A SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE’S

MOST POPULAR FICTION: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

MUHAMMAD YUSUF

My purpose in this short paper is to expose only a few of the insurmountable problems that are posed by evolutionary theory. The seriousness of these problems is such that they are not in any way reconciled. Rather, they demolish this chimera of a theory and reveal it as a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts and unscientific in its method.

I will first concern myself with genetic variation and what the breeders show. In the words of the famous American biologist and evolutionist, Sisley, “It would appear that careful domestic breeding whatever it may do to improve the quality of race horses or cabbages is not actually in itself the road to endless deviation which is evolution.”[1] Ernst Mayr of Harvard, also an evolutionary authority, observes that population of organisms have a certain persistence or inertia which resists drastic change and he calls this persistence “genetic homeostasis”.[2] In other words species are subject to only trivial changes with respect to the wholesale transpecific (transformation of a species) changes that evolution proposes. This may surprise one who has received the standard scientific indoctrination of our formal institutions but it is so much so that the internationally celebrated breeder, Luther Burbank, stated that there is a law which dictates finite limits of development. He called this the Law of Reversion to the Average.[3] “Experiments carried on extensively have given us scientific proof of what we had already guessed by observation; namely, that plants and animals all tend to revert, in successive generations, towards a given mean or average”.[4]

Why is this so? As breeding pressure is applied continually to an organism it will reach an upper limit beyond which, if pressure is further applied, the progency die, become sterile or revert to the original state.

Therefore, in spite of what evolutionists purport minute changes or what one might call micro changes to use Norman Macbeth’s term do not accumulate into transpecific changes or macro changes.[5] No doubt, this is ironic since genetic variation perhaps more than any other argument has been adduced to “demonstrate” evolution. It does not matter what selection pressure man or nature subject a population to and it does not matter how long. Even in a million years micro variations will not transform the species--that is what genetics and breeding show.

As for spontaneous macro variation--it is not known to science and no mechanism for such a happening is even conceinable.

But if we entertain for a moment, evolution’s proposition of neatly graduated series of slightly variead intermediate forms culminating in a new species and new taxa (categories of taxonomy), such a postulate collapses before the facta--the geological record is extremely imperfect. This is no secret; the biologists will admit it.[6] Evolutionists try to account for the gaps in’ the fossil record, that is the absence of inter-mediate series, with a variety of pathetic hypotheses. One such standard rebuttal is that the intermediate forms were short-lived and therefore not preserved in the record. This begs the question that how is it known that the forms were short-lived if they are not even known.[7] Another contention is that fossilization was an accident, a freak of nature, so that a comprehensive fossil record of all forms was not left in every age. Thus it is supposed that the giant whales and dinosaurs were just lucky to be fossilized and their immediate precursor forms were unlucky presumably because they lived under such different conditions that they were not fossilized. These contentions are preposterous. Their improbability is manifest. They are the desperate attempts of theorists with preconceived notions to “save face”. These feeble answers, ungrounded in any empirical basis, are merely adhoc hypotheses pulled out of the air.

If then, micro variations are not additive and macro variations do not spontaneously occur, how can it be argued with any basis that transpacific evolution takes place? Indeed it is logically necessary to conclude that it does not.

Darwin wrote in 1859 that, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down”.[8] He was immediately challenged to explain such handiwork as the human eye. It is still a stumbling block for evolutionists. The eye is an enormously complex and efficient structure of retina, cornea, rods and cones, visual purple, muscles, nerves and fluids. The problem for the evolutionist is to explain how such a structure could be gradually acquired when the incipient and intermediary structure has no selective advantage to the organism until it has reached total size and total complexity. In other words what has to be conceived is a functional, useful, intermediate structure Hardim, the prominent, American, biologist must have realized the impossibility of this proposition when he wrote, “…That dammed eve--the human eye...which Darwin freelly conceded to constitute a severe strain on his theory of evolution. Is so simple a principal as natural selection equal to explaining so complex a structure as the image-producing eye? Can step by-step process of Darwinian evolution carry this process so far?”[9] The answer is an emphatic no. There is no intermediate functional form. The eye is either perfect or perfectly useless.

The celebrated biologist and evolutionist Goldshmidt explicitly cited sixteen features which he defied evolutionists to account for by “accumulation and selection of small mutants.”[10] Among them were hair in mammals, feathers in birds, muscles, nerves, teeth, shells of mollusks, blood circulation, and poison apparatus in snakes. Complex structures which cannot be accounted for by evolutionary processes abound: the lungs of vertebrates, the middle ear of mammals, the compound eye of insects, the spinnerets of spiders. For none of these features, and for none to literally thousands of structures in all the phyla of animals and plants can an adaptive precursor form be conceived. Consider for instance what could possibly be intermediary between a mammal, the dolphin for example, which gives birth to its young under water, and a mammal giving birth in the air on the seashore.

