I seldom nowadays read the Unz Review, but I did read Fred Reed’s Stephen C. Meyer, Douglas Axe, Chuck Darwin, and Me. As always with Fred Reed, it was well written, funny, and anti-Darwinism. I have myself discarded Darwinism because the explanation of evolution by natural selection, even with all spices added, is too simple. Every time I read something of cell metabolism, like for instance how dNTRs are created, it all seems extremely complicated. To such an extent that even a mathematician like me has great difficulties keeping the healthy sense of supremacy towards all this kid-level sciences. Well, it is not kid-level, let’s admit. But then there is the elegant and extremely simple explanation of everything with natural selection: forget all the complexity, it is simply that the fittest survives, Darwin figured it out. I would expect a slightly more complicated explanation to a very complicated issue.
This is not to say that natural selection and mutations could not explain some part of the creation of new species. Separation of a population by natural boundaries (sea, mountains, glaziers, deserts) for a long enough time does cause it to evolve into a new species, simply through mutations. We see this e.g. in islands, like Hawaii used to have large endemic fauna and flora. You can well assume that natural selection guided the evolution there. But this does not explain many difficult special cases of the type how this species A could possibly evolve to this species B in the given time and the given population size.
As Fred Reed nicely explains in his article, the main problem with Darwinism is that natural selection, being a type of a greedy algorithm, should not take species A to species B if the intermediate steps are not at least as fit as the previous step, and this hardly can be possible. Greedy algorithms must stop to a local maximum and cannot find a better maximum since they cannot go downhill. How, for instance, a bat can develop from an early mammal, something similar to a tree shrew? You need wings, strong muscles to wipe the wings, and instincts that make you not only able to fly (bats learn to fly in 15 days which means some innate capability) but also to breed less often and take care of the offspring, they usually have only one young one at a time, quite untypical for a small mammal. And they have the echo system for locating prey. That means that there needs to be many new genes. I can imagine how an early bat glides with some skin between legs, cannot catch any flying insects and preys on cockroaches, but cannot fly. So it crawls dragging the early wings. Then these wings grow bigger and still the creature cannot catch flying insects and cannot start from the ground. It would be too clumsy and fast eaten. How could evolution continue improving useless wings? Or I find it curious why many flowers are beautiful, as I doubt bees – pollinating these flowers – probably do not understand much of esthetics. But my basic problem with Darwinism is that I made a small calculation how probable is to get an essentially new protein coding gene segment by random mutations: after a few mutations the gene does not work and must stop working (become a pseudogene), and after that point natural selection cannot act on it, which means that it must mutate to the working new gene totally by random changes, without any guidance. It is a mathematical impossibility to get new protein coding genes this way in the allowed time with acceptable population sizes.
I did find one mechanism that confirms with the scientific axiom that an explanation of evolution cannot use any external intelligence but work only according to atheistic philosophy. Viruses can occasionally transfer their genes to the host, and even more seldom, get DNA from their hosts and still work as viruses. This makes it possible to transfer a gene from another species. Especially possible this can be if the cells are disturbed, as can be the case after a catastrophe: cells have DNA repair mechanisms, but if the balance of nucleotides in the cell is disturbed, there are more errors in these mechanisms. Some of these errors can remain as inherited mutations. Thus, after a global catastrophe there can be more mutations, and even transfer of genes between species by the help of viruses. But naturally this cannot be a main mechanism of evolution. Evolution had to start from something simple and if everything was simple, there were no species from where to transfer the genes. But I made this mechanism because I could not find any other way. DNA segments cannot pass to the cell e.g. from food: nucleotides are hydrophilic and the cell membrane is hydrophobic, you need DNA transferer to get DNA segments to pass the membrane. Admitted, there are nucleotide salvage pathways that do take intermediate products, so not all nucleotides are made in situ in the cell, but these pathways break nucleotides into small pre-forms. The only way to get new DNA segments into an eukaryotic cell that I know (apart from mating) is viruses.
But that is not the way evolution can mainly work. Let us drop this straightjacket of not having any external intelligence and propose a way evolution actually could work. We have the feeling of free choice, no matter what anybody says. Automatons always make deterministic choices, even if the algorithm includes random steps (i.e., a deterministic algorithm calls a random number generator and acts deterministically on its output). They do not have a free choice and as far as I know they do not have any feeling of a free choice, or any feeling of anything, but animals do. It is very possible that even simple animals have a free choice: they can run or fight, or turn left or right. In order to have a new species DNA needs to be changed. Most mechanisms of mutations in DNA seem to be random, though there are mechanisms that are not yet understood. For instance, there must have been chromosomal rearrangement, though nobody knows how it works. We can see it in sex chromosomes. Birds and mammals evolved from reptiles and originally genes for making eggs were in some female genes, probably in some autosomal chromosome. Birds have the ZW system of sex chromosomes, so the female genes are in the W chromosome, while mammals have the XY system and female genes are in the X chromosome. Somewhere female genes must have jumped from one chromosome to another. We can also assume that there is gene rearrangement, like is the case with recombination in viruses. But mainly the mutations should be rather simple mutations like change of a nucleotide base, omission or duplication. In order to make enough new genes to get a bat from a shrew we need a long chain of these mutations.
