I am the pinnacle of evolution!

It's true. I am the pinnacle of evolution. Or rather, my son is. And so is my cat. And the rat digging in my garbage. And the slime mold growing in the drain in my tub.

Most people have this mistaken idea of evolution based off of an evolutionary tree drawn by Haeckel over a hundred years ago, that evolution is this tree of progress building from "lower" organisms like sponges, up to molluscs and then to the pinnacle: man.

That mistaken understanding of evolution makes it easy to make the mistake that we have to keep humanity "pure" of undesirable genotypes, and can be used to rationalize horrors like eugenics. But it's based on a poor understanding of evolution. It's a pity, because from conversations with other biologists, I think that it's not just a misunderstanding that lay people have, it's one that many biologists have as well.

Every organism alive today is highly evolved for its niche. Calling a dog more evolved than a bacterium is simply incorrect. As Norman Pace said* this week at the American Society for Microbiology meeting, "If you think that a dog is more highly evolved than a Prochlorococcus bacterium, do the experiment. Take them both out and drop them in the middle of the Sargasso Sea and see which one survives." The point he was trying to make was that each individual organism alive today is highly evolved, and making statements about the degree of evolution involved is incorrect. A bacterium is an incredibly evolved and efficient organism that fits very well in the niche that it lives. It has undergone many millions of years of evolution to produce a remarkable organism, just like a human (in fact, it has undergone orders of magnitude more generations, suggesting if anything, that the bacterium is more highly evolved).

PZ Myers makes a similar point at Pharyngula:

I like to compare humans with chimpanzees—are we more complex? I don't think there is any way to say that we are. We have about the same number of genes and a genome that is about the same size and that is organized in a roughly similar way. There is some speculation about the differences in our genomes that lead to the obvious differences in our morphology, but they don't postulate any increases in complexity.

Norman Pace draws evolutionary relationships between the major phylogenetic groups like this:




That every living creature alive today is at the end of those triangles, and all the "less" evolved organisms make up the lines behind them. That is, anything "less" evolved is by definition extinct. The simpler organisms have been outcompeted, and are dead. (He also suggests that part of the problem is the terminology that we use, but I'll save that discussion for another day).

I would suggest that the most useful way to visually depict evolutionary relationships would be a 3 dimensional sphere. Every living organism is on the outer edge of that sphere, and failed branches of life are in the interior of the sphere. Indeed, the last common universal ancestor would be at the center of said sphere. As such, we all represent the pinnacle of evolution, and are all well-adapted to the niche that we occupy.

*not a direct quote, but pretty close on the mark

A rushing river of stupid (Part 2): is creationism responsible for eugenics?

Creationists of late have been spending a fair amount of time writing that the theory of evolution by natural selection naturally flows into eugenics. This would only appear obvious if you have a very superficial understanding of evolution and is easily debunked. Their only smoking gun is that several prominent defenders of evolution were also proponents of forced sterilization of "mental defectives".

I'll repeat what I've written elsewhere: even if this were true, it wouldn't be a convincing argument against evolution. Relativity made the atomic bomb possible. That doesn't mean relativity is wrong.

Now, Andrea Bottaro writes in the Panda's Thumb that we can understand eugenics better as a product of its time, and that in the early and middle parts of the 20th century, prominent members of the creationism crowd also were members of the eugenics movement. This is well worth a read. Find it here.

Note that pointing out that creationists supported eugenics doesn't make creationism a natural flow into eugenics. It merely points out that eugenics was a commonly held and popular belief in the early parts of the 20th century.

A rushing river of stupid. Eugenics is not evolution in action.

Okay, so I was going to let this go, since several other folks have taken it on them to give Michael Egnor a beatdown. But I've just decided that I can't. Michael Egnor is the neurosurgeon making a name for himself as an evolution denier. Others have already taken him down for spouting nonsense. I'm going to focus on the part of his post that I found offensive. That part is:

"In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the only contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is to take it down the horrific road of eugenics, which brought forced sterilization and bodily harm to many thousands of Americans in the early 1900s."

There are two major parts to his argument that are retarded.

First. Eugenics is the claim that some races are fitter than others. Does this sound a little like evolution by natural selection? It's only peripherally related. Though non-biologists like to think of humans as being the most fit species on earth, to a biologist, this statement is clearly bunk. Every living organism today is the descendant of the most fit organism in that niche. Bacteria that live in hot water vents thousands of meters below the ocean's surface are the most fit for that niche. Elephants are the most fit for the niche that they occupy. And pubic lice are the most fit for the niche that they occupy. That said, we cannot predict what exactly will be the environment that we, as human beings, occupy in the future. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to predict who would be the most fit in that environment. Fitness is merely a measure of who survived to have the most offspring in that particular environment. It is not an absolute. It is directly related to the environment that the organism finds itself in at the time. It may turn out that in the post-apocalyptic future, that stupid people will be the most fit, and that brains will have turned out to be an evolutionary dead end, as detailed in the fictional account by Kurt Vonnegut. This is all to say, anyone who says that they know who the most fit humans are does not understand evolutionary theory, and is more than likely a garden variety bigot. Anyone who thinks that eugenics is the practice of genetics or evolutionary biology as applied to human beings doesn't understand eugenics or evolution.

Second. Let us imagine a world where evolutionary biologists were able to identify who is the most fit human for the future environment. We've decided that left-handed, red-haired, stepchildren are the most fit, and instituted a policy of executing all blondes, and artificially inseminating all other women with the fertilized eggs of people who are the most fit. Clearly this would be an inhuman and unethical state of affairs. That said, being unethical doesn't make the science behind it wrong. Creation of the atomic bomb doesn't make the physics behind it wrong. Creation of agent orange, doesn't mean the chemistry is wrong. Even if you were to use this knowledge to do terrible things, that, by itself is not evidence that the underlying science is incorrect.

Please, Dr. Egnor, please. The next time you'd like to accuse an entire field of inquiry of being responsible for the eugenics movement, please, please! speak with a historian or an evolutionary biologist. The fact that you're a neurosurgeon means that people may take you seriously. Please, please, read a little before you make more of an ass of yourself.