The Darwin legacy sold the book. No publicity was needed. All 1,250 printed copies were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was an immediate success, the Harry Potter of the nineteenth century, and sequel to the widely popular Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.

In the afternoons, Prince Albert was known for reading Vestiges aloud to Queen Victoria. The English writer of Vestiges, Robert Chambers (1802–1871) goal was to inspire popular interest in evolution—a Discovery Channel forerunner.

Darwin, however, received wide spread of publicity, with the Westminster Review leading the publicity campaign. In 1851, Chambers aligned with the widely popular Westminster Review journal that had been established in 1823 by British philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as the official arm of the Philosophical Radicals. The Westminster Review was a the New Yorker prototype.

By the mid-1850’s, Westminster Review represented the views of the elite radical intellectuals, including Harriet Martineau and the young journalist Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill (James Mill’s son), William Carpenter, Robert Chambers and later, Thomas Huxley. Eventually, Huxley proclaimed himself “Darwin’s ‘bulldog’”.

Ironically, Huxley’s verdict on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in the Westminster Review, despite deep admiration and expressions of commitment to Darwin’s theory, also highlighted Darwin’s insurmountable problem—natural selection. In Charles Darwin – The Power of Place by Janet Browne points out that Huxley’s evaluation published in the Westminster Review “could not fully accept the principle of natural selection.”

Huxley at the Westminster Review was not a lone critic of natural selection, however. Some of Darwin’s critics were initially even within his inner circle, including botanist Joseph Hooker. Hooker had classified the plants Darwin collected in South America and the Galápagos Islands.

In response to Darwin’s inquiry of Hooker thoughts on his natural selection hypothesis, Hooker replied negatively with British civility –

[There] might have been a gradual change of species. I shall be delighted to hear how you think that this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on this subject.

Agonizingly aware of the inner circle rejection of the natural selection hypothesis, the kingpin “Means” of the theory, Darwin concedes in a letter -

[Charles] Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed.

A consensus on the evolutionary the role of natural selection was not even reached within the inner Darwin circle.

The problem with natural selection stems from the lack of one essential factor—scientific evidence. In an 1859 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin clearly acknowledges that the natural selection hypothesis has “too few facts” and is, therfore, “grievously hypothetical” -

What you hint at generally is very, very true: that my work is grievously hypothetical, and large parts are by no means worthy of being called induction [scientific], my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.

In the intervening 100 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, evidence for natural selection continues only as “grievously hypothetical” concept.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in What Darwin Got Wrong (2010) deliver a stunning exposé on Darwin’s inane assertion that natural selection is the evolutionary theory “Means”. As “out-right, card-carrying, sign-up, dye-in-the-wool, no-holds barred atheists”, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini drives two points -

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.

In fact, ET [evolutionary theory] can offer no remotely plausible account of how filtering by natural selection might work.

Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti in Why a Horse is Not a Fly aligns and concurs with Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s assessment, noting -

Natural selection could perhaps be invoked as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types and orders, can only leave one dumbstruck.

Huxley, in the 1859 Westminster Review, pinpointed the kingpin problem with The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection—natural selection. Darwin did not heed the warning.

This begs the question, why has The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection continued as a powerful worldwide influence. Ardent evolutionist and historian, Janet Browne, answers –

Huxley welcomed the Origin of Species as ammunition for promoting science [sic] at the expense of the church, and the principles of naturalism over theologically based concepts.

The Huxley Westminster Review pattern continues—a philosophical imperative disconnected to the scientific evidence. As in the days of Huxley, the evolution industry continues today to promote the theory of evolution simply for the purposes of undermining biblical authority.

History clearly demonstrates, in time philosophical imperatives must answer to the scientific evidence. The clock has nearly finished ticking on Darwin’s “grievously hypothetical” theory.

This year, 2010, has not been a good year for the “out of Africa” evolutionary theory of human origins. The following is why.

In October 2009, Time Magazine recognized Ardipithecus ramidus, now known as “Ardi,” the number one of “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries” of 2009. The journal Science declared Ardi the “breakthrough of the year.”

Ardi, an nearly complete fossilized female skeleton, was discovered by Timothy Douglas White, an American Paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in the arid badlands near the Awash River in Ethiopia in 1994.

Examination and description of Ardi took nearly 15 years before releasing publication. Although it is not known whether Ardi’s offspring actually developed into Homo sapiens, the discovery was expected to be of great significance since Ardi is the oldest known hominid fossil. Ardi had been theorized to be an ancestor to Australopithecus afarensis, more commonly known as Lucy.

John Noble Wilford, science writer for the New York Times reported that David Pilbeam, a professor of human evolution at Harvard University said that the Ardi skeleton represents “a genus plausibly ancestral to Australopithecus [Lucy]” and began ‘to fill in the temporal and structural ‘space’ between the apelike common ancestor and Australopithecus.”

In the excitement, the Discovery Channel produced a series of articles and videos arguing how Ardi, not the chimpanzee, were the common ancestors to humans. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, developed an educational series in five separate publications on Ardi.

Since Ardi was discovered in east Africa, the finding gained further support for the popular “out of Africa” model first proposed by Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, Darwin hypothesized - 

In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere

Almost fifty years after the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin’s speculations seemed to be supported following the discovery of numerous hominid fossils in several areas of Africa. The “out of Africa” model continued to be the most widely recognized theory since the publication of the Descent of Man—until May 2010.

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany published in the journal Science in May 7, 2010, an article on the sequencing of the genome of the Neanderthal man entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome”.

According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., Svante Pääbo’s “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” Pääbo noted, “In some of us they live on, a little bit” with on major caveat – not in African descendants.

Mark Henderson, science writer for The Sunday Times, London, explains – “Human genomes from France, China, and Papua New Guinea showed Neanderthal signatures, but not those from West and Southern Africa.” The absence of Neanderthal genetic evidence in Africans has devastated Darwin’s treasured “out of Africa” theory pushing the relevance of Ardi as an ancestor to humans into extinction.

Genetics is not Ardi’s only problem with the “out of Africa” theory—so is the paleontological analysis. Time Magazine, and the journals Nature and Science, after more thoroughly examining the available data, has started slow process of recanting on the role of Ardi as an early ancestor to man.

