Books: Opposition to Natural Selection Greets Darwin Centennial

Criticism from within science appears in books aimed at both public and professionals.

Science-inspired books both celebrating and debunking Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection herald the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth due next year.

Earlier this month, The National Academy of Sciences published Science, Evolution and Creationism praising Darwin’s theory. Next month science writer Shaun Johnston will publish Save Our Selves from Science Gone Wrong, a slim manifesto attacking the “bad science” behind the theory.

“Critics of natural selection within the science community should no longer worry about their arguments helping creationism,” Johnston said. “Staying loyal to an obsolete theory won’t make science stronger. We should acknowledge weaknesses in Darwin’s theory and come up with more plausible mechanisms. Doing so could lessen the public’s resistance to the idea of evolution itself.”

Johnston begins by criticising the science behind natural selection for denying the existence of the human self. He points to a dozen assumptions lying behind the theory of natural selection that disqualify it from being the mechanism of evolution. A necessary first step in arriving at a better theory, he claims, is coming up with a better set of assumptions.

Johnston believes that how one accounts for evolution matters. “First we shape evolutionary theory, then it shapes us,” he says. He accuses natural selection and evolutionary psychology of threatening civilized values and encourages his readers to pressure evolutionists and educators to take all reference to mechanism out of the teaching of evolutionary theory, at least until a better theory emerges.

Criticism of natural selection addressed to professional evolutionists appears in the recently-published Biological Emergencies: Evolution by Natural Experiment, latest volume in "The Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology." The author. Robert G. B. Reid, is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Although the two books were written independently and for different audiences they make strikingly similar arguments, pointing to a convergence in scientific opposition to modern Darwinian theory.

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