Barbara Kay: 160 years into Darwinism, there’s one mystery we still can’t explain

Barbara Kay

Darwinism’s puzzling Achilles’ heel is its utter failure to account for, alone amongst the species, humans’ large brains and capacity for both abstract thought and speech.

Back when the world was young, I was taught that four visionaries’ theories shaped modernity: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Of them, only Einstein’s could be subjected to scientific scrutiny. The rest remained hypotheses, resistant to such standard scientific tests as falsifiability, replicability and predictability, but so beautiful in their comprehensiveness that the intelligentsia accepted them for what they were not: settled science.

Time has proven unkind to Freud’s and Marx’s theories, but very kind to Darwinism. Why? Shhh. If you dare to ask, you invite ridicule. Because the minute one expresses doubt about Darwin’s basic premise that all life-forms, including humans, descend from a common ancestor through the simple processes of random, heritable variation and natural selection, one admits the possibility of a counter-theory — Intelligent Design — that is considered anathema to the intelligentsia, since it implies, you know, the G-word.

David Gelernter, a conservative Yale professor of computer science, is suffering extreme ridicule and worse from colleagues for having just published an article in the Claremont Review, “Giving up Darwin.” The title is misleading, because Gelernter does not reject Darwin completely. He says there is no doubt that Darwin “successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances” through fur density or beak shape or wing style changes. It’s the big thing Gelernter now believes Darwin got wrong: humans.

There are intractable problems with Darwin’s “beautiful” theory. The most obvious is the “Cambrian explosion” of about a billion years ago wherein, during 70-odd million years, a startling variety of new organisms, and for the first time actual animals, appear in the fossil record. Where were their pre-Cambrian closely related ancestors? Nobody knows, and it isn’t the fault of fossil science, which is sophisticated and objective.

Gelernter ascribes his conversion principally to the 2013 book, Darwin’s Doubt, by geophysicist Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which he describes as “one of the most important books in a generation.” I haven’t read that book yet, but I have read, and warmly recommend, the late Tom Wolfe’s riveting 2016 book, The Kingdom of Speech. Here Wolfe disassembles the history of Darwinism in his characteristic madly entertaining fashion, but concentrates on what seems to me Darwinism’s even more puzzling Achilles’ heel, its utter failure to account for, alone amongst the species, humans’ large brains and capacity for both abstract thought and speech.

Speech isn’t merely “a” trait that separates us from primates, it is why humans rule the planet. It is why there are zoos with primates inside and us outside. Speech allows us to make “plans” (something no primate understands). It allows us to record and measure, to express ideas and act on them. Make your own long list. Speech is, in Darwinian lingo, the ultimate “artifact.”

full story at https://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-160-years-into-darwinism-theres-one-mystery-we-still-cant-explain