Lynn Margulis, Acclaimed Biologist and Critic of Neo-Darwinism

It is always refreshing to come up on a materialist who is willing to ignore his/her worldview in favour of what the evidence actually suggests. One such person is Lynn Margulis who recently died. Religious persons are often accused of being brainwashed or letting their religion get in the way of objectivity. The accusers rarely will concede their own bias and, considering the evidence is actually in favour of certain religions, it can become a depressing sight indeed. The more and more I listen, the more ridiculous the arguments get. Anyway, below is what lead me to this post.

We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary process. But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric. Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement. One mutation confers resistance to malaria but also makes happy blood cells into the deficient oxygen carriers of sickle cell anemics. Another converts a gorgeous newborn into a cystic fibrosis patient or a victim of early onset diabetes. One mutation causes a flighty red-eyed fruit fly to fail to take wing. Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambigious evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation. Then how do new species come into being? How do cauliflowers descend from tiny, wild Mediterranean cabbagelike plants, or pigs from wild boars?"

(Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species, p. 29 (Basic Books, 2003).)

But many biologists claim they know for sure that random mutation (purposeless chance) is the source of inherited variation that generates new species of life and that life evolved in a single-common-trunk, dichotomously branching-phylogenetic-tree pattern! "No!" I say. Then how did one species evolve into another? This profound research question is assiduously undermined by the hegemony who flaunt their "correct" solution. Especially dogmatic are those molecular modelers of the "tree of life" who, ignorant of alternative topologies (such as webs), don't study ancestors. Victims of a Whiteheadian "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," they correlate computer code with names given by "authorities" to organisms they never see! Our zealous research, ever faithful to the god who dwells in the details, openly challenges such dogmatic certainty. This is science.

(Lynn Margulis, "The Phylogenetic Tree Topples," American Scientist, Vol 94 (3) (May-June, 2006).)

This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.... [N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify and organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

What you'd like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record -- and preferably in all three. Darwin's big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of the sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin's gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then -- whoop -- a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.

Those are her quotes from the site. She does not get religious or advocate intelligent design, but the honesty with regard to evolution as it is, is welcome. Too many are unwilling to voice dissent from this faith based "science" because of what the alternative might be. An intelligent cause simply does not fit with their materialist/atheist views.