Why Evolution Has Failed the Sciences

Abstract

The Neo-Darwinian synthesis asks us to accept that the biological distance separating humanity from an apelike common ancestor was crossed by nothing more than the accumulation and fixation of random genetic mutations, sifted across deep time by natural selection. This paper contends that the molecular evidence points decisively in the opposite direction. Rather than exhibiting the mutational openness that Darwinian change demands, the living cell is equipped with an elaborate, multi-layered apparatus whose measurable and undisputed function is to detect, excise, and reverse the very genetic alterations that evolution requires as its raw material. Over a dozen distinct DNA repair pathways operate continuously in somatic and germ line cells alike, correcting the overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of lesions each cell sustains daily. The double helical architecture of DNA is itself a repair-ready design, storing two complementary copies of every base so that a damaged strand can be restored from its intact partner. Where a chromosome lacks a homologous partner, as with the male-specific Y chromosome, the genome supplies an ingenious alternative in the form of internal palindromic self-repair. I argue that a system engineered so comprehensively to prevent heritable change cannot plausibly be the engine of unlimited heritable change. The number of coordinated beneficial mutations required to convert an ape-like creature into a human being is so vast, and the waiting times so prohibitive, that molecules-to-man evolution is not merely improbable but effectively impossible. Life, in short, was designed not to evolve.