Hey, I’m just a layman, too, Peter. My real beat is math, not biology. I

do feel very strongly, though, that science has cleared a little patch of

reason in a great dark chittering jungle of unreason, and I am keen to

defend that patch. “Trust science!” seems to me a good conservative

position; and I do not believe it is a coincidence that govts of the

imperial-despotic type rarely produce any good science. Think of all those

weird pseudoscience fads that swept the old USSR.

On the particular point about fossils: As I said, the process of

fossilization is very occasional & arbitrary, so you shouldn’t expect much

from the fossil record. And, as I also said, the process of mutation is

poorly understood, though I think we are at the threshold (in fact, a step

or two over the threshold) of great new understandings in this area from

molecular genetics.

The real conundrum is how species-change proceeds. Is it a fairly steady

process, or does it come in bursts? Suppose, for example, over a ten

million year span, a certain class of life-forms got fossilized ten times,

at million-year intervals. If mutation goes along at a steady clip, you

would expect to see ten stages in a continuous process of change. If, on

the other hand, things go along without much change for a long time, then

there is a sudden burst of variation, then between some consecutive two of

your ten fossil “snapshots” you would see the abrupt appearance of new

species, without any intermediate forms. Which, in fact, is mostly what we

do see.

That is one big conundrum in standard-model evolution theory. The other one

is the one Behe fixes on: How do complex systems arise out of simpler ones?

The honest answer, which I should like to have taught to my children in

school science lessons, is: We currently don’t know. Behe’s answer, which

I should NOT wish taught to my kids in science lessons (though I have no

problem with their being taught it in Sunday School, or in a home-schooled

or parochial-school religion class) is: **I** know! — God makes it happen.

However, my impression is that we are inching our way towards a better

understanding of complexity and its origins. There was much about this in

Stephen Wolfram’s book, which I reviewed for NRODT. Most

of what Wolfram says is gassy and (in my opinion) wrong-headed, but here and

there he made me think. The experiments with computer-simulated

evolutionary processes at U Mich that I mentioned (and which have a write-up

in the Feb 05 DISCOVER) are also very interesting in this context, though at

present in too primitive a state to actually prove anything much. They tend

to support, for example, the idea of change coming in sudden bursts after

long spells of stasis.

The history of science over the past 400 years suggests rather strongly that

a bet against there being a natural explanation for any observable

phenomenon is a bad bet. Summoning in the Supernatural to fill gaps in our

understanding has been a steady loser. I could not prove to you that this

will continue to be so: but that’s the way to bet!

As a postscript, here is a just-about-related story from genetics. A dear

friend of ours, who was a neuro-genetics researcher at Cold Spring Harbor

lab, left to take up a new job at a neuroscience institute in Maryland. This guy is Chinese. We took

the family to a restaurant for a farewell dinner last weekend. I asked him

if he would still be working on fruit flies, as he had at CSH. No, he said,

mice. I congratulated him on having graduated to mice, then said: “Wouldn’t

you get rich a lot faster working on human genetics?” He shook his head.

“Can’t do the experiments.” How about in China? I asked. “Oh, yes. In

China they do them….”