In the Time article entitled “Ardi: The Human Ancestor Who Wasn’t” now highlight that “Two new articles being published in Science question some of the major conclusions of Ardi’s researchers, including whether this small, strange-looking creature is even a human ancestor at all.”  

The British science journal Nature reports: “Ardi may be more of an ape than human.” In the article, Esteban Sarmiento, a primatologist at the Human Evolution Foundation argues in the article Comment on the Paleobiology and Classification of Ardipithecus ramidus, that the Ardi could not be an evolutionary ancestor to humans:

[White] showed no evidence that Ardi is on the human lineage…. Those characteristics that he posited as relating exclusively to humans also exist in ape and ape fossils that we consider not to be in the human lineage.

With Ardi as the celebutante, the evolution industry, in desperation to connect the dots for a human evolution theory, has once again fallen into another humiliating about-face based on the inescapable scientific evidence.

As the “out of Africa” model undergoes extinction, scientists are beginning to investigate the “multiregional origin of humans” theory in which man is simply “a single, continuous human species”—a theory approaching the recorded biblical account for the origin of man.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.  Charles Darwin

Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that evolution develops through the processes of natural laws, changing the simple into the complex, in ways analogous to the laws of gravity -

[W]hilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The chromosome is the organizational structure of DNA and proteins in cells. DNA contains the nucleotide sequences that form the genes. During the twentieth century, determining the number of chromosomes in species has been in the investigative forefront.

Since Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications”, according to the theory, chromosomes were expected to demonstrate evolution from the simple into the more complex via “slight, successive” changes.  

While the simplest known organism, Mycoplasma hominis, does have only one chromosome, Darwin’s simple to complex theory quickly breaks down. Unless the Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Cow, Guinea Pig, and Goldfish evolved from Humans, the simple to complex theory of evolution is simply incompatible with the scientific evidence.

If natural selection acts only, as Darwin suggests, by “slight, successive” changes and “must advance by the short and sure, through slow steps”, then scientific evidence from chromosomes clearly contradicts the Darwinian theory of evolution.

In the book Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne conveniently and completely overlooks the lack of evidence for “slight, successive” changes in chromosomes. Coyne never even listed the term “chromosome” the Index. Reason—chromosomal evidence destroys the theory of evolution.

Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History in his companion book Darwin – Discovering the Tree of Life for the Darwin exhibit never mentions that the “slight, successive” sequences of the chromosome never happened. Evolutionist avoid chromosome like the plague. Reason, again—chromosomal evidence destroys the theory of evolution.

The evolution of the chromosome parallels horse evolution tales. Swedish geneticist Heribert Nilsson pointed out as early as 1954 that the “family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks.”

In 1996, Stephen J. Gould used stronger words in his book Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato To Darwin, concluding that the “popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes… has long been known to be wrong.” Rather than “slight, successive” changes as envisioned by Darwin, “fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown.”

Bemoaning the continued use of what he termed “misinformation,” such as horse evolution, Gould, in 2000, pined in a 2000 article that appeared in the journal Natural History – “Once ensconced in textbooks, misinformation becomes cocooned and effectively permanent, because … textbooks copy from previous texts.”

In the molecular world, biochemist Richard E. Dickerson at Cambridge University notes that the “more one approaches the molecular level in the study of living things, the more similar they appear, and the less important the differences between, for instance, a clam and horse become.”

Molecular biologist Michael Denton clarifies – “Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of the cell might have occurred, molecular biology has served only to emphasize the enormity of the gaps.”

Mounting scientific evidence continues to erode any known comprehensive theory of evolution. The evolution industry should heed Darwin’s warning that “[i]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” by starting to count chromosomes.

The Darwin’s were the Kennedy’s of the nineteenth century—a powerhouse of influence.

Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent and wealthy English physician. As a physician in Lichfield from 1756 to 1781, he acquired a reputation for being a great healer. He was so successful that King George III asked him to be his doctor, but Erasmus Darwin refused the appointment.

Erasmus was a noted naturalist, writer, poet, inventor, and founding member of the infamous Lunar Society. Lunar members were of influence, becoming the engine-driving force of the British Industrial Revolution.

As a writer, Erasmus authored several important works of poetry and science. His most important published work was a book entitled Zoönomia, Latin for “law of life,” published in 1794. In Zoönomia, Erasmus endorsed the basic emerging tenets of evolution, asking the question in the affirmative - 

Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament… continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation

At Edinburgh University, Darwin studied under Professor Robert Edmund Grant, a proponent of evolution. Grant was a student of Erasmus Darwin, quoting from Zoönomia in his doctoral thesis. In England, Erasmus ignited the evolution industry. 

Aboard the HMS Beagle, by British custom, the ship’s surgeon traditionally took the position of the official “naturalist.” Darwin’s role was to be a “gentleman’s naturalist” and assist Robert McKormick and Captain Robert FitzRoy. Ashore, though, it was Darwin and not McKormick that received the notoriety and invitations from dignitaries. McKormick was upstaged by Darwin.

Being sufficiently disgruntled, McKormick left the Beagle at Rio de Janeiro just months after sailing from the docks in Plymouth harbor in 1832. McKormick’s status was “invalided out” back to Britain. Darwin assumed McKormick’s naturalist duties. The fame of the Darwin name was widespread, even along the South America coastline.

Little wonder, Darwin was recommended by his Cambridge University professor, John Stevens Henslow to Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the HMS Beagle—an elite selection process comparable to a twenty-first century NASA space appointment. 

Just after returning from the HMS Beagle voyage in October 1836, Darwin’s influence amongst intellectuals rapidly spread. Just a few months after returning from 5 years abroad, in February 1837 Darwin was elected to the British Council of the Geographic Society.

Self-esteem issues were certainly not a problem. In his autobiography, Darwin gives a self-evaluation - 

I think that I am superior to the common run of men

In January 1839, Darwin was elected as a fellow to the most prestigious scientific organization in the world, the Royal Society. The Darwin legacy of influence and privilege long preceded the publication of The Origin of Species. 

On the day the first edition of The Origin of Species was released in 1859, all 1250 copies were sold. The book was an immediate success: the Harry Potter of the nineteenth Century.

Following in the legacy of Darwin influence and privilege, long before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the evolution industry was well developed in eager intellectual circles even though Darwin clearly acknowledged that the theory was not supported by the evidence -

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

The Darwin legacy of influence continues, sadly.

