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Creation 30(1):38–39, December 2007

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Zoogenesis—a theory of desperation

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by Russell Grigg

Austin H. Clark (1880–1954) was an American evolutionary zoologist who wrote 630 articles and books in six languages.¹ Not many people have heard of him today, because he had a major problem with Darwinism, and to get around this he proposed a new theory, which challenged the evolutionary orthodoxy of his contemporaries.

The problem

In an extraordinary book, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis,² Clark showed that there was no evidence that any major type of plant or animal had evolved from or into any other type. He wrote, ‘When we examine a series of fossils of any age we may pick out one and say with confidence “This is a crustacean”—or a starfish, or a brachiopod, or an annelid, or any other type of creature as the case may be.’ This is because all these fossils look so much like their living counterparts today. He pointed out that none of today’s definitions of the phyla or major groups of animals needs to be altered to include the fossils, and he said, ‘[I]t naturally follows that throughout the fossil record these major groups have remained essentially unchanged … the interrelationships between them likewise have remained unchanged.’³

He even said, ‘Thus so far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other.’⁴

His solution: a new theory

With all this lack of fossil evidence discrediting rather than supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution, what was an intransigent evolutionist to do? Propose a brand-new theory of his own, of course! Clark declared that each major type of life form must have evolved separately and independently from all the others. He called this idea ‘zoogenesis’.

Clark put his faith in the omnipotence of the ‘primitive single cell’ from which he said, ‘there simultaneously appeared through mutation as many different types of animals as were capable of successful existence … .’⁵

Lest anyone should think that he had ‘changed camps’, he wrote, ‘Is this creationism? Not at all. It simply means that life at its very first beginnings from the single cell developed simultaneously and at once in every possible direction.’⁶ And he stated, ‘The only acceptable hypothesis is that in its broader features the development of animal forms took place by concurrent evolution.’⁷ (Emphasis in original.)

Clark’s mechanism for this was mutation. But even here he said some startling things (for an evolutionist) such as, ‘Organs may gradually become reduced and perhaps disappear, but nothing is ever added. Specialization is always a matter of subtraction … a structural feature that has once begun to lose importance and to dwindle never reverses the developmental path; it never recovers any of its lost significance.’⁸ He went on to say, ‘The more an animal type has lost through this process of progressive subtraction, the less there remains for the production of mutants which will be capable of existence.’⁹ Today we would say that he was correctly saying that all such changes go in the wrong direction for evolution to occur.¹⁰

When he mentioned the appearance of man, Clark had some more interesting things to say. He wrote, ‘Every bone in the body of a man is at once distinguishable from the corresponding bone in the body of any of the apes. … Man is not an ape, and in spite of the similarity between them there is not the slightest evidence that man is descended from an ape.’¹¹ Likewise, ‘[I]n the light of all the evidence available at the present time there is no justification in assuming that such a thing as a “missing link” ever existed, or indeed could have existed.’¹² Despite these admissions, Clark then says in the next paragraph, confusingly, ‘[M]an and the apes must have had at some time in the past a common ancestor.’¹²

Opposition

Austin Clark’s evolutionist colleagues were not impressed. Clark’s proposal was, they knew, totally preposterous. It required an utterly miraculous series of evolutionary transformations in the early history of life to explain the lack of evidence thereafter.

W. D. Matthew, writing in Scientific American, said that paleontology did not warrant Clark’s conclusion concerning concurrent development.¹³

G. J. Dudycha, writing in The Ohio Journal of Science said, ‘By some mysterious means all the types of life burst forth simultaneously from the primitive single cell. There is certainly no conclusive evidence that such a thing ever did occur, nor can we comprehend how it could have been the case since that has quite apparently not been the method of nature during historic times.’¹⁴

More ideas to explain the gaps

Well, that was 1930, and evolution theory has moved on since then, so what is the current situation? Not much has changed. The fossil record still has not produced the needed plethora of transitional fossils whose absence Clark noted. Some evolutionists have grudgingly acknowledged this fact. In 1977, Stephen J. Gould wrote, ‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.’¹⁵ In 2001, Ernst Mayr wrote, ‘Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.’¹⁶

Several other evolutionists have put forward their own imaginative theories to try to explain this. In 1940, Richard Goldschmidt proposed the ‘hopeful monster’ solution to describe the instantaneous formation of new species—in essence, a reptile laid an egg and a bird hatched out! In 1972, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould¹⁷ proposed a theory they called ‘punctuated equilibria’,¹⁸ namely that major changes between types happened so fast (geologically speaking), and in such small isolated populations, they didn’t leave any evidence that they had occurred at all. This means that the evidence to support their theory was the fact that there was no evidence!

The best explanation of all is that the evidence in the fossil record is consistent with what we would expect from the global Flood of Noah’s day. Nevertheless, today evolutionists decree Darwinism to be a fact. This conveniently allows them to disregard the lack of the required evidence, whether in the fossil record or elsewhere.