Allan Dobras, "Desperate Times for Darwinism? We Can Only Hope" (2005)

Desperate Times for Darwinism?
We Can Only Hope

By Allan Dobras

March 9, 2005

During the height of the Vietnam War, Vermont Senator George Aitken—a critic of the war—facetiously suggested we should declare victory and go home.  Taking a page from Senator Aitken, modern day Darwinists are declaring evolution by natural selection to be a “fact” and alternative views should go home.

Sticker Shock
These are desperate times for proponents of the theory of biological evolution.  It appears that Darwinism is collapsing under the weight of its own improbabilities and the emergent theories of Intelligent Design and Creation Science have split apart the materialistic monopoly academia once enjoyed over the subject of how we came to be who we are.  Nevertheless, desperate times require desperate measures and a concerted effort to defend evolution from any theory that opens the door to the divine seems to be in the works.

On January 9, 2005, a federal judge in Georgia ordered the Cobb County school board to remove a sticker from textbooks that stated, "This textbook contains material on evolution.  Evolution is a theory, not a fact regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

In response to a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of six parents, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled the sticker “conveys an impermissible message of endorsement” of religion:

The use of 'theory' in the Sticker plays on the colloquial or popular understanding of the term and suggests to the informed, reasonable observer that evolution is only a highly questionable 'opinion' or a 'hunch…The Sticker thus has a great potential to prompt confusion among the students.  By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories…While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.

The judge, therefore, believes that evolution has reached such a level of scientific consensus that the only subject open to debate is the “mechanism by which it occurred” and considers any doubt about the efficacy of the theory as religious intrusion into the classroom.  The premise that evolution is a theory beyond questioning permeates popular scientific journals and was a recent topic of discussion in both Discover magazine and the National Geographic.

Hypotheses, Theories, and Laws
In the November 2004 issue of National Geographic, author David Quammen provocatively poses the question, Was Darwin wrong? At first glance, one may have thought that perhaps the author was prepared to grant some credence to the alternative hypothesis of Intelligent Design, which has been gaining favor among a growing number of scientists. 

However, Quammen quickly dashes such thinking with a turn of the page.  In bold megatype, the author tells the reader, “NO.  The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming.”  In a tone of condescendence, he goes on to explain:

If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it’s ‘just’ a theory.  In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is ‘just’ a theory.  The notion that that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543 is a theory.  Continental drift is a theory…Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact.  That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. 

The premise that all theories are “fact” not only redefines the word, but certainly must be a shock to his colleagues in the scientific community who at one time thought that theory becomes fact when the scientific evidence is sufficiently established to classify the theory as “law,” e.g., the First Law of Thermodynamics.  Even Bill Allen, the editor of National Geographic, has signed on to this concept of elevating the theory of evolution into fact by redefinition.  Commenting on popular misconceptions about the terms “evolution” and “natural selection,” Mr. Allen said:

Some of the confusion stems from the phrase the ‘theory of evolution.’  When scientists say ‘theory,’ they mean a statement based on observation or experimentation that explains facets of the observable world so well that it becomes accepted as fact.  They do not mean an unsubstantiated belief.

Thus, by a stoke of the pen, the theory of evolution by natural selection is now a “fact.”  Not surprisingly, Quammen is greatly disturbed over recent polls that show 45 % of Americans believe that God alone created humans without help from evolution—a figure that hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.  He attributes these “startling” statistics to spiritual literalism, creationist proselytizing, and plain ignorance among adult Americans.  

However, as much as National Geographic would like its readers to accept evolution by natural selection as fact, the “overwhelming evidence” presented in the article actually shows how thin the evidence is supporting the hypothesis.  The National Geographic article does little more than repackage the original hypotheses posed by Darwin, noting that all life on this planet evolved into their present forms by “small, random, heritable differences [that] result in different chances of survival and reproduction”—a supposition that is not without controversy, even among evolutionists.  

Far from covering new ground, David Quammen offers such “proofs” of evolution as the long discredited fossil lineage of the modern horse, the equally discredited claim that Archaeopteryx showed a linkage between reptiles and birds, and most egregiously, claiming that embryos reveal stages of evolutionary history, which they “pass through before birth or hatching”—a concept from German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel so riddled with fraud and bad science that it led the late evolutionist Stephen J. Gould to comment:

We should not therefore be surprised that Haeckel’s drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of those drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks…

The National Geographic article offers only specious evidence that Darwinian evolution ever occurred and does not explain how minute and essentially useless mutations in a particular life form can be so compelling that the mutated form overwhelms the entire species and eventually turns a dinosaur into an eagle.  Thus, the evidence provided by National Geographic fails to pass its own criteria for a valid theory: “a statement based on observation or experimentation that explains facets of the observable world so well that it becomes accepted as fact.”

A comprehensive and devastating critique of Was Darwin Wrong? can be found at the website of ApologeticsPress.org in an article titled The National Geographic Shoots Itself in the Foot—Again.

Computer Program “Proves” Darwin Right
The February issue of Discover Magazine includes a featured cover article, “Testing Darwin: Scientists at Michigan State Prove Evolution Works.”  The article describes a computer program called Avida, that the developers say “is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it.” They compare Avida, which tells a computer how to process information, to how DNA instructs a cell how to assemble proteins.

The computer program basically sets up digital “rewards” if, as the program runs, it produces a desired operation known as “equals.” As the program ran over many thousands of generations, the rewards did, indeed, coax Avida into producing a line of code with the desired result.  The scientists have been ecstatic over the results and have essentially challenged creationists, who they claim have inundated the team with email, to find a fatal flaw.

Although Avida is no doubt a clever program, it does suffer from the same problems that plague evolutionary biologists.  Foremost is the fact that Avida and its hardware had an intelligent designer who placed the necessary characteristics into the program and created an environment in which the program could operate and replicate.  The basic conclusion to be drawn from the experiment then, is that evolution could not have happened without an Intelligent Designer.

Second, the designers of Avida noted that “when the researchers took away rewards for simpler operations, the organisms [sic] never evolved an equals program.” Without rewards, then, the process falls apart.  This is similar to the flaw in Darwinian evolution—random mutations do not of themselves produce a “reward” of favored survival. 

Finally, the one thing that Avida certainly cannot do is crawl off the screen and make itself into an iPod—a characteristic it shares with the proponents of biological evolution.  Nevertheless, the editors of National Geographic and Discover seem determined to claim to its readers that it has happened.

Al Dobras is a freelance writer on religious and cultural issues and an electronics engineer. He lives in  Springfield,  Virginia.

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