Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: October - December 2003

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The following are unclassified quotes posted in my email messages in October-December, 2003
The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.

October
7/10/2003
"A number of years ago I was giving a brief talk about the evolution of the brain when someone asked a 
question I couldn't answer. It was not a complicated question. It didn't come from a colleague who had 
found a weakness in my theory or a graduate student who had read about a new experiment that 
contradicted my data. It came from a child in my son's elementary school class. I had given school talks on 
being a scientist before, and I thought I knew what to expect. I never expected an eight-year old to stump 
me. I was talking about brains and how they work, and how human brains are different, and how this 
difference is reflected in our unique and complex mode of communication: language. But when I explained 
that only humans communicate with language, I struck a dissonant chord. `But don't other animals have 
their own languages?' one child asked. This gave me the opportunity to outline some of the ways that 
language is special: how speech is far more rapid and precise than any other communication behavior, how 
the underlying rules for constructing sentences are so complicated and curious that it's hard to explain how 
they could ever be learned, and how no other form of animal communication has the logical structure and 
open-ended possibilities that all languages have. But this wasn't enough to satisfy a mind raised on Walt 
Disney animal stories. `Do animals just have SIMPLE languages?' my questioner continued. `No, apparently 
not,' I explained. `Although other animals communicate with one another, at least within the same species, 
this communication resembles language only in a very superficial way-for example, using sounds-but none 
that I know of has the equivalents of such things as words, much less nouns, verbs, and sentences. Not 
even simple ones.' 'Why not?' asked another child. At this I hesitated. And the more I thought about it, the 
more I recognized that I didn't really have an answer. As far as I could tell no other scientists had seriously 
considered the question in this form. Why are there no simple languages, with simple forms of nouns, verbs, 
and sentences? It is indeed a counterintuitive fact. Myths, fables, fairy tales, animated cartoons, and Disney 
movies portray what common sense suggests ought to be the case: that other animals with their simpler 
minds communicate and reason using simpler languages than ours. Why isn't it so? I'm not sure why I 
hadn't noticed this paradox before, or why other scientists hadn't. Most mammals aren't stupid. Many are 
capable of quite remarkable learning. Yet they don't communicate with simple languages, nor do they show 
much of a capacity to learn them-if our pets are any indication. Perhaps we have been too preoccupied with 
trying to explain our big brains, or too complacent with the metaphoric use of the term animal language, to 
notice this contradictory little fact. But the question may also have been unconsciously avoided because of 
the intellectual costs of considering it seriously. Indeed, the more deeply I have pursued this question, the 
more it seems like a Pandora's box that unleashes troubling doubts about many other questions that once 
seemed all but settled. This isn't the question we had been asking, but maybe it should have been. As 
Dewey suggests, the alternatives we pose in our scientific questions may not even address the most crucial 
issues." (Deacon, T.W., "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain," 
[1997], Penguin: London, 1998, reprint, pp.11-12. Emphasis original)

7/10/2003
"In the light of this, I suggest that the question that constitutes the title of this book is a misleading and 
presumptuous one. It presumes that there is a single category `science', and implies that various areas of 
knowledge, physics, biology, history, sociology and so on, either come under that category or do not. I do 
not know how such a general characterization of science can be established or defended. Philosophers do 
not have resources that enable them to legislate on the criteria that must be satisfied if an area of knowledge 
is to be deemed acceptable or `scientific'. Each area of knowledge can be analyzed for what it is. That is, we 
can investigate what its aims are, which may be different from what its aims are commonly thought to be or 
are presented as, and we can investigate the means used to accomplish those aims and the degree of 
success achieved. It does not follow from this that no area of knowledge can be criticized. We can attempt 
to criticize any area of knowledge by criticizing its aims, by criticizing the appropriateness of the methods 
used for attaining those aims, by confronting it with an alternative and superior means of attaining the same 
aims and so on. From this point of view we do not need a general category `science' with respect to which 
some area of knowledge can be acclaimed as science or denigrated as nonscience." (Chalmers, A.F., "What 
is this thing called Science?: An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and its Method," [1976], 
University of Queensland Press: St Lucia, Queensland, Australia, Second Edition, 1994, reprint, p.166)

8/10/2003
"In close harmony with all these scriptural passages-and our exegesis must always be based upon the 
analogy of Scripture we conclude that here also in Revelation 20:1-3 the binding of Satan and the fact that 
he is hurled into the abyss to remain there for a thousand years indicates that throughout this present 
gospel age the devil's influence on earth is curtailed. He is unable to prevent the extension of the Church 
among the nations by means of an active missionary programme. During this entire period he is prevented 
from causing the nations-the world in general-to destroy the Church as a mighty, missionary institution. By 
means of the preaching of the Word as applied by the Holy Spirit, the elect, from all parts of the world, are 
brought from darkness to light. In that sense the Church conquers the nations, and the nations do not 
conquer the Church. Throughout this entire period churches are established. Not only individuals but 
institutions and ordinances are affected more or less by the gospel of God's grace. In regions where the 
devil had been allowed to exercise almost unlimited authority, during Old Testament times, he is now 
compelled to see the servants of Christ gaining territory little by little. Within a comparatively brief period 
Christianity spreads throughout southern Europe. Soon it conquers the entire continent. During the 
centuries which follow it is proclaimed everywhere so that the ends of the earth hear the gospel of the 
crucified One and many bend the knee before Him. The Church has become international. This international 
Church is very powerful: 'Like a mighty army moves the Church of God.' The maps of the World Missionary 
Atlas are full of little red lines underscoring the names of places where there are mission stations. The 
particularism of the old dispensation has made place for the universalism of the new. The Bible has been 
translated into more than 1,000 languages. The influence of the gospel upon the thought and life of man 
kind can scarcely be overestimated. In some countries the blessed truths of Christianity affect human life in 
all its phases: political, economic, social, and intellectual. Only the individual who lacks the historic sense 
and is, therefore, unable to see the present in the light of conditions which prevailed throughout the world 
before Christ's ascension, can fail to appreciate the glories of the millennial age in which we are now living. 
The prophecy found in Psalm 72 is being fulfilled before our eyes. Do not misunderstand our interpretation. 
We are not stating that the world is becoming better and better and that by and by nearly everyone will join 
the ranks of Christ's army. Many will hear the gospel, but will not heed it. Moreover, God's 
trumpets of judgment will not convert a world which is hardening itself in unbelief. The majority will always 
be on the side of the evil one. We most emphatically reject the dream of a man-made era of peace, prosperity, 
and universal righteousness on earth preceding the second coming of Christ. Just as definitely do we 
repudiate the related idea according to which the almighty 'law of evolution' will bring about an ever-upward 
trend in the course of civilization. We are not closing our eyes to the evils which surround us; nor are we 
ignorant of the fact that present day humanism, masquerading under the guise of a new and better 
interpretation of Christianity, is in reality the rat that is gnawing at the roots of the tree of true religion. 
Nevertheless, although we are fully aware of all these symptoms of evil and harbingers of woe, the facts 
which we have set out above remain true, and no amount of argument can cancel them. The Church, indeed, 
exerts a tremendous influence for good upon almost the entire complex of human life. In that sense-not in 
every sense-the devil is bound." (Hendriksen, W., "More than Conquerors: An Interpretation of the Book of 
Revelation," [1940], Tyndale Press: London, 1966, reprint, pp.189-191. Emphasis original)

10/10/2003
"So, what if, according to findings so recent that they are as yet far from assimilated, we now have grounds 
for believing the Bible to have been significantly more right in respect of the Flood than anyone bar 
Creationists and fundamentalists have been giving it credit for? What if, millennia earlier than Archbishop 
Ussher could have imagined (indeed, earlier than he believed the entire world to have been created), there 
actually was a Flood? A Flood that may not have risen anything like as high as the world's mountain tops, 
or so extensive as to cover the entire earth, but which certainly swept away a major heartland of civilisation 
as it existed at that time? In fact there is no need for such 'what ifs'. For this book is the story of just such a 
Flood event actually having happened. An event that though we may not be able to date it to a single year, 
certainly occurred in or about 5600 BC, give or take a few decades. From what we know about it so far, it was 
an event that occurred in a most unexpected location, the environs of what is today the Black Sea. And it 
was also so massive and devastating that it arguably spawned not only the 'Noah' Flood story as this 
became preserved in the folklore of the Hebrew peoples, but also the Flood stories that have been preserved 
in a number of other cultures besides. That such an event actually happened is now absolutely certain, 
accredited by scientists of international repute to the same degree of confidence with which, only a few 
years ago, the Noah story was being dismissed as nonsense." (Wilson, I., "Before the Flood: Understanding 
the Biblical Flood Story as Recalling a Real-Life Event," [2001],Orion: London, 2002, pp.xiv-xv)

11/10/2003
"Sir-In the News story about scientists' response to creationists, the scientists `comment that the Bible says 
that PI is 3, not 3.14' (Nature 398, 453; 1999). The biblical verse quoted (1 Kings 7:23) reads in part: 
`...measuring 10 cubits from rim to rim... It took a line of 30 cubits to measure around it". Indeed, 30/10 equals 
3, but further on in verse 26 it says: `It was a handbreadth in thickness...' Assuming that a cubit measured 18 
inches and a hand breadth 3 inches, the inner diameter of the bowl would be 174 inches (10 x 18 - 2 x 3), and 
the inner circumference would be 540 inches (30 x 18). This yields a value for PI of 540/174 or 3.10. This is 
about a 1 per cent error from the typical value for PI of 3.14. Although we do not know the exact length of a 
cubit or a handbreadth, this result is very close to the actual value of PI." (Peil, K., "Biblical answer to 
cooking up pi," Nature, Vol 399, 10 June 1999, p.522)

11/10/2003
"Science makes claims about the world. Theology makes claims about the world. How do the claims of 
science and theology relate? At least four answers to this question are possible: (1) they don't relate at all; 
(2) they adopt different perspectives; (3) they conflict (4) they support each other. ... We can imagine 
theology and science as two windows on reality. To say that theology and science don't relate at all is then 
to say that the windows face completely opposite directions and view completely different scenes. ... 
Another possibility is that both windows are looking out at the same scene from pretty much the same 
vantage, but this time one of the windows is distorted. ... The final possibility is that the windows face the 
same scene and do so from perspectives, which, though not identical, are not so disparate that we can't 
meaningfully relate what we are seeing from both windows. Alternatively, what we learn from both windows 
can in many cases be meaningfully related. ... This windows analogy describes our principal options for 
relating science and theology. Science and theology are windows onto reality. How does what we learn from 
one window relate to what we learn from the other? It all depends on where the windows are placed and on 
the quality of the glass. If the windows are facing completely opposite directions, there can be no 
meaningful relation. This is the compartmentalization model of the relation between science and 
theology. On this view, science and theology are airtight compartments whose domains never overlap. The 
usual line here is that science studies the natural world, but theology studies morals and faith. Stephen Jay 
Gould is a great proponent of this view. So is the National Academy of Sciences. Close to this view is the 
complementarily model. Unlike the compartmentalization model, the complementarily model admits 
that science and theology can address the same aspects of reality. Nevertheless, when they do, the 
perspectives of science and theology differ so radically that what science tells us and what theology tells us 
cannot be correlated within a single coherent discourse. According to the complementarily model, theology 
and science speak to the same reality but in languages so different that no translation between the two, not 
even a partial translations is possible. To be sure, both are necessary to give a complete account of reality. 
But it is a completeness of aggregation, not integration. ... It's not for science to tell theology how to do its 
thing or vice versa. They are conceptually independent even if they depend on the same underlying reality. 
The American Scientific Affiliation has been the great proving ground for this view. Complementarity and 
compartmentalization maintain peace between science and theology. The conflict model does not. 
According to the conflict model, science and theology can't both be right-one or the other distorts our 
picture of reality. These days science is usually regarded as providing the undistorted view of reality. In an 
age that regards science as preeminent, theology therefore ends up the loser. ... Rationalists, skeptics, 
atheists and debunkers are the great purveyors of the conflict model. They regard theology, faith, religion 
and superstition as one cloth. The compartmentalization and complementarity models arose historically in 
reaction to the conflict model. Compartmentalization and complementarity are insulating strategies, designed 
to protect theology from the assaults of science. The compartmentalization model redraws the boundaries of 
theology so that it cannot conflict with science. The complementarily model reconceptualizes the nature of 
theological discourse so that, again, theology cannot conflict with science. In either case, these models 
avoid conflict but at the cost of removing theology from any productive conversation with science. None of 
these three models is adequate. ... In place of these models I want to propose a fourth alternative, one that 
recognizes what is correct in these models, yet without being swayed to their extremes. I call this fourth 
option the mutual support model. According to the mutual support model, theology and science 
overlap but are not coextensive. Where they overlap, one discipline can provide epistemic support for the 
other. Epistemic support is much more general than proof. Proof-as in decisive, once-and-for-all settlement 
of a question-if possible anywhere, is possible only in mathematics. The mutual support model has no stake 
in using theology to decisively prove or settle the claims of science, or vice versa. Nonetheless, according 
to the mutual support model, theology can lend credence, increase the conditional probability of, or render 
plausible certain scientific claims and not others. Likewise, science can do the same for theology. The 
Christian doctrine of creation supports a big-bang cosmology much better than it supports a steady-state 
cosmology. ... Within Christianity, God has traditionally been revealed in two books-the book of Scripture, 
which is the Bible, and the book of nature, which is creation. Both books testify to the God who is their 
common author. Not only do these books agree, but each helps us make sense of the other. Much of the 
confusion in science and theology these days results from severing these books." (Dembski, W.A.*, 
"Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 
1999, pp.187-192. Emphasis original)

