The failure of the Darwinian predictions

Darwinism, which says that all life forms have evolved out of accidentally miscopied genes that are then naturally selected, and which I have called the biggest intellectual fraud in history, is on the run and is doomed. I am not saying that the theory will be decisively rejected in the near future; the Darwinian orthodoxy is far too entrenched in the modern mind for that. But its demise, however long it may take, is certain.

One sign of the coming end is the increasing confidence with which intelligent critics of Darwinism are speaking out. In a new, multi-part article, Cornelius G. Hunter shows how Darwinism’s predictions keep being falsified (meaning they keep being shown to be false). Like the geocentric theory of the solar system, which had to keep getting more and more complicated in order to accommodate the evidence that contradicted the theory until the theory was rejected altogether, Darwinism keeps becoming more and more complicated in order to explain the evidence that contradicts its predictions. For example, Darwin required many hundreds of millions of years for new life forms to appear; but the Cambrian explosion, in which all the marine invertebrate phyla appeared in under five million years, with no antecedents in the fossil record, radically contradicted Darwin’s predictions. This necessitated bizarre new complications such as punctuated equilibrium, a theory that itself contradicts Darwinism. Such contradictons and complications are the sign of a dying theory. Yet the Darwinists insist, not only that their theory is not in trouble, but that it is fact. As Hunter puts it, the belief that Darwinism, despite its numerous profound problems, is unassailable fact, is based on metaphysical assumptions, not on science.

He concludes the article thus:

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, science has discovered a plethora of contradictory information. Many predictions of the theory have been falsified, including foundational expectations. The theory has consistently failed and as a consequence it has grown far more complex than anything Darwin ever envisioned. Evolution is not a good scientific theory and in this sense it is comparable to geocentrism. Both theories grew ever more complicated in response to the evidences of the natural world, adding epicycle upon epicycle.

In stark contrast to these evidential problems, evolutionists believe that their theory is a fact. Evolution is a fact, they say, just as gravity is fact. This remarkable claim is an indicator that there is more to evolution than merely a scientific theory. In light of the scientific evidence, the claim that evolution is a fact may seem to be absurd. But it is not.

The fact of evolution is a necessary consequence of the metaphysical assumptions evolutionists make. Metaphysical assumptions are assumptions that do not derive from science. They are made independent of science. These metaphysical assumptions that evolutionists make would be difficult to defend as necessarily true outside of evolutionary circles, but within evolution their truth is not controversial. All of this means that the scientific problems with evolution are relegated to questions of how evolution occurred. The science cannot bear on questions of whether or not evolution occurred.

By the way, look at the photo of the aged, sad, frightfully dispirited Charles Darwin at the top of the webpage. In that revealing photo of a dead-looking soul, Darwin is to Darwinism as the half-dead-looking Konstantin Chernenko was to Soviet Communism when he became the Soviet leader in the early 1980s: an omen of the approaching end.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 01, 2009 01:35 PM | Send