Evolution and Design

David Pratt

May 2004, last revised Jan 2019

Part 3 of 3

Contents

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3
6. Saltation, symbiosis, self-organization
7. Chance, creation and design
8. Theosophy: evolution from within

6. Saltation, symbiosis, self-organization

Punctuated equilibrium

The theory of punctuated equilibrium was proposed in the early 1970s by

palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, soon to be joined by Stephen
Stanley. It postulates that, instead of undergoing continuous evolutionary change,
species remain in a state of unchanging equilibrium for most of their existence. But
these long periods of stability or stasis are occasionally punctuated by brief bursts of
rapid evolution in which new species emerge – so quickly, geologically speaking, that no
finely graded sequence of intermediate forms is preserved in the fossil record.

Standard evolutionary theory recognizes that a new species may branch off from an
existing one very quickly – a process known as quantum speciation – but only in special
circumstances; punctuated equilibrium suggests that rapid speciation is the rule rather
than the exception. Most evolutionists are vigorously opposed to this theory, and
continue to attribute the lack of transitional fossils to the imperfection of the fossil
record. There have been heated and sometimes nasty debates between gradualists and
punctuationists. Gradualists have called punctuationism ‘evolution by jerks’, while
punctuationists have called gradualism ‘evolution by creeps’!

Punctuationists argue that rapid speciation events occur in small populations that have
become geographically isolated. This has the advantage that it is easier for genetic
traits to become fixed in a population, the smaller it is. At the same time, however,
random genetic drift is greatest in small populations, which makes the accumulation of
favourable mutations more unlikely. The theory also claims that speciation happens so
fast that there is no time for nonadaptive mutations to be eliminated by natural selection.
It holds that, rather than individual organisms being selected, entire new species survive
or perish depending on their degree of adaptation to the environment they find
themselves in. Critics maintain that species (or allopatric) selection cannot account for
the degree of adaptation observed in the fossil record.

Punctuationism was originally put forward as a radical alternative theory to neo-

Darwinian gradualism, which Gould declared to be ‘effectively dead, despite its
persistence as textbook orthodoxy’. However, from the early 1980s, in the face of
criticism, punctuationists began to moderate their statements. Gould (who died in 2002)
eventually acknowledged that new anatomical traits are generated by the standard neo-
Darwinian mechanism – natural selection acting on random mutations over long periods
of time in large, relatively stable populations. This meant that the theory could no longer
explain the abrupt emergence of animal forms, such as the explosive appearance of
new body plans in the Cambrian. So while the punctuationists highlighted some of the
failings of neo-Darwinism, they ultimately failed to offer a satisfactory alternative
explanation for the origin of biological form and novelty.1 Palaeontologists James
Valentine and Douglas Erwin concluded in 1987 that neither phyletic gradualism nor
punctuated equilibrium could explain the origin of new body plans.2

The hypothesis that a species can rapidly evolve into a new species as a result of
purely random genetic mutations is far-fetched, especially since genes do not explain
morphogenesis. Furthermore, the punctuationist scheme offers no solution for the really
serious problem of the absence of transitional forms between the higher categories of
organisms – families, orders, classes and phyla. Michael Denton writes:

The gaps which separate species: dog/fox, rat/mouse etc. are utterly trivial
compared with, say, that between a primitive terrestrial mammal and a whale
or a primitive terrestrial reptile and an Ichthyosaur; and even these relatively
major discontinuities are trivial alongside those which divide major phyla
such as molluscs and arthropods. Such major discontinuities simply could
not, unless we are to believe in miracles, have been crossed in geologically
short periods of time through one or two transitional species occupying
restricted geographical areas. Surely, such transitions must have involved
long lineages including many collateral lines of hundreds or probably
thousands of transitional species ... To suggest that the hundreds, thousands
or possibly even millions of transitional species which must have existed in
the interval between vastly dissimilar types were all unsuccessful species
occupying isolated areas and having very small population numbers is
verging on the incredible!3
References

1. Walter J. ReMine, The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message theory, Saint
Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, pp. 328-31; Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt:
The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design, New York:
HarperOne, 2013, pp. 138-51.
2. Darwin’s Doubt, p. 151.
3. Michael Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, Bethesda, MA: Adler & Adler, 1986,
pp. 193-4.

Saltation

A number of influential biologists have seen large-scale mutations, or macromutations,

as the most likely way in which new types of organisms have emerged. A saltational
theory of evolution was proposed in the 1930s by palaeontologist Otto Schindewolf, who
even speculated that at one time a reptile laid an egg from which a bird hatched. In the
1940s geneticist Richard Goldschmidt developed this theory further. Macromutations
would give rise to ‘monsters’, most of which would be unviable and perish, but
occasionally a ‘hopeful monster’ would appear which would be preadapted to a new
environmental niche and become a successful new species. Such events would
account for all the major gaps in the fossil record. Goldschmidt was excommunicated by
the Darwinist establishment and regarded as a lunatic for the rest of his life.

Critics objected that when major mutational changes appear in the laboratory, they
involve errors in the formation or placement of old parts – e.g. a leg coming out of a fruit
fly’s head – and never the appearance of a new organ. Ernst Mayr described these
mutation-generated monsters as ‘hopeless’, and Theodosius Dobzhansky said that the
idea that a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type was equivalent to a ‘belief
in miracles’. No macromutations leading to positive results or the emergence of a viable
new species have ever been observed. Moreover, even if a much improved animal were
to appear, it would find no mate, unless similar macromutations occurred in a male and
female individual at the same time – which does not double the improbability, but
squares it. If saltational events have occurred, it is quite untenable to suppose that they
occurred by mere chance.

Gould defended Goldschmidt’s postulate that major structural transitions can occur
rapidly (and supposedly randomly) without a smooth series of intermediate stages:

All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the
way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are
characteristically abrupt. ... Even though we have no direct evidence for
smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate
forms – that is, viable, functioning organisms – between ancestors and
descendants in major structural transitions? Of what possible use are the
imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or
half a wing?

The conventional reply to this, says Gould, is that incipient stages in the development of
a new organ performed a different function from the one they later came to fulfil: ‘The
half jaw worked perfectly well as a series of gill-supporting bones; the half wing may
have trapped prey or controlled body temperature.’ But he suspected that this approach
could not save gradualism in most cases.1

Fig. 6.1. Darwinists speculate that feathers originally evolved for heat
insulation (though hair would have been much simpler to evolve and would
have done the job just as well). They also claim that the proto-wings of
proto-birds may have been used for capturing insects before they became
suitable for flight.2

Michael Denton accepts that all existing life forms are descended from a primeval
ancestral form, but rejects the Darwinian claim that the tree of life is ‘a functional
continuum where it is possible to move from the base of the trunk to all the most
peripheral branches in tiny incremental adaptive steps’. Instead, ‘nature is clearly a
discontinuum’, made up of distinct types and characterized by sudden, saltational
transitions. Like many 19th-century typologists, he argues that ‘the entire pattern of
evolution was prefigured into the order of things from the beginning’. He describes the
taxa-defining novelties as ‘the immutable building blocks of the biological world’,
‘emergent natural forms which arise from the self-organization of particular categories of
matter’, ‘part of nature’s order from the moment of creation, to which the paths of
evolution were inevitably drawn’, and he argues that most of them must have been
achieved ‘in a relatively saltational manner’.3

References

1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 157.
2. Michael Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, Bethesda, MA: Adler & Adler, 1986,
p. 209.
3. Michael Denton, Evolution: Still a theory in crisis, Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute
Press, 2016, Kindle ed., pp. 112, 29, 59.
Regulatory genes to the rescue
Like Goldschmidt, Gould believed that most large evolutionary changes are brought
about by small alterations in rates of development:

the problem of reconciling evident discontinuity in macroevolution with

Darwinism is largely solved by the observation that small changes early in
embryology accumulate through growth to yield profound differences among
adults. ... Indeed, if we do not invoke discontinuous change by small
alteration in rates of development, I do not see how most major evolutionary
transitions can be accomplished at all. Few systems are more resistant to
basic change than the strongly differentiated, highly specified, complex
adults of ‘higher’ animal groups. How could we ever convert an adult
rhinoceros or a mosquito into something fundamentally different?1

He believed that neoteny – the retention of the juvenile features of an ancestral species
in the adult form of a descendant species, as a result of a slowdown in the rate of
physical maturation – ‘provides one of the few mechanisms for rapid and profound
evolutionary change in a Darwinian fashion without the specter of macromutation. A
descendant with a mixture of ancestral juvenile and adult characters ... may immediately
enter a new adaptive zone; yet the genetic input need involve no more than some
changes in regulatory genes ...’2

Jeffrey Schwartz, too, invokes changes in regulatory genes (such as homeobox genes)
and their activities as the key to the sudden emergence of new morphological designs
and new species. He argues that the concept of macromutations can be dispensed with,
since micromutations in regulatory genes can have major, macroevolutionary effects.
He writes: ‘The activation of homeobox gene expression in novel positions or in novel
combinations at different times certainly produces significant changes.’3 But he adheres
to the core Darwinist belief that nothing but chance determines which regulatory genes
are activated or deactivated, and when and where this occurs.

