2.5 Evolution

by Ulrich Utiger

Abstract

We will shortly discuss the question whether the Eden account is compatible with scientific concepts like Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which is not only eulogized by atheists but also widely accepted by theistic Christians. Most of this theory is no threat to Christian faith. We have already seen in section 2.1.2 that common descent, that is, the view that all species descended from previous ones, can be retrieved from Genesis 2:7. The same passage also refers to the Incarnation, by which common descent is further supported. However, for other issues like monogenism and especially natural selection, considered as a species causing process, this is not as evident.

Contents

Natural Selection
Dawkins’ Weasel Algorithm
Atheism
Monogenism
References

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2.5.1 Natural Selection

Let’s take a brief look at some of the major issues concerning the debate about whether God or natural selection produced all life on earth. For centuries, the belief was widespread that all species were created separately and unchangeably by God (Schönborn 2007 p. 53). This contrasts with the continuous, gradual evolution predicted by the theory of natural selection, which is supposed to produce new species through the accumulation over millions of years of small random mutations occurring at reproduction: since there are inheritance and variability of traits within species with respect to survival, it is thought that individuals with better survival traits outbreed those with lesser survival abilities because beneficial traits are more likely to be inherited by future generations such that eventually a new species is formed (Jackson & Weidman 2004 pp. 66, 78; Klein 2009 p. 3).

It goes without saying that such a pure atheistic view, which reduces life to an exclusively material process exempt from any divine intervention, is contested by most creationists, who often argue that the fossil record should be full of intermediate forms between species if natural selection were responsible for speciation. However, such intermediates are lacking in the record (Klotz 1972 p. 201; Sennott 1984 p. 252; Montefiore 1985 p. 90; Dembski & McDowell 2008 pp. 68-75). Even Darwin himself was aware of this problem and thought that it “is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory”. But he also pretends at the same time that this lack is due to “The extreme imperfection of the geological record” (Darwin 1872 pp. 264-265). The majority of paleontologists today is still putting forward the same argumentation because fossilization as well as finding fossils is indeed a very “chancy business” (Dawkins 2006 p. 229).

Paleontologists Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge did not agree on this and distanced themselves from constant phyletic gradualism by postulating that gaps in the record may well be real due to sudden bursts of speciation at punctuated events followed by stasis (fig. 11). They based their proposition on allopatric speciation theorized by Ernst Mayr (1954 pp. 157-180), according to which speciation cannot happen in a large population due to constant mixing up of the gene pool. It is believed that only if a small group of individuals splits from the main group and remains separated for a long time due to a geographic barrier, they acquire enough genetic changes to become a new species. When they later return to their homeland, they die and their fossils are mixed with those of their ancestors yielding a gap in the record (Eldredge & Could 1972; Dawkins 2006 p. 243).

Punctuated equilibrium as postulated by Gould & Eldredge

Figure11: Phyletic gradualism implying slow change from one species to another as opposed to discontinuous evolution observed in nature suggesting stasis after speciation. Punctuated equilibrium is one of some more recent theories trying to conciliate this observation with natural selection (Wikipedia: Punctuated equilibrium).

It is further argued that small population numbers and rapid evolution make the preservation of fossils almost impossible (Gould & Eldredge 1977). Gould even went so far as to unearth geneticist Richard Goldschmidt’s concept of “hopefull monsters” also called saltationism, according to which macromutations might produce new species, despite the fact that Goldschmidt has been heavily criticized or even ridiculed by Darwinists themselves (Gould 1977; Behe 2006 pp. 26-27; Dawkins 2006 p. 231; Henke & Tattersall 2015 p. 239).

Darwin himself was aware of such evolutionary bursts occurring at the Cambrian explosion, an epoch during which most present-day phyla appeared over a relatively short period from about 540 to 490Ma. He did not address this issue publicly but only wrote a tiny note in shorthand English in his son’s 1909 transcription of one of his earlier papers:

If species really, after catastrophes, created in showers world over, my theory false (Eldredge 2006).

Such bursts followed by stasis show that speciation did not always occur at the same pace, which Darwin (1872 p. 290) was also aware of:

Species belonging to different genera and classes have not changed at the same rate, or in the same degree. In the older tertiary beds a few living shells may still be found in the midst of a multitude of extinct' forms… The Silurian Lingula differs but little from the living species of this genus; whereas most of the other Silurian Molluscs and all the Crustaceans have changed greatly.

