A Mathematician’s View of Evolution: There are at least four fundamental problems with Darwinian evolution as an answer to the origins and complexity of life on earth. (Granville Sewell, February 8, 2025, American Spectator)
Problem 3. It is widely believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection of random replication errors (mutations) explains evolution. But in fact, Darwin’s implausible theory becomes more implausible with every new biological and biochemical discovery.
In 1960 Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”
If you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like you will understand why we generally don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development of new organs through their initial useless stages obviously cannot be explained by natural selection, since new features present no selective advantage before they are useful.
Features which are useless until they are well developed, or almost perfect, are said to be “irreducibly complex,” a term that was introduced by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. Irreducibly complex features and processes are ubiquitous in living things, especially at the microscopic level, as Behe documented in great detail in this now-classic book.
In fact, the development — gradual or not — of new organs or other irreducibly complex features through their useless stages could only be guided by a process with foresight, able to think ahead and envision their future uses. In other words, a mind. Indeed, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose is the title of a 2019 book by Brazilian chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, which carries the endorsement of three Nobel prize winners.
The first part of the video Why Evolution is Different has further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, for the assertion that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did. Here is a segment from the report on the 1980 meeting:
Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups, but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.
“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.
A 2022 article in The Guardian, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?” retells the traditional Darwinian story for how eyes evolved and then says
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading. For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place…
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.”
In 2004, Michael Behe and David Snoke published a paper in Protein Science whose conclusions are summarized on p. 242 of Steve Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt:
[T]hey assessed how long it would typically take to generate two or three or more coordinated mutations. They determined that generally the probability of multiple mutations arising in close (functionally relevant) coordination to each other was “prohibitively” low — it would likely take an immensely long time, typically far longer than the age of the earth.
This explains why Darwinists have always insisted that evolutionary progress must be assumed to have always been very gradual, despite the evidence that it was not.
