I’ve spent my life unconvinced by Neo-Darwinian claims that life arose on this planet over a long time by purely natural means – random genetic mutations combined with the observed process of natural selection.
I’m clearly swimming against the tide of opinion here.
Sometimes, people will react in horror or amusement when I question Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. After all – this is the science we learned as kids at school. We remember the pictures from the science textbooks. Routinely – the response I get from people is:
- Evolution is a fact. It describes how life arose.
- Anyone who questions evolution …is living in the dark ages of human knowledge.
This might be a common assumption. What I find fascinating is – there’s a massive gap between society’s widely held beliefs about the capabilities of “evolution” …and scientists’ beliefs on the effectiveness of the modern synthesis (textbook Darwinism) to explain life’s origin. It seems that the general public have greater confidence in Darwin…than an increasingly large number of scientists do.
In November 2016, there was a meeting at the Royal Society called “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology.” During this meeting, evolutionary biologists clearly laid their cards on the table. Their admissions may surprise you.
Gerd Müller (Austrian evolutionary theorist) said that the modern synthesis (Neo-Darwinism) fails to account for:
- The origins of the anatomy of living creatures (eyes, ears and body plans).
- The origins of new forms of life throughout the history of life.
- Abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record, when complex new life forms appear suddenly.[1]
Müller referred to the gap in understanding between scientists and the public. Even tho Neo-Darwinism continues to be “presented to the public via textbooks as the canonical understanding of how new living forms arose,”[2] the theory lacks the creative power to generate novel anatomical traits and forms. He was simply saying that – contrary to popular belief – evolution does not currently account for the origins of life.
Jim Shapiro (professor of microbiology) went on to show evidence that evolution does not progress slowly and randomly. Rather, cells adjust themselves rapidly and in real-time:
- Many mutational processes in life aren’t random at all. They seem to operate under “algorithmic control.”
- Life seems to possess a pre-programmed adaptive capacity.[3]
- These adaptions can occur in very short periods of time.[4]
I found a great example of this behavior from microbiologists in the University of Reading in the UK: [5]
Today’s experimental biology is showing that, “cells perform adaptions of astonishing sophistication in real time, but these events are emphatically non-random. This means that evolution has goals, and so too do organisms.”[6]
Yet no one asks the question, “where do the non-random, sophisticated pre-programmed real-time capacities originate from?” Life just finds a way. Why?
There’s a gap between the popular understanding and the honest, scientific assessment. There’s no working theory that explains how life arose by purely random naturalistic processes. As paleontologist Graham Budd has observed, “When the public thinks about evolution, they think about [things like] the origin of wings…But these are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about.”[7] Further – life can adapt at a staggering speed and level of sophistication.
The history of science is littered with theories that worked for a while, but were abandoned when we learned that, while they were successful in predicting some observations, the theory turned out to be false. It seems like scientific thinking on “evolution” must evolve to let go of the old ideas about gradual, naturalistic random change. We need to move forward now. The increasing evidence pointing towards purpose, intention and design in life needs to be better understood.
Image courtesy of Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/adult-biology-chemical-chemist-356040/
[1] Why the Royal Society Meeting Mattered, in a Nutshell, Evolution News & Science Today, https://evolutionnews.org/2016/12/why_the_royal_s/, accessed 2nd January 2018.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Landmark conference puts Neo-Darwinism and its atheist evangelists on thin ice, Premier Christianity, https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/Landmark-conference-puts-Neo-Darwinism-and-its-atheist-evangelists-on-thin-ice, accessed 2nd January 2018.
[5] Bacteria evolve over a weekend, UniofReading, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8fKOozG40&feature=youtu.be, accessed 2nd January, 2018.
[6] Landmark conference.
[7] Why the Royal Society Meeting Mattered, in a Nutshell.
