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Evolution debate: State board should reject pseudoscience
Columbus Dispatch ^ | February 17, 2002 | Editorial

Posted on 02/18/2002 4:59:53 AM PST by cracker

The Dispatch tries to verify the identity of those who submit letters to the editor, but this message presented some problems. It arrived on a postcard with no return address:

Dear Representative Linda Reidelbach: Evolution is one of my creations with which I am most pleased.

It was signed, God.

The Dispatch cannot confirm that this is a divine communication, but the newspaper does endorse the sentiment it expresses: that there is room in the world for science and religion, and the two need not be at war.

The newspaper also agrees that Reidelbach, a Republican state representative from Columbus, is among the lawmakers most in need of this revelation. She is the sponsor of House Bill 481, which says that when public schools teach evolution, they also must teach competing "theories'' about the origin of life.

Reidelbach says the bill would "encourage the presentation of scientific evidence regarding the origins of life and its diversity objectively and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''

What this appears to mean is that any idea about the origin of life would be designated, incorrectly, a scientific theory and would get equal time with the genuine scientific theory known as evolution.

Those who correctly object that the creation stories of various religions are not scientific would be guilty, in the language of this bill, "of religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''

Never mind that science is not a bias or an assumption but simply a rigorous and logical method for describing and explaining what is observed in nature.

What Reidelbach and her co-sponsors are attempting to do is to require that science classes also teach creationism, intelligent design and related unscientific notions about the origin of life that are derived from Christian belief.

So bent are they on getting Christianity's foot in the door of science classrooms that they apparently don't mind that this bill also appears to give the green light to the creation stories of competing religions, cults and any other manifestation of belief or unbelief. Apparently, even Satanists would have their say.

But the real problem is that Reidelbach's bill would undermine science education at the very moment when Ohio should be developing a scientifically literate generation of students who can help the state succeed in 21st-century technologies and compete economically around the globe.

The fact is that religious ideas, no matter how much they are dressed up in the language of science, are not science. And subjecting students to religious ideas in a science class simply would muddle their understanding of the scientific method and waste valuable time that ought to be used to learn genuine science.

The scientific method consists of observing the natural world and drawing conclusions about the causes of what is observed. These conclusions, or theories, are subject to testing and revision as additional facts are discovered that either bolster or undermine the conclusions and theories. Scientific truth, such as it is, is constantly evolving as new theories replace or modify old ones in the light of new facts.

Religious notions of creation work in the opposite fashion. They begin with a preconceived belief -- for example, that God created all the creatures on the Earth -- and then pick and choose among the observable facts in the natural world to find those that fit. Those that don't are ignored.

The scientific approach expands knowledge about the natural world; the religious approach impedes it.

The classic example of this occurred 369 years ago when the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. That theory contradicted the religiously based idea that man and the Earth formed the center of God's creation. Had the church's creationist view of the solar system prevailed, Ohioan Neil Armstrong never would have set foot on the moon.

Today, Copernican theory is established and acknowledged fact.

When it comes to evolution, much confusion grows out of the understanding -- or misunderstanding -- of the words theory and fact. Evolution is a theory, but one that has become so thoroughly buttressed by physical evidence that, for all intents and purposes, it is a fact. No one outside of the willfully obstinate questions the idea that new life forms evolved from older ones, a process conclusively illustrated in biology and the fossil record.

Where disagreement still exists is over how the process of evolution occurs. Scientists argue about the mechanism by which change occurs and whether the process is gradual and constant or proceeds in fits in starts. But while they debate over how evolution occurs, they do not doubt that it does occur.

Another way to understand this is to consider gravity. Everyone accepts the existence of this force, but many questions remain about just what gravity is and how it works. That scientists argue about how gravity works doesn't change the fact that gravity exists. Or, as author Stephen Jay Gould has put it, "Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome.''

Just as with gravity, evolution is a fact.

Those who persist on questioning this fact are a tiny minority, even among people of faith. But they are a loud minority and, to those not well-grounded in science, their arguments can sound reasonable, even "scientific.'' But their arguments are little more than unfounded assertions dressed up in the language of science.

