Charles Darwin was the effective founder of the modern theory of evolution through the publication of his book “The Origin of Species” in 1859. The theory was very weak at the time, and, contrary to popular belief, has become no stronger since. Science now has uncovered the incredible complexity of the living cell, which Darwin thought was simple; and genetics, of which Darwin knew nothing, show that mutations are no longer tenable as the source of information on DNA.
It is important to refer to Darwinian Evolution rather than the shorthand “Evolution”. This is because use of the shorthand form promotes one of the major deceptions of Evolution. To give a simple example, a fox losing it’s fur colour to become a Snow Fox is called “Evolution”, and bacteria turning into men is also called “Evolution”. The two are conflated in the popular imagination to become the same process. They are not. The first involves only a minor change to a particular Kind of animal, easily caused by a small loss or mutation of genetic information. The second involves one Kind of organism changing into another, a process which would involve the creation of vast quantities of new genetic information, for which Darwinism offers no plausible source.
The exposure of this exact deception is actually made plain in the full title of Darwin’s book:
The Origin of Species
by means of
Natural Selection
Here the same logical trick is performed by the use of the word “species”. In Darwin’s day there was no clear definition of “species”, as he himself was well aware. Today, there is still no clear definition across all sciences. It is, therefore, a term that should not be used in science, as science relies totally on precision. More precisely, Snow Foxes and Brown Foxes are Variants of Fox, while bacteria and men are different Kinds of organisms. Natural Selection, or equally, human breeding programmes, do indeed produce different Varieties of plants and animals. But Natural Selection can never make one Kind turn into another Kind. Some people claim to be unable to understand the term “Kind”, as in Mankind, Dogkind, Horsekind, Catkind, Rodentkind and so on. It seems that Darwin had the same problem, or deliberately used the loose term “species” in an attempt to blur the distinction between Varieties and Kinds. Today, the term micro-evolution is often used to describe the changes within a Kind which happen, and have happened, on a huge scale, and macro-evolution to refer to one Kind of creature changing into another Kind, which never happens.
The title also reveals a second error in Darwin’s thinking which people manage to miss. Natural Selection is a Selection process. That’s why it’s called Natural Selection! It is not a creative process; it merely selects from features that already exist, whether they be visible in the organism concerned, or already encoded in it’s DNA. It cannot create a new feature or structure. It literally just remixes pre-existing features. That is why a dog can “evolve” or be bred into a different variety of dog, a horse into a different variety of horse, and so on. But a dog cannot “evolve” into a bird, because Natural Selection cannot select feathers, wings, avian lungs, nor any other bird-type features from a dog. They aren’t there, neither visible on the dog, nor hidden in it’s DNA. Darwin used a lot of imagination to conceive the process that turned a brown fox into a white fox continuing to turn the white fox into a bird. But that was all it was: imagination. And that is all it is today. The difference now is that we understand Genetics, of which Darwin knew nothing, so it needs still greater imagination. We now have to believe that mutations, which are merely the DNA equivalent of a typographical error, produce almost infinite numbers of exquisite designs. When did a good book reproduced with a million errors ever become a great book? Or even one that was still readable?
So, for those with a little scientific knowledge, the mere title of Darwin’s book exposes it’s false premises. There’s no need to read the book! Though if you do, it is interesting to see how he gets round the massive problem of the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record (Now normally referred to as Missing Links.) Darwin himself recognised that this was a killer for his theory. His way round it? He had “faith” that they would be found. It remains the case today that it takes faith of the worst sort to believe in Evolution, while the concept of an Intelligent Creator, Biblical or otherwise, provides an obvious fit with what we observe around us.
For more on Evolution, see a quick run through Evolution’s other fatal flaws here, or (some of) the evidence for short Geological time scales here. Or review the Home Page here.