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Fossil Friday: Three Modern Scientific Challenges to the Causal Adequacy of Darwinian Explanations

May 17, 2024, 6:17 AM
Photo: Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

This Fossil Friday I address the common request to provide an expanded written version of my lectures on the waiting time problem and the species pair challenge (e.g., on YouTube here), together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up my arguments. I also added a section on the collapsing tree problem as a new challenge to the causal adequacy of Darwinian explanations for macroevolution. Since the waiting time problem and the species pair challenge are both related to the very fast transition from terrestrial pig-like ancestors similar to Indohyus or Pakicetus to fully marine dolphin-like whales like Dorudon and Basilosaurus, I chose the iconic Pakicetus attocki from the Early Eocene of Pakistan as today’s featured fossil.

As I have demonstrated in great detail in numerous lectures and articles (see Bechly 2024d), the fossil record consistently documents a series of saltational transitions with abrupt appearances of new body plans and bursts of biological novelty within very short windows of time, which have been called revolutions, explosions, and ‘Big Bangs’ by mainstream evolutionary biologists for good reason (also see Bechly 2021, 2023a, Bechly & Meyer 2017). This phenomenon is ubiquitous in all periods of Earth history, in all geographical regions, and in all groups of organisms, from protists and plants to invertebrate and vertebrate animals.

These discontinuities in the history of life not only contradict the Darwinian core prediction of gradualism (i.e., an accumulation of small changes over long periods of time), but also raises another fatal problem for the feasibility of any unguided process as adequate explanation for the major transitions in the history of life (macroevolution). 

The Waiting Time Problem

This problem is called the waiting time problem and arises from the combination of two fields in the biosciences that are usually considered to provide good support for Darwinian evolution. One field is paleontology with the rich data from an extensive fossil record, which documents millions of years of deep time and supposed transitional forms (e.g., Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, and Tiktaalik) that are elegantly explained with common descent. This arguably establishes macroevolution. The other field is population genetics, which documents the effects of the Neo-Darwinian process of natural (and sexual) selection acting on random genetic variation, leading to observable changes in gene frequencies. A good example is the origin of drug resistance within populations of germs in lab experiments. This uncontroversially establishes microevolution. The general assumption is, that an extrapolation of microevolution over long periods of time sufficiently explains macroevolution. However, when we really combine the results from both mentioned disciplines, we arrive at a serious challenge for the mathematical feasibility of the Neo-Darwinian process. While the fossil record provides well-established windows of time that were geologically available for major transitions to unfold, standard textbook population genetics provides a theoretical framework and mathematical toolkit to actually do the math. When such calculations and/or simulations are run with reasonable estimates of all parameters, the unambiguous result is always that the geologically available windows of time, which are established by the fossil record for the all major transitions in the history of life, are orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the waiting times required for the necessary genetic changes to arise and spread in the ancestral populations. Therefore, the waiting time problem proves with mathematical rigour (Hössjer et al. 2021) that Neo-Darwinism is not a viable explanation for macroevolution.

Waiting times increase dramatically if coordinated mutations rather than just point mutations are required for an adaptation. Coordinated mutations are defined as any combination of two or more coincident genetic changes that are individually neutral, and only in combination provide a phenotypic adaptive advantage that allows for selection to operate. That such coordinated mutations are indeed required for many adaptations is empirically known to be the case, and also evident from the fact that many (even simple) characters turned out to have a polygenic control.

So here is how the waiting time problem is derived:

  • Evolution is supposed to proceed by random mutation and natural/sexual selection.
  • Selection can only work on mutations with a positive or negative adaptive value.
  • At least some adaptive advantages require two or more coordinated mutations.
  • Any evolutionary adaptation requires mutations that have to arise and spread in a population. Thus, all mutations have two time constraints that mainly depend on mutation rate, population size, and generation time: the waiting time for a mutation to occur and the waiting time for the fixation of this mutation.
  • Question: Does the history of life provide sufficient resources for evolution to accommodate these waiting times? The answer can be shown to be negative!
  • Conclusion: Neo-Darwinism is mathematically refuted as a viable theory of macroevolution.

Indeed the waiting time problem is not just a simple problem but rather an inextricable dilemma, because however you change the crucial parameter of population size, it will always increase one of the two waiting times. With large population sizes the waiting time for a mutation to occur decreases, but fixation time increases (the same is true for neutral evolution). With small population sizes the waiting time for a mutation to occur increases, but fixation time decreases. Thus, there is no easy way for evolution to work around the waiting time problem, e.g. by means of genetic drift and the founder effect.

The amazing power of the argument from the waiting time problem is that it does not rely on fuzzy concepts but actually allows you to do the math, based on the well-established mathematical apparatus of mainstream population genetics. All required parameters are either known empirically or their range can be reasonably estimated by comparisons with recent relatives (e.g., mutation rates, effective population sizes, generation turnover times, length of binding sites, etc). The fossil record and radiometric dating provide the data for the available windows of time.

The waiting time problem for coordinated mutations was first formulated by Bodmer (1970) and Karlin (1973) and later widely discussed in the mainstream population genetic literature (e.g., Christiansen et. al. 1998, Beerenwinkel et al. 2007, Schweinsberg 2008, Durrett et al. 2009, Behrens & Vingron 2010, Behrens et al. 2012, Chatterjee et al. 2014, Charlesworth 2020). It was recognized as an argument for intelligent design by Behe and Snoke (2004, 2005) and Behe (2007, 2009), and later elaborated in several publications by ID proponents (e.g., Axe 2010, Meyer 2013, LeMaster 2018). I fully agree with these intelligent design proponents, who considered this problem to impose a substantial limit on the effectiveness of random search processes.

