- Failure of natural selection
Natural selection is credited by biologists with miraculous feats because they want a
naturalistic theory of evolution to be true and they have nothing better to put in its place
(Wesson, 1991, p.xii-xiii).
- Failure of sexual selection
Darwinism's other theory, sexual selection, has likewise failed. Anomalies abound, which can
only be `explained' by further ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses. For example: female
salmon and quail females preferring to mate with losers (Mason, 2003).
- Unfalsifiable
Darwinian evolution is not falsifiable. For example, if the Darwinian mechanism of natural
selection of random mutations fails to make any adaptive change after millions of years,
Darwinists like Mayr protect their theory from falsification by claiming that the "proper"
mutations never occurred in order that natural selection could make use of them (Moorhead &
Kaplan 1967, pp.63-64). At the same conference Dr. Alex Fraser, Professor of Genetics at the
University of California, observed that it was "the real inadequacy of [Darwinian] evolution ...
scientifically ... that you can explain anything you want by changing your variables around"
(Moorhead & Kaplan 1967, p.67).
- Failure to predict
As the world's leading Darwinist, Ernst Mayr of Harvard, has admitted, Darwinian
evolutionary theory "cannot make reliable predictions" (Mayr, 1988, pp.31-32). But as leading
Darwinist philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, if Darwinism does not really predict, then it
cannot really explain (Popper, 1982, p.171). Indeed Darwinian evolutionary theory failed to
predict an entire kingdom of life, the Archaea (Howland, 2000, pp.vii-viii).
- Failure of best evidence
It is surely significant that Darwinian evolution's claimed best evidence of its theory,
has either failed, or has major problems. For example, the famous example of "Darwin's
Missing Evidence" (Kettlewell, 1959), the Peppered Moth, has turned out to have major flaws
(Cherfas, 1986; Coyne, 1998; Millar & Lambert, 1999; Holdrege, 1999; Wells, 1999; Wells,
2000, pp.137ff), if not actually fraudulent (Hooper, 2002, pp.253,255; Shapiro, 2002; Grant,
2002).
- Failure to explain new features
As Mayr also admitted, there is "no clear evidence for the gradual [i.e. Darwinian]
emergence of any evolutionary novelty (Mayr E., 1988, pp.529-530). Leading biologists, like
Brian Goodwin, have concluded that "Darwin's assumption that the tree of life is a
consequence of the gradual accumulation of small hereditary differences appears to be without
significant support" and therefore "Some other process is responsible for the emergent
properties of life, those distinctive features that separate one group of organisms from another,
such as fishes and amphibians, worms and insects, horsetails and grasses" and that "Clearly
something is missing from biology" (Goodwin, 1994, pp.x-xi). While it "appears that Darwin's
theory works for the small-scale aspects of evolution ... it can explain the variations and the
adaptations within species that produce finetuning of varieties to different habitats", however,
the "large-scale differences of form between types of organism ... seem to require a principle
other than natural selection operating on small variations, some process that gives rise to
distinctly different forms of organism. ... the origins of novel structures in organisms that has
always been a primary interest in biology." (Goodwin, 1994, pp.x-xi).
- Failure to Find Enough Transitional
Fossils
While some transitional intermediate fossils have been found, thereby falsifying those
fiat creationist theories such as Young-Earth Creation, which deny any transitional
forms ever existed, they are insufficient to save Darwinian evolution. Darwin stated that if his
theory was true, during "vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures" (Darwin,
1872, p.315), with "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and
extinct species ... inconceivably great" (Darwin, 1872, p.294), and therefore we should
"everywhere see innumerable transitional forms" (Darwin, 1872, p.156); with "every
geological ... stratum full of such intermediate links" revealing a "finely graduated organic
chain" (Darwin, 1872, pp.292-293), and "numberless transitional links ... found" (Darwin,
1872, p.343). This is because Darwinian evolution is a purposeless process which would not
proceed directly from a starting point to a destination, so there should also be thick bushes of
adaptively superior side branches off each line (Johnson, 1990, p.35; Johnson, 1994, pp.13-14;
Denton, 1985, pp.172,174). But in fact, as Gould (1977, p.14) pointed out, "[t]ne extreme
rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology." In
the well over a century since Darwin, "the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly
expanded," but it is still not "the most reasonable consequence of natural selection" (Raup,
1979, pp.24-25). Paleontology has not been able to provide the vast number of intermediate
forms that Darwinian evolution requires (Kitts, 1974, p.467).
While in Darwin's day his explanation for the lack of transitional fossil forms could with
some justification be ascribed to the incompleteness of the fossil record (Darwin, 1872,
pp.156-157, 292-293, 343), today with the enormous number of fossil species discovered
since then, that explanation has failed to account for the almost complete absence of
transitional forms (Brouwer, 1967, pp.162-163). Moreover, it has been found that there is a
pervasive pattern to this absence of transitional fossil forms, that is the reverse
of Darwin's expectation in that there are fewer transitional species between major
taxonomic divisions than between minor divisions (Denton, 1985, pp.192-193; Simpson,
1944, pp.105-109; Simpson, 1953, pp.361,366), with sudden appearance, then stasis, being
the norm (Simpson, 1953, p.360; Gould, 1977, p.14). But this is the pattern of
creation (Pagel 1999)!
- Failure to explain `living fossils'
Darwinism cannot plausibly explain the existence of `living fossils' (Stanley, 1979, p.126),
which are just as subject to random mutations and natural selection as any other species, yet
have remained essentially unchanged for hundreds of millions of years (Grasse, 1977, pp.87-88).
Darwin's `bulldog', T.H. Huxley, regarded the existence of "persistent types, and of the
small amount of change which has taken place even in those forms which can be shown to
have been modified" as an even greater problem than the absence of major transitions for
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection (Stanley, 1981, pp.102-103). Examples of
such 'living fossils' include the Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), a lobe-finned fish
which "has changed hardly at all since the time of its fossil ancestors, hundreds of millions of
years ago" (Dawkins, 1986, p.246). This is a particular problem to Darwinists because, as
Kurten pointed out, one branch of lobe-finned fishes, the Rhipidistia "gave rise to all the land-
living vertebrates, so that its history is one of unmatched evolutionary success", yet another
branch of the lobe-finned fishes, the Coelacanthini, remained "very like their earliest fossil
precursors ... to provide a famous instance of a `living fossil'" (Kurten, 1968, p.67). An even
more problematic case for Darwinism may be the recently identified primitive deuterostome
Xenoturbella, a slug-like worm with no brain or sex organs, which is claimed to have
shared a common ancestor with all other deuterostomes, such as echinoderms (which includes
starfish and sea urchins) and the vertebrates, including humans, yet presumably has itself
changed little in over half a billion years (Bourlat, 2003; Highfield, 2003)!
- Failure to explain design in nature
While Darwinism's mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection may be able to
explain some examples of simple design in nature, there is little or no evidence that it can
explain complex design in nature (Wolfram, 2002, pp.383, 391-392). Nature abounds
in sophisticated design that is at present beyond the capability of modern technology, and for
which no detailed, testable, Darwinian explanation is given. For example: fibre-optics (Sundar,
2003). [top]