The ID Report

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The first months of the year are traditionally very busy for most Americans in more ways than one. Not only is this the time when most begin to think about filing their tax returns but it is also the time for getting together with friends and family to watch that most traditional of American events- the Superbowl. 2003 was to be no different in this regard as two teams- The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Oakland Raiders- met in a face off that would draw millions to their screens. For my family and I, having moved from the UK only two years previously, this was a time of readjustment and learning- we had after all neither seen nor heard much about this sport when we were young. Thus watching a game in its entirety was both exciting and baffling and at times resembled our more familiar, home-grown sport of rugby. The post-match reviews were filled with color and emotion as those who had watched the event aired their opinions on both the technical and financial aspects of the game. Talk on the lucrative gains from the game received its just-deserved space in the tabloid press.

Those of us who had only occasionally watched football were awe-struck by how the clash of these two teams had captured the imagination of a nation in a way that at times resembled the Brazilian spirit of soccer which I had lived through as a child. However, there remained a burning and troubling question in our minds for which none of these magazine reviews and newspaper articles provided a satisfactory answer- why had a sport, that for the most part involved forward passing, mauling, throwing and very little kicking or contact with the foot, been given the rather implicit and illustrious name of football? What boot had been responsible for kicking this all-American game into the hall of fame of ultimate contradictions?

The paradox was nicely captured in Johnny Hart's B.C cartoon appearing in the Wisconsin State Journal round about the time that the 2003 Superbowl was being held. In his inimitable fashion, Hart's depiction showed how, unlike soccer (some would argue 'true football'), the naming of the comparatively new, ball-throwing sport represented a contradiction of terms - a sudden departure from a logical sequence which culminated in a moment of ironic proclamation "ERGO THE NAME FOOTBALL!!!".

Curiously paleontologists have a lot to learn from this story. At its heart, paleontology aims to discover much of how animals and their habitats have changed over time. Naturalist Jane Goodall, who spent a period of her life in Africa working alongside the British paleontologist Louis Leakey, reflected on the spirit of paleontology and its, "reconstructions of life-forms long since vanished from our planet" (Ref 1, p.49). For some of my own colleagues paleontology is a get-your-hands-dirty sort of hobby that takes them to the farthest backwaters of our country to scrape and chisel away at the ground. The discovery of graduated intermediates spanning the morphologies of today's living organisms is the inner hope of many a field trip into the deep unknown. Yet curiously, paleontology has over the years had to shift its focus from such deeply held expectations.

Sudden change, or punctuation is according to the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould a closer reflection of nature's ways than blending, smooth gradualism particularly when one thinks back on what the overall picture of the fossil record actually shows us (Ref 2, pp.765-774). In this sense the evidence contradicts the requirements that Charles Darwin so confidently maintained for his theory to hold true. Indeed, Darwin's famous premise 'Natura Non Facit Saltum' shut the door on the possibility of evolutionary jumps (Ref 3). Nevertheless what we see in the fossil record is not a continuum of graduated forms connecting related species but rather a series of intermittent punctuated changes that occur between long periods of morphological 'stasis' (Synonymous to overall 'non- change', See Ref 2, p.768).

In recent years an evolutionary theory called Punctuated Equilibrium has in effect attacked one of the principle tenets of Darwinism in so far as it denies, "the slowness and smoothness of rate" that "formed the centerpiece of Darwin's larger world view" (Ref 2, p.756). As Darwin critic Phillip Johnson commented, "if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution" (Ref 4, pp. 50-51). Biola University biophysicist Cornelius Hunter likewise commented on the 'big bangs' of biology - sudden events of change, separated by million-year long periods of stasis (Ref 5, p.69). Punctuated Equilibrium challenges the 'escape chute' of an incomplete fossil record so often used by evolutionary biologists to explain away the absence of gradual change. After all, if everything else about Punctuated Equilibrium is controversial, stasis remains evident for all to see (Ref 2, p.759).

Scientists are of course well aware of the predominance of stasis throughout the fossil record but have been unwilling to write about it in the scientific literature for the simple reason that it did not agree with the expectations that Darwin himself had so clearly pronounced. Indeed some neo-Darwinists have attempted to reason through it by invoking some kind of silent evolution (otherwise known as 'mosaic' evolution), in which the soft internal anatomy continued to evolve, unrecorded in the fossil record (Ref 4, pp.52-53). Others have suggested that natural selection acts as the 'preventer' of change, "eliminating all the innovations, sometimes for periods of millions of years and despite changing environmental conditions that ought to have encouraged adaptive innovation" (Ref 4, pp.52-53). As Johnson rightly concluded, Darwinism continues to enjoy a status of an a priori truth that, unlike other scientific theories, is shielded from the possibility of critical evaluation (Ref 4, pp. 52-53). Yet frustratingly Punctuated Equilibrium does appear to provide sufficient evidence to refute Darwinian 'gradualism'.

