Article originally appeared in The American Spectator - December
2000 / January 2001
If you had asked me during my years studying science at Berkeley
whether or not I believed what I read in
my science textbooks, I would have responded much as any of my fellow
students: puzzled that such a
question would be asked in the first place. One might find tiny
errors, of course, typos and misprints. And science is always
discovering new things. But I believed – took it as a given – that my
science textbooks represented the best scientific knowledge available
at that time.
It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and development
biology, however, that I noticed what at
first I took to be a strange anomaly. The textbook I was using
prominently featured drawings of vertebrate embryos
– fish, chickens, humans, etc. – where similarities were presented as
evidence for descent from a common ancestor
..
Indeed, the drawings did appear very similar. But I’d been studying
embryos for some time, looking at them under a
microscope. And I knew that the drawings were just plain wrong. I re-
checked all my other textbooks. They all had
similar drawings, and they were all obviously wrong. Not only did they
distort the embryos they pictured; they omitted earlier stages in
which the embryos look very different from one another.
Like most other science students, like most scientists themselves, I
let it pass. It didn’t immediately affect
my work, and I assumed that while the texts had somehow gotten this
particular issue wrong, it was the exception to the rule. In 1997,
however, my interest in the embryo drawings was revived when British
embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleagues published the
result of their study comparing the textbook drawings with actual
embryos.
SURVIVAL OF THE FAKEST
SCIENCE NOW KNOWS THAT MANY OF THE PILLARS OF DARWINIAN THEORY ARE
EITHER FALSE
OR MISLEADING. YET BIOLOGY TEXTS CONTINUE TO PRESENT THEM AS FACTUAL
EVIDENCE OF
EVOLUTION. WHAT DOES THIS IMPLY ABOUT THEIR SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS?
-- JONATHAN WELLS
Richardson himself was quoted in the prestigious journal Science: “It
looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in
biology.”
Worse, this was no recent fraud. Nor was its discovery recent. The
embryo drawings that appear in most
every high school and college textbook are either reproductions of, or
based on, a famous series of drawings by
the 19th century German biologist and fervent Darwinian, Ernst
Haeckel, and they have been known to scholars of
Darwin and evolutionary theory to be forgeries for over a hundred
years.
But none of them, apparently, have seen fit to correct this almost
ubiquitous misinformation. Still thinking this an exceptional
circumstance, I became curious to see if I could find other mistakes
in the standard biology texts dealing with evolution. My search
revealed a startling fact however: Far from being exceptions, such
blatant misrepresentations are more often the rule. In my recent book
I call them “Icons of Evolution,” because so many of them are
represented by classic oftrepeated illustrations which, like the
Haeckel drawings, have served their pedagogical purpose only too well
– fixing basic misinformation about evolutionary theory in the
public’s mind.
We all remember them from biology class: the experiment that created
the “building blocks of life” in a
tube; the evolutionary “tree,” rooted in the primordial slime and
branching out into animal and plant life. Then there
were the similar bone structures of, say, a bird’s wing and a man’s
hand, the peppered moths, and Darwin’s finches.
And, of course, the Haeckel embryos. As it happens, all of these
examples, as well as many others purportedly standing as evidence of
evolution, turn out to be incorrect. Not just slightly off. Not just
slightly mistaken. On the subject of Darwinian evolution, the texts
contained massive distortions and even some faked evidence. Nor are we
only talking about high-school textbooks that some might excuse (but
shouldn’t) for adhering to a lower standard. Also guilty are some of
the most prestigious and widely used college texts, such as Douglas
Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology, and the latest edition of the graduate-
level textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell, coauthored by the
president of the National Academy of Sciences,
Bruce Alberts. In fact, when the false “evidence” is taken away, the
case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks
at least, is so thin it’s almost invisible. Life in a Bottle Anyone
old enough in 1953 to understand the import of the news remembers how
shocking, and to many, exhilarating, it was. Scientists Stanley Miller
and Harold Urey had succeeded in creating “the building blocks” of
life in a flask. Mimicking what were believed to be the natural
conditions of the early Earth’s atmosphere, and then sending an
electric spark through it, Miller and Urey had
formed simple amino acids. As amino acids are the “building blocks” of
life, it was thought just a matter of time
before scientists could themselves create living organisms.
At the time, it appeared a dramatic confirmation of evolutionary
theory. Life wasn’t a “miracle.” No outside agency or divine
intelligence was necessary. Put the right gasses together, add
electricity, and life is bound to happen.
It’s a common event. Carl Sagan could thus confidently predict on PBS
that the planets orbiting those “billlllions
and billlllions” of stars out there must be just teeming with life.
