Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: July - December 2001

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

[January-June] [July, August, September, October, November , December]

July
16/07/2001
"`There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry,' he continued. `There is no place for dogma in science. The 
scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct 
any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect 
it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what 
they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can 
never regress.'" (Barnett, L., "J. Robert Oppenheimer," Life, Vol. 7, No. 9, International Edition, October 24, 
1949, pp.52-59, p.58)

16/07/2001
"The more perfect a structure is, the more certain that any random tinkering will be harmful. Even if a piano 
factory had a very large output of pianos, it could not tune them by giving a monkey a wrench and letting it play 
with the pegs that hold the strings tight, discarding any instrument untuned. The more exact is the tuning 
needed, the larger is the proportion that would have to be junked; rarely indeed would the monkey improve a 
well-tuned instrument. Moreover, junking pianos made nonfunctional would not suffice. If the monkeys jiggered 
the posts a bit but not enough for the instruments to be discarded, all pianos would become slightly or 
eventually seriously untuned. That is, the organ would degenerate. This analogy falls short of reality because 
the well-fashioned eye, for example, is more than a single instrument. It has coordinated systems for tracking, 
focusing, light control, light registration color perception, and incipient image formation, all of which can anal do 
sometimes go wrong. An additional complication is that genes have multiple effects, and it is always possible 
that a gene needed elsewhere may have negative consequences for the eye. It would seem difficult for simple 
selection to maintain the detailed structure of large gene control networks such as must be responsible for such 
an intricately integrated organ as the eye, unless the pattern is somehow self-regulatory. Random changes would 
overwhelm a rather large selection rate, limiting the number of genes that can be maintained as a group (Winstatt 
and Schank 1988, 239-250). A combination of many genes would be vulnerable to deleterious mutations 
disturbing the delicate harmony if the structure did not have great powers of repairing mistakes." (Wesson, R.G., 
"Beyond Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, Rreprinted, 1994, p.81)

17/07/2001
"These convergent parallels suggest some genetic hard wiring of a universal grammar inside our brains. We fall 
back on that genetically hardwired universal grammar if we do not hear another complex grammatical language 
being spoken around us when we are growing up as children. If, however-like most people-we grow up hearing a 
normal complex language around us, we learn that language and its grammar, which override our genetically hard-
wired universal grammar available under conditions of default." (Diamond, J.M., "The Evolution of Human 
Creativity," in Campbell, J.H. & Schopf, J.W., eds., "Creative Evolution?!: Proceedings of a symposium sponsored 
by the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 
March, 1993," Jones & Bartlett: London, 1994, p.81)

17/07/2001
"To test his belief that evolution is a constant rather than a punctuated process, McKee now intends to run 
simulations based on the East African fossil record and see which of the two models is closest to reality. 'Darwin 
was adamant that climatic change did not cause evolution,' says McKee. 'What I'm saying now is that evolution 
will occur whether there's climatic change or not. But what did cause evolution, I have no idea." (Armstrong, S., 
"South Africa - the missing pieces," New Scientist, Vol. 143 No. 1933, 9 July 1994, p.33)

18/07/2001
"There is nothing in the use of the word `day,' by Moses, that requires it to be explained as invariably denoting a 
period of twenty-four hours; but much to forbid it. The following facts prove this. 1. Day means daylight, in 
distinction from darkness. Gen. 1:5,16,18. 2. Day means daylight and darkness together. Gen. 1:5. 3. Day mean the 
six days together. Gen. 2:4. The first day (Gen. 1:5) could not have been measured by the revolution of the sun 
around the earth, because this was not yet visible. The same variety in signification, is seen in the Mosaic use of 
the word `earth.' 1. Earth means the entire material universe. Gen. 1:1. 2. Earth means the solar, stellar, and 
planetary system. Gen. 1:2. 3. Earth means the dry land of the planet earth. Gen. 1:10. 4. Earth means the whole of 
the planet earth. Gen. 1:15, 17." (Shedd, W.G.T.*, "Dogmatic Theology," [1888], Zondervan: Grand Rapids MI, 
1969, Vol. I, reprint, p.476)

19/07/2001
"HBES, the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society .. brings together anthropologists, psychologists, 
zoologists, sociologists, geneticists, memeticists, economists, philosophers, litterateurs, management 
consultants and even lawyers, united by one thing only - Darwinism. You might think this would go without 
saying. Not so. In many social studies departments, Darwin's standing lies somewhere between "Charles who?" 
and the Antichrist." (Dawkins, R., The Times, June 22, 2001)

19/07/2001
"Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our 
belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of 
causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, 
his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no 
intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of: the 
ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction 
in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried 
beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, 
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the 
firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." (Russell, B., "A Free 
Man's Worship," in "Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays," [1910], George Allen & Unwin: London, 1949, 
reprint, pp.47-48)

19/07/2001
"What was that last 0.1 percent of our genes and proteins that changed during that time and that caused the 
Great Leap Forward? There is only one plausible guess that I can think of The genes and proteins responsible for 
the perfection of spoken language. Many animal species have vocal communication, but none remotely as 
sophisticated as human language. Chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught to express themselves with 
computer languages or sign languages of hundreds of symbols, and pygmy chimpanzees have been taught to 
understand spoken human language. However, those apes are not capable themselves of speaking, because the 
structure of the ape larynx only permits them to utter a couple of different vowels and consonants." (Diamond, 
J.M., "The Evolution of Human Creativity," in Campbell, J.H. & Schopf, J.W., eds., "Creative Evolution?!: 
Proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life at the 
University of California, Los Angeles, in March, 1993," Jones & Bartlett: London, 1994, p.79)

19/07/2001
"Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse 
from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding 
at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one 
part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present 
size." (Hawking, S.W., "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes," [1988], Bantam: London, 
1991, reprint, p.128)

20/07/2001
"Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science-the evolutionist attempts to 
explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques 
for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a 
tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain." (Mayr, E.W., 
"Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific American, Vol. 283, No. 1, pp.67-71, July 2000, p.68)

20/07/2001
"Microevolution is expected to be commonplace, yet there are few thoroughly documented cases of 
microevolution in wild populations. In contrast, it is often observed that apparently heritable traits under strong 
and consistent directional selection fail to show the expected evolutionary response." (Merila, J., Kruuk, L.E.B.& 
Sheldon, B.C., "Cryptic evolution in a wild bird population," Nature, Vol. 412, 5 July 2001, pp.76-79, p.76)

20/07/2001
"One of the most remarkable findings of cosmological science is that the universe did have a beginning, and a 
spectacular beginning at that. Discussions of first causes used to be dry philosophical constructs, theoretical 
arguments against an infinite regression of events backwards in time. The big bang made the first cause real. It 
placed a wall at the beginning of time, closing to inquiry (but not, of course, to speculation) all events that might 
leave occurred before that cosmic explosion. In the view of many scientists, the big bang casts a distinctly 
theological light on the origin of the universe." (Miller, K.R., "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for 
Common Ground Between God and Evolution," [1999], HarperCollins: New York NY, 2000, reprint, p.225)

21/07/2001
"To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a 
process of evolution is simply ignorant-inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have 
learned to read and write." (Dennett, D.C., "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life," 
[1995], Penguin: London, 1996, reprint, p.46)

21/07/2001
"The [design] argument boils down simply to this: we can invoke a naturalistic process, evolution, for which 
there is a great deal of evidence, but which we still have some difficulties in fully comprehending. Or we can say, 
simply, that some Creator did it and we are, after all, only watches (perhaps an insight, after all, into what makes 
creationists tick). The analogy is as meaningless as that: it "proves" nothing. It could even be true-but it cannot 
be construed as science ... " (Eldredge N., "The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism," 
Washington Square: New York NY, 1982, p.134)

22/07/2001
"Similarly, any "theory" that explains phenomena by recourse to the actions of an omnipotent, omniscient 
supreme being, or any other supernatural omnipotent entity, is a nonscientific theory. .... It isn't necessarily 
wrong. It is just not amenable to scientific investigation." (Futuyma, D.J., "Science on Trial: The Case for 
Evolution," Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, p.169)

22/07/2001
"Q: If a theory involving the supernatural intervention of a Creator is not science, then what is it? A: It is religion. 
In my opinion, reliance on the acts of a Creator is inherently religious. It is not necessarily wrong. It is just a 
different perspective. It has its places just as science has its place, but it is not science." (Ruse M.. "Witness 
Testimony Sheet," in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution 
Controversy," Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, p.301)

23/07/2001
"Chemists have tried to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. They have put these simple 
substances in a flask and supplied a source of energy such as ultraviolet light or electric sparks-artificial 
simulation of primordial lightning. After a few weeks of this, something interesting is usually found inside the 
flask: a weak brown soup containing a large number of molecules more complex than the ones originally put in. In 
particular, amino acids have been found-the building blocks of proteins, one of the two great classes of 
biological molecules. Before these experiments were done, naturally-occurring amino acids would have been 
thought of as diagnostic of the presence of life. If they had been detected on, say Mars, life on that planet would 
have seemed a near certainty. Now, however, their existence need imply only the presence of a few simple gases 
in the atmosphere and some volcanoes, sunlight, or thundery weather." (Dawkins, R., "The Selfish Gene," [1976], 
Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, New Edition, 1989, p.14)

24/07/2001
"Dare I suggest cosmic biology? I don't know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognise 
that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers on which life 
depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the Earth. Astronomers will have a little 
difficulty at understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so, the biologists having 
been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The "others" are a group of persons who believe, quite 
openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, 
there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits 
oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical 
miracles." (Hoyle F., "The Big Bang in Astronomy," New Scientist, 19 November 1981, pp.521-527, p.526)

24/07/2001
"Holland and Abelson concluded in the 1960s that the Earth's primitive atmosphere was derived from volcanic 
outgassing, and consisted primarily of water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and trace amounts of hydrogen. 
With most of the hydrogen being lost to space, there would have been nothing to reduce the carbon dioxide and 
nitrogen, so methane and ammonia could not have been major constituents of the early atmosphere ... Abelson 
also noted that ammonia absorbs ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, and would have been rapidly destroyed by 
it. Furthermore, if large amounts of methane had been present in the primitive atmosphere, the earliest rocks 
would have contained a high proportion of organic molecules, and this is not the case. Abelson concluded: 
"What is the evidence for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on Earth? The answer is that there is 
no evidence for it, but much against it." (emphasis in original) in other words, the Oparin-Haldane 
scenario was wrong, and the early atmosphere was nothing like the strongly reducing mixture used in Miller's 
experiment." (Wells, J.*, "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution 
is Wrong," Regnery: Washington DC, 2000, pp.19-20)

24/07/2001
"All conceptions of the "primordial soup" from which life arose agree in that it included not only the particular 
sugars, amino acids and other substances that are now essential biochemical reactants but also many other 
molecules that are now only laboratory curiosities. It was therefore necessary for the first organizing principle to 
be highly selective from the start. It had to tolerate an enormous overburden of small molecules that were 
biologically "wrong" but chemically possible. From this background the organizing principle had to extract those 
molecules that would eventually become the routinely synthesized standard monomers of all the biological 
polymers, and it had to link them dependably in particular configurations." (Eigen, M., Gardiner W., Schuster P. & 
Winkler-Oswatitsch R., "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, Vol. 244, No. 4, April 
1981, pp.78-94, p.78)

24/07/2001
"The primitive soup did face an energy crisis: early life forms needed somehow to extract chemical energy from 
the molecules in the soup. For the story we have to tell here it is not important how they did so; some system of 
energy storage and delivery based on phosphates can be assumed." (Eigen, M., Gardiner, W., Schuster, P. & 
Winkler-Oswatitsch, R., "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, Vol. 244, No. 4, April 
1981, pp.78-94, p.78)

