• Abiogenesis refers to first life – the production of living organisms from inanimate matter. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) French chemist and microbiologist actually showed that this was impossible and could never happen!

• Microevolution or speciation refers to change in population and species through time. There are many published examples of speciation, if by the development of a new ‘species’ we mean the development of a new population of individuals which will not breed with the original population to produce fertile offspring. Microevolution is a scientific fact which no one, including creationists, dispute.

• Macroevolution or general evolution refers the progression to more complex forms of life. The mechanisms of macroevolution, including whether or not microevolution over a long enough time leads to macroevolution, can be regarded as a ‘research topic’ and is vehemently disputed. [In this essay, I largely concentrate on macroevolution.]

If you wish to disagree with Darwinism, it is important to know what aspect of the Darwinist and neo-Darwinist’s thinking, and more importantly of modern evolutionary theory, you are disputing. Many opponents of neo-Darwinism seem to think that because one disagrees with, say, the role of Natural Selection in evolution that one automatically disagrees with the general idea of evolution itself.

Creationists especially are accused that they slide from ‘disagrees with some aspect of synthetic Darwinism’ to ‘rejects evolution’. One of the so-called more dishonest versions of this tactic (according to evolutionists) lies in the use of comments made in one context to reconstruct evolutionary trees in an entirely different context.

FOR EXAMPLE: Colin Patterson’s view on the relevance of ‘cladistic methods’ to reconstruct evolutionary trees (in the Symposia on Systematics at the American Museum of Natural History) in an entirely different context. The supposed rejection by Patterson of Darwinism in total, despite his having written a book on evolution accepting Darwinian Theory.

Cladistic Methods are a system of biological taxonomy that defines taxa uniquely by shared characteristics not found in ancestral groups and uses inferred evolutionary relationships to arrange taxa in a branching hierarchy such that all members of a given taxon have the same ancestors.

What Darwinism actually is, is of course at issue. It is a term that has many different meanings, depending on the field in which it is being discussed. In, say, artificial life research, Darwinism tends to mean Natural Selection (in the form of what are called ‘genetic algorithms’), e.g.:

• In Systematics, it means the reconstruction of ancestral forms and historical sequences of species.
  
• In bacteriological research, it means the evolution of drug-resistant strains by selection.
  
• In organismic biology, it means the evolution of new forms of life.
  
• In genetics, it means the so-called ‘central dogma’ of the inability of information about the state of the body to be reverse transcribed back into the genes, because that view was first proposed by an arch-Darwinian, August Weismann (1834-1914), a German biologist, in the 1880s.

In fact, all of these are just tendencies that vary according to where the researchers are, who you are reading, and the period in which those people lived.

‘Darwinism’ according to Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), British humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social critic, in 1890 is very different to Darwinism according to Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), an American palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science writer, or Richard Dawkins, a popular English writer.

So, to overcome this confusion of meanings and to ensure that both notional neo-Darwinists and anti-Darwinists alike know what it is they accept and what they object to, one must take cognisance of the numerous varieties of anti-Darwinism, including opposition to transmutationism, common descent, undirected variation, randomness, selection, Weismannism, and monism.

We can distinguish between seven Darwinian theories, namely:

1. Transmutationism – that species change form one species to become other species; the alternative view is Statism.

2. Common descent – that similar species have common ancestors; the alternative is a view I can only call Parallel descent (a view held by the pioneer French biologist Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet (1744-1829), and Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), another pioneer French biologist).

3. Struggle for existence – that more are born than can survive; the alternate view is sometimes called Commensualism.

4. Natural Selection – that the relatively better adapted have more offspring, sometimes called Malthusianism [after Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1834, English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction]; the alternate has no name.

5. Sexual selection – that the more ‘attractive’ organisms of sexual species mate more (and have more offspring), causing unfit traits to spread; again there is no alternate, just a denial that it happens.

6. Bio-geographic distribution – that species occur close by related species, explaining the distributions of various genera; this view, first published by the British humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social critic Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), is in opposition to the older ‘single centre of creation’ notion.

7. Heredity:

1. Charles Darwin’s own theory was called ‘pangenesis’ and is no longer accepted (it was a form of what we now call ‘neo-Lamarckism’, or the inheritance of acquired characteristics),

2. Weismannism – the more modern view that genes do not record information about the life of organisms.

To this, we must add four other more recent theories:

8. Random mutation – the notion that changes in genes are not directed towards ‘better’ alternatives; in other words, that mutations are blind to the needs imposed by the ecology in which organisms find themselves.