Zoologist Richard Dawkins (2006 ch. 9) tries to reconcile these different trends in Darwinism by claiming that the reason for stasis is the lack of selection pressure. Correspondingly, bursts are driven by high selection pressures. In other words, phyletic gradualism, in his opinion, does not mean that evolution is unfolding at a constant rate and thereby is not really opposed to punctuated equilibrium. With postulations as these, however, one does not prove anything. The claim that high selection pressure is responsible for bursts sweeps the problem under the carpet, which he is aware of because he also writes (p. 230) that the only alternative for the Cambrian burst is “divine creation” but that he rejects this alternative…

Darwin was inspired by laissez-faire economist Thomas R. Malthus and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who saw similarities between biology and sociology, calling the struggle for existence “The survival of the fittest”. This is a concept easily understood as everyone knows very well that only those who are both smart and diligent are successful in society. This is why Darwin’s theory of natural selection is just as easily grasped. Cardinal Schönborn (2007 p. 77) reports that German actor Thomas Kretschmann, who played Pope John Paul II in an American television production, is supposed to have said, “I do not believe in God, I believe in evolution, that’s more logical to me”. This confirms that for a layman natural selection is much more convincing compared to an invisible, omnipotent and perfect God who apparently created us imperfectly such that we failed and need to be saved in a mysterious way.

But is simplicity a valid argument? Must natural selection be preferred just because it is a simpler concept than a seemingly far-fetched creation and salvation theology? Of course not, because reasoning in this manner resembles lynch justice based on superficially thought out arguments made by intellectually lazy and/or dishonest people. The world and life are incredibly complex. Why should their origin be simple? Jesus says:

Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it (Mt 7:13-14).

The way evolutionary concepts such as natural selection are persistently preached in modern nations is effectively tantamount to a media war against creationism. Many atheists rise and take themselves for missionaries to convince the world that there is no Creator and all life is the product of mere chance and adaptation. The most prominent of those is probably Dawkins, who has written many popular books about this topic. Microsoft millionaire and philanthropist Charles Simonyi has endowed him a professorship at Oxford University but later called him “Darwin’s Rottweiler” because of his aggressive and disrespectful manner in which he promulgates his views. However, this was not meant as a critic as Simonyi is himself an atheist (Numbers 2006 p. 375). Dawkins has all of a wise and gentle guru despite his open contempt for religion. It is certainly no coincidence that Jesus warns us against such people in the subsequent verse of the above-cited passage:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves (Mt 7:15).

Natural selection as a species producing mechanism can also be discarded on a more intuitive basis: since it is supposed to be driven by the survival of the fittest, life should only have features that are related to survival. However, human life overflows with characteristics that have nothing to do with mere survival. How can our ability for humor, music, art, and so on, be related to natural selection? Why should an evolution that led to hunter-gatherers generate a brain having the potential to conceive Einstein’s general relativity or Beethoven’s 9th symphony?

This was the thought of Darwin’s colleague Alfred R. Wallace, who initially supported natural selection but then retreated from materialism, arguing that our ancestors possessed brains as large as modern humans but had no need of them (Jackson & Weidman 2004 p. 68). In other words, what kind of selection pressure should have caused such high intellectual abilities? Our ancestors were not used to invent complicated theories, which even today would still be inaccessible to most people. The same idea is expressed by naturalist Francis Crick (1995 p. 262), the co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA:

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants.

For Crick it was indeed highly improbable that life formed by chance on earth, which is why he was a proponent of panspermia, that is, the belief that life originated in space and was thrown on earth by meteorites in form of microorganisms (Crick & Orgel 1973). However, this is a gratuitous postulation that wipes the problem under the carpet because it does not explain how life was formed in the outer space, even though there may have been more time available (Bonette 2014 pp. 116-117). He revised his views later but maintained a naturalistic view on life (Crick 1988 p. 138).

Even hardliner Spencer considered higher human traits like care for others, love, pity, generosity, sense of justice, and so on the most laudable human characteristics but argued that they could not have been produced by struggle and selection because they have no advantage for individual survival (Jackson & Weidman 2004 p. 79-82). One may object that such virtues are good for social survival, which is more successful than individual survival. Therefore, skills for art, social life, and so on may have been developed by natural selection because they motivate us to live. Darwin indeed observed care for others among animals and asked himself how this could have arisen by natural selection. He proposed that

those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring (Darwin 1874 p. 107).

