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As a naturalist, Charles Darwin wasn’t much of a “bird guy.”
His real fascination was with barnacles.
He spent eight years of his life, in fact, painstakingly dissecting smelly samples from all over the world, piling up storage crates in his London study in the pre-refrigeration era. His hope was to discover why barnacles were not all the same, and how various species might have come into existence.
We have no record of what Mrs. Darwin thought of this hobby. But we do know that their son George, when visiting a friend’s house, was flabbergasted not to find a study with a microscope. He asked his friend, “Then where does your father look at his barnacles?”
During his five weeks visiting the Galapagos Islands during 1835, Darwin dutifully shot and preserved a number of small finch-like birds. But he didn’t really notice anything overly interesting about them, and even failed to record which of the specific islands where they had been found. That turned out to be a serious oversight.
It was only later, with the help of an ornithological colleague back in England, that it became clear these birds were closely related to each other – yet different. They sported a fascinating variety of beaks. And that might mean something.
Darwin and his followers ultimately grasped that those different mouthpieces might be adaptations – presumably accrued over a very long period of time – that specifically equipped particular finch species to dine on the vegetation available only at specific locations.
Even though there is no mention of the Galapagos finches in The Origin of Species, his 1859 landmark case for evolution, these small birds have gradually become iconic representations of “natural selection,” Darwin’s proposed mechanism for how living things are able to differentiate into other living things without the intervention of a Creator.
There are 17 species of Darwin’s finches on the islands. They are all “endemic” – found nowhere else on the planet.
Two biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, devoted 30 years of their lives to studying which beaks belong to which finches on which islands. Jonathan Weiner won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of theFinch, his riveting account of their research.
I saw a number of Darwin’s finches during my visit to the Galapagos last week.
They are tiny, energetic, and easy to overlook. “Drab” is the word I would use – a mishmash of grays and browns that make them look a lot like the sparrows that are probably nesting near your house or apartment right now.
It’s fascinating how these small birds are now regarded as ironclad proof that living things grow and change and evolve all by themselves, without any outside help or direction.
Is 100% naturalistic evolution a demonstrated fact? “Of course,” say a great many scientists. “Just look at Darwin’s finches.”
“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.” So says Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson adds, “Equal time for creation-science in biology classes, the Darwinists like to say, is like equal time for the theory that it is the stork that brings babies.”
Here we need to pause and acknowledge that “evolution,” if defined as “change with respect to time,” is clearly happening. And it’s easy to verify. The whole world held its breath during the COVID-19 pandemic as an uncounted number of viruses morphed into ever-more-resistant strains of that life-threatening disease. Bacterial evolution has likewise been so effective at doing end runs around antibiotics that it’s almost put penicillin on the shelf.
But that’s not proof that “evolution,” when proposed as an all-encompassing, mindless, impersonal, directionless process, has somehow been able to generate the mind-boggling complexity of Earth’s living systems.
For one thing, scientists have never observed the birth of a new species, even though a number of researchers are trying very hard to make that happen (which, if in fact they succeed, wouldn’t actually count as a “naturalistic, all-by-itself” development).
Perhaps that’s not fair. Every Darwinist assumes that evolutionary progress requires an extraordinary amount of time.
But it’s exceedingly difficult to see how even millions of tiny genetic mutations, sorted out by the ruthless survival-of-the-fittest mechanism of natural selection, can produce something as exquisite as an eye. Or a wing. Or a human brain, with its trillions of neurons required for you to read and understand this sentence.
The late biologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose worldview contemplated no role for a Cosmic Designer, nevertheless grasped that classic Darwinism could not explain the sudden appearance of entirely new lifeforms in the fossil record.
“What good is 5% of an eye?” he mused. No one has been able to explain how the gradual evolution of complex systems could actually happen, or why it might provide a survival advantage.
Therefore Gould proposed the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” (or “punk eke”) – a fancy way of saying that somehow, for reasons yet unknown, evolution suddenly makes quantum leaps. A fish becomes a land-roving creature. A lizard grows feathers or fur.
Gould’s Darwinist colleagues have cried “heresy!” But that’s not the same thing as explaining the almost complete absence of transitional fossils.
Evolutionary scientist Jeffrey H. Schwartz acknowledges that the major animal groups “appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus – fully blown and raring to go.”
Darwin himself, as a good scientist, states in The Origin of Species that evolution as an explanatory thesis must rise or fall on the evidence. Thousands of so-called “missing links” will have to turn up. So far, after more than a century and a half of digging, paleontologists have unearthed only a handful of candidates.
In 1959, on the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s signature work, it nevertheless seemed his picture of reality was destined to be upheld as something close to certainty.
In the 21st century, however, even some former fans are asking out loud: Is Darwinism based on a fair assessment of the scientific evidence…or has it become simply another kind of philosophical fundamentalism?
Can followers of Jesus believe in evolution? Of course. The evidence is compelling that biological systems have changed, and are still changing, with respect to time.
But should that same evidence lead us to conclude that life emerged all by itself from non-life, that order sprang from chaos, and that complex systems self-assembled from simple parts – all without any external Source of information, design, purpose, or power?
We live in a day and age when the evidence provided by scientific research hardly rules out a Creator.
Reality makes far more sense, in fact, when the God Hypothesis is given its due.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:26-27).
Even Darwin’s finches are sustained by the Creator that Darwin’s hypothesis seems to deny.