Lamarck was the first biologist to propose a mechanism for evolution. He proposed that organisms acquired features as they needed them. A giraffe would require a long neck because it strove to eat leaves high up in the trees, and birds that did not like swimming, but collected food in shallow water would develop long legs and become waders. Lamarck, at times, ascribed the process of evolution to some inner mystical vitalistic property of life (an ethereal fire). Darwin, on the other hand, proposed the totally naturalistic mechanism of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism and this mechanism has become more acceptable to biologists. He defined the principle as follows:
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary, however slightly, in any manner profitable to itself under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.4
This theory provided a mechanism for change over time, but it was not until the science of genetics had developed and the concept of mutations was understood that the concept could be developed
into its present-day form where mutations provide the material for variation and variation becomes the substance upon which natural selection could feed.
The basic difference between Lamarckism and Darwinism is thus that Lamarck proposed that adaptations were acquired because organisms needed them, whereas modern Darwinism states that the adaptations developed by chance through mutations and that the sorting mechanism for determining which of these adaptations would survive, was natural selection. In a sense, natural selection becomes the driving force for change. Most biologists uphold the basic Darwinistic view of origin by natural selection today. They might vary on the mechanism of change, but the basic principles of Darwinism are deeply entrenched in current scientific thinking. Science today leaves little room for a literal interpretation of the genesis account, let alone the short chronology associated with it. At best, scientists might ascribe to some form of theistic evolution where God is seen as the originator of life and the mechanisms of evolution as the “creator” of the varied life forms in existence today. In a sense, God used evolution to create man and all the other liv- ing organisms on earth. The basic theological problems with this attempt at compromise have been discussed in chapter 1, and they can be briefly summarized in Table 2.1.
In the light of these differences, it is evident that it would take quite a degree of distortion to reconcile these two concepts. Indeed the modern concept of scientific Creationism is largely frowned upon by the scientific community and even subjected to open ridicule. Nevertheless, some new evidence regarding catastrophic origins of many geologi- cal features warrant a reappraisal of some of its tenets. Since Luis W. Alvarez, the Nobel prizewinner, proposed in 1980 that an asteroid had collided with the earth and caused widespread destruction and extinc- tion of species, there has been a general acceptance of catastrophism as a causative agent in the shaping of geological features.
Although the concept of a worldwide flood on the scale de- scribed in the genesis account is still taboo, post catastrophic floods
are being regarded more and more as shapers of geological features that were previously considered to have developed as a consequence of uniformitarian principles over thousands or millions of years. One example of such a change of position is the story of the Columbia River Dry Falls, which are now considered to have been shaped by catastrophic floods at the end of the last ice age.
Even though catastrophism is being accepted as a part shaper of the earth’s topography, the concept of vast ages for the history of the world and the universe in general is still deeply entrenched in the mindset of the scientific fraternity. Catastrophism can at best thus only receive partial acceptance, as its obvious time implications must be limited to intermittent events having little impact on the overall time scale. After all, the scientific fraternity claims that radiometric dating
clearly supports long ages and the current cosmological worldview is that the universe is between 10 and 20 thousand million years old. Moreover, the standard model for the origin and development of the universe is also entirely naturalistic in nature and does not require the intervention of a Higher Being.