Evolution is now taught as a fact, across the western world, though much fossil evidence is not merely contradictory, but actually hostile to it. And even the most convinced evolutionists become embarrassed and start mumbling in Eskimo when they try to explain the origin of complex left-handed protein molecules in the primeval swamp that predated life.
No, no, it will never do. So let us consider the other aspect of evolution which Harun Yahya attacks. The emergence of species through the process of evolution. He dismisses it primarily because the Koran declared that God is the author of all. He even rejects intelligent design, because of the Koran.
However, his argument that animals do not evolve, but remain largely the same, is backed up by the most stunning part of his book: superb colour photographs of living animals and of their apparently identical fossil ancestors. Crabs, oysters, cockroaches, grasshoppers, springtails, ants and beetles from 25 million years ago remain - as far as we can see - in existence today, identical in every detail. The starfish of 360 million years ago is the same as its great granddaughter today.
… Yahya does not rule out variations occurring in species; what he argues is that those variations depend on existing genetic material within the species. What is not possible, he argues, is that evolution can add genetic material to one species to create another.
The famous Galapagos finches are not new species, but merely carriers of genes in different proportions from those possessed by their ancestors. To be sure, you have your little finches which specialise in knitting tea-cosies, and other finches which harpoon whales, but they still mate with one another. And do.
So how do discrete animal species come about? How does a species diverge so markedly from its parent stock that it is unable to breed with it, not in just one species, but in millions of them, across the world?
Recent DNA analysis of birds and insects in New Guinea reveals there are many distinct and discrete new species within what had until recently been thought to be a series of undivided species. These newly discovered species are incapable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring with the species they were once thought to be part of. So how did so many kinds of animal and plant, living alongside one another, become sexually separate?
At its most basic, and within our own modest habitat, what evolutionary force caused Europe to have 53 kinds of warbler, 16 kinds of thrush, 18 kinds of finch and 12 types of tit? What was the mechanism which caused not merely sexual sterility between species, but also the ability to recognise the separateness of species? There are least 40,000 types of spider, and hundreds of thousands of kinds of beetle, all of which are able to distinguish potential mates from virtually identical but genetically incompatible kindred species.
What fissiparous mechanism caused so many species to come into being? Moreover, what possible advantage could have accrued from such staggering heterogeneity, combined with such absurd amounts of sexual and genetic incompatibility, right across the plant and animal kingdoms?
These are not complex matters: if they were, I would be unable to discuss them. They are perfectly reasonable questions to ask of the Dogmatic Orthodoxy of Darwinism which is now triumphant across the western world. …
Now, when I hear a set of ideas being protected by the law, almost like a copyright, I get the odd tingle in my brain, as I sense the word "inquisition" taking shape. Today"s inquisitions are conducted with the weapons of disdain, scorn and dismissive stereotyping: "… We evolutionists know better, haw haw haw."
… It stretches the bounds of possibility to breaking point to assert that every living thing in this world was created by a series of accidents, the odds against which are to be measured in the zillion trillions.
… The book that started the two columns, Harun Yahya"s Atlas of Creation from Global Publishing, is quite the most spectacular so far this year.
