COLIN PATTERSON, British Museum (Natural History) "This theory [evolution] has only one main competitor, creation theory, though there are different stories of how the Creator went about His work." Evolution, p. 148.
NILES ELDRIDGE, American Museum of Natural History, "Indeed, the only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world is the notion of Special Creation." TIME FRAMES, 1985, p.240.
D. J. FUTUYMA "creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species from some process of modifications. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must have been created by some omnipotent intelligence." SCIENCE ON TRIAL, 1983, p. 169
RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS, SIR JULIAN HUXLEY, "In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion.", EVOLUTION AFTER DARWIN, Vol. 3, p.253
WHAT IS HUMANISM SIR JULIAN HUXLEY, Membership Brochure, "I use the word 'humanist' to mean someone who believes that man is just as much a natural phenomenon as an animal or plant; that his body, mind and soul were not supernaturally created but are products of evolution, and that he is not under the control or guidance of any supernatural being or beings! but has to rely on himself and his own powers."
EVOLUTION - GIVEN MORALITY, ERNST MAYR, "The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species signified the end of an automatic acceptance of the God-given nature of human morality…Evolution does not give us a complete set of ethical norms such as the Ten Commandments, yet an understanding of evolution gives us a world view that can serve as a sound basis for the development of an ethical system...." TOWARD A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY, Harvard Univ. Press, 1988, pp. 75, 89.
NOT ILLEGAL, STEPHEN JAY GOULD, "But no statute exists in any state to bar instruction in 'creation science.' It could be taught before and it can be taught now." New York Times Magazine, July 19, 1987, p.34
IS BEING TAUGHT, MICHAEL ZIMMERMAN, "' Creation science" can still be brought into the science classroom if and when teachers and administrators feel that it is appropriate. Numerous surveys have shown that teachers and administrators favor just this route. And, in fact, 'creation science' is currently being taught in science courses throughout the country." Bioscience, 17 (9):635 (1987)
SUPREME COURT JUSTICE BRENNAN, LA Balanced Treatment Act, "The Act does not grant teachers a flexibility that they did not already possess, to supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life....Teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science education.", Edwards v Aquillard, 1987
TEXAS TEXTBOOK MANDATES, "1. Scientific methods: under content: 1.4 scientific theories and laws based on existing evidence as well as new evidence... 6. Drawing logical inferences, predicting outcomes and forming generalized statements: under process skills: 6.2 deducing a biological hypothesis from experimental data; 6.3 examining alternative scientific evidence and ideas to test, modify, verify or refute scientific theories....9. Theories of evolution: under content: 9.1 scientific theories of evolution; 9.2 scientific theories of evolution and other reliable scientific theories, if any;...", Texas State Board of Education, Proclamation 66, March 11, 1989 (Amended in 1993 to include "strengths and weaknesses of evolution.").
IMPORTANT DISTINCTION, G. A. KERKUT, "There is a theory which states that many living animals can be observed over the course of time to undergo changes so that new species are formed. This can be called the 'Special Theory of Evolution': and can be demonstrated in certain cases by experiments. On the other hand there is a theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. This theory can be called the 'General Theory of Evolution"'. IMPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTION, p.155.
GENERAL EVOLUTION, THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY, "Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe; the cosmic, biological, and human or cultural developments...Life is a product of the evolution of inorganic nature, and man is a product of the evolution of life." Science, Vol. 155, p.409. "evolution from primordial life, through unicellular and multicellular organisms, invertebrate, and vertebrate animals, to man..." Encyclopedia Americana
OBSERVE EVOLUTION? (In Living World) G. LENYARD STEBBINS "The reason that the major steps of evolution have never been observed is that they required millions of years to be completed." PROCESSES OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION, P. 1. STEPHEN GOULD "Major evolutionary change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of human history." Discover, May, 1981, p.36.
OBSERVE EVOLUTION? (In Fossil Record) STEPHEN JAY GOULD, Harvard, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists,....we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study." Natural History, Vol. 86. DAVID B. KITTS, Univ. of Okl., "Despite the promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists,...." Evolution, Vol. 28, p. 467.
EXPERIMENTAL? REPEATABLE? THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY, "These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. ....the applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter." American Scientist, Vol. 45, p.388.
FALSIFIABILITY, STEPHEN JAY GOULD, "Philosopher Karl Popper has agreed for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified is not science." Discover; May, 1981
PAUL EHRLICH, "Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus 'outside empirical science', but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it....become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as a part of our training" Nature, Vol. 214, p. 352.
MYTHOLOGICAL OBJECTIVITY, STEPHEN JAY GOULD, Harvard, "No myth deserves a more emphatic death than the idea that science is an inherently impartial and objective enterprise;...Yet it continues to thrive among working scientist because it serves us so well....It so provides the rational for America's scientific priesthood: The National Academy of Sciences." SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1978, p.344.
