Survival Of The Fakest

AFTER IT WAS PUBLISHED IN 2000, MY BOOK ICONS OF EVOLUTION got rave reviews—filled, not with lavish praise, but with furious denunciations.¹'²

Several critics wrote that I was stupidly trying to discredit evolution just because of a few textbook mistakes. According to evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, “Wells’s book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction.”³

Biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci wrote, “Because there are omissions, simplifications, and inaccuracies in some general biology textbooks, obviously the modern theory of evolution must be wrong. This is the astounding line of reasoning that is the backbone of Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution.”⁴

Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick of the militantly pro-evolution National Center for Science Education made the same point, heavily seasoned with scorn: “The Whine Expert: Wells reminds us of those kids who used to write to the letters page of Super-man comics many years ago. ‘Dear Editor,’ they would write, ‘you made a boo-boo! On page 6 you colored Superman’s cape green, but it should be red!’ Okay, kid, mistakes happen, but did it really affect the story? Wells cannot hurt the story of evolution; like a petulant child, he can only throw tantrums.”⁵

But if the icons of evolution were really just a few textbook “booboos,” biologists would have quickly corrected them. This point can be illustrated with an actual example from a physics textbook. The 1997 edition of Prentice-Hall’sExploring Physical Science contained a photograph of singer Linda Ronstadt holding a microphone, and the caption identified her as a silicon crystal doped with arsenic. The following page had a drawing of a silicon crystal doped with arsenic, accompanied by a caption about the usefulness of solid-state microphones. Obviously, the captions had been inadvertently switched. John L. Hubisz pointed this out in a Packard Foundation report on mistakes in physical science textbooks.⁶

Of course, the publisher corrected the mistake in subsequent editions. Imagine, though, the following scenario: The identification of Ronstadt as a silicon crystal appears year after year in almost all science textbooks. The caption is consistent with other materials in the textbooks promoting the theory that human life is based on silicon rather than carbon. And the theory is vigorously defended by establishment science, even to the point of vilifying its critics. Obviously, we would no longer be dealing with a mistake, but with a deliberate campaign to convince people that life is silicon-based.

If the icons of evolution were just innocent mistakes, as Coyne, Pigliucci, Padian, and Gishlick claimed, then the icons would have been corrected in subsequent textbooks, just as the Ronstadt-as-a-silicon-crystal error was quickly corrected in the physical sciences textbook. Let’s see what actually happened.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

AFTER THE first edition of The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Darwin concluded later editions with the statement that life had been “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” A few years later, Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion” by using the biblical term, when what he really meant was “appeared by some wholly unknown process.”⁷

In 1871, Darwin wrote to Hooker again and outlined his true thinking about the origin of life: “If (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”⁸

Maybe the first cells actually did live in a warm little pond, but Darwin clearly believed that they were not created there. Instead, he believed they formed by some material process involving the spontaneous self-assembly of various chemicals.

In the 1920s, Russian scientist A. I. Oparin and British scientist J. B. S. Haldane suggested that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere consisted mainly of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor.⁹,¹⁰

The first three are what chemists call “reducing” gases, as opposed to neutral gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen, or oxidizing gases such as oxygen. In a reducing atmosphere, according to Oparin and Haldane, natural energy sources such as lightning could have produced the chemical building blocks of life, which could have then dissolved in the ocean to form a primordial “soup” from which the first living cells emerged.

An interesting idea, but could it be tested?

In 1953, University of Chicago graduate student Stanley Miller announced that he had shown experimentally (in the laboratory of his Ph.D. adviser, Harold Urey) that lightning in the Earth’s primitive atmosphere could have produced amino acids, the chemical building blocks of proteins.¹¹ Miller used a closed glass apparatus in which he boiled water, circulated the steam with a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen past a spark discharge, and then collected the products in a container at the bottom. After a week he analyzed the result (a brown tarry mixture) and detected some of the amino acids that occur in living cells. The experiment was widely advertised as evidence that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life.

