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One hundred years
ago, the British zoologist and evolutionist George Mivart was excommunicated
by the Catholic Church. Mivart had attempted to reconcile religion with
his evolutionary views, and had declared that science lies outside the
province of Pope and Church, and that the true priesthood of scientific
truth rests with scientific investigators alone.
Today Mivart would more likely be "excommunicated" by the AAAS
for his position that natural selection is inadequate to explain evolution.
In the 1871 book "Genesis of Species", Mivart responded to Darwin's
"Origin of Species" with a list of objections that Darwin took
seriously, and Mivart is mentioned in the later editions of "Origin".
Mivart argued that a population of organisms has an innate capacity to
change form over time (generations) in a way that cannot be described
as natural selection working on fortuitous minute variations (Darwinism).
Mivart’s most often quoted objection is that natural selection is
incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.
In my presentation I will examine the list of Mivart’s objections
to Darwinism. It is my contention that Mivart has gone under-appreciated,
and I will make the case that his arguments are still relevant one hundred
and thirty years after his book was published. I have made the entire
text of "Genesis of Species" available on my web site at www.macrodevelopment.org/mivart.
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