Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I am disagreeing with your view of scientists as extreme.

First, let me break this into four different questions.

1) Is there a ever a point where scientists can be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that their understanding is correct.

2) When we reach this point, should we then reject other ideas as "unscientific" and not present them in the classroom.

3) Have we reached this point with evolution? Who decides if we have reached this point? How should we decide?

4) Should scientist consider social/philosophical/religious objections when deciding these questions.

1. I believe that it is right for scientists, after they have overwhelming evidence and no other possible explanation to declare theory "correct" and then move on.

We teach Newton's laws in the classroom with no competing theories. We teach that the Earth revolves around the sun. We don't seriously present the competing theory even though it was once very controversial.


2. When a theory is so "proven" it should be taught in science classrooms. Theories that have been widely discredited shouldn't be presented seriously.

I don't think I need to argue this point, I think we all agree there is a point where the argument should be accepted, and we should move on-- especially in the classroom.

For example, we don't teach about the "4 humors" in the classroom any more. Based on modern medicine, most of us would agree that this would be inappropriate.

3. This is the big question.

This has been argued here ad nauseum, but let me make this point. In questions of science, we should listen to the scientists.

Scientists are perfectly able to make judgements about science. The question of evolution has been fully vetted in the scientific community and overwhelmingly accepted as being convincingly supported by the evidence.

The only way this view is invalid is if science itself is somehow biassed. I think this is the extreme view given the fact that the studies, the papers, the research is all out there.

There is also the fact that science is very successful. The scientists who accept evolution wholeheartedly (and over 95% of life scientists do) are not only the people most qualified to make this determination (they have spent the most time studying the evidence)-- these scientists are on the forefront of discovery.

They are tackling diseases, decoding genomes, developing new drugs, making technology to solve crimes....

If scientists-- especially the life scientists-- are so susceptable to bias leading to bad science, it is hard to imagine they would be so effective and productive.

But my point is that the scientistific community should decide what science is. That the scientific community (except a very small religious minority) speaks so clearly and so emphatically about evolution is very important.

4. I am sympathetic to the argument that religious/philosophical objection should be considered, especially in public schools in a multicultural society

Yes, I have second thoughts given the fact I understand that evolution is a direct challenge to a significant religious community. The fact that this is a public school paid for by taxes of people who are offended presents a bit of a dilemma for me.

But I also understand the important of science in today's culture. By watering down the teaching of a modern view of science, you provide a worse education in an important area.

This is why I think that that the need to teach science-- as understood by modern scientists is very important.

Presenting evolution as an "open issue" when the modern scientific community not only accepts it as fact, but is using evolution as the base for most modern research, is not the way to get the best education.

Perhaps the point here is that both creationist and 'evolutionary' thought can be reduced to close-minded cant. The only "scientific course is to base opinion on refutable hypotheses and remain open-minded about the conclusions as the evidence comes in. One who asserts that evolution conclusively proves there was no creator is just as dogmmatic and in the grip of unprovable belief as one who asserts that evolution is myth and we were created in some fashion by supranatural forces.

George,

There is a difference between being "closed minded", and being convinced. You are wrong to accuse scientists who have been convinced by overwhelming evidence as being "closed minded".

In science when we are convinced, we move on. This doesn't mean being "closed-minded" to new evidence.

No one considers the possibility that living organisms can "spontaneously generate" any more. This isn't being closed minded, it is recognizing that the experiements have been done, an overwhelming amount of evidence says it can't happen and doesn't happen.

However, if a scientist came with evidence that he could produce living matter using "spontaneous generation", scientists would listen and with proof the science would change drastically. However, scientists are careful people and probably haven't missed anything. It is very unlikely that this would happen.

Of course anything is possible. We could wake up tomorrow and discover that Newton's laws no longer apply. Someone could develop a perpetual motion machine that would create unlimited energy out of the air. Someone could demonstrate telepathic abilities in a controlled setting with no other possible way of communication.

There are many things that could happen that would put science on its ear. I am convinced that if someone could show how to do any of these things, they would be accepted by science (after a period of very careful review).

The fact that it is possible for someone to find a way break the laws of science, doesn't mean these laws shouldn't be taught, accepted or used to make new technology.

I also want to clarify one thing.

No one seriously claims that science disproves the existance of God. The existance of God is clearly outside the realm of science.

Evolution is a scientific process (which may or may not have been set up by a creator). The way that species evolved from common anscestors is a scientific question.

My frustration with Creationism and Intelligent Design is not that they suggest a creator.

The obvious flaw with Intelligent Design, as others have pointed out, is its inability to be tested. That is, it can neither be verified nor disproved.

Evolution could be disproven if the proper evidence were presented. And don't believe that folks aren't looking for it.

Darwin never coined the term evolution . His term till the day he died was "Descent with modification", and by saying that Darwin divorced himself from the question of origins .Spenser coined evolution as an onward and upward process ( another Spenserian error alas) To this day the processes of evolution are well understood , applicable to many applied fields, and their foundations are scientifically repeatable. Further, no evidence that refutes anything of the underpinnings of the support sciences has ever been found, and of course theyre looking , because even negative data will make someones career just like Continental drift brought a new generation of geophysicists to the fore and retired a bunch of older ones

.(OH sure, the creationists try to state that every piece of scientific evidence that supports evolution is wrong , but they (the Creationists ) have an even more fantastic "myth based"story to explain away the scientific data) HOWEVER, we must recognize that the Inteligent Design crowd accepts all the underlying science. To do otherwise would put them in a spiral of credibility in which , having connected themselves with a theistic basis, they would , by law, have to disappear up their own butts.The IDers all agree ALL AGREE THAT:

The earth is old, about 4.6 BY

The sedimentary record and Uniformitarianism as concepts are correct

No flood, cmon

There were about 5 major mass extinctions and another bunch of minor extinctions

Evolution explains how life recovered after each mass extinction and how each pinnacle species for that time developed by evolutionary means.

