The theory of evolution has set scientists against conservative Christians ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Recent skirmishes include:

• A US Federal Court ruling in 2005 that the alternative theory of intelligent design, put forward by believers in creation by God, is a religious belief and should not be taught in Pennsylvania schools;

• The distribution less than a year later of intelligent design resource packs to all secondary schools in Britain; and

• The convening by the Pope last year of a seminar to resolve growing divisions on evolution within the Catholic Church.

This on-going war of attrition prompts several questions: Why is evolution so controversial? What is the theory of evolution, and how is it changing in the light of recent research? Is the theory really incompatible with religious belief? Or is there a middle-ground in which science and spirituality can live harmoniously together?

Why is evolution such a hot issue?

To fundamentalist Christians, the Bible is the inspired Word of God which should be interpreted literally. It tells us that God created the universe in 6 days, and some analyses of biblical texts suggest that this happened just several thousand years ago. These ‘truths’ are challenged by the idea that the cosmos and life have evolved in a continuous creative process over billions of years. Worse, most scientists seek to explain existence and life without reference to a designer or creator, thus undermining faith in God. Less directly, the religious backlash may reflect rejection of the scientific doctrine that life is a meaningless, purposeless accident. In the face of this nihilism, fundamentalism provides reassuringly certain answers to life’s big questions.

To scientists, evolution has become the final battleground on which they must defend the freedom from religious dogmatism, bigotry and intellectual repression that they have fought so hard to win over the last few centuries. There is fear of a return to the dark days when truth was determined by priestly authority rather than reason and experiment, and even, perhaps, of renewed persecution by a modern Inquisition. Sadly, in their crusading zeal scientists such as Richard Dawkins – author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion - often mount the platform of dogma and authority from which religion has so recently been displaced.

At one level, then, this is a turf war between rival High Priests. At another level, it’s a debate about life’s greatest questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? and Why am I here?

Evolution and Intelligent Design

As our scientific understanding grows, it seems more and more evident that evolution is a fundamental principle of the cosmos – but not necessarily in the way we currently think of it. The term is actually used in two different senses. The first refers to a gradual process of development or growth that leads to a more advanced or complex form. Thus, the universe is said to have evolved to its current state from the intense energy of the Big Bang. The second meaning relates to the biological process first described by Darwin by which species of living things change from generation to generation, leading to the emergence of new species.

In the last few decades, systems sciences have revealed that many quite simple non-living systems have the ability to organize themselves into new structures and processes. Good examples are mixtures of chemical reagents which develop spatial patterns of concentration, or ‘chemical clocks’ in which the concentration varies rhythmically over time. In such systems, tiny disturbances may be sufficient to trigger evolution to a new, but unpredictable, stable state. At the cosmic scale, self-organization led to the emergence of matter, stars and galaxies, life and consciousness in a process of continuous creation. Many scientists now believe this reflects an as-yet undiscovered ‘law of complexification’ that drives cosmic evolution.

Most controversy, however, centers on the evolution of living things, which Darwinian theory portrays as a two-stage process. First, random genetic mutations create variations amongst the organisms in a species. Second, natural selection weeds out those variants which are less well suited to their environment. In this way, new traits arise by chance that either die out or spread through the population. Individual organisms and species are powerless victims of this process.

This picture of evolution is being challenged from within science as well as by creationists. Research is revealing that organisms have considerable influence over their destiny, and continually strive to transcend their current forms and environmental constraints. It has been demonstrated that not all mutations are chance events, many arising from ‘experiments’ in which the organism switches specific genes on or off, or even modifies its own genes. And some learned behaviours actually may become encoded in the genes and be inherited by offspring – an idea that was branded as rank heresy until recently.

Similar challenges are emerging with regards to natural selection. It is now clear that, rather than being passive victims of environmental conditions, organisms actively modify their environments and pass on those changes to their offspring just as human parents may pass on the house they have built to their children. For example, countless generations of earthworms created the soil which now forms a perfect habitat for earthworms.

Further, studies of development from single cell to maturity are showing that the process is not controlled by master genes as current theory suggests, but is coordinated by self-organising processes that involve the organism’s structure, biochemistry, electromagnetic fields and environment as well as its genes and gene expression. Thus natural selection is not an all-powerful creative force as it is usually portrayed. Rather, it can do no more than select from a menu of alternatives made possible by self-organization, and then fine-tune these structures and processes.