I would like to make a few points clear before going further. I do not oppose the idea of “evolution.” Evolution is change through time. Obviously organisms and everything else changes through time. “Darwinism” is the claim that this change is driven by the purposeless, meaningless, undirected, natural process of “Natural Selection” (Survival of the Fittest). I find the scientific evidence for this philosophical assertion unconvincing and indeed, I am far from alone in this. So the question as is not whether or not “Biological Evolution” occurs, but rather - What is the cause of this “Evolution.” Is it a purposeless, natural cause or is there an intelligence guiding this evolution?

Harry Truman was right, “History is bunk.” The more I learn the more undeniably true this statement becomes. Most “history” consists of claims crafted into a media template that fills some political or philosophical agenda. The picture that emerges is usually substantially at odds with the facts. There are few places where this has been truer than the case of Charles Darwin and the legacy of Darwinism.

Darwin’s apologists have been busy ever since the 1860’s fabricating this template. For example racism is no longer popular. Racists are today seen as evil people. Consequently, “Saint Darwin” could not possibly be a racist. Thus the title of Darwin’s most famous book has been progressively sanitized. The volume which today goes by the title “The Origin of the Species” was originally titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Survival.”

First, the secondary title of the book “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Survival” was dropped. It is widely recognized though rarely admitted by scholars that Darwin’s book was initially most warmly embraced by racists of every stripe. English colonialists, slave owners, sweat shop owners, monarchists and all types of racial supremacists agreed that Darwin had indeed proven why they were superior and it was only natural that they should be at the top of the social hierarchy. Indeed Marx used it to justify European colonialism and Hitler and the Nazi’s used it as the reason for “Aryan supremacy.”

Next “by Means of Natural Selection” was dropped or down played since it has been accepted by the Neo-Darwinists that natural selection alone indeed cannot explain the origin of species. But that is another matter too vast to discuss here.

But now the Darwinists are being confronted with what may be the biggest challenge they have ever faced, the evidence that Darwin’s greatest ideas weren’t even his but were stolen from his grandfather and Alfred Wallace. In a new book called “The Darwin Conspiracy” Roy Davies (himself a former Darwin apologist) makes a detailed and compelling case showing that Darwin actually stole his major ideas from Alfred Wallace.

While the media often traces Darwin’s “discovery of natural selection” to an “ah ah” moment while observing finches in the Galapagos Islands, Darwin scholars have long recognized that their is no evidence to support this claim. His notes of the time record no awareness of this mechanism. It was not until Alfred Wallace sent Darwin a letter in 1858 describing Natural Selection that Darwin claimed that he had discovered it twenty years before but had just never gotten around to publishing it. (Some of his apologists would later claim that his “reluctance to publish” was for fear of persecution by Christians).

Davies book meticulously reviews the documents involved and makes a compelling case that Darwin in fact plagiarized Wallace’s ideas. Given the differential in their social status and connections Wallace agreed to co-publish the theory (half a loaf is better then none), which up until the 1950’s, commonly was attributed to both of them but from which Wallace’s name has been recently dropped. As it turns out Wallace had to be dropped, as his other writings are an embarrassment to Darwinists because Wallace exhibited a strong tendency toward acceptance of the idea that the evolution and natural selection observed in nature were working within some sort of Divine plan.

A joke among Chinese paleontologists is that, “In the US you can criticize the government, but you can’t criticize Darwin, in China it is the other way around”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Apologetics, Bible, Bible Study, Biology, Christian Apologetics, Christian Apologetics History, Christian Education, Darwin, Darwinism, Education, Evolution, God, History, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.