EXTRACTS

Influence on Darwin of "Positivism"
Intoxicated as a youth with Positivism Darwin applied its methods to the problem of the transmutation of living species—he even called his secret notebooks his “Transmutation notebooks”— and came up with a purely physical and chemical reaction capable of achieving it, “Natural selection.”

But he realized he couldn’t try it out, the evidence for it was circumstantial, and he sensed there was a lot it couldn’t account for. He asked close friends for their opinions but they were uncertain. No one had ever applied this way of thinking outside the chemical laboratory. Only 20 years later, when the young whippersnapper Albert Wallace came up with the same theory did Darwin abandon his scruples and publish, though his book was a welter of “maybes” and talked of several other mechanisms of evolution as well.

The greatest scientific minds of the time withheld their approval. Later Wallace changed his mind when he found evidence that natural selection could not be the whole story. But by this time it was too late. People with a purely political agenda and no interest in the limits of Positivism harnessed the theory of the transmutation of living species to their attack on the Church of England, and the issue ceased to be, is this a good theory, to, are you with us or against us? And that kind of a Shibboleth natural selection remains to this day.

Karl Popper added to Positivism the rider that for a theory to be regarded as scientific it must, in principle at least, be falsifiable. Natural selection, he concluded, is not falsifiable and hence is not part of science. Elsewhere I quote the evolutionist John Maynard Smith admitting, “It is rarely possible in evolutionary theory to think of a single decisive experiment or observation that will settle a controversy.”

“Epicycles”
I’ve shown you that natural selection doesn’t work. But natural selection is like a hydra—as soon as you dispatch one theory, another one pops up in its place. You have to dispatch them all.

"Epicycles" is the name you give new theories introduced to make up for flaws in an old theory. When people thought the Earth stood still and the sun, planets and stars all went round it at different speeds, they also assumed those bodies all moved in perfect circles. But to keep the movements of those bodies in line with appearances—to “save the appearances”— they had to keep adding additional smaller and smaller circles to the system—“epicycles”—until they ended up with the “heavenly” bodies moving in over 50 circles great and small! Then someone proposed the Earth rotates and goes round the Sun, and all the epicycles disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Maybe one day all natural selection’s “epicycles” will also disappear in a puff of smoke. But for now, each one of them is claimed to be an independent theory in its own right, and the more of them there are the more that’s supposed to confi rm natural selection. That’s like saying, the invention of more and more epicycles just goes to prove the Earth stands still! After all, if it didn’t, scientists wouldn’t still be “discovering” them!

Darwinianism's "epicycles" are dispatched under the headings:

Natural selection can't select for multiple factors at once
Modern evolutionary math doesn’t work
Variation not accounted by mutation
Competition not effective
Kin selection theory doesn't work
Why selection isn’t important for evolution
Who’s clustering the genes?
The origin of species, still a mystery
Wallace, co-discover of natural selection, turns against it

$14.95 USA, £7.95 UK.  Buy from Amazon
For review copies email.