There are further surprises in store for us: ‘the animals are a surprise because it turns out that they have changed so little67’ comments Bronowski. It appears that many of the animals which fossilised in the African savannah around two million years ago are almost identical to those which roam the plain today. In his introduction to Life on Earth, David Attenborough makes a similar point, ‘to a surprising degree, nearly all the major events in history can be told using living animals to represent the ancestral creatures which were the actual protagonists.68’

Here is another well-known problem for the evolution theory: for, let’s say, an eye to evolve from a cluster of cells, it would be necessary for a whole succession of adaptations to take place in the correct order. None of the necessary individual steps could have any advantage for the animal until the whole series had been completed. Until the animal could at least distinguish light from darkness, like a caterpillar for example, no survival edge could be gained by the possession of a part-evolved eye. Evolutionists have difficulty accounting for a mechanism which would achieve the positive selection of such apparently useless characteristics.

Similarly, the existence of wonderfully anomalous creatures such as the bombardier beetle69 presents evolutionists with an interesting difficulty. The insect defends itself by ejecting chemical substances which explode when mixed together: its enemies are thereby startled and frightened away. This complicated defence mechanism could offer the creature no advantage until fully developed. Indeed the insect could actually blow itself apart if the chemicals were to come into contact internally. So a part-evolved system is doubly unlikely to be passed down the generations. Ocean sponges are a similar anomaly: ‘How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know70’, Attenborough admits.

None of this information, of course, shows that evolution theory is incorrect; though that is certainly one possibility. The scientific method, whilst not exactly encouraging the outcome, does permit scientists to get the theory wrong. A scientific theory stands only until it is displaced by a better revision if that were not so, no further scientific progress would ever be made. All of the great breakthroughs in modern scientific thinking have come about by showing that previously held beliefs were incomplete or deficient in some way. It is the genius of ‘men like Newton and Einstein’ that ‘they ask transparent, innocent questions which turn out to have catastrophic answers71’.

Darwin himself was ‘far from being an atheist72’. Like many other intellectuals of his day, he continued to believe in God and his creation. But he was able to foresee the impact that his theory would have and, because of his Christian beliefs, he actually withheld the publication of his paper until he became aware of the research of Alfred Russell Wallace in the same field; at which time, he felt compelled to publish the results of his own work. Darwin was naturally bothered that his research appeared to contradict the Biblical account of creation as recorded in the book of Genesis. He was right to be concerned, for his theory, which became known as Darwinism, presented the opportunity to, theoretically, displace God by providing a reasonable and elegant alternative explanation to the question of the origin of life.