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Life presents us with many questions. Some are trivial (e.g. "What should I have for dinner tonight?", "What should I wear?"). Others are decidedly non-trivial (e.g. "What is life all about anyway?", "How should I best use the time available to me?"). However, it is hard to see how we can answer such questions in anything but a subjective manner (e.g. "To me, life is about such-and-such a thing") without knowing how we homo sapiens have come to occupy our current position on planet earth.

Two very different explanations of this fact are commonly proffered. The first tells us we are the creation of a transcendent Creator. The second tells us we were formed over the course of billions of years by the chance-plus-law combination that is evolutionary theory. How, then, are we to decide which of these explanations is the more plausible? Well, since our main interest is in life's history, looking at life's fossil record seems as good a place to start as any. Which is what this essay aims to do.

Over the years, however, as I have read what other people have written about the fossil record, I have identified two main problems with their writings. (My own writings, of course, are beyond reproach). First, the presuppositions they entail have been neither clearly stated nor critically assessed. Second, the way in which different disciplines bear on interpreting life's fossil record—philosophical, paleontological, biological, and so on—has rarely been appreciated. That is, the fact that various non-paleontological lines of thought and evidence point in much the same direction as does the paleontological evidence has often been overlooked. Third, the big picture of the fossil record has been obscured by more detailed considerations. That is, questions like "When I consider the record of the rocks, does it look like life has gradually evolved from a common ancestor?" have been treated as if they hinge on other 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 is therefore to view things from a distance—to consider the various assumptions evolutionists make when interpreting the fossil record, the general pattern of the record as a whole, the plausibility of evolutionism's rivals, and what we can learn from all this.

...an overview...

The central claim of this essay is simple: that if evolutionary theory was true, life's fossil record would look very different to the way it does. However, in light of my above comments, I will advance this claim as part of a much wider argument contending:

a] that there is no necessary conflict between the study of science and the study of theology;

b] 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 theologian's presuppositions enjoy an openness and consistency absent from those of the scientist;

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

d] that naturalism has great difficulties in accounting for life's specifically improbable information-content—which constitutes another reason to affirm c];

e] 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

f] 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 details. First, though, some introductory remarks.

...introductory remarks...

Most people have an opinion on the evolutionism-creationism debate, and most people hold to that opinion fairly strongly. Few, however, have given the issue serious consideration—no doubt because they feel no great need to do so. After all, the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists regard evolutionary theory as a proven fact. Why, then, would anyone want to think otherwise? And why would they imagine they were being even remotely rational in doing so?

The answer is because, as we will see, evolutionary theory seems to derive 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 is never challenged from within the scientific community yet which may in fact be false. If, therefore, the theologian can show that there is no good reason to accept—and, better still, good reason not to accept—evolutionary theory's presuppositions, then it may be that rejecting evolutionary theory itself is not such an irrational move to make. For 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 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 less flattering descriptor). But 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 a thrilling prospect.

...science & theology...

Many people regard the Christian faith as inherently "anti-scientific". And in one sense, they are right to do so. For the Christian does not acquire her knowledge of God's person via scientific means. But of course it doesn't therefore follow that the Christian is in some way opposed to science or "anti-scientific" (despite the impression often given by various parties).

It therefore seems appropriate to begin this essay by discussing the interaction between science and theology more fully—in particular by showing that whilst, in practice, scientists and theologians often come to different conclusions about the nature of the world around them, there is nothing inherently anti-scientific about the Christian worldview.

...the christian view...

On the Christian view, God is life's ultimate reality: the reason why anything exists and continues to exist as opposed to nothing at all. God is the creator, governor and sustainer of our, or rather his, universe.

At first blush it may seem odd to talk of God as the "governor and sustainer" of the universe, since most people regard the universe as something that pretty much takes care of itself—that ticks along on its own steam, according to "natural" laws. However, natural laws, whilst lying firmly within the domain of science in terms of the way we study them, are not explained by science. For natural laws (as they are commonly conceived) are simply descriptions of the way the world behaves. And describing the way the world behaves does nothing to explain why it behaves that way.

Take, for instance, the law of gravity. The law of gravity describes what happens to something left unsupported in mid-air—e.g. an apple that's just lost contact with its branch. However, this does nothing to explain why that apple falls to the floor as opposed to, say, floating off into the atmosphere or disappearing into thin air. One can talk of course of things like the force exerted by the earth's gravitational field. But this only gives rise to further questions. For what exactly is this mysterious "force" that the earth exerts—that pulls towards its centre objects thousands of miles away? And why does the earth exert it? And why gravity in particular: that is, why does the earth attract things as opposed to, say, repelling them or making them vanish? And what then of the strong force and the weak force and the like?

It is far from clear that science can provide answers to such questions (and many others like them). On the whole, it takes such fundamental properties of matter to be "brute facts": things that are the way they are "because they just are"—things that have no further explanations as to their nature and being.

Theology, on the other hand, tends to view natural laws as regularities in the way God treats the things he has made—as God's normal means of governing his creation. Of course, this doesn't mean natural laws are God's only means of governing his creation. For whilst, on the whole, God may work through (and value) nature's regularities, there may also be times when God wants to do things that are out-of-the-ordinary—things that can't be achieved by means of natural law (e.g. his raising Christ from the dead). However, it does imply that there is nothing anti-scientific about miracles in and of themselves. For natural laws simply describe what happens to something under normal conditions (e.g. a body of water heated to 80 degrees celsius under standard atmospheric conditions, or a piece of paper dropped on planet earth in the absence of supporting objects). And of course if God chooses to govern his creation in an unusual way, then normal conditions no longer apply since an abnormal force is at work in the universe.

Thus understood, then, a miracle undermines the field of science no more than does a table preventing a piece of paper from falling to the floor. Admittedly, there is no set of sufficient conditions for a miracle to occur, meaning God's supernatural acts can't be tested and repeated in the same way as can his natural acts. But then science doesn't always restrict itself to the repeatable (as we will see later). Moreover, miracles aren't the kind of thing we'd expect to occur under certain specific conditions, for miracles are by definition out-of-the-ordinary events and are the product, not of natural law, but of a person's (namely God's) freely-willed decisions. Indeed, if there was a set of conditions which, whenever it pertained, a miracle occurred, surely people would be tempted to conclude that the alleged miracle wasn't a miracle at all but the product of some as-yet-unknown natural law.

On the Christian view, then, there is no necessary conflict between science and theology. For claims about what the natural world consists of and how it works do nothing per se to undermine theology's basic premise—namely that God is its ultimate creator and governor. Indeed, on the Christian view, the study of science is simply one of many ways of appreciating the wonder of God's workmanship. Similarly, claims about who God is and what he does do nothing per se to undermine the claim that matter has certain standard properties and ways of behaving. Indeed, Christian theology has always affirmed that, since the universe is the product of a rational God, we should expect it to work in a rational way—in a way which lends itself to being studied scientifically.

...the conflict...

But if this is so—if there is no necessary conflict between science and theology—then why, one might wonder, do scientists and theologians disagree so frequently? Why are there so many websites and articles and the like devoted to demonstrating how misguided creationism is, how pigheaded evolutionists tend to be, and how much better the world would be if the one side would simply conform to the views of their opponents? Why can't scientists and theologians leave each other to get on with their own endeavours never the twain to meet?

The answer is two-fold. First, whilst there is no necessary conflict between science and theology, there is clearly a potential conflict. For at the end of the day both endeavours make claims about the nature and history of an external reality. Suppose, for instance, a theologian claims, on the basis of biblical revelation, that God created the universe in six 24-hour periods. Such a person is hardly making a scientifically neutral claim, for her claim (if true) implies that the majority of science's most commonly-used dating techniques are woefully inaccurate (in everything but the short term). Hence, there is clearly the potential for theological claims to contradict scientific ones.

Second, scientists often make theological claims—claims that go well beyond the bounds of what science can plausibly be thought to establish. Take, for instance, George Gaylord Simpson's claim that

"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." (Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, Revised Ed., Yale University Press, 1967, p344-45)

Or Stephen Jay Gould's claim that

"No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature." (Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin", Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1983, p6-7)

How can science, by studying natural laws and substances, determine that God isn't their ultimate author, or that God isn't using natural laws to bring about his purposes? It can't. For such claims are not scientific but theological; hence the conflict.

...a quick caveat...

It is tempting of course to hear a theologian disagreeing with something like evolutionary theory and think, "So what?". After all, theologians are not 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). Nor would anyone take them seriously if they did. Why, then, should we take a theologian's problems with evolutionary theory seriously?

There are a number of reasons.

First, when I talk about "theologians" in this essay, I am not just referring to anyone who has a dog-collar together with an opinion on life's origins. Rather, I am referring to "theistic scientists"—people who have studied and engaged with the relevant scientific issues yet who, given their theistic worldview, are open to the possibility of explaining the world around them in non-naturalistic terms as and when there is theological warrant for doing so.

Thus, the theologian will not be given to explaining something like why she keeps losing her socks by recourse to the work of God, for: a] there are plenty of plausible naturalistic ways of accounting for a pair of missing socks, and b] it is difficult to see why God would be interested in interfering with people's socks. Explaining something like the alleged disappearance of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, is a very different proposition for: a] there are arguably no plausible naturalistic explanations for the disciples' reporting of the empty tomb (at least not that also account for their willingness to die for the sake of their story and their collective experiences of the risen Christ), and b] it is quite plausible, given the religio-historic context of Jesus' life, that God would want to vindicate Jesus' claims and complete his redemptive work by raising him from the dead.

Second, "historical science" (the branch of science that attempts to deduce the most likely course of history based on present-day evidence) is very different from "operation science" (the branch of science that has blessed us with the automobile, the X-ray machine, and more importantly, some might say, the toaster) because history, by its very nature, is unrepeatable. Consequently, the conclusions of the historical sciences are far less testable and hence far less conclusive than those of their operational counterparts. Which means disputing something like the theory of evolution is a very different proposition to disputing something like the theory of gravity. 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)

And of course the less conclusive a body of evidence, the greater the part presuppositions play. Given, then, the extent to which historical science relies on presuppositions, together with the fact that, at the end of the day, presuppositions are largely a matter of personal opinion, it is surely not unreasonable for a theologian to contest the conclusions of historical scientists—to suggest that a different presuppositional basis may make more sense of the evidence. Of course, the theologian's suggestion might turn out to be deplorably false. But the mere act of advancing it does not, in principle, seem an unreasonable thing to do. Indeed, one would think that doing so would stimulate precisely the kind of "competition" that science claims to thrive on.

Third, the particular presupposition science adopts—the assumption that naturalism is true—is, when it comes to the question of life's origins, both unjustified and unhelpful.

However, this last claim is not exactly one which the majority of the world's philosophers of science embrace with open arms. It will be worth my while, therefore, explaining why I think it is true.

I'll start by showing that science does indeed presuppose naturalism—that it does make the kind of presuppositions that I allege it does.

...clearing the ground...

Most people see the enterprise of science as a fairly cold and impartial enterprise—a field of enquiry that will follow 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)

But why does Gould allege that science is not impartial? The answer is simple: because science stipulates that, if a statement is to qualify as "scientific", then it cannot make reference to immaterial causes (which, unless you are a committed materialist, you are unlikely to view as 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)

Thus, the hypothesis that God created life's various species is classed as unscientific since it is not naturalistic. Interestingly, however, what this implies is that "the God hypothesis" is viewed as unscientific, not because there is any great evidence against it (or any great lack of evidence in favour of it), but 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." (Ruse, "Darwinism Defended", Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1982, p322)

Why?

"[Because] 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." (Ibid)

For the person who has come to embrace the truth of creationism, then, the fact that the scientific community rejects creationism is fairly unimportant. For this fact tells us nothing about things like how well creationism explains the fossil record or how plausibly evolutionism explains the existence of similar structures in different animals. All it tells us is that creationism is not naturalistic, which is hardly news to most creationists.

...definitions, definitions...

But there is a deeper issue lurking in the bushes. For why should we accept Ruse's definition of science in the first place? Granted, most scientists do. But why? For it rarely seems to be defended (instead being merely asserted) and suffers from a number of serious problems.

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. What, then, is Ruse's solution to this problem? To sidestep it altogether and instead appeal to a definition! Needless to say, however, Ruse's strategy isn't a very helpful one. For the demarcation debate is not a debate that can be settled by appealing to a mere definition. That is, the demarcation debate is not just a semantic debate about what people tend to mean when they use the word "science". Rather, it is about deciding which kinds of things can and can't be concluded on the basis of the scientific method. Hence, to define science without reference to such considerations (as Ruse appears to do) seems entirely arbitrary.

Second, Ruse's proposed definition of science raises a number of thorny issues for scientists, for:

a] the term "natural" itself is not an easy one to define—at least not in a way that excludes things like God and the soul yet still includes all the things scientists do actually study (e.g. consciousness, the nature of space-time, string theory, dark matter, etc);

b] restricting science to "that which deals with the repeatable" doesn't just render creationism unscientific; it also renders much of modern-day "science" unscientific. Take, for instance, 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). It is difficult, therefore, to see how cosmology can be said to be dealing with "the repeatable"; and

c] as we have seen, the claim that things like laws actually "govern" matter as opposed to merely describing its behaviour is by no means an uncontroversial one. To make something's being subject to natural laws a condition of its being scientific therefore seems premature. For suppose it turns out that there is good reason to think that laws do not govern particular events. Or suppose, less radically, it turns out that the behaviour of elementary particles is completely indeterminate. Must we conclude that the study of such things is unscientific?

Perhaps, in response, a defender of Ruse's definition of science might want to appeal to its fruit—which, when it comes to science's operational aspects, is undoubtedly impressive. When it comes to the historical sciences, however, it is hard to see what it can mean "to be fruitful" without reconstructing history as it actually happened; 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, fruitfulness (whatever it might amount to in practice) is not in fact most people's motivation for defining science the way they do. For as Richard Lewontin explains, the definition comes first:

"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)

Third, investigating the issue of life's origins "scientifically" has a rather closed and hence undesirable feel about it. For doing so can only result in one possible conclusion: that life's species arose via 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 as follows:

"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." (Futuyma, "Science on Trial: Both Religious", 1983, p169)

And of course from here it is only a small step to the conclusion that evolutionism is the best—indeed the only—scientific theory on offer; for creationism is by definition unscientific. As Johnson says,

"For scientific materialists, the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term [such people] "materialists employing science". And 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)

However, if the scientist's aim in investigating life's origins is to discover the truth, then adopting methodological naturalism seems a fairly unhelpful 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 unlikely to be a very helpful thing to do.

