Klin Wochenschr (1989) 67: 923-928 Klinische Wochen-

schrift © Springer-Verlag 1989

Festvortrag

Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science

K.J. Hsii Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zfirich, Switzerland

The Meaning of Science

The Darwinian theory of evolution is taught in public schools. The fundamentalists of the Chris- tian Church were not happy, and the lawyers of the Creations Research Society have been lobbying for "equal time treatment", namely equal time for teaching "creat ion science" as for Darwinism. Their effort bore fruit. The State Legislature of Arkansas passed, in 1981, the Public Act 591, or the Balanced Treatment Act, of Arkansas. Lou- isiana and a few other states followed suit.

The American Civil Liberty Union took the issue to court in 1982; they claimed that the "creat- ion science" is a religious creed. The issue at stake was the constitutional separation of the church and state, and Judge William Overton of the Federal Court of Arkansas had to decide if the "creat ion science" is science or religion.

Many Witnesses were paraded before the court. Ironically the defence of the Act 591 was weakened by the testimony of its supporters. One claimed that " i t is impossible to devise a scientific experi- ment to describe the creation process". "We can- not discover by scientific investigation anything about the creation processes used by the Creator", another defence witness added, because "He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe" [1].

The verdict by Judge Overton was clear. The "creation science" is a religious faith, not science, and the Balanced Treatment Act was thrown out. Later, a similar law passed by the State of Lou- isiana was also declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. I agree with the legal ap- proach to the definition of science, and I agree with the legal judgment that "'scientific creation- ism" is religion. But is Darwinism science?

The question apparently did not come up dur- ing the various trials. The scientific community is awed by the great Charles Darwin and by neo- Darwinists; few dare to challenge the "holy cow". For many of us The Origin of Species is our bible, to be venerated but not to be read, and Charles Darwin is our Messiah. Philosophers are, however, not so constrained, and the question has been asked.

What is science? That was the issue of the Ar- kansas trial. Judge Overton accepted the definition of Karl Popper that science is falsifiable, meaning that it could be tested and proven wrong. "Creat- ion science" is a faith, which is not falsifiable.

Can Darwin's theory of evolution be proven wrong?

Popper did not think so at first. Darwin's theory is an attempt to explain a historical process, describing past events which are not repeatable. The validity of a past event cannot be verified or falsified by experimentation [2]. Popper changed his view later when he wrote that the Darwinian revolution was clearly "scientific in so far as (it) overthrew a dominant scientific theory" [3]. The dominant scientific theory that Popper had in mind was previous theory of evolution by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, which was, in fact, an enlightened form of scientific creationism. Lamarck's theory was based upon an assumption that the number of evolving species, after their creation, has been fixed; it was an explanation of a historical process no more falsifiable by experimentation than the Darwinian explanation.

Perhaps, Popper relaxed his definition of science, when he realized that historical interpreta- tions are falsifiable even though historical pro- cesses are not. History is not science, but theories of history could be science. Written histories of

924 K.J. Hsii: Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science

the antique world can be contradicted by the dig- gings of archaeologists. Interpreted histories of life on Earth can also be contradicted by investigations of relics of ancient life, namely, the fossils. Darwin- ism is scientific when Darwin wrote that the final judgment of his theory will be the fossil evidence on the history of life.

Accepting Popper's definition of falsifiability, science is a pursuit of truth. What is truth? Popper cited the German humorist Wilhelm Busch of Max-and-Moritz fame:

Twice two equals four 'tis true but too empty, and too trite What I look for is a clue to some matter not so light

Twice two equals four is tautology. "Some matter not so light" is the elusive scientific truth. Popper did not think that scientific truth can ever be veri- fied, but he believed that truth exists, because the very idea of mistake and of fallibility requires the acceptance of an objective truth (3).

How do we search for scientific truth? How do we know that we have found it when we have?

