Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: January-June, 2002

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The following are unclassified quotes posted in my email messages in January-June, 2002.
The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.

[January, February, March, April, May, June, July-December]

January
1/01/02
"Oxford evolutionist Richard Dawkins took this idea to its logical popular science extreme, proclaiming that our 
bodies are mere robots-vehicles programmed by the genes. Nonetheless, after developing his narrow "selfish 
gene" concept, even Dawkins was forced to admit that genes in the body of a member of one species may select 
for traits in the bodies of members of another species, even ones thousands of miles away. ... Thus, as the 
"selfishness" concept is extended, it becomes very nebulous indeed. No gene in me can live by itself but only as 
part of a network or aggregate of other encased genes. ... Wilson too had to draw the selfish individual and gene 
idea out to its vanishing point. ... Why, in short, call selfish those genes that maximize the growth of completely 
different genes? In feeding and clothing and housing ourselves-by wearing cotton underwear and leather shoes 
and silk scarves-we are propagating genes other than "our own": the genes of cotton plants, cows, and silk 
worms. Since all these animals and plants and microbes are involved in our keeping ourselves fit, what are these 
selfish genes doing, if they can live only in an environment that is the product of completely different genes? It 
appears that the neo-Darwinian attempt to explain altruism as the result of individual selfishness has required not 
only the redefinition of the individual (from an animal into a gene) but also an inversion of the meaning of 
selfishness.' (Sagan D., "Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth," [1990], Arkana: London, 1991, reprint, 
pp.115-116)

1/01/02
"What is life? To the physicist the two distinguishing features of living systems are complexity and 
organization. Even a simple single-celled organism, primitive as it is, displays an intricacy and fidelity 
unmatched by any product of human ingenuity. Consider, for example, a lowly bacterium. Close inspection 
reveals a complex network of function and form. The bacterium may interact with its environment in a variety of 
ways, propelling itself, attacking enemies, moving towards or away from external stimuli, exchanging material in a 
controlled fashion. Its internal workings resemble a vast city in organization. Much of the control rests with the 
cell nucleus, wherein is also contained the genetic 'code', the chemical blueprint that enables the bacterium to 
replicate. The chemical structures that control and direct all this activity may involve molecules with as many as a 
million atoms strung together in a complicated yet highly specific way." (Davies P.C.W., "God and the New 
Physics," [1983], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.59. Emphasis in original)

1/01/02
"Darwin's second politically helpful vice was closely related to his first. It was his utter independence of other 
people's ideas. It seems incredible that the apostle of evolution should have been so deficient in historical sense; 
so much so that, although deeply interested in his own priority, he never realized that his own ideas were second 
hand. He thought he had worked them out himself, even when he had only sorted them out. Moreover his ideas 
were less clearly sorted out and less clearly expressed and, worst of all, less strictly and less openly held and 
maintained than the ideas of those who first thought of them. He never faced the cardinal issue of the evidence 
for or against the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which is more difficult and therefore more important 
than the issue of whether evolution has happened. He was therefore able, as he put it, to 'wriggle'. He wriggled so 
successfully that in the end he did not himself know where he stood." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in 
History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.61-62)

1/01/02
"Macroevolutionary processes and causations were generally considered to be of a special kind, quite different 
from the populational phenomena studied by geneticists and students of speciation. All this changed 
dramatically with the evolutionary synthesis. Its major effect was to discredit some of the beliefs most widely 
held previously among students of macroevolution. Important assumptions that were now rejected include the 
following: (1) that major saltations are indispensable in explaining the origin of new species and higher taxa; (2) 
that evolutionary trends and the continuous improvement of adaptations require the existence of autogenetic 
processes; and (3) that inheritance is soft. It was a major achievement of Rensch and Simpson to be able to show 
that an explanation of the phenomena of macroevolution does not require the acceptance of any of these three 
theories, and that in fact the phenomena of evolution above the species level are consistent with the new 
findings of genetics and microsystematics. Obviously, this conclusion had to be based on inference, consisting 
of morphological, taxonomic, and distributional evidence, since higher taxa were at that time-and, except for 
molecular evidence, are still today-inaccessible to genetic analysis." (Mayr E., "The Growth of Biological 
Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1982, p.607)

2/01/02
"And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep 
among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page 
of this book, will meet you on every side-even from the pens of clergymen. ... We all have Naturalism in our 
bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back 
upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the 
feeling which is greatly to their credit-which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are 
anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of 
their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural 
explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. ....  In using the books 
of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for 
those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed 
assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really yourself: 
must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all 
been brought up." (Lewis C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," [1947], Fontana: London, 1960, Revised edition, 
1963, reprint, pp.168-169)

3/01/02
"The sweeping nature of the changes proposed by Darwin is best documented by listing some of the more 
philosophical implications of Darwin's theories: (1) The replacement of a static by an evolving world (not original 
with Darwin). (2) The demonstration of the implausibility of creationism (Gillespie, 1979). (3) The refutation of 
cosmic teleology. (4)
The abolition of any justification for an absolute anthropocentrism by applying the principle of common descent 
to man. (5) The explanation of "design" in the world by the purely materialistic process of natural selection, a 
process consisting of in interaction between nondirected variation and opportunistic reproductive success 
which was entirely outside the dogma of Christianity." (Mayr E., "The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, 
Evolution, and Inheritance," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1982, p.501)

4/01/02
"Darwin ... wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his day: `If I were convinced that I 
required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish...I would give nothing for 
the theory of Natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.' (Darwin C.R., 
Letter to C. Lyell, October 11, 1859, in Darwin F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic 
Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, pp.6-7). This is no petty matter. In Darwin's view, the whole 
point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous 
account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For 
Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all." (Dawkins R., "The 
Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.248-249. Emphasis in original)

5/01/02
"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." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," 
[1942], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, pp.1092-1093)

5/01/02
"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 re 
semblance 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," [1942], Cambridge 
University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1093)

7/01/02
"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." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge University Press: London, 
Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1093)

7/01/02
"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," [1942], Cambridge University 
Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1094. Emphasis in original)

9/01/02
"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." (Thompson D.W., "On Growth and Form," [1942], 
Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, p.1094. Emphasis in original)

10/01/02
"I decided I needed to talk to Dan Dennett, who has a reputation as a wideranging and inventive thinker .... His 
new book is Consciousness Explained. That's an ambitious title, I ventured. "Yes," he acknowledged, laughing. 
"Actually I don't claim to have all the answers, or even most." (Lewin R., "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos," 
Phoenix: London, 1993, p.155)

10/01/02
"This simple feature of the Universe, that its density is within about a factor of 10 of the critical density, leads to 
the first of the big problems. .... The problem arises because if the value of the density parameter departed even 
very slightly from the critical value in the very early Universe. ... unless it was set up with more or less exactly its 
own escape velocity at the beginning, it has no chance of ending up with an expansion velocity close to its 
escape velocity now. You can see what this means - the Universe must have been set up in the beginning with 
almost exactly the critical density with quite amazing precision if it is to end up within a factor of 10 of the critical 
density now. This is what is called the fine-tuning problem of the Universe. Despite the fact that there is no 
obvious reason why our Universe should have the critical density, the Universe must have been set up that way 
very precisely in the beginning." (Longair M.S., "The Origins of our Universe: A Study of the Origin and 
Evolution of the Contents of our Universe," The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People 1990, 
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1991, p.98-99)

11/01/02
"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." (Thompson D.W., "On 
Growth and Form," [1942], Cambridge University Press: London, Second Edition, 1952, reprint, Vol. II, pp.1094-
1095)

11/01/02
"The human immunodeficiency virus contains in its brief history the entire argument of The Origin of 
Species: variation, a struggle for existence, and natural selection." (Jones S., "Almost Like a Whale: The 
Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.16)

12/01/02
"In these days of astounding advances in science and technology it is perhaps rash to declare dogmatically that 
anything such as the artificial synthesis of a living cell is impossible. Yet, on what sort of microloom would a 
biologist weave the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum, or with what delicate needles could a biologist 
fashion the intricacies of the cell nucleus?" (Price F.W., "Basic Molecular Biology," John Wiley & Sons: New 
York NY, 1979, p.466)

12/01/02
"More biologists agree that stasis is a real phenomenon than agree about its causes. Take, as an extreme 
example, the coelacanth Latimeria. The coelacanths were a large group of 'fish' (actually, although they are 
called fish they are more closely related to us than they are to trout and herrings)
that flourished more than 250 million years ago and apparently died out at about the same time as the dinosaurs. I 
say 'apparently' died out because in 1938, much to the zoological world's astonishment, a weird fish, a yard and a 
half long and with unusual leg-like fins, appeared in the catch of a deepsea fishing boat off the South African 
coast. Though almost destroyed before its priceless worth was recognized, its decaying remains were fortunately 
brought to the attention of a qualified South African zoologist just in time. Scarcely able to believe his eyes, he 
identified it as a living coelacanth, and named it Latimeria. Since then, a few other specimens have been 
fished up in the same area, and the species has now been properly studied and described. It is a 'living fossil', in 
the sense that it has changed hardly at all since the time of its fossil ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago. 
So, we have stasis. What are we to make of it? How do we explain it? Some of us would say that the lineage 
leading to Latimeria stood still because natural selection did not move it. In a sense it had no 'need' to 
evolve because these animals had found a successful way of life deep in the sea where conditions did not 
change much." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.246)

12/01/02
"A pinhole camera forms a definite image, the smaller the pinhole the sharper (but dimmer) the image, the larger 
the pinhole the brighter (but fuzzier) the image. The swimming mollusc Nautilus, a rather strange squid-like 
creature that lives in a shell like the extinct ammonites (see the 'shelled cephalopod' of Figure 5), has a pair of 
pinhole cameras for eyes. The eye is basically the same shape as ours but there is no lens and the pupil is just a 
hole that lets the seawater into the hollow interior of the eye. Actually, Nautilus is a bit of a puzzle in its own 
right. Why, in all the hundreds of millions of years since its ancestors first evolved a pinhole eye, did it never 
discover the principle of the lens? The advantage of a lens is that it allows the image to be both sharp and bright. 
What is worrying about Nautilus is that the quality of its retina suggests that it would really benefit, greatly and 
immediately, from a lens. It is like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt 
needle. The system is crying out for a particular simple change. In genetic hyperspace, Nautilus appears to be 
sitting right next door to an obvious and immediate improvement, yet it doesn't take the small step necessary. 
Why not? Michael Land of Sussex University, our foremost authority on invertebrate eyes, is worried, and so am 
I. Is it that the necessary mutations cannot arise, given the way Nautilus embryos develop? I don't want to 
believe it, but I don't have a better explanation." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 
1991, reprint, pp.85-86)

14/01/02
"Now I cannot deny all these possibilities: life on the Earth may be a miracle, or a freak, or an alien infection. And 
I agree that the confidence was misplaced that supposed in the fifties that the answer to the origin of life would 
appear in some footnote to the answer to the question of how organisms work. Something much more will be 
needed. Something odd." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story," 
[1985], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.8).