By 1980, however, most geochemists had concluded that the Earth’s early atmosphere probably wasn’t a reducing atmosphere, as Oparin and Haldane had supposed, and as Miller had assumed when constructing his experiment. Instead, the early atmosphere likely consisted of neutral gases like those emitted from modern volcanoes—mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen (though some carbon monoxide, a reducing gas, is also emitted). Since hydrogen is the lightest element, if there had been any in the early atmosphere it would probably have escaped into space.

In 1983, Miller reported that he and a colleague had sparked an atmosphere containing carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide instead of methane and ammonia, and they were able to produce a small amount of the simplest amino acid—butonly if the atmosphere contained more hydrogen than carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. In order to produce other amino acids they needed not only an excess of free hydrogen but also methane.¹² Harvard geochemist Heinrich Holland came to a similar conclusion.¹³

So the Miller-Urey experiment could not produce amino acids from a realistic mixture of gases. Furthermore, the brown tarry mixture that it produced contained not only amino acids, but also substances that would have interfered with the origin of life. For example, the mixture contained cyanide and formaldehyde, which a skilled chemist can use to synthesize biologically useful molecules, but which by themselves are extremely toxic to living cells. In 2015, an international team of scientists reported that bacteria could survive in the residue from a Miller-Urey experiment, but only after the residue had first been purified to remove these toxic substances.¹⁴ In other words, an intelligent agent had to orchestrate matters to make the residue hospitable to life.

The Textbooks Respond

SO HOW did the biology textbooks respond to these discoveries showing that Stanley Miller’s experiment missed the mark? Many of them in 2000 persisted in using images of the Miller-Urey apparatus to convince students that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life. And many biology textbooks are still doing this. For example, Kenneth Mason, Jonathan Losos and Susan Singer’s 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson’s widely used Biology acknowledges that there is a controversy over the composition of the Earth’s early atmosphere, but it proceeds to tell the standard story anyway. It concludes that Stanley

Miller demonstrated that “the key molecules of life could have formed in the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth.”¹⁵ Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine’s 2014 Biology includes a drawing of the Miller-Urey apparatus with the following caption: “Miller and Urey produced amino acids, which are needed to make proteins, by passing sparks through a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor. Evidence now suggests that the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere was different from their 1953 experiment. However, more recent experiments with different mixtures of gases have produced similar results.”¹⁶

This last statement is profoundly misleading, if not downright false. As we saw above, Stanley Miller himself showed that his experiment needed excess hydrogen to produce even the simplest amino acid, and methane was necessary to produce more complex amino acids. So the “different mixtures of gases” that Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine claim “produced similar results” must have been very different from the probable atmosphere of the early Earth.

According to the 2014 edition ofCampbell Biologyand the 2014 edition of Scott Freeman’s Biological Science (both of which feature drawings of Miller’s apparatus), Miller-Urey-type experiments using realistic mixtures of volcanic gases have produced organic molecules such as formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.¹⁸,¹⁹

Yes, but as we saw above, these chemicals are very toxic to living cells. Life could not have emerged spontaneously from a primordial soup containing significant amounts of them.

(...)

The Grand Materialistic Story

DARWIN’S THEORY of evolution by natural selection is a materialistic story about how life diversified after it originated, but Darwin realized that his evolutionary story is incomplete without a materialistic explanation for the origin of life. He hoped that such an origin could be shown to have been possible in some “warm little pond” on the ancient Earth, but what if the origin of life cannot be explained materialistically? What if it required the origin of new information, which is immaterial? And what if that information required an intelligence?

In his 2009 book Signature in the Cell, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues that the complex information in biological molecules cannot result from unguided natural processes such as the spontaneous aggregation of chemicals. The only known source of large amounts of complex information is intelligence. Therefore, Meyer concludes, the origin of life required intelligent design.²⁶

But Science Says No, life must have originated materialistically.

