Vertical Evolution

DaVinci's Vitruvian Man - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was Gordon Rattray Taylor? He was a little known British journalist who wrote on niche topics such as biotechnology and evolution. As he was dying of cancer in 1981, he put the finishing touches on his magnum opus, The Great Evolution Mystery. The book was a commercial dud when it was published in 1983, but has since been reevaluated and much more appreciated. Taylor doesn’t answer any long-standing questions, but in the book he asks several very worthy questions about evolution.

We have now, as in 1983, two prevailing paradigms to explain the origin of life. In the ivied towers of academia there is the theory of Natural Selection – it basically asserts that life has evolved from an accumulation of beneficial mutations in organic matter. Those mutations are random in nature and have happened over eons. Gordon Rattray Taylor pointed up some problems – particularly with organs of extreme perfection such as the human eye. Such complexity would be unlikely to happen from “happy accidents” – the delicate structure would require special timing and tuning. Taylor’s objections were embraced by the religious community who likened Taylor’s eye concept to the pious William Paley’s watch.

The (Christian) religious community itself believes that a super human intelligence created life in one great instance, in the Garden of Eden. The time is “backed in” by religious scholars using the genealogy of the Old Testament – anywhere from 6,000 BC to 4,000 BC. Even supposing some forbears lived to be 100, this date would be in glaring contradiction to modern geological data. 6,000 BC is recent in geological time and fairly standard techniques have established the earth itself to be nearly 5 billion years old. Life itself probably surfaced over 3 billion years ago. Taylor wasn’t devoutly religious nor was he trying to promote a particular faith – he didn’t adhere to the Bible genealogy idea. Taylor was accepting of basic earth and fossil facts … he just wanted to have all the evolutionary elements fall in place and make sense.


Taylor's book - cover and contents - Pictures courtesy of Secker and Warburg

Taylor was likely on to something. In chapters like “Puzzles and Plans” he notices that evolution seems to follow a winnowing, narrowing process which would almost imply intelligent selectivity. I would join Taylor in posing these kinds of questions. If we go with Darwin’s theory, we must inquire:

- Why have we observed no new species?
- Why have we observed no seriously, naturally mutated species?
- Why is there not one other species of animal that offers competition to humans?

Biology texts of the last 50 years love to point out an English moth which switched from white to black so its wings would be well-camouflaged against factory soot. Another text talked about a species of fish in Africa which changed the color of its scales. In both cases, we’re looking at a minor variation – probably the activation of a preexisting gene. Nowhere have we seen anything sprout horns or wings unexpectedly – unless via deliberate lab tinkering. With due respect to beavers who make dams and ants who build nests, no other species is a master architect. Chimps and gorillas, our closest natural relatives, live in primitive clans. They can poke ant hills with sticks and make grass beds.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS

Taylor suggested, but didn’t say outright, that there might be some other kind of force at work. I myself think that organized religion is partly right – there is a super human intelligence. However it is fallible and it works through evolutionary process. There was no grand concoction in the Garden of Eden.

Here are some speculative answers to the questions above. Let me emphasize that these are my own ideas and not Taylor's…

- Humans are the last major new species. Evolution is intelligently driven and doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
- There are many amazing new mutations – but they are subtle and they happen almost entirely in humans. The greatest debates about physical design have already been won and lost – most mutations are to the soft brain tissue of humans. They are probably too minute for even the most advanced human geneticists or DNA experts to unravel.
- Evolution is efficient, selective and intelligently directed. Once a species has a major “design victory” the intelligence driving other species has some ability to realign itself with a “superior” animal. There is some type of dissociative and mobile property in the driving intelligence.

These ideas would probably be disturbing to conventional theists in several ways. Humans are still "superior" by way of evolutionary selection, but the process isn't as tidy as one would like. We actually are derived from animals and the distinction between adjacent species is murky, somewhat clouded. There is an uncomfortable nearness, even overlap with creatures we'd just as soon consign to a zoo.

This idea might also open other cans of worms – are some human subspecies “selected” over others and if so, which ones. What would be the criteria or the signs to see? We live in a world rife with clues – clues planted by a fallible super (but not supernatural) intelligence. There are biological signs all over the place – the truth is immutably there with much of it spelled out in our DNA and other parts spelled out in rich fossil deposits. If we can get past our own self-centered concerns and petty materialism, we can crack these biological riddles once and for all. In the meantime, we can give credit to Gordon Rattray Taylor for asking the right questions.

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