Arrested Pulse

Review and Synopsis of
Beyond Natural Selection

By Robert Wesson


Constitutionally speaking, the theory of intelligent design can--and should--be incorporated into science-based curricula not by virtue of being an "alternative" to the theory of evolution, as its misguided proponents argue, but as an exercise in critique of "Natural Selection" as the dominant paradigm of the biological sciences. Robert Wesson's Beyond Natural Selection (MIT Press, 1991) offers just that. Its relevance to I.D. advocates is this: it is thoroughly grounded in scientific inquiry and doesn't touch on theological doctrine. By pointing out the hundreds of anomalies in nature that cannot be meaningfully explained by evolutionary theory, it serves to undermine the central Darwinian (and post-Darwinian) argument that all living things evolved through "chance." Its compelling scientific argument is that much does exist in nature that suggests a universal or "purposive" design.

How do songbirds sing a hundred different songs with a brain size 1/2000 that of humans? Where did the Australian bowerbird learn how to build an ornate bower of over 500 materials and construct a brush of fibrous material to spread a paint of chewed fruit on it? How can colonies of tropical termites with no means of detailed communication build ten-foot high edifices with channels for cooling and ventilation, porous walls in appropriate locations, and towers oriented so to maximize exposure to morning and afternoon sun and minimize noonday heating? And how do bottom-living fish like plaice, sole, and flounder take on the color – and copy the pattern of gravel, sand, or rock – of the seabed on which they rest? Wesson cannot explain these or any of the hundreds of other enigmas of nature he fills his book with -- and neither, he claims, can the theory of Natural Selection. As long as the biological sciences maintain their adherence to the “Grand Unifying Theory” of Natural Selection, the questions will be many and the answers -- beyond the cliche "it's all due to chance" -- will be few.

The Tyranny of Biological Materialism and its "Grand Unified Theory"

Natural Selection, he argues, is to the biological sciences what the Newtonian Mechanistic universe was to physics until the theory of relativity collapsed that world view. No Einstein has emerged in Biology, though, to produce work that seriously questions the materialist empiricism that has for more than two centuries dominated the discipline. As a result, the principal methodology continues to be reductionist – that is, all knowledge is “reduced” to a Grand Unified Theory where everything is describable and comprehensible within a preferred framework of objective analysis.

As 20th Century physicists were revising the Newtonian View of the physical universe, Biology and its branch sciences became more and more rigidified. The theories of Lamarke and Darwin had holes in them; Darwin’s major weakness was his inability to explain empirically how variations are transmitted. The discovery around 1900 of Mendel’s experiments with plant hybrids seemed to fill these holes; hence, Mendelism and Darwinism were merged in the first decades of the 20th century “to make what came to be regarded as a definitive synthesis of evolutionary theory.”

The discovery in the 1950s of RNA and DNA (nucleic acid) as the carrier of heredity helped solidify this materialist approach: the genome was real, a solid body (as was the atom in the Newtonian Universe) that had a specific function – in this case, the self replication of nucleic acid that transmitted information to proteins in a one-way direction and never in reverse. Biologists like Francis Crick seized upon this as evidence that variation was accidental: “Chance,” Crick is known as proclaiming, “is the only source of true novelty.”

Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection hence became more deeply entrenched than ever. Adaptation became the sole force of change and nothing teleological or purposive was believed to exist in nature. Orthogenesis, the idea of direction caused by internal factors, because it did not fit into the dominant paradigm, was allowed to fall to the wayside.

A Radical New View that Promotes "Design" over "Chance"

Beyond Natural Selection is Wesson’s attempt to chip away at the edifice of Natural Selection by conjuring literally hundreds of enigmas in nature that Natural Selection is hard pressed to explain. Each chapter serves as a category of how he has grouped these fascinating mysteries: Inventive Nature, Remarkable Structures, Fantastic Behaviors, Intelligent Instincts, Altruism, Sociality, and so on. The book is so packed with the enigmatic behaviors of animals, birds, fish, worms, and insects that reading it – and it’s no easy read, mind you – leaves you feeling like you just did a marathon viewing of the Discovery Channel.

In his conclusion, Wesson expands the evolutionary view into the realms of morality. Because the genome, as he sees it, is creative, self-directing, and only to a degree autonomous, it reflects an evolutionary process that is part of a goal-directed universe, “an unfolding of potentialities somehow inherent in the cosmos.” Such a vantage point has far reaching implications, and Wesson suggests that this “new” evolutionary view (he doesn’t call it “intelligent design” but that’s the theory his entire argument supports) should be looked at as a moral guide. Morality is the subordination of individual drives to the good of the larger community; life has purpose; the universe is essentially teleological; and you need only go beyond Natural Selection to see that.