I recently came across a very interesting post at Watts Up With That? which provides an object lesson in how to demolish the claims of neo-Darwinian evolution.
According to the post:
A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny….
Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”
“What’s the relevance of this to neo-Darwinian evolution?” I hear you ask. Simple. If NDE is to be considered an adequate theory, it has to have a model which can account for the kind of complexity we observe in living things today. It doesn’t. If you want a clearcut example, think of the Cambrian explosion. No-one has a quantitative scientific model of how that happened.
For years, though, NDE has been accepted by a large section of the public as established fact, simply because there is a vast amount of evidence for material continuity between all kinds of organisms (especially the underlying genetic similarities). That, coupled with the very strong evidence for a nested hierarchy linking organismic traits in different creatures, certainly points to common ancestry.
What neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t do, however, is explain form – the emergence of new structures at all levels, from micro to macro. And a successful theory of life has to do just that. A competent expose by a lawyer with good cross-examining skills – like the one done on man-made global warming recently – could serve to discredit NDE in the public mind. It could also serve as the basis of a legal challenge to the way evolution is taught at schools – as an all-inclusive theory of biology, in the same way that atomic theory is of chemistry. If we can convince the public at large that there is a large slab of biology that NDE can’t explain, then we willhave knocked it off its perch as a Big Theory. It will no longer seem really important – at best, it will be just part of a much bigger picture.