Why Penguins Can’t Fly

Another Violation of Ockam’s Razor

One of the problems Aristotelianism faced in the sixteenth century was that it had become gratuitous. A hot fire dried out a damp cloth because, Aristotelians explained, fire has the quality of dryness and heat. But these were nothing more than descriptive labels. The qualities did not explain how the fire dried the cloth. As Descartes later complained:

If you find it strange that … I do not use the qualities called “heat,” “cold,” “moistness,” and “dryness,” as do the philosophers, I shall say to you that these qualities appear to me to be themselves in need of explanation.

Descartes helped to defeat Aristotelianism but as it faded a similar form of explanation emerged to replace it. Like Aristotelianism this new, but not really new, program tended to rely on goal-seeking, teleological explanations. And like Aristotelianism the new program failed to fulfill the Cartesian criterion of explaining how. And like Aristotelianism the new program’s followers were certain it was true. That new program provided a foundation for Charles Darwin and is now called evolution.

Consider for example a recent paper explaining why penguins cannot fly. The answer, it seems, is that through evolution penguins lost the ability to fly as they gained their fantastic swimming skills. The physics of swimming and flying do not go well together and if a species is a great swimmer then it won’t be able to fly very well, if at all. Diving into the water must have been more important to the penguin so it evolved swimming skills at the cost of losing its flying abilities. It was an evolutionary tradeoff.

But the evolution part, like the Aristotelian qualities, is gratuitous. In yet another violation of Ockam’s Razor the evolutionists continue to multiply entities. You see the actual science that was done had nothing to do with evolution. Instead what the science suggested is that good swimming and good flying skills likely do not easily fit into one package.

What the scientific analysis did not find was any explanation for how the penguins could have undergone such an evolutionary transition, let alone how penguins could have evolved in the first place.

The explanation is, itself, in need of explanation.

In fact, the scientific evidence does not indicate that penguins, and all the rest of biology for that matter, arose spontaneously. Yet evolutionists claim this is a fact.

The king (Aristotelianism) is dead, long live the king (Darwinism).