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Life presents us with many questions. Some are decidedly trivial ("What should I have for dinner tonight?", "What should I wear?"); others are decidedly non-trivial ("Who am I?", "Is there more to me than flesh and bone?", "How should I best use my time?"). But it is hard to see how we can go about answering these latter questions in anything but a subjective fashion ("To me, life is about such-and-such a thing") without first knowing something about how we homo sapiens have come to occupy our present position in this universe.
How, then, has such a thing happened? How has man come to top the tree of life? Two very different explanations are commonly proffered. The first is theological: it tells us that we are the creation of a transcendent Creator, that the processes responsible for our existence are largely supernatural. The second is scientific: it tells us that we were formed over the course of billions of years by the chance-plus-natural-law combination that comprises modern evolutionary theory. Very different views; and neither without emotional appeal. How, then, are we to decide which of the two is the more plausible?
The answer, it seems to me, is by looking at life's fossil record. For what we are discussing here is, first and foremost, a question of history, a question of deducing the most likely course of past events. Meaning our primary source of evidence should be life's own history book, the rocks beneath our feet.
Over the years, however, as I have read what other people have written about the fossil record, three things have bothered me (my own writings, of course, being beyond reproach). First, the presuppositions involved in interpreting the fossil record have been neither clearly stated nor critically assessed. Second, the way in which different disciplines bear on interpreting life's fossil record—things philosophical, paleontological, biological, and so on—has been overlooked. Third, the big picture of the fossil record has been obscured by its more detailed considerations. That is, questions like "When I consider the record of the rocks, does it look as if life has evolved from a common ancestor?" have been reduced to questions like "Are the anatomical features of the tiktaalik genuinely transitional?" and "Where does the OH-62 fossil fit into the hominid lineage?" and, as a result, the bigger picture has been lost.
My aim in this essay, then, is to put some of these things right, to consider the overarching pattern of the rocks and the assumptions involved in interpreting it and to see what we can learn from these things.
...an overview...
The central claim of this essay is simple: If evolution occurred the way scientists commonly claim, life's fossil record would look very different to the way it does. I will advance this claim as part of a wider argument contending:
a] that when it comes to investigating the issue of "life's origins"—the issue of how life's various species arrived at their present state—the scientist's presuppositions are not ideal;

b] that life's fossil data at best fails to support and at worst disconfirms evolutionary theory. In other words, judging by the evidence presented by the fossil record, it doesn't look as if evolutionary processes played much of a part in life's origins;

c] that naturalism's difficulties in accounting for life's improbabilities constitutes a further reason to affirm b];

d] that "the design hypothesis" explains the pattern of the fossil record far more naturally and adequately than does evolutionary theory, and is by no means gratuitous; and

e] that, if the design hypothesis is true (and if the designer in question is the God of the Christian faith, which for the purposes of this essay, I will take as a given), then this fact should radically change our lives.
Nothing too contentious, then. So, with this basic overview in mind, let's start to fill in some of the gaps.
First, though, some introductory remarks.
...introductory remarks...
An obvious question to ask when reading an essay like the present is this: Why on earth should I listen to the views of a self-confessed theologian (namely the author) as opposed to those of the world's scientific community? The question is a fair one. After all, theologians don't tend to be experts in matters of science. Nor do they seem to have any problem with the vast majority of what scientists do (e.g. their studying of gravity and disease and combustion and the like). Why, then, should anyone take a theologian's problems with evolutionary theory even remotely seriously?
The answer, I hope, will unfold during the course of this essay. Put briefly, however, there are three reasons.
First, as we will soon see, evolutionary theory derives the bulk of its support, not from evidence of life's various species having evolved into one another, but from the presupposition that everything in the universe can be explained in naturalistic terms—a presupposition which cannot be challenged from within the scientific community yet which may in fact be false. If, then, the theologian can show that there is no good reason to accept (and good reason not to accept) evolutionary theory's presuppositions, rejecting evolutionary theory may not be such an irrational move after all. As Intelligent Design advocate Phil Johnson points out,
"'Science' has [acquired] two distinct definitions in our culture. On the one hand, [it] refers to a method of investigation involving things like careful measurements, repeatable experiments, and...a skeptical, open-minded attitude that insists that all claims be carefully tested. [On the other hand], science has become identified with a philosophy known as...naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is...[from which] it follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that [its] means of creation must not have included any role for God. [However, despite the fact that such a philosophy may be false], students are not supposed to approach [it] with open-minded skepticism." (Phillip Johnson, "The Church of Darwin", Wall Street Journal, 16th August 1999)
My hope, however, is that you the reader will approach evolutionary theory's philosophical underpinning with a healthy degree of skepticism. I am aware, of course, that exuding even a mild amount of skepticism towards evolutionary theory is, intellectually speaking, fairly undignified behaviour (and can result in one's being branded as fanatical or positive medieval or some even less flattering descriptor). But it is at least possible that this world is the product of a transcendent Creator, in which case it is at least possible that evolutionary theory is false. And if this is so, then discovering the truth about life's origins—discovering who we are and how we got here—is the most important and thrilling prospect imaginable.
Second, the term science covers a multitude of disciplines (some would say sins). At one end of the spectrum lies "operational science", the branch of science that has produced things like the automobile, the X-ray machine, the toaster and the like. This kind of science is all about results. It is about trial and error, testing and falsifying, and producing things that work. At the other end of the spectrum lies "historical science", the branch of science that seeks to deduce the most likely course of history based on present-day evidence, which is a very different endeavour. For history, by its very nature, is unrepeatable, making one's presuppositions all the more important. As Jerry Coyne and others say,
"In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom...a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture." (Coyne, Reviewing "A Natural History of Rape", MIT Press, 2000, p272)
"Paleontology [i.e. the study of fossils] is a historical science, a science based on circumstantial evidence, after the fact. We can never reach hard and fast conclusions in our study of ancient plants and animals." (John Horner, "Dinosaur Lives", Harper Collins, 1st Ed, 1997, p19)
Given, then, the nature of historical science, it is surely not unreasonable for the theologian to contest its conclusions on the basis that a different presuppositional basis makes more sense of the available evidence. After all, isn't this the kind of "competition" that science is said to thrive on?
Third, the particular method science adopts—namely methodological naturalism—is both unjustified and unhelpful when it comes to discovering the truth about life's origins. For if naturalism is false then adopting methodological naturalism is probably a bad idea.
Of course, this last claim is not one which the world's philosophers of science embrace with open arms. So, before going any further, let us take some time firming it up.
...clearing the ground...
The enterprise of science has good PR. By most, it is viewed as a fairly cold and impartial enterprise, a field of enquiry committed to following the evidence wherever it leads. However, this is far from the case. As Gould says,
"No myth deserves a more emphatic death than the idea that science is an inherently impartial and objective enterprise." (Gould, Science in the Twentieth Century, 1978, p344)
Why? Because science stipulates that, if a statement is to qualify as "scientific", then it cannot make reference to immaterial causes (which is hardly impartial). As Niles Eldredge says,
"If there is one rule, one criterion that makes an idea scientific, it is that it must invoke naturalistic explanations for phenomena...It's simply a matter of definition, of what is science and what is not." (Eldredge, "The Monkey Business", Washington Square Press, 1982, p82)
The hypothesis that God created life's various species is therefore inherently unscientific. And the reason? Because there is an abundant body of evidence against it? Because there is a lack of evidence in favour of it? Not at all. The reason the God hypothesis is unscientific is because science is defined in such a way as to exclude it. As Michael Ruse says,
"Even if scientific creationism were totally successful in making its case,...it would [still] not yield a scientific explanation of origins. Creationists believe that the world started miraculously [and] miracles lie outside of science, which by definition deals only with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law." (Ruse, "Darwinism Defended", Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1982, p322)
But why should anyone who is open-minded about God's existence accept Ruse's definition of science (which, by the way, is the standard one)? Consider its shortcomings.
First, people have been trying for centuries to solve science's "demarcation problem", to establish a way of distinguishing scientific endeavours from non-scientific ones. How, then, has Ruse solved this problem? To all appearances, he hasn't. He has just sidestepped it and appealed to a definition! Which is not a very enlightening course of action. For the demarcation debate is not a debate that can be settled by appealing to mere definitions. That is to say, it is not a semantic debate about what people tend to mean when they use the word "science". Rather, the demarcation debate is about identifying a set of criteria to determine what kinds of things can and cannot legitimately be concluded on the basis of the scientific method. To assert (as Ruse does) a definition of science without referring to such considerations is therefore quite arbitrary.
Second, Ruse's proposed definition of science (namely "that...which deals only with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law") is both opaque and problematic. For:
a] what exactly does Ruse have in mind when he talks about "that which is natural"? Is being natural the same as being material? Ruse can't think so, for science routinely makes statements about things like consciousness, the nature of space-time, and strings, which are not material quantities (even if they are invariably associated with material phenomena).

b] restricting science to "that which deals with the repeatable" renders not just creationism unscientific but much of modern-day historical science. To see this, consider a discipline like cosmology. According to Andrei Linde, part of the job of a cosmologist is "to extract useful and reliable information from [a] unique experiment carried out about 10,000,000,000 years ago" (Linde, "The inflationary universe", Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol 47, 1987, p27). And it is difficult to see how such a discipline can be said to be dealing with "the repeatable"; and

c] the claim that there are such things as laws that actually govern matter in a causal sense (as opposed to merely describing its behaviour) is by no means an uncontroversial one. So, to make something's being subject to natural laws a condition of its being studied scientifically seems decidedly premature. For suppose it turns out that there is good reason to think that laws do not in fact govern particular events. Must we then abandon the endeavour of science altogether?
Perhaps, in response, a defender of Ruse's definition of science would appeal to its undoubted fruit, to things like better healthcare, faster cars, and so on. At first blush, this seems a promising line of defense. For if a set of presuppositions' fruit is impressive, surely the presuppositions themselves can't be so bad. When it comes to historical science, however, it is hard to see what it means to be "fruitful" other than to reconstruct history accurately; and Ruse has done nothing to show that adopting methodological naturalism—that assuming that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of purely naturalistic causes—helps in achieving this end. In any case, whatever fruitfulness cashes out as, it is not in fact most people's motivation for defining science the way they do. As Richard Lewontin explains, the definition comes before the fruit:
"We [scientists] take the side of science [that is, we adopt "scientific naturalism"] 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, [and] in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories. [Why?] Because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism....We are forced...to produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive [and] no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. [And our adherence to] materialism is absolute." (Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review of Books, Jan 1997, p28)
The third problem with Ruse's definition of science is that, if science can only consider naturalistic causes, then investigating the issue of life's origins "scientifically" is not much of an investigation, for there is only one possible conclusion, namely that life's species arose via broadly evolutionary means. As Dawkins and others say,
"Even if there were no actual evidence in favour of the Darwinian theory...we would still be justified in preferring it over rival theories [such as creationism]." (Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", New York: Norton, 1986, p287)
"We believe [evolutionism] because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable." (Sir Arthur Keith, Quoted by Criswell (1972), "Did Man Just Happen?", Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, p73)
Douglas Futuyma explains the reasoning behind such conclusions:
"Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species from some process of modifications. If they did,...they must have been created by some omnipotent [or at least other-worldly] intelligence [which would by definition be non-naturalistic]." (Futuyma, "Science on Trial: Both Religious", 1983, p169)
From which it follows that evolutionism is the only—and by that token the best—scientific theory on offer. As Johnson and others say,
"For scientific materialists, the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term [such people] "materialists employing science". [But] if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence." (Johnson, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism", First Things, Nov 1997, p22-25)
"[The naturalistic] definition of science...outlaw[s] any questioning of naturalistic evolution. Darwinists don't ask whether life evolved from a sea of chemicals; they only ask how it evolved. They don't ask whether complex life forms evolved from simpler forms; they only ask how it happened. The presupposition is that natural forces alone must (and therefore can) account for the development of all life on earth; the only task left is to work out the details. (Nancy Pearcey, "We're Not in Kansas Anymore", Christianity Today, 22 May 2000)
But if the scientist's aim in investigating life's origins is to discover the truth, then adopting methodological naturalism is potentially a disastrous way of going about it. For at the end of the day, it may be that naturalism is false; and if naturalism is false, then adopting methodological naturalism is not advisable. Put another way, it may be that, despite science's assumptions to the contrary, naturalistic processes simply are not capable of (and therefore are not responsible for) generating life's rich diversity and complexity. After all, science has not proven that material causes are the only causes in existence; nor can it do so. For just as searching a room cannot prove that nothing exists beyond that room, so studying material causes and effects can prove that nothing exists beyond the material. Indeed, the claim that matter is all there is is precisely the sort of claim that science forbids itself from making. For materialism is equivalent to the claim that God does not exist (or that, if he does, existing is about all he does), which is a claim about the supernatural.
...a quick summary...
Summing up, then, science's exclusion of non-naturalistic causes from the investigation of life's origins is unjustified, inconsistent, and unacceptably restrictive. Which surely puts the theologian's claims in a more reasonable light. For it means the theologian who claims that evolutionary theory is false is not necessarily claiming to have uncovered some piece of evidence that no-one else is aware of, or that the world's scientific community is incompetent or anti-Christian or involved in some worldwide cover-up. His claim is simply that the scientific method may not be the best means of discovering the truth about life's origins, that a different metaphysics makes more sense of the available evidence.
...a short aside...
'Metaphysics' sounds like very sophisticated stuff. In essence, however, someone's 'metaphysics' is no more than the set of assumptions they make about the things they are willing to entertain the existence of (e.g. matter, dark matter, God, moral values, ghosts, souls, propositions, etc). Thus, everyone has their metaphysics. As David Bohm says,
"Everybody has...metaphysics, even if [they] think [they haven't] got any. Indeed, the practical "hard-headed" individual who "only goes by what he sees" generally has a very dangerous kind of metaphysics, i.e. the kind of which he is unaware...Such metaphysics is dangerous because, in it, assumptions and inferences are...mistaken for directly observed facts...
"One of the best ways of a person becoming aware of his own tacit metaphysical assumptions is to be confronted by several other kinds. His first reaction is often [one] of violent disturbance, as views that are very dear are questioned or thrown to the ground. Nevertheless, if he will "stay with it",...he will discover that this disturbance is very beneficial. For now he becomes aware of the assumptive character of a great many previously unquestioned features of his own thinking." (Bohm, "Towards a Theoretical Biology", Ed. Waddington, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co, 1968, p41)
To see this, suppose my metaphysics accommodates the existence of ghosts and the like; and suppose I read a report of someone who claims to have seen a ghost. How do I decide whether their story is true, whether someone has been in genuine contact with a supernatural entity? One answer is by investigating the specifics of the story, by seeing whether, say, the witness in question has a history of mental illness, whether the non-supernatural aspects of her story seem plausible, whether anyone else saw anything similar, and so on.
Suppose, however, my metaphysics doesn't accommodate the existence of ghosts. How in this case do I decide whether a sighting of a ghost is genuine? The answer is simple: I don't, for there is no real decision to make. The fact of the matter is that there aren't such things as ghosts, meaning sightings of them must be either delusions or fabrications. The specifics of a story (e.g. the reliability of its teller, the corroborating evidence, etc) are therefore irrelevant. No matter how authentic and well-documented the evidence, my conclusion will be the same. The only thing to investigate is how a particular delusion arose.
...end of aside...
What, then, does all this have to do with the issue of life's origins? It teaches us a simple principle: If you want to discover the truth about a given matter, make your metaphysics as broad as possible. That is to say, adopt a metaphysical view that doesn't commit you to any particular conclusion until you've examined the specific evidence for and against it. In terms of investigating life's origins, then, rather than adopting methodological naturalism, we should adopt a more accommodating metaphysics, a metaphysics that can accommodate both natural and supernatural causes. This needn't, of course, commit us to explaining anything and everything in terms of the supernatural any more than granting the possible existence of ghosts commits us to affirming any and every ghost story. It simply means that, when investigating something like the fossil record, we should begin with the assumption that the evidence in question could have either a material or an immaterial explanation, and then judge specific cases on their own merits. Which is more or less the theologian's approach. As Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga says,
"The theist [believes] that God created the heavens and the earth and all that they contain; she [believes], therefore, that in one way or another God has created all the vast diversity of contemporary plant and animal life. But of course she isn't thereby committed to any particular way in which God did this. He could have done it by broadly evolutionary means [although the contention of this essay is that it doesn't look as if he did]; but on the other hand he could have done it in some totally different way...
"A Christian therefore has a certain freedom denied her naturalist counterpart: she can follow the evidence where it leads. If it seems to suggest that God did something special in creating human beings (in such a way that they are not genealogically related to the rest of creation) or reptiles or whatever, then there is nothing to prevent her from believing that God did just that." (Plantinga, "Methodological Naturalism?", Access Research Network, Origins & Design Archives, 1997, 18:1)
In other words, when seeking to explain a given body of evidence, the theologian has a distinct advantage over the naturalist inasmuch as he has a greater range of explanatory resources available to him (and science, after all, is about explaining things, right?). Granted, all other things being equal, the theologian should prefer naturalistic explanations to supernatural ones. But such a preference needn't mean rejecting any and all supernatural explanations out of hand. For if an event a] has no known naturalistic explanation, b] seems on reflection to be the wrong kind of event to have a naturalistic explanation, and c] strikes us as precisely the kind of event that God would be interested in bringing about, then why should we insist on explaining it in terms of naturalism?
...a further consideration...
There are therefore serious problems entailed in using the scientific method to investigate life's origins. But we have not yet considered the biggest of them: namely that doing so is self-defeating. Why? Because the conclusion that man is the product of naturalistic evolution (which follows inevitably from the scientific method) seems to saw off the branch on which it is sitting, to shoot itself in the foot, as it were. As Charles Darwin says,
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises [as to] whether the convictions of man's mind [including of course the conviction that evolutionism is true], which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" ("The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin", London, Ed. Francis Darwin, Albermarle St, Vol 1, 1981, p315-316)
In other words, if man is merely a relatively advanced monkey, and if it is irrational to have any confidence in the convictions of a monkey's mind, then how can it be rational to have any confidence in the convictions of our own minds, in particular the conviction that man is indeed merely a relatively advanced monkey?
Christian philosopher and theologian C S Lewis expands Darwin's concern as follows:
"If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, [as was] the whole evolution of man...If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms, [which] holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's.
"But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accident[s], why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents." (Lewis, "The Business of Heaven", Fount Paperbacks, 1984, p97)
Lewis seems right. If our cognitive faculties arose "by accident"—if they weren't constructed with any specific end in mind—then it is hard to see how we can justify our having any confidence in their reliability.
To see this, suppose I need a new car. I go to my local garage and pick one that I like the look of. The garage has a good reputation, so I assume that the car is in good working order, that it works reliably. But suppose I then find out that a number of accidents occurred during this car's construction (where I am defining an accident as an event the car's manufacturer didn't intend). With this knowledge, surely it would be irrational for me to maintain my belief that the car is reliable: and surely the more accidents I found out about, the more irrational I would be to maintain this belief. Similarly, then, to assume that our cognitive faculties—a set of faculties cobbled together entirely by accidental processes (for evolution has no end in mind)—are reliable is highly irrational.
However, perhaps Lewis's argument is too quick. For according to evolutionary theory, our cognitive faculties are the product, not of a series of accidents, but of a process known as "natural selection", a process which, put briefly, selects the functional by eliminating the dysfunctional, thus furnishing evolution with an ongoing quality-control mechanism.
(In simple terms, the reason natural selection occurs is as follows. If an organism in a given species possesses a trait that helps it to survive and reproduce—e.g. the ability to outrun its fellow organisms—then, given enough time, this trait will dominate the species' population, since it will be passed on to more organisms than will the average trait).
Perhaps, then, the evolutionist can object to Lewis's argument by claiming that, if her cognitive faculties weren't reliable, she'd never have ended up with them in the first place (on the basis that natural selection would have eliminated them).
What can be said by way of counter? To see, we will need to consider the notion of beliefs and their defeaters.
...an aside: defeaters...
Life as thinking agents requires us to consider all sorts of different propositions, to decide what to believe and what not to believe. Some propositions just seem to 'pop into our heads': that is to say, we naturally come to believe them as we go about everyday life—propositions like "It's raining", "Such-and-such a person looks happy", "It's quite hot at the moment", etc. Other propositions require reflection: that is to say, we come to believe them as we ponder over our experiences of life—propositions like "Last night's football match was one of the worst I've seen", "My parents have been kind to me over the years", etc. Other propositions involve a combination of the two.
...being rational...
Being rational—that property every man assumes he exemplifies in maximal quantities—is about adopting rational attitudes to life's many propositions. It is about believing propositions which it is rational to believe, disbelieving propositions which it is rational to disbelieve, and withholding one's belief from propositions which it is rational to withhold one's belief from. But how is this done? How does one decide which propositions it is rational to believe and which propositions it is rational to disbelieve? The answer is by thinking about how our various beliefs interact with each other, by thinking about how each proposition we believe interacts with the other propositions we believe.
...propositional interaction...
A proposition can interact with other propositions in a number of different ways. It can support them, be supported by them, defeat them (i.e. make it irrational for us to continue to affirm certain propositions), be defeated by them, or bear no obvious relation to them; and it can do all these things with greater or lesser degrees of strength.
Suppose, for instance, I believe the proposition
(1) I'm five minutes late for an important meeting at work;
And suppose I also believe the proposition
(2) It'll take me at least another five minutes to get there.
Clearly my believing these two propositions makes it rational for me to believe certain other propositions—propositions like
(3) I'm not going to get to my meeting on time,

