Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: January-June, 2002

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The following are unclassified quotes posted in my email messages in January-June, 2002.
The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.

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

January
1/01/02
"Oxford evolutionist Richard Dawkins took this idea to its logical popular science extreme, proclaiming that our 
bodies are mere robots-vehicles programmed by the genes. Nonetheless, after developing his narrow "selfish 
gene" concept, even Dawkins was forced to admit that genes in the body of a member of one species may select 
for traits in the bodies of members of another species, even ones thousands of miles away. ... Thus, as the 
"selfishness" concept is extended, it becomes very nebulous indeed. No gene in me can live by itself but only as 
part of a network or aggregate of other encased genes. ... Wilson too had to draw the selfish individual and gene 
idea out to its vanishing point. ... Why, in short, call selfish those genes that maximize the growth of completely 
different genes? In feeding and clothing and housing ourselves-by wearing cotton underwear and leather shoes 
and silk scarves-we are propagating genes other than "our own": the genes of cotton plants, cows, and silk 
worms. Since all these animals and plants and microbes are involved in our keeping ourselves fit, what are these 
selfish genes doing, if they can live only in an environment that is the product of completely different genes? It 
appears that the neo-Darwinian attempt to explain altruism as the result of individual selfishness has required not 
only the redefinition of the individual (from an animal into a gene) but also an inversion of the meaning of 
selfishness.' (Sagan D., "Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth," [1990], Arkana: London, 1991, reprint, 
pp.115-116)

1/01/02
"What is life? To the physicist the two distinguishing features of living systems are complexity and 
organization. Even a simple single-celled organism, primitive as it is, displays an intricacy and fidelity 
unmatched by any product of human ingenuity. Consider, for example, a lowly bacterium. Close inspection 
reveals a complex network of function and form. The bacterium may interact with its environment in a variety of 
ways, propelling itself, attacking enemies, moving towards or away from external stimuli, exchanging material in a 
controlled fashion. Its internal workings resemble a vast city in organization. Much of the control rests with the 
cell nucleus, wherein is also contained the genetic 'code', the chemical blueprint that enables the bacterium to 
replicate. The chemical structures that control and direct all this activity may involve molecules with as many as a 
million atoms strung together in a complicated yet highly specific way." (Davies P.C.W., "God and the New 
Physics," [1983], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.59. Emphasis in original)

1/01/02
"Darwin's second politically helpful vice was closely related to his first. It was his utter independence of other 
people's ideas. It seems incredible that the apostle of evolution should have been so deficient in historical sense; 
so much so that, although deeply interested in his own priority, he never realized that his own ideas were second 
hand. He thought he had worked them out himself, even when he had only sorted them out. Moreover his ideas 
were less clearly sorted out and less clearly expressed and, worst of all, less strictly and less openly held and 
maintained than the ideas of those who first thought of them. He never faced the cardinal issue of the evidence 
for or against the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which is more difficult and therefore more important 
than the issue of whether evolution has happened. He was therefore able, as he put it, to 'wriggle'. He wriggled so 
successfully that in the end he did not himself know where he stood." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in 
History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.61-62)

1/01/02
"Macroevolutionary processes and causations were generally considered to be of a special kind, quite different 
from the populational phenomena studied by geneticists and students of speciation. All this changed 
dramatically with the evolutionary synthesis. Its major effect was to discredit some of the beliefs most widely 
held previously among students of macroevolution. Important assumptions that were now rejected include the 
following: (1) that major saltations are indispensable in explaining the origin of new species and higher taxa; (2) 
that evolutionary trends and the continuous improvement of adaptations require the existence of autogenetic 
processes; and (3) that inheritance is soft. It was a major achievement of Rensch and Simpson to be able to show 
that an explanation of the phenomena of macroevolution does not require the acceptance of any of these three 
theories, and that in fact the phenomena of evolution above the species level are consistent with the new 
findings of genetics and microsystematics. Obviously, this conclusion had to be based on inference, consisting 
of morphological, taxonomic, and distributional evidence, since higher taxa were at that time-and, except for 
molecular evidence, are still today-inaccessible to genetic analysis." (Mayr E., "The Growth of Biological 
Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1982, p.607)

2/01/02
"And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep 
among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page 
of this book, will meet you on every side-even from the pens of clergymen. ... We all have Naturalism in our 
bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back 
upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the 
feeling which is greatly to their credit-which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are 
anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of 
their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural 
explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. ....  In using the books 
of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for 
those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed 
assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really yourself: 
must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all 
been brought up." (Lewis C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," [1947], Fontana: London, 1960, Revised edition, 
1963, reprint, pp.168-169)

3/01/02
"The sweeping nature of the changes proposed by Darwin is best documented by listing some of the more 
philosophical implications of Darwin's theories: (1) The replacement of a static by an evolving world (not original 
with Darwin). (2) The demonstration of the implausibility of creationism (Gillespie, 1979). (3) The refutation of 
cosmic teleology. (4)
The abolition of any justification for an absolute anthropocentrism by applying the principle of common descent 
to man. (5) The explanation of "design" in the world by the purely materialistic process of natural selection, a 
process consisting of in interaction between nondirected variation and opportunistic reproductive success 
which was entirely outside the dogma of Christianity." (Mayr E., "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, 
Evolution, and Inheritance," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1982, p.501)

4/01/02
"Darwin ... wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his day: `If I were convinced that I 
required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish...I would give nothing for 
the theory of Natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.' (Darwin C.R., 
Letter to C. Lyell, October 11, 1859, in Darwin F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic 
Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, pp.6-7). This is no petty matter. In Darwin's view, the whole 
point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous 
account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For 
Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all." (Dawkins R., "The 
Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.248-249. Emphasis in original)

5/01/02
"There is one last lesson which coordinate geometry helps us to learn; it is simple and easy, but very important 
indeed. In the study of evolution, and in all attempts to trace the descent of the animal kingdom, fourscore years' 
study of the Origin of Species has had an unlooked-for and disappointing result. It was hoped to begin 
with, and within my own recollection it was confidently believed, that the broad lines of descent, the relation of 
the main branches to one another and to the trunk of the tree, would soon be settled, and the lesser ramifications 
would be unravelled bit by bit and later on. But things have turned out otherwise. We have long known, in more 
or less satisfactory detail, the pedigree of horses, elephants, turtles, crocodiles and some few more; and our 
conclusions tally as to these, again more or less to our satisfaction, with the direct evidence of palaeontological 
succession. But the larger and at first sight simpler questions remain unanswered; for eighty years' study of 
Darwinian evolution has not taught us how birds descend from reptiles, mammals from earlier quadrupeds, 
quadrupeds from fishes, nor vertebrates from the invertebrate stock." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," 
[1942], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, pp.1092-1093)

5/01/02
"The invertebrates themselves involve the selfsame difficulties, so that we do not know the origin of the 
echinoderms, of the molluscs, of the coelenterates, nor of one group of protozoa from another. The difficulty is 
not always quite the same. We may fail to find the actual links between the vertebrate groups, but yet their re 
semblance and their relationship, real though indefinable ' are plain to see; there are gaps between the groups, 
but we can see, so I to speak, across the gap. On the other hand, the breach between vertebrate and invertebrate, 
worm and coelenterate, coelenterate and protozoon, is in each case of another order, and is so wide that we 
cannot see across the intervening gap at all." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge 
University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1093)

7/01/02
"This failure to solve the cardinal problem of evolutionary biology is a very curious thing; and we may well 
wonder why the long pedigree is subject to such breaches of continuity. We used to be told, and were content to 
believe, that the old record was of necessity imperfect-we could not expect it to be otherwise; the story was hard 
to read because every here and there a page had been lost or torn away, like some hiatus valde deflendus in an 
ancient manuscript. But there is a deeper reason. When we begin to draw comparisons between our algebraic 
curves and attempt. to transform one into another, we find ourselves limited by the very nature of the case to 
curves having some tangible degree of relation to one another; and these "degrees of relationship" imply a 
classification of mathematical forms, analogous to the classification of plants or animals in another part of the 
Systema Naturae." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge University Press: London, 
Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1093)

7/01/02
"An algebraic curve has its fundamental formula, which defines the family to which it belongs; and its 
parameters, whose quantitative variation admits of infinite variety within the limits which the formula prescribes. 
With some extension of the meaning of parameters, we may say the same of the families, or genera, or other 
classificatory groups of plants and animals. We cross a boundary every time we pass from family to family, or 
group to group. The passage is easy at first, and we are led, along definite lines, to more and more subtle 
and elegant comparisons. But we come in time to forms which, though both may still be simple, yet stand so far 
apart that direct comparison is no longer legitimate. We never think of "transforming" a helicoid into an ellipsoid, 
or a circle into a frequency-curve. So it is with the forms of animals. We cannot transform an invertebrate 
into a vertebrate, nor a coelenterate into a worm, by any simple and legitimate deformation, nor by anything short 
of reduction to elementary principles." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge University 
Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1094. Emphasis in original)

9/01/02
"A "principle of discontinuity," then, is, inherent in all our classifications, whether mathematical, physical or 
biological; and the infinitude of possible forms, always limited, may be further reduced and discontinuity further 
revealed by imposing conditions-as, for example, that our parameters must be whole numbers, or proceed by 
quanta, as the physicists say. The lines of the spectrum, the six families of crystals, Dalton's atomic law, the 
chemical elements themselves, all illustrate this principle of discontinuity. In short, nature proceeds from one 
type to another among organic as well as inorganic forms; and these types vary according to their own 
parameters, and are defined by physico-mathematical conditions of possibility. In natural history Cuvier's 
"types" may not be perfectly chosen nor numerous enough, but types they are; and to seek for stepping-
stones across the gaps between is to seek in vain, for ever." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], 
Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1094. Emphasis in original)

10/01/02
"I decided I needed to talk to Dan Dennett, who has a reputation as a wideranging and inventive thinker .... His 
new book is Consciousness Explained. That's an ambitious title, I ventured. "Yes," he acknowledged, laughing. 
"Actually I don't claim to have all the answers, or even most." (Lewin R., "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos," 
Phoenix: London, 1993, p.155)

10/01/02
"This simple feature of the Universe, that its density is within about a factor of 10 of the critical density, leads to 
the first of the big problems. .... The problem arises because if the value of the density parameter departed even 
very slightly from the critical value in the very early Universe. ... unless it was set up with more or less exactly its 
own escape velocity at the beginning, it has no chance of ending up with an expansion velocity close to its 
escape velocity now. You can see what this means - the Universe must have been set up in the beginning with 
almost exactly the critical density with quite amazing precision if it is to end up within a factor of 10 of the critical 
density now. This is what is called the fine-tuning problem of the Universe. Despite the fact that there is no 
obvious reason why our Universe should have the critical density, the Universe must have been set up that way 
very precisely in the beginning." (Longair M.S., "The Origins of our Universe: A Study of the Origin and 
Evolution of the Contents of our Universe," The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People 1990, 
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1991, p.98-99)

11/01/02
"Our geometrical analogies weigh heavily against Darwin's conception of endless small continuous variations; 
they help to show that discontinuous variations are a natural thing, that "mutations sudden changes, greater or 
less-are bound to have taken place, and new "types" to have arisen, now and then." (Thompson D.W., "On 
Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, pp.1094-
1095)

