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DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 213-216 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Introduction 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

213 

          Article 
 

Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Introduction 
 

Robert Campbell * 
 

ABSTRACT 
Darwinism as generally interpreted in the modern scientific paradigm claims that chance events 
and rare random mutations, only a few of which bestow a survival advantage, shape the evolution 
of life in the biosphere. We have all experienced accidents and know that we must be careful to 
anticipate and avoid them if we can. We do have the intelligence to learn from past experience 
and behave accordingly in the present in our efforts to ensure a positive future. In this way we 
have an evolving capacity to span and integrate events in space and time. The Darwinian 
paradigm however denies that the evolutionary process possesses any capacity to adjust 
according to feedback from past experience. Only blind accidental mutations determine the 
course of evolutionary events over great spans of time, it is claimed. Only a rare few of these 
mutations bestow a survival advantage that select in favor of the branching limbs of the 
evolutionary tree. The arguments in favor of this belief as expressed by Richard Dawkins are 
critically assessed and shown to be lacking in supporting evidence.         
 
Key Words: Charles Darwin, Theory of Evolution, Cosmic Order, intellegent direction, 
spirituality, atheist, Richard Dawkins. 
 
In the academic world it is usual for scientific contributions to be assessed by a peer review 
process that for all of its weaknesses is better than nothing. A peer review process can cut both 
ways, however. Biases inevitably come to play, as they do in all human endeavors, and a peer 
review process can often serve as much to promote them as to expose them. It is only over time, 
sometimes over periods of centuries, that biases gradually get weeded out from our garden of 
acceptable ideas.  
 
In our current social environment, there is a tendency for certain academic ideas to get publicly 
extolled in popular editions, asserting views as established truth without confirming evidence to 
support them. This is a little disconcerting, since lay people have been educated to believe that 
science is a highly disciplined search for truth, based upon solid empirical evidence. We have 
seen the results. We drive cars. We have television sets and computers. It may therefore come as 
a surprise to some of us that strong biases and political pressures often prevail in scientific 
circles.  
 
In Part One of this series of articles, we will be examining scientific biases that are currently 
favored in evolution theory. Richard Dawkins [3-5] is to be commended for his popular writing 
in this regard, for he has attempted to publicly address many questions posed by skeptics of the 
evolutionary process as viewed by Darwinists. In doing so he has opened the way for public 
                                                 
* Correspondence: Rober Campbell,  Independent Researcher. Website: http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com   

   E-mail: bob@cosmic-mindreach.com  

   Note: The articles presented in this issue are based on my book “Downsizing Darwin: An Intelligent Face for Evolution” self-published in 1996 

[1]. More information is available at my website [2].  



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 213-216 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Introduction 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

214 

examination of the issues involved, for they concern us all. Darwinism is taught in our schools 
and it inevitably influences the thinking of future generations and the direction that our cultures 
will take. 
 
Since literary works of a popular kind sometimes use the mantle of science to cloak biased views 
in the guise of truth, it is important that they be critically assessed. The scientists that write them 
have no conscious intention to deceive the public. They believe in the social value of what they 
are doing and they are conscientiously committed to their jobs. That’s why they write. However 
subtle their biases may be they also wish to swing the tide of public opinion behind them. Science 
must sell itself as a worthy endeavor, as it should. We cannot get along without science.    
 
The public, of course, is usually in no position to assess the merits of ideas preached from the 
pulpit of science. These are learned people who are experts in their field and highly respected. 
They must be right. Since there is normally no peer review in the public domain there is a good 
chance that many will believe the views that an expert expresses. In the interests of a little 
balance it should therefore be permissible for someone to take an academic writer to task over 
ideas that he publicly champions as truth. 
 
I don’t mean to single out Richard Dawkins for personal criticism. I’m sure he is a conscientious 
man who is very committed to doing his job well. He also shows signs of being inconsistent with 
some of he extreme views he expresses in his book “River out of Eden.” [3]. And he may well 
have moderated his views since his still popular book was first published in 1995. The book is 
nevertheless instructive because of the ideas it promotes that warrant the most critical 
examination. As one of the most vocal proponents of views that have become firmly entrenched 
in the academic community, the book betrays a powerful scientific bias, without the support of 
empirical evidence. 
 