(4) My boss probably might not be enamoured with me today,
And so on. But now suppose I receive a text message from my secretary telling me my meeting has been put back 30 minutes. I now have a proposition in my "noetic structure" (the set of beliefs I hold at any given moment in time) that acts as a defeater for (1) and (3), or at least lessens the strength with which I affirm them. But now suppose I receive a second text message from my secretary telling me that she was mistaken earlier and that the meeting actually began at the original time. I now have a defeater of my defeater. That is, I have a reason to doubt my reason for disbelieving (3), meaning I have a reason to affirm (3). But now suppose...well, you get the picture.
What we do learn from this scenario? That a sound noetic structure has to adapt to new input. Some beliefs will be foundational to that structure (e.g. the belief that the external world is real, or that I have free will, or that God loves me). It will therefore take a large number of strongly-held propositions to the contrary to defeat such beliefs. Others will be less foundational (e.g. the belief that my money is well-invested, or that my career is heading in the right direction, or that things at my church are going well) and will therefore be more easily defeated.
...back to lewis's argument...
How, then, does this help us in understanding Lewis's argument? For a start, it enables us to analyse Lewis's argument in more formal terms, in terms of beliefs and their defeaters. This is done as follows:
(1) If evolutionary theory is true, then our cognitive faculties have not been constructed according to any particular "intention" or design-plan.

(2) If our cognitive faculties weren't constructed according to any particular intention or design-plan, then we have no reason to suppose that they are reliable, to suppose that the beliefs they produce are true.

(3) Given (2), we have no good reason to suppose that our beliefs about evolutionary theory are true.

(4) Thus, anyone who believes the proposition that "Man is the product of naturalistic evolution" has a defeater for the belief that man is in fact the product of naturalistic evolution, meaning such a belief cannot form part of a rational noetic structure.
How, then, does the objection we considered earlier relate to Lewis's argument? The answer is that it denies premise (2). In simple terms, the objection runs as follows.
Unreliable cognitive faculties are "maladaptive", they diminish an organism's chances of surviving and reproducing. However, our cognitive faculties—i.e. the cognitive faculties of homo sapiens—are the product of natural selection. Hence they cannot be unreliable, for if they were, natural selection would never have allowed them to dominate our species. Put another way: contra (2), our cognitive faculties have been constructed intentionally, the intention being to work in such a way as to help us to survive and reproduce, which entails their working reliably.
How successful is this objection? According to Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism", it is decidedly unsuccessful. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss Plantinga's argument in detail. However, given its importance, I will set out its main thrust below.
...plantinga's argument...
The driving intuition behind Plantinga's argument is as follows:
"Naturalists are...always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies, such as our nervous systems, or brains...So...let's think about beliefs from a materialist perspective.
"According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neuro-physiology, [i.e. by what goes on in the brain and nervous system]. Neuro-physiology, furthermore, also causes behaviour. According to the usual story, electrical signals proceed via afferent nerves from the sense organs to the brain; there some processing goes on; then electrical impulses go via efferent nerves from the brain to other organs including muscles; in response to these signals, certain muscles contract, thus causing movement and behaviour.
"Now, what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behaviour (perhaps more exactly the behaviour of our ancestors) is adaptive. [That is], since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behaviour of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore, the neuro-physiology that caused that behaviour was also adaptive...What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neuro-physiology promotes or causes adaptive behaviour, the kind of behaviour that issues in survival and reproduction.
"Now, this same neuro-physiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while...natural selection rewards adaptive behaviour...and penalizes maladaptive behaviour—[i.e. behaviour that reduces an organism's odds of reproducing]—it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief." (Plantinga, "Evolution vs Naturalism", Christianity Today International: Books & Culture, Jul/Aug 08, Vol 14, No 4, p37)
Thus, given the truth of naturalism and evolutionism, it seems as likely that we are wandering around in a kind of dream-world—that our thoughts and beliefs completely unrelated to the world around us—as it is that we correctly perceive ourselves and the world around us.
Granted, at first blush Plantinga's argument sounds a strange one. For we all tend to assume that our cognitive faculties are basically reliable, that the majority of the beliefs they produce are true (beliefs like "There is a tree in front of me", "We're going uphill at the moment", etc). And one would think it obvious that having false beliefs would prove "maladaptive", that having false beliefs would reduce an organism's chances of surviving and reproducing. However, on reflection, this claim is not so obvious after all. As Patricia Churchland and others say,
"Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in [terms of behaviours like] feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive...Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost." (Churchland, "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience", Journal of Philosophy, Vol 84, Oct 87, p548-49)
"Darwinism teaches that our minds serve evolutionary fitness, not truth." (Gray, New Scientist, Vol 175, Issue 2360, 2002, p46)
...various considerations...
Are Churchland et al right? Can natural selection ("NS" hereafter) really be indifferent to the truth of organisms' beliefs? If so, Plantinga's argument seems persuasive. For unless an organism's holding false beliefs is maladaptive, evolution has no means of filtering out false-belief-producing faculties, meaning we have no reason to think that our cognitive faculties are reliable. But is Churchland's claim plausible?
To decide, we need to spend some time considering the nature of beliefs.
Given naturalism, what kind of thing is a belief? About all it seems one can say is that a belief is a kind of long-term structure or event in the nervous system; (after all, given naturalism, what else can it be?). Suppose, then, for the sake of definiteness, that a belief is a kind of neural structure, a structured group of neurons connected together in a certain way.
Now consider what kind of causal powers a belief possesses, how beliefs influence behaviour. Clearly, by virtue of its various connections with other neurons and muscles and sense organs and the like (its "NP-properties"), a belief can influence behaviour. But how, if it all, can its content get involved in this process? Plantinga frames the question as follows:
"If [a] belief is really a belief, then [it won't just have a particular NP-property]; it will also have another sort of property: it will have content; it will be the belief that P, for some proposition P (perhaps the proposition "Naturalism is all the rage these days")...The question is this: does a belief—a neural structure—cause behaviour by virtue of its content [or just by virtue of some NP-property]?" (Plantinga, "Naturalism vs Evolution: A Religion/Science Conflict?", infidels.org, 2007)
To better understand the question, consider the following scenario. I am sitting at my desk reading my Bible, becoming increasingly annoyed by a fly orbiting my head at ever increasing speeds. In anger, I swat the offending creature with my Bible (rejoicing in my God-given authority over creation as I do so). Now, suppose I'd swatted the fly with a cigarette paper. What would have happened? Very little presumably. Clearly, then, certain properties of my Bible have caused the fly's death. But which ones? Its colour? Its information content? Its mass? Its hardness? This is the kind of question we are asking of beliefs. Which of their properties are responsible for their causing behaviour? Their NP-properties or its content?
...the options...
There are two possibilities when it comes to the causal relationship between a belief's content and its holder's behaviour: either content affects behaviour or it doesn't. (This much at least seems fairly uncontroversial). Let's call the claim that a belief's content is part of the causal chain leading to an organism's behaviour "C", and the claim that it isn't, "-C".
...behaviour & its causes...
Given the above notation, then, let's consider -C and see how it helps in refuting Plantinga's argument.
On -C, what does the fact that a given neural structure produces adaptive behaviour tell us about about the truth of the beliefs it produces? The answer is very little (or more precisely, nothing). For suppose a neural structure produces adaptive behaviour and true beliefs. Fine, all is well as far as NS is concerned, since the relevant behaviour is adaptive. Suppose on the other hand a structure produces adaptive behaviour and false beliefs. Again, fine. As long as behaviour is adaptive, NS doesn't care about the beliefs.
Given -C, then, appealing to NS is no defense to Plantinga's argument. For on -C, NS can neither eliminate neural structures that produce false beliefs nor select those that produce true beliefs. Consequently, the fact that a neural structure produces adaptive behaviour gives us no more reason to suppose the belief it produces to be true than false. Epistemically speaking, then, the probability of any particular belief's being true is about 0.5. Suppose, then, I have 1,000 independent beliefs in my noetic structure. What is the probability that my cognitive faculties are reliable, that say 750 of the beliefs I hold are true? Very low indeed.
To sum up, then, if R is the reliability of an organism's cognitive faculties, N is naturalism, and E is evolutionism, then P(R|N&E&-C) is very low.
...content as a cause...
What about P(R|N&E&C) though? Does C help us defend against Plantinga's argument? That is to say, given C, do we have reason to think that an organism's being selected ensures the reliability of its CFs? At first blush it seems not. For C is just the claim that behaviours are caused by content as opposed to NP-properties. It gives us no reason to think that content and behaviour are connected in any particular way, that false content tends to be connected to maladaptive behaviour as opposed to adaptive behaviour.
Let's consider things more thoroughly though. Consider the following question: Are false beliefs, by virtue of the fact that their content is false, likely to lead to maladaptive behaviour?
It seems not. For suppose C is the case, and consider our current cognitive situation. Can we now conceive of false beliefs that are adaptively neutral, that have no obvious reproductive disadvantages? Certainly. As Plantinga points out,
"Religious belief is nearly universal across the world, [and] even among naturalists it is widely thought to be adaptive [the belief, for instance, that the use of contraception is morally untenable seems trivially adaptive]; yet naturalists think [religious] beliefs are mostly false. Clearly enough, [then], false belief can produce adaptive behaviour." (Ibid)
Consider another example.
"Perhaps a primitive tribe thinks that everything is really alive, or is a witch; and perhaps all or nearly all of their beliefs are of the form "This witch is F" or "That witch is G"—e.g. "This witch is good to eat", or "That witch is likely to eat me if I give it a chance". If they ascribe the right properties to the right "witches", their beliefs could be adaptive while nonetheless (assuming that in fact there aren't any witches) false...[So] for every true adaptive belief, it seems we can easily think of a false belief that leads to the same adaptive behaviour." (Ibid)
Minimally, then, it seems that N&E&C will happily allow organisms to accumulate whole layers and systems of beliefs which, while being false, do nothing to make behaviour maladaptive. And such layers and systems of beliefs are not at all dissimilar to the kinds of worldviews under discussion in this essay (views like evolutionism, creationism, pantheism, and so on). Meaning the belief that we are the product of naturalistic evolution—the belief that N&E—seems to defeat any reason we might have for thinking that N&E is in fact true.
...going deeper...
It might of course be objected that there is something not quite right about the kind of examples that Plantinga cites. For when we consider organisms who perceive everything in terms of "This witch is X, That witch is Y, etc", we're considering organisms whose perception is basically reliable; we're just layering it with additional beliefs that make each individual belief false.
Now, as I've already stated, in one sense this doesn't matter. For such layering is not disanalogous to the types of beliefs entailed by N&E: "This tiger [which evolved from ancestor X] is approaching me", "That zebra [which is related to Y] is running away from me", and so on. In which case Plantinga's examples suffice to show that N&E is self-defeating. But there is more comprehensive answer available.
To see this, consider the following thought-experiment.
I picture myself standing in the middle of a forest. I now introduce a false belief into the picture. I consider whether, were I to mistake, say, an approaching tiger for a friendly pussy-cat, my behaviour would be likely to be maladaptive. I conclude that, yes, it would.
Now, what does this thought experiment show regarding the likely adaptiveness of false beliefs? Very little. For is it really true that my mistaking the tiger for a friendly pussy-cat would be likely to result in maladaptive behaviour? Not in and of itself, no. That is, not if I possessed other beliefs or "indicators" (i.e. neural structures that subconsciously generate behaviours in response to certain sensory inputs, such as those structures that cause me to blink, breathe, and regulate my metabolism) that caused adaptive messages to be sent to my muscles—messages that caused my muscles to contract in such a way as to avoid said tiger.
To see this, suppose I believed that my race was involved in an ongoing game of hide-and-seek with this particular species of friendly pussy-cat. Or suppose my CFs were wired up in such a way that my deciding to stay put caused me to flee. Or suppose my indicators caused me to flee on seeing a tiger regardless of the beliefs I happened to form about it (in the same way that my indicators would cause me to breathe even if I formed the belief that breathing was unimportant or that I wasn't actually breathing). Or suppose, whenever a tiger appeared to my senses, I formed the belief that the moon is made of cheese, and suppose my noetic structure also contained the belief that, if the moon is made of cheese, I should turn round and start running.
In all the above cases, my believing that an approaching tiger was a friendly pussy-cat would cause no problems adaptively speaking. Meaning the falsity of my belief would be of no concern to NS.
Wouldn't, one might wonder, it be rather odd for me to have come to possess such beliefs and indicators—beliefs and indicators that caused my muscles to contract in such a way as to cause me to avoid an approaching tiger? Not at all. Indeed, I would have inherited these belief and indicators precisely because they had proven adaptive in situations where my ancestors were approached by tigers.
Wouldn't it be much more effective to have CFs that perceive the outside world correctly rather than some convoluted network of false beliefs that somehow produces adaptive behaviour? No doubt. But NS only works with whatever traits it has at its disposal. It doesn't hang around waiting for an ideal solution. If a belief arises that causes adaptive behaviour, it will select it. As Fitelson and Sober write,
"The reason zebras don't have machine guns with which to repel lion attacks is not that firing machine guns would have been less adaptive than simply running away; the trait didn't evolve because it was not available as a variation on which selection could act." (Plantinga's Probability Arguments..., Fitelson & Sober, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nov 20 1997)
The only thing our previous thought-experiment shows, then, is that ceteris paribus NS is unlikely to allow a reliable set of CFs to deteriorate, that once an organism has acquired a reliable set of CFs, they are likely to stay that way (all other things remaining equal). But of course this isn't what we want to know. We want to know whether, given N&E, it is likely that my CFs are in fact reliable, whether there is anything about N&E that predisposes it to engineering reliable as opposed to unreliable CFs.
To consider this issue properly, then, we need to distance ourselves from our current cognitive situation, we need to prevent ourselves from introducing improper assumptions into the equation. After all, the whole point of Plantinga's argument is that when we consider N&E simpliciter—when we consider N&E aside from all the things we happen to think are true of our own particular environment—it seems unlikely that N&E would furnish us with reliable cognitive faculties. So, to counter Plantinga's argument with a thought-experiment that presupposes R, or to introduce claims like "I'm capable of effectively interacting with my environment", is hopelessly invalid. It is like using a liar's claim to be telling the truth to establish his reliability. All it shows is that, if we assume R, then we have good reason to think that R pertains—which is circular in excelsis.
Let us therefore consider an organism's evolution from an outsider's perspective. For this will allow us to consider what follows from N&E apart from the assumption that our own perception of the outside world—the particular perception of the species homo sapiens—is reliable.
...a better thought-experiment...
Suppose, then, a(n) is the n-th evolutionary generation of a given line of descent: suppose it is an early form of bacteria or something of that sort, something that has no beliefs or sense organs to speak of. The question is this: Is N&E likely to furnish such an organism with reliable CFs? It is hard to see why. For suppose a(n+1)—a(n)'s offspring—evolves a light-sensitive spot together with some CFs; and suppose neither of these structures are very reliable. Suppose in particular:
a] when it is dark, a(n) thinks it is light,

b] a(n) thinks that, if it is dark, it is also true that P (where P is any old false belief—say, the belief that the moon is made of cheese, or that running towards one's predators is a good way of surviving), and

