The DI's Science and Culture News announces that a "Darwinist" changed his mind

The Discovery Institute’s website “Science and Culture” (formerly Evolution News and Views) had a dramatic story of conversion recently. A post entitled “He Taught Darwinism for Decades (Then Changed His Mind)” by Andrew McDiarmid on 30 October 2025. It announced that

For decades, British professor and author Neil Thomas was a card-carrying Darwinist. It wasn’t until after he retired from academia that he had the repose to think about things objectively. Then one day, in a scientific flash of inspiration, he came to the conclusion that the standard Darwinian story was “rubbish.”

The result is that Neil Thomas has written two books, published by the DI’s publishing outfit, Discovery Institute Press: Taking Leave of Darwin: A longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design and False Messiah: Darwinism as The God That Failed. He has also made numbers of posts at Science and Culture since 2021, see them here. He was intervewed in a two-part (part 1 and part 2) series by Jonathan Witt in 2021 and by Andrew McDiarmid in 2025. in the DI’s series “ID The Future”.

Thomas cannot understand how biologists ever believed Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. So: has someone who has been devoted to teaching biology students about Darwin and natural selection recently changed his mind? If so, should we pay close attention to his arguments?

Well …

I hasten to say that I have not read these two books, though I have listened to the two podcast interviews. In the podcasts, Thomas expresses his scepticism about the origin of Life, and about whether natural selection can account for the complexity of humans. But he does not explain why natural selection cannot account for adaptations of biological organisms once life has arisen.

Let’s look at a couple of the arguments Thomas uses against “Darwinism”. First, McDiarmid quotes Thomas as saying “This Darwinism business, it’s rubbish isn’t it?” And he summarizes Thomas’s argument, saying

First, Thomas criticizes Darwin’s cardinal principle of natural selection as intellectually incoherent and empty of meaning.

and then he continues with Thomas’s conclusion that

the term essentially refers to preservation; it is conservative, cannot create, and certainly cannot select.

PRATTs

These are two PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times). They are truly “moldy oldies”. The first seems to be the assertion that “survival of the fittest” is meaningless because fitness is defined as having survived. In reality, the moment we compare phenotypes or genotypes to see which have the higher fitness, fitness is meaningful and not a vacuous concept. I am not the first to make this point, but for more explanation see my 2020 post on this here at PT.

As for “preservation”, if there are more than one genotype in the population, and one is preserved more than the others, then it will increase in frequency. So the composition of the population can change, particularly if the genotype(s) “preserved” are not the most frequent ones. Again, the idea that natural selection cannot change the population is a PRATT, and again, I have heard it enough times that I joined the many people who have refuted that argument. See my 2023 post here.

So Neil Thomas seems to have little understanding of how natural selection works. That would be shocking if he were teaching “Darwinism” for many years, as a biologist.

Not a biologist!

In fact, Neil Thomas is not a biologist. Not even close. This is no secret: in his biographical material at S&C News, which appears at the end of each of his posts there, he is described thusly:

Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic.

Useful, but not new

I should add that Thomas spends most of his posts at S&CN describing the intellectual atmosphere preceding and during publication of Charles Darwin’s books. He points to many predecessors, going back to the Greeks and Romans, and concludes that Victorian society was ready for a secular explanation of how adaptation could come about.

He is right about that, but his point is hardly new. There is some implication in Thomas’s posts that “Darwinists” have insisted that Darwin was the first evolutionary thinker. That is totally wrong: there have been numerous books, for decades exploring Darwin’s predecessors. Stephen Jay Gould had many columns on the subject. There is an extensive Wikipedia page on History of Evolutionary Thought. Peter Bowler’s book Evolution, the History of an Idea, is a good summary. We have also posted yearly celebrations of Lamarck, Darwin’s most important predeccessor here at Panda’s Thumb, the most recent also discussing Lamarck’s predecessor and patron Georges Buffon. These posts will be found on or near August 1 of each year.

A particular favorite of mine is an older popularization by John Greene, provocatively titled The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought. It points out the connection between the major advances in other fields, such as astronomy, which led to a search for unifying mechanisms, even in biology.

Thomas seems most upset about this change, the rise to dominance of secular science which searches for mechanisms in our everyday world. He seems to think that recent arguments by the Discovery Institute are invalidating this. He’s welcome to his opinion, but I don’t think his arguments will bear much weight.