By Bhakti Niskama Shanta
The archaeological record is very limited and its analysis has been contentious. Hence, molecular biologists have shifted their attention to molecular dating techniques. Recently on April 2013, the prestigious Cell Press Journal Current Biology published an article (Fu et al. 2013) entitled âA Revised Timescale for Human Evolution Based on Ancient Mitochondrial Genomesâ. This paper has twenty authors and they are researchers from the worldâs top institutes like Max Planck Institute, Harvard, etc. Respected authors of this paper have emphatically accepted that the fossil record is inadequate and unreliable. These statements clearly substantiate that now biologists are agreeing that fossil records do not provide any significant evidence at all for conventional evolution theory. Despite the well-recorded fact of the continual grand propaganda of Darwinism based on fossil evidence for more than 150 years, in recent times biologists are surprisingly coming up with such statements, based on their confidence that evolution can be explained purely by the genealogical/genomic record provided by modern molecular biology. Still many respected journals (for example the article in Nature, Retallack, 2013) continue to publish articles on fossil evidence to support Darwinian evolution. These incoherently diverse claims prove that Darwinists are struggling with unscientific ideological approaches to explain biodiversity. Darwinian evolutionary theory is not only the basis of modern biology, but also acts as the guiding principle of science and intellectual reasoning for modern civilization. Hence, a scientific understanding of the breakdown of the Darwinian theory of objective evolution is very important for overcoming the traditional scientific temper of mechanistic intellectualism that characterizes this ideology. In my article â21st Century Biology Refutes Darwinian Abiologyâ it was noted that several recent findings challenge the credibility that random mutations and natural selection can provide a valid basis for justifying the naturalistic evolution of species. The present article summarizes the problems associated with the fossil record and dating techniques, and its implication on the neo-Darwinian mechanistic misconception of biological life as mere molecular chemistry or abiology. An alternative approach based on the VedÄntic view for explaining biodiversity in the light of 21st century biology is also discussed in the end of the article.
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This could be a regular head-scratcher, on a number of levels.
Just as there is no ultimate proof of Darwinian theory, there is no ultimate disproof of Darwinian theory, either.
The challenge, rather, involves the limits of empiricism in general, and scientific methodology in particular. By utilizing any such methods, there will always be an opportunity for considering more evidence, and the potential for considering a more powerful explanatory hypothesis attempting to make objective rational sense of it. But it is all but a tentative exercise, forever inconclusive. That is a criteria essential to any professional scientific analysis.
Curiously, the idea that the fossil record is incomplete in support of Darwinian theory, or anything else for that matter, is not new. Darwin himself discusses this dilemma at length in Origins, for starters. No matter how many fossils it is possible to collect, it will prove but a minuscule representation of the past.
Of interest, then, is how folks who wish to disprove Darwinian theory by utilizing some form of scientific methodology, are depending on these very same inconclusive methodologies to support of their own pet hypotheses. Yet there is no conclusive proof afforded to anything utilizing scientific methodology, no matter how much we might hope and pray otherwise.
At present, and for the past century or so, the Darwinian paradigm has enjoyed a dominant consensus amongst naturalists. So what of it?
From a Vaisnava perspective, the jiva has nothing essential to do with biological form as manifest on earth. Nor is self-realization dependent on the manifestation of a human form within this specific realm of experience. Perhaps such concepts would present difficulty not just for thinkers limited by western material science, but for more than a few enamored by western theology as well.
In addition, the Puranic concept of transmigration is hardly dependent on earthly biological form to facilitate spiritual evolution in conditional life. All forms, according to the Puranic idea, are always present – though the plethora of such Puranic forms have little to do with an empirical analyses limited by the inherent constraints of an earth-bound biosphere. At the moment, that appears all that is experiential to our plenitude of biological inquirers.