16/01/02
"How did a primordial soup of amino acids and other simple molecules manage to turn itself into the first living 
cell some four billion years ago? There's no way the molecules could have just fallen together at random; as the 
creationists are fond of pointing out, the odds against that happening are ludicrous. So was the creation of life a 
miracle? Or was there some thing else going on in that primordial soup that we still don't understand?" (Waldrop 
M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, 
reprint, p.10)

17/01/02
"If evolution (or free market capitalism) is really just a matter of the survival of the fittest, then why should it ever 
produce anything other than ruthless competition among individuals? In a world where nice guys all too often 
finish last, why should there be any such thing as trust or cooperation? And why, in spite of everything, do trust 
and cooperation not-only exist but flourish?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of 
Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, reprint, p.10)

17/01/02
"First, there is belief in divine Creation: God did it. If that is so, there is no point in trying to investigate further. 
What God did is a matter for faith and not for scientific inquiry. The two fields are separate. If our scientific 
inquiry should lead eventually to God, to questions so large that they cannot be examined coherently, that will be 
the time to stop science." (Edey M.A. & Johanson D.C., "Blueprints: Solving The Mystery of Evolution," Little, 
Brown & Co: Boston MA, 1989, p.291)

18/01/02
"When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual 
positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions 
which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions 
appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has 
ever occurred to them." (Whitehead A.N., "Science and the Modern World," [1926], Penguin Books: 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1938, reprint, pp.63-64)

19/01/02
"How can Darwinian natural selection account for such wonderfully intricate structures as the eye or the kidney? 
Is the incredibly precise organization that we find in living creatures really just the result of random evolutionary 
accidents? Or has something more been going on for the past four billion years, something that Darwin didn't 
know about?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," Penguin: 
London, [1992], 1994, reprint, p.10)

19/01/02
"The traditional argument that moral standards are derived from sensory pleasure or the reduction of pain cannot 
explain the universal fact that people become angry when they see others violate standards they believe are 
right. Why do we become upset when we see a stranger lie to a tourist or push ahead in a queue when our own 
lives are unaffected by those rude acts? One explanation is that these asocial acts by one stranger to another 
provoke bystanders to question the correctness of their own moral beliefs. Because these beliefs are central to 
each day's decisions and conduct, their violation, even by a stranger, threatens the rational foundation of the 
observer's ethical code. Not even the cleverest ape could be conditioned to become angry upon seeing one 
animal steal food from another. Surprise or fear, perhaps, but anger is impossible. The popular writings of Camus 
and Sartre capture the combination of angst and anger that postwar Europeans felt when they realized that if 
there was no firm basis for any particular moral evaluation, life was absurd. Although evolutionary biologists 
insist that the appearance of humans was due to a quirky role of the genetic dice, our species refuses to act as if 
good and evil are arbitrary choices bereft of natural significance." (Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard 
University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.158)

21/01/02
"I confess that, as a graduate student, I was so taken by the simplicity and unifying power of "the modern 
synthesis" that I could imagine no higher task for paleontology than the faithful furthering of its hegemony. The 
modern synthesis built its theory upon small-scale events that occur with in local populations and, assuming a 
smoothly continuous rather than a hierarchical world, argued for complete extrapolation into millions of years and 
major transitions in form. ... I believe that our preference for searching always to exemplify microevolutionary 
principles in the fossil record has been unfortunate ... It has led us into serious errors of scaling. We see, in the 
vastness of geological time, events that bear superficial similarity to phenomena of local populations-and we 
assign a similar cause without realizing that the extended time itself precludes such an application. Thus, some of 
the most puzzling phenomena of paleontology, potential sources of new theory, are passively pushed under a 
familiar rug. ... Gradualism. In this case, we didn't even see the phenomenon in fossil sequences, but assumed 
that it must have existed and been obliterated by an imperfect record-and all because we thought that 
evolutionary theory (as Darwin falsely claimed) required its generality ... And yet, to see gradualism at all in the 
fossil record implies such an excruciatingly slow rate of per-generation change that we must seriously consider 
its invisibility to natural selection in the conventional mode - changes that confer momentary adaptive 
advantages. Any measurable momentary advantage should usually sweep through a population in times 
represented more nearly by a bedding plane than by a thick sequence. Thus, I believe that sustained gradualism, 
rare though it may be, represents more of an interesting mystery than a ringing affirmation of microevolutionary 
extrapolation." (Gould S.J., "The promise of paleobiology as a nomothetic, evolutionary discipline," 
Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, pp.96-118, p.103)

21/01/02
"It is frequently claimed that science must by definition exclude the supernatural. A number of related issues 
were raised in the previous chapter, but it is worth noting that appeal to a definition of science here is going to be 
a bit problematic because there simply is no completely satisfactory formal definition available to appeal to. 
Defining science turns out to be one of the nastier problems within philosophy of science. And some of the 
informal or partial definitions provide little comfort to would-be prohibitionists. For instance, science has recently 
been defined in one court simply as "what scientists do." That does not in principle rule out anything at all. 
Whatever this group of humans (scientists) decided to do-including developing theories which appeal to the 
supernatural-would turn out to be science. In their popular writings, some scientists define science as "an 
attempt to get at truth, no holds barred." "No holds barred" is about as antiprohibitionist as one can get. 
Others define science as "organized common sense." But if there is anything that has been considered common 
sense during human history, it is the existence and activity in nature of the supernatural. Again, barring the 
supernatural purely on definitional grounds thus turns out not to be a straightforward matter." (Ratzsch D.L., 
"Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science," State University of New York Press: 
Albany NY, 2001, pp.105-106. Emphasis in original)

21/01/02
"There is another way to be a Creationist. One might offer Creationism as a scientific theory .... Although pure 
versions of Creationism were no longer in vogue among scientists by the end of the eighteenth century, they had 
flourished earlier ... Moreover, variants of Creationism were supported by a number of eminent nineteenth-
century scientists William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, and Louis Agassiz, for example. These Creationists trusted 
that their theories would accord with the Bible, interpreted in what they saw as a correct way. However, that fact 
does not affect the scientific status of those theories. Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more 
unscientific than postulating unobservable particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the 
ways in which they are articulated and defended." (Kitcher P., "Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism," 
[1982], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, Ninth Printing, 1996, p.125)

22/01/02
"In its December 1990 fly-by of Earth, the Galileo spacecraft found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a 
widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and 
atmospheric methane in extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium; together, these are strongly suggestive of life on 
Earth. Moreover, the presence of narrow band, pulsed, amplitude-modulated radio transmission seems uniquely 
attributable to intelligence. These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial 
life by modern interplanetary spacecraft." (Sagan C., Thompson W.R., Carlson R., Gurnett D. & Hord C., "A 
search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft," Nature, Vol 365, 21 October 1993, pp.715-721, p.715)

23/01/02
"During the Galileo fly-by, the plasma wave instrument detected radio signals, plausibly escaping through the 
nightside ionosphere from ground-based radio transmitters. Of all Galileo science measurements, these signals 
provide the only indication of intelligent, technological life on Earth. ... The fact that the central frequencies of 
these signals, remain constant over periods of hours strongly suggests an artificial origin. Naturally generated 
radio emissions most always display significant long-term frequency drifts. Even more definitive is the existence 
of pulse like amplitude modulation. When the spectrum in Fig. 4a is expanded (Fig. 4b), the individual narrow-
band component, can he seen to have a complex modulation pattern. Although the time resolution of the 
instrument (18.67s) is inadequate to decode the modulation, such, modulation patterns are never observed for 
naturally occurring radio emissions and implies the transmission of information. On the basis of these 
observations, strong case can he made that the signals are generated by an intelligent form of life on Earth ... 
without any a priori assumptions about its chemistry ..." (Sagan C., Thompson W.R., Carlson R., Gurnett D. & 
Hord C., "A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft," Nature, Vol 365, 21 October 1993, pp.715-
721, p.720)

23/01/02
"Darwin's theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most 
people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is made in favor of 
darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true. We must distinguish 
between the fact of evolution - defined as change in organisms over time - and the explanation of 
that change. Darwin's contribution, through his theory of natural selection, was to suggest how the 
evolutionary change took place. The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with 
darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be." (Raup D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and 
Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History: Chicago IL, January 
1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp.22-29, p.22. Emphasis in original)

24/01/02
"Promising though the RNA world scenario seems, it has many detractors. They point out that, however good 
the theory may be, test tube experiments are frequently dismal failures. Key reactions stubbornly refuse to 
proceed without carefully designed procedures and the help of special catalysts. Nucleic acid chains are 
notoriously fragile, and tend to snap long before they have acquired the 50 or so base pairs needed for them to 
act as enzymes. Water attacks and breaks up nucleic acid polymers as it does peptides, casting doubt on any 
soupy version of an RNA world. Even the synthesis of the four bases required as building blocks is not without 
serious problems. As far as biochemists can see, it is a long and difficult road to produce efficient RNA 
replicators from scratch. No doubt a way could eventually be found for each step in the chemical sequence to be 
carried out in the lab without too much drama, but only under highly artificial conditions, using specially 
prepared and purified chemicals in lust the right proportions. The trouble is, there are very many such steps 
involved, and each requires different special conditions. It is highly doubtful that all these steps would 
obligingly happen one after the other 'in the wild', where a chemical soup or scum would just have to take pot 
luck. The conclusion has to be that without a trained organic chemist on hand to supervise, nature would be 
struggling to make RNA from a dilute soup under any plausible prebiotic conditions. So whilst an RNA world 
could conceivably function and evolve towards life if handed to us on a plate (perhaps in a soup bowl would be 
a better metaphor), getting the RNA world going from a crude chemical mixture is another matter entirely." 
(Davies P.C.W., "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, 
p.98)

24/01/02
"Added to these diverse difficulties is the problem of chirality - left versus right .... The fact that all life on Earth is 
based on molecules with the same handedness is not merely a curiosity: RNA replication would be menaced in an 
environment in which both left- and right-handed versions of the basic molecules are equally present. The crucial 
lock-and-key templating arrangements, whereby bases pair up with complementary bases according to their 
shapes, would be compromised as molecules with the 'wrong' handedness locked into the slots. The left hand 
would mess up what the right hand was doing. Unless a way can be found for nature to create a soup with 
molecules of only one handedness, spontaneous RNA synthesis would be a lost cause." (Davies P.C.W., "The 
Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, pp.99-100)

26/01/02
"I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation 
of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with 
antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible 
labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this in instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the 
imagination, which is the motive power of research: that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How 
has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? When we compare this tone of thought in 
Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. 
It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of 
Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into 
nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit 
beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith 
of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words." (Whitehead A.N., 
"Science and the Modern World," [1926], Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1938, reprint, pp.23-
24)