12/10/2003
"The documentary theory seeks to identify four main documents as the sources behind the present text of 
the Pentateuch. It does this by studying blocks of text that can be set apart on the basis of the lack of close 
continuity and order in subject matter, the use of the divine names Yahweh and Elohim, and the duplications 
of material. On this basis it seeks to bring together larger textual corpora that are marked by similarity of 
vocabulary and style and by uniformity of theological outlook, and that, to a variable extent, present parallel 
accounts of the basic pentateuchal story. Thus, four "sources" are established. (1) The Yahwist's narrative 
(J, from German Jahweh) ... (2) The Elohist's narrative (E) ... (3) The Deuteronomist's document (D) ... Not 
concerned to analyze the text by grouping basic units into larger literary corpora or sources, this method 
isolates and studies the individual literary units themselves to determine what kind of literature they are and 
particularly to determine and study their Sitz im Leben, the "setting in life" which produced them and from 
which perspective they speak. ... Much of the old source criticism and of the hypotheses it produced 
remains conjectural and problematic. That there are sources is hard to doubt; that they can be extirpated so 
certainly from the closely-knit corpus that finally emerged is another matter. Of much more importance for 
interpretation is the final result of this long process, produced by the inspired authors, editors, and 
traditionalists of God's chosen people. ... Whatever the process of transmission and growth or the date at 
which it finally reached its present form, whoever the writer or writers who finally put it together as the 
grand historical narrative that it is, surely far more important is the final creation itself. The overarching unity 
so creatively and powerfully formed out of its component parts is surely far more important than the 
existence of whatever sources its complexities may require positing. The real danger of literary analysis and 
criticism is ... that, when such analysis becomes the concern of biblical scholarship to the exclusion of more 
comprehensive, overall considerations, it tends to reduce the Pentateuch to unrelated fragments and hence 
to result in the loss of any real grasp of the unity really present in it. Recent trends in Old Testament 
scholarship increasingly recognize this fact." (La Sor, W.S., Hubbard, D.A. & Bush, F.W., "Old Testament 
Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament," [1982], Eerdmans: Grand Rapids MI, 
1987, reprint, pp.64-65)

14/10/2003
"But the fact that the evolution model is inherently contrary to the creation model and that 
biological evolutionary theory is perhaps absolutely indispensable to the evolution model does not by itself 
suggest in the slightest that there is any logical tension between theism and the biological theory of 
evolution. That two worldviews are mutually inconsistent as wholes does not imply that every 
specific part of each must be inconsistent with the other. To argue so is to make the logical mistake 
known as the `fallacy of division.' Consider this simple example. A complete naturalistic worldview must 
contain some meteorological theories concerning the origin of thunder storms. Those theories, to fit into the 
naturalistic worldview, must be purely natural theories-theories that cite only natural laws and conditions 
such as fronts, hydrological cycles, temperatures and so forth and make no reference whatever to any sort 
of supernatural intervention or nonnatural processes. But such theories can also fit perfectly well into 
theistic worldviews. There is nothing atheistic about such theories. Accepting the theory that last week's 
storm was brought about by purely natural processes does not render one's Christian worldview internally 
inconsistent. Nor does that acceptance represent a compromise with naturalism. Or as an even simpler 
example, if your plumber gave you an explanation other than a purely natural one for why your water heater 
did not work, you would hire another plumber. But that would not represent a compromise of your Christian 
principles." (Ratzsch D.L., "The Battle of Beginnings: Why Neither Side is Winning the Creation-Evolution 
Debate," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1996, pp.182-183. Emphasis original).

14/10/2003
"To begin with a paradox: Darwin, Lamarck, and Haeckel-the greatest nineteenth-century evolutionists of 
England, France, and Germany, respectively-did not use the word evolution in the original editions of their 
great works. Darwin spoke of `descent with modification,' Lamarck of `transformisme.' Haeckel preferred 
`Transmutations-Theorie' or `Descendenz-Theorie.'" (Gould, S.J., "Darwin's Dilemma," in "Ever Since 
Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.34)

14/10/2003
"The fallacy of division is the converse of the fallacy of composition. It occurs when one assumes that what 
is true of a whole is also true of its parts. For example: `We are alive and we are made out of sub atomic 
particles. So they must be alive too.' To argue in this way is to ignore the very real difference between parts 
and wholes." (Schick T. & Vaughn L., "How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New 
Age," Mayfield: Mountain View CA, California, Second edition, 1995, p.287)

14/10/2003
"The fallacy of division lies in assuming that what holds true for all members of a class taken together is 
necessarily true for each alone. This assumption is the converse of composition. Of course, what is true of 
all is often true of each, but not necessarily so. For instance, a general may strive to preserve the fighting 
efficiency of his army as a whole by giving orders which will result in the fighting efficiency of some units 
being destroyed. Less melancholy examples can easily be adduced." (Fearnside W.W. & Holther W.B., 
"Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument," Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1959, 25th printing, p.29)

14/10/2003
"The textbook detractors assume that Ussher's effort involved little more than adding up ages and dates 
given directly in the Old Testamentthus implying that his work was only an accountant's act of simple, 
thoughtless piety. Another text-book-we are now up to seven-states that Ussher's 4004 was `a date 
reconstructed from adding up the ages of people named in the lineages of the scripture.' But even a cursory 
look at the Bible clearly shows that no such easy solution is available, even under the assumption of 
inerrancy. You can add the early times, from creation up to the reign of Solomon-for the requisite information 
is provided by an unbroken male lineage supplying the key datum of father's age at the birth of a first son. 
But this easy route cannot be carried forward into the several hundred years of the kingdom, from Solomon's 
reign to the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian captivity-for here we are only given the lengths 
of rule for kings, and several frustrating ambiguities (including overlaps or co-regencies of a king and his 
successor) were widely acknowledged but not easily resolved. Finally, how can you use the Old Testament 
to reach the crucial birthday of Christ and thus connect the older narrative to the present? For the Old 
Testament stops in the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, the fifth century B.C. in Ussher's Chronology." (Gould, 
S.J., "Fall in the House of Ussher," in "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History," Jonathan Cape: 
London, 1993, pp.187-188)

14/10/2003

"The knowledge of God is the authentic map of the spiritual order. The spiritual order is the total number of 
relationships established by God between himself and his creation, and more particularly those relationships 
established by God between himself and man. It has been the philosophers who have metaphorically spoken 
of human knowledge as having the structure of a map. There is unusually happy feature to this analogy and 
one which particularly suits theology. A map first of all conveys certain knowledge. It is one of the many 
symbolic systems available to man by which he can present a certain number of facts and their relationships. 
But the purpose of the typical map is to enable a person to find his way around. Equipped with a set of maps 
(national, state, and county) a tourist is prepared to find his way to any place of national significance or 
scenic beauty in America. The "map" of the science of chemistry is thus not only a certain body of 
information about chemicals but it enables the chemist to "move about," to "find his way" in the subject 
matter of chemistry. And in theology, the knowledge of God as an authentic map not only conveys to man 
what he needs to know of the spiritual order, but also how he may "move about" and "find his way" 
in the spiritual order. The goal of scholarly research is knowledge and this is true whether we are 
investigating astrophysics or the buying habits rural consumers. The methods of procedure and the 
specialized techniques vary enormously from subject matter to subject matter but the goal of knowledge 
remains the same. And this knowledge may metaphorically be called the map of the subject matter. Certainly, 
maps are not photographs! Each type of map is schematized and involves certain specialized symbols and 
technical structures. The particular purpose which each map serves calls for a certain amount of distortion in 
the construction of the map to achieve this purpose. The oldest chestnut of them all in map-making is how 
to project a round globe on a flat surface with the minimum of distortion. Highway maps uniformly omit rail 
roads, and airline maps omit highways and railroads. Geologists must construct very unusual maps because 
they must not only look across a landscape but also underneath it. The carefully constructed 
map by a skilled cartographer is one of the finest achievements and one of the most serviceable products of 
an advanced culture. The knowledge of God is a map of the spiritual order. It is a product of scholarly 
research. But it is a research determined by the uniqueness of the subject matter, God. The theologian does 
not treat God in himself, but God in his revelation. The product of this very unique kind of research 
is the knowledge of God which we have metaphorically called a map of the spiritual order. The man who has 
this map and knows how to read it spiritually then knows how to move about in the spiritual order. (Ramm 
B.L., "Special Revelation and the Word of God," [1961], Eerdmans: Grand Rapids MI, 1968, Second Printing, 
pp.13-14. Emphasis original)

14/10/2003
"Despite its biological importance, positive selection is seldom observed at work in nature. A few well-
known, and constantly cited examples are industrial melanism in moths (Kettlewell, 1955, 1956, 1958), DDT 
resistance in insects and antibiotic resistance in bacteria. As compared with these, examples of negative 
selection are abundant; it is popular to associate unfavourable effects and deformities with mutations, as so 
many textbook examples of mutants are of this nature. Furthermore, intensive studies of recessive lethals 
and detrimental mutants in Drosophila populations have shown beyond doubt that the majority of these 
mutant genes are unconditionally deleterious both in homozygous and heterozygous states (Mukai and 
Yamaguchi, 1974; Mukai et al., 1972). (Kimura M., "The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution," [1983], 
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1990, reprint, p.118)

14/10/2003
"The fallacy of the crucial experiment. In high-school physics classes, we all learned a heroically simplified 
version of scientific progress based upon a model that does work sometimes, but by no means always-the 
experimenum crucis, or crucial experiment. Newton or Einstein? Ptolemy or Copernicus? Special creation or 
Darwin? To find out, perform a single decisive experiment with a clearly measurable result full of power to 
decree yea or nay. Throw the accused witch in the pond; if she sinks, she was innocent (however dead by 
drowning). ... more generally, single `crucial' experiments rarely decide major issues in science-especially in 
natural history, in which nearly all theories require data about `relative frequencies' (or percentage of 
occurrences), not pristine single cases. Of course, for a person who believes that evolution never occurs at 
all, one good case can pack enormous punch, but this basic issue was adequately resolved more than one 
hundred years ago. Nearly every interesting question in evolutionary theory asks `how often' or `how 
dominant in setting the pattern of life'-not `does this phenomenon occur at all?' For example, on the most 
important issue of all-the role of Darwin's own favored mechanism of natural selection- single examples of 
selection's efficacy advance the argument very little. We already know, by abundant documentation and 
rigorous theorizing, that natural selection can and does operate in nature. We need to determine the relative 
strength of Darwin's mechanism among a set of alternative modes for evolutionary change-and single cases, 
however elegant, cannot establish a relative frequency." (Gould, S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly 
Irrelevant," Natural History, December 1997/January 1998, Vol. 106, No. 11, p.60)