There is yet a further, particularly defiant example to be given. “There are certain sea slugs which have appendages called papillae on their backs. In these papillae are groups of sting cells usually of a long whiplike shape. In their undischarged condition the stings are folded up so that the least touch will cause the coiled nettle-lash to fly out and sting any foreign body within reach. Since similar stings have been found on Coelenterates (little animals on which the sea slugs feed) it was supposed for a long time that the slugs were related to Coelenterates. Recent research, however, has shown that there is no relationship and that the slugs have simply stolen the stings from the Coelenterates. They eat the Coelenterates but somehow they keep from exploding the stings. They get the stings into their stornachs, then work them into narrow channels that have cilia or hairs in them. By means of the cilia they sweep the stings up the channels into pouches out on the papillae and there the stings are all neatly arranged, right way up and still unexploded in such -a way that they can be discharged against an attacker."[11] This example is particularly eloquent in confuting evolution. A perfect mechanism has to exist before the stings can be passed through the sea slug without being caused to explode. There is no way the mechanism could gradually develop. The theory of evolution can not account for such an ability.

It seems that a favourite recourse of evolutionists when they are confronted with the embarrassing feebleness of their theory is to admit that there are many problems with evolutionism but that it is the best theory that we have at present.[12] I intend to spend the rest of this paper to show that this is emphatically not the case.

First of all it is necessary to remember the limitations of science. Science has arbitrarily determined to concern itself only with physical reality or the material world. As the biologist Simpson phrases it, “…the progress of knowledge rigidly requires that no non-physical postulate ever be admitted in connection with the study of physical phenomena. We do not know what is not explicable in physical terms, and the researcher who is seekin explanations must seek physical explanations only…”[13] It is one thing to concern oneself with the physical reality only and it is another to presume therefore that it is the only reality. If Design and spiritual reality or any other reality for that matter are excluded from consideration at the beginning it is not surprising that they do not appear at the end. Earnst Mayr has written on this that”… if by teleology [Design] one means externally imposed goals on the part of a higher intelligence this definition is not useful because it is a supernatural concept. It may be the true order of things in nature but science can not use it to demonstrate the validity of this viewpoint nor use it as a conceptual scheme.”[14] The problem is that science attempts to explain everything in purely materialistic terms. It harbours the illusory notion that it will one day “wrest from nature her ultimate secret but everywhere it runs up against enigmas that give the lie to its postulates and which appear as unforeseen fissures in the laboriously erected system. These fissures get plastered over with fresh hypotheses and the vicious circle goes on unchecked.”[15] Science endorses evolutionism, not for its plausibility, but for its usefulness in covering up its own inadequacies. Science is helpless to explain, but it will not admit its inability to explain.

When it is contested that the necessary; and superior postulate is that of purposive creation, that is Design, science is loathe to admit the reality of such causes lying outside sensory experience. This denial, however, is not reasonable. It is not verifiable perhaps within the realm of sensory reality, but it does not follow that it is incapable of verification. There are other realities besides the physical, but the knowledge of them is not compassed by science.

Lastly, I wish to establish that evolutionism is no more than a natural philosophy which masquerades itself as scientific fact. Evolution is ‘not subject to experimentation; it has no capacity to predict or to explain particular cases. It is based on speculation and circumstantial evidence and does not have a valid empirical basis. Therefore it must be relegated, as just mentioned to the arena of philosophy. But evolutionism in this its proper arena utterly collapses, for it must futilely maintain that a purely biological process “led up to a reflexive intelligence, to a sudden act of awareness that perceived the development for what it was.”[16] Such a proposition is manifestly absurd because there is “no common measure between the act of awareness”[17] and the biological movement which preceded it. Evolutionism and creationism are mutually exclusive philosophies. There is no reconciliation between the two. In this paper it has been demonstrated that evolutionism is contrary to the facts. Purposive creation is therefore the necessary and true deduction.

Bibliography

Avers, C.J. Evolution, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974.

Buftaloe, Neal. Concepts of Biology, Toronto: Prentice Hall of Canada Ltd., 1973.

Eisley, Lorne. Darwin’s Century, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

Hardin, Garret. Nature and Man’s Fate, Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Ltd., 1961.

Moody, Paul. Introduction to Evolution, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.

Macbeth, Norman. Darwin Retried. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1971.

Mayr, Ernst. Evolution, Cambridge,- Mass: The Belnap Pres of Harvard University press, 1976.

Mayr, Ernst. Animal Species and Evolution, Cambridge, Mass.: University of Cambridge Press, 1963.

Olson, E. Concepts of Evolution, Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merril Publishing Company, 1975.

Galthe, Stanley. Evolutionary Biology, Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1972.

Notes and References