Ankylodillos and other chimeras — another crackpot alternative to evolution
It’s all Matt Dillahunty’s fault. He tells me he’s carrying on a correspondence with some guy who claims to have an alternative theory of evolution, and asks me to help him wade through the gobbledygook…so I did. I just didn’t realize how much gobbledygook there was.
The guy is named Eugene McCarthy, and he calls his alternative “Stabilization Theory”. Apparently he does have some scientific background and has studied hybrids in birds; the problem is that now he sees everything in terms of species hybrids. And I mean everything. I downloaded his book — it’s free — and skimmed through all 400 pages.
Oh, man. It was like a timewarp.
The first half of the book is a total snooze. It’s endlessly wordy, tedious rehashing of basic genetics — polyploidy, heterosis, karyotypes, yadda yadda yadda. There’s nothing novel there at all, and if you know any basic biology at all, you can skip it. If you don’t…well, there are more lucid texts you can read. He sets up various controversies, but they’re all ancient history: he goes on and on about Darwin’s work with pigeons, the saltationist-gradualist debates (no, not the recent ones — this is stuff from like 1910-1920), and approvingly cites Arthur Lovejoy (!), author of The Great Chain of Being, and other authors from the 1930s-40s as if their concerns were current. The first part is the kind of book I can imagine being written in 1940 and being taken semi-seriously before being forgotten…and here it is being written in 2008.
And then it starts getting weird.
His theory is rather like Goldschmidt’s saltational theory of systemic mutations that produce abrupt transformations of form…except Goldschmidt was a piker. McCarthy claims to have a mechanism for producing those kinds of mutations. Sure, the familiar point mutations we know about in molecular biology and genetics occur, and genes can gradually change, but these changes are independent of speciation, and in fact have nothing to do with the kind of evolutionary change we see in the fossil record. Instead, the only things that can produce the morphological changes we observe are large-scale genetic changes, like polyploidy and hybridization.
He pooh-poohs Darwinian trees of descent, like the one on the left in this diagram. That’s not how evolution occurs, he claims; it’s like the diagram on the right, where every novel species is produced by hybridization between two species.
He doesn’t like the concept of adaptive radiation, where a lineage branches and diversifies. It doesn’t happen, he claims; instead, it’s more of a combinatorial phenomenon, where different species hybridize to spawn novel, stable forms nearly instantaneously, which will then persist unchanged for long periods of time until there is another hybridization event.
It doesn’t seem to register on him that if every species were the product of two parent species, then that would show up in the genome — that modern molecular genetics would rather readily test his hypothesis. That’s no problem, though, because like I said, this book is in a timewarp from an age before molecular biology. It isn’t on his wavelength at all.
Actually, data isn’t much on his wavelength. Near the end of the book, we get to specific examples, and he chooses to discuss the origin of mammals. You know that conventional theory, where mammals arose in the Mesozoic and underwent a rapid adaptive radiation to fill niches vacated by the extinction of the dinosaurs in the Tertiary? Nonsense! Didn’t happen!
His alternative explanation is that the dinosaurs did not go extinct, but instead there was a kind of combinatorial reshuffling of species via hybridization that produced new forms.
“Say whut?”, you’re thinking. What does that mean?
He gives examples. Look at the Mesozoic ankylosaurs: squat, armored herbivores. Now look at Tertiary armidillos, especially things like the extinct giant glyptodonts. They look kind of similar.
Page 1 of 3 | Next page