Luckily for my readers, I am not the only one with deep thoughts. Not only is Steph a doctor of astrophysics and an immaculate karaoke singer, she has decided to single-handedly combat bad science in the guise of a fiction novel. Her book review was recently published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education and can be found here. Thanks Steph, and keep up the good fight!
Breathless
by Dean Koontz
New York: Bantam, 2009. 352 pages
reviewed by Stephanie LaMassa
The plot of Dean Koontz’s novel Breathless centers on the mysterious appearance of two furry white creatures in the Rockies. The size of young children, they have attributes of dogs, cats, and otters, yet resemble none of these, having hands with opposable thumbs. The two main characters, Grady Adams, a craftsman, and Camilla Rivers, a veterinarian, spend the majority of the novel acquainting themselves with these animals and speculating on their origins. The animals’ eyes are their most enchanting feature, larger in proportion to their head than any known animal’s and colored in various hues of gold.
Seemingly unrelated subplots persist throughout the book and are ultimately tied together in the conclusion. One such subplot focuses on Lamar Woosley, who holds a PhD in both mathematics and physics, specializing in chaos theory. His musings on the nature of scientific inquiry set the tone for the climax of the book, where the target of his criticisms of unfounded theories and the scientists who cling to them is ultimately revealed: evolution.
These new creatures signify the end of the acceptance of evolution and the beginning of a new way of thinking. Where do these creatures originate? From “out of infinity into the finite, from out of time into time” (p 305). Such an alternative to evolution is certainly not a viable scientific one, but as a novelist who often writes about supernatural phenomena, it is neither Koontz’s obligation nor his intention to promote this sudden appearance as a realistic truth. Rather, he is focused on inciting his readers to question the validity of evolution.
Koontz utilizes a two-prong approach to achieve this end: portraying scientists as dogmatic and closed-minded and debunking evolution using specious arguments commonly used by anti-evolutionists. For the first prong, he insists, through his character Woosley, that it’s unscientific ever to regard a scientific fact as settled: a scientist who does so has “ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another” (p 300). Indeed, scientists are apt to “become so committed to a theory that they spend entire careers ever more desperately defending it as new discoveries ever more rapidly undermine it” (p 300). By declaring that evolution is such a theory that survives despite the contradicting evidence, he implies that evolution is a “religion” (p 216).
For the second prong, Woosley offers several lines of evidence against evolution, correcting the “misconceptions” Grady and Camilla, representing the non-scientific public, held. Koontz’s message seems to be that non-scientists accept the fallacious arguments supporting a debunked theory since they are ignorant of the evidence to the contrary. However, these counterarguments are not based on an accurate understanding of evolution or scientific evidence and therefore lend no credence to the claim that evolution has been scientifically refuted. I consider three examples.
Fossil Record. When Grady points out to Woosley that the fossil record supports evolution, he is told that it provides no such evidence. His major points to back up this claim are that Darwin predicted thousands of dead-end species but none has been found, and that no evidence exists for transitional forms in the fossil record. Supposed transitional forms may be unrelated species that have since gone extinct; moreover, dating techniques are not precise enough to date fossils sequentially. The first claim, lack of evolutionary dead-ends, is quite perplexing, for evolutionary biologists have found numerous such fossils, even in the human fossil record. Also, his second claim contradicts the first: if the fossils observed do not represent transitional forms, but rather separate species that have gone extinct, then these would be dead-end fossils. Beyond contradicting the first claim, this second claim also reveals ignorance about the scientific process, since the age of fossils have been accurately determined using independent radiometric dating techniques.
Not Enough Time. Woosley claims that the earth has not existed long enough for evolution to occur. Assuming that each “bit of data” (Koontz’s phrase) in a gene is obtained from mutation, and the fastest this change can occur is the time it takes for the speed of light to transverse a molecule, the amount of time needed to accrue enough changes to evolve from a single-celled organism to a simple one, such as a worm, is much longer than the age of the earth (which he correctly cites as four billion years old). If a worm could not evolve in such a short amount of time, how could anything else, much less a human? (Apparently, the skills of a chaos mathematician are needed to multiply and divide a couple of numbers to refute a biological theory.) This statement demonstrates a lack of understanding about the evolutionary process since not each “bit of data” needs to be acquired through mutation. Evolution occurs through a number of processes, and scientists have demonstrated that these mechanisms can account for evolutionary change within the history of the earth.
The Eye. Though the argument is never made explicitly, it is suggested throughout the book—from the mesmerizing nature of the new creatures’ eyes, referred to as a “more impressive engineering feat than in the human eye” (p 119), to how the “principal challenge they offer [a geneticist and physiologist] is the impossible nature of their eyes” (p 274), it is not coincidental that these creatures’ eyes are their most stunning attribute or that the background on the book’s front cover is a rendering of this eye. For those well-versed in anti-evolution rhetoric, this is a reference to one of the most often used claims of antievolutionists: the complexity of the (vertebrate) eye cannot be accounted for by evolution. True, the eye is complex, but not irreducibly so. Evolutionary biologists have shown how this system could have evolved naturally, and it almost defies reason that this often refuted anti-evolution claim still persists.
Koontz should take the advice he gives to his readers, namely to look beyond what they accept to discover the truth. In his attempts to discredit evolution, he only reveals his (seemingly willing) ignorance on this topic and becomes an “evangelist” for misinformation. His time would have been better spent to learn what the scientific consensus on this issue is and how such tired arguments have been often refuted in the scientific literature. One can only hope that his readers are not swayed by his specious arguments but are instead encouraged to learn the scientific truth—rather than taking science lessons from a novelist. Fitting with the title, Breathless’s dissemination of false information in the guise of bemoaning the stagnation of scientific inquiry can be best described in the words of Judge Jones from the Kitzmiller v Dover decision: “breathtaking inanity.”
About the author:
Stephanie LaMassa has a PhD in astrophysics and is a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University, studying the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.
No comments:
Post a Comment