11/01/02
"The human immunodeficiency virus contains in its brief history the entire argument of The Origin of 
Species: variation, a struggle for existence, and natural selection." (Jones S., "Almost Like a Whale: The 
Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.16)

12/01/02
"In these days of astounding advances in science and technology it is perhaps rash to declare dogmatically that 
anything such as the artificial synthesis of a living cell is impossible. Yet, on what sort of microloom would a 
biologist weave the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum, or with what delicate needles could a biologist 
fashion the intricacies of the cell nucleus?" (Price F.W., "Basic Molecular Biology," John Wiley & Sons: New 
York NY, 1979, p.466)

12/01/02
"More biologists agree that stasis is a real phenomenon than agree about its causes. Take, as an extreme 
example, the coelacanth Latimeria. The coelacanths were a large group of 'fish' (actually, although they are 
called fish they are more closely related to us than they are to trout and herrings)
that flourished more than 250 million years ago and apparently died out at about the same time as the dinosaurs. I 
say 'apparently' died out because in 1938, much to the zoological world's astonishment, a weird fish, a yard and a 
half long and with unusual leg-like fins, appeared in the catch of a deepsea fishing boat off the South African 
coast. Though almost destroyed before its priceless worth was recognized, its decaying remains were fortunately 
brought to the attention of a qualified South African zoologist just in time. Scarcely able to believe his eyes, he 
identified it as a living coelacanth, and named it Latimeria. Since then, a few other specimens have been 
fished up in the same area, and the species has now been properly studied and described. It is a 'living fossil', in 
the sense that it has changed hardly at all since the time of its fossil ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago. 
So, we have stasis. What are we to make of it? How do we explain it? Some of us would say that the lineage 
leading to Latimeria stood still because natural selection did not move it. In a sense it had no 'need' to 
evolve because these animals had found a successful way of life deep in the sea where conditions did not 
change much." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.246)

12/01/02
"A pinhole camera forms a definite image, the smaller the pinhole the sharper (but dimmer) the image, the larger 
the pinhole the brighter (but fuzzier) the image. The swimming mollusc Nautilus, a rather strange squid-like 
creature that lives in a shell like the extinct ammonites (see the 'shelled cephalopod' of Figure 5), has a pair of 
pinhole cameras for eyes. The eye is basically the same shape as ours but there is no lens and the pupil is just a 
hole that lets the seawater into the hollow interior of the eye. Actually, Nautilus is a bit of a puzzle in its own 
right. Why, in all the hundreds of millions of years since its ancestors first evolved a pinhole eye, did it never 
discover the principle of the lens? The advantage of a lens is that it allows the image to be both sharp and bright. 
What is worrying about Nautilus is that the quality of its retina suggests that it would really benefit, greatly and 
immediately, from a lens. It is like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt 
needle. The system is crying out for a particular simple change. In genetic hyperspace, Nautilus appears to be 
sitting right next door to an obvious and immediate improvement, yet it doesn't take the small step necessary. 
Why not? Michael Land of Sussex University, our foremost authority on invertebrate eyes, is worried, and so am 
I. Is it that the necessary mutations cannot arise, given the way Nautilus embryos develop? I don't want to 
believe it, but I don't have a better explanation." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 
1991, reprint, pp.85-86)

14/01/02
"Now I cannot deny all these possibilities: life on the Earth may be a miracle, or a freak, or an alien infection. And 
I agree that the confidence was misplaced that supposed in the fifties that the answer to the origin of life would 
appear in some footnote to the answer to the question of how organisms work. Something much more will be 
needed. Something odd." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," 
[1985], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.8).

16/01/02
"How did a primordial soup of amino acids and other simple molecules manage to turn itself into the first living 
cell some four billion years ago? There's no way the molecules could have just fallen together at random; as the 
creationists are fond of pointing out, the odds against that happening are ludicrous. So was the creation of life a 
miracle? Or was there some thing else going on in that primordial soup that we still don't understand?" (Waldrop 
M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, 
reprint, p.10)

17/01/02
"If evolution (or free market capitalism) is really just a matter of the survival of the fittest, then why should it ever 
produce anything other than ruthless competition among individuals? In a world where nice guys all too often 
finish last, why should there be any such thing as trust or cooperation? And why, in spite of everything, do trust 
and cooperation not-only exist but flourish?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of 
Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, reprint, p.10)

17/01/02
"First, there is belief in divine Creation: God did it. If that is so, there is no point in trying to investigate further. 
What God did is a matter for faith and not for scientific inquiry. The two fields are separate. If our scientific 
inquiry should lead eventually to God, to questions so large that they cannot be examined coherently, that will be 
the time to stop science." (Edey M.A. & Johanson D.C., "Blueprints: Solving The Mystery of Evolution," Little, 
Brown & Co: Boston MA, 1989, p.291)

18/01/02
"When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual 
positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions 
which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions 
appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has 
ever occurred to them." (Whitehead A.N., "Science and the Modern World," [1926], Penguin Books: 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1938, reprint, pp.63-64)

19/01/02
"How can Darwinian natural selection account for such wonderfully intricate structures as the eye or the kidney? 
Is the incredibly precise organization that we find in living creatures really just the result of random evolutionary 
accidents? Or has something more been going on for the past four billion years, something that Darwin didn't 
know about?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," Penguin: 
London, [1992], 1994, reprint, p.10)

19/01/02
"The traditional argument that moral standards are derived from sensory pleasure or the reduction of pain cannot 
explain the universal fact that people become angry when they see others violate standards they believe are 
right. Why do we become upset when we see a stranger lie to a tourist or push ahead in a queue when our own 
lives are unaffected by those rude acts? One explanation is that these asocial acts by one stranger to another 
provoke bystanders to question the correctness of their own moral beliefs. Because these beliefs are central to 
each day's decisions and conduct, their violation, even by a stranger, threatens the rational foundation of the 
observer's ethical code. Not even the cleverest ape could be conditioned to become angry upon seeing one 
animal steal food from another. Surprise or fear, perhaps, but anger is impossible. The popular writings of Camus 
and Sartre capture the combination of angst and anger that postwar Europeans felt when they realized that if 
there was no firm basis for any particular moral evaluation, life was absurd. Although evolutionary biologists 
insist that the appearance of humans was due to a quirky role of the genetic dice, our species refuses to act as if 
good and evil are arbitrary choices bereft of natural significance." (Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard 
University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.158)

21/01/02
"I confess that, as a graduate student, I was so taken by the simplicity and unifying power of "the modern 
synthesis" that I could imagine no higher task for paleontology than the faithful furthering of its hegemony. The 
modern synthesis built its theory upon small-scale events that occur with in local populations and, assuming a 
smoothly continuous rather than a hierarchical world, argued for complete extrapolation into millions of years and 
major transitions in form. ... I believe that our preference for searching always to exemplify microevolutionary 
principles in the fossil record has been unfortunate ... It has led us into serious errors of scaling. We see, in the 
vastness of geological time, events that bear superficial similarity to phenomena of local populations-and we 
assign a similar cause without realizing that the extended time itself precludes such an application. Thus, some of 
the most puzzling phenomena of paleontology, potential sources of new theory, are passively pushed under a 
familiar rug. ... Gradualism. In this case, we didn't even see the phenomenon in fossil sequences, but assumed 
that it must have existed and been obliterated by an imperfect record-and all because we thought that 
evolutionary theory (as Darwin falsely claimed) required its generality ... And yet, to see gradualism at all in the 
fossil record implies such an excruciatingly slow rate of per-generation change that we must seriously consider 
its invisibility to natural selection in the conventional mode - changes that confer momentary adaptive 
advantages. Any measurable momentary advantage should usually sweep through a population in times 
represented more nearly by a bedding plane than by a thick sequence. Thus, I believe that sustained gradualism, 
rare though it may be, represents more of an interesting mystery than a ringing affirmation of microevolutionary 
extrapolation." (Gould S.J., "The promise of paleobiology as a nomothetic, evolutionary discipline," 
Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, pp.96-118, p.103)

21/01/02
"It is frequently claimed that science must by definition exclude the supernatural. A number of related issues 
were raised in the previous chapter, but it is worth noting that appeal to a definition of science here is going to be 
a bit problematic because there simply is no completely satisfactory formal definition available to appeal to. 
Defining science turns out to be one of the nastier problems within philosophy of science. And some of the 
informal or partial definitions provide little comfort to would-be prohibitionists. For instance, science has recently 
been defined in one court simply as "what scientists do." That does not in principle rule out anything at all. 
Whatever this group of humans (scientists) decided to do-including developing theories which appeal to the 
supernatural-would turn out to be science. In their popular writings, some scientists define science as "an 
attempt to get at truth, no holds barred." "No holds barred" is about as antiprohibitionist as one can get. 
Others define science as "organized common sense." But if there is anything that has been considered common 
sense during human history, it is the existence and activity in nature of the supernatural. Again, barring the 
supernatural purely on definitional grounds thus turns out not to be a straightforward matter." (Ratzsch D.L., 
"Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science," State University of New York Press: 
Albany NY, 2001, pp.105-106. Emphasis in original)

21/01/02
"There is another way to be a Creationist. One might offer Creationism as a scientific theory .... Although pure 
versions of Creationism were no longer in vogue among scientists by the end of the eighteenth century, they had 
flourished earlier ... Moreover, variants of Creationism were supported by a number of eminent nineteenth-
century scientists William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, and Louis Agassiz, for example. These Creationists trusted 
that their theories would accord with the Bible, interpreted in what they saw as a correct way. However, that fact 
does not affect the scientific status of those theories. Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more 
unscientific than postulating unobservable particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the 
ways in which they are articulated and defended." (Kitcher P., "Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism," 
[1982], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, Ninth Printing, 1996, p.125)

22/01/02
"In its December 1990 fly-by of Earth, the Galileo spacecraft found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a 
widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and 
atmospheric methane in extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium; together, these are strongly suggestive of life on 
Earth. Moreover, the presence of narrow band, pulsed, amplitude-modulated radio transmission seems uniquely 
attributable to intelligence. These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial 
life by modern interplanetary spacecraft." (Sagan C., Thompson W.R., Carlson R., Gurnett D. & Hord C., "A 
search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft," Nature, Vol 365, 21 October 1993, pp.715-721, p.715)

23/01/02
"During the Galileo fly-by, the plasma wave instrument detected radio signals, plausibly escaping through the 
nightside ionosphere from ground-based radio transmitters. Of all Galileo science measurements, these signals 
provide the only indication of intelligent, technological life on Earth. ... The fact that the central frequencies of 
these signals, remain constant over periods of hours strongly suggests an artificial origin. Naturally generated 
radio emissions most always display significant long-term frequency drifts. Even more definitive is the existence 
of pulse like amplitude modulation. When the spectrum in Fig. 4a is expanded (Fig. 4b), the individual narrow-
band component, can he seen to have a complex modulation pattern. Although the time resolution of the 
instrument (18.67s) is inadequate to decode the modulation, such, modulation patterns are never observed for 
naturally occurring radio emissions and implies the transmission of information. On the basis of these 
observations, strong case can he made that the signals are generated by an intelligent form of life on Earth ... 
without any a priori assumptions about its chemistry ..." (Sagan C., Thompson W.R., Carlson R., Gurnett D. & 
Hord C., "A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft," Nature, Vol 365, 21 October 1993, pp.715-
721, p.720)

