Regardless of whether Bruno was genuinely interested in evolution or not, the most simple way to respond is to answer the question. His question was specifically about fossils. The theory of evolution, according to Bruno, assumes that there have been many badly adapted organisms in the past. Mutations, after all, can be beneficial or not. So where are the fossils of all those past organisms with non-advantageous traits? For some reason, he specifically mentioned pterosaurs. Perhaps he had difficulty envisioning hordes of lizard-like beings trying in vainly to fly with failed mockeries of wings, only to fall in the mud, die, and be found as fossils by an intrepid paleontologist who descended from more successful creatures. Well Joe: this never happened, and evolution dictates it should not happen.

Definitions of failure

My first question when trying to formulate an answer was: what is a failure? I could mention many fossils of beings who did not survive, but in order to be called, with at least some justification, an evolutionary failure, the organism must have been particularly unsuccessful in producing offspring. Ideally, this was because of the traits the organism possessed; there is little point in declaring an organism a failure when it died of bad luck. A dinosaur living in Yucatan about 65.5 million years ago had zero chance of surviving the meteor that was going to hit it, but this did not make the dinosaur a failure. Because of this, I will consider those organisms failures when their traits make them less suitable for producing a generation after them. The least fit, if you will.

That still doesn’t quite define the ‘failures’ narrowly enough. In fact, most of this blogpost will be about defining the term. Joe Bruno is obviously not a paleontologist, nor a biologist, and he did not think his term through very well. Because of this, some more work on the definition must be done before I can answer exactly what fossils relevant to Joe’s question have been found.

Extent and type

Are failures groups of organisms or individuals? This is quite significant when fossils are concerned. Most individual organisms don’t fossilize, even if the species is a commonly found fossil. Plankton skeletal remains dissolve or are crushed in a creature’s gut. Bones rot away. Shells fall to pieces through erosion. The chances of finding a specific individual with a specific mutation are small. But perhaps Bruno thought that failure can form entire populations, in which case one should be able to find them, perhaps even repeatedly in the same area. But the question remains open: are the failures individuals within a population or do they form an entire population? I call this the failure’s ‘extent’. If you see problems (or even impossibilities) here, bear with me, because they will be addressed.

The second concern is what a failing property is in itself. How do failures operate? Are they radically different with clear disadvantages, or are they organisms with the same basic traits as their peers, but to a lesser degree? Compare two people who want to go long-distance running: one of them is short and heavy-set, with large muscles and big bones. He doesn’t have a lot of talent for running and will probably never be the best. The other person doesn’t have legs. He cannot run in the normal sense. I will distinguish between these traits by calling the second ‘principal failure’, when the failure is a separate quality that prevents the organism from reproducing most effectively, while the first is a ‘suboptimal failure’, which is a quantative failure, where the organism doesn’t have the trait in as high an amount as other organisms. Creationists sometimes assume that the division I am making here is genetic, but I do not assume any particular method of variation being at the basis of these variants. In a genetic sense, they can all be large or small mutations, or simple parent’s recombination. No assumption in that regard is made, I’m purely referring to how a phenotype’s trait functions in its environment.

The scheme of failures

Combining the two divisions, I came up with a scheme that maps the possible failures one might, perhaps, find as fossils. I gave a name to each variation, resulting in this table:

I will now discuss each type.

I. The Failed Experiments:

There is a scene in Alien: resurrection where Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) walks into a mad scientist’s laboratory. Throughout the room, there are horrible beings on display. The scientist has been trying to clone Ripley and the alien whose DNA she was carrying, or something like that. Point is, he tried again and again to ‘grow’ creatures until he got it right.

The fossil record should be somewhat like this laboratory. Mad experimenting aside, every once in a while you should find the fossil of an organism that was a bad variant. This organism probably didn’t produce offspring, but that didn’t prevent it from living it’s life till the end. However, these beings are not collected by nature and displayed in one room; such fossils are found between the thousands of others that are, as far as we can see, normal. The mutation may also not be visible in the fossil.

