Here is more evidence in terms of a study showing Darwin was wrong. Why do people continue to believe in evolution?
"With $2 million in funding over a five-year period starting in 2010, researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Bradley Cardinale, with help from colleagues at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara, set out to test a fundamental aspect of Darwin's theory. According to Darwin, closely related species compete more than distant ones, because they occupy similar ecological niches. The scientists neither intended nor expected to find Darwin's precept wrong. Examining closely related algae in North American lakes, they expected to find species battling each other for dominance. What they found was "completely unexpected," the report says. Look at the shock these scientists experienced:
The researchers ... were
so uncomfortable with their results that they spent the next several months trying to disprove their own work. But the research held up.
"
[Darwin's] hypothesis is so intuitive that it was hard for us to give it up. But we are becoming
more and more convinced that he wasn't right about the organisms we've been studying," Cardinale says. "It doesn't mean the hypothesis won't hold for other organisms, but it's enough that
we want to get biologists to rethink the generality of Darwin's hypothesis." (Emphasis added.)
So it's not about competition. It's about cooperation.
"
If Darwin had been right, the older, more genetically unique species should have unique niches, and should compete less strongly, while the ones closely related should be ecologically similar and compete much more strongly --
but that's not what happened," Cardinale says. "
We didn't see any evidence of that at all." They found this to be so in field experiments, lab experiments and surveys in 1,200 lakes in North America.
"
If Darwin was right,
we should've seen species that are genetically different and ecologically unique, doing unique things and not competing with other species," he adds. "
But we didn't."
This result is important because competition is a key tenet of Darwinism. It harks back to the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who assumed that organisms, multiplying exponentially, cannot keep up with the food supply that only grows arithmetically. The inevitable consequence, Malthus reasoned, would be widespread death except for those individuals who could successfully compete for limited resources. Darwin depended on this notion when he built his theory of natural selection. In the sixth edition of
On the Origin of Species, he used "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer (another follower of Malthus), as a more accurate representation of his ideas, because it avoided the appearance of design (i.e., nature "selecting" something, as if on purpose).
Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He
assumed the
whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that
one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They
don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that
nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected.
"Maybe species are co-evolving," he adds. "Maybe they are
evolving together so they are
more productive as a team than they are individually. We found that more than one-third of the time, that they like to be together.
Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong."
Cardinale is being tentative with his "maybes" because it's a big deal to contradict the man most scientists view as the greatest biologist who ever lived, whose views are central to debates over design and loom large in battles over school science. But the evidence has spoken. If it proves true with other organisms, it's hard to overestimate the impact of this finding. The work was done by scientists supportive of Darwinism. This is huge! What will our Darwin-lobbying friends at the
National Censor for Science Education do now? Oh, just ignore it, of course."
Full article here
NSF Study on Green Algae Finds Darwin Was Wrong About Competition