25/07/2001
"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, D., "Some 
Remarks on the Notion of Order," in Waddington, C.H., ed., "Towards a Theoretical Biology: 2. Sketches, An 
IUBS Symposium," Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh UK, 1969, p.41]. 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 assumptive character of a great many previously unquestioned features of his own 
thinking.' [Ibid., p.42]" (Thaxton, C.B.*, Bradley, W.L.* & Olsen, R.L.*, "The Mystery of Life's Origin: 
Reassessing Current Theories," [1984], Lewis & Stanley: Dallas TX, 1992, Second Printing, pp.207-208)

25/07/2001
"Does g have to be 6.67 * 10-11? What if g were a little larger or a little smaller? It turns but that 
the consequences of even very small changes in the gravitational constant would be profound. If the constant 
were even slightly larger, it would have increased the force of gravity just enough to slow expansion after the big 
bang. And, according to Hawking, `If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by 
even one part in a hundred thousand million million it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size.' 
[Hawking, S.W., "A Brief History of Time," Bantam: New York, 1988, p.121] Conversely, if g were smaller, the dust 
from the big bang would just have continued to expand, never coalescing into galaxies, stars, planets, or us. The 
value of the gravitational constant is just right for the existence of life. A little bigger, and the universe 
would have collapsed before we could evolve; a little smaller, and the planet upon which we stand would never 
have formed. The gravitational constant has just the right value to permit the evolution of life" (Miller, K.R., 
"Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution," [1999], 
HarperCollins: New York NY, 2000, reprint, pp.227-228. Emphasis in original)

25/07/2001
"Still another group of fishes is even more important to us, for it includes the ancestors of all the land-living 
vertebrates (or tetrapods), including ourselves. These were the Crossopterygii or lobefinned fishes. There are 
two main divisions, and their subsequent histories show the most remarkable contrast between conservatism and 
progress in evolution. The conservative group, the Coelacanthini or fringe-finned fish, was destined to remain 
water-living. It gradually petered out during the course of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, and vanishes from the 
geological record at the end of the Cretaceous; the coelacanths were long thought to have become extinct. But in 
this century, living coelacanths very like their earliest fossil precursors, have been taken off the coast of South 
Africa, to provide a famous instance of a `living fossil'. The second crossopterygian group, the Rhipidistia, does 
not survive as such, but instead gave rise to all the land-living vertebrates, so that its history is one of 
unmatched evolutionary success." (Kurten, B., "The Age of the Dinosaurs," World University Library, 
Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1968, p.67)

26/07/2001
"Barring an external intelligence, which evolutionists do not detect, nothing in nature can select sets for positive 
preservation. The process can only be one of negative elimination in which, after different sets have formed, 
some are eliminated more or less promptly, while others survive for a while-that is, their elimination is deferred." 
(Darlington, P.J., Jr., "Evolution for Naturalists: The Simple Principles and Complex Reality," John Wiley & Sons: 
New York NY, 1980, p.55)

27/07/2001
"Darwin's argument certainly seems logical. Is there any evidence that Darwin was right? Can nature select as 
well as man? Answer: There is considerable evidence that Darwin was indeed correct about natural selection. 
Perhaps the best example of Darwinian selection is the one that's in all the biology textbooks: the peppered 
moths." (Morris H.M. & Parker G.E., "What is Creation Science?" Master Books: El Cajon CA, 1987, p.78)

28/07/2001
"Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, 
impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of 
conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far back wards and 
far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First 
Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man ; and I deserve to be called a Theist." 
(Darwin, C.R., in Barlow, N., ed., "The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882: With Original Omissions 
Restored," [1958], W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, 1969, reprint, pp.92-93)

28/07/2001
"THERE IS no doubt that the new punctuational movement will bring joy to the heats of creationists-those who 
claim species to be discrete entities that divine being brought separately to life and placed upon the earth. The 
fossil record, in offering the punctuational message that distinctive forms somehow appear suddenly and, once 
established, change slowly, would appear to be playing into the creationists' hands." (Stanley S.M., "The New 
Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species," Basic Books: New York NY, 1981, p.165)

28/07/2001
"Our luck didn't stop there. Gravity is one of four fundamental forces in the universe. If the strong nuclear force 
were just a little weaker, no elements other than hydrogen would have been formed following the big bang. If it 
were just a little stronger, all of the hydrogen in the universe would be gone by now, converted into helium and 
heavier elements. Without hydrogen, no sun, no stars, no water." (Miller, K.R., "Finding Darwin's God: A 
Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution," [1999], HarperCollins: New York NY, 2000, 
reprint, p.228)

29/07/2001
"If another fundamental force, electromagnetism, were just a little stronger, electrons would be so tightly bound 
to atoms that the formation of chemical compounds would be impossible. A little weaker, and atoms would 
disintegrate at room temperature. If the resonance level of electrons in the carbon atom were just four percent 
lower, carbon atoms themselves would never have formed in the interiors of stars. No carbon, no life as we 
understand it." (Miller, K.R., "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and 
Evolution," [1999], HarperCollins: New York NY, 2000, reprint, p.228)

29/07/2001
"And perhaps now a bit of personal history is in order. When I first became attracted to Carter's Anthropic 
Principle, I regarded it as a matter of academic interest only. I figured it would be amusing to know the conditions 
required for life to arise in the universe-amusing and probably instructive, but hardly of great significance. At the 
time I was entirely unaware of Henderson's work on the fitness of the environment, and of Wald's long series of 
articles on the subject. But as I read the works of other scientists, I set myself the task of summarizing their 
conclusions in the form of a list, an actual piece of paper sitting before me on the desk. Initially that list occupied 
a scrap torn from a notepad. I kept reading; soon it occupied a more official 8 1/2-by-11 sheet, then several of 
them. The list kept getting longer ... but that was not the point. The point was its strangeness. So many 
coincidences! The more I read, the more I became convinced that such "coincidences" could hardly have 
happened by chance. But as this conviction grew, something else grew as well. Even now it is difficult to express 
this "something" in words. It was an intense revulsion, and at times it was almost physical in nature. I would 
positively squirm with discomfort. The very thought that the fitness of the cosmos for life might be a mystery 
requiring solution struck me as ludicrous, absurd. I found it difficult to entertain the notion without grimacing in 
disgust, and well-nigh impossible to mention it to friends without apology. To admit to fellow scientists that I 
was interested in the problem felt like admitting to some shameful personal inadequacy. Nor has this reaction 
faded over the years: I have had to struggle against it incessantly during the writing of this book. I am sure that 
the same reaction is at work within every other scientist, and that it is this which accounts for the widespread 
indifference accorded the idea at present. And more than that: I now believe that what appears as indifference in 
fact masks an intense antagonism. It was not for some time that I was able to place my finger on the source of my 
discomfort. It arises, I understand now, because the contention that we owe our existence to a stupendous series 
of coincidences strikes a responsive chord. That contention is far too close for comfort to notions such as: We 
are the center of the universe. God loves mankind more than all other creatures. The cosmos is watching over us. 
The universe has a plan; we are essential to that plan." (Greenstein G., "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind 
in the Cosmos," William Morrow & Co: New York NY, 1988, pp.25-26)

29/07/2001
"The major irony of the sequencing of the human genome is that the result turns out not to provide the answer to 
the chief question that motivated the project. Now that we have the complete sequence of the human genome we 
do not, alas, know anything more than we did before about what it is to be human. ... When this so-called 
`annotation' of the human genome was done it was estimated that humans have about 32,000 genes. This seems a 
rather small number when the comparison is made with the fruit fly (13,000), the nematode worm (18,000), and the 
mustard weed (26,000). Can human beings really only have 75 percent more genes than a tiny worm and a mere 25 
percent more than a weed? If, as the eminent molecular biologist Walter Gilbert wrote, a knowledge of the human 
genome would cause `a change in our philosophical understanding of ourselves,' that change has not been quite 
what was hoped for. It appears that we are not much different from vegetables, if we can judge from our 
genomes." (Lewontin, R.C., "After the Genome, What Then?" The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2001)

30/07/2001
"Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot 
be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once 
(though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? 
Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after 
Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a 
century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the 
electromagnetic theory, and so on. The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by scientists 
themselves. Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of species, wrote: "Although I 
am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume..., I by no means expect to convince experienced 
naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a 
point of view directly opposite to mine. ...[B]ut I look with confidence to the future,-to young and rising 
naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality." And Max Planck, surveying his 
own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by 
convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a 
new generation grows up that is familiar with it." These facts and others like them are too commonly known to 
need further emphasis. But they do need re-evaluation. In the past they have most often been taken to indicate 
that scientists, being only human, cannot always admit their errors, even when confronted with strict proof. I 
would argue, rather, that in these matters neither proof nor error is at issue. The transfer of allegiance from 
paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from 
those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of 
scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself. The source of resistance is the 
assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box 
that the paradigm provides." (Kuhn T.S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," [1962], University of Chicago 
Press: Chicago IL, second edition, 1970, pp.151-162. Ellipses in original)

31/07/2001
"In contrast, the statement that organisms have descended with modifications from common ancestors-the 
historical reality of evolution-is not a theory. It is a fact, as fully as the fact of the earth's revolution about the 
sun. Like the heliocentric solar system, evolution began as a hypothesis, and achieved `facthood' as the 
evidence in its favor became so strong that no knowledgeable and unbiased person could deny its reality. No 
biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled `New evidence for evolution;' it simply has not been an 
issue for a century." (Futuyma, D.J., "Evolutionary Biology," [1979], Sinauer Associates: Sunderland MA, Second 
Edition, 1986, p.15)

31/07/2001
"Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either 
falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great 
misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in 
biology: for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a peculiar 'Darwinian' vocabulary-
'adaptation,' 'selection pressure,' 'natural selection,' etc.-thereby believing that they contribute to the 
explanation of natural events. They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we shall be able 
to make real progress in our understanding of evolution. I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked 
the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: How did 
this ever happen?" (Lovtrup S., "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth," 1987, p.422 in Bird W.R., "The Origin of 
Species Revisited," Regency: Nashville TN, 1991, Vol. I, p.40. Emphasis in original)

31/07/2001
"On the sudden Appearance of whole Groups of allied Species The abrupt manner in which whole groups of 
species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists-for instance, by 
Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick-as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous 
species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to 
the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all of 
which are descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors 
must have lived long before their modified descendants." (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)

August [top]
2/08/2001
"So it is not inconsistent to regard ourselves as rational in this sense and also as creatures who have 
been produced through Darwinian evolution. On the other hand, as I have said, the theory of evolution as 
usually understood provides absolutely no support for this. (Nagel T., "The Last Word," Oxford University 
Press: New York NY, 1997, p.138. Emphasis in original)

2/08/2001
"More fossils are always welcome, but unfortunately the designation "common ancestor" is not etched on 
fragments of bones and teeth. In the course of the past century, the discoverer of every new hominid or 
hominoid has nominated it as a potential human ancestor." (Lowenstein J. & Zihlman A., "The Invisible ape," 
New Scientist, Vol. 120, No 1641, 3 December 1988, pp.56-59, p.59)

