David Hadley sent me a link that was unbelievable. Please, somebody tell me that this weblog, The Social Affairs Unit, is a satire site. I looked all over, and it seems to take itself very, very seriously, and its authors have academic connections. I'm hoping it is merely the most incredibly deadpan English humor, because I've just read an appallingly stupid article on evolution there. It's written by a professor of modern history at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth, one William D. Rubinstein. Despite the credentials, though, the idiocy starts with the title, and it just gets worse and worse.

Look upon this title, and cringe with me: The Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory?

Anyone who has read this site for long knows how I feel about the "just a theory" argument—it's a signifier that whoever utters it is a clueless ignoramus. It requires a total lack of awareness of the scientific meaning of the word "theory" in favor of the irrelevant colloquial meaning. It's a deplorable mistake for a serious scholar to make—but as we'll see, Rubinstein does not seem to be a serious scholar.

Like most people with enquiring minds, I have at least a desultory interest in many fields beyond my own narrow specialty, including the mysteries of science. I am not a scientist, needles[sic] to say, although I think I have as much common sense as the next man and probably more in the way of an independent viewpoint than most.

That's not an auspicious start. That level of self-congratulatory, preening pomposity puts me on edge.

I have thus long been fascinated by the great dogma of the Theory of Evolution, which of course was formulated by Charles Darwin in his seminal work On the Origin of Species in 1859, probably the most important book published during the nineteenth century. The Theory of Evolution in its commonly-voiced form has long struck me as having so many dubious features that it is genuinely surprising that it has not attracted many more challenges than it actually has—although (I gather) a growing number of scientifically-trained commentators are also having their doubts.

The "dogma" of the theory of evolution, formulated by Darwin? This fellow is apparently unaware that there was a major revolution in evolutionary theory in the 20^th century, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, or that there is an ongoing shift fueled by molecular biology and development. Equating modern evolution with Darwin is a foolish mistake—rather as if I were to decide history was just that kind of stuff Herodotus wrote—but to go on to parrot the false claim by creationists that growing numbers of legitimate scientists are joining their ranks is remarkably credulous.

Oh, but wait: he's about to start listing all of the problems in evolution. Sit down, swallow anything you might be drinking, and set your coffee cup down.

Nevertheless, there are so many deep implausibilities in the Theory of Evolution as it is commonly understood that it seems to me, as a non-scientist, that something must surely be radically wrong. Let me set out the doubts which I (and many others) have had about Evolution.

• Evolution appears to be plainly impossible. Animals cannot "evolve" into new and different species. If one breeds cats for a thousand generations, they will still be cats, won't they? They simply will not "evolve" into cats which look like kangaroos and are genetically different from felis domesticus. It simply won't happen.

I guess getting a history degree requires no knowledge of logic. Declaring something impossible because it "appears to be plainly impossible" and "it simply won't happen" is, well, inane. Cats are not expected to evolve into kangaroos, but cats and kangaroos did evolve from ratlike ancestors, not over a thousand generations, but over tens of millions of years.

• Moreover, no one expects "evolution" to occur. If your pet cat gave birth to a litter of kittens, one of which had two tails, you wouldn't exclaim, "Aha! Here is the next stage of feline evolution!" One would assume that the two-tailed kitten was a freak of nature. No one would claim that a deviant animal was an example of evolution at work. If you read in a newspaper that a cat gave birth to kittens which looked like racoons, and had a different DNA structure from ordinary cats, you would assume that a hoax or fraud was being perpetrated. No one, anywhere, would conclude that we have just beheld an example of Darwinian evolution in actual fact.

The guy definitely has a thing for cats and bogus expectations. Evolution is not about cats giving birth to raccoons. It is about cats giving birth to cats, which are slightly different from their parents.

He's right in one thing: no one, anywhere, would consider his example to have anything to do with evolution. Including evolutionists. So why is he bringing up this goofy irrelevancy?

• Even more importantly, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever seen an example of genuine evolution, that is, of one species producing an offspring which was clearly of another, different species. Of course, there are hundreds of billions of living beings in the world, and it would be remarkable if anyone spotted a clear-cut evolutionary change. On the other hand, people have been looking for evidence of evolution for nearly 150 years, and scientists would certainly be sensitive to the emergence of any new species, with the evidential value this would have for proving Darwin right.

"To the best of my knowledge" is the important phrase here; he hasn't looked. Here. He could have just used that new-fangled thing called "Google" and typed in the words "observed speciation" and gotten a list back. The lesson of this paragraph is simply that William D. Rubinstein's knowledge is not very good.

• Most claimed examples of evolution at work are highly dubious. Perhaps the most familiar such example, often cited in textbooks, is of the moths in Lancashire whose colouration progressively darkened during the nineteenth century as dark-coloured moths became progressively more likely to blend in with their soot-darkened surroundings, and hence escape the notice of predators, while light-coloured moths were more likely to be seen and eaten. Even if this actually occurred (and there is apparently some doubt), this is, however, not an example of the evolution of a new species, but of certain members of the same species with favourable characteristics having a better survival rate than less favoured members of that species. The species itself has remained unchanged.

"Unchanged", in the mind of William D. Rubinstein, must mean "hasn't turned into a kangaroo or raccoon." The moths certainly have changed. The peppered moth story is not in doubt. His wording "certain members of the same species with favourable characteristics having a better survival rate than less favoured members of that species" certainly sounds like a simple definition of evolution, so what is he arguing about?