Scientists and philosophers agree that the ver- isimilitude of a scientific theory lies in its testibility, its explanatory, and above all, its predictive power. A theory is mistaken if it cannot be reconciled to all known facts. And science progresses if a theory leads to novel predictions, and degenerates if it is reduced to absorbing facts that have been dis- covered without its help.

T h e E s s e n c e o f D a r w i n i s m

What is Darwinism? I shall define Darwinism as the theory of history of life as presented by Charles Darwin in his first edition of the Origin of Species. The Origin revolutionized biology in challenging the invariability and fixity (in number) of species, which had been accepted by Carl Linnaeus as two axioms. Lamarck challenged the first dogma when he showed variations in a lineage, but he denied the occurrence of extinction, apparently because he had the view that extinction was incompatible with the omnipotence and benevolence of God [4]. Darwin went a step further and broke away entire- ly from the tradition when he proposed that species can evolve and multiply from a common ancestor.

The idea of common descent is in fact not origi- nal to Darwin. Franz Unger wrote in 1852 on The origin of plants; their multiplication and the origin of different types postulated common descent of all organic life from an algae-like Urpflanze, which "must have been designated the origin of all or- ganic life" [4]. As Darwin himself and many histo-

rians of science have recognized that Darwin's con- tribution to science is not so much to innovate the idea of common descent, but to propose a mechanism so that a speculation became a scientif- ic theory. The mechanism is "natural selection".

The essence of Darwinism is embodied in the title of his masterpiece: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life [5]. Dar- win singled out "natural selection" as the mecha- nism to explain the evolving changes in the history of life.

The Origin opens with two chapters on varia- tions. Then came the central theme: Struggle for Existence and Natural Selection. He made his point in passing, as if it is self-evident, that the struggle for life has been most severe between indi- viduals and varieties of the same species, and often severe between species of the same genus. Extinc- tion was a consequence in biotic interactions.

"It is the most closely-allied forms, varieties of the same species, and species of the same genus or of related genera, - which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other. Consequently, each new variety of species.., witl generally press hardest on its nearest kindrest, and tend to exter- minate them" [5].

Darwin was aware of the difficulties of his theory because his postulate was in conflict with the paleontological evidence of his time. Darwin postulated slow and gradual changes, but the fossil record was (and still is) distinguished by periodic catastrophic changes, which mark the transition of geological eras or epochs [6]. Darwin tried to talk his way out by emphasizing the imperfection of the geologic record.

In natural selection, Darwin thought he had found a mechanism to explain evolution from com- mon descent. But, he soon ran into trouble, be- cause a simple logical deduction showed that no new species could ever arise by the mechanism of heredity accepted at Darwin's time [7]. The master was so shaken that he inserted a whole new chapter in the sixth edition of The Origin, in which he re- suscitated the Lamarckian theory of evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which he had unkindly condemned as a "'load of rubbish" [5].

The rediscovery in 1900 of the Mendalian ge- netics rescued Darwinism from oblivion. Biologists believed that everything was again falling into place. The "new synthesis" advocated that the evolution is the outcome of chance mutations re- tained by natural selection. The neo-Darwinists be- lieved that "evolution at all scales, particularly

K.J. Hsfi: Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science 925

macroevolution, could be explained by the genetic mechanisms observed in laboratories and local populations" [8].

Natural selection may well be a mechanism in causing evolution, but what may happen is not necessarily what did happen. Even Darwin himself admitted that the theory of evolution has to be judged on the basis of historical record [5]. Is there any paleontological evidence for natural selection?

Darwinism and the Fossil Record

A scientific theory has predictive value. But the theory of natural selection predicts nothing in the history of life. Paleontologists, for example, have studied for 30 years the Permian faunas of a single formation at a small locality near Nanjing, China. They have collected some 400 vertebrate and inver- tebrate species, described and counted them in de- tail. Yet they cannot predict that none of the 400 are to be found in the overlying Triassic and younger formations. No studies of these or any fossil assemblages could lead to a prediction which of the species are the favored races to be selected for continuing existence during the next geologic epoch. "Selection simply could not explain the ma- jor events of macro-evolution", Reif wrote [9]:

If one surveys the whole historical process since 1859, one finds that, (in Germany) like anywhere else, those paleontolog- ists who became enthusiastic Darwinians were very young. The enthusiasm of Darwinism faded very soon.., because apparently Darwinism (selection theory) did not hold what it promised. It turned out to be impossible to apply Darwinism to the inter- pretation of the fossil record.

