When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he brought scientific credibility to the concept that man developed slowly from previous life forms. Most people do not realize that the concept of evolution did not actually originate with Darwin, but predates him by thousands of years. As far back in history as the ancient Greeks there were ideas about life coming from previous forms of life. Even the mechanisms proposed by Darwin can be attributed, in a large part, to others.1 What sets Darwin apart is the timing of his work. The intellectual community of Northern Europe was ripe for a naturalistic explanation of life. The distortion of Biblical Christianity was bringing faith in the supernatural under increasing ridicule, and humanism (man making himself the center of all things) was rapidly replacing the Christian belief in absolute truth.
Thus, when an alternative to creation seemed to have been found, it was rapidly accepted as fact. The easiest way to reject the authority of a creator is to remove the existence of that creator. In actuality, Darwin proved neither where life came from nor how it developed. He merely proposed a method whereby this transformation from beast to man seemed possible. With the exception of mutations as the source of new genetic information, the belief in evolution as the explanation for our origin has progressed little in the last 150 years. The concepts popularized by Darwin continue to be taught with the fervor of religious dogma.
Darwin proposed several things concerning the origin of the enormous variety of life on our planet. The first was that “the species are not immutable” (i.e. we came from a previous simpler form of life). Darwin’s second proposal was that this trans-formation of one life form into another was driven by a process called natural selection (popularized as “survival of the fittest”). His third assumption was the rejection of a Biblical time frame and a world wide flood as an explanation for the geology of the planet. This allowed him to accept the increasingly popular huge time periods needed for this transformation to take place. Believers in evolution still assume that given enough time, there is essentially no limit to biological variation. But can this seemingly magical force transform amoebas into man?
Almost every biology textbook has the following example of natural selection in action. In England, before the industrial revolution, it was common to find the peppered moth in proportions of 95 percent light-colored to 5 percent dark-colored. This was believed to be caused by the majority of the trees in a certain area being light so the light-colored moths were better camouflaged. Thus fewer light-colored moths were eaten by predators. After the industrial revolution, the trees became primarily dark-colored (due to pollution) and the light-colored moths were now at a disadvantage to the predators. Thus, the peppered moth population shifted from light colored to 95 percent dark. This is a classic example of the powerful ability of natural selection to adapt an organism to its environment. But how far does this go to explain the development of completely different types of animals? We started with light and dark moths and we ended up with...light and dark moths. Nothing new developed. The population merely shifted.
There does not exist even one example of natural selection producing a new type of animal, a new organ, or even a major permanent change in an existing organism. This is because “natural selection” is just that - selection. It can create nothing new. It can only select the most advantageous information which is already present in the molecular blueprint of the organism. Natural selection cannot cause new useful information to be added to the DNA of an animal. Darwin was simply wrong when presenting this mechanism as the explanation for life’s development.
1. Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing, 1987
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