However, it is not clear at all why communities with social practices would produce more offspring than others. The number of children is rather restricted through economic factors (Kaplan et al. 2000), which is why a high number of children is a burden for a family. So one could just argue that smart parents hold it within limits in order to be able to live more comfortably, which would lead to what Behe (2019 p. 220) terms devolution, that is, the loss rather than gain of advantageous genetic code. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton indeed feared that the intelligent, industrious and foresighted were being outbred by the stupid, lazy and reckless (Paul 2009 pp. 221-222). It is neither clear why parents with few children would love them less than parents with many children or, in equivalent terms, why communities that care more for their children would produce greater offspring and thus indirectly develop higher social capacities.

The problem with such views is that love for others would only be virtual, just a means to an end, a kind of illusion caused by some biochemical processes. It would not be real and authentic but fake, whereby life would have no sense. However, God created the world, all species and humans through real love, which thereby is the origin of everything and thereby is more real than anything else having resulted from it. Since also people ideally come into existence because their parents fell in love with each other and decided to have children, empathy and love for others is just as real because God has planted it in our hearts to give sense to our life.

In contrast to this, Dawkins (2006 p. 21) claims that life does not need to have a sense:

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.

One could also argue that it is exactly the other way around, in other words, that Dawkins is blind rather than the watchmaker. For if life has no purpose, does it have any value then? Does it need to be protected? Is it worth being lived? Is there still the need for any ethics and rules for social behavior? It is much more difficult to answer these questions affirmatively by supposing that life is purposeless. Such views lead indeed to social corruption and self-destruction, what can be observed in modern societies that increasingly adopt an atheistic stance, which shows that life must have a sense because this is the prerequisite for protecting and preserving it.

 

2.5.2 Dawkins’ Weasel Algorithm

Many other arguments could be mentioned against natural selection as a speciation process. However, to prove (or disprove) something in a irrefutable manner with words alone is difficult. Numbers are better suited for such a purpose. A hint to proceed in this manner gave me Dawkins himself. In The Blind Watchmaker (ch. 3), he first demonstrates the hopelessness of forming the sentence “methinks it is like a weasel” taken from Shakespeare by chance alone: including the space character, the sentence consists of 28 letters, each of which is randomly chosen, while the English alphabet contains 27 letters. So for a sentence with only 1 letter there are 27 possible outcomes. With 2 letters, there are 27 times 27 outcomes since each letter can be paired with any other. Thereby, the number of possible outcomes is 27 to the power of 28, which yields about 1040 combinations.

One can easily show that the number of trials needed on average to complete the sentence is equal to the number of combinations and that the probability to complete the sentence is the reciprocal value of the number of combinations (Utiger 2020). It does not seem that Dawkins made this simple calculation because he only speaks of its probability of 10-40. This is indeed a very small number such that there is practically no hope that it can be achieved by chance alone, for instance, by letting a monkey tape it on a typewriter. This suggests that it would be similarly unlikely that a nucleotide sequence of some length could be formed randomly, even though there are only 4 possible nucleotides (as opposed to the 27 letters of the English alphabet).

Dawkins openly admits this difficulty but then immediately goes on to argue that natural selection is not a process governed by chance alone and that the probability is dramatically increased if the initial sentence is copied a number of times by allowing errors (mutations) and the copy nearest to a target sentence of the same length is selected for the next generation. These non-verbatim copies correspond to the “offspring” of the initial “parental” sentence. This calculation can easily be realized with a computer algorithm, which he has done, however, without revealing the code nor the numbers he used.

He has run it three times, producing the sentence in only 43, 61 and 41 trials (or generations), respectively. The arithmetic mean of these numbers is about 48. So on average, one needs 48 trials to achieve the sentence, which is indeed a dramatic decrease compared to 1040 trials. Dawkins mentions only the probability of 10-40 to achieve the sentence without selection and compares this number with the 48 trials to achieve it with selection. In other words, he compares a probability with a mean. This shows that mathematics is not really the field in which he excels. Anyway, one can estimate from his calculations that he used a mutation rate of about 0.05 and a number of copies of 100, as assumed on Wikipedia.

The problem with this numeric calculation is that it is by far too slow if sentence lengths of several thousands or millions of nucleotides are used. Even on modern supercomputers this would probably last years, which is why I calculated a much faster analytical solution to this algorithm such that more realistic parameters can be used (Utiger 2020). Unfortunately, this calculation is by far too technical to be presented here, so I only discuss the results.