This minority also insists on creating conflict between religion and science where none needs to exist. Major faiths long since have reconciled themselves to a division of labor with science. Religion looks to humankind's spiritual and moral needs, while science attends to the material ones.

The Catholic Church, which once tried to hold back the progress of science, now admits that it was wrong to suppress Galileo. More than a billion Catholics draw sustenance from their faith untroubled by the knowledge that the planet is racing around the sun.

Religion, in turn, provides spiritual and moral guideposts to decide how best to use the awesome powers that science has unlocked and placed at humankind's disposal.

Nor are scientists themselves antagonistic to religion. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific geniuses in history, was deeply reverent: "My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world,'' he once said.

Others have made similar observations. The more the scientific method reveals about the intricacies of the universe, the more awestruck many scientists become.

The simplest way to reconcile religion and evolution is to accept the view propounded early last century by prominent Congregationalist minister and editor Lyman Abbott, who regarded evolution as the means God uses to create and shape life.

This view eliminates conflict between evolution and religion. It allows scientists to investigate evolution as a natural process and lets people of faith give God the credit for setting that process in motion.

As for what to do about creationism and evolution in schools, the answer is easy. Evolution should be taught in science classes. Creationism and related religiously based ideas should be taught in comparative-religion, civics and history classes.

Religion was and remains central to the American identity. It has profoundly shaped American ideals and provided the basis for its highest aspirations, from the Declaration of Independence to the civil-rights movement. There is no question that religion is a vital force and a vital area of knowledge that must be included in any complete education.

But not in the science classroom, because religion is not science. There is no such thing as Buddhist chemistry, Jewish physics or Christian mathematics.

The Earth revolves around the sun regardless of the faiths of the people whom gravity carries along for the ride. Two plus two equals four whether that sum is calculated by a Muslim or a Zoroastrian.

Reidelbach and her supporters genuinely worry that a crucial element -- moral education and appreciation of religion's role in America -- is missing in education. But they will not correct that lack by injecting pseudoscience into Ohio's science curriculum.

And Reidelbach is not the only one making this mistake. Senate Bill 222, sponsored by state Sen. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, is equally misguided. This bill would require that science standards adopted by the State Board of Education be approved by resolution in the General Assembly. This is a recipe for disaster, injecting not only religion, but also politics, into Ohio's science classes.

These two bills should be ignored by lawmakers.

In a few months, when the State Board of Education lays out the standards for science education in Ohio's public schools, it should strongly endorse the teaching of evolution and ignore the demands of those who purvey pseudoscience.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: crevolist; educationnews; evolution; ohio
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To: gore3000
SHOW ME THE BONES!

(Snip one sentence.)

Bones are meaningless.

When you say there is no proof, you only mean that nothing can ever be proof of what you refuse to see.

81 posted on 02/20/2002 5:20:15 PM PST by VadeRetro
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To: Scully
I find no contradiction between my faith and my science (and yes, I do actually read my Bible with great regularity).

I agree. If scripture is properly understood -- not an easy task -- it doesn't contradict science at all. The trick is knowing when scripture is to be understood literally, and when it's speaking in metaphor.

No one, not even the most strident fundamentalist, takes the numerous passages about "the four corners of the earth" and the "pillars of the earth" as being literally true. Why? Because we know the shape of the earth. Similarly, since Galileo's unfortunate encounter with the Inquisition over the solar system, probably even the most stubborn fundamentalist will agree with Galileo that the solar system is real, and those passages in scripture which seem to say that the earth is the unmoveable center of the universe are mere poetry. Why? Again, it's because we know enough now to realize that the solar system -- although "only a theory" -- is a very good description of reality.

The point here is that our growing understanding -- through science -- of the true nature of the universe is actually an aid to understanding scripture. The scientist, quite without realizing it, and sometimes in spite of his lack of religious conviction, is providing a kind of "reader's guide" to help us have a better understanding of scripture. Actually, the universe itself is the "reader's guide" but it's the scientist who discovers the nature of the universe. Thus, when understood in the light of science, scripture can be properly read, old misunderstandings can be corrected, and there is no conflict. Without science, we have no way of knowing if our reading of scripture is correct.