Myths have circulated that Charles Darwin recanted the theory of evolution while he was dying. Some of the stories read like this: “Shortly after Darwin’s death at seventy-four on April 19, 1882, the evangelistic widow of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Hope [Lady Hope] told a gathering of students at Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts that she had visited Darwin in his last hours and found him reading the Epistle to the Hebrews. Darwin, she said, announced that he wished he ‘had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done,’ and he also asked her to get some people together so he could speak to them of Jesus Christ and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savoring the heavenly anticipation of bliss.”

Darwin’s family all denied the story and campaigned against it. Darwin’s son Francis wrote in a letter in May 1918: “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father’s agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so.”

Darwin’s daughter Henrietta Litchfield also refuted the story, stating in the 1922 publication of The Christian: “I was present at his deathbed; Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case, she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A.… The whole story has no foundation what-so-ever.”

As an agnostic, Darwin was respected by his contemporaries, and even the Church of England. The Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, in a memorial sermon preached in the Abbey on the Sunday following the funeral, launched to bridge the agnostic-belief gap by stating -

I think that the interment of the remains of Mr. Darwin in Westminster Abbey is in accordance with the judgment of the wisest of his countrymen … It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr. Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God.

The bishop along with the Church of England could not have been more naive—Darwin unleashed the wave of atheism. In The Blind Watchmaker, leading atheist Richard Dawkins wrote –

although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Evolution now reigns as the explanation for the origins and meaning of life lead by the British zoologist, Richard Dawkins who explains –

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane.

The rise of atheism early in the twentieth century, rather than bringing an age of enlightenment, became the breeding fields for the bloodiest century in history—largely at the hands Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao. Contrary to Dawkins contention, the theory of evolution unleashed worldwide insanity—not peace.

Certainly, Darwin was critical of his own arguments for evolution in The Origin of Species. In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote,

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish

In the wake of 150 years of unprecedented scientific research on the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, and genetics, the theory of evolution remains as it started —“rubbish.” However, any recanting document prior to his deathbed experience in April 1882 continues to escape the reach of historians.

Since Darwin’s “innumerable” transitional species never existed on the Earth and natural selection never earned scientific vindication, today evolution continues more in crisis now than at any other time since the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Tragically, Darwin’s theory, supported by the likes of Harvey Goodwin in the church, blinded to the incompatibility of evolution with natural history following the abandonment of the Genesis account, continues to extract an immeasurable cost from humankind.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wove the eugenic philosophy of Plato into the theory of natural selection - 

extinction and natural selection go hand in hand

Ancient civilizations, including Rome, Athens, and Sparta, practiced what has become known as eugenics to ensure only the strongest survived.

Darwin uses “extinction” occurs 74 times in the sixth edition; “evolution” is not mentioned once. Encouraged by his brother, Erasmus, Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, an English political economist in 1838. Darwin recalls in his Autobiography the sentinel moments: 

In October 1838 … I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animal and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

The origin of natural selection theory was rooted in behaviors in the struggle for existence, a behavioral science. As Darwin explains, “This is the doctrine of Malthus … [that] many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and … consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence” was the foundation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection:

Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms… from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin after reading The Origin of Species, extended Darwin’s concept of natural selection. After sketching out his theory in the 1865 article “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Galton further elaborated in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius.

Galton reasoned, like Darwin, artificial selection in animals would produce similar results in humans. In the introduction to Hereditary Genius, Galton wrote -

to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

In 1883, Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’ [Greek: εύ (eu) meaning ‘well’ and γένος (genos) meaning ‘kind’ or ‘offspring’] for the study of ways of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race.

Galton’s eugenics movement operationalized Darwin’s view to preserve favored races. The complete title of The Origin of Species is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Darwin endorsed Galton, referring to Galton no less than eleven times in The Descent of Man (1871). The practice of eugenics quickly became an institutionalized worldwide phenomenon.

Galton became a legend, receiving the Huxley Medal from the Anthropological Institute in 1901, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1902, the Darwin–Wallace Medal from the Linnaean Society in 1908, and honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Galton was knighted in 1909.

Adolf Hitler recognized Sparta as the first “Völkisch State.” Three International Eugenics Congresses were held in 1912, 1921, and 1932, with eugenics activists attending from Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mauritius, Kenya, and South Africa.

By 1913, one-third of the U.S. states had laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization. In Sweden, about sixty thousand were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, as did Norway and Canada.

Early during the Nazi regime in Germany, Hitler ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens with ‘undesirable’ handicaps, not just those held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent ‘contamination’ of Hitler’s ‘superior German race’ through intermarriage.

Later during the regime from 1938 to 1945, this surgical treatment of such ‘useless eaters’ was superseded by a more comprehensive solution—genocide. Hitler ordered the extermination of over eleven million people considered sub-human or unworthy of life. As authenticated and documented by the Nuremberg Trials records, the sub-humans included Jews, evangelical Christians, blacks, gypsies, and the physically and mentally handicapped.

Eugenics is Darwinism on steroids. 

The American Museum of Natural History, in the New York presentation of the Darwin exhibit organized by curator Niles Eldredge, declares

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection.

The exhibit explains – “Natural selection is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time.”

“Simple”, according the Answers.com means 1) having or composed of only one thing, element, or part, and 2) not involved or complicated, easy, a simple task. A common antonym of simple is difficult.

Perhaps, the zeal over evolution caused Eldredge to overlook what Charles Darwin actually wrote in The Origin of Species: the term simple was only used 56 times, while difficult was used 213 times. Darwin even entitled Chapter VI – “Difficulties of the Theory.” Chapter VI became an add-on chapter after the 1^st edition. There is no “simple” chapter.

Contrary to Eldredge’s contention, not only is the theory not simple, the theory of natural selection is laced with a litany of inconsistencies and contradictions, at least 15 contradictions on the proposed fundamentals of natural selection can be easily discovered with even a casual reading of The Origin of Species. 

Even Darwin was acutely aware of the contradictions. In a letter to Alfred Wallace in 1868, Darwin acknowledged -

Nevertheless, I myself to a certain extent contradict my own remarks.

As the “Year of Darwin” (2009) approached, the pop-culture ether concentration at the American Museum of Natural History must have caused Eldredge to staggering into Darwin’s natural selection minefield. In the end, Eldredge embraced Darwin’s contradictions in the exhibit acronym for natural selection: V.I.S.T.A. – Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time, and Adaptation.

