Darwin Got It Wrong and It’s Not What You’re Thinking

November 24, 2008 - 10:42 AM
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Charles Darwin got it wrong. This is not to disparage the man. Science is an ever evolving process and scientific theories are subject to being replaced by newer knowledge. Most certainly, Darwin (1809-1882) got everyone thinking about evolution, but the problem is that evolution is not a slow process. It happens very fast.
Indeed, Darwin’s friend, the famed biologist, Thomas Huxley, supported aspects of Darwin’s theory, but didn’t believe that evolution was gradual. Then, too, Darwin had to contend with those who believe that Noah built an ark and put two of all the creatures of the Earth on it. Religion is a great comfort, but it is no substitute for science.
I first became acquainted with Robert W. Felix through his book, Not by Fire, but by Ice, that pointed out that the Earth is on the cusp of a new ice age. Insofar as the Earth is now fully a decade into a new cycle of cooling, one that could last several decades or evolve into a new, full blown ice age, Felix not only got it right, but, in the course of writing his book, discovered an even more frightening scenario.
Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of the Species is Felix’s new book and, were it not for fans like myself and others, it is not likely to make it to the cover of leading news magazines or become a segment on “Sixty Minutes.” It will be largely ignored by the mainstream news media for the same reason they ignored his first book. Enthralled by the bogus “global warming” hoax, the mainstream media will find his new book equally appalling for its presentation of facts that run contrary to their ignorance.
Felix is far from alone in this view that new species are not the result of a long accretion of changes. The late paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) popularized that field of science with articles and books. Gould noted, “Gradualism is not a fact of nature. Most new species appear with a bang, not a protracted crescendo.” Fossil records demonstrate that a species remains unchanged for millions of years before abruptly disappearing, “only to be replaced just as rapidly with a species that is, though clearly related, substantially different. Nature does take leaps.”
Felix’s great talent comes both in his ability to read and absorb the writings of scientists from different fields of study, and in his ability to explain complex issues to people like myself. I always remind readers that, while I am a science writer, I am not a scientist. Felix is a science writer and one who brings a great deal of passion to his quest to understand the history of the Earth and the life that appears to distinguish it from others in our galaxy.
While researching ice ages for his previous book, he became intrigued by a phenomenon that always coincides with them, magnetic reversals. In addition to mass extinctions of species that always accompanied magnetic reversals, Felix and others noticed that new species replaced them. For example, human beings are, in the long history of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, are “blindingly new”, having existed a mere 200,000 years.
The Earth is at the end of a cyclical interglacial period. Such periods are about 11,500 years in length and it has been 11,500 years since the last ice age. That portends that another magnetic reversal is due as well.
Though decried as “deniers”, those of us who have been skeptical of the claims of Al Gore and the legion of global warming charlatans, the real deniers are those refuse to acknowledge the facts put forth and explained in Felix’s new book.
Those who would have you dramatically alter your lifestyle, by ending the use of oil, natural gas, and coal for energy, by installing thousands of wind turbines and miles of solar panels, are willfully ignoring the signs that the Earth is poised to enter a new age in which life as we know it—including our own—will be dramatically changed and to a large extent even exterminated.
There is nothing humans can do about this.