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COMMENTARY
January 19, 2005
Still digging
My dear reader I lied to you. I told you last Wednesday that I would not return to the subject of evolution in the near future. Whereas I'm not finished with that ankle yet. No sooner had I filed the piece than news came of Repenomamus gigantus. A dinosaur-eating mammal in the early Cretaceous -- the sort of thing that would get anyone's attention. However I can guarantee that I won't return to the subject through the next four Wednesdays because I'll be on holiday after Sunday. Now there is no threat whatever to the evolutionary establishment in the story I mention any more than there was a threat to the "ontological discontinuity of man" in the earlier story about Homo floresiensis the fossil woman from remotest Indonesia just one metre high. Today's creature or rather creatures were just found in China's Lianoning province. As anyone familiar with the existing evolutionary charts will know a powerful warm-blooded mammal has no business being found in the early Cretaceous strata of about 130 million years ago. Especially one with a clearly organized carnivorous set of teeth like R. gigantus -- or like his smaller cousin R. robustus with the trademark slightly-displaced mammalian stomach and a little dino he just ate ripped up inside. Mammals of that epoch are supposed to be tiny mole and shrew-like jobs subsisting on seeds and insects. Whereas carnivores tend to inhabit the top of the food chain. One wonders therefore if our latest finds also took dinosaurs larger than themselves -- say by hunting in packs. The Yixian field in which the discoveries were made promises more surprises of just that sort including (I can just taste it) perhaps feathered birds also entirely out of the established evolutionary sequence. It appears to have been a kind of Cretaceous Pompeii with whole populations caught napping in a single moment by a volcanic explosion preceded by lethal gas and then encased in an ideal plaster of sandstone and ash. But as I say no such discovery can endanger the "evolutionists" who are merely put to the (rather delightful and remunerative) trouble of rearranging the chart to accommodate new previously unimagined family trees. It wouldn't necessarily bother the "Darwinists" theoretically if the whole evolutionary sequence were turned upside down: for the "theory" doesn't predict anything. It only explains things after the fact. If instead of R. gigantus and company the palaeontologists had discovered the fossil of a man wearing spectacles they would be even more surprised. But not defeated. So what kind of theory is that? One which lacks coherence can predict nothing cannot be tested in any way and is entirely disconnected from the evidence it purports to explain? Not a theory at all but a "doctrine" or more politely a "paradigm". That all living creatures to this day are descended from a single primitive organism is the credo the declaration of faith upon which it ultimately rests. This can no more be disproved than the Immaculate Conception. The only thing that could possibly displace it would be a more plausible paradigm. And none is currently in sight. My own views on "evolutionary science" have evolved recently under the environmental pressure of much reading. I used to think it was a false theory. Now I realize it isn't a theory at all just a cataloguing system -- with a cumbersome and redundant materialist ideology attached like a big canker. Did the Linnaean system of classification threaten Christian beliefs? No because it didn't come with the canker. And considered merely as a classification system capable of indefinite modification as newly discovered creatures are entered into the chronological morphological molecular and inferred genetic sequences evolution itself is too vague to criticize. There is never quite enough space to explain everything but I think a lot could be explained by reminding my reader that "evolution" per se is nothing to do with Darwin. For it is nearly half as old as historical time. Indeed Charles Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus had a semi-coherent theory of evolution. What Charles added was the obsession with "natural selection" -- which he himself began washing his hands of in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species. But even that "theory" (evolution by natural selection) was fully anticipated by Empedocles a Sicilian of the 5th century B.C. (Aristotle shreds it in his Physics Book II.) So writers like me and readers like you should probably stop using the words "Darwinism" and "evolution" as if they were interchangeable. Readers keep asking me what is my alternative to "Darwinism"? I don't have one. But here is my basic thought in all its naive glory. The splendour of nature and the heavens used to serve as an overwhelming persuasion to the idea of the holy. Now it is converted to the uses of scientism. How without interfering with real science do we take it back? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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