Michael Behe (2007) in his book The Edge of Evolution made the argument that the waiting time for two coordinated mutations is prohibitive for the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of evolution to work. Behe used empirical data about an actual waiting time for a coordinated mutation that conveyed chloroquine drug resistance in malaria. Applying these empirical data on human evolution, by simply correcting for the much lower population size and much longer generation time, predicted a waiting time of 1015 years, which is many orders of magnitude longer than the existence of our universe! The mainstream population geneticists Durrett & Schmidt (2008) criticized Behe’s argument with a mathematical model and claimed that his calculated waiting time of 1015 years is unrealistic. However, their own calculations also resulted in a prohibitive waiting time of 216 million years for a single coordinated mutation in human evolution, which vastly exceeds the available window of time of only about 6 million years since the split of the human lineage and the chimp lineage from a common ancestor. Of course, when results from a theoretical model differ so greatly from experimental real world data, we should rather trust the real world data, because every model necessarily has to make certain simplifications that can introduce errors. Consequently, Behe’s numbers are certainly closer to the true limits of the Darwinian mechanism than those of Durrett and Schmidt. Anyway, both numbers are prohibitive and refute the feasibility of a Darwinian mechanism of macroevolution.

Using a different model, Sanford et al. (2015) applied a computer simulation to calculate the waiting times in human evolution based on reasonable estimates for an ancestral hominin population of 10,000 individuals and a generation turnover time of 20 years. They arrived at fixation times of 85 million years for a single codependent mutation, and 1.5-15.9 million years for a single specific point mutation. This is very remarkable and prohibitive, considering the fact that the assumed 5% difference in the human vs chimp genome translates to millions of mutations that had to arise and become fixed within 6 million years since the assumed separation of their respective lineages. This comes in top of to the waiting time problem for coordinated mutations but is a separate argument (see below).

Even mainstream scientists came to similar results, such as Charlesworth (2020), who found that the waiting time for a new mutation to arise and increase in frequency in a population can be prohibitively long, and Pfennig et al. (2010), who found that “if the production of newly favored phenotypes requires new mutations, the waiting time for such mutations can be prohibitively long and the probability of subsequent loss through drift can be high” (also see Pfennig 2021)

A few years ago, a multidisciplinary research project was established at Biologic Institute, the research branch of Discovery Institute, to explore the waiting time problem and demonstrate that the mentioned examples are not exceptions but represent a general pattern. This collaborative project includes Drs Douglas Axe (molecular biologist), Günter Bechly (paleontologist and project leader), Michael Behe (biochemist), Ann Gauger (molecular biologist), Ola Hössjer (mathematician), Paul Nelson (philosopher of biology), and Richard von Sternberg (evolutionary biologist).

As first step and theoretical ground work we developed a greatly improved new model, based on the mathematical models of Durrett & Schmidt (2008) and Sanford et al. (2015) as well as Behrens & Vingron (2010). This model uses Markov-chains of the Moran type (iterative stochastic memoryless process for finite populations) and allows for multiple different solutions and also incorporates phenomenons like back-mutations and stochastic tunneling. This work was published in two peer-reviewed mainstream science outlets (Hössjer et al. 2018, 2021).

In a second step we applied this new model to the example of whale origins (Bechly et al. in prep.), which is considered as a “poster child for macroevolution” (Thewissen & Bajpai 2001). Previously, Richard von Sternberg had already made rough back-on-the-envelope calculations based on the model in Durrett & Schmidt (2008), and on very generous estimates for an effective population size of 100,000 individuals per generation and a generation turnover time of 5 years. The result was a waiting time of 43.4 million years for a single pair of coordinated mutations. The fossil record shows that only 4.5 million years were available between still walking stem group representatives (Himalayacetus, 53.5 mya) and the first truly aquatic whales like Basilosauridae (49 mya). This profound transition required complex re-engineering like …:

  • forelimbs transformed into flippers, reduction of hind limbs and pelvis, tail transformed into fluke (incl. ball vertebra for vertical movement)
  • re-orientation of the foetus for subaquatic birth (tail-first)
  • modification of mammary glands for nursing under water
  • re-organization of kidney tissue for intake of salt water
  • special lung surfactant (lung has to re-expand rapidly upon coming up to the surface)
  • intra-abdominal counter-current heat exchange system (testes are inside the body next to the muscles that generate heat during swimming)

For our new study we focused on the transition of the amphibic but still quadrupedal protocetids, which had a hind leg driven mode of swimming, to fully marine whales (Pelagiceti) with reduced hind legs and a tail-fluke driven mode of swimming. Based on an extensive fossil record of the paraphyletic ‘walking whales’ (Protocetidae, esp. Georgiacetinae) and remains of the oldest basilosaurids from Antarctica, we found that the available window of time for this transition was only 1.2 million years. Based on modern evo-devo research we also demonstrate that coordinated mutations were required even for apparently simple characters like the reduction of hind limbs. The mathematical model shows that the available time was vastly insufficient to accommodate the required genetic changes by a Neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations (Bechly et al. in prep.). We already submitted this manuscript to two mainstream academic journals, but it got rejected within hours by the editors without even bothering to send it to scientific reviewers. Third try is on the way, but the Darwinian thought police makes it very hard to question the mainstream consensus even with hard data and good science. An affiliation of the authors with Discovery Institute or a name that is blacklisted as notorious intelligent design proponent is enough to let loose the guard dogs of Darwinism.

In 2009 there was a prominent public debate at Beverly Hills about intelligent design theory versus Darwinian evolutionary theory, in which Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg defended the ID side, while the Darwinist side was represented by skeptic Michael Shermer and famous paleontologist Dr. Donald Prothero, author of the book Evolution: What the Fossil Say and Why it Matters. When Sternberg presented the waiting time problem with the example of whale origins, even an expert like Prothero failed to really grasp the argument and proved to be clueless how to respond.

An additional fact that underscores the waiting time problem in cases like whale origins (see Illustra Media 2015, Evolution News 2016, Long Story Short 2020) was ironically provided by Prothero’s own research about the average longevity (lifespan) of a larger artiodactyl mammal species (Prothero 2014), which would include whales and their assumed ancestors because whales are believed to be nested in and derived from artiodactyl ungulates. Prothero found this average species longevity to be only about 4.1-4.39 million years. The fossil record therefore implies that the transition between a pig-like quadrupedal whale ancestor similar to Raoellidae (such as Indohyus) and Pakicetidae, to a fully marine dolphin-like pelagicete whale like Basilosauridae happened within the lifespan of a single species, or even within just two million years if the older estimate of 51.5 million years for the oldest basilosaurid should be correct as we assume (Bechly et al. in prep.). Of course, this does not exclude the possibility of several successive speciation events within this time period, but still represents a fact that illustrates the biological abruptness of this major body plan transition and anatomical re-engineering within only about 300,000-130,000 generations.

