Why do people deny evolution?

Relying upon voices from "authority" is just bogus argument.

The statement was drafted and circulated by Discovery Institute in 2001 in response to widespread claims that no credible scientists existed who doubted Neo-Darwinism

Like Margulis, aid"lets get bck to Darwin"

We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary process. But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric....

No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambigious evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation. Then how do new species come into being? How do cauliflowers descend from tiny, wild Mediterranean cabbagelike plants, or pigs from wild boars?"

But many biologists claim they know for sure that random mutation (purposeless chance) is the source of inherited variation that generates new species of life and that life evolved in a single-common-trunk, dichotomously branching-phylogenetic-tree pattern! "No!" I say.

Then how did one species evolve into another? This profound research question is assiduously undermined by the hegemony who flaunt their "correct" solution. Especially dogmatic are those molecular modelers of the "tree of life" who, ignorant of alternative topologies (such as webs), don't study ancestors...Our zealous research, ever faithful to the god who dwells in the details, openly challenges such dogmatic certainty. This is science.

But did the neo-Darwinists ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!

Darwin conceded that the naturally selective process, by itself, did not seem to create novelty; rather, from the vast store of variants, differing organisms in nature, it only eliminated offspring that already existed by their failure to reproduce...[page 27]

How then did Darwin’s intrinsic, inherited variation arise in the first place?” “Ultimately,... he simply did not know.[page 29]

Amazingly, in 2008, Margulis was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal by the Linnean Society of London. Margulis, who died on Tuesday in Amherst, Massachusetts, however, was no friend of the Darwinian theory evolution....

Moran laments the fact that after 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, a unified theory of evolution still continues as only an elusive abstraction.

The problem: “People are always more loyal to their tribal group,” Margulis protested, “than to any other abstract notion of ‘truth’—scientists especially.” Out of fear, tribal theories of evolution reject the truth to maintain tribal loyalty

We kick about neo Darwinian and Darwinian and , s far as Im concerned, weve really not discussed it a lot. Among the several differences between the two "Schools" are these(to me) important "fly **** in the pepper" issues

Darwin posited Lamarkian "inheritance of acquired characteristics" as a mechanism for evolution.

They were attempting to both (1) emulate physics, as a model for "science,"

This was all a part of their determination to forever exclude any notion of teleology from evolutionary theory.

That is "forks have tines to facilitate human mouths

...demonstrated in the Origin of Species that random (actually chaotic) mutation with selection by niche survival a superior hypothesis.

Actually so did Darwin--teleology inherently implies design with purpose...

Demonstrated?

Darwin posited Lamark and then demonstrated in the Origin of Species that random (actually chaotic) mutation with selection by niche survival a superior hypothesis.

How did this natural variation arise? Darwin considered this of major importance and hence used the Lamarckian theory of the inherited effects of organ use and disuse throughout his work. Thus, in 1868 he published his detailed theory ‘Pangenesis’ to explain the origin of genetic variations....

Pangenesis was a detailed theory, Lamarckian in nature, intended to explain inheritance of acquired characteristics and the sort of natural variability within species that his natural selection theory required. It was his mechanism of heredity. His position on these crucial issues is not widely known however, and not part of the modern orthodoxy that has demonised Lamarck...

Many neo-Darwinists, particularly in Britain, have been acutely embarrassed by Darwin’s Pangenesis speculations and have, where possible, expunged them from the scientific record.