The Darwinian theory has not even absorbed all the facts which have been discovered without its help; it has only absorbed those facts which the biologist have chosen to consider relevant. John Maynard Smith, a prominent evolutionary biologist, described the arrogance of his colleagues [101:

"The attitude of population geneticists to any paleontolog- ist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grown-ups."

They forgot that evolution is the history of life. This simple fact is not appreciated by some of my thick-headed colleagues; often I have to use a par- able to get my point across: I would tell them that Cheops Pyramid, like evolution, is a historical fact. We do not know how it was built, but it is there for all visitors to see. I f an engineer insists that Cheops Pyramid can only be built by machine- powered tools; nobody would pay any attention to him. We believe the historians and archaeolo-

gists who have told us that Cheops' engineers had no machine-powered tools. Yet people are so naive today to think that the history of life happened as what biologists insist how it should have hap- pened, but not what the paleontologists see how it did happen.

Darwins's Three Mistakes

Almost all the species which once existed are now extinct [11]. Extinction of species is as much a part of the history of life as the origin of species. Dar- win did not bother to explain extinction on the basis of fossil record; extinction was referred to as the inevitable extermination of the inferior races by their more favoured relatives [5]. The catas- trophes in the history of life were dismissed as arti- facts of an imperfect geologic record [5]. Yet the evidence for mass extinctions is becoming better than ever a century after Darwin [12]. Just the same, many biologists still think like Darwin: they consider the mutual relation of organism to organ- ism the most important of all the causes in a slow and gradual evolution.

John Maynard Smith was surpriesed when he realized that

"the paleontologists read the fossil record differently. The dino- saurs they (paleontologists) believe, became extinct for reasons that had little to do with competition from the mammals. Only subsequently did the mammals, which have been around for as long as the dinosaurs, radiate to fill the empty space. The same general pattern, they thick, has held for other major tax- onomic replacement" [10].

Darwin postulated natural selection through biotic interactions because he did not believe that environmental catastrophes ever took place. He was misled by the substantive uniformitarianism of his geologist friend Charles Lyell. The idea that the processes operating in the geological past had the same energy (or range of energy) as the present processes was an assumption, a premise, but this premise like the one that the world was created in six days, is an ideological conviction that is no longer defensible on scientific ground.

Studying catastrophes in earth history, such as landslides, submarine avalanches, earthquakes, de- siccation of inland seas (up to the size of the Medi- terranean), and of meteorite-impact, I observed a linear relationship between the frequency and mag- nitude of events when those parameters are plotted on a log-log graph paper [14]. This log/log inverse law was, in fact, first established on the basis of earthquake statistics [15]. Millions of earthquakes have been recorded since the beginning of the cen- tury; the log/log plot of the frequency vs magni-

926 K.J. Hsfi : Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science

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Fig. 1. A frequency-magnitude plot of the earthquakes of the 20th century. (Based upon data provided by the Schweiz. Geoph. Kommission, 1986)

tude is perfectly linear (Fig. 1). The same relation has been obtained by studies of meteorite impacts; many billions of small craters have been identified on the moon, but only a few have diameters hundreds of kilometers across [16].

There is a difference, however, if the most ener- getic, or the least frequent, event is likely to happen in historical time of 103 years or in geologic time of 10 9 years. Few earthquakes can have magnitude larger than 10, and probably none ever exceeded magnitude 12. The earthquakes taking place dur- ing a person's life time have a range of magnitudes close to the whole range of possible energy release by earthquakes. One cannot assume that the Earth has ever been hit by an earthquake a billion times more energetic than the largest one of the century. The statistics on impact tells a different story. In our life time, we are witnessing events which can- not alter terrestrial environment; the largest im- pact in a lifetime should have an energy equivalent to the explosive energy of more or less 1 megaton of TNT. Yet impacts a billion times more energetic have happened several times in the history of life on Earth [17]. There is good geological evidence that one such impact took place at the end of the Mesozoic Era and triggered an environmental crisis and a mass extinction [18].

