Customer Reviews

Evolution: A Theory In Crisis

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I was expecting the material to be updated since it is a 1996 SECOND EDITION copy. But it was just a reprinting of the original, outdated text. Is there good information in there? Yes, some, but quoting from a 13-year-old book when trying to debate an evolutionist is rather pointless. Besides, in his newest book NATURE'S DESTINY, Michael Denton seems to do a complete turn around - he now states that evolution did occur and did overcome all of the arguments he previously made. As another example of his change, he now embrases the "molecular clock", which he denounced in this book. All in all, I think if you are short on cash, avoid this book (and in my opinion, his new one as well) and opt instead for DARWIN'S BLACK BOX by Michael Behe - it is much better and more up-to-date.

Denton's book is a first-rate critique of contemporary versions of Darwinism and is filled with original and compelling arguments. The usual suspects have, naturally, attacked the book with the usual generic accusations, but don't be mislead: "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" is not a defense of "Scientific Creationism" and definitely does not go wrong in easy and obvious ways. It is a penetrating account of features of the natural world that mutation and natural selection are simply inadequate to explain. From biochemistry to the fossil record, Denton systematically demolishes the "fact" of evolution as a sufficient explanation for the world as it is. Denton doesn't deny that evolution occurs; he is, for example, sanguine about the "horse series." He claims, however, that evolution, taken as mutation and natural selection, is no more than a partial answer. His his explication and analysis of the avian respiratory system is as convincing as anything in Mike Behe's book. Some have tried to explain away problems in evolution as owing to the paucity of human imagination, but Denton doesn't merely ask, "How could this have evolved?" e.g., the feather, avian respiration, etc. He argues positively that certain features cannot have evolved, that intermediate forms are not just difficult to imagine, they are impossible. There are those who judge books critical of evolution without actually reading them, evidently considering that to be needless toil. They "know" that evolution is true and explains everything, and therefore "know" that all critics have bad motives and worse education. Those who find that they need actually to read a book in order to fairly judge it will find Denton reasonable, extremely well-informed, clear, readable and thought-provoking. I highly recommend "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis."

It's been at least seven years since I read the first edition of this book, but I remain impressed by the persuasiveness of Denton's argument.

Like some of the other reviewers, I have a strong feeling that the people who have given this book bad reviews have never read it. I gather this not from how they have ranked it, but rather what they've written.

This is too bad because Denton provides a good opportunity for building honest, open-minded dialogue between the two opposing camps in the evolution debate. The book is argumentative, but it is also educational (I especially enjoyed learning about the feather - the complexities of which I was previously unaware).

I would also recommend Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" as an excellent complementary read, since it explores the relevance of molecular biology to this subject in greater detail.

I found Denton's book quite interesting but the critique slightly limited in its scope. Richard Milton's "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" was for me, a much better read and a lot more informative. I believe Milton also claims to be "non-creationist".

Anyway, the heart of the issue for both books is the veracity of the theory of general or macro-evolution.

Going by the latest issue of Time magazine, many of us continue to be fascinated by the topic. I suspect we seek the answers not so much because we are interested in Archeopteryx or Australopethicus or biogenesis per se, but because we want to be a little clearer as to whether we are accountable to God.

For what it's worth, I think we are.

I just wanted to provide a clarification for the benefit of the readers. Several of the reviewers have implied that Denton is a Creationist or a member of the teleological design movement. That is untrue. Denton makes it very clear that he believes there are natural causes for life that have yet to be discovered. He believes that life can not be completely explained by Neo Darwinian evolution but makes no claims that it was specially created.

In an interview he is quoted as saying

"There are various forms of teleological theories, extending from Creationist intervention theories to nature mysticism. But these theories are (I don't want to be derogatory) an occultist type of theory. You can't really find any evidence that such phenomena are operating in nature, but you can see that natural selection can operate. This is a great strength of Darwinism. Although I think it is totally incapable of accounting for the broad picture, the complex adaptations required by the tree of life, it's certainly capable of generating a certain degree of evolutionary change. That is its great strength."

It is very clear throughout Denton's book that he considers creationism to be a myth and teleological design in general to be unscientific.

In his own words, Creation and design hypotheses in general are an "occultism type of theory."

So the accusation that he wrote this book with a certain philosophical priori in mind are unfair and inaccurate.

