Janus
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In other words, behaviourism and neo-Darwinism, which both occupy key positions in the contemporary sciences of life, base their explanations of biological and cultural evolution on essentially the same model operating in two stages: the first step ruled by blind chance, the second by selective rewards. Thus biological evolution is the outcome of nothing but (a) random mutations (the monkey at the typewriter) (b) preserved by natural selection (which rewards fitness); and cultural progress is the result of nothing but (a) random tries preserved by (b) reinforcements (the stick and the carrot).
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Biological Evolution Cultural Evolution
(a) Chance mutations Random tries
(b) Natural selection Reinforcements
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It is strange that no attention has been paid to this parallel. Perhaps the reason is that psychologists are not interested in evolution, and evolutionists are not interested in psychology.
Leaving (a) -- the role of chance -- to be discussed later, it has been shown a long time ago that both (b) concepts -- 'reinforcement' and 'natural selection' -- are devoid of any explanatory value. Take 'reinforcement' first, and listen once more to Professor Skinner:
The verbal stimulus 'come to dinner' is an occasion upon which going
to a table and sitting down is usually reinforced by food.
The stimulus comes to be effective in increasing the probability of
that behaviour and is produced by the speaker because it does so. [5]
In case the reader should be in doubt, this is not a parody but a quote from Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour, published in 1957. He also informs his readers that 'a man talks to himself . . . because of the reinforcement he receives' [6]; that thinking is in fact 'behaving which automatically affects the behaviour and is reinforcing because it does so' [7]; that 'just as the musician plays and composes what he is reinforced by hearing, or as the artist paints what reinforces him visually, so the speaker engaged in verbal fantasy says what he is reinforced by hearing or writes what he is reinforced by reading' [8], and that the creative artist is 'controlled entirely by the contingencies of reinforcement'. [9]
In training the rat to press a lever in the box or to find its way through a maze, the term 'reinforcement' had a concrete meaning: by giving or witholding rewards the rat's behaviour could be effectively conditioned by the experimenter. But the behaviourists' heroic attempt to extrapolate from the Skinner box to the painter's studio, with 'reinforcement' as a deus ex machina, leads him, as we have seen, into hair-raising absurdities. Yet his philosophy compels him to try his best to show that human behaviour is nothing but a more sophisticated form of rat-behaviour. A last quotation from Skiniier will drive the point home. The writer's 'verbal behaviour', he tells us, 'may reach over centuries or to thousands of listeners or readers at the same time. The writer may not be reinforced often or immediately, but his net reinforcement may be great.' [10]
What this means is, if anything, that every writer would like to write an immortal masterpiece. He persists in his efforts because of the reinforcement he receives, and reinforcement means whatever it is that makes him persist in his efforts. [11] As Chomsky [12] and others have pointed out, the concept of reinforcement is based on a tautology, and its explanatory value has been reduced to nil.
2
A similar fate is overtaking the Darwinian household concept of natural selection or the survival of the fittest -- which, as we have seen, is the evolutionist's equivalent of the behaviourist's 'reinforcement'.
Once upon a time, it all looked so simple. Nature rewarded the fit with the carrot of survival and punished the unfit with the stick of extinction. The trouble only started when it came to defining 'fitness'. Are pygmies fitter than giants, brunettes fitter than blondes, left-handers fitter than right-handers? What exactly are the criteria of 'fitness'? The first answer that comes to mind is: the fittest are obviously those who survive longest. But when we talk about the evolution of species, the lifespan of individuals is irrelevant (it may be a day for some insects, a century for tortoises); what matters is how many offspring they produce in their life-time. Thus natural selection looks after the survival and reproduction of the fittest, and the fittest are those which have the highest rate of reproduction -- we are caught in a circular argument which completely begs the question of what makes evolution evolve. This lethal flaw in the theory was recognized by leading evolutionists (Mayr, Simpson, Waddington, Haldane, etc.) several decades ago [13]; it was and is, as I said, an open secret. However, since no satisfactory alternative was in sight, the crumbling edifice had to be defended. Thus Sir Julian Huxley in 1953:
So far as we know, not only is Natural Selection inevitable, not only
is it an effective agency of evolution, but it is the
only effective agency of evolution. [Huxley's italics.] [14]
Compare this ex cathedra pronouncement to the devastating comment by the late Professor Waddington (who was himself an eminent member of the neo-Darwinian establishment, but given to critical doubt):
Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single
individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day
interpretation, perpetuation as a source for future generations. That
individual 'survives' best which leaves most offspring. Again,
to speak of an animal as 'fittest' does not necessarily imply
that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty
competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most
offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact,
merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave
most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a
tautology. [15]
Von Bertalanffy put it even more pointedly. Commenting on the orthodox theory, he remarked, 'It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities.' [16]
To avoid misunderstandings: no critic would of course deny that biological misfits, incapable of coping with life's demands, would be eliminated in the course of evolution. But the elimination of deformity does not explain the evolution of higher forms. The action of a weedkiller is beneficial, but it does not explain the emergence of new plant species. It is a common fallacy among evolutionists to confuse the process of elimination of the unfit with the process of evolution towards some undefinable ideal of 'fitness'. The defenders of the synthetic theory could easily put an end to this confusion by replacing the discredited term 'natural selection' by 'selective elimination'. However, they only went as far as replacing the slogan 'survival of the fittest' by the less offensive 'differential reproduction' -- but that, as we have just seen, provided no escape from the labyrinth of tautologies.
