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FOREWORD I was 10 years of age at the time of the Darwinian Centennial celebrations in 1959, the centennial of Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species. Thus, my own awareness of scientific knowledge was dawning just as Darwinism was attaining its greatest triumph. The Centennial occurred shortly after the famous origin-of-life experiments conducted by Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, who obtained small amounts of two amino acids by sending a spark through a mixture of gases which he considered to be like the atmosphere of the early earth. Amino acids are necessary precursors to the complex molecules of living material. These experiments produced wild optimism within the scientific community that the origin of the first living cell would soon be understood. I was unaware of the excitement, but the euphoria was so great that Julian Huxley, the most honored speaker at the Centennial, expressed the prevailing mood in terms which evoked a coming Millenium: |
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CHAPTER 1 To listen to some scientists, one might think that science had finally answered the questions of ethics, freedom and the meaning of human existence. For example, William Provine of Cornell University, a leading historian of science, has stated: Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with mechanistic principles. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces that are rationally detectable. . . . |
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CHAPTER 2 As I understand it, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is that all living organisms descended from a small number of common ancestors, and perhaps a single microscopic, single-celled organism, as a result of a process called "natural selection." According to this theory, any attributes which conferred an advantage upon an individual organism in the competition for survival were more likely to be passed on to succeeding generations, because such an organism was more likely to survive long enough to procreate. Such attributes would be disproportionately preserved. |
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CHAPTER 3 As one progresses through the fossil record forward in time, the increasing complexity of organisms is apparent. It is this increasing complexity which gives the theory of natural selection its surface plausibility. Natural selection posits more than that, however: it posits that the process through which species arose involved a vast number of small changes - much smaller than the differences which are observed to exist between species. |
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CHAPTER 4 When Darwin proposed his theory in the 19th Century, he specified the criterion for its falsification. "If it could be demonstrated," he said, "that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Darwin's criterion has been met. |
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