[Breitbart] Renowned Yale computer scientist David Gelernter claims that he is abandoning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.Gelernter, who formerly served as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, published a column earlier this year detailing his move away from evolutionary theory. The column, which was titled "Giving Up Darwin," provides Gelernter’s arguments against Darwinism.
Darwin’s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life. Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers. Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors: Darwinian evolution is gradual, step-by-step. All those predecessors must have come together, further back, into a series of branches leading down to the (long ago) trunk.
But those predecessors of the Cambrian creatures are missing. Darwin himself was disturbed by their absence from the fossil record. He believed they would turn up eventually. Some of his contemporaries (such as the eminent Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz) held that the fossil record was clear enough already, and showed that Darwin’s theory was wrong. Perhaps only a few sites had been searched for fossils, but they had been searched straight down. The Cambrian explosion had been unearthed, and beneath those Cambrian creatures their Precambrian predecessors should have been waiting‐and weren’t. In fact, the fossil record as a whole lacked the upward-branching structure Darwin predicted.
A group of scientists, including Gelernter and Meyer, sat down to discuss evolution this summer in a conversation that was hosted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
