Strange Bedfellows in the War Against Darwinism

Natural Selection is at the heart of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and if there ever was a contemporary hot button issue this is it. But what does Natural Selection really mean? And what do today's Fundamentalists have in common with the Communist ideologues who starved Russia a generation ago?

Evolution is controversial because schools do a lousy job of teaching it. Do you know that Darwin's new-fangled Theory of Evolution stems back to the mid-19^th Century? Do you know that the devilish Charles Darwin was a devoutly religious Christian and that his father-law, Josiah Wedgwood, was as famous for his devotion to the Abolitionist cause as for his fine china?

Charles Darwin's famous voyage on the Beagle to the Galapagos Islands would be followed within a few years by men in the colonies actively trying to blow each others' heads off with Minie balls. Charles Darwin's desire to show the common origins of all men was fed by his abhorrence of slavery and his belief in common human origins. Even stranger, his supposedly godless theory rests directly on concepts of classic genetics first established by a devout Catholic Monk, Gregor Mendel.

Gregor Mendel's experiments with peas proved that inheritance is predictable and that traits are carried in the genes of the parents. What this means is that you cannot "force" evolution. To understand this, think of the great story of Procrustes' bed.

The legendary Procrustes was a vicious innkeeper with a brilliant solution to the problem of human height. Every guest was guaranteed to fit into his bed because if the feet were too short, the guest would be stretched on a rack-- if too long, the feet would be chopped off.

Classic genetics predicts that no matter how enthusiastically Procrustes chops or stretches, children born to the mutilated parents will still be roughly the size of their parents and their parent's parents. And common experience proves this to be so. In African countries where the women traditionally resort to rings to artificially elongate the neck for feminine beauty's sake, generation after generation of girls are born with short necks still

Science differentiates between so-called somatic or body cells and germ cells, such as ova and sperm or the pollen and ovules of plants. When Procrustes has at it with an ax, he does not affect the germ cells in the least. What can affect the germ cells however, is a hit from a stray X-ray, mutagenic (mutation or "change causing") chemicals such as aspirin or thalidomide, or in-breeding which can concentrate naturally-occurring genetic errors to an unhealthy degree.

A common misconception is that evolution is directed. That is, because something happens the organism MUST evolve. For example, temperatures become frigid, therefore an organism will become furrier or fatter to adapt. Believing this would be a mistake. When conditions become adverse, the most likely result is that the organism will drop dead-- in more polite terms, become extinct.

Another misconception is that evolution is a magic show. The scoffer says evolution cannot occur because an apple doesn't turn into a pear. Well, of course not, nor does an African American turn into an Irishman even though both are human. Evolution does not suggest that any organism "turns into" any other organism, but that anatomical similarities suggest common ancestry. Changes occur over millenia, not in the blink of an eye.

An apple and pear are closely related because both are classified as members of the Rose family and they even belong to the same sub-family Pomoideae. Scientists who classify plants and animals are known as taxonomists. For plants, the key determinant of whether two plants are related is similarities in their flowers, fruits, seeds and other sexual parts. And apples and pears may not be siblings, but they are certainly kissing-cousins.

Every taxonomist starts with the question, is it alive or dead? Not so easy to determine because there are things like viruses that can crystallize, yet revive to attack and take over the genetic machinery of living cells to reproduce more of their kind.

Next, animal or plant? Again, not so easy because many organisms once thrown into the plant family have now been granted their own new family, Protista, to reflect their intermediate status between animal and plant.

Next, if a plant, are its seeds naked (i.e cone-bearing plants like pines or cycads) or covered (flowering plants like maples, oaks and roses) this division is known as Gymnosperm vs. Angiosperm.

If Angiosperm, do the veins run parallel as in monocots such as grains, grasses, and bananas or do the veins follow the network pattern of dicots (just about every other plant).

If a dicot, what family does it belong to? All roses share certain characteristics such as five petals, many stamens and astringent leaves.

If it is in the Rose Family, are the seeds embedded in hard casings such as cherries, apricots and peaches which are called stone fruits or are the seeds embedded in the fleshy part of the fruit as is the case with pears and apples known as Pomoideae.

At each level of classification, the members become more and more alike reflecting how closely they are related and how recently their ancestors split off in geologic time. So no, an apple won't become a pear, but at one point they had common ancestors as is reflected by the similar appearance of their most important structures.

Evolution states that all this splitting begins with natural variations among offspring that can be favored over time. Evolution does NOT state that any particular change HAS to occur for any reason, but rather that when animals or plants reproduce sexually each offspring will be somewhat different from its siblings and parents.

If a child is born with a quirk, known as a mutation, and if this quirk improves survival or proves appealing to the opposite sex, it will become more common with every generation. Such oddities can also become more common if a breeding population is very limited such as happens in isolated South Pacific Islands like the Galapagos Islands where Darwin studied his finches and tortoises or in vest-pocket parks in New York City.

In New York City there are several populations of cinnamon brown or black colored "Grey Squirrels" in parks. This happens, because unlike chickens, the squirrels often find it hard to cross, not the road, but busy city streets (they get flattened trying).

Every Grey Squirrel occasionally births an odd-colored offspring, but when the population is large enough, they will breed back to the ancestral grey. When populations become inbred, many closely related animals will have the same gene and the odd coloration will persist. They remain Grey Squirrels, however, since any trapped animal released in a new area will have no problem reproducing with the standard squirrel.

Why is it important to know this stuff? In the twentieth century, a refusal to believe these facts lead to widespread failure of the Russian wheat crop during the Reagan years and near starvation of the Russian people. A foolish desire to believe ideology over science led to the jailing in gulags of Russia's most competent and honest scientists and a windfall for their hated enemy-America, in the form of major sales of grain by American farmers supplying the Russian shortfall.

In Russia, a new ideology that embraced the idea of a new Soviet Man became all the vogue. This theory rejected classical genetics and its idea that all change originates through chance mutations in the germ cells for a new concept of forced evolution. This new theory was known as Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism had its roots in an old, discredited view known as Lamarckism. The classic Lamarckian explanation of why giraffes have long necks is that their necks grew because they had to stretch for high-growing leaves. Procrustes and Lamarck would have gotten along like gang-busters.

Chop, and chop and chop, but children are still born with feet. Stretch and stretch and stretch, but beautiful African ladies are still born with short necks that must be remedied with rings later. But the Soviet leadership didn't want to hear it: Triumph of the Will and all that.

Instead, they embraced Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's dusted-off Lamarckian views, preferring to believe that they could manipulate the population to create the new Soviet man. Even better, they figured they could do the same with the wheat crop,and that if they kept planting unsuitable varieties of wheat in areas where the climate was inhospitable, they would eventually force the wheat to grow in the place of their choice.

The result as former political prisoner and author Alexandr Solzehitzsen detailed in several of his books was the disappearance of an entire generation of honest Soviet scientists into freezing Siberian Gulags and near starvation of the Russian people. And of course, Reagan and the American farmer made out like bandits.

Reagan knew not to let ideology interfere with a good business opportunity, but the even more important lesson is to never let ideology or politics replace science. Wishful thinking doesn't grow wheat and creation science texts won't prepare children for reality. As Shakespeare had it in King Lear, the people who tell us what we want to hear aren't necessarily our friends.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Benfey-t.html
DARWIN'S SACRED CAUSE
How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution
By Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Illustrated. 485 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm
http://www.mythweb.com/teachers/why/basics/procrustes.html
http://plant-species.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_rose_family
http://www.skepdic.com/lysenko.html
http://paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com/2009/12/let-me-tell-you-about-trofim-denisovich.html