I applied my solution to the split between chimpanzees and humans, which did not happen earlier than 13 million years ago. I took 6 copies corresponding to the birth rate of 5.6 of hunter-gatherers (Kaplan et al. 2000). There are 4 nucleotides: cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) and thymine (T). According to base pairing rules, A is always paired with T, and C with G, which also yields four possible pairs after recombination: AT or TA and CG or GC (Hartwell et al. 2015 p. 208). Thereby, the alphabet length is 4. The mutation rate is taken 4x10-8 according to different studies. The smallest value mentioned in the literature for the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is 3.5x107 nucleotides. So these are all conservative parameters in favor of natural selection.

Furthermore, the algorithm is very fast compared to natural selection. Even Dawkins admits that it simulates what he calls “selective breeding” rather than natural selection (p. 48), which obviously is much faster. In fact, it is even still faster than breeding because most genes occur as recessive variants, so-called alleles, which are hidden, that is, they are neutral with regard to phenotypic traits in an individual. Only dominant alleles can produce beneficial (or deleterious) traits. Thereby, if mutations occur on recessive alleles, natural selection is paused, at least for the actual generation, because it does not procure any advantage in survival. Dawkins’ algorithm does not take into account such alleles since every mutation turning a nucleotide into one of the target nucleotide is beneficial for survival.

Another feature not taken into account by the algorithm is population size. As mentioned in the previous section, natural selection is almost neutralized inside large populations due to mixing up of the gene pool. Only small populations have a chance to adapt themselves to a new environment. In Dawkins’ algorithm, the parent is considered a hermaphrodite with both male and female reproduction organs, or a monocellular organism reproducing through cell division. So population size is implicitly assumed to be the smallest possible, which maximally speeds up the algorithm. There are other important features that considerably accelerate the speed of the algorithm.

This is why the average number of generations necessary to produce a new species (the mean) produced by the algorithm must be considered a lower limit, that is, the real value must be greater. In other words, applied to the chimpanzee/human split the algorithm should yield a value far below the maximum cited in the literature (13 million years) if natural selection were able to produce new species. However, quite the contrary is the case. In fact, it would take about 3x108 generations on the average or 6 billion years assuming a generation time of 20 years, which is very far from 13 million years. In fact, this is more than the age of the Earth and almost half the age of the universe. And this is only what yields the weasel algorithm. A more subtle algorithm that takes into account population size and allopatric speciation pushed to its limits, that is, a single parents separation from the population bulk, yields a lower limit of 7 trillion years, which is about 500 times the age of the universe.

Dawkins’ whole argumentation is limited to show that through natural selection the average number of generations necessary to form the sentence “methinks it is like a weasel” is reduced from 1040 to about 48 generations. This corresponds to a reduction by a factor of about 2x1038, which is admittedly striking and has undoubtedly impressed his audience. Now, with an alphabet length of 4 letters and 3.5x107 nucleotides, the number of possible outcomes by chance alone is 4 to the power of 3.5x107, which yields an average of about 5x1021 million outcomes or generations, according to the maths shown above. Why did he not calculate this or a similar number based on other empirical values and reduce it by the same factor of 2x1038? Rounding the result, this would still have yielded about 2.5x1021 million generations, so no dramatic change, such that his audience would not have been impressed at all. The reduction to the mean of 3x108 generations is much more important than this. However, it is nevertheless by far not enough!

One can claim that the mean is not an indicative figure, in other words, that it is still possible that the split occurred 13 Ma because it was an extraordinary rare event. For instance, one can show that on the average one needs to throw a die six times to obtain a particular face. But this does not exclude that the same can be obtained in fewer than six rolls. So what is more telling than the mean is the probability to obtain a particular face in less than a given number of throws. For dice, this calculation is easy. However, calculating the same for the split between chimps and humans 13 Ma is not that easy. As shown in my article, an upper limit can nevertheless be estimated. The result is a probability of 10-19 million (ten to the power of minus nineteen million). If this number had to be written out as a decimal number, one would need to print nineteen thick books, each containing a million zeros. And this is only an upper limit.

Let’s get an idea of this number: the observable universe has a radius of about 46.6 billion light years. This is more than the distance light can travel in about 14 billion years, corresponding to the age of the universe, because it has always expanded since then. This yields a spherical volume of something less than 1084 cubic meters. The smallest physical distance that can be measured is the Planck length of the order of 10-35 meters, which is much smaller than atoms, protons and even quarks. Now, if one filled the observable universe with cubes of an edge length equal to the Planck length, this would yield about 10188 of such cubes. So the probability to find a special one of them by a single and fortuitous search is 10-188. Even though this is a very small number, it’s a very high probability compared to 10-19 million. Such a small number is not close but virtually equal to zero, which means that we have no other choice than to “smuggle God in” the process of evolution (Dawkins 2006 pp. 248, 316). In other words, assuming a supernatural being is unavoidable in explaining the existence of species on earth.

