Exposing the impotence of the Neo-Darwinian theory

Scientists who reject the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution are getting bolder about publicly proclaiming their skepticism of the explanation for the origins of life once universally accepted in the scientific community.

During a mid-November conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil, 350 mostly young research scientists and scholars from Brazil, the United States, Canada, Egypt, Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru gathered to discuss intelligent design (ID). The conference dealt “directly with ID evidence and proof, and how the present scientific paradigms fail to explain the origin and evolution of the universe and life on Earth,” said Enezio E. de Almeida Filho, director of the Sociedade Brasileira do Design Inteligente (Brazilian Center of Intelligent Design) in Campinas, Sao Paolo.

Attendance far surpassed the anticipated 150 and included scholars in astronomy, biology, chemistry, science, history, physics, and law. The professional interest in ID research made it clear the ID community runs wider and deeper than any of its members realized from reading published research papers or attending lectures.

Neo-Darwinian evolution, or what evolutionary biologists refer to as the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES), is fraught with fundamental problems exposed by research in hard sciences like biochemistry, chemistry, and physics. Recent discoveries have revealed a weakness in random mutation and natural selection to do the heavy lifting necessary to be the driving mechanism of life.

“As a matter of fact, Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is a dead scientific theory since 1980,” Filho said. Several cell structures discovered since then cast doubt on the previously held notion that the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein process alone determines the basic features of living cells. Such doubt led to what has become known as the Altenberg 16 conference in 2008, when 16 evolutionary biologists and science philosophers met in Altenberg, Austria, and called for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) to modify and eventually replace MES.

The Altenbeg 16 meeting gave voice to the growing realization of the inadequacy of MES to explain evolution. Proponents of creation theory and ID theory point to conclusions from the meeting as evidence that MES, still taught in classrooms and accepted by most practicing biologists, is a framework beginning to topple. EES will be announced as a new general theory of evolution in 2020, but if the scientific literature on the subject is any indication, it won’t include the origin of genetic information. Filho predicts that without complex specified information, EES will be stillborn as a scientific theory.

In the past year, an expanding group of researchers and authors seeking a forum to voice their beliefs that other mechanisms would better explain evolutionary processes are joining a website called The Third Way. Established scholars in the sciences, philosophy, history, and related humanities who are invited to publish work on the site seek an alternative explanation, other than creation or Neo-Darwinism, for evolution processes.

Among the most important developments in evolutionary biology is the undeniable role information plays in the intricate mechanisms of living cells. Mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski argues that matter is not real in and of itself, but things become real insofar as they exchange information with each other. In contrast to a materialist view that everything is built out of matter, Dembski proposes that information is the fundamental stuff of the world and the outworking of an intelligence.

“As a Christian, I hold that things are real because they relate to God,” he said.

Don’t expect the greater scientific community to embrace Dembski’s belief anytime soon, if ever. But a growing body of scientific research could soon expose the impotence of the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.