So origin-of-life researchers rely more on a grand materialistic story than they do on evidence. Biologist Jack Szostak tells the story this way: “Simple chemistry in diverse environments on the early Earth led to the emergence of ever more complex chemistry and ultimately to the synthesis of the critical biological building blocks. At some point, the assembly of these materials into primitive cells enabled the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary behavior, followed by the gradual evolution of more complex life forms leading to modern life.”²⁷

But this story consists entirely of assumptions.If(“& oh what a big if”) simple chemistry led to the synthesis of biological building blocks, andifthese building blocks assembled themselves into primitive cells, etc., etc. None of these steps have been empirically demonstrated. In fact, origin-of-life research has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The Miller-Urey experiment is just one of its many dead ends.

Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour points out that the prebiotic (i.e., prior to life) synthesis of complex organic molecules remains a mystery. A chemist who wants to synthesize such molecules from scratch must start with targets in mind, then think of possible routes to reach them. “Further refinement of various routes leads to a set of desired paths; these are the routes that can be attempted in the laboratory,” Tour wrote in 2016. But “finding a direct path to a target is far too complicated. Dead ends are everywhere”—even for a skilled chemist with a target in mind. But, Tour continued, “There are no targets in evolution.”²⁸

“Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed,” Tour concluded. “Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding.”²⁹

And prebiotic synthesis would be just the first step. Even if we could explain how life’s chemical building blocks formed on the early Earth, we would still be a very long way from explaining how they assembled themselves into a living cell.

But the grand materialistic story lumbers on.

Haeckel’s Embryos

DARWIN THOUGHT that embryology provided “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of his theory.³⁰ In 1859 he wrote that we see “a close similarity in the embryos of widely different animals in the same class,” and that this similarity “reveals community of descent.”³¹ Ten years later he wrote that “it is highly probable that with many animals the embryonic or larval stages show us, more or less completely, the state of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult condition.”³² To support his point, Darwin cited some drawings of vertebrate embryos made by German biologist Ernst Haeckel33(See Figure 3-1).

Haeckel’s contemporaries accused him of faking his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than they really were. Nevertheless, the drawings continued to be widely used in textbooks as evidence of common descent.

FIGURE3-1. HAECKEL’S EMBRYOS: The top row was portrayed by Haeckel as the earliest stage in the development of these eight embryos. The embryos are (left to right): fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, human. Note that the four animals on the right are all mammals. To represent amphibians, Haeckel chose a salamander instead of a frog, which looks quite different. (See Figure 3-2.) From Darwinism Illustrated, George J. Romanes (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1892).³⁴

Recently, the credibility of the drawings took another hit. In 1997, British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team of biologists compared Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos and found many discrepancies.³⁵ In an interview for the journalScience, Richardson said, “It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.”³⁶ But the icon was just too good to abandon without a fight. Never mind the evidence. In 2008, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards published a book defending Haeckel against charges of fraud. According to Richards, Haeckel’s drawings were no less accurate than those of his contemporaries, including the people who criticized him.³⁷ Cambridge historian Nick Hopwood also defended Haeckel against the fraud charge in a 2015 book that included several pages criticizing Icons of Evolution as a creationist “primer for textbook activism.”³⁸

The real issue, however, is not whether Haeckel deliberately committed fraud. The real issue is that Haeckel’s drawings omitted half of the evidence—the half that doesn’t fit Darwin’s claim that embryos are most similar in their early stages. By the logic of Darwin’s argument, the earliest stages should be the most similar, but vertebrate embryos actually start out looking very different from each other, then they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development (Haeckel’s “first” stage) before diverging to their adult forms.³⁹ Biologist Rudolf Raff has called this pattern the “developmental hourglass”⁴⁰ (See Figure 3-2). Haeckel helped Darwin by simply omitting the top half of the hourglass.

