By: Martin Lings
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Must science, in order to be true to itself, maintain the theory of evolution? |
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One of these is the already quoted Bounoure; another, Douglas Dewar, writes: |
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The essay “Science Knows Nothing about The Origin of Man” is an extract of Chapter I of Martin Lings’ book entitled: Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions,
Perennial Books, London (1965), pp 47. This is one of the few rare books written by a scientist critical of the theory of evolution and often quoted by Lings in this essay.
Martins Lings was born in Baronage, Lancashire, in 1909. After taking an English degree in 1932 at Oxford, he was appointed Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania. He went to learn Arabic, and in the following year, he was given a lectureship at Cairo University. In 1952 he returned to England and took a degree in Arabic at London University.
In 1970 he became Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books at the British Museum (In 1973 his department became part of the British Library) and held the post for many years.
Martin Lings’ writings include the Book of Certainty, Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art, A Saint of the Twentieth Century, The Quranic Art of Calligraphy, and Illumination and Mohammed.
Editor.
M. Ahmed
Must science, in order to be true to itself, maintain the theory of evolution?
In answer to this question let us quote the French geologist Paul Lemoine, editor of Volume V (on “Living Organisms”) Of the Encyclopedia Francaise, who went so far as to write in his summing up of the articles of the various contributors:
“This exposition shows that the theory of evolution is impossible. In reality, despite appearances, no one any longer believes in it … Evolution is a sort of dogma whose priests no longer believe in it, though they uphold it for the sake of their flock.”
Though undeniable exaggerated in its manner of expression – that is, as regards its sweeping implications, of hypocrisy on the part of the “priests” in question – this judgment, coming where it does, is significant in more than one respect. There is no doubt that many scientists have transferred their religious instincts from religion to evolutionism, with the result that their attitude towards evolution is sectarian rather than scientific. The French biologist Professor Louis Bounoure quotes Yves Delage, a former Sorbonne Professor of Zoology: “I readily admit that no species has ever been known to engender another, and that there is no absolutely definite evidence that such a thing has ever taken place. None the less, I believe evolution to be just as certain as if it had been objectively proved.” Bounoure comments: “In short, what science asks of us here is an act of faith, and it is in fact under the guise of a sort of revealed truth that the idea of evolution is generally put forward.” He quotes, however, from a present day Sorbonne Professor of Palaeontology, Jean Piveteau, the admission that the science of facts as regards evolution “cannot accept any of the different theories which seek to explain evolution. It even finds itself in opposition with each one of these theories. There is something here which is both disappointing and disquieting.”
Darwin’s theory owed is success mainly to a widespread conviction that the nineteenth-century European represented the highest human possibility yet reached. This conviction was like a special receptacle made in advance for the theory of man’s sub-human ancestry, a theory which was hailed without question by humanists as a scientific corroboration of their belief in “progress”. It was in vain that a staunch minority of scientists, during the last hundred years, persistently maintained that the theory of evolution has no scientific basis and that it runs contrary to many known facts, and it was in vain that they pleaded for a more rigorously scientific attitude towards the whole question. To criticize evolutionism, however soundly, was about as effective as trying to stem a tidal wave. But the wave now shows some signs of having spent itself, and more and more scientists are re-examining this theory objectively, with the result that not a few of those who were once evolutionists have now rejected it altogether.
One of these is the already quoted Bounoure; another, Douglas Dewar, writes:
“It is high time that biologists and geologists came into line with astronomers, physicists and chemists and admitted that the world and the universe are utterly mysterious and all attempts to explain them [by scientific research] have been baffled”; and having divided evolutionists into ten main groups (with some subdivisions) according to their various opinions as to what animal formed the last link in the chain of man’s supposedly “pre-human” ancestry, opinions which are all purely conjectural and mutually contradictory, he says:
“In 1921 Reinke wrote: ”The only statement, consistent with her dignity, that science can make [with regard to this question] is to say that she knows nothing about the origin of man. Today this statement is as true as it was when Reinke made it.”
If science knows nothing about the origin of man, she knows much about his prehistoric past. But this knowledge would have taught our ancestors little or nothing that they did not already know, except as regards chronology, nor would it have caused any general change in their attitude. For in looking back to the past, they did not look back to a complex civilization but to small village settlements with a minimum of social organization; and beyond these they looked back to men who lived without houses, in entirely natural surroundings, without books, without agriculture, and in the beginning even without clothes. It would be true then to say that the ancient conception of early man, based on sacred scriptures and on age-old traditional lore handed down by word of mouth from the remote past, was scarcely different, as regards the bare facts of material existence, from the modern scientific conception, which differs from the traditional one chiefly because it weighs up the same set of facts differently. What has changed is not so much knowledge of facts as the sense of values.
The Transformist Illusion – A Review
The author treats his subject from many different angles – physical, geological, palaeontological, geographical and biological, his method being always to present us with the facts and to draw a sharp line of demarcation between fact and theory – a line which evolutionists have done all they can to blur. Particularly significant in this aspect is a chapter on “Alleged Fossil Links between Man and Non-Human Ancestors”, which makes it clear that there exist fossils of men of modern type which are far older than those of “Pekinman” and other supposed “missing links”.
Equally instructive in its own way is the chapter which follows this, “Transformism versus the Geological Record”. The geological evidence is hostile to the theory of evolution while at the same time it in no sense contradicts the religious doctrine of sudden creation for, as Dewar has pointed out in an earlier chapter, “the abruptness with which new Classes and Orders of animals make their first appearance in the rocks known to us is one of the most striking features of the geological record”. Unable to turn an altogether blind eye to this, some of the more objective evolutionists have sought to save evolutionism and at the same time to avoid having recourse to a Divine Creator, by endowing nature herself with powers of sudden creation which are termed “explosive evolution” (Schindewolf) or aramorphosis (Severtzoff and Zeuner). Such theories have the added convenience of absolving the evolutionist from the need to produce missing links.
