Q. What other rational theory is there to account for the plant and animal kingdoms we see today?

A.  As I'm a journalist, not a scientist, it isn't my job to provide an alternative theory.  However, I can point to research in other areas that is customarily ignored or ridiculed.

It is often said that the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics has been long falsified. Although this is true in the gross sense, there is in fact considerable evidence for such a mechanism at work in some important matters of detail.

The experiments of Cairns at Harvard and Hall at Rochester University suggest that microorganisms may be able to mutate in a way that is beneficial to them, which in turn suggests some form of direction of evolution.

Experiments with tobacco plants and flax demonstrate genetic change through the effects of fertilisers alone.   Experiments with sea squirts and salamanders as long ago as the 1920s appeared to demonstrate the direct inheritance of acquired characteristics.   

Several scientists have suggested that evolution may have been primarily influenced by the influx of microorganisms from space.  As Sir Fred Hoyle has pointed out, Fossil micro-organisms have been found in meteorites, indicating that life is universal -- not a lucky break in the primeval soup. This view is shared by Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the function of DNA.

In the light of discoveries of this kind, the received wisdom of neo-Darwinism is no longer received so uncritically. A new generation of biologists is subjecting the theory to the cold light of empirical investigation and finding it inadequate; scientists like Dr Rupert Sheldrake, Dr Brian Goodwin, professor of biology at theUniversity and Dr Peter Saunders, professor of mathematics at King's College London.

Future research

There are a number of important areas of potential research for biology which are currently being ignored completely.  

The function of DNA

Because DNA is always present in the cells of every plant and animal and because that DNA varies as the anatomy of the plant and animal varies, the assumption has been made that DNA must be the causative agent of heredity.  This is a reasonable working assumption -- but science is not about reasonable assumptions, it is about experiment and proof.

Sand and gravel are always present wherever there is a beach, and the grade and sorting of the sand and gravel vary regularly as the anatomy of each beach varies.  But sand and gravel are not the cause of beaches.  They are themselves the  result of a concealed factor at work.  This concealed factor is that the mass which can be transported by water varies with the speed of the water.  This means that as breaking waves lose their energy running down a beach, different size particles drop out of suspension at different levels and appear to have been graded intelligently.

Sand and gravel are not the cause of  beaches, they are a byproduct of a concealed principle of nature.  DNA, too, may be not the cause of living things, but a by-product of an unknown principle of nature that causes things to live.

Cooperation of cells

The question of how and why cells come together to cooperate is one that biology has left on the back burner, yet it is probably the single most important unanswered question in the life sciences.

The standard Darwinian answer is that cells cooperate because it is 'adaptive' for them to do so: that their cooperation is actually a form of selfishness because it increases their chances of survival.

This may appear superficially to be true, but is contradicted by many counter examples. The largest organ in the human body is the skin, but human skin cells do not increase their chances of survival by participating in this organ -- on the contrary they must inevitably decrease them.

There is a soil amoeba named Dictyostelium discoideum which normally lives a solitary life.  Under some conditions, the organisms will voluntarily come together to form a super-organism that is sensitive to light and heat and can move around by undulating like a snake.

Once again, the Darwinian explanation of this behaviour is that it is 'adaptive' but, plainly, this is scientifically an inadequate explanation of a complex and extraordinary phenomenon.

In a case like this one feels an urgent need to ask: Where is the organising influence or program for the formation and control of this super-organism?  Yet, in my view, the question is just as urgent and just as important for all multi-celled organisms.

The nature of energy

It is a peculiarity of human senses that we cannot sense energy directly, but only when it interacts with matter, as when a photon hits the retina and its energy is converted into electrochemical impulses.

What this means is that the part of the universe which contains energy alone, not interacting with matter, is undetectable by us.  We don't, for example, know whether it makes up a small part of the universe or the major part.

Another area of our ignorance is the question of whether energy can have a structure like that of solid matter.  Energy is usually conceived as a fluid and until recently it was believed that no fluid could maintain a structure over macroscopic distances.  But as Dr Brian Josephson of The Cavendish laboratory has pointed out, the discovery of liquid crystals shows that under some conditions fluids can maintain a macroscopic structure.  This raises the possibility that energy may be able to maintain a structure, independent of matter.  If so, this could be a discovery of fundamental importance to biology (and science in general).

J.B.S. Haldane once observed that, 'My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.'

Things may not be quite so bleak, but it may be the case that rather than knowing much or most of what there is to know, as Western science tends to assume, it may be that we are living in prehistoric times scientifically, and don't yet even know one per cent of what there is to know.