Book review: The Beak of the Finch
Evolution in Real Time by Jonathan Weiner, Random House,
1994.
by Carl Wieland
Some years back, I was due to have a creation/evolution debate with a university
academic in South Australia. Just before the event, I happened to be part of the
crowd standing next to my opponent-to-be, a population biologist. Unaware that his
creationist opponent was standing close by, he was busily expounding his bewilderment
about having to defend what he ‘knew’ to be true.
He explained that he felt like an astronaut who had just returned from observing
the earth from space, only to have to defend the planet’s sphericity in public
debate. After all, biologists like himself routinely ‘see evolution’,
so what is there to debate?
By ‘seeing evolution’, he meant seeing examples of inherited changes
in populations—but this demonstrates evolution only if the old straw-man argument
is accepted that any such heritable change is fatal to biblical creation. Using
the evolutionary ‘tree’ metaphor, demonstrating genetic change (even
to the extent of speciation) is only fatal to the old idea of the ‘Linnaean
lawn’, not the ‘creationist orchard’, which has been a part of
the modern scientific creation movement since its inception.1,2,3
Figure 1. The evolutionary ‘tree’—all today’s
species are descended from the one common ancestor (which itself evolved from non-living
chemicals).
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Figure 2. The Linnaean ‘lawn’—the Genesis ‘kinds’
were the same as today's species.
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Figure 3. The creationist ‘orchard’—diversity
has occurred with time within the original Genesis ‘kinds.’
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There is a very heavy burden of proof on those propounding the doctrine that bacteria
have self-transformed into palm trees and fish, and the latter turned into tigers
and nuclear scientists. For one thing, it demands a natural process capable of generating
vast amounts of new, bio-functionally significant, coded information. To watch natural
selection sifting and sorting through existing information, deleting chunks of it,
begs the question of the origin of all that information.
Of course adaptation will occur in variable populations subjected to selection
pressure. Plants with a mixture of genes coding for deep roots and shallow roots,
if growing in an area where the climate is becoming more arid, will show this phenomenon.
Those members of the population with naturally deeper roots will be more likely
to survive to pass on their deeper-rooted genes, so in time the population will
adapt to its conditions by ‘becoming deeper-rooted’—utilizing
the store of information already present in that population.
However, this process will occur regardless of whether the genetic information (variability)
needed for it to take place arose in the first place by creation, or by some process
of mutation/selection over countless ages. So a demonstration of such changes can
of itself have no real apologetic value for the evolutionist.
The anecdote at the beginning relates very much to the subject of this book review.
I can identify (in reverse) with the evolutionist’s sense of bewilderment—how
is it that, so many years on in the modern creation/evolution debate, intelligent,
educated evolutionists have not grasped this simple point? How can they keep resurrecting
the same straw-man (‘any inherited change due to selection proves that Genesis
is wrong, Darwin was right—particles did become people’)?
Seeing evolution?
The Beak of the Finch: Evolution in Real Time is consciously and deliberately
a hymn of praise to evolution, a drawn-out celebration of what the author perceives
as a logical deathblow to creationists, who are represented (I should say misrepresented)
smugly and patronisingly. Without detracting from the author’s brilliant and
readable style, I believe that this is the key reason why the book
has received near-religious adulation by science journalists and other
reviewers.
The message is that now, for the first time, those foolish, bigoted creationists
have no leg left to stand on—Weiner’s book:
‘tells the extraordinary story of two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant,
whose ingenious, meticulous and extended work in the Galápagos has
culminated in the sight of evolution occurring before their eyes—not in fossils
but in living, breathing creatures, Darwin’s own famous finches’.
We are told this book ‘permanently alters one’s view of nature and even
of life and death’.
None of what follows is meant to detract from the dedicated fieldwork of the Grants,
whose incredibly detailed measurements of thousands of birds over a 20-year period
on the small island of Daphne Major are a major contribution to the study of population
dynamics and ecology. Others have demonstrated natural selection occurring before
(although you might not think it from the hyperbole and fervour accompanying this
book), but never with such precision and clarity. I think that their observations
of sexual selection are of great importance, also.
Evolution: more than selection
What a pity that neither the researchers nor Weiner appear to understand the logical
fact that, while natural selection may be an intrinsic part of a particular evolutionary
model, demonstrating it does not of itself demonstrate the ‘fact’
of evolution—if by that you mean a one-celled organism becoming today’s
complex biosphere. This fact was apparently grasped by the renowned biologist L.
Harrison Matthews F.R.S. writing in the foreword to the 1971 edition of Darwin’s
The Origin of Species. Discussing Kettlewell’s experimental
observations on the famous peppered moths, Matthews pointed out that while this
beautifully demonstrated natural selection, or survival of the fittest, it did not
show evolution in action.
