Rob Breakenridge, a Canadian talk radio host, submits a rather puerile column to The Calgary Herald in which he voices his dismay that so many Albertans are skeptical of Darwinian explanations of the origin of man. As is so often the case among Darwinian critics of those who are skeptical of their Darwinism, he gives little reason why they should think otherwise beyond some standard name-calling and other insults directed at creationists and intelligent design proponents.
Denyse O'Leary responds to Breakenridge in a column which she wrote for the Herald and which she also posts at Uncommon Descent. The heart of her reply is this:
Breakenridge hopes that we can enlighten backward Albertans by teaching more "evolution" in Alberta schools. But that won't help. Textbook examples of evolution often evaporate when researchers actually study them (instead of just assuming they are true).
For example, the peacock's tail did not evolve to please hen birds; hens don't notice them much. The allegedly yummy Viceroy butterfly did not evolve to look like the bad-tasting Monarch (both insects taste bad). The eye spots on butterflies' wings did not evolve to scare birds by resembling the eyes of their predators. Birds avoid brightly patterned insects, period. They don't care whether the patterns resemble eyes. Similarly, the famous "peppered moth" of textbook fame has devolved into a peppered myth, featuring book-length charges and countercharges.
And remember that row of vertebrate embryos in your textbook years ago? It was dubbed in the journal Science one of the "most famous fakes" in biology-because the embryos don't really look very similar. And Darwin's majestic Tree of Life? It's now a tangleweed, or maybe several of them.
We seldom see evolution happening. Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution (2007) notes that for decades scientists have observed many thousands of generations of bacteria in the lab. And how did they evolve?
Well, they didn't. Worse, when evolution is occasionally observed (and widely trumpeted), it often heads the wrong way. For example, bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance by junking intricate machinery, not by creating it. Cave fish lose their eyes. But we don't need a theory for how intricate machinery gets wrecked. We need a theory for how it originates and how it develops quite suddenly. Evolution, as we understand it today, apparently isn't that theory.
This last point is worth dwelling upon. So much of the evidence that is adduced to support the belief that man has emerged out of the primordial soup is really not an example of evolution at all. Rather it's an example of devolution. Christopher Hitchens was all aquiver at having hit upon the cave salamander example of this phenomenon a few weeks back, but the cave salamander is nothing that a Darwinian can take solace from. The problem for the Darwinian is not why the blind salamander lost the eyes it had but trying to come up with a plausible explanation of how eyes evolved by random chance in the first place.
Breakenridge, of course, doesn't even try. He's content to simply insult people who are skeptical of the Darwinian just-so stories, but he hasn't the intellectual wherewithal to explain why they're wrong. Name-calling is just so much easier.
RLC
