“One Little Hour”

Christopher Hitchens, antitheist author of God is Not Great, had an epiphany last week. He was watching the BBC production Planet Earth when the tv series covered some of the blind inhabitants of caves around the world. Hitchens’ eureka moment came upon hearing the narrator describe blind salamanders that had lost their eyesight over a span of millions of years in sunless caves. Here was a stake to the heart (pardon the pun) of the ignorant creationists that Hitchens so detests. Since proof of progressive evolution had failed to convince those pesky intelligent design worshippers, here was an example of the opposite! Understandably Hitchens was excited since

“it is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject.”

Unfortunately for Hitchens’ ego, he is a bit late in his discovery. On October 5th, 1847 Louis Agassiz, a “founding father of the modern American scientific tradition,” proposed an investigation of the “blind-fish” of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although Agassiz never found the time to carry out his experiments, possibly because of his new professorship at Harvard, some of his students later performed groundbreaking research into subterranean blind animals. It has been a bit awkward for evolutionists to embrace Agassiz and his research since he was a vocal opponent of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution as well as a proto-creationist.

Christopher Hitchens has been called “the reincarnation of H.L. Mencken,” famous American journalist and social satirist (the man responsible for the modern stereotype of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”). Hitchens cum Mencken considers the majority of Americans, particularly the ones who believe in God, to be boobs. Ironically, a frequent target of Mencken’s ire in the 1910s was fundamentalist evangelist Billy Sunday.

Sunday had some knowledge of Louis Agassiz and recommended to William Jennings Bryan that the retired Senator should use some of the late scientist’s arguments in his defense of creationism at the Scopes Trial. Sunday even used the blind-fish of Mammoth Cave as a sermon illustration. It gives me great pleasure when a modern day skeptic, who is evangelistic in his atheism, “discovers” an idea once used by a fire-breathing fundamentalist to win souls to Jesus ninety years ago.

Hitchens appears unfamiliar with the term “regressive evolution,” which describes the loss of function over time. Most hardcore evolutionists are also hardcore modernists. Except for some who suffer from varying degrees of cognitive dissonance, modernists believe in the gradual progression of mankind toward a better state of being, as defined by ideals of the European Enlightenment. In other words, things be gettin’ better and better. Sure, evolution is often defined as simple “change over time” denotatively, but words like “upwards,” “better,” and “toward greater complexity” tend to creep in connotatively. Since regressive evolution describes a type of devolution, it has not been a very popular subject for study until recently.

Hitchens contacted his buddy Richard Dawkins, who agreed that Hitchens had hit upon a great argument against creationism. The problem is that regressive evolution should no more bother creationists today than it did in the 1910s and 1840s. Creationists believe in change within species and would typically embrace the idea that species can lose genetic information, even to the point of whole organs. The aspect of macro-evolution with which creationists contend is the addition of new and unique genetic information.

Actually regressive evolution is as much of a challenge to evolutionists as to creationists. When faced with a dark environment generation after generation why would salamanders and fish all over the world lose their eyesight rather than gain new ability? Why didn’t the salamanders’ visual spectrum increase to include infrared or ultraviolet light similar to what some snakes use? Indeed, the loss of function could be expected by creationism, whereas natural selection would seem to dictate not the loss of eyesight, but it’s perfection.

Hitchens’ epiphany about blind salamanders is no more original, nor in my opinion more accurate, than his attacks upon theism.