by Alan Hayward

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it.          George Orwell¹

We saw in the previous chapter that many biologists nowadays have doubts about Darwin’s theory, and think that it might have to be modified. But there are other biologists who go a great deal further, and think Darwinism is worthless.

These are not creationists. They are evolutionists who consider that Darwin’s theory cannot be made to fit the facts, no matter how much biologists might modify it. Their view is that nothing less than an entirely new theory is needed to explain evolution. So far they have not managed to find one, but they are still looking.

There have long been quite a number of these folk about. And those I shall quote in this chapter are generally regarded as quite distinguished biologists, despite their unorthodox views.

Continental Biologists

Because English is fast becoming the international language of science, English-speaking scientists have little incentive to learn foreign languages. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for them to become inward-looking. They tend to forget that a great deal of valuable scientific work is still being published in foreign languages.

This probably explains how most British and American biologists acquired the curious — and incorrect — notion that ‘practically everybody accepts Darwinism’. If they had paid a little more attention to what was going on in continental Europe they would have known better.

For instance, they would not have been so bewildered when a book by the Scandinavian biologist, Erik Nordenskiold,⁽²⁾ appeared in English translation in 1929. This stated that Darwin’s theory of the origin of species ‘was long ago abandoned. Other facts established by Darwin are all of second-rate value.’

When quoting these words in 1983, New Scientist dismissed them as merely ‘reflecting the anti-Darwinian sentiments then current’.⁽³⁾ As much as to say that the continentals have grown wiser since then!

Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the greatest histories of science ever produced is a series of volumes written by various French scientists in the nineteen-sixties. This later appeared in English translation as A General History of the Sciences. In volume 4 the section on  evolution⁽⁴⁾ is written by one of France’s most eminent biologists, Professor Andrée Tétry.

She discusses what she calls ‘the two great theories of evolution’, Lamarckianism and Darwinism, as well as some lesser theories, and dismisses them all as inadequate. Her conclusion is:

In point of fact none of the theories we have been discussing provides an entirely satisfactory account of all the facts of evolution.

She is particularly hard on neo-Darwinism, which is sometimes called the ‘synthetic theory’ of evolution. Her description of it as ‘the theory...which is favoured by British and American geneticists’ is a clear hint that the rest of the world is a lot more sceptical of Darwinism than the Anglo-Saxons are.

She says it is ‘hard to believe’ that complex organs — and above all the human brain — could really have been produced by mutations, which are controlled by sheer chance. To do any good, she points out, a mutation must not only happen to be an exceedingly fortunate step forward — it must also ‘adjust itself to the preceding mutation, and occur at precisely the right place and time.’ In other words, for anything to evolve through a series of useful mutations, there would have to be a quite incredible succession of lucky chances.

After listing her objections she sums up:

No wonder, therefore, that J. Kälin has called the synthetic theory [neo-Darwinism] a kind of ‘synthetic euphoria’.

To read her attack on Darwinism, and her final conclusion that no alternative theory of evolution is any better, you might almost imagine her to be a creationist. In fact she ranks as one of France’s leading evolutionists. But like many French biologists, she would rather say, ‘We don’t yet know how things could have evolved’, than pretend that a bad theory is a good one.

And her words were written in the middle nineteen-sixties, when evolutionists all over the English-speaking world were loudly proclaiming, ‘No respectable biologists doubt the truth of Darwinism.’ It is no wonder that continentals sometimes accuse the British and Americans of arrogance and isolationism!

A French Botanist

In 1967 Dr Pierre Gavaudan, holder of the Chair in Botany and Cytology at the University of Poitiers, published a paper on evolution in the proceedings of a conference at an American university.⁽⁵⁾ Its purpose was to inform the Anglo-Saxon biologists why he thought they were foolish to swallow Darwin’s theory so uncritically. He called neo-Darwinism an ‘ingenious romance’, and compared it to an eighteenth-century French writer who was said to have ‘exalted nonsense to the level of genius’. More plainly, he declared:

The pretence of neo-Darwinism to be able to open on its own account the door to truth looks a little childish.

In support of this conclusion he gave various reasons drawn from his researches in botany. One of the most impressive was based on carnivorous plants, which trap insects and digest them. This ability to obtain airborne nourishment gives them a tremendous advantage, since they can flourish in very poor soils where other plants have a job to survive. So one might have expected large parts of the world to be overrun with carnivorous plants, quietly digesting their mosquito steaks. Yet in fact they are quite rare.

How did this extraordinary behaviour arise? The digestive systems of these plants are highly complex, and there seems no way they could have evolved in a multitude of small steps. And, if they really are a triumphant success of natural selection — ‘the survival of the fittest’ — why are there so few carnivorous plants around? He answers:

The [Darwinian] theory is incapable of giving anything better than a highly fictional description of the origin of these remarkable arrangements.

Being a cytologist (cell expert) as well as a botanist, he then takes a look at plant and animal cells. Anyone wanting to learn all there is to learn would have to plough through ‘many hundreds of kilometers’ of paper, he says. And at the end he still would not know anything like enough to construct the simplest form of living cell!

He concludes that if the wisest men on earth could not even begin to form a new cell, it is hardily likely that mutation and natural selection could do it.

Once more we have a distinguished biologist who writes rather like a creationist, but is actually an evolutionist. Having destroyed Darwinism he does not accept creation as the obvious alternative. Instead, he argues that there must be some mysterious property of living things that compels them to evolve along pre-determined lines.

But is that an explanation, or just another ‘ingenious romance’, with even less support than Darwinism?

A French Zoologist

Pierre-Paul Grassé is no ordinary evolutionist. Some years ago he was described by a famous American Darwinist as:

The most distinguished of French zoologists, the editor of the 28 volumes of Traité de Zoologie, author of numerous original investigations and ex-president of the Académie des Sciences. His knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic...⁽⁶⁾

In his post as Director of the Laboratory of the Evolution of Living Beings, which is part of the University of Paris, he has been responsible for a great deal of research into the mechanism of evolution. Few men in all the world are better qualified to express an opinion about evolution.

In 1973 he published in French a major book on evolution, which appeared in English translation⁽⁷⁾ in 1977. Its purpose was twofold. First and foremost, the book aims to expose Darwinism as a theory that does not work, because it clashes with so many experimental findings. As he says in his introduction:

Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution...some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs. (p. 8)

Then follow 200 large pages packed with evidence that Darwinism is on an entirely wrong track. Only after that does he turn to his second purpose, which is to offer a new theory of evolution to replace Darwin’s.

His attack on Darwinism has many prongs, but its main thrust is aimed at the central idea of Darwinism: that evolution is due to the combined effect of (1) mutations, and (2) natural selection.

Mutations are the result of ‘copying errors’ in the genes. When a plant or animal reproduces, the new generation is usually almost exactly like the parents. The genes are extremely complex chemical substances in the germ cells, and they contain a sort of blueprint of the parents which is passed on to the next generation. If something goes slightly wrong when the genes duplicate themselves, the result may be a four-leafed clover, or the first copper beech tree, or a baby with twelve toes.

Such mutations give natural selection something to work on. Occasionally a mutant offspring is better equipped for survival than its normal brothers and sisters. When that happens the normal variety may die out locally, while the unusual one takes its place. And if that happens often enough, said Darwin, the outcome may be a new species. To summarize:

Mutation + natural selection = Darwinian evolution.

The only trouble is, says Grassé, that neither mutation nor natural selection works the way that Darwinists think they do!

Take mutation first. Grassé has studied this extensively, both inside his laboratory and in nature. In all sorts of living things, from bacteria to plants and animals, he has observed that mutations do not take succeeding generations further and further from their starting point.

Instead, the changes are like the flight of a butterfly in a greenhouse, which travels for miles without moving more than a few feet from its starting point. There are invisible but firmly fixed boundaries that mutations can never cross. As Grassé says:

This text [a Darwinist book] suggests that modern bacteria are evolving very quickly, thanks to their innumerable mutations. Now, this is not true. For millions, or even billions, of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated and still do ... To vary and to evolve are two different things’, this can never be sufficiently emphasized. (p. 6 — his italics.)

Despite their innumerable mutations, Erophila verna [whitlow grass], Viola tricola [wild pansy], and the rest do not evolve. This is a fact. (p. 225 — his italics.)

He insists that mutations are only trivial changes; they are merely the result of slightly altered genes, whereas ‘creative evolution...demands the genesis of new ones’ (p. 217). Other biologists agree with this, he claims, and quotes an American geneticist⁽⁸⁾ who has argued that ‘big leaps in evolution required the creation of new gene loci with previously non-existent functions’ (p. 218). But he offers no real explanation of how nature can ‘create’ new genes.

