Desperate Attempts to Discover ‘the Elusive Process of Evolution’ or Why Neo-Darwinism is Dead

A review of The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry by Suzan Mazur
North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2010

reviewed by Walter J. ReMine, creation.com

Because this book was written by an evolutionist, creation scholars will especially love it. The Altenberg 16 looks at the rivalry in science today surrounding attempts to discover “the elusive process of evolution”. Its centerpiece is the by-invitation-only symposium held at Altenberg, Austria, in July 2008, attended by 16 evolutionary scientists, called the Altenberg 16 (figure 1). 

“[W]hile the Altenberg 16 have roots in neo-Darwinian theory, they recognize the need to challenge the prevailing Modern Synthesis, because there’s too much it doesn’t explain [emphasis added]” (p. vii).

“The Altenberg 16 … recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence [emphasis added]” (p. 19).

“A wave of scientists now questions natural selection’s role, though fewer will publicly admit it” (p. 20).

“Evolutionary science is as much about the posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying that goes on as it is about actual scientific theory. It is a social discourse involving hypotheses of staggering complexity with scientists, recipients of the biggest grants of any intellectuals, assuming the power of politicians while engaged in Animal House pie-throwing and name-calling: ‘ham-fisted’, ‘looney Marxist hangover’, ‘secular creationist’, ‘philosopher’ (a scientist who can’t get grants anymore), ‘quack’, ‘crackpot’ …

“In short, it’s a modern day quest for the holy grail, but with few knights. At a time that calls for scientific vision, scientific inquiry’s been hijacked by an industry of greed, with evolution books hyped like snake oil at a carnival.

“Perhaps the most egregious display of commercial dishonesty is this year’s celebration of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—the so-called theory of evolution by natural selection, i.e., survival of the fittest, a brand foisted on us 150 years ago.

“Scientists agree that natural selection can occur. But the scientific community also knows that natural selection has little to do with long-term changes in populations [emphasis added, ellipsis in original]” (p. v).

Good reporting

The book gives numerous statements that creation scholars will cheer. I therefore expected its author, Suzan Mazur, to offset those by giving the usual, obligatory, condemnation of creationists or the usual, stern (but empty), warning that ‘creationists will find nothing useful here’. I was pleasantly surprised these were absent from her prose. Though Mazur is an evolutionist, she is clearly a serious reporter, committed to the reporter’s craft of excluding her own views. The book is careful reportage throughout. She asks pointed questions of many evolutionary scientists, and gives lengthy transcripts of their responses, along with biographies, and observations about their appearance, manner, habits, and hobbies. It’s unlikely a creationist reporter could have gotten these same evolutionists to open up that much. 

Natural selection is insufficient

The book openly acknowledges the insufficiency of explaining evolution via natural selection (i.e. mutation and recombination plus various forms of selection)—and documents this point with statements from leading evolutionary scientists. 

“We are grappling with the increasing feeling … that we just don’t have the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the bewildering diversity and complexity of living organisms” (from the invitation to attend the Altenberg conference, p. 31).

“Basically I don’t think anybody knows how evolution works [emphasis added]” (Jerry Fodor, p. 34).

“Oh sure natural selection’s been demonstrated … the interesting point, however, is that it has rarely if ever been demonstrated to have anything to do with evolution in the sense of long-term changes in populations. … Summing up we can see that the import of the Darwinian theory of evolution is just unexplainable caprice from top to bottom. What evolves is just what happens to happen [ellipsis in original]” (Stanley Salthe, p. 21).

“There are people spouting off as if we know the answer. We don’t know the answer” (Stuart Kauffman, p. 54).

“Darwinism and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, last dusted off 70 years ago, actually hinder discovery of the mechanism of evolution” (Antonio Lima-de-Faria, p. 83).

“Do I think natural selection should be relegated to a less import role in the discussion of evolution? Yes I do” (Scott Gilbert, p. 221).

