Darwinism Revisited

There are two kinds of evolution: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution refers to very small changes in the forms of living creatures that are inherited and passed on. No-one seriously questions that this is a fact. Macroevolution (the major part of Darwin’s concept) maintains that major changes and even the appearance of new species is the result of the accumulation of tiny changes that appear at random over huge periods of time. Darwinists go on to maintain that humans and all other animal life forms have common ancestors leading back to one original life form.

I have come to believe that macroevolution is nonsense, although for a good part of my life I accepted this nonsense because it was taught as a fact in my biology textbooks. I have come to believe that it is nonsense because of recent discoveries about the complexities of life – and also because I have learned that many of the evidences presented for macroevolution were fraudulent or just plain wrong. Darwin presented a theory, which he understood and acknowledged was only a theory and unproven at the time. He went on to say that future discoveries of fossils of intermediate forms would prove his theory correct – and that the absence of such discoveries would, over time, undermine his theory.

All of the fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time (1859), with a couple of minor and arguable exceptions, have shown only fully developed specimens. Instead, the Cambrian explosion approximately 500 million years ago, shows the sudden appearance of huge numbers of life forms with no ancestral fossils at all. Despite that, biology textbooks continue to treat macroevolution as a fact and continue to present certain examples as evidence – examples many in the field call “idols of evolution”.

One of these idols is a group of drawing called Haekel’s embryos, which purport to show that the embryos of all animals go through similar and look-alike developmental stages that illustrate their ancestral forms. Although these drawings were found to be fraudulent and totally made up decades ago, they still appear in many current biology texts. Another idol is the peppered moths of England. Gray moths were said to evolve into black moths when industrial pollution increased – thus reducing their chances of being eaten by birds when they alighted on blackened tree trunks. Then they supposedly evolved back into gray when pollution decreased, and white lichen again covered tree trunks affording gray moths camouflage. This story is in every biology textbook. The problem is that it is wrong. Subsequent studies showed that this type of moth exhibited this behavior at random throughout England, never alighted on tree trunks at all, and the photos presented had been staged.

In fact all of the “idols of evolution” appearing in our textbooks have similar problems and should be thrown out. Apparently, though, there is a cadre of scientists who have wanted macroevolution to be accepted and have been willing to bend the evidence to make their point. They have been as dishonest as the religious zealots who fake miracles. As we learn more about the disappearing evidence of macroevolution, we also learn more about the complexities of life. Microbiologists have discovered that a single living cell is more complex than a nuclear submarine. They have discovered infinitesimal biological engines such as the bacterium flagellum that operates like an outboard motor with specialized parts that have no use except as components of that engine. Could that have just happened by chance?

They have analyzed the wound healing process and found that an incredibly complex series of steps in succession involving a score of special protein molecules must occur if healing is to take place properly. In discussing two of these healing molecules in his book “Darwin’s Black Box”, Michael Behe estimates that “the odds of getting TPA alone to be 1/10 to the 18th power; the odds of getting TPA and its activator together would be about 1/10 to the 36th power. That is a horrendously large number. Such an event would not be expected to happen even if the universe’s 10 billion year life were compressed into a single second and relived every second for ten billion years”.

Where are we then? Until and unless many examples of transitional forms are found in the fossil record, we will never know if the Darwinists are right. Every day evidence is building that they are wrong and something else has been happening, but we may never know that either. Darwinism laid the foundation for the huge evils that shook the world during the 20th century – the slaughter of 30 million Russian peasants and six million Jews to name just two. Darwinism laid the foundation for relativism and the “feel good” morality that is destroying our civilization. If Darwinism is unproven and no longer makes any sense, why teach it to our children as a fact that cannot be disputed? The engine of life is a hidden mystery after all. Russ