TIME + MUTATIONS = NO CHANGE, MICHEL DELSOL PROF. OF BIOLOGY, UNIV. OF LYONS, "If mutation were a variation of value to the species, then the evolution of drosophila should have proceeded with extreme rapidity. Yet the facts entirely contradict the validity of this theoretical deduction; for we have seen that the Drosophila type has been known since the beginning of the Tertiary period, that is for about fifty million years, and it has not been modified in any way during that time." ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE LIFE SCIENCES Volume II, p. 34 .
BOUNDARIES TO VARIATION W. BRAUN, "....that is the potential mutations of a given biotype are normally limited, else we should have been able to observe drastic evolutionary changes in laboratory studies with bacteria. Despite the rapid rate of propagation and the enormous size of attainable populations, changes within initially homogeneous bacterial populations apparently do not progress beyond certain boundaries under experimental conditions." BACTERIAL GENETICS
NEW SPECIES?, Colin Patterson, British Museum of Natural History, "No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question.", CLADISTICS, BBC, March 4 1982.
ILLUSIONARY EVOLUTION, "It may be time to rethink Our thoughts about the mechanisms for antibiotic - resistance patterns...The anaerobic bacteria, from the bowels of three members of an lt',45 Arctic expedition have survive 140 yrs and are showing resistance patterns to modern antibiotics. Current theories suggest that antibiotic resistance is linked to long-term exposure to antibiotics. Needless to say, antibiotics were not developed until long after these 19th century bacteria and their hosts have been buried in arctic permafrost.'' Medical Tribune, 12/29/88, p.23
"EVOLUTIONARY THEORY UNDER FIRE", "An historic conference in Chicago challenges the Four- decade long dominance of the Modern Synthesis, The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying micro - evolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No....Francisco Ayala, 'major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis in the United States', said: 'We would not have predicted stasis...but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate."' Science, V.210, Nov.21,1980
SELECTION - IRRELEVELANT, S.M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins U. "...natural selection, long viewed as the process guiding evolutionary change, cannot play a significant role in determining the overall course of evolution. Macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution." Pro. N. A. S., v 72, p.648
CHANGE PREVENTED, S. M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins Univ. "Once established, an average species of animal or plant will not change enough to be regarded as a new species, even after surviving for something like a hundred thousand or a million, or even ten million generations… Something tends to prevent the wholesale restructuring of a species, once it has become well established on earth." Johns Hopkins Magazine, p.6, June, 1982.
MUTATIONS IRREVELANT, STEPHEN T. GOIJLD, Harvard, "A mutation doesn't produce major new raw material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species. ...That's a common idea people have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is NOT the cause of evolutionary change." Lecture at Hobart and William Smith College, 14/2/1980
VARŠ IATION, NOT IMPROVEMENT, STEPHEN T. GOUI.D, HARVARD, We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. NATURAL HISTORY, 2/82, P. 22,23
TEXTBOOK EVOLUTION DEAD, STEPHEN. T GOULD Harvard, "I well remember how the synthetic theory beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid -1960's. Since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution…I have been reluctant to admit it - since beguiling is often forever - but if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." Paleobiology Vol. 6 1980 p. 120.
PRIMITIVE CELL? J. MONOD, "....we have no idea what the structure of a primitive cell might have been. The simplest living system known to us, the bacterial cell....in....its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation as do, for example, human cells. Thus the simplest cells available to us for study have nothing 'primitive' about them....no vestiges of truly primitive structures are discernible." CHANCE AND NECESSITY, p. 134. College text used by students just a generation ago is under serious attack. New insights into planetary formation have made it increasingly doubtful that clouds of methane and ammonia ever dominated the atmosphere of the primitive earth....If scientists have, by and large, tossed out the old ideas, they have not yet reached a consensus on the new. Time, 10/11/1993
SOURCE OF INFORMATION??? CARL SAGAN Cornell, "The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10 to the 12th power bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannicas.", Life, Vol.10 p.894. RICIHARD DAWKINS, Oxford, "Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1000 Encyclopedia Britannicas.", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p.116.
SIMPLE CELL? MICHAEL DENTON Molecular Biologist (Agnostic), "To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. 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 portholes 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 these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.... Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which 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?", EVOLUTION, A THEORY IN CRISIS, 1985, pp. 327-8, 342.
LETHAL ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT, CARL SAGAN, Cornell, "Unacceptable high mutation rates will, of course, occur at much lower u.v. doses, and even if we imagine primitive organisms having much less stringent requirements on the fidelity of replication than do contemporary organisms, we must require very substantial u.v. attenuation for the early evolution of life to have occurred..", Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol.39, p.197
CHARLES DARWIN, "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." ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, p. 183
IMPLICATIONS OF INTEGRITY, FRANCIS CRICK, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." LIFE IT SELF, 1981, p. 88.