Posted on 01/22/2006 4:28:17 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Among the many traits that made Charles Darwin one of the greatest minds in science was his pertinacious personality. Facing a daunting problem in natural history, Darwin would obstinately chip away at it until its secrets relented. His apt description for this disposition came from an 1867 Anthony Trollope novel in which one of the characters opined: "There ain't nowt a man can't bear if he'll only be dogged.... It's dogged as does it." Darwin's son Francis recalled his father's temperament: "Doggedness expresses his frame of mind almost better than perseverance. Perseverance seems hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself."
Historian of science Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley, has highlighted Darwin's dogged genius in his own tenacious efforts to force the truth of how Darwin actually pieced together the theory of evolution. The iconic myth is that Darwin became an evolutionist in the Galápagos when he discovered natural selection operating on finch beaks and tortoise carapaces, each species uniquely adapted by food type or island ecology. The notion is ubiquitous, appearing in everything from biology textbooks to travel brochures, the latter inveigling potential travelers to visit the mecca of evolutionary theory and walk in the tracks of St. Darwin the Divine.
In June 2004 Sulloway and I did just that, spending a month retracing some of Darwin's fabled footsteps. Sulloway is one sagacious scientist, but I had no idea he was such an intrepid field explorer until we hit the lava on San Cristóbal to reconstruct the famous naturalist's explorations there. Doggedness is the watchword here: with a sweltering equatorial sun and almost no freshwater, it is not long before 70-pound water-loaded packs begin to buckle knees and strain backs. Add hours of daily bushwhacking through dry, dense, scratchy vegetation, and the romance of fieldwork quickly fades.
Yet the harder it got, the more resolute Sulloway became. He actually seemed to enjoy the misery, and this gave me a glimpse into Darwin's single-mindedness. At the end of one particularly grueling climb through a moonscapelike area Darwin called the "craterized district" of San Cristóbal, we collapsed in utter exhaustion, muscles quivering, and sweat pouring off our hands and faces. Darwin described a similar excursion as "a long walk."
Death permeates these islands. Animal carcasses are scattered hither and yon. The vegetation is coarse and scrappy. Dried and shriveled cacti trunks dot a bleak lava landscape so broken with razor-sharp edges that moving across it is glacially slow. Many people have died, from stranded sailors of centuries past to wanderlust-struck tourists of recent years. Within days I had a deep sense of isolation and of life's fragility. Without the protective blanket of civilization, none of us is far from death. With precious little water and even less edible foliage, organisms eke out a precarious living, their adaptations to this harsh environment selected for over millions of years. These critters are hanging on by the skin of their adaptive radiations. A lifelong observer of, and participant in, the creation-evolution controversy, I was struck by how clear the solution is in these islands: creation by intelligent design is absurd. Why, then, did Darwin depart the Galápagos a creationist?
The Darwin Galápagos legend is emblematic of a broader myth that science proceeds by select "eureka!" discoveries followed by sudden revolutionary revelations, whereupon old theories fall before new facts. Not quite. Paradigms power perceptions. Sulloway discovered that nine months after departing the Galápagos, Darwin made this entry in his ornithological catalogue about his mockingbird collection: "When I see these Islands in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties." That is, similar varieties of fixed kinds, rather than the myth that he already knew that evolution was responsible for the creation of separate species. Darwin was still a creationist! This quotation explains why Darwin did not even bother to record the island locations of the few finches he collected (and in some cases mislabeled) and why, as Sulloway has pointed out, these now famous "Darwin finches" were never specifically mentioned in On the Origin of Species.
Darwin similarly botched his tortoise observations. Later, he recalled a conversation he had had while in the islands with the vice governor Nicholas O. Lawson, who explained that for the tortoises Lawson "could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands." Worse, as Sulloway recounts humorously, Darwin and his mates ate the remaining tortoises on the voyage home. As Darwin later confessed: "I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted."
Through careful analysis of Darwin's notes and journals, Sulloway dates Darwin's acceptance of the fact of evolution to the second week of March 1837, after a meeting Darwin had with the eminent English ornithologist John Gould, who had been studying his Galápagos bird specimens. With access to museum ornithological collections from areas of South America that Darwin had not visited, Gould corrected a number of taxonomic errors Darwin had made (such as labeling two finch species a "Wren" and an "Icterus") and pointed out to him that although the land birds in the Galápagos were endemic to the islands, they were notably South American in character.
Darwin left the meeting with Gould, Sulloway concludes, convinced "beyond a doubt that transmutation must be responsible for the presence of similar but distinct species on the different islands of the Galápagos group. The supposedly immutable 'species barrier' had finally been broken, at least in Darwin's own mind." That July, Darwin opened his first notebook on Transmutation of Species, in which he noted: "Had been greatly struck from about Month of previous March on character of S. American fossils -- and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views." By 1845 Darwin was confident enough in his data to theorize on the deeper implications of the Galápagos: "The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions.… Hence both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance of new beings on this earth."
