Darwin’s Island of Misfit Toys

A Tour of Evolutionary Biology’s Has-Been Hall of Fame

You know about the island Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer discovered, right? The Island of Misfit Toys, an Arctic refuge populated by toys that didn’t make the cut at Santa’s workshop?

In the stop-motion Christmas classic, our eponymous hero (snubbed from any and all reindeer games) saves a very foggy Christmas with his radiantly rubicund nose. Then he urges Santa to gather up the misfit toys and place them with grateful children. Santa obliges and everyone lives happily ever after.

The Christmas classic is studiously secular, with no mention of Jesus or the Incarnation, but elements of the film can readily be understood as informed by a Christian background. For instance, the island’s overseer, the wise and benevolent King Moonracer, is a winged lion—the longstanding symbol for St. Mark, which also served as the coat of arms for Pope John XXIII, whose pontificate overlapped the film’s period of creative development.

More fundamentally, the story’s central theme emphasizes the dignity and worth of every person, including the odd and defective. That’s thoroughly Christian. Jesus embraced and redeemed all manner of misfits. He became an outcast himself. And he taught that all of us are defectives—spiritually disfigured and cut off from our maker by our sin and in need of God’s loving offer of redemption.

Recently it struck me that Rudolph’s Island of Misfit Toys has a doppelganger of sorts, an evil twin island—Darwin’s Island of Misfit “Toys.” Let’s take a tour.

Darwin’s Misfits

When we first arrive by baby iceberg to this second island, it’s hard to distinguish it from the island Rudolph visited. There are misfits here. And it’s cold. But then differences begin to emerge. On the original island, King Moonracer loved the misfit toys and wanted to find homes for them. On Darwin’s island, not so much. Its ruler wants to quarantine the misfits from fit society.

Think about it. Darwinism birthed the eugenics movement in Europe and in the United States. Eugenics gained steam year by year in the early 20th century until Hitler and the Nazis so outdid every other Western nation in their perverse zeal for breeding out and pruning out “life unworthy of life” that they wrecked the eugenics brand for decades.

Evolutionists will counter that eugenics was artificially grafted onto Darwinian evolution in order to borrow prestige from an ascendant scientific theory. They will also contend that apart from some boilerplate Victorian-era racial prejudice, neither Darwin nor his theory has any meaningful connection to eugenics or the scientific racism that blighted the twentieth century. But historian Richard Weikart has shown otherwise.1 Darwin saw sub-Saharan African and Australian aboriginal groups as being much more closely related to our supposed ape ancestors than were white Europeans, and he talked about the inevitability of the white races outcompeting and driving to extinction the darker races of humankind. Also, he employed his low (and misinformed) view of these “savage” races to sell his argument for ape-to-man evolution. Darwin did not build the eugenics house, but he did lay the foundation of scientific racism upon which the eugenics movement would be built.

Also relevant to this discussion is how Darwinism makes possible what Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins describes as “an intellectually fulfilled” atheism by providing a plausible naturalistic explanation for life’s great diversity. Under Darwinism, you can accommodate God if you wish, but the theory renders God largely superfluous in the history of life.

Darwin also yoked his theory to a methodological rule he championed, methodological materialism, which disallows appeals to immaterial causes in scientific explanations. Consequently, the Darwinian framework tends to marginalize the notion of an immortal human soul and the idea that we are made in the image of God with inherent dignity and worth. In this way Darwinism aided and abetted a culture of death in which people are viewed in narrowly utilitarian terms. Those who have worn out their usefulness to society are encouraged to kill themselves or allow someone else to kill them—a ghastly movement that flies under the euphemisms of mercy killing and euthanasia.2 In Canada and some U.S. states, it has progressed to encouraging depressed people to consider suicide as a worthwhile option.

So no, Darwin’s Island of Misfits has nothing like the benevolent King Moonracer, unless one counts as benevolent an overlord urging the misfits to jump into a woodchipper if the fancy strikes them.

The Most Embarrassing Misfits of All

As we wander deeper into Darwin’s Island of Misfits, we find another sort of misfit. These are tucked out of sight, relegated to the icy caverns of its interior.

Here we encounter a most curious menagerie—not animals but floating body parts: a knee, an ankle, what may be a set of tonsils, an appendix, and an eyeball.

At one point a mouth attached only to a throat, windpipe, and esophagus floats directly up to you in the cavern, puffs of cold air forming each time the creature exhales. “Hello,” it says brightly. “We’ve been quarantined from the other misfits. We’re the misfits among the misfits. Quarantined because the evolutionists insisted we were evidence of lousy design—proof of evolution’s dumb-luck trial-and-error process: useless vestigial organs such as the appendix and tonsils; the human knees, ankles, and spine—clumsily jury-rigged from a knuckle-walking ape to serve bipedal humanity; the vertebrate eye, wired in backwards and saddling us with an idiotic blind spot. But then it’s come out that, no, we’re all brilliant designs. Take me. Darwinists will tell you that a wise God would never have mashed together the eating organ and the breathing organ. That would be a choking hazard, right? It must have been mindless evolution. But then some bioengineers investigated. Turns out, the Darwinists’ supposedly superior alternative strategy would be ridiculously bulky with all kinds of unpleasant trade-offs. Fact is, I’m a design master class.”

A column of DNA floats past. “So-called ‘junk DNA,’” the mouth comments, falling into his role as tour guide. “Darwinists were sure the stuff was just pointless evolutionary leftovers, since it didn’t code for proteins. But now scientists are discovering more and more uses for the stuff.”

