Chapter 18. Evolutionists' Confessions Stating that the Theory of Evolution cannot Explain Animal Instincts

Many characteristics observed in living things represent enormous quandaries for the theory of evolution. Bees and ants live together in enormous communities and exhibit the finest examples of excellent, disciplined social life. Bees build those architectural marvels called honeycombs. Spiders spin such high-quality webs that technology is barely able to begin replicating them. Even the fiercest animals show devotion to their own young and even to other species. Countless other actions involving reason, judgment and decision-taking-features supposedly unique to human beings-cannot be explained in terms of any of the mechanisms proposed by the theory of evolution.

Evolutionists say that these modes of living, or behavior in living things emerged as the result of "impulses" from inside. However, they are unable to say what those impulses were.

Darwinists admit the fact that an enormous force affects the behavior of living things. They attribute the display of devotion, division of labor and perfect organization among life forms to direction by a force.

It is Allah Who inspires bees to build the same flawless hexagonal combs that they have been constructing for millions of years.

However, they then bring the issue to an end by simply referring to this force as instinct. To describe the origin of that force, they employ the clichéd term "Mother Nature."

In fact, however, no evolutionist to date can say where instincts are located in living things' bodies. In what part of the anatomy do these impulses, described as instincts, lie? In the brain, weighing just a few hundred grams? Or tucked away in some of the proteins and amino acids that make up the tissues?

When we open up the bodies of living things to examine them, we are still unable to establish the source of this information. This is because instinct is an impulse that expresses the spiritual, and has no material counterpart. This shows the serious inconsistency among Darwinists and materialists, who reject the spiritual and maintain that all things are simply accumulations of matter.

In fact, evolutionists have been consistently unable to shed any light on this question. If an animal shows characteristics like altruism, love, cooperation, friendship and loyalty that means that there is a force that leads the way, that shows it what to do and that inspires it to do such things. That power is obviously Allah, the sole Lord and Ruler of the universe.

Given the obvious nature of these facts, evolutionists have been forced to make confessions regarding instinct too. And as in all areas, the clearest admissions come from Darwin.

Charles Darwin:

What shall we say to the instinct which leads the bee to make cells, and which has practically anticipated the discoveries of profound mathematicians? 363

Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.364

But it would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been acquired by habit.365

If a working ant or other neuter insect had been an animal in the ordinary state, I should have unhesitatingly assumed that all its characters had been slowly acquired through natural selection; namely, by an individual having been born with some slight profitable modification of structure, this being inherited by its offspring, which again varied and were again selected, and so onwards.

But with the working ant we have an insect differing greatly from its parents, yet absolutely sterile; so that it could never have transmitted successively acquired modifications of structure or instinct to its progeny. It may well be asked, how is it possible to reconcile this case with the theory of natural selection?366

I have not attempted to define intelligence; but have quoted your remarks on experience, and have shown how far they apply to worms. It seems to me that they must be said to work with some intelligence, anyhow they are not guided by a blind instinct.367

Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers,- ants making slaves, -the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars,--not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. 368

But the greater number of the more complex instincts appears to have been gained in a wholly different manner, through the natural selection of variations of simpler instinctive actions.

Such variations appear to arise from the same unknown causes acting on the cerebral organization, which induce slight variations or individual differences in other parts of the body; and these variations, owing to our ignorance, are often said to arise spontaneously. We can, I think, come to no other conclusion with respect to the origin of the more complex instincts, when we reflect on the marvelous instincts of sterile worker-ants and bees, which leave no offspring to inherit the effects of experience and of modified habits.369

... it seems to me wholly to rest on the assumption that instincts cannot graduate as finely as structures. I have stated in my volume that it is hardly possible to know which, i.e., whether instinct or structure, change first by insensible steps.370

Francis Darwin

Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin:

Chapter III. of the Sketch, which concludes the first part, treats of the variations which occur in the instincts and habits of animals... It seems to have been placed thus early in the Essay to prevent the hasty rejection of the whole theory by a reader to whom the idea of natural selection acting on instincts might seem impossible. This is the more probable, as the Chapter on Instinct in the Origin is specially mentioned (Introduction, page 5) as one of the "most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory."371

