Darwin envisioned the momentous ontological change from ape to man occurring gradually by way of “transitional forms.” Pressing far too heavily on time itself as a causal agent, he advanced the untestable hypothesis that the changes will have taken place during the billions of years separating our present day from the supposed time of the first appearance of a simian species on our planet. Since this theory is beyond the reach of any possible empirical test, it requires alternative evidential back-up. Unfortunately for Darwin there is a dearth of any fossil evidence establishing the claimed evolutionary “missing links,” a large lacuna which Darwin was aware of but still hoped might be remedied in finds after his day (vainly to date, it must be added, and the notorious Piltdown fraud only served to underscore the evidentiary gap)¹.

It is self-evident that any dispute concerning Darwin must have far-reaching implications for society beyond the world of the biological sciences because Darwin’s strictly materialist theories of human origins and evolution came to oust the idea of the world as a divinely created and providentially directed planet. Hence, if a group of eminent biologists and other scientists could no longer support the claims on which those profound inferences depend (and on which, rightly or wrongly, the worldview of many in the West rests), this must incontestably be a matter of some existential moment, and, I concluded, deserving of far more than the cursory examination I had given to the subject heretofore. This inspired me to make amends for my previous inattention by making the attempt to unpack both the scientific evidence for Darwinism and the wider ramifications of its acceptance by Western society as a whole.

A Surprising Journey

Since biology specialists had, in a manner of speaking, been largely left to mark their own homework for upwards of 160 years, an independent audit, I felt, was overdue, especially since I came to perceive the field of evolutionary research as being distorted by a considerable ideological bias (with some honorable exceptions). Albeit a complete outsider to the biological guild, I came to see myself in the role of foreman of a jury in a technical legal trial tasked with weighing up complicated evidence with as much insight and impartiality as I could muster.

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