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The following are quotes added to my Unclassified Quotes database in August 2006. The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.
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1/08/2006 "The assertion that natural Selection was not true, or rather would not work came from several sources. It came most cogently from one Fleeming, Jenkin, professor of engineering at Edinburgh University. In 1867 Jenkin pointed out that if all hereditary differences blended on crossing, as Darwin assumed, then any variation that arose would diminish in importance in each succeeding generation and no new variation could persist long enough to be selected by the process that Darwin proposed. ... Accordingly in succeeding editions of the Origin of Species, he shifted his ground. He began to suggest that direct adaptation of the organism to its environment brought changes in heredity, and that this direct action played a part, along with natural selection, in the transformation of species. This shift of ground was noticed by Darwin's critics. Darwin responded by calling their attention to something they had overlooked. In the first edition of the Origin of Species he had mentioned twice that the effects of the `external conditions of life'-both the direct effects of climate and food (and such indirect effects as the use and disuse of organs-were perhaps in some extremely small degree inherited. Change was partly directed before it took place as well as partly selected after it took place. In other words, Darwin had prepared a line of retreat against the possibility that natural selection might be found untenable. He now prudently took this line. As time went on Darwin relied more and more on a double or mixed theory of evolution: selection plus direction." (Darlington, C.D., "The Origin of Darwinism," Scientific American, Vol. 201, May 1959, pp.60-66, p.60) 1/08/2006 "Darwin's finches are a classic example of species diversification by natural selection. Their impressive variation in beak morphology is associated with the exploitation of a variety of ecological niches, but its developmental basis is unknown. We performed a comparative analysis of expression patterns of various growth factors in species comprising the genus Geospiza. We found that expression of Bmp4 in the mesenchyme of the upper beaks strongly correlated with deep and broad beak morphology. When misexpressed in chicken embryos, Bmp4 caused morphological transformations paralleling the beak morphology of the large ground finch G. magnirostris." (Abzhanov, A., Protas, M., Grant, B.R., Grant, P.R. & Tabin, C.J., "Bmp4 and Morphological Variation of Beaks in Darwin's Finches," Science, Vol. 305, 3 September 2004, pp. 1462-1465) 1/08/2006 "For the past 25 years, a cadre of evodevotees has been struggling to unify the fields of evolution and development. A recent paper published in the journal Science by Abzahnov et al (2004) reports on the role of the growth factor Bmp4 during the evolution in the beak morphology of Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Islands. These data show that evolutionary changes to the developmental program of large- versus small-beaked species of Darwin's finch arise from shifts in the heterochronic - timing of ontogenetic events - and heterotopic - spatial expression of ontogenetic events - expression of Bmp4.Stephen J Gould (1977) popularized the term heterochrony, which now serves as a mantra chanted at evodevo journal clubs around the globe. If Gould were alive today, he would undoubtedly be raving about the latest evodevo findings on Bmp4. ... Intriguingly, Abzahnov et al (2004) show that heterochronic manipulations of Bmp4 expression during chick development can reproduce the comparative patterns observed among Darwin's finches ... Such heterochronic shifts yield a chick embryo that develops into the large-beaked morphology characteristic of the aptly named Geospiza magnirostris, which likewise expresses Bmp4 earlier in mesenchymal cells than any of the other members of the ground finch genus. .... Such heterochronic and heterotopic expression of Bmp4 provide a parsimonious way to achieve both the svelte-beaked form of the most ancestral of the ground finch (Geospiza) group of Darwin's finches, G. difficilis, as well as the robust-beaked form of G. magnirostris. Abzahnov et al (2004) further confirmed that the changes in beak morphology among Darwin's finches were not associated with two of the regulators of Bmp4, sonic hedgehog (Shh) and fibroblast growth factor 8 (Fgf8). The junction where expression of these two regulatory genes meet on the developing cranium has been shown to drive the out-pocketing of cells that eventually develops into beak and to also induce expression of Bmp4 (Abzahnov and Tabin, 2004). Even though Shh and Fgf8 interact to control the proper location of Bmp4 expression on the cranium and thus beak morphology, variation in Shh and Fgf8 were not correlated with differences between large- and small-beaked species of Darwin's finches. The authors did find that a mesenchymal injection of a viral construct with the gene Noggin, which antagonizes Bmp4 signaling, dramatically reduced the size of the upper beak of the chick. This result does not rule out potential epistatic interactions of other regulatory genes, but it does narrow the search to those that specifically affect Bmp4 gene expression. These findings elucidate the developmental origin of an adaptive radiation that serves as the textbook example of evolution. ... The achievement of an evodevo synthesis in a classic example of evolution like Darwin's finches is dramatic. It quickens the blood and warms the hearts of evodevotees, myself included. The insights on development and evolution associated with Bmp4 are tantalizingly. They bring us closer to smashing the conceptual iron curtain that has been erected in recent years between the fields of evolution and molecular developmental biology..... Even though natural selection on Darwin's finches is still intense (Grant and Grant, 2002), most of the evolved changes in the regulation of Bmp4 have occurred in the remote past when each member of the ground finch genus first evolved, and thus are inaccessible to us in the present day. One more step that remains to be demonstrated is the role of natural selection in specifically shaping Bmp4 or its gene regulators. Perhaps, the answer to this question lies in the elucidation of Bmp4 expression in a species that simultaneously exhibits both small-, large-, and mega-beaked forms such as the African seedcracker, Pyrenestes ostrinus (Smith, 1993,1997). In African seedcrackers, the small-, large- and mega-billed forms arise from a simple Mendelian factor (Smith, 1993), and the implication is that such Mendelian variation should be due to Bmp4 expression. Whether such within-species polymorphism contributed to the morphological radiation of Darwin's finches in the remote past remains unclear. However, such intraspecies polymorphisms will become very useful in our search for the link between proximate causes of development and ultimate causes of natural selection. Thus, elucidating the heterochrony and heterotopy involved in intraspecies polymorphisms should be the next step, since the action of natural selection in shaping beak shape and perhaps the modifiers and regulators of Bmp4 is ongoing (Smith, 1993). The findings on Darwin's finches are likely to be general for vertebrates. Selection on Bmp4 has been demonstrated in African cichlids (Terai et al, 2002; Albertson et al, 2003), another spectacular adaptive radiation of vertebrates." (Sinervo, B., "Evodevo: Darwin's finch beaks, Bmp4, and the developmental origins of novelty," Heredity, Vol. 94, 10 November 2004, pp.141-142) 2/08/2006 "These findings elucidate the developmental origin of an adaptive radiation that serves as the textbook example of evolution. More importantly, it brings us one step closer to understanding how morphological diversity can be achieved with a minimum amount of informational change. The fact that the same growth factor, when applied to mesenchyme versus ectoderm, can achieve completely opposite morphologies provides us with a partial answer to the paradox of the genome. How can the complex morphology of a human require only the coordinated expression of 30 000 genes? The combination of heterochronic and heterotopic changes in the regulation of single genes provides an infinite set of topological shifts to evolve a limitless set of morphological diversity." (Sinervo, B., Evodevo: Darwin's finch beaks, Bmp4, and the developmental origins of novelty," Heredity, Vol. 94, 10 November 2004, pp.141-142) 2/08/2006 "The Origin of Species is still freely abused and often misrepresented, just as it was when Darwin was alive. In his final edition, here reprinted, he entered a mild protest-a luxury he rarely indulged in-against a misrepresentation to which his theory was persistently subjected. `But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented,' he wrote, `and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark, that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely, at the close of the Introduction-the following words: I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification. This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation, but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.'" (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xv. Emphasis original) 2/08/2006 "The power of error to persist is more enduring than Darwin thought; the misrepresentation of which he complained is being made now more blatantly than ever before. It is being proclaimed from the housetops that The Origin of Species contained only one new idea, and that this idea, the conception of natural selection, is false. Natural selection, some of his modern critics declare, is powerless to produce new forms of either plant or animal: Darwin never said it could. In this book the reader will find him giving warning after warning that by itself selection can do nothing. To effect an evolutionary change two sets of factors, he declared, must be at work together-those which bring about variations or modifications in animal or in plant and those which favour and select the individuals which vary or become modified in a certain direction. Why should so many critics continue to misunderstand the essentials of Darwin's theory of evolution? Men do not wilfully persist in misrepresentation; there must be some explanation of their error. The truth is that Darwin himself was at fault; the full title he gave to his book was The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . Plainly such a title was a misnomer, this book was and is much more than such a title implies; it was much more than a mere demonstration of the action of natural selection, it was the first complete demonstration that the law of evolution holds true for every form of living thing. It was this book which first convinced the world of thoughtful men and women that the law of evolution is true." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, pp.xv-xvi. Emphasis original) 2/08/2006 "Long before Darwin's time men had proclaimed the doctrine of evolution, but they failed to convince their fellows of its truth, both because their evidence was insufficient and because they had to leave so much that was unexplained. Darwin, on the other hand, brought forward such an immense array of facts in this book and set them in such a logical sequence that his argument proved irresistible. He never resorted to any kind of special pleading, but permitted facts to speak for themselves. However longingly his readers clung to age-long beliefs, Darwin compelled them to face facts and draw conclusions, often at enmity with their predilections. We all desire to be intellectually honest, and sooner or later truth wins. It was this book which won a victory for evolution, so far as that victory has now been won. When it appeared in the nineteenth century the Why and the How of evolution were immaterial issues. What had to be done then was to convince men that evolution represented a mode of thinking worthy of acceptation and in that The Origin of Species succeeded beyond all expectation. Nor has it finished its appointed mission. No book has yet appeared that can replace it; The Origin of Species is still the book which contains the most complete demonstration that the law of evolution is true." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xvi) 2/08/2006 "This, then, is Darwin's essential service to the world-not that he discovered the law of Natural Selection- but that he succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the outlook of mankind on all living things. He wrought this revolution through this book. Darwin himself formed a true estimate of what the nature of this revolution was. In the last paragraph of his Introduction, printed here on page 20, readers will find a statement of what he claimed to have done. `Although much remains obscure,' he writes, `and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained-namely, that each species has been independently created-is erroneous. I am firmly convinced that species aye not immutable.' From this statement we see that Darwin's aim was to replace a belief in special creation by a belief in evolution and in this he did succeed, as every modern biologist will readily admit." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, pp.xvi-xvii. Emphasis original) 2/08/2006 "No one was in a better position to measure what Darwin succeeded in doing than his magnanimous contemporary and ally Alfred Russel Wallace. Writing to Professor Newton of Cambridge in 1887, five years after Darwin's death, he penned the following passage: `I had the idea of working it out [the theory of natural selection], so far as I was able, when I returned home, not at all expecting that Darwin had so long anticipated me. I can truly say now, as I said many years ago, that I am glad it was so, for I have not the love of work, experiment and detail that was so preeminent in Darwin and without which anything I could have written would never have convinced the world.' Darwin succeeded in convincing the world not only by his superabundance of proof but by the transparently honest way in which he presented his case. No one can read The Origin of Species without feeling that Darwin had the interests of only one party at heart-his client, Truth." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xvii. Emphasis original) 2/08/2006 "Darwin succeeded in convincing scientific men that the law of evolution is true of all living things and yet the manner in which evolution takes place-the machinery of evolution, described in this book-may be totally wrong. If this were really so, The Origin of Species would be altogether out of date. Some critics have insinuated as much.