c] a(n) thinks that, if P is the case, Q is an appropriate way to respond, where Q is adaptive.
Now, given this scenario, a(n+1) will clearly be selected. Granted, a(n+1) has not hit on an ideal way of interacting with its environment. But this is of no concern to NS. Insofar as a(n+1) does Q, it behaves adaptively, which is all NS cares about.
Suppose a(n+2) then continues in a(n+1)'s footsteps; and suppose a(n+3) does likewise. What are the chances that a(n+1000) will have reliable CFs, that its beliefs will be mostly true? It is hard to say. For once an organism's cognitive life has got off to a bad start (which seems just as likely as its getting off to a good start), it is hard to see how or why NS can correct things. For once one's noetic structure consists of mostly false beliefs, acquiring further false beliefs may well prove adaptive (while acquiring true beliefs may prove maladaptive). To see this, suppose an organism m believes that running towards its predators gives it a good chance of survival. In this case, the belief that one of its predators is on the horizon (call this belief b) will, if true, do m more harm than good. If, however, b is false—if there isn't in fact a predator on the horizon—then b will cause m no problems at all.
...a stock take...
Even granted C, then—i.e. even granted that the contents of an organism's beliefs are causally connected with its behaviour—, there is still no reason to suppose that R is the case. For C gives us no reason to think that beliefs and behaviours are hooked up in a reliable way. Consequently, there is nothing to prevent an organism's perception of the real world (which of course includes its perception of its actual behaviour) being like that of a sleepwalker, like that of a man in a dream. Beliefs can be hooked up to behaviours in some completely surreal fashion, and NS will never know any different. Provided the various properties of the organism's beliefs generate the right responses to sensory inputs—responses that aren't maladaptive—NS will not care. Perceptually, the organism can be inhabiting its own little dreamworld, all the while convinced it is correctly perceiving and interacting with its environment, when in fact it is doing nothing of the sort. Plantinga puts the point as follows:
"Suppose m has a certain belief B. B has NP-properties that cause him (it) to [behave in a particular way]. B also has NP-properties on which its content supervenes. B causes the behaviour it does by virtue of that content: if it hadn't had that content, it would not have caused that behaviour [which is all C entails]. But the content needn't be true; and indeed there is no reason to think it would be true. If it is false content that gets associated by the causal laws with those NP-properties, then false content will cause the adaptive behaviour; and there is no more reason to think the causal laws will associate true content with those properties, than false content. Hence the probability of maladaptive behaviour, given false content, will be no greater than the probability of adaptive behaviour." (Ibid)
Given C, then, there still seems little reason to think that an organism's having false beliefs would lead to its behaving maladaptively. For to defend against Plantinga's argument, the believer in N&E needs reason to think that evolutionary processes construct a very specific link between beliefs and behaviours, namely connecting false beliefs to maladaptive behaviours. The problem, however, is that there is no reason to think that NS is interested in doing such a thing, for it has nothing to gain from the exercise. We are therefore forced to assume that the probability of a given false belief's being connected to adaptive as opposed to maladaptive behaviour is something like 0.5, making P(R|N&E&C) no higher than P(R|N&E&-C).
...furthermore...
However, the full strength of Plantinga's argument can perhaps be seen by appreciating how slim a set of premises it needs to run. For suppose we concede that having false beliefs does tend to produce maladaptive behaviour. Does it now follow that P(R|N&E) is high? Not at all. For what exactly does it mean to say that false beliefs are maladaptive? Presumably it means that, all other things being equal, the higher an organism's proportion of true beliefs, the more likely it will be to survive and reproduce, that ceteris paribus CF70s (a set of cognitive faculties 70% of the produced beliefs of which are true) are more likely to cause maladaptive behaviour than are CF75s.
But, thus construed, the claim that false beliefs are maladaptive ("FM" hereafter) doesn't seem to do much to help the believer in N&E in justifying R. For all that really follows from FM is that our CFs are more reliable than those of our ancestors, that given an infinite amount of time, N&E will churn out a reliable set of CFs. But what follows from this? Very little. For we have no way of knowing where we are on N&E's pathway to reliable CFs. Maybe we have descended from CF10-apes and ourselves possess CF15s. Maybe in billions of years time, our descendants will evolve CF75s and, from this standpoint, will realise how hopelessly deluded the majority of our beliefs are. Maybe they will regard us as having similar cognitive faculties to those of, say, cows or sheep.
...in conclusion...
Much more could (and perhaps should) be said about Plantinga's argument. But for our present purposes, suffice to say that belief in N&E seems highly problematic from the point of view of self-consistency. Plantinga concludes as follows:
"If evolutionary naturalism is true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is...very low. And that means that one who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it...
"No doubt she can't help believing that [her CFs are reliable]; no doubt she will in fact continue to believe [that this is so]; but that belief will be irrational. And if she has a defeater for the reliability of her cognitive faculties, she also has a defeater for any belief she takes to be produced by those faculties—which of course is all of her beliefs...She is therefore enmeshed in a deep and bottomless skepticism.
"One of her beliefs, however, is her belief in evolutionary naturalism itself; so...she also has a defeater for that belief. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore—the belief in the combination of naturalism and evolution—is self-refuting, self-destructive, shoots itself in the foot. For all this argument shows, it may be true; but it is irrational to hold it." (Plantinga, "Evolution vs Naturalism", Christianity Today International: Books & Culture, Jul/Aug 08, Vol 14, No 4, p37)
"Can the defeater the naturalist has for R be in turn defeated?...It can't...[For] it could be defeated only by something—an argument, for example, that involves some other belief (perhaps as [its] premise). But any such belief will be subject to the very same defeater as R is. So this defeater can't be defeated." (Plantinga, "Naturalism Defeated", Calvin College, 1994, p9-10)
To see this, consider some analogies with clear cases. Suppose I hear about a certain substance XXX the ingestion of which is widely reputed to destroy the reliability of one's belief-forming faculties. I come to regard the probability that ingestion of XXX really does destroy cognitive reliability as either high or inscrutable. Now, suppose I come to think someone has ingested XXX. I then have a defeater for anything I believe just on their say-so. I won't (or at least shouldn't) believe anything they tell me unless I have independent reasons for doing so. But now suppose I come to think that I myself have ingested XXX—at an unduly high-spirited party, perhaps. I now have a defeater for R in my own case. And it will be a defeater that cannot itself be defeated, for it will undercut all its alleged defeaters.
Alternatively, consider another of Plantinga's examples. Suppose I am in a widget-making factory and I come to believe, on the basis of my sense perception, that a batch of red widgets is being produced. But now suppose a reliable source (or at least a source I deem to be reliable) tells me the owner of the factory sometimes uses coloured lights to make the widgets appear a different colour (that is, a different colour to their actual colour). I now come to believe that the odds of my perceptual faculties yielding trustworthy beliefs about the color of the widgets in question is inscrutable. That is, I have a reason to doubt the reliability of my cognitive faculties for as long as I am in the factory.
The naturalist—or at any rate the naturalist who realises that P(R|N&E) is low or inscrutable—is in a very similar situation, for he has a defeater for the proposition that his cognitive faculties are reliable. That is, he has a reason to reject R along with everything he has come to believe on the basis of R—which of course is everything he believes. And it is a defeater that cannot itself be defeated.
At this point, however, we must be careful not to misunderstand Plantinga's argument. Plantinga is not just claiming that we can never be sure that our CFs are reliable (for, while true, this is a fairly uninteresting claim). Rather, Plantinga is claiming that when the believer in N&E reflects carefully on the way in which she believes her CFs have come about, she acquires a reason to doubt their reliability.
Cast in step-by-step fashion, then, Plantinga's argument runs something like this:
(1) When we consider the concept of N&E, R seems unlikely to pertain. For unless we have reason to think that false beliefs, by virtue of the fact that their content is false, lead to maladaptive behaviour, then P(R|N&E) is low.

(2) If we have reason to be skeptical of R, then we have reason to be skeptical of everything we believe—including of course N&E.

(3) Thus, the belief that N&E is true is incapable of forming part of a sound noetic structure. For in affirming N&E, we acquire a defeater for N&E—a reason to think that our belief in N&E is misguided. Hence in order to affirm E, we need to disavow N.

(4) Furthermore, once we see the force of (1-3), we cannot rationally affirm any posthumous arguments: that is, arguments aimed at reassuring us that R does in fact pertain. For in order to affirm the premises and formal structure of such arguments, we first need to presuppose R, which we cannot rationally do since our noetic structure contains a defeater for R. Or to Put another way: to argue for R on the basis of various things we think are true of the world around us without first refuting (1-3) is effectively to build on Plantinga's existing argument, to add further premises and conclusions to those given in (1-3). However, appending (1-3) with further premises like:

(4') Homo sapiens are fairly adept at communicating with each other, or

(4'') My causal interaction with the world seems pretty successful on the whole,

is of no use. For unless (1-3) can be refuted, it serves as a defeater of all such (4)s.
...time for a breather...
Where have we got to so far then? We have seen:
a] that while science is classically defined in such a way as to exclude creationism from its ranks, such definitions are unjustified and, when consistently applied, render much that is thought to lie within the domain of science "unscientific";

b] that the scientific method is too restrictive a tool with which to investigate life's origins, for unless naturalism is true—which science cannot prove—there is no guarantee that its conclusions reflect history as it actually happened; and

c] that science's presuppositions lead inevitably to N&E, which is a self-defeating proposition. Thus, no matter how compelling its proffered evidences, naturalistic evolutionism cannot be rationally affirmed.
The conclusion is therefore clear. The theologian's presuppositions provide a far better starting-point from which to investigate the issue of life's origins than do those of the scientist, for they:
i] can accommodate either a natural or a supernatural explanation of life's origins. (All the theologian is committed to by virtue of being a theologian is the belief that God is life's ultimate author. Whether it looks like God chose to use naturalistic or supernaturalistic means to create life is, in principle at least, an open question), and

ii] are internally consistent. For if we are the product of a good and loving God—a God who is interesting in our knowing the truth about him and his creation—then it is perfectly reasonable to think that God would have endowed us with reliable CFs. (This is not, of course, to say that the theist's beliefs are infallible. The theist can be mistaken just as easily as anyone else. But the point is this: There is an important difference between the theist's and the non-theist's beliefs in R. The N&E-ist's beliefs, properly analysed, furnish him with a defeater for R and so also for N&E, while the theist's beliefs do not furnish him with a defeater for theism).
This therefore concludes our discussion of points a] and b] as set out in the essay's outline. And while the discussion has been a lengthy one, it lays the necessary foundations. For unless we enter into the evolutionism-creationism debate fully aware of the presuppositions made by each side, we will be unable to distinguish what people are assuming from what they are demonstrating, which is the key to understanding the controversy.
...what next?...
With these things in mind, then, let us move on to consider what after all is the main focus of this essay, namely the fossil record.
...the fossils...
Plants and animals change over time; they adapt to their surroundings. This much is uncontroversial. What is controversial, however, is the claim that such adaptation can turn (and has in fact turned) a single living cell into the bewildering diversity of plants and animals in the world around us today, that it is justifiable to extrapolate such change backwards over billions of years, and that when we do so we arrive at a single living cell. The evolutionist therefore has a heavy burden of proof to shoulder, making conclusive evidence a must. Which is where the fossil record comes in.
The fossil record has unique potential. It has the potential to reveal life's history as it actually happened, to show us evolution in action. However, when Darwin examined the fossil record, what he saw was not exactly evolution in action. As he writes in "The Origin of Species",
"Whole groups of species suddenly appear in [rock] formations." (Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", Charles Darwin, Ed. Joseph Carroll, Broadview Press, 2003, p283)
"Innumerable transitional forms [i.e. creatures connecting different species] must have existed. [So] why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?...Why is not every geological formation and every stratum [i.e. every band of rock layers] full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal [them], which is perhaps the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory." (Darwin, "The Origin of Species", J M Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1971, p243, 292-293)
At the time, Darwin explained (away) this fact by claiming that the record had not been sufficiently well explored, saying,
"Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care" (Ibid, "On the Poorness of Paleontological Collections")
However, it has since become clear that lack of exploration was not the problem. As Eldredge writes:
"One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm...Darwin's predictions." (Eldredge, "The Myths of Human Evolution", Columbia University Press, 1982, p45-46)
The Guardian, in its report on Eldredge's work, explains the situation as follows:
"If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little,...one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after—[creatures with combinations of features from different species]. But no one has found any evidence of such...creatures.
"'Gradualists' [i.e. people who believe evolution takes place in a very slow and gradual fashion—as did Darwin] expected [these gaps] to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them." (The Guardian Weekly, 26 Nov 1978, Vol 119, No 22, p1)
David Raup and others concur saying:
"The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would...Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and [our] knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much...Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time [since many fossils which, in Darwin's day, were thought to be examples of transitional forms have since turned out not to be]." (Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin & Paleontology", Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol 50, 1979, p35)
"Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so." (Leach, "Men, bishops and apes", Nature, Vol 293, 1981, p20)
In other words, it is not just theologians who think there is a discrepancy between what we see in the rocks and what we should see given evolutionism.
...an aside...
But before looking further into the specifics of the fossil record, there are a couple of things we need to appreciate.
First, the fossil record is notoriously difficult to interpret. For only a small proportion of the billions of creatures that have inhabited our planet leave any imprint in the rocks (the majority being eaten or decomposing before they have a chance to do so). Furthermore, the majority of those imprints only provide very limited information about the creatures that left them (revealing only part of the organism or telling us very little about the creature's softer tissues and internal parts). Furthermore, correlating different layers in different parts of the world—working out, say, when a particular layer of rock in China was formed in relation to a different layer of rock in Canada—is far from straight-forward. Consequently, assumptions play a huge part in using the fossil record to deduce the most likely course of history.
The second thing we need to appreciate is the nature of "taxonomy".
Taxonomy is the branch of biology which arranges the world's various plants and animals together into distinct, hierarchical categories on the basis of their "shared similarities".
Some animals, for instance, have backbones; others don't. So, biologists assign those animals with backbones (e.g. fish) to a different category to those that don't (e.g. sponges). Of those animals with backbones, some give birth to live young; others don't. So, biologists assign those animals who give birth to live young (e.g. cattle) to a different category to those that don't (such as birds). And so on.
All in all, the taxonomic hierarchy consists of eight main layers or levels. The lowest level—the most specific level—is that of the species. A few levels higher up comes the "class"; next comes the "phylum", the "kingdom", and finally the "domain". Thus, each species belongs to a particular class, a particular phylum, and so on. Homo sapiens, for instance, belong to the class Mammalia (mammals), the (sub)-phylum Vertebrata, and the kingdom Animalia (the animal kingdom).
The phyla are particularly important categories. They are often referred to as the "major groups", being the broadest category in each kingdoms. Each phyla is characterised by a certain "body-plan" (often referred to as a Bauplan or "building plan") that specifies the way their creatures are constructed—their shape, symmetry, number of body segments, number of limbs, and so on. The spider, for instance, has the same body-plan as the crab, but has a very different body-plan to that of, say, the star-fish. Common examples of body-plans include those of the cnidarians (corals and jellyfish), the mollusks (squids and shellfish), the chordates (the phylum all vertebrates belong to).
With these things in mind, then, let us resume our discussion of the fossil record.
...the big picture...
When we look at the picture that the fossil record paints of life's history (given the standard evolutionary dating methods), two facts become immediately apparent:
i] that, for the first three billion years (i.e. during the pre-Cambrian era), the fossil record contains very little by way of diversity and complexity: some blue-green algaes, some single-celled organisms, and that's about it; and

ii] that, with the close of the pre-Cambrian era, most if not all of life's major innovations suddenly appear in the rocks during a 5-10 million year geological window known as the "Cambrian explosion".
As Gould and others attest,
"For perhaps three billion years, the highest form of life was a [very basic] algae...Then, about 600 million years ago, virtually all the major designs of animal life appeared in the fossil record within a few million years." (Gould, "In the Midst of Life...", "The Panda's Thumb", Penguin: London, 1990 Reprint, p116)
"They [are] just planted there, without any evolutionary history..." (Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", New York: Norton, 1986, p229-230)
"...fully formed [and] without intermediates connecting one form to another." (Futuyma, "Evolutionary Biology", Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc, 1986, 2nd Ed., p325)
"Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists." (Dawkins, Ibid)
Valentine and Erwin concur, saying,
"Transitional alliances are unknown or unconfirmed for...the phyla and classes appearing [during the Cambrian explosion]." (Valentine & Erwin, "Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record", Development as an Evolutionary Process, 1985)
So, rather than revealing a slow and gradual accumulation of complexity and diversity (as is the impression given by people who talk about the 'tree of life'):
The pattern revealed by the fossil record actually looks like this:
Where the x-axis is a measure of a fossil's morphology (i.e. the shapes, structures, and body-parts it illustrates), the dark points/lines show us which fossils we have found, and the light dots represent what evolutionists assume to have happened. A fossil's position along the x-axis therefore shows us how similar or different it is to other fossils. A zebra and a wild ass, for instance, will have similar x-coordinates—they will appear in similar places on the x-axis. An egg-plant and an octopus, however, will appear a long way apart. Thus, we see that evolutionary assumptions do not match up to the pattern displayed by the fossil record. For what the data itself shows us is this:
On an evolutionary view, then, the period during which evolution's major creative works took place—during which all of life's basic body-plans were created—is the very period for which we have the least fossil evidence. As Gould says,
"Almost everything happened in the geological moment just before [the Cambrian explosion], and almost nothing in [the] more than 500 million years since." (Gould, "A Web of Tales", Natural History, Oct 1988, p16-23)
Equally problematic is the fact that, since the Cambrian explosion, we have lost as opposed to gained diversity; we see, not a "cone of increasing diversity", but a cone of decreasing diversity. As Gould and others explain,
"The sweep of anatomical diversity reached its peak right after the initial diversification of multi-cellular animals [i.e. the Cambrian explosion]. The later history of life proceeds by elimination, not expansion." (Gould, A Wonderful Life, 1989, p46)
"The Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major...Bauplane...that would exist thereafter, including many that were "weeded out" and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100." (Lewin, Science, Vol 241, 1988, p291)
Put visually:
A third problematic aspect of the fossil record is the morphological isolation of its various phyla, the fact that life's phyla are separated by significant and seemingly untraversable gaps. In other words, rather than seeing evidence of different phyla's having arisen from a common ancestor:
What we actually see looks more like this:
Which is surely significant. For fundamentally, evolutionism is all about species diverging from one another over time. That is to say, according to evolutionary theory, the process of evolution begins with variation within a species (e.g. one finch's developing a differently-shaped beak to another's), which variation becomes more and more pronounced until the variation gives rise to separate species, the species give rise to different genera, and so on. Thus, the standard evolutionary view is that the species evolves first, then the genus, then the family and so on, until we have an array of different phyla in existence. Dawkins explains it as follows:
"What had been distinct species within one genus become, in the fullness of time, distinct genera within one family. Later, families [are] found to have diverged to the point where taxonomists...prefer to call them orders, then classes, then phyla...Ancestors of two different phyla (say vertebrates and mollusks) which we see as built upon utterly different 'fundamental body plans' were once just two species within a genus." (Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow", Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, p201)
However, the tale told by the fossil record is pretty much the opposite of this. For life's major designs, rather than arising via the gradual diverging of two species, appear "out of nowhere" (Pagel, "Happy accidents?", Nature, Vol 397, 1999, p665), after which time we see, not the appearance of new innovations, but variations on existing themes.
As a result, the pattern of the fossil record is often dubbed "top-down" as opposed to "bottom-up". That is to say, the major groups enter the record as distinct groups and (if they survive at all) remain distinct, their body-plans grading into each other neither at the moment of the explosion, nor over the course of geological time, nor in today's living world. As Gould and others say,
"We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variations about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence." (Gould, Natural History, Feb 82, p22)
"The large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian [rocks] and...they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertebrates that would seem vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." (Discover, USA, April 1993, p40)
Nor is this a mere detail. Indeed, Huxley went so far as to say that
"If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution."
(T. H. Huxley, Three Lectures on Evolution, 1882, Quoted by Bird, Origin of Species Revisited, 1993, Vol 1, p59)
Looking at the big picture, then, we see very little to suggest that complex life has unfolded from a simple common ancestor and a fair amount to suggest otherwise. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the fossil record could look much less Darwinian than it does. As Stefan Bengtson and others say,
"If any event in life's history resembles man's creation myths, it is [the] sudden diversification of marine life [in the Cambrian explosion] when multi-cellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution...The animal phyla emerge out of the Pre-cambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants." (Bengtson, "The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle", Nature, Vol 345, (June 28, 1990), p765-766)
"If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it." (Ward, "On Methuselah's Trail: Living fossils and the Great Extinctions" (Foreword by Stanley), Freeman & Co, New York, 1992, p29)
...the detail...
Nor are things much different when we come to look at the post-Cambrian rocks. For the species that enter the fossil record following the Cambrian explosion—the variations that unfold from life's major designs—don't show any greater propensity to change over time than do the phyla. Rather, they appear as fully-mature species with no trace of their historical development and exit the record just as quietly. As Raup and others say,
"Instead of...gradual[ly] unfolding,...species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record...Biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin & Paleontology", Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol 50, 1979, p23)
"As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, [and] persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly." (Kemp, "A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record", New Scientist, Vol 108, 1985, p66-67)
Gould summarises the record of the post-Cambrian rocks as follows:
"The history of most fossil species includes two [notable] features:
"Stasis: most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless; and
"Sudden appearance: in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'." (Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace", Natural History, Vol 86, 1977)
As shown in the picture we considered earlier:
Which, needless to say, looks nothing like Darwin's tree of life.
...summing up...
It seems, then, that neither the big picture nor the detail of the fossil record looks even remotely Darwinian. It has "puzzled" evolutionists while "delighting creationists". It squares with the predictions of creationists but not those of evolutionists. Nor should this issue be explained away (as methodological naturalism would urge), for when it comes to reconstructing the past, the fossil record is our primary source of evidence. As Steven Stanley and others say,
"It is doubtful whether, in the absence of fossils, the idea of evolution would represent anything more than an outrageous hypothesis." (Stanley, "New Evolutionary Timetable", 1981, p72)
"The process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide the evidence of evolution." (Grasse, Ibid, p4)
After all, if evolution takes place too slowly for us to see it happening in the world around us, then we need to look elsewhere to find out whether it has actually taken place or not. As Dunbar says,
"Although the comparative study of living animals and plants may give very convincing circumstantial evidence, fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms." (Dunbar, "Historical Geology", New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949, p52)
The fossil record is therefore where the rubber hits the road. It is where theories are tested to see how well they square with the evidence. And the fact of the matter is that, when evolutionary theory is tested in this way, it does not pass muster: what we see is not what we should see.
...some reservations...
At this point, however, an awkward question rears it head. For if what I am saying is true, then why do so many scientists view the fossil record as supportive of evolutionary theory? Surely no scientist would claim such a thing if the evidence is as I am suggesting. Yet they do. So what is going on? Am I misrepresenting the experts? Am I missing the point? Or what?
The question is a fair one. But once we remember what we read in the opening section of this essay, the answer is not hard to see. For facts are always interpreted in light of theories; and given methodological naturalism, evolutionary theory is all science's facts can be interpreted in light of. Thus, the scientist is stuck in the following loop:
(1) "Facts do not speak for themselves; they are read in the light of theory." (Gould, "Ever since Darwin", Burnett Books, 1978, p161-162)