We can, therefore, conclude that some pro- cesses, such as mountain-building, have been oper-

ating within the same range of the energy-spectrum as those currently active. On the other hand, other kinds, such as bolide-impacts, had released much higher energy on rare occasions during the geologic past. The Lyellian uniformitarianism is not univer- sally applicable, and certainly is not applicable to interprete the processes influencing the history of life on Earth.

I have pointed out that Darwin's three mistakes were that (a) he dismissed mass extinctions as arti- facts of an imperfect geologic record; (b) he as- sumed that species diversity, like individuals of a given species, tends to increase exponentially with time; and (c) he considered biotic interactions the major cause of species extinction [13]. The theory of natural selection, postulating the extermination of "unfi t species", has been derived on the basis of this set of wrong premises, and it cannot be reconciled to all known facts, or fullfil this mini- mum requirement for a valid scientific theory.

The Popular Appeal of Darwinism

Any falsified scientific theory disappears quickly into oblivion. Yet why should Darwinism continue to enjoy success long after it has been proven un- tenable by observational data. The reason is to be found in the popular appeal of his theory.

Religious fundamentalists like Bishop Wilber- force have been barking up the wrong tree when they attack Darwin's assumption of "common de- scent". The idea was not the central theme of Dar- winism; it was not even original with Darwin. The idea had taken root several years before Darwin wrote his opus, when Robert Chamber's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was enthusiasti- cally received by the general public. Later, a Vien- nese botanist, Franz Unger went a step further to designate the algae as " the origin of all organic life" [191.

The popularity of Darwinism has little to do with his acceptance of the theory of common de- scent. Darwin owed his success to his central themes that natural selection through biotic inter- actions is the mechanism of evolution and that sur- vival of the fittest is a natural law.

Darwinism was not a logical deduction of sci- entific data, but a hypothesis inspired by the Zeit- geist of his age. Darwin told us [20]:

In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Mal- thus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable

K.J. Hsii: Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science 927

variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

Wallace was inspired by the same Malthus, twenty years later and half a globe away; he wrote [211:

I was then (February, 1958) living at Ternate in the Moluc- cas, and was suffering from a rather severe attack of intermR- tent fever, which prostrated me for several hours every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits. During one of these fits, while again considering the origin of species, something led me to think of Malthus 's Essay on Population, (which I read ten years before. . , there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest - that the individuals removed by these checks must be, on the whole, inferior to those that survived. Then . . . . the whole method of specific (i.e. species) modification became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit I had thought out the main point of the theory."

The lack of scientific foundation of Darwin's theory has not been overlooked by his contempor- aries. Frederick Engels wrote in 1875 [22]:

The whole Darwinian teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature, of Hobbes ' docturine bellum omnium eontra omnes together with Malthus 's theory of population. When this conjuror 's trick has been performed .... the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need to be said about it.

The instant success of Darwin's theory had lit- tle to do with his scientific arguments. The success was a social phenomenon and it has been attrib- uted to the social attitudes of his time. As Rupert Ridl, an eminent biologist, recently wrote [23]:

"'The reading public of England, which with Victorian in- dustrialization, had demonstrated its (often ruthless) efficiency, could now see the rights it arrogated to itself on the ground of that efficiency legitimized as law of na ture ."

John Rockefeller could write that the growth of a large business is merely the working out of a law of nature" [24]. Darwin's paradigm appealed to Karl Marx as well, who wrote in 1861: "Dar - win's book is very important and it suits me well that it supports the struggle in history from the point of view of natural science" [24]. Socialists also "welcome Darwin with open arms" and George Bernard Shaw wrote that Darwin " h a d the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind" [25].