Not only is the theory not simple, Darwin even contradicts himself on the evidence for the theory of natural selection –  

Passing from these difficulties, the other great leading facts in paleontology agree admirably with the theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection.

Then, Darwin argues, the evidence from paleontology fails to support the theory of natural selection,

Existence of many links … does not yield the infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species required on the theory.

In the book Darwin, Discovering the Tree of Life, Niles Eldredge follows Darwin’s same pattern of contradictions -

 It [The Origin of Species] is a mature work in the best, and worst, senses of the term… allowing Darwin to hone his logic as he mustered his arguments.

How can Darwin’s arguments be “the best, and worst”? Is Darwin’s theory simple? In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, at least Darwin was honest enough to write -   

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish

Evolution continues as a theory in crisis. Based on 150 years of scientific investigation since the publication of The Origin of Species, David Conway of Cambridge University notes that the evidence –  

provides us with reasons for doubting that it is possible to account for existent life-forms in purely materialistic terms and without recourse to design.

Little wonder that Eldredge’s Darwin exhibit failed to attract any major corporate sponsorship for the proposed national tour. Nicholas Wapshott, prominent British journalist for the newspaper Telegraph, said –

The outbreak of corporate cold feet has shocked New York’s intellectuals…. They tried to find corporate sponsors, but everyone backed off.

A consensus on the theory of natural selection continues as a difficulty for the evolution industry. Natural selection is not a simple theory.

The Origin of Species changed the world. Joseph Carroll professor of English at the University of Missouri, explains in the introduction to a modern reprint of Charles Darwin’s work -

“The Origin of Species has special claims on our attention. It is one of the two or three most significant works of all time—one of those works that fundamentally and permanently altered our vision of the world… It is argued with a singularly rigorous consistency but it is also eloquent, imaginatively evocative, and rhetorically compelling.”

For evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala at the University of California, Irvine, Darwin gave the world “design without a designer.” For militant atheist Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In an interview with American pop-media journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that “among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.”

Darwin, however, was not as “certain” as Dawkins—even on the power of natural selection. In The Origin of Species,  Darwin flips his theory on the power of natural selection.

At times, the “power [is] incessantly ready for action.” Equating the actions of natural selection to that of a Deity, “It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity.” Darwin explains:

There is no limit to this power

Then, Darwin flips the argument – “Natural selection should not have preserved or rejected each little deviation.” Further contradicting the power of natural selection, Darwin writes -

Natural selection will be powerless in certain beneficial directions

While Darwin did change the world, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is now only of historical value, not of scientific merit. Flipping on the power issue illustrates one simple fact, Darwin failed to deliver a cohesive theory on the power of natural selection—the showcase of evolutionary theory for over 150 years.

Even Darwin knew the theory was flawed, acknowledging - “I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.” No wonder Darwin wrote that natural selection “is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered.”

“To suppose that the eye,” Darwin recognizes, “with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

In the 2010 book entitled, What Darwin Got Wrong, evolutionary scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini contend – “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.” They continue: “In fact, “ET [evolutionary theory] can offer no remotely plausible account of how filtering by natural selection might work.” These “card-carrying atheists” conclude,

We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not composing the melody.

In a presentation entitled “Evolutionary Theories” at the World Summit on Evolution held at the Galapagos Islands in June 2005, William Provine, from Cornell University, concluded that natural selection is not a mechanism for evolution – “Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all… It [natural selection] is not a mechanism [for evolution].”

Giuseppe Sermonti, chief editor of one of the longest-running biology journals in the world, Rivista di Biologica, in his book, Why a Fly is Not a Horse (2005), Sermonti pines,

The claim that natural selection is creative of life, of life’s essence and types of orders, can only leave us dumbstruck. Natural selection only eliminates, and it’s adoption as a mechanism of origin is like explaining ‘appearance’ by ‘disappearance.’

Joseph Carroll should examine comparative evolution literature along with 150 years of scientific evidence before attempting to rescue the old evolution industry storyline.

Just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, in 1856, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.  

In The Descent of Man, however, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were the ancestors to humans based on the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

“Nevertheless,” Darwin noted, “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious”—the skull was too large to be a human ancestor.

Darwin was right. The journal Science on May 7, 2010, published an article entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” confirming Darwin’s position that the Neanderthal could not be an ancestor to humans. According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” 

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany led the study team. “[Neanderthals] are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said. “In some of us they live on, a little bit.”

John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

This interbreeding finding is a monumental discovery since interbreeding is a defining factor for defining a species. Our current modern definition of species was developed by Ernst Mayr—Darwin’s Bulldog of the twentieth century.

In the 1942 book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr established the Biological Species Concept (BSC): species consist of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Since humans and Neanderthals are now known to be isolated reproductive populations, they represent a single species—”They’re us. We’re them.”

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is a landmark scientific achievement. The sequencing is a culmination of a four-year investigation led from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Use of efficient “high-throughput” technology allowed the numerous DNA sequences to be processed at the same time from the bones of three different Neanderthals found at Vindija Cave in Croatia.

A major obstacle overcome in the study was the retrieval of quality DNA material from remains Neanderthal DNA contaminated with vast quantities of bacterial and fungal DNA. Even, the Neanderthal DNA had broken down into very short segments and had changed chemically. Since the contamination, breaks, and chemical changes were thought to be of a predictable nature, the researchers developed a software program to estimate the original DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genes.

The DNA evidence from the Neanderthal clearly aligns with the biblical account—the Neanderthals are human, descendants of Adam and Eve. Worldwide dispersion after Babel followed by environmental pressures afterward resulted in people groups with different physical characteristics, including humans with “Neanderthal” Characteristics.

Cellular biologist, David DeWitt, noted that the research was an “amazing feat” of science that continues to demonstrate the validity of the biblical record. “Finding Neanderthal DNA in humans was not expected by evolutionists, but it was predicted from a creation standpoint because we have said all along that Neanderthals were fully human: descendants of Adam and Eve just like us”.

After a flurry of studying, in January of 1831, at the age of twenty-one, Charles Darwin passed his examination for the Bachelor of Arts in theology, Euclid, and the classics from the University of Cambridge—finishing tenth out of a field of 178.

