Schützenberger's opposition to Darwinism

This is an extract from Marcel-Paul Schützenberger -- French Darwin doubter
Journal of Creation 28 (2) (August 2014) 123-127

In addition to his formal mathematics work, Schützenberger was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of Darwinism", a stance that resulted in mixed reactions from his peers and critics, both biologists and mathematicians. Professor Pin added that the brilliant mind of this truly pluridisciplinary researcher also carefully researched "the deficiencies of Darwinism". Professor Perrin wrote that throughout his life Schützenberger was passionately interested in the many flaws in the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Although some of his peers have chosen to ignore Schützenberger's work in this area, many have praised it.

Schützenberger, while acknowledging that biology was not his major specialty, stated that his use of mathematics in the overall assessment of evolutionary thought has been encouraged by the biologists themselves, if only because they presented such an irresistible target. His work in support of the conclusion that random mutations consistently produce not progressive evolution but rather degeneration, resulted in the 1966 Wistar Symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania. This symposium " ... brought together a collection of renowned ... scientists ... . At that meeting Marco became one of the first distinguished scientists in the world to point out that a theory of evolution that depends on uniformly randomly occurring mutations cannot be the truth because the number of mutations needed to create the speciation that we observe, and the time that would be needed for those mutations to have happened by chance, exceed by thousands of orders of magnitude the time that has been available."

At this meeting, Schützenberger openly presented, along with MIT professor Murray Eden, the evidence for the fact that the mathematical probabilities against neo-Darwinism are enormous. He concluded that, as a result of the discovery of genetic coding, scientists have realized that genes are

... like a word composed in the DNA alphabet; such words form the genomic text. It is that word that tells the cell to make this or that protein. Either a given protein is structural, or a protein itself works in combination with other signals given by the genome to fabricate yet another protein.

He stressed that a central evolution postulate is that genes undergo mutations "that may facilitate the reproduction of those individuals carrying it; over time, and with respect to a specific environment, [and these] mutants come to be statistically favored, replacing individuals lacking the requisite mutation[s]." He concluded that

Evolution could not be an accumulation of such typographical errors. Population geneticists can study the speed with which a favorable mutation propagates itself under these circumstances. They do this with a lot of skill, but these are academic exercises because none of the parameters that they use can be empirically determined ... We know the number of genes in an organism. There are about one hundred thousand for a higher vertebrate ... . But this seems grossly insufficient to explain the incredible quantity of information needed to accomplish evolution within a given line of species.