Forum: Darwin in math 101

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Abraham Lincoln liked to ask: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" (The sly answer is "four," since calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.)

Something like calling a tail is a leg has been going on for decades with evolution. Educators, textbook publishers, journalists, and politicians all regard evolution as holy writ. Doubters get ridiculed. President Bush got the "har-de-har-har" treatment for saying children should learn the "different schools of thought" -- e.g., Intelligent Design -- about biology. Reporters joked about reopening the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The cognoscenti "know" evolution is factual. Jay Ambrose, former Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, recently mentioned "the overwhelmingly demonstrated fact of evolution." ("Unintelligent on intelligent design," The Washington Times, Sept. 30, page A20). No kidding? Obviously Mr. Ambrose has a scoop here.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer calls evolution "settled science" and the "foundation of biology," while admitting there are "gaps." He says religion (i.e., Intelligent Design) should not mix with science.

Most journalists (Mr. Krauthammer excepted) don't know one scientific thing from another. They either accept Darwin's theory uncritically or treat it as an opinion-poll topic. Academics and publishers with vested financial and career interests claim evolution is so obviously supported by fact that doubters must be either ignorant or dishonest. But saying so doesn't make it so.

Even Darwin admitted his theory was based on "inference and analogy," not hard facts. He expected supporting evidence to emerge, but this has not happened. Reporters seem ignorant of this lack of evidence.

Darwin developed his theory after observing changes produced by selective breeding. He bred pigeons extensively, producing wide variations. Seeing remarkable changes in a short time, he extrapolated backward to infer that change at that constant rate must have produced new species over vast eons.

Darwin's pigeon-breeding produced only pigeons, however. New birds -- or entirely different animals -- never resulted. Likewise, thousands of years of selective breeding of wolves produced many varieties of dogs, but nothing else. All dogs can breed with each other. They are the same species.

Such variations -- called micro-evolution -- are facts. But this is not the cross-speciesmacro-evolution Darwin predicted, and these facts are not the proof he sought. The facts Darwin wanted are absent because his theoretical reasoning was flawed. He assumed millions of years ofchange at a constant rate produced many new species. That mathematical assumption was incorrect. Modern experiments have shown gene-selective change is fairly rapid at first, but soon levels off, reaching an uncrossable boundary. All variations are within-species. Each lifeform remains true to type.

The fruit fly is a favorite "proof" of evolution. It reaches sexual maturity in five days, so several generations can be observed during a school semester. By selective breeding, red-eyed or green-eyed flies can be produced. Also, white flies, flies with fuzzy wings, and other variations. But millions of students have produced only fruit flies in these examples of microevolution.