Saturday, July 28, 2018

SPECIAL CREATION IN DISGUISE


In my work, I have been very critical, and will always be critical, of the way Charles Darwin introduced racism into evolutionary theory. The evolutionists who preceded him, such as his own grandfather, did not do that. They were holists and saw the evolution of the whole in which each part, small and great, weak and strong, played a vital role. From the point of view of the whole, there really is no such thing as being small or great. All the parts are equal in the service they give. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, replaced this approach with a belief in hierarchy in which each species is ranked.

But enough about that, for the time being. Darwin did sometimes get things right. It is interesting how Darwin admirers and followers do not listen to some of them. Earlier this year, Edward O. Wilson published The Origins of Creativity. I usually quote directly from the source, but this time I am going to the New York Times Book Review (Jan. 14, 2018) for a quote from his book: “It is becoming increasingly clear that natural selection has programmed every bit of human biology—every toe, hair and nipple, every molecular configuration in every cell, every neuron circuit in the brain, and within all that, every trait that makes us human.” So says Wilson.

But Darwin warned against such thinking, which he admitted he had been guilty of. In The Descent of Man, he said he had been led to “my tacit assumption that every detail of structure, excepting rudiments, was of some special, though unrecognised, service.” And so he had “extend[ed] too far the action of natural selection.” In other words, it is possible to overdo explanation for “every toe, hair, and nipple,” to use Wilson’s example.

What is more interesting still is Darwin’s insight into why he had made this mistake. He had retained a belief in special creation: “I was not, however, able to annul the influence of my former belief, then almost universal, that each species had been purposely created.” Believing in the purpose of each “toe, hair, and nipple” was just another version of believing in the special creation of each species.

This means that many Darwinists today, including Wilson, are believers in an intelligent designer. I am sure they would furiously object. But whether you call your intelligent designer God or natural selection, it comes to the same thing. Darwin’s point was that to be supremely careful (and Darwin often failed in this), we must remember that natural selection does not design anything. It eliminates mutations that are injurious to an organism, but it does not create beneficial mutations, except by accident, and it certainly does not create the optimum design that would serve an organism well. Almost any natural organism could have been designed much better for its environment. No organism follows the best design possible, which is why new organisms, introduced from another environment, often decimate native populations; they just happen to be an even better fit in that environment.

That is not the only issue on which Darwinists have failed to follow Darwin. There is another story to tell about how far apart Darwinists and Darwin are in belief in randomness. Darwin disparaged chance, often calling it “so-called chance.” He believed in determinism all the way, “fixed and immutable laws” as he once put it. But that is a story for another time.

© 2018 Leon Zitzer


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