Self-Sacrifice in Nature Proves Darwinism to be False
The theory of evolution claims that the natural world is the scene of merciless competition, and the theory's supporters try to inculcate this idea into the minds of others. Actually, the erroneous belief that nature is simply an arena of struggle has been a part of the theory since evolution was first proposed. The mechanism of "natural selection" promulgated by Darwin, the theory's author, proposes that creatures strong enough to adapt to their natural environment are able to survive and reproduce, while those that are too weak die off. According to this idea of "natural selection," nature is a savage battleground where creatures contend with one another in merciless struggles for survival, and where the weak is killed by the strong.
According to this idea, every creature must be strong enough to overcome others, if its species is to survive. In such an environment, there is no room for self-sacrifice, altruism, or cooperation because these could prove disadvantageous. Accordingly, every creature must be entirely selfish, concerned only for its own personal food, security, and well-being.
But, is the natural world really an environment where creatures engage in pitiless combat with one another, where cruelly selfish individuals strive to outdo everyone else and destroy them?
No! The observations made in this regard do not agree with evolution. Nature is not merely the place of competition that evolutionists claim. On the contrary, many species offer countless instances of intelligent cooperation: One animal may sacrifice its own well-being to the point of risking death; yet another may put itself in danger for the sake of the flock or herd, with no possible promise of reward. In his book entitled Evrim Kurami ve Bagnazlik (The Theory of Evolution and Bigotry) Dr. Cemal Yildirim, a professor and himself an evolutionist, explains why Darwin and other evolutionists of his time thought as they did:
Scientists of the nineteenth century were easily misled into adopting the thesis that nature is a battlefield, because more often than not, they were imprisoned in their studies or laboratories and generally didn't bother to acquaint themselves with nature directly. Not even a respectable scientist like Huxley could exempt himself from this error.1
In his book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, the evolutionist Peter Kropotkin writes about the support that animals give to one another, citing the error that Darwin and his followers fell into:
... the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another's blood… In fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is considered as one of the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution, were we not taught by him, in a paper on the "Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man," that, "from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day."… [I]t may be remarked at once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction.2
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True; there is a struggle and conflict in the natural world. But along with this fact, there is also self-sacrifice, enough to prove that the idea of natural selection, so basic to the theory of evolution, is totally groundless. Natural selection does not add any new features to any given species, nor can it change existing features to create an entirely new species. These facts stop evolutionists in their tracks; and their stalemate in this regard is discussed in the journal Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology):
The question is, why do living beings help one another? According to Darwin's theory, every animal is fighting for its own survival and the continuation of its species. Helping other creatures would decrease its own probability of surviving, and therefore, evolution should have eliminated this type of behavior, whereas we observe that animals can indeed behave selflessly.3
These facts about the natural world completely invalidate evolutionists' claim that nature is an arena of self-interested struggle, where the individual who best protects his own interests comes out on top. With regard to these characteristics of living creatures, John Maynard Smith poses a question to his fellow evolutionists:
Here one of the key questions has to do with altruism: How is it that natural selection can favor patterns of behavior that apparently do not favor the survival of the individual?4
John Maynard Smith is an evolutionist scientist and evolutionists cannot give an answer in the name of their theory to the question he has asked. (For examples of the extraordinary self-sacrifice and mutual assistance among creatures in the world of nature, see Harun Yahya's, Devotion Among Animals Revealing the Work of Allah, Global Publishing, Istanbul: 2004)