For a century and a half, Darwin's theory has steadfastly explained more disparate facts of nature than any other in the history of biology; the process itself is equally dogged, as Darwin explained: "It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers." Doggedly so.
Well, you've taught me a lot so you should be proud.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about Pasteur (at least according to the chapter on him I read in the Scientific 100 - Pasteur never was able to accept Darwin's theory). I don't know about Romanes. Either way, it was over a century ago - Darwin's theory was still indeed scientifically controversial then.
The maybe you could explain why the plaitiffs in the Dover trial had a no-name philosopher from a no-name college in LA testify?
This is what I have for Pasteur:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA114_22.html
Admittedly, not much.
Far secondary to the many physical (and geophysical) problems with your scenario, but it sounds like you have to EVOLVE, within just a few thousand years, the thousands and thousands and thousands of species, often with highly unusual or specialized adaptations, uniquely suited to living in alpine, arctic, abyssal and other extreme environments which didn't exist before the flood.
But then I suppose this is only an intensification of a more general problem with the global flood / Noah's Ark scenario: that it requires rates of EVOLUTION far faster than evolutionists would consider remotely plausible. IOW only a few thousands, at most tens of thousands, of "created kinds" can be fit into the ark (each with only the biological diversity that can be held in a population of 2, or in some cases 14, individuals); but only a few thousands of years later you have millions, and possibly tens of millions, of distinct species inhabiting the earth.
You make it sound like a miracle.
>Then, by all means, since it's an historical fact, that you can provide the exact document in which that historical fact is written.
The sentence is incomplete. It is therefore impossible to respond.
Eg, since this, then that...
where "that" is your request
"The animals on the ark would repopulate the world by migrating away from the ark landing site. The mountainous area around the ark would be ideal to encourage successful repopulation, as a mountainous area contains varying ecological zones and would tend to fragment the growing population into sub-populations (different "herds") giving the animal type multiple chances to avoid extinction. Inbreeding within these sub-populations would also cause differing traits to become dominant within each sub-population, leading to the formation of what we now call different "species" ("rapid speciation"). It is important to remember that speciation (the formation of a new species) is NOT evolution, as no new complexity is being introduced, only the rearranging of existing genetic information. We must also remember that it was God who made the final selection of the animals for the ark. This was necessary as only God could know the genetic makeup of the individual animals, and it was important to choose animals having the widest range of genetic potential. But even if this were not the case, it is true that most of the potential variation of any type of animals will be found in every male/female pair. There are modern day examples of a pair or small number of individuals successfully starting a repopulation effort that eventually leads to a diversified population exhibiting much variation (such as the rock pigeon introduced into the USA from England)."
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ark/sld020.htm
Why not? Are you saying that is impossible?
Man. You're too arrogant and too much of a coward that you made a mistake about Darwin, so you instead throw out a grammatical flame. You are truly shameless.
I DID NOt throw a grammatical flame! I hardly point out grammatical, syntax or spelling errors.
The sentence in question is incomplete. How is one supposed to respond to an incomplete sentence? You read it for yourself and tell me if it makes sense to you. And, if it does, explain it to me.
Is it or is it not an incomplete sentence? Please answer this question and we can proceed from here.
by Bert Thompson, Ph.D.
A story often circulates that suggests Charles Darwin, on his deathbed, recanted his theory of evolution and repented of the damage that he, and it, had done. The story affirms that Darwin died believing in God and salvation through Christ. Is this true?
A.
For many years, such a story has been circulated. It frequently appears in church bulletins, almost always under the byline of one of those three famous writers of our generation: “Mr. Selected,” “Mr. Anonymous,” or “Mr. Copied.” No doubt those who propagate the story mean well. But, regardless of their good intentions, or the sincerity of their motives, they are wrong. The story surrounding Charles Darwin’s alleged repentance simply is not true. And unfortunately, it is not just this story that makes the rounds. There are other “newsworthy” items that are published—again, no doubt by well-meaning people—which are just as false. Two come to mind: (1) the story of how IBM scientists are supposed to have discovered a scientific reason for the “long day of Joshua” in the Old Testament; and (2) the account of how Madalyn Murray O’Hair allegedly threatened to have all religious broadcasting taken off the airwaves in America. Neither of these stories is any truer, nor any more founded in fact, than the story of Charles Darwin’s repentance.
