- It is not the purpose of this article to reject out of hand all concepts of Evolution. It is rather to highlight some of the points in the case against being too eager to drop the word “Theory” after the word “Evolution”.
- Even established scientists refuse to consider the possibility that Evolution could be wrong. Professor D.S.M. Watson, a Nobel Laureate, has openly admitted: “Evolution has been accepted by scientists, not because it has been observed to occur or proved by logical coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly unacceptable “.
- In “Animal Species and Evolution” (1963)Ernest Mayr, a supporter of Evolution, conceded:”The basic Evolutionary theory is in many instances hardly more than a postulate and its application raises numerous questions in almost every concrete case”.
- One of the leading (and in his case crusading) disciples of Darwinism is Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford. In “The Third Culture” (1995), a series of interviews with leading evolutionists, John Brockman discovered an unsuspected degree of intellectual discord.
- Stephen Jay Gould, a fossils expert from Harvard, dismisses the arguments of Dawkins as “logically and empirically wrong”; Brian Goodwin, a British biologist,describes Dawkins as “the most extreme exponent of an unfortunate tendency in biology”; and Professor Lynn Maargulis of the University of Massachusetts, dismisses Dawkins’ writings as an extended exercise in tautology, divorced from the real world of biological facts.
- The scientific establishment is so concerned lest the sanctity of belief in Evolution be violated that there has been, and still is, tremendous discrimination against those who have left the “party line”. An important factor in bringing about the almost universal dominance and acceptance of Neo-Darwinism has been that virtually every eminent professional scientist appointed to a post in the life sciences in the last 60 years or so, in the English-speaking world, has been a convinced believer in Neo-Darwinism..
- The Scientific Establishment (which includes such eminent names as Sir Gavin de Beer, Sir Julian Huxley, J>.B.S. Haldane, C.H. Waddington, Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Simpson) has perpetuated itself in the same way that the Soviet Praesidium used to under Communism!
- Writing in “The Spectator” (London) on 31.12.94 Warwick Collins told his readers that his tutor had been the brilliant theorist, Professor John Maynard, a disciple of J.B.S. Haldane. He told him when he raised certain objections to Darwinian theory that he would not be permitted to air them publicly and that he would personally block publication of a paper which Collins had written on the subject and that, if he continued,his status as one of his inner group of researchers and students would be withdrawn!
- Collins argued inter alia that “Darwinian individual selection, as the central mechanism of Evolution, would tend to eliminate one species after another; and that far from being the origin of species, as Darwin suggested, Darwinian theory seems more capable of providing an elegant explanation of “species extinction”!
- The palaeontologist, Miles Eldridge in “Reinventing Darwin” (1995) writes:”Gradual evolutionary transformation at the ‘macro level is a myth”.
- Dean Kenyon, Biology Professor at San Francisco State University, in his book, “Of Pandas and People”, provides the most comprehensive and thorough scientific critique of Darwinian theory currently available. For 30 years he was the leading scientific authority in the U.S.A. on the mechanism by which the first and most primitive of living organisms might have arisen spontaneously billions of years ago from a chance interaction of chemicals on the Earth’s surfaces. He came to the conclusion that “life itself owes its origins to a master intellect”. It must be stressed that for Professor Kenyon the inference that there must be an intelligent designer has nothing to do with religious belief but is rather a possible conclusion that can be reached from an honest interpretation of the scientific evidence.
- Radiocarbon dating, so necessary for assisting Neo-Darwinists to establish the enormouss time-span for their theory to be accurate, is now widely suspect. After an impressive start, the method quickly ran into difficulties. Anomalous dates were produced from successive attempts, including the discovery that some living shell-fish had very little radiocarbon in their shells and so had been theoretically dead for up to 2,300 years!
- The human eye is the archetypal “impossible” for Darwinism; indeed, it is the one subject which, as Darwin himself confessed, gave him a “cold shudder”. The problem for Evolutionists is to demonstrate that the human eye has developed by evolutionary stages.
- Professsor Michael Crawford and David Marsh challenge the widely accepted theory that chance mutation and Darwinian natural selection “drive” evolution. According to them, the interplay between Humankind and chemicals in the food chain is the dominant evolutionary force.
