Neil Thomas (17)
It appears that the ideological necessity of finding a strictly materialist theory eventually came to trump those honest and open-minded objections voiced by the majority of reviewers of the Origin in the decade after its publication. Intellectual integrity was sacrificed on the altar of ideological commitment.
Neil Thomas
Taking Leave of Darwin, 1181.6K
experiments in the United States to introduce artificial hearts to patients had to be withdrawn some decades ago when the fatalities topped 200 with no realistic hope of medical experts being able to improve their technology. Forty years of research and development and forty billion dollars went down the drain. If such gargantuan efforts and expense could not fashion a functioning heart-substitute, it becomes all the more difficult to imagine a heart being constructed by the serendipity of random mutations and natural selection.Taking Leave of Darwin, 112-113
As philosopher Richard Spilsbury once noted, "The basic objection to neo-Darwinism is not that it is speculative, but that it confers miraculous powers on inappropriate agents. In essence, it is an attempt to supernaturalize nature, to endow unthinking processes with more-than-human powers.Taking Leave of Darwin, 140
I find it the grandest historical irony that the most fervent defenders of Darwinism claim to be advancing the ideals of the European Enlightenment. My view is that they are in reality dishonoring the foundational principles of that admirable project by perpetuating a hypothesis without empirical foundation or even the slightest approximation to verisimilitude.Taking Leave of Darwin, 140
We take it for granted that we are born with hinged bones to provide low-friction articulations, eye protectors (eyelids), tears secreted by the lachrymal glands to lubricate the eyes so that they don't feel scratchy, and an optic nerve to transmit electrical impulses to the brain to decode visual cues so that we can know where we are. We shrug off as unremarkable the fact that broken bones will, unlike broken vases, mend, or the fact that minor wounds will heal by the process to which medical people refer with a complacent lack of affect as "bodily regeneration."Taking Leave of Darwin, 113-114
We should therefore be more appreciative of nature's ingenuity and the sheer ease with which we see, hear, talk, eat, drink, make love, and reproduce our kind. Such should be the central core of school biology lessons, promoting a sense of wonder in the young mind at the very fact of existence. The reason that it does not form that core is that scientists and the educational establishment subscribe to the materialistic-mechanistic model of human functioning, and therefore tend not to "do" wonder.Taking Leave of Darwin, 113
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
Empirically, the idea of a transformation from one species to another appears problematical in view of the practical experience of animal husbandry, where even selective breeding has proved unsuccessful in bringing about fundamentally new species.Taking Leave of Darwin, 73
Scientists often adopt hushed and almost embarrassed tones in referring to consciousness, since it represents a major challenge to the materialist schema into which all facets of human life "should" be able to be fitted. They are loath to acknowledge that the problem rests with the Procrustean, one-size-fits-all schema they support.Taking Leave of Darwin, 72
It is not even possible to imagine a theoretical pathway leading to how consciousness could have come about by natural selection -- which is one reason why leading scientists in the field, such as Susan Blackmore, have found it threatening to the Darwinian paradigm.Taking Leave of Darwin, 72
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.
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."
it is noteworthy that a good deal of the opposition came not from wounded religious sensibilities but from common-sense objections arising from people's instinctive trust in everyday forms of logic. Ellegard reports that Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, with its pictures of creatures constantly strained by overpopulation and sifted by an undending existential struggle, was commonly rejected on the basis that, more often than not, the habitat in which animals have been placed gives them a sufficiency of resources.Taking Leave of Darwin, 35
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