"....Although it represents a mortal threat to mainstream Darwinism, the theory of catastrophic evolution is quite consistent with Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's epochal discovery....that evolution does not take place incrementally but rather in spurts that are divided by long periods of stasis. It departs from Darwin by implying that natural selection by competition among individual organisms cannot be the exclusive cause of evolutionary change, since such competition does not pause for periods of equilibrium.
Darwin is often thought to have rescued the history of life from the superstitious fantasies of religion, by basing his theory on good, solid, empirical evidence. But, as Gould and Eldredge noticed, the empirical evidence does not indicate that evolution proceeds by incremental, incessant natural selection, as Darwin claimed. In fact, the empirical evidence indicates quite the opposite...."
While hailing--and rightly so--"catastrophic evolution," Hawkes pusillanimously fails to credit the originator of both the phrase and the concept: Immanuel Velikovsky, in his book *Earth In Upheaval* (1954). Also, in his comments on "intelligent design," Hawkes fails to mention the real alternative to an "intelligent designer"--the modern neoplatonic concept of "morphogenic fields" propounded, and experimentally validated to some extent, by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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