Genetics Condemns Darwinism

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Oct 2019

(This is an edited text of a note I sent to Dr. Edward Feser, author of the book Aristotle's Revenge.)


Biology has no explanation for speciation, and the problem of explaining evolution is an insuperable one for biology.

The very existence of an empirical science of genetics condemns Darwinism.  That genetics can be an empirical science with predictive powers requires a high degree of faithfulness in the transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.  Geneticists would be astonished and alarmed if a flock of chickens bred to produce white eggs would have one hen that faithfully produced a purple one.  (Long story, the hen that produced them was genetically of the grandparent generation.)  A biologist would be shocked if an egg produced by a chicken hatched an eagle.  All the dog breeding experiments over hundreds of years have only ever produced dogs, never a cat or even a wolf.  The teleology all points to faithful reproduction.

Then there is the problem of directedness of evolution.  Why only upward and why only occasionally?   Why aren’t apes spontaneously and to this day occasionally giving birth to proto-humans?  It was started once, a few million years ago and never done since - why?  (Was it a miracle?) There have been over 7 billion humans born since 1900, so why have we not seen either a higher state human or a retrocession into a more primitive type like Peking man?

Even with simple life like viruses, we hear of new strains of influenza – but these still produce influence, not meningitis.

The principle of biology that “like begets like” seems to hold – like a principle of science!  There seems no room for evolution in the manner of genetic mechanics.  All the teleology points to faithful transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.

A problem for philosophy is to identify the thing in which the evolutionary change occurs: not in the parents, and the offspring is what it is from the moment it comes to be.  So, it can’t be said to be the offspring that changed. (The offspring is a different substance from the parents)  And it can’t be the species because a species exists in its membership.  So there is a problem identifying in exactly what evolutionary change occurs.

In his book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Mortimer J. Adler goes through all the philosophical failings of biology in trying to explain how rational man could evolve from non-rational, primitive apes.

It’s a wonder how Darwinism even persists as a theory apart from the atheism it seems to support.  Although Aquinas allowed for evolution, I think all we have that’s tenable is a theist theory.  The teleology points to faithful transmission of information and it would take some kind of external (miraculous, since it occurs only once) intervention to change the course of natural teleology.


P.S. I’m open to biology solving its problems without recourse to theism, but as a chemist I get some satisfaction at watching Darwinists sputter when challenged.  They seem to know it’s B.S., but it’s all they’ve got.
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