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Uncommon Knowledge: The Deniable Darwin
Is Charles Darwin’s theory fundamentally deficient? David Berlinski makes his case, noting that most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged. Where there should be evolution, there is stasis. So, was Darwin wrong?
David Berlinski is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, a contributing editor at Inference: International Review of Science, and author of many books. Berlinski discusses his book The Deniable Darwin and lays out how Charles Darwin has failed to explain the origin of species through his theory of evolution.
Recorded on June 3rd, 2019 in Fiesole, Italy
Published in General
Maj, I think that your facts here are questionable.
You seem to be claiming that modern humans — people who are “like us” in the relevant way — emerged about 200,000 years ago. Yuval Harari’s recent book Sapiens claims that the actual figure is 70,000, and that the new group that was very different from those who went before, behaviorally, were very similar anatomically.
I think that it’s true that there were hominids living between 200,000 years ago and the present, who had gross anatomical features that are essentially the same as you or me. This does not mean that their brain structures were the same.
Behaviorally, I find your thesis (that humans have been the same for 200,000 years) implausible and Harari’s (70,000 years) only moderately less implausible.
Accepting your premise, I might turn your question around by asking: For 190,000 years nobody ever farmed. Why? Don’t you find that to be weird?
Harari argues for a “Cognitive Revolution” that occurred about 70,000 years ago. I find his overall argument on this point persuasive, but I am less convinced about the timing. Perhaps it occurred as recently as 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. This would be consistent with the development of agriculture and emergence of early cities.
Interestingly, this final speculation would match the Biblical account reasonably accurately, at least as a matter of timing.
I had a bit of a “great minds think alike” moment while watching this video. At around 23:58, Robinson begins a discussion of Nicholas Christakis’s recent book, which praises the way in which “natural selection” is responsible for “priming our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, learning, and even our ability to recognize the uniqueness of other individuals.”
This sounded like naive optimism to me, and I actually stopped the video and said to myself something like: “Cooperation is not automatically good. The Nazis cooperated to slaughter the Jews.”
I was tickled when Berlinski responded with exactly the same point.
Several parts of the Nova documentary that I posted above in Comment #61 address your questions. Comparing skeletal variations to deduce that there is a relationship between different species is typically only a beginning to plot out possible lineage and is not final evidence. Changes or variations in bone shape, structure or eventual usefulness or uselessness is now understood by studying how specific genes in similar species have been turned on or off to inhibit the formation of certain bones or alter their shape and size. (addressed at about 50 minutes into the video). Dog breeding as I’ve pointed out, gives a hint that an underlying mechanism (genetics) was at play that to account for very stark differences within species (also pointed out earlier in the Nova video).
Manmade variations in dog breeding shows that variations can occur at a much more rapid pace than what generally occurs in nature through natural selection. Evolutionary biologists and geneticists now know that because genes can become active or inactive, that chromosomes can fuse, in addition to natural selection that favors or eliminates the survival of one species or variations within a species group (climate or death from other life forms) that this helps to bolster Darwin’s thesis of common ancestor lineage not detract from it or undermine it. None of this seems to be addressed in Berlinski’s criticism of Darwin because my sense is that he not that concerned about specifics or details or even debating with, or attacking the findings of, evolutionary biologists or geneticists directly but rather wants to pontificate more about the social, cultural, and philosophical fallout since the theory of ToE was put forth, developed and has been bolstered for the last 150 years. And yes, there is much to discuss on that front. But he clearly shows a lackadaisical attitude about the actual science that supports Darwin’s original ideas and theory (just as others of the Discovery Institute do…who haven’t discovered much of anything except how not to present an argument and evidence in a court of law or how to better edit their own textbooks) and is more focused on attacking the newer and more controversial realms of evolutionary psychology or sociology.
As the Nova documentary points out, Darwin was unaware of how the genetics worked to produce variations within species, because the DNA molecule and how it was structured and what comprised it and how genes seemed to function, hadn’t been discovered. As the second video points out (and many other works on evolution), there are several different types of evidence and new disciplines that support Darwin’s original idea not just a reliance on fossil evidence.
I should have left that out because I do mean a society without religion – secular only- but I was mainly referring to the Judaeo-Christian world. But you make a good point – because we seem to be talking in post-Christian terms these days, that’s where society is headed here and in Europe, But….no so with Islam – not sure about other faiths.
Not in the slightest. The explanation of course is that in those days humans weren’t very numerous and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was sustainable within our ancestral homelands for millennia.
As the number of humans increased we spread out across different areas of the planet in an effort to maintain that hunter-gatherer plan, but the Malthusian trap would always catch up with people in a particular area, necessitating movement to new areas.
Agriculture could only arise once several conditions were met: location of species that were profitable to cultivate; sufficient population density to perform farm labor; political structure sufficient to defend such investments.
Agriculture was actually bad news for people in some sense; life expectancy went down in the first agricultural settlements for the reasons we might expect. Decreased variation in protein intake, harsh labor conditions and diseases all became problems that didn’t exist in H-G society.
Well obviously there is alot about evolution and genetics that we don’t know. But if species do change over time I don’t see what it isn’t logical to assume that over a longer period of time speciation can occur. Also, according to evidence done on the breeding of feral foxes in Russia into tame dogs, evolution can happen very fast.