Remaining at Cambridge for two more terms after passing the final examination, Darwin became obsessed with the desire to travel. As a stroke of fate, after returning from a geological surveying tour in Wales was a letter from Professor John Henslow, with the offer of a lifetime. Darwin wrote,

“On returning home from my short geological tour in N. Wales, I found a letter from Henslow, informing me that Captain Fitz-Roy was looking for any young man who would volunteer to go with him without pay as naturalist to the voyage of the Beagle.”

The voyage was a planned two-year expedition to chart the coastline of South America in December. When Darwin shared the letter, his father said, “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go I will give my consent.” Not knowing who to ask, on August 31, 1831, Darwin wrote a letter to Henslow reluctantly turning down the offer.

By pure coincidence on the next day, Josiah Wedgwood II, Darwin’s uncle, arrived to visit Darwin’s father. Since Josiah was considered “one of the most sensible men in the world” by his father, Darwin discussed the situation with Josiah, who immediately made the case for the expedition.

Sealing the deal, Josiah offered to pay Darwin’s cost for the planned two-year expedition—an expedition that would eventually stretch to nearly five years. The next day Darwin quickly left for Cambridge to meet with Henslow to intercept the letter he had just sent.

On September 5, 1831, Henslow introduced Darwin to FitzRoy in London. FitzRoy was a wealthy nobleman, a descendant of the Duke of Grafton, and the Marquis of Londonderry. He was widely admired for his tight reign on his men, but as Darwin was soon to discover, his commanding was accompanied by a fiery temper.

At the age of twenty-six, FitzRoy, not much older than Darwin was at first, FitzRoy was not impressed with Darwin. FitzRoy thought the shape of Darwin’s nose was too weak to take a lengthy sea voyage. Eventually, Captain FitzRoy was persuaded—Henslow’s recommendation was accepted.

Darwin was appointed to be a “gentleman’s naturalist” and assist the “official” naturalist, surgeon Robert McKormick. As a paying passenger, Darwin was granted full use all the onboard facilities to perform research as a naturalist. Darwin was set to begin his life-long dream—exploring the tropics.

FitzRoy outlined the details of the voyage, including the impending sail date, October 10. Not wasting any time, Darwin took up residence at 17 Spring Gardens in London and began shopping and discussing the details of the voyage with FitzRoy; a dynamic relationship had just been launched.

Convinced “that he would find scientific proof that Genesis was literally true,” FitzRoy wanted a like-minded naturalist on board the Beagle to find the evidence. Darwin’s interest in William Paley’s perspective on nature made Darwin the perfect applicant. Paley’s book, Evidences of Christianity, espoused a divine design in nature.

Ironically, prior to leaving England, FitzRoy gave Darwin a copy of the just-released first volume of Charles Lyell’s new theory in the book entitled Principles of Geology, which argues in favor of only slight, successive changes in the earth. Lyell championed geological uniformitarianism. The tenet of uniformitarianism is that all the events over the history of the Earth are the same as today—catastrophic events on Earth, like The Flood and plate tetonics never happened.

Little did FitzRoy know that Principles of Geology would influence the impressions of Darwin to challenge rather than support the Genesis account. Although Darwin struggled to understand how the massive land movements along western coast of South America aligned with uniformitarianism, Darwin never abandoned Lyell’s theory.

The offer of a lifetime lead to the development of a lifetime pattern for Darwin—theory development contradicted by the evidence. Or as Charles Darwin’s brother, Erasmus, put it in a letter to Charles on November 23,1859, one day before the publication of The Origin of Species - “if the facts won’t fit, why so much the worse for the facts, in my feeling.”

Darwin had a significant influence on Karl Marx. Struggle and survival are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The full title of The Origin is –

On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection and the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races.

Darwin’s premise on survival and struggle in nature paralleled Karl Marx premise on class struggle. Marx summarized the importance of “struggle” in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 -

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818. In 1843, Marx moved to France, but ordered to leave by the French authorities after participating in an assassination attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia in 1845. After a time in Belgium and Prussia, Marx and his new comrade, Friedrich Engels, finally settled in London, England in 1849.

By the time Marx had moved to London in 1849, Darwin had already moved his young family from London to the Down seven years earlier. Even though Down is located just sixteen miles from London, ironically they never met even though Darwin greatly influenced the works of Marx and Engels.

Marx and Engels immediately recognized the significance of Darwin’s theory. Within weeks of the publication of The Origin of Species in November 1859, Engels wrote to Marx -

“Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done…. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.”

Marx wrote back to Engels on December 19, 1860 -

“This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

The Origin of Species became the natural cause basis for Marx’s emerging class struggle movement. In a letter to comrade Ferdinand Lassalle, on January 16, 1861, Marx wrote -

“Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”

Marx inscribed “sincere admirer” in Darwin’s copy of Marx’s first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. The importance of the theory of evolution for Communism was critical. In Das Kapital, Marx wrote –

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention?”

To acknowledge Darwin’s influence, Marx asked to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. However, Darwin graciously replied -

“Dear sir; I thank you for the honor that you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital and I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, but understanding more of the deep and important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Charles Darwin.”

At Karl Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery in London, Engels spoke at Marx’s graveside March 1883 –

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history”

The American researcher Conway Zirckle explains why the founders of Communism immediately accepted Darwin’s theory -

“Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy.”

Darwin had an undeniable and profound influence on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the development of Communism. Although not intended by Darwin, the effect of the theory of evolution emerged as the single most significant social engineering movement of the twentieth century.

Speculations run wild on what the twentieth century would have looked like without the theory of evolution and Karl Marx. What’s your speculation?

Darwin’s tombstone simply reads – “CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN BORN 12 FEBRUARY 1809. DIED 19 APRIL 1882.”

Westminster Abbey, although originally founded as a Christian church during the first-century, has since emerged simply as a cultural center for the Church of England and the British Monarchy.

Like Westminster Abbey, Darwin beliefs changed over his lifetime. Four-years before his death in 1878, when challenged by a sermon published by the popular theologian E. B. Pusey, Darwin responded in a letter to N.H. Ridley: “Many years ago, when I was collecting facts for the ‘Origin’, my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself.” Notice Darwin’s verb choice in the sentence: “was” not “is”.

Even though christened as a child at the Church of St Chad’s, graduated from Christ’s College of Cambridge University, and buried at Westminster Abbey, Darwin is thought of as an agnostic today based on his own words. In his autobiography, Darwin wrote – “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809. The Parish Church of St. Chad’s Register of Christenings and Burials gives the following entry on 15 November 1809 “Darwin Cha^s. Rob^t. Son of Dr. Rob^t. & M^rs. Susannah his wife/born Feb^r. 12 ^th.”

St. Chad’s was a parish of the Church of England. Darwin’s religious heritage, however, was largely rooted in Unitarianism. Darwin’s father, Robert Waring Darwin, and mother, Susannah, only maintained cultural and social ties with the Church of England. Of their six children, only the two sons, Charles and Erasmus, were baptized in the Church of England.

As a young boy, Charles Darwin was taught at home by his mother assisted by Rev. George Case, pastor of the Unitarian Chapel on High Street (see picture). After Susannah’s death, at the age of eight Darwin entered the Shrewsbury Grammar School with affiliations to the chapel.

Darwin’s mother, Susannah, was the grand-daughter of Josiah Wedgwood who was one of the founder members of the Unitarian movement. Free-thinking was the cornerstone of the movement. The Unitarians rejected the validity of the Bible, specifically the concept of the trinity, and the basic tenet of Christianity: Jesus is the son of God.

Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, from his father’s side, was a also a free-thinker. Erasmus published the book entitled Zoönomia that foreshadowed The Origin of Species.

In Zoönomia, Erasmus espoused the basic tenets of evolution: “Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality… possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?”

What Darwin’s father, Robert Darwin, thought about God remains a mystery. There is no record of his father regularly accompanying the family to the Unitarian Chapel or the Church of England.

Eventually, a memorial was placed in the Unitarian Chapel on High Street bearing the following inscription:—”To the memory of Charles Eobert Darwin, author of the ‘Origin of Species,’ born in Shrewsbury. February 12th, 1809. In early life a member of and constant worshipper in this Church. Died April 19th,1882.”

A one point, Darwin stated – “I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.”

How Darwin arrived at that point? 

Richard Dawkins, the most popular evolution advocate, explains that the mechanism of evolution is “nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions”. For Dawkins, evolution occurs through the nonrandom selection of randomly generated genetic mutations. This defines modern neo-Darwinism.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in their new book entitled What Darwin Got Wrong, delivers a stunning exposé on the Dawkins’s inane assertion that 1) natural selection is a logical theory, and 2) natural selection is nonrandom.

Seasoned by decades of scientific investigation, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini begin by demonstrating that even “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed”. Not only flawed, they view the concept of natural selection is simply an “intensional fallacy”.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are not lone critics. With over 20 pages of references, the authors demonstrate that the theory of natural selection is no more than circular reasoning: a tautology.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini explains: “[T]here is at the heart of adaptations theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits… Darwinism is committed to inferring (2) from (1)”. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini conclude, “We think this argument, although ubiquitous in the literature, is fallacious.”

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini also address Dawkins’ issue of “nonrandom survival”, by pointing out that nonrandom processes require a mechanism to overcome entropy—randomness. The obvious question is – what is the mechanism that natural selection uses to overcome nature’s tendency towards randomness?

To answer this question, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini quotes from Gabriel Dover (2006), the British geneticist that coined the term “molecular drive”: “Selection is not a process as such with predictable outcomes based on fixed, selective ‘powers’ of individual genes controlling aspects of phenotype.”

The evidence demonstrates that natural selection does not deliver “predictable outcomes”. Lack of evidence for a predictable outcome, highlights the fact that natural selection does not have an operational mechanism to overcome randomness to increase complexity—the essence of evolution.

Despite over 150 years of investigation since the publication of The Origin of Species, no known natural law has been discovered to guarantee  natural selection as a nonrandom process. Currently, there are no known natural mechanisms to overcome the general tendency of all nature towards randomness without an intervention. Contrary to Dawkins’ assertion, natural selection is simply a random process.

What is the role of natural selection, then? For Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, “We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not composing the melody.” This is not the nonrandom force of evolution as championed by Dawkins.  

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, like Richard Dawkins, are evolutionists and “out-right, card-carrying, sign-up, dye-in-the-wool, no-holds barred atheists.” On the subject of natural selection acting as a nonrandom agency, however, the contrasts could not be more acute. 

Consensus that natural selection cannot possibly be a nonrandom process has reached a tipping point. Mutations are random. Natural selection is random. Dawkins contention of “nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions” is now clearly emerging as simply “breathtaking inanity.”

The “vestige” status of the appendix originated with Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). In Chapter 1, Darwin writes -

“With respect to the alimentary canal I have met with an account of only a single rudiment [vestige], namely the vermiform appendage of the caecum… It appears as if, in consequence of changed diet or habits [disuse], the caecum had become much shortened in various animals, the vermiform appendage being left as a rudiment of the shortened part… Not only is it useless, but it is sometimes the cause of death”

Darwin’s concept of the appendix continued unchallenged until late in the twenteth century when clinical research began to demonstrate that not only does the appendix function to balance the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, the appendix plays an important immunological function. 

Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, stated in Scientific America -

“Among adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions. Lymphoid tissue begins to accumulate in the appendix shortly after birth and reaches a peak between the second and third decades of life, decreasing rapidly thereafter and practically disappearing after the age of 60. During the early years of development, however, the appendix has been shown to function as a lymphoid organ, assisting with the maturation of B lymphocytes (one variety of white blood cell) and in the production of the class of antibodies known as immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies. Researchers have also shown that the appendix is involved in the production of molecules that help to direct the movement of lymphocytes to various other locations in the body.”

Martin continues noting, “the function of the appendix appears to be to expose white blood cells to the wide variety of antigens, or foreign substances, present in the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, the appendix probably helps to suppress potentially destructive humoral (blood- and lymph-borne) antibody responses while promoting local immunity. The appendix–like the tiny structures called Peyer’s patches in other areas of the gastrointestinal tract–takes up antigens from the contents of the intestines and reacts to these contents. This local immune system plays a vital role in the physiological immune response and in the control of food, drug, microbial or viral antigens.”

Jerry Coyne (2009), professor at the University of Chicago, writes in his new book, Why Evolution is True that, “We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most popular is the appendix.” Coyne claims that: “our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but is of no real value to use.”

Classifying the appendix as “no real value” exemplifies how evolution adherents persist to be woodwinked by ideology. Mounting scientific evidence continues to demonstrate why evolution is NOT true.

Jerry Coyne (2009), professor at the University of Chicago, writes in his new book, Why Evolution is True that, “We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most popular is the appendix.” Coyne claims that: “our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but is of no real value to use.”

Coyne believes the expansion of appendix development occurred because of “use” followed by contraction due to “disuse”—the rise and fall of the appendix. Following this belief, one would expect to find the appendix first increasing then decreasing in our presumed human evolutionary ancestors.

The vestige logic is great; unfortunately, the evidence does not support the logic. Coyne, along with the rest of the vestiges adherents fail mention that the rise and fall theory of the appendix simply never happened. The reason: the appendix occurs only in a few diverse mammals—and does not follow an evolutionary continum of rising and falling.

In fact, the appendix, in any form, is not present in any invertebrate. Among the vertebrates, the appendix is absent in fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and, most importantly, even in only a few mammals. In fact, the appendix is only present in a few marsupials, including the wombat and South American opossum, a few rodents, including rabbits and rats, and only a few primates, only the anthropoid apes and man. Even monkeys do not have an appendix.

Even though the appendix is “critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors,” tracing the development of the rise and fall of the appendix in presumed human evolutionary ancestors is simply a mirage—nothing more.

Although the Chimpanzee, touted as our closest genetic ancestor, has an appendix, surgeons are not exploring the possibility of any type of Chimpanzee-to-human transplantation and nor is the pharmaceutical industry exploring the use of any Chimpanzee molecules for use in humans, not even insulin.

Insulin and heart valves from the Suidae, the biological family to which pigs and their relatives belong, have long been used in humans. Calcitonin, a polypeptide hormone, is identical to the Calcitonin produced in the species of the fish family known as Salmonidae—Salmon. Why are pigs and the salmon more similar to humans than our closest genetic counterpart?  

The reason is—nature is discontinuous and digital, designed as unique creations. Anatomical and molecular evidence demonstrates that nature is not the result of “slight, successive changes” via mutations as touted by evolution adherents—evidence Jerry Coyne must inconveniently ignore; a practice popularized by Charles Darwin.  

In the final paragraph of the section entitled Rudimentary, Atrophied, and Aborted Organs, Darwin writes: “Finally, the several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter, seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera and families, with which this world is peopled, are all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent, that I should without hesitation adopt this view even if it were unsupported by other facts or arguments.”

The concept of vestiges from the actions of “use and disuse” continues today even though proven to be “unsupported by other facts or arguments.” Little wonder why students continue to question whether science in the classroom today is really science. Even though touted by esteemed college professors, what may be “most popular” can be dead wrong. 

Vestiges  are tauted as evidence for biological evolution based on the Larmarckian concept of “use and disuse” that Charles Darwin reluctantly, yet fully accepted by the 6^th edition of The Origin of Species in 1872.

In the 1^st edition Darwin wrote that“use and disuse seem to have produced some effect” that was later changed to “use and disuse seem to have produced a considerable effect” in the 6^th edition. For Darwin, the importance of “use and disuse” increased from “some effect” to “considerable effect.”

In this series, we are examining the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure through the process of “disuse.” Vestiges are thought to be biological elements that have lost their function through “disuse.” At issue is—what is the evidence that the process of “disuse” can actually produce vestiges?

In the decade following the publication of the 6^th edition, German biologist August Weismann, at the University of Freiburg, launched the first scientific inquiry to directly challenging Darwin’s theory. Now known as the “Weisman Barrier” in 1883 Weismann cut off the tails of mice from twenty-one generations. Seeing that the twenty-second generation still had tails, Weismann concluded that the evidence contradicted Darwin’s theory of “disuse” and that despite obvious reasons for change in the mice, “continuity” was observed, not new variations.

The concept of the Weismann Barrier became central to the emerging  Modern evolutionary synthesis. “Disuse” alone simply does not result in vestige structures. Ernst Mayr, known as Darwin’s bulldog of the twenty-first century, called Weismann “the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the nineteenth century, after Charles Darwin.”

Evidence from the Weismann Barrier continues to stand unchallenged, now for over 100 years. Even more to the point, after thousands of years of circumcision, “disuse” has failed to any effect on human anatomy. Without scientific experimental evidence demonstrating that “disuse” can result in any biological changes, the concept of vestige as evidence for evolution remains untenetable.

Other known vestige problems for evolution include, 1) the appendix is not found systematically found through nature, even in mammals; 2) “vestige” structures are now known to be functional. These evolutionary contradictions for vestiges continue to undermining evidence for evolution.

In the up-coming posts, we will continue to explore why these last two problems have completely undermined the concept that the human appendix is a vestige structure.

Charles Darwin attempted to avoid the use of the term “vestiges” largely because the term had been associated with the “erroneous” Larmarckian concept of “use and disuse” that was only “veritable rubbish.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and was appointed to the Chair of Botany in 1788. When the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle was founded in 1793, Lamarck was appointed professor of zoology. In 1801, he published Système des animaux sans vertèbres, a major work on the classifications and coined the term invertebrates. Lamarck is thought to be the first use the term biology in its modern sense. Lamarck continued his work as a premier authority on invertebrate zoology.

Darwin did credit “Lamarck as the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention.… In these works he up holds the doctrine that all species, including man, are descended from other species.”

Lamarck’s theory of evolution, which he referred to as “transformism,” was based on the idea that individuals develop new traits during their own lifetimes by “use and disuse” and transmit them to the next generation. Larmack writes – “Progress in complexity of organization exhibits anomalies here and there in the general series of animals, due to the influence of environment and of acquired habits.”

The giraffe served as Lamarck’s classic example of evolution through “use,” acquiring longer necks in successive generations in competition to reach the ever-scarcer leaves higher in the trees. In illustrating Lamarck’s views on adaptation, Darwin wrote, “To this latter agency he seems to attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature; such as the long neck of the giraffe for browsing on the branches of trees.”

For Darwin, however, this explanation was simply not scientific – “Lamarck, who believed in an innate and inevitable tendency towards perfection in all organic beings, seems to have felt this difficulty so strongly that he was led to suppose that new and simple forms are continually being produced by spontaneous generation. Science has not as yet proved the truth of this belief.”