There were problems, however. Scientists were never able to get beyond
the simplest amino acids in their
simulated primordial environment, and the creation of proteins began
to seem not a small step or couple of steps, but a great, perhaps
impassable, divide. The telling blow to the Miller-Urey experiment,
however, came in the 1970’s, when scientists began to conclude that
the Earth’s early atmosphere was nothing like the mixture of gasses
used by Miller and Urey. Instead of being what scientists call a
“reducing,” or hydrogen-rich environment,
the Earth’s early atmosphere probably consisted of gasses released by
volcanoes. Today there is a near consensus among geochemists on this
point. But put those volcanic gasses in the Miller-Urey apparatus, and
the experiment doesn’t work – in other words, no “building blocks” of
life. What do textbooks do with this inconvenient fact?
By and large, they ignore it and continue to use the Miller- Urey
experiment to convince students that scientists have demonstrated an
important first step in the origin of life. This includes the above-
mentioned Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by the National
Academy of Sciences president, Bruce Alberts. Most textbooks also go
on to tell students that origin-of-life researchers have found a
wealth of other evidence to explain how life originated spontaneously
– but they don’t tell students that the researchers themselves now
acknowledge that the explanation still eludes them.
Faked Embryos
Darwin thought “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor
of” his theory came from embryology. Darwin was not an embryologist,
however, so he relied on the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel,
who produced drawings of embryos from various classes of vertebrates
to show that they are virtually identical in their earliest stages,
and become noticeably different only as they develop. It was this
pattern that Darwin found so convincing.
This may be the most egregious of distortions, since biologists have
known for over a century that vertebrate embryos never look as similar
as Haeckel drew them. In some cases, Haeckel used the same woodcut to
print embryos that were supposedly from different classes. In others,
he doctored his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than
they really were. Haeckel’s contemporaries repeatedly criticized him
for these misrepresentations, and charges of fraud abounded in his
lifetime. In 1997, British embryologist Michael
Richardson and an international team of experts compared Haeckel’s
drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating
conclusively that the drawings misrepresent the truth.
The drawings are misleading in another way. Darwin based his inference
of common ancestry on the belief that the earliest stages of embryo
development are the most similar. Haeckel’s drawings, however,
entirely omit the earliest stages, which are much different, and start
at a more similar midway point. Embryologist William Ballard wrote in
1976 that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of
evidence,” by “bending the facts of
nature,” that one can argue that the early stages of vertebrates “are
more alike than their adults.” Yet some version of Haeckel’s drawings
can be found in most current biology textbooks. Stephen Jay Gould, one
of evolutionary theory’s most vocal proponents, recently wrote that we
should be “astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling
that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number,
if not a majority, of
modern textbooks.” (I will return below to the question of why it is
only now that Mr. Gould, who has known of these forgeries for decades,
has decided to bring them to widespread attention.)
Darwin’s Tree of Life
Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species: “I view all beings not as
special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings”
that lived in the distant past. He believed that the differences among
modern species arose primarily through natural selection, or survival
of the fittest, and he described the whole process as “descent with
modification.” No one doubts, of course, that a certain amount of
descent with modification occurs within species. But Darwin’s theory
claims to account for the origin of new species – in fact, for every
species since the first cells emerged from the primordial ooze.This
theory does have the virtue of making a prediction: If all living
things are gradually modified descendants of one or a few original
forms, then the history of life should resemble a branching tree.
Unfortunately, despite official pronouncements, this prediction has in
some important respects turned out to be wrong.
The fossil record shows the major groups of animals appearing fully
formed at about the same time in a “Cambrian
explosion,” rather than diverging from a common ancestor. Darwin knew
this, and considered it a serious
objection to his theory. But he attributed it to the imperfection of
the fossil record, and he thought that future research would supply
the missing ancestors.
But a century and a half of continued fossil collecting has only
aggravated the problem. Instead of slight differences
appearing first, then greater differences emerging later, the greatest
differences appear right at the start. Some
fossil experts describe this as “top-down evolution,” and note that it
contradicts the “bottom-up” pattern predicted by Darwin’s theory. Yet
most current biology textbooks don’t even mention the Cambrian
explosion, much less point out the challenge it poses for Darwinian
evolution. Then came the evidence from molecular biology.
Biologists in the 1970’s began testing Darwin’s branchingtree pattern
by comparing molecules in various species.
The more similar the molecules in two different species are, the more
closely related they are presumed to be. At
first this approach seemed to confirm Darwin’s tree of life.
But as scientists compared more and more molecules, they found that
different molecules yield conflicting results. The branching-tree
pattern inferred from one molecule often contradicts the pattern
obtained from another.
