No book has so profoundly affected the way modem man views himself than Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, first published in 1859. The notion that man is the product of a blind, materialist process which did not have him in mind is part of the intellectual air everyone breathes. Even orthodox Catholics can get into difficulties when they try to reconcile the creation account in Genesis with what they suppose science has demonstrated about the origin of the universe and of living things. The unfortunate result is a kind of schizophrenia that deems the first chapter of Genesis to be both the inerrant word of God and a scientific embarrassment.
In confronting a theory like Darwin's, Catholics should anchor themselves in the proposition that there can be no real conflict between faith and science. The danger occurs when scientists trespass into theology, or vice versa. The Galileo affair is a sobering reminder of what can happen when certain parties in the Church resist a scientific hypothesis on a priori biblical grounds. If the congregation of Cardinals that condemned Galileo had paid more attention to Augustine and Aquinas, who both held that the Holy Spirit, speaking through the sacred writers, was not teaching a system of astronomy, the disastrous split which occurred between religion and science in the seventeenth century might have been avoided.
Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection
Although it is seldom aired in public, there is a sharp debate among scientists today about almost every aspect of evolutionary theory. The controversy is not over evolution per se, but over the means by which it happened. The crux of the issue is not evolution, but teleology. Either life forms came about by blind chance or they did not. Darwin's theory of natural selection is the only one available which purports to explain how Homo sapiens and other species are exclusively the result of natural forces. This is why the debate over Darwin's theory, and not evolution itself, is so important. It is Darwin's theory, moreover, and not another, which is taught in our schools. And the fact that most writing on the subject does not make the crucial distinction between "evolution" and "Darwinism" simply muddles the issue.
Although his name is synonymous with the theory, Darwin did not create the theory of the evolutionary origin of life forms. It had been broached by ancient Greek philosophers, speculated on by Saint Augustine, and developed into a scientific hypothesis by the French zoologist Buffon a century before the Origin. Darwin's unique contribution was to provide a plausible explanation of how evolution occurred, one that was purely mechanistic and dispensed with God. This was his theory of natural selection.
Darwin's theory in a nutshell is that organisms produce offspring which vary slightly from their parents, and natural selection will favor the survival of those individuals whose peculiarities (sharper teeth, more prehensile claws, etc.) render them best adapted to their environment. Darwinian evolution, then, is a two-stage process: random variation as to raw material, and natural selection as the directing force.
Once he struck on this theory, Darwin spent much time observing pigeon breeders at work near his home in Kent. The first fifty pages of the Origin are mainly about pigeons, which often surprises (and bores) readers. Darwin noticed that through selective breeding, pigeons could be made to develop certain desired characteristics: color, wingspan, and so forth. Darwin extrapolated from these observations the notion that over many millennia species could evolve by a similar process of selection, the only difference being that the "breeder" is nature itself, sifting out the weakest and allowing the fittest to survive. By this simple process, Darwin claimed, some unknown original life form floating in the primordial soup evolved and diversified into the vast array of plants and animals we see today.
But a crucial point has to be made here, one that has been made often by Darwin's scientific critics. What Darwin observed in the breeding pens is micro-evolution. Micro-evolution refers to the small changes that occur within a species over time. Such evolution is common. For example, people are generally taller today than they were a hundred years ago. The varieties of finches that Darwin saw on the Galapagos Islands are another example of micro-evolution. With no direct empirical evidence, Darwin claimed that over long periods of time these micro-changes could result in macro-evolution, which consists of really big jumps-from amoeba to reptile to mammal, for example. This is where his theory runs into problems which are still not resolved in the minds of many scientists today.
No Facile Explanations
There are two places to look for verification of Darwin's theory: the fossil record and breeding experiments with animals. If Darwin's theory is correct, the fossil record should show innumerable slight gradations between earlier species and later ones. Darwin was aware, however, that the fossil record of his day showed nothing of the sort. There were enormous discontinuities between major animal and plant groups. He accordingly entitled his chapter on the subject, "On the Imperfection of the Geological Record." He hoped that future digging would fill in the gaps, which he admitted to be "the gravest objection to my theory." Enormous quantities of fossils have been dug up since, and, if anything, they make more glaring the gaps which troubled Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist, calls this lack of gradual change in the fossil record the "trade secret" of modem paleontology.
The fossil record shows exactly what it showed in Darwin's day-that species appear suddenly in a fully developed state and change little or not at all before disappearing (99 out of 100 species are extinct). About 550 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian era there was an explosion of complex life forms--mollusks, jellyfish, trilobites--for which not a single ancestral form can be found in earlier rocks. A man from Mars looking at the subsequent fossil record would say that species are replaced by other species, rather than evolve into them. Paleontologist Stephen Stanley writes that "the fossil record does not convincingly demonstrate a single transition from one species to another."