• The alleged general evidence for evolution throughout chronological history is often arguable, even logically fallacious. All biology textbooks by definition point to the fact that certain geological strata contain the bones of primitive horses, while the strata above it—assumed to have been deposited more recently—contain the bones of more advanced horses, and conclude that the primitive horses gave rise to the more advanced species. But no evidence is offered that the primitive horses were actually the ancestors of the advanced ones. The linkage is simply assumed. The reasoning here is obviously circular and fallacious—the very issue under discussion is assumed to have occurred, without further direct evidence.

Poor Dr Rubinstein seems to have drifted off the script and mangled a creationist argument. The bogus creationist argument is that fossils are dated from strata, while strata are dated from fossils, and that that is circular (it's also not true). It's also sad that a professional historian has flubbed the historical story. The consistent order of fossils in geological strata was a phenomenon documented well before the proposal of evolution. It showed that there was a succession of forms that were not documented in biblical chronology.

• There are actually no "missing links" in the fossil record, a fact which, I understand, is continuously swept under the rug. According to Darwinian theory, such transitional species should have constantly appeared (and keep appearing), yet remarkably few have ever been observed. There are apparently no known transitional fossils in the whole fossil record of the plant kingdom, although millions of fossil plants have been found [Cited in William R. Corliss, ed., Science Frontiers II: More Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2004), p. 154]. What the actual fossil record allows us to infer is apparently that entirely new species appear, as it were, fully-formed.

Oh, the old "no transitional fossils" argument. It's a lie.

And of course all new species are fully formed; they evolve by small changes from generation to generation. Rubinstein is just hung up on his ridiculous notion of cats leaping into kangaroo-hood.

• New organs in living bodies must appear fully-formed at once or they can serve no biological purpose and confer no advantage upon that creature. On the other hand, the complexity of most organs would seem to make this impossible. Charles Darwin himself was well-aware of this, and apparently regarded it as the most important criticism of his theory. The example which is always given is the eye: the retina cannot simply appear at one time, the lens a million years later, and the optic nerve a million years thereafter. The entire eye, including it neural connections with the brain and, through it, with an animal's locomotive system, must all have appeared at precisely the same time. The odds against this happening by sheer random chance are incalculably vast, and yet many creatures on different branches of the animal kingdom have "evolved" eyes which function in similar ways - squids, spiders, and humans, for example.

Dear gog. The "Darwin's Eye" quote-mine. This guy is like a whole parade of creationist cliches. The fully-formed argument is also bogus, as is the claim that organs have to have their full functions straight from the beginning. Take a look at the thyroid, for instance.

• The "fittest" do not survive. Most species extinctions appear to be the result of unpredictable natural catastrophes, like the meteor which allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Moreover, the survival of any creature, regardless of its "fitness", depends wholly on there being a viable food chain. If the lions in the jungle killed and ate all of the gazelles, the lions would themselves quickly starve to death. For their survival, there must be enough slow gazelles to feed the lions, but also enough fast ones to ensure the continuation of the food chain.

Extinctions by catastrophe are part of the story; they are rare events that can exterminate whole lineages. But most of life goes on without such interruptions; how many of Dr Rubinstein's relatives have been killed by falling meteors?

His "viable food chain" argument is bizarre, and misses the whole point of Darwin's explanation. Lions too slow to catch gazelles die, leaving behind only their faster relatives; at the same time, gazelles too slow to escape lions die, leaving behind their faster relatives. These kinds of arms races are part of evolution, and lead to ever more refined or complex or efficient or just plain different forms…which actually answers his next phony dilemma.

• The incredible complexity of life, and its apparent ever-increasing sophistication over time, strongly implies a guiding force of some kind, and one which can produce a continuous array of new creatures of ever-increasing complexity. Whatever that force may be, it must therefore be capable of producing new species more complex than the previous ones - something which at first glance seems impossible, implying some kind of advanced problem solving force. Where is it situated? How does it go about "solving" the problems confronting it.

Gosh. And in a sieve, where are the little gremlins that sort out the small items that can go through the pores from the big ones that remain behind?

I think if he'd actually read anything by Darwin with any understanding, let alone more recent biologists, he'd realize that the power of evolutionary theory lies precisely in the fact that it answers his last two questions. It isn't "situated" anywhere, and it solves problems by trial and error…selection.

I simply do not know what all of this means, although the best inference which might be drawn is that new species apparently "evolve" suddenly and fully-formed, a concept, known as "saltation", which has been advocated in the past, and which was recently revived, at least in part, in the late Stephen J. Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium".

That is simply rank, ignorant nonsense. Punctuated equilibrium has nothing to do with saltation.

The mechanism which brings about these sudden, fundamental changes, however, remains (so far as I know) completely unknown, but must be marked by a high order of creative ability. The drawn-out transitional process suggested by Darwin, however, does not appear to accord with the facts, coolly considered.

However, "these sudden, fundamental changes" are merely a product of Dr Rubinstein's imagination and have no bearing on the biological evidence; his uninformed fantasies have no standing in the evaluation of the theory.

Rubinstein should be deeply embarrassed to have babbled on so about a subject on which he obviously knows nothing, and did not even trouble himself to take so much as a superficial look at what actual biologists say on the subject. After reading the pretentious introduction to his ignorant bilge, though, I suspect he is unfamiliar with the idea of shame.

I took a few courses in modern history when I was an undergraduate over 25 years ago; I think that means I'm more qualified to pontificate on how history should be done than Rubinstein is to drone on about modern biology. Fortunately, I am also aware of the depth of my own ignorance about the field, and have some measure of self-respect…so I'll spare you. I'm not that big a moron.