We’ve all heard of it. It’s become practically a staple of popular culture and humor over the years. And it’s the proposition upon which pretty much all evolutionary theories rest – the “missing link.”
Whatever side of the evolution debate you’re on (even if you, like me, think that the entirety of said debate closely resembles the excretory refuse of a horse), you know that the concept of a missing link is pretty integral to the theory of evolution. While some versions of the theory propose that evolutionary change takes place in sudden and rapid mutational leaps, the classic – and I think the more generally-accepted formula – calls for gradual change over time. Which requires that there must exist creatures that are evolutionary stepping stones between an older creature and a newer creature.
Classically, when one says “missing link” one refers to a hypothetical human race that bridges the gulf between our modern Homo sapiens selves and the parade of earlier iterations that are said to progress from ape to ourselves. Practically, however, we are not the only species that requires missing links. For the theory to work, there need to have been literally oodles of transitional life forms – such as, e.g., those that are said to establish the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. The extreme form of this argument used by the anti-evolutionist camp is that, in a world of continual gradual change in response to the demands of the environment, in theory all life must be transitional in one way or another. Yet, the argument proceeds, since we see little if any transitional life (and have seen no substantial transition over the span of time for which human beings have been observing such things) then the theory is flawed.
Not being a biologist, I can’t speak to the validity of that argument, although I will concede that it has its appealing side. I also recall that controlled observations of fruit fly populations over the years have not yielded anything particularly conclusive as to the presence of evolutionary change. (For the record, fruit flies are used because their radically short life span allows observers to chronicle change over huge generational spans – observation which is impossible in species with more individual longevity.)
Personally, I’ve never found any of the generally-used examples of evolutionary change to be all that convincing. In my mind, there’s a functional difference between evolutionary change and natural selection. Evolutionary change is supposed to be able to make a dinosaur into a bird, or an ape into a man. Natural selection is, for lack of a better analogy, nature’s way of making dominant those traits already existing in a species’ genetic makeup which are most conducive to the survival of that species.
There was a certain species of moth in England that was very light in color, matching the bark of trees in the environment. This chromatic similarity allowed them to hide from the birds that had a propensity to eat them. Their wardrobe served the purpose rather well, until as a by-product of the industrial revolution, soot and other particulate caused the bark of the moths’ trees to darken. All of a sudden, their camouflage had morphed into something of a highlighter – an all-you-can-eat buffet, from the birds’ point of view. But then something happened.
Every so often, moths of this species would be not light, but dark. It was a recessive trait latent in the gene pool, and one which was held back from becoming dominant based on the short-and-easily-spottable-against-a-light-blackground kind of lifestyle that the unlucky bugs were forced to lead. Except that once their favorite trees developed their darker complexion, those once-unlucky moths became the ones ideally suited to continue to survive. While their lighter siblings were selected as entrees by the birds, they succeeded in eluding the hungry avians and proceeded to perpetuate their swarthy line. Voila, natural selection.
The problem is that, as I said before, this was not evolution. The “dark” trait had been present in the gene pool before humans started burning things at a terrific rate; the only thing that changed was that the environmental shift had gone from treating the darker moths as undesirable to seeing them as better candidates for survival.
This sort of thing is demonstrable. Humans do it to domesticated animals all the time. Just think of the specialization of breed in the domesticated dog. Poodles, boxers, beagles, huskies, and chihuahuas are all members of Canis lupus familiaris. Any of them can mate with any other and produce fertile offspring – as opposed to the product of an inter-species union, which is at least potentially liable to produce something like a mule. What makes all these different flavors of dog different is human mimicry of natural selection – you do something to lock down the gene pool, allowing only those individuals to made who exhibit traits which the breeder deems “desirable.”
As I’ve said, this is not evolution, and while I have to envision transitional forms between the wolf and the chihuahua, they are transitions in a process of genetic specification, not genetic change. If they were, they would typify the supposed progression of evolutionary change, ’tis true, but then again we also know they existed. You can breed dogs and you can watch the change.
What is the point of this whole exposition? I read something and I got a little bit steamed about it. It’s the usual peeve on my part – the truly religious faith of the scientific community in the rightness of their hypotheses and their own intellects in the absence of true, substantive proof. That, and I find paleontology to be one of the least useful sciences in the world.
But enough of that. Rant over.
Excellent point. It’s almost humorous to see evolutionists argue the fact that their position requires as much, if not more faith than Christianity. I always like to ask why, if apes evolved into men, there were still apes?
I tend to avoid that argument…The problem with it is that the theory runs that it was a very specific species of ape that possessed the requisite hardware to move up the evolutionary ladder. Something like a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an orangutan didn’t really have what it took.