(2) "Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things." (Futuyma, "Science on Trial: Both Religious", 1983, p169)

(3) "Creationism is not science" (Ruse, The Annual Robert Grant Lecture, "Darwin or Design?", The Grant Museum for Zoology at UCL, November 2005)

(4) "Evolution [is therefore the theory that] illuminates all facts—a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow" (Dobzhansky, "Biology, Molecular and Organismic", American Zoologist, Vol 4, 1964, p443-452)
Which means, as a matter of logical necessity, that
(5) The facts (of the fossil record) are supportive of evolutionary theory.
Now, for the committed naturalist, this logic may seem convincing. But for everyone else it makes science's claim that evolutionary theory is a proven fact sound a rather hollow one, and one that needn't necessarily concern anyone who has come to a different conclusion on the matter. For as Birch and others explain,
"[The] theory of evolution has become, as Popper described [it], one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it." (Birch and Ehrlich, Nature, 1967, Vol 214, p352)
"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. [But] these facts will invariably be ignored." (Whitten, University of Melbourne, 1980, "Assembly Week address")
"If something happens that is consistent with the theory, all well and good. If it doesn't happen, we will likely find a satisfying explanation within our prevailing worldview." (Whitten, "Facts Are Not Everything in Science", Issues Magazine, Volume 82, Mar 2008, p9-10)
"Because there are no alternatives, we...almost have to accept [evolution by] natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet." (Pinker, "How the Mind Works", [1997], Penguin: London, 1998, p162-163, Emphasis in the original)
Quite plausibly, then, the fossil record is just as un-Darwinian as I am making out and yet scientists affirm Darwinian theory all the same. For as Johnson says,
"Evolutionary scientists are not disturbed when they learn that the fossil record does not provide examples of gradual macro-evolutionary transformation, despite decades of determined effort by paleontologists to confirm neo-Darwinian presuppositions...
"Neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are not troubled by the Cambrian Explosion, where all the invertebrate animal groups appear suddenly and without identifiable ancestors. [For] whatever the fossil record may suggest, those Cambrian animals had to [have] evolve[d] by accepted neo-Darwinian means,...by material processes requiring no intelligent guidance or supernatural input...
"Niles Eldredge, surveying the absence of evidence for macroevolutionary transformations in the rich marine invertebrate fossil record, can observe that "evolution always seems to happen somewhere else", and then describe himself on the very next page as a 'knee-jerk neo-Darwinist'". (Johnson, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism", First Things 77, November 1997: 22-25)
Why? Because evolution is all there is.
...in response...
Having said that, when confronted with some of the more baffling features of the fossil record, scientists don't in fact just throw their hands up in the air and complain that evolutionary theory is the only option available to them. How, then, do such scientists explain what they see in the rocks? How do they reconcile the pattern of the fossil record with the claim that life has evolved from a common ancestor?
...why the lack of evidence?...
We will start answering this question by considering how evolutionists explain the Cambrian explosion ("CE" hereafter).
...fossilisation...
As we have already mentioned, the majority of animals that have roamed (or swum) or planet do not fossilise. Meaning what we see in the rocks is, not a continuous record of the past, but a series of discrete snapshots taken at different points in time. Consequently, many Darwinists claim that the pre-Cambrian's lack of transitionals is due the inherent incompleteness of the fossil record—"the artifact hypothesis". Life did indeed evolve slowly and gradually from a common ancestor, but the rocks do not record this fact.
The artifact hypothesis, however, is not a plausible one. For a specific pattern like the CE cannot be explained by a general lack of data. It is like explaining the specific lack of females in senior management by the general principle that not everyone who applies for a promotion gets it. As Valentine and others say:
"The [Cambrian] explosion is real; it is too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record." (Valentine, "The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary", Evolutionary Biology, Vol 25, Plenum Press, New York and London, 1991)
"[The Cambrian explosion] reflects a biological reality, not the imperfections of geologic evidence: the Precambrian fossil record is little more (save at its very end) than 2.5 billion years of bacteria and blue-green algae; complex life did arise with startling speed near the base of the Cambrian." (Gould, "Is the Cambrian Explosion a Sigmoid Fraud?" in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, p126- 127)
"Data from the fossil record are frequently ignored because they are known to be incomplete...[However], no science is based on complete information, and the fossil record is comparable to any other scientific data set [in this regard]." (Paul, "The Value of Fossil Data", Nature, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Dec 1998)
In short, the artifact hypothesis does not explain anything. This has led some Darwinists to suggest that, relative to the post-Cambrian era, fossilisation was particularly rare in the pre-Cambrian, that there were unique pre-Cambrian conditions that hindered fossilisation.
However, this suggestion is no more convincing, for:
a] there is no good reason to think that pre-Cambrian conditions did in fact hinder fossilisation,

b] there is good reason not to think that pre-Cambrian conditions hindered fossilisation since many pre-Cambrian fossils are highly detailed and capture small and soft-bodied organisms, suggesting that they formed in fossil-friendly environments, and

c] what needs to be explained about the CE isn't the lack of pre-Cambrian fossils per se; it's the fact that what fossils we have collected provide absolutely no evolutionary backdrop for the phyla that appear in the explosion, that the pre-CE fossils are almost completely disconnected to those of the Cambrian;

d] creatures with hard shells appear in the CE, which cannot really be explained as an artifact of an incomplete record. For if such creatures existed in the pre-Cambrian era, we would expect to find evidence of their existence (since their shells make them ideal candidates for fossilisation). And it is highly unlikely that such creatures evolved their shells at the time of the CE for the kind of body-parts they have wouldn't have survived without shells. Thus Chen and Zhou: "Animals such as brachiopods and most echinoderms and mollusks [e.g. shellfish, sea-urchins, squids etc] cannot exist without a mineralized skeleton...Therefore the existence of [such] organisms in the distant past should be recorded either by fossil tracks...or remains of skeletons...That such fossils are absent in Pre-cambrian strata [therefore] proves that these phyla arose in the Cambrian [explosion]." (Lili et al, "The Chengjiang Biota: A Unique Window of the Cambrian Explosion", Vol 10, Taiwan: National Museum of Natural Science, 1997)
The incompleteness of the fossil record therefore cannot explain the Cambrian explosion.
...since the explosion...
What about the post-Cambrian rocks though—the era where we see the major phyla separating out into their various species, where we see vertebrates separating out into fish and amphibians, arthropods into spiders and crabs, and so on? Admittedly, the Darwinist's problems are not quite as daunting here. For the post-Cambrian rocks describe, not the origin of the phyla, but the variation within them, meaning there are no 'explosions as such'. But there is nevertheless a distinct lack of transitional fossils.
So, how do Darwinists explain the pattern of the post-Cambrian? The answer is two-fold (we will look at the explanation afforded by 'punctuated equilibria' later). First, they again appeal to the incompleteness of the fossil record. Second, they point to occasional "transitional series" ("TSs" hereafter), series of fossils documenting the evolution of one species into another.
Leaving to one side the question of incompleteness, then, what about these transitional series? How convincing are they? Do they reflect the kind of evidence that Darwinism requires? Hardly. There are a number of reasons why.
First, because such TSs tend to bridge huge morphological gaps with only a handful of transitional forms; second, because they are rarely plausible phylogenetically speaking; third, because they depend far too heavily on the assumption that evolutionism is true; and finally, because there are nowhere near enough of them.
...i] morphological gaps...
Transitional series claim to provide historical evidence of evolution, to bridge the gaps in the fossil record with a series of intermediate forms. However, most if not all such series comprise only a handful of often incomplete fossils, making their evidential value fairly slim.
It is not the purpose of this essay to examine any of these series in detail. For in doing so the big picture is often overlooked. However, to give the reader a feel for the nature of these series, consider Science Daily's article on evolution's "poster child": whale evolution. In this case, the proffered 'missing link' is Indohyus. It is said to be the final piece in the series bridging the gap between land-dwelling mammals and whales, an artist's impression of which is shown below:
Now, I am no zoologist. And I realise that the Indohyus shares certain morphological features with whales (e.g. its ear structure). But if a "tiny deer-like animal" is the "closest known fossil relative of whales", and if this is macro-evolution's "poster-child", then the state of the fossil record can't be very evolutionary. After all, consider the number of new adaptions this deer-like creature would need to develop in order to become a fully-aquatic whale: tail-flukes, fatty blubber, a means of feeding its young underwater, an impermeable skin, and a blow-hole to mention but a few; and bear in mind that the long lifespan of whales (typically in excess of 40 years) makes rapid evolution highly unlikely. Even when incorporated into a "three or four step" series, then, the evidence is hardly impressive (see Gingerich, Interview: "Fossils and the Origin of Whales", Action Bioscience, 2006).
It is also worth appreciating the fragility of evolutionary accounts of whales' origins. For in the 60s, evolutionists thought whales had evolved from an extinct group of hyena-like animals; in the 90s, it was hippopotamuses; and now it is something different again. That former theories have been supplanted by such meagre evidence is therefore concerning. For if the evidence for the present theory is slim, then the evidence for its predecessors must have been even slimmer; and yet the claim that whales had evolved from land-dwelling mammals has always been proclaimed with certainty. And the picture is the same elsewhere. As Stern explains,
"Missing 'links' are frequently referred to, but often it is whole 'chains' that are missing [when] science has recognised [only] a few isolated links." (Stern, "Introductory Plant Biology", 3rd Ed., Brown Publishers, Dubuque, 1985, p517)
Stern is exactly right.
...ii] phylogenetic...
Phylogenetics is the branch of science that concerns itself with reconstructing the specific paths of evolution, with working out what descended from what. Briefly put, phylogenetics proceeds on the basis of two key assumptions:
i] that the history of life can be represented as an unbroken network of ancestral-descendant relationships, and

ii] that the more similar two organisms are, the more closely related they must be (which, given i], is perfectly reasonable).
The aim of phylogenetics, then, is to organise life's many groups into "family trees". These trees include branchings (as new species are formed via speciation), dead-ends (as species become extinct), and hybridisations (as species merge together), with the uppermost twigs representing the species around us in the world today.
When paleontologists assemble transitional series, they are therefore involved in phylogenetics, for they are reconstructing the branches of phylogenetic trees. However, there is a problem with this endeavour. For a sequence of fossils needs to be extremely smooth—extremely finely-graduated—if it is to give us any insight into the course of evolution. Which is almost never the case. As the following paleontologists explain,
"A direct method of tracing phylogenies [is] to trace a series of fossils that [closely] resemble each other but show a sequence of changes leading through time from an ancestral to a descendant form...This works well when abundant fossils are available in a continuous record, but unfortunately the fossil record is quite incomplete." (Ayala & Valentine, "Evolving: The Theory and Process of Organic Evolution", 1978, p230)
"Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most [of life's] complex morphological adaptations." (Gould & Eldredge, "Species Selection: Its Range and Power", 1988, p19)
As a result, paleontologists have to make a lot of assumptions. They arrange their data into broad groups on the basis of its shared similaries (something that looks like an ape, for instance, gets put in the homonoid tree, something that looks like a reptile in the reptile tree, and so on). Groups of fossils exhibiting particular "trends"—fossils that look similar in some respects yet vary in others—are then arranged into "branches"; and where the gaps in between these fossils are thought to be sufficiently small, they are said to be transitional series (though of course in one sense all fossils are transitional on an evolutionary view). Miller explains this well, saying
"The recognition of transitional forms is as much a question of taxonomy as it is a statement about the nature of the fossil record. Taxonomy produces its own patterns which order the diversity of life." (Miller, "Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record", Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS66506)
A prime example is the whale series mentioned earlier. Fossils are found which, when aligned in a particular order, are similar in some respects yet different in others (they have similar ear structures and progressively shorter forelimbs). As such, they are viewed as transitionals, as data points on an evolutionary pathway (in this case between land-dwelling mammals and whales).
However, there are major problems with this method of interpreting the fossil record. We have already touched on some practical ones: the gaps tend to be too large, the similarities too few, or the progressions (i.e. the evolving parts) too insignificant. So, often, there is no good reason to view many proposed TSs as stepping stones on an evolutionary pathway as opposed to a distinct species that have remained static over time (as per the general pattern of the post-Cambrian). But there is also a deeper theoretical problem. For similarities in appearance are not always a good indicator of phylogenetic relatedness. Meaning arranging fossils into phylogenetic trees on the basis of superficial similarities is potentially misleading. As Lewin says,
"To infer a genetic relationship between two species [i.e. to infer that species S descended from species R] on the basis of a similarity in appearance...can be deceptive...because similarity of structure does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage: a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar [but belong to different family trees]." (Lewin, "Bones of Contention", New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p123)
Nor are sharks and porpoises unique (or even particularly unusual) in this respect. The Tasmanian tiger (a marsupial native to Australia), for instance, looks so much like a dog that the two are often confused; yet they are significantly distant in terms of their phylogenetic relatedness. Indeed, similar body-parts evolve via different evolutionary lineages so frequently that the phenomenon has developed into its own field of enquiry, namely "convergent" or "parallel" evolution. As John Zachary Young says,
"Similar features repeatedly appear in distinct lines [of descent]...so common[ly] that it is almost a rule that detailed study of any group produces a confused taxonomy. Investigators are unable to distinguish populations that are parallel...from those truly descended from each other." (Young, "Life of the Vertebrates", Oxford University Press, USA, 1950, p779)
Take, for instance, the evolution of the eye, and consider in particular the Ostracoda. The Ostracoda is a small shrimp-like creature of the phylum Arthropoda. It has highly developed compound eyes almost identical to those of many its cousins. The natural assumption, then, is to think that the Ostracoda and its cousins inherited their eyes from a common ancestor. However, for other reasons, most biologists place the Ostracoda in a small "eyeless" phylogenetic tree nested within that of the wider phylum. The end result is therefore awkward, for as Todd Oakely and Clifford Cunningham write,
"One of two seemingly very unlikely evolutionary histories must be true [of the arthropods]. Either compound eyes with detailed similarities evolved multiple times in different arthropod groups [which is hard to believe] or compound eyes have been lost in a seemingly inordinate number of arthropod lineages [which is equally hard to believe, for it is difficult to imagine how natural selection could favour the loss of sight]." (Oakley & Cunningham, "Molecular phylogenetic evidence for the independent evolutionary origin of an arthropod compound eye", PNAS, Vol 99, No 3, 2002, p1426-1430)
And the situation is not dissimilar elsewhere in the animal kingdom. As a result, biologists like Dawkins hypothesise that the eye evolved "at least 40 times independently." (Dawkins, "Where d'you get those peepers?", New Statesman & Society, Vol 8, June 1995, p29)
Wing evolution is another case in point. For the closest common ancestor of insects, birds, pterodactyls, and bats—all of whose wings are strikingly similar in terms of their underlying design—is thought to be a primitive wingless organism. Thus, evolutionists hypothesise that similar wing-designs evolved independently of each other in at least four different evolutionary lineages; which stretches credulity, not least because evolutionists are far from clear on how wings could have evolved even once. Carroll puts the point well, asking,
"How can we explain the gradual evolution of entirely new structures, like the wings of bats, birds, and butterflies, when the function of a partially evolved wing is almost impossible to conceive?" (Carroll, "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p8-10).
As Sattler and others conclude, then,
"In general, the homology of structures [i.e. the fact that different animals share many of the same features] cannot be ascribed to inheritance of homologous genes or sets of genes." (Sattler, "Homology—A Continuing Challenge", Systematic Botany, 1984, 9(4):386)
"[Evolution by DNA mutations] is largely uncoupled from morphological evolution." (Raff & Kaufman, "Embryos, Genes, and Evolution", Macmillan, New York, 1983, p67-78)
In short, that two species have certain morphological similarities is no guarantee that one has descended from the other. Thus Lowenstein and others:
"Anatomy and the fossil record cannot be relied on for defining evolutionary lineages. Yet, paleontologists persist in doing just this...The subjective element in this approach to building evolutionary trees...is demonstrated by [its] outcome: there is no single family tree on which they agree." (Lowenstein & Zihlman, [In reference to human evolution], Nature, Vol 355, 1992, p783)
"All the [hominoid] fossils which have been dug up are claimed to be ancestors [of homo sapiens]... but we haven't the faintest idea whether they are ancestors...All you've got is homo sapiens there...that fossil there...another fossil there...and it's up to you to draw the lines, because there are no lines [in the rocks]." (Lewontin, Interviewed by Bethell, "Agnostic Evolutionists", Harper's Magazine, Feb 1985, p60-61)
"We've got to have some ancestors. We'll pick those. Why? Because we know they have to be there, and these are the best candidates. That's by and large the way it has worked. I am not exaggerating." (Gereth Nelson, Wall Street Journal, Dec 9, 1986)
"Ancestral-descendant relationships cannot be objectively recognized in the fossil record." (Schoch, "Evolution Debate," Science, Apr 83, p360.)
Of course, if life's fossil record formed a network of finely-graduated chains, then things would be different. But it doesn't. It was therefore hoped (about 30 or 40 years ago) that advances in our ability to analyse organisms at the molecular level would to inject some much-needed objectivity into the task of reconstructing evolutionary lineages. However, as we will now see, this hope has not been realised.
Note: A full discussion of the fossil record's interpretation should also include a discussion of dating methods. But this is beyond the scope of the present essay.
...(ii) cont'd...molecular phylogenetics...
While the morphological aspect of phylogenetics works by comparing species' morphologies, molecular phylogenetics works by comparing species' molecular make-up, by analysing their DNA, rRNA and proteins. The more similar two organisms' "molecular signatures" are, the more closely related they are assumed to be. Similar organisms are assumed to have descended from a common ancestor in the recent past, different ones from a more distant ancestor.
In theory, then, molecular phylogenetics provides a number of (at least semi-) independent ways of reconstructing an organism's phylogenetic tree, since organisms have hundreds of different genes and proteins available for analysis. Phylogenetic research therefore has the potential to generate a self-authenticating set of data. But in practice things have not worked this way. As Lake et al testify,
"About a decade ago,...scientists started analysing a variety of genes from different organisms, [but] found that their relationships to each other contradicted the evolutionary tree of life derived from rRNA analysis." (Lake, Jain & Rivera, "Mix and Match in the Tree of Life", Science 283, 1999, p2027-2028)
In other words, analysing DNA molecules produces one set of results but analysing rRNA molecules produces a completely different set. Nor do the problems stop there. For results can also depend on which particular gene one analyses. As Lewin and others explain,
"Different genes tell different stories." (Lewin, "Family Feud", New Scientist, Vol 157, 1998, p39)
"Analyses based on different genes (and even different analyses based on the same genes) yield...a diversity of phylogenetic trees." (Lynch, "The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla", Evolution 53, 1999, p319-325)
And the situation is no different when it comes to proteins. As Philippe and others explain,
"Most protein phylogenies contradict each other—as well as the rRNA tree." (Philippe & Forterre, "The Rooting of the Universal Tree of Life Is Not Reliable", Journal of Molecular Evolution, No 49, 1999, p509-523)
"No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced." (Woese, "The universal ancestor", PNAS USA 95, 1998, p6854-6859),
Which is far from helpful when one is trying to introduce some objectivity into a branch of scientific enquiry plagued with subjectivity.
By way of analogy, suppose I am a detective investigating a murder-scene. I submit various pieces of evidence to a laboratory for testing. The results tell me that, on the basis of DNA evidence, P is guilty; on the basis of forensic evidence, Q is guilty (one should always be suspicious of people called Q in any case); and, on the basis of some other evidence, P and Q are both innocent. What am I to conclude? Faced with such incongruous results, all I can conclude is that the evidence is inconclusive. And this situation facing molecular phylogeneticists today is not dissimilar. As Woese says (continuing his earlier statement about protein phylogenies),
"Incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree...[and] are sufficiently frequent and statistically solid that they can neither be overlooked nor trivially dismissed on methodological grounds." (Woese, Ibid)
This is not to say that molecular phylogenetics is a fruitless endeavour or that its findings do not provide strong circumstantial evidence for evolutionism. But, on the whole, molecular phylogenetics has done little to help paleontologists reconstruct evolutionary lineages. Indeed, in many cases it has only introduced further confusion. Recall, for instance, the land-dweller-to-whale series and consider Dennis Normile's report of a 1998 conference on the subject:
"Researchers who learn how living animals are related by studying their DNA have tended to group cetaceans—whales, dolphins, and porpoises—with the...artiodactyls [i.e. pig-like animals]. By some analyses, [however], hippos are the closest living whale relatives. [Yet] to paleontologists, who study fossils, that conclusion has long been anathema...[Paleontologists] contend that cetaceans descended from [elsewhere]." (Normile, "New Views of the Origins of Mammals", Science, Vol 281, No 5378, Aug 1998, p774-775)
And such difficulties are not unusual. As Stern says:
"There is little unanimity of thought...as to precisely how evolution proceeded in the past. One authority will be convinced that a certain group evolved from another, while other equally eminent authorities will maintain that the exact reverse occurred." (Stern, "Introductory Plant Biology", 3rd Ed., Brown Publishers, Dubuque, 1985, p517)
...summing up point (ii)...
Let us try to draw some threads together then. What have we learnt from our discussion of phylogenetics?
If a given transitional series is to count as evidence for the claim that one group of animals has evolved into another—if we are to regard some TS as revealing the course of evolution—, then we need good reason to view its members are phylogenetically related. The fossil record, however, is not sufficiently smooth to provide such a reason (which is precisely why the field of phylogenetics is plagued with so much disagreement). As a result, phylogeneticists have looked elsewhere, specifically, at existing organisms' molecular signatures. However, their research has done little to help the situation, leaving us with very little we can say for sure about life's history. Morris and Patterson's candid comments sum up the situation admirably,
"When discussing organic evolution [i.e. the development of complex forms from simpler ones], the only point of agreement seems to be [that] it happened. Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd." (Conway Morris, "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold", Cell, Vol 100, Jan 2000, p1-11)
"Last year I had a sudden realization...I had been working on [evolutionary theory] for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it...Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory...So, for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people...'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution—any one thing that is true?'
"I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence [until] eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing: it ought not to be taught in high school'...
"I've had [a different answer] from several people in conversation:
'Convergence is everywhere' (Patterson, "Evolutionism and Creationism", Transcript of Address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York NY, November 5, 1981, p2)
Patterson is right. Convergence (similar structures evolving in different lineages) is indeed everywhere. But this being so, where is the evidence for common ancestry?
"It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow...[and that the] explanatory value of the hypothesis of common ancestry is nil [i.e. that assuming common ancestry does nothing to help us understand life's fossil record]." (Patterson, Ibid)
...(iii) too much theory...
In the opening section of this essay, we saw that science's naturalistic bias is not necessarily a good thing, that it makes it possible for evolutionary theory to derive support, not from evidence of things evolving, but from simply presupposing common ancestry. Here, expanding on point (ii) & (iii), we will see that this not just a possibility but an accurate description of the practice of many scientists.
Consider the following question. What would we expect the fossil record to look like if evolutionism were true, if natural processes had in fact transformed a single, simple life-form into the millions of species we see around us today? Surely we would expect it to contain evidence of the gradual evolution of new species—and thus the gradual evolution of new body-parts like wings and limbs—via smooth series of intermediate forms. In fact, however, the fossil record doesn't do this. For if it did, the issue of reconstructing life's phylogenies would be a trivial matter about which there would be little or no disagreement. Fossils would "arrange themselves" into lines, like drawings in a cartoon strip. In reality, however, doing paleontology is about arranging isolated points of data into oft-disputed lines of descent on the basis of evolutionary presuppositions. As Hickman and others relate:
"It has seldom been possible to piece together ancestor-dependent sequences...that show gradual, smooth transitions between species." (Hickman, Roberts & Hickman, "Integrated Principles of Zoology", Times Mirror/Moseby College Publishing, St Louis, 1988, p866)
"New fossil discoveries are fitted into [a] pre-existing story...[and] we call these new discoveries 'missing links'...In reality, [however],...each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps." (Gee, p32)
"Biologists...pick out species at different points in geological time that seem to fit on some line of directional modification through time...[However, such trends] may exist more in the minds of the analysts than in phylogenetic history." (Eldredge, "Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks", 1989, p134)
In other words, fossils are arranged into plausible-looking series—lines of descent—and it is then assumed that the intermediate forms failed to fossilise. As Kemp says,
"[Gradualists] interpret the fossil record in terms of [their] theory,...inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?" (Kemp, "A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record", New Scientist, Vol 108, 1985, p66-67)
Pronouncements like the following should tip us off to the existence of this kind of practice:
"Although the transition [from fish to amphibians] doubtless occurred over a period of millions of years, there is no known fossil record of these stages." (Adler, "Encyclopedia of Reptiles & Amphibians", Equinox, Oxford, 1986, p4)
"The fossil record is not picking up things we know are there" (Waddell, Quoted by Normile, "New Views of the Origins of Mammals", Science, Aug 1998, Vol 281, p775)
Perhaps, however, the reason the transitional fossils are not there is because they never existed in the first place.
Consider a concrete example—human evolution. The fossil evidence for the evolution of man is typically (at least in popular works) described ias substantial (the 2008 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, for intance, describes it as "abundant"). In reality, however:
"All the evidence for the hominid lineage between about 10 and 5 million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box." (Gee, Ibid, p202)
"There is a popular image of human evolution that you'll find all over the place...On the left of the picture there's an ape...On the right, a man...Between the two is a succession of figures that become ever more like humans...Our progress from ape to human looks so smooth, so tidy. [And] it's such a beguiling image that even the experts are loath to let it go. But it is an illusion." (Wood, "Who are we?", New Scientist, Oct 2002, Issue 2366)
"Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory-building, which...strongly influences the way fossils are interpreted." (Pilbeam, Quoted in "Bones Of Contention", New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p127)
"It is in fact a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions...[In reality], data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions." (Lewin, "Bones of Contention", NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p68)
In other words, when interpreting the fossil record, evolutionary theory does far too much work. At the end of the day, a fossil record that is not sufficiently finely-graduated to reconstruct life's phylogenies—that does not allow us to work out what evolved from what—is not a fossil record that supports evolutionary theory, no matter how one chooses to explain that fact. Nor, in and of itself, does the fact that two organisms possess similar body-parts or DNA molecules imply that they share a common ancestor any more than it implies that they share a common designer. After all, different models of Ferrari possess similar body-parts. But this isn't because they have evolved from a common ancestor; it is because they have been designed by the same company.
Summing up,
"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story." (Gee, "In Search of Deep Time", Comstock Publishing, 2001, p116-117)
"The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches...The rest—[i.e. the claim that these data-points evolved into each other]—is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils...We never see the very process we profess to study." (Gould, "The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change" in The Panda's Thumb, New York: Norton & Company, 1980, p179-185)
"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory...which we use to interpret the fossil record." (West, "Paleo-ecology and Uniformitarianism", Compass, Vol 45, 1968, p216)
Grasse and Kitts concur. Their statements are revealing.
"[Darwinists] search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction... This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems...Assuming that the Darwinian hypothesis is correct, [Darwinists] interpret fossil data according to it; [in which case] it is only logical that they should confirm it: the premises imply the conclusions. The error in method is obvious...
"The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism [i.e. their dedication to a naturalistic worldview], purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs." (Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation", [1973], Academic Press: New York, 1977, p7-8)
"Paleontologists and evolutionists have frequently turned to [the] fossils for crucial tests of some theory [e.g. to find out which species something descended from]...only to come away with the realization that the answers lie more in the theory they have presupposed in their interpretation of the fossil record than in the record itself and that, indeed, there isn't even any record at all until [they] somehow make one out of extant rocks and objects that seem to be the broken remains of plants and animals." (Kitts, "Search for the Holy Transformation", A Review of "Evolution of Living Organisms", Paleo-biology, Vol 5, 1979, p353-354)
...(iv) rarity...
Perhaps, however, the most important question that needs to be asked of evolutionists' proffered transitional is "Why there are so few of them?" (the next question being "And why those that do exist comprise so few fossils?"). After all, given the amazing diversity of plants and animals in life's past and present biota together with phylogenetics' inherent uncertainties, it is hardly surprising that paleontologists can take a handful of the millions of fossils at their disposal and make a plausible-looking series out of them. Surely, however, if every living creature had evolved from a single common ancestor, we could expect "one of the best-documented examples of mammal evolution" to consist of more than four or five incomplete fossils. Surely the post-Cambrian should be full of transitional series, teeming with the "countless intermediates" Darwin and his contemporaries expected to find. Yet, as we have seen over and over again, this isn't the case.
"What one finds [in the fossil record is] nothing but discontinuities. All species are separated from each other by bridgeless gaps; intermediates between species are not observed...[and] the problem [is] even more serious at the level of the higher categories." (Mayr, "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance", The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982, p524)
"Over 10,000 fossil species of insects have been identified, over 30,000 species of spiders, and similar numbers for many sea-living creatures. Yet so far the evidence for step-by-step changes leading to major evolutionary transitions looks extremely thin." (Hoyle, "The Intelligent Universe", Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1983, p43)
"The record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition." (Woodroff, Reviewing Stanley's "Macro-Evolution", Science, Vol 208, 1980, p716)
"The origin of no innovation of large evolutionary significance is known." (Wesson, "Beyond Natural Selection", 1991, p45)
Evolutionists normally respond by saying that creationists' demand for transitional series are unreasonable. However, the average species survives for something like 4 million years, meaning there are roughly:
(4,000,000) multiplied by (the average number of organisms in its population) divided by (the length of time separating its generations)
Chances for the average species to fossilise. And the mind boggles to think of the millions of intermediate species that would have been required to bridge the gaps that separate, say, bats, whales, monkeys, and cows (which are only the tip of the iceberg, since they are the smaller, inter-phyletic gaps!). Moreover, there are certain groups of animals (e.g. mollusks) where the fossil record is near complete yet just as static and discontinuous as that of the other groups. As Denton writes:
"G.G. Simpson recently estimated the percentage of living species recovered as fossils in one region of North America and concluded that, at least for larger terrestrial forms, the record may be almost complete!...According to an article by Wyatt Durham in the Journal of Paleontology, "as many as 2% of all marine invertebrate species with hard skeletal components that have ever existed may be known as fossils". Assuming ten to twenty species per genus, this means that for certain groups, such as mollusks (which are ideal fossil material) the percentage of genera known could be as high as 50%. There are, therefore, grounds for believing that in the case of some groups appealing to the imperfection of the fossil record as an explanation for the gaps is not a particularly convincing strategy." (Denton, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis", Bethesda: Maryland, Adler & Adler, 1986, p162-165, 189-190)
The artifact hypothesis (hereafter "AH") therefore fails. For as was the case with the CE, there is a specific pattern that needs explaining. When we examine the post-Cambrian record, we don't just find randomly-distributed gaps; we find that whenever a major transition takes place—whenever a new morphological adaptation arises—there is a notable break in the record. One minute there are wingless creatures; the next there are creatures with fully-developed wings. One minute there is no trace of feathers; the next, there they are, fully-formed and without pre-cursors. As Simpson says, initially referring to mammalian evolution,
"Continuous transitional sequences are not merely rare, but are virtually absent...Their absence is so nearly universal that it cannot, offhand, be imputed entirely to chance, and does require some attempt at special explanation..." (Simpson, "Tempo and Mode in Evolution", Columbia University Press, New York, 1944, p105-107)
"The earliest and most primitive known members of every order [of mammals] already have the basic ordinal characters [i.e. the distinctive features of that order] and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. [In fact], in most cases, the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed [i.e. we don't know what evolved from what]...This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate;...it is true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla; and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants." (Ibid)
"Discontinuities are almost always and systematically present at the origin of really high categories, and, like any other systematic feature of the record, this requires explanation." (Simpson, "The Major Features of Evolution", [1953], Columbia University Press: New York, 1955, Second Printing, p361-366)
To see this, suppose evolution occurred as per Darwin's tree—slowly and gradually; and suppose the fossil record is severely but randomly incomplete. Now, what sort of pattern would we expect to see in the fossil record? We would expect to see a fairly well-spread but sparse selection of fossils (for the same reason that if we left ten empty buckets out in the rain for an hour, we would expect each of them to be evenly if only partially filled). We could therefore expect the morphological gaps separating similar species—say, a sheep and a cow—to be unfilled; but we would expect a much bigger gap—say, the gap separating a sheep and a monkey—to be punctuated by numerous transitional forms, even if they were fairly isolated.
What we do see, however, is quite the opposite. We see dense clusters of fossils separated by large unfilled gaps. That is to say, the record is, not sparse and evenly-spread, but concentrated in some places and empty in others. We find the odd candidate with which to connect, say, different types of cattle (by means of common ancestry), but we find nothing with which to connect cattle to, say, apes. Recalling our previous analogy, this is the equivalent of finding two out of the ten buckets full to the brim and the others empty.
We can consider this in terms of the morphological diagrams we previously considered.
Suppose the horizontal lines (labelled I to XII on the right hand side of the page below) represent different points in time. And suppose, at each of these points in time, the creatures in existence fossilise: that is, suppose the fossil record is severely incomplete.
Now, what kinds of fossils should we see? Judging by the x-coordinates of the points where the horizontal lines intersect the tree of life, we should see fossils evenly distributed across the morphological spectrum.
In reality, however, the fossil record does not reveal such a distribution. On the contrary, certain intervals of the x-axis are heavily populated with fossils while others are blank. We find thousands of different types of, for instance, fossilised reptiles, and thousands of different types of fossilised birds, yet almost nothing with which to plug the gap (like a reptile beginning to evolve bird-like features).
Nor is this situation unique—or even unusual. As Robert Carroll says,
"Although an almost incomprehensible number of species inhabit [the] earth today, they do not form a continous specrum of barely distinguishable intermediates. Instead, nearly all species can be recognized as belonging to a relatively limited number of clearly distinct major groups, with very few illustrating intermediate structures or ways of life...One [would expect to see] a very different pattern among extinct plants and animals. Fossils would be expected to show a continuous progression of slightly different forms linking all species and all major groups with one another in a nearly unbroken spectrum. In fact, most well-preserved fossils are as readily classified in a relatively small number of major groups as are living species." (Carroll, "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution", Cambridge University Press, 1997, p8-10)
"The diagram used by Darwin to illustrate evolution...over the vast expanse of geological time is characterized by gradual and continuous change...The patterns established [by] the fossil record...are conspicuously different. There are relatively few major lineages, all of which are very distinct from one another. Gaps between the lineages indicate that adaptive space—[the x-axis]—is not fully occupied. Instead of showing gradual and continuous change through time, the major lineages appear suddenly in the fossil record, already exhibiting many of the features by which their modern representatives are recognized." (Ibid, p2-4)
Hence:
"Evolutionary biologists can no longer ignore the fossil record on the grounds that it is imperfect." (Woodruff, Science, May, 1980, p717)
"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change...This remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data [i.e. it has been seen as a lack of evidence of change as opposed to evidence of a lack of change]." (Gould, Harvard University, Lecture, Feb 80)
"Stasis, [however], is data." (Gould, "Opus 200", Natural History, Aug 1991, p16)
"The gaps in the fossil record are real [i.e. they represent history as it actually happened rather than an incomplete record]...[Indeed], the absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods [of time]; species seldom (and genera never) show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt." (Wesson, "Beyond Natural Selection", MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991, p45)
"It is special pleading to propose inadequate preservation. We would do better to look at what the record really says." (Waterhouse, University of Queensland, Inaugural Lecture, 1980)
"That discontinuities are almost always and systematically present at the origin of really big categories is an item of genuinely historical knowledge." (Kitts, Evolution, Vol 28, 1974, p467)
...a short aside...
Throughout this essay, I have sought to support my claims by reference to secular research (where the authors in question are theists, I have explicitly pointed this out). One would think this good practice. After all, the options are:
a] to cite secular research,

b] to cite creationist research, or

c] to state my own opinion and leave it at that,
In which case a] seems preferable. However, evolutionists often imply otherwise, claiming that since the scientists being cited are evolutionists, it is disingenuous to cite them as part of a case for creationism. However, this objection seems completely wrong-headed. (After all, how else should one support a case for creationism? By citing creationists?).
Take, for instance my citing of Gould's work. I have frequently referred to Gould's work in support to substantiate the claim that the fossil record is sharply discontinuous. (Gould is a "punctuated evolutionist": he thinks evolution occurs, not in small gradual steps, but in big sudden leaps). Projects like talkorigins' Quote Mine project, however, imply that this practice is disingenuous. They say, for instance, that it is incorrect to quote Gould saying
"Very rarely can we trace the gradual transformation of one entire species into another through a finely graded sequence of intermediary forms"
On the basis that "Gould et al don't reject evolution, but claim that phyletic evolution takes a second seat to speciation": that is to say, they only reject a particular theory as to how evolution happened (namely gradualism).
But this objection completely misses the point of citing secular research. Of course Gould et al don't reject evolutionary theory. If they did, they wouldn't be independent witnesses, so their testimony would add nothing to a creationist's argument. The whole point of referring to someone like Gould is to establish what the fossil data looks like from an evolutionist's perspective, to show that it's not just creationists who allege that the record is riddled with gaps. To dismiss such practice as disingenuous on the basis that Gould et al are evolutionists is therefore to completely miss the point. The fact remains that "finely graded sequence of intermediary forms" are absent from the fossil record.
...a quick stock-take...
So, then: what can we conclude from our discussion of the fossil record so far?
a] Rather than evolving gradually from a single source, life's various body-plans—the phyla—arise in a single geological moment;

b] Rather than demonstrating their capacity to change over time, most species appear fully mature and remain unchanged for millions of years: "they may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species" (Gould, Quoted by Sunderland in "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems", Master Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, 1984, p121-122);

c] Rather than blending seamlessly into one another, most fossils have to undergo significant modification to morph into their nearest fossilised relatives, and the size of the gaps only increases as one considers higher and higher taxa; and