The story that is told so often—and there are almost as many versions of it as there are storytellers—goes something like this. A certain friend of the Darwin family, Lady Hope, was herself a Bible believer. On occasion she found herself in the company of Mr. Darwin. One such occasion happened to be during a beautiful autumn, just a few days before his death. At that time, so the account goes, she found him reading, somewhat to her surprise, the New Testament book of Hebrews. Upon further inquiry, Darwin began to speak about how he was so very young when he formed his ideas of evolution, and how he regretted that so many people had made those ideas their religion. He then insisted that Lady Hope return to his summerhouse that afternoon, at 3:00 pm, to read from the Bible to his servants, and nearby villagers. When she asked exactly what Darwin thought she should read, he is alleged to have turned to her with an emphatic voice and said, “Read about Christ and His salvation!” Lady Hope, so says the tale, quickly spread the good news that Darwin, now on his deathbed, had become a believer in God, and a Christian.
As with all spurious dramas such as this, it is impossible to trace the origin of this story. The search hardly is made easier when time after time the story is reprinted, attributing it only to “selected,” “anonymous,” or “copied.” But on rare occasions the story, in reprinted form, actually has been attributed to an American journal published in years gone by, The Watchman Examiner. However, a search through all available issues of that publication has provided neither the original account nor any references to it. Similarly, on occasion the story is attributed, in reprinted form, to a book by Luther Townsend, The Collapse of Evolution, but that, too, has proved to be elusive. In short, each time a search is made for any kind of original documentation, it ends in the proverbial “dead end.” This alone should make the honest inquirer a bit suspicious. Were that the end of the matter, suspicions might be afforded the benefit of the doubt, and the account accepted as true. However, there are other data that, considered collectively, expose the dubious nature of the story—in any form.
First, out of a sense of fairness, let me state that there really was a “Lady Hope.” Malcolm Bowden, in his book, The Rise of the Evolution Fraud, provided documentation from Mr. L.G. Pine, former editor of Burke’s Peerage in Great Britain, of the existence of Lady Hope (1982, p. 189). And, admittedly, she lived in England at the same time as Darwin. However, the mere existence of such a woman, in proximity to Darwin, does not establish the veracity of the story under consideration. Other factors must be taken into account as well. One such factor comes from the daughter of Charles Darwin himself. Around 1842, Darwin’s wife Emma gave birth to their daughter, Henrietta. Eventually, she married an English barrister by the name of Richard Litchfield. Apparently, even before her death the story of her father’s conversion at the hands of Lady Hope had begun to circulate, because she addressed this matter in a letter written on February 23, 1922 to The Christian, a religious journal. Her comments were as follows:
I was present at his [Darwin’s—BT] deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought and belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think that story of his conversion was fabricated in the USA. In most of these versions, hymn singing comes in and a summerhouse where the servants and villagers sang hymns to him. There is no such summerhouse and no servants or villagers ever sang hymns to him. The whole story has no foundation whatsoever (see Hawton, 1958, p. 4).
Some supporters of the idea of Darwin’s repentance might suggest that his daughter Henrietta would not wish the story to be known even if it were true, and therefore may have distorted, or falsely presented, the facts of the matter. While at first glance this might seem a possibility, other factors militate against such a conclusion. In order to hold to the truthfulness of this story, one would, in essence, have to call Darwin’s daughter an outright liar. Such a charge would be very difficult to sustain for several reasons. First, she was with her father at his death. But to the best of our knowledge, there is absolutely no evidence that Lady Hope ever visited Darwin toward the end of his life. Second, those closest to Darwin at the time of his death knew nothing of his alleged conversion. Third, the story of that supposed conversion did not begin until years after his death, which hardly seems likely if the story is true—and known to be so by those whose lives were intricately intertwined with Darwin’s.
Also to be considered is this: many of the “facts” of the Lady Hope story are, quite simply, wrong. For example, Darwin died April 19, 1882. But the story of Lady Hope specifically states that she visited him on a beautiful autumn afternoon. That would have left six months between her visit, and his demise. Yet evidence available to us proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Darwin was neither bedridden nor “on his deathbed” during that six-month period. Also, the story indicates that Lady Hope came to speak, at Darwin’s request, at the summerhouse on his property. Yet as Darwin’s daughter pointed out, there was no such summerhouse. Further, the story has Darwin opining to Lady Hope that he formed his thoughts on evolution when he was but “a young man with unformed ideas.” This makes little sense, because when Darwin finally published the Origin of Species, he was 50 years old! This hardly qualifies him for being a “young man.” The Origin of Species underwent no less than six revisions from 1859 until 1872—and each one was at the hand of Darwin himself. So the suggestion that a “young man with unformed ideas” was responsible for the Origin, and the concepts contained therein, simply will not withstand intense examination.