This point also applies to all the other abrupt appearances of biological novelty that I described in my other article, because according to standard text book wisdom, the average longevity of an animal species is 5-10 million years for marine invertebrates (May et al. 1995: table 1.1, Levinton 2001: table 7.2), 3-10 million years for insects (Hörnschemeyer et al. 2010, Penney & Jepson 2014: 198-199), and only 2.3-4.43 million years for vertebrates like mammals (Prothero 2014). Thus, a window of time of 5 million years is roughly equivalent to a succession of just 1-2 ancestor-descendant species with only minor differences to each other, so that this can hardly explain the massive re-engineering of body plans within the same time frame. There is simply too much change in too short time to be reasonably explained with an unguided mechanism!

We therefore expect and predict to find the waiting time problem to be a general problem for all major body plan transitions in the history of life, with their common abrupt appearances (Bechly 2021, 2023a, Bechly & Meyer 2017), which for example include: origin of photosynthesis; origin of eukaryotes; origin of the Ediacaran biota (Avalon Explosion) and animal phyla (Cambrian Explosion) such as the origin of trilobites from worm-like ancestors in less than 13 million years (Daley et al. 2018, Bechly 2018); origin of efficient eyes in arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates; terrestrialization of plants (embryophytes), arthropods (tracheae), and vertebrates (tetrapod limbs); origin of wings in insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds (including the origin of pennaceous feathers from filamentous precursors); origin of secondarily marine vertebrates such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, manatees, and whales; origin of echolocation in bats and whales; origin of complex new reproductive systems (angiosperm flowers, dragonfly secondary copulatory apparatus, insect holometabolism, amniote egg, eutherian placenta); the origin of distinct new body plans (e.g., snakes, turtles, bats); and even the origin our own genus Homo and of a globular brain-case correlated with the Upper Paleolithic ‘Creative Explosion’ of symbolic thinking within Homo sapiens.

Potential Objections to the Waiting Time Problem

The waiting time problem has been the target of scornful critique by anti-ID spokesmen (e.g., Moran 2016, Rasmussen 2021, Stern Cardinale 2022a, 2022b, Farina 2022, Hancock 2024), who claimed that it is fallacious and fails to challenge Darwinism. I addressed such critique in several articles (Bechly 2022c, 2022d) and we will also provide a detailed technical response in our forthcoming research paper (Bechly et al. in prep.). The main points raised by critics were:

1.) Critics often explicitly or implicitly suggested that the waiting time problem is nothing but a pseudo-problem invented by Darwin skeptics and creationists who do not understand how evolution really works. This is demonstrably false and fails to acknowledge that the waiting time problem has a long history and has been much discussed in mainstream science, especially population genetics (see above), including distinguished experts like Harvard evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak. The waiting time problem even plays an important role in cancer research (Beerenwinkel et al. 2007, Durrett et al. 2009).

2.) Most critics considered the most powerful objection to be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (e.g., Moran 2016). They claimed that nature does not go for specific mutations as a target but is totally random and could have pursued many different ways to success. In short: this objection claims that you cannot assume a pre-specified target. This argument fails because it dubiously presupposes the existence of many targets, which is contradicted by the rarity of function in the search space for proteins and by the common phenomenon of convergence. The argument also fails to recognize that life cannot allow for periods of maladaptation only to descend a local peak of the rugged fitness landscape to explore other ones. Instead, life has to further adapt to its local fitness peak, which requires specific solutions for specific problems. It’s not like any beneficial mutation could do, or as if the fitness landscape would be flat and homogenous. A stem whale would have no use for a mutation that would be beneficial for a stem bird, such as improving skeletal pneumaticity. The targets were not arbitrarily imposed but are provided and constrained by nature. In the computer models applied in our publications on the waiting time problem we also allowed for alternative targets and fuzzy targets, so not just one pre-specified binding site, which prevents another possible critique. Generally, this objection seems to boil down to the unscientific claim “there could be x so that the problem disappears”, which is a non-sequitur that proves nothing and fails to be testable, because it does not make any specific empirical predictions.

By the way: In the context of this objection, Stern Cardinale (2022a, 2022b) also alluded to a study by Yona et al (2018) which showed that “random sequences rapidly evolve into de novo promoters”. This is interesting, but just refers to a very simple function, which was addressed by Miller (2022). But even more importantly this study is totally irrelevant for the problem of coordinated mutations and therefore is just a red herring. It does nothing to make the waiting time problem go away.

3.) Some critics failed to understand the concept of coordinated mutations and even called it meaningless. They suggested that every individual mutation can be selected for. This ignores the simple fact that in coordinated mutations each individual mutation is neutral and thus in principle cannot be selected for. Only the combination of coordinated mutations has a selection value, which is the whole point, and the reason why they were called ‘coordinated mutations’ in the first place. So, the waiting time problem is not about the mere combination of just any kind of mutations. This failure to grasp the concept of coordinated mutations also often leads to very uncharitable misrepresentations of the waiting time problem as allegedly claiming “it takes too long to get new stuff”, which of course is nothing but a caricature and straw man version of the real problem.

4.) Some critics claimed that the waiting time problem implies that mutations have to occur in a specific sequence and therefore misunderstands the parallel nature of Darwinian processes. This is simply false and maybe based on a misunderstanding of the technical term ‘coordinated gene’. The fact is that no ID proponent ever claimed that the waiting time problem only applies for particular sequences of mutations. For any set of reasonable parameters, the waiting times for coordinated mutations (i.e., mutations that have to occur together to have a selection value) will be prohibitive, irrespective of the order of these mutations. What is true is that the waiting time problem gets even worse when neutral mutations also would have to occur in a specific sequence. However, in real life a specific sequence of mutations would only be reasonable when each individual mutation has an adaptive advantage and therefore gets selected for, which would be the exact opposite of coordinated mutations. Therefore this argument is a total red herring, as it does not apply to coordinated mutations as the central point of the waiting time problem.

