Ward Nicholson has asked me to post the following response to David Wolf's
essay "On form and actuality" that appeared on the list August 2.

Best, Peter
[log in to unmask]

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COMMENTS ON DAVID WOLFE'S (OF N.F.L.) ANTI-EVOLUTION ESSAY TITLED "ON FORM
AND ACTUALITY: A REFUTATION OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION AND ADAPTATION"

A few people who know of my strong stance on what the evolutionary evidence
has to say about early human diets asked me to comment on the essay by
David Wolfe (of the group Nature's First Law) that appeared this summer on
the Raw listgroup (as well as on the Paleofood listgroup), which attempted
in its way to discredit evolutionary science. Here are some observations
that seem worth pointing out:

The first and most interesting observation to me is now that the
anthropological and paleontological evidence for humanity's evolutionary
origins as an omnivore are becoming more widely known, and it is becoming
clear that vegetarian ideals about our species' past are completely
unsupported by science, then those who are bent on maintaining these myths
must resort to attempts to discredit the entire theory of evolution, if not
science itself. (For some of the more concise and "digestible" :-)
summaries of the evolutionary evidence of the omnivorous human past
presented with detailed scientific evidence, see the thoroughly footnoted
posts by researcher Loren Cordain on the Paleodiet listgroup, or my own
heavily documented interview with Chet Day in the 10/96, 11/96, and 1/97
issues of his Health & Beyond newsletter.)

It is obvious that with the increasing awareness of what evolutionary
science and paleoanthropology have discovered about the past, those who
have relied on the "humans are natural vegetarians" line of thinking to
support their beliefs are feeling pushed into a logical corner. They
therefore have little choice but to become more extreme if they are to
continue to assert the ideal ancient vegetarian Eden as humanity's pristine
state.

The David Wolfe paper is an example of this, and like most of NFL's
postings, is virtually completely undocumented scientifically regarding
evolution itself as far as evidence goes. Instead it relies in large part
on demagoguery (i.e., arguments that pander more to emotions to persuade
than logic). Due to the virtual total lack of hard evidence offered to
support the thesis of the paper that evolution simply does not occur, the
essay is almost not worth commenting on except to examine its emotional
structure and debating logic. But it is very interesting from that point of
view.

Number one, the paper is not bashful about being based on the authority or
knowings of David Wolfe himself, i.e., it is an egotistical presentation
(and I use this word purely for its descriptive denotation, not emotional
connotations), based on rejecting science almost wholesale as a mode of
knowing. It is David Wolfe along with a few other individuals from the
history of earlier science--not these modern supposedly idiotic researchers
who have been led down the primrose path--who alone knows that evolution is
a false view. His view, as he states outright in the paper, comes down to
believing the universe will always remain mysterious and unfathomable.
(While one can grant that from a spiritual, mystical point of view, such a
stance may make some sense in terms of the ultimate existential meaning of
the universe, to mix that kind of spiritual experience or view with
scientific observation of the physical world is just foolish.)

Yet at the same time he rejects scientists, he turns right around and
relies on the outdated speculations of a few scientists and philosophers
decades if not a hundred years ago or more for his "mysterious,
unfathomable" origins for a vegan/ frugivorous human species. Basically the
line of thinking used goes as follows: There is no evolution. There are
sudden appearances or jumps from one species to another. And the form of a
species never changes. It always stays the same over time in its essence,
once established. So the world is populated with all these different
species because they just appeared suddenly out of an unknowable somewhere.
No adaptation occurs or is possible due to changes in behavior or genetic
adaptation over the eons. The only change is not adaptation, but rather
degeneration from one's original form, which leads to the sad state the
world is now in. Etc. etc. Thus the objective is to return to some
idealized past (for which no evidence is given), since only preservation of
that idealized form of the species (or its loss--degeneration) can occur,
not evolution.

Although Wolfe falsely states otherwise in the introductory remarks, his
view of the human past basically amounts to a creationist one. For the
basic reasoning needed to debunk the flaky alternatives to evolution that
are offered by those who still live in the dark ages with their hands over
their eyes, one could check out the old Veg-Raw (now Raw-Food) archives
sometime in summer or fall of 1996. I think I pretty thoroughly covered the
basic logic that creationist and other anti-evolutionist zealots use, and
explored their weaknesses. (These are not just *my* arguments by the
way--you can see these points made by scientists themselves in books and
articles devoted to summarizing the creationism vs. evolution debates.)

The Wolfe paper is in fact unavoidably a form of creationism in saying that
the different fossil forms over the eons appear whole and complete
"suddenly." Basically he recites the tired creationist line that "sudden"
jumps disprove evolution--when in fact they do not, because evolution is
not dependent on either suddenness or gradualism, at least not in the way
that opponents seem to think. After all, mutations--one of the key
linchpins in evolutionary theory--are themselves sudden random changes
(which scientists freely and quite proactively acknowledge and
promote)--that is what the theory is all about! Whether something is sudden
or not is just a question of how microscopic the timescale is. Line up
enough sudden and random--but microscopic--mutations at the molecular level
of DNA, and voila, you have "gradual" evolution looked at from afar. It's
all a question of the "resolution" of the lens or microscope/
telescope--how wide a view of time--you are taking.