There are many more data available that establish the conclusion that the “Lady Hope” story is false. Wilbert H. Rusch and John W. Klotz have summarized them in their excellent work on this subject, Did Charles Darwin Become a Christian? (1988). The reader is referred to that volume for an in-depth examination of those data, which are far too numerous to reproduce here.
Did Darwin repent? Did he become a believer in God, or a Christian? The answer to both questions is a resounding no. Creationists and Christians do themselves no favor by circulating, even if inadvertently through good intentions, stories such as these that ultimately are without foundation. When the truth finally does come out (and eventually it will!), it reflects poorly on those who propagate such falsehoods. While there are many legitimate, valuable tools in the arsenal of the Christian apologist, such stories as the one reviewed here are not among them and should be avoided at all cost. If you should see this story reappear in the future, please take occasion to share this material with those who are telling it. There is enough false material being circulated without Christians fueling the fire with more.
REFERENCES
Bowden, Malcolm (1982), The Rise of the Evolution Fraud (San Diego, CA: Christian Life Publishers).
Hawton, Hector (1958), “The Myth of Darwin’s Conversion,” The Humanist, 73:4, July.
Rusch, Wilbert H. and John W. Klotz (1988), Did Charles Darwin Become a Christian? (Norcross, GA: Creation Research Society Books).
Originally published in Reason and Revelation, February 1991, 11[2]:5-6.
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Don't expect any creationists who have repeated the lie that Darwin recanted his theory to admit their mistake. Typically they are too arrogant and too cowardly to acknowledge their own mistakes.
You appear to be correct. I have an old Bantam paperback which doesn't identify the edition, but there's a newer Penguin edition which is an abridgement of the original Journal of Researches published in 1839.
It has nothing so suggestively "evolutionary", but there is a corresponding passage referring to "The law of sucession of types" and suggesting that if Buffon had known of these fossils ( Megatherium etc. ) he would have said "... that the creative force in America had lost its vigour, rather than that it had never possessed such powers." - so there's the "C word".
My first hand knowledge of Darwin's correspondence and notebooks, such as it is, is consistent with Shermer's thesis: Darwin didn't become an evolutionist until after his return to England.
Well, the terms evoutionist and creationist are highly misleading in this context. Darwin refers to "creative force" evidently in a very general way. At the time of his voyage, he was deeply involved in Lyellian geology and was putting his observations in that context, so the general framework in which he was working is recognizable as a prototype of todays cosmic and terrestrial "evolutionism" .
How do two individuals possess the genetic variation, without evolution (or even with evolution in such brief time time spans!), to produce 150 species, and only on average mind you, and many with distinct and peculiar adaptations, in a few thousand, or even an initial one or two thousand, years!?
It out does anything the most wildly liberal evolutionist would ever propose by orders of magnitude. Evolution maybe produces 1 or 2 or maybe, in a good year, a few dozen new species a year (usually maintaining a steady state with extinctions). Additionally those new species are very similar to the immediately preceding types. They may have a bigger bill, or a couple extra teeth, or slightly longer incisors, or a larger or smaller body size, or different coloration, or a different call, a different courtship dance, or some subtle variation in behavior allowing them to survive in a slightly different ecological niche. But your creationistic non-evolution-evolution produces species adapted to radically new, and often very harsh, environments almost instantaneously.
You're right. It's not "evolution". It's "hypervolution".
Consider JUST the amazing adaptations of deep sea fishes. There is virtually no light, so many species produce their own by bioluminescence. The protein density is usually extremely low (in the deep oceans but above the sea bottom, in the "mesopelagic" zones) so many species have to get by with a half to a third of the protein content in their muscles compared to "normal" oceanic fishes.
And of course there's the incredible pressure: 400 times atmospheric pressure at 4,000 feet deep. Can you imagine how difficult it is to inflate a swim bladder, and keep it inflated, at that depth? Especially when your muscles are much weaker (see above) than those of normal fish. Just this feature alone would have had to have been radically redesigned (simultaneously in multiple "kinds") with respect to pre-flood fishes which never experienced such pressures.
And that's not the half of it. Not even a fraction of it. For instance the whole biochemistry has to be different, or specially adapted and enhanced. These extreme pressures force water molecules to stay tightly bound to charged molecules. This interferes with crucial binding events in cells, for instance enzymes binding to energy-yielding molecules like ATP.
And all this had to "evolve" (without evolution!) hundreds of times in just the few thousand years since the flood.
But Lyell was (almost militantly) anti-evolutionist. Sure, he was a progressive creationist, but so were all (scientific) creationists of the time, as biological succession in the geological record was an established fact. The "creative force" explained (however vaugely) biological succession, but it was most definitely NOT evolutionary.
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