Darwinism is miraculous

Darwin’s slapdash theory is still treated as gospel 160-odd years after the publication of his Origin. Normally, no theory gets as much latitude.

A theory gets 30 to 40 years for it to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. If it is, it stops being a theory and becomes a scientific fact. If it isn’t, it’s consigned to a science museum, the room where quaint but discredited hypotheses are kept.

It has taken a miracle for Darwin to be still going strong, and the miracle has a name: political necessity. Post-Enlightenment modernity needed Darwinism in biology as much as it needed Marxism in economics.

Both created a purely materialist view of life that sounded plausible enough to the masses. Their revolt (so called by Ortega y Gasset) thus acquired a scriptural support, making the old scripture redundant in the eyes of many.

The new gospel developed an army of proselytisers who managed to convince the newly enlightened throng that Darwinism was solid, irrefutable science. Yet even Darwin himself had doubts.

Hence this scathing post-publication comment, dealing with the complexity of the human eye: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Yet history suggests Darwin was too reticent even in his most self-lacerating assessments. In the intervening years, science has never proved conclusively a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature.

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data.

They dismiss the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. They ignore the empirical evidence supporting not the appearance and development of new species but rather the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

(Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, the book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.)

In fact, Darwinism, along with other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world hasn’t existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time. The word ‘God’ burning the lips of modern scientists, they came up with ‘The Big Bang’, but that is a matter of semantics only.

And today’s public, with its knee-jerk rejection of anything religious, doesn’t realise it’s being tricked by semantic legerdemain. Weaned on veneration of science, it salutes at the flagpole flying terms like ‘The Big Bang’, ‘Intelligent Design’ or, better still for being less comprehensible, ‘quantum fluctuations’. What people don’t realise is that they are looking at Genesis, encoded in scientific cant.

The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in their development. This applies to all living beings, not just man.

Deep down, scientists know that, if millions of fossils collected over 160 years have shown no evidence of macroevolution, no such evidence exists. In fact, experiments with bacteria (whose lightning-fast propagation rates make it possible to replicate within a few decades the millions of generations normally associated with the length of biological life on earth) show no macroevolutionary developments whatsoever.

Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been accidentally created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that wouldn’t have existed at all in a simpler form. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present. 

Geology is another example. We were all taught at school that the sequence of geological layers testifies to the gradual, smooth development of life from the more primitive to the more complex forms.

That idea was so firmly entrenched that it became impossible to ask questions that beg to be asked. Such as: If evolutionary development was smooth and gradual, then how is it that we observe sharply defined layers at all, rather than the evidence of some species disappearing, others appearing, and still others evolving gradually?

How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?

In general, how can we decide which species are more primitive than others? Studies in microbiology have shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements.

Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced. Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6).

Yet using this criterion, man is more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.

But never mind the hard physical facts. It’s the sheer beauty of the world that Darwinism has been unable to explain. Left out of its cold-blooded and ill-founded musings is something that has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the world is organised according to aesthetic, not only rational, principles.

And in many instances aesthetics comes before practicality, or even cancels it out. Not only, as Dostoyevsky suggested, can beauty save the world – beauty is the world.

Look at the peacock’s tail for example. At first sight, this is a hindrance: after all, the oversized protuberance reduces the bird’s mobility, thus making it less able to flee from predators.

Darwinists explain this and many other examples of seemingly useless aesthetic characteristics as a factor of sexual selection. The more striking the male’s appearance, the more likely it would be to appeal to the aesthetic sense of a female and thereby pass its own genes on to the next generation.

However, this raises a question that’s rather awkward for Darwinism: whence do animals acquire their aesthetic sense in the first place? In the case of the peacock this comes packaged with characteristics that actively hamper the survival of the species. Clearly, metaphysical aesthetics overrides physical functionality – yet again metaphysics takes the lead.

There are many examples of that: the bright colouring of many species of both animals and plants, the beautiful singing of birds (which not only attracts females but also betrays the male’s location to predators, again jeopardising physical survival for the sake of beauty), and the geometric perfection of physical bodies. The golden section is particularly telling here, for all the negative publicity it has received in Dan Brown’s semiliterate fiction.

The problem with Darwinism is that it clashes with science, not with faith. No contradiction exists between faith and evolution: God can create species slowly, as well as fast.

It’s not just Darwinism but science in general that can happily coexist with religion. “The book of nature is written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics,” wrote Galileo, as if pre-empting the current debates.

The conflict between science and religion exists only in the agued minds of ideologised atheists, who love to cite the story of Galileo as proof. In fact, Pope Urban VIII was Galileo’s greatest admirer and patron.

What got Galileo censured was the arrogance and intolerance with which he spread his views. Even so, he was neither immolated nor imprisoned, as so many modern ignoramuses believe. Galileo was exiled to a comfortable villa in a picturesque part of Italy – those taking issue with atheistic communism suffered a worse fate in Russia and elsewhere.

Giordano Bruno was indeed burned in Rome’s Campo di Fiore, but, contrary to modern mythology, his indictment contained not a single word about his scientific exploits. It’s all about his rude, incontinent attacks on every sacrament and dogma of the Church, accompanied by his refusal to recant.

This type of historical revisionism goes hand in hand with scientific chicanery. Neither has anything to with either history or science – and everything to do with obtuse, febrile ideology. A mark of our times, I suppose.