-But was Darwin wrong in his conception of the mode of evolution? Let us look into this. Suppose, for a moment, that an omniscient biologist, greatly daring, were to re-edit this classic--would he find much that needs alteration? Scarcely a single fact would have to be withdrawn; so accurate was Darwin in making his own observations and so careful was he in the selection of his authorities, that the modern reader may accept all his statements of fact without question. But what of his `mode' or method of evolution? The machinery involved-is it out of date? My deliberate opinion is that the machinery of evolution described in this book is not out of date and never will be. Darwin perceived that two factors are concerned in evolution-one is `productive,' the other is `selective.' The productive factor gives rise to the materials of evolution-the points or characters wherein one individual differs from another-whether that individual be a plant or a human being. Such differences Darwin names `variations.' How are such variations produced? In every chapter of this book the reader will find Darwin declaring that he does not know; the only point of which he felt certain was that individual differences do not arise by chance." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xvii) 2/08/2006 "Though he has often been regarded as an obscure writer, Darwin usually expresses himself clearly enough. He was not interested in philosophical considerations or in the exact definition of the terms he used. In the final chapter of the first edition of Origin, where he recapitulates his arguments the word evolution is not even mentioned; yet the proposition he is defending can easily be defined. This is, that all the organisms that exist or have existed have developed from a few extremely simple forms or from one alone, by a process of descent with modification. The mechanism of these transformations though infinitely complex in its detailed working, is very simple in principle. For reasons not fully understood organisms tend to vary slightly in their various characteristics These variations must be called random in the sense that they have no predestined relation to the well-being of the organism. Nevertheless since they occur continually in many directions an individual in which a particular variation has occurred will have a slight advantage over its competitors in a particular environment. The advantage will be transmitted to its progeny in which, owing to variation, it will be manifested in different degrees, and thus there will occur through successive generations, a progressive adaptation to the environment from which the inadequately equipped competitors will disappear either through extinction or by adaptation to a different environment. We must, says Darwin, admit the truth of the following propositions: 'that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind-that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable-and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct.' These truths being admitted, the theory of descent with modification through natural selection, must be accepted. This explanation has universal value. It enables us to understand that every mental power and capacity has been a gradual but necessary acquirement and thus the origin and history of man become scientifically comprehensible. And as the past has been, so will the future. We may look with some confidence, says Darwin, ' to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.' The view that natural selection, leading to the survival of the fittest, in populations of individuals of varying characteristics and competing among themselves, has produced in the course of geological time gradual transformations leading from a simple primitive organism to the highest forms of life, without the intervention of any directive agency or force, is thus the essence of the Darwinian position. Purposeless and undirected evolution, says J.S. Huxley, eventually produced, in man, a being capable of purpose and of directing evolutionary change. This, it appears to me, remains the view of the most representative modern Darwinians. It is true that Darwin himself admitted a Lamarckian element, the effects of use and disuse, and Sir Arthur Keith defended him against those who accused him of relying exclusively on natural selection. But this, in the modern view, would be a virtue of Darwin's theory since the inheritance of acquired characters is now generally denied by biologists." (Thompson, W.R., "Introduction," in Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1967, reprint, pp.viii-ix) 2/08/2006 "I have tried to include in a necessarily brief summary the most important points in Darwin's argument and have not designedly attempted to weaken the presentation. If Darwin convinced the world that species had originated through evolution by natural selection, it was, I think, on the basis of the arguments I have mentioned. But in a matter of this kind a great deal depends on the manner in which arguments are presented. Darwin considered that the doctrine of the Origin of living forms by descent with modification, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory unless the causes at work were correctly identified, so his theory of modification by natural selection was, for him, of absolutely major importance. Since he had at the time the Origin was published no body of experimental evidence to support his theory, he fell back on speculative arguments. The argumentation used by evolutionists, said de Quatrefages, makes the discussion of their ideas extremely difficult. Personal convictions, simple possibilities, are presented as if they were proofs, or at least valid arguments in favour of the theory. As an example de Quatrefages cited Darwin's explanation of the manner in which the titmouse might become transformed into the nutcracker, by the accumulation of small changes in structure and instinct owing to the effect of natural selection; and then proceeded to show that it is just as easy to transform the nutcracker into the titmouse. The demonstration can be modified without difficulty to fit any conceivable case. It is without scientific value, since it cannot be verified; but since the imagination has free rein, it is easy to convey the impression that a concrete example of real transmutation has been given. This is the more appealing because of the extreme fundamental simplicity of the Darwinian explanation. The reader may be completely ignorant of biological processes yet he feels that he really understands and in a sense dominates the machinery by which the marvellous variety of living forms has been produced. This was certainly a major reason for the success of the Origin. Another is the elusive character of the Darwinian argument. Every characteristic of organisms is maintained in existence because it has survival value. But this value relates to the struggle for existence. Therefore we are not obliged to commit ourselves in regard to the meaning of differences between individuals or species since the possessor of a particular modification may be, in the race for life, moving up or falling behind. On the other hand, we can commit ourselves if we like, since it is impossible to disprove our statement. The plausibility of the argument eliminates the need for proof and its very nature gives it a kind of immunity to disproof. Darwin did not show in the Origin that species had Originated by natural selection; he merely showed, on the basis of certain facts and assumptions, how this might have happened, and as he had convinced himself he was able to convince others." (Thompson, W.R.*, "Introduction," in Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1967, reprint, p.xi) 2/08/2006 "No one who views mankind with unprejudiced eyes can say that Darwin's law of selection is out of date. There is competition and struggle throughout the whole of Nature's realm. Nor do I think it can ever pass out of date in any form of human society unless man deliberately resolves to give up the struggle of life. As to what will happen in such a case the law of evolution leaves us in no doubt. The species which gives up the struggle becomes extinct. The revolution in outlook, effected by this book, was not confined to men who study the history of animals and of plants. Its conquest gradually spread until every department of knowledge was affected. No matter what a man's line of study might be-the stars, the earth, the elements, industry, economics, civilisation, theology or man himself-the inquirer soon began to realise that he must take the law of evolution as his guide. It was Darwin, through this book, who changed the outlook of all gatherers of knowledge and made them realise that behind the field of their immediate inquiry lay an immense evolutionary or historical background which had to be explored before further progress was possible. Nay, it was Darwin who made men see that evolution is now everywhere at work--in all things material, moral and spiritual, and will continue in operation, so far as the human mind can anticipate, to the very end of time." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, pp.xviii-xix) 2/08/2006 "A few months ago I had the daring to place Darwin in that small select group of great Englishmen which holds Shakespeare. My judgment was denounced as madly biased by men accustomed to adjudicate on literary reputations. When, however, we see how profoundly Darwin has altered and is altering the outlook of mankind, lifting from it, more than any man has ever done, the pall of superstition, my estimate of his greatness and of his universality will be seen to be nearer the truth than is now acknowledged. I know very well that Darwin's doctrine so far has reached only the intellectual stratum of mankind and has not yet percolated into the minds of the greater mass of humanity. Sooner or later Darwin's outlook will become universal, for men of all grades do desire to know the truth. Darwin's mission is not finished; this book has still many years to live and many converts to make." (Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Sixth Edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xix) 3/08/2006 "Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting- point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and Man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied." (Chesterton, G.K., "Orthodoxy," [1908], Fontana: London, 1961, reprint, p.15) 3/08/2006 "The expanded insanity defense was endorsed by the leading experts and enacted in the federal system and many states. (In California, judges left the old insanity rule unchanged but introduced the new philosophy directly into the law of murder by saying that a defendant lacked `malice aforethought' if he couldn't control his conduct.) The new rules lasted just until they succeeded in generating outcomes the public recognized as crazy, including the insanity acquittal of John Hinckley--who shot President Reagan and his press secretary in hopes of attracting the notice of the movie star Jodie Foster. Of course, Hinckley's motivation really was loony, but he also knew the wrongfulness of what he was doing and chose to do it. Public opinion promptly forced a change back to the old rules, with additional measures designed to ensure that defendants acquitted for insanity would be confined just as securely as if they had been convicted. John Hinckley is still behind bars and going nowhere. What is particularly fascinating about the traditional insanity doctrine, called the M'Naghten Rule by lawyers, is that it is based straightforwardly on assumptions derived from biblical theism. Humans are seen as endowed with an innate understanding of the difference between moral right and wrong--meaning an absolute moral standard that is independent of legal rules. The law holds us responsible if we choose wrong instead of right, just as God does--and science does not. Criminal defendants are excused for insanity only if this innate capacity for moral understanding is so damaged that they are comparable to small children, who do not grasp what killing means even if they pick up a loaded pistol, point it at a playmate, and pull the trigger. (A California six-year-old was recently found incapable of committing attempted murder after he beat a baby almost to death. No one protested the decision.) Insanity in this restricted sense saves a killer from the death penalty, but it does not lead to freedom, because an adult who does not know right from wrong belongs in custody. Whatever scientific naturalists may say, criminal law has found it necessary to assume that humans are moral agents created in the image of God, with a divine gift of freedom and a knowledge of God's moral order written on our hearts. Even James Q. Wilson, who doesn't believe the premise, likes the conclusions that follow from that premise. When you are dealing with human beings, naturalism is a bust--especially as a methodology." (Johnson P.E., "Those Madcap Menendez Boys," Books & Culture Magazine, Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, p.12) 3/08/2006 "Once it is decided that we must wager; once it is decided that there are only two options, theism and atheism, not three, theism, atheism, and agnosticism; then the rest of the argument is simple. Atheism is a terrible bet. It gives you no chance of winning the red prize. Pascal states the argument this way: You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything: if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then: wager that he does exist. If God does not exist, it does not matter how you wager, for there is nothing to win after death and nothing to lose after death. But if God does exist, your only chance of winning eternal happiness is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe. As Pascal says, `I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.' If you believe too much, you neither win nor lose eternal happiness. But if you believe too little, you risk losing everything." (Kreeft, P., "The Argument from Pascal's Wager." From Kreeft, P., "Fundamentals of the Faith: 3/08/2006 "It is therefore of immediate concern to both biologist and layman that Darwinism is under attack. The theory of life that undermined nineteenthcentury religion has virtually become a religion itself and in its turn is being threatened by fresh ideas. The attacks are certainly not limited to those of the creationists and religious fundamentalists who deny Darwinism for political and moral reasons. The main thrust of the