23/01/02
"Darwin's theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most 
people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is made in favor of 
darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true. We must distinguish 
between the fact of evolution - defined as change in organisms over time - and the explanation of 
that change. Darwin's contribution, through his theory of natural selection, was to suggest how the 
evolutionary change took place. The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with 
darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be." (Raup D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and 
Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History: Chicago IL, January 
1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp.22-29, p.22. Emphasis in original)

24/01/02
"Promising though the RNA world scenario seems, it has many detractors. They point out that, however good 
the theory may be, test tube experiments are frequently dismal failures. Key reactions stubbornly refuse to 
proceed without carefully designed procedures and the help of special catalysts. Nucleic acid chains are 
notoriously fragile, and tend to snap long before they have acquired the 50 or so base pairs needed for them to 
act as enzymes. Water attacks and breaks up nucleic acid polymers as it does peptides, casting doubt on any 
soupy version of an RNA world. Even the synthesis of the four bases required as building blocks is not without 
serious problems. As far as biochemists can see, it is a long and difficult road to produce efficient RNA 
replicators from scratch. No doubt a way could eventually be found for each step in the chemical sequence to be 
carried out in the lab without too much drama, but only under highly artificial conditions, using specially 
prepared and purified chemicals in lust the right proportions. The trouble is, there are very many such steps 
involved, and each requires different special conditions. It is highly doubtful that all these steps would 
obligingly happen one after the other 'in the wild', where a chemical soup or scum would just have to take pot 
luck. The conclusion has to be that without a trained organic chemist on hand to supervise, nature would be 
struggling to make RNA from a dilute soup under any plausible prebiotic conditions. So whilst an RNA world 
could conceivably function and evolve towards life if handed to us on a plate (perhaps in a soup bowl would be 
a better metaphor), getting the RNA world going from a crude chemical mixture is another matter entirely." 
(Davies P.C.W., "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, 
p.98)

24/01/02
"Added to these diverse difficulties is the problem of chirality - left versus right .... The fact that all life on Earth is 
based on molecules with the same handedness is not merely a curiosity: RNA replication would be menaced in an 
environment in which both left- and right-handed versions of the basic molecules are equally present. The crucial 
lock-and-key templating arrangements, whereby bases pair up with complementary bases according to their 
shapes, would be compromised as molecules with the 'wrong' handedness locked into the slots. The left hand 
would mess up what the right hand was doing. Unless a way can be found for nature to create a soup with 
molecules of only one handedness, spontaneous RNA synthesis would be a lost cause." (Davies P.C.W., "The 
Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, pp.99-100)

26/01/02
"I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation 
of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with 
antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible 
labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this in instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the 
imagination, which is the motive power of research: that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How 
has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? When we compare this tone of thought in 
Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. 
It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of 
Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into 
nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit 
beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith 
of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words." (Whitehead A.N., 
"Science and the Modern World," [1926], Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1938, reprint, pp.23-
24)

27/01/02
"With Darwin, the reverse swing was started. Man was once again regarded as an animal, but now in the light of 
science rather than of unsophisticated sensibility. At the outset, the consequences of the changed outlook were 
not fully explored. The unconscious prejudices and attitudes of an earlier age survived, disguising many of the 
moral and philosophical implications of the new outlook. But gradually the pendulum reached the furthest point 
of its swing. What seemed the logical consequences of the Darwinian postulates were faced: man is an animal 
like any other; accordingly, his views as to the special meaning of human life and human ideals need merit no 
more consideration in the light of eternity (or of evolution) than those of a bacillus or a tapeworm. Survival is the 
only criterion of evolutionary success: therefore, all existing organisms are of equal value. The idea of progress is 
a mere anthropomorphism. Man happens to be the dominant type at the moment, but he might be replaced by the 
ant or the rat. And so on." (Huxley J.S., "The Uniqueness of Man," Chatto & Windus: London, 1941, Third 
Impression, p.2)

28/01/02
"The second argument-that the imperfection of nature reveals evolution-strikes many people as ironic, for they 
feel that evolution should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed by some 
organisms- the camber of a gull's wing, or butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic 
leaves so precisely. But perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection 
covers the tracks of past history. And past history-the evidence of descent-is the mark of evolution. Evolution 
lies exposed in the imperfections that record history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, 
and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common 
ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case." (Gould S.J., "Evolution as 
Fact and Theory," in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History," [1983], Penguin: 
London, 1986, reprint, p.258)

28/01/02
"My own starting position can be summed up in three statements: first, that the only minds whose existence we 
can be confident of are associated with the complex brains of humans and some other animals; second, that we 
(and other animals with minds) are the products of evolution by natural selection; and, third, that neither in the 
origin of life nor in its subsequent evolution has there been any supernatural interference - that is, anything 
happening contrary to the laws of physics. (This last is, if you like, a confession of biological 
uniformitarianism - a belief that, so far as possible, it is sensible to try to explain the past in terms of the 
kinds of processes that occur in the present.)" (Glynn I., "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of 
the Mind," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.5. Emphasis in original)

31/01/02
"Are these few base substitutions incorporated in the DNA enough to be the source of variation for the last 15 
million years of human evolution? it seems unlikely unless they had just the right kinds of effect. We can think in 
terms of changes in the gene regulatory system that would affect the form or function of an organ. But how many 
base substitutions can have such effects? Amino acid substitutions in typical proteins - no way. I feel that it 
would take billions of small biochemical lesions to add up to the multiple changes that have occurred in form. 
Even billions might not be enough, owing to a low probability of the proper combinations of events." (Britten 
R.J., "The Sources of Variation in Evolution," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of 
Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford U.K, 1978, 
reprint, p.216)
[top]

February
1/02/02
"The truth is that evolution was an hypothesis which hardened into dogma before it had been thoroughly 
analysed. Hence it mothered a number of fallacies. It was easy to say that the idea of change or 
transformation in nature had been substituted for that of immutability; but what sort of change was involved? If 
species were no longer regarded as immutable, the fact remained that they exhibited a measure of stability, or 
they would not have deserved the name of species." (Tomlin E.W.F., "Fallacies of Evolutionary Theory," in 
Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know 
About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford U.K, 1978, reprint, p.228. Emphasis in original).

2/02/02
"We had to wait until the 1950s for Stanley Miller to actually attempt to experimentally reproduce the soup (Miller 
1953) . Miller started with a reasonable composition of the ancient atmosphere: mostly methane and ammonia, 
with no oxygen - since atmospheric oxygen, together with the ozone that blocks UV radiation, was in fact 
produced by the organic process of photosynthesis in blue-green algae much, much later than soup time (which 
is a fortunate coincidence, given that oxygen attacks and destroys - technically it "oxidizes" - organic 
compounds at a very fast rate). Miller put the whole thing in a ball, gave it some electric charge, and waited. He 
did find that amino acids and other fundamental complex organic molecules were accumulating at the bottom of 
his apparatus. His discovery gave a huge boost to the scientific investigation of the origin of life. Indeed, for 
some time it seemed like recreation of life in a test tube was within reach of experimental science. Unfortunately, 
Miller-type experiments have not progressed much further than their original prototype, leaving us with a sour 
aftertaste from the primordial soup." (Pigliucci M., "Where Do We Come From?," Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 23, No. 
5, September/October 1999, pp. 21-29, p. 24. http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic/Essays/origin_of_life.htm)

3/02/02
"If nature unguided by natural selection did hit on our most ultimate ancestors within such a time (and on 
present evidence life appeared on earth at least within a billion years of the conditions being right - and possibly 
almost at once) then we should be able to mimic nature's performance within quite a short time - say about a 
fortnight. That we have not succeeded in what should be technically a relatively simple matter is an indication 
that we have not been looking in the right place." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Synthetic Life for Industry," in Duncan R. 
& Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the 
Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.406)

3/02/02
"Evolution has been by no means simply an increase in complexity and sophistication of some set of mechanisms 
that were there from the start. Typically, in that part of the evolutionary story for which we have evidence, quite 
new mechanisms emerged at levels at which they became possible and useful, and these often displaced earlier 
structures." (Cairns- Smith A.G., "Synthetic Life for Industry," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The 
Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: 
Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.407)

3/02/02
"This all points to the possibility that the formation and development of simple life was not an especially difficult 
process; at least not when compared to the evolution of land plants, which only appeared some 3000m years after 
the ancestral cyanobacteria. It seems as though simple chemical reactions among the compounds that scientists 
envisage were available on the early Earth were sufficient to drive the process that led inexorably to life ... . There 
is, however, one problem with this assumption: scientists still have no firm idea of what the mechanics of this 
kind of 'prebiotic' chemistry were or how the whole ascent to life actually happened. Recently, new experimental 
methods have shed some light on the possible processes, but have also served to add to the general uncertainty. 
One thing that scientists working in this field do know, however, is that whatever form early life took it didn't 
possess DNA or proteins." (Evans, J., "It's alive - isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.44)

4/02/02
"There are a lot of things we do not know about evolution, but they are not the things that non-biologists think 
we do not know. If I admit to a nonbiological colleague that evolution theory is inadequate, he is likely to assume 
at once that Darwinism is about to be replaced by Lamarckism and natural selection by the inheritance of 
acquired characters. In fact, nothing seems to me less likely. In common with almost everyone working in the 
field, I am an unrepentant neo-Darwinist. That is, I think that the origin of evolutionary novelty is a process of 
gene mutation which is non-adaptive, and that the direction of evolution is largely determined by natural 
selection. I am enough of a Popperian to know that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, and that observations may 
one day oblige me to abandon it, but I do not expect to have to." (Maynard Smith J., "The Limitations of 
Evolution Theory," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You 
Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.236)

4/02/02
"Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life, or should it be viewed with caution? Raup 
argued that plots of the diversification of life were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks, the less we know. 
The debate was partially resolved by the observation that different data sets gave similar patterns of rising 
diversity through time. Here we show that new assessment methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks 
(stratigraphy) is compared with the order inherent in evolutionary trees (phylogeny), provide a more convincing 
analytical tool: stratigraphy and phylogeny offer independent data on history. Assessments of congruence 
between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of 1,000 published phylogenies show no evidence of 
diminution of quality backwards in time. Ancient rocks clearly preserve less information, on average, than more 
recent rocks. However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the 
past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past." (Benton 
M. J., Wills M.A. & Hitchin R., "Quality of the fossil record through time," Nature, Vol. 403, 3 February 
2000, pp.534-537, p.534)

4/02/02
"One possible escape route from the strictures of the second law is to depart from thermodynamic equilibrium 
conditions. The American biochemist Sidney Fox has investigated what happens when a mixture of amino acids 
is strongly heated. By driving out the water as steam, the linkage of amino acids into peptide chains becomes 
much more likely. The thermal energy flow generates the necessary entropy to comply with the second law. Fox 
has produced some quite long polypeptides, which he terms "proteinoids', using this method. Unfortunately, the 
resemblance between Fox's proteinoids and real proteins is rather superficial. For example, real proteins are made 
exclusively of left-handed amino acids (see p. 42), whereas proteinoids are an equal mixture of left and right." 
(Davies P.C.W., "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, 
pp.60-61)