15/10/2003
"In the decades following the publishing of Darwin's works, Berkeley professor Joseph Le Conte argued 
that those who believe in evolution should not be referred to as evolutionists any more than those who 
believe in gravity should be referred to as gravitationalists [Le Conte J., "Evolution In Relation to Religious 
Thought," D. Appleton & Co., 1889, p.66]. Evolution, according to Le Conte, was not to be regarded as a 
mere theory, but as an unquestionable fact, a scientific law, on par with gravity. Today, evolutionist Ernst 
Mayr echoes Le Conte's message that evolution should no longer be called a theory. Professor emeritus of 
zoology at Harvard University and one of the twentieth century's foremost evolutionists, it would be 
difficult to find a more authoritative voice in Darwinism than Mayr. The fact of evolution is "so 
overwhelmingly established," says Mayr, "that it has become irrational to call it a theory." [Mayr. E.W., 
"What Evolution Is," Basic Books: New York, 2001, p.264] The idea that evolution is a fact beyond rational 
dispute is broadly popular among Darwinists. In the hundred years or so separating the comments of Le 
Conte and Mayr, many evolutionists have made a similar claim. It is now seen as accepted wisdom in 
biology textbooks and popular literature. ... This is a curious argument since the scientific evidence does not 
establish the fact of evolution. .... In every case the evidence is ambiguous or even argues against 
evolution. How then can evolution be a fact if even the positive evidence does not support it very well? The 
answer is that evolution is considered to be a fact because Darwinists believe they have disproven the 
alternative: divine creation." (Hunter, C.G.*, "Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science," Brazos 
Press: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, p.10)

15/10/2003
"In I Kings 7:23, an altar font in Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits around. This 
means that the mathematical constant PI (pi) is exactly 3. All school children know that PI is not 3 but 
3.14159 and there is nothing to suggest that the Hebrew author was approximating. If PI is equal to exactly 3, 
then no machine, aeroplane, ship, motor vehicle etc. could be designed or would operate. The Bible's 
mathematics is consistent and in II Chronicles 4:2, we also read that PI is exactly 3. There are only two 
possible alternatives. Either the Bible is wrong and that PI is equal to 3.14159 or that the biblical PI is only 
approximate. Accordingly the Bible must be in error. Little wonder that many theologians argue that 
creationists who attempt to literally interpret the Bible mock the Bible, and by so mocking the Bible, they are 
anti-Christian. The creationist solution to the biblical approximation to the value of PI is to interpret only 
parts of the Bible as literal. A selective literal interpretation of the Bible is a common creationist 
contradiction." (Plimer, I.R., "Telling lies for God," Random House: Sydney, 1994, pp.17-18)

15/10/2003
"Doesn't 1 Kings 7:23 give an inaccurate value for pi? First Kings 7:23 says, `He [Hiram] made the sea of cast 
metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in 
circumference' (NASB). Some critics have urged this approximate value of three to one as the relationship 
between the diameter and the circumference of the circle amounts to a geometrical inaccuracy, inconsistent 
with a truly errorless Scripture. They true value of pi is calculated to be 3.14159 rather than 3.0. This criticism 
is, however, devoid of merit. While it is true that the more exact calculation of pi is essential for, scientific 
purposes, or for the manufacture of precision parts in a factory, the use of approximate proportions or totals 
is a familiar practice in normal, speech, even today. ... It is perfectly proper to speak of the circumference of 
any circle as being three times its diameter if we are speaking approximately, just as one may legitimately 
state that the population of China is from 800 million to one billion. The Hebrew author here is obviously 
speaking in the approximate way that is normal practice even today. There is one interesting feature about 
this that might well be added. If the rod used to mark out a length of five cubits (approximately ninety 
inches) for the radius were used to measure the inside circumference of the same bowl-shaped vessel here 
described, then it would take exactly six of those five-cubit measures to complete the circumference. Let the 
skeptic try it and see!" (Archer, G.L., "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties," Zondervan: Grand Rapids MI, 
1982, pp.198-199)

16/10/2003
"A little known verse of the Bible reads `And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the 
other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. 
(I Kings 7, 23) The same verse can be found in II Chronicles 4, 2. It occurs in a list of specifications for the 
great temple of Solomon, built around 950 BC and its interest here is that it gives p = 3. Not a very accurate 
value of course and not even very accurate in its day, for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian values of 25/8 = 
3.125 and 10 = 3.162 have been traced to much earlier dates: though in defence of Solomon's craftsmen it 
should be noted that the item being described seems to have been a very large brass casting, where a high 
degree of geometrical precision is neither possible nor necessary." (O'Connor, J. & Robertson, E.F., "A 
history of Pi," School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland, August 2001)

16/10/2003
"There are some interpretations of this which lead to a much better value. An 
interesting suggestion from Bob Graf reads: `The brass tub in Solomon's temple was a thick-sided vessel, 
and the measurement of ten cubits referred to the outer diameter, while the measurement of thirty cubits 
referred to the inner circumference. The thickness of the annulus was recorded as a hand-breadth. If one 
considers a hand breadth to be 4 inches, and uses a figure of 17.75 for a cubit, the value of p in the equation: 
((10 30/p)/2)17.75 = 4 is p = 355/113. I don't think the Hebrews calculated the values recorded, merely 
observed them.* The true value of would give slightly different values for a hand-breadth 
and a cubit. I think this fact is more interesting than the improper imputation of 3 as the 'Biblical' value of PI.' 
Comment by: Bob Graf, 29th October 1996." (O'Connor J. & Robertson E.F., "A history of Pi," School of 
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland, August 2001.
*"At the time, I did not know that a handbreadth was actually one-sixth of a cubit by 
definition (or one-seventh of a royal cubit). With the additional information that a hand-breadth is one-sixth 
of a cubit, the dimensions of the tub can be adjusted within small limits of error, using Lagrange multipliers, 
for example, to accomodate this fact." (Bob Graf, personal communication, 1 May 2005)

16/10/2003
"For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not 
the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish 
arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every 
thought thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2Cor 10:3-5)

16/10/2003
"But while he pursues the truth, what do Stootman's instincts tell him? What is the gut feeling of the man in 
charge of Australia's search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? `I'd probably come down on the 
more negative side ... I think it's unlikely. But that doesn't stop the quest for something from being 
rigorously pursued and investigated. "The irony of the whole wretched thing is this: In the SETI quest we 
are looking for evidence of something that is artificial - a signal. Yet when we look at the natural world, we 
won't accept that the engineering that's there, and the information that's there in the universe, is artificial.'" 
(Linnell G., "Heaven Only Knows", The Bulletin, Vol. 117, No. 6181, July 6, 1999, p.34)

16/10/2003
"In this vast universe teeming with lonely hearts and hopeful souls, Frank Stootman, the director of SETI 
Australia, is one of the lucky ones. He found what he was looking for a long time ago. He had always been 
curious about how things worked; even as the son of Dutch immigrants growing up in the outer Sydney 
backblocks of Mount Pritchard and Cabramatta, he wanted to become a physicist. Science was the master 
plan behind all life. you could measure the world around you with it. It told you how everything worked; 
from why the Earth orbited the Sun to why the flavour in your bubble gum disappeared after a few minutes 
of chewing. But by the time he got to university, Stootman discovered science had let him down in one area. 
It could tell him how, but it couldn't tell him why. As the brightest minds of the century discovered sooner 
or later, physics could only explain so much. Yes, there was a Big Bang that started everything. But it was 
like the best magician's finest illusion. The audience could only deduce so much. Sooner or later you hit a 
wall. Just how did he do that? A friend of Stootman's at Sydney University, Heather Vaughan, suggested he 
read the Bible. He had always suspected the existence of some grand plan, and soon Stootman became a 
committed Christian. Here, at last, were answers that made real sense. For the past 30 years as a scientist - he 
married Heather, who has a doctorate in chemistry, and they have three children - he has seen nothing to 
shake his faith." (Linnell G., "Heaven Only Knows", The Bulletin, Vol. 117, No. 6181, July 6, 1999, p.33)

17/10/2003
"It is hardly necessary to speak of science and the Bible, because science as a whole touches the Bible very 
little. There are few places where chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc., bear upon the Scriptures, much less 
contradict them. It is true that much is sometimes made of these few places, but actually they are not of 
much significance. For instance, some ridicule the Bible, for they declare that it gives a value of 3 for pi, 
instead of 3.1416. It is true that in II Chronicles 4:2 and also in I Kings 7:23 the dimensions of Solomon's 
great brass laver are given as thirty cubits around and ten cubits across, but what does this really prove? 
Three is the value of pi to the first significant figure, and though the value of pi has been worked out to the 
707th decimal place, its exact value is not yet known. We are not told the preciseness of the measurements 
given, nor are we sure that Solomon's laver was exactly round. There is nothing here to disturb the faith of 
any man, nor any grounds to say that the Scriptures are wrong in their mathematics. And so, it is with many 
other minor objections." (Harris R.L.*, "Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible: An Historical and Exegetical 
Study," [1957], Zondervan: Grand Rapids MI, 1969, Revised, pp.30-31)

18/10/2003
"The central issue relating to the doctrine of creation which had to be debated in the first period of Christian 
theology was thus that of dualism. The classic example of this is found in some of the forms of 
Gnosticism, so forcefully opposed by Irenaeus, which argued for the existence of two gods - a supreme god, 
who was the source of the invisible spiritual world, and a lesser deity who created the world of material 
things. This approach is strongly dualist, in that it sets up fundamental tension between the spiritual realm 
(which is seen as being good) and the material realm (which is seen as being evil). The doctrine of creation 
affirmed that the material world was created good by God, despite its subsequent contamination by sin. A 
similar outlook is associated with Manichaeism, a gnostic worldview which Augustine found attractive as a 
young man. By the end of the fourth century, most Christian theologians had rejected the Platonist 
approach, even in the form associated with Origen, and argued for God being the creator of both the 
spiritual and material worlds. The Nicene Creed opens with a declaration of faith in God as "maker of heaven 
and earth," thus affirming the divine creation of both the spiritual and material realms. During the Middle 
Ages, forms of dualism once more made their appearance, particularly in the views of the Cathari and 
Albigenses, who taught that matter is evil, and was created ex nihilo by the devil. Against such views, the 
Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the Council of Florence (1442) taught explicitly that God created a good 
creation out of nothing." (McGrath A.E.*, "Christian Theology: An Introduction," [1994] Blackwell: 
Cambridge MA, Second Edition, 1997, p.269)

19/10/2003
"'I cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about Darwin. Why, it's all in Lucretius!' 
So wrote Matthew Arnold to John Judd in 1871. We must not go away with the idea that before Charles 
Darwin no one had ever thought of evolution. The concept dates back more than two millennia, to those 
first philosophers, the Greeks." (Blackmore V. & Page A.*, "Evolution: The Great Debate," Lion: Oxford UK, 
1989, p.10)