In other words, it may be that, despite science's assumptions to the contrary, naturalistic processes simply aren't capable of generating complex life. After all, science has never proven the claim that "Material causes are the only causes in operation in this universe" (call this claim "N"). Nor in fact can science prove that N is the case. For just as no amount of searching the contents of a room can prove that nothing exists apart from that room, so no amount of studying material causes and effects can prove that material causes are the only types of causes that exist. Indeed, N is precisely the sort of claim that science claims that it cannot make. For N is equivalent to the claim that God does not exist (or that, if he does, existing is about the only thing he does), which is in effect a claim about the supernatural. Moreover, N seems highly questionable in and of itself. For if the existence of matter itself has a cause—if there is an explanation for the fact that matter exists—then N is false, for whatever caused matter to exist cannot itself be material.

Summing things up, then, when scientists investigate life's origins, they necessarily exclude non-naturalistic explanations, which seems: i] unjustified, ii] inconsistent, and iii] unacceptably restrictive. Thus, the theologian who claims that evolutionary theory may be false is not claiming that she has 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 conspiracy. All she is claiming is that the scientific method may not be the best means of discovering the truth about life's origins—that what divides creationists and evolutionists may be more metaphysical than evidential.

...a short aside...

"Metaphysics" sounds like very sophisticated stuff. In essence, however, someone's "metaphysics" is just the set of assumptions they makes about the kinds of things they are willing to entertain the existence of (e.g. matter, dark matter, God, moral values, ghosts, souls, propositions, etc). Thus, everyone has some kind of metaphysics. As David Bohm says,

"Everybody has...metaphysics, even if he thinks he hasn'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)

Suppose, for instance, 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 was 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 or not? The answer is that I don't, since there is no real decision to make. Ghost don't exist: thus sightings of them must be either delusions or fabrications. The specifics of the story—the reliability of the witness, the plausibility of her story, the corroborating evidence, etc—are neither here nor there. No matter how authentic it all sounds, it will not affect my ultimate conclusion.

...end of aside...

What, then, does all this have to do with the issue of life's origins? It teaches us a simple lesson: that if you want to discover the truth about a given matter, then you should make your metaphysics as accommodating as possible: that is, you should adopt a metaphysical view that doesn't commit you to any given conclusion until you've examined the specific evidence for and against it.

When it comes to the issue of life's origins, then, rather than adopting methodological naturalism, it seems far more helpful (if, that is, your aim is to discover the truth) to adopt a broader metaphysics—to assume that any given phenomenon could have either a material or an immaterial explanation and then to judge each case, not on the basis of pre-determined metaphysical commitments, but on its own merits. Which is more or less what the theologian tries to do. As Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga says,

"The theist [in my terms, "theologian"] knows that God created the heavens and the earth and all that they contain; she knows, 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 far greater range of explanatory resources available to her than does the naturalist. For at the end of the day, the theologian can appeal to all the resources the naturalist can and more. Of course, this doesn't justify her appealing to supernatural explanations gratuitously or out of desperation. All other things being equal, the theologian should prefer naturalistic explanations to supernatural ones and should try to find them. But of course having a preference for naturalistic explanations 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 it would surely be wrong-headed to 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 shoots itself in the foot. As Charles Darwin said,

"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 souped-up 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 souped-up 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 purpose 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 dealers' and choose one. The garage has a good reputation, so I assume the car is in good order—I assume it will work reliably. But suppose I now find out (courtesy of the wonder that is Google) 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 to happen). With this knowledge, surely it would be irrational for me to maintain my belief that the car is a reliable one: and surely the more accidents I found out about, the more irrational I would be to maintain this belief. It seems, then, that to assume that our cognitive faculties—a set of faculties cobbled together entirely by accidental processes (for evolution has no "intentions" as such)—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": which, very briefly put, selects things that work by eliminating things that don't work, thus furnishing evolution with an ongoing quality-control mechanism. (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, probability dictates that this trait will dominate the species' population, since by virtue of the fact that it is advantageous to reproduction, 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; natural selection would have eliminated them.

What can be said in response? 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 weigh-up what to believe and what not to believe on an ongoing basis. Some propositions just seem to pop into our minds; we naturally come to believe them as we go about everyday life: propositions like "It's raining", "Such-and-such a person looks quite happy", "It's quite hot at the moment", etc. Other propositions require reflection; 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 that he exemplifies in maximal degrees—is about adopting rational attitudes to life's many propositions. It is about believing propositions which it is rational to believe, disbelieving propositions it is rational to disbelieve, and withholding one's belief from propositions 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—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 some of 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 differing 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 won't 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 not uncommon scenario, then? 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 great deal 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? The answer is that it enables us to cast Lewis's argument in more formal terms—in terms of beliefs and their defeaters. And thus cast, Lewis's argument runs something like this:

(1) If evolutionary theory is true, then our cognitive faculties weren't 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 they are reliable—we have no reason to suppose the beliefs they produce are true.

(3) Given (2), we have no good reason to suppose 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 the product of naturalistic evolution, meaning such a belief cannot form part of a rational noetic structure. It is quite literally self-defeating.

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—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. Or to put it another way: our cognitive faculties have been constructed, not "accidentally", but with the specific intention of working in such a way as to help us to survive and reproduce. And their working in such a way as to help us to survive and reproduce entails their working reliably.

How successful is this objection, then? 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 seek to set out the main thrust of it 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.

Now, at first blush Plantinga's argument sounds a strange one. For it seems so natural to assume that our cognitive faculties are 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). Moreover, 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, this is not necessarily true. For 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...

But are Churchland et al right? Can natural selection ("NS" for short) really be so indifferent to the truth of organisms' beliefs? If so, then Plantinga's argument seems persuasive. For unless having false beliefs is maladaptive, the fact that an organism has been selected gives us no reason to assume that its cognitive faculties are reliable. The key question, then, is this: why think that NS is indifferent to truth?

To answer, the first thing we need to consider is the nature of beliefs.

Given naturalism, then, 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?). Let us 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.

The next thing we need to consider is what kind of causal powers a belief possesses—how beliefs influence behaviour. For it is easy enough to see how, by virtue of its various connections with other neurons and muscles and sense organs and the like (its "NP-properties" for short), a belief can influence behaviour. But how, if it all, is a belief's content involved in this process? Plantinga frames the question as follows:

"If [a] belief is really a belief, then [it won't just have NP-properties]; 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"). And now the question is this: does a belief—a neural structure—cause behaviour by virtue of its content [or just by virtue of its NP-properties]?" (Plantinga, "Naturalism vs Evolution: A Religion/Science Conflict?", infidels.org, 2007)

The question can perhaps be better understood by means of the following illustration. Suppose I am sitting at my desk reading a copy of Descartes' Meditations; and suppose I am becoming increasingly annoyed by a fly that seems bent on orbiting my head at ever increasing speeds. In a moment of rage I take my copy of Descartes' Meditations in hand and swat the offending creature (perhaps rejoicing in my God-given authority over it as I do so). Now: why do I have a dead fly on my desk? Had I swatted the fly with a single sheet of paper, it would presumably still be alive. Hence there must be some property of Descartes' Meditations that has caused the fly to die. But which property? Its colour? Its information content? Its mass? Its hardness? Some of these properties are clearly relevant, whilst others are clearly not. The question we are asking of a belief, then, is like the question we just asked of Descartes' Meditations. Which of its properties are responsible for its causing behaviour? Its NP-properties or its content properties?

...the options...

There are two obvious possibilities: either a belief's content affects behaviour or it doesn't. (This much at least seems fairly uncontroversial). I will call the possibility that a belief's content is part of the causal chain leading to an organism's behaviour "C". The possibility that it isn't—that a belief's content is irrelevant to its holders' behaviour—I will call "-C".

...behaviour & its causes...

First, let's consider -C.

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. If a neural structure produces adaptive behaviour and true beliefs: fine. If it produces adaptive behaviour and false beliefs: fine again. Natural selection doesn't care either way, as long as the behaviour the given neural structure produces is adaptive. It will work to shape behaviour, but this won't serve to promote any one type of belief as opposed to any other—let alone true beliefs over false ones.

Given -C, then, NS is impotent. It can neither eliminate those 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 in the region of 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? The answer is low—very low indeed. It is the equivalent of tossing a coin 1,000 times and getting 750 heads.

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? Given C, is it any more justifiable to think that an organism's being selected ensures the reliability of its CFs? It is hard to say; but at first blush it seems not. For all C ensures is that behaviours are caused by content as opposed to NP-properties. But this gives us no reason to think that false content will be connected to maladaptive behaviour as opposed to adaptive behaviour. For we still have no guarantee that a belief's content will be accurately represented in an organism's actions—that an organism's deciding to do Q will result in its doing Q in the real world. Hence C seems no more helpful than -C in terms of giving us a reason to think that R is the case.

However, let us take things more slowly. Let us do what we did in the case of -C. Let us consider the following question: Are false beliefs, by virtue of the fact that their content is false, likely to lead to maladaptive behaviour? Are false beliefs likely to supervene on neural structures the possessors of which NS will penalise?

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? Yes indeed. 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 obviously adaptive]; yet naturalists think [religious] beliefs are mostly false. Clearly enough, [then], false belief can produce adaptive behaviour.

"[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...[Hence] 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 N&E&C will happily allow organisms to accumulate layers and systems of beliefs which, whilst being false, do nothing to make behaviour maladaptive. And such layers and systems of beliefs are not at all dissimilar to the worldviews maintained by theists and pantheists and naturalists and so on.

At the very least, then, 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...

However, the skepticism engendered by the belief that N&E does not stop here. Indeed, we have only scratched its surface. For in the above thought-experiments, we began by assuming that our cognitive faculties were reliable—that our non-religious-and-non-witch-related beliefs about the outside world were mostly true. Hence we needed to introduce whole layers of beliefs into the picture in order to demonstrate that having false beliefs needn't result in maladaptive behaviour.

But of course, when conducting such thought-experiments, we cannot legitimately begin by assuming such a thing—by assuming that the CFs of the subjects of those thought-experiments are reliable. For the whole point of Plantinga's argument is that when we just consider N&E—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 have furnished us with reliable cognitive faculties. Hence to counter Plantinga's argument via a thought-experiment that presupposes R is hopelessly invalid. For all the experiment then shows is that if we assume that R pertains, then we have good reason to think that R pertains—which is to beg the question in excelsis.

It is of course perfectly legitimate to assume that, in the context in which we are discussing Plantinga's argument, our faculties are working reliably. Indeed, we have no other option but to do so. However, we cannot legitimately assume that the CFs of the subjects of our thought-experiments are reliable, for this is precisely the issue in question. Nor, by the same token, can we admit evidence offered in defense of R that comes from our actual experience of the actual world. For if R does not pertain, then such "evidence" is not worth a dime. Thus, to use such evidence to establish R would be like using a murderer's plead of innocence to establish that she is in fact innocent.

To see this more clearly, consider the following experiment. I picture myself standing in the middle of a forest and I assume that my CFs are for the most part reliable. I now introduce a false belief into the picture. I consider whether, were I to perceive an approaching tiger as a friendly pussy-cat, my behaviour would be likely to be maladaptive. I conclude that, yes, it would. What have I shown? 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 start running in a random direction. In all the above cases, my believing that an approaching tiger was a friendly pussy-cat would cause no problems adaptively speaking: that is to say, the falsity of my belief would be of no concern to NS.

But wouldn't, one might wonder, it be an incredible co-incidence 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. Of course, if my CFs were reliable, then one could argue that my noetic structure probably wouldn't contain beliefs like "The moon has turned to cheese". But, as I have already mentioned, if my thought-experiment has to presuppose R in order to show that R is likely to pertain, then it is not a very helpful one.

Perhaps, however, you still have your doubts. Perhaps you are happy to grant that, yes, it is perfectly possibly for beliefs to arise which, whilst false, are not maladaptive. But perhaps you still consider it more likely that nature would evolve CFs that led to adaptive behaviour 'for the right reasons' as opposed to 'by chance'—that nature would evolve CFs that caused me to avoid tigers because they caused me to believe that there was in fact a tiger approaching me, in which case false beliefs would most likely prove maladaptive. But of course this is precisely the issue in question: that is, it is just the claim that P(R|N&E) is high. And, as we have already seen, P(R|N&E) doesn't look to be high; (in fact, it looks to be very low). Granted, CFs that perceive the outside world correctly and process sense data in a rational way might be the ideal way of surviving. But NS is not able to hang around waiting for ideal solutions to arrive. NS will take whatever it can get its hands on. If CFs arise that cause adaptive behaviour: fine. NS will take them. Whether the beliefs they entail are true or not is neither here nor there. In this sense, natural selection is life's ultimate opportunist.

The only thing the above thought-experiment seems to show, therefore, 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, then all other things being equal, they are likely to stay that way. But of course this isn't what we want to know at this point. What we want to know is whether, given N&E, it is likely that my CFs are in fact reliable—whether there is anything about N&E that would predispose it to engineering reliable as opposed to unreliable CFs.

To consider this issue properly, then, it will be helpful if we can distance ourselves from our current cognitive situation, thus preventing us from smuggling in any improper assumptions. For it is hopelessly circular to assume that our beliefs about the outside world are true and then to try to work out whether our CFs are actually reliable. What we need to do is to consider an organism's evolution from an outsider's perspective—to consider the likely effects of N&E on some hypothetical organism. We need to think about what follows merely as a result of N&E without assuming that our observations of the world around us—the observations of homo sapiens—are true.

Of course, this is not an easy thing to do. However, a good way of getting started is by considering some simple non-thinking organism and asking ourselves whether N&E would be likely to furnish it with reliable CFs (assuming that N&E does in fact furnish it with CFs of some kind).

...a better 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. Would N&E be 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, say, a light-sensitive spot together with some CFs; and suppose neither of these structures are very reliable. When it is dark, the light-spot tells a_n that it is dark, and when a_n gets told that it is dark, a_n forms the belief 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 when a_n believes that P, it also forms the belief that it should do Q, where Q is adaptive.

Given this scenario, a_n+1 will be selected. Granted, a_n+1 has not hit upon the ideal way of interacting with its environment. But this is of no concern to NS. In that a_n+1 tends to do 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 would put things right. For if one's noetic structure consists of mostly false beliefs, then acquiring further false beliefs may well prove maladaptive (whilst acquiring true beliefs may prove adaptive). To see this, suppose an organism m believes that running towards its predators gives it the best chances 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. The same thing follows if an organism begins its cognitive life with another fundamental false belief: say, "If P implies Q, and P, then not Q".