- Evolutionists believe that the snake is a reptile which was originally like a lizard but lost its arms and legs as a result of adapting to a crawling mode of life. Similarly the whale is believed to be a mammal which has returned to the sea and lost its limbs in order to becomee stream-lined for swimming. Despite the whale’s enormous size, its thigh-bone has now shrunk to a mere 18″ and is on its way to vanishing completely. When one asks about the evolutionary advantage to the snake and the whale, Evolutionists fall back on “random mutations”. This, however, is no more than an act of faith, since it has not been demonstrated.
- In his book, (“Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”) Michael Denton, a molecular biologist, states: “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some freakish, vastly improbable, event…..In terms of complexity, individual cell is nothing when compared with a system like the mammalian brain. The human brain consists of about 10,000,000,000 nerve cells.
- Professor Mark Doughty, Professor Chemistry at Concordia University, Montreal, writes: “Evolution presents us with a perplexing array of order…..It is impossible to believe that such a stupendous series of incessantly repetitive reactions within the living cell, all involving the smallest units of matter – photons, electrons, protons, could have been solely the result of a fortuitous concourse of disparaging entities at the right time and the right place”.
- According to Professor G.A. Kerkut, an Evolutionist, instead of there being one missing link, there are actually thousands upon thousands!
- Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a plant biologist, is something of a scientific heretic, who believes that plants and animals can “tune in” to the experience of their predecessors.
He says that what makes an elephent an elephant is not some genetic programme woven in DNA but a designing principle which he calls “formative causation”
He states that a computer by itself cannot do anything intelligent or impressive: a computer programme pre-supposes a computer programmer. In the thinking of the convential biologist the computer programme is the DNA – there is still a need for a programmer in the universe.
The followiing challenge was issued to Neo-Darwinists in 1940 by the then Professor of Genetics at the University of California at Berkley, Richard Goldschmidt:”: “…try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulations and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of anthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of the gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles,nerves etc.,teeth, shells of mollusces, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, etc.etc. Getting on for 70 years later his points have not been comprehensively answered.
- Darwin is under attack from another quarter. Professor Keith Oatley of Glasgow University told the British Association for the Advancement of Science cconference in Seeptember, 1989 that Darwin was wrong with regard to emotions, According to Professor Oatley, Darwin thought that human emotions were “fossils of the mind”, vestiges of primitive behaviour that were useful for our ancestors but were not so any longer. He said that Cognitive Psychologists now believed that Darwin’s view was flawed, particularly since many mammals and birds show emotions. He added that “Emotions are not just vestiges of an infantile and bestial history. They are important now in our lives, in the everyday management of actions. The function (of the emotional state) is to help adapt to events and to make sense of them”.
- With regard to “Evolutionary Ethics” Bertrand Russell has this to say:
- “The motive force of Evolution, according to Darwin, is a kind of biological economics in a world of free competition. It was Malthus’ doctrine of population, extended to the world of animals and plants, that suggested to Darwin the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as the source of Evolution”.
- “Darwin himself was a Liberal but his theories had consequences in some degree inimial to traditional Liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal, and that the differences between people are due wholly to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species”.
- “An adherent of Evolution should maintain that not only the doctrine of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals”.
- “Though Darwin himself was a Liberal, and though Nietzshe never mentions him except with contempt, Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fiftest led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzshe’s’ philosophy than like Bentham’s”.
- Darwin and his apostle, T.H.Huxley, believed that “negroes are closer to apes than white people are”. They said that the black races would be eliminated – apparently without protest on their part.
- Darwin’s survival of the fittest was a template for Hitlerism.
- It is significant that Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, and the principal architect of the Neo-Darwinist theory in the 20th century as well as being a prominent Humanist, publicly advocated that people who were genetically abnormal should be sterilised in order to relieve society of having to care for their offspring!
- In his correspondence Darwin wrote in 1870: “My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design or indeed of design of any kind in the details”. In 1879 Darwin wrote to J. Fordyce: “My judgeement often fluctuates. In my most extreme fluctuations I have been an atheist…..I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, an agnostic would be more a correct description of my state of mind.”
- In the year of his death, according to a record made by the Duke of Argyll, in reply to the Duke’statement that he saw the wonders of life as the expression of mind, Darwin looked at the Duke very hard and said “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force but, at other times,” and he shook his head vaguely, adding “it seems to go away”.