Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: January - June 2001

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The following are unclassified quotes posted by me to creation/evolution discussion groups
in January - June 2001. The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.

[January, February, March, April, May , June ] [July-December]

January
4/01/2001
"Biological systems, like machines, have, therefore, functions and forms inexplicable by chemical and 
physical laws. The argument that the DNA molecule determines genetic processes in living systems does 
not indicate reducibility. A DNA molecule essentiality transmits information to a developing cell. Similarly, a 
book transmits information. But the transmission of the information cannot be represented in terms of 
chemical and physical principles. In other words, the operation of the book is not reducible to chemical 
terms. Since DNA operates by transmission of (genetic) information, its function cannot be described by 
chemical laws either. The life process is essentially the development of a fertilized cell, as the result of 
information imparted by DNA. Transmission of this information is nonchemical and nonphysical, and is the 
controlling factor in the life process. The description of a living system therefore transcends the chemical 
and physical laws which govern its constituents." (Polanyi, M., "Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry," 
Chemical & Engineering News, Vol. 45, No. 35, August 21, 1967, pp.54-66, p.56).

5/01/2001
"`Organized' systems are to be carefully distinguished from `ordered' systems. Neither kind of system is 
`random'; but whereas ordered systems are generated according to simple algorithms and therefore lack 
complexity, organized systems must be assembled element by element according to an external`wiring 
diagram' with a high information content." (Wicken, J.S., "The Generation of Complexity in Evolution: A 
Thermodynamic and Information-Theoretical Discussion," Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 77, April 
1979, pp.349-365, p.353)

5/01/2001
"Because in our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life, Christian theists 
know that Romans 1:20 is also true: "Ever since the creation of the world [God's] eternal power and divine 
nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made." In other 
words, there is absolutely no mystery about why living organisms appear to be the products of intelligent 
creation, and why scientific naturalists have to work so hard to keep themselves from perceiving the 
obvious. The reason living things give that appearance is that they actually are what they appear to be, and 
this fact is evident to all who do not cloud their minds with naturalistic philosophy or some comparable 
drug. The rest of that passage (Romans 1:20-23) is also true: So they are without excuse; for though they 
knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and 
their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory 
of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. 
What these words plainly mean is that those who turn away from God and toward naturalistic philosophy 
give up their minds in the process and end up endorsing sophisticated nonsense and nature worship." 
(Johnson, P.E.*, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education," 
InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL., 1995, p.108)

6/01/2001
"In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider 
the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the 
mechanisms of speciation that he, or anyone else, for the matter, had proposed. Rather, Dobzhansky, as 
others did and would do, took for granted that, with enough time, the kinds of small mutations and changes 
that were observed in laboratory experiments on fruit-fly population genetics were also capable of 
producing the degrees of differences that seem to characterize species in the wild. To be sure, there was a 
certain logic in the belief that it was unnecessary to postulate another mechanism for evolutionary change 
when one already appeared to exist. This logic also seemed to benefit from the assertion that not only had 
no other mechanism been observed but that no other mechanism had yet produced species. Nevertheless, it 
was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the 
formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed." (Schwartz, J.H., "Sudden Origins: 
Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species," John Wiley & Sons: New York NY, 1999, pp.299-300)

11/01/2001
"In language oddly reminiscent of Buffon's contrast between the works of man and the works of nature, 
Darwin asked his imaginary reader to suppose the existence of: `a Being with penetration sufficient to 
perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with 
forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the 
offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing circumstances, I can see no conceivable reason why 
he could not form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on 
several islands) adapted to new ends. As we assume his discrimination, and his forethought, and his 
steadiness of object, to be incomparably greater than those qualities in man, so we may suppose the beauty 
and complications of the adaptations of the new races and their differences from the original stock to be 
greater than in the domestic races produced by man's agency.... With time enough, such a Being might 
rationally (without some unknown law opposed him) aim at almost any result....Seeing what blind capricious 
man has actually effected by selection during the few last years, and what in a ruder state he has probably 
effected without any systematic plan during the last few thousand years, he will be a bold person who will 
positively put limits to what the supposed Being could effect during whole geological periods' (Darwin, F., 
ed. "The Foundations of the Origin of Species, Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844, by Charles Darwin," 
Cambridge UK, 1909, pp.85-87). A striking conception. this idea of a Master Breeder infinitely wise and 
patient, with infinite time at his disposal, who, carefully selecting from among the variations in nature those 
which suited his purposes, molded organic nature to his own wise ends. Such a Being could be little less 
than God Himself." (Greene, J.C., "The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought," 
[1959], Mentor: New York NY, 1961, reprint, pp.261-262. Ellipses Greene's).

15/01/2001
"Granted that Nature's laws are in fact life-permitting Darwinian accounts give (although usually only in 
very compressed form) the causal story of Life's evolution for which section 1.8 called. Still, not just any 
universe would be one in which Darwinian evolution would work. If a tiny reduction in the early cosmic 
expansion speed would have made everything recollapse within a fraction of a second while a tiny increase 
would quickly have yielded a universe far too dilute for stars to form, then such changes would 
(presumably) have been disastrous to Evolution's prospects." (Leslie, J., "Universes," [1989], Routledge: 
London, 1996, reprint, p.108)

16/01/2001
"Professor Eiseley presents a detailed argument designed to show that Darwin probably derived the idea of 
natural selection from two articles written by his acquaintance Edward Blyth and published in The Magazine 
of Natural History in 1835 and 1837. If these articles were in fact the source of Darwin's theory, Darwin was 
guilty of grave intellectual dishonesty. In the present writer's opinion, Professor Eiseley fails to establish his 
case beyond reasonable doubt, although the evidence he presents is sufficiently disturbing to merit further 
investigation aimed at establishing or disproving his thesis." (Greene, J.C., "The Death of Adam: Evolution 
and its Impact on Western Thought," [1959], Mentor: New York NY, 1961, reprint, p.366)

15/01/2001
"A deep problem--philosophical rather than factual--stymies all our attempts to define the nature of life. 
Scientific generalizations require replication, the demonstration that a given set of forces and substances 
will yield the same result when brought together under the same conditions. Ideally, we test for replication 
with time-honored procedures that scientists call controlled experiments--artificially simplified situations 
manipulated by human observers to guarantee (within the best of our ability) an exact repetition of all 
timings, forces and substances. If we achieve the same result in each of several replications, we then gain 
confidence that we may be witnessing a predictable generality based upon a law of nature. This search for 
replicates underlies the efforts--and partial successes--of scientists to synthesize living matter from the 
presumed chemical constituents in the "primordial soup" of the earth's original oceans. Can we create some 
rudimentary forms of life by exposing these constituents to known sources of energy (lightning from 
electrical storms, heat from oceanic vents, for example) under the presumed conditions of the earth's early 
atmosphere and surface? In this context of accepted scientific procedures, single occurrences present a 
knotty problem. Their "truth" cannot be denied, but how can we use their existence to assert any generality 
rather than an explanation for a singular circumstance? For specific events of history--the rise, domination 
and extinction of dinosaurs, for example--we seek no such generality, and specific narrations for bounded 
events supply the explanations we seek. Thus a particular asteroid, striking the earth 65 million years ago 
and leaving evidence of its impact off the Yucatan Peninsula, probably triggered a global extinction that 
sealed the fate of dinosaurs and many other creatures. In developing such evidence, we have explained a 
unique historical event, but we have not discovered a general law of nature." (Gould, S.J., "Will We Figure 
Out How Life Began? ," Time Magazine, April 9, 2000. 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,42365,00.html)

16/01/2001
"The primary problem with the synthesis is that its makers established natural selection as the director of 
adaptive evolution by eliminating competing explanations, not by providing evidence that natural selection 
among 'random' mutations could, or did, account for observed adaptation .... Mayr remarked, 'As these non-
Darwinian explanations were refuted during the synthesis ... natural selection automatically became the 
universal explanation of evolutionary change (together with chance factors).' Depriving the synthesis of 
plausible alternatives, which seemed such a triumph, in fact sowed the seeds of its faults." (Leigh, E.G., Jr, 
"The modern synthesis, Ronald Fisher and creationism," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 14, no. 12, 
pp495-498, December 1999, p.495)

17/01/2001
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and 
was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Most ignorance is vincible 
ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what 
subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, 
for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. ... For myself, as, no 
doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of 
liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic 
system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered 
with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The 
supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, 
they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the 
same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any 
meaning whatsoever." (Huxley, A.L., "Ends and Means," [1937], Chatto & Windus: London, 1938, Third 
impression, pp.270,273)

18/01/2001
"Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of help from the scientist, 
says Joyce of the Scripps Clinic, an RNA specialist. `It is an inept molecule,' he explains, `especially when 
compared with proteins.' Leslie E. Orgel of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who has probably done 
more research exploring the RNA-world scenario than any other scientist, concurs with Joyce. Experiments 
simulating the early stages of the RNA world are too complicated to represent plausible scenarios for the 
origin of life, Orgel says. `You have to get an awful lot of things right and nothing wrong,' he adds." 
(Horgan J., "In The Beginning...," Scientific American, February 1991, p.103. Ellipses in original)

19/01/2001
"Removing the moon seems harmless enough at first. Of course, Solon [Earth without the moon] would 
differ from the earth. The tides would be lower without the moon, and it would lack eclipses and romantic, 
moonlit nights, but in the global scheme of things these changes seem trivial. As we dig deeper, we discover 
that lower tides, higher winds, and shorter days would greatly affect Solon's geography, its ability to evolve 
life, and the quality of the life animals would have there. As the differences between Earth and Solon 
become more evident, it becomes clear that Solon would be a much less hospitable place in which to live. 
There is much more that could be said about Solon, but this chapter raises a broader question that cries out 
for consideration. That is, just how ideal a planet did we inherit compared with the one we might have 
gotten? Are we living on the best of all possible worlds?" (Comins N.F., "What If the Moon Didn't Exist?: 
Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been," HarperCollins: New York NY, 1993, p.48)

19/01/2001
"Indeed, the earliest insects are rather like Pallas-Athene who sprang fully formed from the head of her 
father Zeus they arrive on the scene with no evidence of antecedents. ... Nor are there any clues as to how 
and when the first winged insects came on the scene. ... Having said all that, it must again be emphasised 
that insect ancestry is extremely conjectural, since the evidence for it is either very fragmentary or non-
existent. It is not impossible that there was no such thing as a common arthropod ancestor at all." (Wootton 
A., "Insects of the World," [1984], Facts on File Publications: New York NY, 1986, reprint, pp.18-19)

21/01/2001
"Beyond the Earth's atmosphere, on the other side of the sky, is a universe teeming with radio emission. By 
studying radio waves you can learn about planets and stars and galaxies, about the composition of great 
clouds of organic molecules that drift between the stars, about the origin and evolution and fate of the 
universe. But all these radio emissions are natural-caused by physical processes ... In the scant few decades 
in which humans have pursued radio astronomy, there has never been a real signal from the depths of 
space, something manufactured, something special something contrived by an alien mind." Sagan, C.E., 
"Contact," Pocket Books: New York NY, 1985, Reprinted, 1986, p.41)

