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Darwin was never able to give a straight answer to those persons who objected to his explanation of why giraffes had long necks. If this were such a selective advantage, why did other animals not evolve long necks? In fact, why were not all species evolving in all different directions, ostriches acquiring the useful faculty of flying, other terrestrial animals of swimming, and so on?Taking Leave, 84-85
as Gertrude Himmelfarb (who did more than any other critic to unmask Darwin's rhetorical evasions) noted, Darwin's technique here and elsewhere was "to assume that by acknowledging the difficulty, he had somehow exorcized it,"Taking Leave of Darwin, 76
Darwin himself acknowledged and indeed drew attention to the lack of fossil evidence--he even, as he put it, "had difficulty imagining by what gradations many structures had been perfected," adding, "Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?... as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth?"Taking Leave of Darwin, 76
Mivart also pointed out that "certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present." This latter point represented a major stumbling block then, as it does now, to the acceptance of Darwin's theory, and it was based on good evidence which Darwin had access to. In the year before the publication of Darwin's Origin, Edward Hitchcock, in his volume The Religion of Geology, had found that the fossil record did not show a gradual development of life forms via intermediaries but rather a discontinuous start-and-stop process involving just those kinds of "saltations" that Darwin ruled out of account. Hitchcock's conclusion that these discontinuities in the fossil record were an indication of repeated divine interventions was of course precisely the doctrine which Darwin was determined to oppose, even, it appears, at the cost of ignoring important evidence if it undermined his own position.Taking Leave of Darwin, 64-65
Coming now to the mainstream reviewers, historian Janet Browne notes that the leading philosophers John Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill also thought the work massively conjectural, with few findings that could be claimed as proofs. (Darwin was particularly stung when it got back to him that Herschel had dubbed natural selection "the law of higgledy-piggledy.") The novelist George Eliot was lukewarm, pointing out that the volume was "sadly lacking in illustrative facts."Taking Leave of Darwin, 63
Hoyle likened the statistical possibility of life appearing spontaneously on earth to a blindfolded person randomly solving a Rubik's cube: "If our blindfolded subject were to make one random move every second it would take him on average three hundred times the age of the earth, 1,350 billion years to solve the cube." The spontaneous origin of life on Earth, according to Hoyle, faced odds at least that long, if not longer.
Nothing illustrates more clearly just how intractable a problem the origin of life has become than the fact that world authorities can seriously toy with the idea of panspermia. The failure to give a plausible evolutionary explanation for the origin of life casts a number of shadows over the whole field of evolutionary speculation.
As noted by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, a non-theist, "I find the confidence among the scientific establishment that the whole scenario will yield to a purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a manifestation of an axiomatic commitment to reductive materialism."
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