The Dini-gration of Darwinism

Texas Tech University biology professor Michael Dini recently came under fire for refusing to write letters of recommendation for students unable to "truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer" to the following question: "How do you think the human species originated?"

For asking this question, Professor Dini was accused of engaging in overt religious discrimination. As a result, a legal complaint was filed against Dini by the Liberty Legal Institute. Supporters of the complaint feared that consequences of the widespread adoption of Dini’s requirement would include a virtual ban of Christians from the practice of medicine and other related fields.

In an effort to defend his criteria for recommendation, Dini claimed that medicine was first rooted in the practice of magic. Dini said that religion then became the basis of medicine until it was replaced by science. After positing biology as the science most important to the study of medicine, he also posited evolution as the "central, unifying principle of biology" which includes both micro- and macro-evolution, which applies to all species.

In addition to claiming that someone who rejects the most important theory in biology cannot properly practice medicine, Dini suggested that physicians who ignore or neglect Darwinism are prone to making bad clinical decisions. He cautioned that a physician who ignores data concerning the scientific origins of the species cannot expect to remain a physician for long. He then rhetorically asked the following question: "If modern medicine is based on the method of science, then how can someone who denies the theory of evolution -- the very pinnacle of modern biological science -- ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist?"

In an apparent preemptive strike against those who would expose the weaknesses of macro-evolution, Dini claimed that "one can validly refer to the ‘fact’ of human evolution, even if all of the details are not yet known." Finally, he cautioned that a good scientist "would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs."

The legal aspect of this controversy ended this week with Dini finally deciding to change his recommendation requirements. But that does not mean it is time for Christians to declare victory and move on. In fact, Christians should be demanding that Dini’s question be asked more often in the court of public opinion. If it is, the scientific community will eventually be indicted for its persistent failure to address this very question in scientific terms.

Christians reading this article are already familiar with the creation stories found in the initial chapters of Genesis and the Gospel of John. But the story proffered by evolutionists to explain the origin of the species receives too little attention and scrutiny. In his two most recent books on evolution, Phillip Johnson gives an account of evolutionists’ story of the origin of the human species which is similar to the one below:

Darwinists, who proclaim themselves to be scientists, are certainly entitled to hold this view of the origin of the species. But that doesn’t mean that their view is, therefore, scientific. They must be held to scientific standards requiring proof as long as they insist on asking students to recite these verses as a rite of passage into their "scientific" discipline.

It, therefore, follows that the appropriate way to handle professors like Michael Dini is not to sue them but, instead, to demand that they provide specific proof of their assertion that the origin of all species can be traced to primordial soup. In other words, we should pose Dr. Dini’s question to all evolutionists. And we should do so in an open public forum whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Dini’s silence as well as the silence of other evolutionists speaks volumes about the current status of the discipline of biology. It is worth asking ourselves whether the study of biology has been hampered by the widespread and uncritical acceptance of Darwinian principles. To some observers, its study has largely become a hollow exercise whereby atheists teach other atheists to blindly follow Darwin without asking any difficult questions.

"Artificial life, a major subfield of complexity studies, is 'fact-free science', but it excels at generating computer graphics." John Maynard Smith,
Evolutionary theorist

"It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."
Professor N. Heiribert-Nillsson,
Lund University, Sweden

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

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. … to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study."
Professor Stephen Jay Gould,

"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.

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."
Dr. Michael Denton,
"Evolution: A Theory in Crisis"

"Don't let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either–despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem.

'In the beginning,' they will say, 'there was nothing–no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which...'

Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there is nothing, then there is something. And the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it all off.

Then they are off and away and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats."
Dr. D. Darling,
"On creating something from nothing," New Scientist, Vol 151, No. 2047, 14 September 1996, p.49

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

"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: '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 Museum of Natural History, London. Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5

"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,
Respected British physicist and astronomer

"Why has it taken 100 years to learn that one of the largest of all dinosaurs Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus of the school book) has been wearing the wrong head? That seems rather basic. How did this mix-up occur; and where has the old fellow's head been all of this time?
The answer to the last question is, of course, that its true head has been in the museum's research collection for all these many years, patiently waiting for research to catch up to reality."
Display Notebook,
Dinosaur National Park Museum, Vernal Utah

"A long-enduring and regrettable effect of the success of the Origin was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculation.
'Explanations' of the origin of structures, instincts, and mental aptitudes of all kinds, in terms of Darwinian principles, marked with the Darwinian plausibility but hopelessly unverifiable, poured out from every research centre.
The speculations on the origin and significance of the resemblances between animals, or between animals and their environment and of the striking colour patterns they often exhibit, constitute one of the best-known examples."
W. R. Thompson,
Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."
Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"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. 1982, John Wiley & Sons, p. 164

"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."
Charles Robert Darwin,
The Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, 1st edition reprint. Avenel Books

"What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But ... the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only one we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA.
Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code.

Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics."
Sir Karl Popper,
1974. Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science. In Ayala, F. and Dobzhansky, T., eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 270

"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.

"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record.
You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.'
I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record."
Dr. Colin Patterson,
Senior Palaeontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems," [1984], Master Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, Fourth Edition, 1988, p89

"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 demonstrable fact that there are no transitional types, and that the so called missing links are indeed non-existent."
Wolfgang Smith Ph.D.,
"Teilhardism and the New Religion". Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., p. 8

"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, Dep. of Geology, Stoval Museum. Evolution, vol 28, p 467

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