For pretty much every nature programme we might watch – and I love David Attenborough’s wonderful nature videos – the underlying explanation is that everything in life as we see it, unfolded through the Darwinian model of evolution. It is also what is taught in schools around the world, and anyone who questions this “self-evident truth” is treated as some kind of ill-informed trouble maker or incompetent. It’s an approach that’s used widely to hold the preferred view in place. Everyone is familiar with the notion of the Earth being flat, but there are many similar examples currently in place, one being that humanity lived in caves 10,000 years ago, in complete denial of the great body of evidence that demonstrates the presence of an advanced civilisation that disappeared about 13,000 years ago, the last time we were in alignment with Galactic Center as we are now.

So, what is the essence of Darwin’s theory?

To quote Wikipedia:

Charles Darwin was the first to formulate a scientific argument for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is a process that is inferred from three facts about populations: 1) more offspring are produced than can possibly survive, 2) traits vary among individuals, leading to different rates of survival and reproduction, and 3) trait differences are heritable.^[4] Thus, when members of a population die they are replaced by the progeny of parents that were better adapted to survive and reproduce in the environment in which natural selection took place. This process creates and preserves traits that are seemingly fitted for the functional roles they perform.^[5] Natural selection is the only known cause of adaptation, but not the only known cause of evolution. Other, non-adaptive causes of evolution include mutation and genetic drift.^[6]

In my view, these other sources of evolutionary change mentioned above would also be selected by the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” model.

Does Darwin’s theory stand up in the face of the evidence?

Let me begin this with the thoughts of Amit Goswami.

Amit Goswami, Ph. D. is a professor of theoretical nuclear physics (retired) at the University of Oregon where he served since 1968. He is a pioneer of the new paradigm of science called “science within consciousness”, an idea he explicated in his seminal book, The Self-Aware Universe, where he also solved the quantum measurement problem elucidating the famous observer effect.

The following are comments made in Goswami’s DVD Quantum Activist.

Goswami says the following relating to Darwin’s theory:

People are entrenched in Darwinism. Is this theory so well established? Does it agree with the experimental data?

There are variations in the hereditary material of living creatures, produced by natural phenomena, such as mutation. Sexual reproduction combines the hereditary material of two people, leading to genetic variation in the offspring.

Environment has been changing, sometimes violently, and organisms survive through evolution. Nature selects those best suited for survival in these changes in nature, brought about by the environment. This is survival necessity.

This is a strictly materialist perspective, except for the notion of survival, which steps outside of the simply material.

Now think about the organs. An organ like the eye takes thousands upon thousands of mutations to be created. Literally. It requires thousands upon thousands of mutations, one after the other to create the eye; but why is nature selecting them? Is one thousandth of an eye any good for doing anything? One thousandth of an eye obviously cannot see.

Darwinians argue that “permutations might be useful for some other purpose”. Suppose the evolution happened, not for seeing but for some other reason that nature chooses them.

This is the end of their story. They don’t elaborate it. So let’s elaborate:

Let’s begin with one mutation which has one purpose. Now another mutation, another survival necessity. You need thousands upon thousands of scenarios which enables nature to preserve these mutations and not throw them away, not reject them because they have no utilisation, because only if they have survival necessity, only then will nature select them.

The storyline becomes unbelievable.

You will never catch this if you read biologists’ sympathetic presentation of this storyline, which is not to give you the details. Only if you look at the details will you catch this.

Intelligent design is more intelligent in this regard, but it also has much stupidity because these theorists mainly completely ignore the idea of evolution. They say it is not necessary. They pick data which shows many organisms never change.

Darwin’s theory does work for microevolution, but it is problematic when we begin to look at organs such as the liver, eyes, muscles; how did they develop?

They require thousands upon thousands of coordinated changes. Somehow they have to be preserved. Nature should not select them away, but nature should, according to Darwin’s theory. If not beneficial, serving a survival necessity, it should be thrown away. It just doesn’t happen that way. Even Darwin was puzzled.

It takes DNA to make protein and protein to make DNA. In reality, you could never make them. It is the chicken and the egg scenario.

Darwinism is a good theory (created in 1857) – a long time ago. Not even genes were known.