9. Genetic drift/neutralism – the view that some changes in genes are due to chance or the so-called ‘sampling error’ of small populations of organisms. Molecular neutralism is the view that the very structure of genes changes in purely random ways.

Finally:

10. Functionalism – the view that features of organisms are neither due to or are constrained by the shapes (morphology) of their lineage, but are due to their functional, or adaptive, benefits.

Darwinism, in common with several other sciences dealing with historical change, also is sometimes held to assert:

11. Gradualism – the view that changes do not occur all at once, and that there are intermediate steps from an earlier stage to the next.

Each of the above-mentioned Darwinian theories can be, and have been at some time in the past 150 years, challenged, and the result called ‘anti-Darwinian’. Anti-Darwinisms include:

1. Special creationism (sometimes just ‘Creationism’, the view that species are created ‘specially’ in each case): challenges 1, 2, 6 and usually 8. Examples: Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), Swiss-born geologist, teacher, and US naturalist who made revolutionary contributions to the study of natural science with landmark work on glacier activity and extinct fishes. Agassiz was the first to recognise that ice ages had taken place.

2. Orthogenesis (linear evolution, a.k.a. Great Chain of Being thinking, the view that evolution proceeds in direct lines to goals, also sometimes called teleological evolution or progressionism): challenges 8 and 9. Examples: Lamarck, Nägeli, Eimer, Osborn, Severtsov, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French philosopher and palaeontologist known for his theory that man is evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final spiritual unity. Often found as vague statements in more orthodox biology (in terms like ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ forms instead of the usual meanings in biology of older and derived). Jan Smuts (1870-1950), South African statesman, soldier, and prime minister, had the same philosophy with his ideas on ‘holism’.

Jan Smuts (1870-1950) wrote in his book Holism and Evolution that, “In its analytical pursuit of the parts, science has missed the whole, and thus tended to reduce the world to dead aggregations rather than to the real living wholes which make up nature”.

Both Smuts and Robert Pirsig wrote that evolution goes beyond its biological realm into the social aspects of human society and if we accept evolution as a fact, we will in fact have to change our present viewpoints on life and reality itself. Pirsig (Lila, 1992:255) wrote, “A metaphysics of substance makes us think that all evolution stops with the highest evolved substances, the physical body of man. It makes us think that cities and societies and thought structures are all subordinate creations of this physical body of man. But it is as foolish to think of a city or a society as created by human bodies as it is to think of human bodies as a creation of the cells, or to think of cells as created by protein and DNA molecules, or to think of DNA as created by carbon and other inorganic atoms. If you follow that fallacy long enough you come out with the conclusion that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build New York City all by themselves. Absurd”.

Smuts (Holism, 1987:1) was of the opinion that “The acceptance of Evolution as a fact, the origen of life-structures from the inorganic, must mean a complete revolution in our idea of matter. If matter holds the promise and potency of life and mind it is no longer the old matter of the physical materialists. We have accepted Evolution, but have failed to make the fundamental readjustment in our views which that acceptance involves.

“The old mechanical view-points persist, and Natural Selection itself has come to be looked upon as a mere mechanical factor. But this is wrong: Sexual Selection is admittedly a physical factor, and even Natural Selection has merely the appearance of a mechanical process, because it is viewed as a statistical average, from which the real character of struggle among the living has been eliminated”.

3. Neo-Lamarckism (a.k.a. Instructionism, the view that the environment instructs the genome, and/or the view that changes occur to anticipate the needs of the organism), challenges 7b, 8, and 9.

EXAMPLES: Darwin, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German zoologist and evolutionist who was a strong proponent of Darwinism and who proposed new notions of the evolutionary descent of man, ED Cope, S Butler, Kropotkin, GBS Shaw, Kammerer, Koestler, E Steele, and Goldschmidt.

The new field of epigenetics reveals that there is a lot more to this as was illustrated in the BBC’s Horizon documentary The Ghost in Your Genes.

Traditional genetics espoused the view that each new organism got fresh DNA from its parent, but Marcus Pembrey, working on genetic diseases of children in London, began to suspect otherwise when he found one chromosomal defect caused two very different syndromes (Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome) depending on which parent was the source of the defect.

Work on mice and the careful correlation of harvest and medical records from an isolated Swedish community shows that epigenetic effects are from generation to generation.

