In court of law, a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The assumption of innocence notwithstanding, a defendant could be guilty as sin. So the jury follows where the evidence takes it. Eventually a verdict is rendered and read, based upon truth or close approximation discerned from the facts in the case, observations of the experts and witnesses, as well as logical inference and reason applied by people whose responsibility it is. Now say the defendant is finally convicted, found guilty. An appeals process could very well overturn that verdict, even if presumption had shifted to guilt—particularly if new evidence comes to light and new investigative methodologies emerge. For instance, DNA evidence has cleared a number of convicted persons of crimes they didn’t commit. Of course, the fact that an innocent person gets released doesn’t always lead authorities to the real perpetrators of the crime.

Legal and political systems are at least amenable to redress of mistakes made, and one would think that scientific systems of thought are too. After all, no one has yet maintained that where human beings are involved mistakes can’t theoretically happen. Mistakes empirically do occur, in science and every other discipline. As late as 1915, the scientific consensus was that the Milky Way constituted the sum total of the celestial sphere. No one says that a judge or jury is infallible, although some people apparently think a nineteenth century naturalist named Charles Darwin still is. Mistakes are unfortunate and sometimes tragic, but they are forgivable unless we choose to ignore and cover up contrary evidence, insisting as it were upon the erroneous verdict.

DNA is clearing up more than the guilt of people held in prison. It is changing the assumptions glued to science for the last 150 years. People whose responsibility it is to be objective investigators and educators, who cling to the infallibility of Darwin and continue to teach his theory concerning origins of life as if it were unquestionable truth—they are the worst guilty parties. It is in the nature of our political system, however, that free people sufficiently informed, will eventually make changes necessary to curricula and to schools they pay for. Many will also study for the love of truth and the thrill of discovery, replacing old oracles and reinvigorating the scientific quest itself with imagination, free inquiry and renewed analytical rigor.

The central theory in modern biology is still the one Charles Darwin left, and it hasn’t evolved much in the intervening years. It is maintained by bureaucratic control of education and sheer mental inertia, more so than by modern science. In 1821 Darwin went to the Gallapogas islands at the age of 22, stayed there a little over a month to collect his notes and specimens. He then went home to England and thought about what he had found for 25 years before publishing his famous treatise on the origin of species in 1859. In it he argued that all life is the product of undirected natural forces, namely time, chance and natural selection. Natural selection was his substitute for a design or plan, a naturalistic mechanism for producing observed biological changes over a long period of time. Darwin argued simply that physical variations proving advantageous to survival are inherited. The logic requires that whatever gets selected for transmission through genes shows functional advantage in terms of adaptation for survival.

What’s amazing is that the theory, interesting so far as it goes, has been elevated to a stature it never deserved. It is helpful in explaining limited kinds of variation to be sure, but it doesn’t begin to explain the complexity of life itself and it is very hard to imagine how it should have been credited with explaining all life on earth, despite incredible advances in science and technology since his day. For instance, there was very little knowledge of the microscopic worlds when he did his research. Darwin could not begin to see internal workings of cells the way we can today at 50,000 times magnification. Darwin theorized from assumptions about cells and cell activities that have since proven to be false. His theory works from the standpoint of supposed chemical evolution and then simplicity evolving into higher and more complex life forms. He did not address specifically how life could originate from non-living matter. He did not view cells the way we do either, nor understand them as the molecular machines they are, evincing form to fit function; nor could he fathom the irreducible complexity of these veritable marvels of miniaturized engineering. Natural selection cannot be used to construct the complex molecular machines that exist, even the simplest bacterial phlagelum.

Darwin himself wrote that his theory would break down, if you could show multi-component parts and systems of systems in simple cells. Yet today we know that cells consist of thousands of proteins and some forty different protein parts. Further, the proteins are composed of amino acids—some twenty in the human body and 370 others in nature. Sequences of hundreds of amino acids collapse into the architecture of proteins. Like letters of the alphabet, sequential arrangements of the acids turn into useful proteins. But the amino acids can’t organize themselves and proteins can’t self-assemble without DNA. Whereas proteins are like written languages or computer codes, construction at the lowest, simplest level presupposes the existence of genetic instructions like blueprints for a house. There are even microscopic factories inside of organisms that manufacture the needed acids and proteins. Communication of information is required, which begs the question where the language of life comes from. The activities inside cells show such a level of specificity that it is highly suggestive of intelligent design. Darwinian theory fails to address this, because it never anticipated the problem of the source of genetic information, i.e., where the messages in living machinery come from. Natural selection only acts on self-replicating organisms, but without the DNA there is no self-replication. In the beginning was the Word.

Those who think that science is only quantitative haven’t got a clue. Those who think the universe is but a bucket of numbers haven’t begun to figure things out, in terms of reckoning reality and existence. God is a god of liberal arts and science, of reason as well as religion. The brain weighs approximately three pounds and is made of soft grey tissue. Slice and dissect it and you’ll find its structure, but the consciousness it contains is something else besides the network of neurons. The unifying theory takes you back to Mind. It is just as logical a hypothesis to suggest that same Mind which was also in Christ Jesus (and controlled the matter around him), as to suggest any other cosmological theory. God, null physics and/or whatever you choose or come up with, may not even be entirely mutually exclusive when completely understood. Evolution and creative intelligence certainly are not.

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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