Disputing Darwin

By Alan Caruba

Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day, February 12, as Charles Darwin in 1809. The place was Shrewsbury, England and he was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susanna Wedgwood. He would bequeath the family name to science as Darwinism or Darwinian.

He wrote “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), generally referred to as “The Origin of Species” for short. From Darwin we have the common phrase “the survival of the fittest” and, of course, “the theory of evolution.”

When I sold my home, one of the biggest problems I had was what to do with all the books my parents had filled it with over the years. They seemingly read everything and built shelves for all them. I did bring a few of the older, leather-bound books with me and one was the “Descent of Man” by Darwin.

When I cracked it open, its yellowing pages, each with two columns of text in small print, struck me immediately as intensely researched, filled with the kind of minutia that only someone with a scientific turn of mind could gather and write. It is no dazzling page-turner, but in his time, before radio or television, reading was the way people entertained and educated themselves.

Darwin’s books ran counter to many religious beliefs of his time or even ours. Even today some preachers take exception to the notion we are descended from monkeys. We’re not, but we do share a lot of DNA with chimps and gorillas. Suffice to say, Darwin stirred considerable debate in England. His theories of evolution were quite revolutionary in his time. And since!

Just ask Robert W. Felix, the author of “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of Species.” I am biased because I was among a select few to read the manuscript before publication.

What Felix had learned from his research for a previous book, “Not By Fire, But by Ice” he extended in his book about magnetic reversals. It is fairly dazzling science. Even Darwin, had he ever known about magnetic reversals would have had to revise his theories

“I learned, “wrote Felix, “that many geomagnetic reversals—far more than could be dismissed as mere coincidence—had occurred in sync with mass extinctions. And many of those magnetic reversals had occurred in sync with our plant’s descent into catastrophic glaciation”; in other words, ice ages.

And here’s where it gets downright astonishing. Many “entirely new kinds of plants and animals appeared in the geologic record almost immediately after extinctions—time after time after time. The new plants and animals had arrived as if from nowhere, with no known ancestors, with no intermediate life forms to explain their sudden presence.”

So, while Darwin theorized that animals mutated over millions of years, adapting to their environments, growing longer beaks to suck nectar from plants, developing larger hearts and lungs to run or swim faster, acquiring the ability to fly instead of just gliding, coming up with all sorts of ways to avoid becoming prey, Felix says it likely happened in the flash of a galactic minute.

It’s useful, too, to understand what newcomers we humans are. “Did you know,” asks Felix, “that we (anatomically modern humans) are blindingly new?—that we’ve existed for only 200,000 years or so.”

As for what we call “civilization”, that’s only at best 5,000 years in which humans developed agriculture and technologies such as metallurgy. If the ancient texts are a guide, we spent much of our time making war on one another. In just the last century, we perfected instruments of war to a point where we swiftly slaughtered millions. Humans, though highly social, are surely one of the most dangerous species on Earth.

“Mass extinctions,” writes Felix, “have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet. Almost identical, each extinction was abrupt, each was extensive, and each was caused by some temporary, unexplainable event.”

It turns out that magnetic reversals are likely those events. “During a geo-magnetic reversal, cosmic radiation would bombard our planet, leading to mutation or death. New kinds of animals appear in the geologic record ‘virtually simultaneously’ with magnetic reversals…”

All of which suggests that, while millions around the globe have been hoodwinked by the global warming charlatans, the real challenge to the human race and all other species is a colossal cosmic event beyond our imagination or control.

And while Darwin got us thinking about evolution, in his time of study and writing, 1836 to 1859, indeed right up to his death in 1882, there was much that limited the scientists of his day and influenced the interpretation of their discoveries.

It is likely that Darwin’s theory is fundamentally wrong.

If Robert W. Felix is right—and I think he is—the planet is at the end of a typical 11,500 interglacial cycle between ice ages and will tip into one any day now. When a magnetic reversal occurs, we humans shall be like the dinosaurs or saber tooth tigers, a thing of the past.

© Alan Caruba, 2011