Darwinism: The Myth of Chance That Science Cannot Close

Darwinism: The Myth of Chance That Science Cannot Close

When a debate forum has spent more than a thousand days discussing whether Darwin was right or not, something smells rotten in the official story. Criticism of Darwinism is not new, but it resurges strongly in the heat of findings that contemporary biology cannot quite fit into the scheme of random mutations and natural selection.

The central argument of skeptics is that chance cannot accumulate favorable changes without an "object" or direction. "The hereditary accumulation of changes favorable for survival implies an object of survival; chaos does not accumulate, that is done by an algorithm with an object," they summarize. Natural selection would be the consequence of favorable change, not its cause. In other words, classical Darwinian theory confuses the effect with the engine.

Chance Doesn't Measure Up: The Paradox of Accumulation

The objection is as old as the theory itself: how can blind chance produce structures of irreducible complexity, such as the bacterial flagellum – a rotary motor with stator, rotor, and gears – that stops working if a single piece is removed? For critics, this demands a design or at least an internal law guiding the process. They appeal to the "Cournot postulate": any event with a probability lower than 10⁻⁵⁰ is considered impossible in practice. The appearance of complex biological systems by mere genetic combinatorics would border on that limit.

From Darwin to St. Augustine: The Return of the "Logos"

Curiously, some see in Darwinism a deviation from older evolutionary ideas, such as St. Augustine's "rationes seminales," which postulated that the potentialities of all creatures were already inscribed in creation. The concept of "logos spermatikos" – an internal rational principle – resembles current currents such as internalism in biology, which holds that the determining forces of development reside inside the organism, not in external accidents.

The question that floats is whether Darwinian evolutionism, which deliberately eliminated the need for a conscious creator, has not replaced one myth with another. Darwin himself was unaware of Mendel's laws – published posthumously in 1900 – and modern genetics, which today offer much more refined explanations, but also raise new questions about the role of chance.

Evolution Is Not Discussed; The Mechanism Is

No sensible person denies that species change over time. The debate is not evolution, but the mechanism: is Darwinism – blind chance plus natural selection – sufficient to explain biological complexity? Some argue that epigenetics and complex systems theory allow Darwinism to be integrated into broader processes, where chance is not absolute but operates within systemic constraints. Others, however, see in these limitations proof that the official story is a myth with feet of clay.

The ultimate question, as one analyst points out, is how to avoid the suspicion that the rationality we perceive in nature is the echo of a greater rationality. Can an unconscious universe generate consciousness? The thread leaves the question open.