French biologist Jean Rostand was no fan of Darwinism but in his 1956 book A Biologist’s View he wrote:

However obscure the causes of evolution appear to me to be, I do not doubt for a moment that they are entirely natural. We have ample time to discover them; biology is in its infancy, and the problem of evolution has only been seriously posed for a century, or more accurately for fifty years, and even if our science failed to solve it, we would still not have to refer it to the province of metaphysics. 

Contrary to popular belief, seventy years later we are still not close to explaining the origin and development of life in terms of entirely natural (unintelligent) causes. Regular Evolution News readers are well aware of this, but for others I recommend reading this New York Times News Service story on a 1980 meeting at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, or this report on a 2022 story in the British newspaper The Guardian: “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” The scientists quoted in these articles all agree on only one thing: the causes of evolution, however obscure, must have been entirely natural. 

“A Search for the Truth”

In the last paragraph of this post, as an introduction to the video below, I had originally written “Many people might say you should never give up on a scientific problem, no matter how hard it appears to be…. But when you find a problem that many bright minds have been trying to solve without success for many years, is it time to consider the possibility that the problem has no solution?” 

But then I heard of the passing of Jonathan Wells, and read the following from Jon: 

Science can mean testing hypotheses by comparing them with evidence. It’s a search for the truth. That’s the science I love. But there’s another kind of science that has become popular nowadays and that’s finding materialistic explanations for everything. That’s materialistic science not empirical science. For empirical science the evidence matters the most. For materialistic science, the story matters the most.

In the light of this remark, I think it is more appropriate to rephrase my question and ask, “Is it time to consider the possibility that materialistic science has no solution for this problem?” because there is still a hypothesis that fits the evidence.