2/08/2001
"There is another mathematical space filled, not with nine-gened biomorphs but with flesh and blood animals 
made of billions of cells, each containing tens of thousands of genes. This is not biomorph space but real genetic 
space. The actual animals that have ever lived on Earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could 
exist. These real animals are the products of a very small number of evolutionary trajectories through genetic 
space. The vast majority of theoretical trajectories through animal space give rise to impossible monsters. Real 
animals are dotted around here and there among the hypothetical monsters, each perched in its own unique place 
in genetic hyperspace. Each real animal is surrounded by a little cluster of neighbours, most of whom have never 
existed, but a few of whom are its ancestors, its descendants and its cousins. Sitting somewhere in this huge 
mathematical space are humans and hyenas, amoebas and aardvarks, flatworms and squids, dodos and 
dinosaurs. In theory, if we were skilled enough at genetic engineering, we could move from any point in animal 
space to any other point. From any starting point we could move through the maze in such a way as to recreate 
the dodo, the tyrannosaur and trilobites. If only we knew which genes to tinker with, which bits of chromosome 
to duplicate, invert or delete. I doubt if we shall ever know enough to do it, but these dear dead creatures are 
lurking there forever in their private corners of that huge genetic hypervolume, waiting to be found if we but had 
the knowledge to navigate the right course through the maze." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], 
Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.73)

2/08/2001
"Gillespie shows that what Darwin was doing was trying to replace the creationist paradigm by a positivist 
paradigm, a view of the world in which there was neither room nor necessity for final causes. Of course, Gillespie 
takes it for granted that Darwin and his disciples succeeded in this task. He takes it for granted that a rationalist 
view of nature has replaced an irrational one and of course, I myself took that view about eighteen months ago. 
Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some 
way. From my new viewpoint, some of Gillespie's comments on pre-Darwinian creationism seem to be strikingly 
apt, but they are apt because when I transposed them from the period he is talking about (1850s to today) - Here 
is one quote from Gillespie's book: "The old scientific epic scene has sanctioned, or so it appears from the new 
perspective, a pseudo-paradigm that was not a research-governing theory. ... an anti-theory, a void that had the 
function of knowledge but as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none." Here Gillespie is 
characterising the old pre-Darwinian creationist paradigm. But I feel that what he says could just as well be 
applied to evolutionary theory today. ... Gillespie also said that creationism is an anti-theory, a void that has the 
function of knowledge but conveys none. Well, what about evolution? It certainly has the function of knowledge 
but does it convey any? Well we're back to the question that I've been putting to people. "Is there any one thing 
you can tell me about evolution?" The absence of answers seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not 
convey any knowledge or if so, I haven't yet heard of it." (Patterson, C., "Evolutionism and Creationism," 
Transcript of Address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5, 1981, p.2)

3/08/2001
"But anatomy and the fossil record cannot be relied on for defining evolutionary lineages. Yet palaeontologists 
persist in doing just this. They rally under the banner of a methodology called cladistics, in which family trees of 
living and fossil primates are constructed on the basis of "primitive" and "derived" traits (mostly of teeth and 
bones), which are either shared or not shared. Shared primitive characteristics are shared because they come from 
a common ancestor; unshared derived characteristics reveal separate evolutionary paths. The subjective element 
in this approach to building evolutionary trees, which many palaeontologists advocate with almost religious 
fervour, is demonstrated by the outcome: there is no single family tree on which they agree. On the contrary, 
almost every conceivable combination and permutation of living and extinct hominoids has been proposed by 
one cladist or another." (Lowenstein J. & Zihlman A., "The Invisible ape," New Scientist, Vol. 120, No 1641, 3 
December 1988, pp.56-59, p.58)

4/08/2001
"Goldschmidt began his book The Material Basis of Evolution (1940), with a challenge to the modern synthesis. 
It may be able to explain the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest: `I may 
challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the 
evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in 
birds, segmentation in arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of the gill arches in phylogeny including 
the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of molluscs, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood 
circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral systems of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, 
cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and finally chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. 
hemocyanin ...' [Goldschmidt R.B., "The Material Basis of Evolution," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 
1940, pp.6-7] Goldschmidt claimed that new species did not arise from the mechanisms of microevolution, and 
that population genetics was unable to explain new types of structures that involve several components 
changing simultaneously. Such macroevolutionary change "requires another evolutionary method than that of 
sheer accumulation of micromutations." (Gilbert S.F., "Developmental Biology," Sinauer Associates: Sunderland 
MA, Fourth Edition, 1994, p.855. Emphasis in original)

4/08/2001
"Thus Denton places a designer god at the origin of a lawful universe which then reliably (and non-Darwinianly) 
turns out human-capped evolutionary series throughout its furthest reaches; and Behe fits his god into a once-
only, albeit large, gap within earth's evolutionary history to create an original cell so stuffed with genetic 
information as to produce all of evolution by its mere unfolding. Neither theory is without its problems and, in 
any case, I would have thought that once given the need for the real design of living machines the idea of a 
tinkering god of the gaps is as good as any. In fact I would like to incite both Denton and Behe to consider this 
hypothesis as the one which best accords with their fundamental belief in the purpose of the universe and to that 
end encourage them to see the phrase "god of the gaps" as nothing more than a question-begging insult meant 
to stop the flow of argument before it has barely started. For it might well be, bearing in mind our earlier 
distinction between the fitness of matter for desirable organic design and the means for achieving it, that even an 
omnipotent god could not create things both ever so fit in this sense and also with the capacity all by themselves 
to get together in a best result. If the effort expended in making these potentially nicely fitting bits of the cosmic 
jigsaw is not to be wasted, the "god" might have to intervene to do some of the fitting." (Olding A., "Maker of 
Heaven and Microbiology," Quadrant, Vol. 44, January - February 2000, pp.62-68, p.68. Emphasis in 
original)

4/08/2001
"Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery; commonly new higher categories 
appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional ancestral forms." (Raup D.M. & Stanley 
S.M., "Principles of Paleontology," [1971], W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1978, Second Edition, p.372)

5/08/2001
"But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the 
bargain. Theology says to you in effect, `Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will 
ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.' The philosophy which forbids you 
to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, 
to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature's claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful 
occasions. Give as this ha'porth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make 
Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. 
You get the deadlock as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement which leaves the scientist free to 
continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers." (Lewis C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary 
Study," [1947], Fontana: London, 1960, Revised edition, 1963, reprint, p.110. Emphasis in original)

6/08/2001
"In part, the role of paleontology in evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, 
tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record 
is of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of analysis meaningfully at the level of the 
species. Such analysis shows that many ideas now enjoying widespread support among biologists are in need of 
reexamination." (Stanley S.M., "Macroevolution: Pattern and Process," [1979], The Johns Hopkins University 
Press, Baltimore MD, 1998, reprint, p.1)

7/08/2001
"Stanley Miller and others have attempted to prepare amino acids under the new conditions. The ratio of 
hydrogen (H2) to carbon dioxide (CO2) is a crucial variable. When this falls below 1, as the above example 
specifies, only glycine is produced, in trace amounts, but no other amino acid. Miller has been quite frank in his 
statements: "There are difficulties in maintaining H2/CO2 ratios greater than 1.0 [for the early earth] because of 
the escape of H2 from the atmosphere. Adequate sources of H2 maintain this ratio are possible but difficult to 
justify." Elsewhere he notes: "If it is assumed that amino acids more complex than glycine were required for the 
origin of life, then these results indicate a need for CH4 [methane] in the atmosphere."It is the Oparin-Haldane 
hypothesis, actually, that requires methane in the atmosphere. If this gas or other reducing substances were 
absent, it would mean that some other course of events, not described by the theory, led to the origin of life. This 
distinction has been missed, however, by some supporters of the hypothesis. The astronomer Manfred 
Schidlowsky stated at a 1977 meeting, for example: `The very fact that life sprang up on Earth constitutes 
conclusive proof of a primary reducing environment since the latter is a necessary prerequisite for chemical 
evolution and spontaneous origin of life.' And a 1983 biochemistry text edited by Geoffrey Zubay contains the 
following statement: `The primitive atmosphere must have contained reducing equivalents in some form to yield 
amino acids, since no biomolecules or their precursors are formed when a mixture of carbon dioxide, water, and 
nitrogen is sparked.' We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact by some, and 
possible contrary evidence is shunted aside. This condition, of course, again describes mythology rather than 
science." (Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 
1986, p.112)

8/08/2001
"But even Huxley, who called himself 'Darwin's bulldog' and was the most vigorous defender of Darwin's work in 
the later nineteenth century, did not believe that natural selection had been demonstrated as the primary 
mechanism of evolutionary change. Because natural selection had not been subjected to experimental proof, 
Huxley and others withheld wholehearted assent, and even Darwin began to search for additional mechanisms." 
(Leakey, R.E., "The Illustrated Origin of Species By Charles Darwin," Faber and Faber: London, 1979, p.11)

8/08/2001
"There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire 
of folly. 'Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does through final cause, link material and moral; and 
yet does not allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, and our classification of such laws, whether 
we consider one side of nature or the other. You have ignored this link; and, if I do not mistake your meaning, 
you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not) 
to break it, humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a 
lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history." 
(Sedgwick A., letter to Darwin, C.R., November 1859, in Darwin F., ed., "The Life of Charles Darwin," [1902], 
Senate: London, 1995, reprint, p.217)

9/08/2001
"But while the sequence of fossils seemed to possess a directional quality, with simpler plants and animals 
appearing before more complicated forms, and the fossils of more recent strata bearing a closer resemblance to 
living species geologists before Darwin did not place an evolutionary interpretation on their findings. There were 
three main scientific reasons for this. In the first place, the earliest known fossils were relatively complicated 
animals-mostly marine invertebrates such as molluscs and crustaceans. Geologists of the 1830S were convinced 
that they had discovered the dawn of life in this strata, called the Cambrian, and no hypothesis save special 
creation was deemed adequate to account for the sudden appearance of Cambrian fossils. Rocks older than the 
Cambrian were, so it seemed, completely devoid of fossils. In the second place, the various strata each generally 
had its own characteristic fossil flora and fauna and the transitions between strata were abrupt. This suggested 
to geologists the probability of successive wholesale creations and extinctions. Indeed, one common way of 
reconciling Genesis and geology was to assume that the Biblical story referred only to the final creation of 
present plants and animals, including, of course, man himself." (Leakey, R.E., "The Illustrated Origin of Species 
By Charles Darwin," Faber and Faber: London, 1979, p.14)

9/08/2001
"This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, 
as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate 
and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is 
apparently also true of analogous categories of plants. Among genera and species some apparent regularity of 
absence of transitional types is clearly a taxonomic artifact: artificial divisions between taxonomic units are for 
practical reasons established where random gaps exist. This does not adequately explain the systematic 
occurrence of the gaps between larger units. In the cases of the gaps that are artifacts, the effect of discovery 
has been to reveal their random nature and has tended to fill in now one, now another-now from the ancestral, 
and now from the descendent side. In most cases discoveries relating to the major breaks have produced a more 
or less tenuous extension backward of the descendent groups, leaving the probable contact with the ancestry a 
sharp boundary. None of these large breaks has actually been filled by real, continuous sequences of fossils, 
although many of them can be exactly located and the transitions described by inference from the improved 
record on both sides. In addition to the fact that they exist, there are other more or less systematic features of 
these discontinuities of record that call for attention and require explanation." (Simpson, G.G., "Tempo and Mode 
in Evolution," Columbia University Press: New York NY, 1944, Third Printing, 1949, pp.107-109)

9/08/2001
"Expectation colored perception to such an extent that the most obvious single fact about biological evolution-
nonchange-has seldom, if ever, been incorporated into anyone's scientific notions of how life actually evolves. If 
ever there was a myth, it is that evolution is a process of constant change. The data, or basic observations, of 
evolutionary biology are full of the message of stability. Change is difficult and rare, rather than inevitable and 
continual. Once evolved, species with their own peculiar adaptations, behaviors, and genetic systems are 
remarkably conservative, often remaining unchanged for several millions of years." (Eldredge N. & Tattersall I., 
"The Myths of Human Evolution," Columbia University Press, 1982, p.3)

