A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE THEORY

The roots of evolutionist thought go back as far as antiquity as a dogmatic belief attempting to deny the fact of creation. Most of the pagan philosophers in ancient Greece defended the idea of evolution. When we take a look at the history of philosophy we see that the idea of evolution constitutes the backbone of many pagan philosophies.

However, it is not this ancient pagan philosophy, but faith in God which has played a stimulating role in the birth and development of modern science. Most of the people who pioneered modern science believed in the existence of God; and while studying science, they sought to discover the universe God has created and to perceive His laws and the details in His creation. Astronomers such as Copernicus, Keppler, and Galileo; the father of paleontology, Cuvier; the pioneer of botany and zoology, Linnaeus; and Isaac Newton, who is referred to as the "greatest scientist who ever lived", all studied science believing not only in the existence of God but also that the whole universe came into being as a result of His creation. 6 Albert Einstein, considered to be the greatest genius of our age, was another devout scientist who believed in God and stated thus; "I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame."7

One of the founders of modern physics, German physician Max Planck said: "Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with."8

The theory of evolution is the outcome of the materialist philosophy that surfaced with the reawakening of ancient materialistic philosophies and became widespread in the 19th century. As we have indicated before, materialism seeks to explain nature through purely material factors. Since it denies creation right from the start, it asserts that every thing, whether animate or inanimate, has appeared without an act of creation but rather as a result of a coincidence that then acquired a condition of order. The human mind however is so structured as to comprehend the existence of an organising will wherever it sees order. Materialistic philosophy, which is contrary to this very basic characteristic of the human mind, produced "the theory of evolution" in the middle of the 19th century.


Darwin’s Imagination

The person who put forward the theory of evolution the way it is defended today, was an amateur English naturalist, Charles Robert Darwin.

Darwin had never undergone a formal education in biology. He took only an amateur interest in the subject of nature and living things. His interest spurred him to voluntarily join an expedition on board a ship named H.M.S. Beagle that set out from England in 1832 and travelled around different regions of the world for five years. Young Darwin was greatly impressed by various living species, especially by certain finches that he saw in the Galapagos Islands. He thought that the variations in their beaks were caused by their adaptation to their habitat. With this idea in mind, he supposed that the origin of life and species lay in the concept of "adaptation to the environment". Darwin opposed the fact that God created different living species separately, suggesting that they rather came from a common ancestor and became differentiated from each other as a result of natural conditions.

Darwin's hypothesis was not based on any scientific discovery or experiment; in time however he turned it into a pretentious theory with the support and encouragement he received from the famous materialist biologists of his time. The idea was that the individuals that adapted to the habitat in the best way transferred their qualities to subsequent generations; these advantageous qualities accumulated in time and transformed the individual into a species totally different from its ancestors. (The origin of these "advantageous qualities" was unknown at the time.) According to Darwin, man was the most developed outcome of this imaginary mechanism.

Darwin called this process "evolution by natural selection". He thought he had found the "origin of species": the origin of one species was another species. He published these views in his book titled The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection in 1859.

Darwin was well aware that his theory faced lots of problems. He confessed these in his book in the chapter "Difficulties of the Theory". These difficulties primarily consisted of the fossil record, complex organs of living things that could not possibly be explained by coincidence (e.g. the eye), and the instincts of living beings. Darwin hoped that these difficulties would be overcome by new discoveries; yet this did not stop him from coming up with a number of very inadequate explanations for some. The American physicist Lipson made the following comment on the "difficulties" of Darwin:

On reading The Origin of Species, I found that Darwin was much less sure himself than he is often represented to be; the chapter entitled "Difficulties of the Theory" for example, shows considerable self-doubt. As a physicist, I was particularly intrigued by his comments on how the eye would have arisen. 9

While developing his theory, Darwin was impressed by many evolutionist biologists preceding him, and primarily by the French biologist, Lamarck. 10 According to Lamarck, living creatures passed the traits they acquired during their lifetime from one generation to the next and thus evolved. For instance, giraffes evolved from antelope-like animals by extending their necks further and further from generation to generation as they tried to reach higher and higher branches for food. Darwin thus employed the thesis of "passing the acquired traits" proposed by Lamarck as the factor that made living beings evolve.

But both Darwin and Lamarck were mistaken because in their day, life could only be studied with very primitive technology and at a very inadequate level. Scientific fields such as genetics and biochemistry did not exist even in name. Their theories therefore had to depend entirely on their powers of imagination.

Darwin's Racism

One of the most important yet least-known aspects of Darwin is his racism: Darwin regarded white Europeans as more "advanced" than other human races. While Darwin presumed that man evolved from ape-like creatures, he surmised that some races developed more than others and that the latter still bore simian features. In his book, The Descent of Man, which he published after The Origin of Species, he boldly commented on "the greater differences between men of distinct races".1 In his book, Darwin held blacks and Australian Aborigines to be equal to gorillas and then inferred that these would be "done away with" by the "civilised races" in time. He said:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.2

Darwin's nonsensical ideas were not only theorised, but also brought into a position where they provided the most important "scientific ground" for racism. Supposing that living beings evolved in the struggle for life, Darwinism was even adapted to the social sciences, and turned into a conception that came to be called "Social Darwinism.

Supposing that living beings evolved in the struggle for life, Darwinism was even adapted to the social sciences, and turned into a conception that came to be called "Social Darwinism".

Social Darwinism contends that existing human races are located at different rungs of the "evolutionary ladder", that the European races were the most "advanced" of all, and that many other races still bear "simian" features.

1 Benjamin Farrington, What Darwin Really Said. London: Sphere Books, 1971, pp. 54-56
2 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed., New York: A.L. Burt Co., 1874, p. 178

While the echoes of Darwin's book reverberated, an Austrian botanist by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance in 1865. Not much heard of until the end of the century, Mendel's discovery gained great importance in the early 1900s. This was the birth of the science of genetics. Somewhat later, the structure of the genes and the chromosomes was discovered. The discovery, in the 1950s, of the structure of the DNA molecule that incorporates genetic information threw the theory of evolution into a great crisis. The reason was the incredible complexity of life and the invalidity of the evolutionary mechanisms proposed by Darwin.

These developments ought to have resulted in Darwin's theory being banished to the dustbin of history. However, it was not, because certain circles insisted on revising, renewing, and elevating the theory to a scientific platform. These efforts gain meaning only if we realise that behind the theory lay ideological intentions rather than scientific concerns.

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