Amidst a Scientific Wreck

The Lone and Level Sands Stretch Far Away

We have noted before on this blog that evolutionism is in a shambles.  We have now reached the stage where a considerable number of highly respected biologists are quietly distancing themselves from Darwinist theories.  They don't have an alternative.  Only questions.  

This phenomenon is typical when a reigning scientific paradigm is going through the process of being dismantled by evidence (or, in Darwinism's case, the lack of it).  Questions arise out of research that are embarrassing to the scientific establishment because they "don't fit".  Former proponents of the paradigm hunker down, go quiet, get about their work, and say nothing.  They become nominal evolutionists--that is, evolutionists in name only.  Meanwhile the remaining ardent advocates of the paradigm embarrass themselves in the eyes of their colleagues.

In the summer of 2007, Eugene Koonin, of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, published a paper entitled "The Biological Big Bang Model for the Major Transitions in Evolution".

The paper is refreshing in its candor; it is alarming in its consequences.  "Major transitions in biological evolution," Koonis writes, "show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity" (italics added).

Major transitions in biological evolution?  These are precisely the transitions that Darwin's theory was intended to explain.  If those "major transitions" represent a "sudden emergence of new forms," the obvious conclusion to draw is not that nature is perverse but that Darwin was wrong.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 192f.]

Doubtless there were rebukes.  Koonin was being a naughty boy.  But the scientific establishment turned a blind eye at Koonin's piece, stared at the horizon with its one remaining good eye, and  began talking of Michelangelo.

We must lay aside the thought that Koonin's paper had found just one example of biological complexity which did not appear to have intermediate, preceding, precursors.  On the contrary,

The facts that fall outside the margins of Darwin's theory include "the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each  of the se prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla."

That is, pretty much everything.  [Ibid.]

To be sure, Koonin's paper did get a reaction in cyberspace.  There were immediate calls for censorship.  Positively medieval.  Such a reaction was not unexpected amongst those few remaining ardent disciples of Darwinism.  There were those who railed against the intemperance and folly of giving Intelligent Design and creationist apostates ammunition.  Then there were those who urged Koonin and his ilk to be cautious.  In other words, as Berlinski points out, they were calling for self-censorship.  Biologists need to keep bad news to themselves. [Berlinski, p. 197.]

These engagements show all the hallmarks of a once-dominant scientific paradigm being "transitioned" out of existence.  Alchemy has gone the way of the dodo, despite centuries of belief and experimental research.  Evolutionism is the modern biologist's alchemy-equivalent.   Like chemical alchemy,  evolutionist alchemy is dying.  Its dodoesque future beckons.

Darwinism is now so thoroughly discredited within the Academy that it is being appreciated for its value as propaganda, not science.

What is left is the "general confusion" that the public so often suffers when it comes to Darwin and Darwinism.  On this matter, biologists are not at all confused.  Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have "misled science into a dead end," the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin's paper, "we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against creationists."

It is hard to be less confused than that. [Berlinski, p. 197.]  

As Ozymandius once said,

"Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.