The book has much of interest for creationist readers. It makes it clear, for instance,
that despite the common myth, Darwin did not deduce his theory under the eureka-like
inspiration of seeing the finches on the Galápagos. In fact, as Gould has
pointed out,4 Darwin did not know
at the time that they were finches. I was also interested to read again of Darwin’s
experimental finding (with its implications for post-Flood biogeography) that garden
seeds still sprouted after 42 days soaking in seawater.
Weiner recounts how Darwin was able to apply selection to breed pigeons so different
from each other that if found by biologists in the wild, they would not only have
been categorized as separate species, but even separate genera. This is of course
a marvellous demonstration of the amount of variability built into each created
kind, allowing it to respond to changing environmental pressures and thus conserve
the kind. It also opens a window of understanding into how the intense selection
pressures after the Flood could have acted on gene pools of rich variability to
allow rapid speciation/adaptive radiation from the restricted number of land-dwelling
kinds represented on the Ark.
No new information
Not only are all the varieties of pigeons still pigeons, however, but if allowed
to interbreed they will revert to the common wild-type rock pigeon. There is no
evidence that any truly novel, functional information arises de novo in
such artificial selection—nor, one finds after reading this book, is there
any evidence for this from the Grants’ observations of natural selection,
either.
Darwin’s finches exhibit an unusually high degree of variability. This, coupled
with the fact that the Grants and their co-workers were fortunate enough during
their 20-year vigil to experience a severe drought and the very opposite, means
that it is no surprise that they were able to document some quite rapid changes
under selection. When the drought brought a shortage of easily available small seeds,
is it any wonder that the birds with big beaks survived better because they were
the only ones to be able to crack big seeds, and so on?
In fact, as a 1992 article in
Creation magazine (actually based on the Grants’ work on the
Galápagos finches) emphasized, observations showing rapid selection/speciation
are helpful to the creation model, which has only a relatively short time in which
post-Flood adaptive radiation/speciation must have occurred (see
Darwin’s Finches).5
Finches: no net change!
After all the ‘hype’ about watching ‘evolution’, one reads
with amazement that the selection events observed actually turned out to have no
net long-term effect. For example, for a while selection drove the finch populations
towards larger birds, then when the environment changed, it headed them in the opposite
direction. The author says concerning this sort of effect (also seen in sparrows)
that ‘Summed over years, the effects of natural selection were invisible’
(p. 108). So that when Darwin looked at the fossil record and found it ‘static
and frozen for long stretches’ (p. 109), this was the reason. Consider, he
says:
‘how much less visible these [natural selection] events will be in the strata
of rock beneath our feet, in which the generations have been summed for many millions
of generations.’
Evolutionists have long argued the opposite—that evolution is invisible in
the short term, but would become visible if we had enough time. Yet according to
Weiner, we can see evolution happening in the (very) short term, but any longer
and it becomes ‘invisible’! The mind boggles at how evolutionists can
be blind to this inconsistency.
Weiner quotes a researcher as saying that:
‘A species looks steady when you look at it over the years—but when
you actually get out the magnifying glass you see that it’s wobbling constantly.’
Obviously, since macroevolution is supposed to be about long-term, directional change
(even the creation/Flood model requires more directional change than the Grants
documented) such ‘wobbling back and forth’ (fluctuation around a mean)
over short time-spans, with no net change over longer
time periods, is hardly supportive of the case for evolution. Yet instead of acknowledging
this, the researcher goes on to say, ‘So I guess that’s evolution in
action.’
Most creationists would agree that Darwin’s finches probably came from an
ancestral pair or two (which were themselves finches), so the idea that some of
the descendant species might hybridize, even to the extent of leading to a new species,
is hardly threatening. The Grants not only observed such hybridization between species
of finches which did not interbreed as a rule, but that under certain conditions
the hybrids appeared to be fitter than either of the parent populations. I was surprised
when the book hinted that here we were approaching the answer to the mystery of
the origin of species. Perhaps the obvious needs to be restated; the mingling of
two sets of pre-existing information can scarcely tell one anything about the ultimate
origin of that information.
There is a particularly misleading sideswipe at creationists on page 216 in the
section on DNA and genetics; we are told that if species were created as functional
entities, the genes in each species would not change. We are then told that the
genes in each generation are ‘shuffled and cut … like a mammoth deck
of cards’—ergo, creation is wrong. Of course, the reshuffling
of pre-existent information by such recombination neither denies original creation
of that information nor confirms its naturalistic origins by Darwinian mechanisms.
From a creation viewpoint, the ‘deck-shuffling’ achieved in this way
by sexual recombination is an amazingly effective mechanism for maximizing variability
(without any de novo information having to arise post-creation). It enhances
the ability of species to avoid or postpone extinction in changing environments,
and assists the rapid filling of empty ecological niches (adaptive radiation), such
as after the Flood.