 

2.5.3 Atheism

The weasel algorithm has some popularity. A Google search of “weasel program” (quotes included) yields some 43’000 results. It has been written in almost every possible programming language. To my knowledge, mathematician and theologian William Dembski was the only person having tried to find an analytical solution, which he called partitioned search (Dembski & Marks 2009). Though, he made an error in assuming that a nucleotide cannot change anymore through mutation once it corresponds to the target nucleotide, which he recognized later. So I expected that my solution, which is accurate because it perfectly matches the numerical calculation, would get some recognition here and there.

Nothing of the sort happened yet. In the contrary: in 2017, I added a link on Wikipedia to ResearchGate, where I published my article, because I thought that the visitors of this page would be interested in the analytical solution. But some time later, the link has been removed on the ground that the article is not peer-reviewed and that the “mathematics in the article, extensive though it is, seems to be [there] to obfuscate rather than elucidate”. The link remover, who seems to be a biologist, also discredits me by arguing that I lack competence in the field of evolutionary biology. He then shows off his knowledge of evolutionary concepts by reciting the usual Darwinian mantra.

However, it is not possible to refute astrology as an astrologer. In other words, what is demanded in finding an analytical solution to an algorithm are less biological but rather mathematical skills, with which, as a theoretical physicist, I am better equipped than a biologist. As he seems to be completely incompetent in this field, his dismissing of my article without having a clue of the calculations is thereby all the more dishonest. After all, I don’t think that he would have removed the link if my article showed that natural selection is indeed a speciation mechanism. Contrarily to the analytical solution, the algorithm itself is very simple and short. So anybody with basic knowledge in programming should be able to understand it. And since there is a clear agreement between both the algorithm and its analytical solution, there is no need for peer reviewers to confirm its accuracy to a lay public.

Such attempts in silencing opponents of Darwinism are typical for those who advocate it. On rationalwiki.org as well as richarddawkins.net and other sites, I indeed experienced a similar treatment by Darwinists. Professor of biochemistry and the founder of the intelligent design movement Michael Behe (2006 p. 29) reports an analogous case: in 1966 leading mathematicians and evolutionary biologists held a symposium at which “one side was unhappy, and the other uncomprehending”. A mathematician claimed indeed that there was insufficient time to make an eye by random mutations, while a biologist found that his calculations must be wrong, however, without understanding anything of them.

A real natural scientist should always remain neutral and observe nature without any preconceptions (Krauss 2012 pp. xii). This includes the possibility that nature has been created. Excluding a priori this possibility and axiomatically postulating the non-existence of a Creator is not science but ideology. This is why Darwinists are not primarily concerned with facts but rather consider themselves as missionaries against religion. Holzer (1964 pp. 71-72) reports that Ernst Haeckel, Germany’s most famous Darwinist of the time and the founder of Monism (Jackson & Weidman pp. 86-87) deliberately falsified a skull to support his evolutionary theories. And Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, victoriously wrote that “one fortress after another capitulates to the assault of science until… there will be no more room for creation in it” (my translation from German).

As shortly mentioned in section 1.5.1, Dawkins (2006 p. 230) writes: “Both schools of thought [phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium] agree that The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this alternative” (my emphasis). He does not give a clear answer on what basis this alternative should be rejected. In any case, if both schools agree that the only alternative is divine creation but that this has to be rejected, then they find themselves holed up in a vacuum devoid of any rationality. How can a professor of a highly prestigious university deliberately and publicly decide to move on such slippery ground?

He gives the answer in his book The God Delusion (Dawkins 2016 p. 51), where he enumerates a list of most blasphemous qualifications regarding God, which I don’t want to repeat here. This shows that the only reason why he is unable to accept “The only alternative” is hatred against religion, which prevents him from being driven by a sane curiosity to discover the scientific truth whatever it is. In other words, he axiomatically excludes a Creator. This would be rational if empirically there were no evidence whatsoever for divine creation. However, this is far from being the case.

