DejaVu...Originally Posted by Missileman
http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthre...ight=Evolution
"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does not make them utter fools... Clearly, some people refuse to learn from this. As we have seen, there are numerous scientists and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us that there is 'no doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence..."
Fix, William R. in The Bone Peddlers. Macmillan, New York, NY (1984), p.150.
"Botanists construct as best they can an imaginary picture of the missing links, so as to complete the sequence of steps in the evolution of the plant kingdom . Obviously such a practice is mainly guesswork, but, like many such hypotheses, has been very useful in organizing subject matter and stimulating research...the record of the rocks reveals practically nothing of the earlier chapters in the evolution of the plant kingdom. For these, therefore, we must rely upon the types of plants still in existence, plus a liberal measure of scientific imagination."
Coulter M. C. in The Nature of the World and of Man. H. H. Newman, Garden City, NY (0), p.216.
"The models we consider are of three sorts: those that extrapolate processes of speciation to account for higher taxa via divergence, those that invoke selection among species, and those that emphasize that many higher taxa originated as novel lineages in their own right, not only as a consequence of species-level processes. It is in this latter class of model that we believe the record favors." "... many of the large populations should have been preserved, yet we simply do not find them. Small populations are called for, then, but there are difficulties here also. The populations must remain small (and undetected) and evolve steadily and consistently toward the body plan that comprises the basis of a new phylum (or class). This is asking a lot. Deleterious mutations would tend to accumulate in small populations to form genetic loads that selection might not be able to handle. Stable intermediate adaptive modes cannot be invoked as a regular feature, since we are then again faced with the problem of just where their remains are. We might imagine vast arrays of such small populations fanning continually and incessantly into adaptive space. Vast arrays should have produced at least some fossil remains also. Perhaps an even greater difficulty is the requirement that these arrays of lineages change along a rather straight and true course --- morphological side trips or detours of any frequency should lengthen the time of origin of higher taxa beyond what appears to be available. Why should an opportunistic, tinkering process set on such a course and hold it for so long successfully among so many lineages?"
Valentine, J., and Erwin, D. in "Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record" in Development as an Evolutionary Process, Raff, Rudolf A. and Elizabeth C. Raff, ed. Alan R. Liss, Inc., New York, NY (1985), p.71.
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Gould, Stephen Jay i,l. (1982), p.140.
"Since we hardly know anything about the major types of organization, suggestions, and suggestions only, can be made. How can one confidently assert that one mechanism rather than another was at the origin of the creation of the plans of organization, if one relies entirely upon imagination to find a solution? Our ignorance is so great that we dare not even assign with any accuracy an ancestral stock to the phyla Protozoa, Arthropoda, Mollusca, and Vertebrata. The lack of concrete evidence relative to the "heyday" of evolution seriously impairs any transformist theory. In any case, a shadow is cast over the genesis of the fundamental structural plans and we are unable to eliminate it."
Grasse, Pierre in "Chapter I: From the Simple to the Complex--Progressive Evolution, Regressive Evolution" in Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation. Academic Press, New York, NY (1977), 2nd edition, p.17.
"Another beauty - and an important weakness - of the theory of evolution by natural selection is that with a little imagination it is possible to come up with an explanation of anything. Evolutionary biologists like to spend their time making up stories about how selection has moulded the most unlikely characteristics. Sometimes they even turn out to be right."
Jones, Steve in The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future. Flamingo, London, (1994), p.196.
""This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals...The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed... This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate...it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.""
Simpson, George Gaylord in "Chapter III: Micro-Evolution, Macro-Evolution, and Mega-Evolution" in Tempo and Mode in Evolution, L. C. Dunn, ed. Hafner Publishing Company, Inc., New York and London, NY (1965), Reprint, p.106,107.
"At this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about how scientists work, something the textbooks don't usually tell you. The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like you to think. Most scientists first get their ideas about how the world works not through rigorously logical processes but through hunches and wild guesses. As individuals they often come to believe something to be true long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else that it is. Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his theory is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will support his position."
Rensberger, Boyce in How the World Works. William Morrow & Co., New York, NY (1986), p.1718.
"Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination."
Takahata. 1995. A genetic perspective on the origin and history of humans in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. …
"Unfortunately, the vast majority of artist's conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence. But a handful of expert natural-history artists begin with the fossil bones of a hominid and work from there. Much of the reconstruction, however, is guesswork. Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips, or ears. Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more apelike they make it.... Hairiness is a matter of pure conjecture. The guesswork approach often leads to errors"
Rensberger, Boyce. 1981, in Science…
"It is, however, when we come to consider the actual course or lineage in the subsequent diversification of organisms...that we meet with disappointment and frustration if we rigorously distinguish between evidence and speculation...At this time there are no known living or fossil forms which unequivocally link any two of the proposed divisions."
Bold, Harold C. in Morphology of Plants. Harper & Row, (1967), p.515.
"Feathers are features unique to birds, and there are no known intermediate structures between reptilian scales and feathers. Notwithstanding speculations on the nature of the elongated scales found on such forms as Longisquama ... as being featherlike structures, there is simply no demonstrable evidence that they in fact are. They are very interesting, highly modified and elongated reptilian scales, and are not incipient feathers."
Feducia, Alan in "On Why Dinosaurs Lacked Feathers" in The Beginning of Birds. Jura Museum, Eichstatt, West Germany (1985), p.76.
One of my biggest issues with Darwinism is fundamentally it has a racist core which i think is it's most socially potent and insidious aspect, many Jewish and other historians acknowledge that Darwinism was a seed bed for the holocaust. And that Darwin promoted many racist Ideas. He was related to and corresponded with many of the people connected to the eugenics movement and to Malthus who voice bogus concerns of overpopulation.
Darwin not only had a racially biased view of the non-Aryan races, he even held other Europeans who were not of English descent with contempt. Here is his opinion of the Irish, taken from his Descent of Man:
"A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly insisted on by Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton, namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. . .Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shewn by Dr. Duncan they produce many more children. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: 'The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits..."(Descent, Chapter Five: On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties During Primeval and Civilised Times: Natural selection as affecting civilised nations.)
Darwin quoted Greg here in referring to his Irish neighbors as degraded members of society.
He also wrote that the western nations of Europe owed none of their "superiority" to Greek ancestry: "The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks", to whom he referred in a quote from Greg as "'corrupt to the very core.'" (Descent, ibid.)
Darwin shared with us his evolutionary viewpoint on what happens to more primitive cultures when encountering more "advanced" (i.e. European) cultures in Chapter Seven of the Descent, On the Races of Man: On the Extinction of the Races of Man: "The partial or complete extinction of many races of man is historically known . . . Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race . . .the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption . . .When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race."
Darwin also stated that the wealthy nations would eventually replace the less privileged races in the struggle for life, and it is apparent that he believed this to be a good thing:
"But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races."(Ibid)
"I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political."
Huxley, Aldous in Ends and Means. (0), p.270.
"What theistic evolutionists have failed above all to comprehend is that the conflict is not over "facts" but over ways of thinking. The problem is not just with any specific doctrine of Darwinian science, but with the naturalistic rules of thought that Darwinian scientists employ to derive those doctrines. If scientists had actually observed natural selection creating new organs, or had seen a step-by-step process of fundamental change consistently recorded in the fossil record, such observations could readily be interpreted as evidence of God's use of secondary causes to create. But Darwinian scientists have not observed anything like that. What they have done is to assume as a matter of first principle that purposeless material processes can do all the work of biological creation because, according to their philosophy, nothing else was available. They have defined their task as finding the most plausible-or least implausible- description of how biological creation could occur in the absence of a creator. The specific answers they derive may or may not be reconcilable with theism, but the manner of thinking is profoundly atheistic. To accept the answers as indubitably true is inevitably to accept the thinking that generated those answers. That is why I think the appropriate term for the accommodationist position is not "theistic evolution," but rather theistic naturalism. Under either name, it is a disastrous error."
Johnson, P.E. October 24, 1994. Shouting `Heresy' in the Temple of Darwin in Christianity Today, 38(12).
Reply With Quote
-Tyr