Richard Dawkins is the author of a number of popular books including The Blind Watchmaker 
[4] and The Selfish Gene [5], books that by their title tell where he is coming from. He is 
promoting the Darwinian concept that the evolutionary process is the blind indifferent result of 
rare random mutations, a few of which accidentally endow a survival advantage that 
environmental selection pressures consequently favor. Some Darwinists have taken a more 
moderate line in recent decades, but not those of Dawkins’ persuasion. As Dawkins himself 
claims, they have all but achieved a closed shop in scientific circles and they are promoting their 
beliefs as gospel to the general public, as we might expect. 
 
The comments offered here are not intended to contest that chance events play a part in the 
evolution of life. We know from our own experience that accidents happen and some of us have a 
better capacity to cope with them than others, resulting in a certain survival advantage. There is 
every reason to believe that similar influences have helped to shape the development and 
adjustment of species in the natural environment.  
 
What is contested is the exclusive view that this is the only creative agent at work in the universe, 
or that it is the most important. In the case of human experience most of us assume there is an 
intelligent process at work in the human mind that allows us to cope creatively with random 
accidents. But Darwinists deny that there is any intelligence whatever at work in the evolutionary 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 213-216 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Introduction 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

215 

process. They believe that the universe is a vast sea of random atomic, molecular and radiation 
collisions, with no coherent universal order behind it other than these local chance collisions. 
This is a universal world view that they implicitly accept as the only foundation of the entire 
universe. There is no evidence, much less proof, to support such an extreme position. It is a blind 
belief, a rock solid bias [6]. 
 
Accidents happen. They must be accommodated and adjustments made for life to continue. But 
we may not correctly assume from this that all events are determined by accident. There is also a 
system of order that pervades the universe, from atoms to galaxies and stars, and from the 
simplest bacterium to plants and animals and humans. All things in the universe are interrelated 
and interdependent, whether by gravity, light and electromagnetism, or by the chemical bath that 
we swim in. There is gravitational and electromagnetic communication between the stars just as 
there is physical and chemical communication between living species.  
 
This is only part of the picture. We shall see that there is also tensional communication between 
the galaxies and stars. There is a synchronicity to their collective being and to the atomic 
synthesis that takes place in the centers of stars in the process of integrating space and time. 
There is also communication between the species through universal hierarchies that are an 
expression of an evolutionary order to the creative process on every level. Self-similarity 
pervades the structure of all phenomena through which we are able to integrate and make sense 
of our everyday experience.  
 
In touching on some of this as we go along, we shall see that the cosmic order that pervades the 
universe is implicitly intelligent. The nature of this System of order has been explored elsewhere1, 
however we shall see here that there are persistent clues as to how intelligence works right under 
our noses, with the evidence spread far and wide.  
 
Because there is no practical paradigm of how intelligence works currently available, science is 
left with accidental cause as the only alternative. It is this bias that will be under critical 
examination here. It will also be shown that an alternate paradigm is possible that can find 
practical application in science and that offers a far grander view of the universe with an 
intelligent role for humans to play. 2 
 

                                                 
 
1 The “System” inherent in the cosmic order was first introduced in a general way by the author in Fisherman’s 

Guide: A Systems Approach to Creativity and Organization, New Science Library (Shambhala), Boston, 1985. It 
has been developed in more rigorous fashion in Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, and in many 
articles freely available at www.cosmic-mindreach.com.  

2 The bias began to form with the emergence of western science three to four centuries ago, but its origins reach back 
to Aristotle. The essence of the bias is a refusal to acknowledge that universal influences are operative in the 
cosmic order of things. In the development of physics, for example, action-at-a-distance has been shunned like the 
plague. All events are believed to be the result of local influences operative in a space-time continuum. General 
Relativity theory has reduced space and time to a continuous field with a curvature to account for apparent 
gravitational action-at-a-distance. More recent experimental evidence of quantum events confirm quantum 
correlation-at-a-distance. Universal influences in the natural order of things do keep cropping up, despite our most 
ingenious inventions to dispense with them. 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 213-216 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Introduction 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

216 

With these thoughts in mind, one of Richard Dawkins’ books, entitled River Out of Eden, will be 
critically reviewed point by point and chapter by chapter, beginning with the preface. This book 
will thus serve as a basis for a critical review of Darwinist ideas in general. 
 
 
References 
 
1. Robert Campbell, Downsizing Darwin: An Intelligent Face for Evolution. MindReach Library (1996). 
 
2. http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com 
 
3. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Basic Books (1996). 
 
4. Richard Dawkins, the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without 

Design. W. W. Norton & Company (1996). 
 
5. Richard Dawkins, the Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press (1990). 
 
6. http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Truth_Bias.html 


