Bethell summarises the issues with Darwinism quite well.  As with Covid-19 the fanatical advocacy of ‘evolution’ has more in common with a cult or a Religion (the 2 are different), than with ‘Science’.  Indeed, Darwinism is a part of ‘Scientism’, the conflating and corruption of metaphysics with scientific facts and empirical evidence.  Darwin was of course a racist and a man of his time.  These cultural mores shape his ‘Malthusian’ and very primitive if not ignorant view of biology.  The title of his first edition of the Origin of Species indicates the racism: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” (1859).

The current culture of woke seems rather curiously silent on this.  It may not matter given that ‘evolution’ is unsupported as a ‘science’ and will soon be discarded. As Bethell points out, ‘evolution as the concept today is understood, was not used by Darwin, ‘The word “evolution” does not occur once in The Origin. (“Evolved” appears once—it is the last word in the book.)  Instead, Darwin referred to improvement, which does convey the idea of progress. Either improved or improvement appears dozens of times.’

For Darwin, ‘improving’ structures and functionality take the fish to the fisherman.  Given the advances in micro-biology, genomic understanding, cellular complexity and the lack of metamorphological proof, the absence of fossil proofs, or the ability to generate even a semblance of functional proteins in a laboratory from contrived chemical and electrical interactions, the theory of Darwinism is in grave danger of disappearing as a science.

Bethell: ‘For a decade or two, Darwinism’s promoters and beneficiaries, most of them lodged within universities, will pretend that nothing much is happening. But the auguries are not good. Those who claim to live by science will eventually die by science……Bertrand Russell was a little more careful: “Darwin’s theory was essentially an extension to the animal and vegetable world of laissez-faire economics.’

Darwin took Malthusian theory – itself a failure – and applied it to flora and fauna.  Why this is considered to be scientific has yet to be answered: ‘Darwin relentlessly pursued his insight. Organisms live by the Malthusian “struggle.” Lighten the pressure, “mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount” (Bethell quoting Darwin)….At its heart, Darwin’s theory was a theory of competition, with free market insights applied to “struggling” animals.’

Karl Marx, like Darwin a fanatical materialist, was delighted by the ‘theory of survival of the fittest’, the very theme of which is saturated in mid-19^th century economic theory and ideals.  ‘One who saw what was going on was Karl Marx. Writing to Engels in 1862, he said that for Darwin, “the animal kingdom figures as civil society”: It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among the beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.

It is thus very odd that most left-wing, Communist or Globalist supporting Atheists are confirmed members of Darwin’s Church.  In essence, and quite ironically, they support a free-market philosophy and metaphysis applied to flora and fauna, offered in terms of ‘natural selection’, as the great God of searching, filtering and improving.  But what does ‘natural selection’ even mean? 

Bethell summarises the current definition of what natural selection means in Darwinian terms: ‘What do we really know about natural selection? To summarize the current view: As a source of innovation, mutations in the DNA molecule generate random variations, and natural selection then acts as a filtering device. “Unfit” variants rarely survive even the early stages of development. As a matter of observation, then, what we find when organisms reproduce is that descendants incorporate small changes. Offspring differ a little from their parents, and their offspring differ even more from their grandparents. And so on. So the reproduction that we see is imperfect. All die in the end, but some variant forms contrive to leave more offspring than others.’

In essence, some force named ‘natural selection’ will ‘select’ or ‘force’ changes to the genomic structure of animals and species, giving them a ‘competitive advantage’ over their peers and ‘rivals’, and over long periods of time, these changes will form new animals and species, ‘adapted’ to their environment.  This theory is of course utter nonsense, one could rightly ask for example, where are these new species?  You are bound by your software, or genomic structure and by reproduction.  Cats mate with cats.  Dogs mate with dogs or other canines.  Bears with those of the same kind.  A cat cannot mate with a pigeon and will not add pigeon software to his own software, in his striving, or in the ‘natural selection process’ of acquiring wings, which he would have no need of, but which according to Darwinism would confer a significant ‘competitive advantage’ in hunting birds.

Bethell (bold is mine): ‘But such a transformation has never been observed. No species has ever been seen to evolve into another. What scientists do observe is something quite different: reversion to a mean. Such reversion can be analogized to commuting, or going back and forth. To alter the metaphor, reversion to the mean implies that species inhabit “plateaus” of limited space upon which variants are free to roam. Artificial selection can “push” varieties to the edge of the plateau, but they cannot be pushed off it or be made to invade the terrain of adjacent species. No experiment has shown us otherwise.’

Natural selection simply does not exist.  Nature does not have a mind.  Nature does not care if you live, die, ‘evolve’, ‘devolve’, or disappear into nothing.  There is no filtering. 

Bethell: ‘But can “nature” make choices in the same way that a farmer can when he is deciding which variants to select? That it could was one of the main arguments in The Origin. In response to Darwin, the philosopher Jerry Fodor, the author of What Darwin Got Wrong (with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, 2010) said that natural selection can’t make decisions. Fodor also wrote that natural selection “can’t run experiments,” and it “can’t consult the intentions of the builder.” Doing any of those requires having a mind, and, by general consensus, natural selection doesn’t have one. Fodor’s point was that whole organisms leave offspring, and they include numerous traits that are inevitably conflated. So when they leave offspring, it is impossible to say which of the conflated traits has been selected for. Fodor’s criticism has never been rebutted.’

The failure of Darwinism and Evolution is quite apparent.  DNA, RNA, proteins, amino acids, a trillion atoms per cell, a trillion cells per human, cannot ‘self form’, from naturalistic processes and ‘selection’.  No proof of this exists.  Neither does any proof exist of common descent, metamorphological changes, or new species through naturalistic adaptations.  A polar bear is still a bear.  A brown bear is still a bear.  A finch with a large beak is still a bird.  A finch with a small beak is still a bird.  Nothing has ‘evolved’.  All of these animals, as Bethell points out, revert to a mean.  They may oscillate within the confines of their software, they may improve or degrade, but they always revert back to the mean.

Bethell quotes the Atheist Karl Popper who nicely summarises the non-science of Darwinism, ‘In his autobiography, Karl Popper said he had come to the conclusion that “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.”’ And so it is.  If a theory cannot be falsified, if every event or happenstance supports the theory, if every outcome confirms its thesis, if every occurrence reinforces the hypothesis, then it is not a science, but a philosophical and metaphysical program.