19/10/2003
"In those days the earth attempted also to produce a host of monsters, grotesque in build and aspect - 
hermaphrodites, halfway between the sexes yet cut off from either, creatures bereft of feet or dispossessed 
of hands, dumb, mouthless brutes, or eyeless and blind, or disabled by the adhesion of their limbs to the 
body, so that they could neither do anything nor go anywhere nor keep out of harm's way nor take what 
they needed. These and other such monstrous and misshapen births were created. But all in vain. 
Nature debarred them from increase. They could not gain the coveted flower of maturity nor procure food 
nor be coupled by the arts of Venus. For it is evident that many contributory factors are essential to be able 
to forge the chain of a species in procreation. First, it must have a food supply. Then it must have some 
channel by which the procreative seeds can travel outward through the body when the limbs are relaxed. 
Then, in order that male and female may couple, they must have some means of interchanging their mutual 
delight. In those days, again, many species must have died out altogether and failed to forge the 
chain of offspring. Every species that you now see drawing the breath of life has been protected and 
preserved from the beginning of the world either by cunning or by courage or by speed. In addition, there 
are many that survive under human protection because their usefulness has commended them to our care. 
The surly breed of lions, for instance, in their native ferocity have been preserved by courage, the fox by 
cunning and the stag by flight. The intelligent dog, loyal of heart and light of sleep, all beasts of burden of 
whatever breed, fleecy sheep and horned cattle, over all these, my Memmius, man has established his 
protectorate. They have gladly escaped from predatory beasts and sought peace and the lavish meals, 
procured by no effort of theirs, with which we recompense their service. But those that were gifted with 
none of these natural assets, unable either to live on their own resources or to make any contribution to 
human welfare, in return for which we might let their race feed in safety under our guardianship - all these, 
trapped in the toils of their own destiny, were fair game and an easy prey for others, till nature brought their 
race to extinction." (Lucretius, "On the Nature of the Universe," Latham R.E., transl., Penguin: London, 1994, 
Revised, pp.150-150. Emphasis original)

20/10/2003
"But I think he [H.G. Wells] thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. 
Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut 
it again on something solid." (Chesterton G.K.*, "The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton," The Collected 
Works of G.K. Chesterton, [1936], Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 1988, reprint, p.212)

21/10/2003
"I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of 
religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn't all be right, 
so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realised the shattering complexity 
and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an 
explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since." (Dawkins, 
R., "You Ask The Questions," Independent, 23 February 2003)

21/10/2003
"Darwin's claims about what the Creator can and cannot do are at the heart of evolution. Darwin's writings 
on evolution remain seminal today because he set forth the manner in which nature is to be interpreted. 
Thus, in 1888 evolutionist Joseph Le Conte wrote extensively on how comparative anatomy reveals 
evolution because it refutes divine creation. ... Darwin provided the religious interpretation, and it is used 
virtually every time arguments are made for evolution. I have never seen a forceful exposition of evolution 
that did not rely on these sorts of personal religious beliefs. Today's evolutionists rely on them no less than 
did earlier Darwinists. As Stephen Jay Gould put it, "odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of 
evolution." (Gould, S.J., "The Panda's Thumb," in "The Panda's Thumb," W.W. Norton: New York, 1980, 
p.20) Gould's point is not that evolution predicts such things, but rather that God would not have created 
them. It is a religious argument." (Hunter, C.G.*, "Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science," 
Brazos Press: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, pp.70-71)

21/10/2003
"Darwin's work was full of religious claims, and they remain crucial for today's evolutionists. The theory of 
evolution is true not because species obviously evolved from each other but because of the failure to 
reconcile God and nature. Darwin studied orchids in detail and again found underlying patterns. The orchids 
seemed to have been made of spare parts rather than individually created. For Darwin and modern 
evolutionists this argues for evolution because it argues against the possibility of divine creation. Gould 
sums up the argument as follows: `Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common 
components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a 
beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts 
generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged 
from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.' (Gould, 
S.J., "The Panda's Thumb," in "The Panda's Thumb," W.W. Norton: New York, 1980, p.20). Notice how easy 
it is to go from a religious premise to a scientific sounding conclusion. The theory of evolution is confirmed 
not by a successful prediction but by the argument that God would never do such a thing." (Hunter, C.G.*, 
"Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science," Brazos Press: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, p.71)

23/10/2003
"Basically there are two different philosophical approaches to the debate. On the one hand, one can adopt 
the conservative position and view the difficulties as essentially trivial, merely puzzling anomalies, that will 
all be eventually reconciled somehow to the traditional framework. Alternatively, one can adopt a radical 
position and view the problems not as puzzles, but as counterinstances or paradoxes which will never be 
adequately explained within the orthodox framework, and indicative therefore of something fundamentally 
wrong with the currently accepted view of evolution. While most evolutionary biologists who have written 
recently about evolution concede that the problems are serious, nearly all take an ultimately conservative 
stand, believing that they can be explained away by making only minor adjustments to the Darwinian 
framework. In this book I have adopted the radical approach. By presenting a systematic critique of the 
current Darwinian model, ranging from paleontology to molecular biology, I have tried to show why I believe 
that the problems are too severe and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox 
Darwinian framework, and that consequently the conservative view is no longer tenable." (Denton, M.J., 
"Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, p.16)

23/10/2003
"This new metanarrative, part of the founding lore of Design, can be pictured imaginatively (in my own 
projection) as if the scientific world is trying to find its way out of a vast labyrinth. Darwinists have found a 
tunnel that they are positive is the way out. Denton inspects this tunnel with its twists and turns, its 
bulges and loops, but sees that it is a dead end. He tells the Darwinists so, urging them to recognize their 
error, move back, and start looking for a better tunnel. The Darwinists are indignant. They point out that 
Denton is a `nonexpert' in tunnel morphology and insist that their research is on track-they are making `so 
much progress in passageway research!' Denton replies, `No, your research is just mapping, in ever finer 
detail, the exact contours of a cul-de-sac.'" (Woodward T.E.*, "Doubts about Darwin: A History of 
Intelligent Design," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, p.256. Emphasis original)

23/10/2003
"Darwinists claim that such adaptations are powerful evidence for their theory. Are new proteins and 
pesticide resistance not examples of evolution in progress? The problem is these adaptations are produced 
by a machine that appears to be set up to produce such changes. Rather than mutations aimlessly exploring 
new designs, we are apparently witnessing the actions of a complex and robust machine.... One study of the 
common fruit fly found that pesticide resistance arises from a gene that has been present all along. The gene 
serves to break down the pesticide. It used to be less active, but now it is more active in resistant flies. A 
special signal was inserted into the gene to lift production constraints. It appears that pesticide resistance is 
conferred by flipping a switch on the genetic production line rather than creating a new factory. These 
findings are awkward for evolution. Instead of single mutations leading to a new functionality one step at a 
time, we must believe that evolution produced this marvelous machine by which more complicated changes 
can occur." (Hunter, C.G.*, "Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science," Brazos Press: Grand 
Rapids MI, 2003, pp.24-25)

24/10/2003
"The hypotheses respecting the origin of species which profess to stand upon a scientific basis, and, as 
such, alone demand serious attention, are of two kinds. The one, the `special creation' hypothesis, presumes 
every species to have originated from one or more stocks, these not being the result of the modification of 
any other form of living matter-or arising by natural agencies-but being produced, as such, by a 
supernatural creative act. The other, the so-called `transmutation' hypothesis, considers that all existing 
species are the result of the modification of pre-existing species, and those of their predecessors, by 
agencies similar to those which at the present day produce varieties and races, and therefore in an 
altogether natural way; and it is a probable, though not a necessary consequence of this hypothesis, that all 
living beings have arisen from a single stock." (Huxley T.H., "The Origin of Species," in "Darwiniana: 
Essays by Thomas H. Huxley," [1896], AMS Press: New York NY, 1970, reprint, pp.53-54)

29/10/2003
"... in a recent book called The Probability of God by the Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore ... He 
makes heavy use of what may be called the Argument from Personal Incredulity. ... The Argument from 
Personal Incredulity is an extremely weak argument, as Darwin himself noted. In some cases it is based upon 
simple ignorance. ... The Bishop quotes, with approval, G. Bennett on spider webs: `It is impossible for one 
who has watched the work for many hours to have any doubt that neither the present spiders of this species 
nor their ancestors were ever the architects of the web or that it could conceivably have been produced step 
by step through random variation; it would be as absurd to suppose that the intricate and exact proportions 
of the Parthenon were produced by piling together bits of marble.' It is not impossible at all. That is exactly 
what I firmly believe, and I have some experience of spiders and their webs." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind 
Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.37-39)

29/10/2003
"With all this to cope with, it is small wonder that some researchers have ditched the idea of a 'dilute soup' 
of organic molecules and resorted to entirely different scenarios for life's origin. Most prominent amongst 
them are hypotheses that invoke the special conditions that exist around submarine hydrothermal vents. 
Proponents of vent theories for the origin of life say that here is everything one could need: water rich in 
minerals and simple carbon-containing compounds such as methane and carbon monoxide, as well as 
ammonia (which is not readily formed in other geological environments). There is also a source of energy to 
drive the chemical reactions: the hot waters of the vent, which can reach temperatures of around 380°C. 
There are other attractions to the 'vent hypothesis'. Some of the most primitive organisms on the planet 
today use hydrogen sulphide in their metabolism; and this compound is abundant in vent fluids. And the 
sulphur-rich water deposits sulphide minerals such as iron pyrite (fool's gold) in and around the vent's 
chimney structures. Iron pyrite can be converted to a different form of iron sulphide by chemical reactions 
that soak up electrons. These electrons can be used to forge links between relatively simple organic 
compounds, including amino acids. It has been suggested that iron pyrite at hydrothermal vents may have 
acted as a kind of battery to drive the chemistry involved in linking together monomers into compounds 
resembling proteins. But this idea remains very speculative, and it demands a chain of serendipity that is 
scarcely less optimistic than that required for polymerization in a conventional 'prebiotic' soup." (Ball, P., 
"H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.211)

30/10/2003
"Dawkins himself has maintained that those who do not believe a complex biological structure may be 
constructed in small steps are expressing merely their own sense of `personal incredulity.' But in countering 
their animadversions he appeals to his own ability to believe almost anything. Commenting on the (very 
plausible) claim that spiders could not have acquired their web-spinning behavior by a Darwinian 
mechanism, Dawkins writes: `It is not impossible at all. That is what I firmly believe and I have some 
experience of spiders and their webs.' It is painful to see this advanced as an argument." (Berlinski, D., "The 
Deniable Darwin," Commentary, June 1996, p.21)

31/10/2003
"The Supreme Court decision described in the second paragraph is Aguillard v. Edwards, 482 U.S. 578 
(1987). The Justices probably did not mean to lay down a rule that the official theory of evolution may not 
be criticized or questioned in public school classrooms, but that was the effect of their decision. The 
Justices who signed the majority opinion seem to have been fooled by arguments from the science 
establishment that every claim made by the scientific elite about "evolution' is a matter of neutral fact and 
that all opposition to materialism comes from people who want to read the Bible to students instead of 
teaching them science. Perhaps a Justice who drives home in the evening from the Court will by now have 
noticed the `Darwin fish' bumper stickers on cars showing a fish with legs in mockery of the Christian fish 
symbol on other cars and will realize that the Supreme Court has been duped into taking sides in a religious 
debate." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 
1997, p.125) [top]

November
1/11/2003
"Goldschmidt raised no objection to the standard accounts of microevolution; he devoted the first half of 
his major work, The Material Basis of Evolution (Yale University Press, 1940), to gradual and continuous 
change within species. He broke sharply with the synthetic theory, however, in arguing that new species 
arise abruptly by discontinuous variation, or macromutation. He admitted that the vast majority of 
macromutations could only be viewed as disastrous-these he called `monsters.' But, Goldschmidt continued, 
every once in a while a macromutation might, by sheer good fortune, adapt an organism to a new mode of 
life, a `hopeful monster' in his terminology. Macroevolution proceeds by the rare success of these hopeful 
monsters, not by an accumulation of small changes within populations. I want to argue that defenders of the 
synthetic theory made a caricature of Goldschmidt's ideas in establishing their whipping boy. I shall not 
defend everything Goldschmidt said; indeed, I disagree fundamentally with his claim that abrupt 
macroevolution discredits Darwinism. For Goldschmidt also failed to heed Huxley's warning that the essence 
of Darwinism-the control of evolution by natural selection-does not require a belief in gradual change. As a 
Darwinian, I wish to defend Goldschmidt's postulate that macroevolution is not simply microevolution 
extrapolated, and that major structural transitions can occur rapidly without a smooth series of intermediate 
stages." (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.155-157)

