Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Post-Darwinian Evolution Darwin�provided a general paradigm, but hardly the final answer. The reason that he can be so easily attacked is that his theory is not really a scientific theory. A scientific theory provides formulas that one can use to check if the theory�s predictions correspond with the behavior of Nature. Darwin�s theory of evolution does not provide any formulas. And it would take millions of years to watch a (large) species being created. Things like knees or eyes cannot have been created by Darwinian evolution alone. The number of nerves and muscles and ligaments and veins that must come together in the exact place at the same time is just too high. Just evolving one nerve is an amazing feat of nature. Imagine evolving the very complex structure of a knee. No matter how many millions of years you have, the chances are lower than the chances that Nature builds a skyscraper. We can prove the existence of a black hole because we can prove all the physics of the black hole here on Earth. And we can detect the motion of objects around the black hole. But we cannot prove that eyes and knees grew out of variation and natural selection. We have never seen a new limb develop in any species. And nobody has invented a machine yet that can simulate it (precisely because we do not know how it happens). We do not know the formulas that would create such limbs.� We do know the (presumed) formulas of the black hole very well. So we can check if the theory of black holes is correct. The fossil record only proves that different species have existed at different times. Thus it is easy to claim that there was an "evolution" from microbes to humans. But Darwin�added an important point: he also claimed that one species descends from another, driven by variation and selection (that's �Darwinian evolution�, not just �evolution�). Alas, Darwin did not explain how this would happen. Since we don't know how to create a species (it implies creating both a male and a female at the same time that cannot have children with others but only between themselves), we cannot prove that Darwin�was right. Worse: we cannot prove that he was wrong. His theory is perfectly reasonable but there are no formulas that we can experiment with. Thus we cannot prove it or disprove it. If we had a theory on the origin of species, we could create a new species. Instead we have no clue how to produce one. At the genetic level the anti-Darwinian argument becomes actually stronger. We observe DNA mutations all the time, but they do not result in new species. DNA mutations result in the same species: your DNA mutates all the time, but you are still a human, and your children will still be humans. According to Darwinists, at some point all these cumulative mutations should suddenly lead to a male and a female that constitute a new species; and survive. But nobody has offered a credible explanation (yet) of why and how this would happen. �If we consider each DNA mutation as an experiment, then the anti-Darwinists are proving their theory every single second: your DNA is mutating every single second but you remain the same species. However, Darwin�discovered something that was indeed scientific: variation plus selection may lead to the creation of order (and, he added, this explains evolution). That part (�Variation plus Selection equals Order�) was the beginning of the science of self-organization. And that science might turn out to be the right and definitive way to come up with a theory of evolution that also explains what Darwin could not explain: the origins of species.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The Evolution of Life: Of Designers and Design" | Back to the index of all chapters