9/08/2001
"THE ORIGIN of life was necessarily the beginning of organic evolution and it is among the greatest of all 
evolutionary problems. Yet its discussion here will be brief, almost parenthetical. Our concern here is with the 
record of evolution, and there is no known record bearing closely on the origin of life. The first living things were 
almost certainly microscopic in size and not apt for any of the usual processes of fossilization. It is unlikely that 
any preserved trace of them will ever be found, or recognized." (Simpson, G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A 
Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1949, 
Reprinted, 1960, p.14)

10/08/2001
"The levels to which these conclusions apply without modification are approximately those discussed as macro-
evolution (under that or an equivalent term) by neozoologists and biologists. On still higher levels, those of what 
is here called "mega-evolution", the inferences might still apply, but caution is enjoined, because here essentially 
continuous transitional sequences are not merely rare, but are virtually absent. These large discontinuities are 
less numerous, so that paleontological examples of their origin should also be less numerous; but their absence 
is so nearly universal that it cannot, offhand, be imputed entirely to chance and does require some attempt at 
special explanation, as has been felt by most paleontologists." (Simpson, G.G., "Tempo and Mode in Evolution," 
Columbia University Press: New York NY, 1944, Third printing, 1949, pp.105-106)

11/08/2001
"Above the level of the virus, if that be granted status as an organism, the simplest living unit is almost 
incredibly complex. It has become commonplace to speak of evolution from ameba to man, as if the ameba were a 
natural and simple beginning of the process. On the contrary, if, as must almost necessarily be true short of 
miracles, life arose as a living molecule or protogene, the progression from this stage to that of the ameba is at 
least as great as from ameba to man." (Simpson, G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life 
and of its Significance for Man," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1949, Reprinted, 1960, pp.15-16)

11/08/2001
"It used to be said that the fossil record is patchy, and therefore very incomplete, and one still finds this old 
excuse appearing in modern biological texts. Yet by consulting geologists one learns otherwise. For example, 
G.M. Bennison and A.E. Wright write as follows: `Over a century ago Charles Darwin expressed disappointment 
that the fossil record provided less support for the theory of evolution than might be hoped for. Since that time 
vast numbers of fossils have been found and many new species and genera described, although the number of 
examples of fossil lineages which demonstrate evolutionary changes in detail is still small. How adequately 
represented [in the fossil record] are organisms which formerly existed on Earth? A.B. Shaw has examined the 
statistical probability of organisms being found in the fossil record. (Shaw, A.B., "Time in Stratigraphy," McGraw-
Hill, New York NY, 1964) It is clear that, if one individual in a million of a particular species was fossilized, there is 
a high probability verging on certainty that if the species survived for only a million years specimens would be 
found. With marine dwelling animals the chance of fossilization is probably better than one in a million and in 
those species known as common fossils, which often occur crowded on bedding planes, considerably better 
[than one in a million].'" (Bennison, G.M. & Wright, A.E., "The Geological History of the British Isles," Edward 
Arnold, London, 1969, in Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Evolution from Space," [1981], Paladin: London, 
1983, reprint, p.85)

11/08/2001
"Insect wings occur in pairs, developed out of the triply segmented tubular structure known as the thorax. They 
are stiffened by veins in which there is a characteristic pattern of air channels used for respiration-i.e. along 
which atmospheric oxygen diffuses to the interior regions of the insects. These 'tracheae' and the veins which 
contain them have a consistency of pattern from one insect order to another which suggests to entomologists 
that all the lines of Figure 6.4 were derived from a common stock. However, the chitinous bodies of insects enable 
them to be well-preserved in the fossil record ... The lack of specimens from the presumed lower, connecting 
branches of Figure 6.4 is therefore hard to understand, especially in view of the very large insect populations. It 
is particularly remarkable that no forms with the wings at an intermediate stage of development have been found. 
Where fossil insects have wings at all they are fully functional to serve the purposes of flight, and often enough 
in ancient fossils the wings are essentially identical to what can be found today. Nor are there intermediate forms 
between the two kinds of wings, those of the Paleoptera held aloft or permanently at the side as in mayflies and 
dragonflies respectively, and those of the Neoptera with a flexing mechanism enabling the wings to be folded 
back into a resting position across the abdomen." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Evolution from Space," 
[1981], Paladin: London, 1983, reprint, pp.89-91)

12/08/2001
"Entertaining as this may be, the prognosis for Darwinism is now very poor. We can only explain the absence of 
intermediate insect forms in the fossil record either by supposing the different insect orders to be of 
separate origin or by arguing that the divergencies from the common stock indicated at the base of Figure 
6.4 took place with extreme rapidity. Only the second of these possibilities is consistent with Darwinism, yet rapid 
evolution is just what Darwinism cannot achieve." (Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Evolution from Space," 
[1981], Paladin: London, 1983, reprint, pp.91-92. Emphasis in original)

13/08/2001
"There is a better reason for studying zoology than its possible 'usefulness', and the general likeableness of 
animals. This reason is that we animals are the most complicated and perfectly-designed pieces of machinery in 
the known universe." (Dawkins, R., "The Selfish Gene," [1976] Oxford University Press: Oxford 1989, New Edition, 
p.vi)

15/08/2001
"For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without evoking the necessity of design. One cannot be 
exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it 
all. In the world round us, we can behold the obvious manifestations of an ordered, structured plan or design. 
We can see the will of the species to live and propagate. And we are humbled by the powerful forces at work on 
a galactic scale, and the purposeful orderliness of nature that endows a tiny and ungainly seed with the ability to 
develop into a beautiful flower. The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all it harbors, the 
more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based." (von Braun W., Letter to the 
California State board of Education, September 14, 1972)

16/08/2001
"While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside 
of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the 
universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion-that everything in the 
universe happened by chance-would violate the very objectivity of science itself." (von Braun W., Letter to the 
California State board of Education, September 14, 1972)

16/08/2001
"So true is this that the ordinary educated man of today sees no third choice between the `scientific ideas' of the 
late nineteenth century and the `obscurantism and superstition of the Middle Ages.' One can imagine him 
saying: `You are not a Darwinist?-You must be a Fundamentalist.' `Not a believer in economic causation?-You 
must be a mystical Tory.' `Not a materialist?-You must be an idealist.' The implication is that if you are all of the 
latter things you must be on the side of ignorance, folly, and `reaction.' And since these are justly dreaded evils, 
any critique of scientific materialism must be an attack on right reason." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: 
Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Revised Second Edition, Doubleday Anchor: Garden City NY, 1958, p.15)

16/08/2001
"Although the relationship of the rhipidistians to the amphibians will be discussed in greater detail in the next 
chapter, it should be said here that none of the known fishes is thought to be directly ancestral to the earliest 
land vertebrates. Most of them lived after the first amphibians appeared, and those that came before show no 
evidence of developing the stout limbs and ribs that characterized the primitive tetrapods. While paleontologists 
hope to find remains of the rhipidistian line in which these structures evolved, they have no intention of 
neglecting the history of the other members of the group." (Stahl B.J., "Vertebrate history: Problems in 
Evolution," [1974], Dover: New York NY, Revised Edition, 1985, p.148)

17/08/2001
"It is but fair to say that Darwin himself soon began to have doubts about the universal efficacy of natural 
selection. Just before the publication of the Origin of Species his faith in it was so strong that he believed a slight 
adaptive variation in a single trait would turn the scale in favor of survival. But as early as 1862 he had begun to 
waver, and by 1865 he talked increasingly of the direct action of the environment and of use and disuse as 
factors of change. Successive editions of the Origin of Species tried to coordinate these doubts and shifts of 
opinion." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Revised Second Edition, Doubleday 
Anchor: Garden City NY, 1958, p.60)

19/08/2001
"There we are back at the beginning. That critic was both right and wrong. Locke, in the Reasonableness of 
Christianity, had driven the call for a simple, an optimistic, a philosophical, and a reasonable piety, to as great 
lengths as it would go: he indicated that all a Christian need believe-but this he must believe-is that Christ is the 
Messiah. This was not much; it was too little for most Christians. But it was not yet deism. In this sense the critic
wrong. But in the sense that it was indeed too little for most Christians, and that while the step from Locke to 
Toland was across an abyss it was still only a single, and not very surprising step, the critic was right. Liberal 
Protestantism was not deism, but it helped to make deism inevitable."
(Gay, P., "Deism: An Anthology," D. Van Nostrand Co: Princeton NJ, 1968, pp.25-26)

20/08/2001
"One difficulty with Darwinism, voiced by many students of the subject, is that it amounts to little more than a 
tautology providing no real predictive or explanatory power." (Steele, E.J., "Somatic Selection and Adaptive 
Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," [1979], University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Second 
Edition, 1981, p.1)

20/08/2001
"Some people say that science has been unable to prove the existence of a Designer. They admit that many of 
the miracles in the world around us are hard to understand, and they do not deny that the universe, as modern 
science sees it, is indeed a far more wondrous thing than the creation medieval man could perceive. But they still 
maintain that since science has provided us with so many answers the day will soon arrive when we will be able 
to understand even the creation of the fundamental laws of nature without a Divine intent. They challenge 
science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?" (von Braun W., < A HREF="http://www.creationsafaris.com/wgcs_4vonbraun.htm">Letter to 
the California State board of Education, September 14, 1972)

21/08/2001
"It was not even a question of dropping natural selection, for natural selection is an observed fact. It was a 
question of seeing - as Darwin came to see-that selection occurs after the useful change has come into 
being: therefore natural selection can cause nothing but the elimination of the unfit, not the production of the fit. 
To use once again the analogy of the shotmaker's slide, the perfectly round shot have to be made before they 
can be selected, and it is nonsense to say that it is their trial on the slide that makes them round. The nonsense, 
however, captivated a generation of thinkers whose greatest desire was to get rid of vitalism, will, purpose, or 
design as explanations of life, and to substitute for them an automatic material cause. They saw adaptation and 
utility, but they wished to explain them both by unintentional necessity." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: 
Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Revised Second Edition, Doubleday Anchor: Garden City NY, 1958, p.62. 
Emphasis in original)

21/08/2001
"In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which 
has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only 
the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of the additional Christian terminology. This 
modern non-redemptive religion is called "modernism" or "liberalism." Both names are unsatisfactory; the latter, 
in particular, is question-begging. The movement designated as "liberalism" is regarded as liberal" only by its 
friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts. And indeed the movement 
is so various in its manifestations that one may almost despair of finding any common name which will apply to 
all its forms. But manifold as are the forms in which the movement appears, the root of the movement is one; the 
many varieties of modern liberal religion are looted in naturalism - that is, in the denial of any entrance of the 
creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of 
Christianity." (Machen J.G., "Christianity and Liberalism," [1923], Victory Press: London, 1968, reprint, p.2)

22/08/2001
"Evolution, then, is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we are. It 
influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official 
function as a biological theory." (Midgley M., "Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears," 
[1985], Methuen: London, 1986, reprint, p.30)

23/08/2001
"Many men who are intelligent and of good faith say they cannot visualize a Designer. Well, can a physicist 
visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet it is so perfectly known through its effects 
that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate 
measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while 
refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him? I am afraid that, 
although they really do not understand the electron either, they are ready to accept it because they managed to 
produce a rather clumsy mechanical model of it borrowed from rather limited experience in other fields, but they 
would not know how to begin building a model of God." (von Braun W., Letter to the California State board of 
Education, September 14, 1972)

23/08/2001
"Although it [Darwinism] may account to some extent for the diversity and abundance of cells or organisms, 
there remains a suspicion that it provides no satisfactory explanation for our intuitive belief that there appears to 
be an element of "directional" progress in the complexity and sophistication of adapted living forms." (Steele, E.J., 
"Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," [1979], University of 
Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Second Edition, 1981, p.1)

