Darwin's Origin of Species uses the variations of the beaks of the finches found on isolated islands in the Galapagos archipelago to generalize that species evolve one from the other, the most famous example, created by Darwin's detractors to ridicule him, being the ape-to-man scenario, the more absurd one, the product of an empirical science that actually apes Darwin's detractors in its monkey see, monkey say process of discovery, being the absurd notion that dinosaurs evolved into birds.
The beaks in question were the tools the finches needed to survive. The edibles on the islands, when the seasons were rainy and the growth plush, were easily picked up by the finches and broken open with little force. Thus, some of the finches had long, slender beaks that were effective at spearing tender morsels and chomping them up with great relish.
However, on islands that suffered little rainfall, the growth was not plush, but had retreated into the hard protective shells necessary for the long periods seeds need to exist before rains once again give them birth. For these finches to feed and survive, long, slender beaks would break off in an attempt to open the hard coverings to obtain the nutrients inside and thus, on islands where there was little rainfall, the finches beaks were short and extremely thick, providing a sort of pointed axe that could be used to pierce the shells and the strong beaks necessary to masticulate the contents.
From these facts, Darwin deduced that different species with a common ancestor would evolve when separated from their common source. Some, today, might make the comment that finches are finches, and beaks a species don't make, but empirical science is the process of classification, and it can pretty much classify anything anyway it wants to. Thus, it's hard to argue that Darwin's basic premise is erroneous, that no species evolved from a common ancestor by being isolated from other descendants of the ancestor.
However, recent studies, through the process of mirrormensis, where empirical science sees the opposite of what exists, have shown that the predominate species of finch on a specific island will change with the climate. If the island has an abundance of rainfall, and therefore an abundance of lush vegetation, then finches with long slender beaks will crowd out finches with short powerful beaks, and when, a decade later, the island undergoes a period of drought, the opposite will occur, finches with short powerful beaks will crowd out finches with long slender beaks. This is taken as proof of Darwinian natural selection, although the time frame for the transition is in years rather than in millions of years.
To actually see the Darwinian mistake, the notion that natural selection allows one species to become another species, we have to look at the philosophical constraints that were the invisible walls of Darwin's mind. Probably the greatest problem that permeated his existence, just as it permeates the existence of empirical science today, was the Newtonian dictate that the universe operates by laws put in place by a God which, by the 19th century in which Darwin's mind attempted to analyze reality, was being systematically removed from the scientific endeavor.
Just as we are left today with an empirical philosophy that the universe operates by mathematical laws that simply await discovery by those denizens of deep thought willing to venture into the multidimensional matrix that holds the fabric of spacetime together, mathematical laws with no source, Darwin was cocooned in a philosophy that denied all biblical dictates. Naturally, the first of these dictates was creationism, the notion that God created man in his image and populated the Earth with fully evolved animals. The other dictate that enveloped Darwin's mind negatively was that the Earth was created some six thousand years before.
The science of the time had come up with two alternate explanations that profoundly influenced Darwin's thinking. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had, in 1801, some sixty years before the publication of Darwin's theory, proposed that animals evolved. The mechanism that Lamarck suggested for evolution was the process of individual adaptation to environmental stimuli. Traits would evolve that allowed animals to accommodate themselves to environmental conditions, and once evolved, those traits would become inheritable.
The second problem presented by biblical discipline was confronted by Charles Lyell who, in 1830, published his landmark work, Principles of Geology. In this work, Lyell, who became Darwin's close friend and associate, postulated that the layers of earth found in cuts were actually sedimentary layers that had been deposited over long periods of time and that therefore the Earth was far older than biblical interpretation dictated. This new uniformitarianism was actually a popular exposition, with evidence available to everyone, of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's 44 volume Historie Naturelle, in which he suggested evolution without Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, and his 1788 Les Epoques de la Nature in which he proposed that the Earth was old enough to accommodate his proposed evolution.
This thinking might have set the stage for Darwin to conclude that species evolution was actually the product of the evolution of traits, or in more modern terms, characteristics, had not both Buffon and Lyell been steeped in another chain of thought that also grew up in opposition to biblical dictates, this time the biblical dictate of the flood. Georges Curvier was an extraordinarily influential professor of animal anatomy at the French Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle. He prospered under the Revolution, Napoleon and the return of the monarchy. He contributed two significant lines of thought. The first was the notion of extinction, that the historical record showed that entire species went extinct at specific times in history. He attributed this to natural catastrophes such as the flood, but the antibiblical forces immediately stepped up in the form of Louis Agassiz, who interpreted the clear evidence of flood debris to his created ice ages (which now need to have rivers flowing under them to explain the existence of the flood debris). The ice ages were in line with Lyell's later uniformitarian concept of slow formation and those long periods of time during which species could change from one form to another.
