Darwin Is Evolving
Evolvability, non-selective
adaptation, mechanics over
genetics – change is in the air
When Nature admits that “change is overdue” in evolutionary theory, Darwin skeptics should perk up.
Voices calling for change within evolutionary theory are not new, but they are getting louder. The old neo-Darwinism (pardon the pun) of natural selection acting on random variations (RM+NS) is aging and starting to look senile. Decades of discoveries in biological complexity that don’t fit the neo-Darwinian paradigm may finally be weakening its century-old web of belief that has seemed so impregnable. How ironic that this is happening on the 100th anniversary year of the Scopes Trial that promoted Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law to the status of religious dogma, that to deny was to commit heresy, resulting in censorship of alternative voices and exclusion from elite institutions.
The persistent voices within the Darwin camp, rustling under the steady din of DODO dogma, have included the evo-devo crowd, the niche construction crowd, and especially the “third way” of evolution (or Evolution 2.0) crowd. These insider critics have been calling for a major rethink of neo-Darwinism. The RM+NS “mechanism” cannot explain numerous important features in the history of life, they say: major gaps in the fossil record, rapid speciation followed by stasis, and examples of adaptation disconnected from mutations.
Most importantly, neo-Darwinism cannot bridge microevolution to macroevolution. Small-scale change, called microevolution (including changes in finch beaks or peppered moth wing patterns) are observable and not controversial. Can trivial changes like this add up to major changes, like new body plans and organs? It’s not just ID advocates and creationists doubting that possibility. Evolutionists themselves are raising their voices in protest against the old dogma.
This is not to say that the insider critics are “getting religion” or abandoning scientific materialism. They are not seeking God or even spirituality of any kind. Instead, they are desperately seeking other mechanisms to explain evolutionary change from molecules to man. Universal common ancestry, one of the pillars of Darwinism, is still assumed. Their options for explaining biological progress, though, are diminishing. Each option—whether self-organization, intrinsic forces toward complexity, or an organism’s own impetus to evolve—seems even more implausible than RM+NS was. How loud the rumbling may get in 2025 is anyone’s guess.
Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity (Nature book review, 13 Jan 2025). Eva Jablonka reviews Kevin Lala’s latest book, Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity. We thought we would never hear this from Nature, the rag that Norman Lockyer started to promote Darwin’s views back in 1869 when The Origin of Species was still wreaking philosophical havoc in Victorian Britain (see 2 Aug 2020 and comment by historian Michael Flannery at Evolution News).
It’s rare that researchers question theories that make up the backbone of whole fields. But in Evolution Evolving, Kevin Lala and four other eminent evolutionary biologists do just that. Their philosophically informed discussion challenges the textbook version of evolutionary theory, known as the modern synthesis, which has been regarded by many scientists as sacrosanct since its conception in the mid-twentieth century.
Sacrosanct is a religious term, not a scientific one. You would expect to hear next a firm debunking of Lala’s daring revisionism. Instead, Jablonka surprises readers, saying: “This shift in thinking — which amounts to a new way of unifying the life sciences — is long overdue.”
Lala advocates evo-devo (modifications in the embryo) to account for rapid adaptations as illustrated by blind cave fish. Jablonka adds another option:
Another aspect of evolution often ignored or downplayed by orthodox evolutionists is the passing down of traits through generations in ways that do not involve variations in DNA sequence. These ‘extragenetic’ modes of inheritance should be incorporated into evolutionary models, the authors contend.
Some ID folk see this book review as illustrative of flailing within the Darwin camp.
The extraordinary ways species control their own evolutionary fate (New Scientist, 4 Dec 2024). In this earlier article, Kevin Lala (author of the book reviewed above) gives examples of organisms taking evolution into their own hands, so to speak. One of these is the desert woodrat, that “evolved” a tolerance to a potent toxin by ingesting material from other woodrat waste that gave it ability to make use of a poisonous food source without changing its genome.
Lala considers himself “one of a growing group of evolutionary biologists who believe that non-genetic inheritance plays a vital role in evolvability.”
Historically, evolutionary biologists have assumed that since all organisms evolve through natural selection acting on their genes, they should all change at roughly the same rate per generation. Only in recent years has it become clear this isn’t the case – some species and some traits are more evolvable than others. Until now, research has focused on genetic change, and genes undoubtedly are part of the explanation. But emerging evidence indicates that extragenetic processes are important, too.