“And all these other floating body parts?” you ask.

“Same story. Turns out the ‘vestigial’ organs said to be worthless evolutionary leftovers perform valuable functions. That fellow over there, the one giving you the stink eye? His backward wiring, come to learn, is an ingenious hack to improve oxygen flow to the eyeball. Eyes need gobs of oxygen. The other body parts—same song, different verse. Knees, ankles, that backbone and wrist joint hanging out together over there—all masterpieces of biomechanical engineering. Most evolutionists don’t have any training in engineering. They ignore the issue of trade-offs and miss the design brilliance. The evolutionists who actually keep up with the latest research, they at least get it. They’re the ones who stuck us back here. They realize that, as arguments for evolution go, we’re the proverbial dog that won’t hunt anymore.”

“So you’re never allowed into the open air?”

The mouth pops his lips. “Oh, it’s not that dire. There are researchers who have been publicly debunking these bad-design-so-no-designer arguments. They slip us past the sentries every now and then and take us for walks out in the sunshine.

A floating skull sidles up to the mouth.

“May I introduce, Piltdown Man,” says the floating mouth. “The Piltdown skull, to be precise—‘discovered’ in 1908 and lauded as proof of the missing link between ape and man. A total fraud, come to find out—a human cranium paired with the jaw and teeth of an orangutan. Evolutionists prefer to forget all about this one.”

“Indeed,” says the skull. “They have gotten so much better at the fakery since my time.”

The mouth nods. “So much better that they even fool themselves—imaginative reconstructions of ancient hominid hip bones to make them look more like ours; artist renderings of ape-like hominids to do the same. Then just the opposite with the very humanish Neanderthals and Homo erectus—they make them look more ape-like. The whole idea is, shrink the massive gap between ape and man. Very clever. The stock-in-trade of natural history museums.3 The propaganda has matured immensely since the thoroughly ham-fisted Piltdown affair.”

“Ham-fisted!” the skull retorts, his feelings injured. “I never hear you bad-mouthing disembodied RNA and the ridiculous RNA-World hypothesis back of them, or those ludicrous imaginary transitionals between land mammals and whales. Frauds and fantasies, the lot of them, but never a cross word from you. It’s all directed at me, a poor collection of bones that never had the least say in—”

“Tell the World About Us”

By now the skull and mouth have drifted out of earshot. A peppered moth lights on your shoulder. He’s another creature employed to sell evolutionary theory to the public and subsequently caught up in an embarrassing fraud of sorts. Just behind him a troupe of animal embryos—eight columns of three, each column a different species—march through the air toward you.

The peppered moth on your shoulder sighs. “Haeckel’s embryos,” he says. “Even I’m embarrassed to be seen with them.”

With the unnerving troupe of embryos closing in, you decide it’s time to find the exit.

When you reach the sunlight at the mouth of the cave, you lift the moth off your shoulder and place him on the branch of an arctic willow. “Whatever you do,” huffs the moth, “don’t glue me to a tree trunk. Humiliating!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you reply.

The peppered moth takes wing and follows you to the shore. As you step onto your improbably seaworthy baby iceberg to begin the journey home, the moth calls out with a final request. “If you really want to help, tell the world about us—Darwin’s Island of Misfits.”

Notes
1. Richard Weikart, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022).
2. Richard Weikart, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (2024), 55–60, 66, 133.
3. Casey Luskin, “Missing Transitions: Human Origins and the Fossil Record,” Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (2017), 437–473.

Fact-Checking Darwin’s Misfits
by Jonathan Witt

Darwin’s Island of Misfits” employs a whimsical fictional setting, but its points of science are factual.

For details on the peppered moth, Haeckel’s embryo drawings, and other discredited “proofs” of evolution, see biologist Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong (2000) and Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (2017).

As for the floating body parts in the cavern—the knee, ankle, tonsils, appendix, eyeball, and throat—Darwinists really do present these as either useless organs leftover from the evolutionary process or as evidence of botched design. And all such arguments really have been overturned.

For instance, in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Oxford evolutionist Richard Dawkins insists that the vertebrate eye is wired backwards in a way that no “tidy-minded engineer” would tolerate. He blames this supposedly substandard design on blind evolution, but his argument is misinformed. The backward wiring greatly improves oxygen flow to the oxygen-hungry vision cells. Biologist Michael Denton ably summarizes these findings in his 1999 Origins & Design article, “The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?”1

Evolutionist Nathan Lents wrote an entire book, Human Errors (2018), claiming a long list of botched designs in the human body as supposed evidence of mindless evolution at work. A rebuttal tome could rightly be titled Nathan’s Errors.

In Your Designed Body (2022) and in the abridged version, Your Amazing Body (2025), Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman rebut several of Lents’s mistakes. And British biomimetics engineer Stuart Burgess does so in point-by-point fashion in his upcoming work Ultimate Engineering: An Award-Winning Engineer Investigates the Human Body. As the title suggests, Burgess counters Lents and other evolutionists with a detailed case showing that the maligned body parts are actually instances of ingenious design.

Burgess reinforces his thesis by describing how, when tasked with building better robots, our best engineers have failed to approach the versatility of human body parts, including the ankle and knee joints, the feet, and the heart. Set beside their biological counterparts, the most advanced robotic body parts are clunky and amateurish by comparison. •

Note
Michael Denton, “The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?” Origins & Design 19:2, is. 37 (1999).