Gould's Three "Proofs" for Evolution as Fact

1. Microevolution. A point not in dispute is that variation occurs within species: Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, moths develop color changes in adaptation to changes in their environment, all the various races of humanity are descended from the original. But this truth provides no explanation for why the various types of living things developed in the first place. Nevertheless, for some evolutionists it suffices to marry observed microevolutionn to uniformitarianism (a philosophy) and declare victory. Part of the problem is the elasticity of the word "evolution," for it seems to cover just about anything the evolutionist desires.

2. The argument from imperfection, sometimes called the "God wouldn't have done it this way" argument, which implies that the evolutionary biologist is smarter than God. They think that instead God would have designed each living thing from scratch to maximize efficiency. This gets at the concept of homologies. Why use the same patterns of structures in different types of organisms to accomplish different functions? Why does the same set of bones in the rat, bat, porpoise, and man serve different ends? An intelligent designer, they insist, would have done better. But "the task of science is not to speculate about why God might have done things this way, but to see if a material explanation can be established by empirical investigation" (P. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, page 71). Many have tried to establish a mechanism for homologies via embryology, for "if homologous structures are relics of a common ancestor, they ought to be traceable to common embryonic parts." Darwin himself relied heavily upon what was known of embryology at his time as support for his theory. Unhappily for the evolutionists, the evidence from embryology is in the opposite direction; vertebrates appear to have multiple origins, not a common origin, and their common body parts are not homologies.

3. Transformations in the vertebrate sequence. This argument refers to what is hoped are the all-important transitional forms in the fossil record. Scanty they are, but Gould appealed to the existence of "mammal-like reptiles" and the "hominid descent line" as proof of evolution. We'll take up the vertebrate sequence next time.