Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

New species appear on the Earth all the time.

His theory had, in essence, preceded his knowledge-that is, he had hit upon a novel and evocative theory of evolution with limited knowledge at hand to satisfy either himself or others that the theory was true. He could neither accept it himself nor prove it to others. He simply did not know enough concerning the several natural history fields upon which his theory would have to be based.'

Dr. Barry Gale (Science Historian, Darwin College, UK) in his book, Evolution Without Evidence.

"You will be greatly disappointed (by the forthcoming book); it will be grievously too hypothetical. It will very likely be of no other service than collocating some facts; though I myself think I see my way approximately on the origin of the species. But, alas, how frequent, how almost universal it is in an author to persuade himself of the truth of his own dogmas."

Charles Darwin, 1858, in a letter to a colleague regarding the concluding chapters of his Origin of Species.

"It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."

Personal letter from Dr Collin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, to Luther D. Sunderland

Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten (Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia)

"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school'."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

"Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

(Prof. Louis Bounoure, Director of Research, National Center of Scientific Research.)

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever! In explaining evolution we do not have one iota of fact."

(Dr. Newton Tahmisian, Atomic Energy Commission.)

"I, myself, am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the credulity that it has."

Malcom Muggeridge, Pascal Lectures, Ontario Canada, University of Waterloo

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans - of upright, naked, tool-making, big-brained beings - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Lyall Watson, Anthropologist

''We're not just evolving slowly,'' Gould says, ''for all practical purposes we're not evolving. There's no reason to think we're going to get bigger brains or smaller toes or whatever - we are what we are.''

Stephen Jay Gould ( Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University )

"...not being a paleontologist, I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there's a very strong desire to exaggerate the importance of those fragments..."

Dr. Greg Kirby (Senior Lecturer in Population Biology at Flinders University ) in an address given at a meeting of the Biology Teachers Association of South Australia.

"the incident on a par with two other embarrassing faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man', the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'."

"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid, that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

(Dr. Tim White, anthropologist, University of California,

I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story-telling.

We have access to the tips of a tree, the tree itself is a theory and people who pretended to know about the tree and to describe what went on with it, how the branches came off and the twigs came off are, I think, telling stories.

Dr. Colin Patterson,( Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London ) in an interview on British broadcasting Corporation ( BBC ) television

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

Stephen Jay Gould, Former Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species

"Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species."

Dr. Etheridge, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, cited in Dr. Scott Huse, The Collapse of Evolution.

"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein".'

Sir Fred Hoyle (English astronomer, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University)

"The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur .... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it."

Grasse, Pierre-Paul (1977) Evolution of Living Organism Academic Press, New York, N.Y., p. 103