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Challenges Inside the Camp

Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1940), (Pagaent Books Inc., Paterson, New Jersey, 1960), pp. 6-7.

...At this point in our discussion I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of the gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given.

E.L. Grant Watson, Saturday Evening Post, 27 May 1961, p. 91.

...My purpose is limited to portraying patterns of life histories that cannot be explain by the orthodox theories of evolution...

[Note: The author proceeds to describe in detail the amazing relationship of certain species of sea slugs with sea anemones. The sea slugs are able to eat anemones, despite their poisonous armament of stinging cells(called nematocysts). The extremely sensitive stinging cells are not exploded, nor are they digested by the sea slugs. Rather, the nematocysts are swept up through ciliated channels to pouches on the outer surface of the slug. There they are arranged in readiness to protect the sea slug from attack from its enemies! After describing the arrangement, the author then outlines the complex, interdependent changes which evolution would have to produce it. He then comments:]

...According to the Darwinian theory, all these combinations of variations must be the outcome of chance. If true, then we can accept the belief that these sea slugs evolved from ancestral types through natural selection.

But is it not both simpler and more reasonable to suppose that this complicated pattern of events resulted from some guiding principle? The pattern exists as a whole, and as a whole it must have come into existence, for separate parts of the pattern would not function without all parts being present. These complicated, interlocking arrangements must, I submit, exist in their entirety. ...