The biggest chance of finding such a fossil is when lots of the same species can be found, for example when looking at many microfossils. That is exactly what happens: every now and then, micropaleontologists come upon strange forms that seem to defy the normal morphologies of the species they’re used to. The microfossil seems to belong to one species, but has developed in an odd way. Usually, they will alert a colleague with some ultra-professional claim in the vein of “Hey, look at this goofy one!” and then go on with counting the species they were counting. One microfossil just isn’t enough to base a thesis on.

Dubois' 'Pithecanthropus' bones

One famous macrofossil displaying a principal failure is actually quite a legendary one: Eugene Dubois’ ‘Pithecanthropus’ had a leg bone with an odd growth on it. Surely the creature it belongedto had trouble walking and was in pain. A clear example of a principal failure, since this was a disadvantageous trait.

II. The Monstrous Horde:
Evolution predicts that a population of principal failures should not exist. After all, if a particular trait makes an organism dominate a population, it is clearly not a failing trait. And if a trait is disadvantageous, it won’t spread in the population.

As we would expect from this, there are no fossil populations of failures. This probably hasn’t stopped paleontologists from claiming to have found them – but the reports themselves proved to be failures. The only example I know is A. E. Trueman’s work on the shells of Gryphaea incurva, which he published in 1922. Trueman thought that, in their evolution, these Jurassic oysters became more curved. Eventually, he claimed, the shells became so curved that they could not open anymore, and the species died out. In 1939, Trueman called this a trend “not in harmony with the environment”, suggesting the creatures were evolving themselves to death. This theory was never accepted, mostly because the shells, as research has shown, actually could open.

So the Monstrous Horde has never been found, as evolution suggests. If Bruno expects it should be found, he can be reassured. It never will.

III. The Lesser Beings:
It is actually quite common to find a fossil with a suboptimal trait. In fact, most organisms are not optimally adapted; we can’t all be Olympic decathlon champions with PhD’s. The trouble, however, is recognizing suboptimal beings in a typical sample of fossils. As the term ‘sample’ suggests, it’s a statistical enterprise.

Once you recognize a certain evolutionary trend, as Trueman thought he did with his shells, you can postulate that the descendants are better adapted than the ancestors. Thus, it can be deduced what the optimal trait is – and what is not. At any point in time during the trend, however, there will be statistical variation in the trend; you can test this by gathering the fossils from the same level and then measuring the trait. Apparently, at that moment in time, there were Lesser Beings who did not have the development in the same amount as the others in the population did.

This approach is somewhat politically incorrect, because Lesser Beings suggests these organisms were overall less fit, which some translate to their worth. It should be noted, however, that a fossil is a lousy measure of a creature’s overall fitness. Lesser Beings are measured by one trait. The best that can be concluded is that they existed in one form or another, it is difficult to point to any one fossil.

Examples of Lesser Beings can be found among larger foraminifera, which show a clear trend called nepionic acceleration. Foraminifera grow as a spiralling series of chambers, and nepionic acceleration entails the gradual fusion of the inner chambers into one large chamber. It can be quantified by counting the number of inner chambers. At one point in time, some individual foraminifera will have more and some less chambers, leading to the conclusion that there are some failures known as Lesser Beings among them.

Opabinia regalis

IV. The Discontinued Products:
The final class of failures can be compared to a commercial product that is conceived, put into production, produced for a few years, and then discontinued for some reason or another after initial success. You might think that the Discontinued Products have the same problem as the Monstrous Horde, i.e. that evolution predicts they should not exist, but I think they might have existed. Discontinued Products are possible if you stretch the definition somewhat: I define them as populations that developed for a certain reason, but that were ultimately doomed to failure. This means that the selection pressure changed during their growth. What made them successful to begin with, couldn’t make them last.