Ernst Chain, a Nobel laureate in biology, spoke bravely [26]:

"To postulate.., survival of the fittest.., seems to me a hy- pothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts... It amazes me that (it is) swallowed so uncritically and

readily, and for such a long time, by so many scientists without a murmur of protest ."

If Chain had been a social scientist, he may have known, for yon Bertalanffy wrote [27]:

I think the fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in "' h a r d " science, has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds. Society and science have been so steeped in the idea of mechanism, utilitarianism and the eco- nomic concept of free competition, that instead of God Selec- tion was enthroned as ultimate reality.

The Darwinists have been very clever to set up religious fundamentalists as the strawmen in their arguments. They took advantage of the un- fortunate attack on the fossil record of common descent, and confused the issue by condemning all critics of the social theory of natural selection. As Darwin's contemporaries lamented: "(The Dar- winists) tried to put down everyone who did not subscribe to the infallibitlity of the God Darwin and his prophet Huxley" [28]. Samuel Butler, the novelist and a disenchanted Darwinian, wrote [29]:

When I attacked the foundations of morality Erewhon, and nobody cared two straws. I tore open the wounds of my Re- deemer as he hung upon the Cross in The Fair Haven, and people rather liked it. But when I attacked Mr. Darwin they were up in arms in a moment.

Biologist, in their arrogance believed, that "no t only is Natural Selection inevitable, not only is it an effective agency of evolution, but it is the

only effective agency of evolution" [30]. The alter- natives to Darwinism are six: creationism, La- marckism/vitalism, Lysenkoism, Anti-Jensenism, Spiritualism/theistic creationism, Prometheism [8]; the possibility of a seventh, namely, insufficient knowledge has not been considered. It is, therefore, not surprising that I have been ostracized by col- leagues who felt that a critique of the Darwinian postulate of natural selection gives support to reli- gious fundamentalism.

Is Darwinism Science

Judge William Overton [1] gave five criteria for a legal definition of science, namely: i) It is guided by natural law. 2) It has to be explanatory with reference to natu- ral law. 3) It is testable against the empirical world. 4) It is falsifiable. 5) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not neces- sarily the final word.

The Darwinian theory has been considered sci- entific because it is guided by the " t aw" of natural selection, and is explanatory with reference to this

928 K.J. Hsii: Evolution, Ideology, Darwinism and Science

"law". But is natural selection a natural law? Dar- win borrowed the idea from the social ideology of Malthus. He presented few historical facts, nor could the paleontologists during the last century find much evidence, to support the notion that nat- ural selection is a natural law.

The Darwinian theory is not experimentally testable against the empirical world, because the proposed mechanism operates in a time-span much longer than our lifetime. As a theory to explain historical facts, it is falsifiable by the fossil record. It was thus a scientific hypothesis when it was first proposed. After more than a century, however, we find that its premise is not supported by the pa- leontological record, and its numerous predictions have been proven wrong [13]. The present state of Darwinism, in my opinion, is comparable to that of Ptolemy's geocentric theory during the Middle Age. Ptolemy's theory was science during the Antique Era, but became a dogma after its predictions had been falsified by Galileo's new ob- servations. Likewise, Darwinism was a scientific hypothesis, but has become an ideology during the 20th century.

The last criterion of Judge Overton is an ex- pression of Popper's philosophy that "scientific truth can only be falsified, but not verified". In this respect, orthodox Darwinists, with their in- sistence that there are no scientific alternatives to natural selection, did not fare much better than religious fundamentalists. No wonder Paul Feyer- abend, Professor of Philosophy of science at Berke- ley, proposed to lead "three cheers to the funda- mentalists in California who succeeded in having a dogmatic formulation of the theory of evolution removed from the text books and an account of Genesis' included. Ideologies are marvellous when used in the company of other ideologies. They be- come boring and doctrinaire as soon as their merits lead to the removal of their opponents" [31].

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Keneth J. Hs~i Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Ziirich Switzerland