DNA is an adequate calendar of evolutionary events for species

Macroevolution occurs regularly and is recorded in both the fossil record and in genomes of related genuses.

The entire argument for the IDers is based totally upon the origin of life. Since this can neither be proved nor disproved either way, there should also be another set of possibles that explain origins. PANSPERMIA, (after all , some of the very nucleotides in DNA can be seen in spectrographs from distant galaxies)., Life could have just as easily arisen by catalytic olymerization, (using polymer chemistry principles, molecular biologists have already manufactured replicating peptides with all the phosphoruses and sulfurs and Haem or Magnesium groups. Theyve also made silica based mega polymers that arose from clay /peptide interactions. Life could have arisen from extremophilic conditions such as in volcanic vents or subocean "smokers", as well as hydrothermal springs. The old "primordial soup' concept dwelled mostly on rearranging basic molecules through time and photolytic reactions. The discovery of really funky lifeforms in extremophilic associations has been a very recent discovery.I think scentists are like kids, they dont let their imaginations get too cemented around one set of foundations when there are others waiting to be discovered. I personally am drawn to panspermia because there is at least some evidence that Cytosine and uracil are in thestars already

AS far as Behe, his position is being slowly chipped away by the molecular biologists and really, Cunninghams question was asked earlier at a seminar I was at in Etown Pa where Behe was asked."Ih blood clotting is an irreducible complex process, how come DNA , which is an even smaller structure can be seen to attract and glom unrelated genomic chunks? In other words , DNA can evolve, so why cant the stuff DNA is part of evolve too.
He used to have a bigger list of irreducibly complex structures, like flagella. Then Some wag pub;ished an evolution of cilia and flagella in unicellular forms. It was a paleobotanist who discovered protociliated structures from oil shales of the Ordovician. I have no other info on that but Im still trying to find it.

ae brown states that he believes;

"1. I believe that it is right for scientists, after they have overwhelming evidence and no other possible explanation to declare theory "correct" and then move on.

We teach Newton's laws in the classroom with no competing theories. We teach that the Earth revolves around the sun. We don't seriously present the competing theory even though it was once very controversial.


2. When a theory is so "proven" it should be taught in science classrooms. Theories that have been widely discredited shouldn't be presented seriously."

I don't particularly argue with that, except to note that at some point - likely secondary school - the educators (particularly those who style themselves as "scientists" ) should note that what they are teaching is accepted theory, which may well be supplanted by new discoveries; or which, like Newtonian mechanics, may be perfectly useful within known practical limits, but fundamentally in error.

The notion that when scientists have overwhelming evidence that a certain model is correct they "should accept (and teach) it as true and move on" is, itself quite unscientific. The moment it was discovered that an electrically charged particle, moving at constant velocity could generate a force, the foundation of Newtonian Mechanics was upset. Despite this, well over a generation passed before the great majority of professed scientists recognized and accepted this fact. The correct approach would have been to point out the discrepancy, note the contradiction, and acknowledge that a new theoretical synthesis will be sought.

The huge advances of science in the last several centuries have not solved the riddle of our existence. The origins of our universe are still as cloudy to us as they were to Aristotle. We have amassed a great deal of what we hope is understanding of the physical processes that immediately followed the burst of energy that started it all, and partial, but imperfect models for describing what followed. We certainly can' t explain why the basic physical constants have the values we observe and why they are so tuned for our existence. To focus exclusively in what has been discovered (and it is a lot) without acknowledging what remains unexplained, it itself most unscientific. "Education" that misses this is not education at all: it is indoctrination.


While many of the opponents of the secular indoctrination that passes for education today would, if given their way, merely substite a different form of indoctrination, those of a real scientific bent will resist both contending and prejudicial schools of belief. Education should communicate and impart the understanding that mankind has accumulated, do so within the context of our cultural norms, and freely acknowledge the contradictions and limitations of both.

Re: Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?


The theory of evolution is basically dead as we speak. It is no longer being defended by anybody with brains or talent, but rather by academic dead-wood. It has been massively disproven over many decades and they have to keep on reinventing it every five or ten years to keep from looking like total idiots. To believe in evolution today, you have to pretty much take everything we know about modern mathematics and probability theory and basically just flush it down the toilet.

"Secular indoctrination" . . . heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .


That just cracks me up . . . Luther's conundrum of whose ox has been gored immediately comes to mind . . .

Good. Then listen; here's a sampling of what serious scientists (as opposed to a good deal of the blowhards you encounter on forums) have to say about evolution:

The Fossils In General

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major
transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been
a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be
claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil
record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and
generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental
structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history
and has been conservative in habitat."

G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with
gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during
their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the
same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed,
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the
earth?" (p. 206)

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest
objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)

Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979

The Abundance of Fossils

"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about
120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been
greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the
situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still
surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of
Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse
in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more
detailed information."

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological
exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely
more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been
discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are
filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The
availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit
objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What
is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major
groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They
can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection
of the fossil record."

Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more
than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so
complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack
of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of
material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51

Evidence for Creation ?

