Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Simulation · 01-31-2002, 08:49 PM

Here are a few quotes from real scientists:

-------------------------
"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ... The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say.

We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."

Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist
Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University
Former math instructor at MIT

-------------------------
The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction. ... The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.

Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

-------------------------
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum

-------------------------
"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London

---------------------------
"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University

---------------------------
"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist

---------------------------
"The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science."

I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author,

Member New York Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America

---------------------------
"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth."

Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose
Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London

---------------------------
"...in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible. ... It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario 'the myth of the prebiotic soup.'

...an intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence." (pp. 211-212)"

Charles B. Thaxton (Creationist)
Ph.D. Chemistry, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard,
Staff member of the Julian Center

---------------------------
"...if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record."

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)
Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham
Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom

---------------------------
"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib... The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

Dr. Tim White
Evolutionary anthropologist
University of California at Berkeley

---------------------------
"A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is certain to impair - just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture."

James F. Crow
Radiation & mutation specialist

---------------------------
"A mutation doesn't produce major new raw (DNA) material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University

---------------------------

<a href="http://www.pbreview.com/forums/showthread.php?s=2258846af133fc791765e4bd74dcbf1d& postid=305288#post305288" target="_blank">This is where they were posted.</a>

Morat · 01-31-2002, 09:12 PM

Quote:

The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University

This one's a misquote. In fact, there's a famous quote of him bitching about how often he's misquoted.

RufusAtticus · 02-01-2002, 12:41 AM

Ooooo, quotes!

The post consists of two types of quotes: misquotes and stupid quotes. The misquotes are short and out of context. The stupid quotes are by people who don't work in the field of evolutionary biology, like mathemeticians. I have yet to see a single creationist who is an evolutionary biologist. If evolulution was wrong, who is more likely to realize it: the people most familiar with the data or laymen? It's obvious that experts are better able to see cracks and flaws than laymen. Then why isn't there a new wave of evolutionary biologists bucking the dogma?

If quotes are all that matters, I need just one to disprove you.

Quote:

(NB: Due to space requirements, 50 years of the journal, Evolution, have been removed from this post. Please visit your local library.)

-RvFvS

[ February 01, 2002: Message edited by: RufusAtticus ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid · 02-01-2002, 01:37 AM

Well the Patterson and Kitts quotes are just plain wrong, so we can be pretty confident that they’re being quoted out of context, since they at least ought to know what they’re talking about.

<a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/fossil_series.html" target="_blank">Smooth change in the fossil record</a>

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html" target="_blank">Talk Origins Transitional Fossils FAQ</a>

Ref the Patterson quote, I found this at <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/quote_patterson2.html" target="_blank">Don Lindsay’s site</a>:

Quote:

The following quote appears in at least one Creationist book:

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument."

-- Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.

This quote is from a letter from Dr. Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland. The next few sentences are:

"... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."

So, what Patterson is saying is that perhaps modern birds descended from the species Archaeopteryx, or perhaps they descended from a cousin species. He just doesn't know how to prove which is the case. Therefore, he refuses to make a claim he can't fully back up.
Dr. Patterson does believe that there are transitional fossils, as witness this quote from the book in question:

"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes ..."

Evolution 1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. pp. 131-133

I personally have a low opinion of Dr. Patterson's objection. A claim about <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/historical.html" target="_blank">history</a> most certainly can be scientific. There are fossil series [see his Smooth Change link above] where a "watertight argument" can be made. In the case of Archaeopteryx, the problem is not that the questions can never be decided. The problem is that we have not yet found enough relevant fossils.

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html" target="_blank">This page</a> is also pretty devastating. A letter to that page’s author from Colin Patterson, covering this and another quote of his that the creationist incubi are fond of, is worth quoting in full.

Quote:

Dear Mr Theunissen,

Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed]

Colin Patterson

I’ll check the other quotes... On second thoughts, no I won’t. The above plus my links give a pretty good idea of what we’re dealing with here.

Simulation, do you have one tiny shred of ACTUAL SODDING EVIDENCE to present?

TTFN, Oolon

lpetrich · 02-01-2002, 02:00 AM

I decided to track down those quotes in <a href="http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/default.htm" target="_blank">No Answers in Genesis</a> and
<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">The Talk.Origins Archive</a>.

Here is what I've found:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html" target="_blank">Discussion of a similar Colin Patterson quote</a>

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/wbrown.html" target="_blank">Discussion of a similar Solly Zuckerman quote</a>

There are numerous examples of erroneous quotes and quotes out of context by creationists; it is significant that they often do not tell us where they got their quotes from.

Finally, I challenge creationists to <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fabnaq.html" target="_blank">answer these tough questions</a>.

tgamble · 02-01-2002, 04:56 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Simulation:
[QB]Here are a few quotes from real scientists:

-------------------------
"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ... The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say.

We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."

Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist
Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University
Former math instructor at MIT

Since when does a Mathamatician qualify as an expert on biology?

