ESSAYS ON ORIGINS:
The Hopeful Monsters of Evolution
by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D.
This version copyright (c) 1994 by:
Missouri Association for Creation
_____________________________________________________________________
[No. 12 in a series] June 1994, Vol. 4, No. 6
_____________________________________________________________________
Since the time of Darwin, evolutionists have looked to the fossil
record for historical evidence of evolution. Most evolutionists now
concede, however, that the fossil record fails to show the progressive
transformation of any living organism into a distinctly different kind
of organism. This has presented some nasty difficulties for
evolutionists -- but they have made it clear that they will not be
dissuaded by the mere lack of evidence, nor will they turn to a Creator
to explain this enigma. Rather, evolutionists hope that _monsters_ may
come to their rescue!
All animals and plants appear suddenly in the fossil record and are
not preceded by continuous transitional stages. While some of these
fossilized organisms have become extinct, many have persisted right up
to the present time in what appears to be essentially their original
form, showing only a limited range of variation. Bats, for example,
appear suddenly in the fossil record with no evidence of "pre-bat"
ancestors. Fossil bats have all the same distinctive features we see in
bats today, including extraordinarily long webbed fingers on their fore
limbs and "backward" facing hind limbs. (Bat knees and toes face to the
rear!) Even the distinctive shape of the bat skull, which serves to
channel sound to their ears for navigation by sonar (echo location), is
found in fossil bats just as it is in all modern bats.
The absence of even a single example of a continuous fossil sequence
showing the progressive stages of evolution of any plant or animal would
certainly seem to be an insurmountable problem for evolutionism.
Evolutionists have long been aware of this problem and have felt
compelled to try to explain it away by any means possible, short of
abandoning their faith in evolutionism itself. In 1944, the
evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson spoke of these missing transitional
forms in his book _Tempo and Mode In Evolution_:
"Their absence is so nearly universal that it cannot, off hand,
be imputed to chance, and does require some attempt at special
explanation as has been felt by most paleontologists."
Paleontologists have indeed been trying to imagine some "special
explanation" for how progressive evolution could occur without leaving
any fossil evidence. Since evolutionary speculations have rarely been
restricted by the demands of experimental verification, evolutionists
have allowed their imaginations to run free and have now devised a
really outrageous explanation for their lack of evidence.
In the 1930s, paleontologist Otto Schindewolf concluded that the
missing links in the fossil record were not really missing at all, but
rather were never there in the first place! Schindewolf proposed that
all the major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in _single
large steps_. He proposed, for example, that at some point in
evolutionary history, a reptile laid an egg from which a bird was
hatched! This bizarre notion was championed in 1940 by the geneticist
Richard Goldschmidt of the University of California at Berkeley. Like
Schindewolf, Goldschmidt resigned himself to the fact that true
transitional forms were not found despite over a hundred years of
searching for them, and that evolutionary theory would simply have to
accommodate this fact.
Goldschmidt sought to advance Schindewolf's notion of evolution
through single large steps by trying to imagine a plausible mechanism
for it. He suggested that the answer might lie in what are known as
embryological monsters, such as the occasional birth of a two-legged
sheep or a two-headed turtle. Goldschmidt conceded that such monsters
rarely survived very long in nature, but he hoped that over a long
period of time some monsters might actually be better suited to survive
and reproduce than their normal siblings. Goldschmidt named this
monstrously hopeless speculation the "_hopeful monster theory_." Since
there was not even the slightest shred of evidence to support the
hopeful monster theory, it was dismissed with derision by almost all
evolutionists of his time. But Goldschmidt was quick to point out to
his critics that there wasn't the slightest evidence for their gradual
evolution either!
The hopeful monster theory would have joined the "recapitulation
theory" in the scrap heap of abandoned evolutionary speculations, were
it not for Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge. In 1972, these
influential evolutionists resurrected the long-discredited hopeful
monster theory and gave it a more respectable name -- "_punctuated
equilibrium_." This theory speculates that the intermediate stages in
the evolution of organisms do not appear in the fossil record because
these transitional organisms were short-lived, extremely unstable
species which, as luck would have it, quickly evolved into stable
species. Thus, the evolution of any organism is characterized by long
periods of _equilibrium_ (no evolutionary change) during which time many
offspring, and thus many fossils, are produced -- _punctuated_ by
relatively rapid bursts of evolution that left no fossil record. In the
May 1981 issue of _Discover_ magazine, Gould explained that "two
outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically sudden origin of
new species and failure to change thereafter" actually "_predicted_"
this new evolutionary theory!
While most evolutionists have now reluctantly accepted punctuated
equilibrium as the only way out of a difficult situation (i.e., no
evidence), a few stubbornly cling to classical Darwinism, and indeed it
is this discredited version of evolution that is generally taught as
"fact" in our schools. Eldredge challenged classical Darwinists by
reminding them that they could disprove punctuated equilibrium theory if
they were to find so much as a single series of intermediate forms in
the fossil record; no one has. Of course the sudden appearance of
relatively unchanging organisms in the fossil record is perfectly
consistent with special creation, but most evolutionists find the idea
of an omnipotent Creator to be simply unthinkable.
Many of the arguments that Eldredge and Gould have used to refute the
beliefs of classical Darwinists sound like they are actually trying to
support special creation, but this is hardly their intent. For example,
in his regular column in _Natural History_ magazine (May 1977 pp. 12-16),
Gould chided the gradual evolutionists for appealing to the "_extreme
imperfection_" of the fossil record in an effort to explain the missing
links. He countered that even if we were to grant this "_traditional
escape_," it still would not answer the biggest question -- the
viability of the transitional forms themselves. Gould pointed out that
it is difficult to even imagine how transitional animals passing through
the intermediate stages of evolution would be benefited or even survive.
He asked:
"Can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms, that
is, viable, functioning organisms, between ancestors and
descendants? Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient
stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a
wing?"
Now that's a good question: One only needs to imagine a mouse-like
creature slowly transforming into a bat to appreciate what Gould is
saying. The reader may well ask at this point, of what use is
evolutionary speculation itself -- and why is it being taught as a
"fact" in our schools?
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Menton received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University. He has
been involved in biomedical research and education for over 30 years.
Dr. Menton is President of the Missouri Association for Creation, Inc.
Originally published in:
St. Louis MetroVoice
PO Box 220010
St. Louis, MO 63122
_______________________________________________________________________
Corrections and revisions have been made by the
author from the original published essay.
This text file prepared and distributed
by the Genesis Network (GenNet).
Origins Talk -- (314) 821-1078, Walt Stumper, Sysop.
FidoNet, 1:100/435; FamilyNet, 8:3006/28;
GenNet, 33:6250/1
c1749h@umslvma.umsl.edu
walt.stumper@f9.n8012.z86.toadnet.org
Voice: (314) 821-1234
Genesis Network I -- (407) 582-1972, Jim Johnston, Sysop.
FidoNet, 1:3609/11; FamilyNet, 8:3111/0;
GenNet, 33:6150/0
CompuServe: 73642,2576
Voice: (407) 582-1880
Contact either of the above systems for
information about file distribution and echos.
--- *** ---
. Personally, I think I'm in the middle, I think the Big Bang was God creating the universe, it was just his power that caused the bang. And God made evolution, so really nobody is wrong or right here. This is my opinion, and I'm sticking with it.