FIGURE3-2: THE DEVELOPMENTAL HOURGLASS:At the top are the earliest stages of five classes of vertebrates (clockwise starting at the left: fish, bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian). Their patterns are noticeably different. Midway through development the embryos converge somewhat in appearance, though not nearly as much as Haeckel portrayed. In the circle on the right the embryos are (clockwise starting at the left): zebrafish, chicken, human, turtle, frog. This is the stage Darwin and Haeckel represented as the first. As the embryos continue to develop they become very different again (bottom). Copyright 2000 by Jody F. Sjogren; used by permission.

When Jerry Coyne reviewedIcons of Evolutionin 2001, he criticized the book for failing to recognize that “embryos of different vertebrates tend to resemble one another in early stages, but diverge as development proceeds, with more closely related species diverging less widely,” thus providing “copious evidence for evolution.” Yet Coyne knew that vertebrate embryos arenotmost similar in their early stages. Indeed, in the same review he acknowledged that “the earliest vertebrate embryos (mere balls of cells) are often less similar to one another than they are at subsequent stages.” But he brushed this aside. For Coyne, evolutionmustbe true, whether early embryos are similar or not.⁴¹

Coyne followed this with a 2009 book titledWhy Evolution Is True, which contained the following: “Each vertebrate undergoes development in a series of stages, and the sequence of those stages happens to follow the evolutionary sequence of its ancestors.” Thus “all vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor.”⁴²
So much for the evidence.

Textbooks Still Haunted By Haeckel’s Embryos

HAECKEL’S DRAWINGS had been discredited before I ever wrote about them, and yet the drawings (or re-drawn versions of them) continued to find their way into many biology textbooks as evidence for evolution. In 2000, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that we should all 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.”⁴³ Haeckel’s embryos, it seemed, were not just dead; they deserved to be buried face down.

Yet many textbooks published after 2000 continue to use versions of Haeckel’s drawings as evidence for evolution. Donald Prothero’s 2013 textbook Bringing Fossils to Lifeactually features Haeckel’s original drawings, with the caption: “Embryos of different vertebrates at comparable stages of development (top row) are strikingly similar in every group.”⁴⁴ Mader and Windelspecht’s 2016 Biologyuses a re-drawn version of Haeckel’s embryos, accompanied by the statement, “All vertebrates inherit the same developmental pattern from their common ancestor, but each vertebrate group now has a specific set of modifications to this original ancestral pattern.”⁴⁵

Some recent textbooks don’t use drawings but make essentially the same claim. The 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson’s Biologytells students, “Some of the strongest anatomical evidence supporting evolution comes from comparisons of how organisms develop. Embryos of different types of vertebrates, for example, often are similar early on, but become more different as they develop.”⁴⁶ Miller and Levine’s 2014 Biology informs its readers that “the early developmental stages of many animals with backbones (called vertebrates) look very similar,” and these similarities provide “evidence that organisms have descended from a common ancestor.”⁴⁷

So despite the evidence, Haeckel’s embryos continue to stalk the halls of science education. When materials containing Haeckel-like illustrations were submitted in 2011 to the Texas State Board of Education for adoption into the science curriculum, Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin wrote, “Like a zombie that just won’t die, these bogus drawings keep coming back.”⁴⁸

Flock of Dodos

IN 2007, biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson released a film titled Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. The film included an interview with John Calvert, director of the Kansas-based Intelligent Design Network and a critic of evolution, who asked Olson whether he had read Icons of Evolution. Olson said he had, and he acknowledged that Haeckel’s embryo drawings misrepresented the truth. “Haeckel did commit scientific fraud,” he said. But he insisted that Haeckel is no longer relevant to what’s being taught today, and the embryo drawings are no longer used in textbooks. “There’s no trace of them,” Olson claimed.⁴⁹ He concluded that Icons of Evolution was no more reliable than a supermarket tabloid.