24/08/2001
"More adequate is the position termed progressive creationism. According to this view, God created in a series 
of acts over a long period of time. He created the first member of each "kind." That grouping may have been as 
broad as the order or as narrow as the genus. In some cases it may have extended to the creation of individual 
species. From that first member of the group, the others developed by evolution. So, for example, God may have 
created the first member of the cat family. From it developed lions, tigers, leopards, and just plain pussycats. 
Then God created another kind. There may well have been overlaps between the periods of development, so that 
new species within one kind were continuing to arise after God created the first member of the next kind. Note 
that between the various kinds there are gaps not bridged by the evolutionary development." (Erickson M.J., 
"Christian Theology," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 1985, pp.383-384)

25/08/2001
"... there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word "day" is not used in its literal sense; while the 
other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen 1:5 - "God called the 
light Day" - a day before there was a sun; 8 - "there was evening and there was morning, a second day"; 2:2 - 
God "rested on the seventh day"; cf. Heb. 4:3-10 - where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are 
exhorted to enter into it; Gen. 2:4 - "the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven" -"day" here covers all the 
seven days ..."
(Strong A.H., "Systematic Theology," [1907], Judson Press: Valley Forge PA, 1967, reprint, p.394)

28/08/2001
"There is a constant interplay of the organism and the environment, so that although natural selection may be 
adapting the organism to a particular set of environmental circumstances, the evolution of the organism itself 
changes those circumstances. ... If ecological niches can be specified only by the organisms that occupy them, 
evolution cannot be described as a process of adaptation because all organisms are already adapted. Then what 
is happening in evolution?" (Lewontin, R.C., "Adaptation," Scientific American, Vol. 239, No. 3, September 1978, 
pp.157-169, p.159)

28/08/2001
"The relation between adaptation and natural selection does not go both ways. Whereas greater relative 
adaptation leads to natural selection, natural selection does not necessarily lead to greater adaptation."
(Lewontin, R.C., "Adaptation," Scientific American, Vol. 239, No. 3, September 1978, pp.157-169, p.166)

28/08/2001
"As it became clear that the Darwinian theory could not be broadly correct, a question still remained, however, 
for I found it difficult to accept that the theory could be wholly incorrect. When ideas are based on observations, 
as the Darwinian theory certainly is, it is usual for those ideas to be valid at least within the range of the 
observations. It is when extrapolations are made outside the range of observations that troubles may arise. So 
the issue that presented itself was to determine just how far the theory was valid and exactly why beyond a 
certain point it became invalid. The issue was a mathematical one ... and I thought at first that it might be settled 
the easy way, by reading in the literature and in classic texts on mathematical genetics. My experience proved 
unrewarding. After a session with `the books,' I would retreat, baffled. The mathematics was never difficult in 
itself. It was the words in which the mathematics was shrouded .... At first I took the fault to be mine, but as the 
frustrating sessions were repeated again and again over a period of years, I came to suspect that the confusion 
was in the heads of the writers themselves. Eventually therefore, I decided to tackle this mathematics myself 
working de novo .... Although my results were all arrived at independently, some-perhaps most-have been 
obtained before. Their arrangement, however, is I believe original. ... And the outcome of this essay? Well as 
common sense would suggest, the Darwinian theory is correct in the small but not in the large. Rabbits come 
from other slightly different rabbits, not from either soup or potatoes. Where they came from in the first place is a 
problem yet to be solved, like much else of a cosmic scale." (Hoyle F., "Mathematics of Evolution", [1987], Acorn 
Enterprises: Memphis TN, 1999, pp.5-6)

29/08/2001
"Scientifically, and in entire loyalty to the biblical record, the narrative can be understood as follows. The cradle 
of civilization in which the action took place was the flood plain of the great rivers of the Euphrates-Tigris 
system, an area about 400 miles long and 180 miles broad (650 km by 300 km). To east and west the land rises to 
elevated plateaux, and to the north to the high mountains of the kingdom of Ararat (Urartu) near Lake Van. The 
flooding was caused by torrential rain occurring simultaneously with huge tidal waves from the Persian Gulf, 
perhaps caused by submarine earthquakes ('the windows of heaven' and 'the fountains of the great deep'). The 
waters surged over the river plain, covering all human settlements; even the high points of the plain were 
submerged ('fifteen cubits deep above the mountains'). As the Ark was borne up and carried northward towards 
the high ground of Ararat, whichever way the occupants looked out there was nothing but water ('under the 
whole heavens). Eventually the Ark grounded in the foothills of Ararat, a resting place not located with any great 
precision. The raven found the sodden land to its liking; the softer dove preferred to wait till things were more 
hospitable. As a wind continued to drive the waters back and the land became dry, the human occupants 
emerged and civilization began again around a new centre. This schema may not be the only possible 
interpretation of the text on the physical level; but it shows at least that the narrative is scientifically credible." 
(Spanner D.C., "Biblical Creation and the Theory of Evolution," Paternoster: Exeter, Devon UK, 1987, p.145)

29/08/2001
"If we consider many complex multicellular organisms however (say, the vertebrates), a somewhat different 
adaptive "solution" appears to be required. A good example is Bateson's hypothetical pre-giraffe: `The 
hypothetical pre-giraffe with the mutant gene 'long neck' will need to modify not only its heart and circulatory 
system but also perhaps its semicircular canals, its intervertebral discs, its postural reflexes, the ratio of length 
and thickness of many muscles, its evasive tactics vis-a-vis predators, etc.' (Bateson G., "The Role of Somatic 
Change in Evolution," Evolution, 1963, 17:529-539). Thus, a crucial problem of the hereditary adaptation process 
is that one "important" change can be expressed usefully in the organism (i.e., possess Darwinian survival value) 
only if additional harmonious adjustments are also made in other parts of the body." (Steele, E.J., "Somatic 
Selection and Adaptive Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," [1979], University of Chicago 
Press: Chicago IL, Second Edition, 1981, p.3)

30/08/2001
"Darwin changed evolution from an idea to a theory. In so doing, he made it more powerful, more convincing, 
and more appealing. However, in seizing upon the new scientific evolution-the theory of natural selection-many 
have disregarded the limitations of scientific theory and dragged it into areas where little empirical support was 
available. Darwinism was unshackled from the constraints of data and transformed into a social-political 
philosophy." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory," The University of 
Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, pp.xi-xii)

30/08/2001
"Because of their habits, bats like birds were not commonly interred in sediments and fossilized. Therefore the 
history of these mammals is inadequately known, even though bats are numerous being among recent mammals 
second only to the rodents in numbers, both of species and of individuals, and of world-wide distribution in 
modern times. These, the only mammals to have mastered true flight, probably originated at a relatively early 
date, and they must have experienced an initial stage of very rapid evolution, because the first known bats of 
Eocene age, as particularly exemplified by the type of Icaronycteris, a beautifully preserved skeleton from 
Wyoming, were highly developed and not greatly different from their modern relatives. There are no known 
intermediate stages between bats and insectivores." (Colbert E.H. & Morales M., "Evolution of the Vertebrates: 
A History of the Backboned Animals Through Time," [1955], John Wiley & Sons: New York NY, Fourth edition, 
1990, Second printing, 1992, p.265)

31/08/2001
"Darwin's theory has spawned ideas and movements that range from the bizarre and murderous, such as Nazi 
Aryanism, to the simply aphoristic, as in advertising and sports references to "survival of the fittest." Darwin and 
evolution also have generated several compelling myths, including the unlikely but entertaining story of his 
recantation of evolution on his deathbed in 1882. In that story, the evangelist Lady Elizabeth Hope claimed to 
have sat at Darwin's side as he praised scripture and lamented the fact that his ideas had been taken seriously. 
Another myth is more believable: that of Thomas Huxley's intellectual and moral triumph over theological 
conservatism, as represented by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and 
Misuses of a Theory," The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, p.xii)

September [top]
1/09/2001
"But suppose that cells could not have originally arisen by purely natural means. In that case the initiating of the 
cell line-the line whose products, properties and reproductive processes are purely natural and exhibit no direct 
evidences of design-would embody direct design. That could occur in a number of ways. For instance, it might 
involve the direct, complete, de novo originating of an ancestor cell from which all other cells descended by 
purely ordinary means. Or it might involve constructing specially designed "artificial" conditions from which the 
ancestor cell itself could arise. For instance, suppose that we finally discover that life can arise spontaneously 
but only under exactly one set of conditions. One must begin with 4003.6
gallons of eight specific, absolutely pure chemicals, exactly proportioned down to the molecule. The mixture must 
then be sealed into a large, light green Tupperware container with one sterile copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely 
Hearts Club Band." Do that, and life develops spontaneously by natural means (catalyzed by the precise surface 
characteristics of "Sgt. Pepper"). Its development, subsequent reproductions and characteristics are completely 
according to normal natural laws. And life in this case was not directly specially created. But those initial 
conditions involve interjection of deliberate intent and design with a vengeance."
(Ratzsch D.*, "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," in Dembski W.A., ed., "Mere Creation: Science, Faith & 
Intelligent Design," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, p.291)

3/09/2001
"Theoretically Earth should have an atmosphere heavier and thicker than that of Venus, but in fact it has a 
far lighter and much thinner atmosphere. The solution to this mystery apparently lies with Earth's moon. 
Most moons in our solar system are formed from the same solar disk material that generated the planets. As 
such, they are relatively small compared to their planets. A few moons orbiting the outer planets are foreign 
bodies that have been captured. Earth's moon, however, is the exception. It orbits a planet that is close to 
the sun, and it is huge compared to its planet. The moon is younger than Earth. According to the Apollo 
lunar rock samples, it is only 4.25 billion years old, compared to Earth's 4.59 billion years. The same lunar 
rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts tell us that the moon's crust is chemically distinct from Earth's. Its 
distinct chemical makeup and its younger age establish that the moon and Earth did not form together. 
Astronomers have seen and measured the moon's slow and steady spiraling away from Earth and the 
slowing of Earth's rotation. Their calculations suggest that the moon was in contact or near contact with 
Earth about 4.25 billion years ago. This implies some kind of collision or near collision at that time. Only one 
collision scenario fits all the observed Earth-moon parameters and dynamics: a body at least the size of Mars 
(nine times the mass of the moon and one-ninth the mass of Earth), possibly twice as large, made a nearly 
head-on hit and was absorbed, for the most part, into Earth's core. Such a collision would have blasted 
almost all of Earth's original atmosphere into outer space. The shell, or cloud of debris, arising from the 
collision would orbit Earth and eventually coalesce to form our moon. This remarkable event, if it occurred 
as the evidence indicates, delivered Earth from a life-suffocating atmosphere and produced a replacement 
atmosphere thin enough and of the right chemical composition to permit the passage of light to Earth's 
surface. It increased the mass and density of Earth enough to retain (by gravity a large quantity of water 
vapor (molecular weight 18) for billions of years, but not so high as to keep life-threatening quantities of 
ammonia (molecular weight, 17) and methane(molecular weight, 16). It so elevated the iron content of Earth's 
crust as to permit a huge abundance of ocean life (the quantity of iron, a critical nutrient, determines the 
abundance and diversity of marine algae, which form the base of the food chain for all ocean life), which in 
turn permits advanced land life. It played a significant role in salting Earth's crust with a huge abundance of 
radioisotopes, the heat from which drives most of Earth's exceptionally high rates of tectonics and 
vulcanism. (Heavy elements from the body colliding with Earth were largely transferred to Earth whereas the 
light elements were either dissipated to the interplanetary medium or transferred to the cloud that would 
eventually form the moon.) It gradually slowed Earth's rotation rate so that a wide variety of lower life-forms 
could survive long enough to sustain the existence of advanced life-forms, which required still slower 
rotation rates. It stabilized the tilt of Earth's rotation axis, protecting the planet from life-extinguishing 
climatic extremes. In summary, this amazing collision, for which we have an abundance of circumstantial 
evidence, appears to have been perfectly timed and designed to transform Earth from a formless and empty" 
place into a site where life could survive and thrive. In fact, the number of conditions that must be fine-
tuned-and the degree of finetuning needed for each of these conditions-for life to possibly survive that is 
manifested in this single event argues powerfully on its own for a divine Creator. Even if the universe 
contains as many as 10 billion trillion (1022) planets, we would not expect even ones by 
natural processes alone, to end up with the surface gravity, surface temperature, atmospheric composition, 
atmospheric pressure, crustal iron abundance, tectonics, vulcanism, rotation rate, rate of decline in rotation 
rate, and stable rotation axis tilt necessary for the support of life. To those who express the desire to see a 
miracle, we can assure them they are looking at one whenever they gaze up at the moon." (Ross,H.N.*, "The 
Genesis Question: Scientific Advances and the Accuracy of Genesis," NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 
1998, pp.31-33) 