4/02/02
"One simple alternative is to presume that the properties of the microspheres are less significant than claimed. 
Suppose, for example, that our monkey had typed a sentence containing more numbers than letters, rather than a 
phrase from Shakespeare. It would be nonrandom but unimportant, indicating only that he had a preference for 
the upper part of the keyboard. Similarly, the various properties shown by the microspheres- division, weak 
catalytic activity, a double-layered border, electrical signals, and the rest-may be somewhat general properties of 
microscopic particles of a certain size and unrelated, or only slightly related, to the actual processes of life. 
During my childhood, I learned that I could make the shadow of a dog with my hand. I needed only to point my 
thumb out, bend in my index finger, and hold my hand before a light to produce the image of a dog's head on the 
wall. I could enhance the effect by moving my pinky while making barking noises. But this form was not a dog, 
nor could it ever become one; it was merely shadow play. In the same way, the properties of the microspheres, 
while entertaining, may be merely shadow play." (Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life 
on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, pp.200-201)

4/02/02
"The rationale put forward by Oparin, Fox, and others for their models is that the living cell was preceded by a 
system that had morphological properties resembling cells but was not yet living. Purportedly, Oparin's 
coacervates became protobionts, and Fox's microspheres, protocells. These structures then supposedly 
underwent a period of evolution in which they changed until they evolved into the first living cells. No matter 
how you look at it, this is scientific nonsense. Evolution is a biological process of development through 
mutation, reproduction, and selection. These pseudecellular models, like clay, soap bubbles, or other inanimate 
objects, have neither the mechanism nor the potential of becoming anything more than what they are." (Day W., 
"Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life's Beginning," [1979], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, Second 
Edition, 1984, pp.204-205)

4/02/02
"Proteinoid microspheres are easy to prepare - it's done in many high school laboratories. All that is necessary is 
to heat a chunk of lava with a gas burner, throw a spoonful of dry L or D amino acids on the hot lava, and wash 
resultant proteinoids off the lava with a cup of water. The central question is where did all those pure, dry, 
concentrated and optically active amino acids come from in the real, abiological world? A further problem arises 
when we consider the nature of proteinoid microsphere boundaries. Cells possess a lipoprotein membrane, which 
is gossamer-thin and slowly permeable to many small molecules by diffusion. Proteinoid microspores have a 
boundary made of grossly thick layers upon layers of partly hydrophobic proteins. This later is so thick that it 
resembles a near- impermeable cell wall or spore coat more closely than a cell membrane." (Folsome C.E., "The 
Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, pp.85,87)

4/02/02
"Could the primeval amino acids have joined into peptides under prebiotic conditions? What looked like a simple 
positive answer to this question was found in 1958 by the American biochemist Sidney Fox, long of the 
University of Florida, now at the University of South Alabama. His recipe: Just heat a dry mixture of amino acids 
for three hours at 170 C (338 F). Water comes out and you get a plastic-like solid that, when ground and mixed 
with water, yields up to 15 percent of its weight as a water-soluble product made, on average, of some fifty amino 
acids joined together. To this product Fox gave the name proteinoid, a cautious [sic curious?] choice since 
proteinoids are far from having the regular chainlike structure of peptides. For Fox, this discovery initiated a 
lifelong avocation. He found that proteinoids spontaneously form microscopic vesicles, or "microspheres," 
which he saw as the first cells, and spent his whole career pursuing these studies. Few origin-of-life experts are 
as sanguine as Fox concerning the significance of his results. It has been objected that the conditions required 
for the formation of proteinoids are not likely to have obtained on the prebiotic Earth, that the resulting material 
has more in common with primeval "goo" than with proteins, and that the microspheres are a far cry from 
anything that could be called a cell." (de Duve C.R., "Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative," [1995], Basic 
Books: New York NY, 1998, reprint, p.29)

5/02/02
"This is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject 
to evolution, from atoms and stars to fish and flowers, from fish and flowers to human societies and 
valuesindeed, that all reality is a single process of evolution." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. 
& Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. 
III, 1960, p.249)

5/02/02
"In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was 
not created, it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and 
soul as well as brain and body. So did religion." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., 
eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, 
pp.252-253)

5/02/02
"Religions are organs of psychosocial man concerned with human destiny and with experiences of sacredness 
and transcendence. In their evolution, some (but by no means all)
have given birth to the concept of gods as supernatural beings endowed with mental and spiritual properties and 
capable of intervening in the affairs of nature, including man. Such supernaturally centered religions ... are 
destined to disappear in competition with other, truer, and more embracing thought organizations which are 
handling the same range of raw or processed experience-in this case, with the new religions which are surely 
destined to emerge on this world's scene." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., 
"Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.253)

5/02/02
"The emergent religion of the near future could be a good thing. It will believe in knowledge. It should be able to 
take advantage of the vast amount of new knowledge produced by the knowledge explosion of the last few 
centuries to construct what we may call its "theology"-the framework of facts and ideas which provide it with 
intellectual support; it should be able, with our increased knowledge of mind, to define our sense of right and 
wrong more clearly so as to provide a better moral support; it should be able to focus the feeling of sacredness 
onto fitter objects, instead of worshiping supernatural rulers, so as to provide truer spiritual support, to sanctify 
the higher manifestations of human nature in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, 
and to emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary 
Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago 
Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.260)

5/02/02
"Thus the evolutionary vision, first opened up to us by Charles Darwin a century back, illuminates our existence 
in a simple, but almost overwhelming, way. It exemplifies the truth that truth is great and will prevail, and the 
greater truth that truth will set us free. Evolutionary truth frees us from subservient fear of the unknown and 
supernatural and exhorts us to face this new freedom with courage tempered with wisdom and hope tempered 
with knowledge. It shows us our destiny and our duty." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & 
Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. 
III, 1960, p.260)

5/02/02
"Enzymes are complex protein molecules and it is impossible to imagine that such a specific compound could 
have been produced by chance, even in a period of up to 300 million years. Professor Quastler has calculated that 
the odds against producing a specific complex molecule on Earth are 1 in 10^301 (10 followed by 301 zeros), 
which is very near to impossible. Other calculations have been made to estimate the chance probability of a DNA 
molecule being produced somewhere in the Universe. If one assumes that there could be 10^20 planets in the 
Universe where life may exist or have existed, then the odds of a complex DNA molecule being formed by chance 
are 1 in 10^415, and these odds lengthen to an astonishing 1 in 10^600 if a longer strand of DNA is postulated. It 
is very hard to imagine even the complex molecular building blocks of life (proteins, enzymes and DNA) being 
formed by chance. And the random abiogenic origin of a simple living cell is approaching the impossible." 
(Brooks J., "Origins of Life," Lion: Tring, Hertfordshire UK, 1985, p.103)

5/02/02
"The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we 
would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it 
didn't look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of 
Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. There were several problems, but the 
principal one was that the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow 
and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where 
one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of 
the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted." (Raup 
D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of 
Natural History: Chicago IL, January 1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp.22-29, pp.22-23).

5/02/02
"To emphasize this let me cite a couple of statements Darwin made in his Origin of Species: At one point 
he observed, "innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in 
countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"; in another place he said, "why is not every geological formation 
and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated 
organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory." Instead of 
finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time, and geologists of the present day actually 
find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no 
change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. And it is not always clear, in fact 
it's rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, 
biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field 
Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History: Chicago IL, January 1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, 
pp.22-29, p.23)

6/02/02
"Another more fundamental and intractable problem that strikes at the very heart of the RNA world hypothesis 
is, as Ferris himself admits, the prebiotic formation of the nucleotide units. At first glance, this doesn't really seem 
to be too much of a problem. An RNA nucleotide is made up of a phosphorylated ribose sugar linked to one of 
the four RNA bases, and a variety of plausible prebiotic synthetic routes for creating all of these have been 
suggested. ... But would these kinds of reactions have been plausible on the early Earth? One scientist who 
thinks not is Robert Shapiro at New York University, US. He argues that many of the prebiotic routes suggested 
for the synthesis of nucleotide bases are so artificial that it is unlikely that they ever took place on the early 
Earth, and that, even if they did, any yields from the reactions would have been so small and the products would 
have decayed so rapidly that there would have been little chance of them getting together to form nucleotides. 
For instance, the adenine nucleotide, adenosine, can theoretically be produced entirely abiotically. However, 
according to Shapiro, ribose can only be derived from formaldehyde in relatively small yields, and a whole bunch 
of closely related products are produced as well; this is also the case for the synthesis of adenine from ammonia 
and hydrogen cyanide. To produce adenosine abiotically in the laboratory, however, prebiotic chemists extract 
ribose and adenine from the other compounds, and react them together under optimum conditions. As Shapiro 
says in his recent book Planetary Dreams: 'It would be much more realistic to heat together the entire 
formaldehyde and cyanide products, which would furnish the mother of all messes. Better yet, the chemist 
should simply mix the cyanide and formaldehyde starting materials. But we know what happens in that case; the 
two substances have a great affinity for each other and their reaction takes off in a direction that bears no 
relation to life as we know it'. At least a theoretical prebiotic synthesis path has been developed for adenosine: 
no such path has yet been defined for the pyrimidine nucleotides." (Evans, J., "It's alive isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.46)

7/02/02
"Clearly, I believe in this interdisciplinary exercise, and I accept the enlightenment that intelligent outsiders can 
bring to the puzzles of a discipline. The differences in approach are so fascinating- and each valid in its own 
realm. Philosophers will dissect the logic of an argument, an exercise devoid of empirical content, well past the 
point of glaze over scientific eyes (and here I blame scientists for their parochiality, for all the world's empirics 
cannot save an argument falsely formulated)." (Gould, S.J. "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge." Book Review 
of "Darwin on Trial." By Phillip E. Johnson, Regnery Gateway: Washington DC, 1991. Scientific American, Vol. 
267, No.1, July 1992, pp.92-95, p.92)

7/02/02
"Bethell's argument has a curious ring for most practicing scientists. We are always ready to watch a theory fall 
under the impact of new data, but we do not expect a great and influential theory to collapse from a logical error 
in its formulation. Virtually every empirical scientist has a touch of the Philistine. Scientists tend to ignore 
academic philosophy as an empty pursuit. Surely, any intelligent person can think straight by intuition. Yet 
Bethell cites no data at all in sealing the coffin of natural selection, only an error in Darwin's reasoning: "Darwin 
made a mistake sufficiently serious to undermine his theory. And that mistake has only recently been recognized 
as such.... At one point in his argument, Darwin was misled." Although I will try to refute Bethell, I also deplore 
the unwillingness of scientists to explore seriously the logical structure of arguments. Much of what passes for 
evolutionary theory is as vacuous as Bethell claims. Many great theories are held together by chains of dubious 
metaphor and analogy. Bethell has correctly identified the hogwash surrounding evolutionary theory." (Gould 
S.J., "Darwin's Untimely Burial," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 
1991, reprint, pp.39-40)

