This is a comment on an article titled “Misunderstanding the theory of evolution” (The Jakarta Post, March 25).
The discovery of the “hobbits” in Flores is an intellectual tsunami within biological circles, proved by so many experts rejecting the idea of the fossils belonging to a new species of hominids. Their existence alone shatters the whole construction of human evolution into pieces.
Dogmatics hate nothing more that a change in the status quo and a new beginning. The problem with Darwinism, proclaimed as the theory of evolution, started just after the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 and Karl Marx’ Das Kapital a few years later.
Both publications became the sacred books of the atheists and religion-haters of that time, attacking the church and all believers, especially those holding to Creationism and thus converting a pure hypothesis of biology into a very political issue, including the 40-year-long lie of the Piltdown Man and the adoration of present-day atheists like Richard Dawkins, the golden boy of the reactionary establishment.
An excellent book is The Hidden History of the Human Race from Cremo and Thompson, who explain not only the hoaxes but show unexplainable human and other fossils, well-hidden by the establishment.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are those Creationists, who believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth, and fanatics like Harun Yahya.
Interestingly, both opposing sides are getting nervous due to the discovery of hundreds of planets in the universe, as the prospect of finding life forms would bring them, the Darwinists and Creationists, into deep depression, as one believes that terrestrial life is unique in the universe (due to probability impossibilities in the formation of a living cell) and the other believes in the uniqueness of this planet, especially human life.
The controversy goes on until today, both sides, unfortunately, ignoring and/or rejecting other (some of them, better) theories, like Panspermia, Marguli’s endosymbiosis, Gould’s punctuated equilibrium, theistic evolution and information evolution (the last two can be seen as part of the so-called intelligent design).
Though Darwinism in its core only tries to explain evolution through random mutations and adaptation, its defenders nonetheless try to explain the origin of life too, which they can’t, of course, as their system of belief is rooted in plain materialism, thus excluding everything immaterial as nonexistent (and therefore “mystic”) per definition.
Darwinists forget, however, that random mutation always has a negative result. Positive mutations are, seen from the perspective of mathematical probability, miracles. They “explain” for example the formation of a hand from a former fish’s fin, but don’t mention the synchronism of millions of molecules when “evolving” not one but five fingers ... at once! Theistic evolution believes that God set the mechanism of automatic evolution when the circumstances afforded it using the natural laws.
Hence we have a combination of both sides.
This does not, however, explain mimicry, symbiosis, extremophiles and altruism, better explained by the third component of the universe besides matter and energy, namely information. Since information (not the one known in it!) is immaterial, a change of paradigm is needed, but some progress is seen even within Neo-Darwinism, where immaterial concepts like self-organization and molecular determinism are beginning to be accepted due to overwhelming evidence. Information explains also endosymbiosis and HGT, plus instinct and the human mind, which Darwinism cannot.
Thus Darwinism is only a hypothesis of evolution, as evolution is something natural, acting when necessary (but not miraculously) and coming through information, an instrument of God.
Edo E.
Jakarta
