Customer Reviews

Beyond Natural Selection

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This is one of the most helpful critiques of the dogma of natural selection, along with Soren Lovtrup's Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, and Robert Reid's Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis. Filled with the hard evidence you won't find in textbooks and that explodes Darwin's claims,without rejecting the broad context of evolution, the book cogently attempts to reach a broader systems view that looks at the transformations of the genome as a whole. Although the intimations of chaos theory here are a bit simplistic, no substitute theory is required to demonstrate the fact that natural selection simply cannot account for the rising number of factual discrepancies. This type of exploration of new ground is both vital and timely. The author's wry suggestion that the six-leggedness of insects falsifies natural selection is but one of the many insights. His disposal of sexual selection is another. Any Darwin dogmatist should be afraid of this book. If you read it, you will snap out of it and end up a Darwin doubter. Bravo. John Landon nemonemini@eonix.8m.com

This is a valuable look at self-organization in evolution. Citing many cases where a reductionistic explanation of genetic variation and natural selection is inadequate, Wesson argues that complex biological structures owe their emergence to a fusion of physical processes at the edge of "Chaos." You will find similar themes in the work of Ilya Prigogine, Brian Goodwin, Niles Eldredge, and others.
Advocates of so-called Intelligent Design often cite this book, while "ultra-Darwinians" dislike it. Actually, however, Wesson's presentation offers a third way, neither reductionist nor theistic. (I do not know what Wesson's personal views are, but it is his work here that is in question.)

This is a spectacular collection of the best and most pertinent biological anomalies that one has to come to grips with in explaining neo-Darwinian natural selection. At the same time, it is abysmally written. The author knows nothing about sentence structure, paragraph structure, or connectives. If the book were well-written (perhaps in its second edition), it might become a world-class best seller. It's worth five stars only because of the superbly selected information it contains. == Anthony D'Amato Leighton Professor of Law Northwestern University

This volume is the profoundest assault on Darwinism I have encountered in the course of fairly wide reading about evolution. I will be assimilating the ideas contained herein for some time to come--re-reading and discovering their fit--but I can at least offer a glimpse of Robert Wesson's thinking. Natural selection, as advanced by Darwin and later by neo-Darwinists, is insufficient to explain life and evolution. Slow accretion of random mutations is not evident in the fossil record, and is not supported by study of extant organisms. Natural selection was advanced in a Newtonian age when science attempted to reduce natural phenomenon to simple equations and relationships, and just as post-Einsteinian physics has reordered our understanding of matter, we are poised to reorder our comprehension of life. To consider Wesson's argument on the simplest level, think about tree leaves. If natural selection selects to optimize living structures--in the case of a leaf, absorption of solar radiation through photosynthesis--why do we observe a wide diversity of leaves within a given biome? Surely there has been time for plants to arrive at an optimal design. Instead there are wide variations in plant life at all levels of efficiency, and leaf structure is only the most evident of the differences. Or consider frogs and toads. Why do they utilize an idiosyncratic means of locomotion: the hop? No other quadruped moves like they do (although rabbits and kangaroos are somewhat similar in some of their motions, if not their skeletons and musculature). Again, according to classical natural selection, such odd behavior would prove better or worse and either become a dominant mode or disappear. This is one of many hints that evolution may not be one thing, but many things, expressed differently across the spectrum of life. The evidence Wesson marshals seems to point to natural selection as a means of refining major changes, but not a means of achieving major change. Instead, it appears that chaos theory, and active self-direction of living organisms must play a large part in the progress from simpler to more complex life. Chaos theory, considered to be one of the three major scientific discoveries of the past century (together with general relativity and quantum mechanics), has revealed a deep level of coherence in randomness. The most accessible vision of chaotic behavior might be seen in running water. A stream consists of a mass of randomly moving particles bumping into each other, reacting to friction on the stream bed and obstacles, and emerging as standing waves and eddies--structures built from random parts. Nothing about the behavior of individual molecules predicts the emergence of such structures, and yet there is a predictability in the disorganization: waves emerge, turbulence coheres. In the same way, it seems, structures and behaviors in living systems emerge all at once: a leap from one form to another without the intervening forms that natural selection would predict. Whales, for example, moved from a terrestrial habitat into the oceans and almost instantly shifted several major organ systems, no intermediate form of which would have proven useful to survival. (Alone among mammals the whale or dolphin tail moves vertically instead of horizontally, alone among aquatic mammals the whales shed rear appendages and moved their breathing apparatus from oral/nasal passages to the top of the head, etc.) Similarly, bats appeared suddenly, virtually identical to their modern form, and have remained the most widely successful mammalian form for millions of years. Coming at Wesson's argument from another quarter, feathers appear to have evolved independently three to five times. Instead of being a lucky accident, it may be more clearly explained as emergence of a basic structural tendency of matter. The same is true of the eye. Or consider the species of bot fly which requires a É mammalian host for its larvae, but lays its egg on the proboscis of a mosquito. There is no intermediate step possible. The fly egg must be injected into a mammalian blood stream. Other flies do that themselves. How does the leap to utilizing a mosquito for egg delivery emerge through random chance? The author opens far more questions than he answers, and that is his stated intent. The point, he says, is that Darwinism has been so successful at refuting creationism that it has become lodged in its success and has failed to move forward beyond its Newtonian roots. I cannot begin to offer the breadth and nuance of his arguments in a short review, but commend this work to anyone interested in a deeper appreciation of how we came to be. I conclude with a quote: "We have not the faintest notion what our long-term role in the drama of evolution may be, how it may appear a million or even a thousand or a hundred years from today. But it can hardly be unimportant; we seem to be the makers of a turning point. Ours is the moment when biological evolution gives way to cultural-informational evolution, with all its explosive potential. Human civilization is not an end but a vaulting into the unknown. It is a supreme glory that humans can decide what destiny they desire and, if wise enough, can make their own evolution."