Curvier's major contribution to the Darwinian straight jacket, however, was his belief that, because any change in an animal's organic make up would make the animal incapable of life, there could be no organic evolution. Instead, he classified animals into four branches, the beginning of the classification system that led to Darwin's notion of natural selection. Because Curvier didn't believe in organic evolution, he opposed both Buffon and Lamarck, the first holding the notion that one animal form could change into another, the second that the change was incremental, trait by trait, characteristic by characteristic.
With Darwin's philosophical universe committed to Lyell's uniformitarianism, Curvier's classifications and Buffon's species evolution, and very respectful of Lamarck's notion of environmental influence, he threaded a path through the maze, producing the notion of natural selection, that the environment would produce conditions that would allow species to change from one group to another, what has become the dinosaur to the bird brainstorm. As Darwinianism began its long battle with the biblical forces, it had to solidify its position. Darwin's disciples therefore quickly discredited Lamarck, whose characteristic evolution would not require the long periods that opposing the biblical time restraints would produce. Darwin could give no quarter to biblical arguments of any form and thus the flood, which would have set down the sedimentary layers Lyell observed, disappeared from science, replaced by the ice age, and the time for species evolution expanded exponentially, rolling over all objections, even those by the reputable Lord Kelvin whose estimate of millions of years for the age of the Earth was insufficient. Lucky for Darwin, radium was discovered in pitchblende and empirical science instantly adopted radiation to produce the illogical belief that radioactive elements in the planet kept it hot far beyond Lord Kelvin's irrefutable estimates.
So what are we dealing with here? We had a man who basically took a bunch of existing knowledge and synthesized a principle, that the environment controlled the evolution of species, not the evolution of characteristics, but the evolution of entire species, even though that man could not figure out how that evolution could occur, could not find evidence, other than the beaks of the finches of the Galapagos Islands, and could not fathom how the Earth could be old enough for such a transformation to occur.
More to the point, we had a man, and his disciples, creating and promoting a theory, with no knowledge of Gregor J. Mendel's laws of heredity in peas, an extraordinary achievement which, because it postdated Darwin by seven years, was immediately buried so that it wouldn't provide ammunition to antiDarwinists, a man who, in addition, had no knowledge of the mid-20th century discovery attributed to James D. Watson and Francis Crick of the double-helical configuration of the gene and therefore no knowledge of the nature of DNA or the production of the picture of the genome.
What is one of the major observations that picturing the gene has produced?
Gene sequencing shows that the genes that control our formation come in bunches that reflect characteristics. That in itself hearkens back to the Darwinist discredited Lamarck and his notion of characteristic evolution. If genes express characteristics, then why would anyone even consider that entire genes evolve independent of the characteristics? Why would anyone even consider that a single stray cosmic ray, the current Darwinian source for evolutionary change, would change the entire genome when the structure of the genome clearly demonstrates that individual characteristics are encoded in its sequence?
Further, the active genes discovered on the genome are isolated in long sequences of genetic material that is "dark" as far as producing the characteristics that make up the entity are concerned. They seem to have no function. They are a puzzle.
However, if they are considered to be simply switched off genetic characteristics, characteristics acquired during the evolutionary process that don't work in conjunction with the set of characteristics that make up the current entity, then they would not only make evolutionary sense, they would make sense of Darwin's finches.
When a particular island in the Galapagos archipelago is experiencing abundant rainfall, the gene that produces long, slender beaks activates itself, with the gene that produces short, powerful beaks going dark. However, when the rainfall drops off and the going gets rough, the dark gene expressing the strong powerful beak comes to life while the gene expressing long slender beaks goes dark.
We are, after all, simply the product of all of our characteristics working in conjunction with one another, and there is no reason why we cannot adapt to the environment in order to better survive within that environment.
In fact, that is evolution.
It's just not carried out on the complex stage of species, but on the simple stage of individual characteristics.
Note: Design evolution is the recognition by empirical science that if the universe is operated by laws, there must have been a designer of those laws. Divine evolution is creationism. Devolution is a recent Eastern concept that holds we originate out of pure consciousness or spirit and devolve through the stage of mind to the lower realm of the body.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com