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“To hell with your theory of evolution Darwin, I
am not related to those idiots!” - King
Kong to Charles Darwin
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://me.me/i/17094252]
[ALBUM SOURCE: https://me.me/t/theory-of-evolution]
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A.N.
Wilson: It’s time Charles Darwin was exposed for the fraud he was
Two of his theories about evolution are wrong — and
one resulting ‘science’ inspired the Nazis
Friday 4 August 2017 11:55
Charles Darwin, whose bearded face looks out at us
from the £10 note, is about to be replaced by Jane Austen. I’ve spent the past
five years of my life writing his biography and mastering his ideas. Which do
you throw out of the balloon? Pride and Prejudice or The Origin of
Species?
Funnily enough, in the course of my researches, I
found both pride and prejudice in bucketloads among the ardent Darwinians, who
would like us to believe that if you do not worship Darwin, you are some kind
of nutter. He has become an object of veneration comparable to the old heroes
of the Soviet Union, such as Lenin and Stalin, whose statues came tumbling down
all over Eastern Europe 20 and more years ago.
We had our own version of a Soviet statue war in
London some years ago when the statue of Darwin was moved in the Natural
History Museum. It now looms over the stairs brooding over the visitors. It did
originally sit there, but it was replaced by a statue of Richard Owen, who was,
after all, the man who had started the Natural History Museum, and who was one
of the great scientists of the 19th century. Then in 2009, the bicentenary of
Darwin’s birth, Owen was booted out, and Darwin was put back, in very much the
way that statues of Lenin replaced religious or monarchist icons in old Russia.
By
the time Owen died (1892), Darwin’s reputation was fading, and by the beginning
of the 20th century it had all but been eclipsed. Then, in the early to mid
20th century, the science of genetics got going. Science rediscovered the
findings of Gregor Mendel (Darwin’s contemporary) and the most stupendous
changes in life sciences became possible. Watson and Crick discovered the
structure of DNA, and thereafter the complexity and wonder of genetics, all
demonstrable by scientific means, were laid bare. Only this week we have
learned of medicine’s stupendous ability to zap embryonic, genetically transmuted
disorders.
Darwinism
is not science as Mendelian genetics are. It is a theory whose truth is NOT
universally acknowledged. But when genetics got going there was also a revival,
especially in Britain, of what came to be known as neo-Darwinism, a synthesis
of old Darwinian ideas with the new genetics. Why look to Darwin, who made so
many mistakes, rather than to Mendel? There was a simple answer to that.
Neo-Darwinism was part scientific and in part a religion, or anti-religion. Its
most famous exponent alive, Richard Dawkins, said that Darwin made it possible
to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. You could say that the apparently
impersonal processes of genetics did the same. But the neo-Darwinians could
hardly, without absurdity, make Mendel their hero since he was a Roman Catholic
monk. So Darwin became the figurehead for a system of thought that (childishly)
thought there was one catch-all explanation for How Things Are in nature.
The great
fact of evolution was an idea that had been current for at least 50 years
before Darwin began his work. His own grandfather pioneered it in England, but
on the continent, Goethe, Cuvier, Lamarck and many others realised that life
forms evolve through myriad mutations. Darwin wanted to be the Man Who Invented
Evolution, so he tried to airbrush all the predecessors out of the story. He
even pretended that Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, had had almost no
influence on him. He then brought two new ideas to the evolutionary debate,
both of which are false.
One is
that evolution only proceeds little by little, that nature never makes leaps.
The two most distinguished American palaeontologists of modern times, Stephen
Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, both demonstrated 30 years ago that this is not
true. Palaeontology has come up with almost no missing links of the kind
Darwinians believe in. The absence of such transitional forms is, Gould once
said, the “trade secret of palaeontology”. Instead, the study of fossils and
bones shows a series of jumps and leaps.
Hard-core
Darwinians try to dispute this, and there are in fact some “missing links” —
the Thrinaxodon, which is a mammal-like reptile, and the Panderichthys, a sort
of fish-amphibian. But if the Darwinian theory of natural selection were true,
fossils would by now have revealed hundreds of thousands of such examples.
Species adapt themselves to their environment, but there are very few
transmutations.
Darwin’s
second big idea was that Nature is always ruthless: that the strong push out
the weak, that compassion and compromise are for cissies whom Nature throws to
the wall. Darwin borrowed the phrase “survival of the fittest” from the now
forgotten and much discredited philosopher Herbert Spencer. He invented a
consolation myth for the selfish class to which he belonged, to persuade them
that their neglect of the poor, and the colossal gulf between them and the
poor, was the way Nature intended things. He thought his class would outbreed
the “savages” (ie the brown peoples of the globe) and the feckless, drunken
Irish. Stubbornly, the unfittest survived. Brown, Jewish and Irish people had
more babies than the Darwin class. The Darwinians then had to devise the
hateful pseudo-science of eugenics, which was a scheme to prevent the poor from
breeding.
We all
know where that led, and the uses to which the National Socialists put Darwin’s
dangerous ideas.
Now that
we have replaced Darwin on the tenner with the more benign figure of Miss
Austen, is this not the moment to reconsider taking down his statue from the Natural
History Museum, and replacing him with the man who was sitting on the staircase
until 2009 — the museum’s founder, Richard Owen?
A.N. Wilson’s
Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (John Murray, £25) is out next month
INTERNET SOURCE: https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/it-s-time-charles-darwin-was-exposed-for-the-fraud-he-was-a3604166.html
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Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler (AP)
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