Matt Ridley, author of the book “Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters” (2006 Harper Perennial) is known to be a brilliant propagandist of Darwin. Perhaps also for this reason the Wall Street Journal gives him the opportunity to periodically write articles on this topic.
In one of these, Ridley candidly writes:
“Biological evolution, too, is anti-fragile. The death of unfit individuals is what causes a species to adapt and improve.
Some could wrongly interpret here the “improvement” in a minor, reductive sense. In truth, Ridley, like all evolutionists, when speaks of “improvement” of species dreams its major all-comprehensive sense, nothing less than biological macroevolution of all species starting from the “primordial soup”, in other words, the “molecules-to-man” series of evolution’s miracles.
“The death of unfit individuals”, the “anti-fragile” task, is exactly Darwin’s natural selection. In his genomics book, where he narrates “the story of human evolution from our ape ancestor”, Ridley cites some examples of “improvement” by natural selection: “natural selection designed [sic] the pieces of our organism”, “natural selection provided a stellar navigation system for the migrant birds”, “this ability [free will] is something that natural selection put inside us”.
The cited bold statement by Ridley offers us the occasion for analyzing the particular relation that evolutionists establish between their supposed evolution and death. For them, it is a causal relation, in short, like Ridley states, “death causes evolution”.
Let’s see what happens when a similar “logic” is applied to other fields. Evolution in car industry: “scrapping of cars causes the creation of all worldwide car production”. Evolution in education: “student’s exam failure causes the knowledge of the professors”. Given the Wall Street Journal is implied, what about this “evolution in economy”: “bankrupt of industries causes the economic growth of a nation”. I could continue with examples from different fields.
To us IDers the Darwinian death-causes-evolution logic smells of non-sequitur, or, worse, of logical contradiction. How can a destructive force cause construction? Destruction does not construct. But the “logic” of evolutionists is different from ours.
First, it is likely evolutionists would say in defence of Ridley: “Matt forgets to mention the second actor in the process: random genetic mutations provide the input materials for natural selection”.
Unfortunately doing so doesn’t help them. In fact in the vast majority of cases random mutations are harmful and produce damage to the biological organization. Only in few cases mutations are neutral. So finally Darwinism clearly appears what it really is, the conceptual concatenation of two negative destructive factors: damage and death.
Isn’t it paradoxical that a theory that pretends to explain life and its astonishing organization uses damage-and-death as creation “engine”? It is absurd for us IDers/creationists, nevertheless it has an important place in the perverted worldview of evolutionists. Design and life are the positive paradigms in the ID/creationism perspective. Evolutionism, which is the inverse of that, somehow must use the inverse paradigms: destructive randomness is the opposite of design, and death is the opposite of life. So, in a sense, Darwinian evolution would be better named “devolution”, or even “destructionism”.
At the very end, any one holds on to the logic he likes. We IDers like the one according to which any real organization arises from intelligent design. All we see around us shows evidence of that. Evolutionists hold on to the believe that any biological organization arises from damage-and-death. Obviously, no evidence whatsoever supports that, but why bother, they are satisfied of their illusion.