Rinker and Readers Need to Do Further Reading

I always read with great interest Dr. Rinker’s columns, and the responses he generates. I just read Tom Taylor’s letter and wanted to comment.

Dr. Rinker seems to be a dogmatic “fundamentalist” Darwinian, just as most of his detractors seem to be dogmatic “fundamentalist” Christians.” Both sides miss the point. While religion claims to know the answers, science does not. Properly understood, science is the process for finding the answers. No true scientist would claim to have the absolute answers. Scientists propose theories to explain observed or measured facts, and those theories evolve and change over time.

The Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection is no exception. I would recommend that Dr. Rinker read, “What Darwin Got Wrong,” by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. What sets this book apart from the many anti-Darwinian books published in recent years is that Dr. Fodor is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University and Dr. Piattelli-Palmarini is a biophysicist and molecular biologist and is now a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. In short, neither is a creationist. Both are respected scientists with impressive credentials and publications .

In their book these two distinguished professors point out that fundamentalist-Darwinian evolution and fundamentalist-creationism are not the only two viable explanations for life as we see it on this planet. The book is dense and somewhat difficult for the non-scientist, but well worth the effort to read.

While Darwinian evolution by natural selection manifestly does occur, it is not the primary mechanism of speciation. As Tom Taylor pointed out, fruit flies tend to remain fruit flies in spite of genetic stress.Recent genetic research has shown that complex structures have not evolved in a Darwinian manner. For example: Eyes. Experiments have shown that if you take the genes from a mouse that encode for the formation of an eye and transplant those genes into the thorax of a fruit fly, the fly will develop an extra eye on its thorax. But it develops a fruit fly eye, not a mouse eye. (These same “eye genes”, e.g. Pax3, Pax2, Pax6, and Dach, appear in everything from sea urchins, where they are switched off , to medusae, to insects, and to all vertebrates.) Since the fly eye and mouse eye have totally different proposed evolutionary histories, they ought to have totally different genes if they arose through Darwinian evolution. But they don’t.

The same is true for many other genes, such as those for wings and fish fins, legs, internal organs, etc. (For a good non-technical introduction to this see, “Your Inner Fish” by Neal Shubin.)

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini sum up their ideas in two statements: “These days biologists have good reasons to believe that selection among randomly generated minor variants of phenotypic traits [Darwinian evolution by natural selection ] falls radically short of explaining the appearance of new forms of life. “

“We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not composing the melodies.”

My point is that neither Dr. Rinker nor Tom Taylor (nor any of the others who have written to The Roanoke Star on this topic) has the answers to how the incredible complexity of the interwoven life on Earth came to be. All we have are the theories of science and the faith of religion. And it is totally foolhardy for us to destroy so much of this exquisitely balanced machine before we know where it came from, how it works, and our true place in it.

Bob Shell

Pocahontas, VA