In the view of probably most impartial and open-minded people, almost infinitely complex entities like living organisms cannot be produced by material processes. Darwinists just ignore this intuition because it would mean that a supernatural being created them. Dawkins (2006 p. 249) reports that Darwin wrote:

I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Does this mean that Darwin would have enthusiastically embraced creationism in that case? Barely, because “miraculous additions” sounds rather pejorative so it seems that he would have been disappointed had it turned out that such additions are unavoidable. Dawkins’ comment on this is:

In Darwin’s view, the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.

One could similarly ask here whether Dawkins would devotedly embrace creationism if it turned out that the central point of evolution is indeed nonsense. In view of what he writes in the previous pages of his book, this is not at all the case. So it’s clearly the atheistic message of Darwin’s evolution that thrills him. Scrutinizing the beauty of God’s creation would be no motivation for him. Defending a theory with such vehemence, even though there is no proof for it, shows that Darwinism is an axiomatic hypothesis and thereby lies on the same level as religion (Fischer 2008 p. 8). The irony of this is that, in defending thus their anti-religious beliefs, Darwinists indeed display the same irrationalism, indoctrination and fanaticism practiced by many religious groups they so despise.

Cardinal Schönborn (2007 p. 77) asks: “There is no ‘Einsteinism’ […], nor is there any ‘Newtonism’ or ‘Heisenbergism’. Why is there a ‘Darwinism’?” in order to show that science is often misused in order to propagandize ideology. It is legitimate and even unavoidable that in research one pursues some preferred direction in the hope to discover confirmation for something that one intuitively considers being true. It is also acceptable that, in the first place, one should investigate natural phenomena on the ground of possible natural explanations rather than relegating them straightaway to the supernatural realm. However, it is not scientific at all to postulate the non-existence of God and deduce from this axiom the proof that natural selection must in any case be responsible for speciation because there is supposedly no other alternative.

While it is true that natural selection can change skin color (Klein 2009 p. 641) and the like, extending it from such microevolution to macroevolution is a fallacious extrapolation (Klotz 1972 p. 69; Whorton & Roberts 2008 p. 274) that is just as pseudoscientific as climbing on a high mountain, looking around and concluding that the whole earth is flat because the reduced sight suggests this impression. Furthermore, the fact that microevolution is surrounded by solid science like common descent, genetics, paleontology, geology, and so forth conveys macroevolution an insidious camouflage supposed to raise it to the same accuracy. This recalls an old war tactic: take a Trojan horse, label it science and erect it in a public place in order to infect people’s minds with its pseudoscientific inner content. Since decades, the Darwinian mafia thus upholds its iron grip on those who are unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience, puffing themselves up as enlighteners and fighters against a swamp of religious nonsense, lies and machinations, while in reality they are the liars disguised as truth tellers.

In order to divert attention from the fact that natural selection as a speciation driver is pseudoscience, a similar preferred tactic of Darwinists is to return the criticisms of their antagonists and to treat creationism even more loudly as pseudoscience. The theists Montenat et al. (1984 p. 13), for example, accuse creationists of “taking refuge in a rejection of this or that scientific reality” (my translation from French). However, one could just as well argue that the Darwinists are those who bunker themselves in their views, having in addition a valid argument at hand: they axiomatically reject God, even though the evidence that life is a miracle is overwhelming.

Theists believe in some confuse supernatural entity supposed to have set everything in motion but then did not intervene anymore. However, this commitment does not prevent them from flirting with a universe popped out of a quantum fluctuation (Barr 2003 pp. 271-272). Their view on evolution is indeed not different from that of atheists (Dembski 2001 pp. 227-232; Numbers 2006 p. 384). Robert M. Gascoigne (1993 p. 9), for instance, attempts to make us believe that God created all living beings by natural selection and that Darwin, in this sense, “made a theologically valuable contribution to culture”… This shows that they come along as wolves disguised as sheep with the purpose of infiltrating creationism and to sow doubt among them, thus collaborating closely with the enemy. At the end of the day, one has to ask oneself, what is worse, an atheist or a theist?

 

2.5.4 Monogenism

At first glance, the Eden story seems to suggest that Adam and Eve were the very first humans on earth and that thereby all of humanity descends from them. This is known as monogenism (or monogenesis), upon which the doctrine of original sin is based: if Adam and Eve weren’t the only humans who transmitted their personal sin to their descent, there would be no need for salvation of humanity by Christ (Denzinger 1955 no. 2328; Wiley 2002 p. 119; Bonnette 2014 p. 153). In other words, monogenism can be inferred from the fact that Christ’s mission consists in saving us from personal as well as original sin. This traditional view was still well established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The few proponents of polygenism, such as Giordano Bruno, arguing for multiple and simultaneous human creations at different geographical locations, were considered heretics (Jackson & Weidman 2004 p. 8).