“She [Lynn Margulis] sees natural selection as ‘neither the source of heritable novelty nor the entire evolutionary process’ and has pronounced neo-Darwinism ‘dead’, since there’s no adequate evidence in the literature that random mutations result in new species” (Mazur, p. 257).

“At that meeting [Francisco] Ayala agreed with me when I stated that this doctrinaire neo-Darwinism is dead. He was a practitioner of neo-Darwinism but advances in molecular genetics, evolution, ecology, biochemistry, and other news had led him to agree that neo-Darwinism’s now dead” (Lynn Margulis, p. 278).

“The point is, however, that an organism can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is not the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated” (Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, p. 314).

Why is natural selection insufficient?

The book identifies key areas where natural selection is not a sufficient explanation, but discusses those only briefly and superficially. Mazur could have done a better job explaining these problems that are driving evolutionary scientists up the wall. I’ll greatly expand the discussion here. 

One area is obviously the origin of life, since natural selection can’t operate until after life has begun. Yet modern science has revealed breathtaking complexity of the simplest known self-reproducing lifeforms. To explain away these difficulties, evolutionists are claiming the existence, on Earth, of countless lifeforms unlike any known lifeforms. They have no evidence of that; instead they are trying to keep their worldview from being falsified, by floating untestable explanations. In addition, evolutionists are now offering unknown processes of ‘self-assembly’ and ‘self-organization’ (and associated terms like ‘plasticity’). 

Another key area is the origin of higher taxa, especially the origin of phyla and classes. According to evolutionists themselves, the origin of all the animal phyla occurred within (or very near) a brief geological twinkling of an eye, known as the Cambrian Explosion. This is a big problem in itself. 

But it gets worse. Stephen Jay Gould noted that the fossil sequence shows the most disparate (most different) biological designs tend to show up first! Followed by the slightly less-disparate designs. Followed by the still less different designs. Until, lastly, the last slight bits of interspecies biological diversity are filled-in at the very end of the process. The general trend in the fossil sequence is: the various phyla show up first, later various Linnaean classes are filled in, and still later various Linnaean orders are filled in … and so forth. Gould called this pattern ‘disparity precedes diversity’. And evolutionists cannot blame this sequence on an ‘incomplete fossil record’, as they often try to do. 

That contradicts the expectations of Darwinism (and neo-Darwinism), which expects slow change that, over time, will gradually accumulate to large differences. In short, Darwinism expects the most disparate designs to show up last, not first. This is contradicted by the fossil record. (To be honest, to most people not emotionally invested in the matter, it falsifies the Darwinism.) Something is wrong at the core of Darwinian theory. 

But it gets still worse. Recent discoveries in genetics are adding another interesting new challenge to the problem. Developmental biologists have observed a small set of genes coordinating organismal development of body plans—and these are present across the multicellular kingdom, in the various phyla and classes. Evolutionists call this the ‘Developmental Genetic Toolkit’. According to evolutionary thinking, this complex toolkit must have originated in some common ancestor to all the phyla. But that common ancestor must have existed prior to first appearance of these phyla—in other words, prior to the Cambrian Explosion. The common ancestor (whose identity is still unknown) must have existed in the Pre-Cambrian— prior to the origin of multicellular life. In short, the genes that control body plans had to have originated when there were no bodies. The genes that control embryological development had to have originated when there were no embryos. 

“At the point when the modern animal body plans first emerged [half a billion years ago] just about all the genes that are used in modern organisms to make embryos were already there. They had evolved in the single-celled world but they weren’t doing embryogenesis [Mazur’s braces]” (Stuart Newman, p. 52).

Natural selection cannot solve that problem: it cannot ‘look ahead’ and create an embryological toolkit for some future use. It cannot develop the ‘tools’ for making multicellular bodies when there are no multicellular bodies. Natural selection is insufficient, so once again evolutionists are appealing to mechanisms of self-assembly and self-organization. 

Stuart Newman’s paper, which “served as the centerpiece of the Altenberg symposium” (Mazur, p. 12), claims that all 35 or so animal phyla physically self-organized by the time of the Cambrian explosion, and selection followed later as a ‘stabilizer’ of the self-organized novelties. 

“Look, when Sherman stresses that the sea urchin [which has no eyes] has, in-expressed, the genes for the eyes and for antibodies (genes that are well known and fully active in later species), how can we not agree with him that canonical neo-Darwinism cannot begin to explain such facts?” (Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, p. 321).

This problem, from genetics and the fossil record, is scientifically solid and firm—but the evolutionists’ solution is not. Yet Mazur inverts the proper handling by giving a superficial description of the problem. Few of her readers will understand what is driving evolutionary scientists to such desperate lengths. 

Testability and experimental demonstrations

The evolutionary ideas of self-assembly and self-organization have two faults. First there is insufficient experimental demonstration. 

“Self-organization is of course an important component, but not much has been discovered beyond generalities. The immense amount of intricate detail that geneticists and developmentalists have been discovering over the years dwarfs general metaphors like autoevolution and even self-organization [emphasis added]” (Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, p. 322). 

Moreover, these evolutionary explanations lack scientific testability, or seriously risk that they could potentially be empirically falsified. Nobody seems to know how to test these. 

“I think self-organization is part of an alternative to natural selection. Let me try to frame it for you. In fact, it’s a huge debate. The truth is that we don’t know how to think about it” (Stuart Kauffman, p. 291).

Due to this two-fold scientific failure, these mechanisms can kindly be called hyperbole, or just plain hype—not science. These do not meet the requirements for science that evolutionists endorsed in all their court cases. But this deficiency is not discussed in the book. 

As we would predict for an evolutionary book of this type, it suggests no need whatever for testability of evolutionary explanations, in fact it scarcely mentions testability. Meanwhile evolutionists elsewhere resolutely demand testability from creation theories. This book is another example of the evolutionists’ routine double standard: One standard (testability) required of creation theory; and a far lower standard required of evolutionary theory. 

Evolutionary epistemology

Here is how evolutionists arrive at what they ‘know’ about origins: 

1. they take evolution as an unshakeable ‘fact’, and
2. science provides compelling evidence against many evolutionary explanations.

Those are taken together as evidence for the remaining evolutionary explanations—no matter how flakey, unsupported, or unscientific. This method of knowing runs deep within the evolutionist mindset. Evolutionists are constitutionally unable to ‘see’ evidence against evolution, even when hitting them in the face. The Altenberg 16 provides an example. There are many examples. 

There is so-called ‘convergence’, which is superabundant in life. For example, evolutionists claim vision arose more than forty separate times, and that a complex eye like yours—with a lens and retina— originated at least five separate times, as it is found separately in vertebrates, cephalopods (octopus/squid), annelid worms, jellyfish, and a spider (figure 2). Such origins have not remotely been demonstrated experimentally, and though these designs are complex, their similarity cannot be explained: 

• by common descent, or
• by atavism (i.e. the masking, and later un-masking of genetic traits), or
• by sideways transposition of traits from one lineage to another (such as by lateral gene transfer, or endosymbiosis).

Those are merely the three versions of simple inheritance that evolutionists actively employ in their storytelling. But all three of these simple explanations are eliminated by the data. (Note: this was necessary to meet the goals predicted by Message Theory.¹) 

Evolutionists are left with their least-easy, least plausible ‘explanation’ of the situation—the bald-faced, unscientific claim for the independent origin of similar biological complexities. In short, these are strong anti-evolutionary evidences. Given the incredible flexibility of evolutionary storytelling, ‘convergences’ are as anti-evolutionary as they can be. 

Ironically, the more profound the antievolutionary evidence, the more the evolutionist sees it as evidence for the incredible power of some evolutionary mechanism! All evolutionists interpret convergence as evidence for the incredible power of natural selection.

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