[Dr. David Menton received a Ph.D. in cell biology from Brown University. He served as a biomedical research technician at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota (1960-62). He served as associate professor of Anatomy at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri (1966-2000) and was then appointed as associate Professor Emeritus of Anatomy at Washington University School of Medicine (July 2000). This year Dr. Menton produced a new DVD series titled The Evolution of Darwin: His Science. We asked Dr. Menton to spend some time with us and share his thoughts on Darwinian evolution given the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species.]
BH: You own a unique copy of an early edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. What does the introduction to that edition reveal?
DM: In the 6th edition of Origin of Species they invited W.R. Thompson to write the introduction. Thompson was one of Canada’s leading biologists. W.R. Thompson warned the publisher that you probably don’t want me to write this introduction because it will not be a hymn to Darwin. They thought, this sounds interesting, so they encouraged him to go ahead and write it. In that introduction he said, “A long enduring and regrettable effect of the success of the Origin of Species was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculations.” That, to me was the biggest hit we took from the whole Darwinian mentality….Darwin speculated without limit. And it’s this limitless speculation that I think W. R. Thompson is talking about. Thompson went on to say, “The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity. This is already evident in the reckless statements of Haeckel, and the shifty devious histrionic statements of Thomas Huxley.” It’s obvious when one reads Darwin’s writings that his boo
k is little more than story telling.
BH: Having studied Darwin’s book, what problems come to mind to you in regards to his work?
DML One of the major problems is with the title of his book. Most evolutionists will contend that Darwin never dealt with that particular issue—the origin of species. He took a lot of antidotal evidences, things he saw, and merely assumed that they would somehow, in the course of time, be explained by variation and natural selection. But he didn’t really account for it….Also, Darwin could see variation in animals. Now remember this was not speculation or theory, this was his firsthand observation. He saw tremendous variability. And because he knew nothing about genetics, he thought that this variation that he could observe was without limit. So ultimately his observations lead him to the wrong conclusion that variation could change things from say birds to a different type of bird, and then even a different animal altogether.
BH: When you hear individuals celebrating the anniversary of Darwin’s birth or the anniversary of his book Origin of Species what goes through your mind as a scientist and a man who taught medical students for years?
DM: As you know, this is the Year of Darwin. Some evolutionists have said that we’re beating a dead horse—that they have moved on. But in actual fact, things haven’t changed greatly from Darwin’s view of variation, which he couldn’t account for. Why there would be variation. Darwin had no understanding of genetics. Gregory Mendel was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and we should be celebrating Gregory Mendel’s contribution to biology. They were huge compared to Charles Darwin. There is simply no comparison. Can you even imagine modern biology without Mendelian Genetics? But it is quite easy to imagine biology without Darwinian evolution. Indeed, I didn’t use it in my career. It contributed nothing to my understanding of biological systems. It contributed nothing to the lectures I gave to medical students over thirty-four years covering perhaps every organ in the body during that time. It rarely contributed to lectures given by my colleagues to medical students. And it certainly didn’t contribute to my published research.
BH: You have a new DVD titled the Evolution of Darwin. Share some of the icons you dismiss in your presentation.
DM: What I’ve been doing lately in a new talk is going through Darwin’s Origin of Species with his tree of life—which he showed and has become an icon. For instance, if you go to London and visit the Darwin exhibit at the Natural History Museum, they prominently show a page from Darwin’s notebook written in 1837 showing this tree. He did this after returning from a voyage on the Beagle. He was only 28 years old at the time. He showed this misshapen tree with branches going here and there and terminating. He had branches labeled with A, B, C, and D, all coming from a number 1 at the bottom. He had no indication of what that first life form was. He never even attempted to try and understand what it was other than to say that maybe it occurred in some warm little pond. At the top of the tree he wrote, “I think” indicating this was merely a guess.
This was what he proposed. The interesting thing was that his ideas were not widely accepted among the scientific community of his day. They were more readily accepted by laymen. Many scientists of his day wanted to believe what Darwin was speculating about. I think specifically of men like Thomas Huxley, who was a great champion of Darwin even as he did not believe what Darwin said. He couldn’t account for the origin of species. He wasn’t convinced that variation and natural selection could explain it all. But Thomas Huxley, being an atheist, found the materialist explanation very attractive. Never mind that Darwin’s mechanism didn’t actually work in his view. Still, he championed it because it was going in the right direction—getting away from divine intervention. Certainly Darwin moved things away from divine intervention.
BH: Darwin placed a number 1 at the bottom of his evolutionary tree of life. But a survey of his work reveals he had no clue what that number represented.
DM: It’s interesting in talking about that very first origin of life, which Darwin couldn’t account for, in a letter to Joseph Hooker in 1871 (after The Origin of Species had been published) he noted, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life. One might as well think of the origin of matter.” Darwin had no idea of that initial origin. It’s interesting that today many evolutionists say the origin of life isn’t even related.
BH: I’ve experienced that personally on several different occasions during my Question & Answer sessions, where evolutionists or atheists try to defend the idea that evolution is not concerned with the origin of matter. They recognize that their theory can’t explain the very existence of matter, and so they try to remove it from the equation.
DM: And yet, their theory does deal with this. After all, they prescribe to the Big Bang, a theory that tries to teach how everything came from nothing. For instance, I was involved in a dispute when I was still in St. Louis with a local school board over the teaching of evolution in a particular community’s high school and what the book said. I happened to comment in passing on how there is no information regarding the origin of life. The biology teacher at this particular high school stood up and said: “This is just a typical tactic from a creationist. They bring up a straw man on the origin of life. We don’t even deal with the origin of life in our biology class at the high school.” That really went over effectively with the audience—as they thought this was really a non-issue. A few days later one of the parents with a student in the class sent me a big fat manila envelope. When I opened it up there was the entire chapter xeroxed from their book regarding the origin of life. This parent wanted me to see that this teacher had been lying through his teeth. It was one of the largest chapters in the biology book that he was using in his class.
BH: Are modern-day scientists any closer to knowing what Darwin’s “number 1” represented?
DM: You know, today if I were to search around and see what the scientific community thinks about the origin of life I don’t think I could do any better than going to someone like Dr. Paul Davies who is at Arizona State University, head of the department of Astrobiology…. Paul Davies, writing in New Scientist, vol 163, p. 2204, September 1999, said, “How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software. And where did the very peculiar form of information needed to get the first living cell up and running come from. Nobody knows.” So we can actually join Charles Darwin today at where he was at the bottom of his evolutionary tree of life with a number 1 that was circled—but no knowledge of what that 1 represented.