21/01/2001
"Imagine that you are walking along a creek on a lazy summer afternoon, idly kicking at the pebbles along 
the bank. Occasionally you reach down to pick up a pebble that has an unusual shape. One pebble reminds 
you of a cowboy boot. As you roll the pebble around in your hand, you notice that the softer parts of the 
rock are more worn away than the harder parts, and that lines of wear follow lines of weakness in the rock. 
Despite some appearance of design, the boot shape of the tumbled pebble is clearly the result of time, 
chance, and the processes of weathering and erosion. But then your eye spots an arrowhead lying among 
the pebbles. Immediately it stands out as different. In the arrowhead, chip marks cut through the hard and 
soft parts of the rock equally, and the chip line goes both with and across lines of weakness in the rock. In 
the arrowhead, we see matter shaped and molded according to a design that gives the rocky material a 
purpose. You have just done what many people dismiss as impossible. In comparing the pebble and 
arrowhead, you were easily able to recognize evidence of creation. I am speaking here only of human 
creation, of course. The arrowhead might have been carved by one of my ancestors (a Cherokee), for 
example. But the same approach can be used even when we don't know who or what the creative agent 
might have been. ... Using your knowledge of erosional processes and your observations of hard and soft 
rock, you were able to distinguish a result of time and chance (the tumbled pebble) from an object created 
with plan and purpose (the arrowhead). If we had found such objects as arrowheads on Mars, all scientists 
would have recognized them immediately as the products of creation, even though in that case we would 
have no idea who made them or how. Carl Sagan, the evolutionist of Cosmos television fame, wants 
the government to listen for signals from outer space, because he knows full well that we can tell the 
difference between wave patterns produced by time and chance from those sent with design and purpose. 
Note: You don't have to see the creator, and you don't have to see the creative act, to recognize evidence of 
creation. Even when we don't know who or what the creative agent is, then, there are cases where "creation" 
is simply the most logical inference from our scientific observations." (Parker G.E.*, "Evidence of Creation in 
Living Systems," in Morris H.M.* & Parker G.E.*, "What is Creation Science?," [1982], Master Books: El Cajon 
CA, Revised, 1987, pp.33-34)

22/01/2001
"Water is actually one of the strangest substances known to science. This may seem a rather odd thing to 
say about a substance as familiar but it is surely true. Its specific heat, its surface tension, and most of its 
other physical properties have values anomalously higher or lower than those of any other known material. 
The fact that its solid phase is less dense than its liquid phase (ice floats) is virtually a unique property. 
These aspects or the chemical and physical structure of water have been noted before, for instance by the 
authors of the Bridgewater Treatises in the 1830's and by Henderson in 1913, who also pointed out that 
these strange properties make water a uniquely useful liquid and the basis for living things."
(Barrow J.D. & Tipler F.J., "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," [1986], Oxford University Press: Oxford 
UK, 1996, reprint, p.524)

22/01/2001
"...the theory of progressive creationism is that interpretation of life which the author advocates and which 
he thinks is a more comprehensive theory than the theory of evolution. Progressive creationism endeavours 
to explain much that the theory of evolution tries to explain, and many of the things that the theory of 
evolution leaves unexplained. Gen. 1 records the broad outline of the successive creative acts of God in 
bringing the universe through the various stages from chaos to man. Being a very general sketch it leaves 
considerable room for the empirical determination of various facts. A multitude of biological facts now 
generally accepted by the biologists would remain unchanged. In progressive creationism there may be 
much horizontal radiation. The amount is to be determined by the geological record and biological 
experimentation. But there is no vertical radiation. Vertical radiation is only by fiat creation. A root-species 
may give rise to several species by horizontal radiation, through the process of the unraveling of gene 
potentialities or recombination. Horizontal radiation could account for much which now passes as evidence 
for the theory of evolution. The gaps in the geological record are gaps because vertical progress takes place 
only by creation." (Ramm, B.L.*, "The Christian View of Science and Scripture," [1954], Paternoster: London, 
Reprinted, 1960, p.191. Emphasis original)

23/01/2001
"Two strongly held views about the origin of our planet and its life are in severe disagreement. Biblical 
Creationists accept on faith the literal Old Testament account of creation. Their beliefs include (1) a young 
earth, perhaps less than 10,000 years old; (2) catastrophes, especially a worldwide flood, as the origin of the 
earth's present form, including mountains, canyons, oceans, and continents; and (3) miraculous creation of 
all living things, including humans, in essentially their modern forms. ... The scientific theory of evolution 
has been developed and modified, challenged and tested, over centuries of geological and biological 
observations. The theory of evolution leads to specific predictions regarding location of fossils, age of rock 
formations, and genetic similarities of different species. Evolution is testable and, like any scientific theory, 
subject to change based on new data." (Hazen R.M. & Trefil J., "Science Matters: Achieving Scientific 
Literacy," [1991], Anchor Books: New York NY, 1992, reprint, pp.243-244).

25/01/2001
"Thus, a century ago, Darwinism against Christian orthodoxy. To-day the tables are turned. The modified, 
but still characteristically Darwinian theory has itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with 
religious fervour, and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific faith." (Grene M., 
"The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, pp.48-56, p.49)

27/01/2001
"Reductionists believed that, given enough time, we should be able to understand the most complex human 
behaviour in terms of subatomic physics. Darwinism is implicitly a reductionist theory because it suggests 
that observations at many different levels of nature-from the mass extinction of creatures over millions of 
years to the submicroscopic event called mutation-may all be explained by reference to a single, unifying 
principle: natural selection. The events of the fossil record are seen as the result, on a large scale, of 
individual competition; and the changes in gene frequencies which are seen as the underlying basis of 
evolution are the result, on a small scale, of the same thing-individual competition and survival. The 
philosophers are not in a position to say that this is wrong, or that reductionism in general is mistaken, but 
there is a definite swing away from this all-embracing view of science. There is a growing feeling that 
perhaps we are actually missing something by this approach, that it is rather naive and simplistic." (Leith B., 
"The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, p.32)

28/01/2001
"One clear message should emerge from this discussion. A variety of results may be possible from the same 
general type of experiment. The experimenter, by manipulating apparently unimportant variables, can affect 
the outcome profoundly. The data that he reports may be valid, but if only these results are communicated, a 
false impression may arise concerning the universality of the process. This situation was noticed by a 
Creationist writer, Martin Lubenow, who commented: `I am convinced that in every origin of life experiment 
devised by evolutionists, the intelligence of the experimenter is involved in such a way as to prejudice the 
experiment.'" [Lubenow M.L., "From Fish To Gish: The Exciting Drama of a Decade of Creation-Evolution 
Debates," CLP Publishers: San Diego CA, 1983, pp.168-169]" (Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the 
Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p..103)

28/01/2001
"The phrase argumentum ad hominem translates literally as `argument directed to the man.' .... It is 
committed when, instead of trying to disprove what is asserted one attacks the person who made the 
assertion. .... This argument is fallacious, because the personal character of an individual is logically 
irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what that individual says or the correctness or incorrectness of that 
individual's argument. ... The way in which this irrelevant argument may sometimes persuade is through the 
psychological process of transference. Where an attitude of disapproval toward a person can be evoked, it 
may possibly tend to overflow the strictly emotional field and become disagreement with what that person 
says. But this connection is only psychological, not logical. Even the most wicked of men may sometimes 
tell the truth or argue correctly."(Copi I.M., Introduction to Logic," [1953], Macmillan Publishing Co: New 
York NY, Seventh Edition, 1986, p.92)

28/01/2001
"As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you 
and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite 
precision. I am not referring to telepathy or mind control or the other obsessions of fringe science; even in 
the depictions of believers these are blunt instruments compared to an ability that is uncontroversially 
present in every one of us. That ability is language. Simply by making noises with our Mouths, we can 
reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds. The ability comes so 
naturally that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is." (Pinker S., "The Language Instinct: The New Science 
of Language and Mind," [1994], Penguin: London, 2000, reprint, p.1)

30/01/2001
"Moreover, and with complete generality-the `"paradox of the visibly irrelevant" in my title we may say that 
any change measurable at all over the few years of an ordinary scientific study must be occurring far too 
rapidly to represent ordinary rates of evolution in the fossil record. The culprit of this paradox, as so often, 
is the vastness of time (a concept that we can appreciate "in our heads" but seem quite unable to get into 
the guts of our intuition). The key principle, however ironic, requires such a visceral understanding of 
earthly time: if evolution is fast enough to be discerned by our instruments in just a few years-that is, 
substantial enough to stand out as a genuine and directional effect above the random fluctuations of 
nature's stable variation and our inevitable errors of measurement-then such evolution is far too fast to 
serve as an atom of steady incrementation in a paleontological trend. Thus, if we can measure it at all (in a 
few years), it is too powerful to be the stuff of life's history. If large-scale evolution proceeded by stacking 
Trinidad guppy rates end to end, any evolutionary trend would be completed in a geological moment, not 
over the many million years actually observed. "Our face from fish to man," to cite the title of a famous old 
account of evolution for popular audiences, would run its course within a single geological formation, not 
over more than 400 million years, as our fossil record demonstrates." (Gould, S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly 
Irrelevant," Natural History, December 1997/January 1998, Vol. 106, No. 11, p.64)

February [top]
1/02/01
"Many people suppose that phylogeny can be discovered directly from the fossil record by studying a 
graded series of old to young fossils and by discovering ancestors, but this is not true. The fossil record 
supplies evidence of the geological ages of the forms of life, but not of their direct ancestor-descendant 
relationships. There is no way of knowing whether a fossil is a direct ancestor of a more recent species or 
represents a related line of descent (lineage) that simply became extinct." (Knox B., Ladiges P. & Evans B., 
eds., "Biology," [1994], McGraw-Hill: Sydney, Australia, 1995, reprint, p.663)

2/02/01
"In other words, if horses have evolved-and few are those who would like to deny it-and if an explanation of 
this transformation through random mutations alone is excessively unlikely- as indeed it seems to be, since 
the great majority of mutations so far observed are adverse or even lethal-then it must be the 
automatic selection in each generation, of very slightly advantageous variants that has built up the 
otherwise astonishing result. But how, one may ask, do we know this? If mutation alone cannot explain the 
evolutionary process-the origin of life, of sentient life, of intelligent life-why is natural selection-the 
elimination of the worst mutations, a negative and external agency-the only conceivable alternative?" (Grene 
M., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.50. Emphasis in original)

5/02/01
"Another common trick in controversy may be called the diversion. This is the absence of a proposition by 
another proposition which does not prove the first one, but which diverts the discussion to another 
question, generally one about which the person who makes the diversion feels more certain. ... This is a 
diversion because the speaker has shifted the discussion from one topic to another under the appearance of 
producing an argument for the original topic. Such diversions are found very commonly in arguments; 
sometimes they are deliberate and sometimes ... they are unintended. .... Indeed, diversions from any 
argument to a discussion of the personal characteristics of the disputants are so common as probably to 
form the majority amongst diversions." (Thouless R.H., "Straight and Crooked Thinking," [1930], Pan: 
London, Revised Edition, 1973, 15th Printing, pp.39-40).

