Darwinism

'Darwinism’ is the generic title popularly given to the elaborate theory of the evolution of all living things from simple organisms to the diverse and complicated forms of life we encounter in the world today. Sometimes known as Neo-Darwinism, or the Modern Synthesis, it purports to go well beyond anything Darwin could have envisaged, given that he could not have known about modern discoveries in genetics and cell biochemistry. However Darwin’s theory, based as it is on random mutation and natural selection, provided a basis for ruling out any design in Nature or any activity in Nature attributable to a Creator. What is now generally less well known is that an increasing number of biologists question the validity of Neo-Darwinism and some go so far as to say that Darwinism is dead. In his recent book Darwin’s House of Cards (Discovery Institute Press, 2017) the journalist Tom Bethell writes tellingly: ‘It’s also time to point out that that Darwinian evolution never did have much in the way of evidence to support it. Today, following Julian Huxley’s lead, it is often embraced more for the support it gives to atheistic philosophy than for its science. The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased’.