Turning to natural selection, he shows that this frequently does not work in a Darwinian fashion, either. For example, he asks why should goats and deer have developed scent glands that enable them to keep track of each other (a minor advantage) but which give them away to the carnivores that hunt them (a major disadvantage)? After a detailed examination of the way natural selection works, he concludes:

Selection tends to eliminate the causes of a population’s heterogeneity and thus to produce a uniform genotype. It acts more to conserve the inheritance of the species than to transform it. (p. 119-his italics.)

Things Wise and Wonderful

Although Grassé is a convinced evolutionist, he enthuses over the wonders of nature as heartily as any creationist. In particular, he mentions many organs and mechanisms in nature that will work only when they are complete. For Darwinism to suggest that mutation and natural selection could produce such things is sheer romancing, he insists.

One of his examples is the mechanism that causes blood to clot when it is exposed to air. This is essential to animal life: without it, a small scratch and we should bleed to death.

Yet the system only works because a whole collection of different, and highly complex, chemical substances act together to achieve the desired result. Remove just one of those vital chemicals, and the blood won’t clot any more. How could natural selection create such a system, asks Grassé. Only if its action were ‘prophetic’, he answers! In other words, it couldn’t.

Another of his many examples is the ant-lion larva. This remarkable insect lives in regions of dry sand or sandy soil, where it digs a pit about two inches deep and waits at the bottom for ants to tumble in. It has a delicate intruder-alarm system, sensitive to the slightest vibration. If a single grain of sand rolls into the pit the ant-lion springs to the alert, with its pincer-like mandibles gaping, ready to seize its prey. The underside of its body is provided with a set of horn-like anchors, so that it can grip the soil while struggling with its captive.

The ant-lion’s mouth is quite extraordinary, being fastened almost shut with a complicated locking system. This makes it unable to eat solid food, but the mouth forms a kind of drinking straw, ideally suited to supping broth.

Having grabbed an ant, the first thing the ant-lion does is to inject a paralysing drug. Then it gives a second injection of digestive juices which gradually turn the ant’s insides into a nourishing liquid, ready for the ant-lion to suck it out.

There is no drinking water in the hot, dry sandpits where ant-lions live. Most insects would soon die of dehydration in such an environment. But not the ant-lion. To begin with, he is provided with an impermeable skin which, like the aluminium foil around a roasting chicken, prevents his body moisture from drying up. And his digestive tract has a system for recycling the urine, as astronauts do in a spaceship, so that every drop of water can be used again and again.

For such a creature to have evolved along Darwinian lines, Grassé comments, it would have needed ‘an avalanche of coordinated and mutually adjusted chance occurrences’ (p. 163). The odds in favour of that, he declares, are ‘infinitesimal’ — a scientific way of saying that it is just not on.

Elsewhere he discusses the origin of the eye. He asserts that there is a better chance that dust blown by the wind might have produced Durer’s ‘Melancholia’ (a great sixteenth-century engraving) than that the eye was the result of copying errors in the gene. (p. 104.)

For reasons like these Grassé — who, remember, has been acknowledged as one of Europe’s greatest zoologists — rejects Darwinism as demonstrably false. He calls it a ‘pseudoscience’, (p. 6) depending on frequent miracles (p. 103), and says that Darwinists only look at those facts that fit their theory (p. 50). They look upon chance as ‘a sort of providence’, which they do not name but ‘secretly worship’ (p. 107). Well might he ask:

When is Darwinian doctrine going to be subjected to a thorough, critical re-evaluation? (p. 128)

Aware that he must sound at times like a creationist, Grassé makes it clear that he is not (p. 166). He also insists that he does not believe in vitalism, the idea that there is a mystical property of life which accounts for everything in nature (p. 216).

Having demolished Darwinism, what, then, does Grassé put in its place as an explanation of evolution? This is where Grassé becomes vague and unconvincing. He argues that living matter must contain some ‘internal factors’ that compel life to evolve along predetermined lines. These ‘factors’ are not mystical or magical, they are physical and should be discoverable by science, he reasons, and biologists should make a great effort to discover them.

