 Cover | |
| Author | Michael Denton |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Evolution |
| Publisher | Burnett Books |
Publication date | 1985 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 368 |
| ISBN | 0-09-152450-4 |
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is a 1985 book by Michael Denton, in which the author argues that the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection is a "theory in crisis". Reviews by scientists say that the book distorts and misrepresents evolutionary theory and contains numerous errors.
The Discovery Institute lists A Theory in Crisis as one of the "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design", [1] though the work does not mention intelligent design. [2]
A Theory in Crisis predates the 1987 United States Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard which was a catalyst for the foundation of the intelligent design movement in the early 1990s. Biochemist Douglas Theobald claims that Denton's later book Nature's Destiny contradicts some of the points of A Theory in Crisis. [3]
Reviews by parties within the scientific community were vehemently negative, with several attacking flaws in Denton's arguments. Biologist and philosopher Michael Ghiselin described A Theory in Crisis as "a book by an author who is obviously incompetent, dishonest, or both — and it may be very hard to decide which is the case" and that his "arguments turn out to be flagrant instances of the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion." [4]
Biologist Walter P. Coombs writing in Library Journal said that Denton "details legitimate questions, some as old as Darwin's theory, some as new as molecular biology, but he also distorts or misrepresents other 'problems'" and that "much of the book reads like creationist prattle, but there are also some interesting points." [5] Mark I. Vuletic, in an essay posted to the talk.origins Archive, presented a detailed argument that Denton's attempts to make an adequate challenge to evolutionary biology fail, contending that Denton neither managed to undermine the evidence for evolution, nor demonstrated that macroevolutionary mechanisms are inherently implausible. [6]
Philip Spieth, Professor of Genetics at University of California, Berkeley, reviewed the book saying his conclusions are "erroneous" and wrote the book "could not pass the most sympathetic peer review" because "evolutionary theory is misrepresented and distorted; spurious arguments are advanced as disproof of topics to which the arguments are, at best, tangentially relevant; evolutionary biologists are quoted out of context; large portions of relevant scientific literature are ignored; dubious or inaccurate statements appear as bald assertions accompanied, more often than not, with scorn." [7]
Paleontologist Niles Eldredge in a review wrote that the book is "fraught with distortions" and utilized arguments similar to creationists. [8]
Creationists including John W. Oller, Jr of the Institute for Creation Research, [9] and Answers in Genesis [10] positively reviewed Denton's book. Intelligent design proponents Phillip E. Johnson [11] and Michael J. Behe [12] say that they rejected evolution after reading the book. Christian apologist and intelligent design advocate Thomas E. Woodward [13] stated "Christians who are interested in the struggle of science to come to terms with the origin of the biosphere in all its variety should read this book and ponder its argumentation."
Molecular equidistance is a term that was first used by Michael Denton in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis to criticise the theory of evolution. The variation in the amino acid sequence of proteins such as cytochrome C can be analyzed to provide a phylogenetic tree that matches trees provided by other taxonomic evidence. What Denton pointed out was that if the percentage difference in cytochrome C amino acid sequences was compared from one organism to other organisms, the changes could be highly uniform. For example, the difference between the amino acid sequence for the cytochrome C of a carp and those of a frog, turtle, chicken, rabbit, and horse is a very constant 13% to 14%. Similarly, the difference between the cytochrome C of a bacterium and yeast, wheat, moth, tuna, pigeon, and horse only ranges from 64% to 69%.
Denton suggested that these data undermined the notion that fish were ancestral to frogs, which were ancestral to reptiles, which were ancestral to birds and mammals. If they were, then wouldn't the difference in cytochrome C structures be increasingly different from carp to frog, to reptile, to mammal? How could the cytochrome c amino acid sequences for such a wide range of species all be "equidistant" from the sequence for bacteria? Molecular biologists quickly pointed out the fallacy in Denton's argument. Just as there is no such thing as a "living fossil", and all modern species are cousins, so too, the amino acid sequences for all living species have been evolving since the time of their divergence from a common ancestor. [14] A modern carp is not an ancestor to a frog; frogs are not ancestors to turtles; turtles are not ancestors to rabbits. Similarly, the variations in eukaryotic cytochrome c structure with respect to bacteria are all due to mutations taking place since divergence from the common ancestor of these different organisms. It thus is not surprising that they show a similar level of divergence and equidistance of this type was even predicted and confirmed by researchers as early as 1963. [15]
Denton did understand this reply, but claimed that it was implausible to assume that such a molecular clock could keep such constant time over different lineages. [16] Those familiar with molecular clocks did not agree, since calibration with fossil records shows the cytochrome clock to be surprisingly reliable, and also found his suggestion that molecular equidistance was instead evidence of some sort of evolutionary "direction" to be a more implausible assumption than the one to which he was objecting. Critics found it difficult to accept a "directed" mechanism for changes in cytochrome C that were neutral, producing different proteins whose action was the same. Denton's conclusions have been called "erroneous" and "spurious" [14] and marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry states that all the observations in question can be explained within the modern framework of evolutionary theory. [17]
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.
Irreducible complexity (IC) is the argument that certain biological systems with multiple interacting parts would not function if one of the parts were removed, so supposedly could not have evolved by successive small modifications from earlier less complex systems through natural selection, which would need all intermediate precursor systems to have been fully functional. This negative argument is then complemented by the claim that the only alternative explanation is a "purposeful arrangement of parts" inferring design by an intelligent agent. Irreducible complexity has become central to the creationist concept of intelligent design (ID), but the concept of irreducible complexity has been rejected by the scientific community, which regards intelligent design as pseudoscience. Irreducible complexity and specified complexity, are the two main arguments used by intelligent-design proponents to support their version of the theological argument from design.
Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (ID).
The molecular clock is a figurative term for a technique that uses the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged. The biomolecular data used for such calculations are usually nucleotide sequences for DNA, RNA, or amino acid sequences for proteins.
Recurring cultural, political, and theological rejection of evolution by religious groups exists regarding the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. In accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact.
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution is a book by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. In the book Behe presents his notion of irreducible complexity and argues that its presence in many biochemical systems therefore indicates that they must be the result of intelligent design rather than evolutionary processes. In 1993, Behe had written a chapter on blood clotting in Of Pandas and People, presenting essentially the same arguments but without the name "irreducible complexity," which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in Darwin's Black Box. Behe later agreed that he had written both and agreed to the similarities when he defended intelligent design at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial.
Émile Zuckerkandl was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Neo-creationism is a pseudoscientific movement which aims to restate creationism in terms more likely to be well received by the public, by policy makers, by educators and by the scientific community. It aims to re-frame the debate over the origins of life in non-religious terms and without appeals to scripture. This comes in response to the 1987 ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard that creationism is an inherently religious concept and that advocating it as correct or accurate in public-school curricula violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Neutral mutations are changes in DNA sequence that are neither beneficial nor detrimental to the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce. In population genetics, mutations in which natural selection does not affect the spread of the mutation in a species are termed neutral mutations. Neutral mutations that are inheritable and not linked to any genes under selection will be lost or will replace all other alleles of the gene. That loss or fixation of the gene proceeds based on random sampling known as genetic drift. A neutral mutation that is in linkage disequilibrium with other alleles that are under selection may proceed to loss or fixation via genetic hitchhiking and/or background selection.
The junkyard tornado, sometimes known as Hoyle's fallacy, is an argument against abiogenesis, using a calculation of its probability based on false assumptions, as comparable to "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein" and to compare the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. It was used originally by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) in his book The Intelligent Universe, where he tried to apply statistics to evolution and the origin of life. Similar reasoning were advanced in Darwin's time, and indeed as long ago as Cicero in classical antiquity. While Hoyle himself was an atheist, the argument has since become a mainstay in the rejection of evolution by religious groups.
Michael John Denton is a British proponent of intelligent design and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD degree in biochemistry. Denton's book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, inspired intelligent design proponents Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe.
Darwinism, Design and Public Education is a 2003 anthology, consisting largely of rewritten versions of essays from a 1998 issue of Michigan State University Press's journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, edited by intelligent design activists John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, neither of whom are scientists. The book is promoted as being a "peer-reviewed science book", however in reviewing it Barbara Forrest notes that:
Nineteen of the twenty-seven essays are by ID creationists and their supporters, not one of whom is a working evolutionary biologist. Among the eight pro-evolution essays, only four are by scientists. Of those, only two are by evolutionary biologists. There is a preponderance of humanities scholars; some, like rhetorician John Angus Campbell, are ID proponents while others are pro-evolution.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but eventually came to receive near-universal acceptance in the scientific community. The observation of evolutionary processes occurring has been uncontroversial among mainstream biologists since the 1940s.
The history of molecular evolution starts in the early 20th century with "comparative biochemistry", but the field of molecular evolution came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s, following the rise of molecular biology. The advent of protein sequencing allowed molecular biologists to create phylogenies based on sequence comparison, and to use the differences between homologous sequences as a molecular clock to estimate the time since the last common ancestor. In the late 1960s, the neutral theory of molecular evolution provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, though both the clock and the neutral theory were controversial, since most evolutionary biologists held strongly to panselectionism, with natural selection as the only important cause of evolutionary change. After the 1970s, nucleic acid sequencing allowed molecular evolution to reach beyond proteins to highly conserved ribosomal RNA sequences, the foundation of a reconceptualization of the early history of life.
The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is an intelligent design book by Discovery Institute fellow Michael Behe, published by the Free Press in 2007. Behe argues that while evolution can produce changes within species, there is a limit to the ability of evolution to generate diversity, and this limit is somewhere between species and orders. On this basis, he says that known evolutionary mechanisms cannot be responsible for all the observed diversification from the last universal ancestor and the intervention of an intelligent designer can adequately account for much of the diversity of life. It is Behe's second intelligent design book, his first being Darwin's Black Box.
Michael Egnor is a pediatric neurosurgeon, advocate of the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design and blogger at the Discovery Institute. He is a professor at the Department of Neurological Surgery at Stony Brook University, a position held since 1991.
Russell F. Doolittle was an American biochemist who taught at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Described as a "world-renowned evolutionary biologist", Doolittle's research primarily focused on the structure and evolution of proteins. Highlights of Doolittle's decades of research include his role in co-developing the hydropathy index and determining the structure of fibrinogen.
The relationship between intelligent design and science has been a contentious one. Intelligent design (ID) is presented by its proponents as science and claims to offer an alternative to evolution. The Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank and the leading proponent of intelligent design, launched a campaign entitled "Teach the Controversy", which claims that a controversy exists within the scientific community over evolution. The scientific community rejects intelligent design as a form of creationism, and the basic facts of evolution are not a matter of controversy in science.
Natural genetic engineering (NGE) is a class of process proposed by molecular biologist James A. Shapiro to account for novelty created in the course of biological evolution. Shapiro developed this work in several peer-reviewed publications from 1992 onwards, and later in his 2011 book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, which has been updated with a second edition in 2022. He uses NGE to account for several proposed counterexamples to the central dogma of molecular biology. Shapiro drew from work as diverse as the adaptivity of the mammalian immune system, ciliate macronuclei and epigenetics. The work gained some measure of notoriety after being championed by proponents of Intelligent Design, despite Shapiro's explicit repudiation of that movement.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution: