Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1612352 in Books
• Published on: 1984-09-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Fun as an anti-Darwinian polemic but no advance in science
In a set of knock-about arguments, Gordon Rattray Taylor twits the orthodox defenders of Darwinian evolution, attempting to expose it as an inadequate explanation reinforced by dogmatism. Unfortunately, most of its argument is directed at Taylor's own misunderstanding of Darwinism and is made at the polemical level, revealing for instance the personal dogmatism of some biology professors.

A regrettable personal hostility to Charles Darwin goes with the territory here: thus Taylor reminds us that Darwin was unjust to Lamarck (ironically so, because Darwin was a Lamarckian) and he made only a grudging acknowledgement of the influence of his grand-father, Erasmus Darwin (saying that 'Zoonomia' had merely 'anticipated the erroneous opinions of Lamarck').

Taylor composes arguments from incredulity (it is impossible to believe that complex life got here by chance), misunderstands randomness in evolution (no one actually says complex life got here by chance) and latches onto every problem recognized by any biologist as destructive for the whole scheme. In reference to adaptations in birds for flight, for example, Taylor says

'It strains the imagination to visualise so many beautifully apt changes occurring by chance, [even in 150 million years]. For my part I can imagine that each change might have occurred by chance during that time; what I find hard to swallow is the accumulation of different changes integrated into a single functional pattern'. [Nu?]

Ultimately, Taylor offers a theory of orthogenetic evolution or progressive genetic evolution. An example is what he calls 'overshoot', where a characteristic which is useful at first continues to grow beyond any reasonable use, such as the absurdly large horns of the Irish Elk. Perhaps we can add to this something like Vavilov's law of homologous series in variation. The aim is to find a means by which evolution need not try out unproductive or less useful adaptations, thereby vastly reducing the element of chance. Because Taylor misunderstood the role of chance in evolution, it is not clear that such a hypothetical mechanism is required, even were there any evidence for it.

Besides the fun of the polemic, the value of such works as 'The Great Evolution Mystery' is that they discuss scientific problems that orthodox text-books and popularisers either ignore or skirt over because they do not currently have answers for them. It is always useful to expose oneself to such problems, so 'anomalous' natural history is the best part of this book.