d] Even granting the evolutionists' proffered transitional series, we are still completely without evidence of pre-Cambrian evolution. At best, then, the fossil record only illustrates "variation on a theme", i.e. how evolution can modify an existing design-plan in order to produce, say, spiders, crabs, scorpions and lobsters from a prototype arthropod. There is still no evidence that evolution can orchestrate the limitless progressive change required to produce fundamentally new design plans. By way of analogy, the fossil record illustrates how a car designer can modify a prototype in order to produce an array of different models of car but does nothing to show how, by means of the same process, boats and micro-wave ovens can be produced.
...the response...
How, then, have evolutionists responded?
The answer is instructive. For once it became clear that the fossil record wasn't going to yield the kind of evidence they had expected to find, there was no great concern, nor was there any suggestion that theories on life's origins might need a fundamental rethink (after all, evolution is the "trajectory all lines of thought must follow", right?). Instead, evolutionists came up with a different model of evolution—the "punctuated equilibria" model—which claims that evolution takes place not in small, gradual steps (as Darwin et al had first thought) but in large, punctuated leaps—hence the jerky nature of the fossil record. As Stanley writes,
"[Post-Cambrian] species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We [therefore] seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly...exactly where we are least able to study [it]...in small, localized, transitory populations...If the transition [is] rapid and the population small and localized, fossil evidence of the event [will] never be found." (Ibid, p77 & 110)
"Major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small, rapidly-evolving populations that leave no legible fossil record." (Stanley, "Macro-evolution and the Fossil Record", Vol 36, 1986, p460)
Thus, what modern-day evolutionists postulate is, not the familiar 'tree of life' where species gradually and organically evolve into new ones,
But a collection of individual twigs where new species are produced in flurries of evolutionary activity so rapid and localised that they leave no record in the rocks (as indicated by the hypothesised dotted lines connecting different species):
Thus Gould:
"When fossils are most common, evolution is most rarely observed...Nothing much happens for most of the time when evidence abounds; everything happens in largely unrecorded geological moments." (Gould, "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", Natural History, 1988, p14)
What can be said by way of response to Gould et al's punctuated model of evolution (hereafter "PE")?
First, it seems a decidedly ad hoc way of explaining the pattern of the fossil record. For if PE is the best explanation for what we see in the rocks—if we're forced to assume that the evolution of new species has left no fossil remains—, then surely, at face value, the fossil record disconfirms evolutionary theory. As Robert Ricklefs and others say,
"The punctuated eqilibrium model has been widely accepted, not because it has a compelling theoretical basis, but because it appears to resolve a dilemma [i.e. the gaps in the fossil record]...The model is more ad hoc explanation than theory, and...rests on shaky ground." (Ricklefs, "Paleontologists confronting Macro-evolution", Science, Vol 199, 1978, p59)
"It seems to me that [evolutionists] have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value, so they [have] searched around to find another model and found one...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence." (Patterson, Quoted by Sunderland in "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems", Master Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, 1984, p100)
Second, the evolutionists' position is decidedly tenuous. For if we ask "Why don't we see countless new species forming in the world around us?", the answer is "Because it happens too slowly", while if we ask "Why don't we see countless new species forming in the fossil record?", the answer is "Because it happens too quickly". It is possible, of course, that evolution takes place at just the wrong speed for us to observe it. But it is a tenuous position nevertheless.
Third, while PE better explains the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks than does gradualism, it still fails to explain the most notoriously un-Darwinian aspect of the fossil record, namely the Cambrian explosion. To see this, consider the way PE is said to work.
The basic idea behind PE is that pools of new species are produced rapidly in localised areas. Natural selection, then, rather than selecting the fittest members of a species, selects the fittest species. Thus, according to PE, the basic unit of selection is the species as opposed to the individual. Life's history proceeds, in Gould's words, not by means of "elimination" but by means of "expansion".
Now, this hypothesis perhaps explains the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks. But it still fails to explain the most notoriously un-Darwinian aspect of the fossil record, namely the sudden appearance of life's various phyla in the Cambrian Explosion. PE, then, is ultimately unhelpful. For while it is conceivable to think that a new species could arise suddenly and locally, no punctuationist thinks that new body-plans could arise in this way. To explain the CE, the punctuationist therefore needs a huge pool of pre-Cambrian species—a diverse array of life for natural selection to work with. But this is precisely what the pre-Cambrian record fails to reveal. Nor does it even hint at the existence of such a thing by showing, say, species in the process of developing new body-plans. Indeed, when it comes to predicting what the pre-Cambrian should reveal, the punctuationist and the gradualist are not all that far apart. As Dawkins says,
"Evolutionists of all stripes believe...that [the Cambrian explosion] really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record...[and] when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever [between] punctuationists and gradualists." (Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", Norton & Co, New York, 1996, p229-230)
That is, gradualists think life's pre-Cambrian history looked like this:
Where the root of the tree represents life's common ancestor and the dotted lines represent the defining boundaries of two different phyla (arthropods and echinoderms, perhaps). Punctuationists, on the other hand, think life's history looked like this:
Where the horizontal lines connecting species of different morphologies represent the rapid evolution posited by punctuationists. Either way, however, we should see a pre-Cambrian record rich with diverse forms rather than a record where they explode out of nowhere:
At best, then, PE is little more than an exercise in damage limitation.
Fourth, whatever PE gains in better explaining the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks, it loses by making the task of explaining how evolution occurs infinitely more difficult (for what drives the rapid, localised generation of new species, and how are such small populations established and maintained?).
Last, the advent of PE is a perfect illustration of Plantinga's earlier claim: that, as far as science is concerned, evolution is a foregone conclusion. For once it became clear that the fossil evidence—i.e. that without which evolutionary theory is "no more than an outrageous hypothesis"—did not reveal what was required of it, rather than questioning the truth of evolutionism, scientists simply explained away the lack of evidence just as Darwin had done 120 years prior. As Stanley says:
"[Post-Cambrian] species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We [therefore] seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly...exactly where we are least able to study [it]."
"Forced"? Stanley's reasoning seems to run as follows:
(1) Evolution is the only possible explanation for the existence of life's various species;

(2) We see little (if any) evidence of species evolving into one another in the fossil record;

(3) Therefore, evolution must have taken place so quickly and locally as to leave no record of its happening in the rocks.
And Stanley is by no means alone in employing such reasoning. As Gould says,
"Very rarely can we trace the gradual transformation of one entire species into another through a finely graded sequence of intermediary forms...There is an alternative, however. Perhaps...the observation of no change within species (and sudden replacement between them) reflects evolution as it actually occurs [i.e. perhaps evolution occurs in punctuated leaps]." (Gould et al., "A View of Life", 1981, p641)
"Perhaps", yes. Or perhaps evolution didn't happen at all. After all, how do punctuationists tell the difference between something that's happened without leaving any evidence of its happening and something that hasn't happened at all? Wouldn't it be sensible for scientists to at least consider the idea that the reason the fossil record looks so un-Darwinian is because life didn't actually evolve from a common ancestor? After all, if God created a number of different and morphologically distinct "kinds" and endowed them with the capacity to vary their forms within certain bounds—or if, as Augustine suggested over 1,500 years ago, God endowed his creation with an "inner potency" which "unfolded" in a number of distinct stages—wouldn't we expect the fossil record to look much the way it does?
...another stock-take...
From what we have seen so far, then, it seems the answer to the question "Does the fossil record provide convincing evidence for evolution?" is a fairly decisive no. As Mark Ridley says,
"A lot of people...think that the main evidence [for the theory of evolution] is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. [However], no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of evolution as opposed to special creation." (Ridley, 'Who doubts evolution?', New Scientist, Vol 90, June 1981, p830-832)
Kitts is of the same opinion:
"Few paleontologists have, I think, ever supposed that fossils, by themselves, provide grounds for the conclusion that evolution has occurred...The fossil record doesn't...provide any evidence in support of Darwinian theory except in the weak sense that the fossil record is compatible with it, just as it is compatible with other evolutionary theories, and revolutionary theories, and special creationist theories, and even ahistorical theories." (Kitts, "Search for the Holy Transformation", Paleobiology, Vol 5, 1979, p353-354)
And let us not forget the importance of the fossil record in all this. As Huxley says,
"The primary and direct evidence in favour of evolution can be furnished only by paleontology. If evolution has taken place, its marks will be left [in the rocks]; if it has not taken place, there will be its refutation." (Huxley, "Collected Essays, Vol II: The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species", 1989, p227-243)
"A theory is only as good as its predictions, and...Darwinism, [though it] claims to be a comprehensive explanation of evolutionary process, has failed to predict the widespread long-term morphological stasis now recognized as one of the most striking aspects of the fossil record." (Williamson, "Morphological stasis and developmental constraint", Nature, Vol 294, Nov 1981, p214)
...another aside...
We will now proceed to look, albeit more briefly, at evolutionary theory's proffered mechanisms. But before doing so, a quick comment is in order. For it may be that some readers are surprised by what they have read so far, that they find it incredible that the fossil record could be as un-Darwinian as I am claiming. If so, you are by no means alone. As Raup says:
"A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. [For] in the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found, yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks." (Raup, "Geology", New Scientist, Vol 90, 1981, p832)
"We [paleontologists] have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change...[We] have said that the history of life supports that [story], all the while really knowing that it does not." (Eldredge, "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria", Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p44)
But this, unfortunately, is the way of methodological naturalism.
...mechanisms...
Two key questions need to be asked of evolutionary theory:
i] As a matter of history, does it look like life has in fact evolved from a common ancestor? and

ii] Can we identify a naturalistic mechanism that could cause such a thing to happen—a mechanism capable of driving evolution uphill?
Thus far, we have concerned ourselves only with the first of these questions. The second question, however, is also worthy of consideration. For if the process of evolution looks eminently plausible, then we can perhaps be more forgiving of the evolutionist's interpretative leaps. If on the other hand the reverse is true—if evolution's processes are unexplained or, worse still, look inherently implausible—, then we have further reason to question the classic evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record.
...the process of change...
When we look at the world around us, it is plain to see that species are capable of adapting to their environments, and often with surprising speed. A good example of this is the peppered moth, a temperate species of moth with lighter and darker varieties.
Biologists have been studying the peppered moth for the last two hundred years or so, during which time its population has changed considerably. As Kettlewell explains:
"In England, before the Industrial Revolution, the trees were often covered with lightly-coloured lichens. As a result, the lightly-coloured moths were favoured, since they were harder to see against the bark of trees. The darkly-coloured moths, however, were easier to see and were therefore eaten by the birds [since birds eat whichever moths they can see the most easily].
"During the worst years of the Industrial Revolution, however, the air became very sooty, making the bark of the trees darker. As a result, the darker moths became harder to see, while the lighter moths became easier to see. Thus, the birds ate the lighter moths, meaning the dark moths became common and the light moths became rare. [In fact, the moth population went from being 99% lightly-coloured to being 98% darkly-coloured]." (Kettlewell, Paraphrased, "Your Book of Butterflies and Moths", Faber and Faber, Dec 1963)
The "peppered moth experiment" is therefore a dramatic illustration of how the frequency of a particular genetic trait can change over time, which is the essence of natural selection.
...natural selection...
Roughly speaking, then, natural selection is the process whereby a population's "helpful" traits—those traits which help an organism to survive and reproduce in is particular environment—multiply throughout a population while its unhelpful traits diminish. This happens because individuals with helpful traits are ipso facto more likely to reproduce than those without them. Thus, generation by generation, a progressively higher proportion of a population will inherit its helpful traits.
However, natural selection so defined clearly can't be what causes single-celled organisms to evolve into complex life-forms—life-forms with wings and hearts and brains and the like. For at the end of the day, natural selection is only as effective as the material it has to work with, having no creative powers of its own. As Leonard Harrison Matthews says of the peppered-moth experiments,
"The peppered-moth...experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection...but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the populations may alter...all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston betularia [that is, peppered moths]." (Harrison Matthews, Introduction to Centennial Edition, Origin of Species, J M Dent & Sons, London, 1971, p11)
In other words, natural selection can affect the frequency of a given gene—the proportion of a population that possesses it—but it cannot be what produces that gene in the first place. For all said and done, natural selection is just non-random death. As Loren Eiseley wrote over 50 years ago,
"Careful domestic breeding [which one would expect to be more successful that nature's attempts at selection], whatever it may do to improve the quality of race horses or cabbages, is not...in itself the road to the endless biological deviation which is evolution." (Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, Vintage, 1958, p223)
To see why, suppose a particular habitat favours, say, dogs with long hair over dogs with short hair—an arctic habitat, perhaps. Now, suppose a pack of dogs only 10% of which have the capacity to produce long hair venture into it. Over time, a progressively higher proportion of the pack will inherit the capacity to produce long hair: that is to say, the long-hair-producing gene will become increasingly common. This is the effect of natural selection; this is what NS is all about. However, this does nothing to explain how the capacity to produce long hair could arise in a world without such a capacity, much less a world without the capacity to produce hair of any kind. As Muller & Newman explain:
"Although the forces driving morphological evolution [i.e. the evolution of new body-parts and body-plans] certainly include natural selection, the appearance of specific [body-parts] must not be taken as being caused by natural selection; selection can only work on what already exists." (Muller & Newman, "Origination of organismal form: the forgotten cause in evolutionary theory", The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003, p3-12)
Hence the adage
"[Natural selection explains] the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest". (Gilbert et al, "Resynthesizing Evolutionary & Developmental Biology", Developmental Biology 173, Article No 32, 1996, p361)
What the evolutionist needs to explain, then, is not just how nature can select favourable traits once they've arisen but how nature can produce such traits in the first place. Which leads us nicely onto our next topic:
...information...
Producing new genetic traits means producing new genetic information. Intuitively speaking, this is fairly easy to see. However, it is hard to define information is any precise and meaningful way—especially when it comes to morphological structures like wings and feathers and the like. In what remains of this essay, I will therefore focus my efforts on examining the information problem as it applies to life at the molecular level, as it applies to things like proteins and DNA and so on. For it is here that information is most readily quantified.
To do this, I will first need to say a few things about the nature of proteins and the genome.
...proteins...
Protein are life's most fundamental building blocks. As Huntly Collins writes,
"It is proteins that carry out all the body's functions, from breathing to digesting food to reading the words on this page." (Collins, Knight Ridder News Service, "Scientists reveal first map of genes", The Oregonian, Dec 1999, pA13).
However, proteins are by no means simple things.
Proteins are long chains of amino-acids linked together like individual carriages in a train. Roughly speaking, it is the order and arrangement of these amino-acids that determines the shape and therefore the functionality of each particular protein.
Amino-acid molecules are both organic and acidic. They have a NH2 group at one end, a CO-OH group at the other end, and a carbon molecule attached to a "side-chain" in the middle (denoted "R" on the diagram below). This side-chain is different in each amino-acid and is what gives each amino-acid its distinguishing features.
When two amino-acids join together, one end of one of them (say, the CO-OH end) bonds with the other amino-acid's NH2 end, creating what is known as a peptide bond. The product (a line of two or more amino-acids) is then known as a residue.
However, proteins are not just 2-dimensional lines of amino-acids. Most proteins fold into highly complex unique 3-dimensional structures, due (largely) to the chemical properties of their various side-chains.
Side-chains can either be hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Hydrophobic ("oily") side-chains tend to cluster together on the inside of the protein—at "interior" sites. Hydrophilic ("water-loving") side-chains tend to locate themselves on the outside of the protein—at "exterior" sites.
Thus, the shape of a protein is determined (at least in part) by the order and relative quantities of its hydrophobic and hydrophilic side-chains. Changing the sequence of a protein's amino-acids therefore affects its shape (in some cases it doesn't, but it normally affects its chemical properties in other ways). Sickle cell anemia, for instance, occurs when a particular hydrophilic amino-acid in a haemoglobin molecule is substituted with a hydrophobic amino-acid. The result is that the molecule "sticks" to other haemoglobin molecules, thus impairing its functionality.
...specificity...
Why is any of this relevant to our discussion of evolution? For one thing, because it enables us to see in what sense the protein can be said to carry information.
For suppose I take some hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide and mix the two together in a test-tube. The results of this experiment are fairly predictable because the chemical properties of the various atoms involved determine which molecules react with which other molecules. (Specifically, the chlorine atoms bond with the sodium atoms, creating salt and water).
However, this is not true of amino-acids. All amino-acids bond—"couple together"—in basically the same way; an NH2 group bonds with a CO-OH group. Meaning the order in which a bunch of amino-acids link up cannot be attributed to their chemical properties. Chemically speaking, then, a bunch of amino acids are no more likely to link up to form any one sequence as opposed to any other.
What is paramount to appreciate, however, is that the vast majority of sequences of amino-acids perform no useful biological function (as we will see later). That is, just as very specific sequences of letters are required in order to spell out a meaningful English sentences (the majority of sequences of letters are meaningless), so very specific sequences of amino-acids are required in order to create useful proteins.
Proteins therefore exhibit what Christian philosopher and information-theorist William Dembski refers to as specifically improbable information (hereafter "SII").
Dembski explains the difference between SII and other types of information using the following illustration:
"Suppose an archer stands 50 metres from a large blank wall with bow and arrow in hand. The wall, let us say, is sufficiently large that the archer cannot help but hit it. Consider now two alternative scenarios. In the first scenario the archer simply shoots at the wall. In the second scenario the archer first paints a target on the wall, and then shoots at the wall, squarely hitting the target's bull's-eye. Let us suppose that in both scenarios where the arrow lands is identical.
"In both scenarios the arrow might have landed anywhere on the wall. What's more, any place where it might land is highly improbable. It follows that in both scenarios, highly complex information is actualized. Yet the conclusions we draw from these scenarios are very different. In the first scenario, we can conclude absolutely nothing about the archer's ability as an archer, whereas in the second scenario we have evidence of the archer's skill." (Dembski, Ibid)
Dembski gives a different illustration of this principle elsewhere in his writings:
"Consider [some] stones placed in a garden. In one instance the stones spell, "Welcome to Wales..."; in the other they appear randomly strewn. In both instances, the precise arrangement of the stones is vastly improbable. Indeed, any given arrangement of stones is but one of [an] almost infinite [number of] possible arrangements. Nonetheless, arrangements of stones that spell coherent English sentences form but a miniscule proportion of the total possible arrangements of stones. The improbability of such arrangements is [therefore] not properly referred to chance.
"What [then] is the difference between a randomly strewn arrangement and one that spells a coherent English sentence? Improbability by itself isn't decisive. In addition, what's needed is conformity to a pattern. When stones spell a coherent English sentence, they conform to a pattern. When they are randomly strewn, no pattern is evident." (Dembski, "The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities", Cambridge University Press, 1998, xi)
In other words, there are certain arrangements of matter that—taken at face value—look to be the product, not of chance, but of intelligence. It is possible of course that they are the product of chance. The archer might have been trying to miss the target, or the stones might have been thrown on the garden at random. However, the most natural explanation for such arrangements of matter is that they are the product of intelligence, the decisive factor being whether they exhibit specific improbability.
...back to proteins...
What, then, does Dembski's insight tell us about the sequence space of amino-acids (the 'sequence space' being the set consisting of each and every possible order in which amino-acids can be arranged)? Are proteins like randomly-strewn stones or intentionally-constructed sentences? The latter. As Axe explains:
"The overall prevalence of [typical-length amino-acid] sequences performing a specific function...may be as low as 1 in 10^77, adding to the body of evidence that [suggests that] functional [proteins] require highly extraordinary sequences." (Axe, "Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds", Journal of Molecular Biology, Aug 2004, 341(5):1295-1315).
In other words, only a minute proportion of the total number of arrangements of 150 amino-acids perform a useful biological function. Which may well explain why, despite decades of study and experiments, geneticists have observed few if any functional proteins arising by means of mutations. Of course, Axe is not claiming only one in every 10^77 amino-acids sequences is of any biological use. Sequences similar to that of a functional protein—sequences where, say, a couple of the 150 amino-acids have been changed—are able to perform the same function, albeit not as efficiently. So, for each functional protein, there is a cluster of similar sequences that perform that same function. But for the moment, the point we need to appreciate is that the arrangements of amino-acids necessary to create functional proteins is both specific and improbable, that proteins exhibit SII.
...back to information...
What, then, is the source of the information-content of proteins? New proteins are created all the time (as organisms grow and reproduce). So, what directs their construction? When we ask this question of something like a sequence of letters (such the one you are currently reading), the answer is obvious: the sentence has been constructed according to the plan of an outside intelligence (albeit a fairly limited one). But what about proteins?
Briefly put, the answer is the genome, the complete set of genes present in an organism.
To understand this answer more fully, we will need to spend some time considering the role of genes.
...DNA...
Living organisms are essentially a mass of individual cells (in the case of human beings, trillions of them). Each of these cells contains its own DNA molecule.
The DNA molecule is referred to as having a "double helix" shape. Its backbone consists of two parallel spirals of phosphates and sugars, each of these strands having a sequence of nucleotides attached to it. It is the order and sequencing of these nucleotides that spells out the information necessary to construct proteins.
Genes contain only four different nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (A, G, T, & C). In a sense, then, genes spell out how to construct different proteins using a four-letter alphabet. And given that there are 20 or so different amino-acids involved in the construction of proteins, it takes a sequence of 3 nucleotides (known as a triplet) to spell out each amino-acid.
Thus, the specific sequencing present in proteins depends on the specific sequencing of the nucleotides in life's genes. That is, just as the specific sequencing of the letters used to construct this sentence is dependent on the information present in an online data-file, the SII present in proteins is a copy—a re-arrangement—of the information present in life's DNA molecules.
"DNA works as a classical information system based on ternary coding [i.e. code that expresses information in groups of three characters]." (Koruga, "DNA as classical and quantum information system", Arch Oncol, 2005, 13[3-4]:115-20)
"The genetic information system is essentially a digital data...system." (Yockey, "Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life", Cambridge University Press, Preface, p10)
However, if we want to explain how naturalistic processes generate the SII present in proteins, appealing to life's DNA does not get us very far. For the question then arises, "Where does the SII present in life's DNA come from?". Grasse frames the question as follows:
"[Every] living being possesses an enormous amount of "intelligence", very much more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this "intelligence" is called "information", but it is...the same thing. It is not programmed...in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA...This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. [But] where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it.
"When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the "intelligence" which fashioned it comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows...[And] if to determine the origin of [the] information in, [say], a computer is not a false problem, why should the search for the information contained in cellular nuclei be?" (Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation", Academic Press: New York NY, 1977, p2)
Note, however, that in asking this question, we are not seeking to explain how life first arose. Rather, we are observing: a] that today's living world contains vastly more information than its common ancestor (e.g. the information required to construct things like eyes, hearts and ears together with the systems required to service these body-parts), and b] that much of this information arises in a single geological moment. We are then asking: "How was such information generated? What naturalistic processes were responsible for its creation?".
The answer, according to the evolutionist, is the genetic mutation. As Simpson and others say,
"All evolutionary change depends on mutations." (Simpson & Beck, "Life: An Introduction to Biology", [1957], Routledge & Kegan Paul, Shorter Ed., 1969, p143)
"[The] mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation found in natural populations, and the only new material available for natural selection to work on." (Ernst Mayr, "Populations, Species & Evolution", Belknap Press, 1970, p102)
The question, then, is whether this answer is a plausible one.
...DNA...
Every living cell in existence contains its own DNA molecule, and each DNA molecule is made up of several different genes (each gene being a sub-section of the DNA molecule as a whole). As Dawkins says,
"Our DNA lives inside our bodies. It is not concentrated in a particular part of the body, but is distributed among the cells. There are about a thousand million million cells making up an average human body, and (barring certain exceptions which we can ignore) every one of those cells contains a complete copy of that body's DNA." (Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", Ibid, Ch3)
When animals reproduce, a male sex cell and a female sex cell combine to create an embryo. This embryo has its own unique DNA molecule. Half of its information content comes from one parent; half from the other. This information then determines the way the embryo develops (along with certain other external factors—e.g. the size and shape of its immediate environment, etc). Thus, the ultimate reason a human embryo develops into a human being as opposed to, say, a fish is because of its DNA.
Every embryo begins life as a single cell. It then grows by making copies of itself, which it does by dividing its cells in half, by dividing each cell into two smaller cells and repeating this process over and over again. As cells divide in two, they make copies of their DNA, ensuring that each cell contains its own complete set of genetic information. Then, as more and more cells are created, the cells start to 'differentiate'. Some of them become tissues, others organs, others bones, and so on. As before, the way these cells differentiate is determined partly by their DNA and partly by external factors. As DNA is copied, however, errors can occur. An adenine molecule, for instance, might be copied as a guanine molecule, or a particular sequences might be inverted or missed out altogether. And this is what genetic mutations are all about.
How, then, do genetic mutations help the evolutionist? How can such occurrences create new information? The answer is not hard to see. After all, errors can and often do create new information in everyday life. Suppose, for instance, a secretary is taking a dictation from her boss, and she types "Fear Death" instead of "Dear Steph". As a result of her mistake, information has been added to her boss's dictation. So, why can't a similar thing can happen in the context of genetics?
What can be said by way of response to this suggestion? It certainly sounds possible. But possibilities come cheap. The question is whether or not it is plausible. And Grasse at least thinks not, saying,
"The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs [i.e. to adapt to their environments] seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal...require[s] thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events...There is no law against day-dreaming, but science must not indulge in it." (Grasse, Evolution of Living Organism, Academic Press, New York, 1977, p103)
"A single, freak, highly improbable event can conceivably happen. Many highly improbable events—drawing a winning lottery number or the distribution of playing cards in a hand of bridge—happen all the time. But a string of improbable events—drawing the same lottery number twice, or the same bridge hand twice in a row—does not happen naturally." (De Duve, "The Beginnings of Life on Earth", American Scientist 83, 1995, p429-37)
Grasse is surely right. To attribute thousands and thousands of "opportune appearances" to mere chance is tantamount to mere "day dreaming". For at the end of the day, evolution is about creating new organs and body-parts, which in turn means creating new types of cell, which in turn means creating new proteins. And as we have seen, proteins (or more precisely the genes directing the construction of proteins) contain the kind of information that doesn't naturally lend itself to being explained by chance.
...quantification...
To go any further with this discussion, however, we need to quantify some of the things we've been talking about. For even SII can arise by chance from time to time. To see this, suppose someone is dealt a royal flush in a poker game. Clearly, his hand contains SII. But we would not suspect him of cheating on these grounds alone. Suppose, however, our card player is dealt another royal flush the very next hand, and another the hand after that. Doubtless, we would now discard "the chance hypothesis" and become attracted to a more design-oriented hypothesis.
The intuition is plain enough. There comes a point when chance ceases to be a satisfactory explanation. But how can we apply this principle more scientifically? The answer is by seeing whether the improbability of a given event falls below the Universal Probability Bound (UPB), where the UPB is
"...the degree of improbability below which a specified event...cannot reasonably be attributed to chance, regardless of whatever probabilitistic resources from the known universe are factored in." (Universal Probability Bound, ISCID's Encyclopaedia of Science & Philosophy, iscid.org/encyclopedia/)
Estimating the UPB is therefore a case of estimating the probabilistic resources of the known universe. In Dembski's earlier work, he estimates the UPB as 10^-150: that is, 1 divided by the number of elementary particles in the observable universe (10^80), divided by the maximum rate per second at which transitions in physical states can occur (10^45), divided by a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe in seconds (10^25). According to Dembski, then, if the probability of an event falls below 10^-150, it is unreasonable to attribute its occurrence to chance. (Seth Lloyd estimates the UPB in a different way, however he arrives at a similar figure—10^-130; so Dembski's UPB is if anything overly conservative.
What does this tell us about the construction of proteins? certainly, it tells us that the existence of a 150-residue protein can be explained by reference to chance. For according to Axe, one in every 10^77 proteins in the amino-acid sequence-space perform useful biological functions. But the SII that emerges in the Cambrian explosion far exceeds that of a single 150-residue protein since some of the proteins involved are over 400 amino-acids in length (e.g. lysyloxidase), and the probability of even one such residue arising by chance is well below 10^-150.
Moreover, the probabilistic resources available to pre-Cambrian evolution are minute compared to those involved in estimating the UPB, for:
a] rather than having literally all the time in the world to evolve, the proteins created in the Cambrian explosion arose within a period of 6-10 million years: that is, 0.1% of the universe's history;