When the Human Genome project was completed and the number of genes found in the Human Genome was insufficient to explain the complexity of our biology, researchers turned to epigenetic switches to explain disease. (See <http://www.vea.com.au/TN/11313035.pdf>)

Conventional biology has always believed that our genetic inheritance is set in stone the moment of our conception. At that instant, we each receive a set of chromosomes from both our mother and father. Within these chromosomes are the genes – strips of coded DNA, the basic unit of inheritance. After conception, it was assumed that our genes are locked away inside every cell of the body, protected and untouched by the way you live.

Therefore, what you do in your life may affect you, but your genes remain untainted, unchanged for future generations. In classic genetics, your parents and grandparents simply pass on their genes. The experiences they accumulate in a lifetime are never inherited – lost forever as the genes pass untouched through generation after generation.

Nevertheless, epigenetics is the study of epigenetic inheritance, a set of reversible heritable changes in gene function or other cell phenotype that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). These changes may be induced spontaneously, in response to environmental factors, or in response to the presence of a particular allele, even if it is absent from subsequent generations.

Epigenetics is distinct from epigenesis, which is the long-accepted description of embryonic morphogenesis as a gradual process of increasing complexity, in which organs are formed de novo (as opposed to pre-formationism).

However, cellular differentiation processes crucial for epigenesis rely almost entirely on epigenetic rather than genetic inheritance from one cell generation to the next. If this were not so, then somatic, cell cloning would be impossible, because a normal organism could not be recovered from a differentiated cell nucleus. Because cell differentiation is epigenetic, a somatic cell can be reprogrammed to become totipotent.

One of the few exceptions to this is the rearrangement of genes in the adaptive immune system – an organism cloned from a memory B cell would lack the ability to generate a full range of immunoglobulins because a portion of the DNA has been irreversibly (genetically) deleted from the genome.

Epigenetics includes the study of effects that are inherited from one cell generation to the next whether these occur in embryonic morphogenesis, regeneration, normal turnover of cells, tumours, cell culture, or the replication of single celled organisms.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the idea that some forms of epigenetic inheritance may be maintained even through the production of germ cells (meiosis), and therefore may endure from one generation to the next in multicellular organism. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics>)

Genomic imprinting is the phenomenon whereby a small subset of all the genes in the genome is expressed according to their parent of origin. Some imprinted genes are expressed from a maternally inherited chromosome and silenced on the paternal chromosome; while other imprinted genes show the opposite expression pattern and are only expressed from a paternally inherited chromosome. Contrary to expectation, ‘imprints’ can act as a silencer or an activator for imprinted genes.

Normally, a healthy child inherits two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother, and one from the father. A living child (this applies to all mammals) cannot be produced when both sets of chromosomes come from the same parent because imprinted gene expression will be unbalanced. Because of the way imprints work, a foetus that has two maternal sets of chromosomes will have twice the normal level of some imprinted genes, and completely lack expression of other imprinted genes.

No naturally occurring cases of parthenogenesis exist in mammals because of imprinted genes. Experimental manipulation of a paternal methylation imprint controlling the Igf2 gene, however, has recently allowed the creation of rare individual mice with two maternal sets of chromosomes, but this is not a true parthenogenote. Hybrid offspring of two species may exhibit unusual growth due to the novel combination of imprinted genes. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(genetics)>)

Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) is the pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired traits are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is disputed by Darwinian Theory.

In the history of biology, Lamarck invented the great chain of being. By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformations, he escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (evolution) which started from Infusoria and ended with humans.

The mixed group ‘Infusoria’, which included all the microscopic forms that would appear when hay was let stand in water, was broken up into empirically recognised groups by the French biologist Felix Dujardin. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed the term Protista in 1866 to include chiefly the unicellular plants and animals because he realised that, at the one-celled level, there could no longer be a clear distinction between plants and animals.

Lamarck imagined a vast sequence of life forms extending like a series of staircases from the simplest to the most complex. Impelled by ‘excitations’ and ‘subtle and ever-moving fluids’, the organs of animals became more complex and took their place on successively higher levels. This was the summary view of the relationship between physical energy and the overall organisation of life set forth in Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (Research on the Organisation of Living Bodies, 1802) and the Philosophie zoologique (Zoological Philosophy, 1809).

In the latter work, he stated two ‘laws’ that he held to govern the ascent of life to higher stages:

1. That organs are improved with repeated use and weakened by disuse.
   
2. That such environmentally determined acquisitions or losses of organs ‘are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise’.