2/11/2003
"This is a convenient moment to deal with the hypothesis of species selection, which is left over, in a sense, 
from the previous chapter. I shan't spend very much time on it, as I have spelled out in The Extended 
Phenotype my doubts about its alleged importance in evolution. It is true that the vast majority of species 
that have ever lived have gone extinct. It is also true that new species come into existence at a rate that at 
least balances the extinction rate, so that there is a kind of 'species pool' whose composition is changing all 
the time. Nonrandom recruitment to the species pool and nonrandom removal of species from it could, it is 
true, theoretically constitute a kind of higher-level natural selection. It is possible that certain characteristics 
of species bias their probability of going extinct, or of budding off new species. The species that we see in 
the world will tend to have whatever it takes to come into the world in the first place - to 'be speciated' - and 
whatever it takes not to go extinct. You can call that a form of natural selection if you wish, although I 
suspect that it is closer to single-step selection than to cumulative selection. What I am sceptical about is 
the suggestion that this kind of selection has any great importance in explaining evolution.This may just 
reflect my biased view of what is important. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, what I mainly want a 
theory of evolution to do is explain complex, well-designed mechanisms like hearts, hands, eyes and 
echolocation. Nobody, not even the most ardent species selectionist, thinks that species selection can do 
this." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991 reprint, p.265)

2/11/2003
"As with all interesting questions in natural history the solution requires an inquiry about relative frequency 
not an absolute yes or no. The logic of self-centered DNA seems sound. The question remains: how 
important is it? How much repetitive DNA is self-centered DNA? If the answer is "way less that one 
percent" because conventional selection on bodies almost always overwhelms selection among genes, then 
self-centered DNA is one more good and plausible idea scorned by nature." (Gould, S.J., "What Happens to 
Bodies?," in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History," [1983], Penguin: 
London, 1986, reprint, p.176)

2/11/2003
"The prevailing mythology in legal circles is that the interpretation of the First Amendment's religious 
establishment clause by the Supreme Court in the second half of the twentieth century continues a 
constitutional tradition established by Thomas Jefferson's reference to a `wall of separation' between church 
and state. Any attempt to change these recent decisions is therefore reported in the press as if it were an 
attack on the Constitution itself." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in 
Science, Law, and Education," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1995, p.221)

2/11/2003
"If rival models of evolution cannot even in principle explain complexity, Dawkins's blind watchmaker model 
deserves to be called the theory of evolution. That is exactly what his protege Helena Cronin did call it in her 
book The Ant and the Peacock, where she referred to the Dawkins model simply as `modern Darwinism.' ... 
By using that term Cronin implicitly relegated all other understandings of Darwinism to the trash can of 
history, and for that she drew a furious reaction from the most famous American advocate of evolution, 
Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould. In his angry review of Cronin's book [Gould, S.J., "The Confusion 
About Evolution," The New York Review of Books, November 19, 1992]. Gould was reviewing Helena 
Cronin's The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (Cambridge 
University Press, 1991). Gould denied that most evolutionary biologists accept the gene-selection model and 
declared ... that genes cannot possibly be the exclusive unit of selection. Gould asserted forcefully that most 
important bodily characteristics are `emergent properties' of organisms which are not produced in any direct 
way by individual genes or even combinations of genes. Instead, these properties are products of such 
complex interactions among genes that they cannot even in principle be adequately known or predicted at 
the genetic level. ... Gould .. went on to reject what he called the `uniformitarian vision of extrapolation,' 
which is the fundamental Darwinian principle illustrated by the finch-beak example ... To classical 
Darwinists, the entire story of evolution and extinction is basically an extrapolation from the examples of 
random variation and natural selection that can be observed in the living world. ... According to Gould, 
however, `the main excitement in evolutionary theory during the last twenty years has not been ... the 
shoring up of Darwinism in its limited realm (by gene selectionism or any other patching device), but rather 
the documentation of the reasons why Darwin's crucial requirement for extrapolation has failed.' Gould 
explained that for one thing, molecular studies have indicated that most variations at the molecular level are 
neutral as far as fitness goes, and so selection plays little part in molecular evolution. The most important 
evidence against extrapolation, however, concerns the frequency and importance of mass extinctions-which 
are increasingly attributed to sudden catastrophic accidents such as asteroid impacts. Such extraordinary 
events, which may account for a high percentage of extinctions, destroy the continuity of natural conditions 
assumed by Darwin and the extrapolationists of today. Environmental conditions in normal times may 
consistently encourage change of the Darwinian kind for a while, but even the fittest organisms are not 
necessarily protected from extinction in a catastrophe that changes all the conditions. Once a catastrophe 
occurs, the lucky survivors, which may have been only marginally fit under precatastrophic conditions, will 
inherit the earth in spite of their modest capabilities. After this review of his own version of `modern 
Darwinism,' Gould concluded, `The Darwinian struggle does not extrapolate to the tree of life.'" (Johnson, 
P.E.*, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education," InterVarsity 
Press: Downers Grove IL, 1995, pp.84-86)

3/11/2003
"The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a 
river of bones and tissues: a river of abstract instructions for building bodies, not a river of solid bodies 
themselves. The information passes through bodies and affects them, but it is not affected by them on its 
way through. The river is not only uninfluenced by the experiences and achievements of the successive 
bodies through which it flows. It is also uninfluenced by a potential source of contamination that, on the 
face of it, is much more powerful: sex." (Dawkins, R., "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life," Phoenix: 
London, 1996, p.5)

3/11/2003
"In February of 1993, Ruse made some remarkable concessions in a talk at the annual meeting of the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The program was organized by Eugenie 
Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a privately funded group dedicated to protecting 
science education from the menace of creationism. In practice this project involves mounting a rhetorical 
attack on anyone who questions naturalistic evolution. The usual NCSE line is that all critics of naturalism 
are either overt or covert Biblical literalists, and so it was probably a step toward reality for the group to ask 
Ruse to speak on a topic labeled `Nonliteralist Anti-Evolutionism The Case of Phillip Johnson.' The object of 
this case study was not invited to defend himself, but the proceedings were officially tape recorded and I 
received a copy almost immediately. After indulging in a few moments of the ritual Johnson-bashing that the 
spirit of the occasion required, Ruse changed his tone dramatically and engaged in some profound public 
soul-searching. ... Ruse admitted to his AAAS audience, `In the ten years since I performed, or I appeared, 
in the creationism trial in Arkansas, I must say that I've been coming to this kind of position myself.' 
Although he is as much an evolutionist as ever, Ruse now acknowledges `that the science side has certain 
metaphysical assumptions built into doing science, which-it may not be a good thing to admit in a court of 
law-but I think that in all honesty that we should recognize' (Ruse, M.E., "The New Antievolutionism," 
Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the AAAS, February 13, 1993). I am told that the audience greeted 
these remarks with stunned silence, indicating that they sensed the political consequences that might follow 
from this line of reasoning." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Darwin on Trial," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 
Second Edition, 1993, p.163)

5/11/2003
"Darwin's general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil 
record is a very incomplete one that it is full of gaps, and that we have much to learn. In effect, he was 
saying that if the record were complete and if we had better knowledge of it wee would see the finely 
graduated chain that he predicted. And this was his main argument for downgrading the evidence from the 
fossil record. Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been 
greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. 
The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of 
evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of 
darwinian change in the fossil rec ord, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be 
discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information - what appeared to be a nice simple 
progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less 
gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record 
which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of 
natural selection. Also the major extinctions such as the dinosaurs and trilobites are still very puzzling." 
(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.24-25)

6/11/2003
"Behe avoided this rhetorical ambush by presenting new data on biochemical systems, most of which had 
come to light in the course of the molecular biology revolution of the previous three decades (1960s through 
the early 1990s). Behe devoted a chapter in his book to each of six miniature biochemical systems, 
describing each in detail and showing the new mystery of origins that attended the elucidation of their 
mysterious workings. In Behe's hands, this information led to two fundamental factual-conceptual 
discoveries. First, as noted above, he realized that most of these systems possessed the quality of 
irreducible complexity. Second, Behe undertook a literature review in 1993-95 that confirmed his suspicion: 
His colleagues in biochemistry and evolutionary biology had not figured out plausible hypothetical 
pathways for the origin of any of these systems. During this review he researched a dozen of the most 
widely used biochemistry textbooks, as well as many technical journals on biochemical evolution, looking 
for proposed evolutionary scenarios. He was astonished, yet excited, to find in the literature a `thundering 
silence' [Behe, M.J.*, in Woodward T., "Meeting Darwin's Wager," Christianity Today, April 28, 1997, 
p.14] Not one biochemist in the past forty years had even attempted a testable explanation for the origin of 
any of the systems about which he was writing. Behe sensed he had the key discovery that would cap off 
his argument-he would use the silence of evolutionary biologists on this topic as his clincher." (Woodward, 
T.E.*, "Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, p.158)

6/11/2003
"Denton also fires a cluster of radical rhetorical rockets, each of them powered by the recalcitrance of the 
empirical data. Most of these are dazzling test cases, or Darwinian conundrums, which appear impossible to 
solve under the glare of `deep common sense.' In his `Bridging the Gaps' chapter, Denton piles example 
upon example of complex organs, structures, or behaviors known to exist in nature that appear to defy any 
plausible step-by-step evolutionary scenario of development. One measure of the rhetorical strength of this 
chapter is the number of reviews (most of the published reviews, in fact) that cited this material as the most 
effective of Denton's book. These reviews often summarized Denton's discussion of the difficulty of 
envisaging the pathway by which reptilian scales evolved into the complex engineering design found in the 
bird feather. Yet Denton's most dazzling test case is the bird lung mystery. Birds are said to have evolved 
from reptiles, but this poses an embarrassing problem due to differences in lung structure. Reptiles have a 
bellows-type lung, similar to that of humans and all mammals-air enters a branching, dead-end system; the 
airflow is reversed with each breath. All birds, however, have a fundamentally different kind of system. Air 
flows in, then breaks out into thousands of tiny parallel passageways (parabronchi) for the oxygen 
exchange, and then continues flowing in one direction through these parabronchi, and finally exits the lung. 
The bird lung is, thus, entirely unique in structure; it is a circulatory system (like the 
cardiovascular system of vertebrates)." (Woodward, T.E.*, "Doubts about Darwin: A History of 
Intelligent Design," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, pp.61-62. Emphasis original)

7/11/2003
"The key organ of the nervous system is the brain, and if there is one human organ that is particularly 
unusual it is the brain. The human brain is nothing short of monstrous in size. No other land creature the 
size of man approaches him in brain size. The elephant has a somewhat larger brain, but that brain must exert 
a control over a much larger body than man's must. We can conclude, then, that there are two aspects of the 
human body that are far, far out of line of the general mammalian pattern. One is his giant brain and the other 
is his long life. ... This book has concerned itself with the parts of the human body, the separate organs 
composing it. It would seem that what is left-the nervous system and other organs controlling intercellular 
organization-makes up the better half and, in fact, makes up that which is most peculiarly and particularly 
human." (Asimov, I., "The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation," Mentor: New York NY, 1963, p.309)

7/11/2003
"In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. ... Our crowd 
(present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared 
the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. At lunch, 
the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. what, they wanted 
to know, was going on in America with all this talk about `scientific creationism'? One asked me: `Is 
evolution really in some kind of trouble; and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught 
that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems 
both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?' A lively pastiche of French, 
Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by 
my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. 
Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement 
(unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word 
of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean." (Gould, S.J., "Nonoverlapping 
Magisteria," Natural History, March 1997, p.16)

7/11/2003
"Lewontin is brilliantly insightful, but too crankily honest to be as good a manipulator as his Harvard 
colleague Stephen Jay Gould. Gould displays both his talent and his unscrupulousness in an essay in the 
March 1997 issue of Natural History, entitled "Nonoverlapping Magisteria" and subtitled "Science and 
religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctly different domains." With a subtitle like that, 
you can be sure that Gould is out to reassure the public that evolution leads to no alarming conclusions. 
True to form, Gould insists that the only dissenters from evolution are "Protestant fundamentalists who 
believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true." Gould also insists that evolution (he never 
defines the word) is "both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief." Gould is familiar with 
nonliteralist opposition to evolutionary naturalism, but he blandly denies that any such phenomenon exists. 
He even quotes a letter written to the New York Times in answer to an op-ed essay by Michael Behe, 
without revealing the context. You can do things like that when you know that the media won't call you to 
account." (Johnson, P.E.*, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism," First Things, No. 77, 
November 1997, pp.22-25)

