A recent article posted on a creation forum caught my eye, outlining some of the prominent scientists around the world who are abandoning Neo-Darwinian Evolution on purely scientific grounds and embracing Intelligent Design.
Günter Bechly PhD, the late German paleo-entomologist and former curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, adopted Intelligent Design (ID) after he concluded that the fossil record scientifically refuted Neo-Darwinian evolution. His arguments centred around:
𝗙𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗹 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀: He argued that the fossil record is dominated by abrupt appearances of new body plans and groups, rather than the smooth, gradual transitions predicted by Darwinian theory.
𝗘𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: Bechly pointed to events like the Cambrian explosion and various other “explosions” in the history of life (such as the Avalon Explosion and the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event) as evidence that life forms appeared suddenly, which he believed contradicted gradualist evolution. As Univ. of Pittsburgh anthropologist, Jeffery Schwartz PhD said, “Most major groups of organisms . . . appear in the fossil record . . . full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction of Darwin’s depiction of evolution.”
𝗪𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: He identified a ubiquitous waiting time problem, noting that the fossil record shows only brief windows for the origin of complex features, which he argued was insufficient time for the coordinated mutations required by natural selection. Other scientists, such as Douglas Axe PhD, David Berlinski PhD, David Gerlernter PhD, and others have stated that Darwinian evolution has a combinatorial inflation problem–there simply isn’t enough time in earth’s history for the changes proposed by Darwin to have taken place.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁: Bechly’s shift to ID was motivated by purely scientific and philosophical reasons; he stated that while he was originally a secular atheist, the cumulative evidence from paleontology persuaded him that intelligent direction was the most reasonable explanation for biological origins.
Bechly isn’t the only scientist to make this jump. The late Cal Tech cosmologist and astrophysicist, 𝗔𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗗 (who was one of Fred Hubbell’s students), formerly an agnostic Jew, converted to Christianity when presented with the cosmological and fine tuning evidence pointing to a Creator.
𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗞𝗲𝗻𝘆𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗵𝗗, a biophysicist and and evolutionary biologist, repudiated his own origin of life theory and converted to Christianity. He noted that origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggest that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and “intelligently” guide the process.𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 …
For more information, you might like to check out my recent book, Evolution’s Fatal Flaws: 12 Reasons Why Evolution Doesn’t Work.