Canadian molecular biologist W. Ford Doolittle doesn’t think the
problem will go away. Maybe scientists
“have failed to find the ‘true tree’,” he wrote in 1999, “not because
their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong
genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented
as a tree.” Nevertheless, biology textbooks continue to assure
students that Darwin’s Tree of Life is a scientific fact
overwhelmingly confirmed by evidence. Judging from the real fossil and
molecular evidence, however, it is an unsubstantiated hypothesis
masquerading as a fact.
They All Look Alike: Homology in Vertebrate Limbs
Most introductory biology textbooks carry drawings of vertebrate limbs
showing similarities in their bone structures. Biologists before
Darwin had noticed this sort of similarity and called it “homology,”
and they attributed it to construction on a common archetype or
design. In The Origin of Species, however, Darwin argued that the best
explanation for homology is descent with modification, and he
considered it evidence for his theory.
Darwin’s followers rely on homologies to arrange fossils in branching
trees that supposedly show ancestordescendant relationships. In his
1990 book, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, biologist Tim Berra
compared the fossil record to a series of Corvette models: “If you
compare a 1953 and a 1954 Corvette, side by side, then a 1954 and a
1955 model, and so on, the descent with modification is overwhelmingly
obvious.”
But Berra forgot to consider a crucial, and obvious, point: Corvettes,
so far as anyone has yet been able
to determine, don’t give birth to little Corvettes. They, like all
automobiles, are designed by people working for auto
companies. In other words, an outside intelligence. So although Berra
believed he was supporting Darwinian evolution rather than the pre-
Darwinian explanation, he unwittingly showed that the fossil evidence
is compatible with either. Law professor (and critic of Darwinism)
Phillip E. Johnson dubbed this : “Berra’s Blunder.”
The lesson of Berra’s Blunder is that we need to specify a natural
mechanism before we can scientifically
exclude designed construction as the cause of homology. Darwinian
biologists have proposed two mechanisms: developmental pathways and
genetic programs. According to the first, homologous features arise
from similar cells and processes in the embryo; according to the
second, homologous features are programmed by similar genes.
But biologists have known for a hundred years that homologous
structures are often not produced by similar
developmental pathways.
And they have known for thirty years that they are often not produced
by similar genes,
either. So there is no empirically demonstrated mechanism to establish
that homologies are due to common ancestry rather than common design.
Without a mechanism, modern Darwinists have simply defined homology to
mean similarity due to common ancestry. According to Ernst Mayr, one
of the principal architects of modern neo-Darwinism: “After 1859 there
has been only one definition of homologous that makes biological
sense: Attributes of two organisms are homologous when they are
derived from an equivalent characteristic of the common ancestor.”
This is a classic case of circular reasoning. Darwin saw evolution as
a theory, and homology as its evidence.
Darwin’s followers assume evolution is independently established, and
homology is its result. But you can’t then
use homology as evidence for evolution except by reasoning in a
circle: Similarity due to common ancestry demonstrates common
ancestry. Philosophers of biology have been criticizing this approach
for decades. As Ronald Brady wrote in 1985: “By making our explanation
into the definition of the condition to be explained, we express not
scientific hypothesis but belief. We are so convinced that our
explanation is true that we no longer see any need to distinguish it
from the situation we were trying to explain. Dogmatic endeavors of
this
kind must eventually leave the realm of science.”
So how do the textbooks treat this controversy? Once again, they
ignore it. In fact, they give students the
impression that it makes sense to define homoloy in terms of common
ancestry and then turn around and use it as evidence for common
ancestry. And they call this “science.” Nothing a Little Glue Can’t
Fix:
The Peppered Moths
Darwin was convinced that in the course of evolution, “Natural
Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive means of
modification,” but he had no direct evidence of this. The best he
could do in The Origin
of Species was give “one or two imaginary illustrations.” In the
1950’s, however, British physician Bernard
Kettlewell provided what seemed to be conclusive evidence of natural
selection. During the previous century, peppered moths in England had
gone from being predominantly light-colored to being predominantly
dark-colored.
It was thought that the change occurred because dark moths are better
camouflaged on pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus less likely to
be eaten by predatory birds. To test this hypothesis experimentally,
Kettlewell
released light and dark moths onto nearby tree trunks in polluted and
unpolluted woodlands, then watched as birds ate the more conspicuous
moths. As expected, birds ate more light moths in the polluted
woodland, and more dark moths in the unpolluted one. In an article
written for Scientific American, Kettlewell called this “Darwin’s
missing evidence.”