5.) Most critics also claimed that the waiting time problem ignores recombination, which according to Farina (2022) “baselessly discounts the profound evolutionary benefit” and is “dramatically accelerating the accumulation of beneficial mutations.” Stern Cardinale (2022b) emphatically disagreed with Hössjer et al. that “it is reasonable to believe that recombination can be ignored.” Actually, this objection rather shows an embarrassing ignorance of the technical literature on this very subject, because the influence of recombination on the waiting time problem has been studied by Christiansen et al. (1998), who have shown that: “Recombination lowers the waiting time until a new genotypic combination first appears, but the effect is small [my emphasis] compared to that of the mutation rate and population size.” Even though this process arguably allows for neutral mutations (about 75% of all mutations) to occur separately in a population and to combine later by sexual recombination, we showed in our peer-reviewed papers (Hössjer et al. 2018, 2021, Bechly et al. in prep.) that recombination does not affect the waiting time under realistic assumptions for parameters like mutation rates and population sizes. It also must be mentioned that even though recombination can speed up some evolutionary changes towards a specific target, it can also increase the waiting time by destroying imminent adaptations that are about to reach the target.

6.) A few critics maintained that the problem is merely theoretical but not realistic in biological terms, e.g., because it does not apply to concrete examples or because coordinated mutations are not necessary. We will address the latter claim very thoroughly in our forthcoming paper, where we do apply the theoretical framework to the concrete example of whale origins. We will also show, based on mainstream evo-devo data, that coordinated mutations indeed are required. This is also suggested by the fact that even simple characters like skin colour turned out to be highly polygenic, thus controlled by many different genes and therefore likely require multiple coordinated allelic substitutions (mutations) of the right sort to have an adaptive effect. By the way: The waiting time problem has been applied to the concrete example of human origins by Durrett & Schmidt (2008) and Sanford et al. (2015) with prohibitive results for Darwinian evolution (see above).

7.) Another possible objection could be the study by Wilf & Ewens (2010), which suggested that there was plenty of time for evolution. This study obviously has been a response to arguments from Darwin critics, as the abstract begins with the sentence “Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations.” This study was celebrated by anti ID activists as a debunk of a popular argument again Neo-Darwinian evolution (Coyne 2010, Myers 2010). However, this study committed the same trivial logical fallacy as Richard Dawkins did with his famous weasel program (Dawkins 1986), by introducing a teleological filter for correct guesses to arrive at Hamlet’s quote “Methinks it is like a weasel” and by ignoring dysfunctional intermediate steps (Witt 2016, Holloway 2022). Moreover, the study has not just been addressed and refuted in a peer-reviewed paper by ID-proponents (Ewert et al. 2012, Luskin 2012), but it’s mathematical conclusions were also challenged in a newer study led by evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak (Chatterjee et al. 2014), who confirmed the fundamental point of the waiting time problem that “that the time required to accumulate multiple mutations in the same individual scales with the number not logarithmically but exponentially“ (Miller 2018).

8) A quite confused objection was raised by the Darwinist YouTuber Dapper Dinosaur (2022), who claimed that parameters like mutation rate and generation time do not really matter, but that the really crucial parameter should be the phylogenetic replacement rate (Arvestad 2019). The problem with this objection is that the phylogenetic replacement rate has no bearing whatsoever on the waiting time problem, which is also evident from the fact that none of the mainstream evolutionary biologists, who discussed the waiting time problem ever bothered to consider such a parameter in their technical publications. Another problem is that Arvestad’s concept of a ‘phylogenetic replacement rate’ has never been published properly and therefore is not even an existing thing in science (a Google search only results in a single hit for a conference abstract published online). The requirement for peer review sometimes seems to be a trite one-way street in the debate between Darwinism and Intelligent Design theory.

9) Some critics of the waiting time argument, such as Stern Cardinale (2022b), instead attacked John Sanford’s different argument about 30 million letter differences between the human and chimp genomes to be too much to become fixed in just 6 million years since the separation of these two lineages. This is of course yet another red herring, as this argument has nothing to do with the waiting time problem s.str. That said, Stern Cardinale was correctly pointing out that the real number should be about half this size, because differences would have accumulated in both lineages, but he was also grossly misrepresenting Stanford’s argument as allegedly claiming 30 million beneficial mutations while Sanford was explicitly only speaking about “letter differences” (e.g., see here). Since Sanford et al. (2015) found fixation times of 1.5-15.9 million years even for single point mutations, this amount of sequence differences arguably could be a valid problem, but it is different from the waiting time problem for coordinated mutations used by intelligent design proponents.

10.) Last but not least, some critics were puzzled by the fact that research papers on the waiting time problem authored by ID proponents could somehow even “sneak into” peer-reviewed journals like the prestigious Journal of Theoretical Biology. The reason is as simple as it should be obvious: because it is good peer-reviewed science and the common censorship of anti-ID activists sometimes fails to sabotage the publication of inconvenient research. It is the height of hypocrisy when the very same people, who pressure editors to reject manuscripts or issue disclaimers, then turn around and claim that ID proponents don’t publish their stuff in the peer-reviewed literature.

Most recently, a more interesting critique was presented by evolutionary biologist Zach Hancock (2024), who introduced in a YouTube video his own mathematical computer simulation to address and refute the waiting time problem. Generally, this would be the way to go, but his critique still suffers from several fatal problems:

  • Hancock unfortunately rehashes a lot of the same hackneyed arguments discussed above.
  • Hancock seems to be unaware of the fact that the mathematical model of Hössjer et al. (2021) made it possible to deal with the Texas Sharpshooter objection of a pre-specified target. In fact, we addressed the Texas Sharpshooter objection (without using this name) in the last paragraph of Section 11.2 and in Appendix D. In particular, in Appendix D (table 16) we addressed how long it would take to change the expression of m out of M possible genes. We reported the waiting time until the first m=5 genes are expressed within a pool of M \in {5, 10, 15, 20, 25} possible genes. For a fitness valley landscape, where back mutations are allowed, the waiting time is still astronomical for M=25 (the rightmost column of Table 16). We make the testable prediction that the waiting time will still be huge for m=5 and M=100, 500, 1000, if the fitness valley is deep enough, and the population size large enough. Furthermore, we mentioned biological arguments why M cannot be very large (see the last sentence of Appendix D).
  • Hancock’s simulation, which uses the SLiM3 software, only addresses the case of m=1 gene. This seems to be mostly in response to the results of the Sanford et al. (2015) study. However, it is not surprising at all that the waiting time for m=1 gene is rather short. Therefore, even though these new simulations of Hancock are interesting, they don’t conflict with the results of Hössjer et al. (2021) and fail to refute the waiting time problem.

