An intellectual hybrid

Credits: Jason Woodhead

Eugene McCarthy (no relation to the famous US senator) is a scientist with very unusual ideas about evolution. McCarthy got a certain notoriety when he proposed that humans are descended from hybrids between chimpanzees and pigs - yes, really! I was therefore surprised when reading his work "On the Origins of New Forms of Life", available for free at the author´s website "Macroevolution.net". While this on-line book is heretical in the extreme from a Neo-Darwinist perspective, it doesn´t strike me as completely kookish, in contrast to some other material on the same website. Perhaps McCarthy is an intellectual hybrid between Einstein and Velikovsky? "Forms of Life" (as the work is known for short) is one long argument for a saltationist theory of evolution based on hybridogenesis.

McCarthy believes that speciation through natural selection working on random mutations (the Neo-Darwinist scenario) has never been demonstrated empirically. Nor does the fossil record support the idea of incremental gradual change. Organisms appear fully formed and look pretty much the same for millions of years, until they finally disappear. Neo-Darwinism is therefore based on special pleading to unprovable just-so stories, or to a mathematical model which looks robust on paper, but is really purely hypothetical. McCarthy further argues that there *are* speciation processes at work today, which can be directly observed. Such processes usually involve hybridization, during which new forms might appear as if "out of the blue". While most hybrids are unviable and/or sterile, hybridization occcurs so often in wide "hybrid zones", that viable crosses are virtually guaranteed. Nobody seems to doubt that plants can speciate in this manner, but McCarthy believes that the same is true of animals. (Of course, scientists know that animals can hybridize, but officially recognized animal hybrids seem to be less dramatic than those demanded by McCarthy´s theory.) The phenomenon known as "polyploidy", when an organism has more chromosome sets than it "should" have, strongly suggests hybridization, and McCarthy believes that more animals than hitherto believed are indeed polyploid. In the standard saltationist scenario, often called "hopeful monsters" after an unfortunate choice of words by heretical geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, it´s difficult to explain who the monstrous mutant could possibly mate with. In McCarthy´s scenario it´s easier: other hybrid spawns, or even backcrossing with the parental species. (Neo-Darwinism seem to have its own "hopeful monster" problem, since evolution in isolated environments is said to produce new species, which then break out of their isolation - but how is *that* possible if the new species are adapted to a weird isolated environment? Note that McCarthy´s hybridogenesis takes place in "normal" environments.)

Another important tenet of McCarthy´s theory is that new forms, once established, tend to be extremely stable. This explains why the fossil series shows a "punctuated equilibrium". A qualitative evolutionary "jump" is followed by a prolonged period of stasis. "Forms of Life" contains a long chapter arguing that many ancient reptiles were really mammals, making both Mammalia as a whole and various mammalian sub-groups much older than hitherto believed. Thus, McCarthy believes that stegosaurids are really misidentified pangolins, while ankylosaurs are armadillos. Gigantic armadillos *did* exist during the "Age of the Mammals", and somewhat curiously, they appear in the fossil record shortly after the ankylosaurs disappear. What if they were really the same kind of animals? In the same way, whales are remarkably similar to Mosasaurus, bats resemble small pterosaurs, while multituberculates look like rodents. In the standard evolutionary scenario, this is the result of convergent evolution due to similar habitats, but is it really realistic that animals supposedly divided by millions of years (and a huge taxonomical distance) can be *such* remarkable lookalikes? Even mainline scientists have speculated that dinosaurs and their allies during the Mesozoic may have been "warm-blooded", and that some may have been viviparous. McCarthy also believes that ungulates and proboscides are older than usually believed (he identifies various extinct mammal groups as such), while marsupials are more recent than placentals. More controversially, he suggests that the platypus might be a bird-mammal hybrid! If McCarthy is right, the dinosaurs and their allies never really went extinct at the K-T boundary, which raises questions about the great extinction event supposedly taking place right then. However, this topic isn´t really covered in "Forms of Life".