27/01/02
"With Darwin, the reverse swing was started. Man was once again regarded as an animal, but now in the light of 
science rather than of unsophisticated sensibility. At the outset, the consequences of the changed outlook were 
not fully explored. The unconscious prejudices and attitudes of an earlier age survived, disguising many of the 
moral and philosophical implications of the new outlook. But gradually the pendulum reached the furthest point 
of its swing. What seemed the logical consequences of the Darwinian postulates were faced: man is an animal 
like any other; accordingly, his views as to the special meaning of human life and human ideals need merit no 
more consideration in the light of eternity (or of evolution) than those of a bacillus or a tapeworm. Survival is the 
only criterion of evolutionary success: therefore, all existing organisms are of equal value. The idea of progress is 
a mere anthropomorphism. Man happens to be the dominant type at the moment, but he might be replaced by the 
ant or the rat. And so on." (Huxley J.S., "The Uniqueness of Man," Chatto & Windus: London, 1941, Third 
Impression, p.2)

28/01/02
"The second argument-that the imperfection of nature reveals evolution-strikes many people as ironic, for they 
feel that evolution should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed by some 
organisms- the camber of a gull's wing, or butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic 
leaves so precisely. But perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection 
covers the tracks of past history. And past history-the evidence of descent-is the mark of evolution. Evolution 
lies exposed in the imperfections that record history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, 
and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common 
ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case." (Gould S.J., "Evolution as 
Fact and Theory," in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History," [1983], Penguin: 
London, 1986, reprint, p.258)

28/01/02
"My own starting position can be summed up in three statements: first, that the only minds whose existence we 
can be confident of are associated with the complex brains of humans and some other animals; second, that we 
(and other animals with minds) are the products of evolution by natural selection; and, third, that neither in the 
origin of life nor in its subsequent evolution has there been any supernatural interference - that is, anything 
happening contrary to the laws of physics. (This last is, if you like, a confession of biological 
uniformitarianism - a belief that, so far as possible, it is sensible to try to explain the past in terms of the 
kinds of processes that occur in the present.)" (Glynn I., "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of 
the Mind," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.5. Emphasis in original)

31/01/02
"Are these few base substitutions incorporated in the DNA enough to be the source of variation for the last 15 
million years of human evolution? it seems unlikely unless they had just the right kinds of effect. We can think in 
terms of changes in the gene regulatory system that would affect the form or function of an organ. But how many 
base substitutions can have such effects? Amino acid substitutions in typical proteins - no way. I feel that it 
would take billions of small biochemical lesions to add up to the multiple changes that have occurred in form. 
Even billions might not be enough, owing to a low probability of the proper combinations of events." (Britten 
R.J., "The Sources of Variation in Evolution," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of 
Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford U.K, 1978, 
reprint, p.216)
[top]

February
1/02/02
"The truth is that evolution was an hypothesis which hardened into dogma before it had been thoroughly 
analysed. Hence it mothered a number of fallacies. It was easy to say that the idea of change or 
transformation in nature had been substituted for that of immutability; but what sort of change was involved? If 
species were no longer regarded as immutable, the fact remained that they exhibited a measure of stability, or 
they would not have deserved the name of species." (Tomlin E.W.F., "Fallacies of Evolutionary Theory," in 
Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know 
About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford U.K, 1978, reprint, p.228. Emphasis in original).

2/02/02
"We had to wait until the 1950s for Stanley Miller to actually attempt to experimentally reproduce the soup (Miller 
1953) . Miller started with a reasonable composition of the ancient atmosphere: mostly methane and ammonia, 
with no oxygen - since atmospheric oxygen, together with the ozone that blocks UV radiation, was in fact 
produced by the organic process of photosynthesis in blue-green algae much, much later than soup time (which 
is a fortunate coincidence, given that oxygen attacks and destroys - technically it "oxidizes" - organic 
compounds at a very fast rate). Miller put the whole thing in a ball, gave it some electric charge, and waited. He 
did find that amino acids and other fundamental complex organic molecules were accumulating at the bottom of 
his apparatus. His discovery gave a huge boost to the scientific investigation of the origin of life. Indeed, for 
some time it seemed like recreation of life in a test tube was within reach of experimental science. Unfortunately, 
Miller-type experiments have not progressed much further than their original prototype, leaving us with a sour 
aftertaste from the primordial soup." (Pigliucci M., "Where Do We Come From?," Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 23, No. 
5, September/October 1999, pp. 21-29, p. 24. http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic/Essays/origin_of_life.htm)

3/02/02
"If nature unguided by natural selection did hit on our most ultimate ancestors within such a time (and on 
present evidence life appeared on earth at least within a billion years of the conditions being right - and possibly 
almost at once) then we should be able to mimic nature's performance within quite a short time - say about a 
fortnight. That we have not succeeded in what should be technically a relatively simple matter is an indication 
that we have not been looking in the right place." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Synthetic Life for Industry," in Duncan R. 
& Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the 
Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.406)

3/02/02
"Evolution has been by no means simply an increase in complexity and sophistication of some set of mechanisms 
that were there from the start. Typically, in that part of the evolutionary story for which we have evidence, quite 
new mechanisms emerged at levels at which they became possible and useful, and these often displaced earlier 
structures." (Cairns- Smith A.G., "Synthetic Life for Industry," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The 
Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: 
Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.407)

3/02/02
"This all points to the possibility that the formation and development of simple life was not an especially difficult 
process; at least not when compared to the evolution of land plants, which only appeared some 3000m years after 
the ancestral cyanobacteria. It seems as though simple chemical reactions among the compounds that scientists 
envisage were available on the early Earth were sufficient to drive the process that led inexorably to life ... . There 
is, however, one problem with this assumption: scientists still have no firm idea of what the mechanics of this 
kind of 'prebiotic' chemistry were or how the whole ascent to life actually happened. Recently, new experimental 
methods have shed some light on the possible processes, but have also served to add to the general uncertainty. 
One thing that scientists working in this field do know, however, is that whatever form early life took it didn't 
possess DNA or proteins." (Evans, J., "It's alive - isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.44)

4/02/02
"There are a lot of things we do not know about evolution, but they are not the things that non-biologists think 
we do not know. If I admit to a nonbiological colleague that evolution theory is inadequate, he is likely to assume 
at once that Darwinism is about to be replaced by Lamarckism and natural selection by the inheritance of 
acquired characters. In fact, nothing seems to me less likely. In common with almost everyone working in the 
field, I am an unrepentant neo-Darwinist. That is, I think that the origin of evolutionary novelty is a process of 
gene mutation which is non-adaptive, and that the direction of evolution is largely determined by natural 
selection. I am enough of a Popperian to know that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, and that observations may 
one day oblige me to abandon it, but I do not expect to have to." (Maynard Smith J., "The Limitations of 
Evolution Theory," in Duncan R. & Weston-Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You 
Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," [1977], Pergamon: Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.236)

4/02/02
"Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life, or should it be viewed with caution? Raup 
argued that plots of the diversification of life were an illustration of bias: the older the rocks, the less we know. 
The debate was partially resolved by the observation that different data sets gave similar patterns of rising 
diversity through time. Here we show that new assessment methods, in which the order of fossils in the rocks 
(stratigraphy) is compared with the order inherent in evolutionary trees (phylogeny), provide a more convincing 
analytical tool: stratigraphy and phylogeny offer independent data on history. Assessments of congruence 
between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of 1,000 published phylogenies show no evidence of 
diminution of quality backwards in time. Ancient rocks clearly preserve less information, on average, than more 
recent rocks. However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the 
past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past." (Benton 
M. J., Wills M.A. & Hitchin R., "Quality of the fossil record through time," Nature, Vol. 403, 3 February 
2000, pp.534-537, p.534)

4/02/02
"One possible escape route from the strictures of the second law is to depart from thermodynamic equilibrium 
conditions. The American biochemist Sidney Fox has investigated what happens when a mixture of amino acids 
is strongly heated. By driving out the water as steam, the linkage of amino acids into peptide chains becomes 
much more likely. The thermal energy flow generates the necessary entropy to comply with the second law. Fox 
has produced some quite long polypeptides, which he terms "proteinoids', using this method. Unfortunately, the 
resemblance between Fox's proteinoids and real proteins is rather superficial. For example, real proteins are made 
exclusively of left-handed amino acids (see p. 42), whereas proteinoids are an equal mixture of left and right." 
(Davies P.C.W., "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, 
pp.60-61)

4/02/02
"One simple alternative is to presume that the properties of the microspheres are less significant than claimed. 
Suppose, for example, that our monkey had typed a sentence containing more numbers than letters, rather than a 
phrase from Shakespeare. It would be nonrandom but unimportant, indicating only that he had a preference for 
the upper part of the keyboard. Similarly, the various properties shown by the microspheres- division, weak 
catalytic activity, a double-layered border, electrical signals, and the rest-may be somewhat general properties of 
microscopic particles of a certain size and unrelated, or only slightly related, to the actual processes of life. 
During my childhood, I learned that I could make the shadow of a dog with my hand. I needed only to point my 
thumb out, bend in my index finger, and hold my hand before a light to produce the image of a dog's head on the 
wall. I could enhance the effect by moving my pinky while making barking noises. But this form was not a dog, 
nor could it ever become one; it was merely shadow play. In the same way, the properties of the microspheres, 
while entertaining, may be merely shadow play." (Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life 
on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, pp.200-201)

4/02/02
"The rationale put forward by Oparin, Fox, and others for their models is that the living cell was preceded by a 
system that had morphological properties resembling cells but was not yet living. Purportedly, Oparin's 
coacervates became protobionts, and Fox's microspheres, protocells. These structures then supposedly 
underwent a period of evolution in which they changed until they evolved into the first living cells. No matter 
how you look at it, this is scientific nonsense. Evolution is a biological process of development through 
mutation, reproduction, and selection. These pseudecellular models, like clay, soap bubbles, or other inanimate 
objects, have neither the mechanism nor the potential of becoming anything more than what they are." (Day W., 
"Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life's Beginning," [1979], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, Second 
Edition, 1984, pp.204-205)

4/02/02
"Proteinoid microspheres are easy to prepare - it's done in many high school laboratories. All that is necessary is 
to heat a chunk of lava with a gas burner, throw a spoonful of dry L or D amino acids on the hot lava, and wash 
resultant proteinoids off the lava with a cup of water. The central question is where did all those pure, dry, 
concentrated and optically active amino acids come from in the real, abiological world? A further problem arises 
when we consider the nature of proteinoid microsphere boundaries. Cells possess a lipoprotein membrane, which 
is gossamer-thin and slowly permeable to many small molecules by diffusion. Proteinoid microspores have a 
boundary made of grossly thick layers upon layers of partly hydrophobic proteins. This later is so thick that it 
resembles a near- impermeable cell wall or spore coat more closely than a cell membrane." (Folsome C.E., "The 
Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, pp.85,87)