Each individual possesses two copies of each gene, which may be the same or
different; if they are different, one copy will be dominant and the other recessive or
unexpressed. Nonlethal genetic mutations are usually recessive to start with, and
Schwartz argues that at some point, after they have been inherited by many members
of the species, regulatory genes, ‘by a mechanism that remains unclear’, activate the
recessive mutated genes and deactivate certain other genes, leading to the abrupt
appearance of a new organ, or perhaps a new species.4 Regulatory genes themselves
also undergo random mutations, which may turn them on or off, or may duplicate or
change them slightly. Schwartz recognizes that most of these random changes would
lead nowhere and assumes that ‘The evolution of life is probably strewn with the
carcasses of failed species’.5 However, there is no evidence that there have been any
such failures, and the idea that all these alleged random happenings could somehow
produce a feather, an eye, a kidney, an echolocation system, let alone a completely new
plant or animal, places great strains on our credulity. A hundred years of mutagenesis
experiments show that mutations affecting early body-plan development invariably
result in abnormal or dead animals; this is because each regulatory gene coordinates
the expression of numerous other genes.
Moreover, as pointed out earlier, regulatory genes no more explain morphogenesis than
do structural genes. It is true that the order and location in which particular regulatory
genes are switched on and off are correlated with the development of particular
structures. But no one has ever shown that regulatory genes, or any other genes, carry
instructions that determine the form of developing organs and organisms. Changes
during embryonic development could certainly produce far-reaching effects, but they
would need to unfold in a planned and purposeful manner. According to the theosophic
tradition, such changes reflect prior changes in the astral body, which provides the
template for embryonic and postnatal physical development.

References

1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 160.
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard
University Press, 1977, p. 284.
3. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of
species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 348.
4. Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, Extinct Humans, New York: Nevraumont,
2001, pp. 46-9.
5. Sudden Origins, p. 373.

Symbiosis

The first living organisms on earth are thought to have been bacteria, which consist of a
single prokaryotic cell (i.e. a cell without a nucleus). They are said to have evolved
further partly by random mutations and partly by transferring genes from one to another
(known as DNA recombination). Around 2 billion years ago, larger and more complex
eukaryotic cells (i.e. nucleated cells) appeared, the first unicellular eukaryotic organisms
being the protists. All later, multicellular organisms – animals, plants and fungi – consist
of eukaryotic cells.

Lynn Margulis attributed these major evolutionary innovations to symbiosis – the

widespread tendency of different organisms to live in close association with one another
and often inside one another (like the bacteria in our intestines). The most intimate form
of symbiosis is the incorporation and integration of the genes of one species (mostly
bacteria and other microbes) into the genome of another, giving rise to a new species –
a process known as symbiogenesis. She saw symbiogenesis as the principal avenue of
evolution, and said that random genetic mutations, which are ‘nearly always
inconsequential or detrimental to the work as a whole’, have been ‘dogmatically
overemphasized’ by neo-Darwinists.1

Margulis argued that mitochondria, the powerhouses inside most nucleated cells, were
once free-floating bacteria, and that in the distant past a larger cell either swallowed or
was invaded by a bacterium, but instead of digesting it or being killed by it, they began
to cooperate and the invading cell eventually became a mitochondrion. This proposal
was initially greeted with ridicule but is now widely accepted, though it has never been
experimentally demonstrated. Margulis also suggested that the flagella or fringe of cilia
used by eukaryotes to propel themselves through the water were once the rapidly
swimming bacteria called spirochetes, which accidentally attached themselves to other
prokaryotes and progressively lost their distinct traits; and that the chloroplasts in plant
cells used to be cyanobacteria which for some reason were spared digestion by plant
ancestors. These chance alliances, ‘encouraged’ by environmental pressures, allegedly
gave rise to the internally elaborate eukaryotic cells, which then diversified through
random variation and selection, and eventually formed symbiotic alliances with one
another, thereby producing the first multicellular organisms.

Note that, like genetic mutations, all the changes involved in the integration of the genes
of one organism into the genome of another organism are supposed to take place
randomly, i.e. without any overall guidance or purpose. Michael Behe raises a further
objection: ‘The essence of symbiosis is the joining of two separate cells, or two separate
systems, both of which are already functioning. ... Neither Margulis nor anyone else has
offered a detailed explanation of how the preexisting cells originated.’2 And as Ernst
Mayr pointed out, ‘There is no indication that any of the 10,000 species of birds or the
4,500 species of mammals originated by symbiogenesis.’3 The large-scale, undirected
exchange of genetic material between unrelated individuals is just as incapable of
explaining the history of life on earth as any other random mechanism.

References

1. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A theory of the origins of
species, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. 15.
2. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 189.
3. Foreword to Acquiring Genomes, p. xiii.

Self-organization and self-engineering

Stuart Kauffman, a leading proponent of complexity theory, argues that the origins of
life, metabolism, genetic programmes and body plans are all beyond Darwinian
explanation but may arise spontaneously through self-organization. This refers to the
tendency of complex systems to spontaneously organize themselves into ordered
patterns; ‘perturbations’ of a system can sometimes cause it to switch from one pattern
to another. It’s true that many systems do sometimes seem to ‘spontaneously’ organize
themselves, but saying that self-organization is driven by ‘laws of complexity’ is useless,
since scientific laws do not cause or explain natural phenomena; they merely describe
them.

Complexity theory is heavily mathematical and is unconnected to real-life chemistry. No

proponent of complexity theory has ever gone into a laboratory, mixed a large variety of
chemicals in a test tube, and looked to see if self-sustaining metabolic pathways
spontaneously organize themselves. Many origin-of-life scientists have already tried
such experiments – without any notable success. There is no evidence that either
biological information or complex anatomical structures can arise from physics and
chemistry alone. Self-organization remains a vague and fuzzy concept, and the theory
excels mainly at generating computer graphics rather than explaining anything. Critics
have accused Kauffman of practising ‘fact-free science’ and indulging in ‘cyberfantasy’.
Robert Wesson is another scientist who recognizes that evolution involves more than
just random variation and natural selection. He holds that it also involves self-
organization, and that the emergence of a new species is directed by ‘internal factors’.
The essence of self-organization, he says, is the ‘attractor’, which somehow guides the
development of a new organ or instinct in a particular direction. He claims that thinking
in these terms ‘makes extraordinary adaptations more understandable’.1 The truth,
however, is that ‘attractors’ will remain no more than an empty word until the causal
mechanism it denotes can be specified.

Like Wesson with his ‘attractors’, many other scientists have felt compelled to invoke all
sorts of new ‘laws’ and ‘organizing principles’ to explain the amazing diversity, creativity,
ingenuity and beauty of life. Michael Denton, for example, speaks of ‘a preordained
pattern, written into the laws of nature from the beginning’.2 Paul Davies says that in
addition to the laws of physics, there are ‘general organizing principles that supervise
the behavior of complex systems at higher organizational levels’.3 Systems theorist
Fritjof Capra says that there is an ‘inherent tendency’ in nature towards the
‘spontaneous emergence of increasing order and complexity’.4 But as already noted,
‘laws of nature’, ‘organizing principles’ and ‘inherent tendencies’ are purely descriptive
terms and explain nothing.

Molecular biologist James Shapiro invokes ‘natural genetic engineering’ to explain how
novelty is created in the course of evolution.5 He rejects the traditional view that the
genome is a read-only memory system subject to change by accidental damage and
copying errors, and shows in great detail that cells are able to ‘rewrite’ their own
genomes, especially in response to outside stresses:

Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and
interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth, and proliferation. They
possess corresponding sensory, communication, information-processing,
and decision-making capabilities. Cells are built to evolve; they have the
ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly through well-described
natural genetic engineering and epigenetic processes as well as by cell
mergers. Evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and
multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification functions and
cell fusions.6

According to Shapiro, ‘The DNA record definitely does not support the slow
accumulation of random gradual changes transmitted by restricted patterns of vertical
descent.’7 There is abundant evidence that horizontal DNA transfer has played a key
role in evolution; organisms can quickly co-opt structures from other organisms and re-
engineer them. ‘The data’, he says, ‘are overwhelmingly in favor of the saltationist
school that postulated major genomic changes at key moments in evolution.’8 He does
not explain the origin of the first cell or of cells’ ‘cognitive’ abilities.

Many biologists fiercely oppose the concept of natural genetic engineering, and the idea
of ‘cell cognition, decision-making, and goal-oriented function’, because they feel it
implies an engineer and therefore supports intelligent design. Willam Dembski, a
proponent of intelligent design, remarks:

Organisms that can do their own natural genetic engineering are themselves
marvels of engineering. We need to be engineers even to understand them.
 Moreover, the engineering feats they accomplish vastly overshadow human
technological prowess. So why should it be a stretch to think that such
systems are themselves the result of engineering?9

Shapiro rejects the idea of a ‘guiding intelligence outside of nature’. So does the
theosophic worldview, for nothing can be outside of infinite nature; it also recognizes
that the universe is pervaded by mind and intelligence, manifesting in many different
degrees in all manner of life forms (including cells), but that consciousness cannot be
reduced to the operations of physical matter.

References

1. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p.
170.
2. Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny, New York: Free Press, 1998, p. 282.
3. Paul Davies, The Mind of God, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 182.
4. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, London: Flamingo, 1997, p. 222.
5. James A. Shapiro, Evolution: A view from the 21st century, Upper Saddle River,
NJ: FT Press Science, 2011; Casey Luskin, ‘James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View
from the 21st Century offers a stunning look at biological complexity and non-
Darwinian evolution’, 29 Aug. 2011, evolutionnews.org; James A. Shapiro, ‘“Is
James Shapiro a design theorist?”: James Shapiro replies’, 16 Jan. 2012,
evolutionnews.org.
6. Evolution: A view from the 21st century, p. 143.
7. Ibid., p. 126.
8. Ibid., p. 89.
9. William A. Dembski, ‘Borderline heretic: James Shapiro and his 21st century view
of evolution’, 2012, designinference.com.

