A third, more important criticism concerns the way the inadequacy of natural selection as an explanatory principle. According to this criticism, living things in all stages from amoeba to human beings exhibit an extraordinary organization and purposefulness incompatible with physical and chemical explanation. It is impossible to account for this mechanical order based on random variations by way of natural selection.
J. B. S. Haldane is a British geneticist and famous evolutionist biologist:
To sum up, no satisfactory cause of evolution other than the action of natural selection on fortuitous variations has ever been put forward. It is by no means clear that natural selection will explain all the facts...10
He will probably attempt to account for it as a result of natural selection, but natural selection is more fitted to explain the origin of given adaptations than the existence of living beings to which the term adaptation can be applied with a meaning. 11
J. Hawkes:
I have difficulty in believing that the dazzling beauty in birds, fish, flowers, etc., came about by natural selection. Beyond that, he asks the question whether human consciousness can be the product of such a mechanism. In his article, finally, he concludes that the human mind that produced the blessings of civilization, and the creative imagination that immortalized those such as Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein cannot be the gift of the law of the jungle called the "struggle for survival" to us. 12
Roger Lewin is a prize-winning author and former News Editor of Science Magazine:
It [natural selection] may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a creative force, as many people have suggested. 13
Dr. Colin Patterson a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History:
No one has ever produced a [new] species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question. 14
Arthur Koestler is a Hungarian-born British novelist, journalist, and critic:
In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection-quite unaware of the fact that random mutations have turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology. 15
Pierre Paul Grassé is the former president of the FrenchAcademy of Sciences:
The "evolution in action" of J. Huxley and other biologists is simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries! Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of the genome, does not imply evolution, and we have tangible proof of this in many panchronic species. 16
Kevin Padian is Professor in Department of Integrative Biology at University of California, Berkeley and Curator of Paleontology at UC Museum of Paleontology:
How do major evolutionary changes get started? Does anyone still believe that populations sit around for tens of thousands of years, waiting for favorable mutations to occur (and just how does that happen, by the way?), then anxiously guard them until enough accumulate for selection to push the population toward new and useful change? There you have the mathematical arguments of Neo-Darwinism that Waddington and others rightly characterized as "vacuous." 17
1- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter VI, "Difficulties of the Theory."
2- Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. II, p. 10.
3- Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1988, p. 26.
4- Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, 1982, pp. 181-182.
5- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Return of Hopeful Monsters," Natural History, Vol. 86, July-August 1977, p. 28.
6- Cemal Yıldırım, Evrim Kuramı ve Bağnazlık, ["The Theory of Evolution and Bigotry"], p. 36.
7- Ibid., p. 49.
8- Ibid., p. 185.
9- Ibid., p. 128.
10- Cemal Yildirim, Evrim Kurami; ve Bağnazlık, ["The Theory of Evolution and Bigotry"] , p. 51.
11- J. Hawkes, "Nine Tantalizing Mysteries of Nature," New York Times Magazine, 1957, p. 33.
12- Science, 1982, No. 217, pp. 1239-1240.
13- Colin Patterson, "Cladistics," BBC, Interview with Brian, Peter Franz, 4 March 1982.
14- Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up, Vintage Books; 1978, p. 185.
15- Pierre Paul Grassé, Evolution On Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Information, Academic Press, Jan. 1978.
16- Kevin Padian, "The Whole Real Guts of Evolution," Review of Genetics, Paleontology and Macroevolution, by Jeffrey S. Levinton, p. 77
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