Darwin, Someday

Beginning about 300 years ago the world began to experience a revolution of new discoveries, many of which have come to rest as part of the bedrock of knowledge upon which our current world is founded. Newton’s innovations in geometry, trigonometry and the invention of calculus were now bearing fruit in many other disciplines. His discovery of gravitation and the principles of physics were beginning to spawn implications in mechanics, birthing the field of mechanical engineering and giving rise to inventions that would change the course of life from that time onward. Today we scarcely know anything about Newton’s work, save a cartoonish drawing of him seated under a tree with an apple falling toward his head. So thoroughly assimilated into scientific culture are his ideas that they hardly need to be taught. Nobody who drives a car thinks about the internal combustion engine and the principle of angular motion which governs its crankshaft and piston rods. Newton himself has faded into a sort of academic oblivion. And yet, his progeny, the mechanical wonders of our post-industrial world, which have all but been replaced by newer, digital versions for the information age, still linger in our memories, if nowhere else. Truly Isaac Newton was the founder of many truths.

Similarly, just over 250 years ago, Clerk Maxwell published his “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” explaining the magnetic field. Maxwell’s work has also, over time, become part of the canon of scientific information, unquestioned for the most part, and is foundational to quantum field theory, about which we are hearing so much these days. Maxwell’s living on through his principles means that hardly anyone, save the odd history buff, knows who he was personally. Like Newton and many other revolutionary fact-finders, little controversy attends his discoveries, and great use is made of them in the background, as it were, of scientific and societal endeavor.

Only 3 years after Maxwell’s great work was published, Charles Darwin brought forth his “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. Contrasted against Newton and Maxwell, Darwin cuts an impressive figure. School children the world over know of the Beagle and Darwin’s publication of the journal from that 5 year voyage, which made him famous. Middle-schoolers study the principles behind what Darwin called the “transmutation of species,” the backbone of his theory of evolution. From high school through university students are taught to handle with great care the evolutionary hypothesis, because while it has never been demonstrated as truth, it forms the foundation of all our biological sciences. Pragmatically, Darwinists claim genetic engineering, biological understanding and advances in medical science as the application of the evolutionary hypothesis, much as Newton claimed mechanical inventions and innovations as deriving from his work. Indeed, much evolutionary explanation lies behind modern genetic engineering, medical science and all other natural fields. The contrast lies, however, in the fact that Newton and Maxwell’s discoveries were demonstrated as fact before the application of them was attempted. Darwin’s hypothesis, still very much contested, is brought along after the fact, in untimely fashion, and used as an explanation for why this process occurs in nature, or how that particular genetic manipulation works. No direct application of evolutionary science produces any of these things. No thinking person would ever say that without Darwin’s work we would not have developed the sciences as we have them today. Darwin’s hypothesis, however universally accepted it may be in the scientific community, remains an unprovable appendage to scientific endeavor, not a foundation of it.

Where most people never realize that they are taking advantage of Newton’s work on a daily basis, so completely assimilated is it in our world, Darwin’s work has reached the status of religious truth, accepted as fact by those who hold to “the faith,” and rejected in equally vehement fashion by those who do not. Alternate explanations are such only because Darwinists hold such political sway as to have all other contenders labeled as disingenuous attempts to avoid the “scientifically proven truth.” To live in the scientific world today while rejecting Darwin’s hypothesis is tantamount to living in 16th Century Europe while rejecting the authenticity of the Pope as the vicar of Christ in the world. You may hold your opinion privately, but spout off in the wrong place and you’ll likely cause a war.

In his essay, “The Deniable Darwin,” Discovery Institute’s David Berlinski says “the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought. ‘It is just a matter of time,’ one biologist wrote recently, reposing his faith in a receding hereafter, ‘before this fruitful concept comes to be accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar system.’ Time, however, is what evolutionary biologists have long had, and if general acceptance has not come by now, it is hard to know when it ever will.”

Swimming in the soundless sea, the shark has survived for millions of years. The shark is an organism wonderfully adapted to its environment. Pause. And then the bright brittle voice of logical folly intrudes: after all, it has survived for millions of years. College freshmen with a course in critical thinking under their belt recognize this most common of fallacies. Begging the Question lies at the very heart of the evolutionary hypothesis. Richard Dawkins writes:

Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventually to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.

Dawkins implies that Darwin had somehow demonstrated the physical forces of which he speaks: That somehow this impersonal power called natural selection was brought into a laboratory and examined, found in the act of filtering and screening out the bad and allowing the strong and survivable good characteristics to pass onward into the future. No such demonstration has ever occurred, however. Natural selection is itself theoretical, standing unproven and unprovable. It more closely resembles the kind of religious tenets which lie behind doctrines of predestination or election in Medieval theology than the kind of scientific truth for which it being called into existence. Berlinski writes that using natural selection to verify the evolutionary hypothesis is a bit like verifying an article in The New York Times by reading it twice.

Had someone along the line discovered flaws in Newton’s or Maxwell’s concepts of truth, exposing them as fallacious, the question would have immediately arisen as to how, then, these inventions and innovations work, if the principles upon which they are designed are wrong. An immediate pointing to the practicality, the functionality of the application of Newton’s principles might at least have brought about a logical argument, which could be mounted in order to establish corrections or amendments to the theories. In the case of Darwin’s theories, though, quite a different situation may occur. When, and if, we finally arrive at a concrete solution to how the “book of life” constituted by DNA is transmitted from one generation to the next, and how that linguistic code remains intact and holds within it the instructions for all succeeding generations, we will find something much more akin to a dictionary than to a randomly typed string of letters. When that occurs, it will become clear that something much more deliberate than chance and natural selection lies behind life. Evolutionary theory will crumble. And much of the scientific endeavor based upon evolutionary theory will be thrown into disarray. But none of the advances in medicine, genetic engineering or natural sciences will be in the least bit harmed. Those innovations and inventions will stand, because they do not depend upon the evolutionary hypothesis or its children for their existence. Those innovations and inventions work. And if they work by some other force than blind chance and natural selection, it will be a simple matter to adjust. Herein lies the contrast between Darwin and Newton. Newton discovered pragmatic truth which could be applied to many areas of life, and from which would arise invention and innovation. Darwin invented a religious perspective which has stood alongside advancements in biology, claiming priority and yet never demonstrating cause.