The Process of Creation
A Qur'anic Perspective
by
Dr Israr Ahmad
6. Darwin’s Theory & Its Flaws
No
doubt, Charles Darwin (1809-82), through his long and arduous voyage on Beagle
and accumulation of fossils, promoted the theory that organisms tend to produce
offspring varying slightly from their parents. He, however, failed miserably to
explain the mechanism by which new species may arise widely different from each
other and from their common ancestors. Unfortunately, the ordinary educated
person too often identifies the fact of evolution with its cause and ignores
that to say that, evolution has occurred is not the same thing as to believe in
its cause as explained by a particular philosopher or a scientist. It is,
however, easy to see that to know a fact is not the same thing as to know its
cause. A man who believes in the fact of evolution is generally imagined to be
a Darwinist, although Darwinism is a theory relating to the cause of evolution
and not its facts. Darwinism is not evolution, nor is evolution Darwinism.
The
idea of evolution became a subject for scientific study in the domain of
science long before Darwin had even said anything about it. The European who
first put forward the idea of evolution in its modern scientific form was
Buffon, the French naturalist. Goethe in Germany and St.Hilare in France
received it with enthusiasm. The latter in fact called attention to the
embryological evidence in its favour. However, the true father of the modern
theory of evolution is another French naturalist Lamarck (1744-1829) whose
epoch-making work on Zoological Studies was published in 1809 and he
presented a purposive or teleological evolution as against the merely passive
and mechanical evolution of Darwin.
Unfortunately, however, Lamarck did not
receive in his lifetime the recognition that he deserved. The idea of evolution
was widely known and understood only after Charles Darwin had published his Origin
of Species and Wallace had stated that he, working independently, had
arrived at similar results. Darwin soon followed up his first publication by
his book Descent of Man. Since then the theory of evolution has found an
increasing confirmation in practically every field of science especially in
Physics, Astronomy, Geology, Biology, Sociology, Embryology, Paleontology and
Comparative Anatomy. Darwin not only collected and systematized all evidences
for evolution that could be available in his own days, but also put forward the
view that Natural Selection, through the survival of the fittest in the
struggle for existence, is in itself a complete explanation of the cause of
evolution. It is this particular explanation of evolution that is known as
Darwinism.
Darwin’s
books, however, created a fierce controversy about the fact of evolution
because they attracted the attention of the common intellectual, for the first
time, to a theory that questioned his age-old beliefs and assumptions and
which, though long in existence, was so far going unnoticed. In this
controversy, some eminent biologists like Thomas Huxley nd Ernest Haeckel
championed the cause of evolution and defended the views of Darwin both as
regards the occurrence of evolution and the factors responsible for its
occurrence. Their critics, on the other hand, refuted these views wholesale
with the result that Darwinism and evolution came to be identified with each
other on both sides. While the scientists have now accepted the fact of
evolution, the controversy about Darwinism still persists although it is
perfectly true to say that Darwinism is rapidly losing its ground and its
opponents are already on the way to a complete victory. Indeed if we take into
consideration what we hear and read in scientific circles and journals time and
again, we have to conclude that even now there is no dearth of serious students
of evolutionary science who believe that Darwinism has already collapsed.
Briefly,
the theory of Darwin is that it is in the nature of life to vary. The whole
organism and its individual organs and functions are subject to minute
variations which occur blindly and haphazardly in any and every direction.
Moreover, all species of animals have to struggle against a hostile
environment, against their enemies and dangers of every kind in order to feed
and protect themselves and their offspring. In this struggle only the fittest
species are able to maintain their race while all others perish. This means
that nature favors the maintenance and further development of only that
accidental change of shape, colour, structure, function or instinct which
renders the animal better able to secure food for itself, to grasp its prey, to
avoid or defeat its enemies, to protect
its offspring, to propagate its species and so on. Without choice,
without aim and without conscious purpose, nature offers a wealth of variations,
the conditions of existence act as a sieve, variations which correspond to them
maintain themselves gliding through the meshes of the sieve, those that do not
disappear.