7/02/02
"The three chapters collectively argue that Homo sapiens possesses a small number of unique qualities 
that are present in no other animal. Uniqueness is common in biology. Snakes shed their skin, dogs do not; bears 
hibernate, cats do not; monkeys form dominance hierarchies, mice do not. Humans experience guilt, shame, and 
pride, anticipate events far in the future, invent metaphors, speak a language with a grammar, and reason about 
hypothetical circumstances. No other species, including apes, possesses this set of talents." (Kagan J., "Three 
Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.9)

8/02/02
"More philosophical works have been written on morality than on any, other human quality because it is a 
unique and distinctive characteristic of our species. Every species inherits potentialities that make the acquisition 
of particular competencies easy. Talking comes readily to humans, while reading usually requires special 
tutoring. Assigning the symbolic labels good or bad to experience also comes easily to humans, and this 
disposition permeates our actions, beliefs, and emotions. ... Social scientists have awarded a little too much 
power to the obvious desire to maximize self-interest and attain sensory pleasure and not quite enough to the 
universal need to be kind, loyal, and loving. This chapter does not compete with philosophical works by 
defending one set of ethics over another, for I ask only why humans hold any ethical position at all." (Kagan J., 
"Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, pp.6-7)

9/02/02
"But put against the background of the popular, traditional alternative which Darwin's six predecessors meant it 
to displace-the theory of providential or guided or automatic progress-this idea takes on a sinister complexion. 
For the 'nature' it calls upon to undertake the work of selection, unlike man, has no purpose and no goal. 
Variation likewise being by chance has no purpose and no goal. The changes nature favours are not predestined 
to be improvements. ... Progress is not inevitable. Instead of a convergence on desirable ends we are offered only 
a divergence, a horribly erratic divergence, from unknown beginnings. Instead of a spiritual guidance there is a 
material determinism in whose operation blind accident plays a necessary and morally meaningless part. Thus the 
conflict between natural selection and automatic or inherent or providential direction is deeper and more abiding 
than the parallel conflict between evolution and creation. And it is far more important today. For the argument 
about evolution or creation concerns the dead past; but the argument about selection or direction concerns us 
now: it concerns the present we know and the future we expect." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," 
Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.42-43)

9/02/02
"There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humiliate them. There is enough obscurity 
to blind the reprobate and enough light to condemn them and deprive them of excuse." (Pascal B., "Pensees," 
236, [1670], Krailsheimer A.J., Transl., Penguin: London, Revised edition, 1966, p.73)

9/02/02
"And finally on the last page of his book [Descent of Man] Darwin concludes that although 'social instincts' 
which afforded the basis for development of the moral sense may be safely attributed' to natural selection, yet 
'the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the 
reasoning powers, religion, etc.' (II, 404). Where are we now? In the last sentence Darwin, with the phrase 
'directly or indirectly', slips into a double disguise. He puts together without distinction the known transmission 
of culture, religion, etc. and the unknown inheritance of acquired characters as the joint antithesis of natural 
selection. Thus, even the parson might suppose that his preaching contributed to evolution; and contributed 
moreover to a particularly progressive and hopeful form of evolution. Was the confusion here a confusion in 
Darwin's mind? Did he imagine he had any evidence for his conclusion? If so why did he not quote it? It would 
have been epoch- making. Or was he, on the contrary, unconsciously introducing confusion to throw ignorant 
people of the scent: to keep the serious discussion between people who were interested in the scientific 
problem? The immediate context favours this view as well as the autobiography." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's 
Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.46-47)

10/02/02
"One of the most fundamental claims in the Darwinian theory of evolution is that natural selection provides the 
only satisfactory explanation for adaptation. The Darwinian, therefore, must show that the alternatives to natural 
selection either do not work or are scientifically unacceptable. Let us consider the natural theologians' 
supernatural explanation first. We can accept that an omnipotent, supernatural agent could create welladapted 
living things-in that sense the explanation works. However, it has two defects. First, supernatural explanations 
for natural phenomena are scientifically useless. Second, the supernatural Creator is not explanatory. The 
problem requires us to explain the existence of adaptation in the world, but a supernatural Creator already 
possesses this property. Omnipotent beings are themselves well-designed, adaptively complex, entities. Thus, 
the thing we are trying to explain has been built into the explanation. Positing a God merely invites the question 
of how such a highly adaptive and well-designed thing could, in its turn, have come into existence. Theological 
sophistry about the perfect simplicity of God and the inexplicability of the First Cause can be ignored here: the 
problem is to explain adaptive complexity. The first alternative to natural selection, therefore, is a viciously 
circular argument, and unscientific." (Ridley M., "Evolution," Blackwell: Cambridge MA, Second Edition, 1996, 
p.339)

10/02/02
"Mutations are known to occur spontaneously - i.e. without our doing anything deliberately to cause them - with 
low frequency. It was shown by Muller that their frequency is greatly increased by X-rays. Since that time, a 
number of chemical substance, have been found which increase the frequency of mutation. More important, 
different chemical and physical agents produce different types of change. There is nothing particularly surprising 
about this. For example, one class of mutagenic substances is the so-called 'base analogues'. These are molecules 
which bear a close chemical similarity to one of the four bases, adenine, thymine, guanine, or cytosine. When 
such analogues are present, a replicating DNA molecule may incorporate one of them instead of the 
corresponding base, the result being a mutation. Thus a particular analogue would be expected to cause 
mutations at particular sites within the gene, and this has been shown by Freese to be the case in viruses. Thus it 
is no longer possible to think of mutations as `random'. But we can abandon the concept of the randomness of 
mutation without accepting Lamarckism, and while continuing to hold that it is selection and not mutation which 
determines the direction of evolution." (Maynard Smith, J., "The Theory of Evolution," [1958], Cambridge 
University Press/Canto: Cambridge UK, Third edition, Reprinted, 1993, pp.80-81)

10/02/02
"Even proponents of the RNA world hypothesis admit that there are major problems with the prebiotic synthesis 
of RNA nucleotides. Writing in The RNA world, Gerald Joyce, a professor in the departments of 
chemistry and molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute, California, US, and Leslie Orgel of the Salk 
Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, US, state: 'Scientists interested in the origins of life seem to divide 
neatly into two classes. The first, usually but not always molecular biologists, believe that RNA must have been 
the first replicating molecule and that chemists are exaggerating the difficulties of nucleotide synthesis. The 
second group of scientists are much more pessimistic. They believe that the de novo appearance of 
oligonucleotides on the primitive Earth would have been a near miracle. Time will tell which is correct'." (Evans, J., 
"It's alive - isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, pp.46-47)

10/02/02
"The first point to make about Darwin's theory is that it is no longer a theory, but a fact. No serious scientist 
would deny the fact that evolution has occurred, just as he would not deny the fact that the earth goes around 
the sun. Darwin's great contributions were, first, gathering enormous masses of detailed facts that did not make 
sense unless evolution had occurred and, second, discovering the principle of natural selection, and so 
providing a mechanism of evolution that is intelligible on scientific grounds without calling in any external 
agency." (Huxley J.S., "`At Random': A Television Preview," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., "Evolution After 
Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.41).

10/02/02
"Orthodox neo-Darwinians extrapolate these even and continuous changes to the most profound structural 
transitions in the historyof life: by a long series of insensibly graded intermediate steps, birds are linked to 
reptiles, fish with jaws to their jawless ancestors. Macroevolution (major structural transition) is nothing more 
than microevolution (flies in bottles) extended. If black moths can displace white moths in a century, then reptiles 
can become birds in a few million years by the smooth and sequential summation of countless changes. The shift 
of gene frequencies in local populations is an adequate model for all evolutionary processes - or so the current 
orthodoxy states." (Gould S.J., "The Return of the Hopeful Monster," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections 
in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, pp.155-156)

10/02/02
"The strict version, with its emphasis on copious, minute, random variation molded with excruciating but 
persistent slowness by natural selection, also implied that all events of large-scale evolution (macroevolution) 
were the gradual, accumulated product of innumerable steps, each a minute adaptation to changing conditions 
within a local population. This "extrapolationist" theory denied any independence to macroevolution and 
interpreted all large-scale evolutionary events (origin of basic designs, long-term trends, patterns of extinction 
and faunal turnover) as slowly accumulated microevolution (the study of small-scale changes within species)." 
(Gould S.J., "Prologue," in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History", [1983], 
Penguin: London, 1986, reprint, p.13)

10/02/02
"Finally, the universal emergence of a moral sense at the end of the second year is so striking to those who study 
children that its significance is difficult to ignore. A scientist who studied only college students might agree with 
a statement once made by Van Quine, one of the world's most respected philosophers, that human conscience is 
essentially a socially constructed product built from slaps and sugarplums. But no one who has seen a three-
year-old's face become tense as she fails a difficult task, or heard a small child say `Yukky' to a dirty cloth lying 
on a laboratory floor, would find this argument persuasive." (Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard 
University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.10)

10/02/02
"There is simply no denying the breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in nature. Time and again, 
biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see 
that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of 
Mother Nature's creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the name of his colleague 
Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls `Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.'" (Dennett D.C., 
"Darwin 's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, reprint, p.74)

10/02/02
"The first words chosen to name natural phenomena are always too general. Air, fire, water, and earth, which 
were conceived as essences, are not the four fundamental forms matter assumes. Darwin's concept of natural 
selection failed to distinguish between traits that persisted over generations because they were adaptive and 
traits that persisted simply because they were not maladaptive. Nor did Darwin award significance to the 
difference between a gradual extinction that was the result of the inheritance of maladaptive qualities and sudden 
extinction caused by an unusual ecological event, like a prolonged drought or a large asteroid striking the earth." 
(Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, pp.76-77)

11/02/02
"Organisms are not optimizing machines; they are historical objects, constrained by inherited Bauplane, modes of 
development, and mechanical properties of building materials. The answer to why theoretical morphospace is so 
empty in some places and so chock full in others (surely the cardinal question for a science of form) may have 
less to do with good performance in the Newtonian sense than with historical and developmental constraints. 
We need to pay much more attention to the maligned tradition of classical continental European morphology 
with its emphasis on constraints, history and the formal (rather than functional)
properties of design and its generation." (Gould S.J., "The promise of paleobiology as a nomothetic, evolutionary 
discipline," Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, pp.96-118, p.111)

11/02/02
"The idea of purpose or ultimate design therefore does not deny the reality or importance of the material and 
efficient causes studied by science, but it does suggest that intelligence might be the source of the formal causes 
in nature, the natural boundaries that shape the direction taken by nature's efficient causes. A convinced 
`teleologist,' Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield, expressed it thus, `Some lack of general philosophical acumen 
must be suspected when it is not fully understood that teleology is in no way inconsistent with-is rather 
necessarily involved with-a complete system of natural causation. Every teleological system implies a complete 
"causo- mechanistic" explanation as its instrument.'" (Warfield B.B., "A Review of Darwinism Today, by Vernon 
L. Kellogg," Princeton Theological Review, 1908, pp.640-50). (Wilcox D.L.*, "How Blind the Watchmaker?," in 
Templeton J.M, ed., "Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator," Continuum: New York NY, 1994, 
p.169)