Nor did it help to resort to yet another synonym for fitness, namely, 'adaptability'. To cut a long story short, here is von Bertalanffy again:
... In my opinion, there is no scintilla of scientific proof
that evolution in the sense of progression from less to more
complicated organisms had anything to do with better adaptation
. . . or production of larger offspring. Adaptation is possible at
any level . . . An amoeba, a worm, an insect or non-placental mammal
are as well adapted as placentals; if they were not, they would have
become extinct long ago. [17]
In other words, nobody questions the truism that a species can only survive if it is able to adapt to the environment, but there are countless ways of adapting to one and the same environment, and some of these ways are so incredibly tortuous and complicated that the term 'adaptation' becomes empty of meaning. Consider this example from Sir Alister Hardy's The Living Stream:
There are some kinds of orc
hids with flowers which mimic, in colour,
shape and smell, the female form of certain insects and so offer
sexual attraction to the males of these insect species; the excited
spouses who come for the creative act, unwittingly, by carrying
pollen, complete, instead, the sexual process for the flower! [18]
Or, to quote von Bertalanffy yet again:
I for one . . . am still at a loss to understand why it is of
selective advantage for the eels of Comacchio to travel perilously to
the Sargasso sea, or why Ascaris has to migrate all around the
host's body instead of comfortably settling in the intestine where
it belongs; or what was the survival value of a multiple stomach
for a cow when a horse, also vegetarian and of comparable size,
does very well with a single stomach. [19]
And how does 'adaptation' explain the fantastic transformations of the caterpillar into a chrysalis -- spinning itself into a cocoon, where it undergoes a complete transformation which involves the dissolution of the larval organs and tissues and their complete re-moulding into a winged adult? Books on natural history have innumerable examples of such far-fetched ways of 'making a living' as a species, but they are rarely mentioned in theoretical works on evolution, because they reveal too glaringly that the theory begs the vital questions. Thus 'adaptation', as a deus ex machina of 'natural selection', shares the fate of its precursors, 'survival of the fittest' and 'differential reproduction.
3
According to the neo-Darwinian doctrine, the raw material on which the magic of natural selection operates is provided by random mutations, i.e., chemical changes in the genes, the carriers of heredity. These changes are triggered by radiations, noxious chemicals or excessive heat, and are 'random' in the sense of being completely unrelated to the animal's needs or welfare, or its natural environment: they are in the nature of accidents which interfere with the normal functioning of the delicately balanced organism. Accordingly, the vast majority of mutations have either damaging or trivial effects; but from time to time, so the theory goes, there is a lucky hit, which will be preserved by natural selection, because it happens to confer some small advantage on the bearer of the mutated gene; and given sufficient time, 'anything at all will turn up', as Sir Julian Huxley wrote. 'The hoary objection of the improbability of an eye or a hand or a brain being evolved by "blind chance" has lost its force' -- because 'natural selection operating over stretches of geological time' [20] explains everything.
Compare this statement with the following by Waddington:
To suppose that the evolution of the wonderfully adapted biological
mechanisms has depended only on a selection out of a haphazard set
of variations, each produced by blind chance, is like suggesting
that if we went on throwing bricks together into heaps, we should
eventually be able to choose ourselves the most desirable house. [21]
Nevertheless, Jacques Monod (Nobel Prize, 1965) calls evolution a 'gigantic lottery' [22] or 'nature's roulette' [23] and concludes:
Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation
in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the
very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central
concept of modern biology is no longer one among other conceivable
hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the
only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing
warrants the supposition -- or the hope -- that on this score our
position is likely ever to be revised . . . [24]
The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man.
Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. [25]
But the roulette analogy hides rather than indicates the fantastic improbability of any major evolutionary advance produced by chance mutations. For such an event to occur, it is not enough that a certain required number, say the 17, should come up on the roulette table -- but that it should come up simultaneously on a dozen or so tables in the same establishment, followed by the 18, 19 and 20 simultaneously on all tables.
Let me illustrate this by a few examples. The first is very simple and trivial, involving only four roulette wheels. The giant panda has on its front limbs an added, sixth finger. This could be a typical case of a deformation caused by a deleterious chance mutation; it happens to be quite useful to the panda in manipulating bamboo shoots, but it would of course be a useless hindrance if it were not equipped with the requisite muscles, nerves and blood-supply. The chances that among all possible genetic mutations just those which produced the added bones, nerves, muscles and arteries occurred simultaneously and independently from each other are infinitesimally small. And yet in this case we have only four main factors -- four roulette wheels at work. When it comes to such composite marvels as the vertebrate eye -- that classic stumbling block of the Darwinian theory -- with its retina, rods and cones, lens, iris, pupil and what have you, the odds against the harmonious evolution of its components by independent random mutations, i.e., by 'blind chance', becomes, pace Huxley, absurd. Darwin himself clearly realized this when, in 1860, he wrote to Asa Gray: 'I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.' [26] It still has that effect on the upholders of the doctrine, so they avoid discussing it, or resort to elaborate evasions.*
* For a summary of the problems posed by the evolution of the eye see,
e.g. Grassé (1973). pp. 176-81 and Wolsky (1976), pp. 106 f.
Equally chilling is the idea that some ancestral reptiles became transformed into birds by the small, step-by-step changes caused by random mutations affecting different organs. In fact one gets goose-pimples at the mere thought of the number of Monod's roulette wheels which must be kept spinning to produce the simultaneous transformation of scales into feathers, solid bones into hollow tubes, the outgrowth of air sacs into various parts of the body, the development of the shoulder muscles and bones to athletic proportions, and so forth. And this re-casting of bodily structure is accompanied by basic changes in the internal systems, including excretion. Birds never spend a penny. Instead of diluting their nitrogenous waste in water, which is a heavy ballast, they excrete it from the kidneys in a semi-solid state though the cloaca. Then there is also the little matter of the transition, by 'blind chance', from the cold-blooded to the warm-blooded condition. There is no end to the specifications which have to be met to make our reptile airborne or to construct a camera eye out of living software.
To conclude this section, here is a less dramatic example of an evolutionary advance -- the seemingly modest step which led to the transformation of the amphibian egg into the reptilian egg. I have described this process in The Ghost in the Machine, and am quoting it again, because its explanation by the Darwinian schema is not only vastly improbable, but logically impossible.
The vertebrates' conquest of dry land started with the evolution
of reptiles from some primitive amphibian form. The amphibians
reproduced in the water, and their young were aquatic. The decisive
novelty of the reptiles was that, unlike amphibians, they laid their
eggs on dry land; they no longer depended on the water and were free
to roam over the continents. But the unborn reptile inside the egg
still needed an aquatic environment: it had to have water or else
it would dry up at an early stage. It also needed a lot of food:
amphibians hatch as larvae who fend for themselves, whereas reptiles
hatch fully developed. So the reptilian egg had to be provided with
a large mass of yolk for food, and also with albumen -- the white
of egg -- to provide the water. Neither the yolk by itself, nor
the egg-white itself, would have had any selective val
ue. Moreover,
the egg-white needed a vessel to contain it, otherwise its moisture
would have evaporated. So there had to be a shell made of a leathery
or limey material, as part of the evolutionary package-deal. But that
is not the end of the story. The reptilian embryo, because of this
shell, could not get rid of its waste products. The soft-shelled
amphibian embryo had the whole pond as a lavatory; the reptilian
embryo had to be provided with a kind of bladder. It is called the
allantois, and is in some respects the forerunner of the mammalian
placenta. But this problem having been solved, the embryo would
still remain trapped inside its tough shell; it needed a tool to
get out. The embryos of some fishes and amphibians, whose eggs are
surrounded by a gelatinous membrane, have glands on their snouts:
when the time is ripe, they secrete a chemical which dissolves the
membrane. But embryos surrounded by a hard shell need a mechanical
tool: thus snakes and lizards have a tooth transformed into a kind
of tin-opener, while birds have a caruncle -- a hard outgrowth near