I.    Cover introduction:
(Front)  New Developments in Science are challenging orthodox Darwinism.

(Back)    The idea of evolution is the keystone of our modern world view.  Yet the theory propounded by Darwin and elaborated into accepted "fact" by the scientific establishment is coming under increasing fire.
    This authoritative and remarkably accessible book by a molecular biologists shows how rapidly accumulating evidence is threatening the basic assumptions of orthodox Darwinism.  Although the theory appears to be correct regarding the emergence of new species, its larger claims to account for the relatioinship between classes and orders, let alone the origin of life, appears to be based on shaky foundations at best.
    Not only has paleontology failed to come up with the fossil "missing links" which Darwin anticipated, but hypothetical reconstructiions of major evolutionary developments - such as that linking birds to reptiles - are beginning to look more like fantasies than serious conjectures.  Even the currently popular theory of "punctuated equilibrium" cannot adequately fill in the real gaps we face when envisaging how major groups of plants and animals arose.
    Most important of all, the discoveries of molecular biologists, far from strengthening Darwin's claims, are throwing more and more doubt on traditional Darwinism.  At a fundamental level of molecular structure, each member of a class seems equally representative of that class, and no species appear to be in any real sense "intermediate" between two classes.  Nature, in sum, appears to be profoundly discontinuous.
    Dr. Denton's book sets out to explain the gathering evidence against evolution in its traditional form.  It is a clear account of a growing crisis in biology and enables us to understand why an increasing number of research scientists are questioning strict Darwinism.

II.    Preface:

...  The triumph of evolution meant the end of the traditional belief in the world as a purposeful created order - the so-called teleological outlook which had been predominant in the western world for two millennia.
    According to Darwin, all the design, order and complexity of life and the eerie purposefulness of living systems were the result of a simple blind random process - natural selection.
    Before Darwin, men had believed a providential intelligence had imposed its mysterious design upon nature, but now chance ruled supreme.  God's will was replaced by the capriciousness of a roulette wheel.  The break with the past was complete.
    Because of its influence on fields far removed from biology, the current problems in evolution theory have been widely publicized and have captivated the public imagination to the extent that topics such as the gaps in the fossil record or competing methodologies in taxonomy - subjects which would normally be considered obscure and esoteric - are discussed in detail in popular maggazines and even the daily press.  Any suggestiion that there might be something seriously wrong with the Darwinian view of nature is bound to excite public attention, for if biologists cannot substantiate the fundamental claims of Darwinism, upon which rests so much of the fabric of twentieth-century thought, then clearly the intellectual and philosophical implications are immense.  Small wonder, then, that the current tumult in biology is arousning such widespread interest.
    Basically there are two different philosophical approaches to the debate.  On the one hand, one can adopt the conservative position and view the difficulties as essentially trivial, merely puzzling anomalies, that will all be eventually reconciled somehow to the traditional framework.
    Alternatively, one can adopt a radical position and view the problems not as puzzles, but as counterinstances or paradoxes which will never be adequately explained within the orthodox framework, and indivcative therefore of something fundamentally wrong with the currently accepted view of evolution.
    While most evolutionary biologists who have written recently about evolution concede that the problems are serious, nearly all take an ultimately conservative stand, believing that they can be explained away by making only minor adjustments to the Darwinian framework.
    In this book I have adopted the radical approach.  By presenting a systematic critique of the current Darwinian model, ranging from paleontology to molecular biology, I have tried to show why I believe that the problems are too severe and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework, and that consequently the conservative view is no longer tenable.

Chapter 3:  From Darwin to Dogma
p69    ... There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution.  Neither speciation nor even the most trivial type of evolution had ever actually been observed directly in nature.  He provided no direct evidence that natural selection had ever caused any biological change in nature and the concept was flawed because it was impossible to reconcile with the theory of heredity in vogue at that time.
    The idea of evolution on a grand scale was entirely speculative and Darwin was quite unable to demonstrate the 'infinitude of connecting links', the existence of which he repeatedly admitted was crucial to his theory.

p70    ... Yet despite the weakness of the evidence, Darwin's theory was elevated from what was in reality a highly speculative hypothesis into an unchallenged dogma ...
... the concepts of continuity and gradualism which were basic to the whole Darwinian model of evolution ...
... Stephen Jay Gold and Niles Eldredge comment: ... 'The general preference that so many hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance ... it is not a high-order empirical observation, induced from the objective study of nature ...