“Schindewolf … asserts that it is useless to look for missing links in many cases, because the supposed links never existed. The first bird hatched from a reptilian egg.”
No less miraculous, however, are the gradual changes imagined to have taken place by the “none-explosive” evolutionists, whose texts continually rely, not without success, on the ignorance of the layman or on his lack of observance. Dewar gives many outrageous examples of such exploitation, from amongst which we may quote Darwin’s remark: “With some savages the foot has not altogether lost its prehensile power, as is shown by their manner of climbing trees and of using them in other ways”, and since a point of central significance is touched on here, we should be justified in dwelling on it for a moment attentively – more attentively than Darwin would have wished, for he must have been well aware of the following facts. Any normal human being can develop with practice, if driven by circumstances, certain powers of grasping with the feet. But such development can be only within very narrow limits, for organically the human foot, unlike the human hand, is not made for grasping. It is made to serve as a basis for man’s upright posture and gait, whereas the foot the transverse ligament binds together all five toes, whereas in the ape it leaves the big toe free like a thumb. Now let any reader look at his own hand, which in the above respect is similar to the foot of an ape, and ask himself whether it is imaginable that even in millions of millions of years the ligament that binds together the four fingers could ever come to throw out a kind of noose, lasso the thumb, and bind it up together with the fingers, all this, presumably, taking place under the skin. When Darwin says “the foot has not altogether lost its prehensile power” does he mean “the lassoing has already taken place but the roping in has not quite been effected”? But he relies on such questions not being asked.
Another way of taking advantage of the layman is through terminology, and in this connection Dewar fully confirms a suspicion that some of us have already had, the suspicion that under cover of technical terms scientists sometimes talk or write nonsense with impunity. A case in point, given in the chapter on “Some Transformations Postulated by the Doctrine of Evolution”, is an account by Dr R. Broom, an authority on the fossils of the South African mammal-like reptiles, of how he supposes the mammals to have evolved from the Ictidosaurians. In Broom’s own language the account sounds quite impressive thought it is more or less unintelligible to the layman. Translated by Dewar into plain English, it reads:
“Some reptile scrapped the original hinge of its lower jaw and replaced it with a new one attached to another part of the skull. Then five of the bones on each side of the lower jaw broke away from the biggest bone. The jaw bone to which the hinge was originally attached, after being set free, forced its way into the middle part of the ear, dragging with it three of the lower jaw bones, which, with the quadrate and the reptilian middle-ear bone, formed themselves into a completely new outfit. While all this was going on, the Organ of Corti, peculiar to mammals and their essential organ of hearing, developed in the middle ear. Dr Broom does not suggest how this organ arose, nor describe its gradual development. Nor does he say how the incipient mammals contrived to eat while the jaw was being rehinged, or to hear while the middle and inner ears were being reconstructed!”
Broom's hypothesis is not just an exceptional freakish vagary, but a typical example of the sort of transformation that the evolutionist assumes to have been repeated again and again all along the line of any existing animal's evolution from the first "one-celled" ancestor. What is exceptional in Broom's case, is that unlike most others he does at least try to explain how the supposed transformation might have occurred. Dewar comments, not without justice:
“One reason why the evolution theory was so readily accepted was the belief that, while the theory of special creation involves the miraculous, that of evolution does not. One of the aims of the present book is to demonstrate that the theory of evolution, far from dispensing with miracles, involves more than does the theory of creation.” Meantime, most people are altogether ignorant of this and other equally significant facts that The Transformist Illusion lays bare. One result of this ignorance is the flood of books by non-scientists about the history of mankind, books for adults and books for children, which take evolution altogether for granted, as a truth that no reasonable man would call in question, and which pour out, year after year, doing untold harm; and not the least harmful of these books are those by believers on the brink of unbelief, some of them religious dignitaries, who seek to stabilize their own and others’ tottering faith by a reinterpretation of religion in conformity with “the light of modern scientific knowledge”.
Looking at the question from a different angel, one which is more in the spirit of the book to which this appendix has been added, it must be remembered that only by escaping from time can man escape from the phases because only its starting point lies altogether within time. From there onward it is a “vertical” upward movement through domains which are partly or wholly supratemporal as represented in Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso. But modern science does not know of any such movement, nor is it prepared to admit the possibility of an escape from the temporal condition. The gradual ascent of no return that is envisaged by evolutionism is an idea that has been surreptitiously borrowed from religion and naively transferred from the supratemporal to the temporal. The evolutionist has no right whatsoever to such an idea, and in entertaining it he is turning his back on his own scientific principles. Every process of development known to modern science is subject to a waxing and waning analogous to the phases of the moon, the season of the year, and the different periods of man’s life. Even civilizations, as history can testify, have their dawn, their noon, their late afternoon and their twilight. If the evolutionist outlook, instead of being sectarian and pseudo-religious, were genuinely “scientific” in the modern sense, it would be assumed that the evolution of the human race was a phase of waxing that would necessarily be followed by the complementary waning phase of devolution; and the question of whether or not man was already on the downward phase would be a major feature of evolutionist literature. But the question is never put. Nor can there be any doubt that if evolutionists could be made to face up to it, most of them would drop their theory as one drops a hot coal.
There could be no question of any such evolution from the standpoint of ancient natural science, which did not claim to have everything within its scope, that is, within the temporal domain, and could therefore admit to being transcended by the origins of earthly things. For those origins, it looked beyond temporal duration to the Divine creative act which places man (and the whole earthly state) on a summit from which evolution, in the sense of terrestrial progress, is inconceivable.