But Olson already knew of textbooks published after 2000 that contained such drawings.⁵⁰ In 2007 he came to Seattle for a screening of his film and (to his credit) stopped by the office of the Discovery Institute, where Casey Luskin and I showed him a stack of recent textbooks that used versions of Haeckel’s embryos to teach evolution. Olson’s response, in essence, was that the story he told in his film was just too good to give up. At that point, the Discovery Institute established a website to document Olson’s misrepresentations.⁵¹

Nevertheless, the misrepresentations did not stop. On April 12, 2012,Flock of Dodoswas shown at Villanova University, followed by a panel discussion that included Olson and Lehigh biochemist (and intelligent design advocate) Michael Behe. Behe presented photocopies of Haeckel-style embryo drawings from some recent textbooks, but Olson defended the film anyway.⁵²,⁵³

In 2015 Olson published a book titled Houston, We Have a Narrative, in which he wrote, “Scientists must realize that science is a narrative process, that narrative is story, therefore science needs story.”⁵⁴

Even if the story’s untrue.

1.Jonathan Wells, “Survival of the fakest,” The American Spectator (December 2000 / January 2001): 19–27. http://www.discovery.org/a/1209. The title of this article was suggested byThe American Spectator’seditor at the time, Josh Gilder.

2.Jonathan Wells, “Critics rave overIcons of Evolution: A response to published reviews,” Discovery Institute XI:2 (2002). http://www.discovery.org/a/1180.

3.Jerry A. Coyne, “Creationism by stealth,”Nature410 (2001): 745–746. doi:10.1038/35071144.

4.Massimo Pigliucci, “Intelligent design theory,”BioScience51 (2001): 411–414. doi 10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0411:IDT]2.0.CO;2.

5.Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick, “The talented Mr. Wells,” Quarterly Review of Biology77 (2002): 33–37. doi:10.1086/339201.

6.The misidentified Ronstadt photo was in the second edition of Prentice Hall’s Exploring Physical Science(1997). See John L. Hubisz,Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts(Physical Sciences Resource Center, 2002), 55. http://www.compadre.org/psrc/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=1289&DocID=142#Doc142.

7.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker, March 29, 1863, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), III:18. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=30&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=side.

8.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker, February 1, 1871. http://evolutionatbyu.com/20130104Darwin-and-spontaneous-generationV03.pdf.

9.Alexander I. Oparin,The Origin of Life(Moscow: Moscow Worker, 1924).

10.J. B. S. Haldane, “The origin of life,”Rationalist Annual148 (1928): 3–10.

11.Stanley L. Miller, “A production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions,” Science117 (1953): 528–529. doi:10.1126/science.117.3046.528. PMID:13056598.

12.Gordon Schlesinger and Stanley L. Miller, “Prebiotic synthesis in atmospheres containing CH4, CO, and CO2. I. Amino acids,”Journal of Molecular Evolution19 (1983): 376–382. doi:10.1007/BF02101642. PMID:6417344.

13.Heinrich D. Holland,The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 99–100.

14.Xueshu Xie, Daniel Backman, Albert T. Lebedev, Viatcheslav B. Artaev, Liying Jiang, Leopold L. Ilag, and Roman A. Zubarev, “Primordial soup was edible: Abiotically produced Miller-Urey mixture supports bacterial growth,”Scientific Reports5 (2015): 14338. doi:10.1038/srep14338. PMID:26412575.

15.Kenneth A. Mason, Jonathan B. Losos, and Susan R. Singer, Raven and Johnson’sBiology, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), 511–512.

16.Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph S. Levine,Biology(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014), 554.

17.Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman, Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson,Campbell Biology, 10th ed. (San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2014), 57.

18.Scott Freeman, Lizabeth Allison, Michael Black, Greg Podgorski, Kim Quillin, Jon Monroe, and Emily Taylor,Biological Science, 5th ed. (San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2014), 33–34.

19.Sylvia Mader and Michael Windelspecht, Biology, 12th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2016), 319.

26.Stephen C. Meyer,Signature in the Cell(New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

27.Jack W. Szostak, “Attempts to define life do not help to understand the origin of life,”Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics29 (2012): 599–600. doi:10.1080/073911012010524998. PMID:22208251.

28.James Tour, “Animadversions of a synthetic chemist,”Inference2:2 (May 19, 2016). http://inference-review.com/article/animadversions-of-a-synthetic-chemist.