Morphic fields

Rupert Sheldrake goes a step further by recognizing the need for nonphysical causal
factors – which he calls morphic fields. These include morphogenetic fields (which guide
the development and maintenance of the bodies of organisms), motor fields (which
organize movements), behavioural fields (which organize habitual and instinctive
behaviour), mental fields (associated with conscious and unconscious mental activity),
and social and cultural fields. He argues that natural systems at all levels of complexity
– from atoms to organisms and societies of organisms – are animated, organized and
coordinated by these fields, which contain an inherent memory. Natural systems inherit
this collective memory from all previous things of their kind by ‘morphic resonance’;
what happens therefore depends on what has happened before.

During embryogenesis, groups of relatively unspecialized cells act as ‘morphogenetic

germs’ that tune into the morphogenetic fields that guide the development of particular
bodily structures. A given type of morphogenesis usually follows a particular
developmental pathway, but may also proceed towards the final form from different
morphogenetic germs and by different pathways, as shown by organisms’ ability to
repair themselves after damage. If unusual environmental conditions or genetic
changes alter the structure of a germ sufficiently, it may become associated with a
different morphogenetic field or no field at all. The pattern of gene activity controlled by
homeotic genes affects a whole pathway of morphogenesis. Mutations in these genes
affect the tuning of morphogenetic germs to particular morphogenetic fields, just as an
alteration to a transistor or condenser in a tuning circuit could cause a television to tune
into a different channel or to lose the ability to tune into any channel at all.

Evolution, says Sheldrake, ‘involves more than a change in gene frequencies: it

involves the natural selection and stabilization of patterns of organization brought about
by morphic fields. These fields themselves evolve.’1 He argues that the origin of new
morphic fields could be ascribed to chance, or to creativity inherent in nature, or to a
transcendent creative agency. He says that morphic fields never completely vanish
when the species or entity they organize dies but continue to exist as ‘potential
organizing patterns of influence’, and that this explains why the same evolutionary
pathways are sometimes repeated.

To some extent, morphic fields correspond to the inner, subtler bodies or souls
postulated in mystic traditions, and the morphic field of Gaia corresponds to the subtler
(astral and akashic) planes interpenetrating our physical globe. But Sheldrake’s concept
of morphic fields is extremely hazy. He describes them as ‘fields of information’, saying
that they are not a type of matter or energy and are detectable only by their effects on
material systems. However, if morphic fields were absolutely nonmaterial, they would be
pure nothingness and therefore devoid of any explanatory power. It is more logical to
conceive of them as finer, nonphysical patterns of energy-substance, too ethereal to be
detectable by scientific instruments.2

Instead of a physical world organized by nebulous nonmaterial ‘fields’, theosophy

proposes the existence of a whole spectrum of paraphysical forces and entities, ranging
from elemental nature-forces to spiritual intelligences. The idea that there are subtler
energies and entities at work makes more sense than the belief that there are abstract
‘laws’ and ‘principles’ floating around, magically creating order out of chaos, or that
chance and spontaneity just happen to be creative. From a theosophical viewpoint, the
physical world and everything within it are organized and guided from within outwards,
and are self-organizing only if ‘self’ is taken to include supraphysical levels of their
constitution.

The notion of inner planes of existence does not of course ‘explain’ things in the sense
of offering an ‘ultimate answer’; after all, we could then enquire after the properties of
these subtler states of energy-substance, the characteristics of the various entities that
populate the unseen realms, and the way in which these supraphysical factors influence
and interact with the physical world. The point is simply that if we do in fact live in a
multilevelled reality, as many ‘anomalous’ phenomena imply, then paraphysical forces
and entities will inevitably play a role in evolution too. The basic principle is that
whatever is happening on any particular plane is influenced by subtler forces connected
with inner planes, rather than by absolutely nonmaterial ‘laws’, ‘principles’, ‘fields’, etc.3

References

1. Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic resonance and the habits of
nature, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 285.
 2. See Rupert Sheldrake: a theosophical appraisal, http://davidpratt.info.
3. See Worlds within worlds, http://davidpratt.info.

7. Chance, creation and design

Miraculous accidents

Darwinists believe that one type of creature can eventually evolve into a completely
different type of creature through genetic changes that are totally random and
purposeless. Consider the transition from land reptiles to fish:

[A]s ordinary land reptiles ventured into the water, ... they now needed fish-
like tails. Obligingly, with no possible knowledge that such was needed,
random, accidental mutations altered the incredibly complex genetic
apparatus that had produced reptiles in such a way that beautifully designed,
marvellously functional fish-like tails were produced on a reptile previously
floundering awkwardly around in the water. Likewise, feet and legs were no
longer useful for propulsion in water, and so the vast complex of genes that
coded for all the structures in feet and legs was somehow, a mutation here,
a mutation there, transformed miraculously into the incredible complex of
genes required to code for the tendons, blood vessels, nervous system,
muscles, bones, and other structures, all arranged in a precise way, to
constitute the paddles now highly efficient for propulsion in water. It is
evident that, in spite of fervent denials, evolutionists do believe, even in
miracles.1

To transform a reptile into a mammal, all sorts of radical changes would be required.
Darwinists believe that this transition is very well documented by the fossil record, which
shows certain therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) becoming increasingly mammal-like in
the course of the Triassic. Reptiles have multiple jaw bones and a single bone in the
ear, while mammals have a single jaw bone and three in the ear. The gradual
reconfiguration of these structures, via the intermediate stage of a double jaw joint, is
attributed to a long series of random mutations; most were harmful, but some produced
just the right changes, so that the surviving creatures could continue to chew and hear.
The essential organ of hearing in the mammal is the extremely complicated organ of
Corti, which no reptile possesses. At the same time, many other marvellous new
physiological and anatomical organs and processes had to be invented, such as a new
mode of reproduction, mammary glands, temperature regulation, hair, and a new way of
breathing (including a diaphragm). Hair develops from complex follicles deep in the
dermal layer of skin, quite unlike reptilian scales, their presumed precursors. Mammary
glands (the source of the name ‘mammals’) allegedly evolved from sweat glands
(missing in reptiles) and milk from sweat. It’s unclear what happened to mammal babies
during the supposed slow transition from a thin, watery, salty solution of urea and
various toxins to a thick, nutritious liquid rich in protein, sugar, fat and antibodies.2
 Fig. 7.1. The organ of Corti contains rows of sensory hair cells, which generate nerve
impulses in response to sound vibrations.3

For the mammalian reproductive system to function properly, the following features,
among others, must all be present: ovary and testes to manufacture ova and sperm,
each of which must have only half the normal number of chromosomes; the male body
must have a mechanism for implanting the sperm in the female’s body; sperm cells
must have the ability and instinct to seek out the waiting ovum; the ovum must accept a
single sperm, and then block the entry of any further sperm; the sperm cell must unite
with the ovum in a way that ensures ordered blending of the nuclear chromosomes and
genes; the fertilized ovum must initiate cell division and proliferation; the growing
embryo must acquire a placenta and umbilicus to conduct blood and waste products
between mother and embryo; the fetus must be expelled from the womb at full term;
mammary glands are needed to supply liquid nourishment to the newborn babe. All
these features could hardly be the outcome of a slow accumulation of genetic copying
mishaps. To paraphrase Gould: What good is half a penis? Or a sperm without a tail?
The entire reproductive system would have to appear all at once in perfect working
order.

As indicated earlier, many Darwinists have now resorted to invoking regulatory genes as
a magical solution to every problem. For instance, Michael Schwartz writes:

If fins become limbs with feet at their ends merely through the turning on of
homeobox genes in novel locations and the insertion of a short molecular
sequence into one particular homeobox gene, then the evolution of primate
hands and feet would be an even simpler evolutionary feat.4

In other words, a regulatory gene is switched on here and adjusted there and hey presto
– hands and feet appear! The origin of the regulatory gene system itself, and any
mutations that regulatory and structural genes undergo, are of course attributed to blind
chance.

The living world presents endless fascinating examples of ingenious designs that
expose the sheer idiocy of standard Darwinian explanations. The butterfly, for instance,
starts life as a tiny hard-shelled egg within which an embryo grows and eats its way out
to become a caterpillar, which proceeds to gorge itself on vegetation. When fully grown,
the caterpillar sheds its skin for the last time, and changes into a pupa or chrysalis
containing an amorphous mass of tissues, which somehow rebuilds itself into a totally
different structure with a totally different lifestyle. It is surely an insult to our intelligence
to insist that the mysterious metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly could have
originated by fortuitous genetic mutations. But as Michael Behe says, ‘In some ways,
grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys ...’5

The electric eel, typically growing to about 2 metres long, has three abdominal pairs of
organs that produce electricity, extending four-fifths of the length of its body. They are
composed of 5000 to 6000 stacked electroplates and can produce a shock of up to 500
volts. All the various components have to be present for the system to work; without the
insulating fatty layer, for example, the eel would electrocute itself. Darwin himself
admitted: ‘The electric organs of fishes offer another case of special difficulty; it is
impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced.’6

Or consider the bombardier beetle, half an inch in length, which is equipped for its
defence with a miniature liquid-fuel rocket engine. The beetle stores hydroquinones and
hydrogen peroxide in an internal reservoir, from which the mixtures can be pumped into
a reaction chamber containing enzymes. The valve is closed, and the explosive reaction
at 100°C forces the spray out through a turretlike orifice in the beetle’s rear end, which
sends it in any desired direction. This complex defence mechanism along with the
instincts needed to operate it could hardly be the result of gradual, random evolution.