What about non-Darwinian processes of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis?

Contrary to the claims of some scientists that a critique of Neo-Darwinism is irrelevant because Neo-Darwinism is effectively dead since the 1960s and we moved beyond it long ago (Gould 1980, Swamidass 2018), Neo-Darwinism is far from obsolete and still represents the ruling paradigm in mainstream evolutionary biology (Hancock et al. 2021). Hancock et al. (2021) concluded that: “The Modern Synthesis (or ‘Neo-Darwinism’), …, remains the foundation of evolutionary theory. … Neo-Darwinism is alive and well”.

Nevertheless, in the past decades evolutionary biologists more and more realized that the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural/sexual selection acting on random mutations failed as sufficient explanation for the origin of biological complexity and diversity. At the conference New Trends in Evolutionary Biology held in November 2016 at the prestigious Royal Society in London, the keynote was presented by Austrian evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller, who listed five explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis (aka Neo-Darwinism) including phenotypical complexity, biological novelty, and non-gradual forms of transition (Müller 2016, Bechly et al. 2019). Thus, the most crucial phenomena of macroevolution arguably are not explained by Neo-Darwinism. Likewise, the announcement of the conference Evolution held 2018 in Salzburg by the New York Academy of Sciences left no room for doubt: “For more than half a century it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from random‚ error-based’ events. Now it is recognized that errors cannot explain genetic novelty and complexity” (Witzany 2018, 2020). This realization sparked the movements of a Third Way of Evolution (Shapiro et al. 2014) and an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (e.g., Laland et al. 2015, Garte 2016, Müller 2017), which acknowledged the explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis and suggested several other evolutionary mechanisms such as phenotypic plasticity (evolvability), niche construction, epigenetics, natural genetic engineering, hybridogenesis, symbiogenesis, and neo-Lamarckism. However, contrary to sweeping claims (e.g., Müller 2013) none of these mechanisms explains the origin of new specified information and complex adaptations any better than Neo-Darwinism did or rather failed to do. None of these alternative mechanisms solves or even addresses the waiting time problem.

Another non-Darwinian or rather non-adaptationist approach was suggested by the proponents of Neutral Evolution (Kimura 1968, 1983, Jensen et al. 2019), who emphasized the role of genetic drift rather than selection. Contrary to the bold claims by some scientists (Duret 2008, Koonin 2016, Moran 2018, Swamidass 2018), neutral theory has not at all become the new mainstream view in evolutionary biology but has rather proven to be completely irrelevant for macroevolution. This is hardly surprising as neutral theory mainly applies to molecular evolution. In a recent review, Kern & Hahn (2018) came to a scathing conclusion:

In this perspective, we evaluate the explanatory power of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, 50 years after its introduction by Kimura. We argue that the neutral theory was supported by unreliable theoretical and empirical evidence from the beginning, and that in light of modern, genome-scale data, we can firmly reject its universality. … On the 50th anniversary of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, we have been charged with the task of asking: how has the neutral theory fared in light of adaptive variation within and between species? In a word, poorly. … the explanatory power of the neutral theory has never been exceptional. … each of the original lines of evidence for the neutral theory are now falsified, … As a consequence, we believe that the neutral theory has been overwhelmingly rejected”.

Even if neutral processes like genetic drift may explain some forms of speciation by accumulation of differences in separated lineages, they certainly cannot explain integrated and specified adaptive biological complexity.

Therefore, a new approach called ‘Constructive Neutral Evolution’ (CNE) was suggested as a ratchet with the alleged creative power to bring about new biological (especially cellular) complexity and even apparent irreducible complexity (Stoltzfus 1999, 2012, Gray et al. 2010, Lukeš et al. 2011, Brunet & Doolittle 2018). However, CNE not only failed to be embraced with great enthusiasm by evolutionary biologists (Muñoz-Gómez et al. 2021), but rather represents an ignored fringe theory, likely because it can only explain Rube-Goldberg-machine-like inefficient and unnecessary complexity (maybe like the blood clotting cascade), but not highly adaptive and efficient complex new organs (such as the countercurrent heat exchange system in whales) and molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum. Indeed, CNE could a best increase complexity and interdependence but not adaptation and functionality, so that it has to presuppose already existing function prior to the further accumulation of complexity (Jones 2011). Speijer (2011) concluded that CNE “has major conceptual problems, [and] can not explain observed patterns of complex processes”. Concerning alleged cases of cellular complexity generated by CNE even the most recent review (Muñoz-Gómez et al. 2021) admitted that “most, if not all of these proposed examples remain speculative and await further evidence and detailed evolutionary narratives”. The problem even gets worse when coordinated mutations would be required, as Pillai et al. (2020) found that “in principle, molecular assemblies could arise and become more complex via neutral processes, but this scenario is unlikely if many mutations are required”. Therefore, CNE also fails to provide any potential solution to the waiting time problem. On the contrary, neutral processes would greatly inflate the fixation times as was demonstrated by Hössjer et al. (2021), who found that “the expected waiting time increases exponentially with m, for a selectively neutral model, when back-mutations are possible”.

