Darwin on Trial.

PHILLIP JOHNSON has written a provocative book, but you aren't likely to see it reviewed in the Washington Post or The New York Review of Books. For Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has taken on perhaps the most bloated of sacred cows: evolution. The very cogency of his arguments ensures that the mainstream press will greet his book with silence.

The popular image of critics of evolution was forever set by the famous "monkey trial," in which Clarence Darrow defended a high-school teacher named Scopes for teaching evolution. Yet evolution raises numerous legitimate scientific questions. Johnsons lacks a technical background, but he makes up for that deficiency with his ability to deconstruct poor reasoning. In fact, he writes, "what first drew my attention to the question was the way the rules of argument seemed to be structured to make it impossible to question whether what we are being told about evolution is really true."

First one must understand basic definitions. Writes Johnson: "The concept of creation in itself does not imply opposition to 'evolution,' if evolution means only a gradual process by which one kind of living creature changes into something else. A Creator might well have employed such a gradual process as a means of creation. 'Evolution' contradicts 'creation' only when it is explicitly or tacitly defined as fully naturalistic evolution--meaning evolution that is not directed by any purposeful intelligence." "Creationists" like Johnson, who merely believe that God created the earth, should not be confused with "creation-scientists," who hold to a literal six-day creation despite abundant contrary evidence.

Much of Johnson's work has been done by adherents of evolution, who disagree among themselves over virtually every important part of Darwin's theory. Although they close ranks against outsiders suggesting that there may be a God Who had something to do with the world, they are almost as critical of each other as Johnson is of all of them. For instance, Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum, asked in 1981: "Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing . . . that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence." Patterson compared evolution to creationism, complaining that the adherents of neither ever explains how the processes work.

Patterson later backed away from his comments under fire, for dedicated evolutionists, despite all their attacks on the rigidity of religious fundamentalists, are an intolerant lot. For instance, in 1981 the British Natural History Museum created an exhibit on Darwin's theory. The museum stated that evolution was "one possible explanation" as to "why there are so many different kinds of living things"; it also noted that "the concept of evolution by natural selection is not strictly speaking scientific" because it had not been empirically demonstrated. This honest skepticism ignited a row that caused the museum to eliminate any mention of the problems with Darwinism.

Johnson, however, spends the bulk of his book detailing the many things that we either don't know about evolution or, more importantly, know aren't true. Fundamental to Darwinism is the claim that natural selection causes genetically advantaged organisms to thrive and eventually evolve into more advanced creatures. Darwin himself couldn't point to any examples of such a process, but instead argued by analogy to the breeding of plants and animals by humans. The problem with this approach, observes Johnson, is that "plant and animal breeders employ intelligence and specialized knowledge to select breeding stock and to protect their charges from natural dangers. The point of Darwin's theory, however, was to establish that purposeless natural processes can substitute for intelligent design."

The weakness of this particular argument doesn't mean that no evidence of natural selection exists. But the examples usually cited--fluctuations in the proportions of dark and light moths depending upon the darkness of trees, for instance--don't demonstrate creatures evolving into different species. Some evolution activists don't seem too concerned about finding evidence, however; they merely treat evolution as a tautology. "Those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition . . . the fittest ones," wrote Ernst Mayr in 1963.

Another theoretical problem is how a series of small steps over enormous time periods created wings, lungs, eyes, and other highly complicated organs that require a host of related parts to operate. "What we have to imagine is a chance mutations that provides this complex capacity all at once, at a level of utility sufficient to give the creature an advantage in producing offspring," writes Johnson. Yet even where creatures such as the nautilus have existed for millions of years, we see no evidence of improvement.

Here, again, arguments among Darwinists and neo-Darwinists have become acrimonious. For instance, supporters of evolution believe that macro-mutations, or large-scale jumps, are responsible for the most complex changes. But that position repudiates Darwin himself and has been ridiculed by believers in micro-evolution. The latter have also poured scorn on mathematicians who argue that there has not been enough time for the many small changes necessary to create sophisticated organs such as an eye. Where evidence is lacking, evolutionists simply restate their theory as fact. Johnson again quotes Mayr: "Somehow or other by adjusting these [the mathematicians'] figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred."

Yet there is no fossil record of the constant progression in creatures that would prove evolution to be true. Indeed, observes Johnson, "most people are unaware that Darwin's most formidable opponents were not clergy-men, but fossil experts." When talking among themselves, as opposed to the general public, evolutionists admit there is no evidence of intermediate creatures. Darwinists have been particularly hard put to explain whence came the profusion of creatures in the so-called Cambrian explosion around six hundred million years ago; complains one scientists, "It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history."

Biochemistry provides no better evidence of evolution. Yet the theory continues to masquerade as fact. "If there are so many problems with Darwinism," asks Johnson, "and no satisfactory alternative within the framework of evolution, why not re-evaluate the framework?" Because evolution--that is, fully naturalistic evolution--has become a secular religion. To question it is to be either a fundamentalist crack-pot or a naive ignoramus.

But Johnson dispassionately exposes the pretenses of science's high priests, and he does so in the name of truth, not dogma. "Falsification is not a defeat for science, but a liberation," he concludes. "It removes the dead weight of prejudice, and thereby frees us tto look for the truth." And such a search would benefit all of us, believers and atheists alike.

Mr. Bandow is author of The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington (Transaction).