Proof of Evolution!

            I called him Ubermaus.¹ The bottom drawer in the kitchen showed the tell-tale signs: our entire collection of Taco Bell and Arby Sauce packets sucked dry! The hunt began that night: a dollop of peanut butter on your standard Victor mouse trap. The next morning he had licked the trap clean without tripping it. Next was cheese—two traps. He only needed one to fill his stomach which he accomplished by tripping the trap without getting caught and then eating the morsel at his leisure. Smart mouse. It was time to say “no” to a merciful death: glue traps.

            That night he got his dinner and managed to pull himself free from the glue trap by hauling it and himself out of a plastic tray twice his height—yanking and levering, he pulled his way to freedom. Strong as well as smart. But I didn’t know how intelligent till the next day when I opened the drawer to find that the little grey guy had chewed up some cardboard packaging, maneuvered it onto the newest glue trap as flooring, and walked safely to his free meal.

            It was then that I realized I was dealing with no ordinary rat. This was an ubermaus—obviously a genetic mutation, a visible example of processes in Darwinian evolution resulting in the production of a new species: Rodentia Mousketeerus—the Super Mouse. Highly intelligent and, it turned out, nearly invulnerable. I finally caught him in a regular trap. But even with his stomach and head flattened he remained alive, fighting for freedom. He lost the battle, but I wonder (having met the next evolution in mousedom) how much longer till they become the dominant species on the planet?

The Problem with Evolution

            My evolutionary take on Ubermaus is a great example of what’s wrong with calling evolutionary theory a fact. All of the following “facts” are, like my encounter with the mutant mouse, “proof” of evolution:

1. The “tailbone” or coccyx is supposedly a “vestigial organ” left over from when we had tails. It has since been learned that the muscles for childbirth, rectal control, the small-of-the-back muscles and the muscles that hold the lower abdominal organs into place are controlled by this part of the spine. Other “left over” organs, thought once to be necessary but now useless as we’ve evolved out of needing them include the tonsils (which help the immune system), the appendix (which helps immunity and makes red blood cells in embryos before the spleen and bone marrow take over) and the pituitary gland.

2. Piltdown Man was a human/ape hybrid (skull like a human, jaw like an orangutan) which turned out to be an outright fraud. Other fakes include the embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel from 1866 which show embryos developing through the various primitive stages of life—the drawings were fake. Most recently a fake dino-bird fossil, Archaeorapter liaogensis, was proven to be a combination of two separate animal fossils.²

3. Nebraska Man was a mistake. A human/ape creature was carefully and scientifically deduced from a single tooth fossil which eventually turned out to be the tooth of a boar. In the 1970’s, when I looked in my text book at school, I saw pictures of Neandrathal Man, an ape like hominid who preceeded modern man and Cro-magnon.³ In the 1980’s I was shown new pictures of Neandrathal and he looked nothing so apelike as he had a decade before. Then in the 90’s I learned that he hadn’t preceded modern man by two evolutionary links but had actually lived at the same time as modern man, a separate species in the evolutionary pool, sharing common ancestry but not the missing link from lower apes to man.

            The problem with evolution is science, and the problem with science is that it is built on false assumptions having little to do with science but everything to do with philosophy. You’ve heard the phrase, “You can’t argue with the facts.” Sounds reasonable. It’s just wrong. There is a subjective element in every act of human knowing. What we know and what is real (the facts) are connected by an act of interpretation. A man shows me an object and says, “This is a missing link in human evolution.” I respond, “No, it’s a skull.” There’s a difference between the fact and the interpretation, but behind much scientific practice is the belief that we can know facts objectively, apart from any interpretation. This is not a question for science but for a branch of philosophy called Epistemology(the study of how we know).

Philosophy is Not Science

            For a hundred and fifty years science has been dominated by two philosophies which have nothing to do with fact or scientific method. The first philosophy, Rationalism or Logical Positivism, is the belief that man can find answers to everything through reason. This is a belief system, not a scientific hypothesis provable by experimentation. The second philosophy, Naturalism, is an assumption based on false reasoning: “Since all we can see is nature, nature must be all there is.” Naturalism is not a conclusion that must be drawn from facts. It’s a philosophical position from which many scientists make interpretations of facts.

            My interpretation of the nature of Ubermaus is clearly a silly thing. My point, however, is not. The failure of science in evolution (and I would even say in Creation theory as well) is born of a false philosophy of knowing which ignores subjective interpretation. It isn’t that the science is bad. It’s that the thinking is. Only those scientists who have really wrestled with the problem of interpretation in knowing—that is, only those scientists who have also spent time studying things other than science—come close to seeing the limitations of any attempt at finding the origins of man (or mouse).

¹ German for "Supermouse"—it makes me sound smarter. (back to reference)

² See National Geographic, 11/99 and 10/2000 for the full story. (back to reference)

³ This famous picture by Rudolph Zallinger, ASCENT OF MAN from "Early Man" (1965) continues to appear in textbooks even today—check out Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth (2000) by Jonathan Wells. (back to reference)