The flatworm called Microstomum also has a remarkable defence system. When it is
attacked, defensive cells called nematocysts, just beneath the surface of the worm’s
back, are discharged and sting the attacker. The worms obtain their nematocysts from
hydras; normally they avoid hydras, but when they need more nematocysts, they eat
them and digest all their tissues except these particular cells. After the nematocysts
have been enclosed within certain of the flatworm’s cells, those designed to fire coiled
or sticky threads are digested, while those that fire poisonous barbs are transported to
sites just beneath the outer layer of the worm’s back, where they are oriented so that
their stings will fire upward. The cells forming the worm’s outer layer become very thin
just above the nematocysts, providing portholes for the firing of the stings. Finally, the
cells encapsulating the nematocysts undergo extensive changes that enable these cells
to act as trigger mechanisms.7

There are countless puzzling examples of mimicry in the plant and animal worlds. For
instance, the aardwolf resembles the striped hyena – an aggressive animal that most
predators avoid. The aardwolf possesses an erectile mane along its back that makes it
appear much larger than it really is and enhances its resemblance to the hyena. The
similarities even extend to the aardwolf’s internal anatomy. How did random mutations
and natural selection manage to accomplish this?
 Fig. 7.2. The aardwolf (top) mimics the striped hyena (bottom).8

Fig. 7.3. A Philippine anglerfish, looking

just like a rock or shell, waves a piece of
bait resembling a small fish which is
found in that region. The bait, which is
part of its body, has fins, a tail, and black
spots for eyes. The bait attracts predatory
fish close enough for the anglerfish to
snap them up.9

References

1. Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The fossils still say no!, El Cajon, CA: Institute for
Creation Research, 1995, pp. 104-5.
2. Ibid., pp. 167-73; John D. Morris and Frank J. Sherwin, The Fossil Record:
Unearthing nature’s history of life, Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research,
 2010, p. 154.
3. ‘Ear, human’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM 2004.
4. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of
species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 38.
5. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The biochemical challenge to evolution,
New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 23.
6. Balázs Hornyánszky and István Tasi, Nature’s I.Q., Badger, CA: Torchlight
Publishing, 2009, p. 66; wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel.
7. Richard L. Thompson, Mechanistic and Nonmechanistic Science: An investigation
into the nature of consciousness and form, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book
Trust, 1981, pp. 193-5.
8. William R. Corliss (comp.), Biological Anomalies: Mammals I, Glen Arm, MD:
Sourcebook Project, 1995, p. 17.
9. William R. Corliss (comp.), Science Frontiers: Some anomalies and curiosities of
nature, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1994, p. 154.

Irreducible complexity

In Darwin’s time the cell was believed to be a ‘homogeneous globule of protoplasm’, but
it is now known to contain systems of mind-boggling complexity. Some cells swim using
a cilium, a structure that looks like a hair and beats like a whip. Cilia are very
complicated molecular machines, containing about 200 different kinds of protein parts. It
is an example of what Michael Behe calls an ‘irreducibly complex system’ – i.e. a
system which ceases to function if any one of its interrelated parts is removed. Such
systems, he says, cannot be produced in the gradual, step-by-step manner that Darwin
envisaged, and would have to arise all at once.

Another irreducibly complex system is the rotatory flagellum – a sort of outboard motor
that some bacteria use to swim. Some flagella turn at more than 1000 revolutions per
second. The device includes a long tail that acts as a propeller; the hook region, which
attaches the propeller to the drive shaft; the motor, which uses a flow of acid from
outside the bacterium to the inside to power the turning; a stator, which keeps the
structure stationary in the plane of the membrane while the propeller turns; and bushing
material to allow the drive shaft to poke up through the bacterial membrane. In the
absence of the hook, the motor, the propeller, the drive shaft, or most of the 40 types of
proteins necessary for the construction and operation of the flagellum, either no
flagellum is produced or one that does not work at all.1
 Fig. 7.4. Drawing of a bacterial flagellum showing the filament, hook, and the
motor imbedded in the inner and outer cell membranes and the cell wall.2

Other examples of irreducible complexity include vision, blood clotting and the
intracellular protein transport system. Behe points out that the technical literature is
essentially silent when it comes to explaining in any detail how such intricate systems
might have evolved in a Darwinian fashion; most of the papers in molecular biology
journals are concerned with DNA sequence analysis. On the subject of the flagellum,
Simon Conway Morris writes:

While we should not underestimate the difficulty in explaining how such a

flagellar motor might have evolved, everything else we know about evolution
indicates that the pathway to construction will involve the twin processes of
cobbling together and co-option, with at least some of the proteins being
recruited in quite surprising ways from some other function elsewhere in the
cell.3

In other word, Morris has nothing to offer but a pious hope.

Darwin admitted that the belief that an organ as perfect as the eye could have been
formed by natural selection is ‘enough to stagger anyone’, but appealed to the
enormous period of time available. Even more staggering is the current belief that
camera-type eyes (like our own) evolved randomly and independently at least seven
times. Like Darwin, Richard Dawkins thinks that the eye evolved step by step through a
series of intermediate stages. But improvements in the structure of the eye are useless
unless they go hand in hand with improved neural processing. And even the ‘light-
sensitive spot’ that Dawkins takes as his starting point is a multicell organ, each of
whose cells makes the complexity of a motorcycle or television look paltry in
comparison. Dawkins merely adds complex systems to complex systems and calls that
an explanation. Behe comments:

This can be compared to answering the question ‘How is a stereo system

made?’ with the words ‘By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier, and
adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.’4

Fig. 7.5. Cross-section of the human eye. The retina has 130 million light-
sensitive rods and cones, which cause photochemical reactions that
transform light into electrical impulses. About a billion impulses are
transmitted to the brain every second, by means that are poorly understood.

Behe illustrates the complexity of vision with the following rather technical but still highly
simplified description: When a photon of light hits the retina, it interacts with a small
organic molecule called cis-retinal, causing its rather bent shape to straighten out. This
changes the shape of the protein rhodopsin, which is bound to it, and exposes a binding
site that allows the protein transducin to stick to it. Part of the transducin complex now
dissociates and interacts with a protein called phosphodiesterase, which then acquires
the ability to cut a molecule called cyclic-GMP and turn it into 5'-GMP. Some of this
sticks to another protein called an ion channel. Normally the ion channel allows sodium
ions into the cell, but when the concentration of cyclic-GMP decreases because of the
action of the phosphodiesterase, the cyclic-GMP bound to the ion channel eventually
falls off, causing a change in shape that shuts the channel. As a result, sodium ions can
no longer enter the cell, the concentration of sodium in the cell decreases, and the
voltage across the cell membrane changes. That in turn causes a wave of electrical
polarization to be sent down the optic nerve to the brain. The system then has to
regenerate and return to the starting point ready for the next incoming photon.5 When
the electrical signals are processed, integrated and interpreted by the brain (and mind),
vision results.

Michael Schwartz believes that by invoking regulatory genes, the need for an elaborate
account of the eye’s origin and complexity disappears:

[T]he reasons lie in knowing that there are homeobox genes for eye
formation and that when one of them, the Rx gene in particular, is activated
in the right place and at the right time, an individual has an eye.6

A more vacuous Darwinian ‘explanation’ is difficult to imagine!

References

1. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and

Evidence for Design in the Universe, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000, pp.
123-4, 134-5; Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits of
Darwinism, New York: Free Press, 2008, pp. 261-8.
2. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 71.
3. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 111.
4. Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39.
5. Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, pp. 117-9; Darwin’s Black Box,
pp. 18-22.
6. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of
species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 362.

God and imperfection

In the early 19th century, Anglican priest William Paley argued that if we found a watch
on the ground we would assume its various parts had been designed and put together
for a purpose. He went on to argue that highly complex living systems, too, must have
been designed. Supporters of the modern intelligent design (ID) movement argue that
intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the
information in the cell, because only intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to
produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Biotechnologist Matti
Leisola writes:

In our everyday experience, we find that intelligent agents create new

information (books, song lyrics, speeches, software). And we never witness
mindless forces generating new information. Laboratory experiments,
computer modeling, and probability mathematics all confirm that this uniform
 experience likely is universally the case – information is the product of mind.
Based on this combination of experience, experimentation, and
mathematical analysis, we can infer that the best explanation for biological
information is intelligent design.1

He describes ID as ‘a historical science of design detection’ and likens it to the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), archaeology and cryptography.2

Michael Behe argues that random mutations and natural selection play a role in
evolution, but that ‘design is evident when a number of separate, interacting
components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the
individual components’.3 Intelligent design is also invoked to explain the vast chain of
coincidences that make life on earth possible – e.g. the relative strengths of the four
physical forces, the ratio between strong and weak chemical bonds, the thermal
properties of water, and the properties of the earth’s atmosphere. If the ‘laws of physics’
had been only slightly different, carbon-based life would be impossible.4 Darwinists
reject the intelligent-design hypothesis as untestable and unfalsifiable, and therefore
pseudoscience. However, the same charge can be levelled against the neo-Darwinian
hypothesis that the entire living world originated through random mutations and natural
selection.