Many Christians will be encouraged by this distinguished biologist’s conclusion that something more than Darwinism is needed to account for the living world. And most of them will find it easier to believe in the creative activity of God, than in Grassé’s elusive ‘internal factors’.

English-Speaking Biologists

Until recently, anti-Darwinists have been a rare species in English-speaking countries. One of them, Professor C. P. Martin, of McGill University in Montreal, explained why this was:

As to our fewness, it must be remembered that unless we command independent means of publication it is very difficult for us to obtain a hearing today .⁽⁹⁾

He went on to say why he and others believed in evolution, but not in Darwinism. His researches had convinced him that mutations are practically always harmful, and never creative. On the rare occasions when a mutation appears to be beneficial, it is really only undoing the harm done by a previous mutation — just as punching a man with a dislocated shoulder might possibly put his joint back into place. He concludes:

Mutation is a pathological process which has had little or nothing to do with evolution.

The leaders of evolutionary thought, he says, are ‘almost entirely devoid of a critical attitude’. This is true: it hits you in the face as soon as you open a typical evolutionary textbook. As the unorthodox Darwinist, Professor G. A. Kerkut of Southampton University, has said. ‘It seems at times as if many of our writers on evolution have had their views by some sort of revelation.’⁽¹⁰⁾

One of the few English-speaking biologists to attack Darwinism in the nineteen-fifties was Dr W. R. Thompson. A Fellow of the Royal Society, and director of a major research establishment, he was an entomologist (insect specialist) of world renown. In an introduction to a new edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1956 he warned the readers to take Darwin with a grain of salt. He wrote:

Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce palaeontological evidence sufficient to prove his views...the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different today. The modern Darwinian palaeontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts...Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction mingle in an inextricable confusion .⁽¹¹⁾

A British Botanist

By any standards, J. C. Willis was a great botanist. Among the many distinctions conferred or him were Fellowship of the Royal Society and an honorary doctorate of science from Harvard University. The scientific establishment on both sides of the Atlantic felt obliged to honour him, even though he was a rebel. For throughout his life he poured out a stream of books and papers attacking Darwinism.

Because of his high standing the Cambridge University Press published his book. The Course of Evolution⁽¹²⁾ — probably the only major attack on Darwinism handled by these sedate publishers within living memory. But orthodox Darwinists often suffer from tunnel vision: few of them have looked at Willis’ publications, and a large number have never even heard of him.

According to Gavaudan(13),³¹, the objections raised by Willis have never been answered. There are scores of these, of which there is space to give only a handful here.

Take first his point that natural selection cannot possibly affect plants as powerfully as it affects animals. One plant species generally differs from its cousins⁽¹⁴⁾ in quite small details, such as the shape of the leaves, or the arrangement of the leaves on the stem, or the layout of the veins in the leaf. It seems most unlikely that such features can have the slightest effect on the plant’s ability to survive; how, then, can natural selection have produced them?

Climate is regarded by Darwinists as a major factor in natural selection. In a certain place the climate gradually gets wetter, with the consequence that new species of plants and animals evolve that can stand wetter conditions. But what happens when, halfway through this period, an altogether exceptional spell of weather causes a prolonged drought? The half-evolved water-loving animals might be able to survive by migrating temporarily to the nearest lake. But not the half-evolved moisture-adapted plants — they are rooted to the spot and will die there.

Thus Willis shows by example after example that ‘the survival of the fittest’ rarely applies in the plant world. With plants the more usual rule is ‘survival of the luckiest’.

Again, Willis refers to an objection raised by Fleeming Jenkin,⁽¹⁵⁾ that the effect of favourable mutations would soon be lost, through crossing with the parent species. Darwin described this as the biggest difficulty anyone had ever raised, and Darwinists have worked like Hercules to produce some ingenious answers to it. But, says Willis, those answers really don’t work for the vegetable kingdom, where crossing cannot be avoided.

He also discusses many features of plants where no intermediate steps between two arrangements are possible. To give just one simple example, leaves are arranged on plant stems in two main ways. They may alternate as you go along the stem: left, right, left, right, and so on. Or they may be opposite each other in pairs. You cannot have a ‘half opposite, half alternate’ arrangement.

How, then, did one arrangement evolve into the other, when there cannot be any intermediate steps? And what possible survival value can one arrangement have over the other, anyway?