Peppered moths soon became the classic example of natural selection in
action, and the story is still retold in
most introductory biology textbooks, accompanied by photographs of the
moths on tree trunks. In the 1980’s, however, researchers discovered
evidence that the official story was flawed – including the pertinent
fact that peppered moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks. Instead,
they fly by night and apparently hide under
upper branches during the day. By releasing moths onto nearby tree
trunks in daylight, Kettlewell had created an
artificial situation that does not exist in nature. Many biologists
now consider his results invalid, and some even
question whether natural selection was responsible for the observed
changes. So where did all those textbook photos of peppered moths on
tree trunks come from? They were all staged. To expedite things, some
photographers even glued dead moths to trees. Of course, the people
who staged them before the 1980’s thought they were accurately
representing the true situation, but we now know they were mistaken.
Yet a glance at almost any current biology textbook reveals that they
are all still being used as evidence for natural
selection. In 1999, a Canadian textbook-writer justified the practice:
“You have to look at the audience. How convoluted do you want to make
it for a first time learner?” Bob Ritter was quoted as saying in the
April 1999 Alberta Report Newsmagazine. High school students “are
still very concrete in the way they learn,” continued Ritter. “We want
to get across the idea of selective adaptation. Later on, they can
look at the work critically.”
Apparently, the “later” can be much later. When University of Chicago
Professor Jerry Coyne learned the
truth in 1998, he was well into his career as an evolutionary
biologist. His experience illustrates how insidious the icons of
evolution really are, since they mislead experts as well as novices.
Beaks and Birds: Darwin’s Finches
A quarter of a century before Darwin published The Origin of Species,
he was formulating his ideas as a naturalist
aboard the British survey ship H.M.S. Beagle . When the Beagle visited
the Galapagos Islands in 1835, Darwin
collected specimens of the local wildlife, including some finches.
Though the finches had little in fact to do with
Darwin’s development of evolutionary theory, they have attracted
considerable attention from modern evolutionary
biologists as further evidence of natural selection. In the 1970’s,
Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues
noted a 5 percent increase in beak size after a severe drought,
because the finches were left with only hard-tocrack
seeds. The change, though significant, was small; yet some Darwinists
claim it explains how finch species originated in the first place.
A 1999 booklet published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
describes Darwin’s finches as “a
particularly compelling example” of the origin of species. The booklet
cites the Grants’ work, and explains how “a
single year of drought on the islands can drive evolutionary changes
in the finches.” The booklet also calculates that “if droughts occur
about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might
arise in only about 200 years.”
But the booklet fails to point out that the finches’ beaks returned to
normal after the rains returned. No net
evolution occurred. In fact, several finch species now appear to be
merging through hybridization, rather than
diverging through natural selection as Darwin’s theory requires.
Withholding evidence in order to give the impression
that Darwin’s finches confirm evolutionary theory borders on
scientific misconduct. According to Harvard
biologist Louis Guenin (writing in Nature in 1999), U.S. securities
laws provide “our richest source of experiential
guidance” in defining what constitutes scientific misconduct. But a
stock promoter who tells his clients that a particular stock can be
expected to double in value in twenty years because it went up 5
percent in 1998, while concealing the fact that the same stock
declined 5 percent in 1999, might well be charged with fraud. As
Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson wrote in The Wall Street
Journal in 1999: “When our leading scientists have to resort to the
sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know
they are in trouble.”
From Apes to Humans
Darwin’s theory really comes into its own when it is applied to human
origins. While he scarcely mentioned
the topic in The Origin of Species, Darwin later wrote extensively
about it in The Descent of Man. “My object,”
he explained, “is to show that there is no fundamental difference
between man and the higher animals in their
mental faculties” - even morality and religion. According to Darwin, a
dog’s tendency to imagine hidden agency in
things moved by the wind “would easily pass into the belief in the
existence of one or more gods.” Of course, the awareness that the
human body is part of nature was around long before Darwin. But Darwin
was claiming much more. Like materialistic philosophers since ancient
Greece, Darwin believed that human beings are nothing more than
animals.
Darwin, however, needed evidence to confirm his conjecture. Although
Neanderthals had already been found,
they were not then considered ancestral to humans, so Darwin had no
fossil evidence for his view. It wasn’t
until 1912 that amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson announced that
he had found what Darwinists were looking
for, in a gravel pit at Piltdown, England. Dawson had found part of a
human skull and part of an apelike lower jaw with two teeth. It wasn’t
until forty years later that a team of scientists proved that the
Piltdown skull, though perhaps thousands of years old, belonged to a
modern human, while the jaw fragment was more recent, and belonged to
a modern orangutan. The jaw had been chemically treated to make it
look like a fossil, and its teeth
had been deliberately filed down to make them look human.