Mutations
The real key to the credibility or otherwise of macroevolutionism is not natural
selection, but the question of the origin of the information on which natural selection
may act. In the current materialist paradigm, the only conceivable source of such
information is mutation (random mistakes as the information on DNA is copied). Yet
information theory, common sense and observation unite to indicate that randomness
fails as a source of functional information. Thus it is no wonder that the section
on mutations/DNA is markedly fuzzy—almost skipped over in haste. A casual
reader could gain the impression that random mutations
have been involved in the changes observed by the Grants, but close reading reveals
that there is no evidence for this at all. Nor is it likely in view of the rapidity
of the changes, and the lack of net effect already discussed. The ‘storehouse’
of variation is already there, allowing the populations to shift this way and that,
as required.
What about the observation on page 217 that three out of three hundred bases (‘letters’)
of the cytochrome c sequence are different in two of the finch species?
I think these differences are indeed the result of mutations. However, such mutations
are unlikely to have, historically, generated the raw material for the differences
in the two finch species. They are almost certainly functionally meaningless or
‘neutral’ mutations, not expressed in the phenotype, and thus transparent
to selection. Why? Cytochrome c is a crucial enzyme for life; any copying
errors of functional significance (that is, in those stretches
of gene critical to the function of the resultant enzyme) are likely to be lethal.
The probable course of events which gave rise to the current base-pair
differences (which, because of the redundancy of the code may not have resulted
in an amino-acid substitution, or if so, this has been in a non-critical segment
of the enzyme, not altering its function) is this: selection operating on existing,
functionally significant (created) genetic variation gave rise to the initial divergence
of the populations. Because of their reproductive isolation, the populations were
free to independently accumulate such ‘neutral’ mutations in the cytochrome
c gene at varying rates and loci.
Towards the end of the book, the author seeks to cement his imagined Darwinian triumph
with other examples of ‘evolution’ such as antibiotic and pesticide
resistance. Farmers in the US Bible Belt who would oppose evolution, yet at the
same time are spending increasing amounts on spraying their crops as insects become
more resistant to pesticides, are treated with the bemused contempt deserved by
such ‘closed-minded fundamentalists’. Yet his attempts to provide further
observations which deal death-blows to Genesis creation have the same logical and
scientific weaknesses as the beak arguments. The reader is referred to a recent
article in this journal on the subject.6
Interestingly, Weiner shows in some detail how a mutational change in one particular
bacterium (p. 260) gives a survival advantage—but the enhanced survival comes
via a loss of information/function.
Conclusion
In summary, this book will reinforce the prejudices of the evolutionary faithful;
it will delight the shallow-thinking evolutionist who has not bothered to think
through or become informed about the matters raised by creationist biologists such
as Lester and Bohlin,
in their classic The Natural Limits to Biological Change.7 Careful reading of The Beak of the Finch: Evolution
in Real Time will reveal much to support the creation model, and nothing
to dismay the discerning creationist—except frustration at the continuing,
seeming ‘wilful ignorance’ displayed towards creationist biological
arguments.
As a very polished, readable account of a piece of classic fieldwork demonstrating
natural selection in the wild, the book is noteworthy. As an alleged empirical proof
that Darwin was right about the origin of all things, it is easy to show that it
fails completely. It never once comes to grips with the crucial question of the
origin of biological information. No doubt creationists confronted by bright-eyed
evolutionary disciples inspired by this tale of finches’ beaks and straw-men
will end up feeling like astronauts debating flat-earthers all over again.
References
- I first heard the terms lawn and orchard in this context in a lecture
by Kurt Wise in 1990. Return to text.
- Wise, K.P., Baraminology: a young-Earth creation biosystematic
method. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism,
R. E. Walsh and C. L. Brooks (eds), Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
Vol. 2, pp.345–360, 1990. Return to text.
- Wieland, C., Variation, information
and the created kind, CEN Tech. J., 5(1): 42–47,
1991. Return to text.
- Wieland, C.,
Darwin’s real message: Have you missed it? Creation Ex Nihilo,
14(4):16–19, 1992. Return to text.
- Wieland, C.,
Darwin’s finches: Evidence supporting rapid post-Flood adaptation,Creation
Ex Nihilo, 14(3):22–23, 1992. Return to text.
- Wieland, C., Antibiotic resistance
in bacteria, CEN Tech. J., 8(1):5–6, 1994. See also
Superbugs: not super after all. Return
to text.
- Lester, L.P. and
Bohlin, R.G., The Natural Limits to Biological Change, Zondervan Publishing
House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984. Return to text.
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