p73    ... Darwin himself admitted, the actual empirical evidence was insufficient, and there was absolutely no evidence that any of the major divisions of nature had been crossed in a gradual manner.  If nature was to be explained by natural processes, she had to be continuous.

p74    ... the facts themselves were not sufficient to compel belief in the continuity of living nature or to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the whole drama of life on earth was generated by the sors of simple random processes responsible for microevolution on the Galapagos Islands.   ... as evolution became more and more consolidated into dogma, ... its highly theoretical and metaphysical nature was forgotten ... The fact that every journal, academic debate and popular discussion assumes the truth of Darwinian theory tneds to reinforce its credibility enormously.

p75    ... many biologists are confused as to the true status of the Darwinian paradigm and are unaware of its metaphysical basis.
    ... quote from Julian Huxley at a conference in 1959 ..."The first point to make about Darwin's theory is that it is no longer a theory but a fact ..."  ... Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, is even more emphatic "The theory is about as much in doubt as the earth goes round the sun."
... such claims are simply nonsense.  For Darwin's model of evolution is still very much a theory and still very much in doubt when it comes to macroevolutionary phenomena.  Furthermore being basically a theory of historical reconstruction, it is impossible to verify by experiment or direct observation as is normal in science.
... Philosophers such as Sir Karl Popper have raised doubts as to whether evolutionary claims, by their very nature incapable of falsification, can properly be classed as truly scientific hypotheses.  Moreover, the theory of evolution deals with a series of unique events, the origin of life, the origin of intelligence and so on.  Unique events are unrepeatable and cannot be subjected to any sort of experimental investigation.  Such events, whether they be the origin of the universe or the origin of life, may be the subject of much fascinating and controversial speculation, but their causation can, strictly speaking, never be subject to scientific validation.

p76    Furthermore, not only is the theory incapable of proof by normal scientic means, the evidence is, ... far from compelling.
    Although it is nonsense to clain that Darwin's theory is a fact, ironically both Huxley and Dawkins are right in the sense that, once a community has elevated a theory into a self-evident truth, its defence becomes irrelevant and there is no longer any point in having to establish its validity by reference to empirical facts.
    The transformation of Darwinian theory into dogma is evidenced also by the hostility that is directed towards the dissidents from orthodoxy such as Klammerer in the 1920's and recently the Australian geneticist Steel for raising the possibility of Lamarckianism, and ... geneticist Goldschmidt ... paleontologist Schindewolf for rejecting natural selection as the major agency in macroevolution.
    Such hostility is readily understandable in terms of the sociology of knowledge because, as the biological community considers Darwinian theory to be established beyond doubt ... then dissent becomes by definition irrational and hence especially irritating if the dissenters claim to be presenting a rational critique.  It is ironic to reflect that while Darwin once considered it heretical to question the immutability of species, nowadays it is heretical to question the idea of evolution
    Once a theory has become petrified into a metaphysical dogma it always holds enormous explanatory power for the community of belief. ... This sembalance of truth is of course a mirage, ...

p77    ... The raising of the status of Darwinian theory to a self-evident axiom has had the consequence that the very real problems and objections with which Darwin so painfully laboured in the Origin have become entirely invisible.  Crucial problems such as the absence of connecting links or the difficulty of envisaging intermediate forms are virtually never discussed and the creation of even the most complex of adaptations is put down to natural selection without a ripple of doubt.
    The overriding supremacy of the myth has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago and that all subsequence biological research - paleontological, zollogical and in the newer branches of genetics and molecular biology - has provided ever-increasing evidence for Darwinian ideas.
    Nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is that the evidence was so patchy one hundred years ago that even Darwin himself had increasing doubts as to the validity of his views, and the only aspect of his theory which has received any support over the past century is where it applies to microevolutionary phenomena. 
    His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more agressive advocates would have us believe.

...

Chapter 15    The Priority of the Paradigm
p344    ...    Since 1859, a vast amount of evidence has accumulated which has thoroughly substantiated Darwin's views as far as microevolutionary phenomena are concerned.  Evolution by natural selection has been directly observed in nature, and it is beyond any reasonable doubt that new reproductively isolated populations - species - do in fact arise from pre-exxisting species.  Although some of the details of the process are still controversial, and certain aspects of the modern view of speciation differ slightly from Darwin's, it is clear that the process involves a gradual accumulation of small genetic changes guided mainly by natural selection.
    But while his special theory has been confirmed, its general application, the grand claim that, in Mayr's words: ... "all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes guided by natural selection and that transpecific evolution is nothing but an extrapolatiion and magnification of the events which take place within population and species ..."  remains as unsubstantiated as it was one hundred and twenty years ago.
    The very success of the Darwinian model at a microevolutionary level, and particularly the mode of its success - by rigorous empirical documentation of actual evolutionary events and thoroughly worked out models showing precisely how the process of speciation and microevolution occurs - only serves to highlight its failure at a macroevolutionary level.

