SCIENCE UNDER THREAT

The rise of the fundamentalist Christian right in America has seen a troubling increase in attacks on evolutionary biology on purely religious grounds. This is a sad reflection both of the American education system
and the erosion of the church and state divide as envisaged by America’s founding fathers. Under the guise of ‘scientific creationism’ Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists have increasingly used ‘intelligent
design theory’ to erode the American public’s confidence in evolution.
In November 2004, a Gallup poll found that only about a third of
Americans believe the theory of evolution is well supported by evidence.

While we can blame creationists for some of this, the lack of confidence
also reflects the inability of current Darwinian theory to explain all the diverse and extraordinary biological phenomena we see around us in
nature. Things like stasis and other inconsistencies of the fossil record,
the ‘Cambrian explosion’, the evolution of irreducibly complex organs
like the reptilian eye and mammalian brain, the sudden appearance of
new species, the symbiotic interaction between species, the ubiquitous presence of emotions in multicellular animals, and the complexity and diversity of innate behaviour and instincts, including our own 'human nature.'

When teem theory is added to NeoDarwinian theory, the new synthesis
creates a stronger and more credible evolutionary paradigm. The unified
teemic paradigm appears to explain these and other problematical phenomena simply and without contrivance, although creationists may not agree.