Alternatively, rather than considering some primitive organism, we can consider some alien life-form (call it "A") that has evolved on some distant planet somewhere and ask ourselves the same question: Is it likely that N&E would have furnished A with reliable CFs? The answer, it seems, is no. For what do we know about this life-form? All we can legitimately assume is that its ancestors behaved adaptively. But as we have already seen, this tells us nothing about whether these organisms' beliefs would have been true. Given, then, that N&E is unlikely to have furnished our hypothetical alien life-form with reliable CFs, it is unlikely to have in fact furnished us with reliable CFs. And any argument aimed at demonstrating that we homo sapiens are in a privileged position compared to A will inevitably have to presuppose R, so will ipso facto be invalid.

...a stock take...

Even granted C, then—that is, 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 realistically—that an organism's believing that P and then deciding to do Q corresponds to P's being the case and the organism's doing Q in the real world. As a result, there is nothing to prevent an organism's perception of the real world (which of course will include its perception of its actual behaviour) being like that of a sleepwalker. Beliefs can be hooked up to behaviours in a completely surreal fashion, and NS will never be any the wiser. Provided the various properties of the organism's beliefs generate the right responses to sensory inputs—responses that aren't maladaptive—NS will not mind one bit. The organism can wander around in its dreamworld for as long as it likes, all the while convinced it is correctly perceiving and interacting with the outside world when in fact it is doing nothing of the sort. Plantinga explains this 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 that C actually 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)

In other words, to justify R, the believer in N&E can't make do with any old causal link between beliefs and behaviours. She needs a very specific kind of link. She needs false beliefs to be connected to maladaptive behaviours and true beliefs to be connected to adaptive behaviours. The problem, however, is that there is no reason to think that NS would be interested in configuring CFs in this way. For it has nothing to gain by doing so. Hence we must assume that the probability of a given false belief's being connected to adaptive as opposed to maladaptive behaviour is in the region of 0.5.

Thus, whether C or -C pertains, there seems little reason to think that an organism's having false beliefs would lead to its behaving maladaptively. In which case neither P(R|N&E&C) nor P(R|N&E&-C) are in very good shape.

...furthermore...

However, the full strength of Plantinga's argument can perhaps be seen by appreciating how slim a set of premises it can run on. 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? It seems not. 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, say, CF75s.

However, thus construed, the claim that false beliefs are maladaptive ("FM" for short) doesn't seem to do much to help the believer in N&E to justify R. That is, it doesn't justify her belief that the beliefs of homo sapiens are not in fact mostly false.

Why? For one thing, because at best all that can be gleaned from FM is that our CFs are more reliable than those of our ancestors, and 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 constructing 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 actually were. Maybe they will regard us as having similar cognitive faculties to those of, say, cows or sheep. Or maybe the truth of the matter is that we possess CF15s and caws and sheep don't in fact exist. At the end of the day, all that follows from FM is that whichever organism we descended from had less reliable CFs than we do. But not much else of interest seems to result.

An objector could perhaps argue that if FM is the case—if having false beliefs tends to cause maladaptive behaviour—then NS would prevent the evolution of anything less reliable than CF50s. But it is far from obvious that this is true. For having, say, a one in ten chance of forming correct beliefs about the outside world may well prove better (in NS terms) than, say, having no sense organs or indicators or beliefs at all—than having to act for all intents and purposes at random. Moreover, as we will see shortly, it is perfectly conceivable for NS to allow CFs to deteriorate (just as it allowed dodos to lose their ability to fly). Hence the existence of, say, CF20s seems perfectly compatible with FM.

Given FM, then, there is very little reason to think that anything like CF75s have evolved—much less that we homo sapiens are their proud owners. Belief in R would be justifiable only if a structure's being adaptive guaranteed: a] its evolution, and b] its being inherited by every living organism. However, both these claims are patently false. Take, for instance, L75s (legs capable of propelling their owners along at 75mph). L75s would doubtless have better adapted our ancestors to life on the Serengeti plains. However, neither we nor any of our cousins seem to have inherited such adaptations. Granted, L75s might have proven helpful in NS terms (as might the ability to fly, breathe fire, or raise the dead). But acquiring L75s is not a condition of our having evolved, meaning we cannot assume that such adaptations have in fact evolved.

...further problems...

However, there are further problems in arguing from FM to R. For it is one thing to assume that, all other things being equal, false beliefs will prove maladaptive. But all other things may not in fact be equal.

Suppose, for instance, a_n has reliable sense organs and CFs (where, as before, a_n is the n-th evolutionary generation on a particular line of descent). Now suppose a_n+1 comes along. Fortunately, a_n+1 has acquired a mutation making it a stronger and fitter organism than the rest of its species. Unfortunately, however, this mutation has a side-effect: that its carriers have less reliable CFs. a_n+1's deteriorated CFs will therefore ex concessionis be disadvantageous in NS terms. However, suppose this doesn't matter since its greater strength and fitness compensates for this disadvantage. Given this scenario, a_n+1's behaviour will be adaptive; thus, a_n+1 will be selected.

Admittedly, this scenario may sound somewhat contrived at first blush. But it is not actually all that implausible. Indeed, "compensatory mutations" are well-known phenomena, and many scientists think that evolution regularly removes structures which, in the majority of situations, would have proven highly adaptive (e.g. eyes, limbs, wings, etc). As Megan Porter and Keith Crandall say,

"Recently, researchers have begun to identify the prevalence of trait simplification, loss, and reversal across all levels of biological organization." (Porter and Crandall, "Lost along the way: the significance of evolution in reverse", Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 18, No 10, Oct 2003, p541)

such "reverse evolution" being possible partly as a result of species' environments changing and partly as a result of things other than NS affecting their evolution. As Steven Pinker states:

"Natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change. Organisms also change...[as a result] of statistical accidents in who lives and who dies, environmental catastrophes that wipe out whole families of creatures, and the unavoidable by-products of changes that are the products of natural selection." (Pinker, "How the Mind Works", [1997], Penguin: London, 1998, p36)

"[Hence, whilst] the mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection,...[this] does not mean everything we think, feel, and do is biologically adaptive." (Ibid, p23)

Indeed, given the amount of extinctions that proliferate the tree of life, it seems quite plausible to think that, as time has gone on, life has been getting less well-adapted to its environment (paradoxical though the concept may sound)—that today's species are less well-adapted to their environment than were, say, the early post-Cambrian species to theirs. As Grasse says,

"[Evolution's] period of great fecundity is over; present evolution appears...a weakened process, declining or near its end. Aren't we witnessing the remains of an immense phenomenon close to extinction? Aren't the small variations which are being recorded everywhere the tail end—the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement? Aren't our plants [and] our animals lacking some mechanisms which were present in the early flora and fauna?" (Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation", [1973], Academic Press: New York, 1977, p71)

It certainly seems like it. For as Julian Huxley said almost 60 years ago (in a statement that is difficult to reconcile with Darwinian theory):

"Evolution is...a series of blind alleys—[pathways that fail to make any ultimate progress]. Some are extremely short...Others are longer...But all in the long run have terminated blindly." (Huxley, "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis", Harper: New York & London, 1942, p571)

Of course, Huxely's and Grasse's claims are (like those of Porter & Crandall) based on empirical findings. I am not therefore suggesting that they give us any reason to think that life's CFs have in fact become less well-adapted to their environment. For this would be to make the same mistake as was made by the thought-experiments we considered earlier. The point of referencing such research, however, is to show that concepts like reverse evolution and adaptive deterioration cannot be all that implausible, for many scientists believe they actually take place in the world around us.

It may well be, then, that whilst it is true that unreliable CFs are maladaptive, evolution has nevertheless allowed life's CFs to deteriorate over time. Or maybe evolution has only allowed our lineage's faculties to deteriorate in this way. It is tempting to reject this possibility on the grounds that we seem the most advanced of evolution's creations. But of course the validity of this judgment presupposes the reliability of our CFs, so is ipso facto illegitimate. For if in reality we possess CF15s, then our believing that we are more cognitively advanced than our evolutionary cousins counts is like the madman's believing that he is more intelligent than his doctors on the basis that they have failed to realise that he is Napoleon.

Let us therefore resume the thread of the previous thought-experiment.

As you will recall, a_n+1 has supplanted a_n: its CFs were less reliable than a_n's but its superior strength carried the day. Suppose, then, a_n+2 continues what a_n+1 has begun. That is, suppose a_n+2's physical prowess is greater still than a_n+1's but its CFs are again less reliable. Suppose a_n+3 then follows suit. Or alternatively, for the sake of plausibility, suppose a_n+3's NS advantage has some other cause. Suppose a_n+3 evolves adaptive desires (e.g. a strong desire to feed and reproduce) or adaptive indicators. Or suppose a_n+3 has no obvious selective selling point at all. Suppose it just happens to live in an environment where unreliable CFs are adaptive—e.g. being alive at a time when crusaders are executing believers in N&E (N&E being a true belief as far as a naturalist is concerned).

Suppose this trend continues for a while. Or suppose, for the sake of argument, it doesn't. Suppose a_n+4 improves on a_n+3's CFs, and a_n+5 does likewise, but then a_n+9 comes along and undoes all the good work in CF terms.

Now, suppose we are a_n+1000. What are the odds of our having a reliable set of CFs?

It is hard to say. It all depends what kinds of mutations affected our particular line of descent, what kinds of environments our ancestors encountered, and how much NS values CFs in comparison to other traits (e.g. vision, strength, etc)—all of which factors are fairly inscrutable.

...summing up these 'further problems'...

Even granted, then, that false beliefs tend to produce maladaptive behaviour, we still don't seem to have much reason to think that R is the case. For all said and done, FM guarantees neither that reliable CFs ever evolved nor that, if they did, they remained in existence.

...in conclusion...

Thus, whether C or -C pertains, we seem to have little reason to think that P(R) is high or anything like it. For P(R|N&E&C) looks to be fairly low and P(R|N&E&-C) looks to be lower still; and -C is in fact the majority view amongst evolutionary psychologists. As William Robinson and others explain,

"It would seem that, on a naturalistic view,...neuro-physiological properties must be sufficient to cause any behaviour that might commonsensically be attributed to a belief. If so, [then] there would seem to be no causal work left for the content property to do—i.e. the content of beliefs would be causally irrelevant to behaviour." (Robinson, "Evolution and Epiphenominalism", Iowa State University, May 06)

"Orthodox biologists believe that behaviour, however complex, is governed entirely by biochemistry and that the attendant sensations—fear, pain, wonder, love, [beliefs]—are just shadows cast by that biochemistry." (Time Magazine, Dec 92)

Plantinga therefore concludes his argument 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], note some analogies with clear cases. [Suppose] I hear about a certain substance XXX—a substance the ingestion of which is widely reputed to destroy the reliability of one's belief-forming faculties; nevertheless I find it difficult to estimate the probability that ingestion of XXX really does destroy cognitive reliability, and regard that probability as either high or inscrutable. Now suppose I come to think you have ingested XXX. Then I have a defeater for anything I believe just on your say-so; I won't (or shouldn't) believe anything you tell me unless I have independent evidence for it. [But suppose] I come to think that I myself have also ingested XXX—at an unduly high-spirited party, perhaps—then I will have a defeater for R in my own case. [And it will be a defeater that cannot itself be defeated]." (Plantinga, "Naturalism vs Evolution: A Religion/Science Conflict?", infidels.org, 2007)

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.

Similarly, then, the naturalist—or at any rate the naturalist who realises that P(R|N&E) is low or even just inscrutable—has a defeater for the proposition that her cognitive faculties are reliable. That is, she has a reason to reject R along with everything she has come to believe on the assumption of R—which of course is everything she believes. Moreover, it is a defeater that cannot itself be defeated.

Note, then, that Plantinga is not just claiming that we can't be sure that our CFs are reliable (which of course is true, though trivially so). He is claiming that when the believer in N&E carefully reflects on the way in which N&E has constructed her CFs, 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 in fact pertains. For in order to affirm the premises and formal structure of such arguments, we would first need to presuppose R, which we cannot rationally do since our noetic structure already contains a defeater for R. Or to put it 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.

...so what?...

The question, then, is how problematic Plantinga's argument is for evolutionary theory. And the answer, I think, is that it is hugely problematic. For if a theory is self-defeataing, then no amount of empirical evidence will rescue it. That is, further scientific research can be of no help in this matter. Either N&E's methodological-cum-philosophical problems must be dealt with or belief in it must be abandoned as inherently irrational.

...time for a breather...

We have now covered a fair amount of ground in this essay, so it will probably be a good idea to take a breather—to take stock of our situation. What have we seen so far, then? The answer is the following:

a] that whilst science is often defined in such a way as to exclude creationism from its ranks, such definitions seem unjustified and, when consistently applied, render many things that scientists do in fact study "unscientific";

b] that the scientific method is far 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 will reflect history as it actually happened; and

c] that science's presuppositions lead inescapably to N&E, which is a self-defeating position. Thus, naturalistic evolutionism cannot be rationally affirmed, no matter how compelling its various evidences seem.

What does this mean in practice? It means, I would suggest, that 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 the theologians' presuppositions:

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 seems perfectly reasonable to think that God would have endowed us with CFs that are basically reliable.

This is not, of course, to say that the theist's beliefs are infallible. For the theist can be mistaken about her beliefs just as easily as can anyone else. But that is not the point here. The point Plantinga is making is that there is an important difference between the theist's and the naturalistic evolutionist's respective beliefs in R: namely that the N&Eist's belief in N&E, once properly analysed, furnishes her with a defeater for R (and therefore in turn with a defeater for N&E) whilst the theist's belief in God doesn't furnish her with any such defeater for theism—which surely makes the theologian's starting-point the more rational one.

This therefore concludes our discussion of points a] and b] as set out in the essay's initial outline. And whilst the discussion has been a lengthy one, I feel that it has been necessary. For unless we enter into the evolutionism-creationism debate fully aware of the presuppositions made by each side, we will be unable to evaluate the relevant evidence. We will not be able to distinguish what people are assuming from what they are demonstrating, nor why people are making their particular assumptions. And this is the key to understanding the controversy.

...what next?...

With these things in mind, then, let us move on to consider what is, after all, the main focus of this essay: the fossil record.

...the fossils...

Plants and animals change over time; they adapt to their surroundings. This much is fairly 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, meaning evidence is a must. Which is precisely 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 far from evolutionary. As he wrote 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 linking different species to each other] 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 (or rather 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 the alleged 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 [that is, 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 have their reservations about evolutionary theory—who think there is a discrepancy between what we should see in the rocks if evolutionism was true and what we do actually see.

