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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE THEORY 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. They came together in a meeting organised by the Geological Society of America in 1941. Geneticists such as G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky, zoologists such as Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley, paleontologists such as George Gaylord Simpson and Glenn L. Jepsen, and mathematical geneticists such as Ronald Fisher and Sewall Right, after long discussions, finally agreed on ways to "patch up" Darwinism. 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". 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 "false religion". The Canadian philosopher of science Michael Ruse, a staunch evolutionist himself, confesses this in a speech he gave at a 1993 meeting:
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 maintains that living species came about not through a series of small changes, as Darwin had maintained, but by sudden, large ones. 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.12 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. 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".
Before doing so, it may be useful to remind the reader that the reality we will be confronting at every stage is that the evolutionary scenario is a fairy-tale, a great deceit that is totally at variance with the real world. It is a scenario that has been used to deceive the world for 140 years. Thanks to the latest scientific discoveries, its continued defence has at last become impossible.
11.Michael
Ruse, "Nonliteralist Antievolution", AAAS Symposium: "The
New Antievolutionism," February 13, 1993, Boston, MA.
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When Darwin put
forward his assumptions, the disciplines of genetics, microbiology,
and biochemistry did not yet exist. If they had been discovered
before Darwin put forward his theory, Darwin might easily
have recognised that his theory was totally unscientific
and might not have attempted to advance such meaningless
claims. The information determining the species already
exists in the genes and it is impossible for natural selection
to produce new species through alterations in the genes.