The official Christian church accepts the orthodox Darwinian tale that evolution is a
blind, unguided process, while adhering to the belief that the world was created by a
supernatural God. According to this perspective, science is the domain of rational
knowledge, while religion is the domain of faith. Many clergy members from the
Christian, Jewish and Buddhist religions have endorsed the neo-Darwinist theory of
evolution as a ‘foundational scientific truth’, and criticize fellow religionists who
challenge that theory.5 But mindlessly accepting unproven materialistic and irrational
beliefs as ‘scientific truth’, in the hope that scientists will then leave religion alone, is a
backward step.

The ID movement leaves open the question of the identity of the designer or designers,
whether they are natural or ‘supernatural’, and how their designs are imprinted on
matter. ID advocates disagree about the reality of common ancestry. Many are Christian
theists (some of whom are young-earth creationists), and believe that there is only one
designer/creator: the hypothetical omnipotent and omniscient God of orthodox Christian
theology. Biblical creationists accept that genetic variation (microevolution) is constantly
taking place, but reject macroevolution and the theory of common descent. They do not
believe that God intervenes by planning and directing mutations to accomplish large-
scale evolutionary changes. At various times in the past, God supposedly created each
new kind of creature out of nothing by supernatural means, so that these newly created
beings appeared on earth abruptly and fully developed. A 2012 survey found that 46%
of Americans believe that ‘God created human beings in their present form at one time
within the past 10,000 years’.6

Darwinists argue that since there are flaws in the designs of creatures we see on earth,
they cannot be the product of an intelligent agent – this is known as the ‘argument from
imperfection’. As S.J. Gould put it, ‘Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof
of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process,
constrained by history, follows perforce.’ His favourite example was the panda’s thumb.
The giant panda has a thumb that it uses to grasp the bamboo shoots that form its main
diet. However, its thumb is not one of the five fingers of the normal mammalian paw.
Instead, it is an extra digit constructed from a modified wrist bone, with appropriate
rearrangement of the musculature. Gould assumes that a designer would have given
the panda a real opposable thumb, and concludes that the panda’s thumb must have
evolved by Darwinian means.7

However, it is impossible to disprove design on the basis of unprovable assumptions

about how a hypothetical designer would or would not act. As Behe says, the designer
might have multiple motives, with engineering excellence often relegated to a secondary
role. Furthermore, the fact that living systems are not perfect does not prove that there
is no design at all and that random Darwinian evolution is a fact. Note that Gould fails to
provide an adequate Darwinian explanation of how the Panda’s thumb evolved:

He simply states that a single change in a regulatory gene, which controls

the action of many structural genes, was responsible for the whole complex
development of bone and muscle. But he does not specify which regulatory
gene changed, nor does he explain how a change in the regulatory gene
would orchestrate this remarkable transformation. He offers nothing more
than the traditional vague magic-wand explanation.8

ID proponents, including creationists, respond to the argument from imperfection by

trying to show that alleged ‘imperfect’ designs are actually sophisticated engineering
feats or they regard them as the product of degeneration of a rational and beneficial
original design. Take the human eye, for example. Darwinists argue that the vertebrate
eye is a botched design as it is wired backward: the photoreceptors face away from the
light, resulting in a ‘blind spot’. ID proponents point out that positioning the nerves in
front of the light-sensitive retinal cells ensures maximum blood supply to the retina and
therefore maximum sensitivity. Whether the eye is perfect or not, the fact remains that
‘The scientific literature contains no evidence that natural selection working on mutation
can produce either an eye with a blind spot, an eye without a blind spot, an eyelid, a
lens, a retina, rhodopsin, or retinal.’9

Robert Wesson draws attention to many odd and seemingly illogical features in the
living world. The human body, for example, is ill adapted in many ways:

The body is a bundle of imperfections, with sagging bellies, drooping

breasts, useless protuberances above the nostrils, rotting teeth with trouble-
prone third molars, aching feet, bulging buttocks, easily strained backs, and
naked tender skin, subject to cuts, bites, and, for many, sunburn. We are
poor runners and are only about a third as strong as chimpanzees smaller
than ourselves.10

However, these relatively minor defects do not prove that the body arose from chance
mutations and random selection. From a theosophical point of view, the entities
embodying in physical forms get the body they need to gain the experiences and learn
the lessons necessary for their evolutionary progress. Evolving, imperfect souls are
unlikely to have absolutely perfect bodies, and the misuse by humans of their free will is
the root cause of a multitude of ailments.

Evolutionists have argued that the forelimbs of turtles, horses, humans, birds and bats
are less than perfectly adapted because they are modified from an inherited structure
rather than designed from completely ‘raw’ materials for a specific purpose. But the
mere fact that vertebrate forelimbs are modifications of the same basic design is no
proof of anything. It is certainly compatible with intelligent design, for why shouldn’t
designers – who need not be omnipotent – produce new features in organisms by
modifying existing ones?

Behe, who describes himself as ‘a pretty conventional Roman Catholic’, believes there
is a single intelligent designer, ‘beyond nature’, but that it is also responsible for creating
‘a torrent of pain’ and ‘untold human misery’. He asks: ‘Are viruses and parasites part of
some brilliant, as-yet-unappreciated economy of nature, or do they reflect the bungling
of an incompetent, fallible designer?’11 Other believers in a benevolent intelligent
designer predict that genetic studies will reveal that virulent bacteria are degenerative
systems resulting from loss of original genetic information.12

Features that have no apparent use at all are also cited as evidence against design. For
instance, less than 5% of the DNA in most plants and animals codes for proteins; the
remainder was originally labelled ‘junk DNA’ or ‘pseudogenes’. Darwinists argued that
this non-functional DNA confirmed that genes mutated randomly, resulting in a genome
riddled with useless information, mistakes and broken genes. However, it has been
known for decades that many non-protein-coding sequences do have important
functions, such as encoding RNA molecules involved in the regulation of gene
expression. It has also been suggested that some of this DNA may consist of
‘redundant’ ancestral genes that are no longer expressed, or that it may contain
information for future evolutionary events. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements
(ENCODE) project infers that at least 80% of human DNA serves some biochemical
purpose, though many Darwinists continue to argue that the figure is closer to 10%.13

References

1. Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, Heretic: One scientist’s journey from Darwin to
design, Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2018, Kindle ed., ch. 5.
2. Ibid., ch. 8.
3. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 194.
4. See Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the laws of biology reveal purpose
in the universe, New York: Free Press, 1998.
5. The Clergy Letter Project, theclergyletterproject.org.
6. gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx.
7. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 20.
8. Sri Ramesvara Swami (ed.), Origins: Higher dimensions in science, Los Angeles,
CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1984, p. 47.
9. James P. Gills and Tom Woodward, Darwinism under the Microscope: How recent
scientific evidence points to divine design, Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2002,
pp. 151-9; Darwin’s Black Box, p. 224.
10. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p.
95.
11. Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits of Darwinism,
New York: Free Press, 2008, pp. 228, 232, 237-8.
12. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for intelligent
design, New York: HarperOne, 2009, pp. 490-1.
13. Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the
 case for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2013, pp. 400-2; Jonathan
Wells, Zombie Science: More icons of evolution, Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute
Press, 2017, Kindle ed., p. 129; Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The
hypothesis of formative causation, London: Icon Books, 3rd ed., 2009, p. 180;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA.

Monotheism vs. creative powers

Many people are unable to reconcile the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, perfect
creator with the suffering, imperfections and waste in nature. The gnostics, for example,
argued that God must have been

an inferior deity, a builder, receiving his ‘orders,’ so to say, from the divine
architects ... [T]he manifold imperfections and incompletenesses so plainly
apparent even to us humans, in the kosmical system, proclaim that it could
not be the work of an all-perfect and kosmically omnipotent Deity; from utter
perfection could spring forth only a perfect and complete work.1

Monotheists might argue that God chose to create a potentially perfect universe, but
endowed each soul with a measure of free will, which can be used for good or ill.
However, this explanation is insufficient, for if God determines the character and
circumstances of birth of each new soul he supposedly creates, he would be
responsible for many of the numerous apparent injustices in the human and animal
worlds – which would surely reflect rather badly on him.

The theistic idea of an infinite ‘God’ outside the boundless universe is illogical; there’s
no room for two infinitudes. It makes more sense to take the pantheistic view that
divinity is infinite nature itself, comprising both physical and nonphysical realms. Such a
divinity is an abstraction, not a being who thinks, designs and creates. Moreover, the
idea of God creating the universe and everything within it out of literally nothing is
absurd: nothing can come from nothing, and therefore infinite, ever-changing nature
must always have existed – whatever creationists and big-bang cosmologists may
claim.2

Instead of a single supreme creator-god, more sophisticated forms of creationism hold

that a wide range of spiritual and other nonphysical beings are involved in the process
of ‘creation’.3 In contrast to strict creationism, other researchers and mystical traditions
propose that there is a physical evolutionary process, but they go beyond strict
Darwinism by proposing that this process is guided and directed by hierarchies of
paraphysical entities.