7/11/2003
"Saying that the universe began in a Big Bang is one thing, but saying life was designed by an intelligence is 
another. The phrase Big Bang itself evokes only images of an explosion, not necessarily a person. The 
phrase intelligent design seems more urgent and quickly invites questions about who the designer might 
have been. Will persons with philosophical commitments against the supernatural be painted into a corner 
by the theory? No. The human imagination is too powerful. ... Francis Crick also thinks that life on earth 
may have begun when aliens from another planet sent a rocket ship containing spores to seed the earth. This 
is no idle thought; Crick first proposed it with chemist Leslie Orgel in 1973 in an article entitled `Directed 
Panspermia' in a professional science journal called Icarus. A decade later Crick wrote a book, Life 
Itself; reiterating the theory; in a 1992 interview in Scientific American on the eve of the publication of 
his latest book, Crick reaffirmed that he thinks the theory is reasonable. The primary reason Crick 
subscribes to this unorthodox view is that he judges the undirected origin of life to be a virtually 
insurmountable obstacle, but he wants a naturalistic explanation." (Behe, M.J.*, "Darwin's Black Box: The 
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," [1996], Free Press: New York NY, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006, 
p.248)

7/11/2003
"For our present purposes, the interesting part of Crick's idea is the role of the aliens, whom he has 
speculated sent space bacteria to earth. But he could with as much evidence say that the aliens actually 
designed the irreducibly complex biochemical systems of the life they sent here, and also designed the 
irreducibly complex systems that developed later. The only difference is a switch to the postulate that aliens 
constructed life, whereas Crick originally speculated that they just sent it here. It is not a very big leap, 
though, to say that a civilization capable of sending rocket ships to other planets is also likely to be capable 
of designing life-especially if the civilization has never been observed. Designing life, it could be pointed 
out, does not necessarily require supernatural abilities; rather, it requires a lot of intelligence. If a graduate 
student in an earthbound lab today can plan and make an artificial protein that can bind oxygen, then there 
is no logical barrier to thinking that an advanced civilization on another world might design an artificial cell 
from scratch. (Behe, M.J.*, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," [1996], Free 
Press: New York NY, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006, pp.248-249)

7/11/2003
"This scenario still leaves open the question of who designed the designer-how did life originally originate? 
Is a philosophical naturalist now trapped? Again, no. The question of the design of the designer can be put 
off in several ways. It could be deflected by invoking unobserved entities: perhaps the original life is totally 
unlike ourselves, consisting of fluctuating electrical fields or gases; perhaps it does not require irreducibly 
complex structures to sustain it. Another possibility is time travel, which has been seriously proposed by 
professional physicists in recent years. Scientific American informed the readers of its March 1994 issue 
that `far from being a logical absurdity...the theoretical possibility of taking such an excursion into one's 
earlier life is an inescapable consequence of fundamental physical principles.' Perhaps, then, biochemists in 
the future will send back cells to the early earth that contain the information for the irreducibly complex 
structures we observe today. In this scenario humans can be their own aliens, their own advanced 
civilization. Of course, time travel leads to apparent paradoxes (things like grandsons shooting grandfathers 
before their offspring are born), but at least some physicists are ready to accept them. Most people, like me, 
will find these scenarios entirely unsatisfactory, but they are available for those who wish to avoid 
unpleasant theological implications." (Behe, M.J.*, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to 
Evolution," [1996], Free Press: New York NY, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006, p.249)

7/11/2003
"A `straw man' argument distorts somebody's position in order to make it easier to attack. Creationists are 
particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. That is so in part because some creationists really have made 
crazy arguments and in part because of the Inherit the Wind stereotype. Many Darwinists want to pretend 
that the only people who doubt their theory are the most extreme religious fundamentalists. They know how 
to win a debate when the issue is framed as `science versus the Bible,' and so they want to keep the debate 
framed that way. Contrariwise, Darwinists are in trouble when they have to present positive evidence that 
natural selection can create new kinds of plants and animals from simple beginnings. Hence they are 
constantly trying to divert the discussion away from the scientific issues so that they can debate the straw 
man position that we should close our eyes to scientific evidence if it seems to contradict Genesis. One 
prominent science writer wrote to me for months, never engaging the scientific issues but constantly 
pestering me with questions about my interpretation of Genesis (`Did Adam have a navel?'). Obviously he 
was hoping to find a straw man to ridicule." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Tuning Up Your Baloney Detector: How 
to Get a Good Grasp on Logical Reasoning and Investigative Procedure," Cornerstone, Vol. 26, Issue 
112 (1997), p. 12-16, 18)

8/11/2003
"Because this book presents a teleological interpretation of the cosmos which has obvious theological 
implications, it is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely 
consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science-that the cosmos is a seamless unity 
which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, 
including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. 
is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called `special creationist school.' According to 
special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws 
of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the 
result of a series of supernatural acts, involving God's direct intervention in the course of nature, each of 
which involved the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument 
presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world-
that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are 
natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or 
galaxies. In large measure, therefore, the teleological argument presented here and the special creationist 
worldview are mutually exclusive accounts of the world. In the last analysis, evidence for one is evidence 
against the other. Put simply, the more convincing is the evidence for believing that the world is 
prefabricated to the end of life, that the design is built into the laws of nature, the less credible becomes the 
special creationist worldview." (Denton, M.J., "Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose 
in the Universe," Free Press: New York NY, 1998, pp.xvii-xviii. Emphasis original)

8/11/2003
"In his rhetorical strategy to defend these points, Thaxton employed powerful weapons of analogy. For 
example, he argued that an observer beholding Mount Rushmore immediately perceives an `intelligent 
cause,' even if he does not know the details about how or by whom the presidential faces were sculpted. So 
also the scientific observer may legitimately infer some sort of `intelligent cause' when looking at features of 
nature like DNA, which bear telling marks of design. Thaxton noted that one does not have to know the 
exact identity of the designer in order to come to a positive conclusion of design. In another frequently 
presented analogy, Thaxton argued that just as SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) surveys radio 
emissions of stars looking for codelike sequences that would indicate intelligent origin, so scientists should 
have the academic freedom to be able to look at DNA and other information rich systems in nature and 
consider the possibility of intelligent causation. The SETI analogy, which quickly came to function as a 
favorite commonplace in the rhetorical repertory of Design, proved especially helpful since SETI is seen as a 
valid scientific research program. For a period of time in the 1990s, NASA even funded some projects that 
scanned the night skies for radio messages that might be produced by distant civilizations. In other words, 
the `detection of intelligent design' is not a wild or illegitimate (or inherently religious) idea in science. 
Rather, it is currently being carried out by astronomers who are sifting inflowing galactic static by means of 
radio telescopes and code-recognizing computers." (Woodward, T.E.*, "Doubts about Darwin: A History of 
Intelligent Design," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, pp.87-88. Emphasis original)

8/11/2003
"The meaning of the term `rhetoric' has been distorted in our time by some unfortunate associations. When 
we dismiss some politician's speech as `mere rhetoric,' we mean that it contains nothing but bombast. People 
today need to be reminded that rhetoric is actually a noble art which has been the subject of serious study 
since the time of Aristotle and before. Put simply, rhetoric is the art of framing an argument so that it can be 
appreciated by an audience, even one which is relatively uneducated in the subject or predisposed not to 
appreciate it. My favorite example is that of a lawyer who has to persuade a biased jury to take seriously 
some evidence or argument that they do not at first understand or would much rather dismiss on the basis 
of prejudice." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Foreword," in Woodward, T.E., "Doubts about Darwin: A History of 
Intelligent Design," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003, p.7)

8/11/2003
"The fallacy of complex question is the interrogative form of the fallacy of begging the question. Like the 
latter, it begs the question by assuming the conclusion at issue. Complex question accomplishes this by 
leading one to believe that a particular answer to a prior question has been answered in a certain way when 
this may not be the case. This fallacy goes by many names, including loaded question, trick question, 
leading question, fallacy of the false question, and fallacy of many questions. It is told of King Charles II of 
England that he once asked members of the Royal Society to determine for him why it is that if you place a 
dead fish in a bowl of water it makes the water overflow, while a live one does not. Some of the members 
thought about this a very long time and offered ingenious but unconvincing explanations. Finally, one of 
them decided to test the question. He discovered, of course, that it did not make a bit of difference whether 
one placed a dead fish or a live one in the bowl of water. Whether the story is true or not, it holds an 
important lesson. Before rushing to answer a question, it is best to question the question. For every 
question necessarily brings with it a set of assumptions which determine the lines along which it is to be 
answered, and sometimes those assumptions may render the argument fallacious." (Engel S.M., "With Good 
Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies," St. Martin's Press: New York, Fourth Edition, 1990, pp.141-
143)

12/11/2003
"Complex Question. It is obvious that there is something `funny' about questions like `Have you given up 
your evil ways?' or `Have you stopped cheating at cards?' These are not simple questions to which a 
straightforward `yes' or `no' answer is appropriate. Such questions presuppose that a definite answer has 
already been given to a prior question that was not even asked. Thus the first assumes that the answer `yes' 
has been given to the unasked question `Have you in the past followed evil ways?' And the second 
assumes an affirmative answer to the unasked question `Have you ever cheated at cards?' In either case, if a 
simple `yes' or `no' answer to the trick question is given, it has the effect of ratifying or affirming the implied 
answer to the unasked question. A question of this sort does not properly admit of a simple `yes' or `no' 
answer because it is not a simple or single question but a complex question consisting of several questions 
rolled into one. ... In all such cases the intelligent procedure is to point out the complexity of the complex 
question and to analyze it into its component parts. It may well be the case that when the implicit or implied 
prior question is correctly answered, the second or explicit one simply dissolves. If I did not hide any 
evidence, the question of where I hid it does not make sense." (Copi I.M., Introduction to Logic," [1953], 
Macmillan: New York, Seventh Edition, 1986, pp.101-102)

12/11/2003
"At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being untestable, dogmatic (and thus 
non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked 
claims that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that Creationism makes no empirical 
assertions whatever. That is surely false. Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about 
empirical matters of fact. Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its implications), 
the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that 
most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated 
worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which 
the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view 
that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil record must be paleontologically 
co-extensive with the record of lower animals. It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such 
claims with the available evidence-evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history, among other 
things. In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests. 
Unfortunately, the logic of the Opinion's analysis precludes saying any of the above. By arguing that the 
tenets of Creationism are neither testable nor falsifiable, Judge Overton (like those scientists who similarly 
charge Creationism, with being untestable) deprives science of its strongest argument against Creationism. 
Indeed, if any doctrine in the history of science has ever been falsified, it is the set of claims associated with 
"creation-science." Asserting that Creationism makes no empirical claims plays directly, if inadvertently, into 
the hands of the creationists by immunizing their ideology from empirical confrontation. The correct way to 
combat Creationism, is to confute the empirical claims it does make, not to pretend that it makes no such 
claims at all." (Laudan L., "Science at the Bar-Causes for Concern," in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: The 
Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy," Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, 
p.351)

