Kettlewell's Folly

Two of Two

Mostly Humankind

The particulars of the observable scientific environment were in Darwin’s realm Newtonian organisms at the limit of the optical microscope. The post-Darwin realm was formed by the molecules Kimura knew of at the limit of the electron microscope. First, simple arithmetic sufficed, and then it did not. Darwin’s account of “evolution” was too simple. He and his supporters viewed life as very diverse but they succumbed to the idea that an explanation of major groupings of life could be approached all too easily. It has become evident the diversity of life calls for a diversity of explanation to account for its “evolution”. A major sense of being incomplete was filled in, they thought, by genetics. A forced pairing of NS and genetics was made to account for Darwinian “evolution”. But the addition of the explanatory power of genetics in the service of NS got away from them. Darwin’s views were at the macro level and a scaling up of genetics at the micro level to the macro level assumed an unimportant loss of truth in the telling in regard to “evolution”. Maybe one-fourteenth of the truth was lost and in the new ballgame, a science reduced by one-fourteenth, still left thirteen-fourteenths. Wasn’t that enough?

The previous Haldane’s Dilemma, a result of placing more mathematical rigor into biology, especially evolutionary biology, had a requirement of too much time needed for genes to change, that is, for species to change. At the micro level of molecular genetics, there were too many genomic variations. No Darwinian “fitness” could match them. There is a drift and flow to derive what comes to be “used”. If it is not Haldane’s Dilemma, it is Kimura’s neutralism – a still greater dilemma.

The peppered moth story was instigated by the advent of human intervention – the Industrial Revolution’s pollution. This was not Nature at work and so, in a larger sense, no “natural” selection could result. As Darwin proposed his notions concerning Nature, their applicability had lapsed by only a matter of decades. Only rewilding projects could reestablish the “natural” component to an environment, though still the push that sets up the project is human. What has been called a “romantic” factor in rewilding has been used to support a weak, incomplete science. The emotional appeal “to let Nature take its course” behind fences and to let more ancient ecosystems to reestablish themselves means the end of the present day ecosystem. Destroying the present to let the past come again robs “evolution” of meaning.

There are no brightly colored hues of life just for the hell of it. But there is a linkage of biological structure. This linkage isn’t accounted for by evolutionary biology, if by Darwin’s resultants or anyone else’s notions. Certainly not by NS, now, maybe never, though perhaps more possible in Darwin’s time. Peppered moths, if selected, would not have been about species but a form of a species. Birds, if involved, would have been natural enough but soot and smoke are not. What is “natural” and of the “wild” was not present. They are of the past. “Evolution” (Darwin) studies Nature through examining the past. It was a theory of historical differences; it was about what was and can never be again. The additions we make to global warming invalidate all selection in the Darwinian sense – it throws an artificial blanket equating to a lack of “natural” processes on a worldwide scale.

In any event, the advent of humankind could never be and wasn’t explained by Darwinianism or its offshoots. His Origin of Species was too too slow, and careful to not miss a detail, to have ever been the origin of humankind. Certainly humankind is not a part of Nature. For homo sapiens to humankind by what route? The dead-end routes of “evolution” are not much use for explication. Humankind’s sufficient intelligence isn’t much more than a phenotype. It isn’t seen but alters behavior (also not seen in the fossil record structurally speaking) and outcome and “fitness”. How, then, a transition to intelligence if it affected survival? No “sort of pregnant” reasoning to get to levels of intelligence, graduations of, and not a little intelligence vs a zero amount.

However, the condition(s) did obtain, they did/do not represent “progress” as evolutionists now insist. Once upon a time the evolutionists were quite certain that a teleological process was occurring. If no “progress”, what to call it – a trend? An accumulation of change? Once A, then B, B not dependent on A. Then A+B=C. C not dependent on A+B. There is linkage, but not a dependent one. “Evolution” (Darwin) is condemned to being a historical and an unimportant study. It totally ignored humankind. Darwin’s “Nature” in theory came before humankind.

If one wants “progress” of living things, then NS is the way to go. If not, randomness has been the alternative – random then random and after that, random. The first occurrence of randomness precludes certain further changes in some directions and so a second random event must work on a prior determination, and a third effective random event must work on what these random events solidified. You get change not in a preferred direction but in an established direction, not predetermined but determined by one; by one and one are two, then three and so on. It is additive but not entirely controlled. Four is more than three and after that no more can be said.