5/02/01
"For many years population genetics was an immensely rich and powerful theory with virtually no suitable 
facts on which to operate. It was like a complex and exquisite machine, designed to process a raw material 
that no one had succeeded in mining. Occasionally some unusually clever or lucky prospector would come 
upon a natural outcrop of high-grade ore, and part of the machinery would be started up to prove to its 
backers that it really would work. But for the most part the machine was left to the engineers, forever 
tinkering, forever making improvements, in anticipation of the day when it would be called upon to carry out 
full production. Quite suddenly the situation has changed. The mother-lode has been tapped and facts in 
profusion have been poured into the hoppers of this theory machine. And from the other end has issued - 
nothing. It is not that the machinery does not work, for a great clashing of gears is clearly audible, if not 
deafening, but it somehow cannot transform into a finished product the great volume of raw material that 
has been provided. The entire relationship between the theory and the facts needs to be reconsidered." 
(Lewontin R.C., "The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change," Columbia University Press: New York NY, 
1974, p.189)

6/02/01
"But reductionistic biologists want to translate form into matter in the sense of least parts: Only 
biochemistry and cell biology, they hold, are biology at all. Thus they read selection as particulate, affecting 
always and only genes, not organisms. This is adaptationism, not because it is selectionist, but 
because it is atomistically so. It is not organisms or populations that are thought to be adapted, but their 
minute parts. In Aristotelian terms, formal cause is being suppressed for the sake of its material correlate - 
and in much the way that Aristotle himself found so inadequate in the case of Democritus. On the other 
hand, the just-so story aspect of adaptationist explanation, carrying over its atomizing habit to the 
phenotypic and behavioral level, tells what tales it likes of any and every trait, again, taken on its own." 
(Grene, M.G., "Introduction," in Grene M.G., ed., "Dimensions of Darwinism: Themes and Counterthemes in 
Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Theory," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1983, p.11. Emphasis 
original)

6/02/01
"What distinction is signalized by the terms Creatio prima seu immediata, and Creatio secunda seu 
mediata, and by who was 'it introduced? The phrase Creatio prima seu immediata signifies the 
originating act of the divine will whereby he brings, or has brought into being, out of nothing, the principles 
and elementary essences of all things. The phrase Creatio secunda seu mediata signifies the 
subsequent act of God in originating different forms of things, and especially different species of living 
beings out of the already created essences of things. The Christian Church holds both." (Hodge A.A., 
"Outlines of Theology," Second Edition, 1879, Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1983, reprint, pp.238-239)

7/02/01
"These misconceptions stem largely from the metaphorical ways in which the concept has been expressed, 
even by Darwin himself ... But as Darwin noted, such poetical expressions can lead us to view natural 
selection as `an active power or Deity,' omniscient, omnipotent, and, depending on one's point of view, 
either beneficent shaping species into perfect form or malevolent. ... Natural selection, however, has none of 
these qualities. It is not providential, it is neither moral nor immoral, it carries no ethical precepts - "it" is not 
an active agent with physical properties, much less a mind. It is no more than a statistical measure of the 
difference in survival or reproduction among entities that differ in one or more characteristics, Selection is 
not caused by differential survival and reproduction; it is differential survival and reproduction, and 
no more." (Futuyma D.J., "Evolutionary Biology," [1979], Sinauer Associates: Sunderland MA, Second 
Edition, 1986, p.150. Emphasis original)

9/02/01
"A scientist commonly professes to base his beliefs on observations, not theories. Theories, it is said, are 
useful in suggesting new ideas and new lines of investigation for the experimenter; but "hard facts" are the 
only proper ground for conclusion. I have never come across anyone who carries this profession into 
practice--certainly not the hard-headed experimentalist, who is the more swayed by his theories because he 
is less accustomed to scrutinise them. Observation is not sufficient. We do not believe our eyes unless we 
are first convinced that what they appear to tell us is credible. It is better to admit frankly that theory has, 
and is entitled to have, an important share in determining belief." (Eddington A., "The Expanding Universe," 
Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1940, p.25)

11/02/01
"Indeed, if tubulin dimers are the basic computational units, then we must envisage the possibility of a 
potential computing power in the brain that vastly exceeds that which has been contemplated in the AI 
literature. Hans Moravec, in his book Mind Children (1988), assumed, on the basis of a 'neuron alone' 
model, that the human brain might in principle conceivably achieve some 1014 basic 
operations per second, but no more, where we consider that there might be some 1011 
operational neurons, each capable of sending about 103 signals per second (cf. §1.2). If, on 
the other hand, we consider the tubulin dimer as the basic computational unit, then we must bear in mind 
that there are some 107 dimers per neuron, the elementary operations now being performed 
some 106 times faster, giving us a total of around 1027 operations per second. 
Whereas present-day computers may be beginning to close in on the first figure of 1014 
operations per second, as Moravec and others would strongly argue, there is no prospect of the 
1027 figure being achieved in the foreseeable future. ... it is clear that the possibility of 
'microtubular computing' (cf. Hameroff 1987) puts a completely different perspective on some of the 
arguments for imminent human-level artificial intelligence." (Penrose R., "Shadows of the Mind: A Search for 
the Missing Science of Consciousness," [1994], Vintage: London, 1995, reprint, p.366)

11/02/01
"Similarly the theory recently suggested by Einstein and de Sitter, that in the beginning all the matter 
created was projected with a radial motion so as to disperse even faster than the present rate of dispersal of 
the galaxies, leaves me cold. one cannot deny the possibility, but it is difficult to see what mental 
satisfaction such a theory is supposed to afford. Since I cannot avoid introducing this question of a 
beginning, it has seemed to me that the most satisfactory theory would be one which made the beginning 
not too unaesthetically abrupt." (Eddington A., "The Expanding Universe," Penguin: 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1940, p.58. Emphasis in original)

11/02/01
"The test of extrapolation to the most distant future does not, I think, disclose any definite weakness in the 
present system of science-in particular, in the second law of thermodynamics on which physical science so 
largely relies. It is true that the extrapolation foretells that the material universe will some day arrive at a state 
of dead sameness and so virtually come to an end, to my mind that is a rather happy avoidance of a 
nightmare of eternal repetition. It is the opposite extrapolation towards the past which gives real cause to 
suspect a weakness in the present conceptions of science. The beginning seems to present insuperable 
difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural. We may have to let it go at that."
(Eddington A., "The Expanding Universe," Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1940, p.117)

12/02/01
"But, as Gasman argues, Haeckel's greatest influence was, ultimately, in another, tragic direction-national 
socialism. His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion 
to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, 
conferring upon favored
races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion 
with his brave words about objective science-all contributed to the rise of Nazism. The Monist League that 
he had founded and led, though it included a wing of pacifists and leftists, made a comfortable transition to 
active support for Hitler." (Gould, S.J., "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, 
pp.77-78)

13/02/01
"The creativity of natural selection. Darwinians cannot simply claim that natural selection operates since 
everyone, including Paley and the natural theologians, advocated selection as a device for removing unfit 
individuals at both extremes and preserving, intact and forever, the created type. The essence of Darwinism 
lies in a claim that natural selection is the primary directing force of evolution, in that it creates fitter 
phenotypes by differentially preserving, generation by generation, the best adapted organisms from a pool 
of random variants that supply raw material only, not direction itself. Natural selection is a creator; it builds 
adaptation step by step." (Gould, S.J., "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory," Science, Vol. 
216, 23 April 1982, pp.380-381)

13/02/01
"Although gravity does play this unique role, the exact values of the strengths of the other fundamental 
forces seem to be just as important for life. The example we have elaborated in detail is typical of such 
exercises if we modify the value of one of the fundamental constants, something invariably goes wrong, 
leading to a universe that is inhospitable to life as we know it. When we adjust a second constant in an 
attempt to fix the problem(s), the result, generally, is to create three new problems for every one that we 
"solve." The conditions in our Universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves, 
and perhaps even for any form of organic complexity." (Gribbin J. & Rees M.J., "Cosmic Coincidences: Dark 
Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology," Bantam Books: New York NY, 1989, pp.268-269. Emphasis in 
the original)

16/02/01
"Many investigators now consider nucleic acids to be much more plausible candidates for the first self-
replicating molecules. The work of Watson and Crick and others has shown that proteins are formed 
according to the instructions coded in DNA. But there is a hitch. DNA cannot do its work, including forming 
more DNA, without the help of catalytic proteins, or enzymes. In short, proteins cannot form without DNA, 
but neither can DNA form without proteins. To those pondering the origin of life, it is a classic chicken-and-
egg problem: Which came first, proteins or DNA?"
(Horgan J., "In The Beginning...," Scientific American, Vol. 264, No. 2, February 1991, pp.100-109, p.103. 
Ellipses in original)

20/02/01
"In his book about the Cambrian explosion, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, 
Stephen Jay Gould remarks on this top-down quality of the Cambrian with wonder." (Kauffman S.A., "At 
Home in the Universe," 1996, p.13) As well he might! You only have to think for one moment about what 
`top down' filling in would have to mean for the animals on the ground and you immediately see how 
preposterous it is. 'Body plans' like the mollusc body plan, or the echinoderm body plan, are not ideal 
essences hanging in the sky, waiting, like designer dresses, to be adopted by real animals. Real animals is all 
there ever was: living, breathing, walking, eats , excreting, fighting, copulating real animals, who had to 
survive and who can't have been dramatically different from their real parents and grandparents. For a new 
body plan-a new phylum-to spring into existence, what actually has to happen on the ground is that a child 
is born which suddenly, out of the blue, is as different from its parents as a snail is from an earthworm. No 
zoologist who thinks through the implications, not even the most ardent saltationist, has ever supported 
any such notion. Ardent saltationists have been content to postulate the sudden bursting into existence of 
new species, and even that relatively modest idea has been highly controversial. When you spell out 
the Gouldian rhetoric into real-life practicalities, it stands revealed as the purest of bad poetic science." 
(Dawkins R., "Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder," [1998], Penguin: 
London, 1999, reprint, p.203. Emphasis original)

18/02/01
"Miller had performed the first prebiotic chemistry experiment He had discovered plausible means whereby 
the building blocks of proteins might have been formed on the early earth. .... Similar experiments have 
shown that it is possible (though with much greater difficulty) to form the nucleotide building blocks of 
DNA RNA, and fatty molecules and hence, through them, the structural material for cellular membranes. 
Many other small molecular components of organisms have been synthesized abiogenically. But substantial 
puzzles remain. Robert Shapiro notes in his book Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth 
that even though scientists can show that it is possible to synthesize the various ingredients of life, it is not 
easy to get them to cohere into a single story One group of scientists discovers that molecule A can be 
formed from molecules B and C in a very low yield under a certain set of conditions Then, having shown 
that it is possible to make A, another group starts with a high concentration of the molecule and shows that 
by adding D one can form E-again in a very low yield and under quite different conditions. Then another 
group shows that E, in high concentration can form F under still different conditions. But how, without 
supervision, did all the building blocks come together at high enough concentrations in one place and at 
one time to get a metabolism going? Too many scene changes in this theater, argues Shapiro, with no stage 
manager." (Kauffman S.A., "At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and 
Complexity," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, reprint, p.36)

19/02/01
"Homology has proved one of the more enigmatic of evolutionary concepts. It seems to have a clear-cut 
meaning, but it rapidly becomes confusing when you try to apply it to real evidence. De Beer's paper 
discusses the problem, as he works through one possible criterion after another and shows that none of 
them are adequate. Homology is undoubtedly a genuine and important concept; the problem is to spell out 
exactly what it means." (Ridley M., "Reconstructing The Past," [1971], in Ridley M., ed., "Evolution," Oxford 
Readers, Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1997, p.208)

20/02/01
"Different accounts leading to the origin of the replicator could be constructed, using other experiments 
published in the literature. Some would be less spectacular than the above one, but all would share the same 
general defects. Many steps would be required which need different conditions, and therefore different 
geological locations. The chemicals needed for one step may be ruinous to others. The yields are poor, with 
many undesired products constituting the bulk of the mixture. It would be necessary to invoke some 
imagined processes to concentrate the important substances and eliminate the contaminants. The total 
sequence would challenge our credibility, regardless of the time allotted for the process." Shapiro, R., 
"Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p.186)

20/02/01
"Some 540 million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian, there appeared an array of multicellular 
marine animals, including the major phyla that exist today-coelenterates, platyhelminths, annelids, 
arthropods, molluscs, Echinoderms and others. Chordates are also present in the Cambrian: they are not 
known from the earliest deposits, in which only hard parts are preserved, but are present in the slightly later 
Burgess Shale, in which soft-bodied forms are preserved. Forty years ago, this sudden appearance of 
metazoan fossils was not only a puzzle but something of an embarrassment: the absence of any known 
fossils from earlier rocks was a weapon widely used by creationists. Today, the fossil evidence for 
prokaryotes goes back 3000 million years, and for protists some 1000 million years. The Cambrian explosion 
remains a puzzle, however, which has been only fitfully illuminated by the discovery of the enigmatic soft-
bodied Ediacaran fauna, which had a worldwide distribution between 580 and 560 million years ago. ... The 
puzzle is why the Cambrian explosion took place when it did. Two kinds of answer are possible. One is that, 
before complex multicellular organisms could evolve, some crucial invention or inventions in cell physiology 
or gene regulation had to be made: once made, there was rapid radiation into an ecologically empty world. 
The apparently monophyletic origin of the Metazoa, deduced from molecular data, is consistent with this 
view." (Maynard Smith J. & Szathmary E., "The Major Transitions in Evolution," W.H. Freeman: Oxford UK, 
1995, p.203)