Evolutionists themselves debate suddenness (the "punctuated equilibrium"
school) vs. gradualism, but it is not at all central to the debate of
whether evolution occurs or not. Yet creationists and people like NFL
(Philip Johnson in "Darwin on Trial," who NFL likes to promote, is another
example) lift this debate from *within* evolution, which is merely a
refinement of the details, and reframe it as if it were a fatal flaw, when
in actuality it is an ever-more-detailed debate on the niceties of how the
rubber meets the road at the most reductionistic level.

The basic and easy way to show anti-evolutionist arguments for the
creationist ideas they are is simply to point out that if you believe there
are different fossil forms, and you believe the dating methods are in any
way accurate to even a rough level, then you have to account for how all
these different fossil forms got there. Ask them what they propose leading
to the different fossil forms if they don't believe earlier ones gave rise
to later ones somehow.

If you posit that earlier forms led to the later ones via changes over time
(mutations, evolution, whatever term you want to use), then you are an
evolutionist. If you believe otherwise, then what it comes down to is you
are a creationist, because to get around evolution, you have to affirm some
sort of either supernatural, extraterrestrial, or otherwise "outside"
source for the new forms--or as, David Wolfe prefers to believe, always and
forever unexplainable materialization of new fossil forms out of nowhere
apparently, or at least nowhere one can point to. Then you ask, now which
is more reasonable and supported by the evidence, folks? If you want to
continue to say things just popped into existence apropos of nothing with a
straight face, please do so, I've got better things to nitpick. :-)

Or if people go so far as to deny that the fossils even existed at all more
than 6,000 years ago (the strictly biblical creationists), or the dating
techniques are dubious or bunk, then you point out that you can't just
arbitrarily pick and choose which scientific techniques and research you
are going to believe are real--because science today has become a tightly
interlocking edifice built and mutually supported across many different
fields of research and application at all levels. I.e., if you believe in
science at all--that the many modern applied technologies such as atomic
bombs, electronics, bioengeering, actually work--and the theories of
subatomic physics, genetics, etc., that give rise to them--are real, then
you can't just legislate away radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence
dating, electron-spin resonance dating, and all the other techniques used
to date fossils that are based on the same science that has given rise to
all manner of modern high-tech devices and technologies we depend on in our
daily lives, and that we can see work just like the theory says they ought
to.

Now if you take the stance that on the strictest level you can't "prove"
evolution works, if you are going to go that far, then nothing is provable.
What is possible, however, is to use evidence as one's standard for
assessing how probable it is something is true. This is what science is all
about.

If you are going to reject science outright, as Wolfe in his paper would
seemingly prefer, then you are basically saying you do not agree to abide
by the process of repeated experiment and observation among competing
groups of scientists as the acid test for what one takes as empirical
"fact"--which is the only dependable process we have for establishing some
degree of objectivity as to what is or isn't an empirical "fact" in the
material world. (Otherwise, if we were to give up repudiate current science
as Wolfe would like, we would be reduced to the specter of everyone
affirming what they wanted, unchecked by confirmation by others using
similarly rigorous observational and experimental techniques.)

By any scientific standard, evolution has massive amounts of evidence going
for it. For creationism, you have appeal only to a supernatural God, or to
unverified spores from space or extraterrestrials, with no scientifically
supportable chain of evidence as such for that being the mechanism of how
fossil forms actually appeared. It's religion or science--that's the choice
you put to people--which is it going to be?

That's basically how you debunk creationists, which is what one is if they
aren't an evolutionist. There are no other choices, really, just variations
on the two themes. (There are some who try to get around sounding
unscientific with the spores-from-space line of thinking--but it amounts to
the same thing, of course, because if that were true, then the spores too
had to come from somewhere, eh? How did *they* arise? Was every fossil form
beyond perhaps the first bacteria that arose on earth due to the arrival of
a spore-transformed-to-complex-fossil in one fell swoop? And so forth...
:^) )

Beyond these basic observations, as with much of the writing that comes
from the NFL group there is not much more to say about the Wolfe paper
unless one wanted to wade into the non-sequiturs, outdated pseudoscience,
and just plain arrogant me-ism and total leaps of faith and illogic. But it
really isn't necessary to do that with a basic understanding of why
creationism is bankrupt as outlined above, and how it relies on faith
rather than science or evidence.

A final comment worth reiterating is that the Nature's First Law group as
an entity often displays an ambivalent attitude about science that lacks
any real consistency. (This might of course be due to somewhat differing
viewpoints among the threesome making up the group--hard to say.) On the
one hand, they freely sprinkle alleged scientifically backed factoids in
their postings in support of their point of view. (But virtually always
without citing traceable scientific sources for others to see if what they
say is really true or not, or has not been distorted, of course.) Yet in
other postings, they can be rabidly anti-science, as in postings similar to
one I have seen for instance, that put down me and Kirt Nieft for (I am
paraphrasing roughly here, going by memory) "prostrating themselves on the
altar of science." This tells you quite a bit about where the group is
coming from in terms of their use-science-if-it-suits,
condemn-it-if-it-doesn't approach, which relies more on emotional
demogoguery than consistent logic.


--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS