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SORRY MR DARWIN!
On February 12, 2009 the
world celebrates 200 years of the birth of Charles Darwin, the founder and
the main architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection. It
also observes 150 years of his famous book “The Origin of Species” which
was first published in 1859. The book had, not just his theory and the
evidences for evolution taking place in nature, but also a major
confession that Darwin had made about the most important type of evidence
one would require to really prove evolution beyond any reasonable doubt.
In Darwin’s own words, that confession was: “The number of intermediate
varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly
enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum
full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any
such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious
and gravest objection which can be argued against my theory”
But since Darwin had already committed himself to the idea of evolution of
newer and fitter species through gradual change over time, he blamed his
self confessed “gravest objection” on what he called “the imperfection of
the geological record” or the imperfection of the fossil record. He wrote
in his book: “The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme
imperfection of the geological record”
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Darwin had hoped that with
time, as the science of paleontology developed and matured, such fossils
would be found. The ‘missing links’ as they are called would stop missing
and clear and neat chains of organisms with transitional forms would prove
his theory irrefutably.
But here we are, in the 200th year of Darwin’s birth and observing 150
years of his theory of evolution, and still the missing links are missing!
No intermediate stages that would show the gradual transition between
species have been found. In fact quite to the contrary, paleontological
evidence unmistakably points to the sudden appearance of species with no
transitional forms that would show gradual developmental stages; all are
fully developed! |
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The fossil evidence is
especially problematic for Darwin and his followers when it comes to
what is known as the “Cambrian Explosion” which evolutionary
paleontologists believe to have taken place some 530 million years
ago. As the term “explosion” itself indicates, things were not gradual
in the Cambrian period but rather sudden. And explosive, with all the
major animal phyla coming into existence at once. So striking is this
Cambrian phenomenon that even Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist
and as of now the most prominent and vocal Darwinist has to confess: |
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“It is as though they
[the phyla and the species] were just planted there, without any
evolutionary history” The fossil record, especially the “Cambrian
Explosion” poses a very serious problem for Darwin, his theory and for
the Darwinian paleontologists. One such paleontologist, Niles Eldredge,
outs it like this: “Either you stick to the conventional theory
despite the rather poor fit of the fossils, or you focus on the [data]
and say that [evolution through large steps] looks like a reasonable
model of evolutionary process – in which case you must embrace a set
of rather dubious biological propositions” |
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To escape this dilemma,
some prominent evolutionists like Stephan Jay Gould have been forced to
think of alternate ways to explain the absence of the intermediate stages.
They have proposed that evolution takes place by huge leaps. The only
problem is that we never see a chicken hatching out of a lizard’s egg! And
the theory itself sounds more miraculous than scientific!
Darwin’s anticipation was clearly off and his hope of finding fossils that
would finally prove his theory of evolution through gradual change lies
shattered, even after 200 years! All the evidence of the fossil record on
the contrary points to the presence of an intelligent creator who created
all the wide diversity that we see around us in nature. Sorry Mr. Darwin! Contributed By:
Deepak Ransom has an M.Sc in Zoology from the Allahabad University and
is with the International Language Institute, Allahabad.
d_ransom@rediffmail.com
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