ARN Quote Library

"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."

Smith, Wolfgang (1988)
Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of The Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books & Publishers Inc., p.2

"And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion ... And it seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely, that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things come what may."

Ruse, M. (1993)
"Nonliteralist Antievolution"
AAAS Symposium: "The New Antievolutionism," February 13, 1993, Boston, MA

Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs."

Grasse, Pierre-Paul (1977)
Evolution of Living Organisms
Academic Press, New York, N.Y., p.8

"This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.

Doubt is clearly a value in the sciences. Whether it is in other fields is an open question and an uncertain matter. I expect in the next lectures to discuss that very point and to try to demonstrate that it is important to doubt and that doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of very great value."

Richard Feynman
"The Meaning of It All", p. 28

"We are faced more with a great leap of faith that gradual, progressive adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks than any hard evidence."

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 57

Dr. Robert Macnab of Yale University concluded a major 50 page review of the sensory and motor mechanism of the bacterium, E. coli, with these remarks:

As a final comment, one can only marvel at the intricacy in a simple bacterium, of the total motor and sensory system which has been the subject of this review and remark that our concept of evolution by selective advantage must surely be an oversimplification. What advantage could derive, for example, from a "preflagellum" (meaning a subset of its components), and yet what is the probability of "simultaneous" development of the organelle at a level where it becomes advantageous (Macnab, 1978)?

Macnab, R. (1978)
"Bacterial Mobility and Chemotaxis: The Molecular Biology of a Behavioral System"
CRC Critical Reviews in Biochemistry, vol. 5, issue 4, Dec., pp. 291-341

Perhaps the most formidable of Darwin's critics was St. George Mivart. His major book, On the Genesis of Species, took aim at the notion that natural selection could account for the accumulation of the incipient stages of useful structures (Mivart, 1871). Stephen Jay Gould notes that

"Darwin offered strong, if grudging, praise and took Mivart far more seriously than any other critic...Mivart gathered, and illustrated "with admirable art and force" (Darwin's words), all objections to the theory of natural selection---"a formidable array" (Darwin's words again). Yet one particular theme, urged with special attention by Mivart, stood out as the centerpiece of his criticism. It remains today the primary stumbling block among thoughtful and friendly scrutinizers of Darwinism. No other criticism seems so troubling, so obviously and evidently "right" (against a Darwinian claim that seems intuitively paradoxical and improbable).

Mivart awarded this criticism a separate chapter in his book, right after the introduction. He also gave it a name, remembered ever since. He called it "The Incompetency of 'Natural Selection' to account for the Incipient Stages of Useful Structures." If this phrase sounds like a mouthful, consider the easy translation: we can readily understand how complex and full developed structures work and owe their maintenance and preservation to natural selection---a wing, an eye, the resemblance of a bittern to a branch or of an insect to a stick or dead leaf. But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favored by natural selection? You can't fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota's similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?"

Gould goes on to point out that among the difficulties of Darwinian theory "one point stands high above the rest: the dilemma of incipient stages. Mivart identified this problem as primary and it remains so today."

Gould, S. J. (1985)
"Not Necessarily a Wing"
Natural History, October, pp. 12, 13

Darwin was not without his critics. In his book, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, Soren Lovtrup points out that "some critics turned against Darwin's teachings for religious reasons, but they were a minority; most of his opponents ... argued on a completely scientific basis." He goes on to explain:

"...the reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous."

Lovtrup, S. (1987)
Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth
Croom Helm Ltd., Beckingham, Kent, p. 275

"Stasis is data."

Gould, S. J. (1991)
"Opus 200"
Natural History, August, p. 16

The history of most fossil species include two features particularly 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; morphological change is usually limited and directionless;

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'.

Gould, S.J. (1977)
"Evolution's Erratic Pace"
Natural History, vol. 86, May

Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 48

Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. ... That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, ... prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search ... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserly fossil record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 45-46

"At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.

A sense of surprise is surely in order. How did that get here?

If the origin of the human mind is mysterious, so too is its nature. There are, Descartes argued, two substances in the universe, one physical and the other mental.

To many contemporary philosophers, this has seemed rather an embarrassment of riches. But no sooner have they ejected mental substances from their analyses than mental properties pop up to take their place, and if not mental properties then mental functions. As a conceptual category, the mental is apparently unwilling to remain expunged."

Berlinski, David (2004)
"On the Origins of the Mind"
Commentary, November 2004, pg 26

"It is still, as it was in Darwin's day, overwhelmingly true that the first representatives of all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record. This phenomenon is particularly obvious in the case of the invertebrate fossil record. At its first appearance in the ancient paleozoic seas, invertebrate life was already divided into practically all the major groups with which we are familiar today."

Denton, Michael (1986)
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Bethesda, Maryland, Adler & Adler, Pub., p.162

"Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence."

Denton, Michael (1985)
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler Publishers, p.261

"Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations."

Behe, Michael J. (1996)
Darwin's Black Box
The Free Press, p. 185

"The 'RNA world' scenario hinges on some rather far-fetched assumptions about the catalytic ability of RNA. For example, RNA polymerase ribozymes must have been responsible for replicating the ribozymes of the RNA world, including themselves (via their complementary sequences). RNA replication is a very challenging set of reactions -- far more challenging than those yet known to be catalyzed by RNA."

Bartle, David P. and Unrau, Peter J.
"Constructing an RNA World"
Trends in Biochemical Sciences 24 (1999): M9-M13.

"Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism --- of much of science, in short --- that has since been the stage of most Western thought."

Futuyma, D. J.
Evolutionary Biology
Sinauer Associates Inc., 1986, Sunderland, MA, p. 2

"It is fair to say that Darwin simply assumed that gradual improvement was possible in general... Darwin's assumption, I will try to show, was almost certainly wrong. It does not appear to be the case that gradualism always hold. In some complex systems, any minor change causes catastrophic changes in the behavior of the system. In these cases ... selection cannot assemble complex systems. Here is one fundamental limit to selection."

Kauffman, Stuart
At Home in the Universe, p.152

The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well."

Gould, Stephen J. (1977)
"The Return of Hopeful Monsters"
Natural History, Vol. 86, June/July, p. 28

Charles Darwin made the concept of major evolutionary change plausible by convincing scientists that natural selection could account for the appearance of design in nature (Horan, 1979). He would never have considered evolution to be a fact without a plausible theory of how it could occur. The very title of his book reflects the importance of an evolutionary mechanism. Although much evidence has been cited in favor of macroevolution, as it had been prior to 1859, such evidence in Darwin's own opinion would be unsatisfactory without a mechanism:

"In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and such other facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration."

Darwin, C. (1859)
The Origin of Species (Reprint of the first edition)
Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, New York, 1979

Note: See Horan in the Foreward to this reprint of The Origin of Species

" 'Survival of the fittest' and 'natural selection.' No matter what phraseology one generates, the basic fact remains the same: any physical change of any size, shape or form is strictly the result of purposeful alignment of billions of nucleotides (in the DNA). Nature or species do not have the capacity for rearranging them, nor adding to them. Consequently no leap (saltation) can occur from one species to another. The only way we know for a DNA to be altered is through a meaningful intervention from an outside source of intelligence: one who knows what it is doing, such as our genetic engineers are now performing in their laboratories."

Cohen, I.L. (1984)
Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities
New York: NW Research Publications, Inc., p. 209