Dear Ward,

Thank you for your thoroughgoing rebuttal of creationism (posted a while
back).  I join in the general applause you've received for your labors.

Now that creationism is laid to rest, let's bring our attention back to
the adequacy of the Darwinist model.  Is there room for dissatisfaction
with it among reputable scientists?  Some may hesitate to speak out,
lest they seem to give aid and comfort to the creationist camp.

Have you read Gordon Rattray Taylor's thoughtful critique, entitled /The
Great Evolution Mystery/ (Harper & Row, 1983, 277 pages including
16-page bibliography)?  Evolution, Taylor agrees, is an indisputable
fact -- but Darwinism is a separate issue.  That is to say, no one can
rationally doubt the progressive evolutionary process; the question,
rather, is whether we can fully account for it by the Darwinian
postulate of random mutations winnowed by survivability.

"Variation and selection were [Darwin's] two keys.  Now, there can be no
doubt that selection occurs.  Many thousands of experiments and
observations have shown it at work.  Nevertheless, there are quite a
large number of phenomena, mostly structural variations or alternatives,
which natural selection seems unable to account for.  Is there some
other principle at work alongside natural selection?  If so, what?
Piling up cases where selection _does_ work will never prove that it is
the unique agency in evolution, though many eminent biologists act as if
they thought so." (Taylor, p. 2)

According to Taylor, after some early skepticism in the nineteenth
century, it came to be accepted that chance alone can engender all
changes in form.  But the question "raised its ugly head again in a
fairly dramatic form in 1967," when MIT hosted an academic conference
called Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of
Evolution.  "The conference was chaired by Sir Peter Medawar, whose work
on graft rejection won him a Nobel prize and who, at the time, was
director of the Medical Research Council's laboratories in North
London.  Not, you will understand, the kind of man to speak wildly or
without careful thought.  In opening the meeting, he said:  'The
immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of
dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted
evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called
neo-Darwinian theory.  This dissatisfaction has been expressed from
several quarters ....'" (p. 4)

An MIT electrical engineering professor, Murray Eden, opened the meeting
with a paper entitled "The Inadequacy of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a
Scientific Theory," in which he undertook to quantify the statistical
unlikelihood of evolution by chance mutations alone.  Expanding on the
point, Taylor cites "many scientists -- paleontologists especially --
[who] have felt forced to accept the existence of some directive force
and have felt it impossible to assign the many seemingly purposeful
developments to chance" (p. 5).

Others, of course, "froth at the mouth at the mere idea" of such
teleological revisionism.  "This is because they fear that we shall
revert to believing in a divine plan."  No such a plan figures in
Taylor's thinking.  "[I]f there is a divine plan everything can be
accounted for simply by declaring it is part of the plan and a
scientific approach becomes impossible.  I shall argue, however, that we
need not throw the baby out with the bathwater." (p. 6)

Taylor summarizes:  "The fact of evolution is not in question.  What is
in question is how it occurred and whether natural selection explains
more than a small part of it.  As we shall see, a great many eminent
biologists have raised this question but such has been the confidence
and aggressiveness of the Old Guard that their views have been swept
under the carpet and ignored." (p. 11)

Wondering how the "Old Guard" responds to such criticism, I searched the
Talk.Origins website for a review of Taylor's book.  No luck; apparently
the Darwinists have not directly confronted Taylor.  They do know his
book, however.  I found it mentioned in a piece called "The General
Anti-Creationism FAQ," by Jim Meritt.

Meritt goes so far as to quote Taylor's own account of the MIT
conference, including Professor Eden's statistical argument.  Thus he
seems to admit that critics of such stature require an answer.  But
Meritt's style of rebuttal is not commendable, in my eyes.  Falsely, he
portrays Eden as questioning evolution as such, rather than the specific
mechanism of natural selection.  Then he dishes up a stew of
intimidating technospeak, spiced with sarcastic ad hominem attacks aimed
at Eden and anyone else daring to question the party line.  Sample
quote:  "I get a little angry when people seem to be implying that
evolution is casually refutable and was refuted (by a professor of
electrical engineering?) decades ago.  Do they really think that two
decades of bright, dedicated biologists would stick to a theory that
this kind of argument could refute?"

Meritt's kind of argument is hardly substantive.  He's simply defensive
in the face of rational, qualified critics.  All of whom he dismisses in
a cavalier two lines elsewhere in the FAQ, saying that nothing has 100%
acceptance, "not even gravity."

I for one feel these issues deserve more serious attention than Meritt
gives them.  Taylor's argument, despite some evident flaws, seems
measured, scholarly and worthy of a hearing.  One need not join the
supernaturalists to open one's mind to the possibility that Darwin's
model is but part of the story.  We know that Newton's grand model, the
very prototype of explanatory science, came to be eclipsed -- not
discarded, mind you, but transcended -- by the theory of relativity.
Could a parallel honor be in store for Darwinism?

Thoughtfully,

Christopher Morrill