4/02/02
"Could the primeval amino acids have joined into peptides under prebiotic conditions? What looked like a simple 
positive answer to this question was found in 1958 by the American biochemist Sidney Fox, long of the 
University of Florida, now at the University of South Alabama. His recipe: Just heat a dry mixture of amino acids 
for three hours at 170 C (338 F). Water comes out and you get a plastic-like solid that, when ground and mixed 
with water, yields up to 15 percent of its weight as a water-soluble product made, on average, of some fifty amino 
acids joined together. To this product Fox gave the name proteinoid, a cautious [sic curious?] choice since 
proteinoids are far from having the regular chainlike structure of peptides. For Fox, this discovery initiated a 
lifelong avocation. He found that proteinoids spontaneously form microscopic vesicles, or "microspheres," 
which he saw as the first cells, and spent his whole career pursuing these studies. Few origin-of-life experts are 
as sanguine as Fox concerning the significance of his results. It has been objected that the conditions required 
for the formation of proteinoids are not likely to have obtained on the prebiotic Earth, that the resulting material 
has more in common with primeval "goo" than with proteins, and that the microspheres are a far cry from 
anything that could be called a cell." (de Duve C.R., "Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative," [1995], Basic 
Books: New York NY, 1998, reprint, p.29)

5/02/02
"This is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject 
to evolution, from atoms and stars to fish and flowers, from fish and flowers to human societies and 
valuesindeed, that all reality is a single process of evolution." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. 
& Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. 
III, 1960, p.249)

5/02/02
"In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was 
not created, it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and 
soul as well as brain and body. So did religion." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., 
eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, 
pp.252-253)

5/02/02
"Religions are organs of psychosocial man concerned with human destiny and with experiences of sacredness 
and transcendence. In their evolution, some (but by no means all)
have given birth to the concept of gods as supernatural beings endowed with mental and spiritual properties and 
capable of intervening in the affairs of nature, including man. Such supernaturally centered religions ... are 
destined to disappear in competition with other, truer, and more embracing thought organizations which are 
handling the same range of raw or processed experience-in this case, with the new religions which are surely 
destined to emerge on this world's scene." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., 
"Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.253)

5/02/02
"The emergent religion of the near future could be a good thing. It will believe in knowledge. It should be able to 
take advantage of the vast amount of new knowledge produced by the knowledge explosion of the last few 
centuries to construct what we may call its "theology"-the framework of facts and ideas which provide it with 
intellectual support; it should be able, with our increased knowledge of mind, to define our sense of right and 
wrong more clearly so as to provide a better moral support; it should be able to focus the feeling of sacredness 
onto fitter objects, instead of worshiping supernatural rulers, so as to provide truer spiritual support, to sanctify 
the higher manifestations of human nature in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, 
and to emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary 
Vision," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago 
Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.260)

5/02/02
"Thus the evolutionary vision, first opened up to us by Charles Darwin a century back, illuminates our existence 
in a simple, but almost overwhelming, way. It exemplifies the truth that truth is great and will prevail, and the 
greater truth that truth will set us free. Evolutionary truth frees us from subservient fear of the unknown and 
supernatural and exhorts us to face this new freedom with courage tempered with wisdom and hope tempered 
with knowledge. It shows us our destiny and our duty." (Huxley J.S., "The Evolutionary Vision," in Tax S. & 
Callender C., eds., "Evolution After Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. 
III, 1960, p.260)

5/02/02
"Enzymes are complex protein molecules and it is impossible to imagine that such a specific compound could 
have been produced by chance, even in a period of up to 300 million years. Professor Quastler has calculated that 
the odds against producing a specific complex molecule on Earth are 1 in 10^301 (10 followed by 301 zeros), 
which is very near to impossible. Other calculations have been made to estimate the chance probability of a DNA 
molecule being produced somewhere in the Universe. If one assumes that there could be 10^20 planets in the 
Universe where life may exist or have existed, then the odds of a complex DNA molecule being formed by chance 
are 1 in 10^415, and these odds lengthen to an astonishing 1 in 10^600 if a longer strand of DNA is postulated. It 
is very hard to imagine even the complex molecular building blocks of life (proteins, enzymes and DNA) being 
formed by chance. And the random abiogenic origin of a simple living cell is approaching the impossible." 
(Brooks J., "Origins of Life," Lion: Tring, Hertfordshire UK, 1985, p.103)

5/02/02
"The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we 
would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it 
didn't look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of 
Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. There were several problems, but the 
principal one was that the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow 
and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where 
one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of 
the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted." (Raup 
D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of 
Natural History: Chicago IL, January 1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp.22-29, pp.22-23).

5/02/02
"To emphasize this let me cite a couple of statements Darwin made in his Origin of Species: At one point 
he observed, "innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in 
countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"; in another place he said, "why is not every geological formation 
and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated 
organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory." Instead of 
finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time, and geologists of the present day actually 
find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no 
change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. And it is not always clear, in fact 
it's rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, 
biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field 
Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History: Chicago IL, January 1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, 
pp.22-29, p.23)

6/02/02
"Another more fundamental and intractable problem that strikes at the very heart of the RNA world hypothesis 
is, as Ferris himself admits, the prebiotic formation of the nucleotide units. At first glance, this doesn't really seem 
to be too much of a problem. An RNA nucleotide is made up of a phosphorylated ribose sugar linked to one of 
the four RNA bases, and a variety of plausible prebiotic synthetic routes for creating all of these have been 
suggested. ... But would these kinds of reactions have been plausible on the early Earth? One scientist who 
thinks not is Robert Shapiro at New York University, US. He argues that many of the prebiotic routes suggested 
for the synthesis of nucleotide bases are so artificial that it is unlikely that they ever took place on the early 
Earth, and that, even if they did, any yields from the reactions would have been so small and the products would 
have decayed so rapidly that there would have been little chance of them getting together to form nucleotides. 
For instance, the adenine nucleotide, adenosine, can theoretically be produced entirely abiotically. However, 
according to Shapiro, ribose can only be derived from formaldehyde in relatively small yields, and a whole bunch 
of closely related products are produced as well; this is also the case for the synthesis of adenine from ammonia 
and hydrogen cyanide. To produce adenosine abiotically in the laboratory, however, prebiotic chemists extract 
ribose and adenine from the other compounds, and react them together under optimum conditions. As Shapiro 
says in his recent book Planetary Dreams: 'It would be much more realistic to heat together the entire 
formaldehyde and cyanide products, which would furnish the mother of all messes. Better yet, the chemist 
should simply mix the cyanide and formaldehyde starting materials. But we know what happens in that case; the 
two substances have a great affinity for each other and their reaction takes off in a direction that bears no 
relation to life as we know it'. At least a theoretical prebiotic synthesis path has been developed for adenosine: 
no such path has yet been defined for the pyrimidine nucleotides." (Evans, J., "It's alive isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.46)

7/02/02
"Clearly, I believe in this interdisciplinary exercise, and I accept the enlightenment that intelligent outsiders can 
bring to the puzzles of a discipline. The differences in approach are so fascinating- and each valid in its own 
realm. Philosophers will dissect the logic of an argument, an exercise devoid of empirical content, well past the 
point of glaze over scientific eyes (and here I blame scientists for their parochiality, for all the world's empirics 
cannot save an argument falsely formulated)." (Gould, S.J. "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge." Book Review 
of "Darwin on Trial." By Phillip E. Johnson, Regnery Gateway: Washington DC, 1991. Scientific American, Vol. 
267, No.1, July 1992, pp.92-95, p.92)

7/02/02
"Bethell's argument has a curious ring for most practicing scientists. We are always ready to watch a theory fall 
under the impact of new data, but we do not expect a great and influential theory to collapse from a logical error 
in its formulation. Virtually every empirical scientist has a touch of the Philistine. Scientists tend to ignore 
academic philosophy as an empty pursuit. Surely, any intelligent person can think straight by intuition. Yet 
Bethell cites no data at all in sealing the coffin of natural selection, only an error in Darwin's reasoning: "Darwin 
made a mistake sufficiently serious to undermine his theory. And that mistake has only recently been recognized 
as such.... At one point in his argument, Darwin was misled." Although I will try to refute Bethell, I also deplore 
the unwillingness of scientists to explore seriously the logical structure of arguments. Much of what passes for 
evolutionary theory is as vacuous as Bethell claims. Many great theories are held together by chains of dubious 
metaphor and analogy. Bethell has correctly identified the hogwash surrounding evolutionary theory." (Gould 
S.J., "Darwin's Untimely Burial," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 
1991, reprint, pp.39-40)

7/02/02
"The three chapters collectively argue that Homo sapiens possesses a small number of unique qualities 
that are present in no other animal. Uniqueness is common in biology. Snakes shed their skin, dogs do not; bears 
hibernate, cats do not; monkeys form dominance hierarchies, mice do not. Humans experience guilt, shame, and 
pride, anticipate events far in the future, invent metaphors, speak a language with a grammar, and reason about 
hypothetical circumstances. No other species, including apes, possesses this set of talents." (Kagan J., "Three 
Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.9)

8/02/02
"More philosophical works have been written on morality than on any, other human quality because it is a 
unique and distinctive characteristic of our species. Every species inherits potentialities that make the acquisition 
of particular competencies easy. Talking comes readily to humans, while reading usually requires special 
tutoring. Assigning the symbolic labels good or bad to experience also comes easily to humans, and this 
disposition permeates our actions, beliefs, and emotions. ... Social scientists have awarded a little too much 
power to the obvious desire to maximize self-interest and attain sensory pleasure and not quite enough to the 
universal need to be kind, loyal, and loving. This chapter does not compete with philosophical works by 
defending one set of ethics over another, for I ask only why humans hold any ethical position at all." (Kagan J., 
"Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, pp.6-7)

9/02/02
"But put against the background of the popular, traditional alternative which Darwin's six predecessors meant it 
to displace-the theory of providential or guided or automatic progress-this idea takes on a sinister complexion. 
For the 'nature' it calls upon to undertake the work of selection, unlike man, has no purpose and no goal. 
Variation likewise being by chance has no purpose and no goal. The changes nature favours are not predestined 
to be improvements. ... Progress is not inevitable. Instead of a convergence on desirable ends we are offered only 
a divergence, a horribly erratic divergence, from unknown beginnings. Instead of a spiritual guidance there is a 
material determinism in whose operation blind accident plays a necessary and morally meaningless part. Thus the 
conflict between natural selection and automatic or inherent or providential direction is deeper and more abiding 
than the parallel conflict between evolution and creation. And it is far more important today. For the argument 
about evolution or creation concerns the dead past; but the argument about selection or direction concerns us 
now: it concerns the present we know and the future we expect." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," 
Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.42-43)

9/02/02
"There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humiliate them. There is enough obscurity 
to blind the reprobate and enough light to condemn them and deprive them of excuse." (Pascal B., "Pensees," 
236, [1670], Krailsheimer A.J., Transl., Penguin: London, Revised edition, 1966, p.73)