b] rather than occurring 10^45 times every second, mutations are rare phenomena (an average species experiencing something like 3 or 4 mutations per generation). Moreover, mutations need time to fix themselves within (i.e. multiply themselves throughout) a population, which takes still more generations; and

c] even helpful mutations can be lost (their carrier can be unlucky, the rest of its genes can be maladaptive, etc). Thus, 'hitting the target' just once may not be enough.
...what next?...
Where, then, does this leave the evolutionist? If chance mutations alone cannot explain the information that emerges in the Cambrian explosion, then what can? The answer is simple and elegant: chance plus natural selection; in other words, Neo-Darwinism. The thinking behind Neo-Darwinism as follows.
Chance alone cannot generate all life's information, and NS alone cannot generate anything fundamentally new. The two together, however, are potentially a very powerful combination. For while natural selection cannot in and of itself generate new information, what it can do is preserve information, thus providing a way for information to accumulate a bit at a time. As Dawkins writes in his book "Climbing Mount Improbable" (the climbing of Mount Improbable being a metaphor for generating life's complex species),
"If Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work...An eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck...To invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable's steepest cliff in one bound. [It will never happen]. What corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain? It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection." (Dawkins, "Mount Improbable", Norton & Co, 1997, p73-107)
Dawkin illustrates the difference between these two methods of scaling Mount Improbable in his book "The Blind Watchmaker".
"I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase of course is 'given enough time'.
"Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare, but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel'...How long will he take to write this one little sentence?" (Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", New York: Norton, 1986, p46-48)
The answer, according to Dawkins, is "about a million million million million million years". Which is far too long since it is "a million million million times as long as the universe has...existed". However, as we have intimated, nature needn't perform a task of this magnitude; instead, it can accumulate information a bit at a time. Accordingly, Dawkins modifies the monkey-and-typewriter scenario to show how this affects things.
"[This time, let us use] a computer monkey...with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters...[It then] duplicates the sequence repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error—i.e. 'mutation'—in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases (the 'progeny' of the original phrase) and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, 'METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL'." (Ibid)
In other words, Dawkins imagines a computer program where the useful mutations are fixed or preserved in a manner similar to how a "Hold" button fixes the position of a wheel on a fruit machine. The result is that the program arrives at its target phrase in a mere 43 generations.
Generation 01: 'WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P '
Generation 02: 'WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P'
Generation 10: 'MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P'
Generation 20: 'MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL'
Generation 30: 'METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL'
Generation 40: 'METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL'
Generation 43: 'METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL'
The parallels between the monkey program and the process of evolution are easy to see. The generating of new sentences is mirrored by genetic mutations; the fixing of the correctly-placed letters by natural selection. A new protein can then be said to have evolved when the sentence reaches its target. In this way, the mutation-plus-selection method dramatically reduces the odds of generating specifically improbable information. As Ruse explains,
"Natural selection allows the successes, but 'rubs out' the failures. Thus, selection creates complex order, without the need for a designing mind...Selection makes the improbable actual." (Ruse, "Darwinism Defended", Addison-Wesley, 1982, p308)
However, while there are obvious analogies between Dawkins' computer monkey and the process of evolution, there are also major disanalogies. For Dawkins' program has the capacity to do precisely what natural selection does not have the capacity to do, namely to prefer one sentence over another on the basis that it resembles a pre-specified target phrase. After all, according to N&E, there is no target as such. NS has no goals or objectives in mind. So, mutations can only be selected on the premise that they are immediately beneficial to the organism carrying them. As John Maynard Smith says,
"If evolution by natural selection is to occur, [then] functional proteins must form a continuous network which can be traversed by...mutational steps without passing through non-functional intermediates." (Maynard Smith, "Natural selection and the concept of protein space", Nature 225, 1970, p563-564)
Of course, Dawkins is not unaware of this fact. Presumably, then, his monkey program was intended to be a mere illustration of a principle rather than a realistic simulation of evolution in action. But it is a helpful illustration, since it gives us the starting point for constructing a more realistic simulation of evolution in action. We can do so by making the following alterations:
i] we begin (in generation 1) with a phrase that is already functional—say "TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN";

ii] we define a "validation rule" specifying that, if a mutation produces a meaningful sentence, it is fixed: if not, it is rejected (that is, generation n is reset to generation n-1's sequence); and

iii] we introduce a bug into the program that occasionally deletes useful mutations.
We now have a far more realistic model of evolution in action. The problem, however, is that we do not arrive at our target phrase in anything like 43 generations. In fact, we may well not arrive at it at all. Why? Because strings of letters don't seem to form a network of meaningful sentences that can be traversed by changing a letter at a time. Instead, they seem to form islands of meaning in a sequence-space of overwhelming meaninglessness:
Thus, in Dawkins' monkey program, natural selection, rather than facilitating the accumulation of information, actually ends up preventing it—which, if the simulation is an accurate one, may well explain why life's fossil record is characterised by stasis as opposed to change.
What we need to determine, then, is whether sequences of amino-acids form a connected network of paths or a bunch of disconnected stepping stones. We are already some way towards answering this question, for we have already considered the density of the protein sequence-space. But we have not yet investigated how readily proteins lose their functionality; and this is critical. For if proteins are resistant to change—if they can significantly alter their amino-acid make-up and yet still perform the same function—, then even a very sparsely populated sequence-space might be traversable by way of functional intermediaries. So, how easily do proteins lose their functionality? Are they like a sentence which, when you randomly altered, say, one in every three of its letters loses its meaning, or are they more hardy creatures than this?
...the sea-scape model...
When discussing the evolution of proteins, biologists often employ a "sea-scape" model (as shown above). The horizontal plane represents the sequence space of proteins; different points on the plane represent different sequences of amino-acids; and the z-axis represents each protein's activity level—its functionality. The water-level marks the point at which a protein becomes dysfunctional, or in NS-terms, "unselectable". To assess the plausibility of protein evolution, then, we need to assess how sensitive a protein is to change. For the more sensitive a protein is to change, the smaller its island will be; and the smaller its island, the lower its chances of: a] being connected to other islands via NS, and b] being located at random by mutations. Conversely, the less sensitive a protein is to change, the larger its island and thus the greater its chances of being connected to other islands, and being located at random.
However, it is difficult to say how sensitive proteins are to change since our knowledge of the them is at best incomplete. That said, the picture that is beginning to emerge suggests that proteins are extremely sensitive to change, that making even minor adjustments to their sequencing quickly renders them dysfunctional. In which case their islands are likely to be relatively small.
...sensitivity...
A protein's amino-acids can be situated at either active or non-active sites. The sites where the protein comes into contact with its "target" are known as active sites; the rest are known as non-active sites.
Until recently, scientists thought that, while proteins were sensitive to substitutions at their active sites (swapping one amino-acid for a similar amino-acid resulted in a significant loss of function), the non-active sites were tolerant to substitutions. Axe summarises this situation at the beginning of his 2000 paper on protein sensitivity, saying,
"[Past] studies...have demonstrated that protein function...is compatible with a variety of amino-acid residues at most exterior non-active site positions. These observations have led to the...view that functional constraints on sequence are minimal at these positions." (Axe, "Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors", Journal of Molecular Biological, Aug 2000, 301(3):585-595)
However, Axe goes on to show that, when changes are allowed to accumulate (this kind of accumulated change being precisely what evolutionary theory relies on), this picture turns out to be incorrect. Axe demonstrates this by taking two proteins—barnase and TEM-1 beta-lactamase—and progressively substituting their amino-acids with different ones. He notes that, once one in every five of the proteins' amino-acids have been changed, a "complete loss of function" results, even when the changes in question are fairly conservative (that is, when none of the changes alone would cause significant functional disruption).
Axe's next step is to simulate the evolution of protein A into protein B where A and B are fairly similar proteins: that is, where protein B consists of a similar sequence of amino-acids to protein A yet performs a different biological function. He does this by constructing "a set of hybrid sequences" connecting A to B by means of slight, successive changes, just as one might connect the word WALKING to the word RUNNING by means of words like WULKING, RULKING, and RUNKING. Axe notes, however, that all such hybrids are "biologically inactive", saying,
"[The proteins] are best pictured as points on different quasi-islands...Much more water than land separates them...[and] it appears that the same could be said of an even more similar pair of [proteins]." (Axe, "Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors", Journal of Molecular Biological, Aug 2000, 301(3):585-595)
Blanco et al second both of Axe's conclusions, saying,
"Both [active and non-active sites] are important in determining the structure of the proteins and suggest that the appearance of a completely new "fold" [i.e. a feature capable of providing new functionality] from an existing one is unlikely to occur by evolution through a route of folded intermediate sequences." (Blanco et al, "Exploring the conformational properties of the sequence space between two proteins with different folds", Journal of Molecular Biology, Volume 285, Number 2, Jan 1999, p741-753)
The picture that is beginning to emerge, then, is that proteins are highly sensitive to change, giving us good reason to think that:
a] protein islands are small, for whether one changes residues at active sites or non-active sites, a complete loss of function soon results once such changes accumulate; and

b] protein islands are disconnected, for the pathways connecting similar proteins seem to be composed of biologically inactive intermediates.
In conclusion, then, the mutation-plus-selection mechanism doesn't seem able to explain the appearance of SII that characterises the Cambrian explosion, and this becomes especially clear once we bear in mind two further complications.
First, it is hard to see how selective-mutations could account for the new body-shapes and body-parts that arise in the CE. The reason for this is as follows. Different genes affect different stages of an organism's development and thus different aspects of the organism in question. Some genes, for instance, affect the earlier stages of an organism's development; others affect the later stages. During the early stages of development, the more fundamental aspects of an organism are decided: e.g. what shape it will be, how its body-parts will be laid out, and so on. During the later stages, the "details" are filled in: e.g. what colour it will be, how big it will be, and so on. Thus, mutations affecting late-acting genes have little impact on an organism's form, since by the time they become effective, the form is already decided. If mutations are to produce new body-shapes, they therefore need to affect genes that relate to an organism's early embryo-genesis. However, there are problems with this requirement:
a] mutations affecting an organism's early embryo-genesis are more likely to be harmful than mutations affecting its late-acting genes, meaning they are less likely to accumulate. As Kauffman explains, "A mutation disrupting formation of a spinal column and cord is more likely to be lethal than one affecting the number of fingers" for the same reason that a problem in a house's foundations is more serious than a problem with its interior furnishings.

