As every child in our public school system knows, all critics of neo-Darwinism are religious fanatics. Except those who aren’t, such as University of Madrid biologist Maximo Sandin, whose dislike for Darwinism seem to be as much based on its association with capitalism (here) as with its inconsistency with the fossil record and other evidence.
The theories which have been proposed to replace neo-Darwinism tell us something about the respect that many biologists have for the official version. Sandin’s alternative theory involves viruses and bacterias (he refers more or less approvingly to Alfred Hoyle’s “Evolution from Space”). The following is excerpted from one of his essays , an English translation is here .
Viral and bacterial response capacity to environmental stimuli would justify the inevitably rapid and far-reaching changes shown in the fossil record, forcibly needed due to the complex interrelation between tissues and the whole organism. And their “infective” character would render these changes possible in a considerably large number of organisms simultaneously. On the other hand, this infective character could be implicated in mass and selective extinctions, often coinciding with episodes of environmental disruption, events that would therefore be part of the evolutionary process.
In this context, natural selection, whose lack of creative power has been previously discussed, would be relegated to a secondary plane in the evolutionary process, being occasional and void of meaning as a mechanism for evolution. Competition would no longer be the driving force behind evolution, since new species would arise and mature as a whole.