9/02/02
"And finally on the last page of his book [Descent of Man] Darwin concludes that although 'social instincts' 
which afforded the basis for development of the moral sense may be safely attributed' to natural selection, yet 
'the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the 
reasoning powers, religion, etc.' (II, 404). Where are we now? In the last sentence Darwin, with the phrase 
'directly or indirectly', slips into a double disguise. He puts together without distinction the known transmission 
of culture, religion, etc. and the unknown inheritance of acquired characters as the joint antithesis of natural 
selection. Thus, even the parson might suppose that his preaching contributed to evolution; and contributed 
moreover to a particularly progressive and hopeful form of evolution. Was the confusion here a confusion in 
Darwin's mind? Did he imagine he had any evidence for his conclusion? If so why did he not quote it? It would 
have been epoch- making. Or was he, on the contrary, unconsciously introducing confusion to throw ignorant 
people of the scent: to keep the serious discussion between people who were interested in the scientific 
problem? The immediate context favours this view as well as the autobiography." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's 
Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, pp.46-47)

10/02/02
"One of the most fundamental claims in the Darwinian theory of evolution is that natural selection provides the 
only satisfactory explanation for adaptation. The Darwinian, therefore, must show that the alternatives to natural 
selection either do not work or are scientifically unacceptable. Let us consider the natural theologians' 
supernatural explanation first. We can accept that an omnipotent, supernatural agent could create welladapted 
living things-in that sense the explanation works. However, it has two defects. First, supernatural explanations 
for natural phenomena are scientifically useless. Second, the supernatural Creator is not explanatory. The 
problem requires us to explain the existence of adaptation in the world, but a supernatural Creator already 
possesses this property. Omnipotent beings are themselves well-designed, adaptively complex, entities. Thus, 
the thing we are trying to explain has been built into the explanation. Positing a God merely invites the question 
of how such a highly adaptive and well-designed thing could, in its turn, have come into existence. Theological 
sophistry about the perfect simplicity of God and the inexplicability of the First Cause can be ignored here: the 
problem is to explain adaptive complexity. The first alternative to natural selection, therefore, is a viciously 
circular argument, and unscientific." (Ridley M., "Evolution," Blackwell: Cambridge MA, Second Edition, 1996, 
p.339)

10/02/02
"Mutations are known to occur spontaneously - i.e. without our doing anything deliberately to cause them - with 
low frequency. It was shown by Muller that their frequency is greatly increased by X-rays. Since that time, a 
number of chemical substance, have been found which increase the frequency of mutation. More important, 
different chemical and physical agents produce different types of change. There is nothing particularly surprising 
about this. For example, one class of mutagenic substances is the so-called 'base analogues'. These are molecules 
which bear a close chemical similarity to one of the four bases, adenine, thymine, guanine, or cytosine. When 
such analogues are present, a replicating DNA molecule may incorporate one of them instead of the 
corresponding base, the result being a mutation. Thus a particular analogue would be expected to cause 
mutations at particular sites within the gene, and this has been shown by Freese to be the case in viruses. Thus it 
is no longer possible to think of mutations as `random'. But we can abandon the concept of the randomness of 
mutation without accepting Lamarckism, and while continuing to hold that it is selection and not mutation which 
determines the direction of evolution." (Maynard Smith, J., "The Theory of Evolution," [1958], Cambridge 
University Press/Canto: Cambridge UK, Third edition, Reprinted, 1993, pp.80-81)

10/02/02
"Even proponents of the RNA world hypothesis admit that there are major problems with the prebiotic synthesis 
of RNA nucleotides. Writing in The RNA world, Gerald Joyce, a professor in the departments of 
chemistry and molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute, California, US, and Leslie Orgel of the Salk 
Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, US, state: 'Scientists interested in the origins of life seem to divide 
neatly into two classes. The first, usually but not always molecular biologists, believe that RNA must have been 
the first replicating molecule and that chemists are exaggerating the difficulties of nucleotide synthesis. The 
second group of scientists are much more pessimistic. They believe that the de novo appearance of 
oligonucleotides on the primitive Earth would have been a near miracle. Time will tell which is correct'." (Evans, J., 
"It's alive - isn't it?," 
Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, pp.46-47)

10/02/02
"The first point to make about Darwin's theory is that it is no longer a theory, but a fact. No serious scientist 
would deny the fact that evolution has occurred, just as he would not deny the fact that the earth goes around 
the sun. Darwin's great contributions were, first, gathering enormous masses of detailed facts that did not make 
sense unless evolution had occurred and, second, discovering the principle of natural selection, and so 
providing a mechanism of evolution that is intelligible on scientific grounds without calling in any external 
agency." (Huxley J.S., "`At Random': A Television Preview," in Tax S. & Callender C., eds., "Evolution After 
Darwin: Issues in Evolution," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Vol. III, 1960, p.41).

10/02/02
"Orthodox neo-Darwinians extrapolate these even and continuous changes to the most profound structural 
transitions in the historyof life: by a long series of insensibly graded intermediate steps, birds are linked to 
reptiles, fish with jaws to their jawless ancestors. Macroevolution (major structural transition) is nothing more 
than microevolution (flies in bottles) extended. If black moths can displace white moths in a century, then reptiles 
can become birds in a few million years by the smooth and sequential summation of countless changes. The shift 
of gene frequencies in local populations is an adequate model for all evolutionary processes - or so the current 
orthodoxy states." (Gould S.J., "The Return of the Hopeful Monster," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections 
in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, pp.155-156)

10/02/02
"The strict version, with its emphasis on copious, minute, random variation molded with excruciating but 
persistent slowness by natural selection, also implied that all events of large-scale evolution (macroevolution) 
were the gradual, accumulated product of innumerable steps, each a minute adaptation to changing conditions 
within a local population. This "extrapolationist" theory denied any independence to macroevolution and 
interpreted all large-scale evolutionary events (origin of basic designs, long-term trends, patterns of extinction 
and faunal turnover) as slowly accumulated microevolution (the study of small-scale changes within species)." 
(Gould S.J., "Prologue," in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History", [1983], 
Penguin: London, 1986, reprint, p.13)

10/02/02
"Finally, the universal emergence of a moral sense at the end of the second year is so striking to those who study 
children that its significance is difficult to ignore. A scientist who studied only college students might agree with 
a statement once made by Van Quine, one of the world's most respected philosophers, that human conscience is 
essentially a socially constructed product built from slaps and sugarplums. But no one who has seen a three-
year-old's face become tense as she fails a difficult task, or heard a small child say `Yukky' to a dirty cloth lying 
on a laboratory floor, would find this argument persuasive." (Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard 
University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, p.10)

10/02/02
"There is simply no denying the breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in nature. Time and again, 
biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see 
that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of 
Mother Nature's creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the name of his colleague 
Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls `Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.'" (Dennett D.C., 
"Darwin 's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, reprint, p.74)

10/02/02
"The first words chosen to name natural phenomena are always too general. Air, fire, water, and earth, which 
were conceived as essences, are not the four fundamental forms matter assumes. Darwin's concept of natural 
selection failed to distinguish between traits that persisted over generations because they were adaptive and 
traits that persisted simply because they were not maladaptive. Nor did Darwin award significance to the 
difference between a gradual extinction that was the result of the inheritance of maladaptive qualities and sudden 
extinction caused by an unusual ecological event, like a prolonged drought or a large asteroid striking the earth." 
(Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998, pp.76-77)

11/02/02
"Organisms are not optimizing machines; they are historical objects, constrained by inherited Bauplane, modes of 
development, and mechanical properties of building materials. The answer to why theoretical morphospace is so 
empty in some places and so chock full in others (surely the cardinal question for a science of form) may have 
less to do with good performance in the Newtonian sense than with historical and developmental constraints. 
We need to pay much more attention to the maligned tradition of classical continental European morphology 
with its emphasis on constraints, history and the formal (rather than functional)
properties of design and its generation." (Gould S.J., "The promise of paleobiology as a nomothetic, evolutionary 
discipline," Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, pp.96-118, p.111)

11/02/02
"The idea of purpose or ultimate design therefore does not deny the reality or importance of the material and 
efficient causes studied by science, but it does suggest that intelligence might be the source of the formal causes 
in nature, the natural boundaries that shape the direction taken by nature's efficient causes. A convinced 
`teleologist,' Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield, expressed it thus, `Some lack of general philosophical acumen 
must be suspected when it is not fully understood that teleology is in no way inconsistent with-is rather 
necessarily involved with-a complete system of natural causation. Every teleological system implies a complete 
"causo- mechanistic" explanation as its instrument.'" (Warfield B.B., "A Review of Darwinism Today, by Vernon 
L. Kellogg," Princeton Theological Review, 1908, pp.640-50). (Wilcox D.L.*, "How Blind the Watchmaker?," in 
Templeton J.M, ed., "Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator," Continuum: New York NY, 1994, 
p.169)

11/02/02
"To understand what Aristotle means, we must take account of what he says about causes. There are, according 
to him, four kinds of causes, which were called, respectively, material, formal, efficient, and final. Let us take again 
the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of 
the statue to be produced, the efficient cause is the contact of the chisel with the marble, and the final cause is 
the end that the sculptor has in view. In modern terminology, the word 'cause' would be confined to the efficient 
cause." (Russell B., "History of Western Philosophy", George Allen & Unwin: London, 1961, p.181)

13/02/02
"Schwartz ignores the fact that homeobox genes are selector genes. They can do nothing if the genes regulated 
by them are not there. It is these genes that specify in detail the adaptive structure of the organs. To be sure, 
turning on a homeobox gene at the wrong place can result in the appearance of an ectopic organ, but only if the 
genes for that organ are present in the same individual. It is totally wrong to imply that an eye could be produced 
by a macromutation when no eye was ever present in the lineage before. Homeotic mutations that reshuffle parts 
do happen, and sometimes they may have led to fixation of real evolutionary novelties, but this does not mean 
that such changes are implied in the majority of speciations. In fact, macromutations of this sort are probably 
frequently maladaptive, in contrast to the vast number of past and present species-not to mention the fact that 
morphological differences between related species can be minute." (Szathmary E., "When the means do no not 
justify the end," review of "Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species," by Jeffrey H. 
Schwartz, Wiley,: 1999, in Nature, Vol. 399, 24 June 1999, p.745)

13/02/02
"Few opinions of men are sacrosanct, and Evolution is merely one view of how the world of Nature reached its 
present status. The loud and persistent attestations that it is not theory but "fact" merely serve to indicate how 
shaky some of its foundations are." (Shute E.*, "Flaws in the Theory of Evolution," [1962], Baker: Grand Rapids 
MI, 1980 , Eighth Printing, p.230)

14/02/02
"In the world of ideas dogma focuses thinking. In a given domain it acts to eliminate or suppress alternative 
habits of thought. Successful scientific ideas often begin life as playful and potentially fruitful possibilities 
(circumventing the received teachings) because they appear to solve a pressing problem; they mature into 
acceptance and then freeze over, if you like, into dogma. Really useful dogmas allow us to economise our time 
and effort in not constantly reinventing the wheel. Scientific dogmas' can be very useful and are only given up 
after vigorous and often sustained resistance. They are strongly defended-often literally to the death of the main 
intellectual players-precisely because they have allowed the fruitful development of a successful school of 
thought and have usually been of practical significance to mankind." (Steele E.J., Lindley R.A. & Blanden R.V., 
"Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm," Allen & Unwin: St 
Leonards NSW, Australia, 1998, pp.xviii-xix)

14/02/02
"It is hard to overstate the impact that these physical images have had in shaping our world view. The doctrine 
that the physical Universe consists of inert matter locked into a sort of gigantic deterministic clockwork has 
penetrated all branches of human inquiry. Materialism dominates biology, for example. Living organisms are 
regarded as nothing more than complicated collections of particles, each being blindly pulled and pushed by its 
neighbours. Richard Dawkins, an eloquent champion of biological materialism, describes human beings (and 
other living entitles) as 'gene machines'. Thus, organisms are treated as automata. ... There is no doubt that the 
Newtonian world view, with its doctrine of materialism and the clockwork universe, has contributed immensely to 
the advance of science by providing a highly intuitive framework within which to study a wide range of 
phenomena. But there is equally no doubt that it has also contributed in large part to alienating human beings 
from the Universe they inhabit. ... People feel a sense of helplessness; they are merely 'cogs' in a machine that will 
lumber on regardless of their feelings or actions. Many people have rejected scientific values because they 
regard materialism as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automata and leaves no 
room for free will or creativity. These people can take heart: materialism is dead." (Davies P.C.W. & Gribbin J., 
"The Matter Myth: Beyond Chaos and Complexity," [1991], Penguin: London, 1992, reprint, pp.6-7)

14/02/02
"DNA governs the operation of every cell in our bodies. A cell is a busy place, a city of large and small molecules 
all constructed according to information encoded in DNA. The metaphor of a city may seem even more farfetched 
than that of a skyscraper for an invisibly small cell until you consider that a cell has room for more than a 
hundred million million atoms; that is plenty of space for millions of different molecules, since even the largest 
molecules in a cell are made of only a few hundred million atoms. DNA ensures that a cell is not just a chemical 
soup but a molecular city with a center from which critical information flows, a molecular version of King David's 
Jerusalem. That walled city, with its supply of food and water entering through special portals and channels, had 
a great temple at the center and a book at the very center of the temple. A cell's version of the temple is the 
nucleus, a membrane wrapped receptacle enclosing the cell's DNA. The nucleus is also the hub from which 
portions of the text are delivered to the cell, just as the sacred scripts were read to the people of Jerusalem from 
the entrances of the temple. ... If a cell were as big as the Old City of Jerusalem, each chemical "letter" in the cell's 
DNA text - consisting of a few hundred atoms - would be about as big as letter in a word of any familiar book. Yet 
every part of the cell, no matter how complex its form or function, is made according to information contained in 
the DNA folded into its nucleus. To appreciate this triumph of molecular origami, consider that the DNA in one 
human cell, if unwound and straightened out, would be a pair of molecules each about one yard long. A yard of 
DNA is a hundred million times longer than it is wide, and this exquisite thinness is the key to its ability to fit 
inside the nucleus. The pair of yard-long DNAs in a human cell are so slender that about ten billion copies, laid 
side by side like the wires of a telephone cable, would fit inside a waist-length human hair. That is about as many 
pairs of human DNA as there are people on the planet today; a genetic archive of our entire species could 
therefore be tightly packed into one long human hair if we had the means (and the desire) to do it." (Pollack R., 
"Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA," [1994], Penguin Books: London, 1995, reprint, pp.18-19)

15/02/02
"Mayr, professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard University, asserts that the term `evolutionary theory' should 
be abandoned. Evolution, he says, `is a fact so overwhelmingly established that it has become irrational to call it 
a theory.'" (Anonymous, "The Editors Recommend." Book "What Evolution Is." By Ernst Mayr, Basic Books, 
New York, 2001, Scientific American, February, 2002, p.85. 
http://www.sciam.com/books/?section=review&issue_date=01-feb-2002).

15/02/02
"Nevertheless, Darwin's theory still had some serious imperfections that prevented its being accepted by many 
students of evolution. The theory explained why unfit or inadaptive types of organisms tend to be eliminated, 
but it did not seem adequately to explain the much more important origin of more fit, better adapted organisms. It 
also failed to explain why evolution is not completely adaptive-why different types of organisms may evolve 
even though their relationships with the environment seem to be exactly the same, why adaptation is seldom or 
never perfect, and why non-adaptive characters (those not involved in adaptation) and inadaptive characters 
(those opposed to harmonious adaptation) do often arise in evolution. These features of evolution were not well 
explained by the older forms of Darwinian theory and their reality was abundantly demonstrated by critics of 
Darwin." (Simpson G.G., "Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million 
Years of History," [1951], The Natural History Library, Doubleday & Co: Garden City NY, 1961, reprint, p.293)

16/02/02
"The debate on evolution between the creationists and the neo-Darwinists is not just sterile, it misses the central 
issue, which is that neo-Darwinism is wrong and dangerous. It is promoting and misguiding a runaway 
technology that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. It reinforces a worldview that undermines every 
single moral value that makes us human. It is also obstructing and preventing the necessary shift to holistic 
ecological sciences that can connect to the organic revolution rising from the grassroots all over the world, 
which can truly regenerate the earth and revitalize the human spirit." (Ho M-W., "The End of Bad Science and 
Beginning Again with Life," Conference on "The Limit of Natural Selection", French Senate, Paris, March 18, 
2000, in Institute of Science in Society, London, 2000.
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/bad.htm)

17/02/02
"In days long gone, the second law of thermodynamics (which predated the first law) was regarded as perhaps 
the most perfect and unassailable law in physics. It was even supposed to have philosophical import: It has been 
hailed for providing a proof of the existence of God (who started the universe off in a state of low entropy, from 
which it is constantly degenerating); conversely, it has been rejected as being incompatible with dialectical 
materialism and the perfectibility of the human condition. ... No exception to the second law of thermodynamics 
has ever been found-not even a tiny one. Like conservation of energy (the "first" law), the existence of a law so 
precise and so independent of details of models must have a logical foundation that is independent of the fact 
that matter is composed of interacting particles." (Lieb E.H. & Yngvason J., "A Fresh Look at Entropy and the 
Second Law of Thermodynamics," Physics Today, April 2000, pp.32-37, p.32)

19/02/02
"It is, however, the word "struggle" that has led to most serious misunderstanding of the process of natural 
selection, along with a host of related phrases and ideas, "nature red in fang and claw," "class struggle" as a 
natural and desirable element in societal evolution, and all the rest. "Struggle" inevitably carries the connotation 
of direct and conscious combat. Such combat does occur in nature, to be sure, and it may have some connection 
with differential reproduction. A puma and a deer may struggle, one to kill and the other to avoid being killed. If 
the puma wins, it eats and presumably may thereby be helped to produce offspring, while the deer dies and will 
never reproduce again. Two stags may struggle in rivalry for does and the successful combatant may then 
reproduce while the loser does not. Even such actual struggles may have only slight effects on reproduction, 
although they will, on an average, tend to exercise some selective influence. The deer most likely to be killed by 
the puma is too old to reproduce; if the puma does not get the deer, it will eat something else; the losing stag 
finds other females, or a third enjoys the does while the combat rages between these two." (Simpson G.G., "The 
Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University 
Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, pp.221-222)

19/02/02
"The mystery about sexual reproduction is ... that there is a ... 'cost of halving the chromosome number and not 
being able to double the number of gametes ... what possible advantage there could be to sexual reproduction 
that makes up for this cost and accounts for its persistence. This question has caused some embarrassment to 
evolutionary biologists in the past. Although determined to fit everything into a selective framework and see 
shifting gene frequencies as the basis of all evolutionary events, they were unable to come up with any 
satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon that is at once extremely widespread and also appears to suffer from 
a selective disadvantage of quite enormous (50 per cent)
proportions. Early explanations, that it was 'good for the species' to have the variation that is engendered by the 
mixing and shuffling of sex, had largely to be discarded. It was an attractive idea to think that sexual reproduction 
might result in variation staying in populations so that if the environment suddenly changed, the population 
could 'cope' and have at least some of its members surviving, which a uniform asexual population might fail to do. 
But by the end of the 1960s, the weakness of such arguments was generally realized. .... Populations do not 
harbour deleterious traits against the possibility of future benefit. We cannot expect a trait, to use Sydney 
Brenner's immortal words, to evolve in the Cambrian 'because it might come in handy in the Cretaceous'." 
(Dawkins M.S., "Unravelling Animal Behaviour," Longman: Harlow, Essex UK, 1986, p.135)

19/02/02
"The word "competition," used in discussion here and previously, may also carry anthropomorphic undertones 
and then be subject to some of these same objections. It may, however, and in this connection it must, be 
understood without necessary implication of active competitive behavior. Competition in evolution often or 
usually is entirely passive; It could conceivably occur without the competing forms ever coming into sight or 
contact." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for 
Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.222)

21/02/02
"The study of adaptation seems to show the opposite mode of development. It has already had its Newtonian 
synthesis, but its Galileo and Kepler have not yet appeared. The 'Newtonian synthesis" is the genetical theory of 
natural selection, a logical unification of Mendelism and Darwinism that was accomplished by Fisher, Haldane, 
and Wright more than thirty years ago. For all its formal elegance, however, this theory has provided very limited 
guidance in the work of biologists. Ordinarily it does little more than to give a vague aura of validity to 
conclusions on adaptive evolution and to enable a biologist to refer to goal-directed activities without 
descending into teleology. The inherent strength of the theory is restricted by the paucity of generalizations, 
analogous to Kepler's laws, that can serve on the one hand as summaries of large masses of observations and, 
on the other hand, as logical deductions from the theory." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A 
Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, 
p.20)

21/02/02
"A frequently helpful but not infallible rule is to recognize adaptation in organic systems that show a clear 
analogy with human implements. There are convincing analogies between bird wings and airship wings, between 
bridge suspensions and skeletal suspensions, between the vascularization of a leaf and the water supply of a 
city. In all such examples, conscious human goals have an analogy in the biological goal of survival, and similar 
problems are often resolved by similar mechanisms. Such analogies may forcefully occur to a physiologist at the 
beginning of an investigation of a structure or process and provide a continuing source of fruitful hypotheses. 
At other times the purpose of a mechanism may not be apparent initially, and the search for the goal becomes a 
motivation for further study." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current 
Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.10)

22/02/02
"Any biological mechanism produces at least one effect that can properly be called its goal: vision for the eye or 
reproduction and dispersal for the apple. There may also be other effects, such as the apple's contribution to 
man's economy. In many published discussions it is not at all clear whether an author regards a particular effect 
as the specific function of the causal mechanism or merely as an incidental consequence. In some cases it would 
appear that he has not appreciated the importance of the distinction. In this book I will adhere to a terminological 
convention that may help to reduce this difficulty. Whenever I believe that an effect is produced as the function 
of an adaptation perfected by natural selection to serve that function, I will use terms appropriate to human 
artifice and conscious design. The designation of something as the means or mechanism for a certain 
goal or function or purpose will imply that the machinery involved was fashioned by 
selection for the goal attributed to it." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some 
Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, pp.8-9. Emphasis 
in original).

