Darwin’s Zombies Are Still Shambling Along

The Icons of Evolution that Dr Jonathan Wells wrote about 24 years ago have not been put out of our misery. Like denizens of Zombie Science, they keep reappearing in popular science articles, cartoons, and even scientific journals. The perpetrators should know better. There is no excuse for perpetuating the mythic fables that Darwinians have used to popularize just-so stories of how natural selection supposedly works (but doesn’t under the spotlight).

Two of the icons appeared in publications recently. The old stories are retold without remorse, in spite of the fact that new evidence contradicts them.

The Peppered Myth Still Walks

Perhaps word of the falsification of the peppered myth has not yet reached the Far East. That’s doubtful, but the University of Michigan co-authors of a new study that could have told their colleagues in Singapore and Japan not to write as if the peppered myth is still a valid case of natural selection. News from the University of Singapore says bluntly,

Lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) exhibit a splendid diversity of wing colour patterns, and many species display black and white, or dark and bright, wing colour pattern variants associated with the presence and absence of melanin. Many of these wing colour pattern variants are textbook examples of natural selection and evolution. Iconic examples include the rapid increase in frequency of the melanic form of the British peppered moth Biston betularia, driven by the sootier and darker environment caused by carbon burning and industrialisation in the late 1800s in the United Kingdom, and the mimetic radiation of Heliconius butterflies, among others. [Emphasis added.]

Can this be dismissed as a minor slip? Did they perhaps mean that peppered moths “were” or “used to be” textbook examples of natural selection and evolution? Clearly not; the press release includes a YouTube video by Antonia Monteiro, one of the co-authors of the paper in Science.¹ The narrator calls it a “classic Darwinian story of natural selection.” The video repeats the peppered myth in all its gory, hoary just-so story form, claiming that the coloration provided camouflage as the moths rested on tree trunks and that nature selected them because color changes helped them evade predators — false claims made by Kettlewell and never substantiated since. We remind everyone that both light and dark moths are variants of the same species: Biston betularia.There was no origin of species. In the quote, they state that “many species” display dark and light “variants” yet they call these “textbook examples of natural selection and evolution.” Within species? How is that kind of selection going to get brains from bacteria?

What’s ironic is that the scientific findings undermine natural selection as the cause of the color variants. As I mentioned in a recent article, researchers have been finding that microRNAs and noncoding RNAs are likely responsible for the color changes — not mutations to the cortex gene or to any other gene. This new paper identifies a particular microRNA named mir-193, a derivative of ivory, a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), as the regulatory switch that turns on light or dark coloration. The outcome depends on the switch’s interaction with ivory or with the mRNA transcript of another gene called ebony. 

The video illogically says, 

It appears that the mutations that regulate the presence and absence of ivory and mir-193 across many different species are the go-to mutations that are repeatedly used to create the dark/light polymorphisms in insects.

Do the moths (or a blind Selector) “use” mutations to “create” on purpose? These are not genetic mutations assumed in neo-Darwinism. They are switches present in all butterflies that can produce one polymorphism or another. In the case of peppered moths, both the dark and light forms existed before and after the industrial revolution. All the story demonstrated, therefore, was “a shift in the proportions of two existing varieties of the same species,” as Wells stated in Zombie Science (p. 64). And it was not demonstrated, Wells goes on to say, that the moths routinely rest on tree trunks or that predation by birds altered the proportions of the pre-existing varieties. 

This is hardly a classic case of natural selection, therefore, and certainly not an instance of the origin of species. The new research merely finds a regulatory switching mechanism that can produce dark or light polymorphisms within species. MicroRNA transcripts of noncoding RNAs are likely implicated in variability in other animals as well.

Overall, our study identified a miRNA, processed from the primary transcript of a lncRNA, as the likely effector of a hotspot locus that underlies adaptive evolution in animals. This adds to a recent discovery of small noncoding RNAs being key regulators of adaptive flower color evolution and speciation. The burst of miRNA innovation at the base of Lepidoptera may have served as evolutionary raw materials to create a gamut of morphological diversity within this order, one of the most species-rich on earth.

This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Darwinism

The authors never mention genetic mutations, selection, inheritance, or fitness. The paper never says that phenotypic plasticity helps moths avoid predators. And Darwin the gradualist would have shuddered at any “burst of innovation” at the base of a taxonomic group. The authors did not witness a burst of innovation. They only asserted it. 

