Evolution is not a convincing theory

Letter: Evolution is not a convincing theory
Thursday, March 10, 2005

David Frenkel's frenzied rantings start off with a rather dubious premise, which a bit of research on his part might have cleared up.

Darwin's theory of biological evolution is not nearly the rock-solid explanation that Frenkel pretends it is in his column ("Church and state must stay separate," March 3). For one thing, as has been pointed out by many, the fossil record simply fails to support the sort of gradual evolutionary process which Darwin's theory would predict. Here is Niles Eldridge, a respected paleontologist and collaborator of Stephen Jay Gould:



"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very slight accumulation of change - over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history.

When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution."

Here is the realty, as described by Phillip Johnson, a frequent Darwin critic:

"Darwinism is a lot stronger as a philosophy than it is as empirical science. If you aren't willing to challenge the underlying premise of scientific materialism, you are stuck with Darwinism-in-principle as a creation story until you find something better, and it doesn't seem that there is anything better. Once you get past the uncontroversial examples of micro-evolution, however, such as finch beak variations, peppered moth coloring, and selective breeding, all certainty dissolves in speculation and controversy. Nobody really knows how life originated, where the animal phyla came from, or how natural selection could have produced the qualities of the human mind.

Ingenious hypothetical scenarios for the evolution of complex adaptations are presented to the public virtually as fact, but skeptics within science derisively call them 'just-so' stories, because they can neither be tested experimentally nor supported by fossil histories."

As the above indicates, Frenkel's intemperate attack on religious belief is not therefore very convincing.

Michael Sharon

Leslie Road

http://www2.townonline.com/winchester/opinion/view.bg?articleid=199287