Oh no, Eugene McCarthy was right

 

Ahem. Please don´t tell Eugene McCarthy and the creationists! 

Rare blue-and-green hybrid jay spotted in Texas

Walking with hybrids

 

- Hybrid? Me? Nah, I´m just an inplanted species!

A somewhat esoteric blog essay on "hybrid non-bird dinosaurs". Eh? Don´t tell the creationists and, whatever you do, don´t tell Eugene McCarthy!

In Quest of Hybrid (Non-Bird) Dinosaurs

The young woman shall conceive

 

Was the young woman a virgin, after all? 

This is one of the more crazy clips I´ve seen on YouTube, in which Edward Dutton ("The Jolly Heretic"), who I assume is an atheist, argues that at least theoretically, virgin birth could be possible among humans?! Although extraordinarily improbable (it´s almost easier to believe in a divine miracle). 

Reminds me a bit of another heretic, Eugene McCarthy (the scientist, not the politician), who argues that hybridization between completely unrelated animals is possible, say, between a chimpanzee and a pig...

Freaks of evolution

 

"Mammalian Hybrids" is an on-line work by Eugene M McCarthy, a maverick American scientist. It´s available at his website "Macroevolution.net". Some of the material seems to consist of draft chapters for McCarthty´s book "Telenothians", which I haven´t seen. 

When McCarthy was still a conventional scientist, he compiled a scientific reference work titled "Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World" (reviewed by me elsewhere on this blog). "Mammalian Hybrids" is decidedly less conventional, and often comes across as a work of cryptozoology or even mythology. This is in keeping with McCarthy´s turn towards more alternative vistas, including a notorious theory that humans are descended from chimp-pig hybrids (!). Indeed, all species are the products of hybridogenesis, rather than standard Neo-Darwinist natural selection working on random mutations. But if so, there should be a lot of transitional forms between different groups observable today, transitional forms that really are "half a cow" (to quote creationist Duane Gish). This explains McCarthy´s interest in hybrids, including unconfirmed and fantastic reports about virtual "freaks of nature". If the existence of such crosses could be proved, his radical hybridogenesis theory would be strengthened. 

"Mammalian Hybrids" thus discusses putative human-pig hybrids, the famed cynocephali, crosses between humans and sheep or goats, snake-men, and other bizarre creatures virtually all scientists would reject out of hand. The sources include works of ancient authors, newspaper clippings from the 19th century, YouTube videos with a strong yuck factor, but also occasional reports from 18th and 19th century scientists. McCarthy´s labors remind me of Charles Hoy Fort! 

More "conventional" hybrids have also been included (such as ligers, coywolves or mules) and so have crosses which are believed to be biologically impossible, but which probably won´t create much controversy among ordinary people in the street. Let´s be honest, nobody except geneticists get worked up about (perhaps fake) claims that chicken and pigeons can crossbreed, to take just one such example. Everything involving humans, on the other hand...!

I don´t deny that "Mammalian Hybrids" does contain interesting content. Did you know that male orangutans occasionally rape human females? Or that female orangs are exploited as prostitutes in Indonesia? McCarthy wonders whether the famous quagga could have been a hybrid (it certainly looks like one), or whether the Bili ape could be the legendary Koolakamba, a supposed cross between chimps and gorillas. Some information on birds have been included, too, including a discussion of some peculiar species described by Audobon (him again!) but never seen since. Was the Labrador Duck actually a hybrid eider? Readers of "Macroevolution.net" are apparently very interested in the dox, a supposed cross between dog and fox. 

That being said, I nevertheless consider this something of a fringe work, so with the exception of relatively close crosses, I don´t expect to see "half a cow" anytime soon. In general, I think Eugene McCarthy himself is something of a hybrid, an intellectual hybrid between Copernicus and Velikovsky, perhaps? Or Stephen Jay Gould and Charles Hoy Fort... 

An intellectual hybrid

Credit: jasonwoodhead23

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". 

Pigs in space

A crazy website by a *very* heretical scientist actually named Eugene McCarthy, arguing that humans are the products of hybridization between chimpanzees and...pigs. 

Or at the very least chimp-like animals and pig-like animals, with the hybrid then being backcrossed with chimp-like creatures. 

To call this fringe is to understate the case considerably, and I don´t really believe it either, but since I link to all and everything on this blog, enjoy!

Yes, pigs.  

Macroevolution.net

Where is the skvader?

"Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World" is a bizarrely brilliant reference work listing all known hybrids between different species of birds. Or at least all known to the compiler, Eugene M. McCarthy (any relation to the left-leaning liberal senator?). The list of literature consulted is extremely large, and something tells me Mr. McCarthy has either spent most of his spare time collecting information on hybrids from obscure ornithology journals...or he had at least a dozen people helping him. Nothing wrong with that. It's not often a book that mostly consists of bird names in long columns can be called fascinating!

Of course, some crosses are "better" than others. Most readers probably wouldn't know what to think of a cross between the Usambara Nightjar and the Abyssinian ditto, or between a King Cormorant and an Imperial Cormorant. (Perhaps we could give it the vernacular name Princess Cormorant?) The occasional hybrids between Tawny Owls and Ural Owls, said to occur right here in Sweden, don't move me either. In my book, most owls look the same anyway. However, even a bad bird-watcher like me sometimes gets the drift, as when McCarthy tells us that a cross between a Red Crossbill and a Bullfinch has been reported, and that it changed hands for 2,500 dollars. Ah, that I *can* believe! I also noted that the book contains an entire appendix listing Canary crosses only. It seems canaries sleep around with pretty much everybody who is somebody in finch high society...

Of course, the most fascinating part of the book is the appendix about unconfirmed or extremely dubious hybrids. How about Mallard x Domestic Fowl? A German headmaster claimed in 1862 that he had observed such a hybrid. It could swim, but would soon turn back to the shore, and swam only if it could reach bottom with its outstretched legs. Another report is from 1834 by Arthur Biggs of the Cambridge Botanic Garden. These hybrids couldn't swim, had difficulty eating and had legs like hens. Mallard x Guineafowl and Superb Lyrebird x Domestic Fowl are two other dubious crosses we all wish would be true. There's also a report from 1731-38 about a hybrid between a European Goldfinch and a Barn Swallow. Finally, the senator lists an obviously phony rumor that the Chilean poultry breed Araucana is the result of matings between Domestic Fowl and Tinamous. While both Araucanas and Tinamous lay blue eggs, Tinamous are - despite their deceptively fowl-like appearance - actually ratites. They are related to ostriches rather than to chicken... The idea of a ratite breeding true with the hens in your backyard is appealing but, alas, a fable.

Speaking of urban legends, I was reminded of an old Swedish hoax when browsing this book. When I was a kid, a museum in Stockholm displayed a stuffed "skvader", said to be a cross between a pheasant and a hare! According to Wikipedia, a similar animal is still on display in another Swedish town, Sundsvall. Their version is a cross between a hare and a Wood Grouse. (Perhaps my memory fails me and it's really the same specimen.) The bizarre creature is a joke, based on a tall tale by a hunter who claimed to have shot such an animal in 1874. I suppose this was a bit too much for a serious, scientific reference work...

Even without the skvader, I believe "Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World" is well worth a high five!