Janus by Arthur Koestler

Author:Arthur Koestler [Koestler, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-05-01T16:12:54+00:00

Now according to the Darwinian schema, all these changes must have been gradual, each small step caused by a chance mutation. But it is obvious that each step, however small, required simultaneous, interdependent changes affecting all the factors involved in the story. Thus the liquid store in the albumen could not be kept in the egg without the hard shell. But the shell would be useless, in fact murderous, without the allantois and without the tin-opener. Each of these changes, if they had occurred alone, would have been harmful, and the organisms thus affected would have been weeded out by natural selection (or rather, as suggested above, by 'natural elimination'). You cannot have an isolated mutation A, preserve it over an incalculable number of generations until mutation B occurs in the same lineage and so on to C and D. Each single mutation would be wiped off the slate before it could be combined with all the others. They are all interdependent within the organism -- which is a functional whole, and not a mosaic. The doctrine that the coming together of all requisite changes was due to a series of coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation. In a recently published major work, Professor Pierre Grassé (who, for thirty years, held the chair for evolution at the Sorbonne without losing his Gallic wit) commented:

Where is the gambler, however obsessed with his passion, who would be crazy enough to bet on the roulette of random evolution? The creation, by grains of dust carried by the wind, of Dürer's Melancholia has a probability less infinitesimal than the construction of an eye through the mishaps which might befall the DNA molecule -- mishaps which have no connection whatsoever with the future functions of the eye. Daydreaming is permissible, but science should not succumb to it. [Grassé's italics] [28]

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