Just to clarify here for our readers, obviously, you’re poking holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution but you’re saying it only tells the story up to a certain point. What do you mean by that?
Well that he believed that evolution was driven by selection. That’s essentially Darwin’s contribution. And it’s true for big populations, but it has limits.The limits are you need big populations in order for selection to be dominant. If you have small populations, then random drift is actually more important than selection. That’s the Kimura theory. Kimura called it the neutral theory of evolution and he wrote a book about it which was widely ignored by all the orthodox biologists.
But I think he was right. And in fact, it happens that small populations are very important in evolution. In fact, you have to have a small population to start a new species, almost by definition. So small populations have a controlling effect on starting new species and also in the extension of old species.
So this neutral regime where the selection is not important may, in fact, be the real driving force of evolution when you come to a new species. And of course, if that’s true, it changes the picture in many ways.
Darwin understood the difficulty. He asked the question “why is nature so diverse?”, he asked, “why do we have millions of species?” Darwin asked the question, in a beautiful way, “why did God love beetles? There are half a million species of beetles, why did God make so many?”
And it’s hard to understand that on the basis of selection. If selection were dominant, then you’d expect that there would be a few species of beetle which would prevail. They would be the best adapted and the others would disappear.
But in the real world, you have this enormous richness of species, many kinds of beetle and there are birds of paradise and there are all sorts of weird peacocks with peacock feathers which seem to be peculiarly unfit. And all those weird creatures which have prevailed for reasons that Darwin couldn’t explain. He understood that there was a problem and I think that the neutral theory of Kimura really does help a lot to understand that.
I tend to believe the answer is yes. There are so many details in the universe that seem to favour life and intelligence. It looks as if there is some purpose there, but certainly, we cannot decide that. It’s a matter of religion, not of science.