4/09/2001
"When the Darwinians fought for a hearing, very little moderation was shown on either side, and the triumph of 
Darwinism was commensurate with the noise it made. Once in power the victors could afford to manhandle past 
and present dissenters or, applying a double standard, make all the exceptions in their own favor..." (Barzun J., 
"Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Revised Second Edition, Doubleday Anchor: Garden City 
NY, 1958, p.119)

6/09/2001
"What sceptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and, 
especially important, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like 
the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the 
premises or starting point and whether that premise is true." (Sagan, C.E., "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as 
a Candle in the Dark," [1996], Headline: London, 1997, reprint, p.197. Emphasis in original)

7/09/2001
"Spin more than one hypothesis. If there's something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it 
could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the 
alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among 'multiple 
working hypotheses', has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first 
idea that caught your fancy." (Sagan, C.E., "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," [1996], 
Headline: London, 1997, reprint, p.197. Emphasis in original)

8/09/2001
"Deistic Evolution. Deism does not believe in any supernatural acts or miracles after the initial act of creating the 
material universe out of nothing. As far as the evolutionary process and the production of life forms, including 
human beings, there is no real difference between deistic evolution and naturalistic evolution, which includes 
atheism and agnosticism." (Geisler N.L., "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics," Baker Books: Grand 
Rapids MI, 1999, p.233)

8/09/2001
"I believe this to be a genuinely fundamental restraint facing adaptive evolution. As systems with many parts 
increase both the number of those parts and the richness of interactions among the parts, it is typical that the 
number of conflicting design constraints among the parts increases rapidly. Those conflicting constraints imply 
that optimization can attain only ever poorer compromises. No matter how strong selection may be, adaptive 
processes cannot climb higher peaks than afforded by the fitness landscape. That is, this limitation cannot be 
overcome by stronger selection. ... it is clear that conflicting constraints are a very general limit in adaptive 
evolution. Each part of a complex system costs something. For example, additional genes and proteins require 
metabolic energy. .... This argument shows that there is again a limit on the complexity which can be attained. The 
marginal increase in fitness for the next part must be positive. The complexity-catastrophe due to conflicting 
constraints ... is therefore a general property of complex systems." (Kauffman S.A., "The Origins of Order: Self-
Organization and Selection in Evolution," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, pp.53-54)

10/09/2001
"The only thing more difficult to explain than perfection is repeated perfection by very different animals. A fish 
on a clam's rear end and another front of an anglerfish's nose - the first evolved from a brood pouch and 
outer skin, the second from a fin spine more than doubles the trouble. I have no difficulty defending the origin of 
both "fishes" by evolution. A plausible series of intermediate stages can be identified for Lampsilis. The fact that 
anglerfish press a fin spine into service as a lure reflects the jury-rigged, parts-available principle that made the 
panda's thumb and the orchid's labellum speak so strongly for evolution (see the first essay of this trilogy). But 
Darwinians must do more than demonstrate evolution; they must defend the basic mechanism of random 
variation and natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change. ... But what about the "how?" We 
may know what the fish of Lampsilis and the lure of the anglerfish are for, but how did they arise? This problem 
becomes particularly acute when the final adaptation is complex and peculiar but built from familiar parts of-
different ancestral function. If the angler's fishlike lure required 500 entirely separate modifications to attain its 
exquisite mimicry, then how did the process begin? And why did it continue, unless some non-Darwinian force, 
cognizant of the final goal, drove it on? Of what possible benefit is step one alone? Is a five-hundredth of a fake 
enough to inspire the curiosity of any real item?" (Gould, S.J., "Double Trouble," in "The Panda's Thumb," 
[1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, pp.34,37. Emphasis in original)

11/09/2001
"Unlike most explanations in science, evolutionary explanations are essentially narratives, taking us from a time 
when something didn't exist to a time when it did by a series of steps that the narrative explains." (Dennett, D.C., 
"Consciousness Explained," [1991], Penguin Books: London, 1993, reprint, p.172)

12/09/2001
"I am no longer preoccupied with the nature of absolute foundations, because it does not look as if there are any; 
or with a priori knowledge, because there probably is not any, or with sense data, because that is a mixed-up way 
of thinking about sensory processing. It is doubtful that knowledge in general is sentential; rather, 
representations are typically structures of a quite different sort. Whatever reasoning and information processing 
turn out to be, formal logic is probably not the model, save perhaps for a small part. Decision theory, confirmation 
theory the predicate calculus, etc., beautiful and magnificently clever though they are, do not appear destined to 
play a central part in the theory of how, in fact, human and other nervous systems solve problems and figure 
things out. Inductive logic does not exist, and does not show any positive signs in that direction; 'inference-to-
the-best-explanation' is a name for a problem, not a theory of how humans accomplish some task. Formal 
semantics now looks like a thoroughly misbegotten project which cannot even begin to explain how human 
language is meaningful. ... Consequently, the very concept of truth appears to be in for major reconsideration." 
(Churchland P.S., "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 84, October 1987, 
pp.544-553, p.545)

13/09/2001
"The most fundamental point is that the human brain is a product of evolution. ... There is a fatal tendency to 
think of the brain as essentially in the fact-finding business-as a device whose primary function is to acquire 
propositional knowledge. At its best, supposedly, it discovers truth-for-its-own-sake. From a biological 
perspective, however, this does not make much sense. Looked at from an evolutionary point of view ... a nervous 
system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's; feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. ... 
Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage ... so long as it is geared to the 
organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely 
takes the hindmost." (Churchland P.S., "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 
84, October 1987, pp.544-553, pp.548-549. Emphasis in original)

13/09/2001
"I remark that if the theory of the evolutionist were all conceded, the argument from designed adaptation would 
not be abolished, but only removed one step backward. If we are mistaken in believing that God made every 
living creature that moveth after its kind: if the higher kinds were in fact all developed from the lowest; then the 
question recurs: Who planned and adjusted these wondrous powers of development? Who endowed the cell-
organs of the first living protoplasm with all this fitness for evolution into the numerous and varied wonders of 
animal life and function, so diversified, yet all orderly adaptations? There is a wonder of creative wisdom and 
power, at least equal to that of the Mosaic genesis. That this point is justly taken, appears thus: Those 
philosophers who concede (as I conceive, very unphilosophically and unnecessarily) the theory of "creation by 
law," do not deem that they have thereby weakened the teleological argument in the least. It appears again, in the 
language of evolutionists themselves: When they unfold what they suppose to be the results of this system, 
they utter the words `beautiful contrivance of nature,' `wise adjustment' and such like, involuntarily. This is the 
testimony of their own reason, uttered in spite of a perverse and shallow theory." (Dabney R.L., "Systematic 
Theology," [1871], Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1985, reprint, p.37)

15/09/2001
"This dichotomy extends to mathematical models of evolution. The precision with which they can describe and 
predict simple Mendelian processes or the outcomes of population-growth and competition experiments in glass 
jars proves the reality of the models in artificially simple cases in which factors are few, known, and quantifiable. 
On the other hand, the factors concerned in real cases of organic evolution are more numerous and more difficult 
to identify and measure than the factors that determine weather. Mathematical models of real evolutionary 
processes may therefore be even more wrong than weather predictions But while bad weather predictions are 
promptly falsified by visible events, bad mathematical models of evolution are not, because evolution cannot be 
seen as weather can. So, erroneous models of evolution may be uncritically accepted. This is not just a remote 
possibility but a frightening probability, frightening because the wrong conclusions are likely to be applied to 
man with consequences incomparably more disastrous than having a picnic rained out." (Darlington, P.J., Jr., 
"Evolution for Naturalists: The Simple Principles and Complex Reality," John Wiley & Sons: New York NY, 1980, 
p.40)

15/09/2001
"These were virtues or accidents. But side by side with them were what I shall describe as vices. These, we now 
have to admit, were almost as great a help, almost as valuable a combination in achieving his success, as the 
virtues that accompanied them. By that I mean his public and political success in mass conversion. These vices 
were of three kinds: a conservative outlook in every respect except the evolutionary hypothesis; a failure to 
recognize or to relate his own ideas, his larger ideas, with those of others working in the same field; and a flexible 
strategy which is not to be reconciled with even average intellectual integrity: by contrast with Wallace, Lyell, 
Hooker, Chambers or even Spencer, Darwin was slippery." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," Basil 
Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1959, p.60)

16/09/2001
"Darwin's independence of other people's ideas led him (and his admirers) to think of himself as a man of ideas. It 
led him to copy out the observations from his predecessor's writings while ignoring their theories. His own 
methods nourished his own illusions. He began more and more to grudge praise to those who had in fact paved 
the way for him. We see this very well if we compare him with his contemporaries. Chambers and Naudin both 
praised Lamarck at the same time that both of them rejected him. Darwin damned Lamarck and also his 
grandfather for being very ill-dressed fellows at the same moment that he was engaged on stealing their clothes. 
He ridicules Lamarck's speculations and caps them with his own. He scorns Buffon's 'fluctuating opinions' while 
he himself is fluctuating from one edition to another, even from one chapter to another. And fluctuating with an 
opportunism which he judiciously strives to conceal." (Darlington, 1959, p.62)

17/09/2001
"Darwin also considers the argument that the subject of evolution `was in the air,' `that men's minds were 
prepared for it.' We may note that even if this was so, it would not explain why Darwin was the individual who 
plucked evolution out of the air or how he accomplished the feat. Darwin himself rejected the argument out of 
hand because, as he wrote, he `never happened to come across a single naturalist who seemed to doubt about 
the permanence of species,' and he acknowledged no debt to his predecessors. These are extraordinary 
statements. They cannot be literally true, yet Darwin cannot be consciously lying, and he may therefore be 
judged unconsciously misleading, naive, forgetful, or all three. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, whose 
work Charles knew very well, was a pioneer evolutionist. Darwin was also familiar with the work of Lamarck, and 
had certainly met at least a few naturalists who had flirted with the idea of evolution. He actually specifies one 
elsewhere in the autobiography: a Robert Edmund Grant, professor at the University of London. Of all this 
Darwin says that none of these forerunners had any effect on him. Then, in almost the next breath, he admits that 
hearing evolutionary views supported and praised rather early in life may have favored his upholding them later." 
(Simpson, G.G., "Charles Darwin in search of himself," Scientific American, August 1958, Vol. 199, No. 2, 
pp.117-122, p.119)