Thus, in a celebrated example, the forelegs and neck of giraffes have become lengthened through their habit of browsing. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species 50 years later, these views of Lamarck became the centre of interest and controversy. Lamarckism was discredited by most geneticists after the 1930s, except in the Soviet Union, where, as Lysenkoism, it dominated Soviet genetics until the 1960s.

As originally formulated, however, Lamarckism was part of an elaborate surmise about processes for whose operation Lamarck had no direct evidence.

From a lifelong, direct exposure to plants and animals, Lamarck gained an intuitive sense of the dynamic quality of life, the close interdependence of physical and vital processes upon which the modern science of biology rests.

Indeed Lamarck was the first to use the word biology, in 1802, and now he also seemed to have been correct and Charles Darwin wrong!

It makes one wonder what else could be wrong.

4. Process Structuralism (a.k.a. Formalism, a.k.a. Laws of growth tradition, also called Naturphilosophie, deriving from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher. He was also the greatest figure of the German Romantic period and of German literature as a whole. Oken and his view that there are deep laws of change that determines some or all of the features of organisms): challenges 3 to 5 and 10. Examples: Goethe, Geoffroy, Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948), Scottish zoologist, and classical scholar noted for his influential work ‘On Growth and Form’ (1917), Goodwin, Salthe, Gould, and Løvtrup.

5. Intelligent Design. “We recognise design in what William Dembski in his book Intelligent Design calls ‘specified complexity’ or equivalently ‘specified small probability.’ In other words, we apprehend design in highly improbable (complex) events that also fit some independently identifiable pattern (specification)”. (Behe in the foreword of Intelligent Design, 1999:10).

Dembski (Intelligent Design, 1999:13) wrote the following: “Intelligent Design is three things:

• A scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes.
  
• An intellectual movement that challenges Darwinism and its naturalistic legacy.
  
• A way of understanding divine action. Intelligent design therefore intersects science and theology.

“Unlike neo-Darwinist and other evolutionary theorist, design theorists hold that intelligent causes rather than undirected natural causes best explain many features of life and the universe.

“Unlike many creationists, design theorists do not necessarily believe that the earth is young; neither do they base their theories upon scriptural texts.

“Unlike many theistic evolutionists who think design can only be seen through ‘the eyes of faith’, design theorists believe that scientific evidence actually points to Intelligent Design – that Intelligent Design is, in their words, ‘empirically detectable’.” (Behe, Dembski, and Meyer, ‘Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe’, 2002:12.)

There is still a lot of ignorance and intolerance on all sides of the creation argument and people on all sides are determined not to be ‘brain-washed’ by other views. This is particularly the case in the US where ‘A court has ruled against the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ alongside ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’.

A group of parents in the Pennsylvania town of Dover had taken the school board to court for demanding biology classes not teach evolution as fact.

“Judge John Jones ruled the school board had violated the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools (?). The eleven parents who brought the case argued that teaching intelligent design was effectively teaching creationism [?], which is banned. They complained that intelligent design – which argues life must have been helped to develop by an unseen power – was tantamount to religious education”. (BBC News, Tuesday, 20 December 2005, 18:54 GMT.)

What exactly is the confusion about? According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘religion is human being’s relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is commonly regarded as consisting of a person’s relation to God or to gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are generally also constituent elements of the religious life as practiced by believers and worshipers and as commanded by religious sages and scriptures’. [?]

Now, the choices available to scientists among established principles of faith are wide-ranging, but two types represent the extremes. There is what can be called the secular and there are the mystical principles of faith.

According to the secular principle, a hypothesis is tentatively declared true if it is the simplest available explanation of the evidence. As such, it is a principle that reflects the conviction that a hypothesis should be intellectually aesthetic (or elegant) – that is, rationally plausible and preferable concise – as well as being an explanation of the evidence. [This means that the explanation need not necessarily be correct – it could be a case of conveniently available circumstantial evidence, or even falsified evidence!]

This is the very principle of faith that in the 16^th century guided the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) to believe in the heliocentric theory of the solar system, and to disbelieve the more popular geocentric theory, even though both theories explained the available evidence.

In order to reconcile the observed motions of the planets with the assumption that the Earth occupied the centre of the solar system, geocentrists were forced to advocate a rather complicated model of the solar system. In contrast to this, the orderly and symmetrical orbits imputed to the planets by the heliocentric model of Copernicus were intellectually more appealing. Based on that criterion alone, Copernicus preached heliocentrism as opposed to geocentrism.