...an aside...

But before looking any further into the specifics of the fossil record, it is worth our while appreciating the following points.

First, the fossil record is notoriously difficult to interpret, since only a very small proportion of the creatures that have inhabited this planet will have left their imprint in the rocks. (The majority will be eaten or simply rot away). Moreover, the majority of the imprints we find only provide us with limited information about the creatures that left them: that is, they only reveal part of an organism or lack detail (meaning they tell us very little about the creature's softer tissues and internal workings). Furthermore, matching up 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—can often be a tricky business. Due to the above ambiguities, then, assumptions play a key part in using the fossil record to deduce the most likely course of history.

The second thing we need to appreciate is what "taxonomy" is.

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. Thus, biologists assign animals with backbones (e.g. fish) to a different category to those that don't (e.g. sponges). Some animals with backbones give birth to live young; others don't. Thus, biologists assign 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.

The taxonomic hierarchy consists of eight main layers or levels. The lowest level—the most specific level—is the species level. A few levels higher up comes the "class", then the "phylum", the "kingdom", and the "domain". homo sapiens, for instance, are a species that belong to the class Mammalia (mammals), the (sub)-phylum Vertebrata (things with backbones), and the kingdom Animalia (the animal kingdom).

The phylum, then, is the highest (i.e. broadest) biological category in the plant and animal kingdoms—which is why life's various phyla are often referred to as the "major groups". Each of these phyla are characterised by a certain "body-plan" (often referred to as a Bauplan or "building plan") that specifies the way in which their creatures are constructed—their shape, symmetry, number of body segments, number of limbs, and so on. Spiders, for instance, have the same body-plan as crabs yet have a very different body-plan to that of, say, star-fish and mosses. 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—including you and I), and many others.

So, with these things in mind, 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 (assuming the standard evolutionary dating methods to be correct), two things are immediately apparent:

i] that, for the first three billion years (known as the pre-Cambrian era)—that is, for the vast majority of life's history—we see very little in terms of diversity and complexity: some blue-green algaes, some single-celled organisms, and that's about it; and

b] that most if not all of life's major innovations then suddenly appear in the rocks during a 5-10 million year geological window—that is, a tiny proportion of life's history—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)

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)

In other words, rather than revealing a slow and gradual accumulation of complexity and diversity (as is the impression given by drawings of the 'tree of life'):

the pattern revealed by the fossil record actually looks more 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 x-coordinate therefore tells us how similar or different it is to another fossil. 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, according to standard evolutionary theory, the process of evolution begins with the development of variation within a species (e.g. one finch's developing a differently-shaped beak to another's) which, over time, becomes more pronounced until the variation gives rise to separate species which continue to diverge until the species become two distinct genera, the genera two distinct families, 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). And, from that point on, we see, not the appearance of new innovations, but variations on existing themes. In other words, at the start we have a wider range of phyla which later branch out into different species as opposed to having a narrow range of species which later diverge into different phyla.

As a result, the pattern of the fossil record is often referred to as "top-down" as opposed to "bottom-up" evolution. That is, the major groups of animals and plants enter the record as distinct groups and (if they survive at all) remain as distinct groups; their body-plans grade 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)

Looking at the big picture, then, we see very little to suggest that complex life has gradually 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 after the Cambrian explosion—the variations unfolding 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. 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 [just as] 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:

i] 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

ii] 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. Nor should this issue should not be explained away (as methodological naturalism would urge). For 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 (namely to the fossil record) 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 historical theories get tested to see how well they stack up with the evidence. And the fact of the matter is that, when evolutionary theory is tested in this way, it does not pass muster.

...some reservations...

Of course, for my part, I am only a layman when it comes to matters of science, and probably not even that. So, if you have firm convictions about the truth of evolutionary theory, you will no doubt find it tempting to dismiss my claims on the basis that I have misunderstood or misrepresented the sources I am quoting, or that something else has gone wrong somewhere along the line. After all, for all the work I have cited, the fact of the matter is that most scientists claim that the fossil record is supportive of evolutionary theory. And surely, you may reason, no scientist would claim such a thing if the evidence suggested otherwise.

However, as we saw in the opening section of this essay, this kind of thinking seems somewhat naive. For facts are always interpreted in light of theories; and given methodological naturalism, evolutionary theory is the only theory science's fact-base can be interpreted in light of! Hence the following argument is played out:

(1) "[Scientific] facts...are read in the light of [scientific] theories" (Gould, "Ever since Darwin", Burnett Books, 1978, p161-162)

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

(3) Therefore, "Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts—a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow" (Dobzhansky, "Biology, Molecular and Organismic", American Zoologist, Vol 4, 1964, p443-452)

Of course, given methodological naturalism, this logic is perfectly valid. But then, given methodological naturalism, it is untrue that an un-Darwinian fossil record would cause scientists to reject Darwinism. For if every scientific fact we discover about the world around us must be interpreted in light of evolutionary theory, then from a scientific perspective, all that follows if a body of evidence looks un-Darwinian is that it is misleading—that it is not giving us the full picture. 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")

"Some biologists...claim that they are validating the theory of evolution on a daily basis. Not true. 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)

Hence it seems quite possible for the fossil record to be as un-Darwinian as I claim it to be yet for scientists to affirm Darwinian theory all the same. After all, science has, in Lewontin's words, "a prior commitment to materialism" (and ipso facto to evolutionism) which can explain away a significant amount of un-Darwinian evidence. As Johnson says,

"[Such a] prior commitment explains why 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 [their] presuppositions....[It also explains why], when [the] evidence showed that the period available on the early earth for the evolution of life was extremely brief in comparison to the time previously posited for chemical evolution scenarios, Carl Sagan calmly concluded that the chemical evolution of life must be easier than [people] had supposed because it [had] happened so rapidly!

[It also explains] why Niles Eldredge, [when] surveying the absence of evidence for macro-evolutionary transformations in the rich marine invertebrate fossil record, [remarked] that evolution always seems to be happening somewhere else." (Phillip Johnson, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism", First Things, 1st November 1997)

as well as a number of other conclusions that sound decidedly odd to the "uninitiated". In other words, the scientist can happily accept that the fossil record doesn't give the impression that life evolved from a common ancestor and yet still conclude that the fossil record is the product of evolutionary processes. In which case it is quite possible that, in claiming that the fossil record is supportive of evolutionary theory, a lot of scientists are simply restating their presuppositions rather than telling us anything about the nature of the fossil record. As Johnson says,

"There is an important difference between going to the empirical evidence to test a doubtful theory against some plausible alternative, and going to the evidence to look for confirmation of the only theory that one is willing to tolerate." (Johnson, "Darwin on Trial", Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1991, p28)

Having said that, when confronted with some of the more baffling features of the fossil record, most scientists don't 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?

We will start answering this question by considering how evolutionists explain the Cambrian explosion (the "CE" for short).

...fossilisation...

As we have already mentioned, the majority of animals that walk this earth (or crawl it, or inhabit it in some other way) do not fossilise, since fossilisation requires highly specialised conditions. Thus, 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. As a result, many Darwinists claim that the pre-Cambrian's lack of transitional forms can be explained by the simple fact that most organisms fail to fossilise—by the inherent incompleteness of the fossil record. Their claim, then, is that life did indeed evolve slowly and gradually from a common ancestor but that the rocks failed to record this fact. This hypothesis is known as "the artifact hypothesis".

However, the artifact hypothesis does not seem a particularly plausible one. For one cannot explain a pattern as specific as the CE by appealing to something as general as the incompleteness of the fossil record. Doing so is the equivalent of explaining why everyone in a particular place has flu by appealing to a hypothesis like "People get ill from time to time". The hypothesis of course is true enough as a general observation, however it fails to explain the data in question—it fails to explain the pattern that needs to be explained. And the hypothesis that the fossil record is incomplete is similar. It is true enough as a general observation, however it fails to explain the specific pattern that needs to be explained, namely the Cambrian explosion. Hence Valentine and Erwin and others conclude that:

"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 work. Some Darwinists therefore suggest that, relative to the post-Cambrian era, fossilisation was very rare in the pre-Cambrian—that there was something unique about conditions in the pre-Cambrian era that hindered fossilisation.

However, this suggestion does not seem to explain much. For there is no good reason to think that pre-Cambrian conditions did in fact make fossilisation particularly rare. Moreover:

a] the problem with the CE isn't the lack of pre-Cambrian fossils per se; it's that the fossils we have collected provide absolutely no evolutionary backdrop for the phyla that appear on the scene at the start of the Cambrian era—that they are almost completely unrelated to what follows them;

b] many of the pre-Cambrian fossils we have collected look to have been formed in a highly fossil-friendly environment. Why? Because they are highly detailed and are of small and/or soft-bodied organisms which, given their speed of decomposition, don't often fossilise, and

c] we find creatures with hard shells appearing in the CE. If, therefore, such creatures existed in the pre-Cambrian era, then we would expect to find evidence of their existence—which we don't. And it is highly unlikely that they evolved their shells in the CE for their body-parts are such that the creatures wouldn't have survived without their 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)

In conclusion, then, it seems difficult to reconcile the Cambrian explosion with evolutionary theory.

...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, for instance, separating out into fish and amphibians, arthropods separating out into spiders and crabs, and so on? Admittedly, the Darwinist's problems are not quite as daunting here. For since the post-Cambrian rocks describe, not the origin of the phyla, but the variation within them, there are no 'explosions as such'. However, there is still a distinct lack of transitional fossils which surely requires an explanation.

How, then, 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). They again appeal to the artifact hypothesis. However, they also have the odd "transitional series" ("TSs" for short) they can point to: series of fossils documenting the evolution of one species into another.

Leaving the artifact hypothesis to one side, then, let us examine the state of these alleged transitional series. How much do they prove? The answer, in my view, is not very much. 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 last, because there are nowhere near enough of them.

...i] morphological gaps...

Transitional series claim to provide historical evidence of evolution—to bridge the morphological gaps in the fossil record with series of intermediate forms. However, most if not all such series consist of only a handful of often incomplete fossils, making their evidential value fairly questionable.

Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine any of evolutionists' proposed TSs in any detail. However, to give you a feel for what these series look like, consider Science Daily's article on evolution's "poster child": whale evolution. Here, the 'missing link' said to bridge the gap between land-dwelling mammals and a bunch of primitive whale fossils is a "tiny deer-like animal" (an artist's impression of which is shown below) that resembles a whale only insofar as it exhibits a handful of similar morphological features—e.g. a similar ear structure.

Now, admittedly, I am no zoologist. However, the creature pictured above—the "closest known fossil relative of whales"—hardly looks like it bridges the gap between whales and land-dwelling mammals. That is, given the number of new adaptions this deer-like creature would need to develop in order to become a fully-aquatic whale (e.g. tail-flukes, fatty blubber, a means of feeding its young underwater, an impermeable skin, a blow-hole), the fossil reconstruction pictured above is not exactly compelling evidence of evolution in action, even granted that it can be incorporated into a "three or four step" series. (Gingerich, Interview: "Fossils and the Origin of Whales", Action Bioscience, 2006)

It is also worth appreciating (if only in passing) the historic fragility of evolutionary accounts of whales' origins. For in the 1960s, evolutionists thought that whales evolved from an extinct group of hyena-like animals, and in the 90s, hippopotamuses. That these former theories have been supplanted on the basis of evidence like that pictured above therefore suggests that evolutionists don't require a very high standard of evidence in order to embrace what are after all fairly substantial claims (e.g. the claim that natural processes have turned a hyena-like creature into a whale).

However, this is only a minor point. The point we currently need to appreciate is that the land-dweller-to-whale TS is a fairly typical one (indeed, it is billed as macro-evolution's "poster-child"), yet it claims to bridge a significant morphological gap with an unfeasibly small number of transitional forms. 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)

This is exactly right.

...ii] phylogenetic...

Phylogenetics is the branch of science that concerns itself with reconstructing the course of evolution. Briefly put, it 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 of course, given i], seems reasonable enough).

The aim of phylogenetics, then, is to represent life's many groups in the form of "trees" showing what evolved from what. These trees include branchings (as new species are formed via speciation), dead-ends (as species become extinct), and hybridisations (as species merge together)—the uppermost twigs representing the species alive in the world today.

Thus, when paleontologists assemble transitional series, they are effectively involved in phylogenetics—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—that is, 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)

Thus, 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, is assigned to the homonoid tree, something that looks like a reptile to 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). As Keith Miller says:

"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 good example of this is the whale series mentioned earlier. A group of fossilised mammals are found; they seem to have similar ear structures yet their forelimbs get progressively shorter (when lined up in a particular order); thus, they are viewed (roughly speaking) as points on an evolutionary pathway between land-dwelling mammals and whales.

However, there are two major problems with this method of interpreting the fossil record. The first is practical: that, as we have seen, the gaps in such series tend to be far too large. Thus, there is no good reason to view their members as a collection of transitionals as opposed to a bunch of distinct species that remained static over time, as per the general pattern of the post-Cambrian. The second problem is methodological. For similarities in appearance are not always a good indicator of phylogenetic relatedness. Thus, arranging fossils into phylogenetic trees on the basis of certain superficial similarities is potentially extremely 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 far removed from each other in terms of 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 the Ostracoda. The Ostracoda is a small shrimp-like creature of the phylum Arthropoda. It has highly developed compound eyes which are almost identical to those of its cousins: that is, to the eyes of its fellow arthropods. The standard assumption, then, would be to think that the Ostracoda and their cousins inherited their eyes from a common ancestor. However, most biologists do not make this assumption (as a result of chemical analysis of the arthropods); instead, they think the Ostracoda belongs to a small "eyeless" phylogenetic tree nested within that of the phylum. Thus, 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 the same 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 seems difficult to believe, for evolutionists are not exactly clear on how wings could have evolved even once. As Carroll asks, "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).

Thus, Sattler and others conclude that,

"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)

That two species have certain morphological similarities is therefore no guarantee that one has descended from the other. As Lowenstein and others point out,

"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)

"Ancestral-descendant relationships cannot be objectively recognized in the fossil record." (Schoch, "Evolution Debate," Science, Apr 83, p360.)

Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if the fossils we found formed finely-graduated chains. But they don't. It was therefore hoped (about 30 or 40 years ago) that advances in our ability to analyse organisms at the molecular level would be able to inject some much-needed objectivity into the task of reconstructing evolutionary lineages. However, as we will now see, this hope doesn't seem to have been realised.

