Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

200 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
sufficiently adaptive. As Darwin saw it, one could regard the process as
operating as if the variations sprang up by chance.
Modern Darwinians do insist on pure chance. But why? What do they
mean by asserting—as a positive fact—that inheritable variations are always
random? Essentially they are saying that it does not matter how the
variations arise. It is irrelevant. How do they know that? The biologists
have no such knowledge of the forces that produce genetic variation. What
they have is a tremendous faith that whatever those forces turn out to be,
they will have nothing to do with the direction that life actually takes. The
difficulty, from a scientific perspective, is that it is very difficult to test such
an assertion. As a result, Darwinism dances on the edge of being “unfalsifiable”
in Popperian terms. It is easy to describe what a random result
might be in a simple system such as the machines that generate lottery
numbers with air pressure and numbered Ping-Pong balls. That is because
while it is impossible to calculate the trajectory of an individual ball, we
can be certain that all the balls are the same and similar forces are acting on
all of them. But what if the balls had slightly different weights and shapes?
The outcome would still be random in some sense (it could not be precisely
predicted), but repeated trials would produce a different pattern of outcomes.
Over time, some numbers would be clearly favored over others. But
if your observation of these trials is limited to a very few (as it generally is
in evolutionary biology), how can you say if a given outcome is the result
of “chance”? Or more precisely, how can you “falsify” the assertion that
only chance is operating?
Monkeys and Typewriters
Darwinism does make predictions, although vague, that have been challenged.
Several thoughtful, reasoned, and well-informed attacks on natural
selection have been made in recent years. Two in particular—Robert G.
Wesson’s Beyond Natural Selection and Michael Denton’s Evolution: A
Theory in Crisis—are notably balanced and informative. 2 Denton looks at
Darwinism from the perspective of Kuhn’s dialectic of normal and revolutionary
science. His contention is that the Darwinian paradigm is in a state
of advanced crisis, the state at which anomalies have become inescapable
and obvious, engendering heated debate and passion among those in the
profession. But as Kuhn maintains, the old paradigm is clung to no matter
how glaring the anomalies become until a new paradigm is offered to take
its place. And science has not found a replacement for Darwinism. Like a