13/11/2003
"Panentheism is not to be confused with pantheism. Pantheism literally means all (`pan') is God (`theism'), 
but panentheism means `all in God.' it is also called process theology (since it views God as a changing 
Being), bipolar theism (since it believes God has two poles), organicism (since it views all that actually is as 
a gigantic organism), and neoclassical theism (because it believes God is finite and temporal, in contrast to 
classical theism). ... Rather than viewing God as the infinite unchanging sovereign Creator of the world who 
brought it into existence, panentheists think of God as a finite, changing, director of world affairs who works 
in cooperation with the world in order to achieve greater perfection in his nature. Theism views God's 
relation to the world as a painter to a painting. The painter exists independently of the painting; he brought 
the painting into existence, and yet his mind is expressed in the painting. By contrast, the panentheist views 
God's relation to the world the way a mind is related to a body. Indeed, they believe the world is God's 
`body' (one pole) and the `mind' is the other pole. This is why the term bipolar is used. However, like some 
modern materialists who believe the mind is dependent on the brain, panentheists believe God is dependent 
on the world." (Geisler N.L.*, "Panentheism," in "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics," Baker 
Books: Grand Rapids MI, 1999, p.576)

13/11/2003
"Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible 
religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody knows how it 
would work; anyone who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That 
Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones." 
(Chesterton G.K., "Orthodoxy," [1908], Fontana: London, 1961, reprint, p.75)

14/11/2003
"All my critics season their reviews to varying degrees with attacks on my character. At the high end of the 
ad hominem scale is Martin, who despite our disagreements treats me with relative decency. At the 
bottom of the scale are Padian and Gishlick. The title of Padian and Gishlick's review ("The Talented Mr. 
Wells") is taken from a 1999 film. The review begins: "When we first meet the protagonist of the film The 
Talented Mr. Ripley, he is playing piano at a rooftop party in New York City. As the song finishes, an older 
man approaches and, observing Ripley's Princeton blazer, remarks that Ripley must have been at school with 
his son, Dickie. Sensing an opportunity, Ripley does not mention that the blazer is borrowed from another 
guest, nor that he did not attend Princeton, but only worked there. He merely asks, 'how is Dickie?' This kind 
of distortion, misleading by the omission of important information, is the basis of Icons of Evolution. Its 
author, Jonathan Wells, appears to come from an unusually strong academic background, but the truth is 
more complex.' (Padian & Gishlick, pp. 33- 34) Throughout their review, Padian and Gishlick repeatedly 
compare me to Ripley. But Ripley isn't just a social climber who tells little white lies to get ahead. In the 
course of the film he commits all kinds of evil, including murder. In other words, he is a sociopath. A 
sociopath. Now that's moral corruption! Wells `appears' to have earned Ph.D.s from Yale and Berkeley, but 
the `more complex' truth is that he is no better than a lying, murderous sociopath. If Padian and Gishlick are 
right, I shouldn't just be stripped of my academic credentials--I should be arrested. But wait. On what 
grounds do they justify comparing me to a sociopath? First they quote my 1994 statement about devoting 
my life to destroying Darwinism (discussed above), and then they write that after obtaining a Berkeley Ph.D. 
in molecular and cell biology Wells `followed this with a 5-year postdoctoral position sponsored by a retired 
professor in the same department at Berkeley, during which time he seems to have performed no experiments 
. No peer-reviewed publications resulted from Wells's 5- year stint.' (Padian & Gishlick, p. 34) These 
statements are false. ... Since Padian is a Berkeley biology professor, he could easily have checked the facts 
about my Berkeley post-doc before publishing his false and defamatory statements. Maybe he did not 
bother to check carefully, or maybe he chose to lie. Maybe he was negligent, or maybe he was malicious. 
Personal attacks on me, however, merely expose the scientific and moral bankruptcy of Darwinism. If 
Darwinists could show that my criticisms of the icons of evolution were unwarranted, or if they would stop 
trying lamely to defend the icons and simply replace them with better evidence, I would drop my case. But 
Darwinists cannot defend the icons, and they cannot afford to abandon them, so they resort to insults and 
smears. Is this how science is supposed to work?" (Wells, J.*, "Critics Rave Over Icons of Evolution: A 
Response to Published Reviews," Discovery Institute: Seattle WA, June 12, 2002)

14/11/2003
"Ad Hominem Arguments. A person with the wrong motives may have the right answer. Be careful about 
ad hominem arguments, which attack the person making the argument instead of the argument itself. 
(Ad hominem is Latin for `to the man.') Attacking somebody as a creationist, or an atheist, is often a 
way of distracting attention from valid arguments that person has to offer. On the other hand, it is not 
necessarily irrelevant or unfair to point out that a person has a bias. Again, the problem is not so much that 
people might lie as that we all have a tendency to believe what we want to believe. If a man argues that 
secondhand cigarette smoke isn't hazardous to your health, nobody thinks it unfair to point out that he 
owns a cigarette company or that he has smoked heavily for years and doesn't want to think that he may 
have endangered the health of his family. His bias is relevant, but it doesn't necessarily mean he is wrong. 
That depends on the evidence. In almost every disputed matter there is a problem of bias on both sides, and 
it's legitimate to bring this out. Bible believers may be reluctant to credit evidence that seems to contradict 
some passage in the Bible, and atheists may be reluctant to credit evidence that seems to suggest that 
natural selection can't do all Darwin claimed for it. Business owners don't like to believe facts that may hurt 
their business, and zealots for consumer protection may exaggerate the conclusions of a single study that 
confirms their worst suspicions about business. Scientists may be biased in favor of theories that make their 
work important and hence tend to increase their funding. In this imperfect world an ad hominem 
argument sometimes performs the legitimate function of showing that a person has a bias and hence that his 
or her arguments should be examined carefully. The argument is misused if it does more than that, causing 
us to ignore worthwhile arguments because of what we think of the person making them. The point is to 
recognize and acknowledge bias, and then get beyond it to evaluate the evidence fairly." (Johnson, P.E.*, 
"Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1997, pp.40-41)

14/11/2003
"TOWARD the end of 1961 America's well-known painter of primitives, Grandma Moses, died. She had 
begun her career of painting rather late in life, when she was almost 80. Nevertheless, she enjoyed many 
years in this profession, for she died at the matriarchal age of 101. I mention this because in this book on the 
intricacies of the human body I have laid some emphasis on the numerous ailments and disorders that can 
afflict it. Perhaps I ought to emphasize the reverse for a moment. The automobile, despite its being one of 
mankind's most polished machines, is ancient if it lasts ten years. The human body, far more fragile, far less 
amenable to repair (a car's engine can be replaced; a human heart cannot), in capable of being shut down for 
an overhaul, and subject to far greater and more continuous difficulties, can last a hundred. Nor need we 
compare the human body to inanimate objects only. How many living things that greeted the day and 
responded to the changing environment at the moment of Grandma Moses' birth in 1860, were still doing so 
on the day of her death in 1961? The list is tiny. Some trees can live centuries, and even millennia. Some 
giant tortoises can live up to 200 years or so. No other creatures aside from man, however, are known to top 
the century mark. ... When Grandma Moses died, then, the world of life of 1860 had as its representative a 
few trees, a very few tortoises-and a few ancient men and women. Now consider that trees live slowly, 
remain rooted, and stolidly stand against the buffeting of the environment. They buy longevity at the price 
of passivity. The giant tortoise moves - but just barely. He too buys longevity at a price: that of cold-
blooded slow motion. Man is warm blooded, however, and is as fast-moving and as deft as any creature 
alive. He races through life and yet manages to outlive all organisms that, like him, race, and almost all 
organisms that, unlike him, crawl or are motionless." (Asimov, I., "The Human Body: Its Structure and 
Operation," Mentor: New York NY, 1963, pp.304-305)

15/11/2003
"Let us restrict ourselves to the land representatives of the order to which man belongs, Mammalia. Here we 
can best make comparisons. for all its members are warm-blooded and all are built about the same body plan, 
differing only in rather minor variations. Here it turns out that longevity is strongly correlated with size: the 
larger the mammal, the longer-lived. Thus, the smallest mammal, the shrew, may live 1½ years and a rat may 
live 4 or 5 years. A rabbit may live up to 15 years, a dog up to 18, a pig up to 20, a horse up to 40, and an 
elephant up to 70. To be sure, the smaller the animal the more rapidly it lives-the faster its heartbeat and 
breathing rate, the quicker its motions relative to its size, the more it must eat, the higher its metabolism per 
unit mass. For that reason, longevity becomes a more constant thing when it is measured by heartbeat rather 
than by year. A shrew with a heartbeat of 1000 per minute can be matched against an elephant with a 
heartbeat of 20 per minute and it would seem that a day in the life of a shrew sees as many heartbeats as 
seven weeks in the life of the elephant. In fact, mammals in general seem to live, at best, as long as it takes 
their hearts to beat about one billion times. The rule is not absolute. There are exceptions, and the most 
astonishing exception is Man is considerably smaller than a horse and far smaller than an elephant, yet he 
lives (or can live) to be more than 100. Nor is this the effect of modern medicine; even in days when medicine 
was a collection of witch doctor's superstitions, an occasional human being attained great age. On the other 
hand, animals, receiving the best of domestic care and medicine, wear out much more quickly than man. Nor 
is this longevity the result of a metabolism that is unusually slow for a mammal. Man's heartbeat of about 72 
per minute is just what is to be expected of a mammal of his size. It is faster than that of a horse and slower 
than that of a dog. In 70 years, which is the average life expectancy of man in the technologically advanced 
areas of the world, the human heart beats 2½ billion times. As for Grandma Moses' heart, that beat over 3½ 
billion times be fore she died. Considering that trees have no hearts and that tortoises (and cold-blooded 
creatures generally) have only very slowly beating ones, it is safe to say that the human heart outperforms 
all others. Certainly it outperforms other mammalian hearts by a ratio of 2% or even 3½ to 1. Nor can man's 
closest relatives, evolutionarily speaking, match him. The chimpanzee, somewhat smaller than a man, is a 
dotard in the late thirties. The gorilla, considerably larger than a man, is a dotard in the late forties. In terms 
of heartbeat they fit much more closely into the mammalian scheme than does man. The human body, 
therefore, in all modesty, and from a completely objective viewpoint, is the most marvelous structure we 
know of. It may not have the grace of a cat or the sleek power of a horse or the tremendous strength of an 
elephant. It may not have the swimming ability of the seal, or the racing ability of the cheetah, or the flying 
ability of the bat, but it is put together for endurance and it out lives and outproduces them all." (Asimov, I., 
"The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation," Mentor: New York NY, 1963, pp.305-306)

15/11/2003
"In 1953 Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flask s - one containing a 
little water to represent a primaeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen 
sulphide gases to represent the Earth's early atmosphere - connected them with rubber tubes and introduced 
some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green 
and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars and other organic compounds. 'If God didn't 
do it this way,' observed Miller's delighted supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, 'He missed a good 
bet.' Press reports of the time made it sound as if about all that was needed now was for somebody to give 
the flasks a good shake and life would crawl out. As time has shown, it wasn't nearly so simple. Despite half 
a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life than we were in 1953 - and much further 
away from thinking we can. Scientists are now pretty certain that the early atmosphere was nothing like as 
primed for development as Miller and Urey's gaseous stew, but rather was a much less reactive blend of 
nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Repeating Miller's experiments with these more challenging inputs has so far 
produced only one fairly primitive amino acid." (Bryson, B., "A Short History of Nearly Everything," 
Doubleday: London, 2003, p.253)

16/11/2003
"At all events, creating amino acids is not really the problem. The problem is proteins. Proteins are what you 
get when you string amino acids together, and we need a lot of them. No-one really knows, but there may be 
as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of 
probability proteins shouldn't exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids (which I am 
obliged by long tradition to refer to here as 'the building blocks of life') in a particular order, in much the 
same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. The problem is that words in the 
amino-acid alphabet are often exceedingly long. To spell `collagen', the name of a common type of protein, 
you need to arrange eight letters in the right order. To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids 
in precisely the right sequence. But - and here's an obvious but crucial point - you don't make it. It makes 
itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in. The chances of a 1,055-
sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn't going to happen. 
To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened 
greatly - to about 27 metres, to be precise - to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three 
or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you 
have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively, for ever. Even if you 
reduced the number of spinning wheels to 200, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a 
protein, the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10260 (that is a 1 
followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms in the universe. Proteins, in short, 
are complex entities. Haemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards, yet even it 
offers 10190 possible amino-acid combinations, which is why it took the Cambridge 
University chemist Max Perutz twenty-three years - a career, more or less - to unravel it. For random events 
to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability - like a whirlwind spinning through a 
junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo Jet, in the colourful simile of the astronomer Fred 
Hoyle." (Bryson, B., "A Short History of Nearly Everything," Doubleday: London, 2003, pp.253-254)

