Darwin's theory is falling apart

BY MICHAEL F. COCHRANE/SPECIAL TO THE DAILY PRESS

April 3, 2005

Editor's note: The following is in response to J. Emmett Duffy's March 20 Outlook article, "Faith, science and nature's mysteries." And below this rebuttal is Duffy's reply.

J. Emmett Duffy has tried, in good faith I believe, to argue that the notion of "intelligent design" is flawed and intellectually empty because it does not offer "scientific explanations" for natural phenomena. He also suggests that ID is simply a repackaging of so-called "creation science," foisted upon the academic community by irate (and clearly ignorant) Christian fundamentalists. Both of these commonly held beliefs are well intentioned, but because they are based on a false premise, they are wrong.

Duffy assumes his readers understand what he means when he uses ambiguous terms like "evolution." Is he talking about microevolution or macroevolution?

Virtually no one, scientist or otherwise, disagrees that the process of natural selection within species is well documented. This is what Charles Darwin himself observed during the years he studied various animal species on the Galapagos Islands. However, Darwin went much further. His theory essentially extrapolated the random mutation and adaptation observed in microevolution to the whole of creation - macroevolution. Darwin claimed that all living creatures descended from a common ancestor that lived eons ago, and that every new species can be explained by this random, genetic mutation.

In 1871, Darwin even speculated that life might have originated spontaneously in some prehistoric pond when inorganic chemicals combined to form protein compounds. The implications of this postulation are highly significant. Darwinism essentially claims that there is no creator, and that all life as we know it is merely the result of descent with modification.

In the true spirit of scientific inquiry, Darwin knew that the fossil record up to that point had not provided sufficient evidence to support his theory. But he believed that future discoveries would validate and support macroevolutionary explanations for species variations. The problem is, they haven't.

Darwinian evolution requires that natural selection take place gradually over time. However, 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period, sometimes called biology's Big Bang, virtually all of the major animal phyla we know today appeared within a mere 5 million years. Completely new body plans appeared that could not be accounted for by evolution. The last 150 years have not yielded any so-called "missing links" that can adequately explain this discontinuity.

The "Cambrian Explosion" is only one of many examples of the body of scientific evidence that gives rise to skepticism about macroevolution. Over the last 50 years, respected scientists in a variety of fields have begun to give serious consideration to the hypothesis that there is an intelligence behind the universe:

Cosmology: The Big Bang theory, which is robustly supported by the data, shows that the universe had a beginning. Logic dictates that if something has a beginning, then it has a cause.

Physics: The laws and constants of the physical universe have been determined to be finely and precisely tuned for the existence of life. According to physicist Robin Collins, gravity is fine-tuned to one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion.

Astronomy: Our sun has just the right combination of mass, light, age, distance, orbit and location to sustain living organisms on a circling planet.

Biochemistry: Darwin himself said, "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." Biochemist Michael Behe has demonstrated that molecular "machines" such as cilia and bacterial flagella are "irreducibly complex"; that is, they are unlikely to have been built piecemeal through natural selection.

Biology: No naturalistic explanation has been advanced since the discovery of DNA that accounts for how information got into biological matter.

The scientific method of inquiry is conservative. A hypothesis is presented as an explanation for a physical phenomenon or process and is assumed to be true. Experimental data are collected and analyzed to see if the hypothesis is supported. If the collected data are so inconsistent with the assumed hypothesis then science rejects that hypothesis and postulates a competing one.

Proponents of ID are not religious fundamentalists. They include hundreds of respected scientists from many different disciplines who have followed the evidence, and the evidence has led them to conclude that the theory of Darwinian natural selection has so little explanatory power regarding the origins of the universe and life on this planet that serious doubts should be raised regarding its validity.

Duffy states that ID "fails ... because it not only offers no alternative scientific explanation, it offers no scientific explanation at all." This is an obviously misleading statement because the scientific evidence of the last 50 years is pointing to something beyond science. Of course ID offers no "scientific" explanation for the origin of the universe - there is none. Duffy accuses proponents of ID of being ideologically driven, but in fact, it is pure naturalistic scientists who are desperately clinging to a theory that is falling apart around them. To believe in macroevolution requires a greater amount of faith than does believing in an intelligent designer of the universe.

Stephen Meyer, a philosopher and historian of science, provides a possible explanation for the hostility many scientists feel toward ID: "Within the scientific culture there are belief systems that are philosophically very questionable. For instance, many believe that science must only allow naturalistic explanations, which excludes from consideration the design hypothesis. Many scientists put blinders on, refusing to acknowledge that evidence, and a kind of 'group think' develops."

Such a worldview does a major disservice to school students, who are mistakenly led to believe that Darwinism is the unquestioned and universally accepted explanation for the origins of life on earth.

My own view is that this hostility arises from fear (it quite often does) of losing control of the debate. These scientists recognize that they cannot pigeonhole the advocates of ID as ignorant, backward religious fundamentalists. In fact, skeptics of Darwinism are their own colleagues. In October 2001, more than 100 respected scientists with degrees from universities such as Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Princeton took out a two-page ad in The Weekly Standard under the banner, "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism." They were protesting a recently aired and highly biased PBS special on evolution.

The ultimate fear of Darwin advocates, however, might be of the implications if there is, in fact, an Intelligent Designer. What if there really is a God? I can imagine this would be a very unsettling situation for an avowed atheist, or even a practical one.

Duffy concludes, "Let's not cloud the issue by confusing deliberate obfuscation with a scientific theory." I would have to agree with him completely, although I would reverse the roles. Given the growing body of scientific evidence pointing to an Intelligent Designer, the perpetuation by the scientific community of the fiction that Darwinism is a valid scientific theory is, indeed a "deliberate obfuscation."


A rebuttal: Darwin's theory is falling apart