Extract from God Gametes and the Planet of the Butterfly Queen - page 271

In his book Life’s Grandeur, Stephen Jay Gould uses an analogy when outlining his case, asking us to imagine a drunk walking down the street. He depicts the drunk as the progress of life in that there is no purpose or direction to his actions or which way he will fall. We are asked to imagine that there is a wall on his left and a gutter to his right. The left wall is ‘minimum complexity’ and the gutter, ‘improved design’. He then points out that there is only one way the drunk can fall. He will most likely wobble to the left as many times as to the right. When he hits the left wall however, he will bounce back. If he keeps going he will eventually fall and it will be into the gutter.
Gould then argues that there is such a brick wall to life on earth, his rationale being that there is a minimum level of complexity necessary for life to exist. He seems to suggest that when creatures hit this wall they bounce back and take the only option available and this is to evolve greater complexity.
He assumes there is a level of complexity supporting life, yet the Darwinian paradigm does not provide any mechanism for supporting minimum complexity. It is true that if the complexity of creatures falls below a certain level, they will cease to live. Ceasing to live, however, is different from bouncing back. What is it that stops the level of complexity falling below the minimum required to support life? It seems contradictory for Gould to suggest there is a property of life (or by analogy his left brick wall) for Darwinists argue that there is no preferred status for life to exist.
Individuals can die and species can become extinct, so a more accurate Darwinian analogy would be a ‘left cliff’. Any creature that devolved below the minimum level of complexity needed to support life would fall over this cliff, never to be seen again.
We are told that 99.9% of species have become extinct. This would suggest that there is no left wall protecting living creatures from the perils of extinction. It might also be worthwhile looking at why so many species have suffered this fate. The left wall analogy implies that these are species that fell to the left (minimum complexity) and did not bounce back, yet this does not appear to be the case. Most unsuccessful species are those that fell the other way. They attempted to make a living by evolving greater complexity and failed to adapt when environmental conditions changed.
Gould’s analogy does not explain why species tend to evolve greater complexity when there is no left wall bouncing them in that direction. And ‘falling into the gutter’ is not a good simile for evolving complexity. A better comparison would be to suggest that our drunk suddenly did a triple pirouette off the back foot, leaped 30 feet into the air and landed amidst oncoming traffic on other side of the street. This would paint a clearer picture of the developmental processes involved and also suggest a reason for the high incidents of extinctions associated with evolving greater complexity.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11-Oct-18 08:35 by Robert Jameson.