19th-century naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, parted company with his
contemporary, Charles Darwin, after coming to the conclusion that unaided natural
selection was unable to account for the physical form of humans and that the guiding
action of ‘higher intelligences’ was a ‘necessary part of the great laws which govern the
material Universe’.4 20th-century anthropologist Robert Broom believed that various
spiritual and psychic agencies were at work in guiding and controlling evolution, some
benevolent and some malignant.5
Alexander Mebane proposes that a variety of subdivine designers guide the process of
saltational evolution. He suggests that the abundance of weirdly fantastic life forms and
lifestyles indicates that the designers have always competed with one another.6 Robert
Gilson proposes that the ultimate ‘all-wise and all-powerful’ divine source delegates
most of the work of creation to a vast hierarchy of subordinate but largely autonomous
powers. These nonphysical agencies bring about genetic mutations, but the lower ranks
may make errors.7 Both Mebane and Gilson seem to imply that the designers work
predominantly selfconsciously.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel recognizes that the materialistic, reductionist Darwinian

paradigm has failed to explain the origin and evolution of life, and the existence of
consciousness, cognition and our moral sense, purely in terms of purposeless
physicochemical laws and a long series of accidents. Rejecting the idea of an intelligent
agency outside the natural order, he hopes that new ‘principles’ that are ‘teleological
rather than mechanistic’ will eventually be discovered.8 There certainly appear to be
purposeful processes at work in nature, but invoking abstract teleological principles
does not help to explain them – it’s real, natural, but predominantly nonphysical forces,
energies, entities and intelligences that are required.

The ageless wisdom tradition postulates an interlinked series of nonphysical worlds and
entities behind the workings of the physical world, as echoed in many religious and
philosophical systems. Christianity, for instance, speaks of angels, archangels,
dominions, principalities, etc. And in the first verse of Genesis – ‘In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth’ – the word normally translated as ‘God’ is actually a
plural word, elohim, meaning ‘gods’ (el means ‘god’, eloh means ‘goddess’, and -im is
the masculine plural ending). The word translated as ‘created’ is a reflexive verb
signifying that the androgynous creative powers made or formed themselves into, i.e.
became, the spiritual realms and the material realm.9 The elohim are clearly not
equivalent to boundless infinitude, which is referred to in the second verse as ‘the deep’
(tehom), corresponding to the ayn soph of the kabbalists, the shunyata of the Buddhists,
and the parabrahman of the Hindus.

The most detailed and accessible presentation of the ancient wisdom is to be found in
modern theosophy. The theosophical teachings on evolution given out since the
formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 are merely a general outline of the
information in the possession of the Brotherhood of Adepts.10 This information is said to
have been compiled and repeatedly verified by countless generations of sages and
seers, whose occult powers grant them access to the inner realms of nature and enable
them to read the records of the earth’s history clairvoyantly.

References

1. G. de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, Pasadena, CA:

Theosophical University Press (TUP), 2nd ed., 1979, p. 509.
2. See Trends in cosmology, http://davidpratt.info.
3. See Michael A. Cremo, Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory,
Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 2003.
4. Quoted in H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 1:339.
5. R. Broom, The Coming of Man, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1933, pp. 11-2, 196-
 8, 220-5.
6. Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing, 1994, pp.
69-70.
7. Robert J. Gilson, Evolution in a New Light: The outworking of cosmic imaginism,
Norwich: Pelegrin Trust, 1992, pp. 99-109, 122.
8. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception
of nature is almost certainly false, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
9. G. de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy, TUP, 1973, pp. 129-33;
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, pp. 95-104.
10. See The mahatmas, http://davidpratt.info.

8. Theosophy: evolution from within

Darwin vs. design

[A]ll things had their origin in spirit – evolution having originally begun from
above and proceeded downwards, instead of the reverse, as taught in the
Darwinian theory.1

It is not against zoological and anthropological discoveries, based on the

fossils of man and animal, that every mystic and believer in a divine soul
inwardly revolts, but only against the uncalled-for conclusions built on
preconceived theories and made to fit in with certain prejudices.2

Darwinism is rooted in the materialistic assumption that the universe consists only of
physical matter-energy, that living organisms are no more than complex machines, and
that mind and consciousness are simply a by-product of the brain. It claims that one
physical organism can be transformed into a completely different physical organism
through the accumulation of favourable mutations thrown up by blind chance, without
any overall direction, innate purpose or inner urge.

Theosophy, on the other hand, describes the physical world as the outer shell of inner
worlds – astral, mental and spiritual. Likewise, every physical organism is animated by
inner, subtler ‘bodies’ or souls, including an astral model-body, an instinctive or
selfconscious mind, of widely varying degrees of development, and a spiritual-divine self
or monad. Evolution (lit. ‘unrolling’) involves the unfolding of latent powers and
capacities in response to impulses from within and stimuli from without, and the
development of suitable physical forms through which they can be expressed.
Evolutionary change takes place on every plane of reality, including every level of our
own constitution.

According to theosophy, organs develop and organisms evolve in response to an inner

impulse and inner direction. Just as physical expressions of human creativity and
inventiveness exist first as ethereal ideas or thought-forms, so is every physical organ
or organism an expression of a preexisting ethereal prototype. In other words, ‘no form
can be given to anything, either by nature or by man, whose ideal type does not already
exist on the subjective plane’.
 Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone has ever been
created, and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced ‘becoming,’
i.e., objectivising into its present materiality, or expanding from within
outwards, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its
grossest appearance. Therefore our human forms have existed in the
Eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes ...3

It is puerile, says Blavatsky, to suppose that blind, indifferent cells could arrange
themselves into organs, or that the marvellous complexities of the human body could be
produced without the ‘supervisory presence of a quasi-intelligent impulse’ or ‘sub-
conscious intelligence pervading matter’; this instinctive, directing intelligence is
‘ultimately traceable to a reflection of the divine and dhyani-chohanic wisdom’.4 ‘Dhyani-
chohans’ (lit. ‘lords of meditation’) is a general term for spiritual entities, whose collective
consciousness makes up a ‘universal mind’, whether it be that of a planet, star, galaxy,
etc.

Blavatsky writes:

there are centres of creative power for every ROOT or parent species of the
host of forms of vegetable and animal life. This is, again, no ‘special
creation,’ nor is there any ‘Design,’ except in the general ‘ground-plan’
worked out by the universal law. But there are certainly ‘designers,’ though
these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the
term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given
them by the ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason – the ONE
LIFE and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, or possibility
of working on any other, during the present manvantara, at any rate. That
they work in cycles and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of
progression, is what the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they
act by design in the details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is what
natural history has sufficient evidence for. In the creation of new species,
departing sometimes very widely from the parent stock, as in the great
variety of the genus Felix – like the Lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc. – it is the
‘designers’ who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving the
species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the
new environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal
and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For, it is those
terrestrial spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature; which, if it fails
occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed
with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and
attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.5

There are ‘designers’ of many degrees, but none of them are to be thought of as
omniscient, omnipotent, selfconscious gods who can ‘create’ whatever they like. Their
work on our plane is predominantly instinctive and automatic, reflecting the karmic
needs of the evolving entities and wider cycles of planetary activity.

Nature is ‘an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (elementals)

guided by high planetary spirits (dhyan chohans), whose collective aggregate forms ...
the MIND of the universe and its immutable LAW’.6 Just as many of our own bodily
processes, such as respiration, blood circulation, digestion, growth, and healing are
regulated by our automatic will (autonomic nervous system), which in a sense is a
reflection of our conscious self, so the regular or ‘lawlike’ operations of nature can be
regarded as the automatic and instinctual operations on our plane of the will and
consciousness of higher beings; the ‘laws’ of nature are therefore more like habits of
nature. As G. de Purucker explains, these ‘laws’ are an expression of the actions of
what the ancients called ‘gods’. Exoterically, the gods were often anthropomorphized,
but esoterically the term denotes the ‘informing principles’ of nature – i.e. ‘formless’
entities, the ‘conscious and semi-conscious energies in nature’.7

Like most world religions, theosophy speaks of hierarchies of creative powers of

different grades, providing the inner impulses behind the outer workings and processes
of the physical world. They include ‘architects’ and ‘builders’, the lowest being the
semiconscious nature-forces or elementals. The general idea is that, in any particular
hierarchical world-system, the more evolved forms of consciousness-substance guide
and inform the less progressed forms. Theosophy therefore denies the existence of
design in the sense of a ‘special creation’ by a supernatural creator. It postulates,
however, a general evolutionary blueprint or ground plan, the result of past eras of
evolution, stored in the subtler (astral and akashic) realms, which is put into effect by a
variety of nonphysical agencies. Every evolutionary cycle builds on the one that went
before, and utilizes preexisting patterns and prototypes, which are modified and
adapted as required. This means that nothing has to be created entirely from scratch –
and certainly not out of ‘nothing’.

References

1. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University

Press (TUP), 1977 (1888), 2:170.
2. Ibid., 1:636-7.
3. Ibid., 1:282; also 1:58, 2:660.
4. Ibid., 2:299fn, 648-9.
5. Ibid., 2:732.
6. Ibid., 1:277-8.
7. G. de Purucker, Occult Glossary, TUP, 2nd ed., 1996, pp. 53-4.

Evolutionary rhythms

According to theosophy, the present earth is the reembodiment of a former earth (our
moon being the remains of its astral body), and the different classes or kingdoms of
monads forming and evolving on our globe are pursuing an evolutionary journey that
has no absolute beginning and will have no absolute end. In each grand cycle of
evolution, encompassing tens of billions of years, monads embody in each kingdom in
turn, from submineral (elemental) to superhuman (dhyani-chohanic).