22/02/02
"The same story could be told for every normal part or activity of every stage in the life history of every species 
in the biota of the Earth, past or present. For the same reason that it was once effective in the theological 
"argument from design," the structure of the vertebrate eye can be used as a dramatic illustration of biological 
adaptation and the necessity for believing that natural selection for effective vision must have operated 
throughout the history of the group." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some 
Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.6)

23/02/02
"The account of evolution given above is based on molecular and historical evidence and on our knowledge of 
the living world as it is today. Many events were postulated without direct evidence. Because of the lack of hard 
evidence, it might be said that the concept of evolution is abstract, theoretical, possibly a figment of the 
imagination. The question therefore arises: can we reproduce evolution in the laboratory? Obviously, we cannot 
do so using long-extinct creatures or large present-day animals. Because evolutionary events take place over 
many generations, it would take centuries to experiment with mice, say. But we can design an experiment 
using fast-reproducing organisms like bacteria or fruitflies." (Dulbecco R., "The Design of Life," Yale University 
Press: New Haven CT, 1987, p.439. Emphasis in original)

23/02/02
"What is the theory of evolution? It is very easy to find out in a vague way, but very difficult to find out in a 
precise way. This is because it is really two theories, the vague theory and the precise theory. The vague theory 
has been abundantly proved, with an overwhelming mass of evidence, so much that it cannot possibly be 
doubted. The precise theory has never been proved at all. However, like relativity, it is accepted as a faith. Vague 
evolution is rather difficult to formulate, because it is vague, but it is extremely easy to see. Any book on biology 
is full of it, and it has been so thoroughly popularized that there is hardly anybody who is not aware of it. It 
points to the striking similarities, in every detail, between the bodies of men and of the apes; to the slightly more 
distant resemblances between men and other mammals, to the duck-billed platypus, which Huxley called "a 
museum of reptilian reminiscence," to the reptiles themselves, to the fish, both bony and cartilaginous, and so on 
and so on, as can be found in many a fine book. It points, too, to the development of the embryo, "climbing up 
the family tree," and to the record of the rocks-there were fish before there were reptiles, reptiles before mammals. 
Whatever this proves-and it would seem to prove that all forms of life are connected in some way-is 
indisputable. But in what way? To answer this question, we need a precise theory. The precise theory of 
evolution is that all forms of life on the earth today came from some original form of life by a series of changes 
which, at every point, were natural and explainable by science. ... Biologists ... by mixing up the vague 
theory of evolution with the precise theory ... give the impression that both have been proved, whereas the 
precise theory is much further from being proved than men are from flying to the moon." (Standen A., "Science Is 
A Sacred Cow," [1950], E.P. Dutton & Co: New York NY, 1958, reprint, pp.101-103. Emphasis in original)

25/02/02
"This debate is of considerable interest for two reasons. On the one hand, it points to some uncertain aspects of 
the concept of evolution, such as the origin of life. On the other hand, it is an important example of how humans 
approach objective truth. A body of facts available to everybody is used by some individuals to build a scientific 
theory they think is above all doubts, but is considered by others as only a fabrication leading to moral turpitude. 
The difference between the two groups lies in their cultural backgrounds and philosophies. There are probably 
few other cases where the same information is used to draw such opposing conclusions." (Dulbecco R., "The 
Design of Life," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1987, p.446)

25/02/02
"But time, and further archaeological discoveries, would tell on the side of evolution. It still remains merely a 
"theory"-by its very nature, its secrets buried in time and its operations agonizingly slow, it can never be 
"proved" the way mechanical principles can." (Macrone M., "A Little Knowledge: What Archimedes Really 
Meant and 80 Other Key Ideas Explained," [1994], Ebury Press: London, 1998, reprint, p.153)

26/02/02
"Yet even today there is no theory of evolution, no set of rules that says under what conditions this or that will 
happen. Natural selection is a very general explanation of how evolution occurs, but not when or why. As with 
any historical process, so many minuscule factors can affect the outcome that prediction is impossible. Two 
worlds, with the same plants, animals, and environment, will over time evolve radically different species (Gould, 
1989). The trajectory of evolution is chaotic. Looking back in time, evolutionists can try to infer what 
environmental factors influenced the development of certain species, but this is little more than speculation. Too 
many factors are involved ever to be sure which the instigating cause was." (Cromer A., "Uncommon Sense: The 
Heretical Nature of Science," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, p.40)

26/02/02
"Thus changes that benefit an individual will tend to be selected and perpetuated. Most changes of this nature 
will be a disadvantage to a member of a species; such changes will therefore usually not be perpetuated, for a 
member of a species which exhibits such a change is likely to lose the battle for life, and will not reproduce. So 
slowly, gradually, a new species comes into existence through random mutation and natural selection of the 
fittest. This is the theory. It has of course never been proved. In fact it could never be proved to be the sole 
mechanism of evolution without a disproof of all other possible mechanisms and without positive evidence of its 
operation." (Montefiore H., "The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, pp.74-75)

26/02/02
"In the case of human evolution, the situation is even more speculative because the fossil evidence is so spotty. 
Every new discovery has the potential for radically changing our views on the subject. This is a very incomplete 
science in which the most basic question What were the selective pressures that favored human intelligence-
remains unanswered. That is, we don't know what natural selection was doing when it invented thinking." 
(Cromer A., "Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1993, 
pp.40-41)

26/02/02
"Biological evolution is necessarily the unbroken continuation of a long process of chemical evolution. It is 
possible to try to reconstitute in the laboratory the conditions that apparently prevailed on earth before the 
appearance of living organisms. Whole series of organic compounds are then seen to form spontaneously. Even 
polymers can arise by chance associations between the subunits. Although inefficient, the reactions required for 
producing the macromolecules characteristic of living organisms really seem to occur without biological 
catalysts. Yet it is difficult to imagine the appearance of an integrated system, however primitive; the origin of an 
organization able to reproduce even badly, even slowly. For the humblest organism, the simplest bacterium, is 
already a coalition of enormous numbers of molecules. It is out of the question for all the pieces to have been 
formed independently in the primeval ocean, to meet by chance one fine day, and suddenly arrange themselves 
in such a complex system." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," [1970], Trans. Spillmann B.E., 
Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, pp.304-305)

27/02/02
"I have never understood how God can be the God of all the earth unless there can be real points of contact with 
him in addition to the Word spoken in Christ. In any case, I come from a Jewish family, and the idea that non-
Christians are so totally blind that they can have no authentic knowledge of God is to me not only obnoxious but 
also disproved by my earlier experience. Nonetheless, the familiar discourse within the Christian church today is 
frequently fideist, speaking in a language of faith which seems to have little relevance to the ordinary workings of 
the world in which we live, and which makes sense only within the charmed circle of Christian believers. This has 
added to the marginalization of the church, against which I have taken up my pen to write this book. If God 
created the universe, then we would expect to see his footsteps within it in a way which can be generally 
recognized by the light of reason." (Montefiore H., "The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, pp.5-6)

27/02/02
"Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly 
underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and 
hourly, all around us, and we can watch. ... Now the Grants' work on Darwin's finches is entering the textbooks 
too. This is one of the most intensive and valuable animal studies ever conducted in the wild; zoologists and 
evolutionists already regard it as a classic. It is the best and most detailed demonstration to date of the power of 
Darwin's process." (Weiner J., "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," Alfred A. Knopf: New 
York NY, 1994, p.9)

27/02/02
"The Grants are leaders of this field, and they are among its ideal representatives. Year after year they go back to 
the most celebrated place in the study of evolution, the place that helped lead the young Darwin to his theory: 
the Galapagos, the Enchanted Islands. There they observe Darwin's finches, the birds that Darwin was the first 
naturalist to collect; the birds whose beaks inspired his first veiled hints about his revolutionary theory; the birds 
whose portraits in textbooks and encyclopedias have now introduced so many generations to Darwinism that 
they have become international symbols of the process, totems of evolution, like the overshot brows and 
cumulous beard of Darwin himself." (Weiner J., "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," 
Alfred A. Knopf: New York NY, 1994, p.9)

27/02/02
"The beak of the finch is an icon of evolution the way the Bohr atom is an icon of modern physics, and the study 
of either one shows us more primal energy and eternal change than our minds are built to take in. Yet like the 
vista of the atoms, the vista of evolution in action, of evolution in the flesh, has enormous implications for our 
sense of reality, of what life is, and also for our sense of power, of what we can do with life." (Weiner J., "The 
Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," Alfred A. Knopf: New York NY, 1994, p.112)

27/02/02
"It is difficult for a nonscientist to appreciate the overriding importance to the researcher of priority of discovery. 
Credit in science goes only for originality, for being the first to discover something. With rare exceptions, there 
are no rewards for being second. Discovery without priority is a bitter fruit. In the clash of rival claims and 
competing theories, a scientist often takes active measures to ensure that his ideas are noticed, and that it is 
under his name that a new finding is recognized. The desire to win credit, to gain the respect of one's peers, is a 
powerful motive for almost all scientists. From the earliest days of science, the thirst for recognition has brought 
with it the temptation to `improve' a little on the truth, or even to invent data out of whole cloth, in order to make 
a theory prevail." (Broad W. & Wade N., "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," 
Simon and Schuster: New York NY, 1982, p.24)

27/02/02
"For want of vestiges to examine, biology is reduced to making conjectures. It tries to arrange the problems in 
series, to individualize the objects and formulate questions that can be answered by experiments. Which of the 
polymers, nucleic acid or protein, came first? What is the origin of the genetic code? The first question leads one 
to speculate whether anything vaguely like a living organism would be conceivable without both types of 
polymer. The second raises problems both of evolution and of logic. Of evolution, because univocal 
correspondence between each group of three nucleic-acid sub units and each protein sub-unit cannot have 
arisen at a single stroke. Of logic, because it is difficult to perceive why this particular correspondence was 
adopted rather than another; why one nucleic-acid triplet 'means' a certain protein sub-unit and not another. 
Perhaps primitive organizations had some constraints of structure we know nothing about: it would then be the 
adjustment of molecular conformations that would have imposed, if not the whole system at least some of its 
equivalences. But again perhaps there was no constraint at all: then it would have been purely by chance that the 
equivalences were produced and persisted afterwards." (Jacob F., The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity," 
[1970], Trans. Spillmann B.E., Pantheon: New York NY, 1982, reprint, pp.305-306)

