Replies

"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

Excellent post!!

Sweetie, your Darwin and Gould quotes are taken out of context. The full quotes obviate the point you are making with you selective misquotes. As for several of the others, most are more than two decades old (and the science has come a long way since then) and that Denton fellow is a dyed-in-the-wool creationist who's comments should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists--whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled 'Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax' states: 'The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge...are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible.'"

- Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"

"This is not to imply that we know everything that can and should be known about biology and about evolution. Any competent biologist is aware of a multitude of problems yet unresolved and of questions yet unanswered. After all, biologic research shows no sign of approaching completion; quite the opposite is true. Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Antievolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin."

- Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"

(I added this because you have a T. Dobzhansky misquote in your selection. If you'd double check the actual provenance of the quotes instead of simply copying and pasting from creationists websites this would not be such a problem.)