82 posted on 02/20/2002 5:26:37 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: cracker
In a few months, when the State Board of Education lays out the standards for science education in Ohio's public schools, it should strongly endorse the teaching of evolution and ignore the demands of those who purvey pseudoscience....

Evolution IS pseudoscience.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

83 posted on 02/20/2002 6:05:06 PM PST by medved
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To: Junior
"So, the dozen or so speciation links on The Ultimate Resource magically disappeared before you could read them?

Since you seem to have a dozen or more proofs of macro-evolution you should have no problem posting JUST ONE. Perhaps it is impossible for a genius such as you to know how to cut and paste?

I have been on these threads a long time and have seen a lot of the garbage in the "Ultimate Evolution Garbage Pile". Each time an article supporting evolution has been discussed here it has been thoroughly discredited by me and others.

BTW - I will not even bother to discuss the rest of your statements, they just verify what I said - that the evolutionists would use every foul trick to avoid giving an answer. Therefore, I just re-raise the challenge:

NOT ONE, NOT ONE EVOLUTIONIST WILL POST PROOF OF MACRO-EVOLUTION - BECAUSE THERE IS NONE. BECAUSE THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY PROOF OF EVOLUTION IN THE 150 YEARS SINCE THE CHARLATAN CHARLES DARWIN WROTE HIS HEATHEN BOOK.

84 posted on 02/20/2002 6:07:39 PM PST by gore3000
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To: gore3000
When an all-out search carried out over a 150-year time span fails to turn up anything, a rational observer at least entertains the possibiility that the reason nothing has been found is that there's nothing there....
85 posted on 02/20/2002 6:11:30 PM PST by medved
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To: RadioAstronomer
My vote is for the latter. :)

Shame on you. I have given you and your fellow evolutionists a challenge and you answer it with insults.

If evolution is so well proven, if evolution is so undoubtedly true - how come you do not just give us all non-believers in the petty god Darwin the proof and shut us up?

86 posted on 02/20/2002 6:12:33 PM PST by gore3000
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To: lexcorp
From the link:

"Pakicetids were the first cetaceans, and they are more primitive than other whales in most respects."

The proofs given in the way of bones in the article are:


The skulls of two pakicetid whales (Ichthyolestes on the left, Pakicetus on the right), flank the skull of a modern coyote.

and:
Photograph (above) of bones of Pakicetus (large animal) and Ichthyolestes (small animal)

Now that the "proof" is right here for all to see, perhaps you can explain to us how the above prove the evolution of whales from a coyote!

BTW - evos were trying to pass off the hippo as the ancestor of the whale, but they ran into a little trouble - DNA. The DNA proved conclusively that whales did not descend from hippos.

87 posted on 02/20/2002 6:49:56 PM PST by gore3000
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To: Scully
I wasn't aware that Creationists acknowledged any form of evolution.

They call it variation, natural selection, and/or microevolution. I've never read a creationist that had a problem with it. But I haven't read all creationists.

Another point: if it can occur in a small, isolated society, it can occur on a larger scale as well.

If you're referring to macroevolution, that's an entirely different matter. With microevolution there is no disagreement between evolutionists and creationists. The main issue, as I see it, is macroevolution.

88 posted on 02/20/2002 6:52:51 PM PST by scripter
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To: gore3000

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Catastrophism

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities


89 posted on 02/20/2002 6:57:22 PM PST by medved
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To: one_particular_harbour
"You can be Christian and still fit evolution into your cosmological view."

Are you a Christian? If not, how would you know?

90 posted on 02/20/2002 7:00:00 PM PST by gore3000
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To: Sabertooth
"The random mutagenesis model strikes me as rolling dice. Now, maybe time is sufficient to get enough rolls to come up with new species... but look at all the species that have either existed or currently exist... that's rolling a lot of sevens.

