June 18, 2000

BIOLOGIST DEMONSTRATES THE TRIUMPH OF EVOLUTION

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge visited Denver last week, to talk about his new book and to enlist supporters in the effort to solve ecological problems that in his view are among the direst threats facing humanity.

These two aims might seem at odds, because the book is called The Triumph of Evolution (and subtitled The Failure of Creationism), while the author believes that science and religion working together can have a positive effect on the earth and its ecosystems.

"I have come to see that religious traditions in general and concepts of God in particular reveal a lot about how people see themselves, and how they see themselves fitting into the natural world," he writes.

"It's only their stories about how they got that way that tend to be fanciful."

The term "evolution" as Eldredge uses it refers to two things. One is the very general principle, quite correctly called a "theory" in the scientific sense, that all living organisms on earth, past and present, are related by ancestry and descent from a common ancestor in the remote geological past. That principle is firmly established, and has been since the 19th century, never mind the 21st. Hence the title.

The second is the lavish profusion of theories, many of them incompatible, about how the process of evolution works. Of course, there are many things as yet unexplained; scientists are working on a puzzle billions of years old with most of the pieces missing. As new pieces turn up, they continually devise variations on existing theories to account for them, and only the theories that fit survive -- natural selection operating to drive the evolution of scientific thought.

A religion whose doctrine was in such a state of ferment might well fear for its future, but for science it is a sign of robust good health. And what creationist critics of evolution fail to understand is that disagreements about the mechanisms of evolution do not shake the principle that it happened somehow.

Eldredge is most closely identified with the cluster of theories that see long periods of stability alternating with comparatively brief periods of rapid evolution triggered by a sudden or catastrophic change in the environment.

After a reign of some 150 million years, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a planetary collision 65 million years ago; only then did the mammals, which had been scampering around trying not to get stepped on, diversify into the ecological niches the dinosaurs no longer occupied.

Writing about evolution invariably brings lots of mail, to me and to the paper. The letters parrot arguments they evidently don't understand; people prate about thermodynamics, for instance, who don't realize that if their argument were valid, they would not exist to make it.

Some of the writers send pages and pages painstakingly copied out by hand; others send magazines and pamphlets they've been induced to purchase.

They mean well, but they're wasting their time and money. About the most charitable thing to be said about the printed literature they send is that it is written by the ignorant to mislead the gullible.

Usually I read no further than the first nonsensical argument or quotation taken out of context. I received one not long ago, anonymously, from someone in Alabama who mailed it to my address carefully cut out of the newspaper, and I would have given it the usual treatment except that it cited Eldredge -- of all people -- as among the authorities whose work contradicts Darwinism, so I thought I'd keep it around until I heard the man speak for himself.

Eldredge is wearily familiar with all this, and his observation that creationists claim evolution is discredited when evolutionists disagree is rooted in his own experience. Readers who are familiar with the scientific debate may find his insights into the political conflict the most illuminating part of his book.

(626 words)