"A circular argument arises: Interpret the fossil record in terms of a
particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that
it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?"

Dr.. Tom Kemp, Curator
University Museum of Oxford University
" A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record"
New Scientist, Dec 5, 1985, p. 66

"Much evidence can be advanced in favour of the theory of evolution -- from
biology, biogeography and paleontology, but I still think that to the
unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.
... Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from
the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The
evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would
break down before an inquisition."

E.J.H. Corner, Prof of Botany,
Cambridge University, England
Evolution in Contemporary Botanical Thought,
Quadrangle Books, 1971, p. 97

"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there
is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of
conservative creationists, that God created each species separately,
presumably from the dust of the earth."

Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose
Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London
The Nature and Origin of the Biological World
John Wiley & Sons, 1982, p. 164

The Geologic Column

"In many places, the oceanic sediments of which mountains are composed are
inverted, with the older sediments lying on top of the younger."

"Mountain Building in the Mediterranean"
Science News, Oct 17, 1970, p. 316

"2/3 of Earth's land surface has only 5 or fewer of the 10 geologic periods
in place. ... 80-85% of Earth's land surface does not have even 3 geologic
periods appearing in 'correct' consecutive order." (p. 46)

"Since only a small percentage of the earth's surface obeys even a
significant portion of the geologic column, it becomes an overall exercise
of gargantuan special pleading and imagination for the evolutionary -
uniformitarian paradigm to maintain that there ever were geologic periods.
The claim of their having taken place to form a continuum of rock/life/time
of ten biochronologic 'onion skins' over the earth is therefore a fantastic
and imaginative contrivance." (p. 69)

John Woodmorappe, Geologist (Creationist)
"The Essential Non-Existence of the Evolutionary
Uniformitarian Geologic Column: A Quantitative Assessment"
Creation Research Society Quarterly
June 1981, pp. 46-71.

Circular Dating

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of
rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never
bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth
the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be
hard-headed pragmatism."

J.E. O'Rourke, Evolutionist researcher
"Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy"
American Journal of Science, Jan 1976, p. 48.

"It cannot be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint,
geologist are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has
been determined by the study of their remains imbedded in the rocks, and
the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms
they contain."

R.H. Rastall, Lecturer in Economic Geology
Cambridge University
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1956, vol 10, p 168

Catastrophism

"The scientific establishment's acceptance of worldwide catastrophism and
mass extinction does not signify their abandonment of materialistic
evolution. Neither has their grudging acquiescence to the fact that great
catastrophes caused the deposition of many of the fossils forced them to
consider that virtually no fossils are in the process of forming on the
bottom of any lake or sea today. This is a verboten subject. When I asked
the editors of several of the most prestigious scientific journals the
reasons for this silence, I was met with more silence."

Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
"Mass Extinction & Catastrophism Replace
Darwinism & Uniformitarianism"
Contrast: The Creation Evolution Controversy,
Vol 4, No. 2, 1986, pp.1-2

"We can accumulate great quantities of sediment in a given area very
rapidly. This has changed our whole thinking about the processes that came
to lay these layers here in the Grand Canyon." "One thing that supports
this view is the fact that these layers are continuous for mile after mile
through the Canyon. You can pick any one of these layers and follow it
through for a 100 or 200-miles in the Canyon, with very little change. This
kind of continuity and uniformity suggests that deep water was involved in
the process."

Dr. Arthur V. Chadwick (Creationist geologist)
The Fossil Record (film)
Films for Christ Assoc, 1983

"A week's study of the Grand Canyon should be a good cure for Evolutionary
geologists as it is a perfect example of Flood geology with its
paraconformities and striking parallelisms of the under strata. The whole
area was obviously laid down quickly, then uplifted and then the whole
sedimentary area split open like a rotten watermelon."

Albert W. Mehlert, Former Evolutionist &
paleoanthropology researcher
"Diluviology & Uniformitarian Geology -- A Review"
Creation Research Society Quarterly
Vol 23, No. 3 (Dec 1986) p. 106



"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a
number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and
the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this
planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random,
they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

Sir Fred Hoyle
Nature, Nov 12, 1981, p. 148

"...in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive
earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if
not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical
evolution rates would have been negligible. ... It is becoming clear that
however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged
from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis.
We may therefore with fairness call this scenario 'the myth of the
prebiotic soup.' " (p. 86)

"...an intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy
would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then
doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima
facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not
just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a
message sequence." (pp. 211-212)

Charles B. Thaxton (Creationist)
Ph.D. Chemistry, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard,
Staff member of the Julian Center
The Mystery of Life's Origin:
Reassessing Current Theories
Philosophical Library, 1984

"At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate
between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching
halt

I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician
Member NY Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4

"Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many
discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it
comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no
positive evidence for its existence." (p. 261)

"The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is
impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together
suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an
occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle." (p. 264)
"It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which
possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever
existed on Earth, from giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all
its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10-16 grams.
It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than
the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man." (p.
338)

Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Adler and Adler, 1985,

"Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random
is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think
that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in
every respect deliberate... It is almost inevitable that our own measure of
intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -- even to the limit of God."

Sir Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe
Prof of Astronomy, Cambridge University
Prof of Astronomy and Applied Mathematics
University College, Cardiff
Evolution from Space, J.M.Dent, 1981, pp 141,144

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Michael Denton:


Dr. Denton, an evolutionist, holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, and is
currently doing biological research in Sydney, Australia.

"Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the
evolution of the cell might have occurred, molecular biology has served
only to emphasize the enormity of the gap. We now know not only of the
existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that
it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities
of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological
system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and
absolute as it is possible to conceive.

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on
earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the
tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms,
each is in effect a veritable micro- miniaturized factory containing
thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery,
made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more
complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel
in the non-living world.

Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system
is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to
mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical.
The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells.
The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery
is practically the same in all cells. In terms of the basic biochemical
design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or
ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest
empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse
cells on earth. For those who hoped that molecular biology might bridge the
gulf between chemistry and biochemistry, the revelation was profoundly
disappointing." (pp. 249-250)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The American biochemist Harold Morowitz has speculated as to what might be
the absolute minimum requirement for a completely self- replicating cell
... Such a minimal cell containing, say three ribosomes, 4 mRNA molecules,
a full complement of enzymes, a DNA molecule 100,000 nucleotides long and a
cell membrane would be about 1000A. (1A. = 10-8 cm) in diameter. According
to Morowitz:

This is the smallest hypothetical cell that we can envisage within the
context of current biochemical thinking. It is almost certainly a lower
limit, since we have allowed no control function, no vitamin metabolism and
extremely limited intermediary metabolism. Such a cell would be very
vulnerable to environmental fluctuations." (pp. 263-264)

"The intuitive feeling that pure chance could never have achieved the
degree of complexity and ingenuity so ubiquitous in nature has been a
continuing source of skepticism ever since the publication of the Origin;
and throughout the past century there has always existed a significant
minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring
themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims." (p. 327)

"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we
look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an
absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of
chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed
a reality, the smallest element of which - a functional protein or gene -
is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very
antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the
intelligence of man? (p. 342)

"Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the
extreme complexity and ingenuity of biological adaptations more apparent
than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell. Viewed down a
light microscope at a magnification of some several hundred times, such as
would have been possible in Darwin's time, a living cell is a relatively
disappointing spectacle appearing only as an ever-changing and apparently
disordered pattern of blobs and particles which, under the influence of
unseen turbulent forces, are continually tossed haphazardly in all
directions. To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by
molecular biology, we must magnify the cell a thousand million times until
it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant air ship large
enough to cover a great city like London or New Your. What we would then
see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On
the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port
holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream
of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of those openings
we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering
complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits
branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some
leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly
plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical
chamber more than a kilometre in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome
inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered
arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of
products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in
a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the
outer regions of the cell.

We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many
objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We
would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of
robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional
components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex
pieces of molecular machinery, each on consisting of about three thousand
atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would
wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these
weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all
our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing
one such molecular machine - that is one single functional protein molecule
- would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not
be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life
of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly
tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.

We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its
analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems,
memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems
regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe
and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes
involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In
fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy,
that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating
molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late
twentieth-century technology.

What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense
automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as
many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth.
However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled
in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of
replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness
such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an
awe-inspiring spectacle." (pp. 328-329)

"As Von Neumann pointed out, the construction of any sort of self-
replication automaton would necessitate the solution to three fundamental
problems: that of storing information; that of duplicating information; and
that of designing an automatic factory which could be programmed from the
information store to construct all the other components of the machine as
well as duplicating itself. The solution to all three problems is found in
living things and their elucidation has been one of the triumphs of modern
biology.

So efficient is the mechanism of information storage and so elegant the
mechanism of duplication of this remarkable molecule that it is hard to
escape the feeling that the DNA molecule may be the one and only perfect
solution to the twin problems of information storage and duplication for
self-replicating automata." (pp. 337-338)
......................................................................


Fossil Evidence

"The family trees which adorn our text books are based on inference,
however, reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Evolution's Erratic Pace"
Natural History, May, 1977, p. 13

"... if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a
trace of that evolution in the fossil record."

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)
Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham
Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom
Beyond the Ivory Tower
Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970, p 64

"The entire hominid (a so-called 'ape-man' fossil) collection know today
would barely cover a billiard table... Ever since Darwin... preconceptions
have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man."

John Reader
"Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus?
New Scientist, March 26, 1981, pp. 802-805

"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are
still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the
physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with
room to spare, inside a single coffin."

"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, to be honest with
ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Lyall Watson
"The Water People"
Science Digest, May 1982, p 44.

"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those
who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one
hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does
not make them utter fools... As we have seen, there are numerous scientists
and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us that there is 'no
doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence..."

William R. Fix
The Bone Peddlers (Macmillan, 1984), pp. 150

"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone
of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib... 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
Evolutionary anthropologist
University of California at Berkeley
New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199

"...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..."

Greg Kerby
From an address to the Biology Teachers
Association of South Australia, 1976

"Echoing the criticism made of his father's Homo habilis skulls, he
(Richard Leakey) added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it
was 'imagination, made of plaster of paris,' thus making it impossible to
draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to."

Richard Leakey (Son of Louis Leakey)
Director of National Museums of Kenya, Africa
The Weekend Australian, May 7-8, 1983, p. 3

"The evidence given above makes it overwhelmingly likely that Lucy was no
more than a variety of pygmy chimpanzee, and walked the same way (awkwardly
upright on occasions, but mostly quadrupedal). The 'evidence' for the
alleged transformation from ape to man is extremely unconvincing."