Problem with mutations is that they cannot occur fast enough to achieve what the evolutionists say they achieve. For example, lacking all other proof, the evos have resorted to calling the building of resistance to chemicals, and medicines by viruses and pests as evolution when clearly it does not prove any such thing. Let's look at the situation in a logical manner. The dead do not reproduce, so clearly the viruses and pests killed by these medicines and chemicals are not the source of the genes which have become resistant to these medicines and chemicals. The source of the genes for the resistant strains of these creatures must therefore be found in the creatures that were not killed by these chemicals and medicines. Since these creatures managed to survive the medicines and chemicals there was no mutation required for their successors to be resistant to these medicines and chemicals. All they needed was normal reproduction!

91 posted on 02/20/2002 7:14:03 PM PST by gore3000
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To: PatrickHenry
Without science, we have no way of knowing if our reading of scripture is correct.

Thank you for putting this in more eloquent terms than I could. :)

92 posted on 02/20/2002 7:17:06 PM PST by Scully
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To: gore3000
NOT ONE, NOT ONE EVOLUTIONIST WILL POST PROOF OF MACRO-EVOLUTION...

That's because we're talking science and not mathematics. What the various scientists are trying to explain to you is that there are many pieces of "evidence" for evolution. When you say "proof", its difficult to know what you mean.

You say DNA "proves" that organisms are not descended from each other, but you don't explain how this is done. It's not possible to "prove" with DNA that your kids are yours. You can only say that they are similar to you to a very high degree of probability.

You use the word "proof" when you have no method, no data and no calculated probabilities at all. Yet biology has trillions of observations and you say there is no "proof".

I realize that some Christians don't like science, but why turn over the field to atheists? Why not participate and influence instead?

93 posted on 02/20/2002 7:17:34 PM PST by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Junior
"Do not underestimate the power of willful ignorance... "

I never underestimate the power of willful ignorance. See it all the time on these threads coming from the evolutionists. They sing "evolution is science", "evolution is proven fact" on and on like a Budhist mantra but when asked "what is the proof?" they fail to give it and respond with insults.

94 posted on 02/20/2002 7:19:58 PM PST by gore3000
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To: Scully
" I find no contradiction between my faith and my science "

Really? Well, evolution says that man descended from lower species (they no longer say from monkeys because real science has proven that to be a lie). The Bible says (and quite explicitly too) that God created man in his own image.

If you do not find any contradiction then clearly it is because your passions have overcome your logic.

95 posted on 02/20/2002 7:26:18 PM PST by gore3000
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To: Sabertooth
...that's rolling a lot of sevens....

The players have been rolling dice for lo these billions and billions of years now. There are trillions and trillions (maybe even quadrillions) of players too. The adequate survive.

96 posted on 02/20/2002 7:26:40 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic
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To: cracker
Typical liberal tripe. These people don't have a clue about the real evolution-design debate. They simply parrot the "experts" in their smug arrogance. Fools.
97 posted on 02/20/2002 7:31:54 PM PST by Timmy
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To: Khepera
reject evolution as pseudoscience

reject creation as a silly story out of an old book
98 posted on 02/20/2002 7:34:57 PM PST by mn12
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To: medved
That's because we're talking science and not mathematics. What the various scientists are trying to explain to you is that there are many pieces of "evidence" for evolution.

Right...

Consider what some of the real scientists are saying about evolutionism:

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

Chuck Darwin showed signs of occasionally being struck by the stupidity of his own BS:

"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. 

99 posted on 02/20/2002 7:35:50 PM PST by medved
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To: VadeRetro
"When you say there is no proof, you only mean that nothing can ever be proof of what you refuse to see.

No, I do not refuse to see. It is the evolutionists who refuse to see beyond their own noses. The bones are a very small part of a creature. In fact, genetically speaking, they show far less than 10% of the makeup of a creature. Therefore, one cannot say that a creature is the descendant of another with less than 10% of the evidence being available. What of the other 90%? For example, the distinctive characteristic of mammals, is that they have mammary glands. These are not present in the bones. How can one tell if the bones are of a mammal or not? The answer is one cannot. However evolutionists make that unjustified claim all the time when it is convenient for them.

100 posted on 02/20/2002 7:39:09 PM PST by gore3000
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 81 | View Replies]


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