Unlike most of the books which deal with theories of evolution, this one takes an objective non-partisan approach. The author sticks to the facts and depicts an incredible array of behaviors and facts regarding just about any life form found on earth. This can be sometimes a bit tedious, most of the time very interesting though. I do not think the style is appalling, it is scientific and precise. Chapter 12 (evolution and humanity) could justify the book by itself. I command the author for his amazing and thorough scientific approach, as well as his philosophical insights. In my search for truth and virtue about the humane, i stumbled upon too many one-sided books, and the more thorough i became the more confusing everything grew. I could have just bought this book. For it is also a book about faith, and what it means to be human. Mr Wesson, thank you.

Robert Wesson (1920-1991) was a distinguished scholar in political science, natural science and philosophy. This was his last book (1991); and, like its 1989 predecessor (Cosmos and Metacosmos), is concerned with science and philosophy.

He states in the Introduction, "Recently, however, there have been increasing tendencies to doubt that the role of natural selection is as great as has been assumed, and a growing number of biologists believe that it is not a wholly satisfactory answer. Its inadequacy is a thesis of this book.... Adaptive innovations, especially of higher animals, may be commonly initiated by behavior or learning. That is, exploration, choice, and learning seem to play a key part ... The emergence of the human species in particular is not to be comprehended simply as the outcome of accidental mutations and natural selection for intelligence. In this view, evolution is not only adaptation, as Darwinism stresses, but also the realization of inherent potentials ... there is much reason to believe that evolution, although conditioned by natural selection, is to a large extent innerdirected."

He summarizes traditional Darwinian theory, pointing out problems along the way. "But evolutionary theory must apply to Homo sapiens as well as other forms of life, and it is very difficult to account for all the oddities and capabilities of humans, from storytelling to leadership to religion, in biological terms." (pg. 79) He adds, "It would be extremely satisfying to find or surmise an adapative reason for everything, but there may be no particular meaning in a million details of living nature, just as there is no significance in the details (within certain patterns) of snowflakes or the ocean breakers or the folds of mountain ranges." (pg. 154)

"It is difficult to understand how sexual selection by display can exist. Force can overrule show; when male birds gather to strut their charms, it should be easy for one with shorter feathers but stronger beak and more truculent disposition to drive others away. And the female, if she cannot have a helpmate, would do better to choose a strong fighter than the bearer of a gorgeous cape." (pg. 169)

He concludes with a statement, "There is something of self-hate in the materialist approach. It depreciates the life of the mind and works of imagination and character. It demeans the richness and wonder of nature. It seems to make unnecessary further thinking about the mysteries of existence, of life and the universe. If one is gripped by the idea that we were made by chance (an unlovable deity) and are not intrinsically superior to amoebas (which by the same logic are not superior to bacteria or grains of sand), one is not prepared to cope with the responsibility of intelligence and power." (pg. 308)