Evolution exists, but it is not Darwinian:

• You cannot explain what life is and how it originated.
• You can never explain macro-evolution using Darwin’s kind of argument

The data suggests Darwin’s theory doesn’t hold. If Darwin’s theory held, then we would see these steps of macro-evolution. We would see thousands upon thousands of intermediates, not the one or two that we see. We don’t see the thousands upon thousands of intermediates in the fossil record.

The article entitled Darwin’s Doubts has this to say:

Even Charles Darwin thought his own theory was “grievously hypothetical” and gave emotional content to his doubts when he said, “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” To think the eye had evolved by natural selection, Darwin said, “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” But he thought the same about something as simple as a peacock’s feather, which, he said, “makes me sick. ” Of course, anyone who has knowledge of the intricacies of the human eye and other living structures immediately realizes the problem Darwin sensed. How could an organ of such an intricate magnificence ever have originated via random chance?

Oller and Omdahl (Creation Hypothesis) Page 274

The same article contains Darwin’s thoughts about whether his theory was proven:

But Darwin was not so dogmatic. He described his theory as an inference grounded chiefly on analogy. And he praised the author of one review foreseeing “that the change of species cannot be directly proved and that the doctrine must sink or swim according as it groups and explains phenomena ” (Darwin 1899, 2:155). In an 1863 letter, he amplified by pointing out that evolution by natural selection was “grounded entirely on general considerations” such as the difference between contemporary organisms and fossil organisms. “When we descend to details,” he wrote, “we can prove that no one species has changed [i.e., they cannot prove that a single species has changed]; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not” (Darwin 1899, 2:210). In other words, Darwin was aware that the scientific evidence was short of compelling.

Nancy Pearcey (Mere Creation) Page 77

So much for what Darwin thought. Indeed he was noted for his extensive revision for each new reprinting of “Origin of the Species”.

If you are an observer of nature, you will be aware of a vast array of unique and specific relationships between plants and the insects, birds or animals that pollinate them, such as the emu’s tropical cousin, the cassowary, in Northern Australia, where at least one tree relies on the consumption of the fruit by the cassowary to trigger germination. Or the following example:

Dung beetles find their way – in the stars. What would Darwin think?

How do lost dung beetles find their way home? By using the Milky Way to navigate, according to a team of researchers awarded the dubious honour of an Ig Nobel award in biology and astronomy.

The annual Ig Nobels, announced in America on Friday, are a parody of the Nobel Prizes given out by the jokey journal The Annals of Improbable Research.

The awards, selected from hundreds of entries, are given to research which both makes people laugh and think.

Among the award-winning dung beetle team is Australian-born Eric Warrant, whose unusual field of physics and entomology played a key role in the research which was the first to document the use of the Milky Way for orientation and navigation in the insect world.

The revelations of the dung beetle’s reliance on celestial landmarks to travel in a straight path, by researchers from Sweden, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Germany, was published in the journal Current Biology earlier this year.

At the time the article was published Professor Warrant, now with Lund University in Sweden, told National Geographic that it was a complicated navigational feat.

“It’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” he said.

Previously, it was thought only birds, humans and seals used the stars for orientation. Read more here.

So why has Darwin’s theory come to be so slavishly promoted?

Once you accept that the complex elements of life cannot come about by randomness alone, then you have to acknowledge a creative or intelligent “hand” or force in the creation of life (or come up with an alternate theory that practically addresses the reality of life, which I have not seen and seems highly unlikely). I do not want to get into the various alternate theories about how this might arise, because this is not my focus here. Rather, I simply want to highlight this consequence.

Once you acknowledge this and also acknowledge the obvious limitations of Darwin’s theory, acknowledged freely by Darwin himself, the question arises as to why it has been so slavishly and powerfully promoted.

In my view, we come face-to-face with yet another tentacle from that thousand-tentacled octopus to which I have referred several times. Put simply, if you want people to believe they came forth from primordial slime, lived in caves 10,000 years ago, are alone in the Cosmos, and there will be nothing left of you when you die, then you need a theory like Darwin’s to explain how we got here. Pure and simple. And the evidence is abundant that a lie that is widely promoted and powerfully supported will be believed.

So, for me it is simply part of this web of illusion that we have been persuaded to accept about who and what we are, so we can be demeaned, disempowered and controlled by a very small and powerful group, a group we already know is at work in the world.

Postscript – Here is another article expressing similar views.