(Note: A full discussion of the fossil record's interpretation would also include a discussion of dating methods. However, this is beyond the scope of this essay, and is perhaps not essential anyway).

...(ii) cont'd...molecular phylogenetics...

Whereas the morphological aspect of phylogenetics works by comparing species' morphologies (and thus deducing the most likely course of evolution), 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. Very similar organisms are assumed to have descended from a common ancestor in the recent past, very different ones to have "branched-off" from each other in the distant past.

In theory, then, molecular phylogenetics provides a number of (at least semi) independent ways of reconstructing an organism's phylogenetic tree, for each organism has hundreds of different genes and proteins that can be analysed. Phylogenetic research therefore has the potential to generate an impressive self-authenticating set of data. In practice, however, it has not done so. 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 whilst analysing rRNA molecules produces a completely different set of result. Nor do the problems stop there. Analysing one gene can produce a different result from analysing another gene. 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)

none of which is very helpful when one is trying to introduce some objectivity into an already highly subjective branch of scientific enquiry.

By way of analogy, suppose I am a detective investigating a murder-scene. I submit various pieces of evidence to the lab for testing (this apparently being the kind of thing detectives do). The results are as folows. On the basis of the DNA evidence, it looks like P is guilty; on the basis of the forensic evidence, it looks like Q is guilty (always be suspicious of people called Q); and, on the basis of some other evidence, it looks like neither P nor Q are guilty. What can I conclude? It seems that, faced with such incongruous results, I cannot conclude much at all. And this situation is not dissimilar to the one facing molecular phylogeneticists today. 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 has been a fruitless endeavour or that its findings do not provide circumstantial evidence for evolutionism. However, on the whole, molecular phylogenetics has done little to help paleontologists reconstruct evolutionary lineages. Indeed, in many cases it has only introduced further confusion into an already confused matter. 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? The answer is as follows.

If a transitional series is to count as evidence in support of the claim that one group of animals has evolved into another—if we are to regard a TS as a record of evolutionary history—then we need good reason to think that its members are phylogenetically related. However, the fossil record is not smooth enough to justify this claim—which is precisely why the field of phylogenetics is plagued with so much disagreement. As a result, phylogeneticists have had to look elsewhere to find evidence of the evolutionary developments they have proposed: specifically, at existing organisms' molecular signatures. However, such research has done little to shore up a decidedly patchy fossil record. The fact of the matter, then, is that we know very little about life's history. As Simon Conway Morris and others say,

"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)

which of course is true. But it is hard to see how observing that similar looking structures routinely evolve in independent lineages—that life's evolution is characterised by odd coincidences that are difficult to explain on a naturalistic worldview—can be said to teach us a great deal about evolution, other than that it tends to do rather unexpected things. Hence Patterson's conclusion:

"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]."

...(iii) too much theory...

In the opening section of this essay, I showed that science's naturalistic bias is not a good thing—that it makes it quite possible for evolutionary theory to derive its support, not from convincing evidence of evolution's having happened, but from the presupposition that evolutionism is true. Here I will seek to show that this possibility is in fact an accurate description of the status quo amongst evolutionists. Hence point (iii) will be in large part a development and defense of the claims made in (i) and (ii).

What, then, might the fossil record 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 it would contain evidence of the gradual evolution of new species (and hence the gradual evolution of new body-parts like wings and limbs) via smooth chains of intermediate forms. In fact, however, it doesn't. Indeed, the reason the fossil record cannot reliably be used to reconstruct phylogeneies is precisely because it does not show us such things happening—because it does not show us evolution in action. If it did, the practice of arranging fossils into TSs wouldn't be such a subjective business. For fossils would "arrange themselves" into lines, as do the drawings in a cartoon strip. In practice, however, doing paleontology is a case of 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." (Ibid, 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, for some reason, the intermediate forms that filled the gaps in such series 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)

Which is why one often hears pronouncements like the following:

"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)

Yet how can we "know" the fossil record contains certain fossils unless we actually find them? The answer is by assuming the truth of evolutionary theory. But of course assumptions are not evidence. As Gee and others explain,

"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)

Take, for instance, human evolution—the fossil evidence for which is typically regarded as "abundant"—e.g. by the 2008 Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 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 used to interpret the fossil record, evolutionary theory has to do far too much work. At the end of the day, a fossil record that is not finely-graduated enough 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. Or to put it another way: to take a bunch of fossils that are not transitional forms, arrange them in the shape of a tree, and then assume that the gaps were filled with transitional forms that failed to fossilise doesn't prove much. (And given that the living world around us seems so devoid of transitional forms in the living around us, there is little warrant to infer their existence in the past). 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. However, the reason for this is, not because they have evolved from a common ancestor, but because they have been designed by the same company; (and, in any case, evolutionists often deny that similarities are evidence of common ancestry, hence the theory of convergent evolution).

Summing up, then, in the words of Ronald West,

"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, saying,

"[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)

When assessing the state of the post-Cambrian record, we therefore need to ensure that the TSs proffered by evolutionists demonstrate what they're supposed to demonstrate—that they show us evidence of evolution in action. More precisely, taking S to be a typical transitional series, we need to ask questions like:

Is there a good reason as to why S been lined up the way it has? Or to put the question negatively: why hasn't it been lined up some other way? Is there a theory-independent reason for its order, or is it just that it looks more evolutionary when lined up the way the evolutionists suggest? As previously mentioned, I have neither the time nor the expertise to discuss the radiometric and geological evidence that bears on this question. However, this may not be such a big deal. For when paleontologists say that they've found a transitional series, they don't tend to mean that its members form an actual chain of ancestors and descendants. What they mean is that they've found some fossils of creatures that might themselves have descended from the creatures involved in this chain. As, for instance, Michael Novak says of the whale series: "[These fossils] cannot be strung in procession from ancestor to descendant in a scala naturae—[in a strict line of descent]" (Novak, "Whales leave the beach", Nature 368, 1994, p807). They are merely the supposed offspring of creatures that bridged the gap between land-dwellers and whales,

Are the similarities shared by S's successive members more notable than their differences? If not, why think S's members are on their way to becoming something else? Why not treat S as a collection of similar yet distinct species that exhibit stasis as opposed to change over time as per the general pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks? Kevin Padian, for instance, mentions a number of features which the tail-end of the whale series would "have to lose in order to be considered direct ancestors of other known [whales]" (Padian, "The Tale of the Whale", NCSE, Dec 1999); plus, there are a whole load of features its earlier members would need to gain in order to become whales—features which we see no trace of developing. Why then regard such fossils as transitional? and

Does S document genuine change? Does it document, for instance, the evolution of a complex structure like the eye or the wing or the jaw? After all, today's biota is full of such structures, and they had to evolve somewhere. Surely, then, transitional series should be able to document such structures evolving.

Evolutionists often say that to expect affirmative answers to such questions is to set the bar too high. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. For the claim that something like a deer can evolve into something like a whale, and all by means of unguided naturalistic processes, is not exactly a trivial claim.

...(iv) rarity...

Perhaps, however, the most important question that needs to be asked of evolutionists' proffered TSs is why there are so few of them and why those that do exist contain such small numbers of fossils. After all, given the amazing diversity of plants and animals in the world around us and the rocks beneath us, together with the uncertainties involved in the study of phylogenetics, it is hardly surprising that paleontologists are able to take a handful of the millions of fossils at their disposal and make a plausible-looking TS 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 4 or 5 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, it is not. As the following scientists make clear:

"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)

And the artifact hypothesis (the "AH" for short) cannot account for this pattern any more convincingly than it can account for the Cambrian explosion. Why? Because, as with the CE, there is a very specific pattern that needs to be explained. For when we examine the post-Cambrian record, we don't just find the odd gap here and there. Instead, what we find is 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 and feathers. One minute there is no trace of feathers; the next minute, there they are. 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)

However, the artifact hypothesis cannot provide this explanation. For one cannot explain specific patterns by reference to random processes. The AH can perhaps explain small gaps, and it can perhaps explain random gaps. But as we have seen, the kind of gaps the AH needs to explain are large and systematic. To see why the AH can't explain such gaps, suppose evolution occurred as per Darwin's tree; and suppose the fossil record is severely incomplete. What sort of pattern would we expect to see in the rocks? Presumably, 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 fairly evenly, though only partially, filled). In other words, we would expect the morphological gaps separating similar species—say, a sheep and a cow—to be fairly empty. But we would expect bigger gap—say, the gap separating a sheep and a monkey—to be punctuated by transitional forms, however isolated they might be.

What do we see, then? The answer is that we see quite the opposite of what we would expect. We see dense clusters of fossils separated by large unfilled gaps; and we see that many species are well-represented. That is, rather than being sparse and evenly-spread, the record is concentrated in some places and empty in others. We find the odd candidate with which to connect, say, like different types of cattle (by means of common ancestry), but we find nothing with which to connect cattle to, say, apes. Which is the equivalent of putting ten empty buckets out in the rain for an hour and finding that two of them get filled whilst the others remain empty. In other words, it is something that requires explaining.

We can perhaps see this point more clearly by considering the following diagram of the tree of life and thinking about what the fossil record would look like if the tree was an accurate representation of life's evolutionary history.

Suppose, then, the horizontal lines (labeled I to XII on the right hand side of the page) 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. What kinds of fossils will we find? Judging by the x-coordinates of the points where the horizontal lines intersect the tree of life, we will find a fairly even distribution of fossils across the morphological spectrum. And of course, the more lines we draw, the more even the distribution will be.

In reality, however, the fossil record does not reveal an even covering across the x-axis—an even distribution across the morphological spectrum. On the contrary, certain intervals of the x-axis are very heavily populated with fossils whilst others are completely devoid of them. Take, for instance, reptiles and birds (birds are thought to have descended from reptiles). Over the years, we have found thousands of different types of fossilised reptiles and thousands of different types of fossilised birds. Yet we have found almost nothing with which to plug the gap between the two groups—nothing that looks like a reptile on its way to evolving the kinds of features that characterise birds: e.g. feathers (the only possible exception to this claim is the "curious mosaic" Archaeopteryx, but whether this is a genuinely transitional form is hotly disputed to say the least). As William Swinton says, "The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved." (Swinton, "The Origin of Birds: Chapter 1, Biology & Comparative Physiology of Birds", Ed. A J Marshall, Academic Press, New York, Vol 1, 1960, p1). Nor is this situation unique—or even unusual. Indeed, the overwhelming pattern of the post-Cambrian is one of dense clusters of fossils separated by large morphological gaps, just like that of today's living world. 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 morphological 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)

Thus, the artifact hypothesis appears to be completely insufficient to account for the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks.

However, even if the AH was able to explain the post-Cambrian pattern, it would still seem a decidedly ad hoc hypothesis to embrace. For at the end of the day, there is no good reason to think—and in fact good reason not to think—that the fossil record is incomplete. For 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 may be almost complete yet is just as static and discontinuous as that of the other groups. As Michael 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)

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 scholars I have referred to are theists I have explicitly pointed this out)—which, one would think, would be considered good practice. After all, the options available to me are: a] to cite secular research, b] to cite creationist research, or c] simply to state my own opinion and leave it at that—in which case a] seems preferable. Many evolutionists, however, imply otherwise, claiming that, since the scientists I cite are evolutionists, my citing of them as part of a case for creationism is disingenuous. However, this objection seems wrong-headed.

Take, for instance my citing of Gould's work. Frequently I refer to Gould in support of my 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 referring to Gould's work as part of a case for creationism is disingenuous since "Gould et al don't reject evolution" per se but just a particular sub-theory of it (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 classed as "neutral scientists", meaning their testimony wouldn't add any weight to my argument. The whole point of referring to the work of 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 therefore seems entirely wrong-headed. For if it is disingenuous to cite the research of evolutionists and partisan to appeal to the research of fellow creationists, then what is a creationists to do?

...a quick stock-take...

So, then. What can we conclude from our discussion of the fossil record so far? The answer is as follows:

a] that rather than evolving gradually from a single source, life's various body-plans—the phyla—arise in a single geological moment;

b] that rather than demonstrating their capacity to change over time, most species appear fully mature and remain unchanged for millions of years: as Gould says, "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] that rather than blending seamlessly into one another, most fossils would have to undergo significant modification if they were to morph into their nearest fossilised relatives; moreover, the size of the gaps separating different creatures only increases as one considers higher and higher taxa; and

d] that even if we grant that every TS ever proposed is valid, the evolutionist is still completely without evidence of pre-Cambrian evolution. Thus, at best the fossil record only illustrates how evolution is capable of modifying existing design-plans in order to produce "variation on a theme" (e.g. producing spiders, crabs, scorpions and lobsters from a prototype arthropod). There would still be no evidence that evolution could orchestrate the limitless progressive change required to produce fundamentally new design plans. By way an analogy, the fossil record would illustrate how a car designer could modify a basic prototype in order to produce an array of different models. But it would not show how, by means of the same process, that manufacturer could produce an array of, say, boats or micro-wave ovens. In other words, the fossil record shows "top-down" variation as opposed to "bottom-up" progressive evolution.

And, as we have already noted, such facts should not be explained away or glossed over (as is the tendency given methodological naturalism). For as Huxley stated over a century ago—that is, before it was clear what the fossil record would reveal,

"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)

Nor is Huxley alone in such thinking. For as Williamson says,

"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)

...the response...

How, then, have evolutionists responded to the above?

The answer is revealing. For once it started to become clear that the fossil record wasn't going to provide the kind of evidence scientists had expected to find, there was no great outcry, nor was there any suggestion that scientists might need to fundamentally rethink their views on life's origins (after all, how could they? "Evolution is...a trajectory all lines of thought must follow"). 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 something that looks more like a collection of individual sticks where new species are produced in flurries of evolutionary activity that are so rapid and localised that they fail to leave any record in the rocks (as indicated by the hypothesised dotted lines that connect species of different morphologies):

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 ("PE" for short)?

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 (that is, if we're forced to assume that the evolution of new species has left no fossil remains), then surely this is the same thing as saying that, taken 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, if, as evolutionists frequently allege, evolution is taking place too slowly for us to see it happening in the present day, then it seems somewhat tenuous for them to allege that it took place too quickly for us to see it happening in the past. It is possible, of course. However, there seems to be a certain tension between the two claims.

Third, whilst 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".

However, whilst this hypothesis perhaps explains the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks, 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 whilst it is perhaps conceivable to think that a new species could arise suddenly and locally, no punctuationist thinks that new body-plans could arise in this way.