Both Stephen Jay Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge recognized the predominance of stasis quite early on their scientific careers. For Eldredge it came while he was studying the fossilized fauna of the Devonian- a period of geological time that began approximately 408 million years ago and marked the arrival of land dwelling animals on earth (Ref 6, pp.40-42). One particular creature known as Phacops rana captured Eldredge's interest because of the insignificant amount of variability in the number of eye lenses that it displayed during the eight million of years that followed its first appearance (Ref 6, p.70). This greatly troubled Eldredge for the simple reason that he had been trained to expect gradual morphological change over time (Ref 6, pp.54-55). As Eldredge recalls, the response that followed the publication of his and Gould's subsequent Punctuated Equilibrium paper was from many less than congenial:

"We were not prepared for the reaction. Whether favorable ("I knew it all along" or the more positive "Finally I can make sense of my data") or critical ("You guys are full of ----------" heard more then once at national meetings in the mid- to late 1970s), the reactions provoked by the paper were strong among nearly all paleontologists....Some paleontologists were angered that we implied that the profession as a whole was ignorant of the simple model of allopatric speciation....Other criticisms were more serious including....the denial that stasis is a general phenomenon or even occurs at all!"(Ref 6, pp.121-122)

Since the 1970's several other key examples have confirmed the predominance of stasis in the fossil record (See review, Ref 7). It seems paradoxical therefore that paleontologists should still adopt the gradualistic premise of Darwinism as an established fact and dismiss stasis as just another failure to document evolution. It was Gould's and Eldredge's triumph that they recognized stasis as, "a potentially fascinating phenomenon worthy of rigorous documentation, not merely as a failure to find evolution" (Ref 2, p.760).

Ironically, many of the famous textbook cases of the gradualistic picture that Darwinists set out in support of their views (including the well-known horse series) have since been found to document stasis (Ref 2, p.760). As Gould has commented, the failure of neo-Darwinists to accept stasis as real data has set evolutionary studies into a 'straight jacket' that lamentably still persists today to the detriment of the scientific method (Ref 2, p.763). After all, theories should be refutable, not established a priori truths immune from testing, and should be open to refutation as new evidence accumulates.

REFERENCES
1. Jane Goodall (1999), Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Warner Books Inc, New York, NY

2. Stephen Jay Gould (2002), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

3. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York, p.246

4. Phillip Johnson (1991), Darwin on Trial, 1st Ed, InterVarsity Press Publishers, Madison, Wisconsin

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

6. Niles Eldredge (1985), Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian, Evolution and the Theory of Puctuated Equilibria, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

7. Robert Deyes (2008), More Than A Minor Dispute: How Punctuated Equilibrium Has Challenged Contemporary Evolutionary Biology, http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2008/06/23/more_than_a_minor_dispute_how_punctuated

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The other day I was at my local grocery store and I noticed what appeared to be a girl child shopping. But I quickly realized - watching from behind - that it could not be a child.

Movements too precise, too disciplined. Honed by decades of experience, not mere years.

Well, she turned around and - it was a woman only slightly younger than me.

An almost proportionate dwarf. She came up only to the bottom of my rib cage - and I am only 5 ft tall.

Thus she was less than a metre tall, for sure.

Of course I immediately ceased to look at her - continuing to look would have been rude.

Her head struck me as slightly too large for an adult, in proportion to her body, which is why I describe her as a "nearly proportionate" dwarf.

Then, a few days later, I saw another nearly proportionate dwarf - a different woman - in another part of town - about the same size.

So I am even more skeptical than I used to be of claims that Flores man represents a "different species" of human.

I always was skeptical of the little lady of Flores claims as evidence for a new human species, but am especially so when I run into normal humans who just happen to be very small.

I think it more likely that - just as the elephants on Flores were unusually small, so were the people. While it would be interesting to know the reason for that, we need not assume that the people were a different species.

New intelligent design book

Remembering The Privileged Planet

Faith in mindless matter and energy

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy - also, April 1 warning ...

A reader writes from an island in the Mediterranean to ask ...

A friend's note about Niko Tinbergen and the herring gull chicks - who was gulled, exactly?

Why newspapers are dying?

From the "More Stuff We Know That Ain't So" files: NobelistTinbergen

Excerpts from Ezra Levant's Shakedown

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).