Darwinism.(has Darwin's theory has been discredited?)

LAST DECEMBER Darwinism was attacked by a Mr John Michell, who writes a column for the British magazine the Oldie. Michell implied that Darwin's theory has been more or less completely discredited. This prompted a reply to the editor from Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in University College London, which ran as follows:

 
   John Michell, your orthodox voice, says that 
   Darwinism is totally unproved and that modern 
   scholarship has discredited every 
   aspect of it. I find this curious, as I 
   have spent (or--I now fear--wasted) 
   my life in the study of that subject 
   and have somehow missed the research to which 
   he refers. Indeed, if Mr Michell is right the whole 
   of modern biology rests on a hypothesis which he 
   is in a position to discredit. He owes it to the 
   progress of science to tell us how he proposes to 
   do so. 

Modern physicists do not claim to spend their lives studying Newtonism and it is worth asking why there is this difference between biologists and physicists. The probable answer is that the admiration of Darwin has more to do with atheism than with science, for he is wrongly thought to have refuted religion. Some biologists of the twenty-first century resemble the denizens of America's Bible Belt; they think the evolutionary hypothesis is logically incompatible with creationism. That is a mistake: the idea of evolution is quite compatible with creationism as such, though not, of course, with the literal truth of the first chapter of Genesis.

Michell was perhaps exaggerating, but so is Jones. It is not true that the whole of modern biology rests on Darwinism and not in the least bit likely that Jones or any other contemporary biologist has spent his whole life studying it. For example, one of the things a modern biologist studies is DNA, an entity which Darwin had never heard of.

Professor Jones' statement that he had "somehow missed the research" which causes problems for Darwinism is probably an indication that he has been looking in the wrong places (if looking at all). The right places are Darwin's own books, Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the findings of anthropologists and archeologists who have studied human beings living as hunter-gatherers, and last but not least the philosophical commentaries by Mary Midgley in her Evolution as a Religion and David Stove in his Darwinian Fairytales.

Darwin's own Darwinism has three elements:

1. The first evolutionary hypothesis--propounded by naturalists in Darwin's childhood--was that existing species originated in earlier ones as an ongoing outcome of an unknown cause: