Darwinian faith

In the ongoing discussions of evolution in these pages your correspondents, Mark Schellekens (22/2) and Roger Marks (8/3), appear to be in heated agreement that there is a distinction between ‘micro-evolution’ and ‘macro-evolution’.

However, as a biological scientist who has lived a professional academic life surrounded by Darwinians, I can assure your readers that hard-core Darwinians regard the distinction as a furphy, allowing them to believe that the scientifically proven evolution within species (e.g., antibiotic resistance, anthropogenic dog-breeding) can be casually extrapolated to explain the unproven origin of all species, including Homo sapiens, by natural descent from a primordial single cell.

Their faith in the unseen allows them to assume that, one day, we’ll understand how life first came into existence by natural thermochemical processes (Darwin’s “little warm pond”); it also allows them to believe in countless long-extinct incrementally evolved forms (‘missing links’) that continue to elude the most exhaustive searches of the fossil record.

In fact, abiotic synthesis of sugars (e.g., ribose or glucose) from carbon dioxide and water is a thermodynamic impossibility, while incremental evolution of functionless proto-mechanisms is a logical contradiction of the Darwinian concept of natural selection’s ensuring survival of the fittest.

Given the massive amount of faith required for Darwinian belief, it is important to understand the philosophical function of Darwinism.

This has been loudly proclaimed by its most aggressive contemporary evangelist, Professor Richard Dawkins, who is on record as saying that Darwinism not only explains everything we