Quote:

The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction. ... The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.

Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Didn't Denton change his views in Nature's destiny? I wonder how he feels about having his old views quoted as if he still holds them...

Quote:

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum

Not exactly accurate but he's probably talking PE.

Quote:

"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London

Out of context quote. See talkorigins.

Quote:

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University

This is the guy who said it was "infuriating" to be quoted by creationists as saying there are no transitional fossils...

Quote:

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist

probably talking about a specific group of plants.

Quote:

"The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science."

I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author,
Member New York Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America

The ignorant opinion of a mathematician means nothing. Maybe he isn't aware of the AOS position on evolution?

Quote:

"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth."
Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose
Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London

No date given. Just what is the "present" here? 50 years ago?

Quote:

"...if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record."

Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy)
Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham
Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom

An opinion contrary to the majority of scientists.

Quote:

"A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib... The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."
Dr. Tim White
Evolutionary anthropologist
University of California at Berkeley

Kinda like mistaking dinosaur and human foot prints togather? LOL! So a bone was temperarilly misidentified. It was corrected.

Tim white:
<a href="http://ib.berkeley.edu/faculty/whitet.html" target="_blank">http://ib.berkeley.edu/faculty/whitet.html</a>

ps418 · 02-01-2002, 12:54 PM

Funny how creationists quote Denton 1986 but not Denton's recent books. Below is a rehash of Denton's views from previous posts.

In Darwinism Defeated?, Denton says:

To a very large extent the arguments of Johnson, and indeed of special creationism throughout the past 150 years, depend critically on the claim that the gaps between the different groups of organisms are absolute, could not have been closed via a series of functional intermediates, and are prima facie evidence against common descent and can be taken as evidence for divine intervention.

A primary problem with this strategy is obviously, How can we be absolutely sure that the gaps are as real as they appear? If there is even the slightest room for doubt, the whole strategem collapses. And one reason for doubt is . . . that gaps that once seemed unbridgable have been closed as knowledge has advanced. . . p.143

Denton also briefly discusses biogeographic evidence, and how impotent special creation is to explain any of the data in this field. One example he discusses is the concordance of divergence ages estimated from molecular evidence and divergence ages as estimated from geologic evidence. Discussing Gondwana, Denton states:

The relative implausibility of the creationist model grows further when we examine the DNA sequences of the modern descendents of the ancient fauna and flora of the supercontinent. What we find is fantastically difficult to account for on creationist terms. By comparing the DNA of the various related species stranded in Australia, South America, and Africa as Gondwanaland fragmented, and extrapolating backwards using molecular clock estimates to the time when the sequences converge into ancestral sequences, we get a date of approximately 100 million years . . much the same date that we derive from geological and geophysical evidence for the initial splitting of the supercontinent.

I've hear about this and similar studies before, but unfortunately Denton does not cite any references. Denton concludes his bried discussion of biogeography, saying:

I think that in the face of the facts of geographical distribution, the inference to descent with modification is inescapable, and I suggest that if indeed special creation is true, then it is evident that God must have created life to appear as if evo9lution had occurred. p.149

From Nature's Destiny:

"[I]t is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called 'special creationist school' . . . Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies" (pp xvii-xviii).

"One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps"

"So the sharp discontinuities, referred to above, between different organs and adaptations and different types of organisms, which have been the bedrock of antievolutionary arguments for the past century (3), have now greatly diminished at the DNA level. Organisms which seem very different at a morphological level can be very close together at the DNA level." (p. 276).

So, Denton is clearly no friend to Special Creationism or to Young-Earthism.

ps418 · 02-01-2002, 01:10 PM

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum

Sure paleontology provides plenty of examples of transitionals, not only at the SPECIES level, but also at the level of genera, families, orders and classes. What is the source for this quote?

Writer@Large · 02-01-2002, 01:14 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ps418:
<strong>[b] What is the source for this quote?</strong>

According to <a href="http://users.arczip.com/sjackson/Quotes/fossil.htm" target="_blank">this Cretinist [mis]quote page</a>, it's from "Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467."

--W@L

ps418 · 02-01-2002, 01:14 PM

"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth."

Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose
Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London

In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that life was not created in the manner asserted by special creationists, namely in 6 days, ~7000 yrs ago.

Of course you could argue that each species that appears in the fossil record over time was specially created via innumerable creation events, but dont pretend that there is any biblical or scientific support for this claptrap.