As to the criticism that Denton offers no alternative to Neo Darwinian theory, I can only say that that's a very large burden to place ont he shoulders of one man. Scientific revolutions are rarely made by a single individual. Even Darwin's hypothesis was spawned initially from the works of others before it came to stand on its own. Darwin's claim to fame is suggesting that changes in organisms are random and not directed. Before Darwin it was accepted that organisms change, but the idea is that change was somehow directed by the organism in some mysterious fashion. Those are the key differences in evolutionary thought before and after Darwinism.

In this book Dention is merely trying to get us to consider that Neo Darwinian evolution does not explain life completely, and should be reconsidered in some areas of science where it is applied.

It was said by one reviewer that Denton fails to provide another theory to replace evolution, yet that is circular logic. The implication in the reviewer's words is that Neo Darwinian evolution should be accepted until such a time as another theory can be provided. Yet, according to that logic, how can the sythesis of another theory explaining the origins of life even be attempted if one refuses to admit that there are problems in Neo Darwinian theory? Furthermore why should one even attempt to create another theory if no problems are perceived in the current theory?

Denton's purpose in writing this book therefore, is getting us to analyze the claims of Neo Darwinian theory, acknowledge the problems , and then proceed on the path to discovering a more complete theory of life.

As I stated before however, none of this can happen until it sufficiently demonstrated that there is a problem with the current theory. This is the purpose of Denton's book.

A theory should not be accepted just because there is nothing better to replace it.

I give this book three stars because the reviewer did have one good point. The information in Denton's book is severely outdated. To give just one example, one of the items in his list of proofs of evolution is Kettle's peppered moths. In 1998 however, Kettle's work was determined to have been falsified.

Since Kettle however, many other researchers have proven that evolution does happen. Or at least, we hope they've been far more honest than Kettle.

Also, this book lacks the insights from more recent research such as the human genome project. However, I cannot state for certain just how much recent research impacts Denton's arguments. Perhaps someone else can enlighten us on just how much the human genome project has taught us about macroevolution and Neo Darwinian theory.


All the recent research in the world will not matter if it does not give us new insights into how Neo Darwinian evolution might work on a macroevolutionary scale.

Despite its dated nature however, I found Denton's book to be enjoyable. He is objective and fair minded and that is quite rare in this modern age. If nothing else his book is valuable for its historical content. illustrates how the idea of evolution has changed throughout the years, and in doing that reminds us that even scientists are vulnerable to the human desire to "see what one wishes to see." Of looking through colored lenses so to speak.

It's amazing to me that Denton's book written 15 years ago (1985)has been largely ignored. It is the best book I have ever read in criticism of The Theory of Evolution; and it does it from a purely scientific basis. Denton a Molecular Biologist removes all of the supports (if there ever were any) from Darwin's theory of macro-evolution (continuity of life). Denton blasts all of the previous arguments made by the pro-evolutionists showing that there is essentially no support of macro-evolution in the fossil record. He also, clearly demonstrates that there is no support coming from his specialty molecular biology. In the end the only sound explanation he can make is that life is profoundly discontinous. Denton makes another point that is particularly interesting, he demonstrates that it is the anti-evolutionists (not to be confused with creationists) that have always utilized a scientific approach to their argument while the evolutionists have been guilty of at best pseudo-science. This book is worth reading for anyone who wants to approach the subject matter objectively and scientifically.

This book is for those who think that only religious believers are motivated to reject evolution. Denton, who is not a religious believer, has much to say about the serious flaws of evolutionary theory. His intellectual honesty is refreshing.

A must for anyone interested in understanding the fundamentals of Evolution. Mr. Denton performs the near-impossible as he brings the basics of Evolution to a level comprehendable by the layperson. From fossils to microbiology, explore the origins of man as presented by few others. A little foggy on the details? Unable to discuss the subject in an expert manner? This book is a must. Denton may be the most honest scientist in the field today!

The author presented very convincing arguments that raised doubts about Darwin's theory of evolution. The evidence is especially convincing coming from a non-creationist. The author states that since Darwin's theory appears to be improbable, if not impossible, perhaps scientists need to develop new theories about how live began and how it progressed.

I came to this book as a person who has absolutely no problem in accepting Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection ("TENS"). After all, TENS is the account taught throughout my academic career, it seems to be universally accepted by most - essentially all - reputable scientists, and, then, there are all those fossils of animals and plants that no longer exist and a fossil record that tells when the animals that we are familiar with began to exist. Obviously there was a world of "then" - deep in the past- and the world of "now" and the two worlds are related in some fashion. Something obviously happened over time, and the best explanation is that the animals and plants that existed "then" became the animals and plants that exist "now."

