Bounded Variations
Not only do Mendel’s laws give a
theoretical explanation for why variations are limited, broad
experimental verification also exists (a). For example, if evolution happened, organisms (such as bacteria) that quickly produce the most offspring should have the most variations and mutations. Natural selection would then select the more favorable changes, allowing organisms with those traits to survive, reproduce, and pass on their beneficial genes. Therefore, organisms that have allegedly evolved the most should have short reproduction cycles and many offspring. We see the opposite. In general, more complex organisms, such as humans, have fewer offspring and longer reproduction cycles (b). Again, variations within existing organisms appear to be bounded.
Organisms that occupy the most diverse environments in the greatest numbers for the longest times should also, according to macroevolution, have the greatest potential for evolving new features and species. Microbes falsify this prediction as well. Their numbers per species are astronomical, and they are dispersed throughout almost all the world’s environments. Nevertheless, the number of microbial species is relatively few (c). New features apparently don’t evolve.
a.
“...the discovery of the Danish scientist W. L. Johannsen that the more or less constant somatic variations upon which Darwin and Wallace had placed their emphasis in species change cannot be selectively pushed beyond a certain point, that such variability does not contain the secret of ‘indefinite departure.’ ” Loren Eiseley,
Darwin’s Century (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1958), p. 227.
b.
“The awesome morphological complexity of organisms such as vertebrates that have far fewer individuals on which selection can act therefore remains somewhat puzzling (for me at least), despite the geological time scales available...” Peter R. Sheldon, “Complexity Still Running,”
Nature, Vol. 350, 14 March 1991, p. 104.
c. Bland J. Finlay, “Global Dispersal of Free-Living Microbial Eukaryote Species,”
Science, Vol. 296, 10 May 2002, pp. 1061–1063.
[
From “In the Beginning” by Walt Brown]
