

9. William Dembski (2002), No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Lanham, Maryland