Albert W. Mehlert, Former Evolutionist &
paleoanthropology researcher
"Lucy - Evolution's Solitary Claim for Ape/Man"
Creation Research Society Quarterly,
Vol 22, No. 3, (Dec 1985), p. 145

"Neanderthals had short, narrow skulls, large cheekbones and noses and,
most distinctive, bunlike bony bumps on the backs of their heads. Many
modern Danes and Norwegians have identical features, Brace reported at the
annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Phoenix...
Indeed, the present-day European skulls resemble Neanderthal skulls more
closely than they resemble the skulls of American Indians or Australian
aborigines, he said. Brace...measured more than 500 relatively modern
northwestern Europeans craniums last year..."

"Neanderthal Traits Extant, Group Told"
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix)
Nov 20, 1988, p. B-5, reporting on:
C. Loring Brace
Physical anthropologist and evolutionist
University of Michigan

Genetic Evidence

"The evolutionary interpretation of homology is clouded even further by the
uncomfortable fact that there are many cases of 'homologous like'
resemblance which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be explained by
descent from a common ancestor." ( p. 151)

"The really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the
proteins' amino acid sequences is that it is impossible to arrange them in
any sort of an evolutionary series." (p. 289)

Dr. Michael Denton
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Adler and Adler Publishers, 1985,

"It has often been claimed, moreover, that these new and momentous findings
have at last unearthed the true mechanism of evolution, and that we are
presently on the brink of discovering precisely how macroevolution has come
about. However, the truth of the matter is very much the opposite: now that
the actual physical structure of what might be termed the biochemical
mainstays of life has come into view, scientists are finding -- frequently
to their dismay -- that the evolutionist thesis has become more stringently
unthinkable than ever before... "

"...on the molecular level, these separations, and this hierarchic order
stand out with a mathematical precision which once and for all silences
dissent. On the fundamental level it becomes a rigorously demonstratable
fact that there are no transitional types, and that the so called missing
links are indeed non-existent."

Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D
Teilardism and the New Religion
Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1988, p. 8

"In recent years several authors have written popular books on human
origins which are based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and
objectivity... by and large, written by authors with a formal academic
background... Prominent among them were On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, The
Naked Ape and The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris..." (p. 283)

"Yet the tendency for individual paleontologists to trace human history
directly back to their own fossil finds has persisted to the present day."
(p. 285)

"So one is forced to conclude that there is no clear cut scientific picture
of human evolution." (p. 285)

Dr. R. Martin, Senior Research Fellow
Zoological Society of London
"Man is Not an Onion"
New Scientist, Aug 4, 1977


"The paleontologists have convinced me small changes do not accumulate."

Francisco Ayala, Ph.d
Assoc Professor of Genetics, U of California
"Evolutionary theory under fire"
Science, Nov 21, 1980. p 883-887

"People are misled into believing that since microevolution is a reality,
that therefore macroevolution is such a reality also. Evolutionists
maintain that over long periods of time small-scale changes accumulate in
such a way as to generate new and more complex organisms ... This is sheer
illusion, for there is no scientific evidence whatever to support the
occurrence of biological change on such a grand scale. In spite of all the
artificial breeding which has been done, and all the controlled efforts to
modify fruit flies, the bacillus escherichia (E-coli), and other organisms,
fruit flies remain fruit flies, E-coli bacteria remain E-coli bacteria,
roses remain roses, corn remains corn, and human beings remain human
beings."

Darrel Kautz, Creationist Researcher
The Origin of Living Things, 1988, p. 6

"The salient fact is this: if by evolution we mean macroevolution (as we
henceforth shall), then it can be said with the utmost rigor that the
doctrine is totally bereft of scientific sanction. Now, to be sure, given
the multitude of extravagant claims about evolution promulgated by
evolutionists with an air of scientific infallibility, this may indeed
sound strange.
And yet the fact remains that there exists to this day not a shred of bona
fide scientific evidence in support of the thesis that macroevolutionary
transformations have ever occurred."

Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D Mathematics , MS Physics
Teilardism and the New Religion
Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1988, p. 5

Mutations

"A mutation doesn't produce major new raw (DNA) material. You don't make a
new species by mutating the species."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a New and General Theory of Evol. Emerging?
Lecture at Hobart&Wm Smith College,Feb4,1980

"With ... the inability of mutations of any type to produce new genetic
information, the maintenance of the basic plan is to be expected." (p.168)
"There are limits to biological change and ... these limits are set by the
structure and function of the genetic machinery." (p. 153)

Ph.D. L.P.Lester & R.G. Bohlin (Creationists)
The Natural Limits of Biological Change
Zondervan/Probe, 1984

"No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of
(E)volution."

Pierre-Paul Grosse
past-President, French Acadamie des Science
Evolution of Living Organisms
Academic Press, New York, 1977, p 88

"A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes
which constitute life is certain to impair - just as a random interchange
of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture."

James F. Crow
Radiation & mutation specialist
"Genetic Effects of Radiation"
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, pp 19-20

Natural Selection

"Natural selection, a central feature of neo-Darwinism ... may have a
stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a
creative force as many people have suggested."

Roger Lewin
Science 217:1239-1240, 1982

"But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if
Evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each
favored by natural selection? You can't fly with 2% of a wing ... How, in
other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of
structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more
elaborated forms? ... one point stands high above the rest: the dilemma of
incipient stages. Mivart identified this problem as primary and it remains
so today."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Not Necessarily a Wing"
Natural History, Oct 1985, pp. 12-13

"No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No
one has ever gotten near it..."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
Interview, BBC television, March 4, 1982

" 'Survival of the fittest' and 'natural selection'. No matter what
phraseology one generates, the basic fact remains the same: any physical
change of any size, shape or form is strictly the result of purposeful
alignment of billions of nucleotides (in the DNA). Nature or species do not
have the capacity to rearrange them nor to add to them. Consequently no
leap (saitation) can occur from one species to another. The only way we
know for a DNA to be altered is through a meaningful intervention from an
outside source of intelligence - one who know what it is doing, such as our
genetic engineers are now performing in the laboratories."

