I have seen the foolish taking root.... Job 5:3
"Whenever you see a science headline saying, “How the [creature] got its [feature]” be prepared for a just-so story. That’s the way Rudyard Kipling wrote his farcical tales for children, like “How the camel got his hump” or “How the leopard got his spots.”
Kipling’s cute stories for children were never meant as scientific explanations. Those of Darwinians, however, are intended to be scientific. Even some evolutionists have complained about this bad storytelling habit. Hardcore Harvard materialist Richard Lewontin complained back in 1997 about “the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories”.
The frequent complaint by creationists and some evolutionists has been enough to make some Darwinians defensive about their Kipling-like headlines. Here’s a recent example from the University of Chicago: “How the insect got its wings – scientists (at last!) tell the tale.” Note that it is still a tale. But can they make it substantiated this time?It sounds like a just-so story—“How the Insect Got its Wings”—but it’s really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have emerged in recent years, but none were entirely satisfactory.
The tale has graduated from story to mystery, an “intriguing” one at that. But a mystery is still arguably a story. Is that progress?
Next, the article shows Heather working at a microscope, something Kipling didn’t do, so she gets some points for that. We learn that she replaced the common ancestor of insects, from myriapods (e.g., centipedes) to crustaceans (a subgroup of arthropods). This allowed for her to do a switcheroo, taking a nub (or segment) from a crustacean and turn it into a future wing. Myriapods didn’t have those, so with the new ancestry, Heather doesn’t have to imagine a wing popping into existence by itself. The nub presumably fused into the body wall of a primitive ancestor of insects and crustaceans. With some juggling of nubs, and a little testing with CRISPR, she found some similarities in gene expression between the nubs. This was the basis of her “Aha!” or “wow!” moment:
“But I still didn’t have the wing part of the story,” she said. “So I kept reading and reading, and I came across this 1980s theory that not only did insects incorporate their proximal leg region into the body wall, but the little lobes on the leg later moved up onto the back and formed the wings. I thought, wow, my genomic and embryonic data supports these old theories.”
The article brags on UChicago’s equipment that made possible Heather’s insight." CEH
*"Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is among Kipling's best known works. Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. These had to be told "just so" (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. The stories describe how one animal or another acquired its most distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots. For the book, Kipling illustrated the stories himself." wiki
