Typology

Typology refers to the way in which we mentally organise things.  'Things', here, can be many different objects.  We can, for example, organise transport into types, so that we would have spacecraft, aircraft, land vehicles and vehicles which could travel in or on the surface of water.  We could also sort buildings into types, i.e. commercial properties, domestic properties and so-on.  Similarly living things naturally organise themselves into types by their characteristics.  In this respect the so-called hierarchical pattern in living forms, put forward by evolutionists, conflicts rather seriously with what is actually found.

Types are classified by their characteristics.  Indeed it is usually only by the physical characteristics that a type is identifiable.  Organisms which do not show the characteristics of a type are excluded from it.  Characteristics are the means by which we identify, label and organise organisms.

Evolution preaches a continual sequence of change.  It does not allow for some characteristics to become immutable, a fixed part of the organism.  If characteristics can be freely added, then equally they can be freely lost.  Yet what we actually see, if we assume that the sequential, hierarchical view of life is correct, is that characteristics, once part of an organism, are very rarely lost.  Further evolution, it seems, merely cement those characteristics ever more indelibly into the organism's line.

Why should certain facets, developed under the influence of environmental conditions, become permanently embedded, rarely fundamentally changing?  There is something basically wrong here.  It is as if there is a preset form of an organism, which once attained, is frozen for ever.  Even more incredibly, further evolution does not change this substantially.  One of the problems associated with this is that all organisms show this fixity.  If it was confined to a few examples reason would allow it to pass.  But it is the universal experience.

There are a few changes, it can be argued, of which this is not absolutely true.  For example whales have an extensively modified pelvic structure, some apparently having lost almost all of it (but in this case there are greater evolutionary problems to deal with).  But this, in a sense, makes the point, because the effect is so rare.  This loss should turn up in many places, not a few.  But that, as implied above, would make the process of taxonomy impossible.  It is only because this effect is so rare that we can classify living organisms with any confidence.

Taxonomy and cladistics are absolutely built on natural typology.  We use this property of living things to classify living organisms, yet it clashes with evolutionary theory.  It implies that a characteristic having appeared, it remains for ever, extended perhaps, modified perhaps, but never fundamentally altering.  This property of living things both runs totally counter to what we would expect of evolution, yet is what we see, and is the property we wholly depend upon to classify life.

Many of the older biologists of the 19th century, who did not accept evolution, were accused, indeed still are, of having religious reasons for that rejection.  It has been pointed out by a number of analysts that this is a gloss, and is not true.  These men rejected evolution precisely because the typology then found in nature ran absolutely counter to the (new) evolutionary ideas.  It was a rejection on an empirical basis, not a metaphysical one.

An hierarchical arrangement does not, in point of strict fact, describe what we find in nature.  The onus, then, is on evolutionists to explain why typology is so strong in living organisms, and why characteristics once gained are seemingly never lost, and become the markers whereby we can group living organisms.