Hence, in order to explain the CE, the punctuationist needs a huge pool of pre-Cambrian species—a diverse array of life for NS to get to work on. However, this is precisely what the pre-Cambrian record does not 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 would expect to see a pre-Cambrian fossil record full of diverse forms charting the development of life's many phyla rather than a record where they explode out of nowhere:

which ultimately squares with neither gradualism nor punctuationism. Thus, at best PE only solves the lesser of the evolutionist's problems.

Fourth, whatever PE gains in better explaining the pattern of the post-Cambrian rocks, it loses in spades by making the task of explaining how evolution occurs infinitely more difficult—e.g. identifying a mechanism capable of generating the rapid, localised generation of new species, explaining how such small populations could be established and maintained, etc.

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"—would not reveal what Darwinism required it to reveal, rather than questioning the truth of evolutionism, scientists simply explained away the lack of evidence just as Darwin had done 120 years prior to them. As Stanley says:

"Forced"? Stanley's reasoning seems to run as follows:


Premise 1:	Evolution is the only possible explanation for the existence of life's various species;
Premise 2:	We see little (if any) evidence of species evolving into one another in the fossil record;
Conclusion:	Therefore, evolution must have taken place so quickly and locally that it didn't leave any 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. But why should anyone who isn't a committed naturalist accept Stanley's key premise? And why should the metaphysically open-minded accept Gould's implication that the only alternative to gradualism is punctuationism? And how do punctuationists tell the difference between something that's happened without leaving evidence of its happening and something that hasn't actually 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 distinctive 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)

Of course, Ridley and Kitts are evolutionists, so they presumably think there is ample evidence for evolution elsewhere. However, once we recall the statements of Dunbar and many others—i.e. that "fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms"—it seems the non-Darwinain nature of the fossil record speaks volumes.

Still, let us do as Ridley and Kitts would no doubt suggest and turn our attention elsewhere. For it may be that we can learn something about the plausibility of evolutionary theory by considering whether there is any less direct or "circumstantial" evidence of evolution's having happened. Before doing so, however, I want to make a quick comment: namely that if you are surprised by what you have read so far in this essay—if you find it unbelievable that the fossil record could genuinely be as un-Darwinian as I claim—then 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...

There are two main questions that 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 only concerned ourselves with the first of these questions—which is fairly understandable. After all, the fossil record is the main focus of the essay. The second question, however, is also important. For if the process of evolution looks eminently plausible, then we can perhaps be more forgiving to the evolutionist as she goes about interpreting the fossil record. However, if this is not so—if evolution's processes are unexplained or, worse still, look inherently implausible to begin with—then this gives us further reason to doubt that the fossil record reveals its happening. It also leaves evolutionism decidedly incomplete as a scientific theory. For as Lewontin says,

"The simple observation that life has evolved—that forms that existed in the past no longer exist, whereas those that live today were absent millions of years ago—is not the same as a theory of evolution. Fossils...are not [in and of themselves] a history of past events [since] such a history demands a causal theory of how and why one form became another." (Lewontin, "Human Diversity", Scientific American Library: New York, 1995, p146)

In other words, absent a causal explanation of how life's various species evolved, no amount of paleontology can yield a proper scientific theory. For historical science is all about inferring what happened in the past on the basis of the evidences and cause-and-effect relationships that exist in the present day. Without a causal component, then, evolutionary theory is not a scientific theory as such.

...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, whilst 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 whilst 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 higher and higher proportion of any given population will inherit its helpful traits.

But natural selection so-defined obviously 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 genetic material it has to work with. It has no creative powers as such. 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, NS can affect the frequency of a given gene—that is, the proportion of organisms that possess it—within a given population. But it cannot be what produces that gene in the first place. For all said and done, natural selection is simply 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. And suppose a pack of dogs only 10% of which have the capacity to produce long hair venture into it. Over time, a higher and higher proportion of the pack will inherit the capacity to produce long hair: the long-hair-producing gene will become increasingly common. This is the effect of natural selection: this is what NS does. However, this fact does nothing to explain how the capacity to produce long hair could arise in a world where such a capacity didn't previously exist, much less a world that lacked 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 nicely onto the next topic:

...information...

Producing new genetic traits means producing new genetic information. Intuitively speaking, this is fairly easy to see. However, it far from easy 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 can be most readily quantified. However, to do this, I will first need to say a few things about the nature of proteins and their relationship to 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 (mostly) 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 often affects its shape (and even if it doesn't, often affects its chemical properties in some other way). Sickle cell anemia, for instance, occurs when a particular hydrophilic amino-acid in a haemoglobin molecule being is substituted with a hydrophobic amino-acid. The result is that the molecule "sticks" to other haemoglobin molecules, thus impairing their functionality.

...specificity...

Why, then, 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 will be fairly predictable. For the chemical properties of the various atoms involved will determine which molecules will react with which other molecules—which atoms will bond with which other atoms. Specifically, the chlorine atoms will 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. Hence, the order in which a bunch of amino-acids link up cannot be attributed to their chemical properties. Chemically speaking, a bunch of amino acids are no more likely to link up to form any one sequence as opposed to any other.

What is interesting, 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 vast majority of random sequences will be 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—"SII" for short.

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. They could of course be the product of chance. The archer could have been trying to miss the target, or the stones could have just happened to land in such a way as to spell out a sentence. However, in the absence of any reason to think otherwise, the most natural explanation for such arrangements of matter is that they are the product of intelligence—the key indicator being whether they exhibit specific improbability.

...back to proteins...

What, then, does Dembski's insight tell us about the sequence space of amino-acids: that is, 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 answer is the latter. For as Axe explains:

"The overall prevalence of [typical-length amino-acid] sequences performing a specific function...may be as low as 1 in 10⁷⁷, 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 10⁷⁷ 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. That is, for each functional protein, there is a cluster of similar sequences that perform that same function. And later, we will need to consider the size of these clusters in order to assess the plausibility of their evolution. However, for the moment, the main 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). What, then, 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. But what about proteins?

Briefly put, the answer is the genome: that is, the complete set of genes present in an organism. However, to understand this answer more fully, we will need to consider 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. As the following scientists explain,

"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 it is that naturalistic processes generate the SII present in proteins, then 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? To find out, we will need to consider the role of DNA.

...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 will then have its own unique DNA molecule. Half of its information content will come from one parent and half from the other. This information will then determine the way the embryo develops (along with certain other external factors—e.g. the size and shape of its immediate environment). Thus, the ultimate reason a human embryo develops into a human being as opposed to, say, a fish is because of its DNA.

Each 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 its cells into two smaller cells and then repeating this process over and over again. As cells divide in two, they make copies of their DNA thus ensuring each cell has its own set of genetic information. Then, as more and more cells are created, the cells start to 'differentiate'. Some of them become tissues, some of them organs, some of them bones, and so on. Again, the way the cells differentiate is determined partly by their DNA and partly by external factors. This involvement of external factors is important to some of the issues we will consider later in this essay. For the moment, however, the key point we need to appreciate is that, as DNA is copied, errors can occur. Perhaps, for instance, an adenine molecules is copied as a guanine molecule, or perhaps a particular sequences is 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 simple: by their very nature. After all, errors can and often do create new information. Suppose, for instance, a secretary is taking a dictation from her boss, and suppose she types "Fear Death" instead of "Dear Steph". As a result of her mistake, information will have been added to her boss's dictation that wasn't present in the original. And the same thing can happen in the context of genetics.

What, then, can be said about this explanation? It certainly sounds possible. But as J P Moreland once said, "Possibilities come cheap". The real question is whether it is plausible. And Grasse at least thinks this isn't the case, 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 "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 precisely the kind of information that doesn't naturally lend itself to being explained by reference to chance.

...quantification...

Let us therefore try to quantify some of the issues we have been discussing.

The first thing we need to know is how to decide whether or not something can be referred to chance. As we have already seen, the existence of SII provides a good indicator of this. However, even SII can arise by chance from time to time. Suppose, for instance, someone gets a royal flush in a poker game. Without any reason to think otherwise, we would no doubt regard this event as mere chance as opposed to something more sinister. A royal flush, however, exhibits SII, meaning SII can arise by chance from time to time. But now suppose our card player gets another royal flush on the next hand, and another one on the hand after that. Doubtless, we would now discard "the chance hypothesis" and become attracted to other hypotheses—e.g. "the design hypothesis".

The idea, then, is plain enough. But how do we apply such things in practice? The answer is by seeing whether the improbability of a given event falls below the Universal Probability Bound (UPB):

"...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—which is not an easy thing to do. In Dembski's earlier work, he estimates the UPB as 10^-150: that is, 1 divided by 10⁸⁰ (the number of elementary particles in the observable universe) multiplied by 10⁴⁵ (the maximum rate per second at which transitions in physical states can occur) multiplied by 10²⁵ (a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe in seconds). Thus, according to Dembski, if the probability of something's happening falls below 10^-150, it is unreasonable to attribute its happening to chance. (Seth Lloyd estimates the UPB in a different way however arrives at a similar figure—10^-130—implying that Dembski's UPB is at least in the right ball-park and if anything overly conservative.

What, then, does all this tell us about the construction of proteins? It tells us that it is plausible to explain the existence of one 150-residue protein by reference to chance. For according to Axe, one in every 10⁷⁷ proteins in the amino-acid sequence-space perform useful biological functions. However, the SII that emerges in the Cambrian explosion far exceeds that of a single 150-residue protein. For 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, even based on conservative extrapolations, 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 10⁴⁵ times every second, mutations are fairly rare phenomena (an average species experiences something like 3 or 4 mutations per generation, which is precisely why most offspring are born fit and healthy). Moreover, mutations need time to fix themselves within (i.e. multiply throughout) a population, which takes many more generations; and

c] even helpful mutations can be lost (perhaps their carrier gets unlucky, perhaps the rest of its genes are maladaptive, etc). Thus, hitting the target 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 both simple and elegant: chance plus natural selection. That is, 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 combination of the two, however, seems potentially powerful. For whilst 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 and diverse 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. [That is, 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 suggested, nature may not need to perform a task of this magnitude, for nature may be able to accumulate information a bit at a time. Dawkins therefore modifies the monkey-and-typewriter scenario to show how much easier this makes 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 useful mutations are automatically fixed or preserved in the same way that 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 not hard to see. Genetic mutations generate new sentences and NS fixes the right letters. A new protein is then evolved when the target phrase is reached. 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, whilst there are obvious analogies between Dawkins' computer monkey and the process of evolution, there is also a major disanalogy between them. 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. NS has no goals or objectives in mind. Thus, 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 no idiot and his monkey program was doubtless never intended to be a realistic simulation of evolution in action. However, we can perhaps make it a more realistic simulation 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 allowed to remain: if not, it is rejected (that is, generation n is set 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 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 vast sequence-space of meaninglessness:

Thus, in Dawkins' monkey program, natural selection, far from facilitating the accumulation of information, actually ends up preventing it—which, if the simulation is an accurate one, may well explain why the fossil record is characterised by stasis as opposed to change.

The key question, then, is whether or not sequences of amino-acids form a connected network—a network of functional proteins that is traversable via mutations. Of course, we have already gone some way towards answering this question, for we have investigated 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 very 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 could be traversed by way of functional intermediaries. How easily, then, do proteins lose their functionality? Are they like a sentence—which, if you randomly altered, say, one in every three of its letters would probably lose its original meaning—or are they more resistant to change 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 with different points on the plane representing different sequences of amino-acids. The z-axis then shows each protein's activity level—its functionality—with the water-level marking the point at which a protein becomes dysfunctional: that is, "unselectable" in NS terms. The key issue in assessing the plausibility of protein evolution, then, is assessing 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. And conversely, the less sensitive a protein is to change, the larger its island and thus the greater its chances of: a] being connected to other islands, and b] being located at random.

Unfortunately, however, it is difficult to say how sensitive proteins are to change since our knowledge of the them is fairly incomplete. That said, the picture beginning to emerge suggests that proteins are in fact extremely sensitive to change—that making even minor adjustments to their sequencing soon renders them dysfunctional. Hence it seems their islands are likely to be fairly 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, whilst proteins were sensitive to substitutions at their active sites—whilst swapping one amino-acid for another similar amino-acid resulted in a significant loss of function—the non-active sites could tolerate substitutions much more readily. 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, in the rest of his paper, Axe shows that such thinking was based on insufficient data since the changes hadn't been allowed to accumulate (and of course accumulated change is precisely what evolutionary theory relies on). Axe demonstrates this by taking a couple of proteins—barnase and TEM-1 beta-lactamase—and substituting their various amino-acids for different amino-acids. 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 emerging, then, is that proteins are highly sensitive to change, thus giving us good reason to think that:

a] protein islands are small: for whether one changes residues at active sites or non-active sites, once such changes accumulate, a complete loss of function soon results; and

b] protein islands are disconnected: for the pathways connecting similar proteins seem to be composed of biologically inactive intermediates.

In conclusion, then, selected-mutations seem unable to explain the Cambrian explosion. Which becomes especially clear once we bear in mind two further complications.

First, new body-shapes and body-parts arise in the CE, and it is hard to see how selected-mutations could account for such things. 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: what shape it will be, how its body-parts will be laid out, etc. During the later stages, the "details" are filled in: what colour it will be, how big it will be, etc. Thus, mutations affecting late-acting genes will have very little impact on an organism's form, for by then its form will already have been decided. Hence if mutations are to produce new body-shapes, they must affect genes that relate to an organism's early embryo-genesis. However, there are two main problems with this requirement. The first is that mutations affecting an organism's early embryo-genesis are far more likely to be harmful than mutations affecting its late-acting genes, meaning they are far 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. The second problem is that "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). In other words, what genetic variation we do see in the world around us is not the kind that produces major changes.

Second, genetic information is only itself one aspect or layer of an organism's hierarchy of biological information. That is, whilst 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 will require certain raw materials: bricks, pipes, glass, and so on. However, these raw materials will not themselves tell me how I should assemble them. This requires further information: building plans and the like. Similarly, the genome's instructions detailing how to construct proteins do not themselves 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)

The above considerations therefore build whole new layers of improbability into what already seemed a hopelessly improbable task. Thus, as Ohno says,

"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 the misgiving Waddington voiced during the advent of Neo-Darwinian theory were 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)

...furthermore...

It is also worth noting in passing that, according to Christian bio-chemist Michael Behe, explaining the evolution of bio-chemical systems is no less daunting a task for Neo-Darwinism than is explaining the evolution of proteins. Briefly put, the problem for Darwinists is as follows.