Piltdown Man was a forgery.
Most modern biology textbooks do not even mention Piltdown. When
critics of Darwinism bring it up, they
are usually told that the incident merely proves that science is self-
correcting. And so it was, in this case - though the correction took
over forty years. But the more interesting lesson to be learned from
Piltdown is that scientists, like everyone else, can be fooled into
seeing what they want to see. The same subjectivity that prepared the
way for Piltdown continues to plague human-origins research. According
to paleoanthropologist Misia Landau, theories of human origins “far
exceed what can be inferred from the study of fossils alone and in
fact place a heavy burden of interpretation on the fossil record – a
burden which is relieved by placing fossils into pre-existing
narrative structures.”
In 1996, American Museum of Natural History Curator Ian Tattersall
acknowledged that “in paleoanthropology, the
patterns we perceive are as likely to result from our unconscious
mindsets as from the evidence itself.” Arizona State University
anthropologist Geoffrey Clark echoed this view in 1997 when he wrote:
“We select among alternative sets of research conclusions in
accordance with our biases and preconceptions.” Clark suggested that
“paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of science.”
Biology students and the general public are rarely informed of the
deep-seated uncertainty about human origins
that is reflected in these statements by scientific experts. Instead,
they are simply fed the latest speculation as though it were a fact.
And the speculation is typically illustrated with fanciful drawings of
cave men, or pictures of human actors wearing heavy make-up. What’s
Going on Here?
Most of us assume that what we hear from scientists is comparatively
trustworthy. Politicians might distort
or shave the truth to support a preconceived agenda, but scientists,
we are told, deal with facts. Sure they might
sometimes get it wrong, but the beauty of science is that it’s
empirically testable. If a theory is wrong, this will
be discovered by other scientists performing independent experiments
either to replicate or disprove their results. In
this way the data are constantly reviewed and hypotheses become widely
accepted theories. So how do we explain such a pervasive and long-
standing distortion of the specific facts used to support evolutionary
theory?
Perhaps Darwinian evolution has taken on a significance in our culture
that has little to do with its scientific
value, whatever that may be. An indication of this was seen in the
nearly universal and censorious reaction to the
Kansas School Board’s decision to allow room for dissent in the
standard teaching of evolution (much of which, as we have just seen,
is plain wrong).
According to the news media, only religious fundamentalists question
Darwinian evolution. People who
criticize Darwinism, we are told, want to bomb science back to the
Stone Age and replace it with the Bible. The
growing body of scientific evidence contradicting Darwinian claims is
steadfastly ignored. When biochemist Michael
Behe pointed out in The New York Times last year that the embryo
“evidence” for evolution was faked, Harvard Dar-
winist Stephen Jay Gould admitted that he had known this for decades
(as noted above) – but accused Behe of being a “creationist” for
pointing it out.
Now, although Behe supports the idea that some features of living
things are best explained by intelligent design, he is not a
“creationist” as that word is normally used. Behe is a molecular
biologist whose scientific work has convinced him that Darwinian
theory doesn’t conform to observation and experimental evidence. Why
does Gould,
who knows Haeckel’s drawings were faked, dismiss Behe as a creationist
for criticizing them?
I suspect that there’s an agenda other than pure science at work here.
My evidence is the more or less explicit
materialist message woven into many textbook accounts. Futuyma’s
Evolutionary Biology is characteristic of this,
informing students that “it was Darwin’s theory of evolution,”
together with Marx’s theory of history and Freud’s
theory of human nature, “that provided a crucial plank to the platform
of mechanism and materialism” that has since
been “the stage of most Western thought.”
One textbook quotes Gould, who openly declares that humans are not
created, but are merely fortuitous twigs on a “contingent” (i.e.
accidental) tree of life. Oxford Darwinist Richard Dawkins, though not
writing in a textbook, puts it even more bluntly: “Darwin made it
possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” These are
obviously philosophical rather than scientific views. Futuyma, Gould,
and Dawkins have a right to their philosophy. But they do not have the
right to teach it as though it were science. In science, all theories
– including Darwinian evolution – must be tested against the evidence.
Since Gould knows that the real embryological evidence contradicts the
faked drawings in biology textbooks,
why doesn’t he take a more active role in cleaning up science
education? The misrepresentations and omissions I’ve examined here are
just a small sampling. There are many more. For too long the debate
about evolution has assumed “facts” that aren’t true. It’s time to
clear away the lies that obstruct popular discussion of evolution, and
insist that theories conform to the evidence. In other words, it’s
time to do science as it’s supposed to be done.
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