Some scientists erroneously believe that the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium has explained abrupt origins of biological novelty and therefore could solve the waiting time problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. Punctuated Equilibrium was introduced by Eldredge & Gould (1972) as an explanation for stasis (Gould 1991) and discontinuities in the fossil record of (microevolutionary) species-to-species transitions, but it was never meant as a macroevolutionary theory that could explain major transitions and complex biological novelties. The common misunderstanding of Punctuated Equilibrium as a saltationist macroevolutionary theory, rather than a gradualist microevolutionary theory, may have been provoked by the somewhat misleading choice of the title “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism” by Eldredge & Gould (1972) for their original paper. Løvtrup (1981) had already rejected Punctuated Equilibrium, precisely because it still was a form of gradualism and not a macromutation theory favored by him. He concluded that “Eldredge and Gould’s theory has nothing to do with macroevolution in Goldschmidt’s sense”. Of course, Stephen Jay Gould (1977, 1980) indeed sympathized with saltational ideas and thought that “macroevolution proceeds by the rare success of these hopeful monsters, not by continuous small changes within populations”, but this was independent from and totally unrelated to his own ‘punk eek’ theory (Moran 2008). Gould (1982) explicitly emphasized that “Punctuated equilibrium is not a theory of macromutation”, which should have settled the issue. Nevertheless, Ernst Mayr (1982: 617) got confused and erroneously claimed that Gould and Eldredge’s theory of Punctuated Equilibrium implies saltations that correspond to Goldschmidt’s ‘hopeful monsters’. This gross misunderstanding was initially adopted and perpetuated by Daniel Dennett, who only later acknowledged and corrected his error (Dennett 1995). A saltationist view of Punctuated Equilibrium was explicitly rejected by Gould & Eldredge (1986), who clarified that “our greatest frustration throughout this debate — was the persistent confusion, particularly in the press, of punctuated equilibrium with true saltationism”. Gould (1991) said that “simple misunderstanding of basic content was distressingly common, even among professional evolutionists. Many colleagues thought that we had raised the old anti-Darwinian specter of macromutationism, or truly sudden speciation in a single generation by a large and incredibly lucky mutation. I do not know why this happened”. Likewise, Eldredge (2008) lamented that “the paper attracted a wave of attention—much of it negative, as we were accused of turning against Darwin and of promoting a form of ‘saltationism’— discredited ideas of evolution proceeding in sudden ‘jumps’ (‘saltus’ is the Latin word for ‘jump’) through some unknown genetic mechanism or other”. Apart from that, Punctuated Equilibrium also failed to convince many evolutionary biologists to be a useful idea at all. Dawkins (1986) called Punctuated Equilibrium a “minor wrinkle on the surface of neo-Darwinian theory”. Hancock et al. (2021) concluded that “punctuated equilibrium did not represent a major revolution in evolutionary biology”, and Coyne (2021) even declared punctuated equilibrium to be a dead theory. Whatever, even if Punctuated Equilibrium would be correct and apply to macroevolution, it would rather make the waiting time problem worse, because it would suggest transitions that were so rapid that they eluded the fossil record, so that there would even be less time available for the required genetic changes to originate and spread in an ancestral population. Thus, Punctuated Equilibrium is not a solution but rather just a synonym for the waiting time problem.

Finally, some scientists (Davidson & Erwin 2006), who acknowledged that microevolutionary processes cannot account for large differences in body plans, instead suggested that small and simple changes in regulatory control genes could produce large phenotypic changes of the body plans, without the need for any new genes or proteins to evolve. Therefore, Marshall (2013) maintained that “new phyla were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes”. A similar view was suggested by Cabej (2019) as solution to the problem of the abrupt origin of new animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion. However, this possibility has not only been criticized by other evolutionary biologists (e.g., Alonso and Wilkins 2005, Hoekstra and Coyne 2007, Stern & Orgogozo 2008), but indeed has been empirically refuted by more recent phylogenomic studies (e.g., Paps 2018, Paps & Holland 2018, Heger et al. 2020), which documented that major body plan innovations consistently went along with novel genes and proteins. Paps & Holland (2018) concluded that “contrary to the prevailing view, this uncovers an unprecedented increase in the extent of genomic novelty during the origin of metazoans, and identifies 25 groups of metazoan- specific genes that are essential across the Animal Kingdom”. Paps (2018) put it even more clearly that “reconstructing the genome of the last common ancestor of extant animals has unveiled an unprecedented emergence of new genes, highlighting the role of genomic novelty in the origin of metazoans”. Similarly, Heger et al. (2020) “identified 157 bilaterian-specific genes”, which is “contradicting the current view [and] reveals that genes with bilaterian origin are robustly associated with key features in extant bilaterians”. Clearly, new complex organs and tissues required new genes and new proteins, and not just the rearrangement of preexisting genetic ‘Lego bricks’. So, the waiting time problem cannot be explained away as a pseudo-problem. Apart from that, we will, show in our forthcoming study (Bechly et al. in prep.) that even the cis-regulatory hypothesis implies a profound waiting time problem. The origin and spread of genetic innovations that correlated with macroevolutionary transitions requires an explanation within the constraints given by population genetics and the fossil record.

We can safely conclude that none of the newly proposed mechanisms addresses and solves the origin of complex new organs and the implied waiting time problem for the genetic changes required to achieve such a re-engineering of the body plan. Therefore, the theoretical void left by the failure of Neo-Darwinism is still unfilled and calls for a major rethinking of the theory (Laland et al. 2014). Novel paradigms should be considered and explored that might for example include non-random adaptive macromutations as suggested by proponents of quantum evolution (McFadden & Al-Khalili 1999, McFadden 2001, Ogryzko 2009, Elsheik 2016, Nemer et al. 2017), or modern versions of saltationism and mutationism in the spirit of Goldschmidt’s ‘hopeful monster’ hypothesis (Gould 1977, Løvtrup 1987, Theißen 2006, Rieppel 2001, 2017). In this context it is interesting that the ruling paradigm of random mutations is more and more challenged and refuted by experimental evidence (Sniegowski 1995, Wright 2000, Jablonka & Lamb 2005, Kokić 2010, Merlin 2010, Shapiro 2011, 2013, Livnat 2013, Martincorena & Luscombe 2013, Fitzgerald & Rosenberg 2019, Monroe et al. 2022), even though the existence of directed/adaptive mutations is still a matter of scientific controversy (Cairns et al. 1988, Hall 1990, Lenski & Mittler 1993, Sniegowski & Lenski 1995, Rosenberg 2001, Shapiro 1997, 2013, Zhang & Saier 2012, Svensson 2023).