...irreducibly complex machinery...

Many machines in living organisms rely on the interdependent co-ordination of a number of different protein parts. Consider, for instance, the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum is a tail-like construction of proteins that propels bacteria through their environments by rotating like a miniature outboard motor. However, unless all 40 of the flagellum's parts are present and fully functioning, the flagellum is useless. That is, a flagellum with half of its parts does not work half as effectively as one with all its parts: it does not work at all. The flagellum is therefore, in Behe's words, an "irreducibly complex" machine. And the existence of such a thing is clearly problematic for Darwinists, for as Darwin himself recognised:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, [then] my theory would absolutely break down." (Darwin, "The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition", Harvard University Press, 1964, p189)

According to Behe, an irreducibly complex machine ("ICM" for short) is just such a thing. For ICMs, like the proteins they are constructed from, represent islands of functionality within an ocean of dysfunction where even slightly modified machines are useless. About the closest scientists have come to suggesting ICMs might therefore have evolved is identifying the odd "stepping stone" in this ocean—identifying situations where an incomplete flagellum might be able to fulfill a slightly different purpose and hence avoid being eliminated by NS. However, one stepping stone does not make a bridge, nor is the flagellum is a lone example of irreducibly complex machinery. As James Shapiro says (in a statement later re-iterated by Harold),

"There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." (Shapiro, "In the details...what?", National Review, 1996, p62-65)

Nor are all scientists optimistic about what the future might hold in this respect. As Coyne says,

"We may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways [in the construction of such systems]" (Coyne, God in the Details, Nature 383, 1996, p227-228)

...so...

Of course, there is far more that needs to be said about Behe's work. But even from this brief glance at it, we can perhaps begin to see that naturalism's difficulties in explaining life's complexities extend far beyond the world of proteins—that there are many different layers to life's complexity, each of which presents similar problems to evolutionary theory. From individual molecules to bio-chemical machinery to morphological structures, the world is full of things which we wouldn't expect naturalistic processes to be able to produce. As a cosmologist once said about galaxies:

"By all rights, they just shouldn't be there, yet there they [are]." (James Trefil, "Dark Side of the Universe", Barnes & Nobles, 1988, p55)

"If [they] didn't exist, we would have no problem explaining that fact." (Dallas Morning News, 8/15/1988)

And the same seems to be true of many features of the biological world.

...response...

How, then, might the evolutionist respond to such charges—to the claim that evolutionism is unable to explain the evolution of proteins and the existence of seemingly irreducibly complex machinery?

One answer is to take the position that, rather than declaring evolutionary theory a failure, the prudent course of action is to wait and see what science will uncover in the future. For science, we are told, is a progressive endeavour—an endeavour that is slowly demystifying the universe's many mysteries. Hence, rather than resorting to explanations like "God did it", we should give science the benefit of the doubt.

However, whilst in some ways this sounds like sensible enough advice, it does not seem a good reason to deny the face-value implications of today's evidence. For at the end of the day, there may in fact be features of this universe that cannot be explained scientifically for the simple reason that they are the work of a divine being. And if this is so, then giving science further time to investigate such matters will not yield much fruit, for science has already excluded such matters' true explanation from its pool of explanatory resources.

Moreover, when it comes to many of life's mysteries, it is hard to see science's "progress" as very "progressive". Consider, for instance, the history of modern cosmology over the last century.

In the early 1900s, the prevailing view of the universe was that it had always existed. Then, however, came the big bang model, which claimed that the universe had a finite history—that space, time and matter came into being at the moment of the big bang. This model was confirmed by a considerable amount of scientific data. However, there was one small problem. Positing as it did a beginning of space and time and matter, it implied that the universe had a non-naturalistic cause (after all, what other type of cause could have caused nature itself to come into existence?). Thus, as Hawking said, it "smack[ed] of divine intervention". As a result, other models were sought. First came the steady state model which re-postulated the infinity of the universe's past. However, this theory had little if any evidential support and was soon abandoned when further evidence confirming the big bang model arrived (e.g. our observation of red-shifts). Next came various oscillating models proposing that the universe had been expanding and contracting since eternity past. But such models were soon shown to be untenable. As a result, vacuum fluctuation models were spawned, faring little better. And so the story has continued. Past-eternal models of the universe are frequently posited and almost as frequently found to be implausible. Would anyone call this progress? Maybe. For maybe the universe does in fact have an eternal past. Maybe, however, the truth of the matter is that, despite its smack of divine intervention, the big bang model is a good approximation of reality and science's 'progress' is merely leading us down the garden path.

The point, then is this. It may be that not everything in this universe has a naturalistic cause. And simply assuming that it does hasn't always been particularly fruitful. Why, then, returning to the issue of protein-evolution, should we assume that science will find a way of explaining how life's various proteins have evolved when it may be that the more we discover about them, the more unfeasible their evolution will start to look for the simple reason that they didn't actually evolve? At the end of the day, 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 it seems no scientific theory can be rationally affirmed; for according to most definitions of science, a scientific theory must be falsifiable--must be capable of being overturned by future discoveries.

When it comes to such matters, then—that is, when it comes to deducing the best explanation for a given body of evidence—there is little point in speculating about what science may or may not uncover in the future. All we can go on is the evidence we currently have to hand. It is true of course that, as time has gone on, science has filled a number of gaps in its understanding of the physical world. But it has also uncovered a number of gaps in its understanding (e.g. in realising that the fossil record is rife with discontinuities, that what Darwin took to be a simple cell was in fact an incredibly complex system, and so on). And in any case, on the Christian view, one would expect science to be a progressive and successful endeavour, for God's normal way of governing his universe is via natural law. To use science's past triumphs to justify the assumption that everything in the world is potentially explainable in scientific terms therefore seems unjustified.

Another way in which an evolutionist might respond to the problems presented by proteins and ICM is by appealing to the "neutral" theory of evolution.

...neutralism...

As we have seen, if one protein is to become another protein, it must cross an "abyss of dysfunctionality". However, there may be a way in which this can be done. For many sections of the genome are thought to be "non-coding": that is, their nucleotides do not have any obvious effect on an organism's morphology. Such sections of the genome therefore allow mutations to take place "silently"; they allow genetic information which, if outwardly expressed, would be eliminated to go unnoticed. Neutralists suggest that such non-coding sections of the genome facilitate protein evolution. In other words, information builds up silently, allowing a series of mutations to cross the abyss—to cross the water between two islands. Then, once the new island has been reached, the non-coding section then gets "switched on" (via mutations that are hypothesised to occur elsewhere in the genome).

What can be said about the neutral theory of evolution? The first thing to note is that it is fairly speculative. In other words, there is not a great deal to suggest that it is anything more than a possibility. More problematically, however, its strength (i.e. its ability to cross the water between island) also turns out to be its weakness. For being invisible to NS is all very well. But if NS cannot eliminate a section of the genome's functionally disadvantageous sequences, then neither can it favour its functionally advantageous sequences. Thus, the neutralist is back to the relying on chance alone—on monkeys and typewriters as opposed to the selection-guided mutations. And as we have already seen, relying on chance alone will not do the job.

...summing up...

Summing up, then, it seems the theory of evolution has major obstacles to overcome if it is to provide a feasible account of life's complexity and diversity. For life's proteins seem too complex to be produced in one foul swoop yet too functionally isolated in their sequence space to be assembled gradually. Which is perhaps why, as we will see in the following section, evolutionary forces seem to be achieving so little in the natural world around us.

...observation...

Every evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, agrees that evolution is an extremely slow process. It therefore seems unrealistic to expect to see, say, new complex adaptations like eyes and wings evolving in the world around us. However, it does not seem unrealistic to expect to see the evolution of new species from time to time. As Keith Thomson says,

"Perhaps the most obvious challenge [to evolutionary theory] is to demonstrate [it] empirically. There are, arguably, some 2 to 10 million species on earth. The fossil record shows that most species survive somewhere between 3 and 5 million years. In that case, we ought to be seeing small but significant numbers of originations and extinctions every decade." (Thomson, "Natural Selection and Evolution's Smoking Gun", American Scientist, Vol 85, No 6, Nov-Dec 1997, p516)

However, we do not see such things. As Kevin Kelly and others write:

"Despite a close watch, we have witnessed no new species emerge in the wild...Also...we have seen no new animal species emerge in domestic breeding...And in computer life (where the term "species" does not yet have meaning) we see no cascading emergence of entirely new kinds of variety beyond an initial burst...

"We see the emergence of variation. But, by the absence of greater change, we also clearly see that the limits of [this] variation appear to be narrowly bounded." (Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines", [1994], Fourth Estate: London, Reprint: 1995, p475)

"The formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed." (Schwartz, "Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species", John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1999, p299-300)

More telling is the fact that even creatures with extremely short lifespans—creatures where we can observe the effects of thousands of generations' worth of mutations—still show no propensity to produce new species. As the following scientists explain,

"The [fruit] fly can be bred by the thousands in milk bottles. Thus, it costs nothing but a few bananas to feed...; its entire life cycle lasts 10 days; and it has only four chromosomes. [It is therefore a geneticist's dream]." (Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution, 1990, p169)

"[Yet even] if we were able to combine a thousand or more [fruit-fly] mutants in a single individual, this still would [bear] no resemblance whatsoever to any[thing] known as a species in nature." (Goldschmidt, "Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist", American Scientist, Jan 1952, p94)

"It is a striking but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world,...they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme." (Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, 1983, p48)

The same is true in the case of bacteria. As Linton says,

"Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for [evolutionary] study, with generation-times of twenty to thirty minutes...But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another...Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [e.g. bacterial] to eukaryotic [e.g. plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the...higher multi-cellular organisms." (Linton, "Scant Search for the Maker", The Times Higher Education Supplement, Book Section, 2001, p29)

Grasse concurs saying,

"Bacteria, the study of which has formed a great part of the foundation of genetics and molecular biology, are the organisms which, because of their huge numbers, produce the most mutants. This is why they [appear in] an infinite variety of species, called strains...[Yet], despite their great production of intraspecific varieties [i.e. their micro-evolution], [bacteria] exhibit a great fidelity to their species...

"It is surprising, to say the least, to want to prove evolution and...discover its mechanisms, and [yet] to choose as a material for this study a being which practically stabilized a billion years ago!...No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution."
(Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, 1977, p87-88)

"Mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired." (Margulis, Quoted in Darry Madden, "UMass Scientist to Lead Debate on Evolutionary Theory", Brattleboro (Vt) Reformer, Feb 2006)

In short, then, what we see evolution achieving in the world today doesn't stack up with what it is alleged to have achieved in the past. As we heard earlier from Grasse and Huxley,

"[Evolution's] period of great fecundity is over; present evolution appears as a weakened process, declining or near its end...Our plants [and] our animals [are] lacking some mechanisms which were present in the early flora and fauna." (Grasse, Ibid, p71)

"Evolution is...a series of blind alleys. Some are extremely short—those leading to new genera and species that either remain stable or become extinct. Others are longer—the lines of adaptive isolation within a group...which run for tens of millions of years before coming up against their terminal [brick] wall. Others are still longer—the links that in the past led to the development of the major phyla and their highest representatives...But all in the long run have terminated blindly." (Huxley, "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis", Harper: New York & London, 1942, p571)

...in conclusion..

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 expression 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 NS cannot create new information.

c] Nor can it be explained by mutations alone, since the odds of arriving at such huge amounts of SII via chance alone are beyond the bounds of credibility: that is, they are below the UPB.

d] Nor can it be explained by a combination of the two—by selected-mutations—since it seems unlikely that life's many proteins are connected via series of functional intermediates. Hence NS will hinder as opposed to helping their evolution.

e] It is therefore only to be expected that we do not observe evolutionary forces causing any significant changes in the world around us.

We therefore conclude this section with the words of Grasse:

"It is possible that in this domain [in the domain of information-creation] biology, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics." (Ibid, p246)

...drawing some threads together...

We are now, at last, in a position to answer the key question asked by this essay: Is the fossil record supportive of evolutionary theory? We can summarise our findings as follows.

i] Taken at face value, the rocks provide us with a record of life's history—a record of how life has unfolded over time. And in broad terms, this record seems to reveal a progression from the simple to the complex. For we see relatively little complexity and diversity at the base of the fossil record (in the pre-Cambrian) and a great deal at the top. However, even allowing for the fragmentary nature of the fossil record, the progression is by no means a smooth one (see Eldredge). Indeed, rather than gradually unfolding, we see all of life's major designs (the phyla) appear in a "single geological moment"—"fully formed" and "without any evolutionary history". Moreover, these phyla are separated by significant morphological gaps from the moment of their creation onwards (see Valentine). Nor do we see smooth progression after this explosion. The general pattern of the post-Cambrian is that species abruptly enter the record as fully-mature species, hang about not evolving for a few million years, and then disappear just as abruptly (see Gould).

ii] Nor do we see speciation occurring in nature (see Schwartz).

iii] Moreover, matters of history aside, evolutionary theory seems to lack an adequate cause. For there is little evidence to suggest that its proposed mechanisms are capable of achieving the results they are said to have achieved, and reasonable evidence to suggest that they are not capable of doing so (see Axe).

iv] Indeed, nature contains many structures—most notably irreducibly complex ones—that seem fundamentally unevolvable (see Behe).

In sum, then, it doesn't look like evolution has in fact generated life's many complex species, nor does it look like it could have done so. Moreover, as Plantinga shows, even if evolution has in fact achieved what it is said to have achieved, it is still irrational for us to affirm that it has done so.

Of course, the above points are by no means uncontroversial and I don't claim to have established any of them beyond reasonable doubt. However, each has been backed up by secular research and each is, in my opinion, more rational to believe than its negation. Moreover, many of them lend support, not just to the conclusion that N&E is false, but to each other. They therefore constitute a powerful cumulative argument. We can see this in the following way.

The main point against N&E is that the fossil record looks decidedly un-Darwinian (i.e. point i] above—"F" for short). However, given the truth of some of the other points—for instance, our failure to observe speciation taking place in nature ("-S" for short)—F is only to be expected. -S therefore supports F; and both -S and F support the conclusion that N&E is false
("-(N&E)"). Thus, -S, F, and -(N&E) form a self-supporting structure.

