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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE THEORY
The theory of evolution is the outcome of the materialist philosophy
that surfaced with the reawakening of ancient Sumerian and Greek materialistic
myths and became widespread in the 19th century. Materialism seeks to
explain nature through purely material factors. Since it denies creation
right from the start, it asserts that every thing, whether animate or
inanimate, has appeared without an act of creation but rather as a result
of a coincidence that then acquired a condition of order. The human mind
however is so structured as to comprehend the existence of an organising
will wherever it sees order. Materialistic philosophy, which is contrary
to this very basic characteristic of the human mind, produced "the theory
of evolution" in the middle of the 19th century.
Darwin's Imagination
The person who put forward the theory of evolution the way it is defended
today, was an amateur English naturalist, Charles Robert Darwin.
Darwin had never undergone a formal education in biology. He took only
an amateur interest in the subject of nature and living things. His interest
spurred him to voluntarily join an expedition on board a ship named H.M.S.
Beagle that set out from England in 1832 and travelled around different
regions of the world for five years. Young Darwin was greatly impressed
by various living species, especially by certain finches that he saw in
the Galapagos Islands. He thought that the variations in their beaks were
caused by their adaptation to their habitat. With this idea in mind, he
supposed that the origin of life and species lay in the concept of "adaptation
to the environment". According to Darwin, different living species were
not created separately by Allah but rather came from a common ancestor
and became differentiated from each other as a result of natural forces.
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Karl Marx made it clear that Darwin's theory provided
a solid ground for materialism and thus also for communism. He also
showed his sympathy to Darwin by dedicating Das Kapital which is
considered as his greatest work to him. In the German edition of
the book, he wrote: "From a devoted admirer to Charles Darwin".
(left)
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Darwin called this process "evolution by natural selection". He
thought he had found the "origin of species": the origin of one species
was another species. He published these views in his book titled The Origin
of Species, By Means of Natural Selection in 1859.
Darwin was well aware that his theory faced lots of problems. He confessed
these in his book in the chapter "Difficulties of the Theory".
These difficulties primarily consisted of the fossil record, complex organs
of living things that could not possibly be explained by coincidence (e.g.
the eye), and the instincts of living beings. Darwin hoped that these
difficulties would be overcome by new discoveries; yet this did not stop
him from coming up with a number of very inadequate explanations for some.
The American physicist Lipson made the following comment on the "difficulties"
of Darwin:
On reading The Origin of Species, I found that Darwin
was much less sure himself than he is often represented to be; the chapter
entitled "Difficulties of the Theory" for example, shows considerable
self-doubt. As a physicist, I was particularly intrigued by his comments
on how the eye would have arisen.2
While developing his theory, Darwin was impressed by
many evolutionist biologists preceding him, and primarily by the French
biologist, Lamarck.3 According to Lamarck,
living creatures passed the traits they acquired during their lifetime
from one generation to the next and thus evolved. For instance, giraffes
evolved from antelope-like animals by extending their necks further and
further from generation to generation as they tried to reach higher and
higher branches for food. Darwin thus employed the thesis of "passing
the acquired traits" proposed by Lamarck as the factor that made living
beings evolve.
But both Darwin and Lamarck were mistaken because in their day, life
could only be studied with very primitive technology and at a very inadequate
level. Scientific fields such as genetics and biochemistry did not exist
even in name. Their theories therefore had to depend entirely on their
powers of imagination.
While the echoes of Darwin's book reverberated, an Austrian botanist
by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance in 1865.
Not much heard of until the end of the century, Mendel's discovery gained
great importance in the early 1900s. This was the birth of the science
of genetics. Somewhat later, the structure of the genes and the chromosomes
was discovered. The discovery, in the 1950s, of the DNA molecule that
incorporates genetic information threw the theory of evolution into a
great crisis. The reason was the incredible complexity of life and the
invalidity of the evolutionary mechanisms proposed by Darwin.
The Desperate Efforts of Neo-Darwinism
Darwin's theory entered into a deep crisis because of the laws of genetics
discovered in the first quarter of the 20th century. Nevertheless, a group
of scientists who were determined to remain loyal to Darwin endeavoured
to come up with solutions.
This cadre focused on the question of the origin of the advantageous
variations that supposedly caused living organisms to evolve-an issue
that Darwin himself was unable to explain but simply tried to side-step
by depending on Lamarck. The idea was now "random mutations". They named
this new theory "The Modern Synthetic Evolution Theory", which
was formulated by adding the concept of mutation to Darwin's natural selection
thesis. In a short time, this theory came to be known as "neo-Darwinism"
and those who put forward the theory were called "neo-Darwinists".