The Species Pair Challenge

Finally, there is also another problem that has been hitherto largely overlooked: The morphological similarity of modern species pairs that have diverged in a similar time frame poses a severe problem, because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that were at work and common in the history of life in all periods of Earth history and all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species. To make this point I surveyed TimeTree.org (Hedges and Kumar 2009, Hedges et al. 2006, 2015, Kumar et al. 2017), which is a databank of 148,876 living species of all kinds or organisms with molecular clock estimates of their time of divergence based on 4,185 studies. When probing any pairs of species, even those with longer divergence times than available for the development of the body plan differences between for example pakicetids and basilosaurids (separated by about 4-5 million years), we find without exception that their morphologies are hardly distinguishable for laymen and they often still can hybridize.

Here are a few examples from TimeTree (the datings have been updated compared to Bechly 2022a, based on the most recent version of the TimeTree database):

  • Firs (Abies spec.) and cedars (Cedrus spec.) belong to the same subfamily of conifer trees but separated already 136 million years ago;
  • common house fly (Musca domestica) and small house fly (Fannia scalaris) diverged 39-45 mya;
  • northern damselfly (Coenagrion hastulatum) and azure damselfly (Coenagrion puella) diverged 11.8 mya;
  • European common frog (Rana temporaria) and moor frog (Rana arvalis) diverged 13.2 mya;
  • Galapagos land iguanas (Conolophus spec.) and Galapagos marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus spec.) diverged 23.9-24.2 mya (marine iguanas can excrete salt from a gland at their nostrils and have a more flattened tail, but otherwise still look very much like their cousins);
  • green warbler (Phylloscopus nitidus) and Bonelli’s warbler (Phylloscopus bonelli) diverged 15.2 mya (at least 4-7 million years according to Helbig et al. 1995) but look almost identical and can still hybridize (this pattern is typical for birds);
  • house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and tree sparrow (Passer montanus) diverged 5.6 mya and still can hybridize in the wild;
  • house mouse (Mus musculus) and rat (Rattus norvegicus) diverged 11.6-13.1 mya (at least 12 million years according to Kimura et al. 2015);
  • European bison (Bison bonasus) and aurochs / house cattle (Bos taurus) diverged 3.56 mya and still can hybridize as beefalos;
  • horses (Equus caballus) and ass (Equus asinus) diverged 11.1 mya and still can hybridize as mules;
  • Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and African elephant (Loxodonta africana) diverged 8.4 mya (at least 7.6 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007), and even African savannah elephants (L. africana) and the very similar forest elephants (L. cyclotis) diverged 5.5 mya (at least 4 million years according to Rohland et al. 2007);
  • spectacled bears (Tremarctos ornatus) and Asian black bear (Ursus / Selenarctos thibetanus) diverged 13.9 million years ago and can still hybridize in captivity (Mondolfi & Boede 1981);
  • river otter (Lutra lutra) and brown fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) diverged 40 mya (still a far cry from the difference between pakicetids and basilosaurids in a tenth of the time);
  • river hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and pygmy hippo (Choeropsis liberiensis) diverged 7.0 mya (hippos represent the closest living relatives of whales);
  • common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) diverged 2.25 mya (this is more than twice the available time of the transformation of quadrupedal protocetids to fully marine pelagicetids, but only achieved minor differences).

Most of these recent species pairs only differ in allometric measures and minor color pattern. They usually look so similar that they could hardly be distinguished by laymen, even though they were separated for a much longer time than was available for most major transitions in the fossil record.

So, what about great apes and humans? Chimp (Pan paniscus) and gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) diverged according to TimeTree 8.6 million years ago and humans (Homo sapiens) from chimps 6.4 million years ago, which agrees with the hominin fossil record. There are two possibilities: Either you follow those scientists who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as marginal. Then this example would just confirm the pattern described above. Or, you consider humans as very different from chimps, based on their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity and cultural achievements. In the latter case humans would represent the only exception to the pattern that I could find, which arguably would represent a remarkable confirmation of Judeo-Christian human exceptionalism.

These examples could be expanded endlessly but should be sufficient to establish the point. There are clearly limits to what unguided evolution can do within a few million years, and these limits are far below the level of any major body plan transitions. Thus, we can safely conclude that there are two indisputable facts that require an adequate explanation:

1.) There are many examples of fossil species pairs with very different body plans that diverged within a window of time of 5 (±5) million years. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are only about 350,000 described fossil species (extrapolated based on data in Teichert 1956, Valentine 1970, Raup 1976, and Alroy 2002), which represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 5-50 billion species that have ever lived on Earth (Raup 1991).

2.) There exist no living species pairs with even remotely similar differences in body plan that are dated to have diverged in a similar time frame. This is even more remarkable if we consider that there are an estimated 8.7 million living species (Mora et al. 2011, Strain 2011, Sweetlove 2011), of which more than 2 million are described (IISE 2012). Previous estimates of the total number of living species varied from 3-100 million species (May 1988, Tangley 1997, Chapman 2009), but if microbes are included, it could even be up to a trillion living species (Locey & Lennon 2016, Latty & Lee 2019).

Considering the fact that windows of time of only 5-10 million years account for most of the abrupt appearances of new body plans in the fossil record (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021), the Bayesian likelihood of not finding a single example of similar morphological disparity having originated on a similar time frame among the millions of living species is basically close to zero. I consider this simple argument as a final nail in the coffin of Darwinian unguided evolution.

Based on this argument, I formally and publicly posed the following challenge to evolutionary biologists (Bechly 2022a): find in the vast database of almost 149,000 species at TimeTree.org just a single example of any pair of different species that have diverged about 5 million years ago (give or take a few million years) according to a consensus of multiple molecular clock studies, and that exhibit a morphological disparity in their body plans comparable to, say, Pakicetus and Basilosaurus. To be clear, of course no evolutionary biologist ever claimed that Pakicetus was the actual ancestor of Basilosaurus. It rather represented a side branch of the cetacean stem group. But it definitely does imply that the stem species was roughly similar in body plan to Raoellidae and Pakicetidae. Therefore, this challenge is absolutely valid and reasonable.

