At the January meeting of the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), University of Texas Austin professor David Hills asserted that there are no legitimate scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian evolution. He stated that scientific weaknesses in evolution have “no scientific basis” and compared teaching these weaknesses to teaching “alchemy” or “astrology.” 

Dr. Hillis’s assertions were false, and his comparisons were specious. Hundreds of Ph.D. scientists have expressed scientific skepticism of neo-Darwinian evolution.1 Additionally, the TSBOE was presented with hundreds of scientific articles that discuss scientific weaknesses in key aspects of neo-Darwinian evolution. Additionally, much like his co-participant Ronald Wetherington, Hillis has bluffed about the facts of this debate, and his own arguments are controverted by the scientific record. Hillis’s testimony included multiple inaccurate statements. Hillis’s mistakes and misrepresentations included:

1. Overselling the practical importance of evolution to agriculture and medicine.
2. Failing to acknowledge scientific challenges to Darwin’s “tree of life” hypothesis and completely misrepresenting disagreements between molecule-based phylogenetic trees.
3. Falsely claiming that there are high levels of congruence between anatomical and molecular phylogenies (leading experts acknowledge widespread disagreement between these two approaches).
4. Overstating the length and understating the extent of the Cambrian explosion (again, leading experts disagree with Hillis’s claims).
5. Invoking artificial selection as an explanation for biological information, even though it doesn’t accurately reflect the processes of unguided natural selection in the wild.
6. Wrongly claiming that newly-discovered function for so-called “junk DNA” does not demonstrate a weakness of evolution, despite the fact that evolutionists themselves previously cited “junk DNA” as key evidence for evolution.
7. Inaccurately portraying irreducible complexity as if it has been refuted by the scientific community (in reality, a variety of scientific papers show there is a vibrant scientific debate over irreducible complexity).
8. Downplaying natural selection acting on mutations as the primary adaptive mechanism in orthodox evolutionary theory.

Dr. Hillis said he “wants the truth to be told.” That is commendable. Unfortunately, many of Dr. Hillis’s statements before the TSBOE were clearly false or misrepresentations of the truth. In that vein, what follows is a rebuttal to selected segments of Hillis’s testimony before the TSBOE.

A. Hillis Overstated the Practical Importance of Evolution

Dr. Hillis’s testimony was brimming with praise for the alleged utility and power of modern evolutionary biology. He claimed that there are “a large number of modern agricultural practices that are now based upon evolutionary methods.” But even some leading evolutionary biologists have conceded otherwise. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne admitted in the leading scientific journal Nature:

[I]f truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.2

To further show the alleged utility of evolution, Hillis discussed how mutations in one particular protein of the influenza virus allow it to escape detection by our immune system, stating “phylogenetic analysis … is a critical tool for developing flu vaccines every year,” and asserting that “knowledge of evolution helps millions of human lives be saved every year.” While there is no doubt that influenza “evolution” is a real phenomenon, we must ask the crucial questions: What degree of evolution is this? And can this sort of “evolution” be legitimately extrapolated to explain large-scale evolutionary changes? In other words, if we were teaching students about this type of “evolution,” should we teach them that it implies large scale macroevolutionary change that could explain the origin of complex biological features, such as new body plans?

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