16/11/2003
"The three easiest to understand methods for age-dating the universe involve the expansion of the 
universe, the burning of stars, and the abundances of radioactive elements. 1. Expansion of the universe. 
Astronomers have been able to measure the motion and speed of galaxies and the even older, more power-
packed bodies called quasars. What they see is that the farther away the object, the faster it is moving away. 
This set of facts tells us that the universe is expanding outward from a starting point in space and time. In a 
universe that expands outward from an infinitesimally small volume, the distances between the galaxies 
result from the velocity of expansion multiplied by the time of the expansion. So with a measure of the 
distances to the galaxies and the velocity of expansion (correcting for the expected slight slowdown of 
expansion that results from the gravitational pull of the galaxies on one another) we can calculate how long 
the universe has been expanding (time = distance/velocity). .... 2. Stellar burning. Like flames from a burning 
log, the color and brightness of a star's flames tell us how long the star has been burning (provided we know 
the star's mass). ... Astronomers have observed the colors and measured the brightnesses of millions of 
stars. Through these measurements they have found the range of ages for stars from the youngest to the 
oldest. With straightforward determinations of how long the universe must have been expanding before 
stars could form, astronomers simply add the age of the oldest stars to the time necessary for star formation 
to begin (about 1.5 billion years) to discover the age of the universe. ... 3. Abundances of radioactive 
elements. The only entity in the universe (outside nuclear physics laboratories) that can produce radioactive 
elements heavier than iron is supernovae. ... Since radioactive decay proceeds according to well understood, 
measurable physical processes, we can use the abundances (that is, the relative quantities) of various 
radioactive elements to estimate how much time has passed since these elements were produced in that 
burst of supernova activity. ... We know the universe cannot be older than a certain age because some 
radioactive elements still exist. Uranium238 and thorium232, for example, with 
radioactive half-lives of several billion years, can still be found. Therefore, we know that the universe cannot 
be as old as a trillion years, for if it were, all the uranium and thorium would have decayed into lighter 
elements. On the other hand, the universe cannot be very young because most radioactive elements no 
longer exist at all. The radioactive elements with half-lives of millions of years or less (except the byproducts 
of other radioactive elements with longer half-lives and the products of local or cosmic radiation) are 
completely gone. Enough time has elapsed for every bit of these elements to decay away. Therefore, the 
universe and the earth must be at least a billion years old." (Ross H.N.*, "Creation and Time: A Biblical and 
Scientific Perspective on the Creation-Date Controversy," NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 1994, pp.92-95)

17/11/2003
"What do the creationists believe should be taught? Some people are `theistic evolutionists,' who believe 
that evolution, as conceived and documented by biologists is the method God has used to achieve his aims. 
But fundamentalist creationists reject the concept of theistic evolution, which they find theologically 
repugnant; the Creator of whom they conceive could not have used such cruel, wasteful processes as 
natural selection and extinction to achieve his ends. Only the Genesis story or something very much like it 
fits the fundamentalists' concept of creation, because it turns out, according to the creationist literature, that 
religious views of origins that are not based on a literal interpretation of Genesis are actually evolution in 
disguise. `There are only two world views, evolution and creation. Each of these has many variants. 
Hinduism and Buddhism are variants of the typical evolutionary world views beginning as they do with an 
eternally self-existing universe (the same is true of Confucianism, Taoism, and all the other ancient pagan 
pantheistic religions).' [Morris, H.M.*, "The Anti-Creationists," Impact No. 97, Institute for 
Creation Research: El Cajon CA. ] Their `scientific' theory of creationism entails a personal, omnipotent, 
intelligent, purposeful Designer-the Creator as traditionally conceived in JudeoChristian religion. It is the 
particular concept of creation that the `scientific creationists' espouse that I shall deal with when I show that 
biology provides no evidence for omnipotence, intelligence, purpose, or design." (Futuyma, D.J., "Science 
on Trial: The Case for Evolution," Pantheon: New York, 1982, pp.12-13)

17/11/2003
"Old Testament Evidence for an Old Earth. Turning away from general revelation, let us look at special 
revelation. If an earth of great age is mandated by the evidence from nature, then the inspired Scriptures 
ought to agree. Rest assured, they do. In Job 15:7, Eliphaz asked Job, `Wast thou made before the 
hills?' Does it seem reasonable that Eliphaz would have used this question of digging sarcasm had he 
thought the age of the hills and the age of man were virtually the same, varying by a scant five days? The 
intent of Eliphaz in Job is confirmed by  Habakkuk 3:6. The mountains are described as `everlasting,' the 
hills are `perpetual.' The Hebrew words 'ad and 'owlam mean `long duration' `ancient,' `forever,' and 
`continuous existence.' Does the Bible comment on the earth-age dispute? Consider Ecclesiastes 1:10: 
`Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was 
before us.' Could `any thing' include an earth, for example?" (Fischer, D.*, "The Origins Solution: An 
Answer in the Creation-Evolution Debate," Fairway Press: Lima OH, 1996, pp.81-82)

17/11/2003
"Biblical figures of speech for the earth's age. In describing the eternity of God's existence, several Bible 
writers often compare it to the longevity of the mountains or the `foundations of the earth.' The figures of 
speech used in Psalm 90:2-6, Proverbs 8:22-31, Ecclesiastes 1:3-11, and Micah 6:2 all depict the immeasurable 
antiquity of God's presence and plans. The brief of a 3000-year terrestrial history (in the context of the 
wisdom literature) seems an inadequate metaphor for God's eternality. The fact that the Bible does consider 
the antiquity of the founding of the earth a suitable metaphor for God's eternality suggests the biblical view 
of a very ancient earth. ... Explicit statements of earth's antiquity. Habakkuk 3:6 directly declares that the 
mountains are `ancient' and the hills are 'age-old.' In 2 Peter 15, the heavens (the stars and the universe) are 
said to have existed `long ago.' " (Ross, H.N.*, "Creation and Time: A Biblical and Scientific Perspective on 
the Creation-Date Controversy," NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 1994, p.52)

17/11/2003
"Darwin himself relied crucially on such an extrapolative vision: smoothly extend the adaptive struggles of 
generations across millions of years in geological time, and you will obtain the entire, wondrously ramified 
tree of life. ... If this uniformitarian vision of extrapolation fails, then we must conclude that while 
adaptationism may control immediate changes in the overt forms of organisms, it cannot render evolution at 
other scales. The main excitement in evolutionary theory during the past twenty years has not been-as 
Cronin would have us believe-the shoring up of Darwinism in its limited realm (by gene selectionism or any 
other patching device), but rather the documentation of the reasons why Darwin's crucial requirement for 
extrapolation has failed. Selectionism is not a general model for evolutionary change at most scales. ... But 
the ultimate failure of Cronin's adaptationism, as a general evolutionary model, appears most clearly when 
we consider the paleontological record. Darwin's vision may prevail in the here and now of immediate 
adaptive struggles. But if we cannot extend the small changes thereby produced into the grandeur of 
geological time to yield the full tree of life, then Darwin's domain is a limited corner of evolutionary 
explanation." (Gould, S.J., "The Confusion over Evolution," The New York Review of Books, 
Vol. 39, No. 19, November 19, 1992, pp.47-54, pp.52-53)

17/11/2003
"There are a few other theories that have been, and even occasionally still are, advanced as alternatives to 
Darwinian selection. Once again, I shall show that they are not really serious alternatives at all. I shall show 
(it is really obvious) that these 'alternatives"neutralism', `mutationism', and so on - may or may not be 
responsible for some proportion of observed evolutionary change, but they cannot be responsible for 
adaptive evolutionary change, that is for change in the direction of building up improved devices for 
survival like eyes, ears, elbow joints, and echo-ranging devices. Of course, large quantities of evolutionary 
change may be non-adaptive, in which case these alternative theories may well be important in parts of 
evolution, but only in the boring parts of evolution, not the parts concerned with what is special about life 
as opposed to non-life. " (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, 
p.303)

18/11/2003
"Every once in a while, some scientist who accepts the view that the universe, life, and human beings have 
developed slowly over billions of years through evolutionary processes is lured into a debate with a 
`creationist' who insists that the universe, life, and human beings have been brought into existence only a 
few thousand years ago, in just about its present form, by supernatural action. To serious students of 
science, it would seem that a scientist must win such a debate. After all, on the side of the scientist are vast 
numbers of all kinds of observations, to say nothing of careful argument and unassailable logic. On the side 
of the creationist there is, from the scientific point of view, exactly nothing. And yet, somehow, in such 
debates, the creationist often appears to have it all his own way, while the scientist is reduced to an 
ineffective defense. Why is that? No mystery! The scientist has generally spent his professional life in 
scientific debate with other scientists. The weapons in such debates are evidence and careful reasoning. 
Opposing points of view are maintained unemotionally, and all participants follow the rules of the scientific 
method. If one or all of those taking part in a scientific debate are not good speakers, that does not matter 
very much. It is the content that counts. The creationist, however, is often a showman, and usually a 
polished speaker. He has no concern for scientific evidence or careful reasoning and is on the stage in order 
to win debating points with the audience. He sounds much better than the scientist as a matter of course. 
What he says is worth nothing, but it invariably sounds good. The scientist usually is untrained in 
handling such showman-tactics and cannot respond effectively. The scientist, moreover, is conditioned to 
admit uncertainty and ignorance. That is an essential part of science. The creationist, therefore, attacks in 
that direction. He points out places in the evolutionary view where there are uncertainties and confusion, 
and the scientist must, perforce, admit it. He is forced to defend and explain endlessly. The scientist, in fact, 
once maneuvered into the defense, almost never thinks of shifting to the attack. He never demands the 
actual evidence-for the view that there was a universal creation a few thousand years ago. The creationist is 
never forced to state whether many men and women were then created, or only one pair; whether both sexes 
were created at once, or women after men; and whether serpents could at one time speak. What's more, there 
is almost always a built-in bias on the part of the audience. Almost invariably, the debate takes place before 
people who are only sketchily trained in science, if at all, and who have, in many cases, an automatic 
reverence for the literal words of the Bible. The creationist seems to be on the side of the Bible and religion 
(and Mom, and baseball, and apple pie, toots while the scientist is easily represented as being against these 
things. The audience, therefore, tends to place itself clearly behind the creationist, and that further confuses 
and demoralizes the scientist. What ought a scientist to do then? It seems to me he ought to decline to 
debate these showmen on their terms if he lacks the talent for the rough-and-tumble. And if he thinks he has 
the talent, he should not bother defending evolution; he should move to force his opponent to present the 
evidence for creationism. Since there isn't any, the results could be humorous." (Asimov, I., "Losing the 
Debate," in, "The Roving Mind," [1983], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1987, reprint, pp.29-30. 
Emphasis original)

18/11/2003
"First, Emilio has trivialized the conflict between evolution and creation portraying it as merely a dispute 
over whether the word day in the book of Genesis can be interpreted figuratively rather than literally. His 
logic is that if the `days' of Genesis are really a poetic way of describing long geological ages, then 
`evolution' is merely God's chosen method of creating, and one can without difficulty be both an 
evolutionist and a creationist. ... Unfortunately, this much-too-easy solution to the problem rests on a 
misunderstanding of what contemporary scientists mean by that word evolution. If they meant only 
a gradual process of God-guided creation, then Emilio might be on the right track. A God-guided process is 
not what modern science educators mean by "evolution," however. They are absolutely insistent 
that evolution is an unguided and mindless process, and that our existence is therefore a fluke rather 
than a planned outcome. For example, the 1995 official Position Statement of the American National 
Association of Biology Teachers (hereafter NABT) accurately states the ge