11/02/02
"To understand what Aristotle means, we must take account of what he says about causes. There are, according 
to him, four kinds of causes, which were called, respectively, material, formal, efficient, and final. Let us take again 
the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of 
the statue to be produced, the efficient cause is the contact of the chisel with the marble, and the final cause is 
the end that the sculptor has in view. In modern terminology, the word 'cause' would be confined to the efficient 
cause." (Russell B., "History of Western Philosophy", George Allen & Unwin: London, 1961, p.181)

13/02/02
"Schwartz ignores the fact that homeobox genes are selector genes. They can do nothing if the genes regulated 
by them are not there. It is these genes that specify in detail the adaptive structure of the organs. To be sure, 
turning on a homeobox gene at the wrong place can result in the appearance of an ectopic organ, but only if the 
genes for that organ are present in the same individual. It is totally wrong to imply that an eye could be produced 
by a macromutation when no eye was ever present in the lineage before. Homeotic mutations that reshuffle parts 
do happen, and sometimes they may have led to fixation of real evolutionary novelties, but this does not mean 
that such changes are implied in the majority of speciations. In fact, macromutations of this sort are probably 
frequently maladaptive, in contrast to the vast number of past and present species-not to mention the fact that 
morphological differences between related species can be minute." (Szathmary E., "When the means do no not 
justify the end," review of "Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species," by Jeffrey H. 
Schwartz, Wiley,: 1999, in Nature, Vol. 399, 24 June 1999, p.745)

13/02/02
"Few opinions of men are sacrosanct, and Evolution is merely one view of how the world of Nature reached its 
present status. The loud and persistent attestations that it is not theory but "fact" merely serve to indicate how 
shaky some of its foundations are." (Shute E.*, "Flaws in the Theory of Evolution," [1962], Baker: Grand Rapids 
MI, 1980 , Eighth Printing, p.230)

14/02/02
"In the world of ideas dogma focuses thinking. In a given domain it acts to eliminate or suppress alternative 
habits of thought. Successful scientific ideas often begin life as playful and potentially fruitful possibilities 
(circumventing the received teachings) because they appear to solve a pressing problem; they mature into 
acceptance and then freeze over, if you like, into dogma. Really useful dogmas allow us to economise our time 
and effort in not constantly reinventing the wheel. Scientific dogmas' can be very useful and are only given up 
after vigorous and often sustained resistance. They are strongly defended-often literally to the death of the main 
intellectual players-precisely because they have allowed the fruitful development of a successful school of 
thought and have usually been of practical significance to mankind." (Steele E.J., Lindley R.A. & Blanden R.V., 
"Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm," Allen & Unwin: St 
Leonards NSW, Australia, 1998, pp.xviii-xix)

14/02/02
"It is hard to overstate the impact that these physical images have had in shaping our world view. The doctrine 
that the physical Universe consists of inert matter locked into a sort of gigantic deterministic clockwork has 
penetrated all branches of human inquiry. Materialism dominates biology, for example. Living organisms are 
regarded as nothing more than complicated collections of particles, each being blindly pulled and pushed by its 
neighbours. Richard Dawkins, an eloquent champion of biological materialism, describes human beings (and 
other living entitles) as 'gene machines'. Thus, organisms are treated as automata. ... There is no doubt that the 
Newtonian world view, with its doctrine of materialism and the clockwork universe, has contributed immensely to 
the advance of science by providing a highly intuitive framework within which to study a wide range of 
phenomena. But there is equally no doubt that it has also contributed in large part to alienating human beings 
from the Universe they inhabit. ... People feel a sense of helplessness; they are merely 'cogs' in a machine that will 
lumber on regardless of their feelings or actions. Many people have rejected scientific values because they 
regard materialism as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automata and leaves no 
room for free will or creativity. These people can take heart: materialism is dead." (Davies P.C.W. & Gribbin J., 
"The Matter Myth: Beyond Chaos and Complexity," [1991], Penguin: London, 1992, reprint, pp.6-7)

14/02/02
"DNA governs the operation of every cell in our bodies. A cell is a busy place, a city of large and small molecules 
all constructed according to information encoded in DNA. The metaphor of a city may seem even more farfetched 
than that of a skyscraper for an invisibly small cell until you consider that a cell has room for more than a 
hundred million million atoms; that is plenty of space for millions of different molecules, since even the largest 
molecules in a cell are made of only a few hundred million atoms. DNA ensures that a cell is not just a chemical 
soup but a molecular city with a center from which critical information flows, a molecular version of King David's 
Jerusalem. That walled city, with its supply of food and water entering through special portals and channels, had 
a great temple at the center and a book at the very center of the temple. A cell's version of the temple is the 
nucleus, a membrane wrapped receptacle enclosing the cell's DNA. The nucleus is also the hub from which 
portions of the text are delivered to the cell, just as the sacred scripts were read to the people of Jerusalem from 
the entrances of the temple. ... If a cell were as big as the Old City of Jerusalem, each chemical "letter" in the cell's 
DNA text - consisting of a few hundred atoms - would be about as big as letter in a word of any familiar book. Yet 
every part of the cell, no matter how complex its form or function, is made according to information contained in 
the DNA folded into its nucleus. To appreciate this triumph of molecular origami, consider that the DNA in one 
human cell, if unwound and straightened out, would be a pair of molecules each about one yard long. A yard of 
DNA is a hundred million times longer than it is wide, and this exquisite thinness is the key to its ability to fit 
inside the nucleus. The pair of yard-long DNAs in a human cell are so slender that about ten billion copies, laid 
side by side like the wires of a telephone cable, would fit inside a waist-length human hair. That is about as many 
pairs of human DNA as there are people on the planet today; a genetic archive of our entire species could 
therefore be tightly packed into one long human hair if we had the means (and the desire) to do it." (Pollack R., 
"Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA," [1994], Penguin Books: London, 1995, reprint, pp.18-19)

15/02/02
"Mayr, professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard University, asserts that the term `evolutionary theory' should 
be abandoned. Evolution, he says, `is a fact so overwhelmingly established that it has become irrational to call it 
a theory.'" (Anonymous, "The Editors Recommend." Book "What Evolution Is." By Ernst Mayr, Basic Books, 
New York, 2001, Scientific American, February, 2002, p.85. 
http://www.sciam.com/books/?section=review&issue_date=01-feb-2002).

15/02/02
"Nevertheless, Darwin's theory still had some serious imperfections that prevented its being accepted by many 
students of evolution. The theory explained why unfit or inadaptive types of organisms tend to be eliminated, 
but it did not seem adequately to explain the much more important origin of more fit, better adapted organisms. It 
also failed to explain why evolution is not completely adaptive-why different types of organisms may evolve 
even though their relationships with the environment seem to be exactly the same, why adaptation is seldom or 
never perfect, and why non-adaptive characters (those not involved in adaptation) and inadaptive characters 
(those opposed to harmonious adaptation) do often arise in evolution. These features of evolution were not well 
explained by the older forms of Darwinian theory and their reality was abundantly demonstrated by critics of 
Darwin." (Simpson G.G., "Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million 
Years of History," [1951], The Natural History Library, Doubleday & Co: Garden City NY, 1961, reprint, p.293)

16/02/02
"The debate on evolution between the creationists and the neo-Darwinists is not just sterile, it misses the central 
issue, which is that neo-Darwinism is wrong and dangerous. It is promoting and misguiding a runaway 
technology that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. It reinforces a worldview that undermines every 
single moral value that makes us human. It is also obstructing and preventing the necessary shift to holistic 
ecological sciences that can connect to the organic revolution rising from the grassroots all over the world, 
which can truly regenerate the earth and revitalize the human spirit." (Ho M-W., "The End of Bad Science and 
Beginning Again with Life," Conference on "The Limit of Natural Selection", French Senate, Paris, March 18, 
2000, in Institute of Science in Society, London, 2000.
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/bad.htm)

17/02/02
"In days long gone, the second law of thermodynamics (which predated the first law) was regarded as perhaps 
the most perfect and unassailable law in physics. It was even supposed to have philosophical import: It has been 
hailed for providing a proof of the existence of God (who started the universe off in a state of low entropy, from 
which it is constantly degenerating); conversely, it has been rejected as being incompatible with dialectical 
materialism and the perfectibility of the human condition. ... No exception to the second law of thermodynamics 
has ever been found-not even a tiny one. Like conservation of energy (the "first" law), the existence of a law so 
precise and so independent of details of models must have a logical foundation that is independent of the fact 
that matter is composed of interacting particles." (Lieb E.H. & Yngvason J., "A Fresh Look at Entropy and the 
Second Law of Thermodynamics," Physics Today, April 2000, pp.32-37, p.32)

19/02/02
"It is, however, the word "struggle" that has led to most serious misunderstanding of the process of natural 
selection, along with a host of related phrases and ideas, "nature red in fang and claw," "class struggle" as a 
natural and desirable element in societal evolution, and all the rest. "Struggle" inevitably carries the connotation 
of direct and conscious combat. Such combat does occur in nature, to be sure, and it may have some connection 
with differential reproduction. A puma and a deer may struggle, one to kill and the other to avoid being killed. If 
the puma wins, it eats and presumably may thereby be helped to produce offspring, while the deer dies and will 
never reproduce again. Two stags may struggle in rivalry for does and the successful combatant may then 
reproduce while the loser does not. Even such actual struggles may have only slight effects on reproduction, 
although they will, on an average, tend to exercise some selective influence. The deer most likely to be killed by 
the puma is too old to reproduce; if the puma does not get the deer, it will eat something else; the losing stag 
finds other females, or a third enjoys the does while the combat rages between these two." (Simpson G.G., "The 
Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University 
Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, pp.221-222)

19/02/02
"The mystery about sexual reproduction is ... that there is a ... 'cost of halving the chromosome number and not 
being able to double the number of gametes ... what possible advantage there could be to sexual reproduction 
that makes up for this cost and accounts for its persistence. This question has caused some embarrassment to 
evolutionary biologists in the past. Although determined to fit everything into a selective framework and see 
shifting gene frequencies as the basis of all evolutionary events, they were unable to come up with any 
satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon that is at once extremely widespread and also appears to suffer from 
a selective disadvantage of quite enormous (50 per cent)
proportions. Early explanations, that it was 'good for the species' to have the variation that is engendered by the 
mixing and shuffling of sex, had largely to be discarded. It was an attractive idea to think that sexual reproduction 
might result in variation staying in populations so that if the environment suddenly changed, the population 
could 'cope' and have at least some of its members surviving, which a uniform asexual population might fail to do. 
But by the end of the 1960s, the weakness of such arguments was generally realized. .... Populations do not 
harbour deleterious traits against the possibility of future benefit. We cannot expect a trait, to use Sydney 
Brenner's immortal words, to evolve in the Cambrian 'because it might come in handy in the Cretaceous'." 
(Dawkins M.S., "Unravelling Animal Behaviour," Longman: Harlow, Essex UK, 1986, p.135)

19/02/02
"The word "competition," used in discussion here and previously, may also carry anthropomorphic undertones 
and then be subject to some of these same objections. It may, however, and in this connection it must, be 
understood without necessary implication of active competitive behavior. Competition in evolution often or 
usually is entirely passive; It could conceivably occur without the competing forms ever coming into sight or 
contact." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for 
Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.222)

