ABSTRACT
We’ve already encountered some of the early ripostes to Darwinism, issues about hybrids, probability, and entropy. But three abiding lines of attack are worth considering here. I don’t think the critics succeed in pulling down Darwin’s citadel. But they help reveal evolution’s strengths and limits. The first of the three was voiced by Darwin’s teacher Adam Sedgwick:
Evolution was atheistical, cold, materialistic. It ignored “all rational conception of a final cause.” Those were motives of the critique. But motives don’t render a theory false. Sedgwick’s argument was that evolution rests on a tissue of circumstantial evidence. It fails to meet the standards of inductive reasoning. By the late nineteenth century that charge had become boilerplate. It was pursued in the twentieth by the creation science movement and elaborated by Alvin Plantinga. The second charge is Karl Popper’s: evolution is a near tautology. It
ascribes the survival of adaptive forms to their fitness. But Darwinian fitness just means survival, as measured in ratios of viable offspring. Types that survive are, by definition, well adapted; but adaptive traits are those that promote survival. So Darwinism seems to explain nothing and make no real predictions. Its story is not falsifiable: No conceivable evidence could count against it – a sure sign of vacuity. Third comes Intelligent Design. The core objection: Living structures and
processes are irreducibly complex. They cannot evolve piecemeal, since there’s no utility, thus no adaptive edge, in their isolated components. Darwinism is trapped in its own mechanistic dogma.