Neo-Darwinists point to genetic studies as evidence that animal hybridogenesis can´t be generally true, and that the standard evolutionary model must be correct. McCarthty gives the entire genetic-cladistic enterprise short shrift, claiming that animals can be arranged in different "evolutionary trees" depending on what genetic character you choose to emphasize. He believes that the critera are usually subjective and theory-driven. Scientists can´t agree on a single "correct" tree of life. Judging by his chapter on mammal origins, the author considers morphological studies to yield more certain results, but only if you let go of preconceptions such as "convergent evolution". Why are similar forms classified as "reptiles" before the K-T boundary, and "mammals" afterwards? 

Ultimately, there are no species in  nature, "species" being an essentialist-scholastic holdover from a time when most scientists were a kind of creationists. McCarthy points out that no single definition of species exist, and believes that each proposed definition has huge problems. What does exist are distinct forms, not "species". The idea of a "last common ancestor" that gradually diverges into many distinct evolutionary lines is, of course, also wrong. Nature is neither an evolutionary "tree" nor a "bush", but rather a huge interdependent web, where each form has at least two distinct ancestors, sometimes more than two, and each form can (at least potentially) influence the evolution of every other form. Also, the forms or "species" aren´t strictly dependent on their respective environments, but can easily adapt to many different living conditions, and also actively shape their environment. (This is of course connected to the idea of a prolonged stasis in evolution.) "There is hope in this view of life", as McCarthy puts it. Science nerds will recognize the reference.

McCarthy´s intellectual hybrid does have such far-reaching consequences, that it probably won´t be adopted by the scientific community any time soon, *even if* the speculations about our suid ancestry are quietly dropped. The reason is simple: modern science isn´t really about "understanding", but about control. This is true even of theories which don´t obviously give anyone such power. Neo-Darwinism gives the scientists the *illusion of control* by claiming to exactly explain how "we" got here. It represents the pretend expansion of the Faustian Mind into deep time, just as the Big Bang theory is its illusory expansion into deep space. Taxonomy and the building of evolutionary trees is a more obvious example of this attitude. To "know" the place of the suid in the phylogeny is to "control" it. But if McCarthy is right, this is simply impossible. We can´t know the exact location of any living creature in the web of evolution, a web so vast and intricate that science (and, of course, the scientific institutions and their members) must abdicate its attempts to omniescent knowledge of the same. But since humans crave answers, somebody else will offer them. Non-scientists, perhaps? Philosophers. Or mystics. Do you see where this is going? Note also the irony: the McCarthyite hybridogenesis does to human pride what Darwin´s theory *supposedly* did. That´s exactly why it will never be adopted, at least not any time soon.

There might be another reason, too. While scientists are hard pressed admitting it, scientific theories very often (surprise) follow the Zeitgeist (which doesn´t necessarily mean they are wrong - in a best case scenario, the Zeitgeist makes it easier to see hidden truths). People in the know long ago noticed that the gradualist approach to evolution of Darwin might reflect his class position in British Victorian society. In the same way, immutable forms created by God usually reflect a conservative mind-set, while Lamarckianism was popular among socialists. (My grandfather was a Lamarckian. Guess what political sympathies he had?) Note also how Darwin´s theory was distorted (sometimes even by himself) by the triumphalist 19th century view of "progress". If we are permitted to speculate, how will the Zeitgeist of today and the near future affect evolutionary theory? Or at least the popular perception of such? McCarthy´s hybrid theory is easy to translate into "spiritual" terms. Had the theory been proposed circa 1970, it would have become a staple of New Age or neo-Buddhist thinking, alongside a spiritualized version of Lovelock´s Gaian hypothesis. I can see David Spangler expositing on it at some hippie festival in Washington State. But today? The decline of modern civilization might actually give a form of Darwinism with a very negative social spin staying power for another 100 years or so. Who can deny "the struggle for existence", "the survival of the fittest" or "selfish genes" at a time like this? Not to mention the inevitable extermination of the lower races (or Irish immigrants)...

Perhaps the last Neo-Darwinist will be a hard boiled lone wolf warrior in a Montana compound, surrounded by fanaticized theists... 

With that (strange) reflection, I end my review of "On the Origins of New Forms of Life".