p345    Neither of the two fundamental axions of Darwin's macroevolutionary theory - the concept of the continuity of naturre, that is the idea of a functional continuum of all life forms linking all species together and ultimately leading back to a primeval cell, and the belief that all the adaptive design of life has resulted from a blind random process - have been validated by one single empirical discovery of scientific advance since 1859.
    Despite more than a century of intensive effort on the part of evolutionary biologists, the major objections raised by Darwin's critics such as Agassiz, Pictet, Bronn and Richard Owen have not been met.  The mind must still fill up the "large blanks" that Darwin acknowledged in his letter to Asa Gray.
...    Since the birth of modern biology in the mid-eighteenth century, nearly all advocates of the continuity of nature have attempted to explain away the gaps in terms of what ultimately amounts to some sort of sampling error hypothesis.  ...
    That the gaps cannot be dismissed as inventions of the human mind, merely figments of an anti-evolutionary imagination - an imagination prejudiced by typology, essentialism or creationism - is amply testified by the fact that their existence has always been just as firmly acknowledged by the advocates of evolution and continuity.  While it may have been the anti-evolutionists who, in perceiving the enormity of the empirical challenge posed by the existence of breaks in the order of nature, coined the phrase "missing links", it has been the evolutionists who have acknowledged their existence, who have sought them with such persistence.

p346    ... It would require a highly prejudicial reading of biological history to conclude that advances in biological knowledge have continually tended to narrow the gaps.  On the contrary, the gaps are as intense today as they were in the days of Linnaeus, and almost every major advance in biological knowledge, from the founding of comparative anatomy and paleontology in the eighteenth century to the recent discoveries of molecular biology, has only tended to emphasize the depth and profundity of the great divisions of nature.

p347    ...   The classic example ... of a major discontinuity being enhanced rather than diminished by advances in knowledge, is the division between life and inorganic nature.
... We now know, as a result of discoveries made over the past thirty years, that not only is there a distinct break between the animate and inanimate worlds but that it is one of the most dramatic in all nature, absolutely unbridged by any series of transitional forms and like so many of the other major gaps of nature, the transitional forms are not only empirically absent but are also conceptually impossible.
    The fact that the gaps have not been narrowed in any significant sense since the mid-eithteenth century means that the sampling error strategem has essentially failed, and its failure has in effect stripped the Darwinian concept of a continuum of functional forms leading gradually across all the dividions of nature of any objective basis.
    Darwin's prediction and hope expressed in the Origin, that future discoveries would fill in the blanks, has, on any unprejudiced reading of the evidence, not been fulfilled.  On the contrary, the suspicion of his critics, ... that the divisions were fundamental and would never be closed by further sampling, has been confirmed.
    Similary, the credibility of the second great axion of the Darwinian world view, the all-sufficiency of pure chance as the creative agency of evolution, is greatly diminished since Darwin's day.

p348    ... it is abundantly clear that in every analogous system, pure unguided random events cannot achieve any sort of interesting or complex end.  As the analogy deepens between organism and machine, as life at a molecular level takes on increasingly the appearance of a sophisticated technology and living organisms the appearance of advanced machines, then the failure to simulate Darwinian evolution in artificial systems increasingly approaches a formal logical disproof of Darwinian claims.
 
p351    ... To the sceptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithmns controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason.  But to the darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

p352    ... in the context of the almost mathematically perfect isolation of different groups of organisms at a molecular level, the Darwinist, instead of questioning the orthodox framework as common sense would seem to dictate, attempts of justifying his position by ad hoc proposals, molecular clocks and such, which to the sceptic are self-apparent rationalizations to neutralize what is, on the face of it, hostile evidence.
    Similarly, the sorts of scenarios conjured up by evolutionary biologists to bridge the great divisions of nature, those strange realms of 'pro-avis' or the 'proto-cell' which are so utterly unrealistic to the sceptic, are often viewed by the believer as further powerful confirmatory evidence of the truth of the paradigm.