18/09/2001
"An essential claim of Darwinism devolves on the ubiquity of organic adaptation. The presumption is that 
physical characteristics have an adaptive value; they were preserved and selected because of their useful 
natures in the struggle for existence. But, in fact, it is easy to see that even in principle Darwinians guard 
themselves against counterarguments. Take something much discussed by evolutionists: the sail on the back of 
the Permian reptile, Dimetrodon. ... The possibility that this may have absolutely no adaptive value is given no 
credence at all, as Darwinians plunge into their favorite parlour game: 'find the adaptational The sail was a 
defense mechanism (it scared predators), or it served for sexual display (not much chance of mistaking someone's 
intentions with that thing along one's backside), or, as many evolutionists (including Raup and Stanley) 
suppose, it worked as a heat-regulating device to keep the cold-blooded Dimetrodon at a more constant 
temperature in the fluctuating environment. The animal would move the sail around in the sunlight and wind, 
heating or cooling the blood it the sail, which could then be passed through to the rest of the body. In short as 
this example shows. There has to be some reason for anything and everything. One can be sure that if the 
Darwinian can think of no potential value in the struggle for existence, then value will be found in the struggle for 
reproduction. Even the most absurd and grotesque of physical features are supposed to have irrepressible 
aphrodisiac qualities. Like the Freudians, Darwinians get a lot of mileage out of sex." (Ruse M., "Darwinism 
Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies," [1982], Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1983, Third Printing, 
pp.134-135)

18/09/2001
"Darwin's difficulty had several aspects. For one thing, the presence of vestigial organs could hardly be 
accounted for by natural selection. It could not be a critical need of the creature to lose useful organs-the toes in 
the flipper of the whale or the eyes of the mole. The more these vestiges suggested evolution, the less they 
supported natural selection. Darwin fell back on the Lamarckian factor of disuse. Then there were differences 
between related species such as the varying number of hairs on the head of certain insects, or the tuft on the 
breast of the wild turkey, which fulfilled no visible purpose. Yet natural selection required life-and-death utility 
before it could come into play, so Darwin had to suppose direct environmental influence a la Buffon or selection 
through sexual preference. In other words Darwin was slowly coming back to some of the positions of the early 
nineteenth-century evolutionists, including his own grandfather's ideas." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: 
Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Doubleday Anchor: Garden City NY, Revised Second Edition, 1958, p.60)

19/09/2001
"The real core of Darwinism, however, is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the 
Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the "design" of the natural theologian, by natural 
means, instead of by divine intervention."(Mayr, E.W., "Foreword," in Ruse M., "Darwinism Defended: A Guide to 
the Evolution Controversies," [1982], Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1983, Third Printing, pp.xi-xii)

20/09/2001
"... thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much function of organ, as bile of liver" (Darwin, C.R., in 
Barrett P.H., et al., eds., "Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844," Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 1987, 
p.614, in Wright R., "The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life," [1994], Vintage Books: 
New York NY, 1995, reprint, p.351)

21/09/2001
"The notion that slow, gentle pressure produces extinction is part of the Darwinian paradigm. In The Origin of 
Species, Darwin used the metaphor of a log of wood with many wedges driven into its surface. Newly driven 
wedges were the newly evolved species. With crowding of wedges (species), each new wedge displaced and 
expelled old ones from the log. The clear implication is that gentle pressure exerted by new and better-adapted 
species leads to the extinction of one or more incumbent species. This idea is appealing and has been learned by 
generations of biology students. But its verification from actual field data is negligible." (Raup D.M., "Extinction: 
Bad Genes or Bad Luck?" [1991], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1993, reprint, pp.184-185)

21/09/2001
"It is one of those fixed images of evolution: adventurous fish managing to hoist themselves onto their stubby 
fins and crawling clumsily out of the swamps to forage for food. Once these primeval creatures were on terra 
firma, their offspring began to adapt to their new environment, natural selection (over tens of millions of years) 
favoring those that developed features well suited to life on land: paws, hooves, knees, joints, fingers and 
thumbs. Thus, as generations of schoolchildren have learned, did these marine creatures give rise to frogs, birds, 
dinosaurs and all the rest. There's only one problem with this familiar version of how our distant ancestors 
emerged from the sea: it's probably wrong. For one thing, the first creatures to waddle ashore were arthropods 
with welldeveloped legs and pincers. For another, newly assembled fossils-in particular, a 360 million-year-old 
salamander-like aquatic animal called Acanthostega- strongly suggest that toes and feet were developed before 
the first relatives of fish climbed onto land, not after. Moreover, in shape and function, Acanthostega's fully 
jointed toes bear no resemblance to the spiky, fanlike fins of a fish. Scientists believe they understand how a 
fish's gills evolved into an amphibian's lungs. But how did fins turn into feet like these?" (Nash, J.M., "Where Do 
Toes Come From?" TIME, August 7,1995, p.68)

21/09/2001
"Clack who works at the University of Cambridge's Museum of Zoology, discovered the bulk of Acanthostega's 
skeleton in 1987 and has been carefully reconstructing it ever since with fellow paleontologist Michael Coates. 
They are just finishing up their monographs on the creature, and some of the conclusions they've drawn from its 
body are surprising other paleontologists. For a long time it was assumed that our limbs and feet, which work so 
well for walking on land, evolved for that exact purpose. But Acanthostega has convinced Clack and Coates 
otherwise; tetrapod anatomy evolved while our ancestors lived exclusively underwater and it evolved for life 
underwater. The first vertebrate that walked onto land didn't crawl on fish fins, it had evolved well-turned legs 
millions of years beforehand." (Zimmer, C., "Coming Onto the Land," Discover, Vol. 16, June 1995, pp.118-127, 
p.120)

21/09/2001
"But in 1987, Ahlberg and Jenny Clack of the University of Cambridge discovered some remarkably complete 
fossils on the barren shores of Greenland. Acanthostega is around the same age as Ichthyostega and is also a 
very primitive tetrapod, forcing the palaeontologists to rethink. Years of painstaking laboratory analysis have 
revealed that Acanthostega looked similar to the panderichthyids, except that it had limbs with digits instead of 
lobe-fins. The big surprise, however, is that this creature would have spent most of its time in the water. "We 
didn't expect to find Acanthostega having such a fish-like gill apparatus," says Coates, who described the 
material with Clack. "While it had lungs, it may not have been obliged to use them. The gill skeleton is an 
important part of our interpretation of Acanthostega as primarily, and primitively, aquatic," he adds." (McLeod, 
M., "One small step for fish, one giant leap for us," New Scientist, Vol. 167, 19 August 2000, p.28)

21/09/2001
"The ability of the lungfishes to breathe air is certainly suggestive of an intermediate stage between fishes and 
land-living vertebrates. (In this connection it is interesting to note that the Australian lungfish is able to `walk' 
along the bottom of the rivers or pools in which it lives by using its paired fins like legs.) Yet in spite of such 
specializations in the lungfishes directed toward a method of surviving out of the water, the total evidence points 
quite clearly to the fact that these vertebrates are not and never have been on the direct line of evolution leading 
from fishes to the first land-living vertebrates. Briefly the lungfishes show too many specializations, even in the 
earliest known stages of their evolutionary history, for vertebrates that might occupy an intermediate position 
along the line from fishes to amphibians." (Colbert, E.H. & Morales, M., "Evolution of the Vertebrates: A History 
of the Backboned Animals Through Time," [1955], John Wiley & Sons: New York NY, Fourth Edition, 1990, 
Second Printing, 1992, pp.62-63)

22/09/2001
"The advocates of creation find in the smallest details of nature signs pointing inevitably to the conclusion that, 
in their minds, is inescapable. The advocates of evolution, on the other hand, seek endlessly in that same nature 
traces of events that often left none, attempting to reconstruct what they want to be not a myth but a history, a 
theory that evolves. This dialogue of the deaf will eternally oppose those who deny a universal and imposed 
vision of the world and those who cannot do without it." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," 
[1970], Trans. Spillmann B.E., Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, p.ix)

22/09/2001
"Yet, although the principles involved in the organization, construction and logic of living systems can now be 
perceived, although their origin can be glimpsed by extrapolation, it is still hard to grasp the series of events that 
led from the organic to the living." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," [1970], Trans. Spillmann 
B.E., Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, p.304)

22/09/2001
"A final, obvious question. What about the Darwinism I am defending in this essay? Do I pretend that it reflects 
no ideology? Do I claim that all of its hypotheses are so firmly based, that no sense of values and of wishes can 
be found behind the claims within its boundaries? Do I think that the extension to human social behavior reveals 
no commitment to any value system? No indeed! I believe that Darwinism, especially as it extends into human 
sociobiology, reflects a strong ideology. Moreover, this is one to be proud of." (Ruse M., "Darwinism Defended: 
A Guide to the Evolution Controversies," [1982], Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1983, Third Printing, p.280)

22/09/2001
"If we believe in only one universe then the remarkably uniform arrangement of cosmic matter, and the 
consequent coolness of space, are almost miraculous, a conclusion which strongly resembles the traditional 
religious concept of a world which was purpose-built by God for subsequent habitation by mankind. " (Davies 
P.C.W., "Other Worlds," [1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.162)

23/09/2001
"Whales have diverged more than any other mammals from the basic pattern of the mammal class. How long they 
(or seals, dugongs, ichthyosaurus, birds, and bats) may have taken to develop from quadruped ancestors is not 
known, but their extraordinary specialization (like that of the bats) must have been complete in about 10 million 
years (Eldredge 1989, 23). It could have been less because whales may have been around long before the first 
known bones show their presence. But 10 million years is less than a fifth of the time taken by Hyracotherium to 
become a not extremely different animal, the modern horse. During this period, whales, besides converting 
forelimbs to flippers and growing a long and powerful tail, moved the nostril to the top of the head, modified their 
respiratory system, and made other adaptations for feeding in the depths. They remarkably developed new 
organs, dorsal fins and flukes, from skin and connective tissue (Young 1981, 498). In addition, before losing the 
hind limbs necessary to clamber onto the shore, they had to become able to give birth in the water, a process that 
must have involved new instincts for both mother and calf, including suckling the calf by pumping milk into its 
mouth, having surrounded the nipple with a cap to keep out seawater. It is difficult to imagine how all of this 
could have come about without a remarkable series of highly coordinated changes." (Wesson, R.G., "Beyond 
Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, Rreprinted, 1994, pp.51-52)

24/09/2001
"Genetic considerations also point up the difficulty of the whale's rapid evolution. By Mayr's calculation, in a 
rapidly evolving line an organ may enlarge about 1 to 10 percent per million years, but organs of the whale-
inbecoming must have grown about ten times more rapidly over 10 million years. Perhaps 300 generations are 
required for a gene substitution (Mayr 1963, 238, 259). Moreover, mutations need to occur many times, even with 
considerable selective advantage, in order to have a good chance of becoming fixed. Considering the length of 
whale generations, the rarity with which the needed mutations are likely to appear, and the multitude of mutations 
needed to convert a land animal into a whale, it is easy to conclude that gradualist natural selection of random 
variations cannot account for this animal. After their perplexing rapid development, both whales and bats have 
for many million years evolved slowly, supposedly because their populations mingle widely, with no territoriality 
and much dispersal (Carl et al. 1977, 3945)." (Wesson, R.G., "Beyond Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: 
Cambridge MA, Rreprinted, 1994, pp.51-52)

24/09/2001
"Perhaps we should not expect to understand major evolutionary innovations. None has ever been observed; 
indeed, no one has ever observed a mutation's making even the beginnings of a new organ. Innovation is the 
central problem that has troubled evolutionists ever since Darwin, and it is no less mysterious today than when 
he published his great book." (Wesson, R.G., "Beyond Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 
Rreprinted, 1994, p.53)

