Dr. George Sim Johnston
The Death of Darwinism
George Sim Johnston is a New York writer whose works appear
frequently in such places as The Wall Street Journal, Crisis,
and First Things. He is the author of "Did Darwin Get
it Right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution." Following
is our abridged version of an article published in the June,
1995 issue of Lay Witness, from which he gave his lecture
to the College on April 16, 1999.
No book has so profoundly affected the way modern man views
himself than Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, first published
in 1859. The notion that man is the product of a blind, materialist
process which did not have him in mind is part of the intellectual
air everyone breathes. Even Catholics can get into difficulties
when they try to reconcile the creation account in Genesis
with what they suppose science has demonstrated about the
origin of living things. The unfortunate result is a kind
of schizophrenia that deems the first chapter of Genesis to
be both the inerrant word of God and a scientific embarrassment.
In confronting a theory like Darwin's, Catholics should anchor
themselves in the proposition that there can be no real conflict
between faith and science. The danger occurs when scientists
trespass into theology, or vice versa.
Although it is seldom aired in public, there is a sharp debate
among scientists today about almost every aspect of evolutionary
theory. The controversy is not over evolution per se, but
over the means by which it happened. The crux of the issue
is not evolution, but teleology.
ither life forms came about by blind chance or they did not.
Darwin's theory of natural selection is the only one available
which purports to explain how homo sapiens and other species
are exclusively the result of natural forces. This is why
the debate over Darwin's theory, and not evolution itself,
is so important. It is Darwin's theory, moreover, and not
another, which is taught in our schools. And the fact that
most writing on the subject does not make the crucial distinction
between "evolution" and "Darwinism" simply
muddles the issue.
Darwin's theory in a nutshell is that organisms produce offspring
which vary slightly from their parents, and natural selection
will favor the survival of those individuals whose peculiarities
(sharper teeth, more prehensile claws, etc.) render them best
adapted to their environment. Darwinian evolution, then, is
a two-stage process: random variation as to raw material,
and natural selection as the directing force.
Once he struck on this theory, Darwin spent much time observing
pigeon breeders at work near his home in Kent. The first fifty
pages of the Origin are mainly about pigeons, which often
surprises (and bores) readers. Darwin noticed that through
selective breeding, pigeons could be made to develop certain
desired characteristics: color, wingspan, and so forth. Darwin
extrapolated from these observations the notion that over
many millennia species could evolve by a similar process of
selection, the only difference being that the "breeder"
is nature itself, sifting out the weakest and allowing the
fittest to survive. By this simple process, Darwin claimed,
some unknown original life form floating in the primordial
soup evolved and diversified into the vast array of plants
and animals we see today.
But a crucial point has to be made here, one that has been
made often by Darwin's scientific critics. What Darwin observed
in the breeding pens is micro-evolution. Micro-evolution refers
to the small changes that occur within a species over time.
Such evolution is common. For example, people are generally
taller today than they were a hundred years ago. The varieties
of finches that Darwin saw on the Galapagos Islands are another
example of micro-evolution. With no direct empirical evidence,
Darwin claimed that over long periods of time these micro-changes
could result in macro-evolution, which consists of really
big jumps -from amoeba to reptile to mammal, for example.
This is where his theory runs into problems which are still
not resolved in the minds of many scientists today.
There are two places to look for verification of Darwin's
theory: the fossil record and breeding experiments with animals.
If Darwin's theory is correct, the fossil record should show
innumerable slight gradations between earlier species and
later ones. Darwin was aware, however, that the fossil record
of his day showed nothing of the sort. Enormous discontinuities
exist between major animal and plant groups. He entitled his
chapter on the subject, "On the Imperfection of the Geological
Record." He hoped future digging would fill in the gaps,
which he admitted to be "the gravest objection to my
theory." Enormous quantities of fossils have been dug
up since, and, if anything, they make more glaring the gaps
which troubled Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist,
calls this lack of gradual change in the fossil record the
"trade secret" of modern paleontology.
The fossil record shows exactly what it showed in Darwin's
day - that species appear suddenly in a fully developed state
and change little or not at all before disappearing (99 out
of 100 species are extinct). About 550 million years ago,
at the beginning of the Cambrian era, there was an explosion
of complex life forms - mollusks, jellyfish, trilobites -
for which not a single ancestral form can be found in earlier
rocks. A man from Mars looking at the fossil record would
say that species are replaced by other species, rather than
evolve into them. Paleontologist Stephen Stanley writes that
"the fossil record does not convincingly demonstrate
a single transition from one species to another."
There are other serious problems with classical Darwinian
theory. Among them are the fact that scientists see very little
"struggle for survival" in nature (many species
tend to cooperate and occupy ecological niches which do not
compete); the fact that all the major body plans we see today
in animals and insects appeared at once in the Cambrian era,
a fact which does not fit Darwin's model; and that many species
like the lungfish have not changed at all in over 300 million
years despite important shifts in their environment, which
flatly contradicts the constant fine-tuning Darwin attributed
to natural selection.
Darwin himself was increasingly plagued by doubts after the
first edition of the Origin. In subsequent editions, he kept
backing off from natural selection as the explanation of all
natural phenomena. Darwin's unproven theory nonetheless became
dogma in the public mind.
Yet, there was sharp scientific opposition from the start.
As Swedish biologist Soren Lovtrup points out, most of Darwin's
early opponents, even when they had religious motives, "argued
on a completely scientific basis." Most of these critics
did not reject evolution per se, but rather Darwin's explanation
of evolution. In the decades following Darwin's death in 1882,
his theory came increasingly under a cloud, and throughout
at least the first third of our century, biologists did not
believe in Darwinism.
The great irony is that the Scopes trial in 1925, which the
American popular imagination still regards as putting to rest
the whole case against Darwin, took place against this background
of general dissent. The scientific issues were never properly
discussed at that trial; a fossil tooth was proffered as the
remains of something called "Nebraska Man," which
later turned out to belong to a pig; and William Jennings
Bryan made the mistake of allowing his fundamentalist beliefs
to be ridiculed in court by Clarence Darrow, who was a kind
of "Village Atheist" raised to the national level.
The Scopes trial proved nothing about the scientific validity
of Darwin's theory, but it did plant in the American mind
the notion that in the debate over evolution the only available
choices are "Bible-thumping" fundamentalism and
Darwinism.
Because of the obvious shortcomings in Darwin's original
theory, the so-called "synthetic theory" emerged
in the 1930's. This theory incorporated genetics, molecular
biology, and complicated mathematical models. But it remained
completely Darwinian in its identification of random variations
preserved by natural selection as the driving force of evolution.
Julian Huxley, the chief spokesman for the synthetic theory,
claimed that Darwinism had "risen Phoenix-like from the
ashes." But the synthetic theory had as many problems
as classical Darwinism and over the next forty years its supports
fell away one by one. In 1979, Stephen Jay Gould echoed the
sentiments of many scientists when he declared: "The
synthetic theory . . . is effectively dead, despite its persistence
as textbook orthodoxy."
Since the synthetic theory originally arose in response to
the collapse of classical Darwinism, where does that leave
us today? "Punctuated Equilibrium" would be the
reply of the average biology teacher or science columnist.
This is the famous hypothesis which Gould and Niles Eldredge
came up with in the early 1970's, when they and other paleontologists
began to insist that the gaps in the fossil record must be
taken at face value. According to this theory, small groups
of animals break off from the herd, migrate to peripheral
locations "at the edge of ecological tolerance,"
and mutate very rapidly into "hopeful monsters"
who then replace the old herd. Because the changes occur so
quickly, there is no fossil evidence-which means that the
theory can be neither proved nor disproved. Scientists once
said that evolution is so slow that we cannot see it; now
they say that it is so fast that it is invisible.
Besides the punctuationists, there are two other evolutionary
camps today: those who cling to classical Darwinism because
they say there is no better explanation for the origin of
species (a position which is metaphysical rather than scientific),
and those who reject Darwin entirely, including a well-known
group of "cladists" at the American Museum of Natural
History. An anti-Darwinist biologist there once summed up
to me the situation of evolutionary theory today: "We
know that species reproduce and that there are different species
now than there were a hundred million years ago. Everything
else is propaganda."
The Catholic Church has never had a problem with "evolution"
(as opposed to philosophical Darwinism, which sees man solely
as the product of materialist forces). The Church has never
taught that the first chapter of Genesis is meant to teach
science.
Pius XII correctly pointed out in the encyclical Humani Generis
(1950) that the theory of evolution had not been completely
proved, but he did not forbid that the theory of evolution
concerning the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent
and living matter - for Catholic faith obliges us to hold
that human souls are immediately created by God - be investigated
and discussed by experts as far as the present state of human
science and sacred theology allows.
In his catechesis on creation given during a series of general
audiences in 1986, John Paul II stated that "the theory
of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not
exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the
truth about the creation of the visible world as presented
in the Book of Genesis." He hastened to add that "this
hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty."
The Church's quarrel with many scientists who call themselves
evolutionists is not about evolution itself, which may or
may not have occurred in a non-Darwinian, teleological manner,
but rather about the philosophical materialism that is at
the root of so much evolutionary thinking. The Church insists
that man is not an accident; that no matter how He went about
creating homo sapiens, God from all eternity intended that
man and all creation exist in their present form.
Catholics are not obliged to square scientific data with
the early verses of Genesis, whose truths - and they are truths,
not myths - are expressed in an archaic, prescientific Hebrew
idiom. And they can look forward with confidence to modem
scientific discoveries which, more often than not, raise fundamental
questions which science itself cannot answer.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 2001
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