Dissenters from Darwinism

One of the top stories in theoretical biology in 2022 is the growing schism between traditional Darwinian evolutionists and those biologists who are growing increasingly disenchanted with the ability of the standard Darwinian model to explain the data.

The standard model states that all living things have descended from a simple original cell over vast periods of time through genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift. But that model is coming under increasing skepticism from within the biological community.

The dissension gained public notice when science journalist Stephen Buranyi did a piece last summer in The Guardian in which he outlined the problems facing the traditional view. David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a summary of Buranyi's lengthy article which can be read in its entirety here.

Klinghoffer observes that, "The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions."

He then adds this quote from Buranyi's column in which he highlights in boldface some of those "scandalous admissions" of which most people in the public and students in the nation's biology classrooms are completely unaware:

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection….

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. 

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance.

But how exactly these processes interact — and whether other forces might also be at work — has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”…

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline.

“The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

Klinghoffer comments:

“Absurdly crude and misleading”? A “classic idea” that “has so far fallen flat”? “A fairytale we need to finally give up”? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for “professional recognition and status”? What about for the truth?

The problem, at least in large part, is that most scientists work on the assumption of materialism. They cannot, or will not, allow for any explanations that involve non-natural, non-physical forces or interventions. This commitment to materialism was famously articulated by biologist Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As long as the operation of a mind is ruled out a priori biologists are going to struggle to make sense of life. The words of the early 20th century philosopher/psychologist William James come to mind in this context:

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

The refusal to allow the possibility of intelligent agency as a biological explanation is a good example of what James was talking about.