144 Evolution and the Fossil Record
The most outrageous case was when a creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck
into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum
in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. At this time in the long history of debates on cladis-
tics, many of the most extreme advocates were calling themselves “pattern cladists.” They
no longer followed neo-Darwinism (as we discussed in chapter 4) and all the convoluted
scenarios that had been built on top of simple phylogenetic diagrams to create complicated
family trees with many additional assumptions. Instead, they argued that pure science was
simply the testable hypotheses of the patterns of cladograms and nothing more. My friend, the
distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the Natural History Museum in London,
was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions
about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil
record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such
as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that
evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of
“shorthand” that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate,
but means something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and
was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland’s account of what had happened because
I remembered Colin’s ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted.
For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and
why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted
a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that neo-Darwinists made. Unfortunately,
Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these
misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists.
The Molecular Third Dimension
One no longer has the option of considering a fossil older than about eight million
years as a hominid no matter what it looks like.
—Vincent Sarich, 1971As was pointed out in chapter 4, one of the most powerful corroborations of Darwin’s evi-
dence of the branching structure of life is that we can see that branching pattern by compar-
ing the molecules in nearly every cell in every living thing (e.g., fig. 4.7). This was evidence
that not even Darwin could have anticipated and convincing proof of the fact that life
has evolved. Whether one looks at the DNA sequences directly or at other nucleic acids
like mitochondrial DNA, or the RNAs, or the protein sequences in any other number of
biochemicals—cytochrome c, hemoglobin, alpha lens crystalline, and many other proteins—
the answer nearly always comes out the same. To paraphrase the Bible, every one of our cells
declare the handiwork of evolution! It is a simple calculation to show that these identical
branching patterns in every biochemical system in an organism are not random and could
not occur unless that branching pattern were due to common ancestry.
Molecular phylogeny emerged in the 1960s with very crude methods, such as hybrid-
izing DNA strands from different animals to see how similar their DNAs were (and therefore
their evolutionary distance). Other methods compared the strength of the immune response
(more closely related organisms have stronger immune responses than distantly related