I have no problem with that idea whatsoever. But when I start to think about the details of evolution - the mechanics of how evolution occurred - I start having problems. How do mutations create new structures? How does chance give rise to the coordinated new structures required for birds to fly - i.e., the unique structure of the feather and the unique structure of the avian lung - or for whales to live in the water - i.e., morphological changes plus changes in the teats of whale mothers and the throats of whale babies required before whales can be born in the ocean? How do these mutations become a species? Is it a long and gradual process of an entire population - in which case, how does it happen in spite of the preservation of dominant traits and regression to the mean? Or is it "saltational" - big jumps by "lucky" individuals, in which case how do they manage to share their genes if the jump is too big? I would like answers to these questions, but I have noticed that the answers seem to short on details and long on tautology. The standard answer seems to go, "well, obviously, coordinated new structures can arise because that is what obviously happened." My response is usually, "I am not saying that doesn't happen, but how does it happen." The counter-response is, "It must happen because TENS is true," and I respond, "but how?"

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The thesis of Denton's book is that these questions - and many other - are a real problem for TENS and that TENS and the scientists who are deeply invested in TENS do not have any good answer for these questions. The eminence grise behind Denton's book, who makes an explicit appearance in the final chapter, is Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Kuhn's thesis was that science advances only after the structure of an existing science has been undermined by questions and contradictions that are unanswerable under the assumptions of the prevailing scientific theory - the "paradigm" under which the scientists operate. At that point, the old science is ripe for a revolution, when someone has an insight that shifts the way of looking at the problem, and the older science is swept away by the new (although, as Kuhn says, the new science doesn't coopt the older scientists so much as it makes the older scientists holding the older paradigm irrelevant - science advances death by death, according to Kuhn, sort of like evolution.)

Denton's book starts with a long historical look at the history of Darwin's ideas and TENS' assumption that species would develop throug a long, long, gradualistic change within a population. This is a necessary discussion, but unless one is interested in 19th Century scientists like Darwin, Huxley, Agassiz and Cuvier, it seemed long and dry. Denton then moves on to discuss "typology" and its implications. Typology posits that there are actual "types" of species as opposed to a gradual, continuum of form. Nature in fact, according to Denton, is characterized by discontinuities, and not by continuity. Again, this account seemed to be a necessary if not intrinsically interesting introduction before he got down to his real thesis.

When Denton moved on to his actual task - outlining and explaining the contradictions in the evidence for TENS - the book became something of a page turner. Denton makes the point that the fossil record lacks the transitional species that Darwin predicted would exist. Of course, I've heard this argument a thousand times as a kind of straw man argument made by my teachers and by scientists shortly before they shot it down. How can, I have wondered, his argument be made in the light of the fossil evidence of the horse and the archaeopteryx? This is probably the first time that I've heard a critic of the fossil record make the argument for himself, and, now that I've heard it, the argument seems like a fair one.

Denton points out that we lack the fossils of the transitions between the new type and the old type. So, with respect to Archeopterix what we have evidence of is a bird. Archeopterix has the feathers and wing structure of a bird. Admittedly, it has teeth and it has claws on the end of its wings, but those forelimb structures are wings, and the feathers are feathers with the complex interlocking barbules that stiffen the feather for fight. Where are the feathers with "half barbules" or "three quarter barbules"? Undiscovered, as yet. And, similarly, the archaeopteryx wing is a wing, not a half or three quarter wing. Where is the fossil evidence of the animal that was just slightly in to the process of sacrificing the use of its forelimbs in favor of a new form of propulsion? Who knows?

Denton points out that this is typical of the fossil record. We don't find the transitional creatures that are supposed to be there for the transition between types. What we do find is fossils that show the type fully developed. This is true of even the living fossils held up as transitional creatures between Linnaean classes, such as the duck-billed platypus and the lungfish. Both are held up as being transitional animals - between reptiles and mammals in the case of the platypus and between fish and amphibians in the case of the lungfish. And yet, according to Denton, on closer examination, we don't find transitional creatures, we find a "mosaic" of fully developed traits of the respective classes. (See p. 107 - 108. Hence, according to Denton the platypus has a reproductive system that is "almost fully reptilian" but, of course, it also has mammalian hair, and the lungfish is likewise a mosaic of fully developed fish and amphibian systems.