01-31-2002, 08:49 PM	#1
Simulation Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 12	Have you seen these names/quotes before? Here are a few quotes from real scientists: ------------------------- "Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ... The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say. We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists." Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University Former math instructor at MIT ------------------------- The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction. ... The influence of the evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist Evolution: A Theory in Crisis ------------------------- "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..." David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology) Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum ------------------------- "Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London --------------------------- "The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'." Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University --------------------------- "My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled." Prof N. Heribert Nilsson Lund University, Sweden Famous botanist and evolutionist --------------------------- "The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science." I. L. Cohen, Mathematician, Researcher, Author, Member New York Academy of Sciences Officer of the Archaeological Institute of America --------------------------- "At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth." Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London --------------------------- "...in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible. ... It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario 'the myth of the prebiotic soup.' ...an intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence." (pp. 211-212)" Charles B. Thaxton (Creationist) Ph.D. Chemistry, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, Staff member of the Julian Center --------------------------- "...if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record." Lord Solly Zuckerman, MA, MD, DSc (Anatomy) Prof. of anatomy, University of Birmingham Chief scientific advisor, United Kingdom --------------------------- "A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib... The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone." Dr. Tim White Evolutionary anthropologist University of California at Berkeley --------------------------- "A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is certain to impair - just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture." James F. Crow Radiation & mutation specialist --------------------------- "A mutation doesn't produce major new raw (DNA) material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species." Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University --------------------------- <a href="http://www.pbreview.com/forums/showthread.php?s=2258846af133fc791765e4bd74dcbf1d& postid=305288#post305288" target="_blank">This is where they were posted.</a>

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02-01-2002, 02:00 AM	#5
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	I decided to track down those quotes in <a href="http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/default.htm" target="_blank">No Answers in Genesis</a> and <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">The Talk.Origins Archive</a>. Here is what I've found: <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html" target="_blank">Discussion of a similar Colin Patterson quote</a> <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/wbrown.html" target="_blank">Discussion of a similar Solly Zuckerman quote</a> There are numerous examples of erroneous quotes and quotes out of context by creationists; it is significant that they often do not tell us where they got their quotes from. Finally, I challenge creationists to <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fabnaq.html" target="_blank">answer these tough questions</a>.

02-01-2002, 12:54 PM	#7
ps418 Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Louisville, KY, USA Posts: 1,840	Funny how creationists quote Denton 1986 but not Denton's recent books. Below is a rehash of Denton's views from previous posts. In Darwinism Defeated?, Denton says: To a very large extent the arguments of Johnson, and indeed of special creationism throughout the past 150 years, depend critically on the claim that the gaps between the different groups of organisms are absolute, could not have been closed via a series of functional intermediates, and are prima facie evidence against common descent and can be taken as evidence for divine intervention. A primary problem with this strategy is obviously, How can we be absolutely sure that the gaps are as real as they appear? If there is even the slightest room for doubt, the whole strategem collapses. And one reason for doubt is . . . that gaps that once seemed unbridgable have been closed as knowledge has advanced. . . p.143 Denton also briefly discusses biogeographic evidence, and how impotent special creation is to explain any of the data in this field. One example he discusses is the concordance of divergence ages estimated from molecular evidence and divergence ages as estimated from geologic evidence. Discussing Gondwana, Denton states: The relative implausibility of the creationist model grows further when we examine the DNA sequences of the modern descendents of the ancient fauna and flora of the supercontinent. What we find is fantastically difficult to account for on creationist terms. By comparing the DNA of the various related species stranded in Australia, South America, and Africa as Gondwanaland fragmented, and extrapolating backwards using molecular clock estimates to the time when the sequences converge into ancestral sequences, we get a date of approximately 100 million years . . much the same date that we derive from geological and geophysical evidence for the initial splitting of the supercontinent. I've hear about this and similar studies before, but unfortunately Denton does not cite any references. Denton concludes his bried discussion of biogeography, saying: I think that in the face of the facts of geographical distribution, the inference to descent with modification is inescapable, and I suggest that if indeed special creation is true, then it is evident that God must have created life to appear as if evo9lution had occurred. p.149 From Nature's Destiny: "[I]t is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called 'special creationist school' . . . Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies" (pp xvii-xviii). "One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps" "So the sharp discontinuities, referred to above, between different organs and adaptations and different types of organisms, which have been the bedrock of antievolutionary arguments for the past century (3), have now greatly diminished at the DNA level. Organisms which seem very different at a morphological level can be very close together at the DNA level." (p. 276). So, Denton is clearly no friend to Special Creationism or to Young-Earthism.

02-01-2002, 01:10 PM	#8
ps418 Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Louisville, KY, USA Posts: 1,840	"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..." David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology) Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum Sure paleontology provides plenty of examples of transitionals, not only at the SPECIES level, but also at the level of genera, families, orders and classes. What is the source for this quote?

02-01-2002, 01:14 PM	#10
ps418 Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Louisville, KY, USA Posts: 1,840	"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species separately, presumably from the dust of the earth." Dr. Edmund J. Ambrose Emeritus Prof of Cell Biology, University of London In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that life was not created in the manner asserted by special creationists, namely in 6 days, ~7000 yrs ago. Of course you could argue that each species that appears in the fossil record over time was specially created via innumerable creation events, but dont pretend that there is any biblical or scientific support for this claptrap.

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