Charles Darwin |
The following decades were to become an era of desperate attempts to
prove neo-Darwinism. It was already known that mutations-or "accidents"-that
took place in the genes of living organisms were always harmful. Neo-Darwinists
tried to establish a case for "advantageous mutation" by carrying out
thousands of mutation experiments. All their attempts ended in complete
failure.
They also tried to prove that the first living organisms could have originated
by chance under primitive terrestrial conditions that the theory posited
but the same failure attended these experiments too. Every experiment
that sought to prove that life could be generated by chance failed. Probability
calculations prove that not even a single protein, the building-blocks
of life, could have originated by chance. And the cell-which supposedly
emerged by chance under primitive and uncontrolled terrestrial conditions
according to the evolutionists-could not be synthesised by even the most
sophisticated laboratories of the 20th century.
Neo-Darwinist theory is also defeated by the fossil record. No
"transitional forms", which were supposed to show the gradual evolution
of living organisms from primitive to advanced species as the neo-Darwinist
theory claimed, have ever been found anywhere in the world. At the same
time, comparative anatomy revealed that species that were supposed to
have evolved from one another had in fact very different anatomical features
and that they could never have been ancestors or descendants of each other.
But neo-Darwinism was never a scientific theory anyway, but was an ideological
dogma if not to say some sort of "religion". This is why the champions
of the theory of evolution still go on defending it in spite of all the
evidence to the contrary. One thing they cannot agree on however is which
of the different models proposed for the realisation of evolution is the
"right" one. One of the most important of these models is the fantastic
scenario known as "punctuated equilibrium".
Trial and Error: Punctuated Equilibrium
Most of the scientists who believe in evolution accept the neo-Darwinist
theory of slow, gradual evolution. In recent decades, however, a different
model has been proposed. Called "punctuated equilibrium", this model rejects
the Darwinist idea of a cumulative, step-by-step evolution and holds that
evolution took place instead in big, discontinuous "jumps".
The first vociferous defenders of this notion appeared at the beginning
of the 1970s. Two American paleontologists, Niles Eldredge and
Stephen Jay Gould, were well aware that the claims of the neo-Darwinist
theory were absolutely refuted by the fossil record. Fossils proved that
living organisms did not originate by gradual evolution, but appeared
suddenly and fully-formed. Neo-Darwinists were living with the fond hope-they
still do-that the lost transitional forms would one day be found. Realising
that this hope was groundless, Eldredge and Gould were nevertheless unable
to abandon their evolutionary dogma, so they put forward a new model:
punctuated equilibrium. This is the claim that evolution did not take
place as a result of minor variations but rather in sudden and great changes.
This model was nothing but a model for fantasies. For
instance, European paleontologist O.H. Shindewolf, who led the way for
Eldredge and Gould, claimed that the first bird came out of a reptile
egg, as a "gross mutation", that is, as a result of a huge "accident"
that took place in the genetic structure.4 According
to the same theory, some land-dwelling animals could have turned into
giant whales having undergone a sudden and comprehensive transformation.
These claims, totally contradicting all the rules of genetics, biophysics,
and biochemistry are as scientific as the fairy tales about frogs turning
into princes! Nevertheless, being distressed by the crisis that the neo-Darwinist
assertion was in, some evolutionist paleontologists embraced this theory,
which had the distinction of being even more bizarre than neo-Darwinism
itself.
Today tens of thousands of scientists
around the world particularly in the USA and Europe defy the theory
of evolution and have published many books on the invalidity of
the theory. Above are a few examples. |
The only purpose of this model was to provide an explanation of the gaps
in the fossil-record that the neo-Darwinist model could not explain. However,
it is hardly rational to attempt to explain the fossil gap in the evolution
of birds with a claim that "a bird popped all of a sudden out of a
reptile egg", because by the evolutionists' own admission, the evolution
of a species to another species requires a great and advantageous change
in genetic information. However, no mutation whatsoever improves the genetic
information or adds new information to it. Mutations only derange genetic
information. Thus the "gross mutations" imagined by the punctuated equilibrium
model would only cause "gross", that is "great", reductions and impairments
in the genetic information.
Moreover, the model of "punctuated equilibrium" collapses from the very
first step by its inability to address the question of the origin of life,
which is also the question that refutes the neo-Darwinist model from the
outset. Since not even a single protein can have originated by chance,
the debate over whether organisms made up of trillions of those proteins
have undergone a "punctuated" or "gradual" evolution is senseless.
In spite of this, the model that comes to mind when "evolution" is at
issue today is still neo-Darwinism. In the chapters that follow, we will
first examine two imaginary mechanisms of the neo-Darwinist model and
then look at the fossil record to test this model. After that, we will
dwell upon the question of the origin of life, which invalidates both
the neo-Darwinist model and all other evolutionist models such as "evolution
by leaps".
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