Colin Patterson (1933-1998) was the Senior Principal Scientific Officer in the Paleontology Department of British Museum of Natural History in London, from 1962-1993. He also gave a famous (infamous?) talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on November 5, 1981, in which he asked the discussion group listening, "Can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing that is true?" (Creationists had secretly taped this talk, and now sell recordings and transcripts of it.) He also wrote
Molecules and Morphology in Evolution: Conflict or Compromise?
.
This book was originally written in 1978, and it was revised by him in 1999. He states in the Foreword to the 1978 edition, "In writing this book I have set out to produce an account of modern evolutionary theory which does not beg too many questions, and is complete enough to be coherent, but simple enough to be comprehensible to those with little or no technical knowledge of biology." He begins by stating, "The modern theory of evolution is the basis of biological science. It is an idea that unifies and directs work in all sorts of specialized fields, from medicine to geology."
He states (1st edition), "Many species have features, like individual bristles in insects, details of wing coloration in butterflies or fingerprint patterns in man, which are genetically controlled, but appear to be so trivial that they can make no difference to the survival of the individual, and can have no selective value.... If these features are useless, how did they become fixed by natural selection? Genetic drift--a mechanism which could fix neutral or useless features by chance--provided a welcome explanation of such difficulties."
He adds, "Darwin cited several sorts of observations which would, in his view, destroy his theory.... Darwin's potential tests may strike the reader as pretty feeble, or as tests of natural selection rather than evolution. But many discoveries, not foreseen by Darwin, provide more severe tests of the theory. These include Mendelian genetics; the real age of the earth; the universality of DNA and the genetic code; and the evidence of protein biochemistry. Evolution has survived all these with flying colors."
In the Preface to the 2nd edition, he said, “I could say that the first edition of the book was written in ignorance and the second in knowledge… The knowledge in my first edition came from education and indoctrination; it was that now-Darwinism is certainty. The knowledge in this second edition comes more from working things out for myself; it is that evolution is certainty. And part of the ignorance in the first edition concerned the difference between neo-Darwinism and evolution, whereas the ignorance in this edition is of the completeness of neo-Darwinism as an explanation of evolution.”
He notes, “Most observed mutations are harmful and recessive but it does not follow that new mutations will also be recessive, for it is very likely that the mutations observed… have appeared millions of times before in previous generations and it may be that selection has adjusted the dominant/recessive mechanism so that the mutation does least damage…” (Pg. 38) Later, he adds, “genetic drift can cause even slightly disadvantageous mutations to be fixed in small populations, against the pressure of selection… The fact that some attribute of an organism APPEARS useless is no guarantee that it IS useless… some do, in fact, have survival value… it is never possible to prove that a feature has no survival value and is selectively neutral: we might not have looked carefully or closely enough.” (Pg. 43) He continues, “In nature, favorable mutations must be rare. This is because existing species are the result of past selection, which will have brought them close to the best possible adaptation to their surroundings, so that mutations… will decrease that adaptation. Favorable mutations are more likely in a changing or deteriorating environment, when mutations that were previously harmful may become valuable… a favorable mutation conferring a 1% advantage may have to occur about 50 times before, by chance, it becomes sufficiently widespread in the population to have a secure future.” (Pg. 45-46)
He observes, “These two models of speciation are not mutually exclusive. The gradual model (the one favored by Darwin) might prevail in rather uniform environments, and the rapid, revolutionary one (sometimes called ‘quantum speciation’) in fluctuating or ‘patchy’ environments… But the fact is that no one has actually observed the origin of even one new species in nature and we cannot tell if the gradual or quantum model is the dominant one… we do not yet know whether the dominant force in speciation in Darwin’s natural selection, or the neutral changes that will inevitably accumulate to differentiate populations that are separated.” (Pg. 98-99)
He states, “Darwin paid special attention to what … [are] now usually called ‘vestigial organs’)… Under Darwin’s view… vestigial organs are readily explained as structures that were functional in ancestral species but are now selected against. It can be argued that we know too little of the function and construction of organisms, and that a whale’s pelvis or the hair on our legs really serves some purpose but there are vestiges at the molecular level which escape that criticism.” (Pg. 106)
He admits, “It seemed obvious to [Darwin] that, if his theory of evolution is correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it because each geological stratum should contain links between the species or earlier and later strata and… it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor-descendent sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not so in Darwin’s time and today, after many more decades of assiduous fossil collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps.” (Pg. 106)
He explains, “are we justified… in making the leap from small-scale changes like selection in peppered moths… to large-scale results such as the existence of elephants and oak trees? Some evolutionists … have felt that the original appearance of birds, or land vertebrates… requires innovations that cannot be satisfactorily explained by gradual, small-scale changes. So they have supposed that major innovations arise at one step, by large-scale… macromutations… The main reason for inventing these macromutations is that some features of plants and animals can hardly be imagined as arising in gradual steps… intermediate steps seem to be useless, or even harmful… What use are feathers unless then are ‘proper’ feathers? What use is a lung that is half-developed, and cannot give you enough oxygen? How can the segmentation of an … earthworm or a centipede arise bit by bit? An animal is either segmented or it is not… the principle of preadaptation… explains puzzles like feathers and lungs by showing that intermediate stages … could be promoted by selection … for a quite different reason (heat conservation, buoyancy)… Some of the innovations requiring ‘hopeful monsters’ have yielded to explanations of this sort, but others remain unsolved and the idea of macromutations as a force in evolution persists.” (Pg. 113-114)
He cautions, “When published the first edition of this book I was hardly aware of creationism but, during the 1980s, like many other biologists I learned that one should think carefully about candor in argument (in publications, lectures or correspondence) in case one was furnishing creationist campaigners with ammunition in the form of ‘quotable quotes,’ often taken out of context.” (Pg. 122)
Patterson’s first edition was already an excellent work, and this second edition makes it even more valuable.
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