Gordon Rattray Taylor is an evolutionist author and chief science advisor for the BBC:

When we ask ourselves how any instinctive pattern of behavior arose in the first place and became hereditarily fixed, we are given no answer...372

Biologists assume freely that such inheritance of specific behavior patterns is possible, and indeed that it regularly occurs. Thus Dobzhansky roundly asserts: "All bodily structures and functions, without exception, are products of heredity realized in some sequence of environments. So are all forms of behavior, without exception." This simply isn't true and it is lamentable that a man of Dobzhansky's standing should dogmatically assert it.

If in fact behavior is heritable, what are the units of behavior which are passed on-for presumably there are units? No one has suggested an answer.373

The manifest fact is that the genetic mechanism exhibits not the smallest indication of being able to transmit specific forms of behavior from one generation to another. The genetic mechanism just produces protein. It may affect behavior in general by producing greater amounts of certain hormones; it may make an animal more aggressive or passive, for instance, or more dependent on its mother. But there is no evidence that it can transmit a specific form of behavior, such as the string of actions required to build a nest, from one generation to another. If behavior really is inherited, then what is the unit of behavior transmitted from one generation to another? These are assumed; nobody has been able to answer this question.

Evolutionists' Confessions About the Altruism in Living Things

Contrary to what evolutionists maintain, nature is not a battleground. Quite the opposite: Nature is full of instances of acts of altruism and rational cooperation, even at the price of the death of the individuals concerned in order to save the family, or their coming to harm. These countless examples of altruism, self-sacrifice and solidarity disprove evolutionists' claims that nature is simply a battleground, with the selfish, those putting their own interests first, surviving.

John Maynard Smith, a famous evolutionist:

Here one of the key questions has to do with altruism: How is it that natural selection can favor patterns of behavior that apparently do not favor the survival of the individual? 374

Prof. Cemal Yıldırım, a Turkish evolutionist, is Professor of Philosophy at the Middle East Technical University:

Scientists of the 19th century were easily misled into adopting the thesis that nature is a battlefield, because more often than not, they were imprisoned in their studies or laboratories and generally didn't bother to acquaint themselves with nature directly. Not even a respectable scientist like Huxley could exempt himself from this error.375

Peter Kropotkin, an evolutionist author:

... the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another's blood... In fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is considered as one of the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution, were we not taught by him, in a paper on the "Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man," that, "from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiators' show"... it may be remarked at once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction.376

From Scientific American magazine:

In spite of male baboons' lack of genetic relationship, they do display one type of cooperative behavior. When two baboons are in some kind of contest, one of them may enlist the aid of a third baboon. The soliciting baboon asks for help with an easily recognized signal, turning its head repeatedly back and forth between its opponent and its potential assistant.377

From Bilim ve Teknik (Scientific and Technical) magazine:

The question is, Why do living beings help one another? According to Darwin's theory, every animal is fighting for its own survival and the continuation of its species. Helping other creatures would decrease its own chances of surviving, and therefore, evolution should have eliminated this type of behavior, whereas we observe that animals can indeed behave selflessly.

One classic way of accounting for self-sacrifice is maintaining that this will work to the benefit of the group or species concerned, and that communities consisting of self-sacrificing individuals will be more successful in evolution than communities made up of selfish ones. The question now made clear here, however, is how can self-sacrificing communities preserve these characteristics? The appearance of just one selfish individual in such a society will be able to hand on a higher level of selfish attributes to later generations, because that individual will fail to sacrifice itself.

Another unclarified point is that if evolution takes place on the societal level, what the dimensions of that society will be. Family? Herd/Flock? Species? Order? What would happen if the results of the evolution taking place at more than one level if these were to be incompatible with one another?378

Nature is not a battleground in which only the fittest survive, as evolutionists would have us believe. On the contrary, it is filled with countless examples of altruism and of rational co-operation. Many animals even risk death, and self-sacrifice for the sake of their young or herd-which represents no advantage to the individual concerned.