Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
declare, if thou hast understanding.
Job 38:4
"A very interesting article appeared recently in The Guardian
(a UK
publication), titled “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” The
subtitle read, “A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream
evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have
dismissed them as misguided careerists—and the conflict may determine
the future of biology.” So what’s this all about?
Well, the article opens up,
Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.
The writer then summarizes what most of us are very familiar with from school and the media:
If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.
Q: But is this really what happened?
A: Well, according to the article, a growing number of scientists say such a
story is “crude and misleading,” with one saying the current
evolutionary idea “has so far fallen flat”:
For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”
Now these biologists aren’t saying life didn’t arise by naturalistic processes or that evolution isn’t
the driving force that created all life—they certainly haven’t become
creationists of any kind! But these “reforming” (or “revolutionary,”
depending on whom you ask) biologists recognize there are huge problems
with the current evolutionary model: that it fails to take into account
much of what we’ve learned in biology in the last few decades, and,
quite simply, doesn’t really explain how life in all its complexity got
here!" AIG
