(Part 1)

The neo-Darwinian theory that one species gradually evolves into another species through the slow accumulation of minute changes over extremely long periods of time is contradicted by the fossil record, including the hominid fossil record.1 Stephen J. Gould pointed out that ‘we still have no firm evidence for any progressive change within any hominid species’.2 Instead, species persist unchanged for millions of years, and these periods are followed by the sudden appearance of several new species. This prompted the development of the modified Darwinian theory of punctuated equilibrium, first proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972, which says that new species split off from ancestral species so rapidly that there is little chance of a smooth series of transitional fossils being preserved.

However, the probability of the right random genetic variations (amidst all the unfavourable ones) occurring and being ‘selected for’ within a very short space of time, leading to the appearance of a new species, is even more remote than the prospect of such changes occurring over a very long period. The vast majority of genetic mutations are harmful or even lethal. In the 1950s geneticist J.B.S. Haldane showed that, even under very favourable assumptions, only one new, beneficial mutation could be completely substituted in a population every 300 generations. So in 10 million years – far longer than the time that has elapsed since the alleged chimp/human split from a common ancestor – only 1667 substitutions of beneficial genes could occur.3 This amounts to three ten-millionths of the human genome – which is hardly likely to turn an ape into a human.