criticism comes from within science itself. The doubts about Darwinism represent a potential revolt from within rather than a siege from without. What is even more surprising is that these doubts are arising simultaneously from several independent branches of science. With a growth in the appreciation of the philosophy of science-largely due to the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper-has come a doubt about whether Darwinism is, strictly speaking, scientific. Is the theory actually testable-as good theories must be? Is the idea of natural selection based on a tautology, a simple restatement of some initial assumptions? From within biology the doubts have come from scientists in half a dozen separate fields. Many palaeontologists are unconvinced by the supposed gradualness of Darwinian evolution; they feel that the evidence points to abrupt change-or else to no change at all. Some geneticists question Darwin's explanation for the 'origin of species', feeling that natural selection may have virtually nothing to do with the events that lead to the appearance of new species. Among other scientists, for example among immunologists, embryologists and taxonomists, the same feeling seems to be growing: there is a lot more to evolution than Charles Darwin envisaged, and even the modern synthesis of evolutionary ideas-called neoDarwinism ... seems inadequate in many respects. In some ways the attacks are nothing new; several of the debates now surfacing can be traced to Darwin himself, and even before. What is new is the climate that the debates are creating. Since the days of Darwin and his 'bulldog', T.H. Huxley, and especially since the confident synthesis that created neo- Darwinism in the 1940s, any attack on evolutionary theory has been treated rather like flat-earthism: evidence of mental aberration due to religious mania or political fanaticism. Such attacks were simply not taken seriously. This is no longer true. In the past ten years has emerged a new breed of biologists who are considered scientifically respectable, but who have their doubts about Darwinism." (Leith, B., "The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, pp.10-11) 3/08/2006 "The raising of the status of Darwinian theory to a self-evident axiom has had the consequence that the very real problems and objections with which Darwin so painfully laboured in the Origin have become entirely invisible. Crucial problems such as the absence of connecting links or the difficulty of envisaging intermediate forms are virtually never discussed and the creation of even the most complex of adaptations is put down to natural selection without a ripple of doubt. The overriding supremacy of the myth has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago and that all subsequent biological research - paleontological, zoological and in the newer branches of genetics and molecular biology has provided ever-increasing evidence for Darwinian ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that the evidence was so patchy one hundred years ago that even Darwin himself had increasing doubts as to the validity of his views, and the only aspect of his theory which has received any support over the past century is where it applies to microevolutionary phenomena. His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe." (Denton, M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, p.78) 3/08/2006 "When country changes rapidly, we should expect most species. The difference [between] intellect of man and animals not so great as between living thing without thought (plants) and living thing with thought (animal). ... My theory very distinct from Lamarck's." (Darwin, C.R., "First Notebook (July 1837-February 1838)," in de Beer, G.R., ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species (1837-1839)," in Appleman, P., ed., "Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, First Edition, 1970, p.76) 3/08/2006 "If my theory true, we get 1st a horizontal history of earth within recent times, and many curious points of speculation; for having ascertained means of transport, we should then know whether former lands intervened. 2d) By character of any two ancient fauna, we may form some idea of connection of those two countries. Hence India, Mexico and Europe-one great sea. (Coral reefs .'. shallow water at Melville island). 3d) We know that structure of every organ in A.B.C., three species of one genus can pass into each other by steps we see; but this cannot be predicated of structures in two genera. Although D.E.F. follow close to A.B.C., we cannot be sure that structure (C) could pass into (D). We may foretell species, limits of good species being known. It explains the blending of two genera. It explains typical structure. Every species is due to adaptation hereditary structure; Latter far chief element. ... Little service habits in classification or rather for the fact that they are not far the most serviceable. We may speculate of durability of succession from what we have seen in old world and on amount changes which may happen. It leads you to believe the world older than geologists think; it agrees with excessive inequality of numbers of species in divisions, -look at articulata!!?" (Darwin, C.R., "First Notebook (July 1837-February 1838)," in de Beer, G.R., ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species (1837-1839)," in Appleman, P., ed., "Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, First Edition, 1970, p.77. Emphasis original) 3/08/2006 "With belief of transmutation and geographical grouping we are led to endeavour to discover causes of changes,-the manner of adaptation (wish of parents??), instinct and structure becomes full of speculation and line of observation. View of generation being condensation, test of highest organization intelligible. May look in first germ, led to comprehend true affinities. My theory would give zest to recent and fossil Comparative Anatomy; it would lead to study of instincts, heredity and mind heredity, whole [of] metaphysics. It would lead to closest examination of hybridity, to what circumstances favour crossing and what prevent it; and generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from and I,, what we tend, this and direct examination of direct passagesof structure in species might lead to laws of change, which would then be [the] main object of study, to guide our speculations with respect to past and future." (Darwin, C.R., "First Notebook (July 1837-February 1838)," in de Beer, G.R., ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species (1837-1839)," in Appleman, P., ed., "Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, First Edition, 1970, p.78. Emphasis original) 3/08/2006 "I utterly deny the right to argue against my theory because it makes the world far older than what geologists think: it would be doing what others but fifty years since [did] to geologists,--& what is older- what relation in duration of planet to our lives. Being myself a geologist, I have thus argued to myself, till I can honestly reject such false reasoning." (Darwin, C.R., "Fourth Notebook (October, 1838-July 10, 1839)," in de Beer, G.R., ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species (1837-1839)," in Appleman, P., ed., "Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, First Edition, 1970, p.80. Emphasis original) 4/08/2006 "One unorthodox radiometric method addresses the question of whether the earth is young....To understand the method, first consider neptunium237, the first member of a natural radioactive decay sequence. We cannot, however, find neptunium-237 in minerals or any natural source. But we can synthesize it in nuclear reactors and measure its half-life. Those who claim the earth is very old maintain that we cannot find this isotope because its half-life, 2.2 million years, is too short. Thus, if it were present in the beginning, in 2.2 million years only half the initial amount would be present; in 4.4 million years, only one-fourth. Obviously, if the earth is several billion years old , we could not find neptunium-237 today; the 'missing' neptunium-237 could indicate the earth is very old. Of course, a person who claims the earth is but ten thousand years old would very likely maintain that neptunium-237 was not present at the time of creation. Fair enough. But a problem arises because neptunium-237 is not the only 'missing' isotope. Here is the critical piece of information: all 40 radioactive isotopes whose half-lives are between 1000 years and 50 million years are missing in nature; all 17 radioactive isotopes with halflives greater than 50 million years are present in nature. If the earth is several billion years old, then even for a 50-million year half life, many half lives have elapsed since the beginning: one would not expect to find now in nature a substance with a half-life of as much as 50 million years. But if the earth is young--say, 10,000 years old--all 57 (40 plus 17) isotopes would be present in nature now if they were present initially. Yet, since we know of some of these isotopes only because we can synthesize them, it would not be necessary for all 57 to be present; on a random basis, some could have been present, others absent. In a young earth we would at the present time find whichever of the 57 isotopes were present initially. What, then, is the probability that the 40 short-lived isotopes would be missing and the 17 long-lived would be present at the beginning? Calculation shows that the probability of such a distribution at the beginning, compared to all possible random distributions, is less than one part in 100 thousand billion; this is thus also the probability that the earth is young. " (Maatman, R.W.*, "The Impact of Evolutionary Theory: A Christian View," Dordt College Press: Sioux Center IA, 1993, pp.276-277. Emphasis original) 4/08/2006 "Nearly all the finches collected by Charles Darwin are similar in appearance to those taken by later collectors, but there are two forms which have not been recorded since 1835. First, there are three male and four female specimens obviously referable to the large ground-finch Geospiza magnirostris, but which are considerably larger than any collected since. ... while it would be pleasing to demonstrate measurable evolution on the basis of specimens collected by Darwin, it seems far more probable that these large birds represent an extinct subspecies of G. magnirostris from Charles, where the bird no longer resides. ... Also among the Beagle specimens are two which in my opinion belong to an unknown form related to the sharp- beaked groundfinch G. difficilis. They have a similar shape of beak, though the beak is larger." (Lack, D., "Darwin's Finches: An Essay on the General Biological Theory of Evolution," [1947], Harper Torchbooks: New York NY, 1961, reprint, pp.22-23) 5/08/2006 "Nonetheless, the claim that evolution must be too slow to see can only rank as an urban legend-though not a completely harmless tale in this case, for our creationist incubi can then use the fallacy as an argument against evolution at any scale, and many folks take them seriously because they just `know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation actually prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades. However, this plethora of documents-while important for itself, and surely valid as a general confirmation for the proposition that organisms evolve-teaches us rather little about rates and patterns of evolution at the geological scales that build the history and taxonomic structure of life. The situation is wonderfully ironic-a point that I have tried to capture in the title of this article. The urban legend holds that evolution is too slow to document in palpable human lifetimes. The opposite truth has affirmed innumerable cases of measurable evolution at this minimal scale-but to be visible at all over so short a span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the basis for major transformations in geological time. Hence the `paradox of the visibly irrelevant'-or, `if you can see it at all, it's too fast to matter in the long run!'" (Gould, S.J., "The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant," in "The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History," [2000], Vintage: London, 2001, reprint, pp.333-346, pp.334-335) 5/08/2006 "I would recommend this book as supplementary reading in an introductory university course on evolution, but not without a word of caution. Whether the book is a masterpiece or not, its scope is quite narrow; there is some painful oversimplification and a number of irritants. Mr. Dawkins is solely concerned with what one may call `efficiency selection,' namely, when shortages of material resources generate a reproductive payoff for individuals that -- somehow -- manage to spend less of the precious resources on body maintenance and growth and thus proportionately more on reproduction. Designers also strive for this ideal and draw attention to it with the slogan `Less is more.' However, there are regimes of natural selection based not on poverty but on wealth, on superabundance of material resources, whether they are seasonal or circumstantial. Eyes and spider webs are organs of utility, and their evolution through efficiency selection runs by somewhat different rules from those of `luxury organs,' such as deer antlers and peacock tails. Mr. Dawkins's time frame for evolution is too optimistic. After all, organisms act to defeat natural selection, to escape from evolution. Mr. Dawkins pays no attention to adaptive phenotypic plasticity -- an organism's ability to alter its physiology to accommodate changes in its environment -- which normally thwarts natural selection on genes. Thus a false impression is conveyed that genes (mutations) generally produce the same results. They rarely do. Organisms vary in size, in form and structure and in other ways based on the environment they exploit, so that identical genetic constitutions can give rise to very different shapes and behaviors within the same species, depending on the environment they experience during early growth and maturation. While natural selection is continuous, evolution begins only when individuals in a population cannot adjust to environmental stresses with existing abilities. Mutations whose effect can be overridden by the normal abilities of individuals spread randomly and, at best, become part of the genetic load of the species. We expect evolution (genetic change) to be rare, and when it does occur, it is proof of incompetence, of extinction barely avoided. Successful forms do not evolve noticeably as they deal competently with environmental vagaries. To be a `living fossil' is the hallmark of biological success." (Geist, V., "The Origin of Eyes." Review of "Climbing Mount Improbable," by Richard Dawkins, W. W. Norton & Co: New York, 1996. The New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1996) 5/08/2006 "In Darwin's Journal the year 1837 contains an entry which runs, `In July opened first notebook on `Transmutation of Species'-Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March on character of S. American fossils--& species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.' This notebook is transcribed and printed below and forms the subject of the present study. ... It will be noticed that the passage from the journal quoted above must have been a retrospective entry written at a later date, for if he only began his Notebook in July 1837 he could not then have known what `all his views' were." (de Beer, G.R., ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species (1837-1839)," in Appleman, P., ed., "Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, First Edition, 1970, pp.70-71) 7/08/2006 "The personality of Galileo, as it emerges from works of popular science, has even less relation to historic fact than Canon Koppernigk's. In his particular case, however, this is not caused by a benevolent indifference towards the individual as distinct from his achievement, but by more partisan motives. In works with a theological bias, he appears as the nigger in the woodpile; in rationalist mythography, as the Maid of Orleans of Science, the St George who slew the dragon of the Inquisition. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the fame of this outstanding genius rests mostly on discoveries he never made, and on feats he never performed. Contrary to statements in even recent outlines of science, Galileo did not invent the telescope; nor the microscope; nor the thermometer; nor the pendulum clock. He did not discover the law of inertia; nor the parallelogram of forces or motions; nor the sun spots. He made no contribution to theoretical astronomy; he did not throw down weights from the leaning tower of Pisa, and did not prove the truth of the Copernican system. He was not tortured by the Inquisition, did not languish in its dungeons, did not say 'eppur si muove' ["it still moves"]; and he was not a martyr of science. What he did was to found the modern science of dynamics, which makes him rank among the men who shaped human destiny. It provided the indispensable complement to Kepler's laws for Newton's universe: 'If I have been able to see farther,' Newton said, 'it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' The giants were, chiefly, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes." (Koestler, A., "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", [1959], Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972, reprint, p.358. Parentheses mine) 7/08/2006 "The Court's reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; an incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself; a failure to differentiate evolution from Darwinism; and strawman arguments against ID. The Court has accepted the most tendentious and shopworn excuses for Darwinism with great charity and impatiently dismissed evidence-based arguments for design. All of that is regrettable, but in the end does not impact the realities of biology, which are not amenable to adjudication. On the day after the judge's opinion, December 21, 2005, as before, the cell is run by amazingly complex, functional machinery that in any other context would immediately be recognized as designed. On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non-design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wishful speculations and Just-So stories." (Behe, M.J., "Whether Intelligent Design is Science: A Response to the Opinion of the Court in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District," Center for Science & Culture, Discovery Institute, Seattle WA, 2006) 7/08/2006 "But Doesn't Intelligent Design Refer to Something Supernatural? From an ID perspective, the natural- vs.-supernatural distinction is irrelevant. The real contrast is not between natural laws and miracles, but between undirected natural causes and intelligent ones. Mathematician and philosopher of science William Dembski puts it this way: `Whether an intelligent cause is located within or outside nature (i.e., is respectively natural or supernatural) is a separate question from whether an intelligent cause has operated.' Human actions are a case in point: `Just as humans do not perform miracles every time they act as intelligent agents, so there is no reason to assume that for a designer to act as an intelligent agent requires a violation of natural laws.' On the other hand, even if an object were miraculously created, it could still be studied. Take the flagellum, for example. No matter what its origins, a flagellum is a flagellum. We can take it apart, we can examine its components, we can modify it, we can figure out how it works. And we can do that whether it evolved over eons or popped into existence two seconds ago. In the world of human technology, this is called reverse engineering. But the same process is also used in biology. `That’s basically what everybody at the bench is doing,' said Scott Minnich, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho. `We don’t have the blueprints in the true sense. We have the DNA code for a lot of organisms, but in terms of the assembly of these molecular machines, it’s a matter of breaking them apart and trying to put them back together to figure out how they function.' This is also the kind of work that will be done with the human genome. Speaking to the New York Times in late June, when the human genome breakthrough was announced, Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health commented, `The important thing is having pieces of DNA in your hand, and being able to figure out how they work by modifying and mutating them. That's where the game is now.' Fittingly, the metaphor he used to describe this process was examining a clock: `You can take the clock apart, lay the pieces out in front of you, and then try to understand what makes it tick by putting it back together again.'" (Hartwig, M., "Frequently Asked Questions about Intelligent Design," Access Research Network: Colorado Springs CO, 2003) 7/08/2006 "It is a hard fact that the scientific case for the intelligent design hypothesis is getting much stronger. ... How will the idea of intelligent design be regarded by the public and by the scientific community in years to come? ... On the one hand, although newspaper editorialists might disapprove, polls show that the great majority of the public already is convinced of design. On the other hand, because it has been raised on Darwinism, much of the scientific community is used to thinking exclusively in Darwinian terms. Nonetheless, even there it seems, the times they are a- changin'. A recent news article in the journal Nature reported on an invitation-only meeting where up-and-coming students could rub elbows with Nobel prize winning scientists. For this year's meeting the organizing committee `... invited scientific academies and other agencies around the world to open competitions for young scientists to attend, then whittled down a list of nearly 10,000 applicants. The final 2005 list of 720 invitees represented a new profile of participant: academically excellent, familiar with societal impacts of their research and fluent in English. They are generally under thirty, but the majority are now Ph.D. students or postdocs.' But the students asked surprising questions. `it is curious to see the questions that students from different cultures ask,' [Gunter Blobel (medicine, 1999)] remarked after a discussion on evolutionary biology led by Christian de Duve (medicine, 1974). He was taken aback to find some students expressing so much interest in the `creative guiding hand' of intelligent design.[Abbott, A., "Nobel laureates: Close encounters," Nature 436, July 14, 2005, pp.170-171]" (Behe, M.J., "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," [1996], Free Press: New York NY, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006, pp.272-273) 8/08/2006 "The term homology is derived from the Greek homologia which means `agreement', and is applied to corresponding organs and structures of plants and of animals which show `agreement' in their fundamental plan of structure, as for example the leaf of an oak tree with the leaf of an ash tree, or the right forelimb of a dog with the right forelimb of a horse. Richard Owen introduced the term into biological language in 1843 to express similarities in basic structure found between organs of animals which he considered to be more fundamentally similar than others. ... As it turned out, Owen was right in basing homology and homologous organs, or homologues, on their structure regardless of their function. An organ is homologous with another because of what it is, not because of what it does. Homologous organs are the `same' organs however modified in detailed form and in the function that they carry out. The forelimb of a horse is homologous with the wing of a bat, although the former serves for locomotion on land and the latter for flight in the air. Homology is therefore to be distinguished sharply from analogy, the term applied by Owen to structures that perform similar functions but do not correspond to the same representative in the archetype. The wings of an insect serve the same function as the wings of a bird and are analogous to them, not homologous with them. The entire science of comparative anatomy is concerned with the recognition of homologous organs in different groups of organisms, plants and animals, and their distinction from analogous organs. Like other people, Owen had predecessors in his way of thinking, and the earliest was Aristotle who may be said to have founded comparative anatomy in his Historia animalium, when he wrote: `There are living beings such that all the parts of one recall the corresponding parts of others'; forelimb of quadruped, wing of bird, fin of fish. " (de Beer, G.R., "Homology, An Unsolved Problem," Oxford University Press: London, 1971, p.3. Emphasis original) 8/08/2006 "Darwin's bombshell of evolution, which burst in 1859, had a profound effect on the concept of the explanation of homology, but without touching the criteria by which it is established. At one stroke, it was obvious that metaphysical `archetypes' do not exist, and that homology between organs is based on their correspondence with representatives in a common ancestor of the organisms being compared, from which they were descended in evolution. `What can be more curious,' asked Darwin, `than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should be all constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?' In the 6th edition of the Origin of species [sic] (1872) he went on to quote Sir William Flower: `We may call this conformity to type, without getting much nearer to an explanation of the phenomenon, but is it not powerfully suggestive of true relationship, of inheritance from a common ancestor?' In other words, it is homologous organs that provide evidence of affinity between organisms that have undergone descent with modification from a common ancestor, i.e. evolution. Furthermore, since evolution is the explanation of the `agreement' between homologous organs, their study, if they are hard parts susceptible of fossilization, is not restricted to the morphology of living organisms, but the entire range of palaeontology is available for it. So, provided with a cast-iron explanation in terms of affinity, of inheritance in evolution from a common ancestor, it looked as if the concept of homology was at last soundly based and presented no more problems of principle; however, as will be seen below, it unfortunately does." (de Beer, G.R., "Homology, An Unsolved Problem," Oxford University Press: London, 1971, pp.4-5. Emphasis original) 8/08/2006 "We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but not too much. The question is, how much? The immensity of geological time entitles us to postulate more improbable coincidences than a court of law would allow but, even so, there are limits. Cumulative selection is the key to all our modern explanations of life. It strings a series of acceptably lucky events [random mutations] together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished product carries the illusion of being very very lucky indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone, even given a timespan millions of times longer than the age of the universe so far. Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started, and we cannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in the origin of cumulative selection itself." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design," W.W Norton & Co: New York NY, 1986, pp.139-140. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "The Darwinian Hypothesis. ... We have allowed that natural selection can be accepted, within certain narrow limits. It is a probable enough explanation of the phenomenon of mimicry. Animals whose colour and instinctive habits made them inconspicuous survived; the misfits died out. Indeed there is a good deal to be said for Willis' contention, that a new species or genus having more or less suddenly appeared on the earth, its individuals in subsequent generations began to vary in all directions, and natural selection licked them into shape, eliminating the unsuitable, improving those that fitted well into the scheme of life. That all living things change, and have changed in past geological time, seems clearly established. What Willis does not make clear is how the new genus or family first comes into existence. Where natural selection comes to grief is when it is pressed further, and is made responsible for the origin of new families of animals or plants quite different from the alleged ancestors, or when it is supposed to account for the origin of new structures, such as feathers in birds, or the eye, which turns up not only in the vertebrates but also in the cephalopods, such as the octopus. If vertebrates and cephalopods ever had a common ancestor, it is practically certain that there was no such well-developed eye. As L. Berg, of Leningrad, stated in his book, the idea that the eye should have been evolved twice over, in cephalopods and in vertebrates, by mere throws of chance as the Darwinians suppose, is `a miracle no naturalist ought to contemplate'. It is equally difficult to see how the numerous enzymes that occur in the living body, of such complicated chemical structure, so easily destroyed, and of such diverse function, can have been evolved by natural selection alone." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.127-129. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "The theory is, of course, that new organs and new functions did not `arrive' suddenly, but that there were a multitude of simpler stages that went to the building up of the perfected structure. But, as has been pointed out a hundred times, if these intermediate stages served no useful purpose, natural selection, being blind to the future, would eliminate them, not foster them. The tissue cells of the body compete for fluids, for oxygen, for sugar, for other forms of nourishment; there is none to spare for such as are mere consumers and not contributors. It is past the wit of man to offer a reasonable suggestion as to the value of every stage. For instance, by what succession of useful stages did feathers arise?" (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, p.129) 10/08/2006 "It is true that we can sometimes find examples of organs simpler in animals than in man. In Crustacea of the crayfish family, there is a little pocket at the base of the antenna, beset with hair cells and supplied with nerves, which contains a gritty particle, and serves to inform the animal which way up it is. This is a very simple form of the utricle and semicircular canals in mammals and man. The cochlea in birds is straight, not coiled, and one bone, the columella, takes the place of the malleus, incus and stapes. But the coiling of the cochlea is a mere elaboration to make room for the very many more sensory receptors that are needed to appreciate such a wide variety of musical notes. The main miracle of producing an apparatus to respond to musical notes has already been accomplished. How?" (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.129-130) 10/08/2006 "It would take us too far from our main theme to discuss the pros and cons of the Darwinian hypothesis in detail, so we shall deal with further difficulties of the theory in a few paragraphs. It fails to offer a solution of the problem of the origin of life in the first place on the earth. ... Our modern chemists have not yet been able to synthesize the proteins that are the raw material of living cells. Even if proteins had somehow been formed in some primitive ocean or mud bank, they would have needed a cell membrane to enclose them, or they would have dissolved away into the surrounding fluids. Our new knowledge of cell chemistry, with the series of enzymes, all of which must be present to enable a living cell to function, goes to show that the problem of the origin of a primitive living cell is much more complicated than it appeared a hundred years ago, and even then Darwin did not succeed in solving it." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, p.130) 10/08/2006 "The Darwinian theory fails to explain the strange way in which the first fossils appear. The Pre-Cambrian strata, the oldest known to us, and supposed to have taken far longer to lay down than any of the subsequent formations, are barren of life, but in the Cambrian rocks that follow them, fossils of quite complicated animals suddenly appear; brachiopods, trilobites, graptolites, and the rest. No fewer than 1119 genera of Cambrian fossils have been described. [Dewar, D., Journal of Transactions of Victoria Institute, 1948, 80, 12] " (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.130-131) 10/08/2006 "To introduce another serious difficulty, we will quote a few paragraphs from Professor D'Arcy Thompson's book Growth and Form (p.1092). `In the study of evolution, and in all attempts to trace the descent of the animal kingdom, fourscore years' study of the origin of species has had an unlooked-for and disappointing result. It was hoped to begin with, and within my own recollection it was confidently believed, that the broad lines of descent, the relation of the main branches to one another and to the trunk of the tree, would soon be settled, and the lesser ramifications would be unravelled bit by bit and later on. But things have turned out otherwise. We have long known, in more or less satisfactory detail, the pedigree of horses, elephants, turtles, crocodiles and some few more; and one's conclusions tally as to these, again more or less to our satisfaction, with the direct evidence of palaeontological succession. But the larger and at first sight simpler questions remain unanswered; for eighty years of Darwinian evolution has not taught us how birds descended from reptiles, quadrupeds from fishes, nor vertebrates from invertebrate stock. The invertebrates themselves involve the same difficulties, so that we do not know the origin of the echinoderms, or of the molluscs, or of the coelenterates, nor of one group of protozoa from another... . The breach between vertebrate and invertebrate, worm and coelenterate, coelenterate and protozoan, is so wide that we cannot see across the intervening gap at all.' `The failure to bridge this the cardinal problem of evolutionary biology is a very curious thing, and we may well wonder why the long pedigree is subject to such breaches of continuity. We used to be told, and were content to believe, that the old record was of necessity imperfect- we could not expect it to be otherwise; the story was hard to read because every here and there a page had been lost or torn away, like some hiatus valde deflendus in an ancient manuscript. But there is a deeper reason. A principle of discontinuity, then, is inherent in all our classifications... . To seek for stepping stones across the gaps between is to seek in vain for ever.' Many other authorities besides D'Arcy Thompson have commented on this difficulty; it is allowed by Julian Huxley himself. [Huxley, J.S., "Evolution, The Modern Synthesis," p.488]" (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.131-132) 10/08/2006 "Another objection to the theory of natural selection is that the qualities which separate one species from another older species, in the great majority of cases, do not convey any obvious benefit, and we are left to wonder why natural selection selected them. Thus far, we have been thinking of the applicability of the theory to animals in general, and not specially to man. ... There are, however, some characteristics of the human body which call for special notice. For instance, there is the bare skin. Loss of the hairy coat, if our ancestor ever had one, would seem to be a positive drawback, not an advantage to be exploited by natural selection. The hair would be a protection from injury, from rain, and from cold. Most tropical mammals have a hairy coat and do not seem to be any the worse for it, but they are often quiescent during the heat of the day. Some, like the horse family, have such short hair that they sweat freely. The advantage of the bare skin is to allow man to inhabit regions of tropical heat and of Arctic cold, but to enjoy this benefit he has to wear clothes, and natural selection can scarcely be expected to take that into consideration." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.132-133) 10/08/2006 "But the desperate bankruptcy of the theory is proclaimed to all the world, when it presumes to account for man's mental powers, his ability to think, talk, plan forward, invent, theorize. In the words of Professor Wm. McDougall, [McDougall, W., Evolution in the Light of Modern Knowledge, p.352] of Harvard, a leading authority on psychology, "It is now widely recognized that the strict neo-Darwinian theory of organic evolution is inadequate... . It finds itself at the end of its attempts with mind upon its hands as an enormous remainder or surd, that cannot intelligibly be brought into the scheme, or ignored, save at the cost of the absurdity of the scheme as a whole." Are we seriously invited to conclude that our thinking powers are the result of mere chemical and physical forces, determined by natural selection acting on random variations? If so, our thinking, and out opinions, are predetermined for us, and have no relation to evidence or reality. How can anyone imagine that the masterpieces of human eloquence, or architecture, or painting, or poetry, or music, or literature; or the masterpieces of human behaviour, that have won the Victoria Cross, or have liberated enslaved nations; or the great discoveries of science, are all the product of just material forces? To use an illustration which is becoming hackneyed, if all that is looked upon as credible, it is just as reasonable to allege that if a million monkeys were each given a typewriter, and a million years in which to work, one of them would eventually tap out something equivalent to a book of the New Testament. But he would not know anything about it when he had done it. We may put it another way. Let us imagine that the B.B.C., to save the salary of the announcer, have 365 gramophone records prepared of next year's news written up beforehand by some amateur prophet. Some mechanical device every day feeds one of these records, selected at random, into the microphone, to constitute the news for the day. The system would no doubt work admirably and economically. The only trouble is that nobody would think it worth while to switch on. Yet is not this predetermined mechanical thinking just what the materialists want to reduce us to?" (Short, A.R., "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.134-135) 10/08/2006 "Let it not be supposed that it is only the theologians and the philosophers who realize that natural selection, acting on chance variations, with no plan or purpose or programme to guide, is hopelessly inadequate to account for the origin of new organs and new functions, or of new families of animals and plants quite different from any that have gone before them. We could fill pages with quotations from scientists of repute to show that the inadequacy is just as obvious to them. A. R. Wallace, the co-founder, with Darwin, of the evolution theory, in his last book, The World of Life has a chapter which he entitles Proofs of an Organizing Mind. He remarks that-those who deny such a mind are like visitors from another planet inspecting all the activity of a sawyard, who see figures running about, saws working, and timber being cut up, but entirely fail to realize that the men at work are intelligent beings, and not just machines like the saws. Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent anatomist and anthropologist, and an ardent evolutionist, by no means trammelled with religious orthodoxy as the quotation will show, wrote in 1946, in his Essays on Human Evolution, "What are we to say then about, such a complicated and efficient instrument as the human eye? If it had been made of wood, brass and glass, it would have been said to have been planned for a purpose, but because it has been `evolved', is made of living tissues, and came into existence without a preliminary `blue print', it is not purposive. Are not my critics, by the use of a verbal quibble, seeking a sophist's escape from a real difficulty? Would it not be more honest to say that the finer purposive adaptations we see in plants and animals remain, as yet, unexplained? The eye has been evolved; that much is quite certain; the living vital forces which moulded it are probably still at work, but as yet we have not isolated them. I would as easily believe the doctrine of the Trinity(!), as one which maintains that living, developing protoplasm, by mere throws of chance, brought the human eye into existence. The essence of living protoplasm is its purposiveness... . To ask me to believe that the evolution of man has been determined by a series of chance events is to invite me to give credit to what is biologically unbelievable." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.135-136) 10/08/2006 "Let us conclude this section with a parable. The owner of a jewellery store comes to his office one morning and finds that his rather old-fashioned safe has been ransacked, all the cash, and the less distinctive articles of jewellery, have gone. The bulkier articles, those of little value, and some that lend themselves to easy recognition, are left behind. The safe has been opened by cutting round the lock, and the edges show signs of great heat. The tablecloth and crockery which he used for a late supper the previous evening he on the floor,, and a plate is smashed. In anger and dismay he sends for the police. The stolid inspector who arrives to view the scene is a lazy man. He foresees lots of trouble in trying to trace the burglars, and loss of prestige if he fails to catch them. He gives it as his opinion that the damage was done by the office cat: He says he has seen a cat pull off a table-cloth and break a plate, just like this, trying to catch a mouse. When the indignant jeweller asks if he considers that the cat also used an oxyacetylene flame to cut into the safe, and sorted out the jewellery, the inspector replies that the data are so conflicting that it is not worth while to try to be dogmatic as to what really happened. This sounds an improbable story. Some degree of damage and loss can quite reasonably be attributed to the cat, but when they go beyond a certain point, and there is evidence that skill has been at work, any jury will give a verdict that perverted' human intelligence is responsible. Now, we may fairly ask the Darwinians what degree of complexity, of fittedness to fulfil a, useful function, do they demand of the structures and organs of the human body, before they will acknowledge that it was not the cat but the man, not the unthinking, purposeless processes of chance, but an intelligence like our own intelligence, working to a plan as we work to a plan, that was the architect of our bodies? If the answer is that no conceivable degree of complexity or purposefulness will convince them, we cannot help being reminded of the proverb that none are so blind as those who won't see. They remind us, in fact, of the very hypothetical police inspector. If the answer is that a considerable degree of complexity and adaptation for a purpose would convince them, we ask, is there not already enough described in the foregoing chapters? And it ought to be realized that we have only been able to describe what is relatively easy to be understood. What we now think we understand about the functions of the human body is only a small fraction of the whole. Enough is left to baffle our successors for a hundred years, and perhaps for ever." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.136-137. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "A Super-Intelligence. Thus far we have shied away from the idea that there may be another explanation, that human physiology may have been decreed and constructed by an outside intelligence not resident in the organism, but independent of it. Why? Because, say some, the theory of a superintelligence is the conception of an immature mind. Primitive man was terrified by phenomena he could not account for; thunder, tempest, pestilence. He was gratified to see corn growing in his fields, and his cattle bearing young. He attributed these banes and blessings to supernatural powers. We, today, understand thunder; we can forecast storms; we can show you under our microscopes the bacteria that cause pestilence; we have classified and named the best varieties of wheat, and we know the value of fertilizers and the dangers of exhaustion of the soil. To that extent, we do not need to believe in God. When science has advanced a little further, everything will be explained, and the idea of a superintelligence will be obsolete. Sentiments like these grew like weeds in the days of science triumphant, in shall we say the late Victorian era. But things have turned out other than certain optimistic philosophers expected. They thought we had only to explore a small island. We know now that we have landed on a vast continent, and no one can tell how big it is or what lies on the other side, if there is another side. The sciences have become more, not less, complex. Newtonian physics was relatively intelligible; Einstein's teachings are not so simple. We thought Helmholtz had explained how we see colours; we are now aware that simple theories will not do. We were told that the atom was the smallest possible fragment of matter; now, we are trying to get used to protons and neutrons and electrons. Simple explanations in physiology nearly always turn out to be inadequate explanations. Darwinism seemed to account for the origin of species beautifully; now, by many biologists, though they believe in derivation by descent, it is regarded as inadequate to explain the beginning of new organs. It looks as if the more we find out about nature, the more, not the less, shall we need to believe in God." (Short, A.R., "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.136-137. Emphasis original). 10/08/2006 "A Super-Intelligence. Thus far we have shied away from the idea that there may be another explanation, that human physiology may have been decreed and constructed by an outside intelligence not resident in the organism, but independent of it. Why? ... Because, say others, it is the negation of the spirit of scientific enquiry to attribute everything you cannot explain to some supernatural power. This is an arm-chair theory. It does not take the trouble to make enquiries. If it could be shown that in a country like Britain, where a considerable number of educated people do profess belief in God, the great scientific discoveries were nearly all made by unbelievers, it might be feasible to argue convincingly that research is cramped by theism. On the other hand, we might retort that physiologists who believe that the functions of an organ of the body are designed for a purpose are more likely to make an earnest search to discover what those functions are, than others who think the organ may have been formed quite at random by the genes, like boys stealing a boat and going sailing without a chart or compass, they know not where. However, it is not very profitable to bandy guesses like these, when the question can easily be tested. Books have been published giving particulars of the religious opinions of leading British scientists, and it is evident that the proportion of Christian believers, agnostics, and undeterminates is much the same as in the general population of the country. Very long lists can be given of eminent research scholars in science who avowed themselves believers in God, including several Presidents of the Royal Society. Others imply belief; for instance Lord Rayleigh, the discoverer of the inert gases in the atmosphere, which discovery led up to our neon lighting, prefaced his book by quoting: `The works of the Lord are great, `Sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.' Were Lord Lister, and Sir James Young Simpson, and Lord Kelvin, and Sir Ambrose Fleming, to mention only a very few to whom the world is indebted for great discoveries, handicapped in their work because they were Christians? Einstein, perhaps the greatest of them all, has not been looked on as a religious man, but he has written, `My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.' [Barnette, L., The Universe and Dr. Einstein ,1949, p.95]." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.137-139. Emphasis original). 10/08/2006 "The favourite weapon in the hands of those who would have us rule out the idea of a divine Creator is to make the most of the alleged imperfections of His work. Why, they ask, are there functionless organs or useless relics in the human or animal body? Why is pain allowed? Why are there congenital idiots, or infants with club foot, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, cleft palate; or monstrosities? We submit that this argument is entirely beside the point. It is an attempt to sidestep the challenge to recognize a divine intelligence. No thoughtful person, certainly no physiologist, is likely to argue that you can prove from nature, or from physiology, that the Intelligence we are almost bound to postulate as responsible for the master plan, is a kindly Intelligence. Even if such a proposition were supported by human physiology, it would have to face the challenge of other difficulties, and find a reason for carnivorous animals, snakes, tornadoes, droughts. If an aeronautical engineer invents an entirely new and much more efficient engine, he is not looked upon as a complete nitwit because though ninety-nine out of : hundred of his engines work well, one breaks down in action owing to faulty materials. .... Let us take one step at a time. Kindly or not, has a Power with intelligence been at work, or not?" (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.140-141). 10/08/2006 "It may be replied, that it is not His kindliness that is in question, but the technical perfection of His handiwork. But we must beware of hasty and shortsighted conclusions. It is just as difficult for the advocates of natural selection, or of entelechy, to explain functionless organs, or useless relics. Why did they ever develop, and why were they not eliminated? They make demands on fluids, oxygen, and food supplies needed by other organs, as already pointed out. As a matter of fact, when we ask for examples in human anatomy of these useless structures, they are few and doubtful. The body has so many reserve mechanisms that it by no means follows that an organ is useless because it can be removed without ill- effects. The spleen is a case in point, and probably the appendix. The pituitary, and the parathyroids, were at one time thought to be functionless, but quite mistakenly. The thymus has been alleged to be functionless, but removal cures myasthenia gravis, so it cannot be inert. Some structures, such as the branchial arches, have a function in the foetus; they convey blood to the brain. Some structures are present in the embryo, which the hormones determining sex either cause to grow, or keep in abeyance; if they were not there the hormones would have nothing to act on. Thus, rudimentary nipples are present in the male, and Wolffian ducts in the female. The so-called Darwinian tubercle on the ear is said to be a relic of a long- eared ancestor, but apes and monkeys have not long ears. We are not arguing that human structures are never the equivalents of something much more useful in the other Primates. The muscles of the scalp, and certain variable muscles of the trunk or limbs, do correspond to more active muscles in animals. But it is absurd to say that the presence of rudimentary organs is unworthy of the intelligence of a Creator." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.141-142) 10/08/2006 "But what about the congenital idiots, Siamese twins, and so on? `A nasty bit of work', people say. Do these defects actually disprove divine intelligence? We must not assume that because we do not like these aberrations therefore there is something radically wrong about them. These afflicted creatures are usually quite happy, in their limited way. They have not our dreads of the future, for instance. They cost us something as ratepayers; perhaps that is a reason for our dislike. Why do they occur? According to the geneticists, because when the sort-out of genes took place before and after the sperm entered the ovum, these creatures drew an unlucky combination. The agnostic scientists look upon genes, marvellous as are their properties, as the product of blind forces; this chapter has given reason for regarding them as the gifts of a directing Intelligence. Then why should there be, in, say, one case in a hundred, an unlucky draw? Probably because, apart from a succession of miracles to prevent it, it was inevitable. Let us go back to basic principles. All living things vary, and always have varied. No two human beings, therefore, are exactly alike, in character, facial appearance, or even fingerprints. To provide for this variety, the gene-mixture must be capable of innumerable combinations, and they cannot all be happy. Grossly defective combinations lead to still-birth. Less harmful combinations result in a live birth, but often the child does not reach puberty. We may take our choice: human beings all exactly alike; incessant miraculous intervention to avoid misfits; the world as it is. Are we sure that our wisdom would have improved matters?" (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, p.142) 10/08/2006 "If a study of human physiology, and of the course of man's life in the world, does not convince us that the fashioning Power is kindly, still less does it prove that Power to be malevolent. The basal ganglia of our brains are capable of sensations of pleasure as well as of pain. Only a small minority of sane and healthy individuals really prefer death to life, and wish they had never been born. We find that the world contains at least as many things beautiful as things menacing and ugly. Even animals appear to enjoy life. An unhappy man is said to `lead a dog's life', but take a puppy for a walk, and then tell us he did not enjoy it!" (Short, A.R., "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.142-143) 10/08/2006 "Physiology not the only Evidence. Whatever conclusions we may draw from a study of physiology as to the mystery that underlies all the processes of this world, we must not forget that physiology is far from being the only window into the unknown. For instance, investigations in the realm of cosmogony have made it more and more probable that there was a creation. We have already given a quotation from that outstanding authority Dr. Einstein. Professor Sir Edmund Whittaker, in his Donnellan Lectures given in 1946, said, "Three different estimates converge to the conclusion that there was an epoch about 10^10 or 10^11 years ago, on the further side of which the cosmos, if it existed at all, existed in some form totally unlike anything known to us, so that it represents the ultimate limit of science. We may perhaps without impropriety refer to it as the Creation." Sir James jeans and other eminent physicists have written to the same effect. Quite recently, it has been argued by F. Hoyle, H. Bondi, T. Gold and others that creation did not take place once only and never again, but that there has been and may still be a continuous series of processes of creation. On this view the sun and this earth are running down by heat loss, but the universe as a whole is not. Astronomers are still very critical of these ideas, but if true they still do not enable us to avoid belief in creation." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, p.143. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "The Darwinians think they can attribute the adaptation of animals and plants to their environment, and the origin of new organs and faculties, to evolution controlled by natural selection. But this explanation fails to cover :another type of adaptation; the extraordinary manner in which this earth has become fit for habitation by plants, animals, and man. Unless certain conditions are fulfilled, life as we know it is not possible. There must be carbon, that essential constituent of all living things. There must be oxygen to breathe. Water must be present, not only to drink, but to carry substances in solution in our bodies, to break down rocks into soil by virtue of its strange habit of expanding just above its freezing temperature, and in many other ways besides to serve the purposes of living things. There must not be very wide variations of temperature if a planet is to be inhabited for any great length of time, or all life will be alternately scorched and frozen. It is astounding that the enormous output of heat by the sun has never since the beginning of geological time, as far as the evidence of palaeontology tells us, ruined all life by excesses one way or another. However, this is a very big subject." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.143-144) "Another ground for believing in God is the experience of mankind. This appears in the virtually universal sense of a Sky-Father, found in every primitive race of men. Polytheistic religions, historically, are believed by good authorities to be degenerations from an earlier monotheism. In all ages, amongst people of the highest as well as the lowest culture, there have been testimonies to individual experiences of God. The history of nations, especially of the people of Israel, but also of Britain, shows a certain providential overruling at critical periods." (Short, A.R.*, "Wonderfully Made: Some Modern Discoveries About the Structure and Functions of the Human Body," [1951], Paternoster: Exeter UK, Reprinted, 1964, pp.142-143. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "There is one last lesson which coordinate geometry helps us to learn; it is simple and easy, but very important indeed. In the study of evolution, and in all attempts to trace the descent of the animal kingdom, fourscore years' study of the Origin of Species has had an unlooked-for and disappointing result. It was hoped to begin with, and within my own recollection it was confidently believed, that the broad lines of descent, the relation of the main branches to one another and to the trunk of the tree, would soon be settled, and the lesser ramifications would be unravelled bit by bit and later on. But things have turned out otherwise. We have long known, in more or less satisfactory detail, the pedigree of horses, elephants, turtles, crocodiles and some few more; and our conclusions tally as to these, again more or less to our satisfaction, with the direct evidence of palaeontological succession. But the larger and at first sight simpler questions remain unanswered; for eighty years' study of Darwinian evolution has not taught us how birds descend from reptiles, mammals from earlier quadrupeds, quadrupeds from fishes, nor vertebrates from the invertebrate stock. The invertebrates themselves involve the selfsame difficulties, so that we do not know the origin of the echinoderms, of the molluscs, of the coelenterates, nor of one group of protozoa from another. The difficulty is not always quite the same. We may fail to find the actual links between the vertebrate groups, but yet their resemblance and their relationship, real though indefinable are plain to see; there are gaps between the groups, but we can see, so I to speak, across the gap. On the other hand, the breach between vertebrate and invertebrate, worm and coelenterate, coelenterate and protozoon, is in each case of another order, and is so wide that we cannot see across the intervening gap at all." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1917], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1942, Reprinted, 1952, Vol. II, pp.1092-1093) 10/08/2006 "This failure to solve the cardinal problem of evolutionary biology is a very curious thing; and we may well wonder why the long pedigree is subject to such breaches of continuity. We used to be told, and were content to believe, that the old record was of necessity imperfect-we could not expect it to be otherwise; the story was hard to read because every here and there a page had been lost or torn away, like some hiatus valde deflendus in an ancient manuscript. But there is a deeper reason. When we begin to draw comparisons between our algebraic curves and attempt. to transform one into another, we find ourselves limited by the very nature of the case to curves having some tangible degree of relation to one another; and these `degrees of relationship' imply a classification of mathematical forms, analogous to the classification of plants or animals in another part of the Systema Naturae. An algebraic curve has its fundamental formula, which defines the family to which it belongs; and its parameters, whose quantitative variation admits of infinite variety within the limits which the formula prescribes. With some extension of the meaning of parameters, we may say the same of the families, or genera, or other classificatory groups of plants and animals. We cross a boundary every time we pass from family to family, or group to group. The passage is easy at first, and we are led, along definite lines, to more and more subtle and elegant comparisons. But we come in time to forms which, though both may still be simple, yet stand so far apart that direct comparison is no longer legitimate. We never think of `transforming' a helicoid into an ellipsoid, or a circle into a frequency-curve. So it is with the forms of animals. We cannot transform an invertebrate into a vertebrate, nor a coelenterate into a worm, by any simple and legitimate deformation, nor by anything short of reduction to elementary principles." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1917], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1942, Reprinted, 1952, Vol. II, pp.1093-1094. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "A `principle of discontinuity,' then, is, inherent in all our classifications, whether mathematical, physical or biological; and the infinitude of possible forms, always limited, may be further reduced and discontinuity further revealed by imposing conditions-as, for example, that our parameters must be whole numbers, or proceed by quanta, as the physicists say. The lines of the spectrum, the six families of crystals, Dalton's atomic law, the chemical elements themselves, all illustrate this principle of discontinuity. In short, nature proceeds from one type to another among organic as well as inorganic forms; and these types vary according to their own parameters, and are defined by physico-mathematical conditions of possibility. In natural history Cuvier's `types' may not be perfectly chosen nor numerous enough, but types they are; and to seek for stepping-stones across the gaps between is to seek in vain, for ever. This is no argument against the theory of evolutionary descent: It merely states that formal resemblance, which we depend on as our trusty guide to the affinities of animals within certain bounds or grades of kinship and propinquity, ceases in certain other cases to serve us, because under certain circumstances it ceases to exist. Our geometrical analogies weigh heavily against Darwin's conception of endless small continuous variations; they help to show that discontinuous variations are a natural thing, that `mutations sudden changes, greater or less-are bound to have taken place, and new `types' to have arisen, now and then. Our argument indicates, if it does not prove, that such mutations, occurring on a comparatively few definite lines, or plain alternatives, of physico-mathematical possibility, are likely to repeat themselves: that the `higher' protozoa, for instance, may have sprung not from or through one another, but severally from the simpler forms; or that the worm- type, to take another example, may have come into being again and again." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1917], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1942, Reprinted, 1952, Vol. II, pp.1094-1095. Emphasis original) 10/08/2006 "Finally, we have considered the special difficulty of the evolution of complex organs and of co- adaptations, of which the interrelations of the male and female genitalia are one example. The argument employed by Fisher and Haldane to show that Natural Selection might account for the evolution of such structures, depends on the assumption that very minute changes in a complex situation will, as likely as not, lead to an improvement. As we have previously stated (p. 224), we are very doubtful whether the enhanced survival value conferred by such minimal variants would give a sufficiently steady selection-rate to ensure the establishment of the variant. ... In short, we do not believe that Natural Selection can be disregarded as a possible factor in evolution. Nevertheless, there is so little positive evidence in its favour, so much that appears to tell against it, and so much that is as yet inconclusive, that we have no right to assign to it the main causative rôle in evolution." (Robson, G.C. & Richards, O.W., "The Variation of Animals in Nature," Longmans, Green & Co: London, 1936, p.316) 11/08/2006 "Now, what about that relationship between DNA and protein? How did it get started? Evolutionists picture a time long ago when the earth might have been quite different. They imagine that fragments of DNA and fragments of protein are produced. These molecules are supposed to `do what comes naturally' over vast periods of time. What's going to happen? Will time, chance, and natural chemical reactions between DNA and protein automatically produce life? At first you might think so. After all, nothing is more natural than a reaction between acids and bases. Perhaps you've used soda (a base) to clean acid from a battery The fizz is an acid-base reaction. So is using `Tums' to neutralize stomach acid. Nothing is more common than reactions between acids and bases. If you just wait long enough, acid-base reactions will get DNA and protein working together, and life will appear-right? Wrong! Just the opposite. The problem is that the natural relationship between bases and acids is the wrong relationship for living systems Acid-base reactions would `scramble up' DNA and protein units in all sorts of `deadly' combinations. These natural reactions would prevent, not promote, the use of DNA to code protein production. Since use of DNA to code protein production is the basis of all life on earth these acid-base reactions would prevent, not promote, the evolution of life by natural processes." (Parker, G.E.*, "Creation: the Facts of Life," [1980], Master Book Publishers: San Diego CA, Third Printing, 1984, pp.6,8. Emphasis original) 11/08/2006 "Peter Grant, Rosemary Grant and their students stand at the other extreme of Galapagos researchers- returning time and again for decades. They too continually find new things. For example, the Grants' increasing recognition of crossbreeding among Darwin's finches suggests that hybridization plays a larger role in evolution than was previously thought. Galapagos ground finches do breed across species, the Grants find, and their hybrid offspring can thrive where conditions favor intermediate types. `The discovery of superior hybrid fitness over several years suggests that the three study populations of Darwin's finches are fusing,' they note, `and calls into question their designation as species.' [Grant, P.R. & Grant, B.R, "Hybridization of Bird Species," Science, Vol. 256, 1992, pp. 193-197] Under strict phylogenetic or breeding-population definitions of species, Peter Grant concludes, only six separate species of Darwin's finches may exist, not the traditional fourteen. Owing to these findings, made more than half a century after David Lack's landmark study, Ernst Mayr once again wonders whether Darwin's finches offer a textbook case of adaptive radiation [Mayr, E.W., Interview with author, 20 April 2000, Cambridge MA]. The ground finches may indeed constitute a `hybrid swarm' with marked varieties, much as Darwin feared and pre-Lack ornithologists surmised. [Lowe, P., "The Finches of the Galapagos in relation to Darwin's Conception of Species," Ibis, Vol. 6, 1936, pp. 310-321, p.311]" (Larson, E.J., "Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Gala´pagos Islands," Allen Lane: London, 2001, p.240) 14/08/2006 "In recent years, the convergence of theology and science upon a form of religious evolutionary humanism has reached its apotheosis in the writings of some sociobiologists. In his major work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson makes strong claims for the ability of evolutionary biology to account not only for human social behaviour but also for religious beliefs and practices. `It is a reasonable hypothesis', he writes `that magic and totemism constituted direct adaptations to the environment and preceded formal religion in social evolution' (Wilson, 1975, p.560). Of course, there is nothing particularly new about this functionalist view of religion: Indeed, it was clearly formulated almost a century ago by the social philosopher Benjamin Kidd (1894), who argued that religion had been a crucially important non-rational sanction for ethical conduct during human evolution. But sociobiology has provided a newly refined theoretical framework within which to interpret behaviour; and as Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner demonstrate in chapter 5 of this volume, it raises for the first time the serious prospect of biological investigation of the adaptive value of religion. At the same time, however, it presents us with a curious dilemma. For to explain religion in non-cognitive terms might be thought to undermine its credibility; and if this is so, then sociobiology may well threaten the very phenomenon whose biological utility it sets out to establish. Wilson himself is aware of this problem, for in his more recent book On Human Nature he sets his account of the sociobiology of religion alongside an impassioned plea for the re-investment of `the mythopoeic requirements of the mind' in `the evolutionary epic ... [which] ... is probably the best myth we will ever have' (Wilson, 1978, pp.200-1)." (Durant, J.R., "Introduction," in "Durant, J.R., ed., "Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1985, pp.30-31) 14/08/2006 "This brings us back once again to the deification of the evolutionary process. Mary Midgley explores this theme in more detail in chapter 6 of this volume; but in the present context it is worth noting how very similar are the creation myths of Christian theism and religious evolutionary humanism. Each provides an account of the natural order and of the place of humankind within it; each casts its account in the form of a narrative epic centred upon the origin and destiny of humankind; and each derives from its account practical lessons for the ordering of human affairs, together with the comforting reassurance that the universe is on the side of our noblest aspirations. As the philosopher John Passmore once observed, `it is astonishing just how often 'god-smashing' evolutionists have substituted for the ancient gods a new god-man as he is to be, with powers of a kind which had ordinarily been ascribed only to the divine' (Passmore, 1970, p.240). This, surely, is Wilson's position. Reasoning, as he puts it, `in direct line from the humanism of the Huxleys, Waddington, Monod, Pauli, Dobzhansky, Cattell, and others', he concludes On Human Nature by looking forward to the construction of `the mythology of scientific materialism ... kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed' (Wilson, 1978, pp.206, 209)." (Durant, J.R., "Introduction," in "Durant, J.R., ed., "Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1985, pp.31-32) 14/08/2006 "I began this chapter with the conventional image of Darwinism as a potent force for the de-mythologization of world-view, but I have ended up with the unconventional image of it as a major ingredient within the mythic world-view of religious evolutionary-humanism. I believe that each of these images captures something of the truth. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that Darwinism was a secularizing force in the nineteenth century. It contributed very materially to a separation of spheres in which increasingly distinct professional communities of scientists and theologians were able to get on with their work without having to pay much attention to one another (Turner, 1974; Young, 1980). On the other hand, however, it is equally the case that evolutionary theory in general and Darwinism in particular have always tended to blur the simple distinction between knowledge and values. For all thoughtful Darwinians, including Darwin himself, have recognized that there are strong links between questions such as, Where have we come from? What sort of creatures are we? And what could we or should we do with our lives? To try to draw neat lines around each of these questions, labelling some `scientific' and others `religious' or `moral', is counterproductive, since it is in the connections between them that all the crucial issues are located." (Durant, J.R., "Introduction," in "Durant, J.R., ed., "Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1985, pp.32-33) 14/08/2006 I have argued that there are resources within evolutionary theory that make it attractive to certain kinds of theology. Darwin opened the door to a particular form of alliance by presenting natural selection as a `secondary law' instituted by the creator to populate the earth. Overwhelmingly, however, it has been the idea of evolution as a law of progressive historical development culminating in humankind that has proved most attractive to biologically-minded theologians and theologically-minded biologists. This is an area of interaction that deserves closer study. For the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection contains no `law of progress'; and whether and in what way it applies to human culture, where such a law is most urgently sought, are still matters of intense debate within the human sciences. In the past, attempts to derive optimistic lessons from biology concerning the future of humankind have owed far more to prior religious or political convictions than they have to any independent insights derived from science; and, as the example of Julian Huxley illustrates, this has been the case even where those involved have been major authorities on Darwinism. There is nothing in a scientific training, it would seem, that immunizes a person against their own prejudices." (Durant, J.R., "Introduction," in "Durant, J.R., ed., "Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1985, p.33) 14/08/2006 One of the most ironic aspects of the deification of Darwinism in the twentieth century has been the encouragement that such idolatry has afforded to the forces of religious anti-evolutionism. I have argued that in the 1920s the association between evolutionism, on the one hand, and secularism and liberalism, on the other, helped to fan the flames of popular anti-evolutionary sentiment. Significantly, the same association appears to be playing its part in the current battle between evolutionists and so-called `scientific creationists' in the United States. ... All that needs to be said here is that this phenomenon is as deeply ideological today as it was 60 years ago. In the foreword to the bestknown textbook of scientific creationism, for example, the authors declare that, `in the name of modern science ... a nontheistic religion of secular evolutionary humanism has become, for all practical purposes, the official state religion promoted in the public schools' (Morris, ed., 1974, p.iii). To learn more about this religion we have only to read on, for at various stages in the book it is linked with atheism, materialism, mechanism and liberalism, as well as with behaviourism, libertinism, racism and communism (Morris, ed., 1974, pp.196-201, 252). Obviously, none of these labels is intended as a compliment, but it would be wrong to dismiss them as nothing more than a cheap exercise in mud-slinging. For much of the energy of the creationist movement arises from a sense of moral outrage at the advance of an evolution-centred worldview that has the audacity to parade its secular, liberal values as if they were the objective findings of science. Here at least, if not in matters of biological fact and theory, creationism has a point of which the scientific community might do well to take heed." (Durant, J.R., "Introduction," in "Durant, J.R., ed., "Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1985, pp.33-34) 15/08/2006 "Stressing connectedness and continuity also led Darwin to deny another important empirical pattern in the fossil record: stasis. Philosopher David Hull, in his Darwin and His Critics (1973), reprints all the early reviews of the first edition of Darwin's Origin, including some four or five by paleontologists. All of them remark on the absence of any truly significant discussion of the well-known fact (to paleontologists) that once a species appears in the fossil record, though it may exhibit normal variation both within local populations and geographically, little net evolutionary change tends to accumulate throughout its entire duration. This duration is now known to be typically 5 to 10 million years, at least in the case of marine invertebrate species. But Darwin did acknowledge that some species change more slowly than others (see above quote and note 20); he responded more fully to his critics on just this point in his sixth edition. Yet stasis remained an embarrassment to him, because the actions of natural selection should on first principle act to perfect and thus by definition modify adaptations were the environment to remain stable. Either that or it would modify species to keep fitting what mid-nineteenth-century geologists had been pointing out: that the earth, including its climate, is continually changing. For the most part, Darwin simply denied the reality of stasis. Instead, he chose once again to blame the nonprevalence of "incessantly graded series" in the fossil record on a poor record: poor preservation, lack of time documented in sediments, and lack of paleontological collecting and analytic experience. But none of these reasons could explain away the problem for later generations." (Eldredge, N., "The Pattern of Evolution," [1998], W.H. Freeman & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.88-89. Emphasis original) 15/08/2006 "What really irked Simpson, then, was not so much the rhetoric on the origin of reproductive disjunction but rather what he took to be the sheer triviality of the entire issue of species. The differences between closely related species are typically minor: Coyotes and timber wolves are fairly similar. To Simpson, all the energy expended on developing a biological species concept was never really worth it, simply because speciation itself entails only minor evolutionary changes. Simpson thought of speciation simply as a process of subdivision of the adaptive `zone' already occupied by the ancestral species-hardly the stuff of evolutionary novelty and innovation. What grabbed Simpson's attention, instead, were the large-scale changes in evolution: the origin of mammals from an ancestral reptilian stock, the origin of birds, or the diversification of the major subdivisions (the orders) of placental mammals. Steeped in Darwinian gradualist tradition, Simpson maintained that countless cases of evolution at and around the species level documented in the fossil record upheld the Darwinian view that change comes slowly, progressively, and gradually-and doesn't get anywhere far. New genera might arise in this slow, steady fashion. But, Simpson claimed in his highly original Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944), such can hardly be the case for families, orders, and all the taxa of higher categorical rank in the Linnaean hierarchy. Some additional factors must be at work that prompt lineages to leave one adaptive zone for another. Such, it seemed to Simpson, was the stuff of true evolutionary creativity." (Eldredge, N., "The Pattern of Evolution," [1998], W.H. Freeman & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.133-134) 15/08/2006 "In example after example, Simpson saw that new groups seemed to appear suddenly in the fossil record. New higher taxa such as whales (mammalian order Cetacea), bats (order Chiroptera), or even the lineage of grass-grazing horses that evolved from leaf-browsing ancestors all made sudden appearances. Seldom was there a long series of intermediate forms that could be traced back through the tens of millions of years that such large-scale evolution would seem to call for. Moreover, Simpson saw that these new groups first appear pretty much in recognizable form. In modern terms, the defining characteristics, the synapopmorphies, that mark a lineage as distinct and evolutionarily homogeneous (monophyletic) are in place at the very outset of a group's evolutionary history. Eocene whales, for example, were distinctly whalelike. As one might expect, they were primitive in certain ways as whales; for example, they bore serrated teeth and still retained a pair of pelvic flippers. But those earliest whales were by no means half-way between a four-legged terrestrial mammalian ancestor and a modern sperm whale. They were much more like the latter than the former. Bats offer an even more dramatic example. The earliest ones known, also from the Eocene Epoch, have not only wings but also the distinctive inner-ear apparatus to show that echolocation had already evolved! And here is the kicker. The earliest whales Simpson knew about are some 55 million years old. If one could devise some sort of measure of rate of evolutionary change, the rate of change within whales over the past 55 million years would seem to be slow to moderate. If that rate were then extrapolated back to encompass the far greater anatomical changes between the earliest whales and their wholly terrestrial, four-legged mammalian ancestors, we would have to place the beginnings of whale evolution hundreds of millions of years back in geological time! And that is a patent absurdity, as placental mammals of any kind had appeared at most only a few tens of millions of years prior to the advent of the earliest whales." (Eldredge, N., "The Pattern of Evolution," [1998], W.H. Freeman & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.134-135. Emphasis original) 15/08/2006 "Simpson was, in a sense, skating on thin ice. For other paleontologists had also recognized this general pattern. Foremost among them was Otto Schindewolf, a German invertebrate paleontologist. Schindewolf imagined such evolutionary transitions to be as abrupt as the fossil record seemed to be indicating. Typostrophism was his term for it, literally a leap between one `type' and another. Such `saltational' ideas are reminiscent of another German biologist, Richard Goldschmidt, the geneticist remembered mostly for his advocacy of the sudden appearance of `hopeful monsters' through `macromutations.' Simpson had to distance himself from such renegade thinking. All the while, though, he admitted, albeit tacitly, that Schindewolf had a point about the pattern of relatively abrupt origin of higher taxa. He did so by developing a theory, Quantum Evolution, which could explain the absence of intermediate forms required by any version of a Darwinian-based explanation of evolutionary patterns. The core of Simpson's idea is that, at certain times and in certain circumstances, lineages evolve in rapid spurts. These bursts occur in such relatively small populations, happen so rapidly, and typically involve such a drastic transition from one major environment to another (for example, from land to sea for whales; from land to air for bats) that the chances of them leaving much of a fossil record is slight. Simpson was saying that the origin of higher taxa, the major evolutionary transitions, was essentially Darwinian in character. A full series of intermediates connects ancestors with descendants. But the whole process works so rapidly, involves so few creatures, and occurs in such unusual surroundings and circumstances that we can expect to find few or even no intermediate fossil forms in most instances. This absence of evidence, the lack of intermediate forms, troubled Simpson no matter how content he may have been with his explanation of that missing data." (Eldredge, N., "The Pattern of Evolution," [1998], W.H. Freeman & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.134. Emphasis original) 15/08/2006 "In its own limited field, the science of genetics was immensely successful, and still is. But it took a long time for the more thoughtful among its practitioners to realize that their labours, while providing new insights into the mechanisms of minor hereditary variations, had little or no relevance to the basic problem of evolution: the origin and why and how of the major steps up the evolutionary ladder, the emergence of higher life-forms and new life-styles. In the words of Pierre Grassé who, let us remember, held the chair of evolution for thirty years at the Sorbonne (italics in the original): `Variation is one thing, evolution quite another: this cannot be emphasized strongly enough ...' [Grassé, P. "L'Evolution du Vivant," Editions Albin Michel: Paris, 1973, p.21 `Let. us repeat it once more: mutations do not provide an explanation for the nature or temporal order of the phenomena of evolution; they do not create evolutionary novelties; they cannot account for the precise fitting together of the parts of an organ and the mutual co-ordination of organs ... '[Ibid., p.351] `Mutations provide change but not progress ...' [Ibid.] `The repertory of mutations or mutation-spectrum of a species has nothing to do with evolution. The 'Jordanons' (equivalents of mutations) of the whitlow grass Erophila verna); of the wild pansy Viola tricolor); of the Plantains (Plantago); of the candytuft (Iberis), which add up to a rich and well-catalogued assortment, are the irrefutable proof of it. When all is said, Erophila verna, Viola tricolor, etc., despite their numerous mutations, do not evolve. This is a fact. The various races of dogs, and of all the other domesticated animals, represent merely the mutation spectrum of the species, manipulated by artificial selection. The same applies to garden plants. Nothing in all this amounts to an evolution.' [Ibid.]" (Koestler, A., "Janus: A Summing Up," Picador: London, 1983, pp.182-183. Emphasis original) 15/08/2006 "`In any given culture and at any given moment,' Foucault wrote in Les mots et les choses, `there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.' This observation, which might otherwise serve as a motto for this book, immediately presents difficulties: Only one episteme? All knowledge? As shall be seen, a large part of the conflict in Darwin's era arose from the fact that there were, in effect, not one but two major epistemes in natural history invoking different standards of scientific knowledge and influencing in multitudinous ways the practice of naturalists as well as their theories about nature. I shall call them positivism and creationism. The positivist limited scientific knowledge, which he saw as the only valid form of knowledge, to the laws of nature and to processes involving `secondary, or natural, causes exclusively. The creationist, on the other hand, saw the world and everything in it as being the result of direct or indirect divine activity. His science was inseparable from his theology. His epistemology was closely geared to a metaphysics, and in metaphysics he tended to be an `idealist.' To comprehend nature fully, for a scientist of this persuasion, was to Understand the workings of the mind of the Creator. This emphasis on minded purposes and design in nature is what I shall mean by `idealis