21/02/01
"`Mount Improbable' is a metaphor for adaptation occurring gradually, in increments. The metaphor is that 
of a mountain which has an absolutely sheer cliff face. If we relate this cliff to adaptation, to the most 
complicated piece of biological machinery you can think of, which for many people is an eye, then you say 
to yourself that it's impossible to leap from the bottom of this mountain to the top, which indeed it is. 
Leaping from the bottom of the cliff to the top would correspond to having the sheer luck to get that eye 
coming into place in one fell swoop. Many people wrongly think that Darwinism is a theory of chance, that it 
means that eyes and other complex organs come about by sheer luck. So no wonder these people don't 
believe natural selection. Of course an eye couldn't possibly come about like that. But on the other side of 
the mountain, you've got a slow, gradual slope. and it is very easy to get to the top of the mountain if you 
go around the other side and just walk up the slope. Relating this to adaptation, you have gradual, 
incremental improvement. You begin with hardly any eye at all and then each step of the way up the 
mountain gradual improvement. It may not be much but it's enough to be better than your predecessors, 
who didn't have even that improvement. Climbing Mount Improbable emphasizes that evolution of complex 
adaptations has got to be gradual." (Dawkins R., "Interview," in Campbell, N.A., Reece, J.B. & Mitchell, L.G., 
"Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, p.412)

22/02/01
"An evolutionary moment is frozen in time. Complete skeletons of the horse Pliohippus verify the transition 
of a primitive three-toed variety (above) to the one-toed type (top) ten million years ago." [This is the 
caption below pictures of fossil hooves of a one-toed and a three-toed horse respectively. Both horses were 
entombed at the same time in the one volcanic ashfall! - SEJ] (Voorhies M.R., "Ancient Ashfall Creates a 
Pompei of Prehistoric Animals," National Geographic, Vol. 159, No. 1, January 1981, pp.67-68,74)

22/02/01
"In another of your books, The Selfish Gene, you argue that genes are the units upon which natural 
selection acts and that organisms are "survival machines" for genes. To what extent are humans exceptions 
to this mechanistic view of life? Humans are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same 
evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our 
bodies and our brains. However, the brains that natural selection gave us are exceptionally big brains, so big 
that they have done a rather unusual thing. Using language and culture, humans have formed societies in 
which there is something like Darwinian evolution going on, though it is not really Darwinian. We live in a 
highly domestic environment, largely governed by technology, largely divorced from the environment in 
which our genes were originally naturally selected. So what is different about us is that it is no longer 
possible to look at a human the way one might look at a wildebeest or a kangaroo and ask, "Why is that? 
What's that kangaroo doing that increases its gene survival?" If you see a wild animal doing something in 
the wild, then it's sensible to ask the question, "What is it about that behavior, or what is it about that 
morphological structure, which improves its survival, or more particularly the survival of its genes?" And 
you can't do that for humans? No, you can't look at humans playing the violin, or trying to run a company, 
or writing a book or writing a symphony, and ask, "In what way does writing this symphony benefit survival 
and replication of that human's genes?" because it doesn't." (Dawkins R., "Interview," in Campbell N.A., 
Reece J.B. & Mitchell L.G., "Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, 
p.412)

24/02/01
"Darwin's theory of evolution, therefore, passes muster as science even though it is not, strictly speaking, 
falsifiable. The same applies to other historical theories: the 'Big Bang' theory of cosmology is scientific so 
long as you can test it against observations from astronomy and physics. The theory that there was a battle 
of Waterloo in 1815 is scientific in so far as if can be tested against documentary evidence. It would seem 
that only the less ambitious theories-ones that restrict themselves to present and future events-can be 
strictly scientific in the sense of being falsifiable." (Leith B., "The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of 
Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, p.29

24/02/01
"Henry Ward Beecher, America's premier pulpiteer during Darwin's century, defended evolution as God's 
way in a striking commercial metaphor: "Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail' - better, that 
is, to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat." (Gould, S.J., "Knight Takes 
Bishop?," in Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections in Natural History," [1991], Penguin: London, 1992, 
p.400)

25/02/01
"The philosophers have another bone to pick with evolutionary theory, one that has haunted Darwinism for 
a hundred years: is the idea of natural selection a tautology? A tautology is the saying of something twice 
over in different words, and is therefore either a nonsense or a statement which is so self-evident as to be 
meaningless. The statement 'several bachelors who were not married were at the meeting' is nonsense 
because bachelors are unmarried, while the sentence implies that they are not. ... For a scientific 
statement to avoid being tautologous, therefore, it must propose some relationship in the world that is 
testable by experiment. The problem of tautology in Darwinism is a subtle one. It hinges on the definitions 
of a few crucial words: 'the survival of the fittest.' This is the central claim that Darwin make that only the 
'fittest' succeed in a struggle for 'survival'. If this basic statement does not tell us anything new about the 
Outside world then the whole of Darwinism is in deep trouble. Unfortunately the senses in which these 
words are often used by biologists do turn the statement into a nonsense." (Leith B., "The Descent of 
Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, p.29. Emphasis in the original.)

25/02/01
"Finally, what's being sent seems to be a long sequence of prime numbers, integers that can't be divided by 
any other number except themselves and one. No astrophysical process is likely to generate prime numbers. 
So I'd say-we want to be cautious, of course-but I'd say that by every criterion we can lay our hands on, this 
looks like the real thing."
(Sagan C., "Contact," [1985], Pocket Books: New York NY, 1986, reprint, p.69)

25/02/01
"This problem of just-so story telling is not some minor irritation to do with the perennial problem of 
giraffes, dismissable as some naive caricature of what you really proposed in your theory of evolution. The 
problem runs much deeper and wider, embracing many new disciplines of evolutionary psychology, 
Darwinian medicine, linguistics, biological ethics and sociobiology. Here quite vulgar explanations are 
offered, based on the crudest applications of selection theory, of why we humans are the way we are. There 
seems no aspect of our psychological make-up that does not receive its supposed evolutionary explanation 
from the sorts of things our selfish genes forced us to do 200,000 to 500,000 years ago. ... Not only is there 
the embarrassing spectacle of psychologists, philosophers and linguists rushing down the road of selfish 
genetic determinism, but we are also shackled with their self-imposed justification in giving 'scientific' 
respectability to complex behavioural phenomena in humans which we simply do not so far have the 
scientific tools and methodologies to investigate. There is a naivety about genetic determinism in both 
evolution and development that signifies intellectual laziness at best and shameless ignorance at worst 
when confronted with issues of massive complexity."
(Dover G.A., "Dear Mr Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature," [1999], University of 
California Press, Berkeley CA, 2000, reprint, p.45)

26/02/01
"To have a theory of evolution we need a theory of development; but to have a theory of development we 
need a theory of molecular interactions during the construction of an organism. We don't have a theory of 
interactions and so it is difficult to have a comprehensive theory of evolution. Indeed, I shall argue that we 
can no more have a theory of developmental interactions than we can have a theory of history, despite the 
attempts to produce one. So can we really have a true theory of evolution? Both individual development and 
evolution are the result of chance, ungoverned by any 'laws' of nature." (Dover G.A., "Dear Mr Darwin: 
Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature," [1999], University of California Press: Berkeley CA, 
2000, reprint, pp.xii-xiii)

26/02/01
"These shortest-term studies are elegant and important, but they cannot represent the general mode for 
building patterns in the history of life. The reason strikes most people as deeply paradoxical, even funny-but 
the argument truly cannot be gainsaid. Evolutionary rates of a moment, as measured for guppies and lizards, 
are vastly too rapid to represent the general modes of change that build life's history through geological 
ages. ... These measured changes over years and decades are too fast by several orders of magnitude to 
build the history of life by simple cumulation. Reznick's guppy rates range from 3,700 to 45,000 darwins (a 
standard metric for evolution, expressed as change in units of standard deviation-a measure of variation 
around the mean value of a trait in a population-per million years). By contrast, rates for major trends in the 
fossil record generally range from 0.1 to 1.0 darwins. Reznick himself states that "the estimated rates [for 
guppies] are...four to seven orders of magnitude greater than those observed in the fossil record" (that is, 
ten thousand to ten million times faster!)." (Gould, S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant," Natural 
History, December 1997/January 1998, Vol. 106, No. 11, pp.61-62,64)

26/02/01
"Exactly what form that self-replicating enzyme might have taken was first suggested 30 years ago, when 
RNA was put forward as the precursor to DNA and proteins in early lifeforms. In cells today, RNA is the go-
between for DNA and proteins: a protein is manufactured from an RNA template, which has itself been 
created from a DNA template. The idea remained purely speculative until the early 1980s when Thomas Cech 
at the University of Colorado and Sydney Altman at Yale University independently discovered RNA 
molecules with catalytic ability, now known as ribozymes. This discovery immediately put on a much firmer 
footing the idea that RNA could have been used for both storing information and catalysing reactions in 
early forms of life, and in 1986 the term 'RNA world' was coined. Nevertheless, despite the fact that most 
scientists working in this field accept the validity of the idea, the RNA world hypothesis is still far from 
being proved. For one thing, in almost 20 years only seven types of natural ribozymes have been 
discovered: two remove introns (parts of RNA that don't code for proteins) from themselves; four cut 
themselves in two; and one trims off the end of an RNA precursor. So, as David Bartel and Peter Unrau, 
researchers in the Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, US, 
say in a recent review (Trends Cell Biol., 1999, 9(12), M9): 'Although the reactions of natural 
ribozymes are fascinating and impressive, they do not approach the sophistication of the key reactions 
assumed by the RNA world hypothesis'." (Evans, J., "It's alive - isn't it?," Chemistry in Britain, 
Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-45, pp.44-47)

28/02/01
"It is true that some of the simpler amino acids have been found in complex mixtures generated under 
conditions simulating those that might have been present on the primitive Earth. Even nucleotide letters 
have been found in mixtures that are said to be plausible simulations of probiotic products. But all such 
'molecules of life' are always minority products and usually no more than trace products. Their detection 
often owes more to the skill of the experimenter than to any powerful tendency for the 'molecules of life' to 
form." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," Cambridge 
University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, pp.44-45)

28/02/01
"Sugars are particularly trying. While it is true that they form from formaldehyde solutions, these solutions 
have to be far more concentrated than would have been likely in primordial oceans. And the reaction is quite 
spoilt in practice by just about every possible sugar being made at the same time - and much else besides. 
Furthermore the conditions that form sugars also go on to destroy them. Sugars quickly make their own 
special kind of tar - caramel - and they make still more complicated mixtures if amino acids are around." 
(Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," Cambridge University 
Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.44)

March [top]
1/03/01
"In sum the ease of synthesis of 'the molecules of life' has been greatly exaggerated. It only applies to a few 
of the simplest and in no case is it at all easy to see how the molecules would have been sufficiently 
unencumbered by other irrelevant or interfering molecules to have allowed further organisation to higher-
order structures of the kinds that would be needed: message tapes, selective control structures, etc.
Finally, even if I am wrong about all this and primitive geochemistry had shown a precision in organic 
reaction control quite unlike modern geochemistry; even if it had produced all 'the molecules of life' and 
nothing but 'the molecules of life' in ample amounts; even then it would still only have reached the edges of 
the real problem as outlined in the first four chapters. Still, somehow, an evolving machine had to be made." 
(Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," Cambridge University 
Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.44)

1/03/01
"The opposite truth has been affirmed by innumerable cases of measurable evolution at this minimal scale-
but, to be visible at all over so short a span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the 
basis for major transformations in geological time. Hence, the "paradox of the visibly irrelevant"-or, if you 
can see it at all, it's too fast to matter in the long run." (Gould, S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant," 
Natural History, December 1997/January 1998, Vol. 106, No. 11, pp.14-15)

2/03/01
"But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor was the record in the best preserved 
geological sections, had not the absence of innumerable transitional links between the species which lived 
at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory." (Darwin C.R., "The 
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 
6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.311)

3/03/01
"I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life 
that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea 
and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble 
workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if `dead' matter has 
reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain 
even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful 
powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, `but one mask of many worn by the Great Face 
behind.'" (Eiseley L.C., "The Secret of Life," in "The Immense Journey," [1946], Vintage: New York NY, 1957, 
reprint, p.210)

7/03/01
"Should we conclude that the universe is a product of design? The new physics and the new cosmology 
hold out a tantalizing promise: that we might he able to explain how all the physical structures in the 
universe have come to exist, automatically, as a result of natural processes. We should the no longer have 
need for a Creator in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, though science may explain the world, we still have 
to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves 
to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must 
have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes 
us." (Davies P.C.W., "Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature," [1984], Penguin: 
London, 1995, reprint, p.243)

8/03/01
"In my book The Accidental Universe I have made a comprehensive study of all the apparent 
'accidents' and 'coincidences' that seem to be necessary in order that the important complex structures which 
we observe in the universe should exist. The sheer improbability that these felicitous concurrences could be 
the result of a series of exceptionally lucky accidents has prompted many scientists to agree with Hoyle's 
pronouncement that the universe is a `put-up job'." (Davies P.C.W., "Superforce: The Search for a Grand 
Unified Theory of Nature," [1984], Penguin: London, 1995, reprint, p.242)

12/03/01
"Cladistic analysis of cranial and dental evidence has been widely used to generate phylogenetic 
hypotheses about humans and their fossil relatives. However, the reliability of these hypotheses has never 
been subjected to external validation. To rectify this, we applied identical methods to equivalent evidence 
from two groups of extant higher primates for whom reliable molecular phylogenies are available, the 
hominoids and papionins. We found that the phylogenetic hypotheses based on the craniodental data were 
incompatible with the molecular phylogenies for the groups. Given the robustness of the molecular 
phylogenies, these results indicate that little confidence can be placed in phylogenies generated solely from 
higher primate craniodental evidence. The corollary of this is that existing phylogenetic hypotheses about 
human evolution are unlikely to be reliable. Accordingly, new approaches are required to address the 
problem of hominin phylogeny." (Collard M. & Wood B., "How reliable are human phylogenetic 
hypotheses?," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, No. 9, April 25, 2000, pp.5003-5006. 
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/5003)

14/03/01
"There is a fundamental law of the kingdom that, in an echo of Noah, requires electrons to enter orbitals two 
by two and no more than two by two. That is, according to the exclusion principle enunciated by the 
Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1924, no more than two electrons can occupy any one orbital. 
This is an extraordinarily deep principle of quantum mechanics: it can be traced to foundations embedded in 
the structure of spacetime, and is perhaps the deepest of all principles governing the imaginary kingdom, 
and hence-because the kingdom is not really all that imaginary-the actual kingdom, too. There is no picture 
to elucidate the principle: it is handed down on stone tablets as an axiom, from whatever hand carves 
axioms." (Atkins P.W., "The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey into the Land of the Chemical Elements," Basic 
Books: New York NY, 1995, pp.116-117. Emphasis original)

17/03/01
"The creationists so animating one another, the lay public, and our contemporary court system today rest 
uneasy with Darwin's heritage. Natural selection, operating on variations which are random with respect to 
usefulness, appears a slim force for order in a chaotic world. Yet the creationists' impulse is not merely 
misplaced religion. Science consists in discovering that point of view under which what did occur is what 
we have good grounds to expect might have occurred. Our legacy from Darwin, powerful as it is, has 
fractures as its foundations. We do not understand the sources of order on which natural selection was 
privileged to work. As long as our deepest theory of living entities is the geneology [sic] of contraptions 
and as long as biology is the laying bare of the ad hoc, the intellectually honorable motivation to 
understand partially lying behind the creationist impulse will persist." (Kauffman S.A., "The Origins of 
Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, p.643)

18/03/01
"Then came 1952. J. and E.M. Lederberg designed an ingenious experiment which demonstrated that 
bacteria could become resistant to streptomycin without coming into contact with it. What was worse, the 
experiment was equally effective in verifying the pioneering finding of Luria & Delbruck. As far as 
Lamarckism was concerned, that was virtually the end ... The theory was not only overthrown, it also 
became thoroughly discredited. It did not occur to the jubilant Darwinists that they had yet to show that all 
adaptive mutations in nature occur purely by chance. ... Because of the euphoria which attended the triumph 
of Darwinism, the effect of those experiments on the thinking on evolution was most profound. First, the 
long-held conjecture that chance alone produced the favourable variations which natural selection 
preserved was deemed, without any justification, to have been experimentally verified. Then everything that 
evolved was designated the lucky beneficiary of chance. Enzymes, proteins, and even man himself, were 
held to be the products of mere chance. In short, the biologists' belief in the creative power of chance soon 
equalled or surpassed the Christian belief in the creative power of God." (Opadia-Kadima G.Z., "How the 
Slot Machine Led Biologists Astray," Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 124, 1987, pp.127-135, p.129)

18/03/01
"This book is an attempt to focus attention on new themes in developmental and evolutionary biology. It is, 
in fact, an attempt to include Darwinism in a broader context. ... No research program has sought to 
determine the implications of adaptive processes that mold systems with their own inherent order. Yet such 
must be our task. And more as well, for some systems adapt readily, whereas others are so badly disrupted 
by minor modifications that adaptive improvement by random mutation and selection can hardly occur. 
Darwin simply assumed that such improvement was possible. One might have thought, more than a century 
later, that we would understand the construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt. But 
we do not. Nor do we understand the extent to which selection can achieve systems able to adapt 
successfully." (Kauffman S.A., "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution," Oxford 
University Press: New York NY, 1993, p.vii)

19/03/01
"Darwin and evolutionism stand astride us, whatever the mutterings of creation scientists. But is the view 
right? Better, is it adequate? I believe it is not. It is not that Darwin is wrong, but that he got hold of only 
part of the truth. For Darwin's answer to the sources of the order we see all around us is overwhelmingly an 
appeal to a single singular force: natural selection. It is this single-force view which I believe to be 
inadequate, for it fails to notice, fails to stress, fails to incorporate the possibility that simple and complex 
systems exhibit order spontaneously." (Kauffman S.A., "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and 
Selection in Evolution," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, p.xii)

19/03/01
"PALEONTOLOGY. once more, furnishes both the most direct evidence for the fact of evolution, and the 
most imposing evidence against the conception of evolution as a continuous, gradual progression of 
adaptive relationships. `Gaps in the fossil record' were a serious stumbling block in Darwin's time, and 
despite the discovery of many missing linked for example the striking completion of horse family history, or 
the discovery of the bird ancestor Archaeopteryx, with its reptilian features-they still persist. Moreover, 
they persist systematically: over and over, with suddenness termed `explosive,' a bewildering variety of new 
types appear: this is true, notably, for example, of the origin of the major mammalian types. Thus, as G.G. 
Simpson's calculations of rates of evolution show, the bat's wing if evolved by `normal' Mendelian mutation 
and selective pressure, would have had to begin developing well before the origin of the earth!" (Grene M., 
"The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.54)

19/03/01
"From another perspective, David Lack, loyal Darwinian though he is, gives the game away. In the book I 
have already mentioned, he refers to Darwin's question: "Can the mind of man, descended, as I believe, from 
the lowest animal be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" and he comments: `Darwin's "horrid 
doubt" as to whether the convictions of man's evolved mind could be trusted applies as much to abstract 
truth as to ethics; and "evolutionary truth" is at least as suspect as evolutionary ethics. At this point, 
therefore, it would seem that the armies of science are in danger of destroying their own base. For the 
scientist must be able to trust the conclusions of his reasoning. Hence he cannot accept the theory that 
man's mind was evolved wholly by natural selection if this means, as it would appear to do, that the 
conclusions of the mind depend ultimately on their survival value and not their truth, thus making all 
scientific theories, including that of natural selection, untrustworthy.' Lack concludes from this that the old 
opposition of science and religion is still, and must remain, an "unresolved conflict." But I think one may 
conclude, on the contrary, that it is the conventional logic of science, and the view of mind implied in it, that 
needs revision. For, as Plato argued long ago about Protagonas' "man the measure," there is surely 
something wrong in a theory which, at its very root, invalidates itself." (Grene, M.G., "The Faith of Darwinism," 
Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.56).

20/03/01
"Dawkins ran the simulation again, starting with a new random sequence of letters. This time the computer 
reached the target in 64 generations. On a third run, the computer reached the target in 41 generations. This 
is an average rate of 1.8 generations per substitution Evolutionists advertised the rapid simulated evolution 
as evidence for Darwinism. ... Yet the simulation not only succeeds in accomplishing its task, but it does so 
very rapidly and consistently. It never fails NEVER. ... The computer simulations use many unrealistic 
assumptions that favor evolution. First, the simulations assume away everything that could prevent 
evolution.
They do not allow extinction, which normally would terminate all further evolution. 
They do 
not allow error catastrophe, which normally would cause a degradation away from any target sequence-no 
matter how severe the selection. 
They do not allow canyons and hills in the fitness terrain, which normally 
would prevent evolution. 
 In short, they assume naive natural selection -that evolution is upward, ever 
upward.
 Having artificially disallowed all possible failure modes, it is not surprising the evolution 
simulations work." (ReMine W.J.*, "The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory," St. Paul 
Science: Saint Paul MN, 1993, p.232)

22/03/01
"There's just one thing we haven't quite dared to mention. It's this, and you won't believe it. It's all happened 
already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small 
teeth. Where did it get him? Nowhere. Maybe there isn't any future. Or, if there is, maybe it's only 
what you can find in a little heap of bones on a certain South African beach. Many of you who read this 
belong to the white race. We like to think about this man of the future as being white. It flatters our ego. But 
the man of the future in the past I'm talking about was not white. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger 
than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child's face. He was the end evolutionary product 
in a direction quite similar to the one anthropologists tell us is the road down which we are traveling." 
(Eiseley L.C., "The Immense Journey," [1946], Vintage: New York, 1957, reprint, pp.129-130. Emphasis in 
original)

22/03/01
"Assertions that we are descended either from a large, vegetarian, apelike ancestor (Australopithecus 
robustus) or from a smaller, carnivorous one (Australopithecus africanus) and that we owe our 
present natures to the eating habits of these early "ancestors" are totally without merit. We have not the 
faintest idea of which of these species-if either-is in the direct line of human descent. .... A major problem in 
reconstructing human evolution is that we have no close living relatives. The chimpanzee and the gorilla 
were connected to us by a common ancestor at least 7 million years ago, so that more than 14 million years 
of independent evolution must be traversed in tracing up from these apes to that common ancestor and then 
back down to us." (Lewontin R.C., "Human Diversity," Scientific American Library: New York NY, 1995, 
p.164)

25/03/01
"As The Blob, of Steve McQueen's greatest triumph, so amply demonstrated, the more you encompass the 
more formless you become. Orzack accuses me of construing the modern synthesis too narrowly in 
describing a version championed only by Mayr and Fisher-a pair of unlikely bedfellows, I would have 
thought. Yet his version is so broad that he wins his own argument by internal definition, thus rendering it 
meaningless.
(Gould, S.J., "But Not Wright Enough: Reply to Orzack," Paleobiology, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.131-134, 1981, p.131)