29.Ibid.

30.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray, September 10, 1860, inThe Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), II:338. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=354&itemID=F1452.2&viewtype=side.

31.Charles R. Darwin,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed. (London: John Murray, 1859), 442, 449.

32.Charles R. Darwin,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1869), 533.

33.Ibid., 515.

34.This widely used version of Haeckel’s embryo drawings is from Figures 57 and 58 in George J. Romanes, Darwinism Illustrated (Chicago: Open Court, 1892), 42–43.

35.Michael K. Richardson, James Hanken, Mayoni L. Gooneratne, Claude Pieau, Albert Raynaud, Lynne Selwood, and Glenda M. Wright, “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: Implications for current theories of evolution and development,”Anatomy and Embryology196 (1997): 91–106. doi:10.1007/ s004290050082. PMID:9278154.

36.Quoted in Elizabeth Pennisi, “Haeckel’s embryos: Fraud rediscovered,”Science277 (1997): 1435. doi:10.1126/science.277.5331.1435a.

37.Robert J. Richards,The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

38.Nick Hopwood,Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

39.Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), 94–101.

40.Rudolf A. Raff,The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197.

41.Coyne, “Creationism by stealth,” 745.

42.Jerry A. Coyne,Why Evolution Is True(New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 77–79.

43.Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),”Natural History(March, 2000): 42–49.

44.Donald R. Prothero,Bringing Fossils to Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 29.

45.Mader and Windelspecht,Biology, 274.

46.Mason, Losos and Singer, Raven and Johnson’sBiology, 428.

47.Miller and Levine,Biology, 469.

48.Casey Luskin, “Haeckel’s embryo drawings make cameos in proposed Texas instructional materials,”Evolution News & Views(June 17, 2011). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/haeckels_embryos_make_multiple047321.html.

49.Randy Olson,Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus(New York: New Video Group, 2007).

50.Jonathan Wells, “Flock of dodos, or pack of lies?”Evolution News & Views(February 9, 2007). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/02/flock_of_dodos_or_pack_of_fals_4003165.html.

51.John G. West and Casey Luskin, “Hoax of dodos, part 1,”Evolution News & Views(February 7, 2007). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/02/hoax_of_dodos_pt_1_flock_of_do003132.html.
52.Debate at Villanova University (April 12, 2012), starting at 4:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vDzcJNt1MM.

53.Casey Luskin, “Dodos keep on hoaxing,”Evolution News & Views(April 13, 2012). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/thursday_night058531.html.

54.Randy Olson,Houston, We Have a Narrative(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), vii.

Zombie Science
More Icons of Evolution

Jonathan Wells

A Puzzling Situation or The Story of a Young Man

 

In recent years I have been experiencing something I had often heard about from others but somehow never expected might happen to me: I have found myself getting old. So far it does not seem quite as bad as I have heard it described, but at sixty-one years of age I am, so to speak, still a youngster at being old. We’ll just have to see.

I am still somewhat partial to young people, however, possibly because I was one myself for a time. I have plenty of young friends trying to make their way in a challenging and confusing world, and find myself wanting to help them out in any way I can. But they often appear less anxious to hear my hard-bought wisdom than I think they ought to be. I keep feeling reminded of an old definition of “expert”—someone who has already made every mistake it is possible to make within some limited domain. To myself I seem a highly qualified expert in any number of domains by this standard, and I would be more than happy to share the story of my mistakes with the younger people I observe repeating them. Perhaps it is my unprepossessing exterior, or perhaps it just isn’t the fashion today for the young to seek out advice from their elders.

An exception occurred recently, however, and that is why I am setting pen to paper. A young man of my acquaintance approached me with the most intractable and confounded difficulties of which I have ever heard. He is really a good kid, about nineteen or twenty I would reckon, well brought-up and now gainfully employed. But he finds himself in a perplexing situation. It turns out that if a dilemma appears sufficiently difficult to resolve, a few young people are still willing to learn from their elders. This gives me hope for the future.