He proceeds to discuss “epigenetic inheritance” and other non-Darwinian methods of adaptation, like symbiotic inheritance and cultural adaptation. The latter is important to human culture by intelligent design, but Lala points to animals like orcas that seem capable of learning and passing on what is learned. He suggests that these are not the only extragenetic mechanisms by which species control their own fate.

Darwin skeptics have often repeated Fred Hoyle’s analogy comparing Darwin’s mechanism to expecting a functional 747 jetliner to emerge from a tornado in a junkyard.
Evolution takes multiple paths to evolvability when facing environmental change (PNAS, 31 Dec 2024). Here’s another indication that the Darwin Party is flailing, if you read between the bluffing and revisionism. Note that the ability to adapt is “elusive” still after 166 years of trying to figure it out! Maybe divination on the computer screen can help:
That all the diversity of life constitutes what Erasmus Darwin called “a single living filament”—an unbroken chain of descent from the last universal common ancestor—is evidence of life’s fundamental adaptability. However, the evolutionary processes that shape this ability to adapt (evolvability) remain elusive because of the required resolution and timespan of observations. Using evolving, self-replicating computer programs, we find that multiple pathways to increased evolvability emerge concurrently and distinctly aid adaptation. One pathway (evolved mutational landscapes) allows rapid adaptation to previously seen environments, while the other (higher mutation rates) allows rapid adaptation to entirely new environments. This multifaceted picture of evolvability helps us understand how organisms deal with ever-changing conditions and relentlessly explore nature’s opportunities for innovation.
A sea cucumber or blind mole rat cannot plan ahead to think about how exploring its environment or increasing its evolvability will help it survive. This looks like spiritism or an appeal to a life-force all over again after those went out in the 19th century. These lazy researchers make it work in computer games by adding new functions for “second-order selection” and “fluctuating selection.” Complicating one’s explanation with auxiliary hypotheses, though, is a sign of desperation in science.
Chornobyl Dogs’ Genetic Differences Not Due to Mutation (North Carolina State University, 13 Jan 2025). Researchers looked for genetic mutations in dogs living in the radiation zone of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site, and found none. The dogs adapted but not by means of RM+NS. One of the researchers said, “It’s possible that the dogs that survived long enough to breed already had genetic traits that increased their ability to survive.” See our 8 March 2023 article about how the Chernobyl site should have provided a real-time test of neo-Darwinism, but failed.
Why sabre-toothed animals evolved again and again (New Scientist, 9 Jan 2025). You’ll find nothing about RM+NS in Chris Simm’s article here. Instead, he talks about rapid adaptation in response to environmental cues, something creationists and ID advocates are proposing as a built-in mechanism. That’s not Stuff Happens; that is engineering for robustness by a mind with foresight.
Mechanics, Not Genetics, Determine Crocodile Head Scale Patterns (The Scientist, 18 Dec 2024). A neo-Darwinist would look at a variation in head scales on a crocodile and attribute it to RM+NS, perhaps announcing a new species. Not Dr Sahana Sitaraman. She describes how Dr Michel Milinkovitch at the University of Geneva, an expert in the “evolution of scales” in reptiles, found something interesting:
In 2012, he and his team found that the scales on a crocodile’s head are generated through physical processes, rather than being regulated by genetic drivers, but the exact mechanism of their development was unclear.
Now, in a new study, Milinkovitch and his team reported that the polygonal head scales form due to the growth and compression of skin, which creates a self-organizing pattern of folds. These findings, published in Nature, reveal a simple evolutionary mechanism for the variation in shape and size of scales seen in diverse crocodile species.

Darwin meditating in his junkyard
Why call it an evolutionary mechanism, and not just a mechanism? Milinkovitch found a mechanism that produces “the diversity of shapes of certain anatomical structures in different species, without having to involve intricate molecular genetic factors,” said a colleague. The press release says nothing about RM+NS.
The ID community has been watching a slow unraveling of classical neo-Darwinism. These recent articles are just the tip of a big iceberg of discontent within the Darwin Party. It hasn’t filtered down to the dogmatic reporters in Big Science Media yet, but a collapse of Darwin’s house of cards could be sudden and dramatic.
When it happens, don’t expect any apologies from elitists in the academy. They will continue bluffing that they understood all along that Darwinian evolution was “incomplete” but “now we know” better. Hey, evolution evolves! Stuff happens. What’s the problem? No problem here. Sorry for the genocides and scientific racism, but as we all know, science is a self-correcting process. Keep that funding coming!
The way creationists view this trend: