Neo-Darwinism is Dead. What Replaces it?

Classical Darwinism died about fifty years ago as we understood more about how genetics worked. Neo-Darwinism replaced it, but it too is dead. Not that you would know that from either what is taught to your children in government-run schools or the media, but scientists on the cutting edge of the issues (that's not Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson) know it.

Here are just a few of the many quotes I could use to show this:

“Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of a dying theory.” – Stuart Newman ( professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY)

“There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.” (Eugene Koonin, Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics, Nucleic Acids Research, 37(4), 2009, pp. 1011-1034) Note "Purifying selection" here just means that genomes have a weak tendency to 'heal themselves'. When there is a mutation that has reduced function in a population, it can sometimes get fixed and restored- thus "increasing complexity" by taking things back to where they were before the mutation occurred.

“The Altenberg 16 … recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence [emphasis added]” (p. 19).

“A wave of scientists now questions natural selection’s role, though fewer will publicly admit it” (p. 20).

Both from "The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry by Suzan MazurNorth Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2010

Natural selection isn't strong enough to explain what we see. The more savvy evolutionists know this and have been adopting the "neutral theory of evolution" and abandoning Darwinism. Computational Biologist Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass  declared "Kimura replaced Darwinism in 1968. No need to make up a pseudo history. Neo-Darwinism as understood within science was falsified a long time ago" . This "new theory of evolution" is not the same thing as Darwinism or even neo-Darwinism because "natural selection" is not in the driver's seat.  

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The evolutionary "Tree of Life" is also facing some serious challenges. It looks like "horizontal gene transfer" is a lot more common than we thought back when the evolutionary tree of life was developed. That is and for example, certain genes may be found in sponges and mammals- and nothing in between! Genes are found in two groups of creatures far apart in the classical evolutionary scenario and not found in vast gaps of creatures which are supposed to be between the two on the evolutionary scale. That doesn't fit the idea that a creature gets all its genetic information from its ancestors as modified by random mutations. Rather, it appears that a living creature is more like a cell phone that can download apps from vastly different sources to supplement and integrate with its main operating system.

But perhaps an even bigger challenge to the evolutionary tree of life is the work of Winston Ewert (see a rundown here). The idea of "nested hierarchies" has in recent times past constituted some of the strongest evidence for evolution. Oh it was not as clean and clear-cut as advocates tried to make it, but it is hard to deny that certain genes and mutations show up in what looks like nested hierarchies in a way consistent with the idea that all groups within them evolved from a common ancestor. And it is doubtless true to the extent which it applies: a group of similar species are a "nested hierarchy" within the same Genus for example. The problem for Neo-Darwinism is that efforts to extend that idea up the tree of life don't produce as good a fit at the higher taxonomic levels. What Ewert has done is used sophisticated mathematical analysis which shows that a "Dependency Graph" based on function is a somewhat better fit for the data than the idea of a Nested Hierarchy.

So "natural selection acting through random mutations" is not powerful enough to explain the complexity and diversity of all of Earth's biota throughout its history. It turns out chance dominates "natural selection". For example, humans have maybe 22,000 protein-producing genes. Each one of them is either more helpful than the average same gene in the rest of the population, or less helpful, or the same. Say one gene gets a hugely beneficial mutation and becomes three times as helpful as that same gene location in the average of the rest of the population. That is a huge leap. The vast majority of mutations are harmful. But even that huge leap would only help overall fitness increase by 3/22,000. Maybe other mutations that person has are more harmful and so overall fitness averages out. Maybe he gets eaten by a lion or steps on a snake and that mutation has no role in saving him. Chance overwhelms natural selection. This is true whether we are talking about weeding out mildly harmful mutations or spreading helpful ones.

Scientists are facing the probability that natural selection plays a minor role shaping life on earth. It weeds out only the most hurtful mutations and effects the details of creatures within their current forms. It's not the major player and perhaps not much of a minor player in increasing complexity and the arrival of new forms.

So if "Natural Selection" has been demoted to a minor player in the shaping of life on earth, what was the major player? "Chance" is all evolutionary scientists are left with. I have heard a couple respond to the inadequacy of natural selection by saying words to the effect of "but that's the old theory, the new one is that chance is the dominant change mechanism." Well, if that's what the data is pointing to then it's only honest to say so, but I am old enough to remember the days when creationists would say that it is not reasonable to assume that chance produced all the diversity and rise of complexity that we see in the earth's living things throughout time. And I remember the response "but we are not saying it was chance, we are saying that it was natural selection acting through chance." So it seems to me they are arguing in a circle, albeit one which has taken two decades to swing round.

Chance doesn't operate like this though. It may produce repeating patterns, but it doesn't drive increasing complexity and any increasing diversity it produces is through a loss of form and function into chaos, not exquisite adaptation. The explanation of "chance" is as unsatisfying now as it was decades ago when evolutionary scientists were assuring people like me that it was natural selection, not chance, driving evolution. 

Of course science is bound operationally by methodological naturalism. As scientists, they couldn't see God if God were standing right in front of them. Nor even acknowledge the gray areas between Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Special Creation. As men and women however, we ought to be able to take off that "science" cap which binds what we are allowed to consider (natural causes only) and realize that natural forces alone are insufficient to explain the diversity of life in Earth's history. To ascribe "chance" as the driving force of evolution is as close to ascribing life's diversity and complexity to God as science can get. And the scripture to some extent agrees. The New Living Translation of Proverbs 16:33 says...

We may throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall.

Even the events we see as random are really ordered by Him.

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While scientists need to change some of their ideas about evolution, the church also needs to change some mistaken ideas about what the text of early Genesis is actually saying. It's a far more Christ-centered document than generally accepted theology accounts for.  The book below, available at no change for those with access to Kindle Unlimited, peels back the layers of misunderstanding and reveals the truth of Early Genesis and how it points to Christ. It takes some work, but for someone willing to do the work then the knowledge of the mystery of Christ in early Genesis is there for the having.