This and future investigations of noncoding RNAs will shed light on the long-standing hypothesis that it is the complexity of swiftly evolving noncoding components of the genome (cis-acting regulatory DNA elements and trans-acting noncoding RNAs), rather than the relatively static evolution of protein sequences, that drives organismal complexity.

Here again they assert “swiftly evolving” parts of the genome without proof. The old gradualistic neo-Darwinism, updated for modern genetics, would only have produced “relatively static evolution of protein sequences” by mutations. Complexity within a species, genus or family because of regulatory elements is not the same as universal common ancestry due to natural selection of random mutations. How, then, can this be a “textbook example of natural selection and evolution” as the authors claim in the press release? The paper doesn’t even mention natural selection.

The authors do not say what cues — whether environmental or otherwise — trigger action by the mir-193 regulatory switch. They mention four times that the colors are “adaptive” in some way, but non-Darwinian interpretations are possible: genetic drift, or (as some ID researchers are proposing) internal engineering: i.e., switches that can be triggered by environmental cues. The return of the light-colored peppered moths after the industrial revolution suggests that the switching is reversible. Connecting the activity of miRNAs and lncRNAs to environmental cues sounds like a good follow-up experiment for non-Darwinian scientists. 

The Miller Myth Still Walks

It the same issue, Science trotted out another zombie icon for celebration: the Miller experiment.² In Darwinian style, Antonion Lazcano’s article, “On the origins of organisms,” praises both Aleksander Oparin and Stanley Miller. “The heterotrophic theory of the origin of life turns 100,” the subtitle announces triumphantly. Oparin’s 1924 book, The Origin of Life,

proposed that life had emerged in an oxygen-free primitive environment that led to the synthesis and accumulation of organic compounds that subsequently formed gel-like droplets from which the first heterotrophic organisms evolved. The volume became quite popular among student associations, workers’ clubs, and biology teachers, and the small edition quickly sold out, never to be reprinted. On its 100th anniversary, Oparin’s visionary work is worth revisiting.

Oparin the Marxist, who had been influenced by Ernst Haeckel, expanded his book for a 1936 edition whose 1938 translation was highly influential to Harold Urey. His PhD student Stanley Miller is pictured in a large photo standing by his spark-discharge apparatus.

Does Lazcano ever warn his readers that Oparin and Miller’s works have been demoted to irrelevant historical footnotes because the early earth likely had oxygen? Does he lament the fact that Miller used an improbable reducing atmosphere? Does he point out that the predominant product of the spark-discharge apparatus was tar that would have destroyed the desired products faster than they formed, had Miller not built a trap to separate them out? No; instead, he calls the experiment “spectacular” —

The 1938 English translation of Oparin’s second book played a seminal role in shaping Stanley L. Miller’s famous 1953 synthesis of amino acids and other organic compounds under possible primitive conditions. The spectacular results of Miller’s laboratory simulation marked the start of the laboratory phase of what we now call prebiotic chemistry.

Why Risky? And Useful to Whom?

Lazcano grants that “No scientific theory remains unchanged as time goes by, and the prebiotic soup remains a useful but risky metaphor.”

The fact that a number of biochemical components of contemporary forms of life can be synthesized nonenzymatically does not necessarily imply that they were also essential for the origin of life or that they were available in the primitive environment.

We do not know when, where, or how life appeared on Earth, but the current debates on the significance of extraterrestrial organic molecules, together with our laboratory reconstructions of primitive environments, are in themselves a recognition of the key role that prebiotic chemistry played in the processes that led to the emergence of the first life-forms.

Oparin and Miller had the right religion, in other words: materialism. They had the wrong atmosphere. They had the wrong ingredients. They interfered in the experimental design. But they had the right doctrine: some unknown form of “prebiotic chemistry” led to “the emergence of the first life-forms” — no intelligence allowed. 

For this reason — science notwithstanding — the mainstream media continues to allow these zombie icons to “shed light” on evolution, rising from the tombs, putting on Darwin costumes, holding up their sparking flasks, distributing samples of prebiotic soup to the townspeople as peppered moths flutter about their heads.

Notes

1. Shen Tian et al., A microRNA is the effector gene of a classic evolutionary hotspot locus. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1135-1141. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp7899.
2. Antonio Lazcano, On the origins of organisms. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1098-1099. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads5691.