Three tales from the Never-Ending Darwinian Story

The following is from a passage on amphibian reproduction, in The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins, p. 294-296, with my comments interpolated in bold:

Trees provide relatively safe havens, and frogs have discovered ways to reproduce in them without losing the vital tie to water…. Male African grey free frogs, Chiromantis xerampelina, co-operate to whip up a thick white foam, with their back legs, from the liquid secreted by the females. [And all these functions appeared as a result of chance random mutations occurring simultaneously in a male and a female grey tree frog, because if the mutually complimentary changes had not appeared in a male and a female living in the same time and place so that they could mate, their mutations would not be passed on. A female grey tree frog developed, by chance random mutations, the organic ability and the behavior to secrete a certain liquid with certain properties. And at exactly the same time, in the same generation, and in the same neighborhood, a male grey tree frog developed, by chance random mutations, the instinctive behavior to whip this liquid into a foam with its legs!] This foam hardens to a crust on the outside, protecting the moist interior which serves as a nest for the group’s eggs. [By chance random mutations the female’s body gained the ability to produce a liquid which had the precise chemical properties so that when it was whipped by a male frog’s legs it would harden to a crust on the outside while keeping a moist interior as a perfectly functioning nest for larvae. At the same time, the female, by a chance random mutation, developed the instinct to place her eggs in this nest!] The tadpoles develop inside the wet foam nest, up a tree. When they are ready, in the next rainy season, they wriggle free and drop into puddles of water below the tree, where they develop into frogs….

Some frog species have made interesting transitions in the direction of true viviparity—live birth. The female of the South American marsupial frog … transfers her fertilised eggs to her back, where they become covered by a layer of skin. [A female marsupial frog developed, by a chance random mutation, the instinct to place her eggs on her back, and the same frog also had a chance random mutation which made the skin on her back grow over the eggs, in precisely a manner that would protect the eggs without killing them.] There the tadpoles develop and can clearly be seen wriggling under the skin of their mother’s back until they eventually burst out. Again, several other species do something similar, probably independent evolved. [And not only was there this amazing confluence, in a single female marsupial frog, of the mutation that produced the behavior to deposit the eggs on her back, and another mutation that produced the growth of skin over the eggs, but the same amazing simultaneous occurrence of mutations has occurred independently in several other species!]

Another South American frog species, named Rhinoderma darwinii after its illustrious discoverer, practises a most unusual version of viviparity. The male appears to eat the eggs that he has fertilised. The eggs don’t travel down his gut, however. Like many male frogs he has a commodious vocal sac, used as a resonator to amplify the voice, and it is in this moist chamber that the eggs lodge. There they develop, until they are finally vomited out as fully formed froglets, forgoing the freedom to swim as tadpoles. [By a chance random mutation the male frog acquired the instinct to eat the eggs that he had fertilized. And by another chance random mutation, occurring in the same frog, internal behaviors developed inside the frog’s body so that the eggs he had taken into his mouth did not go into his stomach but lodged, safe and sound, in his vocal sac. And by another chance random mutation his vocal sac happened to be a perfect environment for eggs. And by another chance random mutation the same frog developed the instinct to vomit up his fully formed offspring when the time came!]

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Bill Carpenter sent the present article to Phillip Johnson, the well-known Darwin critic, with this letter:

Dear Prof. Johnson,

I hope you are well. This discussion from View from the Right highlights the credo quia absurdum [“I believe because it is absurd”] of Darwinism. It seems to me its proponents really demand that we take on faith their paradigm for interpreting information. The basic pre-rational axiom underlying that paradigm is the universality and exclusivity of Democritean physics, in which (as I understand it) the universe is simply a collection of atoms moving around. When that is accepted, then the Darwinian hypothesis is evaluated according to whether information is consistent with the fundamental paradigm, not whether information proves the already accepted paradigm. Hence the frustration of Darwinists who can’t understand why non-Darwinists do not accept the blindingly obvious truth of Darwinism. The Darwinists’ standard of proof is consistency with their fundamental act of faith.

They don’t seem to realize that their new paradigm has been around for a very long time and has never yet fully displaced all other paradigms, though it may have worked “scientific revolutions” in many limited areas of knowledge over the centuries.

Best, Bill

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 01, 2008 03:43 PM | Send