In
this process of passive adaptation, the forms of life are raised from the
originally homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex,
and from the lower to the higher. The absence of purpose is the very essence of
Darwinism. Variations arise fortuitously out of the organism and present
themselves for selection in the struggle for existence. They are not actively
acquired by means of struggle. If there is any purpose in evolution, it is,
according to Darwin, apparent and not real. Darwinists endeavor to explain the
emergence of even the most complicated organ such as the eye and the most
puzzling function such as the instinct of a bee, as a result of a series of
accidents. This position is, of course, completely antagonistic to that of
teleological evolutionists like Lamarck, Bergson and Iqbal.
Darwinism
has passed through several stages and undergone several differentiations and
transformations since its birth but its essence and main features have remained
the same. Although it is primarily a biological theory, the Darwinists endeavor
to use it to answer all questions relating to Psychology, Metaphysics, Logic,
Epistemology, Ethics, Aesthetics and even History, Economics and Politics.
Indeed, if Darwinism with its radical opposition to teleology and its stress on
mechanical selection is really an adequate explanation of a part of the
evolutionary process, it ought to be an adequate explanation of the whole of
it. Naturally, Darwinism has deeply influenced all subsequent developments of
the human and social sciences. It has yielded many bitter fruits and the
bitterest of them all is Marxism and worse still totally materialist
interpretation of history, morals and religion.
“My theory”, said Darwin “will lead to a whole
philosophy”. He was right. But the philosophy that results from the theory of
Darwin is a terrible shock to man’s justified conviction of his own dignity
over the rest of creation, which he thinks he enjoys by virtue of the nobility
of his mind and spirit and the sanctity of his reason and free-will. For the
implications of this theory are that the whole of this wonderful world of life
is nothing but the blind and fortuitous play of the ‘reckless’ forces of
nature. It is completely devoid of plan or method. What is now a human being
may have been a worm crawling in a gutter at some stage of the evolution tree!
The higher activities of man like religion, morality, politics, arts, science,
philosophy, law and education have no worth or value of their own, since their
very basis i.e. the conscience of man and his desire for ideals is the
result of an accident, a chance product of ignoble tumult of animal impulses,
desires and sensations, which in all statistical probability may not have come
into existence at all.
The
spirit of man revolts against such ideas and their scientific accuracy
instantaneously becomes doubtful. No wonder, therefore, that there were soon
many powerful rebels in the Darwin’s own camp. Wallace, the proponent of the
Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence, ultimately came to believe in a
spiritual explanation of evolution. Romanes, a prominent disciple of Darwin,
ended as a Christian theist. Fleischmann kept illustrating the orthodox
Darwinian standpoint during many years of personal research, but finally
developed into an outspoken opponent of not only the theory of natural
selection but also of the doctrine of descent. Friedmann was no different.
Driesch started with a mechanical theory of life but wrote a series of essays
to show that life is fundamental and evolution is purposive. Some of the more
notable founders of constructive theories of evolution opposed to Darwinism
include Lamarck, Etienne Geoffroy, St. Hilaire, Ersner, Kassowtz, W. Haacke,
Nageli, De Vries, Driesch and Bergson. Suffice it to say that the commonest and
the most prominent feature of all these theories is that a living organism has
not to wait passively for natural selection and prolonged accumulation of
minute variations.
On
the other hand, there is a hidden purpose working in and through the organism
that enables it spontaneously and of itself to bring forth what is necessary
for self-maintenance, often what is new and different with an extensive range
of possibilities. It is, for instance, able to produce protective adaptations
against cold or heat, to regenerate lost parts, often to replace entire organs
that have been lost and under certain circumstances to produce new organs
altogether. There is no end to illustrations that have been adduced in support
to this viewpoint. As such it is a mere caprice on the part of those Darwinists
who still cling to the theory of natural selection and do not take into account
the spontaneous capacities and characteristics of living organisms that
constitute a definite proof of the teleological nature of evolution.
The
emergence of conscious purpose in man itself, as one of his most important
characteristics, constitutes evidence in favour of purposive evolution. The
very word evolution implies purpose, since it means growth or movement towards
continuously higher stages of development. Every kind of growth or development
must have some destination from the very beginning; otherwise it will not be
any growth or development at all. The highest product of the growth of a tree
is the seed and the seed is implied in the tree at every stage of its growth.
