THE RANDLE REPORT

THE DESCENT OF MAN

Although enthusiastically supported by a scientific clique, on their original publication Darwin’s theories of evolution were largely dismissed and ridiculed.

The catchy and pivotal slogan, ‘survival of the fittest’, was recognised as empty tautology. That which survives in a milieu ‘red in tooth and claw’ is clearly that which was best fitted so to do.

Where it gets more complicated is in discovering or defining what makes those things which survive do so, and whether they are in fact operating in a mindless dog-eat-dog environment.

Not only current popular science but the entire political and economic system of the Western World is predicated on the rather simple-minded proposition that all things come down to this half-baked formula.

Yet Darwin himself regarded cooperation between life forms as infinitely more successful than doing in all your competitors. That way, as is more than clear when we look at post-1980s Europe and the US, lies oblivion.

Darwin’s theories are now so embedded in the scientific mind (or brain) that no other thought can be countenanced, and no other model is to be taught in schools, lest the young folk should be corrupted by independent thought.

But Darwinism isn’t science at all, just one of a number of articles of faith which, being part of the fundamental scriptures laid down by the ancient prophets, are beyond question or observation.

Today’s priesthood tells us this evolved and that evolved without the slightest evidence. Messrs Attenborough and Cox don’t even wonder about it before passing it on as holy writ.

Although the very fact of this belief has unleashed many of the most contra-survival idiocies upon the world: eugenics, fascism, racism, monetarism, scapegoating, intolerance, politico-economic short-termism and megalomania, statism and suppression – all depend on the shaky grasp of a dogma not properly inspected or comprehended – the Darwinian model is still held up, not only as some kind of universal revelation, but as an ‘explanation’ both of the ‘natural’ selection of life forms and life itself!

In fact it fails in both endeavours, most spectacularly in the latter, in which it is not merely unsuited to purpose, acting instead, in the way of all dogma, as a more or less impenetrable barrier to perception and real understanding.

We’ve all seen the familiar graphic of a monkey getting up on his hind legs and metamorphosing, through dubious pictorial sleight of hand, into a man, yet few of us seem to have noticed that the monkey was far better fitted to survive the challenges of this planet at that time than the bloke into which he has ‘evolved’.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository