The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

If it was a general rule that species slowly evolved themselves out of existence by
gradual change under natural selection, then the history of human evolution, too,
must have boiled down to a long, gradual slog from primitiveness to perfection:
a process of fine-tuning over eons. Even leaving aside the magisterial and
unassailable authority of Mayr and Dobzhansky, this view of human evolution
was highly congenial to a science already steeped in notions of the Great Chain
of Being, and it came rapidly to dominate the paleo-anthropological mindset. 23
Punctuated Equilibria
The problem was that the people who studied the fossils found little evidence
for this gradualist view of evolution at all, let alone among the hominid fossils. This led
in 1972 to the publication by two young paleontologists, Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay
Gould, now both famous professors, of a paper proposing the theory of “punctuated
equilibria.” This theory posited “tremendous evolutionary conservatism,” where little
or no change tends to accumulate through time, and the concentration into branching
events of what evolutionary transformation does occur, as Eldredge himself formulated
it. 24 Long periods of stasis (well attested by the fossil record) are punctuated by rapid
evolutionary changes. The main causes for such change are climatic (e.g., ice ages) or
catastrophic (e.g., periods of extensive volcanic activity or earth’s collision with large
meteors which probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs). Natural selection
working on the existent variation relatively quickly selects individuals better adapted
to the new circumstances.
Since the early work of Eldredge and Gould, it has become clear that there are
genetic mechanisms that can hasten this relatively rapid emergence of new species
in rapidly changing environments. Regulatory genes are known to influence major
developmental patterns in the individual organism. Such structural changes can have
major impact on an animal’s morphology, size and developmental life history. For any
new structure to be viable, as one would expect in an organism, it must reach a certain
level of development or the mutant will be aborted. This explains why there are no
partial gills, wings, eyes or semibipedal hominids (the famous “hopeful monsters” as
the geneticist Goldscmidt termed partly evolved organs hypothesized by traditional
Darwinist explanations of gradual evolution). Organisms do not survive to breed if
they are burdened with partly-evolved major organs or structures. Because non-lethal
mutations known as “recessives” can be masked by dominant genes, they can be carried
forward from generation to generation within a population until a critical mass of them
has accumulated. “Finally, at some point, and by a mechanism that remains unknown,
the mutant recessive is converted to the dominant state,” 25 and a new form emerges.
This could explain the apparently sudden emergence of new fossil forms, such as the
appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, without leaving fossil evidence of
the stages of transformation from old to new.
This possibility leads to the fact that speciation was probably the norm in hominid
evolution as indeed it has been for other mammals. Instead of evolution appearing as a
tree trunk with branches and modern humans as the growing tip, as Darwin suggested
and Haeckel loved to illustrate with images of Teutonic oak trees representing the
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23
Tattersall, I. and J. Schwartz, 2000, Extinct Humans, p46.
24
Eldredge, N., 1991. Fossils: The Evolution and Extinction of Species, p38.
25
Tattersall and Schwartz, 2000, p49.
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