I. L. Cohen
Member New York Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, Inc., 1984. p. 209

"The peppered moth experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection or
survival of the fittest. But they do not show evolution in progress. For
however the population may alter in their content of light, intermediate or
dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston betularia."

L. Harrison Matthews, D.Sc, FRS
Intro to Origin of Species, Dent, London, 1971

"In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has
provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations
plus natural selection -- quite unaware of the fact that random mutations
turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology."

Arthur Koestler
Janus: A Summing Up, Vintage Books, 1978, p 185

Separation between the Species

"Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly
fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?
Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see
them, well defined?"

Charles R. Darwin
The Origin of Species, first edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979, p. 205

"...now that the actual physical structure of what might be termed the
biochemical mainstays of life [DNA] has come into view, scientists are
finding -- frequently to their dismay -- that the evolutionist thesis has
become more stringently unthinkable than ever before... " "...on the
molecular level, these separations, and this hierarchic order stand out
with a mathematical precision which once and for all silences dissent. On
the fundamental level it becomes a rigorously demonstratable fact that
there are no transitional types, and that the so called missing links are
indeed non-existent."

Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D Mathematics , MS Physics
Teilardism and the New Religion
Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1988, p. 8

The Fossil Record

"Beginning about six hundred million years ago ... the earliest known
representative of the major kinds of animals still populating today's seas
made a rather abrupt appearance. This rather protracted 'event' shows up
graphically in the rock record: all over the world, at roughly the same
time, thick sequences of rocks, barren of any easily detected fossils, are
overlain by sediments containing a gorgeous array of shelly invertebrates:
trilobites, brachiopods, mollusks. ... Creationist have made much of this
sudden development of rich and varied fossil record where, just before,
there was none ... Indeed, the sudden appearance of a varied,
well-preserved array of fossils ... does pose a fascinating intellectual
challenge."

Niles Eldredge, Paleontologist
American Museum of Natural History
The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism
Washington Square Press, N.Y., 1982, p. 44

"One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the
occurrence of diversified, multi-cellular marine invertebrates in Lower
Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater
age."

D. Axelrod,
Science 128:7, 1958

"The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of
the fishes ..."

J. R. Norman, Dept of Zoology
British Museum of Natural History, London
"Classification and pedigrees: fossils"
A History of Fishes, Dr P.H. Greenwood (editor)
British Museum of Natural History, 1975, p. 343

"There are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the
fossil collections of the world."

Gordon Rattray Taylor
Award-winning science writer
Former editor of the BBC's "Horizon" series
The Great Evolution Mystery,
Harper & Row, 1983, p. 60

"The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There
is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change
from reptile to bird was achieved."

W.E. Swinton, British Museum of Natural History
Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds
A.J. Marshall (editor), Vol 1, Academic Press
New York, 1960, p. 1

"The evolution of the horse provides one of the keystones in teaching of
evolutionary doctrine, though the actual story depends to a large extent
upon who is telling it and when the story is being told. In fact one could
easily discuss the evolution of the story of the evolution of the horse."

Prof G. A. Kerkut
Dept of Physiology & Biochemistry
University of Southhampton
Implications of Evolution
Pergamon Press, London, 1960, p 144

"The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the
textbooks. ...... The construction of the whole Cenozoic family tree of the
horse is therefore a very artificial one, since it is put together from
non-equivalent parts ..."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
Synthetische Artbildung
Verlag CWE Gleerup Press

"It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned
as a student ... have now been 'debunked'. Similarly, my own experience of
more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic
Brachiopoda has proven them equally elusive."

Prof. Derek Ager
Dept of Geology, Imperial College, London
"The nature of the fossil record."
Proc. Geological Assoc. Vol. 87, 1976, p. 132


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

Prof. Louis Bounoure, Former:
President Biological Society of Strassbourg,
Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum,
Director of Research at the
French National Centre of Scientific Research
The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17

"Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a
simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding
before us. ... The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since
some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and
refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs."

Pierre-Paul Grasse
past-President, French Acadamie des Science
Evolution of Living Organisms
Academic Press, New York, 1977, p 8

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially 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 very flimsy and dubious
an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."

Malcolm Muggeridge
Well-known Journalist and philosopher
Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo

"After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle,
science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a
mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort
could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the
primeval past."

Loren Eiseley, Ph.D. Anthropology
The Immense Journey
Random House, NY, 1957, p. 199

"Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest- growing
controversial minorities... Many of the scientists supporting this position
hold impressive credentials in science."

Larry Hatfield
"Educators Against Darwin"
Science Digest Special, Winter 1979, pp. 94-96

"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated,
the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ...
The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the
issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of
respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is
interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have
abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical
persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances
regretfully, as one could say."

"We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are
never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often
enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this
evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune
from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely
in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence
consists."

Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist
Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University
Former math instructor at MIT
Teilhardism and the New Religion:
A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin
Tan Books & Publishers, 1988, pp. 1-2

"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. T. N. Tahmisian, Physiologist
Atomic Energy Commission. As quoted in:
Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes,
3D Enterprises Limited, 1983, title page

"In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all
scientists accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations
to fit in with it."

