Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Rebuts Latest Tall Tale of Giraffe Evolution
Darwinists sometimes think that they can account for the evolutionary origin of a complex biological feature simply by citing some kind of experimental or theoretical evidence showing that the complex feature would have provided a selective advantage to its owner. However, such Darwinists forget that, as many have recounted, natural selection only accounts for the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest . Evidence that a given feature—when fully formed—provides some selective advantage does not demonstrate that the feature can be evolved in a step-wise, mutation-by-mutation fashion. If Michael Behe is correct, then irreducibly complex features require many parts to be present all-at-once in order to get any functional advantage whatsoever. As Charles Darwin famously wrote, such features defy a Darwinian explanation:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for plant breeding research in Cologne, Germany, takes Darwin’s challenge seriously. He has recently responded to a paper entitled “Winning by a Neck: Tall Giraffes Avoid Competing With Shorter Browsers.” As might be expected from the paper’s title, it addresses the survival of the giraffe’s long neck but not the arrival of the giraffe’s long neck. In short, the paper assumes that a complex feature like the giraffe’s neck could arise “by numerous, successive, slight modifications” (Darwin’s words) and assumes that merely accounting for the advantage given by such a complex feature is sufficient to demonstrate its Darwinian evolution. Dr. Lönnig writes in response:
One of the basic problems with natural selection, however, is that – to illustrate – it only acts like a sieve which selects (screens) tea leaves from a certain size onwards 11 but, of course, sieves never create the tea leaves themselves (for a detailed discussion on the limits of natural selection, see http://www.weloennig.de/NaturalSelection.html.). Hence, it is necessary to clearly distinguish between selection and the rich but limited genetic potential for phenotypic variations of any species (the range of ‘tea leaves’, so to speak, that it can offer for survival to the sieve of natural selection). So for the smaller browsers this definitely means that phenotypic variation is limited too. Moreover, whatever ‘selection pressure’ may exist, one may safely predict it will never transform them into 6 m tall animals at all. And naturally this was true for the past as well.
(Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, Appendix on Cameron & du Toit (2007): “Winning by a Neck: Tall Giraffes Avoid Competing With Shorter Browsers” of the Paper: The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe: What do we really know? .)
Lönnig provides an excellent critical analysis of Cameron & du Toit’s paper, observing that even if their data is correct, “it would prove nothing concerning evolution by the postulated random mutations and natural selection.” Lönnig concludes that “Cameron and du Toit are trying to force the state of being of the giraffe and other browsers into the Procrustean bed of perpetual Darwinian evolution by natural selection, taking for granted that mutations have produced the genetic variation necessary to evolve all the animals now found.”
Read Lönnig’s full response to the Cameron & du Toit paper at http://www.weloennig.de/Giraffe_Note_on_Cameron_and_duToit.pdf
Originally published at evolutionnews.org.
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Stumble It!
December 19th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
One can see some useful academic knowledge-work that has come from a Darwinian perspective on life. The more traditional perspectives, of course, have produced even more productive ‘getting on with living’ work.
A point. A question or two.
“Survival of the Fittest’ is a great and well known phrase. But what does it mean? What does it presage?
Fittest *for what? Fittest to survive? Whoops. That would be a tautology. And pretty meaningless.
Fittest *to what? Fittest to fit an environmental niche? So what? It seems the niches are pretty danmed small and restricted to a very few places in an enormous Universe.
Fittest for the future? Whoops. There would have to be some sort of future being moved toward for which ‘fitness’ is slowly being achieved. Or are we perhaps going backwards? How do we know? We don’t even know what ‘fittest’ means unless we presume it is us.
Maybe fitness just, simply, for evolving life. Hold on, though. What do we mean by ‘evolve’ and ‘life’. It would make no developmental sense from what we see.
Life hasn’t got a smidgen easier to be in. We haven’t ‘evolved’ a longer life, even after a couple of billion years. Or a better one in terms of disease, eating, reproducing. How come we haven’t evolved genes that would keep us alive for 500 years? That would have been useful. Why hasn’t our metabolism been refined by evolution so that we can get by for six months on a cup of water? Eating and drinking every damned day has been a friggin’ chore. Women were dying in droves in difficult childbirth right up to a century ago, and it wasn’t a new gene set that changed it. How come? One would have thought, from a ‘life’ perspective, that dying in childbirth would have been evolved out of by now. Now THAT would be evolution! That’s the sort of fitness that we could appreciate.
And the fitness mechanism. Slowly developing fitter and fitter genes (whatever that means) and the culling and withering of less fitting genes? One would think by now there would be Arnie Swartzenegger style genes all over the place and hardly any ‘unfit’ ones left. But we are so fragile. We cark it in huge numbers by the minute.
Bugger Giraffes.
December 21st, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[...] another good article out, this time referencing Wolf-Ekkehard Lonnig’s work that dispels the Darwinist myth about giraffe neck evolution. [...]