Darwin’s Intellectual Children

“The mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree.” Charles Darwin[1]

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Peter Singer of Princeton once argued that “Darwin’s theory undermined the foundations of [the] entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe.” He added that “All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed in the nineteenth century that we are simply animals.”[2]

Evolutionary psychologist David Barash of the University of Washington would concur, adding that

“The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.”[3]

If human beings “are produced by a natural, totally amoral process,” what good does it do to have morality as the foundation of institutions such as marriage? Well, evolutionary psychologist Christopher Ryan, co-author of the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, answers that question for us. Marriage, Ryan told us, is

“in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species.”[4]

Singer is right: people of all stripes (most specifically some biologists) are trying to catch up with Darwin. Some have taken him to the left, and others to the right. As we shall see, both left and right, sprung from the same well, which does not have a solid, metaphysical ground.

In his best-selling book Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, French biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod took Darwin’s ideas to a new height when postulated:

“Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, [is] at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.”[5]

In the same vein, George Gaylord Simpson, arguably one of the most influential paleontologists in the twentieth century, declared:

“Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”[6]

Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionary biologists in the twentieth century, agreed:

“Darwin’s theory of natural selection also made invocation of teleology unnecessary. From the Greeks onward, there existed a universal belief in the existence of a teleological force in the world that led to ever greater perfection. This ‘final cause’ was one of the causes specified by Aristotle. Darwinism swept such considerations away….

“Darwin, by comparison, accepted the universality of randomness and chance throughout the process of natural selection. Despite the initial resistance by physicists and philosophers, the role of contingency and chance in natural processes is now almost universally acknowledged.”[7]

Monod’s and Simpson’s assertions and assumptions about the power of chance are taken for granted, but when asked for empirical, testable evidence, Monod and Simpson and other Darwin’s intellectual children provided none. Why?

Well, the general theory of evolution—commonly known as macro-evolution—was not born out of empirical and testable evidence and can only produce ambiguous evidence at best, and no one has ever come up with concrete proof as to how it really happened. In fact, this idea has faced formidable challenges over the past few decades.[8]

Two of the common arguments that have been put forth for macro-evolution is what is known as genetic similarities and natural selection. For much of my life, even during my high school years, I have heard and read about those flimsy arguments.

First of all, natural selection—Darwin’s designer substitute—selects! It does not create anything new.[9] I have no major argument with natural selection. But as I said in a previous article, natural selection only works with information that is already present in a system. Science Magazine admitted back in 1982 that

“Natural selection may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a creative force as many people have suggested.”[10]

So to use natural selection to prove evolution is a circular argument. Mathematicians would call this tautology.

The genetic similarity argument is also fallacious. The argument sometimes goes like this: since humans and chimpanzees are 98 percent similar,[11] then that somehow proves that humans and chimps have a common ancestor. Is that a serious argument?

For example, suppose that we have both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet on a table. What is the probability that both books will have twenty-six letters? Well, you know the drill.

But suppose that someone magically declares that since both have twenty six letters, they therefore were the result of an explosion from a print shop! Does that conclusion warrant a worthy response?  Could it be that the same author used the same twenty-six letters to write different books?

Furthermore, wouldn’t it be smart for the author of this universe to make all the plants and animals from the same basic amino acids? In other words, if you and I do not have some similarities with the cow, we would not be able to eat the cow and find it delicious! So, the cow has some similarities with the grass, and we have some similarities with the cow. Does that prove Darwin’s common ancestor?

Balderdash.

Let me be clear: macro-evolution cannot be presented as a testable theory that a serious mathematician or physicist would easily recognize.[12] Even Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionary biologists in the twentieth century, seemed to have recognized this problem. He wrote,

“Evolution is a historical process that cannot be proven by the same argument and methods by which purely physical or functional phenomena can be documented. Evolution, as a whole, and the explanation of particular evolutionary events, must be inferred from observations.”[13]

The obvious question is why not? If it is scientific, then by definition it must be repeatable or at least demonstrable. Moreover, just like a mathematician should have no problem proving the Pythagorean Theorem, one must be able to prove a theory that purports to be scientific scientifically; otherwise the theory does not deserve the title.

It is also important to point out here that we are not talking about micro-evolution—changes occurring within a species—which is indeed scientific and testable. (For example, you are different from your parents.) Rather, the theory under dispute is macro-evolution—changes occurring across species’ lines. It is this theory that cannot provide scientific evidence to support itself (and repeating the mantra that the evidence is coming is insufficient, for the theory has existed for more than one hundred years).

Consider for example this grand universe. What are the mathematical odds that life could have originated by chance? Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, two of the world’s leading mathematicians and astronomers in the twentieth century, did their own calculations. At their end of their research, they concluded:

“The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one in part (10²⁰)²⁰⁰⁰ = 10^40,000 , an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

“If one is not prejudice either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.

“But one is so prejudiced it is possible, in the fashion of a grand master with a lost game of chess, to wriggle ingeniously for a while. He would make a series of postulates, for which there is no evidence….

“For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instructions should have been provided for its assembly….No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning.

“Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material.”[14]

Ask any serious mathematician and he’ll honestly tell you that anything to the 50^th power is an impossibility. But 10^40,000? We must all admire the faith of people who believe in this new tooth fairy. Hoyle said elsewhere,

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”[15]

Physicist Paul Davies and others have said or written about similar things.[16] Molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner Francois Jacob wrote back in 1977:

“The probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero.”[17]

Hoyle later said that evolution was like “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard” and having assembled “a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”[18]

Hoyle was hardly the only one who questioned the power of Neo-Darwinism on mathematical grounds. I have read that Gian-Carlo Rota, one of the noted mathematicians and philosophers in the last century, laughed at the theory.[19] Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger, “one of the most creative and influential combinatorialists of the [last] century” who had “a low tolerance for poseurs and fools,” questioned the validity and intellectual rigor of Darwinism.[20]

It was this mathematical background that got him “deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of Darwinism.”[21]

Another individual who was shaken by the implication of his research was Dean Kenyon. Kenyon received his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University. Kenyon believed that evolution could have explained even the origin of the universe.

Kenyon then took a position as a postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Biodynamics at the University of California. He also was a Research Associate at NASA-Ames Research Center, and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University. His career was on the rise and, with co-author Gary Steinman, wrote the textbook Biochemical Predestination. Kenyon declared,

“Life might have been biochemically predestined by the properties of attraction that exist between its chemical parts…particularly amino acids and proteins.”

Yet five years after the release of Biochemical Predestination, Kenyon began to doubt the plausibility of his conclusion in the book, and began to discover that biological life could not have existed in the first place without intelligence. His academic environment came to an abrupt end when he began to express his doubts.

In fact, he was quickly was fired from a position at San Francisco State University.  He sued the school and he was finally reinstated. They seemed to have felt sorry for him. Keep in mind that Kenyon was already tenured. Eugenie C. Scott, however, was quite displeased with Kenyon:

“Kenyon is a scientist of modest accomplishments who apparently has let his religious views cloud his scientific judgement.”

Which religious views? The man was an atheist! What Scott ended up saying is that you simply cannot question the theory of evolution. So, when people start postulating things like, “the vast majority of scientists support evolution,” The response should be:

“Well, duh! Look what happens if you question the theory.”

If you want more proof, call noted scientists like Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Caroline Cracker of George Mason University, Michael Egnor of Columbia University, Guillermo Gonzalez of Ohio State University, Keven Haley of Oregon Community College, Nancy Bryson of the University of Mississippi, etc.[22] If calling these people is too hard to do, then let us hear from geneticist Richard C. Lewontin of Harvard:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

“We take the side of science [macro-evolution] in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism…

“Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, the miracles may happen.”[23]

Again, isn’t it hypocritical for those people to brazenly declare that “all serious scientists believe in evolution” or that arguments against evolution do not pass “intellectual muster” when in fact they leave virtually no door for criticism?

As it turns out, evolution is actually an ideology which superficially uses scientific flavor but metaphysically is devoid of serious rationality. Many scientists over the past few decades have implicitly admitted this. Philip Skell, Emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the National Academy of Science, wrote in The Scientist back in 2005:

“Darwin’s theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past.

“For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals.

Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin’s theory has been raised to its present high status because it’s said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct?”

After lamenting that Darwin’s grand scheme is quite inefficient, Skell moved on to say:

“Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin.

“I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

“I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others.

“I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides.

“Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word ‘evolution’ often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers?

“To find out, I substituted for ‘evolution’ some other word – ‘Buddhism,’ ‘Aztec cosmology,’ or even ‘creationism.’ I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core. This did not surprise me.

“From my conversations with leading researchers it had become clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.”

Skell concluded:

“Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false.

“It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.”[24]

[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 175.

[2] Quoted in John G. West, Darwin Day in America (Wilmington: ISI, 2007), 341.

[3] David P. Barash, “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class,” NY Times, September 27, 2014; emphasis added.

[4] Quoted in Thomas Rogers, “‘Sex at Dawn’: Why monogamy goes against our nature,” Salon, June 28, 2010.

[5] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 112-113

[6] George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 345.

[7] Steve Mirsky, “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought,” Scientific American, November 24, 2009; emphasis added.

[8] For a survey on the literature, see for example John Angus and Stephen C. Meyer, eds., Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003); Peter J. Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Darwin Deleted (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); William Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1998); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler & Adler Publishers, 1985); Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2000); Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downer Grove: IVP Books, 1993).

[9] I remember even my own high school biology text book made that huge mistake.

[10] Daniel Brooks, “A Downward Slope to Creator Diversity,” Science, Vol. 217. No. 4566: 1239-1240.

[11] This figure is quite misleading, and it depends on what is being compared. See for example Roy J. Britten, “Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels,” Proceedings National Academy of Science, August 22, 2002.

[12] For those who are interested in this topic, see for example P. S. Morehead and M. M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph, 1966); “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, November 1967; William Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); For related study, see Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

[13] Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 13.

[14] Fred Holy and Chandra Wickramasinghe Evolution from Space (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 24, 30.

[15] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981: 8-12.

[16] Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (); The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); John D. Barrow, The World Within the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Clifford N. Matthews and Roy Abraham Varghese, ed., Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends: Where Science and Religion Meet (ILL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1995).

[17] Francois Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering,” Science, June 10, 1977: 1161-1166.

[18] Fred Hoyle, “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, November 12, 1981: 105.

[19] David Berlinski, “Darwin and the Mathematicians,” Evolution News, November 7, 2009.

[20] Herbert Wilf, “In Memoriam: Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger,” Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, University of Pennsylvania Dept. of Mathematics, October 12, 1996.

[21] Ibid.

[22] John G. West, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2007), 238-239.

[23] Richard C. Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997), 31.

[24] Philip Skell, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?,” The Scientist, August 29, 2005.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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