The human intelligence is critically dependent on the human brain. The size of the brain and size of the body containing the brain aren’t enough to adequately characterize intelligence. It is maintained that a dense packing of neurons plus resorting to cooked food brought about sufficient intelligence. Within that intelligence the actual causes of species-level changes of life could be very complex, hidden, and only given over to worthless discussion. For example, the lack of hubris regarding reductionism might see a push beyond molecular genetics into quantum genetics or leave off “genetics” entirely and make the transitions of all life coupled to quanta.

The search for “fitness” on the quantum level would seem to be futile. In any case, “fitness” does not apply to humankind. It is odd that humankind, the source of the propagation of ideas about “evolution” and all else, should have been turned by human reasoning into animals to apply “fitness” to ourselves. Or is humankind odd and its hallmarks of “only human”, “to err is human”, and “all too human” establish a special province of life for us?  In that province physicists reason about the never-having-lived and Darwin and others reasoned about the dead and the living, including those like us, and obviously we are of the living, but Darwin was absolutist (like Newton) and sought to have us “ape” the dead. He rid us of fixed species, but that was not enough ambition, and he overreached himself and made the dead and us like objects of physics – known and determinate. T. H. Huxley did not think Darwin had an experimental science. He said Darwin showed no proof of NS, but that it must occur. Then “fitness”. Many agreed with Waddington in 1966 that NS got tangled in a tautology. The survivors survive.

To survive is to also to age. The aging of a phenotype can have a connection with the stress of air pollution. Kettlewell was aware the forms he made use of could have differing ages. Telomeres may be causally related to aging. Telomere length shortens with each cell division. Telomeres act as a cell’s “memory” of exposure to air pollution. To compensate for telomeric DNA loss, telomere length is maintained by the enzyme named telomerase. In addition, if you die, I die, but then again we don’t all die. Humankind does not die. It doesn’t have a mortality rate at 90% nor births in the hundreds or more per source. Evolutionists have no role for intelligence nor recognition of its existence. We do have similar structure vis-à-vis apes or monkeys or chimps or whatever but we did not “descend” from them or “cousins”. We transcend death, apes do not. “Evolution” is a mathematical combination of life and death. Darwin read Malthus into Nature. “Evolution” should have had determinate relations concerning brain size and body size, and structures derived from them. Yet humankind has “evolutionary” structure but the interaction has an outcome transcending “evolution”. We shouldn’t be here and have been there. We are and we were. We gave up on God, got “evolution” and some fight viciously and desperately to keep “evolution”. It doesn’t work, something else acknowledging humankind as paramount vs the never-having-lived and the dead and other life can be sought for answers. Start from we aren’t part of Nature. For some a representative of the much admired intelligence came up with “evolution” and so, nevertheless, we aren’t as smart as we think we are. But now it isn’t 1859. The quantum world may bubble up into molecules and some of those molecules could be DNA or RNA or…

Another fundamental problem is to have regarded Darwin and Wallace as scientists. Very early on theory got divorced from empirical test. One needed confirmation from others. No bias in hypotheses, data, and conclusions was needed. Lurking underneath it all was the conviction that God was gone and good riddance. The central facts of biology were posited to be in human prehistory. That’s where the hypotheses were relegated to and multiplied if needed so that causal importance could be drawn out. Acceptance of Darwinism is more about “climate change”, how dreary, dark, and cold God “died” and how cheery, bright, and warming was the intellectual fashion that received a climate not hostile to intellectual acceptance of biology and its disciple, evolutionary biology.

Where, then, does the truth reside? In the specifics or the generalizations? Can one separate the two? Supposedly truth about data could lead to a false generalization. Good data doesn’t automatically mean good generalizations. A certain kind of thought must be along the rope leading from the specifics to a generalization. A concern for truth must be brought along. Should it go part of the way to the generalization? Half? One-third? Three-fourths? Perhaps one-fourteenth. Once upon a time, a court of law would have a recitation of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and a reference to a deity. In our day the partial truth is all the rage. In support of this laxity is our sloppy use of language – the words, especially the scientific ones that were once thought to be significant and precise in usage. Now the words, improperly punctuated in a fragment represent mostly a worthless piece of thought. Let your usage be your guide – not any standards, however low, are allowed. A try for high standards “obviously” lets “elitism” in and that cannot be sanctioned. Thus the language has a simple and obvious lack of truth, absolute and unequivocal and resolute beyond anything the Hebrews got from God via Moses.