Mutations can be random, and if the mutation rate is higher e.g. after a catastrophe, we have enough of these mutations, only they do not fall to the same paternal or maternal lineage. The problem is that we must get certain two individuals to meet, mate, and get a young one, and the young one must live up to the fertile age, and meet and mate again with a special individual that has suitable mutations. If this is possible, then mutations can accumulate, but this is not possible by natural selection in case the effect of these mutations is invisible or harmful. I think we often have the case that the effect of mutations is not beneficial. The best may be that there is no effect: mutations affect a pseudogene and the pseudogene is only later turned on when it actually works. So, the problem is how special individuals meet, mate and avoid early death. Fortunately all these tasks require free choice. In order for a male to stay alive and mate more often than the average you in many species need courage: to choose to fight instead of running. The Greeks thought that gods give you the courage or put the fear in your hearth. They also thought that gods make you fall in love, which is a step promoting mating. And of course, gods can also guide your to want to go to some place where you just happen to meet the future mate. Thus, all this selection could be made by Greek gods, rather than Darwin’s natural selection.
It is indeed not natural selection. When interviewed most women in most parts of the world (all parts, many say) will tell that their favorite mate is rich, tall, intelligent and a few years older, while men tell that their favorite mate is beautiful and young. These are rational preferences, just what natural selection should propose, but most women do not marry a tall and smart millionaire. They meet some guy, fall in love, and marry. Or mostly. In some cultures the parents arrange the marriage, but those marriages are even less according to natural selection because in such cultures almost everybody gets married and that is not the idea of natural selection.
So gods could make new genes basically, just by using the free choice that probably all animals have (free choice does not imply self-consciousness, and certainly not thinking of who I am and how did I get there, which is only human activity and not the same as self-consciousness, which is simply a feeling that you are). But the tricky part is that these gods should know what individuals have useful mutations in the genes of interest. Is this too much to assume? If these gods or spirits have a way to influence what the individual feels is his free choice (like the free choice with whom to fall in love, or where to turn on the street), then there is some communication channel. This channel should give information of DNA to the other direction. It is clearly possible for a designed system, but the system with gods is by essence a designed system, so this feature is built-in. OK, so this works. You do get evolution by this solution. It is somewhat better than the biblical theory that God created man from earth.. But that theory is from a book that describes the world conquest plan of Second Temple priests and is was adopted by the Church that was born from a suicide cult after the failed attempt to conquer the Roman Empire, so I think we can forget that theory.
Well, maybe I will invent some better theory, but this is not really so bad. There is the free choice, we are not automatons, so there must be something else than this material world, and there is the mathematical problem of how to get random mutations in a limited time and limited population to form a combination that transfers a shrew into a bat. If you have a better theory, then good for you. But I do not know a better theory and natural selection certainly is not the theory. What these Greek gods do is selection. God’s selection can do everything that Darwin’s selection alternatives (natural, sexual) can do, and more. It can do a bit more because the path from species A to species B does not need to be improving (or at least fit enough) at each intermediate step. God’s selection can make this even if there is no visible change in the species before a sudden turn to B. That would mean building the genes as pseudogenes and then turning them on, so even this is possible, but it is also possible to change the species through remarkably unfit intermediate steps.
The described mechanism with Greek gods only works to turn a shrew to a bat. Does not explain how you can get new protein coding DNA segments? I did not discuss this yet because I have so far assumed that bats have the same proteins (apart from different alleles, produced by simple mutations) than a tree shrew, which probably is true. But yes, this selection mechanism can explain how you can get lots of useful mutations to a single DNA segment: if selection prefers (i.e., those having useful mutations get more young ones and they stay alive) useful mutations, then this does work. Natural selection cannot work unless the useful mutations give some advance in the phenotype. Greek gods can select without the advantage.
But notice that I did not explain how the most difficult steps of evolution could possibly be made, like the miracle of making life out of non-life, that is, how to get a cell. But nobody has done it so far. It requires something more, and it is not the warm soup of Darwin. That is too vague for an explanation.
Certainly somebody should present a more reasonable theory of evolution. The existing one stinks of 1800 century mechanical materialism. Something it explains, but a correct theory should explain everything, not only something and fail in other cases. I am now reading four old books by Richard Dawkins, one of the proponents of Darwinism. I very much doubt he has anything sensible to say, but I will check it. (Long ago read his books, was not impressed.)