In 1973 I was a postdoc in molecular
biology at Columbia University and it
was a time really of a lot of intense
discussion .
I had a lot of friends whowere postdocs subjects came out
naturally and I just happened to come
across a copy of the Wistar symposium that was held in 1966 in Philadelphia.

The collection of essays about Darwinian theory and I read Murray Eden's article
the critical article about Darwinian theory and Marcel shuttin burgers
critical argument about dominating
theory 
and I started talking about it
with the other postdoctoral fellows
people who were working in the
laboratory at the time .

And I discovered somewhat to my own surprise that  the arguments which seemed so very credible
was very important went virtually
unanswered among the biologists that I knew who attended to dismiss the
arguments in a way that suggested they hadn't really understood them and if they had understood them we're not prepared to respond to them.

 And now that was the beginning of my skepticism about Darwinian theory when I spent a year in Paris working with shorten Berger of course both of us enriched each other's opinions.

Shinsen Berger had been a long-standing critic within the French Biological establishment of Darwinian theory and what he had to say reinforced what he had to say later.

 I talked with Murray Eden there were a group of us who are similarly skeptical I must say in the
70s in the late 60s ,
and in the 70s therewas a much more intensive degree of opposition to Darwinian theory a much much greater willingness to examine.

Darwinian orthodoxies the great
counter-reformation took place in the
1980s in the 1990s so when I started
work now when I started thinking about these issues chutes and Berger and I wanted to write a book together on this there's a there was a very relatively liberal attitude among mathematicians people who were interested physicists people who are interested in Darwinian theory a much greater willingness to wonder whether any of this could possibly be true.

 So that was roughly my own background approach to it.

Well the claim that all skeptics about
Darwinian orthodoxy a Christian
fundamentalist stands refuted by me it's obviously not true or not neither
Christian or a fundamentalist but lots
and lots of people are skeptical in the
scientific community I know dozens of mathematicians who scratch their head and say you guys think this is the way life originated it's absolutely a preposterous theory.

And many many very significant figures John von neumann one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century just laughed at Darwin in theory he hooted at it so it's perfectly absurd .

This is a point in a polemical dispute it's not a reasonable standard of criticism opposition to Darwinian theory is. 

I wouldn't say widespread but there's a
consistent group of people among
mathematicians among physicists among some very good speculative biologists we simply  don't accept it don't  even regard it as a scientific
theory in any reasonable sense.