Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Books : Origin of the Species : Preface : "I WILL here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created... Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms."

Conclusion : "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Darwins theory of evolution hase been discredited by evolutionist infavor of Neo-Darwinism which favors Genetic mutation as the source of evolutionary change.

Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum, has acknowledged that "no one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection."6 Professor of biology and Dean of the Graduate School at Yale, Keith Thomson laments that "speciation itself' is still, 130 years after Darwin supposedly solved the problem, "the central mystery" of evolutionary biology.

Christopher Booker, an evolutionary writer for the London Times, wrote about the theory of evolution: "It was a beautifully simple and attractive theory. The only trouble was that, as Darwin was himself partly aware, it was full of colossal holes. [Regarding Darwin's Origin Of Species ] we have here the supreme irony that a book which has become famous for explaining the origin of species in fact does nothing of the kind... A century after Darwin's death, we still have not the slightest demonstrable or even plausible idea of how evolution really took place - and in recent years this has led to an extraordinary series of battles over the whole question... a state of almost open war exists among the evolutionists themselves, with every kind of sect urging some new modification... As to how and why it really happened, we have not the slightest idea and probably never shall."

Educator Francis Hitching observed: "In three crucial areas where [the modern evolutionary theory] can be tested, it has failed: The fossil record reveals a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than gradual change. Genes are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving. Random step-by-step mutations at the molecular level cannot explain the organized complexity of life... To put it at its mildest, one may question an evolutionary theory so beset by doubts among even those who teach it. If Darwinism is truly the great unifying principle of biology, it encompasses extraordinarily large areas of ignorance. It fails to explain some of the most basic questions of all: how lifeless chemicals came alive, what rules of grammar lie behind the genetic code, how genes shape the form of living things... [The theory is] so inadequate that it deserves to be treated as a matter of faith.'