Since then the theory has become established as a primary guiding influence on deciding social values and shaping relationships among individuals and organizations. Its impact extends across all institutions and facets of modern society, including philosophy, economics, politics, science, education, and religion. Its advocates pronounce it to be no longer theory but incontestable fact, attested to by all save the simple-minded or willfully obtuse. According to Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of Darwinism, "To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant."2
And from Oxford University's professor of zoology, Richard Dawkins, one of the most vigorous and uncompromising popularizers of Darwinism today: "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."3
Dennett also expresses reservations about the suitability of anyone denying Darwinism to raise children.4
Like the majority of people in our culture, I suppose, I grew up accepting the Darwinian picture unquestioningly because the monopoly treatment accorded by the education system and the scientific media offered no alternative, and the authority images that I trusted at the time told me there wasn't one. And nothing much had happened to change that by the time of my own earlier writings. The dispute between Hunt and Danchekker in Inherit the Stars 5 isn't over whether or not the human race evolved, but where it happened. And eleven years later I was still militantly defending the theory. 6 By that time, however, my faith in many of the things that "everyone knows" was being eroded as a result of getting to know various people with specialized knowledge in various fields, who, in ways I found persuasive, provided other sides to many public issues, but which the public weren't hearing. Before long I found myself questioning and checking just about everything I thought I knew.
As far as I recall, doubts about evolution as it was taught began with my becoming skeptical that natural selection was capable of doing everything that it was supposed to. There's no question that it happens, to be sure, and that it has its effects. In fact, the process of natural selection was well known to naturalists before Darwin's day, when the dominant belief was in Divine Creation. It was seen, however, as a conservative force, keeping organisms true to type and stable within limits by culling out extremes. Darwin's bold suggestion was to make it the engine of innovation. Observation of the progressive changes brought about by the artificial selection applied in animal and plant breeding led him—a pigeon breeder himself—to propose the same mechanism, taken further, as the means for transforming one species into another, and ultimately to something else entirely.
But on rereading Origin, I developed the uneasy feeling of watching fancy flying away from reality, as it is all too apt to do when not held down by the nails of evidence. The changes that were fact and discussed in great detail were all relatively minor, while the major transitions that constituted the force and substance of the theory were entirely speculative. No concrete proof could be shown that even one instance of the vast transformations that the theory claimed to explain had actually happened. And the same pattern holds true of all the texts I consulted that are offered today. Once the fixation on survival to the exclusion of all else sets in, a little imagination can always suggest a way in which any feature being considered "might" have conferred some advantage. Dull coloring provides camouflage to aid predators or protect prey, while bright coloring attracts mates. Longer beaks reach more grubs and insects; shorter beaks crack tougher seeds. Natural selection can explain anything or its opposite. But how do you test if indeed the fittest survive, when by definition whatever survives is the "fittest"?
All breeders know there are limits beyond which further changes in a characteristic can't be pushed, and fundamental innovations that can never be induced to any degree. Some varieties of sheep are bred to have a small head and small legs, but this can't be carried to the point where they reduce to the scale of a rat. You can breed a larger variety of carnation or a black horse, but not a horse with wings. A given genome can support a certain amount of variation, giving it a range of adaptation to alterations in circumstances—surely to be expected for an organism to be at all viable in changeable environments. But no amount of selecting and crossing horses will produce wings if the genes for growing them aren't there. As Darwin himself had found with pigeons, when extremes are crossed at their limit, they either become nonviable or revert abruptly to the original stock.
Horizontal variations within a type are familiar and uncontroversial. But what the theory proposes as occurring, and to account for, are vertical transitions from one type to another and hence the emergence of completely new forms. It's usual in the literature for these two distinct types of change to be referred to respectively as "microevolution" and "macroevolution." I'm not happy with these terms, however. They suggest simply different degrees of the same thing, which is precisely the point that's at issue. So I'm going to call them "adaptive variation" and "evolutionary transition," which as a shorthand we can reduce to "adaption" and "evolution." What Darwin's theory boils down to is the claim that given enough time, adaptive variations can add up to become evolutionary transitions in all directions to an unlimited degree. In the first edition of Origin (later removed) he said, "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." But, unsubstantiated, this is the same as seeing no difficulty in adding to scaffolding indefinitely as a way to get to the Moon, or changing a Chevrolet a part at a time as a workable way of producing a Boeing 747. Regarding the generally held contention that there are limits to natural variation, he wrote, "I am unable to discover a single fact on which this belief is grounded."7 But there wasn't a single fact to support the belief that variation could be taken beyond what had been achieved, either, and surely it was on this side that the burden of proof lay.
And the same remains true to this day. The assurance that adaptations add up to evolution, presented in textbooks as established scientific fact and belligerently insisted on as a truth that can be disputed only at the peril of becoming a confessed imbecile or a sociopath, is founded on faith. For decades researchers have been selecting and subjecting hundreds of successive generations of fruit flies to X rays and other factors in attempts to induce faster rates of mutation, the raw material that natural selection is said to work on, and hence accelerate the process to observable dimensions. They have produced fruit flies with varying numbers of bristles on their abdomens, different shades of eye colors, no eyes at all, and grotesque variations with legs growing out of their heads instead of antennas. But the results always remain fruit flies. Nothing comes out of it suggestive of a house fly, say, or a mosquito. If selection from variations were really capable of producing such astounding transformations as a bacterium to a fish or a reptile to a bird, even in the immense spans of time that the theory postulates, then these experiments should have revealed some hint of it.