Darwinian Evolutionary Theory and the Life Sciences in the 21st Century

This essay was originally published in “Uncommon Dissent” (ISI Books, 2004) edited by William Dembski.

Evolutionary theory has had a major impact on the development of biology since the appearance of On the Origin of the Species in 1859. Over the century following publication of that book, experiments and field observations led to successive refinements of the Darwinian theory of evolution, and it was confidently proclaimed as the foundation of biology in the Darwin Centennial year of 1959.

Such confidence is not warranted today. New technologies developed in the past four decades have revealed to us the chemistry underlying biological processes. These technologies have revealed that life is far more complicated than was imagined in 1959, and that much of its complexity cannot easily be addressed by existing evolutionary theory. Indeed some of the major discoveries in the life sciences presented in this article were hardly anticipated by evolutionary theory, but instead came out of advances in experimental technologies.