26/03/01
"What strikes one about the Jewish description of creation and early man, compared with pagan 
cosmogonies, is the lack of interest in the mechanics of how the world and its creatures came into existence, 
which led the Egyptian and Mesopotamian narrators into such weird contortions. The Jews simply assume 
the pre-existence of an omnipotent God, who acts but is never described or characterized, and so has the 
force and invisibility of nature itself: it is significant that the first chapter of Genesis, unlike any other 
cosmogony of antiquity, fits perfectly well, in essence, with modern scientific explanations of the origin of 
the universe, not least the 'Big Bang' theory." (Johnson P., "A History of the Jews," Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 
London, 1987, p.8)

27/03/01
"My main criticism of Darwinism is that it fails in its initial objective, which is to explain the origin of species. 
Now, let me explain exactly what I mean by that. I mean it fails to explain the emergence of organisms, the 
specific forms during evolution like algae and ferns and flowering plants, corals, starfish, crabs, fish, birds. 
That sort of spectrum of organism, each of which is distinct from the other. They don't blend with each 
other, they are distinct from each other. Now the problem is that in order to understand that the kind of 
distinct structure and form we have to understand how organisms are actually generated, and that means 
understanding how starting with an egg or a bud, the organism goes through a developmental process and 
ends up as a particular type of species with a particular morphology (shape and features). So the whole 
problem then is to try to understand the nature of that process. One of the fundamental issues is whether or 
not you can get more or less any kind of organism, or whether there are constraints. Darwin turned biology 
into a historical science, and in Darwinism, species are simply accidents of history, they don't have any 
inherent nature. They are just 'the way things happened to work out' and there aren't any particular 
constraints that mean it couldn't have all worked out very differently." (Goodwin B., in "An interview with 
Professor Brian Goodwin by Dr David King," GenEthics News, Issue 11. March/April 1996, pp.6-8. 
http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/article8.htm)

27/03/01
"The biblical record does not settle the uniqueness, antiquity, and unity of the human race by a central 
appeal to morphological considerations. The disjunction between man and the animals, of the sub-Adamic 
forms and the Adam form of life, in Genesis, takes place with the formation of a creature under moral 
command. Man's basic distinction is that he is divinely endowed with the imago Dei, through the specially 
inbreathed breath of life. The Bible knows man as from the beginning intended for fellowship with God, for 
rational-moral-spiritual discrimination, for social responsibility for dominion over the earth and the animals. 
The record moves swiftly, in biblical theology, from the primal Adam, who is already a "cultured gentleman,' 
to the beginnings of society and civilization. ... Perhaps we are not to rule out dogmatically the possibility 
that the dust of man's origin may have been animated, since the animals before man appear to have been 
fashioned from the earth (Gen. 1:24). The Bible does not explicate man's physical origin in detail. The fact 
that, after Genesis 1:1 the narrator deals with a mediate creation, which involves the actualizing of 
potentialities latent in the original creation, should caution us against the one-sided invocation of divine 
transcendence." (Henry, C.F.H.*, "Science and Religion," in Henry, C.F.H.*, ed., "Contemporary Evangelical 
Thought: A Survey," [1957], Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 1968, reprint, p.282)

29/03/01
"Consequently, if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was 
deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the 
Cambrian age to the present day; and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living 
creatures. ... To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed 
earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (Darwin C.R., "The Origin 
of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th 
Edition, 1928, reprint, p.315)

29/03/01
"He who rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record, will rightly reject the whole theory. 
For he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional links which must formerly have connected the 
closely allied or representative species found in the successive stages of the same great formation?" 
(Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent 
& Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.343)

30/03/01
"There's a hole in the case for creation so big you could drive a truck through it. It's as simple as this: 
Creation can't possibly be true ... if there's no Creator. For too many people that settles the issue right there. 
They `know' with every fiber of their being that there is no Creator, and they have built their whole life on 
that premise. The noted British anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith, for example, summarized it this way, `The 
only alternative to some form of evolution is special creation, which is unthinkable.' For Keith, creation 
(which he acknowledged as the only alternative to evolution) was simply `unthinkable,' so he would not 
even permit himself to look at the evidence one way or the other." (Parker, G.E.*, "Creation: the Facts of Life," 
Master Book Publishers: San Diego CA, 1980, pp.134-135. Ellipses in original)

31/03/01
"Anyone trying to solve this puzzle immediately encounters a paradox. Nowadays nucleic acids are 
synthesized only with the help of proteins, and proteins are synthesized only if their corresponding 
nucleotide sequence is present. It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are 
structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to 
have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, 
have originated by chemical means." (Orgel L.E., "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, Vol. 
271, No. 4, October 1994, p.54)

April [top]
3/04/01
"The cosmos is so vast because there is one crucially important huge number Ν in nature, equal to 
1,000,000, 000,000, 000,000,000,000, 000, 000, 000, 000. This number measures the strength of the electrical 
forces that hold atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them. If Ν had a few less zeros, 
only a short-lived miniature universe could exist: no creatures could grow larger than insects, and there 
would be no time for biological evolution." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the 
Universe," [1999], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, p.2)

3/04/01
"Another number, ε, whose value is 0.007, defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the 
atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars 
transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, whereas gold 
and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If ε were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist." 
(Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," [1999], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, p.2)

3/04/01
"The cosmic number Ω (omega) measures the amount of material in our universe - galaxies, diffuse gas, and 
'dark matter'. Ω tells us the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the universe. If this ratio 
were too high relative to a particular 'critical' value, the universe would have collapsed long ago; had it been 
too low, no galaxies or stars would have formed. The initial expansion speed seems to have been finely 
tuned." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," [1999], Phoenix: London, 
2000, pp.2-3)

4/04/01
"Measuring the fourth number, λ (lambda), was the biggest scientific news of 1998. An unsuspected mew 
force - a cosmic 'antigravity' - controls the expansion of our universe, eaten though it has no discernible 
effect on scales less than a billion light-years. It is destined to become ever more dominant over gravity and 
other forces as our universe becomes ever darker and emptier. Fortunately for us (and very surprisingly to 
theorists), λ is very small. Otherwise its effect would have stopped galaxies and stars from forming, and 
cosmic evolution would have been stifled before it could even begin." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The 
Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," [1999], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, p.3)

4/04/01
"The seeds for all cosmic structures - stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies - were all imprinted in the Big 
Bang. The fabric of our universe depends on one number, Q which represents the ratio of two fundamental 
energies and is about 1/100,000 in value. If Q were even smaller, the universe would be inert and 
structureless; if Q were much larger, it would be a violent place, in which no stars or solar systems could 
survive. dominated by vast black holes." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the 
Universe," [1999], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, p.3)

5/04/01
"The sixth crucial number has been known for centuries, although it's now viewed in a new perspective. It is 
the number of spatial dimensions in our world, D, and equals three. Life couldn't exist if D were two or four. 
Time is a fourth dimension, but distinctively different from the others in that it has a built-in arrow: we 'move' 
only towards the future. Near black holes, space is so warped that light moves in circles, and time can stand 
still. Furthermore, close to the time of the Big Bang, and also on microscopic scales, space may reveal its 
deepest underlying structure of all: the vibrations and harmonies of objects called 'superstrings', in a ten-
dimensional arena." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," [1999], 
Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, pp.3-4)

6/04/01
"From different kinds of eyes in contemporary animals, one may guess how the organ evolved. Many 
primitive animals even a few protists, have light-sensitive spots. In some flatworms (planaria) the pigmented 
spot becomes a cavity; if the opening is narrowed, it can form a crude image. Covering it with transparent 
skin could lead to the making of a lens, and so forth. Darwin, troubled by the perfection of the eye, pointed 
out such gradations (C. Darwin 1964,186-190), yet the existence of viable stages on the way does not explain 
how it was possible that many very unlikely genes came along in the right order to direct all the details, 
while at the same time an immensely larger number of continually occurring deleterious mutations were 
continually being eliminated." (Wesson R.G., "Beyond Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: Cambridge 
MA, 1994, reprint, p.62)

6/04/01
"This book describes six numbers that now seem especially significant. Two of them relate to the basic 
forces; two fix the size and overall 'texture' of our universe and determine whether it will continue for ever; 
and two more fix the properties of space itself. ... Perhaps there are some connections between these 
numbers At the moment, however, we cannot predict any one of them from the values of the others. Nor do 
we know whether some 'theory of everything' will eventually yield a formula that interrelates them, or that 
specifies them uniquely. I have highlighted these six because each plays a crucial and distinctive role in our 
universe, and together they determine how the universe evolves and what its internal potentialities are; 
moreover, three of them (those that pertain to the largescale universe) are only now being measured with 
any precision." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," [1999], Phoenix: 
London, Reprinted, 2000, pp.2,4)

6/04/01
"These six numbers constitute a 'recipe' for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if 
any one of them were to be `untuned', there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a 
coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of 
other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could 
only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the 'right' 
combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on 
the nature of physical laws." (Rees, M.J., "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe," 
[1999], Phoenix: London, Reprinted, 2000, p.4)

7/04/01
"It is also worth pondering why there has been general and unquestioned acceptance of Kettlewell's work. 
Perhaps such powerful stories discourage close scrutiny. Moreover, in evolutionary biology there is little 
payoff in repeating other people's experiments, and, unlike molecular biology, our field is not self-correcting 
because few studies depend on the accuracy of earlier ones. Finally, teachers such as myself often neglect 
original papers in favour of shorter textbook summaries, which bleach the blemishes from complicated 
experiments." (Coyne J.A., "Not black and white," review of Majerus M.E.N., "Melanism: Evolution in 
Action," Oxford University Press, 1998, Nature Vol. 396, No. 6706, 5 November 1998, pp.35-36, p.36)

7/04/01
"Once it was clearly established that spontaneous generation did not take place and that all life (as far as 
human beings were able to observe) came from previous life, it became very difficult to decide how life 
originated on Earth-or on any other planet. ... the defeat of spontaneous generation and the new suggestion 
that life came only from previous life, which came only from still earlier life and so on in an endless chain, 
made it seem that the original forms of life couldn't possibly have arisen save through some miraculous 
event. In that case, even if habitable planets were as plentiful as the stars themselves, Earth might yet be the 
only one that bore life." (Asimov I., "Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Crown: New York NY, 1979, p.153-154)

8/04/01
"A HALF century has passed since Darwin wrote `The Origin of Species,' and once again, but with a new 
aspect, the relation between life and the environment presents itself as an unexplained phenomenon. The 
problem is now far different from what it was before, for adaptation has won a secure position among the 
greatest of natural processes, a position from which we may suppose it is certainly never to be dislodged; 
and natural selection is its instrument, even if, as many think, not the only one. Yet natural selection does 
but mold the organism; the environment it changes only secondarily, without truly altering the primary 
quality of environmental fitness. This latter component of fitness, antecedent to adaptations, a natural result 
of the properties of matter and the characteristics of energy in the course of cosmic evolution, is as yet 
nowise accounted for. It exists, however, and must not be dismissed as gross contingency. The mind balks 
at such a view. Coincidences so numerous and so remarkable as those which we have met in examining the 
properties of matter as they are related to life, must be the orderly results of law, or else we shall have to turn 
them over to final causes and the philosopher." (Henderson L.J., "The Fitness of the Environment: An 
Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter," [1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, 
reprint, pp.274-276)

9/04/01
"Thus regarded, our new form of the old riddle appears twofold, and, on that account, for the present the 
more unanswerable. There is but one immediate compensation for this complexity; a proof that somehow, 
beneath adaptations, peculiar and unsuspected relationships exist between the properties of matter and the 
phenomena of life; that the process of cosmic evolution is indissolubly linked with the fundamental 
characteristics of the organism; that logically, in some obscure manner, cosmic and biological evolution are 
one. In short, we appear to be led to the assumption that the genetic or evolutionary processes, both cosmic 
and biological, when considered in certain aspects, constitute a single orderly development that yields 
results not merely contingent, but resembling those which in human action we recognize as purposeful. For, 
undeniably, two things which are related together in a complex manner by reciprocal fitness make up in a 
very real sense a unit, something quite different from the two alone, or the sum of the two, or the 
relationship between the two. In human affairs such a unit arises only from the effective operation of 
purpose." (Henderson L.J., "The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of 
the Properties of Matter," [1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, reprint, pp.278-279)