H. J. Lipson, F.R.S.
"A physicist looks at evolution"
Physics Bulletin, vol 31, 1980

"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 Palaeontologist
British Museaum of Natural History, London
Keynote address at the
American Museum of Natural History,
New York City, 5 November, 1981

"The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian
revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in
the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual
sanction. ... The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far
removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of
how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific
evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate
the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social
and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped
that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory
that literally changed the world, would have been something more than
metaphysics, something more than a myth."

Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Adler and Adler, 1985, p. 358

"One is forced to conclude that many scientists and technologists pay
lip-service to Darwinian theory only because it supposedly excludes a
Creator..."

Dr. Michael Walker
Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sydney University
Quadrant, Oct 1982, p. 44

"I think we need to go further than this and admit that the only acceptable
explanation is creation. I know this is an anathema to physicists, as
indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if
the experimental evidence supports it."

H. S. Lipson
Prof of Physics, University of Manchester
A paper published by The Institute of Physics
IOP Publishing Ltd., 1980

"In a certain sense, the debate transcends the confrontation between
evolutionists and creationists. We now have a debate within the scientific
community itself; it is a confrontation between scientific objectivity and
ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion - between fact and fiction.
" (pp. 6-7)

"...In the final analysis, objective scientific logic has to prevail - no
matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honored idols
have to be discarded in the process." (p. 8)

"... After all, it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of
evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end - no matter what illogical and
unsupported conclusions it offers.... If in the process of impartial
scientific logic, they find that creation by outside superintelligence is
the solution to our quandary, then let's cut the umbilical cord that tied
us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us
back." (pp. 214-215)

"... every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended
thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically
established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability
concepts. Darwin was wrong." (p. 209)

"... The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science." (p.
210)

I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author,
Member New York Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, Inc., 1984.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Evidently you think I am wrong, or have offered a foolish proposition here. I'm not at all offended, just curious.

I believe both contending parties in this ongoing dispute are perfectly willing to see the other's ox gored and will do so to the extent they are permitted or able. Perhaps I have missed that aspect of your intended point.

I do believe that a form of secular indoctrination has crept through both our educational process and accepted public doscorse as well. Further, I believe that reisistence to it is an important modivating element behind today's controversy over education. While many of those who resist would, given their way, merely sustitute one form of prejudice and superstition for another, that does not absolve the other side in this dispute.

gungasnake,

The opinions you provided are interesting and add perspective to this topic. However, the assertion that the theory of evolution is dead "as we speak" can not be supported by a list of opinions that are all more than twenty years old.

Yes but our "lack of understandu=ing" is at a much higher level. In 2009 itll be one hundred fifty years since the publication of The Origin. The molecular and macro level of the rules governing the descent of life is well understood with no serious critiques of the evidence or mechanisms. .When Nirenberg and Khorana, and Mesehlen and Stahl unraveled how DNA and RNA transcribe and code weve had the ability to begin deciphering the "bar code" of the realtionshipes of life. As more time passes, the accuracy of Darwins little book would probably even astound him. I see no reason to dwell on the vastness of what we dont yet know except in the context of how the student can possibly contribute.Thats usually at the graduate level
I dont disagree that the systematics of ignorance must be displayed to the workers in the various fields so they can plan their attacks and research. However, teaching it in the secondary level just to aid and comfort some fringe belief that has no evidence upon which to stand on at all, is just silly. Theres not enough contact time to teach what we already know and how it "appears" to fit into the overall ribbon of life.

Actually its the other way around. Darwin is, each day, as we speak, being proven correct. The problem with your stance gunga, is that you present "gungasnakeoil" and you know inside that youre all wet. Theres nothing that Creationists propose that can be used in an applied science, while all the models derived using Darwinian synthesis, actually work, and work quite well thanks.

You apparently have little appreciation for what goes on in universities and colleges, to even bring your point up for discussion.

In French, the word education refers to what one learns at home. Pity we've altered the definition. Those who do not take the time and make the effort to pass their values on to their children, and to supervise what they learn, deserve whatever nonsense may be alleged to have been fed to them at school.

Here is the question I am asking you.

"At what point do you accept that what the scientists are telling you has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in spite of this religous objections?"

Remember that this has happened before... where discoveries of science contradicted deeply held religious beliefs. Galileo, for example faced a board of Inquisition for stateing the Earth moved. He believed he had conclusive evidence (and other scientists agreed). His findings were still rejected for many years.

I assume that now you have been convinced that the Earth orbits the Sun. So, at some point you can be convinced.

You are leveling a very serious charge against scientists You are accusing them of being maniuplated by "indoctrination", prejudice and superstition. Let me tell you this is about the worst thing you can say to someone in the scientific profession.

Science works very hard to avoid this kind of thing. We work hard to base findings on evidence. We have elaborate systems of peer review. I can assure you when scientists say there is "overwhelming evidence" to support evolution they say it with conviction and weight.

Despite the list of a very vocal minority, the scientific community is very confident that evolution is correct Gunga will with giddly enthusiasm list scientists who Creationists. The fact is that nearly all scientists (more than 95%) of scientists are fully convinced that evolution is a fact... meaning there is no reasonable doubt. Strangely the dissenters all happen to object from a religious standpoint.

So how do we convince you George? I beleive that if you took a undergraduate biology course or two you would be convinced. Seeing the scientific evidence is impressive and it is much harder to object when you know the facts.

