Evolution and Passion

BRITISH columnist Christopher Booker takes a neutral position in the creation-evolution controversy. Recently he commented on the passion he has observed on both sides. The Creationists passionately deny that there was any such thing as evolution, he wrote in his Saturday Column for Londons Daily Telegraph. So he reasoned that a thinking person might turn to the scientific world for a more plausible, rationally argued explanation—only to find an equal display of passion behind every kind of evolutionist position, many of them quite incompatible with one another.

The trouble is that, for all the sophistication it has gathered from research into molecular biology, Darwinian natural selection is just a theory, Booker observed, and furthermore, it is a theory riddled with the most enormous holes and question marks.

Booker illustrated with the problem of jumps in the evolutionary ladder . . . such as the emergence of the eye, or of all the factors which distinguish birds from every other kind of creature. He noted that even the latest theory, which suggests relatively large evolutionary jumps among isolated groupings, must admit to some intermediate stage, of a creature lumbered with a membrane as yet insufficiently developed to enable it to fly, while so retarding the former agility . . . that it would have hindered rather than aided survival. The columnist then charged:

The more orthodox Darwinians not only manage not to see the importance of such questions. Revealingly they simply fall back with redoubled fervour on mere dogmatic assertions, and take refuge yet again in those one or two favourite case-histories . . . which seem to confirm them in their comfortable faith, while leaving all the really interesting questions totally unanswered.

The key word is faith. To the reasonably detached observer there is nothing more obvious about Darwinians, in all their varieties and sects, than that ultimately they are just as much resting their account of the origins and evolution of life on sheer faith and unsubstantiated belief as the Creationists they so hotly deride.

Their myth is one which enables them to see the whole mystery of life as the product of blind, mechanistic forces without any guiding mind or purpose—and that therefore we can enjoy our place as the triumphant end-product of this process without feeling that we owe it to anyone. Comforting this may be but there is nothing in the strictest sense scientific about this set of beliefs.