Deep Time: Cladistics, The Revolution in Evolution [Paperback]

A little slow to get going - you think that Gee might have been attending a few too many Creative Writing courses. (Why do popular science authors think that every miniscule detail of their field trips is fascinating or relevant to the science?) It's worth the wait however, as this is a very clear explanation for the average person of the aims of cladistics, with some detailed discussions as applied to the fish/tetrapod relationship, birds/dinosaurs, and the hominids.

Gee reminds us that a scientific hypothesis should be testable, a precept virtually forgotten by today's disingenuous science in which total conjecture is always being handed down to us as incontrovertible fact. Contrary to the long-standing viewpoint of palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists, cladistics argues that any temporal or causal link between any fossil and any other fossil or any living species simply cannot be proven - they are after all dead and gone; the best we can do is create bifurcating "cladograms" indicating some sort of inferred relationship, without any temporal axis.

Some of the discussion of birds contained herein may well require a rewrite with the recent exposure of some Chinese bird fossils as fakes. Also, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a book like this really ought to contain some pictures of fossils and anatomical drawings to explain the points made in the text - there are none at all.

Despite such faults, this book should be required reading for anyone intending to embark upon a scientific career - this is what science should be about. Let's get back to our scientific roots.

Fascinating? Cladistics? Yes, amazingly, a topic based on things buried eons ago in the past, one that could be dull as ditchwater or dry as desert dust, is given a chatty and almost conversational treatment to bring it to life before us. Even dyed-in-the-wool creationists might find some revelations in here they could find hard to dispute.

Gee has enjoyed many years playing with palaeontology on field trips, in museum basements, and theoretically, as well as contributing extensively to the Nature publication. He has an easy style with words, and the breadth of his knowledge and intensity of his enthusiasm shines through them.

This little book gives us a crystal clear insight into the scale of the problem of time itself, and how one might begin to assign characteristics to an animal from tiny fragments of fossilised remains. And then he illustrates the difficulties found when trying to extend the reasoning, or to construct more about the animal by comparing similarities and functionalities across types.

I'm not a historian, nor an archaeologist, nor a palaeontologist, but an impatient engineer, and so I admire anyone who has the dedication, time and persistence to immerse themselves into these arts and to discover knowledge, for real, for the first time! Gee gives us the voyeur's glimpse into how it is done, and how the techniques of Cladistics can be extended into some surprising new areas.

I think having previously recently read The Invisible Gorilla helped my understanding of the importance of the rigorous cause and effect reasoning that makes Cladistics so effective. It also helped me understand more quickly why so many of the previous evolutionary associations retro-assigned to species have been flawed, because of the desire to make them `fit a story' or be `part of a sequence'.

However I've only given it four stars, because I felt that he rambled on for too long in several places, and what should have been a very interesting last chapter seemed a bit rushed and left me with the unsatisfied feeling of wanting more detail.

Fortunately, he has quoted extensive references, and, if I find the time, I hope to be able to pursue some of them.

Henry Gee's "Deep Time" is, if you will excuse the pun, a most timely book. Over the past ten years or so we have been treated to an increasingly rich diet of 'evolutionary' explanations for almost every conceivable human physical and psychological attribute on the basis of a highly speculative and scientifically untenable interpretation of the role of genes, inspired to a large extent by what biology professor Brian Goodwin termed the "absurd and degenerate concept" of the so-called 'selfish gene'.

If, as Henry Gee states, most professional palaeontologists "rejected the story-telling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than 30 years ago', then the appearance of a book about cladistics - the subject of "Deep Time" - is long overdue. Cladistics is the science of relationships based on verifiable attributes, as gleaned from comparative anatomy, physiology and embryology, from palaeontology and recently also from the comparison of gene sequences in plants and animals.

Such studies, in the view of cladists such as Gee, lead only to patterns of kinship - degrees of closeness of relationship based on observable features of structure and form. Any interpretation or extrapolation of such data to generate evolutionary lineages - lines of descent - is unscientific and therefore invalid. Such narratives of human or animal evolution are just that - stories invented to satisfy subjective prejudices about our place in nature, in particular about the presumed inevitable upward progression of evolution. "Deep Time", the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth, and the extraordinary sparsity of the fossil record allow no valid conclusions to be drawn about how or why evolution occurred.

Cladistics claims to be an objective scientific method primarily on the basis that it is testable. Yet Gee admits that the test applied by cladists - Occam's Razor or the Principle of Parsimony - is unreliable and can never reveal the truth, which Gee says is unknowable. We are therefore left hanging in the void. We are told that 'almost everything we have been told about evolution is wrong', that we must abandon the stories of a progressive evolutionary process leading to Man, but we are given instead a scientific method which has nothing to say about the 'how' or 'why' of evolution and which is in any case apparently unreliable.

There is a further paradox. If the objective facts studied by cladists can say nothing about the how or why, then they can neither confirm nor deny Darwin's theory. Gee seems strangely ambivalent about this, at times acceping the lack of proof for Darwinism, at others using the assumption of the fact of natural selection to make his case e.g. when he simply asserts that evolution (because it is Darwinian) can have no direction or purpose.

Cladistics should nonetheless be welcomed. It has potential - if objectively pursued - to cut through the pseudo-science which currently bedevils evolution theory. It can help us towards a clearer view of our place in nature - but only if it is genuinely open to ALL the facts.

There is a kind of sub-plot to "Deep Time", in which Gee joins those who feel the need to knock humans off any kind of imagined pedestal, to reduce us to an insignificant accident of cosmic history. Bipedality, the manufacture and use of tools, language, intelligence, creativity and self-consciousness are all dismised as 'really not very special'. One has to ask if this is an objective assessment of the facts, unprejudiced by personal preferences and why it is that Gee fails to mention those facts of comparative embryology and anatomy which tell a very different story of evolution from the Darwinian one.