According to Denton, this is typical of the fossil record. Denton writes, "all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record" (p. 162), which in the face of the idea of continuous and gradual development seems to be a trick like not unlike Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus. At their first appearance, angiosperms - the flowering plants that would remake the world - were already divided into different classes. (p. 163. Ditto with vertebrates and fish (p. 164), and the amazing proliferation of life preserved in the Burgess shale. (p. 161. In fact, it may be the case that life itself in the form of the cell had this characteristic of a sudden appearance with the essential elements that it would contain for all time. According to Denton, while the traditional view posited billions of years to happen, the current evidence is that we find the modern cell in existence within a few hundred million years of the Earth "cooling off." This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that for the cell to exist at least two things had to happen simultaneously: there had to be a cell wall that could contain and protect a "transcription machine" that would regulate the activities of the cell, one activity of which would be the manufacture of the cell wall. Chicken meet egg.

Denton's book seems to be dated. One reason I was reluctant to read it, and a fact that constantly recurred to my mind while I was reading it, was that the book was written in 1986, the Paleolithic period of our genetic/biological/archeological knowledge of evolutionary history. This seems to be a serious drawback for the book but on further inspection, I'm not sure it is. For example, Denton makes a great deal about the absence of fossils of the intermediate species leading from a land animal to the whale, including an otter precursor, a dugong precursor, etc.

During the 90's, however, these precursors were discovered, but what do these discoveries do to Denton's thesis? I'm not sure. One reason I'm not sure is that they seem to confirm Denton's point about the absence of intermediate fossils with respect to key changes in animals from one type to another. The internet has some clever and superficially convincing videos showing these transitional types. The problem for me, though, in light of Denton's point about types appearing fully developed is that the video shows that happening in the transition from Kutchicetus to Dorudon. Dorudon appears to be a whale, i.e., a form that lives entirely in the water, unlike the Kutchicetus, which is depicted as a fully developed otter. These two types either give birth on land (in the case of the otter-like Kutchicetus) or in the water (in the case of the dugong-like Dorudon. But where is the species that is developed for either kind of birth? Who knows? So, while the presentation in the video seems superficially convincing, I still have questions.

Likewise, how do we know that Pakicetus and Ambulocetas were in fact precursors to the modern whale? The answer is that both were found to have a particular bone that is found today only in whales. Mmm...okay ...fine...so there is no typology of form, except when it comes to identifying precursor species? How do we know that there weren't random mutations in completely different orders that gave rise to this kind of bone and then died out?

I'll agree that such a supposition doesn't seem likely and perhaps it is ruled out by the "law of parsimony" but it does seem ad hoc to appeal to typology while denying typology.

In addition, it may be the case that the last thirty years have provided confirmatory evidence for Denton's thesis. For example, it is not hard to find stories such as the one concerning the discovery of a fossilized "Jurassic beaver" that lived 160 million years ago and which has forced scientists to revise and reconsider the diversity of mammals at a time when they were traditionally viewed as primitive shrew-like creatures running scared from the dinosaurs. In fact, every few years, scientists seem to find new fossils that significantly push back the time at which typological traits developed and, thus, seems to rule out the gradual development thesis. In light of the newly -discovered evidence, Denton's claim that ""all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record" seems to get stronger as time passes.

Ultimately, though, for me at least, Denton explains why I remain a dissatisfied Darwinist; it's the only game in town. In his final chapter on Kuhn's approach to the philosophy of science, Denton points out that you can't beat something with nothing. Pointing out the problems in a science is only the first step to replacing the science. The next step is coming up with a theory that explains the problems that were paradoxical under the previous paradigm. Denton does not provide that theory as far as I could tell. Undoubtedly, his purpose was to highlight the problems in TENS so as to start a discussion "outside the box" of TENS.

But we don't have that theory yet. What we have is TENS. So, until a better one comes along, I will have to take TENS on faith with respect to the conundrums and paradoxes that Denton points out. It may ultimately be the only game that is ever in town. As Denton suggests in his final chapter, "There is still a possibility that living systems could possess some novel, unknown property or charactristics which might conceivably have played a role in evolution." In light of the evidence of types emerging fully developed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, that may well be the case. Perhaps the unknown property we don't understand is the property that answers to the "final cause," or teleology, as discussed by Etienne Gilson in From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution, but as Gilson points out that discussion is not "scientific" because science has restricted itself from all considerations of final causes in order that it can do its "scientific thing."

The reader of this revew should understand that the last paragraph was my speculation. Denton does not make any foray into theology or mysticism. He stays firmly planted in the world of science with its limitation to two causes - the material and the efficient - and its mechanistic, naturalistic assumptions.

Denton's book is well-written. As far as I could tell from a layman's perspective, it was fair and accurately recounted the evidence available at the time. It should be read by anyone with an interest in evolutionary theory.