In his 1838 essay on Theology and Natural Selection, Darwin insisted that any good scientific explanation had to be capable of making predictions – which is precisely what led him to reject creationism in the first place. Since the “will of God” is not subject to any law, it is unpredictable. For this reason, Darwin regarded theological explanations of biological diversity as scientifically useless. What’s more, Darwin believed that any explanation of a phenomenon in terms of physical laws had to be a deterministic explanation: as he put it in his Autobiography, “Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” (Page 87, Nora Barlow’s 1958 edition).
Darwin’s Predictions:
For Darwin, the course of evolution was not only fixed by deterministic laws. It was also predictable, at least in its broad outline. Darwin maintained that with time, evolution tended to produce organisms that were more and more complex, in the degree of specialisation of their body parts. In the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, he argued that the evolution of life, viewed as a whole, was guaranteed by the laws of Nature to progress ever upward. The evolution of the “higher animals” was the inevitable outcome of simple biological laws:
“And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” [1]
It is interesting to note that Darwin used the words “elaborately constructed” to describe the plants and animals in his entangled bank contemplation. Construction infers design…
Random mutation
One example of the failure of Neo-Darwinism to make the correct predictions is in malaria. With its billions of microbes living within billions of hosts, malaria offers abundant opportunities to test Neo-Darwinism. The emergence of resistance to a drug that requires one mutation can be expected to occur regularly. Resistance that requires two coordinated mutations takes much longer. Three coordinated mutations, however, are so improbable as to never occur. Since chloroquine resistance requires two mutations, it does occur from time to time. Beyond that, a drug will be past the edge of evolution. Running the infected cells through a flow cytometer, they could then use single-cell sequencing to look for new mutations. What they found did not fit neo-Darwinian predictions. Iain Cheeseman, co-leader of the study, explains:
“We would expect these brand-new mutations to be scattered randomly throughout the genome,” Cheeseman says. “Instead, we find they are often targeting a gene family that controls transcription in malaria.” [2]
But that’s not the only notable thing about the results. What really excites Cheeseman is that when the team compared single-cell sequencing data for P. vivax and P. falciparum, the same transcription gene family contained the majority of new mutations for both species.
Mutations are supposed to be random. They should occur anywhere in the genome. Why are the majority of new mutations appearing in a gene family that controls transcription? Why are they appearing in two species, that are not in contact with each other?
Astute readers should take note that sounding “excited” is a coping mechanism for evolutionary biologists when findings don’t match their expectations.
Whatever is going on, it doesn’t look like the random variation that Darwin expected to be the feedstock of natural selection. And the mention of plural mutations looks like what is happening is beyond the edge of evolution. If coordinated mutations in one species are improbable, how does it help to posit similar coordinated mutations in two species?
If indeed the findings point to a non-random process at work, this would indicate foresight, a hallmark of a designing mind. Designing a cell that can recognize and respond to unforeseen threats requires good engineering. Whether malaria was designed to cause harm originally or devolved into what it is now is more a philosophical or theological issue, but findings from design-based research in this situation could help all microbiologists. It could begin to nudge them away from the default appeals to Neo-Darwinism and convergence and start them thinking about how an engineer would design cells for robustness in a dynamic world.
Gradual increase in complexity
On a separate note, and from a different perspective, the theory of Evolution requires gradualism to explain the presence of speciation. Common ancestry requires a basic organism to evolve and mutate gradually to become more complex. But Charles Darwin raised a question about the fossil record: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? … But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” [p 133 &134]. On page 266, Darwin wrote: “… the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.” [1] He goes on to admit that they had not yet found fossil remains of such infinitely numerous connecting links.
Geological Record
He often blamed the lack of these links on the imperfect or incomplete geological record, inferring that as more digging is done and more fossils are uncovered, these links will be found and the gaps closed. However, to this day, there are only about ten transitional fossils found—although highly disputed and since debunked—certainly not the “infinitely numerous” links Darwin predicted.
Conclusion:
The predictions made by Charles Darwin based on his theory of evolution through natural selection and random mutations have just not panned out. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
“If the predictions derived from the hypothesis are not found to be true, the hypothesis may have to be given up or modified.” [3]
An article on the American Museum of Natural History’s website which forms part of the Darwin Exhibition says the following:
A theory not only explains known facts; it also allows scientists to make predictions of what they should observe if a theory is true. Scientific theories are testable. New evidence should be compatible with a theory. If it isn’t, the theory is refined or rejected. [4]
We are waiting to see whether this theory of evolution will adhere to this standard, seeing as the predictions based on this theory aren’t proving true and new findings today are not compatible with it.
References:
[1] Darwin, Charles. 1876. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th edition with additions and corrections from 1872. London: John Murray
[2] Single-genome sequencing reveals within-host evolution of human malaria parasites, Dia, Aliou et al. Cell Host & Microbe, Volume 29, Issue 10, 1496 – 1506.e3
[3] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hypothesis – https://www.britannica.com/science/hypothesis
[4] American Museum of Natural History, Darwin Exhibition, What is a Theory? https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/evolution-today/what-is-a-theory
You will find the other articles in this series below:
The Scientificity of Evolution – Comparison to a scientific law
The Scientificity of Evolution – Observability Criterion
The Scientificity of Evolution – Experimental Criterion
The Scientificity of Evolution – Retrodiction Criterion