24/09/2001
"Simultaneous changes, in several bodily parts, pose real difficulties for our conventional evolutionary paradigm, 
which relies on discrete Mendelian genetic units as the currency of heredity and loci of mutation: the concept 
unabashedly demands that several or many genetically unlinked mutations should be favoured in a short time by 
natural selection operating on populations of organisms-that is, parallel evolution. Our knowledge of the 
ontogenic process seems to require that, if several genetic changes are to occur, they must be co-ordinated if 
they are to be harmoniously integrated into the four dimensions of development. If the process of mutation is 
occurring at random in the nucleic acids of the germ cells, it is difficult to see how all these ontogenic criteria can 
be satisfied: the most likely result of a random mutation process will be the production of "abnormal", and 
probably "unfit", phenotypes. A simple calculation shows that provision of the 'correct" phenotype by a random 
genetic mutation process will be an extremely rare event. Suppose that an important adaptive process in a 
multicellular species requires the parallel occurrence within an individual of three new dominant germline 
genes: if the chance for each to occur is (say) 10-5 per gene per generation, then the probability of 
their mutual occurrence is very unlikely (10-15)." (Steele, E.J., "Somatic Selection and Adaptive 
Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," [1979], University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Second 
Edition, 1981, p.4. Emphasis in original)


24/09/2001
"Where so little has been done and so much is still speculative, it is difficult to give a coherent account that is at 
the same time soundly based in all points. The account has clearly to be one of a work in progress, already out of 
date the moment it is written. Yet, in order to retain any intelligibility, it must be told as a reasonable, continuous, 
hypothetical story, a myth of the origin of life, and this will be found in the subsequent chapters." (Bernal, J.D., 
"The Origin of Life," [1967], Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1973, Third Impression, pp.34-35)

25/09/2001
"Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, 
unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an 
elementary particle - an electron, say - in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from 
outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate 
sceptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the 
same result." (Sagan, C.E., "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," [1996], Headline: 
London, 1997, reprint, p.198. Emphasis in original)

25/09/2001
"The authors of this work consider the Bible to be the authoritative, inerrant revelation of God. It does not follow 
from this, however, that (1) the scientific models regarding the age of the earth and the universe must be 
overthrown in order to maintain the scientific authority of Scripture, or that (2) the scientific authority of Scripture 
must be reduced to a few propositions like "God is behind it all." Although neither theistic evolution nor recent 
creationism is necessarily as extreme as the ends of the spectrum above indicate, our position is to be identified 
with neither of these. We advocate a third, intermediate view usually labeled "progressive creationism." 
(Newman R.C. & Eckelmann H.J., Jr., "Genesis One and the Origin of the Earth," [1977], Interdisciplinary Biblical 
Research Institute: Hatfields PA, 4th printing, 1991, p.11)

25/09/2001
"Another sensitive area at the moment is palaeontology. Many-perhaps most-palaeontologists are beginning to 
feel quite strongly that there is a great deal more to the fossil record than can be predicted by natural selection 
alone. In a recent research textbook (Patterns of Evolution, edited by Hallam, 1977), for example, eleven 
out of fifteen of the world's leading palaeontologists expressed doubts about the conventional 'gradualist' 
interpretation of the fossil record-an interpretation by which Darwin himself set much store. This gradualism was 
originally derived from an impression of the way in which natural selection acts; since selection was thought to 
act slowly to produce adaptation it was assumed that the fossils themselves would show gradual change over 
time. But, as modern palaeontologists now recognize, there is no such obvious trend in the fossils. The fossil 
record, they argue, is open to a different interpretation in which creatures change quite rapidly and then remain 
unchanged for great lengths of time. Once again the reductionist expectation-that events at the 'macro' level 
should be directly derivable from an appreciation of the 'micro' level-has foundered." (Leith B., "The Descent of 
Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, p.33)

26/09/2001
"In the most part, however, conventional Darwinian theory rationalizes most adaptations by assuming that 
sufficient time has transpired during evolution for natural selection to provide us with all the biological 
adaptations we see on earth today. That the earth is very old cannot be debated, but in reality the adaptive 
process must by necessity occur rather quickly (in one or at the most two breeding generations)." (Steele, E.J., 
"Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," [1979], University of 
Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Second Edition, 1981, p.3)

27/09/2001
"The theory of evolution is another example of a theory highly valued by scientists because of its enormous 
explanatory power, but which lies in a sense too deep to be directly proved or disproved." (Broad, W. & Wade, N., 
"Betrayers of the Truth," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1982, pp.16-17)

27/09/2001
"C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), perhaps the best-known Christian apologist of his day and a personal friend of Captain 
Acworth's [Chairman, Evolution Protest Movement, London]. ... In 1951 he confessed that his belief in the 
unimportance of evolution had been shaken while reading one of his friend's manuscripts. `I wish I were 
younger,' he confided to Acworth. `What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it 
[evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much 
your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.'" (C.S. Lewis to B. Acworth, 
September 13, 1951, in Numbers R.L., "The Creationists: the Evolution of Scientific Creationism," [1992], 
University of California Press: Berkeley CA, 1993, p.153)

29/09/2001
"So a metaphysical system, although naturalistic and secular, has been built up by modern humanists around the 
nucleus of biological evolutionism. Such a system may be seen to the best advantage in the writings of the well-
known biologist, Julian Huxley (18871975), grandson of Darwin's 'bulldog', Thomas Henry Huxley. Really Julian 
Huxley espoused a new religion, rather than a mere metaphysical system. Accepting with enthusiasm the 
doctrine of evolutionism, he maintained that the future evolutionary process on Earth is to be carried out almost 
exclusively by man. Thus man's destiny has become that of realising his evolutionary potentialities and 
furthering the evolutionary process, which for Huxley is a notion that may be contemplated with a kind of 
religious enthusiasm." (Oldroyd, D.R., "Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution," [1980], 
New South Wales University Press: Kensington NSW, Australia, Second Revised Edition, 1988, reprint, p.254)

October
1/10/2001
"Notice, this is exactly what we would expect as evidence of good creative design and engineering practice. 
Suppose you were in the bridge-building business, and you were interviewing a couple of engineers to determine 
whom you wanted to hire. One fellow says, "Each bridge I build will be entirely different from all others." Proudly 
he tells you "Each bridge will be made using different materials and different processes so that no one will ever 
be able to see any similarity between the bridges I build. " How does that sound? Now the next fellow comes in 
and says, "Well, out back in your yard I saw a supply of I-beams and various sizes of heavy bolts and cables. 
We can use those to span either a river or the San Francisco Bay. I can adapt the same parts and processes to 
meet a wide variety of needs. You'll be able to see a theme and a variation in my bridge building and others can 
see the stamp of authorship in our work." Which fellow would you hire?" (Parker G.E., "Creation: the Facts of 
Life," Master Book Publishers: San Diego CA, 1980, p.26)

1/10/2001
"A creationist would also expect many biochemical similarities in all living organisms. We all drink the same 
water, breathe the same air, and eat the same food. Supposing, on the other hand, God had made plants with a 
certain type of amino acids, sugars, purines, pyrimidines, etc.; then made animals with a different type of amino 
acids, sugars, purines, pyrimidines, etc.; and, finally, made man with a third type of amino acids, sugars, etc. 
What could we eat? We couldn't eat plants; we couldn't eat animals; all we could eat would be each other! 
Obviously, that wouldn't work. All of the key molecules in plants, animals, and man had to be the same. The 
metabolism of plants, animals, and man, based on the same biochemical principles, had to be similar, and 
therefore key metabolic pathways would employ similar macromolecules, modified to fit the particular internal 
environment of the organism or cell in which it must function." (Gish D.T., "Creation Scientists Answer Their 
Critics," Institute for Creation Research: El Cajon CA, 1993, p.277)

1/10/2001
"Nevertheless, the application of this method to areas where we have little knowledge is essentially an act of 
faith. For example, one exercise which we shall later carry through is to estimate the likelihoods of the origin of life 
in a suitable planetary system, the origin of intelligence, the origin of technical civilization, etc. Such estimates 
are, either implicitly or explicitly, based upon terrestrial experience. But it is dangerous to extrapolate from one 
example. This is why, for example, the discovery of life on one other planet-e.g., Mars-can, in the words of the 
American physicist Philip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, `transform the origin of life 
from a miracle to a statistic.'" (Shklovskii I.S. & Sagan, C.E., "Intelligent Life in the Universe," [1966], Picador: 
London, 1977, p.358)

1/10/2001
"It is often considered that at least the origin of the universe requires a God - indeed an Aristotelian idea.* This 
is a point worth looking at in a little more detail. First of all, it is perfectly possible that the universe is infinitely 
old and therefore requires no Creator." (Sagan, C.E., "Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science," [1974], Coronet: 
London, 1980, reprint, pp.354-355)

1/10/2001
"Naturalism was a major premise of Darwin's thinking and the success of his theory gave strong sanction to the 
validity of naturalism, showing that the supernatural account of the world's seeming design was a superfluity." 
(Oldroyd, D.R., "Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution," [1980], New South Wales 
University Press: Kensington NSW, Australia, Second Revised Edition, 1988, reprint, p.254)

1/10/2001
"Biology has become, quite simply, the study of the causes and effects of evolution, and the question of the 
origin of life is, first, the question of the origin of evolution." (Cairns-Smith, A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of 
Life: A Scientific Detective Story," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.1)

2/10/2001
"What in your judgment are the most serious objections to Darwinian theory? The most serious objection I have 
is with the nature of mutation. Darwinism is based on the idea that all the mutations which have been selected 
during the course of evolution were, when they initially occurred, entirely random. Mutations are random, and 
when an organism has a mutation which in fact is advantageous to it, that's purely fortuitous. This is the 
essential bedrock of Darwinism. The mutational input into living things is, as it were, at random. Now, the 
problem with this doctrine is that we simply don't know much about mutations. ... Darwinism is claiming that all 
the adaptive structures in nature, all the organisms which have existed throughout history were generated by the 
accumulation of entirely undirected mutations. That is an entirely unsubstantiated belief for which there is not 
the slightest evidence whatsoever. Maybe there will never be that evidence because those mutations occurred in 
the distant past and have now disappeared forever, perhaps, from the view of man. So the first claim, that random 
mutations are selected and create different forms of life, is unsustained. The second problem is that there are a 
vast number of complex systems in nature, and no matter how unglamorous this problem is, no matter how 
people try to look the other way, the fact is that a huge number of highly complex systems in nature cannot be 
plausibly accounted for in terms of a gradual build-up of small random mutations." (Denton, M.J., in "An 
Interview With Michael Denton," Origins Research, Access Research Network, Vol. 15, No. 2, July 20, 1995)

3/10/2001
"Of course, when thinking about the V2 rocket I was thinking about a product of human design, whereas, a few 
years later, when I was thinking about the shapes of mammalian teeth, I was asking why mammals were better at 
chewing, and so left more descendants. But this difference had no effect on the way I thought about the two 
problems. Indeed, I have become increasingly convinced that there is no way of telling the difference between an 
evolved organism and an artifact designed by an intelligent being. Thus imagine that the first spacemen to land 
on Mars are met by an object which appears to have sense organs (eyes, ears) and organs of locomotion (legs, 
wings). How will they know whether it is an evolved organism, or a robot designed by an evolved organism? 
Only, I think, by finding out where it came from, and perhaps not even then." (Maynard Smith, J., "Genes, Memes, 
& Minds." Review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett. Simon 
and Schuster. The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLII, No. 19, November 30, 1995, pp.46-48, p.46)

3/10/2001
"In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis in the United 
States, said: `We would not have predicted stasis from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what 
the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.'" (Lewin, R., "Evolutionary-Theory Under Fire: An 
historic conference in Chicago challenges the four-decade long dominance of the Modern Synthesis," Science, 
Vol. 210, 21 November 1980, pp.883-887, p.884)

3/10/2001
"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of 
his essays, he has come to be seen by nonbiologists as the preemin