There is no conceivable reason why a disparity like that between Pakicetus and Basilosaurus should be limited to the fossil record, where it can be found in numerous examples among all groups of organisms, while being totally absent among the millions of recent species. So, the challenge could even be formulated in a more relaxed and generous way, which is not restricted to the TimeTree database. Just find any pair of species among the millions of living species to meet the challenge; just a single example! If unguided evolution really can do its magic, this should not be too difficult. However, if the challenge cannot be met, Darwinists must be asked to explain why.

An obvious possible objection to the species pair challenge might be, that such recent species pairs do not represent ancestor-descendent lineages but just sister- or cousin-lineages that both diverged from a common ancestor. However, this also applies for most fossil examples, and indeed makes the case even more problematic. While differences in ancestor-descendent lineages could only accumulate in a single evolving lineage, sister-lineages could both evolve differences during the same time and thus should rather present more and not less morphological disparity. Evidently, actualistic explanations fail in the case of major transitions in the fossil record. This arguably represents powerful independent empirical confirmation for the hypothesis that microevolutionary (population genetic) processes cannot be extrapolated over large periods of time as sufficient explanation for the origin of complex biological novelties in the history of life.

Maybe evolutionists will appeal to yet unknown non-Darwinian processes (see above). However, the great advantage of this new argument is that it is totally independent of the nature of the transformation process. You could simply consider that process as a black box. Therefore, it is totally irrelevant if Darwinists invent some new possible mechanism. The crucial point is not the process, but the resulting pattern of new body plans consistently having come into being abruptly in the distant past, but not in the more recent past.

So, how did evolutionary biologists react to this new challenge. Mostly crickets, except for some discussion at the Peaceful Science forum, where Prof. Arthur Hunt, a botanist and soil scientist from the University of Kentucky, suggested that a group of Hawaiian endemic plants called the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance does meet the challenge. I refuted this claim in an article (Bechly 2022b), which showed that the very different growth forms are mostly due to phenotypic plasticity and even occur within the same species. Again nothing but crickets. A year later the challenge still stands and lacks any serious response, which is quite telling and shows that the raised issue is a genuine and valid problem that requires an adequate explanation.

In my view the cumulative evidence suggests that the only adequate explanation is that Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only to the Neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection but to any unguided evolutionary processes including those suggested by proponents of the so-called Extended Synthesis (e.g., Shapiro et al. 2014, Laland et al. 2014, 2015, Garte 2016, Müller 2016, 2017). There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this process should have been active over all of Earth history but then ceased to function within the past 10 million years. Intelligent design proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final telos. Any further identification of the intelligent cause would have to transgress the methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).

A New Challenge: The Collapsing Tree Problem

In three recent Fossil Friday articles (Bechly 2023b, 2024a, 2024b) and a podcast (Bechly 2024c) I introduced a further new challenge to Neo-Darwinism, which I called the collapsing tree problem. This problem is rampant in all groups of organisms, and I demonstrated it with the examples of the phylogenies of arachnid arthropods, insectivore mammals, and modern (neoavian) birds. The general gist of the argument is the following: When you look at the various phylogenetic trees published by the most modern research on a particular group (say just the papers of the past ten years), based on the most sophisticated methods and most complete data, and then calculate a so-called consensus tree as common denominator, these trees tend to collapse to an unresolved bush (polytomy). This is even admitted in mainstream scientific papers (e.g., Sharma et al. 2014). This is of course mainly because of the ubiquitous conflicting tree topologies produced by different data sets. This totally contradicts the necessary prediction of Darwinism that different lines of data should converge to one true tree of life, but it nicely confirms the “lawn view” of Darwin critics. The only topological structure that survives this procedure is the pre-Darwinian Linnaean classification, thus phyla, classes, orders, and families would still be confirmed, but all the inter-ordinal and inter-family groupings postulated by Darwinism and “common descent with modification” evaporate. Basically modern phylogenetics backfired against common descent, or at least very much weakens one of the main arguments championed by Darwinian activists like Richard Dawkins in favor of common descent. This should give even staunch Darwinists reason to pause, but instead they just shrug off such conflicting evidence and explain it away with ad hoc rescue devices such as incomplete lineage sorting and convergent evolution. No questioning of the fundamental paradigm is allowed by petty evidence.

From Darwin Back to Linnaeus

As one of the consequences of the collapsing tree problem, I suggest abandoning evolutionary classifications and return to a pre-Darwinian Linnaean classification based on clustering according to overall similarity (phenetics), and groups defined by their unique combination of diagnostic characters, without any evolutionary assumptions. Such a return to typological essentialism in biosystematics would also avoid circular reasoning, which indeed was a crucial argument by the pheneticists in the 1970s and the pattern cladists in the 1980s. Unfortunately, these two alternative schools of biosystematics did not prevail against the mainstream push towards cladistic classifications based on reconstructed evolutionary relationship. For the sake of good scientific practice, a classification based on patterns of similarity would have to come first, and all interpretations should come only later and be based on these primary data. Evolutionists can of course interpret such similarity-based classifications in terms of common descent with modification, and design theorists can alternatively or additionally interpret similarities as common design. I do not advocate a design-based classification instead of an evolution-based cladistic classification, but a theory-free classification based on observational empirical evidence of maximum overall similarity.

Conclusions

I suggest that the waiting time problem, the species pair challenge, and the collapsing tree problem, together with the numerous other profound challenges to Neo-Darwinism, such as the ubiquitous conflicts between molecular clock datings and the fossil record, the rampant discontinuities in the fossil record (see Bechly 2024d), the combinatorial search-space problem for new protein folds, and irreducible complexity in molecular machines, have reached a threshold of conflicting evidence that requires a paradigm change in the biosciences and a revival of teleology. Whatever new paradigm will replace Neo-Darwinism, the merit of any such new approach will have to be estimated not only based on its empirical support, causal adequacy, overall explanatory power, plausibility, and parsimony, but also based on its ability to solve the mentioned problems. This does by no means imply any denial of well-established science like geological dating and common descent with modification, but implies a necessity for a new view on the mechanisms that bring about biological novelty, which does not shy away from the possibility of goal-directed processes. Instead of letting a materialist world view bias decide, which explanations are allowed and which are considered as taboo, it should only be the scientific empirical data rather than dogmatic world view blinders that decide among competing hypotheses in an inference to the best explanation of biological origins, following the evidence wherever it leads.

Literature