p353    ... the holistic illusion is created that every single fact of biology irrefutably supports the Darwinian thesis.  Hence, even evidence that is to all common sense hostile to the traditional picture is rendered invisible by unjustified assumptions.
... The rationalizations are unconvincing to anyone not emotionally committed to the defence of Darwinian theory.  To an outsider from the community of belief, they merely tend to emphasize the metaphysical nature of evolutionary claims and the lack of any sort of rational or empirical basis.
    The anti-evolutionary thesis argued in this book, the idea that life might be fundamentally a discontinuous phenomenon, runs counter to the whole thrust of modern biological thought.  ...
... Whatever the initial source of its appeal, the concept of the continuity of nature has always suffered the enormous drawback in that at no time ... right up to its latest manifestation in twentieth century Darwinian thought, has it been possible to provide any direct observation or empirical evidence in its support.  ... no one has ever observed the interconnecting continuum of functional forms linking all known past and present species of life.  The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature.  In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism, and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach.

p354    ... Theology and philosophy may well have asked for continuity, but observation pointed to discontinuity.  Nature refused to conform - the great chain of being was broken.

p355    ... The idea that it was the opponents of evolution who were blinded by the error of a priorism is one of the great myths of twentieth-century biology.  ... the evolutionists themselves conceded that in the last analysis nature provided no direct empirical support for their views. ...
    ... one of the major factors which contribute to the immense appeal of the Darwinian framework is that, with all its deficiencies, the Darwinian model is still the only model of evolution ever proposed which invokes well-understood physical and natural processes as the causal agencies of evolutionary change.  Creationist theories invoke frankly supernatural causes, the Lamarckian model is incompatible with the modern understanding of heredity, and no case has ever been observed of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and saltational models of evolution can never be subject to any sort of empirical confirmation.  Darwinism remains, therefore, the only truly scientific theory of evolution.  It was the lack of any obvious scientific alternative which was one of its great attractions in the nineteenth century and has remained one of its enduring strengths ever since 1859.  Reject Darwinism and there is, in effect, no scientific theory of evolution.

p356    ... speculations do not ... provide anything other than the vaguest possibility that a naturalistic alternative to the Darwinian paradigm may be possible sometime in the future.  ...
... even in the face of what are "disproofs", Darwinian concepts continue to dominate so much of biological thought today.  Consequently, biologists wishing to operate within a scientific framework, even those only too well aware of the seriousness of the problems, have no alternative at present but to continue to subscribe to the Darwinian world view.   It seems more than likely that, given the need for and the priority of paradigms in science, the philosophy of Darwinism will continue to dominate biology even if more by default than by merit.

p357    ... The lack of any scientifically acceptable competitor leaves evolutionary biology in a state of crisis ...    Whatever view we wish to take of the current status of Darwinian theory, whatever the reasons might be for its undoubted appeal, whether we wish to view it as being in a classic state of crisis ... there can be no doubt that after a century of intensive effort biologists have failed to validate it in any significant sense.  The fact remains that nature has not been reduced to the continuum that the Darwinian model demands, nor has the credibility of chance as the creative agency of life been secured.
    The failure to validate the Darwinian model has implications which reach far beyond biology.  It was the overriding relevance to fields far removed from biology that made the Darwinian revolution in the nineteenth century so much more significant than other revolutions in scientific thought.  In the century since 1859 the Darwinian model of nature has come to influence every aspect of modern thought.  ...
    The entire scientific ethos and philosophy of modern western man is based to a large extent upon the central claim of Darwinian theory that humanity was not born by the creative intentions of a deity but by a completely mindless trial and error selection of random molecular patterns.  The cultural importance of evolution theory is therefore immeasurable, forming as it does the centrepiece, the crowning achievement, of the naturalistic view of the world, the final triumph of the secular thesis which since the end of the middle ages has displaced the old naive cosmology of Genesis from the western mind.

p358    ... It is ironic to recall that it was the increasingly secular outlook in the nineteenth century which initially eased the way for the acceptance of evolution, while today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century.  What was once a deduction from materialism has today become its foundation.
    The influence of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age.
    Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory was capable of a complete, comprenhensive and entirely plausible explanation for all biological phenomena from the origin of life on through all its diverse manifestations up to, and including, the intellect of man.  That it is neither fully plausible, nor comprehensive, is deeply troubling.  One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.
    Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.  Like the Genesis based cosmology which it replaced, and like the creation myths of ancient man, it satisfies the same deep psychological need for an all embracing explanation for the origin of the world which has motivated all the cosmogenic myth makers of the past, from the shamans of primitive people to the ideologues of the medieval church.
    The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the tremendous intellectual effort directed towards reducing living systems to the confines of Darwinian thought, nature refused to be imprisoned.  In the final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise.  The "mystery of mysteries" - the origin of new beings on earth - is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.