His difficulty concerns a young lady of his acquaintance. I don’t know her well, but have every reason to believe she is a respectable girl of good family and sound principles. He has known her for some time: in fact, he occasionally crossed paths with her when they were children, what with their both living in the same town and all. For this reason, he was taken by surprise recently at what happened when he ran into her again after about a year and a half. I will try to recount his story the way he told it to me, but must ask the reader’s indulgence due to the extraordinary nature of my young friend’s experience. It was not always easy for him to find the words to put it across to me.

Viewed from the outside, not all that much happened. He went to one of those small-town family-type get togethers. Folks were barbecuing and talking, kids running around playing ball, men were arguing over politics while women compared notes on family matters—you get the picture. Well, there stood this young lady, and she must not have been too upset to see my friend again, because when he appeared, she smiled. And although it probably wasn’t the first time he had seen her smile, something different happened on this occasion: as near as he could describe it to me, his whole being suddenly seemed flooded with a sensation of extreme happiness. He wondered what was going on, because he could see neither why such a thing should happen at all, nor why it should have happened today, nor why with this particular girl. He has been puzzling over these mysteries ever since.

Despite the unexpectedness and intensity of his feelings, his interaction with the young lady was rather limited. They exchanged some conventional greetings and conversed briefly about a few matters of hardly any importance at all. Then she had to leave to look after her little brother. She’s very good with children, you see, and hopes to have her own someday.

One reason my friend did not speak longer with her, he tells me, is that he seemed to be overcome by shyness. He hadn’t expected that either: they were, as I mentioned, acquainted from childhood, and he is not usually a shy young man. But he suddenly found himself fumbling to produce even the most commonplaces remarks in the lady’s presence. He has only seen her a few times since that day, but each time he finds the same thing happening.

So he came to me for advice. Perhaps he was relying on my reputation as the author of Sexual Utopia in Power. I actually do know quite a lot about sexual matters, as it happens. I am familiar with the gay liberation movement, have followed the recent kerfuffles over transsexualism and men competing in women’s sports, and once even reviewed Jim Goad’s account of the artificial vaginas transsexuals can now pay to have drilled into their bodies, along with the debate over how their odor compares to that of the natural prototype. But I’m not sure whether even a complete study of Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis would suffice to equip me to deal with my young friend’s situation, and I am ashamed to admit that I did not know quite what to tell him.

There are other matters to be considered. Although young, my friend is already aware that this world can be a dangerous place. It has seen wars and revolutions, fires, floods, and famines; criminals lurk in dark corners. This gives him cause for concern, because the young lady of whom he is so fond scarcely weighs a hundred thirty pounds and is not nearly as robust as he is. For the moment, he admits, no one appears to be coming after her with gun or knife. But he still finds himself worried about her well-being. He can’t even quite explain the nature of his concern, but it just plain seems to him that there ought to be someone capable of coming to this young woman’s assistance should such need arise.

My friend really does have a good heart, and I found his solicitude admirable, but when it came to practical advice, I did not find the case an easy one. I do, however, know someone who works in security, so I took the problem to that fellow. He has provided armed guards for businesses, banks, and meetings of right-wing extremists, but says he has never heard of a security detail being assigned to a young lady. Well, maybe the President’s daughter—but certainly not an ordinary girl in a small town like the one where these two live. Perhaps the market just is not there.

And now my young friend is facing even greater difficulties. I asked him how he imagines the future of himself and this girl he cares so much about, and he isn’t too sure of the matter. Being so young, I suppose he just is not used to thinking seriously about the future. All he could tell me is that every time he thinks about her—and he thinks about her quite a bit—it seems to him that the supreme happiness of which a human might be capable would somehow involves clasping this girl in one’s arms.