Again, Willis asks, why is it that so many arrangements in plants and their flowers are mathematically perfect? In the case of opposite leaves, for instance, they are always exactly opposite. Why is this? If natural selection were responsible for the arrangement, would it not have been content with ‘more or less opposite’, which would surely have served the purpose of survival just as well as ‘precisely opposite’?

Giant Leap Forward

Willis cites the cases of climbing plants and parasitic plants. Because these are more specialized it is generally agreed that they must have evolved from their more ordinary relatives. But how?

Climbers differ in two ways from their upright relatives: they have weak, flexible stems, and they have tendrils, or some other climbing device. Which evolved first? If the weak stems came first, how did the floppy-stemmed plants escape being smothered by other vegetation while their tendrils were evolving? And if the climbing organs evolved first, what made such organs evolve when they were not yet needed?

Instead of roots, parasitic plants have suckers that can penetrate the outer skin of other plants, or even the bark of trees. How could a plant with roots evolve by gradual stages into a parasite? Willis claims that the only way a parasite or a climbing plant could have evolved is in a single, huge leap. The Darwinian idea of evolution by many little steps has never been properly thought through, he says. It simply does not fit the facts, so far as the plant world is concerned.

So he proceeds to list the evidence that evolution really has occurred in huge leaps. Most of this evidence is of too technical a nature to reproduce here. Much of it is mathematical evidence, being based on the statistics of plant distribution,⁽¹⁶⁾ on which he was a world authority. It all adds up to an extremely strong case, which has never been refuted, and which has been accepted by quite a number of botanists.

If his case really is unanswerable, why has it not been accepted more widely? Largely because of his breathtaking conclusion. The mutations that we see occurring today are all very small, producing creatures that differ only slightly from their parents. But the mass of evidence found by Willis pointed to occasional gigantic mutations, or ‘differentiations’ as he called them.

These must have created, in one generation, not just new species, but also new genera (groups of species), and even new families (groups of genera). Thus the seed of a grass might bring forth a sugar cane or a bamboo; or translating Willis’ ideas to the animal kingdom, a chimpanzee might have a litter of human beings — or vice versa.

He offered no suggestion as to how such huge, creative steps could occur. White he expressly ruled out the idea of any divine activity, all he could offer in place of it was this:

It is an inspiring thought that so great and complex a process as evolution has not been a mere matter of chance, but has behind it what one may look upon as a great thought or principle that has resulted in its moving as an ordered whole, and working itself out upon a definite plan...there is a general law, probably electrical, at the back of it⁽¹⁷⁾ (My italics.)

It is intriguing to read the great botanist’s conclusion that there must be ‘a great thought or principle...at the back of it’. But what did Willis really discover? Evidence for a splendid new theory of evolution? Or evidence that there must surely have been a Creator at work?

Another English Botanist

In 1961 the Botanical Society of Edinburgh sponsored a survey of botanical knowledge, complete in one volume.⁽¹⁸⁾ The whole field was divided into eight sections, and eight eminent botanists were asked to write papers on the areas where they were expert.

The paper entitled ‘Evolution’ was written by Professor E. J. H. Corner, frs, of Cambridge. It is a remarkable paper in many ways, not least because Corner speaks much more favourably of Willis than of Darwin! This distinguished anti-Darwinian has sometimes been portrayed as a creationist, because he said:

I still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. (p. 97)

This, however, is unfair, because the rest of the page gives a rather different picture of Corner’s views. What he is really saying is that some of the available evidence seems to support evolution, whilst some — the evidence from fossils — appears to support special creation. And later in the paper Corner makes it clear that he does indeed believe in evolution.

But not in Darwinian evolution. He rejects Darwinism as a ‘temple’ where believers ‘worship’. And most of them, he charges, ‘would break down before an inquisition’. He summarizes his views on Darwinist writings in one terse sentence: ‘Textbooks hoodwink.’ (p. 97)

In his ‘Conclusions’ he states:

This evolution can be likened to a piece of clockwork which, once wound up, proceeds in a set manner ... It will take much research, I fancy, to discover how this clock was wound up. (p. 113)

So we can safely add Corner’s name to the growing list of distinguished biologists who think Darwin was completely wrong. Like most of the others who feature in this chapter, his view is that evolution followed some pre-ordained path, and that it must have worked by some totally unknown means.

That is not the same as asserting that the evidence points to the existence of a Creative Power. But it does seem to be only one step short of it.

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