What about those pictures in museums and textbooks, those charts showing how large horses gradually evolved from small ones, and so forth? These portrayals of ancestral descent are conjectural and are constantly being discarded. Paleontologists, in effect, find a fossil of an extinct species and make up a scenario connecting it with a later or earlier animal. But they never find the transitional forms which Darwin's theory demands.
The famous series of pictures at the American Museum of Natural History showing the "evolution" of horses, the diminutive Eohippus slowly changing into modem Equus, has been quietly discarded even by orthodox Darwinists. Eohippus remained Eohippus; it was followed (or accompanied) by numerous species of horses, some larger, some smaller. The chart is nonetheless widely reprinted in textbooks. John Bonner, a biology professor at Princeton, writes that textbook diagrams of evolutionary descent are generally "a festering mass of unsupported conclusions."
The ancestry of man changes as often as the weather as the few bits of "hominid" fossil are shuffled about. There have been Java Man, Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ramapithicus, and numerous others which have been rejected for one reason or another. The two most famous figures in hominid paleontology today, Richard Leakey and Donald Johansen (discoverer of "Lucy") are in complete disagreement over man's ancestry. Australopithecus afarensis has been rendered in textbooks with faces ranging from ape to human, de ding on whose side the artist is on. Richard Lewontin, professor of zoology and genetics at Harvard, sums up as follows:
We don't know anything about the ancestors of the human species.... Despite the excited andoptimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.
A New Breed?
Since we do not see species changing into other species in the fossils, the only other place to look is breeding experiments. But here the evidence also goes against Darwin. Breeders can change the color of a pigeon or the size of a cow to some degree, but they can only go so far. In fact, all breeders have the same experience: If they try to go too far in one direction, the animal or plant in question either becomes sterile or reverts back to type.
The most famous breeder of all, Luther Burbank, found no evidence of the unlimited plasticity of species, which Darwin's theory demands, and posited the "Law of Reversion to Average." Richard Goldschmidt, a leading geneticist who taught at Berkeley, spent years observing the mutations of fruitflies and concluded that biologists had to give up Darwin's idea that an accumulation of "micro" changes creates new species. If you have a thousand-point mutation in the genes of a fruit fly, a statistical impossibility, it is still a fruit fly.
Goldschmidt published a famous list of seventeen items--including teeth, feathers, the poison apparatus of the snake, and whalebone--and challenged anyone to explain how they could have evolved on a step-by-step basis. Goldschmidt pointed out that if natural selection were the mechanism for major changes in species, then every intermediate form must be useful to the organism. This problem of explaining the usefulness of incipient organs--five percent of an eye, for example--has been a persistent problem for Darwinists. As one biologist puts it, "Since the eye must be either perfect, or perfectly useless, how could it have evolved by small, successive, Darwinian steps?" Otto Schindewolf, the great German paleontologist and anti-Darwinist, rejected out of hand the idea that transitional forms could be found or even imagined:
It should be emphasized that there is no way that there could be transitional forms as they have often been envisaged and required.... A placenta cannot be absent and present simultaneously....
Schindewolf, who died in 1971, was largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon countries, while Goldschmidt was subject to a savage campaign of vilification for suggesting that evolution must have involved the appearance of "hopeful monsters"--that is, sudden genetic freaks which somehow manage to function-rather than minute gradations sifted by natural selection. But scientists like Gould of Harvard now claim that both men were on the right track after all, that the story of evolution is one of rapid, dramatic changes followed by long periods of stasis. But in downplaying the role of natural selection, Gould, Stanley and other scientists are stuck with the problem of providing a plausible mechanism that can explain how the bacteria and blue-green algae that appeared on this planet over two billion years ago randomly mutated into the highly complex fauna and flora we see today. Modem genetics shows that DNA programs a species to remain stubbornly what it is. There are fluctuations around a norm, but nothing more. Dogs remain dogs; fruit flies remain fruit flies.
The Development of Darwinism
There are other serious problems with classical Darwinian theory. Among them are the fact that scientists see very little "struggle for survival" in nature (many species tend to cooperate and occupy ecological niches which do not compete); the fact that all the major body plans we see today in animals and insects appeared at once in the Cambrian era, a fact which does not fit Darwin's model; and that many species like the lungfish have not changed at all in over 300 million years despite important shifts in their environment, which flatly contradicts the constant fine-tuning Darwin attributed to natural selection.
Darwin's theory in a nutshell is that organisms produce offspring which vary slightly from their parents, and natural selection will favor the survival of those individuals whose peculiarities (sharper teeth, more prehensile claws, etc.) render them best adapted to their environment. Darwinian evolution, then, is a two-stage process: random variation as to raw material, and natural selection as the directing force.
In my opinion, the pure evolution theory proposed by Darwin (as opposed to evolution guided by a loving creator) is proven every single day in traffic. Evolution cannot predict or explain the existence of stupid drivers.
