I Would Rather Label The Whole Enterprise

Darwin's Principle Of Natural Selection Leads To The Prediction That The Proper Way To Analyze Any Evolutionary Development Is To See The New Features As Adaptive To Environments. And That's A Perfectly Good Principle. The Problem Is That There Are Many Evolutionary Biologists Who View Everything That Happens In Evolution As Directly Evolved For Adaptive Benefit. And That Just Doesn't Work. Whenever You Build A Structure For Adaptive Reasons, The Structure Is Going To Exhibit Properties That Have Nothing To Do With Adaptation. They're Just Side Consequences.

I Have Often Been Amused By Our Vulgar Tendency To Take Complex Issues, With Solutions At Neither Extreme Of A Continuum Of Possibilities, And Break Them Into Dichotomies, Assigning One Group To One Pole And The Other To An Opposite End, With No Acknowledgment Of Subtleties And Intermediate Positions And Nearly Always With Moral Opprobrium Attached To Opponents.

Even The Standard Example Of Ancient Nonsense - The Debate About Angels On Pinheads - Makes Sense Once You Realize That Theologians Were Not Discussing Whether Five Or Eighteen Would Fit, But Whether A Pin Could House A Finite Or An Infinite Number.

I Like To Summarize What I Regard As The Pedestal-smashing Messages Of Darwin's Revolution In The Following Statement, Which Might Be Chanted Several Times A Day, Like A Hare Krishna Mantra, To Encourage Penetration Into The Soul: Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which, If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again, Or Perhaps Any Twig With Any Property That We Would Care To Call Consciousness.

Since We Proposed Punctuated Equilibria To Explain Trends, It Is Infuriating To Be Quoted Again And Again By Creationists-whether Through Design Or Stupidity, I Do Not Know-as Admitting That The Fossil Record Includes No Transitional Forms. Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.