One of the most eminent pre-Darwinists was Charles Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). Erasmus discussed his ideas at length in a two-volume work, Zoonomia, published in 1794. Erasmus wrote that “all … have risen from one living filament.”

Erasmus’ book was widely popular in Western Europe- even translated into German, French, and Italian. Erasmus envisioned that the driving force behind species modification was a result of “lust, hunger, and danger.” In line with Greek philosophy, Erasmus envisioned changes by “continuing to improve its own inherent activity.”

Actually how these “improvements” developed was completely unknown to Lamarck and Erasmus—evolution was a philosophy, not a science. The unknown cause of “improvements” is what drove Darwin to discover the underlying laws of nature—scientifically. Writing in the preface of The Origin of Species, Darwin suggests how Erasmus’s work, although “erroneous,” may have influenced Lamarck: “It is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his Zoonomia.”

For Lamarck, new characteristics are acquired through the process of “use and disuse.” Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a Lamarckian evolutionist. Charles Darwin, however, in pursuit of a “scientific theory” of evolution, initially opposed Lamarckian evolution, only granting the theory marginal support.

In a letter written to J. D. Hooker in 1844, Darwin wrote, “Heaven forefend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression.’ … But the conclusions I am led to are not widely diff erent from his, though the means of change are wholly so.” “With respect to books on this subject,” Darwin continues, “I do not know any systematic ones, except Lamarck’s, which is veritable rubbish.”

Although attempting to distance himself from Lamarck’s concepts of “use and disuse” and “vestages,” Darwin distain for “use and disuse” eventually waned as causes for the origin of variation required for the actions of natural selection remained Darwin’s largest unsumountable enigma.

Since then, the term, “vestiges” has once again gained prominence over “rudiments,” as has Larmarckian concepts of evolution. The question remains, however, are structures classified as “vestiges” evidence of evolution? Specifically, have vestiges seemingly lost all or most of their original function in a species through evolution?

To address answers to these questions, we will be examining the most popular example of vestiges—the mammalian appendix in the up-coming posts.   

Charles Darwin uses “vestiges” five times in The Origin of Species. Vestiges, since then has become synonomous with evolution. The emenent evolutionist, Douglas Futuyma, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, notes that vestigial structures make no sense without evolution. The first question is—what are vestiges?

 In this first in a series on vestiges, we will discover how structures labeled as vestiges play an important role as evidence for the theory of evolutionary. Since the most popular example of a vestige structure is the human appendix, the human appendix will be the focus structure examined in this series.

By the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, vestiges had already been a hot topic popularized by Robert Chambers’ following the publication of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844. The work brought together various ideas of stellar evolution and progressive transmutation of species. The book was a best-seller and is now seen as causing a shift in public opinion that paved the way for the general acceptance of evolution.

While agreeing with the general concept of evolution, Darwin took exception to the concept that evolution occurred by sudden changes in nature. Darwin wrote – “The author apparently believes that organisation progresses by sudden leaps, but that the effects produced by the conditions of life are gradual.”

Perhaps for these differences with Robert Chambers, Darwin even avoided defining the term “vestiges” in the The Origin of Species. In the Glossary, however, Darwin does define a related term: “RUDIMENTARY.—Very imperfectly developed.” In The Origin of Species, the term “rudimentary” appears 101 times.

Darwin envisions rudimentary structures to be the result of two different dynamics: 1) as structures “imperfectly developed”—emerging, and 2) as structures in disuse undergoing loss of function—elimination. Darwin writes – “Rudimentary organs will speak infallibly with respect to the nature of long-lost structures”—a Lamarckian disuse concept. Darwin explains that rudimentary structures exist because “natural selection… had no power to check deviations in their structure.”

Today however, only the elimination due to disuse concept is thought to be in operation. WIKIPEDIA.org states: “Vestigiality describes homologous characters of organisms that have seemingly lost all or most of their original function in a species through evolution. Answers.com defines vestige structures, as “A rudimentary or degenerate, usually nonfunctioning, structure that is the remnant of an organ or part that was fully developed or functioning in a preceding generation or an earlier stage of development.”

The next question is – how well does the human appendix fit the vestige structure criteria? Next week we will examine the existence of the appendix throughout the animal kingdom.

But what could the confusion be over? Here are some examples.  Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species - “There is no logical impossibility in the acquirement of any conceivable degree of perfection through natural selection”. Coyne contradicts Darwin by stating – “natural selection does not yield perfection”. Over a trivial issue, confusion reigns over whether natural selection can or cannot produce perfection in nature.

Presumably, to show how easy the theory of evolution is to understand, Coyne features what he calls the six basics of evolution: “evolution, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms”. For Coyne, natural selection is not the exclusive driving force of evolution.

Niles Eldredge, evolutionary biologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, disagrees. Niles Eldredge, architect  and designer of the museum’s currently touring Darwin exhibit in the companion book Darwin, Discovering the Tree of Life (2005), credits Darwin with discovering the actions of natural selection—the essence of evolution: “When [Darwin] formulated the principle of natural selection, he had discovered the central process of evolution.”

Unlike Coyne, Eldredge envisions evolution acting exclusively through the process of natural selection: “A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection.” Unlike Coynes six basics of evolution, Eldredge uses a VISTA acronym for natural selection that stands for Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time, and Adaptation.

Differences in approach even between Coyne and Eldredge, exemplify why evolution theory continues to be confusing—even on the basics. The teaching of evolution is in chaos. Coyne pines “most of my university students who supposedly learned evolution in high school, come to my courses know almost nothing about this central organizing theory of biology.” Could it be because a unified theory of evolution simply does not exist?

Even university science major graduates seem to be no better. T. Ryan Gregory and Cameron A. J. Ellis, in their paper entitled “Conceptions of Evolution Among Science Graduate Students” published in BioScience 59(9):792-799 (2009), surprizingly found that less than 30% of students pursuing advanced science degrees could correctly identify even the basic principles of evolution.

The reason is—a comprehensive theory of evolution simply does not exist. Even with the convening of the most respected evolutionary scientists at the Altenberg Summit in 2008, no consensus was reached on a comprehensive theory of evolution.

Given the flood of available evidence, in the wake of Crick’s Central Dogma collapse, evolution is a theory that remains in chaos—now more than ever.