What Is Evolooshin Anyway?
by Asa Boxer
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I’ve been reading science historian Nicolaas Rupke’s 1994 biography of Richard Owen, revised and updated in 2009. It’s called Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin, and it’s a rehabilitation of character after a century or so of Owen having been demonised by Darwinists and then by science historians who parroted Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) instead of taking the trouble to cross reference and waste their time actually reading Owen.
If you Google Richard Owen, you’ll find the ugliest of caricatures. This hit piece by a graduate of Ryerson University is typical. Funny to find it on a website called Factinate (“fun facts about everything”) and strange to find it undated, one supposes because “facts” are eternal. This piece calls Owen insane and accuses him of all manner of vile and loathsome behaviour, not least of which was plagiarism of the most gruesome sort I’ve ever read about. He lifted the evidence from a demented and decrepit, dying old man, virtually pried it out of his withered hands. Old Bones Owen however was not mad and bad at all but in fact the most revered naturalist of his time until being relentlessly slandered, wilfully misinterpreted and the focus of a decades-long, Victorian campaign led by Tom Huxley to have the man cancelled.
Owen’s love child was the Natural History Museum of London, which took decades of work to politically massage into being, and he managed to found the enterprise despite attempts by the Darwin mafia to prevent such a museum ever coming into existence.
Owen is also famous for coining the name “dinosaur” in 1841, fusing the Greek words deinos, meaning terrible, and sauros, meaning lizard. As a museum man, he put together three discoveries of massive lizard fossils, and observing some analogues between them, placed them together under a sub-order, and poof! we had a novel vision of our planet once being inhabited by these terrible lizards.
The more I read about the history of evolutionary theory and the ascendancy of Darwinism, the more curious I find the whole thing because the history reveals the squabbling and political context… which makes me question the very “facts” we’ve been brought up to believe in as “settled science” when it comes to evolution.
So I go to the Khan Academy to review the evidence because I know I’m going to get a basic textbook review of the evolooshin spiel. Homology is a big one: that’s when we see resemblances in bone structure and anatomy—Owen’s specialty and cornerstone of Darwin’s hypothesis cum theory. More recently there’s been DNA homology. But there are problems with homology as evidence. Check out this cute video from the intelligent design camp.
And before you guffaw, design isn’t what it used to be. Of course, there are religious folk involved, but not exclusively. It’s not about God and scripture. Personally, I take intelligent design in the way Richard Owen and the nineteenth century German naturalists did, also the way Henri Bergson saw it—i.e. still naturalistic and not claiming divine intervention or a platonic vis vitalis (a non-material, life-giving substance). The sophisticated design idea these Victorian scientists were entertaining was that there’s a geometrical intelligence at work in matter. We see it in crystal formation for instance. And most significantly, we see it in magnetic fields.
Think about it: magnetic fields are polarised, expressing a left and right, a symmetrical morphology we see in most living organisms as well as in inert formations like planets. Even the branching and twigging of plants and trees, the veining of leaves. We see it also in how those branches and twigs reach into one element, while their root systems reach into another: polarised, homologous in approach, but shaped by the medium they reach into. Why two eyes, arms, legs? Why twin sets of ribs? Where’s the symmetry coming from? According to Darwinism and all our present ideas of evolooshin, it’s due to common descent from some original ancestor that randomly expressed these developments. A compelling proposition.
But this is just one analogy. What if there were others, like magnetism—a geometric intelligence proceeding out of the aether, finding ever more rarefied expression as it unfolds through Time (whatever that is). Our brains and nervous systems are electromagnetic after all. Atoms are electromagnetic… solar systems and galaxies share homologies. Do we conclude that galaxies descended from atomic ancestors? Or is there a different analogy at work there? Why is that? What are the implications?
The Pythagoreans held the pentagram as divine because it expressed a perfect symmetry of relationships defined by the irrational and mysterious number φ—the golden ratio—in all its angles and limbs… the shape of a human being, but as we note homologically, also many other creatures. Why do we see this repetition of fives? This star shape. Our five senses. In other words, homologies may not indicate descent at all, but instead a common design pattern inherent to the material universe, the stamp of a God principle.
Religious promoters of intelligent design speak of “a designer,” and I can see how this might put some atheists off. But think of it this way: there may be a meeting point here, an evolving view of God as not a Big Bad Daddy in the sky so much as a geometrical intelligence, not to be underestimated in terms of its power and connectivity, nor its spiritual dimension. Atheism by such an insight would have an opportunity to evolve too. Science would be free to admit things about consciousness and certain spiritual phenomena it presently must close itself off from and dismiss despite these phenomena playing an integral role in human experience. (Science might also quit policing how things work and go back to observing.)
The magneto-geometrical hypothesis does not imply that natural selection is bunk. Nor would it imply that species haven’t developed and evolved. But if magnetic sculpting were indeed at work in shaping the development of biological matter, it would dramatically alter our concept of evolution. The very fact that we can entertain alternative analogies points to the deeper fact that we don’t really know what evolooshin is! How exciting! No? I don’t mean to be stealing anyone’s teddy bear; I just find an unsettled science more interesting than a settled one… and a heck of a lot less authoritarian.
One last point. This one’s related to my observation about probability as discussed in “What is a Scientific Fact?”—that the “laws of probability” are a very clever workaround for what we, in fact, do not know and cannot predict, not the actual laws governing how things truly are. Similarly, the clever device of natural selection disguises what we in fact do not know, which is how life emerged in the first place. And without the answer to that most basic of questions, we really can’t claim to have any idea what we’re talking about. It can be a fun, playful and creative conversation, nevertheless, if we allow it to be.
What do you think? Looking forward to your comments.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
I learned a lot in this essay and particularly like your conclusion: "there may be a meeting point here, an evolving view of God as not a Big Bad Daddy in the sky so much as a geometrical intelligence, not to be underestimated in terms of its power and connectivity, nor its spiritual dimension..." and also your point that Atheism could then also evolve, and that "Science would be free to admit things about consciousness and certain spiritual phenomena it presently must close itself off from and dismiss..." and that science "might also quit policing how things work and go back to observing."
Thanks, Karen. You might find this equally interesting from another Substacker: https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/the-jelly-roll-of-truth