A closer look at the Eden story is less explicit. In fact, some passages indicate that Adam and Eve were surrounded by other people. For instance, God certainly protected Cain against other humans, so not against animals (Gen 4:15). Furthermore, as far as the literal Cain living some 6000 years ago is concerned, he might not have found his spouse (Gen 4:17) among unnamed sisters as traditionally assumed (Cassutto 1961 p. 229) but among neighboring peoples. The same passage also mentions that Cain became the founder of a town, which would obviously have been too large just for the members of his family, unless one argues that the patriarchs literally lived and reproduced for hundreds of years (Ross 2001b pp. 102-103). In addition, cities were only constructed in a very late period of human history, that is, with the first civilizations (Fischer 2008 pp. 6-7, 50-52).

However, this does not necessarily support polygenism: as discussed in section 2.1.1, Genesis 2:7 implies common descent, which in turn implies that there is a slow morphological and genetic change from one species to another. This prevents a sudden transition from animals to humans because new species must be born, fed and educated by their parents who thereby cannot be very different from their offspring (Dawkins & Wong 2017 p. 93). However, this change is not as continuous as a mutational change of single nucleotides driven by natural selection because speciation as a natural process must be dismissed as discussed in section 2.5.2. So if we accept that God created all animal species, then we must assume that he created only a single pair, male and female, of the new species.

Such a slow creative process implies that hominization took place over several consecutive human species or subspecies, as evidenced by the fossil record. It also weighs against adult creation because any living being must undergo a learning process and acquire capacities that need practice in order to be able to survive in a given environment. Arguing that God prepro­grammed these capabilities is not convincing at all because the newly created species would have had a created memory of events that never took place, which does not correspond to a trustworthy God.

This lets open the question whether gene flow occurred, in other words, whether offspring was possible between old and new species and whether this offspring was fertile or not. It is believed that there has been gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans (Henke & Tattersall 2015 p. 2303), which makes it difficult to ascertain whether Neanderthals are a distinct human species or a subspecies of modern humans (Pääbo 2014 p. 237). In any case, newborn species lived among their ancestor species, at least during their early life as long as they depended on their parents.

The monogenic consensus slowly changed with the discovery and colonization of Africa and later America, which gave rise to all kinds of abominable racist theories and practices. In particular, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of the most bizarre and pseudoscientific justifications for slavery, mainly advocated by polygenists, which happened even before Darwin, who surprisingly was a monogenist. His views accelerated the emergence of scientific racism as Darwin held that there were hierarchically distinct races due to natural selection, even though he distanced himself from slavery (Cohen 1980 ch. 8; Jackson & Weidman 2004 chs. 2-3).

In the pre-war period of the twentieth century, racism and colonialism found its scientific justification through social Darwinism, that is, the application of natural selection to social and national levels, which was not only adopted by scholars and politicians but also by journalists and other popular writers, bringing thus this poison to the masses. This happened not only in Germany but also in other Western nations, each of which discovered its own racial superiority. The result is known: World War I, the outbreak of which was enthusiastically welcomed by young Hitler, who then volunteered for military service.

Germany’s defeat deeply hurt the pride of the whole nation as well as self-taught Hitler, who was inspired by social Darwinism and believed having to proceed methodically like a natural scientist. He found the enemy in Jewry, which he accused of being rootless and threatening the cohesion of the German race and nation. He represented the zeitgeist of all Germany, carrying it to its logical conclusion, namely the extermination of all those forces that were considered polluting nation and race. The result is known too: World War II and the systematic elimination of six million Jews as well as other people considered inferior to the Aric race (Koch 1984 ch. 8).

After the war, when the Nazi’s atrocities became known to the whole world, scientists began to reject racism and eugenics. But they did not reject the concept of race, without agreeing how to define it yet. Some argued that racial variations were merely due to environmental and educational differences, others upheld that there are indeed inherent genetic differences, in other words, that blacks are really inferior to whites, for example. In any case, race discrimination was successively abolished, but the idea of polygenism survived (Jackson & Weidman 2004 chs. 4-7), which comes as no surprise since speciation continued to be considered a natural process, acting on large geographical scales and resulting in the gradual change of populations.

