Interest in the Cambrian fossils (what word should I use here?)
exploded some years back when Stephen Jay Gould published his
book _Wonderful Life_ in 1989. One of Gould's main objectives
in publishing this book was to debunk public misconceptions
about the reality of the fossil record. One common misconception
pervasive throughout society is that the fossil record, in
accord with Darwinian theory, reveals diversity preceding
disparity. Gould deals extensively about the history of this
interpretation by examing both the actual fossil record and
the way the fossil record has been portrayed by generations of
evolutionists. In setting the record straight, Gould airs an
awful lot of dirty laundry. Here is an excerpt:
"In his _Regular Gradation in Man_, British physician Charles
White shoehorned all the ramifying diversity of vertebrate
life into a single motley sequence running from birds through
crocodiles and dogs, past apes, and up the conventional racist
ladder of human groups to a Caucasian paragon, described with
the rococo flourish of White's dying century:
'Where shall we find, unless in the European, that
nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of
brain....? Where the perpendicular face, the prominent
nose, and round projecting chin? Where that variety of
features, and fullness of expression, ... those rosy
cheeks and coral lips? (White, 1799)'
[The labels to these illustrations read as follows:
{illegible bird}, Crocodile, Greyhound, Great Southern Hound,
Bull Dog, Monkey, Man-of-the-Woods, Orang-Ootang, {illegible},
Negro, American Savage, Asiatic, European, {next 3 illegible
Europeans}]
This tradition never vanished, even in our modern enlightened
age. In 1915, Henry Fairfield Osborn celebrated the linear
accretion of cognition in a figure full of illuminating errors
[The figure depicts a series of inscribed cross sections of
brains with sizes, in order: Chimpanzee, Pithecanthropus,
Piltdown, Neanderthal, and Modern Man]. Chimps are not ancestors
but modern cousins, equally distant in evolutionary terms from
the unknown forebare of African great apes and humans.
Pithecanthropus (Homo Erectus in modern times) is a potential
ancestor, and the only legitimate member of the sequence. The
inclusion of Piltdown is especially revealing. We now know that
Piltdown was a fraud composed of a modern human cranium and an
ape's jaw. As a contemporary cranium, Piltdown possessed a
brain of modern size; yet so convinced were Osborn's colleagues
that human fossils must show intermediate values on a ladder
of progress, that they reconstructed Piltdown's brain according
to their expectations. As for Neanderthal, these creatures were
probably close cousins belonging to a separate species, not
ancestors. In any case, they had brains as large as ours, or
larger, Osborn's ladder notwithstanding.
Nor have we abandoned this iconography in our generation.
Consider figure 1.5, from a Dutch translation of one of my
own books! [The figure depicts a series of 5 man-apes,
walking in stride from ape to man. The caption reads:
'A personally embarrassing illustration of our allegiance
to the iconography of the march of progress. My books
are dedicated to debunking this picture of evolution, but
I have no control over the jacket designs for foreign
translations....']" [pp 28-31]
Gould extensively discusses the "Tree of Life" illustrations
of Ernst Haeckel which fallaciously depicts diversity preceding
disparity. Gould shows how Haeckel's disproportionate branches
leading up the vertebrate phylogeny to modern man exposes
Haeckel's preconceived biases rather than a detailed construction
from the fossil data itself. We need not belabor Haeckel's
personal integrity. He would be too easy a target for us
"conspiratorialists." But it is important to realize that Haeckel
had a profound influence in establishing Darwinism in Europe
and especially Germany. And in retrospect, the course he charted
was unfortunately set on a very false trajectory.
Gould also studied the personal notes of Charles D. Walcott, who
performed the pioneering studies of the Burgess shale, which is
one of the most important deposits for study of Cambrian fossils.
Walcott spent a frustrating career trying to make sense of the
enigmatic abrupt appearance of fossils with profound disparity
and no observed ancestors. He simply could not make sense of
the data within the rigid Darwinian paradigm of diversity
preceding disparity.
Gould does not describe people like Walcott as deceitful. But
he forcefully makes the case that our preconceptions can have
a powerful influence on coloring our perception of reality.
And when the facts didn't fit they simply closed their minds.
They refused to accept the now established fact that the testimony
of the fossils told a very different history of life then the
history they expected. I admire honest scholars like Stephen
Jay Gould who have attempted to set the record straight. Perhaps
now we will all know that the perception we all learned about the
fossil record derived from Darwin's expectations were false.
God Bless,
-jpt
--John P. Turnbull (jpt@ccfdev.eeg.ccf.org)Cleveland Clinic FoundationDept. of Neurology, Section of Neurological ComputingM52-119500 Euclid Ave.Cleveland Ohio 44195Telephone (216) 444-8041; FAX (216) 444-9401