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If anyone speaks a sentence to us that resembles the title of this essay, I'm guessing the typical internal response is to reject its premise summarily.
After all, who's to say we're wrong? Who has the right to judge our ideas or decisions? Who died and made anyone around us Caesar? Well, there are answers to all those questions and more, but they're not the subject of this essay. Let's start with a question: Do any of you out there still think evolution is proven fact? Before answering too quickly, you may wish to be certain you fully recognize what Darwinian evolution implies and what purpose it serves. Remember what Richard Dawkins famously wrote: "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." However, Darwin himself recognized the precarious nature of his theory. He wrote, "There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group are descended from a single progenitor, apply with equal force to the earliest known species. For instance, it cannot be doubted that all the Cambrian and Silurian trilobites are descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Cambrian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. Some of the most ancient animals, as the Nautilus, Lingula, &c., do not differ much from living species; and it cannot on our theory be supposed, that these old species were the progenitors of all the species belonging to the same groups which have subsequently appeared, for they are not in any degree intermediate in character. "Consequently, if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day; and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures. Here we encounter a formidable objection; for it seems doubtful whether the earth, in a fit state for the habitation of living creatures, has lasted long enough. Sir W. Thompson concludes that the consolidation of the crust can hardly have occurred less than 20 or more than 400 million years ago, but probably not less than 98 or more than 200 million years. These very wide limits show how doubtful the data are; and other elements may have hereafter to be introduced into the problem. Mr. Croll estimates that about 60 million years have elapsed since the Cambrian period, but this, judging from the small amount of organic change since the commencement of the Glacial epoch, appears a very short time for the many and great mutations of life, which have certainly occurred since the Cambrian formation; and the previous 140 million years can hardly be considered as sufficient for the development of the varied forms of life which already existed during the Cambrian period. It is, however, probable, as Sir William Thompson insists, that the world at a very early period was subjected to more rapid and violent changes in its physical conditions than those now occurring; and such changes would have tended to induce changes at a corresponding rate in the organisms which then existed." A bit thick to tread if you're not prone to consuming technical expositions. So what is he saying in these paragraphs, in a nutshell? Darwin is admitting that the fossil evidence creates a glaring hole in his theory, which requires a minimum amount of time to accomplish X and Y, but neither stretch of time these developments are thought to have occurred in are sufficient. An even shorter version of that is: There hasn't been enough time for Darwinian evolution to have accomplished what it has allegedly accomplished, given the physical evidence gathered. What's fascinating about that passage from On the Origin of Species is that Darwin's logical conclusion has already been supported multiple times by respected mathematicians who diligently crunched the numbers using established data regarding biological features, known fossils and accepted timelines for geologic development. At least as far back as the Wistar Institute Symposium in 1966, legitimate objections to Neo-Darwinism have been officially raised and have continued without serious refutation ever since. There will certainly be those who prefer to respond as the evolutionary biologists responded in 1966, with observations that can be paraphrased as 'Evolution happened, so your math must be wrong,' or with a common reference to punctuated equilibrium and how it conveniently rides alongside gradualism to accomplish the result tacitly assumed to be empirical when in fact it has not been observed in laboratory conditions even once. Lenski's E. coli citrate use in the presence of oxygen was not new information, but a result of previously existing DNA information rearranged so that what the bacteria could already do without oxygen could now also do with oxygen. The scotch-tape-and-paper-clip crew are still trying to repair the damage done to the theory by the Cambrian explosion. They more recently claim that new microfossils found in Cambrian strata are proof that fully formed species didn't just appear without apparent progenitors. The only problem with that hypothesis is the same problem they've had since Darwin was still alive: the continued absence of the profusion of transitional fossils that would unambiguously link all biological life together, as dictated by the arbitrary "Tree of Life" model appropriated from Carl Linnaeus, who sought only to classify existing biological organisms and didn't spend any time trying to claim they were all connected to a common progenitor via innumerable non-deleterious mutations. Okay, okay. We've come this far, so I should probably explain what this has to do with the title of the essay. As time goes on and both scientific discovery and technology advance, they have had the opposite effect on Darwinian theory that was originally anticipated. More knowledge has produce more doubt about Neo-Darwinism's central premise, not more substantiation. Therefore, we should all take a step back and look at what we think about evolution. If trends continue, Neo-Darwinist theory will go the same way as the Steady State theory of the universe. And just what will the common person (people like you and I) do when eventually faced with the surprising development that unguided random processes no longer sufficiently explain our existence? If you, much like the Steady State holdouts in the first half of the twentieth century, decide you'll still just reject the new scientific developments out of principle, then you don't know what you're doing, because at that future moment, retrospectively it will become obvious that evolution has never been anything more than a means by which those created in the image of God may pretend they are not. |