Commonsensical questions about Darwinism

Paul K. writes:

I tend to stay out of the Darwin debates because I’ve only begun giving the matter serious thought in the last year or two, sparked by your posts and Ann Coulter’s “Godless,” which presented the anti-Darwinist case very concisely and persuasively. I am not well-grounded in science so I don’t know if the theory has attempted to answer some of the questions that perplex me.

If evolution is random, why is nature not even more random than it is? Would not a creature which randomly mutated an eye on the back of its head have an advantage? Why were some advantages evolved by some creatures but not others? Wouldn’t the ability to spray a foul scent benefit the chipmunk as much as the skunk? Wouldn’t a human who had the night-vision of a cat have a tremendous advantage over other humans? If a life form happens to develop a randomly mutated advantage, it must pass along this mutation through reproduction. But are these sorts of mutations genetically dominant? What is to prevent them from simply disappearing in a few generations?

After all, any slight mutation is going to result in such a slight survival advantage and one’s survival is reliant on so many extraneous factors that the likelihood of a mutation taking hold and spreading through generations seems fantastically unlikely. Combined with the fact that the origin of a new species would require countless generations, each passing incremental mutations heading in a given direction (e.g., the development of a wing), and that for each step in the right direction there must logically be countless random missteps, it seems to me we are talking about a mathematical impossibility. Without some intelligent force directing an order in nature, how do Darwinists explain the increasing complexity in life forms? It would seem to contradict Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, that “all processes go only in one direction, which is the direction of greater and greater degradation of energy, in other words, to a state of higher and higher entropy.” What imperative caused life to evolve beyond bacteria? I mean, why did it bother?

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Paul K. writes:

The last two days I have noticed a tv advertisement for a new movie called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” starring Ben Stein. This appears to be a movie exploring the flaws in evolutionary theory.

This could be significant. Until fairly recently, I accepted Darwinism without giving it a second thought (or at any rate, a third thought). I think in that way I was typical of many Americans. However, when you posted well-reasoned examinations of the holes in the theory, my doubts were aroused and I began reading into it further, causing me to end up dismissing it completely. Subject to scrutiny, Darwinism may lose its place as accepted wisdom.

I think it is key to discredit it on its scientific merits, which is surprisingly easy to do. Darwinism may join Freudianism and Scientific Socialism on the junkpile of 19th-century “Big Ideas.”

LA writes:

Paul K. writes: “After all, any slight mutation is going to result in such a slight survival advantage and one’s survival is reliant on so many extraneous factors that the likelihood of a mutation taking hold and spreading through generations seems fantastically unlikely.”

Yes, two things are true according to Darwinism: Each mutation is tiny, so tiny, vanishingly tiny; AND the mutation is so significant that its possessor has a decisive survival advantage over all fellow members of its species!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 19, 2008 09:06 AM | Send