If you don't have time for this, you are going to have to listen to other people who claim to have studied the evidence.

I would choose the scientists and I find it strange that you suspect the scientists of "prejudice and superstition" but listen to people who are religious.

Then there is the possibility that you can never be convinced no matter how much evidence we give you. In that case, there isn't much point is there.

But I am part of the scientific community. I know how we work to provide objective decisions based on evidence. I see how the scientific method has been very productive and successful in nearly every area of society.

When science nearly unanimously agrees that evolution has been proven... it should mean something. I don't think teaching anything else in a science classroom is correct.

gunga posts that thread of random 20to 30 year old
quotes every so often. He fails to recognize that many or most of them are out of context,(for example Gould, who is dead by the way Gunga) was discussing his favorite baby , punctuated equilibrium. Gungas quotes come from a separate time and a separate context that doesnt negate evolution at all.
Gould published a huge treatise on Evolution before his death which engages the false statements of the Creationists in the context of how evolutionary theory grew
If we were( to engage gunga to explain what any of his quotes meant -hed probably have no idea becaiuse he just lifts this crap from Answers in Genesis.

Stephen Gould, in his testimony in the Arkansas "Creation" trial
"tried to expose creationism for the narrow form of dogmatic religion, masquerading as science merely as an attempt to subvert First Amendment guarentees against the establishment of religions in public institutions" (Gould 2002 , The STructure of Evolutionary Theory pp 990)
"Creationists continue to distort punctuated equilibrium (as science attempting to refute evolution), but we continue to win by exposing them in fair forums. For example in North Carolina in 1997 , Rep Capps used a :standard" misquotation of one of my(Gould's) essays on punctuated equilibrium wherein he used a direct lift from Duane Gish's THE FOSSILS SAY NO (I love that title, said Gould)"
. In this misquote , in which he even included some of Gish's mispellings, Capps tried to make this essay sound like a major rift among evolution scientists was raging and by presenting various sides of a "fake" argument, Capps wanted to introduce legislation to ban teaching evolution. Gould wrote a letter to the legislature to refute the second hand quote that Capps lifted from Gish, in it Gould stated
"My article is not an attack on evolution at all, but an attempt to explain how evolution, interpreted, yields the evidence that we see in the fossil record. The first part of the quotation is accurate, but only about RATES OF CHANGE, not whether or not evolution occurs. The second part of the quote(the part after the three dots that indicate hes omitted items contrary to his point)-"It was never seen in the rocks"- seems to deny the occurence of evolution. But if you read my (gould's) full text and observe the material he left out, it is obvious that the word "it" has to do with gradualism, and not with evolution itself... Thus you can see that my essay says exactly the opposite of the FALSE quotation cited by your colleague"(Gould, op cit p 990-91).
The bill was immediately withdrawn by rep Capp.
I dont wanna burden this thread with calling all of gungas quotes fraudulent and downright misquotes , but , yeh I guess I am.
Its very common for the Creationists to take rather old comments, cut and paste them, sometimes re arrange them and often omit huge sections , to make them sound like the scientists quoted are saying the opposite of what they really said. Then they claim some kind of victory based on false pretence and outright deception.
So gunga, Every time you quote some rearranged crap, remember, we can google the entire speech and show how your AIG website is certainly not practicing the vitue of truth. Odd isnt it? the evangelical Christians must think its ok to use fraud and deception to present false data in carying out what they consider , is the work of a just God. And the heathen scientists , are being misquoted left and reight , but thats ok, because Gods means are justifiable, even if they involve lying.

Farmerman et. al.

I choose to ignore Gunga, except with a passing dismissive reference. I think you all should too.

A discussion with people like George is much more interesting.... I don't think Gunga get's in the way of this conversation.

Well, I guess I was once part of the scientific community too. I have a Ph.D. in Aeronautical Engineering (Fluid mechanics) from Cal. Tech. The experience wearied me of the knowledge business, so I went back to flying fighters in the Navy. I have taught a few undergraduate courses in math and statistics at U. Va. and William & Mary for some extra bucks while I was stationed in the Norfolk VA area.

I have a good deal of experience with the all-to-human prejudices and intolerance of academic types. They are, in my view no more open minded or immune from mean-spirited self-aggrandizement than any other group I have known. I am reminded of Henry Kissinger's famous quip when asked why academic disputes and rivalries are fought so tenaciously --- "Because the stakes are so low", he said.

Again, I don't doubt at all that evolution, more or less as Darwin and subsequent biologists have described it, is indeed occurring. Neither do I doubt that some variation of quantum relativistic mechanics may one day give us a fairly satisfactory explanation for the observable universe. I am more inclined to physics than biology, but I find both quite fascinating. However I profoundly doubt that either will ever explain the mystery of our consciousness and existence. I view the certainty expressed and implied by some (not all) of the practicioners of these disciplines that they will certainly find the answers to these questions within the context of their disciplines no less superstitious and prejudicial than those expressed by the bible thumping rednecks into which category they often put all who disagree with them.

Thats quite right e. brown. As gunga so openly displays, by using quotes out of context and half edited, it appears(at least to me) that the Creationist camp has never ever respected truth. So how can anyone accept their logic. We have to thank gunga for periodically reminding us that its easy to cut, dice, and rearrange paste-ups to sound like a big battle for science is raging, when its not. 'If any of the AIG stuff ever got to court and was used as evidence , it would be impeached quite early, and the presenter of the evidence would be humiliated