To see the same thing another way, consider P(E|F). P(E|F) is, I contend, significantly less than 0.5—perhaps it is 0.25. If so, then P(E|F&-S) will be lower still—perhaps it is 0.2. But -S supports not just -(N&E) but also the likelihood that F is indeed the case. In other words, if P(F) is the probability that the fossil record is as I describe it, then whatever P(F)'s value, P(F|-S) will be higher. Hence, if the main argument against N&E is of the form:

(1) F
(2) Therefore -(N&E)

then -S lends support both to the premise as well as to the conclusion of the argument, thus strengthening it on all counts. And points iii] and iv] do likewise. For if iii] pertains—if naturalism lacks a cause capable of achieving the results evolution is supposed to have achieved—then it is likely that F will pertain, and it is also likely (on the basis of independent grounds) that -(N&E) will pertain. And the same is true of iv].

Points i] to iv] therefore comprise, in my opinion, a powerful cumulative argument against evolutionism. Moreover, the argument's key premise (F) seems sufficiently well-established and sufficiently disconfirming of N&E to warrant, not just a re-working of current evolutionary theory, but the consideration of a different approach altogether. For it is hardly likely that, having already yielded upwards of 100 million fossils over the last 150 years, the rocks are suddenly going to produce the transitional series that have been so conspicuously absent for so long. Thus, as travelers along life's way who want to know the truth about our origins, we have every reason to look for an alternative account of how we came to be who we are.

...the alternative...

So, then, what alternatives are there? Other than evolutionism, is there any other plausible way of explaining life's origins? In my opinion, yes. For recall what we heard from Futuyma earlier:

In which case, given that evolutionism seems fairly improbable, creationism (or something very similar) must be fairly probable. However, without appealing to such arguments-by-elimination, is there any other reason to think that life is the product of an intelligent designer? Yes indeed. For consider the information and complexity inherent in the world around us. Much of this information and complexity is housed in living things—the brain with its billions of neurons, the eye with its millions of rods and cones each wired-up with pin-point precision, and so on. But of course much of the world's information and complexity is housed in artificial things—books, car-engines, CD's, toasters. And based on our experience of the world around us, there is ultimately only one type of cause that can produce such things: intelligence.

Surely, then, it is not unreasonable to think that the information and complexity present in the biological world is the product of a guiding intelligence—to propose "the design hypothesis" as an explanation of life's origins. After all, biologists have long acknowledged that the natural world looks like it was 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)

However, if something looks like it's been designed, then surely the hypothesis that it was in fact designed is at least worthy of consideration. 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—and to do so for no good reason—seems a strange way of doing science. 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—because they bespeak intelligence. As Lisa Shawver says,

"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)

Alexander Travis, who is currently looking into the possibility of using the bacterial flagellum to power man-made nano-technology, concurs saying,

"At [the micro] scale, biology provides the best functional motors." (Travis, Quoted by Bryn Nelson, Columnist, MSNBC contributor, 2 Jan 2008)

Morevoer, consider the millions of bits of information carried by life's DNA molecules. We encounter information like this every day in the form of books, databases, computer programs, and so on. And the fact of the matter is that it invariably stems from an intelligent agent. A computer user, for instance, who traces the information appearing on her screen back to its source will invariably find that it has arisen from an intelligent agent, as will the reader of a book. And, as Quastler says,

"[The] creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity." (Quastler, "The emergence of biological organization", Yale University Press, New Haven, 1964, p16)

Surely, then, the design hypothesis ("DH" for short) is a perfectly natural alternative to Darwinism. After all, as we have already mentioned, historical science is all about inferring what happened in the past on the basis of the evidences and causes that exist in the present day. Which is precisely what the design hypothesis does. Of course, evolutionary theory does this as well (for selection and mutation are processes we see at work in the present day). The difference is that the DH explains the past in a way that is causally adequate. For where evolutionism struggles to explain life's SII, the hypothesis that life's SII is the product of a non-biological intelligence explains its existence perfectly well and is in fact what the existence of information most naturally points to. And where NS, due its short-term bent and conservative nature, is unable to work towards a long-term goal, the design hypothesis can do just this. And where naturalism is unable to account for the stasis and discontinuities we see in the fossil record, the hypothesis that life was created in a series of discrete creative acts explains this fact perfectly well.

Formally speaking, then, the argument for design might run something like this:


Premise 1:	SII is the product of either chance-and-natural-law or design.
Premise 2:	The best account of how chance-and-natural-law could have generated life's SII is the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. However, given the discontinuous nature of the fossil record together with naturalism's insufficient probabilistic resources, it doesn't seem likely that life's SII is in fact the product of chance-and-natural-law.
Conclusion:	Therefore, the most probable cause of life's SII is an intelligent designer who exists independently of the earth's biological realm.

Contrary to common allegations, then, the design hypothesis is not an argument from silence. Nor, interestingly enough, does it entail any commitment to the supernatural in and of itself. After all, you the reader are currently reading an essay which I assume you regard as the product of intelligence (even if you deem it a hopelessly misguided one). However, unless you take a dualistic view of life—unless you view human beings as consisting of both an immaterial decision-maker and a material body—you will not regard my having written this essay as a supernatural event. And of course if you are a dualist, then you should have no problem with explaining things in non-naturalistic terms. Either way, then, the design hypothesis is a viable option for you: it doesn't commit you to any metaphysics you are not already committed to. Crick and Dawkins, for instance, argue that if it could be shown that life was designed, then the most reasonable thing to conclude would be that life was "seeded" on planet Earth by alien life-forms. Of course, I am not trying to minimise the theological implications of the design hypothesis. My personal belief is that the design hypothesis is the best available explanation of life's origins and that the designer in question is the God of the Christian faith. The point I am making is simply that the inference from a designer to God is a further step. It is not part of the design hypothesis per se even if in practice most people think that the most natural candidate for a designer is in fact God.

...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. One might therefore wonder why. After all, one would think that a decent argument should cause people who don't already accept its conclusion to feel some kind of urge to do so—some kind of obligation to change their minds. Why, then, are most scientists not changing their minds?

One answer to this question should be obvious, for the opening section of this essay has been spent discussing it: because the scientific method, given its commitment to naturalism, cannot accommodate the design hypothesis.

Of course, in one sense it hardly matters whether the design hypothesis is 'scientific' or not. If it is a decent hypothesis, then it should be embraced, regardless of which academic discipline it falls under. But in any case, there is a something of a non sequitur lurking in the bushes here. For whilst scientists seems to assume that the DH entails supernaturalism, this is not necessarily the case, as we have seen. Admittedly, proponents of the DH do in practice tend to be of a religious persuasion, and the claim that life has a designer sounds suspiciously like a religious claim. However, this does not mean that the DH is a religious hypothesis per se. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that is has been treated as such by most scientists. Hence embracing the DH has been equated with departing from the world of reason—with abandoning the facts and appealing instead to faith. Affirming the design hypothesis therefore carries a certain stigma, especially for someone whose living relies on their academic reputation. Nor are comments like Dawkins' likely to do much to alleviate this situation:

"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, but I'd rather not consider that)." (Dawkins, New York Times, April 9, 1989, p34)

However, I will not here say any more on this matter, for I have spent quite enough time doing so earlier in the essay. For the moment, suffice it to say that science's decision to exclude creationism from its ranks is undoubtedly one of the reasons for its lack of popularity.

A second reason why people might withhold assent from the design hypothesis is because it runs contrary to the scientific paradigm, and paradigms are notoriously difficult things to shift. They ingrain themselves in their respective disciplines, making it extremely hard for people to think about solving problems—like explaining life's origins—in new ways. As Kuhn says,

"Under normal conditions 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 [his] existing scientific tradition." (Kuhn, "The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change", Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977, p234)

A third reason why some people withhold assent from the design hypothesis is because they claim that design cannot be distinguished from chance when it comes to matters of biology—that in the case of living things, we cannot infer design in the normal way.

However, the question that needs to be asked of this claim is an obvious one: why not? If of course it could be shown that evolution regularly produced apparently-designed structures, then the claim would be a reasonable one. But this is precisely the issue in question. Thus, to claim that design cannot be distinguished from chance in matters of biology without having evidence of evolution's having designed anything is to beg the question.

Consider, for instance, the practice of archeologists.

Archeologists distinguish design from chance every time they decide a shard of pottery in the ground is the product of an ancient civilisation as opposed to naturalistic processes. What leads them to draw this distinction? The answer is simple: because pottery looks like it was designed. That is, it doesn't look like the kind of thing that would arise by chance. Consider, alternatively, the practice of forensic scientists. Forensic scientists distinguish design from chance every time they conclude that someone has been murdered as opposed to, say, dying of natural causes. Why do they conclude this? Because some things—e.g. bullet-wounds—smack of design as opposed to chance.

Why, then, shouldn't biologists be able to apply the same principles to their field? Why shouldn't a biologist, on seeing, say, a pair of wings—organs that seem "perfectly designed for flight"—conclude that they were in fact designed? After all, biologists often claim to be able to distinguish design from chance in a negative sense. That is to say, they claim to know when things haven't been designed. Take, for instance, Russell Doolittle's comment about the blood-clotting cascade,

"No creator would have designed such a circuitous and contrived system." (Doolittle, "A delicate balance", Boston Review, 1997, p28-29)

or Gould's comment about the panda's thumb:

"Funny solutions [like the panda's thumb] are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process [would]." (Gould, "The Panda's Thumb", New York: Norton, 1980, p20-21)

However, if it is possible to conclude that certain morphological structures are not the product of design, then surely it is not unreasonable to conclude that other structures are the product of design. Indeed, we make such inferences every day (e.g. when we assume an e-mail or web-page has an author as opposed to being produced by a bug) and, as far as we know, they tend to be correct. Moreover, scientists relied (in part) on precisely these kinds of inferences in concluding that the "Piltdown Man" fossil was a hoax. That is, they concluded that the kinds of abrasion marks present on its teeth were unlikely to have been caused by naturalistic processes and were therefore "evidence of [the fossil's being a] fake". ("The Piltdown Men", Ronald Millar, St Martin's Press: NY, Library of Congress No 72-94380, 1972, p203)

A fourth reason why some people withhold assent from the design hypothesis is emotional rather than intellectual: because life's having designer implies the existence of a higher power of some kind—an ultimate authority, perhaps. As Thomas Nagel says:

"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)

It may well be, then, that the theological implications of the design hypothesis are a further reason for its unpopularity. For as Nagel recognises: a] the desire for atheism to be true is not unusual (even if Nagel's candidness is), and b] people who desire atheism to be true will have a strong predisposition for non-design-based explanations of life's complexity.

...an aside...

In truth, however, there is no need for Nagel or anyone else to withhold their assent from the design hypothesis due to their having a "cosmic authority problem". Admittedly, the message of the gospel—the most fundamental message of Christianity—requires us to submit our lives to God's authority. However, on the Christian view, our God is a God of love—a God who seeks to use his power and authority, not to satisfy his own megalomaniacal urges, but for our good and blessing. Indeed, in God we find life's ultimate purpose and pleasure.

Naturalism, on the other hand, does seems to entail certain 'cosmic problems'. For as Russell says, the inevitable consequences of N&E are:

"...that man is the product of causes which had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." (Russell, "The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell", "Contemplation and Action", Vol 12, London, 1985)

Hardly inspiring thoughts. Which is no doubt why philosophers like Loyal Rue urge us to embrace "the Noble Lie"—the belief that our actions have meaning and significance despite the fact that, ultimately, they do not. Rue says, "Without such lies, we cannot live" (Rue, Address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1991).

But to embrace something you know to be false is not an easy thing to do. Nor does it seem necessary. For if the Noble Lie can bestow life with meaning and significance, then surely theism can achieve at lest as much; moreover, theism enjoys the advantage of being at least possibly true. Thus, even if scientific or philosophical considerations do not decide the evolutionism-creationism debate, it may still be a rational course of action to embrace the design hypothesis together with its theological implications on pragmatic grounds.

That said, one need not—indeed, one probably should not—rely ultimately on either scientific, philosophical or pragmatic considerations in one's decision to embrace the Christian faith. For on the Christian view, the truth of God's existence is known ultimately by seeking him in sincerity and humility—by pouring out our hearts to him and asking him to reveal his existence to us. For God's desire is that in seeking and finding him we discover, not just the fact of his existence, but the fact of our own fallenness and need of forgiveness. As Christian mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal writes,

"Wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him,...God has [regulated] our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire...to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition." (Pascal, Pensees, Trans Krailsheimer, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, Lafuma 149)

"If there were no obscurity, man would not be sensible of his corruption; if there were no light, man would not hope for a remedy. Thus, it is not only fair, but advantageous to us, that God be partly hidden and partly revealed; since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, as to know his own wretchedness without knowing God. A too easy knowledge of God would blind man to his own corruption; the hiddenness of God awakens man to a sense of his sinfulness and his need for redemption." (Ibid, "Justice and the Reason of Effects", Pensees 586)

...a stock-take...

Thus far in this essay, then, we have considered a number of problems with evolutionary theory, discussed an alternative theory of life's origins, and suggested some possible reasons as to why this alternative has not proven unduly popular—at least not within the scientific community.

I would therefore like to conclude this essay by expanding the sentiments expressed by Russell and Pascal above—by considering the existential and theological implications that fall out of embracing or not embracing the design hypothesis. For all things considered, the truth of evolutionism is most likely a point in favour of naturalism and the truth of the design hypothesis is most likely a point in favour of theism (which for the purposes of this essay we are taking to be synonymous with Christianity). Let us therefore consider how naturalism and Christianity answer life's most important questions.

1. Who are we?
On a naturalistic view, we are just lumps of matter—chance collections of particles. It is therefore hard to see what distinguishes us from robots, for it is hard to see what aspect of our being allows us to make freely-chosen, meaningful decisions. After all, 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 given 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. In fact, on a naturalistic view, 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. Thus, the truth of the matter is 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 the Bible can be trusted, 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. For 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, and he seems right in doing so. 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, then, I wonder if 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 difficult to disentangle from the rational side. Perhaps, however, as we examine the message of the gospel, things will become clearer. Perhaps God himself will speak to you as you hear about what he has done for 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. You may not believe this. However, if the Bible is true, it will happen nonetheless. So, let us make what may seem a rather sweeping assumption: 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. However, 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, please, do not react in pride. 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 spend your eternity somewhere; and if are given what you deserve, then the scriptures teach that the place in which you will spend it is "the outer darkness, where there is [only] weeping and pain" (Matthew 25:30).

You may think this sounds unreasonable, for you may consider yourself to have lived a fairly good life. And relative to others, you may have done so. However, 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 and being 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. Hence what ultimately separates us from knowing the love and beauty of our Creator is 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 wonderful news to follow. For we have 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 simply surrender your life to the Lord. Will you do so? Well, that is your choice and my prayer.