9/04/01
"However, not all scientists find it so easy to accept the "miracle of nature" as a brute fact. It is all very well 
proclaiming that the laws of physics plus the cosmic initial conditions explain the universe, but this begs the 
question of where those laws and conditions came from in the first place. Science may be powerfully 
successful in explaining the universe, but how do we explain science? Why does science-based on the 
notion of eternal laws of physics work, and work so well? As our understanding of the basic processes of 
nature advances, so it becomes increasingly clear that what we call scientific laws are not just any old laws, 
but are remarkably special in a number of intriguing ways. ... The physical world is not arbitrarily regulated; 
it is ordered in a very particular way poised between the twin extremes of simple regimented orderliness and 
random complexity. It is neither a crystal nor a random gas. The universe is undeniably complex, but its 
complexity is of an organized variety. Moreover, this organization was not built into the universe at its 
origin. It has emerged from primeval chaos in a sequence of self-organizing processes that have 
progressively enriched and complexified the evolving universe in a more or less unidirectional matter. It is 
easy to imagine a world that, while ordered, nevertheless does not possess the right sort of forces or 
conditions for the emergence of complex organization." (Davies P.C.W., "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of 
Science," in Templeton J.M, ed., "Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator," Continuum: New 
York, 1994, pp.44-45)

10/04/01
"Natural selection remains still a vera causa in the origin of species; but the function ascribed to it is 
practically reversed. It exchanges its former supremacy as the supposed sole determinant among practically 
indefinite possibilities of structure and function, for the more modest position of simply accelerating, 
retarding, or terminating the process of otherwise determined change. It furnishes the brake rather than the 
steam or the rails for the journey of life; or in better metaphor, instead of guiding the ramifications of the tree 
of life, it would, in Mivart's excellent phrase, do little more than apply the pruning knife to them. In other 
words, its functions are mainly those of the third Fate, not the first, of Siva, not of Brahma.-PATRICK 
GEDDES and J. ARTHUR THOMPSON, "Evolution." New York, Home University Library, 1911, p. 248." 
(Henderson L.J., "The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the 
Properties of Matter," [1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, reprint, pp.274-275. Emphasis original)

10/04/01
"For the coincidence of properties itself a rational explanation based upon known laws of nature is perhaps 
conceivable. Attention has already been called to the interconnection of such properties as latent heat of 
vaporization, thermal conductivity, molecular volume, the value of the van der Waals constant a, the 
dielectric constant, and ionizing power. Further, it is of course most probable that numerous other properties 
are necessarily associated with these; and finally it is not surprising that elements of low atomic weight, 
which become concentrated in the atmosphere on account of the small specific gravity of their gases, 
should possess unusual properties, like high specific heat, or if one property leads to another, many 
unusual properties. Be that as it may, chemical science is still a very long way from accounting for the 
simultaneous occurrence of the various characteristics of water, especially if we include such things as heat 
of formation, solvent power, the process of hydrolytic cleavage, the degree of solubility of carbon dioxide, 
the anomalous expansion on cooling near the freezing point, etc. There is, in fact, exceedingly little ground 
for hope that any single explanation of these coincidences can arise from current hypotheses and laws. But 
if to the coincidence of the unique properties of water we add that of the chemical properties of the three 
elements, a problem results under which the science of to-day must surely break down." (Henderson L.J., 
"The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter," 
[1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, reprint, pp.276-277)

10/04/01
"There is, in fact, exceedingly little ground for hope that any single explanation of these coincidences can 
arise from current hypotheses and laws. But if to the coincidence of the unique properties of water we add 
that of the chemical properties of the three elements, a problem results under which the science of to-day 
must surely break down. If these taken as a whole are ever to be understood it will be in the future, when 
research has penetrated far deeper into the riddle of the properties of matter. Nevertheless an explanation 
cognate with known laws is conceivable, and in the light of experience it would be folly to think it impossible 
or even improbable. Such an explanation once attained might, however, avail the biologist little; for a further 
problem, apparently more difficult, remains. How does it come about that each and all of these many unique 
properties should be favorable to the organic mechanism, should fit the universe for life? And for the 
answer to this question existing knowledge provides, I believe, no clew. ... The great difficulty appears to be 
that there is here no possibility of interaction. In our solar system, at least, the fitness of the environment far 
precedes the existence of the living organisms." (Henderson L.J., "The Fitness of the Environment: An 
Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter," [1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, 
reprint, pp.277-278)

10/04/01
"My heart would sink whenever my father attributed the carelessness of scholars to his own ignorance 
based on lack of professional training. I could never get him to understand that advanced degrees and 
letters after a name guarantee no new level of wisdom and that, in the end, there is no substitute for old-
fashioned careful reading. I could never convince him that he had a far better chance than Uno or Due to 
grasp the integrity of another man's argument. After all, he had the prerequisites of basic intelligence and 
adequate knowledge of jargon; and he possessed, in addition and in abundance, two cardinal traits rarely 
encountered in active scholars: time to read carefully, and lack of distorting preconceptions." (Gould, S.J., 
"Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity," in "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural 
History," Jonathan Cape: London, 1993, pp.124-125)

11/04/01
"Alternatively the numerical coincidences could be regarded as evidence of design. The delicate fine-tuning 
in the values of the constants, necessary so that the various different branches of physics can dovetail so 
felicitously, might be attributed to God. It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the 
universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. 
Such a conclusion can of course, only be subjective. In the end it boils down to a question of belief. Is it 
easier to believe in a cosmic designer than the multiplicity of universes necessary for the weak anthropic 
principle to work? It is hard to see how either hypothesis could ever be tested in the strict scientific sense. 
As remarked in the previous chapter, if we cannot visit the other universes or experience them directly, their 
possible existence must remain just as much a matter of faith as belief in God. Perhaps future developments 
in science will lead to more direct evidence for other universes, but until then, the seemingly miraculous 
concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the 
most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design."
(Davies P.C.W., "God and the New Physics," [1983], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.189)

11/04/01
"As soon as the evolution doctrine was accepted the term took on a new significance: homologous 
structures were now defined as those derived from the same single structure in a common ancestor) 
however much that structure may have been modified by subsequent variation in evolution. All the humerus 
bones of the terrestrial vertebrates) for instances are thought to be derived by modification over millions 
and millions of years from the bones of the primitive limb-like fins of the first fish-like amphibia that 
pioneered the conquest of the land from the water. In the same way, the hearts, the nerve cords, the eyes 
and so on are said to be homologous, derived by gradual modification from the original ancestral type. This 
seemed very simple at one time and is still spoken of by most zoologists as if it were; the fact is, however, 
that today the idea of homology is not quite so easy- to understand. It is a curious paradox that this concept 
of homology is absolutely fundamental to what we are talking about when we speak of evolution, yet in 
truth I believe we cannot explain it at all in terms of present-day biological theory ..." (Hardy A., "The Living 
Stream: Evolution and Man," [1965], Meridian: Cleveland OH, 1968, reprint, p.211)

12/04/01
"In 1611 Galileo visited Rome and demonstrated his telescope to the most eminent personages at the 
pontifical court. Encouraged by the flattering reception accorded to him, he ventured, in three letters on the 
sunspots printed at Rome in 1613 ... to take up a more definite position on the Copernican theory. Movement 
of the spots across the face of the Sun, Galileo maintained, proved Copernicus was right and Ptolemy 
wrong. His great expository gifts and his choice of Italian, in which he was an acknowledged master of style, 
made his thoughts popular beyond the confines of the universities and created a powerful movement of 
opinion. The Aristotelian professors, seeing their vested interests threatened, united against him. They 
strove to cast suspicion upon him in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities because of contradictions 
between the Copernican theory and the Scriptures. They obtained the cooperation of the Dominican 
preachers, who fulminated from the pulpit against the new impiety of "mathematicians" and secretly 
denounced Galileo to the Inquisition for blasphemous utterances, which, they said, he had freely invented." 
(de Santillana G., "Galileo," Encyclopaedia Britannica, Benton: Chicago, 15th edition, 1984, Vol. 7, pp.852-
853)

13/04/01
"The only illustration Darwin published in On the Origin of Species was a diagram depicting his view 
of evolution: species descendant from a common ancestor; gradual change of organisms over time; 
episodes of diversification and extinction of species. Given the simplicity of Darwin's theory of evolution, it 
was reasonable for paleontologists to believe that they should be able to demonstrate with the hard 
evidence provided by fossils both the thread of life and the gradual transformation of one species into 
another. Although paleontologists have, and continue to claim to have, discovered sequences of fossils 
that do indeed present a picture of gradual change over time, the truth of the matter is that we are still in the 
dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did 
from the head of Zeus-full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin's depiction of evolution as 
resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations, which, in turn, 
demands that the fossil record preserve an unbroken chain of transitional forms." (Schwartz, J.H., "Sudden 
Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species," John Wiley & Sons: New York NY, 1999, p.3)

14/04/01
"There is, in truth, not one chance in countless millions of millions that the many unique properties of 
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and especially of their stable compounds water and carbonic acid, which 
chiefly make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should simultaneously occur in the three elements 
otherwise than through the operation of a natural law which somehow connects them together. There is no 
greater probability that these unique properties should be without due cause uniquely favorable to the 
organic mechanism. These are no mere accidents; an explanation is to seek. It must be admitted, however, 
that no explanation is at hand." (Henderson L.J., "The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the 
Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter," [1913], Beacon Press: Boston MA, 1958, reprint, p.276)

14/04/01 "Many molecules, particularly organic molecules (or those containing carbon atoms), may be 
described as 'left-handed' or 'right-handed'. In the normal laboratory synthesis of compounds with left- and 
right-handed versions, a process involving many millions of molecules in order to have weighable 
quantities, the result is an equal production of left- and right-handed molecules. By contrast, nature almost 
always produces molecules of one unique type. The tartaric acid produced in fermentation consists of just 
one of the two mirror-image forms, whereas in laboratory synthesis both forms are made in equal amounts. 
The actual properties of the left-handed and the right-handed version of the same molecule are in most 
respects identical the same weight, the same chemical reactions. ...Even the small molecules involved in 
living systems not only show handedness but also exist in just one natural form. Above all, the amino-acids, 
from which proteins are built, are all left-handed. We actually possess an enzyme in our livers which will 
destroy any right-handed amino-acids that we happen to synthesize or encounter. Clearly, the nature of life 
is closely related to the symmetry of the molecules which constitute living systems. What now cries out to 
be answered is why all life is built from molecules of a definite handedness. This remains an unsolved 
problem, despite a wealth of speculation. Not only are the small molecular building blocks of one specific 
handedness; so are the larger structures made from them." (Richards W.G., "The Problems of Chemistry," 
Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1986, pp.43-44,46-47)

15/04/01 "The theory of evolution by natural selection is not a difficult concept to grasp, and Charles 
Darwin addressed The Origin of Species itself to a general audience. But neither is it self-evident to 
many people that natural selection can fully account for the world they observe. Thus when questions 
about the theory arise in public forums, the scientific community would do much better in the long run to 
patiently list supporting facts and frankly admit where positive evidence is lacking, rather than 
paternalistically maintaining that an understanding of the theory of evolution is reserved for the priesthood 
of professional scientists." (Behe M.J., "Understanding Evolution," Letters, Science, 30 August 1991, p.950)