21/02/02
"The study of adaptation seems to show the opposite mode of development. It has already had its Newtonian 
synthesis, but its Galileo and Kepler have not yet appeared. The 'Newtonian synthesis" is the genetical theory of 
natural selection, a logical unification of Mendelism and Darwinism that was accomplished by Fisher, Haldane, 
and Wright more than thirty years ago. For all its formal elegance, however, this theory has provided very limited 
guidance in the work of biologists. Ordinarily it does little more than to give a vague aura of validity to 
conclusions on adaptive evolution and to enable a biologist to refer to goal-directed activities without 
descending into teleology. The inherent strength of the theory is restricted by the paucity of generalizations, 
analogous to Kepler's laws, that can serve on the one hand as summaries of large masses of observations and, 
on the other hand, as logical deductions from the theory." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A 
Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, 
p.20)

21/02/02
"A frequently helpful but not infallible rule is to recognize adaptation in organic systems that show a clear 
analogy with human implements. There are convincing analogies between bird wings and airship wings, between 
bridge suspensions and skeletal suspensions, between the vascularization of a leaf and the water supply of a 
city. In all such examples, conscious human goals have an analogy in the biological goal of survival, and similar 
problems are often resolved by similar mechanisms. Such analogies may forcefully occur to a physiologist at the 
beginning of an investigation of a structure or process and provide a continuing source of fruitful hypotheses. 
At other times the purpose of a mechanism may not be apparent initially, and the search for the goal becomes a 
motivation for further study." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current 
Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.10)

22/02/02
"Any biological mechanism produces at least one effect that can properly be called its goal: vision for the eye or 
reproduction and dispersal for the apple. There may also be other effects, such as the apple's contribution to 
man's economy. In many published discussions it is not at all clear whether an author regards a particular effect 
as the specific function of the causal mechanism or merely as an incidental consequence. In some cases it would 
appear that he has not appreciated the importance of the distinction. In this book I will adhere to a terminological 
convention that may help to reduce this difficulty. Whenever I believe that an effect is produced as the function 
of an adaptation perfected by natural selection to serve that function, I will use terms appropriate to human 
artifice and conscious design. The designation of something as the means or mechanism for a certain 
goal or function or purpose will imply that the machinery involved was fashioned by 
selection for the goal attributed to it." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some 
Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, pp.8-9. Emphasis 
in original).

22/02/02
"The same story could be told for every normal part or activity of every stage in the life history of every species 
in the biota of the Earth, past or present. For the same reason that it was once effective in the theological 
"argument from design," the structure of the vertebrate eye can be used as a dramatic illustration of biological 
adaptation and the necessity for believing that natural selection for effective vision must have operated 
throughout the history of the group." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some 
Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.6)

23/02/02
"The account of evolution given above is based on molecular and historical evidence and on our knowledge of 
the living world as it is today. Many events were postulated without direct evidence. Because of the lack of hard 
evidence, it might be said that the concept of evolution is abstract, theoretical, possibly a figment of the 
imagination. The question therefore arises: can we reproduce evolution in the laboratory? Obviously, we cannot 
do so using long-extinct creatures or large present-day animals. Because evolutionary events take place over 
many generations, it would take centuries to experiment with mice, say. But we can design an experiment 
using fast-reproducing organisms like bacteria or fruitflies." (Dulbecco R., "The Design of Life," Yale University 
Press: New Haven CT, 1987, p.439. Emphasis in original)

23/02/02
"What is the theory of evolution? It is very easy to find out in a vague way, but very difficult to find out in a 
precise way. This is because it is really two theories, the vague theory and the precise theory. The vague theory 
has been abundantly proved, with an overwhelming mass of evidence, so much that it cannot possibly be 
doubted. The precise theory has never been proved at all. However, like relativity, it is accepted as a faith. Vague 
evolution is rather difficult to formulate, because it is vague, but it is extremely easy to see. Any book on biology 
is full of it, and it has been so thoroughly popularized that there is hardly anybody who is not aware of it. It 
points to the striking similarities, in every detail, between the bodies of men and of the apes; to the slightly more 
distant resemblances between men and other mammals, to the duck-billed platypus, which Huxley called "a 
museum of reptilian reminiscence," to the reptiles themselves, to the fish, both bony and cartilaginous, and so on 
and so on, as can be found in many a fine book. It points, too, to the development of the embryo, "climbing up 
the family tree," and to the record of the rocks-there were fish before there were reptiles, reptiles before mammals. 
Whatever this proves-and it would seem to prove that all forms of life are connected in some way-is 
indisputable. But in what way? To answer this question, we need a precise theory. The precise theory of 
evolution is that all forms of life on the earth today came from some original form of life by a series of changes 
which, at every point, were natural and explainable by science. ... Biologists ... by mixing up the vague 
theory of evolution with the precise theory ... give the impression that both have been proved, whereas the 
precise theory is much further from being proved than men are from flying to the moon." (Standen A., "Science Is 
A Sacred Cow," [1950], E.P. Dutton & Co: New York NY, 1958, reprint, pp.101-103. Emphasis in original)

25/02/02
"This debate is of considerable interest for two reasons. On the one hand, it points to some uncertain aspects of 
the concept of evolution, such as the origin of life. On the other hand, it is an important example of how humans 
approach objective truth. A body of facts available to everybody is used by some individuals to build a scientific 
theory they think is above all doubts, but is considered by others as only a fabrication leading to moral turpitude. 
The difference between the two groups lies in their cultural backgrounds and philosophies. There are probably 
few other cases where the same information is used to draw such opposing conclusions." (Dulbecco R., "The 
Design of Life," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1987, p.446)

25/02/02
"But time, and further archaeological discoveries, would tell on the side of evolution. It still remains merely a 
"theory"-by its very nature, its secrets buried in time and its operations agonizingly slow, it can never be 
"proved" the way mechanical principles can." (Macrone M., "A Little Knowledge: What Archimedes Really 
Meant and 80 Other Key Ideas Explained," [1994], Ebury Press: London, 1998, reprint, p.153)

26/02/02
"Yet even today there is no theory of evolution, no set of rules that says under what conditions this or that will 
happen. Natural selection is a very general explanation of how evolution occurs, but not when or why. As with 
any historical process, so many minuscule factors can affect the outcome that prediction is impossible. Two 
worlds, with the same plants, animals, and environment, will over time evolve radically different species (Gould, 
1989). The trajectory of evolution is chaotic. Looking back in time, evolutionists can try to infer what 
environmental factors influenced the development of certain species, but this is little more than speculation. Too 
many factors are involved ever to be sure which the instigating cause was." (Cromer A., "Uncommon Sense: The 
Heretical Nature of Science," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, p.40)

26/02/02
"Thus changes that benefit an individual will tend to be selected and perpetuated. Most changes of this nature 
will be a disadvantage to a member of a species; such changes will therefore usually not be perpetuated, for a 
member of a species which exhibits such a change is likely to lose the battle for life, and will not reproduce. So 
slowly, gradually, a new species comes into existence through random mutation and natural selection of the 
fittest. This is the theory. It has of course never been proved. In fact it could never be proved to be the sole 
mechanism of evolution without a disproof of all other possible mechanisms and without positive evidence of its 
operation." (Montefiore H., "The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, pp.74-75)

26/02/02
"In the case of human evolution, the situation is even more speculative because the fossil evidence is so spotty. 
Every new discovery has the potential for radically changing our views on the subject. This is a very incomplete 
science in which the most basic question What were the selective pressures that favored human intelligence-
remains unanswered. That is, we don't know what natural selection was doing when it invented thinking." 
(Cromer A., "Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, 
pp.40-41)

26/02/02
"Biological evolution is necessarily the unbroken continuation of a long process of chemical evolution. It is 
possible to try to reconstitute in the laboratory the conditions that apparently prevailed on earth before the 
appearance of living organisms. Whole series of organic compounds are then seen to form spontaneously. Even 
polymers can arise by chance associations between the subunits. Although inefficient, the reactions required for 
producing the macromolecules characteristic of living organisms really seem to occur without biological 
catalysts. Yet it is difficult to imagine the appearance of an integrated system, however primitive; the origin of an 
organization able to reproduce even badly, even slowly. For the humblest organism, the simplest bacterium, is 
already a coalition of enormous numbers of molecules. It is out of the question for all the pieces to have been 
formed independently in the primeval ocean, to meet by chance one fine day, and suddenly arrange themselves 
in such a complex system." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," [1970], Trans. Spillmann B.E., 
Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, pp.304-305)

27/02/02
"I have never understood how God can be the God of all the earth unless there can be real points of contact with 
him in addition to the Word spoken in Christ. In any case, I come from a Jewish family, and the idea that non-
Christians are so totally blind that they can have no authentic knowledge of God is to me not only obnoxious but 
also disproved by my earlier experience. Nonetheless, the familiar discourse within the Christian church today is 
frequently fideist, speaking in a language of faith which seems to have little relevance to the ordinary workings of 
the world in which we live, and which makes sense only within the charmed circle of Christian believers. This has 
added to the marginalization of the church, against which I have taken up my pen to write this book. If God 
created the universe, then we would expect to see his footsteps within it in a way which can be generally 
recognized by the light of reason." (Montefiore H., "The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, pp.5-6)

27/02/02
"Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly 
underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and 
hourly, all around us, and we can watch. ... Now the Grants' work on Darwin's finches is entering the textbooks 
too. This is one of the most intensive and valuable animal studies ever conducted in the wild; zoologists and 
evolutionists already regard it as a classic. It is the best and most detailed demonstration to date of the power of 
Darwin's process." (Weiner J., "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," Alfred A. Knopf: New 
York NY, 1994, p.9)

27/02/02
"The Grants are leaders of this field, and they are among its ideal representatives. Year after year they go back to 
the most celebrated place in the study of evolution, the place that helped lead the young Darwin to his theory: 
the Galapagos, the Enchanted Islands. There they observe Darwin's finches, the birds that Darwin was the first 
naturalist to collect; the birds whose beaks inspired his first veiled hints about his revolutionary theory; the birds 
whose portraits in textbooks and encyclopedias have now introduced so many generations to Darwinism that 
they have become international symbols of the process, totems of evolution, like the overshot brows and 
cumulous beard of Darwin himself." (Weiner J., "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," 
Alfred A. Knopf: New York NY, 1994, p.9)

27/02/02
"The beak of the finch is an icon of evolution the way the Bohr atom is an icon of modern physics, and the study 
of either one shows us more primal energy and eternal change than our minds are built to take in. Yet like the 
vista of the atoms, the vista of evolution in action, of evolution in the flesh, has enormous implications for our 
sense of reality, of what life is, and also for our sense of power, of what we can do with life." (Weiner J., "The 
Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," Alfred A. Knopf: New York NY, 1994, p.112)

27/02/02
"It is difficult for a nonscientist to appreciate the overriding importance to the researcher of priority of discovery. 
Credit in science goes only for originality, for being the first to discover something. With rare exceptions, there 
are no rewards for being second. Discovery without priority is a bitter fruit. In the clash of rival claims and 
competing theories, a scientist often takes active measures to ensure that his ideas are noticed, and that it is 
under his name that a new finding is recognized. The desire to win credit, to gain the respect of one's peers, is a 
powerful motive for almost all scientists. From the earliest days of science, the thirst for recognition has brought 
with it the temptation to `improve' a little on the truth, or even to invent data out of whole cloth, in order to make 
a theory prevail." (Broad W. & Wade N., "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," 
Simon and Schuster: New York NY, 1982, p.24)

