This Thing of Darkness

Summer break is ending, and I plan on continuing this blog.

The following is an excerpt from This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, on the theory of evolution:

" 'According to Mr. Darwin, transitional forms, precisely because they are transitional, are less likely to leave a fossil record than stabilized species. Is that not clever? The theory itself brilliantly explains why there is no evidence whatsoever to support the theory! There is only one adjective to describe such logic: unsatisfactory. Scientists have searched in vain for any shred of evidence, any shred of proof, that any one individual species might have varied, be it ever so little, into a different genus. One tiny variation that might validate the conclusion that such variability is progressive and unlimited, so as, in the course of generations, to change the species, the genus, the order and, eventually, the class. That proof has not been found-- and it never will be.

" 'There is no tendency on the part of the lower animals to become the self-conscious, intelligent being that is man. Mr. Darwin's conclusions are mere hypothesis, nothing more, raised most unphilosophically to the dignity of a casual theory! Is it really, truly credible that a turnip strives to become a man?'

"The rush of arguments in his head became a landslide, an avalanche, each irrefutable fact tumbling incoherently over the others. The inability of natural selection to account for the origin of life itself. The unsatisfactory reduction of the aesthetic, the emotional and the spiritual to mere epiphenomena. The falsity of Darwin's narrative, which had been constructed on foundations that were geologically poles apart. The failure of natural selection to explain the development of complex organs, such as the eye, and their coordination in bodily systems. The presence of advance creatures in the earliest strata of fossils, and of the most primitive creatures alive today.

"FitzRoy tried to tell them that he had been there with Darwin, that he had observed the same things, that Origin of the Species was not a logical arrangement of the facts that he had witnessed."