The present earth and its life forms originated some 2 billion years ago in a highly
ethereal condition, and gradually materialized and condensed during the ‘descending
arc’ of the earth’s evolution, which lasted until the midpoint of the earth’s lifespan, some
4½ million years ago, in the middle of the current, fourth round of evolutionary activity.
Since then the ascending arc of etherealization and spiritualization has begun.1
The globe we live on is said to be the most material of 12 globes that make up the earth
planetary chain; the other globes are situated on more ethereal and spiritual planes and
are therefore unobservable by us. The different kingdoms or life-waves of monads make
seven rounds through all the globes in succession during each embodiment of a
planetary chain, spending many millions of years on each one, during which they
embody in suitable forms and pass through different stages of development. On any
globe, at any time, one kingdom dominates, and the bulk of its monads embody on that
globe. When a life-wave departs from a globe, it leaves behind its most advanced
representatives (often referred to by the Sanskrit term shishtas, meaning ‘remainders’).
When it returns to that globe in the next round, the monads reawaken these ethereal
seeds of life, which begin to materialize and differentiate into a variety of stocks
appropriate to that kingdom’s evolution.

Science Theosophy
Began (years BP) Began (years BP)
Phanerozoic eon
Cenozoic era
Quaternary period:
Holocene epoch 11,700
Pleistocene 2,588,000 1,090,000
Tertiary period:
Pliocene epoch 5,333,000 1,870,000
Miocene 23,030,000 3,670,000
Oligocene 33,900,000 5,280,000
Eocene 56,000,000 7,130,000
Palaeocene 66,000,000 7,870,000

Mesozoic era
Cretaceous 145,000,000 16,000,000
Jurassic 201,300,000 28,000,000
Triassic 252,170,000 44,000,000

Palaeozoic era
Permian 298,900,000 74,000,000
Carboniferous 358,900,000 110,000,000
Devonian 419,200,000 148,000,000
Silurian 443,400,000 179,000,000
Ordovician 485,400,000 214,000,000
Cambrian 541,000,000 250,000,000

Proterozoic eon
(Laurentian) (640,000,000) 320,000,000
(start of 4th round)
 Late 1,000,000,000
Middle 1,600,000,000 720,000,000
(start of 3rd round?)
Early 2,500,000,000

Archean eon
Neoarchean 2,800,000,000 1,300,000,000
(start of 2nd round?)
Mesoarchean 3,200,000,000
Palaeoarchean 3,600,000,000
Eoarchean 4,000,000,000

Hadean eon 4,600,000,000 2,170,000,000

(start of 1st round)

Fig. 8.1. Chronology of the geological ages. According to theosophy, the

scientific time-periods are too long by a factor of between about 2 and 9, due
to the false assumptions on which radiometric dating is based.2

Our earth’s fourth round began in the Late Precambrian, about 320 million years ago
(the corresponding ‘scientific’ figure being 640 million years). The appearance of the first
fossils of the metazoans (multicellular animals) about 600 million years ago, and their
sudden proliferation 530 million years ago in the spectacular ‘Cambrian explosion’
resulted from the reawakening of the astral root-types by the monads arriving on our
globe from the preceding globe.

Scientists believe that simple metazoans must have originated far earlier in the
Precambrian, and that older and more primitive fossils will eventually turn up.
Controversial evidence that an advanced land flora and insect fauna may have existed
in the Cambrian or even Precambrian has been found, but orthodox scientists reject it
as it does not fit in with their beliefs.3 Theosophy indicates that ethereal life forms
existed in earlier rounds, but since these boneless creatures would have left, at most,
only a fossilized imprint, and since scientists do not expect to find large Precambrian
fossils, this greatly reduces the likelihood of them recognizing such evidence for what it
is.

In the Cambrian explosion most of the animal phyla, or basic anatomical designs,
present in the known fossil record burst onto the scene, seemingly out of nowhere.
Many other phyla also evolved during this time but have since gone extinct. No new
classes of animals have arisen since the mid-Palaeozoic, and no new orders since the
radiations of the mammals and birds in the early Tertiary, following the demise of the
dinosaurs. The overall trend has been towards an increasing number of species based
on fewer and fewer basic body plans. For instance, there are about three million species
of insects alive today, but only three basic arthropod designs, compared with over 20 in
the mid-Cambrian.

From the start of the fourth round until the midpoint of the planetary life cycle, some 4½
million years ago, the evolutionary trend was downwards into matter, resulting in a
profusion of new species, which developed the fundamental designs activated at the
start of the round in a variety of specialized directions. However, the midpoint of the
cycle marked the beginning of the ascending arc towards spirit, and henceforth more
and more animal monads will tend to pass into a lower nirvanic rest as they will not be
able to evolve sufficiently along psychological and spiritual lines.

The types of organisms that emerged during the Cambrian explosion testify to the
heightened creativity at that time. It was a period of amazing experimentation, when
elements from different basic body plans could be mixed together in one organism. This
is no longer possible today: there is a completely distinct vertebrate body plan,
angiosperm body plan, mollusc body plan, etc. The limited variability of plants and
animals that breeders nowadays have to contend with is another sign of the lower
creative potential that prevails now that the descending arc has ended. Most mutations
today are harmful, but in earlier eras they would have been constructive, creative and
purposeful.

The development of life on earth has been far from smooth and linear. Instead, the
emergence and diversification of new stocks and the extinction of existing ones tend to
take place fairly rapidly and abruptly. As G. de Purucker points out, evolutionary
development sometimes passes through phases of greater rapidity and intensity:

we ... teach the general doctrine of a slow and steady evolutionary growth
from within outwards ... We also teach that this steady evolutionary process
consists in bringing out, through what we may call self-expression, the
intrinsic, native, latent, dormant powers or faculties inherent in and urging on
the evolving entity; and, furthermore, that this process is at certain cyclic
intervals marked by noteworthy spurts or increases of evolutionary intensity,
followed as surely by periods of quiescence or dormancy, and even
occasionally by apparent, but not real, retrogression.4

From a theosophical viewpoint, nothing appears out of nowhere for no reason or

purpose. When a new type of physical vehicle is required for a monad’s development, a
suitable prototype is provided by the patterns from previous evolutionary cycles stored
in the earth’s memory field. On the other hand, plant or animal species that are unable
to adapt sufficiently to changing environmental conditions, or no longer provide suitable
vehicles for the evolutionary experience of the monads embodying in that kingdom,
eventually go extinct, and their place is taken by more appropriate forms. This process
may be accelerated by environmental changes and natural disasters, including volcanic
eruptions, earthquakes and impacts, but these are merely the mechanisms of deeper-
lying causes.

References

1. See Evolution in the fourth round, http://davidpratt.info.

2. See Geochronology: theosophy and science, Geological timescale,
http://davidpratt.info.
3. See Michael A. Cremo, Human Devolution, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book
Publishing, 2003, pp. 43-54; Richard L. Thompson, Mechanistic and
Nonmechanistic Science, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1981, pp.
 191-2.
4. G. de Purucker, H.P. Blavatsky: The mystery, San Diego, CA: Point Loma
Publications, 1974, pp. 73-4.

Man – storehouse of all types

The first root-race of humanity in the fourth round began to develop in the mid-
Palaeozoic; these early protohuman forms were huge, ovoid, semi-astral,
nonselfconscious beings that did not reproduce sexually but by fission (as cells do
today). During the ensuing millions of years, they slowly materialized, declined in size,
and assumed the present human shape. Sexual reproduction in the human kingdom is
said to have originated in the second half of the third, Lemurian, root-race, some 18½
million years ago. On the theosophical timescale, this was in the late Jurassic of the
Mesozoic era, or age of reptiles.

The late second and early third root-races reproduced by budding or gemmation – an
asexual method of reproduction still found in a few unicellular organisms (e.g. certain
bacteria, yeasts and protozoans) and in certain multicellular animals (e.g. hydras,
jellyfish and sea squirts). At certain seasons many buds or vital cells would leave the
parent body, and while many might perish, others would successfully grow into other
beings. If they fell from the portion of the parent body which had become the seat of the
reproductive organs, they would reproduce another human, but if they fell from some
other part of the body, they would often, if the environment was favourable, grow into
the beginnings of the mammals, which then proceeded to develop and specialize along
their own lines. G. de Purucker explains:

every vital cell or reproductive germ is in itself a storehouse or repertory of

unexpressed types; and if there be no natural inhibition, no psychical barrier
or bar to its expression, the type having the strongest urge for manifestation
would be the one to emerge as dominant, and grow into a representative
entity which would be the beginning of a new stock of creatures.1

In our day, the 40 trillion cells composing our bodies are so tightly held in the dominant
grip of the inner human entity that the inherent tendencies of the cells have become
recessive. But in those early times, before the awakening of selfconscious intelligence
gathered pace in the later third root-race, the dominance of the human life-fluid or
mental essence over the cells and life-atoms composing their primitive, more ethereal
bodies was far weaker. When any of the cells freed itself from that control, it instinctively
followed the path of self-expression, according to its stage of development. A further
reason why the cells developed along their own lines was that all entities were then
running down the arc of descent, which is the period of the evolution of matter and the
involution of spirit, and therefore all stocks from the ‘human’ down were under the
natural urge to evolve new bodily forms.

The first creatures belonging to the class Mammalia appear in the fossil record in the
early Mesozoic, and supposedly evolved from the therapsids – mammal-like reptiles
that originated in the Carboniferous of the Palaeozoic. However, there is no continuous
fossil trail leading from reptiles to mammals. The mammals started to appear in greater
numbers in the Cretaceous and Jurassic, towards the end of the third root-race, and
underwent a tremendous radiation and diversification in the early Tertiary, or early
Atlantean period, following the late Cretaceous extinctions.