27/02/02
"For want of vestiges to examine, biology is reduced to making conjectures. It tries to arrange the problems in 
series, to individualize the objects and formulate questions that can be answered by experiments. Which of the 
polymers, nucleic acid or protein, came first? What is the origin of the genetic code? The first question leads one 
to speculate whether anything vaguely like a living organism would be conceivable without both types of 
polymer. The second raises problems both of evolution and of logic. Of evolution, because univocal 
correspondence between each group of three nucleic-acid sub units and each protein sub-unit cannot have 
arisen at a single stroke. Of logic, because it is difficult to perceive why this particular correspondence was 
adopted rather than another; why one nucleic-acid triplet 'means' a certain protein sub-unit and not another. 
Perhaps primitive organizations had some constraints of structure we know nothing about: it would then be the 
adjustment of molecular conformations that would have imposed, if not the whole system at least some of its 
equivalences. But again perhaps there was no constraint at all: then it would have been purely by chance that the 
equivalences were produced and persisted afterwards." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," 
[1970], Trans. Spillmann B.E., Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, pp.305-306)

27/02/02
"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 C.D., 
"Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, p.62)

27/02/02
"The idea that Darwinism's rapid triumph was solely scientific without regard to his and others' courting of public 
opinion, is a historical myth that assures us of the power of science and its victory on the merits of evidence 
regardless of ideology, religion, or social mores. It is the same with the myth of Huxley's triumph over 
Wilberforce. The culture of science and science historians have created a myth which fits very well a history that 
depicts the intellectual, even moral, superiority of science." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and 
Misuses of a Theory," The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, p.xiv)

28/02/02
"In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; but who ever objected to chemists 
speaking of the elective affinities of the various elements?-and yet an acid cannot strictly be said to elect the 
base with which it in preference combines. It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or 
Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? 
Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary 
for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the 
aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. 
With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten." (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.81)

28/02/02
"Whereas Darwin emphasized that only certain organisms survive to reproduce, modern evolutionists emphasize 
differential reproduction. Certain organisms can acquire a greater share of available resources; if they have the 
ability to reproduce, then their chances of successful reproduction are greater than those that are not as well 
equipped to capture resources. (Mader S.S., "Biology," [1985], Wm. C. Brown Co: Dubuque IA, Third Edition, 
1990, p.287)

28/02/02
"Natural selection can be defined simply as the differential reproduction of alternative genetic variants, 
determined by the fact that some variants increase the chances of survival and reproduction of their carriers 
relative to the carriers of other variants. Natural selection may be due to differential survival or differential 
fertility, or both." (Ayala F.J. & Kiger J.A. Jr., "Modern Genetics," [1980], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, 
Second Edition, 1984, p.800)

28/02/02
"Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the 
history of life can be explained by purely materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of 
differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the 
mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A 
Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, 
reprint, p.343)

28/02/02
"Like most revolutionary ideas, social Darwinism was a highly malleable concept; it was easily interpreted to 
support very different values, and that is exactly what occurred. Second, social Darwinism was empirical 
an attribute that gave it credibility, especially in America and Germany, two cultures which were quite taken with 
science and technology. Third, social Darwinism easily appealed to the educated middle and upper classes, 
whose social and economic superiority it explained in terms of scientific law. Finally, the idea ostensibly was 
fairly straightforward and without moral complexities and burdens. Social Darwinism had these attributes while 
retaining the imprimatur of scientific truth. This last point also explains why different groups have adopted one or 
two of the three myths discussed in this book." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a 
Theory," The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, p.xiii. Emphasis in original)

28/02/02
"In Hitler's eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he 
declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest. 'Taken to 
its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.' From political 
considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by 
persecution. For this reason he was more circumspect than some of his followers, like Rosenberg and Bormann, 
in attacking the Church publicly. But, once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy 
the influence of the Christian Churches. 'The evil that is gnawing our vitals,' he remarked in February 1942, 'is our 
priests, of both creeds. I can't at present give them the answer they've been asking for but ... it's all written down 
in my big book. The time will come when I'll settle my account with them.... They'll hear from me all right. I shan't 
let myself be hampered with judicial samples.'" (Bullock A., "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny," [1952], Odhams Books: 
London, Revised Edition, 1964, p.389)

28/02/02
"Hitler's belief in his own destiny held him back from a thoroughgoing atheism. 'The Russians,' he remarked on 
one occasion, 'were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It's 
a fact that we're feeble creatures and that a creative force exists.' ... What interested Hitler was power, and his 
belief in Providence or Destiny was only a projection of his own sense of power. He had no feeling or 
understanding for either the spiritual side of human life or its emotional, affective side. Emotion to him was the 
raw material of power. The pursuit of power cast its harsh shadow like a blight over the whole of his life. " 
(Bullock A., "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny," [1952], Odhams Books: London, Revised Edition 1964, p.390).

28/02/02
"The truth is that, in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist. `The dogma of 
Christianity,' he declared in one of his wartime conversations, gets worn away before the advances of science.... 
Gradually the myths crumble All that is left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and 
the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that 
the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will 
be convicted of absurdity.... The man who lives in communion with nature necessarily finds himself in opposition 
to the Churches, and that's why they're heading for ruin for science is bound to win." (Bullock, 1964, p.389).

28/02/02
"The Leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigour of 
its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is 
regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary 
destiny of its people. He has brought into modern life the tribal and evolutionary mentality of prehistoric times. 
Hitler has confronted the statesmen of the world with an evolutionary problem of an unprecedented magnitude. 
What is the world to do with a united aggressive tribe numbering eighty millions!" (Keith A., "The Behaviour of 
Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], 
Watts & Co: London, Third Impression, 1947, p.8)

28/02/02
"Hitler is also a eugenist. Germans who suffer from hereditable imperfections of mind or of body must be 
rendered infertile, so that as `the strong may not be plagued by the weak.' Sir Francis Galton, the founder of 
eugenics, taught a somewhat similar evolutionary doctrine-namely, that if our nation was to prosper we must give 
encouragement to the strong rather than to the weak; a saying which may be justified by evolution, but not by 
ethics as recognized and practised by civilized peoples. The liberties of German women are to be sacrificed; they 
must devote their activities to their households, especially to the sacred duty of raising succeeding generations. 
The birth-rate was stimulated by bounties and subsidies, so that the German tribe might grow in numbers and in 
strength. In all these matters the Nazi doctrine is evolutionist." (Keith, A., "The Behaviour of Germany 
Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], Watts & Co: 
London, Third Impression, 1947, p.9)

28/02/02
"Hitler has sought on every occasion and in every way to heighten the national consciousness of the German 
people-or, what is the same thing, to make them racially conscious; to give them unity of spirit and unity of 
purpose. Neighbourly approaches of adjacent nations are and were repelled; the German people were deliberately 
isolated. Cosmopolitanism, liberality of opinion, affectation of foreign manners and dress, were unsparingly 
condemned. The old tribal bonds (love of the Fatherland, feeling of mutual kinship), the bonds of "soil and 
blood," became "the main plank in the National-Social programme." "Germany was for the Germans" was another 
plank. Foreign policy was "good or bad according to its beneficial or harmful effects on the German Volk-now or 
hereafter." "Charity and humility are only for home consumption"-a statement in which Hitler gives an exact 
expression of the law which limits sympathy to its tribe." Humanitarianism is an evil ... a creeping poison." "The 
most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. 
Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs." (Keith A., "The Behaviour of Germany 
Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], Watts & Co: 
London, Third Impression, 1947, pp.9-10. Ellipses in original)

28/02/02
"I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany-methods 
of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a 
Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result." (Keith A., "The Behaviour 
of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], 
Watts & Co: London, Third Impression, 1947, p.10).
[top]

March
1/03/02
"This means that the materials of our proposed stock taking will be diverse: biography, criticism, history, 
philosophy-all converging on the same point, which is the dominance of materialism. Some of the biographical 
connections are of course well known. It is a commonplace that Marx felt his own work to be the exact parallel of 
Darwin's. He even wished to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to the author of The Origin of 
Species." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Doubleday Anchor: Garden City 
NY, Second Edition, 1958, p.7-8)

2/03/02
"There are, of course, degrees of difference in evaluation of successes, from healthy skepticism to confidence, 
that the final word has been said, and there are still some among the biologists who feel that much of the fabric of 
theory accepted by the majority today is actually false and who say so. For the most part, the opinions of the 
dissenters have been given little credence. This group has formed a vocal, but little heard, minority." (Olson E.C., 
"Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution," in Tax S., ed., "Evolution After Darwin," Vol. I, "The Evolution of 
Life: Its Origin, History and Future," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, 1960, p.523)

3/03/02
"There exists, as well, a generally silent group of students engaged in biological pursuits who tend to disagree 
with much of the current thought but say and write little because they are not particularly interested, do not see 
that controversy over evolution is of any particular importance, or are so strongly in disagreement that it seems 
futile to undertake the monumental task of controverting the immense body of information and theory that exists 
in the formulation of modern thinking. It is, of course, difficult to judge the size and composition of this silent 
segment, but there is no doubt that the numbers are not in considerable. Wrong or right as such opinion may be, 
its existence is important and cannot be ignored or eliminated as a force in the study of evolution." (Olson E.C., 
"Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution," in Tax S., ed., "Evolution After Darwin," Vol. I, "The Evolution of 
Life: Its Origin, History and Future," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, 1960, p.523)

4/03/02
"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus 
catching, like a whale, insects in the water. [Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were 
constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of 
bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and 
larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale]." (Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by 
Means of Natural Selection," [1859], First Edition, Penguin: London, 1985, reprint, p.215. The words in square 
brackets were removed by Darwin in subsequent editions.)

5/03/02
"Consider the engineering problem that mitosis must solve. Identical chromatids, called sister chromatids, the 
result of chromosomal replication, must separate so that each goes into a different daughter cell (see fig. 3.3). 
These chromatids are the visible manifestation of the chromosomal replication that has taken place in the S phase 
of the cell cycle. The chromatids are initially held together; each will be called a chromosome when it separates 
and becomes independent. Each of the two daughter cells then ends up with a chromosome complement identical 
to that of the parent cell. Mitosis is nature's elegant process to achieve that end-surely an engineering marvel." 
(Tamarin R.H., "Principles of Genetics," International Edition, [1996], McGraw-Hill: New York NY, Seventh 
Edition, 2002, p.52)

5/03/02
"MEIOSIS Gamete formation presents an entirely new engineering problem to be solved. To form gametes in 
animals (and, for the most part, to form spores in plants), a diploid organism with two copies of each chromosome 
must form daughter cells that have only one copy of each chromosome. In other words, the genetic material must 
be reduced by half so that when gametes recombine to form zygotes, the original number of chromosomes is 
restored, not doubled. If we were to try to engineer this task, we would first need to be able to recognize 
homologous chromosomes We could then push one member of each pair into one daughter cell and the other 
into the other daughter cell. If we were unable to recognize homologues, we would not he able to ensure that 
each daughter cell received one and only one member of each pair The cell solves this problem b