b] "early mutations" don't seem to occur much in nature. As McDonald says, "those [genes] that are obviously variable within natural populations do not seem to [produce] many major adaptive changes (e.g. new body-parts), while those...that [are capable of producing] major adaptive changes are not variable" (McDonald, "The Molecular Basis of Adaptation", Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics 14, 1983, p93). So, what genetic variation we do see in the world around us is not the kind that produces major changes.
That mutations have generated new body-plans is therefore highly unlikely.
Second, genetic information is only itself one aspect or layer of an organism's hierarchy of biological information. That is, while DNA directs the construction of different proteins, it does not itself determine how these proteins should be assembled into larger systems such as cells. As Harold explains, "There is much more to [a cell's] growth and division than manufacturing the parts". For instance, "construct[ing] an efficient apparatus to partition its chromosomes, locat[ing] its midpoint, lay[ing] down a septum...Is all this elaborate choreography spelled out in particular genes? Evidently not, for the many genomes now on record apparently contain no genes that specify cellular forms and patterns. Genes specify the molecular parts, not their arrangement into a higher order." (Harold, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Vol 69, No 4, Dec 2005, p544-564). By way of analogy, suppose I am building a house. I require certain raw materials: bricks, pipes, glass, and so on. However, these raw materials do not tell me how they should be assembled. This requires further information, such as building plans. Similarly, the genome's instructions detailing how to construct proteins do not detail how such proteins should be organised into larger systems. Such organisation is directed by information outside of the genome. However, if this is so, then mutations cannot even begin to account for the new body-parts and body-shapes that arise in the Cambrian explosion. Which is why Johns & Miklos claim that "changes in...structural genes are unlikely to have anything to do with the production of [major] morphological change." (Johns & Miklos, "The Eukaryote Genome in Development and Evolution", London: Allen & Unwin, 1988, p293)
These two complications therefore build whole new layers of improbability into an already overly improbable task. Thus Ohno:
"The Cambrian explosion—denoting the almost simultaneous emergence of nearly all the extant phyla of the kingdom Animalia within the time span of 6-10 million years—can't possibly be explained by mutational divergence of individual gene functions." (Ohno, The notion of the Cambrian pananimalia genome, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 1996, 93:8475-8478)
Indeed, it seems that the misgiving Waddington voiced during the advent of Neo-Darwinian theory was well-founded:
"[Neo-Darwinian] theory claims that if you start with any fourteen lines of coherent English and change it one letter at a time, keeping only those [sentences] that still make sense, you will eventually finish up with one of the sonnets of Shakespeare...It strikes me as a lunatic sort of logic, and I think we should be able to do better." (Waddington, "Evolution", Science Today, 1961, p79)
...response...
How do evolutionists respond to such claims? In a variety of ways.
One approach is to adopt the theory of neutralism. The idea behind neutralism is that proteins traverse the "abysses of dysfunctionality" separating them by using non-coding sections of the genome. Such non-coding sections are not outwardly expressed in terms of an organism's morphology. Consequently, they are invisible to natural selection. That is to say, genetic sequences which, if expressed, would lead to an organism's being eliminated, are allowed to accumulate in peace and quiet, allowing the abyss of dysfunctionality to be traversed. Then, once the genetic sequence has arrived at its destination, the non-coding section is "switched on" somehow.
The problem, however, is that its strength—its ability to traverse the dysfunctional—also turns out to be its weakness. For if NS cannot eliminate a section of the genome's functionally disadvantageous sequences, then nor can it favour its functionally advantageous sequences. Thus, the neutralist is back to monkeys and typewriters as opposed to selection-guided mutations; and, as we have already seen, mere monkeys will not do the job.
A second approach is to take the position that, rather than declaring evolutionary theory a failure, we should simply wait and see what science uncovers. The idea is this: as things stand, it might not be clear how naturalism can account for some phenomenon. But science is a progressive endeavour, an endeavour that is demystifying life's many mysteries bit by bit. Rather, then, than resorting to explanations like "God did it", we should give science its due chance.
The problem here, however, is that while at first blush this advice sounds reasonable enough, it is surely not a good reason to deny the prima facie implications of today's evidence. Granted, future discoveries may show how naturalistic processes assembled life's proteins. But they may equally well make the task look less and less achievable. Why, then, should we pre-judge the issue in favour of naturalism as opposed to accepting the prima facie implications of our present level of knowledge? After all, no conclusion is 'future-proof'. Indeed, if in order to be rationally affirmed, a conclusion must be immune to being overturned by future discoveries, then no scientific theory can be rationally affirmed, for scientific theory must be falsifiable.
...mechanisms: a summary...
So, then, what have we learnt from our discussion of evolution's mechanisms? We can summarise our findings as follows.
a] Life's complexity and diversity is the product of an enormous amount of specifically improbable information, a significant chunk of which appears in "the blink of an eye" in the Cambrian explosion (Ohno, Ibid).

b] The production of this information cannot be explained by natural selection alone, since natural selection cannot create new information.

c] Nor can it be explained by mutations alone, since the odds of arriving at such a huge amount of SII via chance alone are beyond the bounds of credibility.

d] Nor can it be explained by a combination of the two—by selective-mutations—since life's proteins seems to be separated by abysses of dysfunctionality which natural selection will not allow to be traversed.
The naturalist is therefore left in something of a conundrum. For on the one hand life's proteins seem too complex to be produced in one foul swoop while on the other they seem too isolated in sequence-space to be assembled a part at a time.
...drawing some threads together...
What we have seen of evolution's potential creative power is therefore consistent with what we have seen of its historical evidentiary support and its philosophical standing. That is to say, on philosophical grounds, evolutionary has no leg to stand on; judging by the fossil record, it doesn't look like evolution was responsible for producing the diverse life-forms we see around us in the world today; and judging by life's information content and complexity, it doesn't even look like it is capable of doing so. Not all the issues in question are clear cut; but in my view all the evidence is pointing in the same direction, and it is not pointing in the direction of evolutionism.
...the alternative...
What, then, is the alternative to evolutionary theory? The answer will probably not surprise anyone; indeed, we have already heard it from the lips of the evolutionists:
"Organisms either appeared on earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species from some process of modifications. If they did,...they must have been created by some omnipotent intelligence." (Futuyma, "Science on Trial: Both Religious", 1983, p169)
Given, then, the implausibility of evolutionism, creationism (or something very similar) is the most plausible explanation of life's origins.
However, arguments for creationism needn't proceed solely on the basis of elimination, for there are positive reasons to think that life is the product of an intelligent designer. After all, information content and complexity is not unique to biological life.
Consider the information and complexity inherent in the man-made structures and machines around us, in things like cars, record players, and microwaves. Based on our experience of such things, there is ultimately only one type of cause that is capable of producing them: intelligence. Surely, then, it is not unreasonable to think that the complexity present in biology is also the product of a guiding intelligence. Indeed, biologists have long acknowledged that the natural world gives the appearance of having been designed. As Dawkins and others say,
"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." (Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, New York: Norton, 1986, p5)
"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that [despite appearances to the contrary] what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." (Crick, "What Mad Pursuits", New York: Basic Books, 1988, p138)
"The functional design of organisms and their features...seem[s] to argue for the existence of a designer." (Ayala, "Darwin's Revolution", Campbell & Schopf, "Creative Evolution!?", 1994, p4-5)
Why, then, exclude the hypothesis that life is the product of design when, to all intents and purposes, it looks like it was. As Jonathan Wells (molecular biologist and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute) asks,
"What if living things really are designed?
"Someone who finds a watch on the ground, and wants to investigate its origin, would be mistaken to rule out design a priori. [For] having already jumped to the wrong conclusion, that person might go on to waste an entire lifetime dabbling in spurious explanations. If science is truth-seeking, then this is a strange way to do science.
"According to an old joke, a passer-by walks up to a drunk stumbling around under a street light. The passer-by asks the drunk what he's doing, and the drunk replies, "Looking for my watch". "Oh, did you lose it here?" asks the passer-by. "No", the drunk replies, "I lost it across the street, but there's no light over there!"
Wells' point is a good one. To rule out the hypothesis that that which appears to be designed was in fact designed seems a strange way of doing science (or anything else for that matter). After all, the reason many living organisms strike us as so complex and well-adapted is because they remind us of the way we design things. Alexander Travis, who is currently looking into the possibility of using the bacterial flagellum to power man-made nano-technology, says,
"At [the micro] scale, biology provides the best functional motors." (Travis, Quoted by Bryn Nelson, Columnist, MSNBC contributor, 2 Jan 2008)
Lisa Shawver concurs, saying,
"Trilobites...possessed the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature...[They] look like they were designed by a physicist." (Shawver, Science News, Vol 105, No 72, Feb 1974)
So, why not attribute them to the same ultimate cause, namely design? Archeologists distinguish design from chance every time they decide that a shard of pottery in the ground is the product of an ancient civilisation as opposed to naturalistic processes. And how do they come to such conclusions? On the basis that pottery doesn't look like the kind of thing that arises by chance. Forensic scientists likewise distinguish design from chance every time they conclude that someone has been murdered as opposed to dying of natural causes. How do they do it? On the basis that things like bullet-wounds look to be the result of intelligent as opposed to naturalistic processes. So, why the reluctance to apply the same logic in matters of biology? Granted, to do so raises some thorny metaphysical questions. But we should not reject a conclusion on the grounds that we don't like its implications. Historical science should be all about inferring what happened in the past on the basis of the evidences and causes operating in the present day. Evolutionism does this by investigating naturalistic hypotheses; creationism does it by adding the design hypothesis into the pool of live options. The basic approach is therefore very similar. The difference, however, is that creationism ends up with a hypotheses that is causally adequate to explain what needs to be explained. For where evolutionism struggles to explain life's specifically improbable information content, the hypothesis that life is the product of a non-biological intelligence explains its perfectly well (and is what the existence of information most naturally points to). And where natural selection, due its short-term bent and conservative nature, is unable to work towards long-term goals, the design hypothesis does just this. Moreover, where naturalism is unable to account for the stasis and discontinuities we see in the fossil record, the hypothesis that life unfolded in a series of discrete creative acts explains this fact perfectly.
...why, then, the reluctance?...
However, for all the creationists' arguments, the majority of the world's scientists have not exactly leapt to embrace the design hypothesis. Of course, we have already seen the primary reason for this fact: because they are prevented from doing so by the very defintion of science; and as Kuhn says,
"The research scientist is not an innovator...The puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition." (Kuhn, "The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change", Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977, p234)
However, there may be other reasons for at least some scientists' rejection of creationism—reasons we have recently begun to touch on. Consider the following statement:
"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 (or wicked)." (Dawkins, New York Times, April 9, 1989, p34)
On hearing a statements like this, one gets the impression that, for some people, there are more than merely intellectual concerns at stake in the evolutionism-creationism debate. Such concerns are expressed well by atheists Nagel and Provine:
"I want atheism to be true...It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and...is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life." (Nagel, "An Excerpt from The Last Word", Vol 5, No 2, 2002, p160-163)
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.
"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly: 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) No life after death exists; 3) No ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) No ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) Human free will is nonexistent. ("Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life�, 1998, Darwin Day Keynote Address)
Of course, not all evolutionists share Nagel and Provine's sentiments; indeed, not all of them are true. But this much is clear: the creationism-evolutionism debate goes well beyond the academic.
...final thoughts...
I would therefore like to conclude this essay by considering the existential implications entailed in embracing naturalism as opposed to theism (in particular, Christian theism), for the two are worlds apart. To see this, consider how they answer some of life's biggest questions.
1. Who are we?

On a naturalistic view, we are just lumps of matter—chance collections of particles. Indeed, on naturalism, it is hard to see what distinguishes us from robots, for what aspect of our being could allow us to make freely-chosen, meaningful decisions? Certainly, matter is not free to choose its course of action; it simply follows the dictates of whatever natural laws it is subject to (or at best—given certain interpretations of quantum physics—behaves randomly; which, if one is trying to explain how it is that persons can make meaningful decisions, is no more helpful than the idea that matter behaves in a determinately). As Paul Kwatz asks: "How do we get control of the...atoms [that constitute our thoughts] if we are nothing but atoms ourselves? [In order] for us to have free will, wouldn't there have to be a part of us that isn't made of atoms—a part of us that's free to tell [our] atoms how to behave? But if so, then where is it—this non-atomic corner of our brains? And what kind of 'stuff' is it made of...if not atoms?" (Kwatz, "Conscious Robots", Peacock's Tail Publishing, 2005, p8). Hence Dawkins' rather depressing conclusion: "We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." (Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", 1st Edition, Oxford University Press, 1976, Preface)

2. Why are we here?

On a naturalistic view, there is no overarching purpose for our being here at all. For on naturalism, we are just accidental by-products of a big bang billions of years ago and have no real idea as to what, if anything, caused it. As Jacques Monod says, "Man...is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe from which he has emerged by chance...His duty is written nowhere. It is for him to choose". (Monod, "Chance and Necessity")

3. Where are we going?

On a naturalistic view, we are going nowhere. Indeed, on naturalism, the whole universe is going nowhere. For the time will come when every living creature has died, every star has been burned up, and every ounce of energy has been "expended" (i.e. a state of "heat death" has been reached). All that will remain will be the cold, dark recesses of space, stretching endlessly on into nothingness. It is therefore hard to avoid the conclusion that our lives are ultimately insignificant. For in the final analysis, nothing we do makes the slightest bit of difference. Our lives end only in death and our destinies are unrelated to our behaviour. As Christian philosopher William Lane Craig says, "[If naturalism is true], then the research of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good men everywhere to better the lot of the human race—all these come to nothing. In the end they don't make one bit of difference...Each person's life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships—all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless. This is the horror [that faces] modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing." (Lane Craig, "Reasonable Faith", Crossway Books, 1994, 2nd Ed., p51-75)
Yet, if we affirm the words of Scripture, this changes everything. For on the Christian view we are, not just the by-products of chance chemical reactions, but free agents made in the image of our Maker; and the heart-breaking combination of beauty and suffering we see in this world is evidence, not of millions of years of evolution, but of the effects of man's sin in a once-perfect world. Moreover, on the Christian view our lives are, not just brief insignificant flickers of light amidst the darkness of a universe in ruins, but the beginnings of eternal existences, thus making the way we live—and more particularly the way we relate to our Maker—of eternal significance.
These are solemn and sobering thoughts, and my hope is that you the reader will give them serious consideration, not just as academic theories but as existential claims. As Pascal's following caricature shows, to fail to do so is far from rational behaviour:
"I know not who sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am...I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul and that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects upon itself as well as upon all external things, and has no more knowledge of itself than of them. I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself limited to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set down here rather than elsewhere, nor why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and will come after me. On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape.
"As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned. Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty. From all this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so, I will not take one step towards its discovery." (Pascal, Ibid, Pensees 29)
Pascal clearly regards such indifference as insane. Beyond life's thin veil of decision-making lies, for each one of us, the best of possible worlds or the worst of possible worlds, life with or without the One we were made to know. The consequences of how we choose to live our lives—in search of God or in spiritual apathy—therefore could not be any greater.
...a question of motive...
So, has reading this essay has made any difference to the way you think about life? Do you think the Bible could be right when it says, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth"? If not, why not? Could it be because, like Nagel, you have a cosmic authority problem? Could it be because the Bible contains moral dictates you don't happen to agree with? It is often hard to make such judgments for ourselves, since the emotional side of our being is hard to disentangle from the rational side of our being. My prayer, however, is that as we consider the message of the gospel—the most fundamental message of the Christian faith—, God himself will make things clear to you.
...the judgment to come...
If the Bible is God's Word, then a day is coming in which God will judge the world in righteousness and truth (Acts 17:31); and the standard by which he will judge it is the standard expressed in the Ten Commandments. So, let us assume that the teaching of Christianity is the truth and see how you will fare on the Day of Judgment.
1. Is God always first in your life?

Do you love God with all your heart, mind, and strength? When deciding how to live your life, is pleasing your Maker your primary concern? What do you devote more time to: serving the One who gave you life or fulfilling your own desires?

2. Have you ever committed idolatry?

Not many people make gods out of wood or stone in today's society. But a great many people make gods with their minds. What is your concept of God based on? What does he require of you? Would you live your life differently if you no longer believed in him? Or do his opinions tend to match up with your own on the whole?

3. Have you ever taken God's name in vain?

When people blaspheme, they use the name of the One who gave them life as a swear-word. In God's eyes, this is not a trivial matter. People don't even use the name of Hitler in this way.

4. Do you observe the principle of the Sabbath by honouring God with your time?

Do you regularly set time aside to spend with God? Or are you more concerned about other things?

5. Have you always honoured your parents?

Have you ever treated your parents inconsiderately or taken them for granted? Try to think about what they would say in answer to this question!

6. Have you ever committed murder?

Jesus said, "You have heard it said...'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgement'. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment" (Matthew 5:21-22). Have you ever acted in anger, or harboured grudges against people? Do you ever think about unpleasant things you'd like to do or say to people who have upset you? If so, then God associates your thoughts and intentions with murder. This isn't of course to say that your thoughts are as bad as murder. However they transgress the sixth commandment all the same.

7. Have you ever engaged in sex outside of marriage?

If so, then in God's eyes, you are an adulterer. However, the commandment extends beyond this. For Jesus said, "Anyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28).

8. Have you ever stolen anything (regardless of its value or nature)?

You may never have broken into someone else's house. But have you ever stolen a day's work from your employer, or benefits from your insurer? Have you ever deprived a record company of its royalties or a transport company of its fares?

9. Have you ever told a lie?

Sometimes we lie to avoid hurting other people's feeling. But more often that not, it is simply to get ourselves out of a difficult situation.

10. Have you ever desired something that belongs to someone else?

It is rare to find someone who is genuinely content with their lot in life. Thoughts of covetousness, on the other hand, are so fundamental to human nature that they have become a common saying: "The grass is always greener on the other side". No matter how much we have, we often want more.
...how did you do?...
In light of the above, try to think about what your Creator—the one who spoke the entire universe into being—must make of your life. This may not be a pleasant thought. But to react in pride is a mistake. Listen to the voice of your conscience and consider your predicament carefully. Spend time in prayer and ask God to show you your sin as it truly is. For if the Bible is God's word, then you will surely spend your eternity somewhere; and if are given what you deserve, the scriptures teach that this place will be "the outer darkness, where there is [only] weeping and pain and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 25:30).
You may think this sounds unreasonable, for you may consider yourself to have lived a fairly good life. Relative to others, you may even have done so. But God's standards are not relative: they are absolute. And it is only to be expected that God's standards of holiness are infinitely higher than ours. Indeed, the very reason we are able to refer to certain people as holier than others is because there is an ultimate and infinite standard of holiness in this universe; and that standard is God himself—the ground of all that is pure and holy.
In light of God's awesome holiness (the Bible refers to God as "dwelling in unapproachable light" and likens his holiness to "a consuming fire"), it follows that no sin can enter God's presence. So, what ultimately separates us from knowing the love and beauty of our Creator is, not God's arbitrary policy, but our own sin and selfishness. As things stand, we all—whether Christians or not—enjoy the traces of God's goodness that break through into this fallen world: the wonder of a sunset, the love of a mother, the innocence of a child. However, a day is coming when the world in its present form will pass away, and on that day separation from God's presence will be seen and experienced for what it truly is: infinite loss and regret.
For people like you and I, this is desperate news indeed. However, if we are willing to accept our plight and call out to God for help, then there is incredible news to follow. For there is a Saviour in Heaven who loves us dearly, and "who is able to keep [us] from falling away" and to "bring [us] with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault" (Jude 24). Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig describes the way in which Christ's death saves us as follows:
"God finds himself in a kind of dilemma. On the one hand are His justice and holiness, which demand punishment for sin [and rightly so]. On the other hand are God's love and mercy, which demand reconciliation and forgiveness. Both are essential to [God's] nature; neither can be compromised. What is God to do?...The answer is Jesus Christ. He is the fulfillment of God's justice and love. The two meet at the cross...
"[On the cross], we see God's love. Jesus died in our place. He voluntarily took upon himself the death penalty of sin...However, we also see God's wrath, as His just judgment is poured out upon sin. Jesus...tasted death for every human being and bore the punishment for every sin. None of us can imagine what he endured [yet, through his death, we can be forgiven]." (The Craig-Bradley Debate: Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?, Simon Frasier University, Vancouver, Canada, 1994)
Olin Curtis describes the events of Calvary as follows:
"There alone our Lord—[Jesus, God incarante]—opens his mind, his heart...to the whole inflow of the horror of sin, the endless history of it, from the first choice of selfishness...on to the eternity of hell, the boundless ocean of desolation...he allows wave upon wave to overwhelm his soul." (Curtis, The Christian Faith, Kregel Pubns, 1971, p325)
You may be wondering why someone like Jesus would choose to do something like this for someone like you. The reason is simple: because he loves you. Your life may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of naturalism and evolutionism. But you are precious to God. And you have the chance to become a part of the most wonderful story—indeed, the only truly important story—this world has ever known: the story of man's redemption. The Bible says,
"God commended His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us...For the wages of sin are death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord...[Therefore] if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved." (Romans 5.8, 6.23, 10.9, NKJV)
"This is how God showed his love...He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the one who would turn aside his wrath, taking away our sins." (1 John 4.9-10)
Thus, as Lane Craig says,
"Life's supreme question is, "What will we do with Christ?". In order to receive forgiveness, we need to...trust in Christ as our Saviour and the Lord of our lives. But if we reject Christ, then we reject God's mercy, and fall back on His justice...[meaning] there is no-one to pay the penalty for our sin but ourselves." (Ibid)
Don't let evolution make a monkey out of you. You only have one life to live and it is too precious to waste. This very day, this very moment, your sins can be washed away and you can enter into a personal relationship with the God who made you to know his goodness. A whole new spiritual reality awaits you if you will surrender your life to the Lord. Will you do so? Well, that is your choice and my prayer.