Darwinists also had to defend themselves against being taken as social Darwinists, claiming that racism, eugenics, imperialism, laissez-faire economics, and so on are misinterpretations of Darwin’s original ideas (Dickens 2000 chs. 1-2; Dawkins 2006 p. 250; Paul 2009 pp. 219-220; Henke & Tattersall 2015 p. 38; Mogilski 2016). Instead of survival of the strongest in direct confrontations, contemporary Darwinists rather preach that a population just has to be more fertile, wherefore there is no need of war, extermination and genocide in order for a superior population to supplant an inferior one. However, this is not a valid excuse as there is no correlation between fitness and fertility (sec. 2.5.1), besides the fact that such a process would take at least trillions of years for producing the human species (sec. 2.5.2). So considering Darwinism as science and at the same time rejecting racism as immoral and unscientific is as contradictory and hypocrite as a mafioso who attends mass every Sunday.

In 1987, Cann et al. showed that all modern humans descend from one African mother who lived about 200’000 years ago. They based their research on mitochondrial DNA, which is only inherited from the maternal part. This is why our African ancestor was later nicknamed mitochondrial Eve, although the authors distanced themselves from this sobriquet inspired by Genesis. The article led to a heated debate as it was a blow for multi-regionalists, who believed that Homo erectus evolved independently into different Homo sapiens on different continents, thus producing different races (Reichholf 1998 p. 13). Even though the view that modern humans went out of Africa and replaced Homo erectus on the whole planet was adopted subsequently, the article did not eradicate once and for all this cancer of polygenism from the minds of Darwinists (Brown 1990 ch. 3; Henke & Tattersall 2015 p. 2303). In fact, its authors as well as almost all scholars up to the present claim that it is very unlikely that the mitochondrial Eve was the first woman of our species, arguing that during her lifetime there may have been thousands of other mothers who were as well modern humans but that her lineages came to an end (Brown 1990 pp. 108-111; Ayala 1995; Foley 1995 p. 129; Reichholf 1998 p. 20; Sykes 2001 p. 277; Sykes 2003 pp. 136-138; Klein 2009 p. 634; Dawkins & Wong 2017 p. 60).

However, I calculated that it is exactly the other way around: knowing that all present humans stem from a single mother, the probability that it was the only one is clearly higher than 50%, which shows that what is rather unlikely is that we stem from more than one woman. This is not a 100% proof for monogenism but nevertheless reveals that the Darwinist’s claim that polygenism is the only likely option is baseless, pretentious and propagandist. In any case, monogenism cannot be disproven by whatever data or logic (Blocher 1997 p. 40). Furthermore, because speciation is not a natural process but needs a Creator, it is a certainty that we all descend from single parents.

This reveals again that academic Darwinists not always really know what they are talking about. Lacking mathematical skills, they rely on their biased intuition rather than verifiable facts, especially when it comes to taking a stand against creationism. Having replaced religion by science and temples by universities, they can be considered the Pharisees of our time. Unfortunately, laymen often let themselves impress by their displayed authority and blindly trust the academic system because they don’t have the means nor the will to check whether what they claim is true or not. Jesus says of them:

They are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit (Mt 15:14).
Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering (Lk 11:52).

It is well known that someone who wants to believe in something cannot be convinced otherwise (Sykes 2001 p. 115). This is not only true for religious people, scientists are just as well exposed to this obsession. Dawkins said that anyone who denies evolution is either ignorant, stupid or insane (Behe 2006 p. 250), thus categorizing creationists as fact deniers. While this is certainly true in the case of YECs, their denial is mostly so obviously wrong that they cannot really be taken seriously. On the other hand, because Darwinists, as established academics, are expected to tell the truth, they are a lot sneakier when they deny God’s existence. Nobody takes someone seriously who is obviously and/or notoriously lying. Only a person who is taken as a truthteller is able to sell certain lies as truth. This is why, as far as natural selection as a speciation mechanism and monogenism are concerned, Darwinists are no lesser fact-resistant than climate change or holocaust deniers.

Monogenism is indeed mirrored in the whole creation from the beginning: the physical universe was formed at the big bang from a very small point, a singularity; all planets were born from the same solar disk; the continents formed from a single one before their continental drift; life was only created on Earth from a single cell; new species emerged from a single pair of a previous species; Adam and Eve are the ancestors of humanity; Abraham is the ancestor of Israel; Christ is the First-born of all Christians and the last step of all the evolution (fig. 9). At the example of the big bang, these events may all be called singularities. They appear when something completely new is brought to existence and prefigure monogenesis, which thus is a universal law mirroring the unique God.

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