This secular principle (nowadays a religion of its own) is now a canon of faith in modern science and is generally referred to as the principle of Ockham’s razor (or the law of parsimony). It is named for the Franciscan philosopher, theologian, and political writer, a late scholastic thinker regarded as the founder of a form of nominalism, William of Ockham (‘Doctor Invincibilis’, 1285-1347/49?), who in the early 14^th century first put forward the idea that non sunt multiplicanda entia preater necessitatem (entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity). [I truly wish life were so simple!]

As paraphrased in the 19^th century by the celebrated Austrian physicist and philosopher who established important principles of optics, mechanics, and wave dynamics, Ernst Mach (1838-1916), it instructs scientists to put their faith in only those hypotheses that explains the evidence objectively and concisely. [This is more realistic!]

In contrast to the secular principle, the mystical principle of faith judges a hypothesis not only by how well it explains the evidence but also by whether it is consistent with a philosophy that assigns a purpose to everything (teleology).

In addition, whereas the secular principle implies that the truth of a hypothesis rests only on what we can verify with our five senses, the mystical principle implies that purposefulness is an additional, insensible factor that must be considered in explaining the truth. [I.e. History à Planning (the extrapolation of history).]

This principle of faith led the English Anglican priest, Utilitarian philosopher, and author of influential works on Christianity, ethics, and science, William Paley (1743-1805) to believe in his hypothesis of divine creation called the ‘argument-from-design’ and to disbelieve Darwin’s hypothesis of evolution, even though both hypotheses explained the evidence available at the time. In order to explain the origin of species scientifically, Darwin was led to interpret the evident variety and harmony of the animal and plant kingdoms without imputing a purpose to them.

To Darwin, the harmony and variety are the inevitable outcome of a non-purposeful process that selects from among accidental genetic mutations only those that are best adapted to the environment.

In contrast to Darwin’s secular hypothesis, the mystical argument-from-design hypothesis explains the very same harmony and variety as being the handiwork of a purposeful agent [a creator God]. Unlike Darwin’s hypothesis, the argument-from-design is true to the mystical principle of faith, and for that reason Paley was led to preach it.

In his famous debates with Darwin, Paley stated the argument-from-design something like this: Suppose that you are riding along in your car, when you notice some rocks on a hillside that spell out the message ‘WELCOME TO PAULPIETERSBURG. It would most probably occur to you that the rocks had been purposefully arranged, but it is conceivable that someone might take the position that the arrangement was a fluke of nature that happened over many, many millions of years by natural geological forces. [This make me think of the crop-circle controversy.] This person may also hold a belief in the non-purposeful appearance of human life on Earth!

However, no matter which way you might actually believe, if you depend on the arrangement of the rocks for evidence that you are indeed entering ‘Paulpietersburg’, you are necessarily conceding the truth of the teleological interpretation. Otherwise, your behaviour would be irrational – you cannot have it both ways!

Now consider the human eye. As with the rocks, the human eye as a sense organ can be interpreted either as having a purpose or as being chance result (a fluke) of evolutionary forces. Whatever you believe, though, if you depend on your eyes for evidence of what the world looks like then you concede the truth of the teleological interpretation.

CONCLUSION: Since a similar argument can be made for each of our extraordinary human organs – including the brain – then it follows that the human body was purposefully created!

Adherents of the secular-like philosophy are called Formalist. In opposition to the Formalists are the Platonists, adherents of the mystical-like philosophy.

Phillip Johnson’s (1940- ) wrote in his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, 1997:75:

·        “First, life consists not just of matter (chemicals) but of matter and information. [In fact, matter- energy, and mind.]

·        “Second, information is not reducible to matter, but it is a different kind of ‘stuff’ altogether. A theory of life thus has to explain not just the origin of the matter but also the independent origin of the information. [Gregory Bateson in his book Mind and Nature said some very, very interesting things regarding information.] What do we now have – life is information, information is life? This is a very, very interesting conceptualisation!

·        “Third, complex, specified information of the kind found in a book or a biological cell cannot be produced either by chance or at the direction of physical and chemical laws”. [A case of, nothing can be made out of nothing – information is obligatory.]

Well now, the first known supposed primates date to about 60 million years ago, as complete skulls and partial postcranial skeletons are available for the genera Plesiadapis, Ignacius, and Palaechthon from Europe and North America. Very ‘special’ evolutionist, like for example Richard Dawkins, are people who can effortlessly trace their genealogy right back to Plesiadapis – do not feel too bad if you cannot do the same!