15/04/01 "Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the 
explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it. Thankfully, the evidence is 
overwhelming. I don't just mean evidence that life evolved (which is way beyond reasonable doubt, 
creationists notwithstanding), but that it evolved by natural selection. Darwin himself pointed to the power 
of selective breeding, a direct analogue of natural selection, in shaping organisms. ... Natural selection is 
also readily observable in the wild. In a classic example, the white peppered moth gave way in nineteenth-
century Manchester to a dark mutant form after industrial soot covered the lichen on which the moth rested, 
making the white form conspicuous to birds. When air pollution laws lightened the lichen in the 1950s, the 
then-rare white form reasserted itself. There are many other examples, perhaps the most pleasing coming 
from the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant. ... The Grants painstakingly measured the size and toughness of 
the seeds in different parts of the Galapagos at different times of the year, the length of the finches' beaks, 
the time they took to crack the seeds, the numbers and ages of the finches in different parts of the islands, 
and so on-every variable relevant to natural selection. ... Selection in action is even more dramatic among 
faster-breeding organisms, as the world is discovering to its peril in the case of pesticide-resistant insects, 
drug-resistant bacteria, and the AIDS virus in a single patient." (Pinker S., "How the Mind Works," [1997], 
Penguin: London, 1998, pp.162-163. Emphasis in the original)

16/04/01 "IN SHORT, three concepts, evolution, in the minimal sense of "descent with modification" 
(no "emergence," no "higher and lower" allowed), variation, in the sense of Mendelian 
micromutation, tiny changes in the structure or arrangement of the genes, the ultimate material of heredity 
(no sweeping or sudden alterations allowed), and natural selection, the decrease in frequency of 
those variants that happen in each successive generation to be less well adapted than others to their 
particular environment: these three form a tight circle within which, in happy self-confirmation, neo-
Darwinian thinking moves. To those who believe in it, this circle is an ample intellectual dwelling place, 
roomy enough in fact to house all the immense achievements of modern biological research. To those not so 
convinced, however, the circle seems a strangely constricted one. They may even agree with the Professor 
Emeritus of Zoology at Cambridge that `no amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent 
improbability of orthodox (Darwinian) theory.' [Gray, J., "The Case for Natural Selection." Review of "Evolution 
in Action," by Julian Huxley, Chatto & Windus: London, 1953. Nature, Vol. 173, February 6, 1954, p.227]" 
(Grene, M.G., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.50. Emphasis original)

16/04/01 "FIRST, it is one of the major paradoxes of the history of science, that the Darwinian theory, 
speculative as it must be by the very nature of its subject-matter, has been held up as a model of simple 
Baconian induction through the patient accumulation of facts. ... No, the species theory, like most great 
forward steps in science, was a triumph of scientific imagination rather than of fact-collecting. Dr. 
Himmelfarb shows us plainly the two leaps of imagination through which Darwin's theory took shape: first in 
the sketch of 1837, where he speaks of adaptation perpetuated through generation, and secondly in 
the notes of 1842 and 1844, which follow his reading of Malthus on population, the text which by his own 
account suggested to him the concepts of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, the essential 
agents of natural selection. These steps once made, the new conceptual scheme took over, and the 
task of the Origin was to amplify the evidence in its support-evidence gleaned everyhow and everywhere-
with the passion of genius ... and to assimilate within its all-enclosing scope whatever evidence might 
appear at first sight to conflict with it. The method is one of imagination, of extrapolation from a few facts to 
many more inferred realities seen in terms of the imagined scheme, and proof of these realities by the 
exclusion of other possibilities." (Grene, M.G., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, 
p.51. Emphasis original).

18/04/01 "In order to build up a structure by natural selection, it is essential that each stage in the building 
process must make an animal better fitted to its environment than the one before it. An eye that is half 
developed must be more useful to an animal than an eye that is 49 per cent developed, and this in turn, than 
one, the development of which has proceeded to only 48 per cent, and so on. The graph of usefulness 
against the extent of structural organization must show a steady upward rise-otherwise progress must 
inevitably stop, hindered by natural selection itself. If the graph is not a steady upward rise, but has ups and 
downs, then natural selection (which selects usefulness and adaptation), working from either direction, will 
force the organism to the nearest maximum. Today, with our much greater knowledge of and familiarity with 
complex systems, we know that steady upward rises of the kind demanded by materialistic evolutionists are 
unknown to science. Isolated fundamental changes make a machine less efficient than it was before and may 
even make it useless, unless, indeed, numerous other adaptations are made at the same time. The radio 
manufacturer cannot turn one model of a wireless set into a larger and better one by continuous stages-he 
cannot add a new valve, a condenser, a piece of wire, etc., in a series of operations, and hope each time to 
obtain a model that is slightly better than the one before. All the changes must be made at once-or not at all! 
To add an extra valve to a wireless set you must first cut through wires, disconnect the loudspeaker, etc., 
and at once the set becomes useless as a functioning whole. Only after passing through the useless stage 
can it be made more useful than before. It is the same with all arrangements of matter organised as 
functioning units. To ask for a gradual, uniform, improvement is, it seems, to ask for the impossible." (Clark 
R.E.D., "The Universe: Plan or Accident?: The Religious Implications of Modern Science," [1949], 
Paternoster: London, Third Edition, 1961, pp.123-124)

19/04/01 "Biological information is the most important information we can discover because over the next 
several decades it will revolutionize medicine and lead to treatments for most diseases. Human DNA is like a 
computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." (Gates W.H., "The 
Road Ahead," [1995], Penguin: London, Revised, 1996, p.228)

19/04/01 "This is not to suggest that Darwin or Darwinians, past or present, are "speculative" rather than 
"scientific" in their reasoning. Darwin himself certainly was not of a philosophical turn of mind; and he 
certainly believed sincerely, as his followers have done and do, that, as against such daydreaming 
evolutionists as his grandfather or such systematising evolutionists as Herbert Spencer, he was patiently 
and empirically and critically pursuing facts and rejecting hypotheses not confirmed by facts. Yet what the 
genius of Darwin achieved, surely, was not to discover a host of new facts unknown to his predecessors 
that somehow added up to the further fact of evolution through natural selection; what he did was to see 
the facts in a new context-an imaginative context, the context of an idea, but an idea which seemed and 
seems to many modern minds peculiarly factual, an idea so convincing, so congenial, so satisfying that it 
feels like fact." (Grene, M.G., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.51. Emphasis 
original).

21/04/01
"materialism ... the theory that matter alone exists. It immediately implies a denial of the existence of minds, 
spirits, divine beings, etc., in so far as these are taken to be non-material. It was proposed by the ancient 
atomists (Democritus, Epicurus) and in the modern era by Gassendi, Hobbes, Meslier, La Mettrie, Helvetius, 
Holbach, etc. Its current versions, formulated with greater conceptual refinement, are often called 
PHYSICALISM. It has been said that during the 1960s (and since), materialism became one of the few 
orthodoxies of American academic philosophy, and analytic philosophy elsewhere has shown a similar 
tendency. The doctrine is older than the word, of which the earliest use can be traced to the 1660s." 
(Mautner, T., ed., "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, pp.341-
342. Emphasis original)

21/04/2001
"naturalism ... (in modern metaphysics) the view that everything (objects and events) is a part of nature, 
an all-encompassing world of space and time. It implies a rejection of traditional beliefs in supernatural 
beings or other entities supposedly beyond the ken of science. Human beings and their mental powers are 
also regarded as normal parts of the natural world describable by science. Human beings and their mental 
powers are also regarded as normal parts of the natural world describable by science. ... This obviates the 
need to postulate entities outside the material world. ... (in philosophy of mind) physicalism, i.e. materialism 
in combination with the view that mentalistic discourse should be reduced, explained or eliminated in favour 
of non-mentalistic scientifically acceptable discourse." (Mautner, T., ed., "The Penguin Dictionary of 
Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, p.373. Emphasis original) 

22/04/01 "But as researchers continue to examine the RNA-world concept closely, more problems emerge. 
How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the 
best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones. For example, the process by which one creates 
the sugar ribose, a key ingredient of RNA, also yields a host of other sugars that would inhibit RNA 
synthesis. Moreover, no one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of how phosphorus, which is a 
relatively rare substance in nature, became such a crucial ingredient in RNA (and DNA)." (Horgan J., "In 
The Beginning...," Scientific American, February 1991, p.103. Ellipses in original)

23/04/01
"Courtroom experience during my career at the bar taught me to attach great weight to something that may 
seem trivial to persons not skilled in argumentation-the burden of proof. The proponents of a theory, in 
science or elsewhere, are obligated to support every link in the chain of reasoning, whereas a critic or 
skeptic may peck at any aspect of the theory, testing it for flaws. He is not obligated to set up any theory of 
his own or to offer any alternative explanations. He can be purely negative if he so desires. William Jennings 
Bryan forgot this in Tennessee, and was jockeyed into trying to defend fundamentalism, although this was 
not necessary to the matter in hand. The results were disastrous. They would have been equally disastrous 
for Clarence Darrow if he had tried to discharge the burden of proof for the other side. The winner in these 
matters is the skeptic who has no case to prove." (Macbeth N., "Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason," 
Gambit: Boston MA, 1971, p.5)

23/04/01
"Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A 
knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the 
evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms. Neither the examination of present beings, nor 
imagination, nor theories can serve as a substitute for paleontological documents. If they ignore them, 
biologists, the philosophers of nature, indulge in numerous commentaries and can only come up with 
hypotheses. This is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution. 
From it we learn how to interpret present occurrences cautiously; it reveals that certain hypotheses 
considered certainties by their authors are in fact questionable or even illegitimate." (Grasse P.-P., 
"Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation," Academic Press: New York 
NY, 1977, p.4)

23/04/01
"MODERN arguments work in much the same way. Thus for example the recent work of H.B.D. Kettlewell on 
industrial melanism has certainly confirmed the hypothesis that natural selection takes place in nature. This 
is the story of the black mutant of the common peppered moth which, as Kettlewell has shown with beautiful 
precision, increases in numbers in the vicinity of industrial centres and decreases, being more easily 
exposed to predators, in rural areas. Here, say the neo-Darwinians, is natural selection, that is, evolution, 
actually going on. But to this we may answer: selection, yes; the colour of moths or snails or mice is clearly 
controlled by visibility to predators; but "evolution"? Do these observations explain how in the first place 
there came to be any moths snails or mice at all? By what right are we to extrapolate the pattern by which 
colour or other such superficial characters are governed to the origin of species, let alone of classes, orders, 
phyla of living organisms? But, say the neo-Darwinians again, natural selection is the only mechanism we 
observe in present-day nature. But again, if this were so, we should still have no right to say that the only 
mechanism we see at work now is the only one that has been at work in all the long past of the living world. 
Nor, for that matter, is it the only "mechanism." ... Because the chance-variation/ natural-selection schema, 
which through Darwin's work first convinced the world that evolution did in fact happen, still holds-the 
mind entranced, absorbs into itself all evolutionary data, and at the same time rejects all data not so 
absorbable." (Grene, M.G., "The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.51. 
Emphasis original).

23/04/01
"THERE is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more 
dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from 
all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-
century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in 
morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day 
which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these 
pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately 
they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and 
public conduct in the public mind. This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous 
than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled materialism is helped by the reaction 
against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism." (Roosevelt, T. "History as Literature," 1913. 
http://www.bartleby.com/56/9.html)

24/04/01
"As David Bohm has written: `It seems clear that everybody has got some kind of metaphysics, even if he 
thinks he hasn't got any. Indeed, the practical "hard-headed" individual who "only goes by what he sees" 
generally has a very dangerous kind of metaphysics, i.e., the kind of which he is unaware.... Such 
metaphysics is dangerous because, in it, assumptions and inferences are being mistaken for directly 
observed facts, with the result that they are effectively riveted in an almost unchangeable way into the 
structure of thought.' Bohm then adds some practical advice: `One of the best ways of a person becoming 
aware of his own tacit metaphysical assumptions is to be confronted by several other kinds. His first 
reaction is often of violent disturbance, as views that are very dear are questioned or thrown to the ground. 
Nevertheless, if he will "stay with it," rather than escape into anger and unjustified rejection of contrary 
ideas, he will discover that this disturbance is very beneficial. For now he becomes aware of the