The reader will surely understand my alarm. I asked my friend if he did not realize that this was precisely where the very greatest danger of all for young ladies was to be found. To my relief, he assured me that he did. He is a serious young man who does a bit of reading, and the family leans Republican. Well, according to what is said in many highly-respected conservative publications, horrifying things can happen to innocent young women on American college campuses these days. The young men are quite simply predators, without honor or conscience. My friend is beside himself with anxiety because he understands the girl’s parents are seriously contemplating letting her matriculate at the local university. He is going to ask her father to reconsider the whole thing. If anything should happen to this young lady, he does not know what he would do.

I asked him to describe to me the dangers that face young women on college campuses. He reports that they are rarely described in detail because conservative authors are rather decorous and old-fashioned in their use of language and dislike being overly explicit. But according to what he can understand—and this is precisely the most confusing and disturbing aspect of the entire situation—the campus predators clasp girls in their

arms.

In other words, it appears from what these writers are saying that my young friend may himself be a predator. I’m sure the reader will appreciate his agony at the thought that his cherished dream of happiness might turn out to be a source of the greatest possible danger to the girl he loves: the very thought is almost too much for the poor fellow to bear.

I am not the first person he went to for advice about his situation, as it happens. Despite his generally conservative leanings, my friend has gotten wind of possible objections to his association with this young woman from a different quarter. How many obstacles there are to happiness on this earth! It turns out that young women have a right to bodily autonomy. Their bodies belong to them, obviously, so who should have any rights over them if not the women themselves? In fact, my friend enthusiastically agrees with this point of view.

Now, it appears that women are sometimes subjected against their will to inappropriate touching, but this young man is vehemently opposed to any such thing. In fact, he says that if anyone should come along and touch this particular young lady inappropriately, he would scarcely be able to contain his rage. He might not even be able to answer for his behavior! I was amazed to hear him speak like this because it was so out of character. He was never a violent kid.

Well, braving all the predators, he went down to our local university to seek the advice of Dr. Naomi Rosenberg, Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Rosenberg is the author of the well-received monograph Transgressive Biker Sluts Going for Broke, and is married to Alejandra García-Martínez, a Guatemalan labor activist and woman of color. A ten-year resident of our local community, Dr. Rosenberg is also an internationally renowned authority on the theory of inappropriate touching.

The young man explained his concerns. One point on which he was particularly keen to be instructed was that the very term would seem to imply the existence—at least as a logical possibility—of another kind of touching that was appropriate. But academic specialization has now gone so far that even Dr. Rosenberg’s extensive expertise on inappropriate touching did not translate into any ability to provide a young man with guidance as to the appropriate variety. Dr. Rosenberg did, however, express the hope that the young lady might enroll in one of her classes. No aspect of her work gives her greater satisfaction, she says, than the extremely personal interest it allows her to take in the development of young women.

The girl herself appears to like this young man, and she shares his perplexity. They hope they might eventually discover some sort of reliable, mutually beneficial arrangement to solve their difficulties. If such a thing were to emerge, my friend says he would not hesitate to “proposition” the young lady with it, if the reader will pardon the expression.

In my younger days I earned a PhD in philosophy and devoted many hours to some fairly abstruse issues: free will vs. determinism, idealism vs. materialism, realism vs. nominalism, you name it. But the novelty of my young friend’s situation is such that I can find no solution at all. So I have decided to resort to what is nowadays called “crowdsourcing.” Counter-Currents has some very intelligent readers, and I am hoping one of them may be able to suggest a way forward for this deserving young man and his lady friend. Commentators are urged not to shy away from even the most far-fetched suggestions, for nothing is so exotic that it might not provide a clue to the solution of a difficulty that has so far eluded the young man, myself, and even the learned Dr. Rosenberg.

F. Roger Devlin →

From comments

Laughing my [censored for the prudes] head off. OK Roger let’s just admit what you’re doing. Some of us can tell, especially if we’ve read your previous work.

By the way, you were wrong in your prior article about what “the immaculate conception” is. It’s not Mary conceiving Jesus without sex, it’s Mary herself having been conceived (born) without sin. An all-too-common mistake made by people without a Catholic background.

Sounds like an immaculate misconception then.