David Gelernter starts out his piece, "Giving Up Darwin," by saying "Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory." He wants to give Charles Darwin full credit for his "astounding" idea as described in The Origin of Species, published 1859.
There's no doubt that species adapt to circumstances - evolve - in small ways like fur density, but the origin of species is exactly what evolutionary theory cannot explain. The professor cites two lines of argument that convinced him of this.
1) The "Cambrian Explosion" refers to the fossil record which shows new animal body plans emerging about half a billion years ago. According to Darwin's theory, these newly appearing animals should have very gradually appeared in history, with many transitional forms before them. But their transitional forms don't exist in pre-Cambrian fossil layers. The new animals exploded into history.
2) New animal forms, i.e. new species, would require new animal-building instructions within cells. Since Darwin's theory came out (1859), molecular biology has revealed that random mutation cannot account for new proteins and DNA. Anyone of his day would have been utterly ignorant of this.
from "Giving Up Darwin"
(cont'd tomorrow)
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