If the universe has really evolved and developed up to its present stage, does
it not mean that purpose, one of the most precious products of its development,
was implied in it from the very onset, that purpose of some sort was present at
every stage of its development. At the material stage it was entirely unconscious,
at the biological stage it was half conscious, at the human stage it became
completely conscious and deliberate.
A
purely scientistic and agnostic man finds himself in the uncharted territory of
an exploratory and descriptive science rather than the revealed and the
illuminating knowledge of the traditions, a knowledge that was the embodiment
of a sacred science and a repository of meaning for the enigmatic mysteries of
life. There is a need for a perceptive approach to man’s origin and end that
can contextualize man’s perception of self within a framework of
comprehensibility and meaning. The scientific evolutionary narrative provides
modern man with a terrestrial lineage of development that commences with a
single replicating cell and ends with the spectacular transition from animal
primate to conscious human. As a result, the Godless Darwinian evolutionary
theory has completely recast the mindset and mentality of people wholesale with
its hypothetical explanation of man’s origin and by implication his spiritual
and ultimate destiny. That also explains why both Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels
highly appreciated the contents of Darwin’s books and Marx even desired to
dedicate his book “Das Capital” to Darwin.
By
any stretch of imagination, the origin and progression of organic life on earth
in all of its diversity and uniqueness through multiple, innumerable species
cannot be the result of blind mutations and mindless transformations. The
development of such things as organs and limbs and shells and skins of animals
and humans can only be the result of a fundamental intelligence being
manifested at every level of existence. Indeed, is intelligence not the very
manifestation of pattern, order, design, uniqueness, function, meaning, and
fullness and fulfillment of intention? In this sense, the cells, molecules and
atoms that represent our flesh make it virtually intelligent in a manner in
which they create and maintain a living organism. An exquisite reality of
organic forms belies the blind, spontaneous and random (essentially mindless
and without design) mandate at the very heart of the evolutionary theory.
Darwin himself had a problem with
the myriad creation that reflected, if nothing else, ‘stunning design’. He, for
example, well understood the development of the eye as a serious problem for
his theory. He wrote:
“To suppose that the eye
with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different
distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of
spherical and chromatic observation, could have been formed by natural
relation, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.” (Quoted in Stephen
Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin, New York, 1977, p.103)
Let
us, at this point, look at the guidance and knowledge provided by the Holy
Qur`an. Verse 30 of Surah Al-Anbiya asserts:
“We
made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?” (21:30)
That
all life began from water (as a result of chemical reaction between water and
crust of the earth) is a conclusion to which our latest knowledge in biological
science points. Apart from the fact that protoplasm, the original basis of
living matter, is a liquid or semi-liquid and in a state of constant flux and
instability, it is an established fact that land animals, like the higher
vertebrates, including man, show in their embryological history, organs like
those of fishes, indicating the watery origin of their original habitat. The
constitution of protoplasm, as a matter of fact, is about 80 to 85 percent water.
Classical
Darwinism assumed that all changes in living things take place gradually.
“Natural selection”, Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species, “will banish
the belief in the continued creation of new organic beings, or in any great and
sudden modifications of their structure.” This assumption of the continuity of
organic changes made it difficult to understand and explain how any single
modification or group of co-adapted modifications could first arise. An
improved and metaphysically loaded theory of emergent evolution put forward by
C. Lloyd Morgan and others maintain that such events must be discontinuous with
what went before. Whatever comes to be for the first time must do so suddenly
or abruptly. One function of the concept of emergence is to express this
contention. In opposition to purely mechanistic or reductionist view the
concept of emergence implies that the variety, diversity and complexity are
novel, irreducible and high-level features of the creative advance in nature.
Scientists
working in paleontology and its related fields have accumulated a number of
early and pre-human fragments of skulls, teeth and bones, and yet the
paleontological gaps in our knowledge of human origins are indisputable, even
among paleontologists themselves, as is evident from the interpretation of
their findings. In other words, the links are still missing between the main
waves of successive hominids and the appearance on earth of Homo sapiens.
Because the “missing link” has yet to be found --- a link to be found only in
the light of revealed datum of knowledge --- it is not possible to definitely
state that there is a common lineage between the prehistoric primate and man
--- the primordial Adamic man.
to be continued . . . .
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