Mr Macdonald did not subscribe to the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of evolution as outlined by Harvard professor of zoology Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) and supported by Niles Eldredge, who cited the unchanging nature of Trilobite fossils to support the theory for the sudden appearance of new species. Neither did he concur with the “gradualism” theory of more traditional Darwinism one of whose foremost exponents is the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins suggests that, “Core Darwinism is the minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively non-random directions by the non-random survival of small random hereditary changes. Note especially the words small and adaptively. Small implies that adaptive evolution is gradualistic….Adaptive does not imply that all evolution is adaptive, only that core Darwinism’s concern is limited to that part of evolution that is.” (Darwin Triumphant in A Devils Chaplin, Phoenix 2004).
Mr Macdonald was not an “evangelical creationist” some of whose exponents have used professor Gould’s theory to support their case. Fundamentalist teaching reached one of its periodic high points in the USA in the 1920’s and culminated with the arrest and trial (“The Monkey Trial”) in Tennessee in 1925 of John Scopes, a twenty-four year old biology teacher at Dayton High School. He had taught the Darwinist theory in contravention to the existing state law (Tennessee House Bill No.185 which made it “unlawful to teach that man descended from a lower order of animals”). The case in which the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow confronted the evangelical William Jennings Bryan with presiding judge John T. Raulston is renowned. The defense’s goal was not to win acquittal but to manouvre for a declaration from a higher court, preferable the U.S.A.s Supreme Court that laws forbidding the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional. Darrow received his request for a verdict of guilty in order that the case may be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court and Scopes was fined $100. The following year the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a technicality and not on constitutional grounds as Darrow had hoped. Forty-two years later in the case of Epperson v. Arkanas the USA Supreme Court ruled that laws forbidding the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional.
“Today at Dayton there is a college named in Byron’s honour and 130 churches for 28,000 people. There are 11 Bibles on the shelves of the present day high school, but not a single copy of The Origin of Species.” (David Fox ‘Mini-man’ is just like us, a review of evolution theory as a result of recent discoveries on the Indonesian island of Flores, The Tablet 6 November 2004).
Periodic upsurges of the creationist belief led to “equal time” laws being passed in the states of Arkanas and Louisiana in the 1970’s. These laws were overturned in court cases in 1982 and 1987. Creationism became a focus of debate in the United Kingdom in 2002 when Stephen Layfield, a science teacher at Emmanuel College, Gateshead, used the lack of intermediate fossils between ancient species and their descendants to question the widely accepted concept of Darwinism.
The extent of use and interpretation given to aspects of Darwin’s Theory of evolution is striking. One views it cleverly used in the Guinness Commercial entitled noitulovE directed by Danny Kleinman, which made its debut on U.K. terrestrial television on 3rd October 2005. The advertisement by AMV BBDO begins with three men contentedly sipping their pints of Guinness in a pub/bar and then regressing at sped through billons of years of evolution to mudskippers drinking at a pond, to the rendition of “Rhythm of Life” from the musical Sweet Charity.
In a re-action to extensive reporting of pervasive and oft-times violent abuse and bullying suffered by employees in the city of London Shaun Springer, a former broker stated “If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. This is a Darwinian city - it is survival of the fittest. If you are not fit enough to survive, you will be killed off and you will be killed off quickly.” (Maxine Frith Punched, kicked and burnt by bullies: the daily abuse suffered by City workers, The Independent (London). The maxim of the survival of the fittest was part of the force that drove Adolf Hitler throughout his life. ‘From start to finish, it alone describes what he propounded as his philosophy of life.” In his Table Talk and Monologues in the Führer’s Headquarters in the 1940’s Hitler declared that all man made rules and regulations were a betrayal of Nature and revolt against Heaven. In the real world more basic laws applied. (Joachim Fest Inside Hitler’s Bunker, The last days Of The Third Reich, Pan Books 2005, Chapter Eight pps 166–167). This is book offers a helpful insight into “the profound nihilism that governed” Hitler’s ideas.
As a young biologist Charles Robert Darwin (1809 – 1882) set sail from England on the HMS Beagle in 1831 under the command of Robert Fitzroy. From the observations he made during the five-year voyage he constructed his theory of natural selection, which was published in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Although by no means the first to suggest a theory of evolution, his was the first to become widely and popularly known.
One can have a sense of Mr Macdonald's view of both creation and evolution through the following,
“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”
1 Corinthians 15:44