Is there a reason to believe Discontinued Products ever existed? Maybe there is. There have been species that were never able to produce a strong lineage of other species or belonged to such a lineage. Take, for example, some of the Burgess Shale species. A species like Opabinia regalis could be regarded as belonging in this class.

In order for Discontinued Products to have existed, there has to be a kind of evolution on the species level, like the ‘species sorting’ proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Evolution may tinker on the species level, putting forth designs and then discarding them when they don’t work in the long run. It’s not a widely accepted model, but I think it holds water, because selection pressures could change as a species develops from one small population to a larger group of multiple populations.

Many more possible examples of Discontinued Products can be mentioned, like early Tetropods with multiple digits (like Ichthyostega and Ventastega), or even whole groups, like Placoderm fish. Once you recognize evolution taking place on higher levels than the gene, it is possible.

Knowledge feedback

With the Discontinued Products, I’ve come to the end of my definitions of evolutionary failures. As I pointed out, all failures except type II (the Monstrous Horde) are probably expected by evolution, and in all cases have I mentioned specific examples. What this means is that evolution gives us a reliable image of the evolution we know from biology, but fossils can also give biologists an idea about how evolution works. There is a feedback process from both fields contributing to the knowledge about the history of life.

Returning to Joe Bruno, I would ask him if this has given him the feeling that he has come to grips somewhat more with evolutionary theory in paleontology. Both the incredulity argument and the lack of knowledge should be removed. Unless he never wanted them removed in the first place, that is.

Assuming he was talking about the book of Genesis and the order in which the different groups of animals and the plants appear, I did not recall any similarity to the order with which organisms first appear in the fossil record. In fact, the two creation stories (and yes, there are two) can be interpreted with so much ambiguity that one has a lot of elbow room when projecting them on the real world. Having read Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Biography, I am also wary of a claim that these creation stories contain any singular message, since they contradict each other.

Still I was wondering what a comparison between chapter 1 of Genesis and the fossil record would bring. That would be the first story of creation, since any attempt to make such a comparison with the second story seems doomed even as an intellectual exercise. If you start reading from the second half of Genesis 2:4, you’ll see what I mean.

The creation in six days however, is from the viewpoint of a geological timescale very ripe for comparison. The stepwise introduction of groups is not unlike the way my geological time table (by Haq and Van Eysinga) places the appearance of each clade in its respective period. Of course the big difference lies in the process of evolution: while the bible does not describe what the earliest animals and plants looked like, the earliest members of some groups were hardly recognizable as such. The first fish did not look like your typical salmon.

The dimension of time is also clearly different; modern life is about 3,8 billion years in the making, but recognized groups did not appear at a steady pace. According to the creation story, it took ‘days’ and at a steady rate, almost staccato.

But let’s, for the sake of the exercise, ignore all such issues and see if the authors of the bible really were so inspired that they basically ordered things correctly.

First come the plants, in Genesis 1:11. But not just any plant: the word ‘seed’ always comes back, no matter what translation I bother to read. Using seeds for procreation is, however, a fairly advanced adaptation for plants. The first plants on land used spores, like ferns. That was of course after there had already been a lot of development in marine plants and algae, who did not bear seeds.

Fossil plant remains from the Carboniferous. Scale: width is about 6 cm.

Were the first organisms plants? No, certainly not. Even stretching of what a ‘plant’ is as far as it will go, the first organisms were not advanced enough to be called a plant. There is no word for a prokaryote in the bible.

Disregarding the peculiar appearance of stars after plants, the next living beings to appear in Creation are the creatures of the sea and the birds. While we all know that the oldest fossils are those from marine creatures, birds are another matter entirely. Birds descend from dinosaurs, so there were creatures walking around before any bird took to the air.

Genesis, however, describes how God creates the animals that crawl and the cattle next. Describing cattle as a relatively recent addition to creation is a safe bet, but the bible did get right that the groups of plants, aquatic beings and birds were firmly in place before animals were domesticated.

