Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [65]
The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2–3 ft) most disgusting, clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the sea.—Somebody calls them “imps of darkness.”—They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.1
When Frank Sulloway and I hit the beaches of San Cristóbal 170 years later, we searched in vain for Darwin’s imps. In their stead we spotted feral cats darting in and out of the black boulders, the largest, fastest, and stealthiest cats imaginable. The adult marine iguanas are too large and leathery for the fugitive felines, but the juveniles make easy targets. Without a juvenile cohort to maintain a viable breeding population, the iguanas suffered geographic extinction.
Frank and I reported this glum news to our colleagues at the 2005 World Summit on Evolution that was being held on a coastal outskirt of the lively little fishing town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, adjacent to Frigatebird Hill.2 With 210 of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists in attendance, the conference illuminated the greatest unsolved mysteries of evolution.
The Known and the Unknown
In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara besieged the American public with eye-blurring statistical charts and graphs to demonstrate that we were winning a war in Vietnam that we were actually losing. Four decades later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attempted the same sleight of hand, when he employed his infamous epistemology of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns to explain the apparent nonexistence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.3
Creationists, Intelligent Design theorists, and outsiders to science often mistake the latter two categories for signs that the theory of evolution is in trouble, or that contentious debate between what we know and do not know means that the theory is false. Evolution is rich in controversy and disputation over the known and unknown. In reviewing what is on the cutting edge of debate within evolutionary biology, we discover the real questions we should be asking about evolution. If Intelligent Design creationists want to “teach the controversy,” here are just a few of the major questions scientists are asking—and hoping to answer—about the origin and evolution of life.
How Did Life Begin and
What Is the Origin of DNA?
Creationists revel in “how did it all begin?” questions, and the opening session of the Evolution Summit was on the origins of life, starting with a lecture by Antonio Lazcano, President of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life and a scientist at the Universidad Autónoma de México. Lazcano theorized that there were three sources for the primordial soup: volcanic out-gassing, high-temperature submarine vents and fumaroles, and outer space—the 4.6-billion-year-old Murchison meteorite, discovered in Australia in 1969, for example, was loaded with such chemical building blocks of life as amino acids, aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, hydroxy acids, purines, and pyrimidines. “The evidence strongly suggests that prior to the origin of life the primitive Earth already had many different catalytic agents, polymers with sequences of nucleotides, and membrane-forming compounds,” Lazcano inferred, concluding that this prebiotic soup led to the first replicators, most likely RNA, and this led to the more complicated DNA replicator of today.
In his commentary on Lazcano’s lecture, the UCLA paleobiologist William Schopf, pace Rumsfeld, asked: “What do we know? What are the unsolved problems? What have we failed to consider?” Schopf answered himself: “We know the overall sequence of life’s origin, from CHONSP [carbon,