According to theosophy, then, the origins of the mammals can be traced to astral
prototypes thrown off by the late second and early third root-races in the late Palaeozoic
and early Mesozoic,2 when humans were androgynous and had not yet separated into
two sexes and become mammals themselves. The bodies of the animals became fully
physical before those of astral humanity, and likewise separated into male and female
from the preceding androgynous state before the human stock. Among vertebrates,
males and females possess the rudimentary reproductive organs of the other sex, and
this points to the existence of former hermaphrodite ‘mammals’, or rather mammal
ancestors.3

All the stocks below the mammals – the invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles and
birds – were derived from the primitive human stock in the preceding (third) globe-
round, hundreds of millions of years ago in the Precambrian, long before the earth
attained its present degree of physical density. Thus, as far as our present fourth round
is concerned, only the mammals are traceable to prototypes shed by man. ‘The
amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the third round, astral fossil
forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity
subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks’,4 i.e. after the commencement
of the fourth round.

The early stages of development that mammalian embryos, including human embryos,
pass through are very similar. Blavatsky writes:

When it is borne in mind that all forms which now people the earth, are so
many variations on basic types originally thrown off by the MAN of the third
and fourth round, such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the
‘unity of structural plan’ characterising all vertebrates, loses its edge. The
basic types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the
multitude of organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a general unity
of type has, nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. ...
[T]he human type is the repertory of all potential organic forms, and the
central point from which these latter radiate. ... [The mammals are] post-
human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the general resemblance
between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who necessarily
embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features of the
group he originated.5

The human embryo seems to pass through plantlike, fishlike and reptile forms during its
development.6 In this regard, it should be noted that in earlier rounds, when the earth
and its inhabitants were still very ethereal, the monads who were later to manifest in
fully-fledged human form passed relatively quickly through the lower kingdoms, thereby
recapitulating the stages of development they had passed through during previous
embodiments of the earth. Furthermore, as indicated above, the animal groups below
the mammals originated from ‘man’ in earlier rounds. However, ‘man’ here refers to
proto-human ethereal forms bearing no resemblance to the selfconscious humans of
today.
References

1. G. de Purucker, The Esoteric Tradition, TUP, 2nd ed., 1973, p. 320.

2. A.L. Conger (ed.), The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, TUP, 1948, 3:181-2; The
Esoteric Tradition, p. 324.
3. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 2:184; see Sex and
sexuality, sections 2 and 5, http://davidpratt.info.
4. The Secret Doctrine, 2:684.
5. Ibid., 2:683-4.
6. Ibid., 1:184, 2:187-9, 258-9.

Astral and physical evolution

According to the Darwinian doctrine of common descent, all species that have ever lived
have descended directly from other species. Theosophy denies that this is universally
true:

no occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that all the now existing
forms, ‘from the structureless Amoeba to man,’ are the direct lineal
descendants of organisms which lived millions and millions of years before
the birth of man, in the pre-Silurian [= Precambrian, in modern terminology]
epochs, in the sea or land-mud.

There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members
of one progressive series. They are ‘the products of various and different
evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in
another.’

The ‘Unity of Type’ common, in a sense, to all the animal and human
kingdoms, is not ... a proof of the consanguinity [common ancestry] of all
organic forms, but a witness to the essential unity of the ‘ground-plan’ Nature
has followed in fashioning her creatures.1

Darwin’s insistence on gradual evolutionary change was opposed by many of his

contemporaries, such as St. George Mivart:

[W]e find a remarkable (and on Darwinian principles an inexplicable)

absence of minutely graduated transitional forms. All the most marked
groups ... appear at once upon the scene. ... [A]ll these difficulties are
avoided if we admit that new forms of animal life of all degrees of complexity
appear from time to time with comparative suddenness, being evolved
according to laws in part depending on surrounding conditions, in part
internal ...2

Although several ‘transitional’ fossils have turned up, theosophy rejects the hypothesis
that they are links in a more or less continuous sequence of bodily transformations, as
many Darwinists still claim.3 There are genuine major gaps in the fossil record, e.g.
between invertebrates and vertebrates, and between the various classes of vertebrates,
and they point to the existence of ethereal prototypes and evolutionary processes.
Blavatsky says that the physical factors influencing evolution – on which Darwinism is
fixated – only come into play after ‘the physicalization of the primeval animal root-types
out of the astral’.4 But no subsequent significant changes in physical form are possible
unless they have been prepared on the astral, formative level. The changes may remain
latent and unexpressed until outer circumstances are appropriate for their manifestation,
resulting in sudden major variations or the emergence of a new species.5 This would be
accompanied by far-reaching genetic mutations, but guided and coordinated from within
rather than random.

It may be the case that, in the past, individuals of one species have given birth to
descendant species belonging to a different genus or family, but ‘descent with
modification’ seems a less likely explanation for the origin of new orders, classes, phyla
and kingdoms. As Blavatsky says, ‘the admitted chasm between the systems of
reproduction of the oviparous vertebrates and mammalia, constitutes a hopeless crux to
those who, with the evolutionists, seek to link all existing organic forms in a continuous
line of descent.’6 New genera, families and orders of creatures have continued to appear
since the middle of the third root-race when matter was losing its previously ethereal,
plastic nature and beginning to assume its current density. If new families or orders of
mammals are not the modified descendants of species belonging to other families and
orders, several alternative scenarios (involving ‘spontaneous generation’) are
conceivable.

At some point, a new species that has taken shape astrally – based on the designs of
previous species but not descended from them physically – could materialize fairly
abruptly into physical manifestation. This would be analogous to the materialization of
complete human forms that have occasionally been reported in seance rooms. One of
the most famous cases from the heyday of spiritualism in the 19th century was the
materialization of a seemingly flesh-and-blood female known as Katie King, by the
medium Florence Cook.7 Blavatsky cited Katie King as an illustration of the manner in
which the ethereal Lemurian race assumed a fully physical form8 – a major difference
being that the latter process took millions of years rather than a minute or two in the
case of seance-room materializations. The animal kingdom underwent a similar gradual
process of materialization, and became fully physical before the third-race humans.
Once the animal and human kingdoms had attained a fully physical state, however, any
projection or precipitation of ethereal forms into physical visibility must have occurred
quite suddenly.

Alternatively, only the seeds or eggs of members of the new species might be
precipitated in some suitable environment where they can grow to maturity. These
creatures would be parentless, unless such environments included the bodies of other
creatures. But if a reptile, for instance, once laid an egg from which a bird was hatched
(as Otto Schindewolf once suggested), it must have come as quite a shock for the
parent!

In conclusion, the reason why transitional forms are generally missing from the fossil
record is because no such physical beings ever existed. According to Darwinism, we
would expect the highest of any subphylum to be most like the lowest of any higher
subphylum. Significantly, however, it is usually the lowest (earliest) representatives in
each phylum which are most alike in primitive features. According to theosophy, the
reason that all the mammalian and premammalian strains approximate in type and
character the farther back we can trace them is because they sprang from one common
source – ethereal prehuman ‘man’.

All the animal stocks tend to diverge away from the primitive human stock and develop
specializations of particular functions and organs, such as wings, trunks, claws, horns
and gills. The animals had little capacity to forge ahead along psychological lines, but
there was plenty of scope for them to develop physiological variations. The monkeys
and anthropoid apes, for example, possess a far more specialized anatomy than
humans, showing that they are a later development rather than our ancestors;
according to theosophy, they originated from human-animal interbreeding.9 G. de
Purucker writes:

the human race, most primitive of all, retained its comparative simplicity of
bodily structure and function, because it was not solely concerned with mere
experimentation and adaptation along physical lines. Once it had built for
itself a suitable vehicle, it abandoned that line of evolution as a distinct line
of evolution for its own sake, in order to bring into outer expression the far
more important inner psychological, intellectual, and indeed spiritual factors
locked within it.10

***

According to an old kabbalistic axiom, ‘the stone becomes a plant; the plant, a beast;
the beast, a man; and the man, a god’. This does not mean that a mineral form evolves
into a plant form, then an animal form, then a human form, etc., along Darwinian lines.
Rather, it means that a monad undergoes countless embodiments in each kingdom in
turn, beginning with the three elemental kingdoms, followed by the mineral, plant,
animal and human kingdoms, and ending with the three spiritual kingdoms. We begin
each major planetary cycle as unselfconscious god-sparks and, if we run the race
successfully, we will complete it as selfconscious gods, having attained relative
perfection for the world-system in question. But no state of consciousness can last for
ever. After a period of nirvanic rest, a new period of activity commences, involving
similar stages of evolutionary development, for there are always new spheres of
experience in which to become selfconscious masters of life.

References

1. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 2:259-60, 258, 737.
2. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species, London: Macmillan, 2nd ed., 1871,
pp. 161-2; cf. The Secret Doctrine, 2:697.
3. G. de Purucker, Man in Evolution, TUP, 2nd ed., 1977, pp. 72-3.
4. The Secret Doctrine, 2:648-9.
5. Man in Evolution, p. 134.
6. The Secret Doctrine, 2:735.
7. See Visitors from the twilight zone, section 2, http://davidpratt.info.
8. The Secret Doctrine, 2:737.
9. See Human origins: the ape-ancestry myth, http://davidpratt.info.
10. Man in Evolution, p. 132.
 Evolution and design: contents

Human origins: the ape-ancestry myth

Evolution in the fourth round

Cyclic evolution

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