Going over it, I think Genesis scores rather badly on biostratigraphy. I cannot see how anyone would mutilate this story to such a degree that it is taken to be in relative accordance with what we know from fossils. To shoehorn Genesis into science takes more interpretation than the story can bear.

But there is a very serious reason why the comparison between Genesis and the actual history of nature is important to some Christians, and I think this reason can say something about atheism as well. By recognizing the creation story in nature, Genesis becomes ‘anchored’ in the real world. By an ‘anchor’ for religion, I mean a tangible, universally identifiable thing that gives the reassurance that a certain kind of faith is not just a personal illusion. A relic is a different kind of anchor, but it basically does the same thing: one can point to it and say, that object, that thing, is the bridge between what I believe in and the material world. Isn’t it spiritually immensely fulfilling if all of nature can have such purpose?

The relevance to atheism is this: atheists often deny to have any kind of faith, but I do think they look for anchors for what they believe in. After all, no atheist is defined just by what (s)he doesn’t believe in. Atheism may be reactionary, it is not purely negative or negating, despite the word beginning with an ‘A’.

What else can the atheists’ anchor be, other than science itself?

My first-year textbook on geology contained a picture on convection currents and plate tectonics, something like this:

Convection in the deep earth

The teacher, otherwise quite enthusiastic about the book, sighed deeply before he started talking about the picture. “This and similar images,” he said, “are well-meant but flawed. There is a fundamental misunderstanding about plate tectonics contained within them.”

He explained. Lithospheric plates move because of convection currents, so much is correct. However, a common mistake apparently made in these pictures is that they make it look like the fluid movement of the asthenosphere drives the movements of the plates floating on it. This is not true, because the plates themselves are part of the convection current. They move because of two mechanisms: ridge-push and slab-pull, the first being the pushing force created by new material created at the mid-oceanic ridges and the second being the pulling force created by a cool slab sinking back into the asthenosphere. In terms of the picture, the arrows should go right through the plates, rather than under them. More than froth on the fluid asthenosphere, the oceanic lithosphere plates are like the upper part of a conveyor belt.

A hot pan

To illustrate the principle of a convection current, a cross-sectional picture of a saucepan with boiling water was given in the textbook. It looked similar to this:

Forced convection in a saucepan

This seemed to irritate my teacher less. It looks like a simple illustration of how a convection current works. No problem, until I noticed something odd when I was making some vegetable stock. The herbs and froth were flowing towards the middle of the boiling water, rather than from the center to the edge of the pan, as the diagram would predict. In fact, they always did in my kitchen, regardless of the size of the pan or the flame beneath it. So were the authors of the textbook guilty of putting two differently flawed pictures right next to each other? In one of the first chapters of a basic introduction?

What is disregarded in the picture, I think, is that the sides of a pan become hotter than the water, which stays 100^o C. So the water is heated from the sides and the bottom, and can only cool down at the top. This would cause water at the sides to go up, leaving the water in the center with nowhere to go but down. The resulting convection is opposite to the picture, which is therefore wrong. It has nothing to do with plate motion, giving the impression that the textbook got two things wrong in short succession.

A textbook exemplar

The pan of boiling water is a typical ‘exemplar’, a textbook case illustrating a scientific theory. It’s copied and re-used again and again – apparently without testing it. The examples of convection experiments I found on youtube were either ambiguous or showed a current going up along the sides of the container used:

This seemed like a solved case to me, until I cooked water in a thin-walled pan at a windy campsite. The boiling water promptly behaved as the classic diagrams, partially saving at least one of the pictures in my geology textbook. So the direction of convection currents is perhaps not easy to predict. The exemplar is partially wrong in that it does not really describe the everyday situation. I’ve been thinking about the factors influencing it, but regardless of the correct model, it seems odd that only one current direction is ever illustrated. Perhaps creation of convection models and cooking are done by different people?