27/02/02
"Darwin's independence of other people's ideas led him (and his admirers)
to think of himself as a man of ideas. It led him to copy out the observations from his predecessor's writings while 
ignoring their theories. His own methods nourished his own illusions. He began more and more to grudge praise 
to those who had in fact paved the way for him. We see this very well if we compare him with his contemporaries. 
Chambers and Naudin both praised Lamarck at the same time that both of them rejected him. Darwin damned 
Lamarck and also his grandfather for being very ill-dressed fellows at the same moment that he was engaged on 
stealing their clothes. He ridicules Lamarck's speculations and caps them with his own. He scorns Buffon's 
'fluctuating opinions' while he himself is fluctuating from one edition to another, even from one chapter to 
another. And fluctuating with an opportunism which he judiciously strives to conceal." (Darlington C.D., 
"Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, p.62)

27/02/02
"The idea that Darwinism's rapid triumph was solely scientific without regard to his and others' courting of public 
opinion, is a historical myth that assures us of the power of science and its victory on the merits of evidence 
regardless of ideology, religion, or social mores. It is the same with the myth of Huxley's triumph over 
Wilberforce. The culture of science and science historians have created a myth which fits very well a history that 
depicts the intellectual, even moral, superiority of science." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and 
Misuses of a Theory," The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, p.xiv)

28/02/02
"In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; but who ever objected to chemists 
speaking of the elective affinities of the various elements?-and yet an acid cannot strictly be said to elect the 
base with which it in preference combines. It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or 
Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? 
Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary 
for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the 
aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. 
With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten." (Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by 
Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, 
p.81)

28/02/02
"Whereas Darwin emphasized that only certain organisms survive to reproduce, modern evolutionists emphasize 
differential reproduction. Certain organisms can acquire a greater share of available resources; if they have the 
ability to reproduce, then their chances of successful reproduction are greater than those that are not as well 
equipped to capture resources. (Mader S.S., "Biology," [1985], Wm. C. Brown Co: Dubuque IA, Third Edition, 
1990, p.287)

28/02/02
"Natural selection can be defined simply as the differential reproduction of alternative genetic variants, 
determined by the fact that some variants increase the chances of survival and reproduction of their carriers 
relative to the carriers of other variants. Natural selection may be due to differential survival or differential 
fertility, or both." (Ayala F.J. & Kiger J.A. Jr., "Modern Genetics," [1980], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, 
Second Edition, 1984, p.800)

28/02/02
"Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the 
history of life can be explained by purely materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of 
differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the 
mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A 
Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, 
reprint, p.343)

28/02/02
"Like most revolutionary ideas, social Darwinism was a highly malleable concept; it was easily interpreted to 
support very different values, and that is exactly what occurred. Second, social Darwinism was empirical 
an attribute that gave it credibility, especially in America and Germany, two cultures which were quite taken with 
science and technology. Third, social Darwinism easily appealed to the educated middle and upper classes, 
whose social and economic superiority it explained in terms of scientific law. Finally, the idea ostensibly was 
fairly straightforward and without moral complexities and burdens. Social Darwinism had these attributes while 
retaining the imprimatur of scientific truth. This last point also explains why different groups have adopted one or 
two of the three myths discussed in this book." (Caudill E., "Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a 
Theory," The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville TN, 1997, p.xiii. Emphasis in original)

28/02/02
"In Hitler's eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he 
declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest. 'Taken to 
its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.' From political 
considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by 
persecution. For this reason he was more circumspect than some of his followers, like Rosenberg and Bormann, 
in attacking the Church publicly. But, once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy 
the influence of the Christian Churches. 'The evil that is gnawing our vitals,' he remarked in February 1942, 'is our 
priests, of both creeds. I can't at present give them the answer they've been asking for but ... it's all written down 
in my big book. The time will come when I'll settle my account with them.... They'll hear from me all right. I shan't 
let myself be hampered with judicial samples.'" (Bullock A., "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny," [1952], Odhams Books: 
London, Revised Edition, 1964, p.389)

28/02/02
"Hitler's belief in his own destiny held him back from a thoroughgoing atheism. 'The Russians,' he remarked on 
one occasion, 'were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It's 
a fact that we're feeble creatures and that a creative force exists.' ... What interested Hitler was power, and his 
belief in Providence or Destiny was only a projection of his own sense of power. He had no feeling or 
understanding for either the spiritual side of human life or its emotional, affective side. Emotion to him was the 
raw material of power. The pursuit of power cast its harsh shadow like a blight over the whole of his life. " 
(Bullock A., "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny," [1952], Odhams Books: London, Revised Edition 1964, p.390).

28/02/02
"The truth is that, in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist. `The dogma of 
Christianity,' he declared in one of his wartime conversations, gets worn away before the advances of science.... 
Gradually the myths crumble All that is left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and 
the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that 
the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will 
be convicted of absurdity.... The man who lives in communion with nature necessarily finds himself in opposition 
to the Churches, and that's why they're heading for ruin for science is bound to win." (Bullock, 1964, p.389).

28/02/02
"The Leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigour of 
its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is 
regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary 
destiny of its people. He has brought into modern life the tribal and evolutionary mentality of prehistoric times. 
Hitler has confronted the statesmen of the world with an evolutionary problem of an unprecedented magnitude. 
What is the world to do with a united aggressive tribe numbering eighty millions!" (Keith A., "The Behaviour of 
Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], 
Watts & Co: London, Third Impression, 1947, p.8)

28/02/02
"Hitler is also a eugenist. Germans who suffer from hereditable imperfections of mind or of body must be 
rendered infertile, so that as `the strong may not be plagued by the weak.' Sir Francis Galton, the founder of 
eugenics, taught a somewhat similar evolutionary doctrine-namely, that if our nation was to prosper we must give 
encouragement to the strong rather than to the weak; a saying which may be justified by evolution, but not by 
ethics as recognized and practised by civilized peoples. The liberties of German women are to be sacrificed; they 
must devote their activities to their households, especially to the sacred duty of raising succeeding generations. 
The birth-rate was stimulated by bounties and subsidies, so that the German tribe might grow in numbers and in 
strength. In all these matters the Nazi doctrine is evolutionist." (Keith, A., "The Behaviour of Germany 
Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], Watts & Co: 
London, Third Impression, 1947, p.9)

28/02/02
"Hitler has sought on every occasion and in every way to heighten the national consciousness of the German 
people-or, what is the same thing, to make them racially conscious; to give them unity of spirit and unity of 
purpose. Neighbourly approaches of adjacent nations are and were repelled; the German people were deliberately 
isolated. Cosmopolitanism, liberality of opinion, affectation of foreign manners and dress, were unsparingly 
condemned. The old tribal bonds (love of the Fatherland, feeling of mutual kinship), the bonds of "soil and 
blood," became "the main plank in the National-Social programme." "Germany was for the Germans" was another 
plank. Foreign policy was "good or bad according to its beneficial or harmful effects on the German Volk-now or 
hereafter." "Charity and humility are only for home consumption"-a statement in which Hitler gives an exact 
expression of the law which limits sympathy to its tribe." Humanitarianism is an evil ... a creeping poison." "The 
most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. 
Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs." (Keith A., "The Behaviour of Germany 
Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], Watts & Co: 
London, Third Impression, 1947, pp.9-10. Ellipses in original)

28/02/02
"I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany-methods 
of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a 
Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result." (Keith A., "The Behaviour 
of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942," in "Essays on Human Evolution," [1946], 
Watts & Co: London, Third Impression, 1947, p.10).
[top]

March
1/03/02
"This means that the materials of our proposed stock taking will be diverse: biography, criticism, history, 
philosophy-all converging on the same point, which is the dominance of materialism. Some of the biographical 
connections are of course well known. It is a commonplace that Marx felt his own work to be the exact parallel of 
Darwin's. He even wished to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to the author of The Origin of 
Species." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Doubleday Anchor: Garden City 
NY, Second Edition, 1958, p.7-8)

2/03/02
"There are, of course, degrees of difference in evaluation of successes, from healthy skepticism to confidence, 
that the final word has been said, and there are still some among the biologists who feel that much of the fabric of 
theory accepted by the majority today is actually false and who say so. For the most part, the opinions of the 
dissenters have been given little credence. This group has formed a vocal, but little heard, minority." (Olson E.C., 
"Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution," in Tax S., ed., "Evolution After Darwin," Vol. I, "The Evolution of 
Life: Its Origin, History and Future," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, 1960, p.523)

3/03/02
"There exists, as well, a generally silent group of students engaged in biological pursuits who tend to disagree 
with much of the current thought but say and write little because they are not particularly interested, do not see 
that controversy over evolution is of any particular importance, or are so strongly in disagreement that it seems 
futile to undertake the monumental task of controverting the immense body of information and theory that exists 
in the formulation of modern thinking. It is, of course, difficult to judge the size and composition of this silent 
segment, but there is no doubt that the numbers are not in considerable. Wrong or right as such opinion may be, 
its existence is important and cannot be ignored or eliminated as a force in the study of evolution." (Olson E.C., 
"Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution," in Tax S., ed., "Evolution After Darwin," Vol. I, "The Evolution of 
Life: Its Origin, History and Future," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, 1960, p.523)

4/03/02
"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus 
catching, like a whale, insects in the water. [Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were 
constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of 
bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and 
larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale]." (Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by 
Means of Natural Selection," [1859], First Edition, Penguin: London, 1985, reprint, p.215. The words in square 
brackets were removed by Darwin in subsequent editions.)

5/03/02
"Consider the engineering problem that mitosis must solve. Identical chromatids, called sister chromatids, the 
result of chromosomal replication, must separate so that each goes into a different daughter cell (see fig. 3.3). 
These chromatids are the visible manifestation of the chromosomal replication that has taken place in the S phase 
of the cell cycle. The chromatids are initially held together; each will be called a chromosome when it separates 
and becomes independent. Each of the two daughter cells then ends up with a chromosome complement identical 
to that of the parent cell. Mitosis is nature's elegant process to achieve that end-surely an engineering marvel." 
(Tamarin R.H., "Principles of Genetics," International Edition, [1996], McGraw-Hill: New York NY, Seventh 
Edition, 2002, p.52)

5/03/02
"MEIOSIS Gamete formation presents an entirely new engineering problem to be solved. To form gametes in 
animals (and, for the most part, to form spores in plants), a diploid organism with two copies of each chromosome 
must form daughter cells that have only one copy of each chromosome. In other words, the genetic material must 
be reduced by half so that when gametes recombine to form zygotes, the original number of chromosomes is 
restored, not doubled. If we were to try to engineer this task, we would first need to be able to recognize 
homologous chromosomes We could then push one member of each pair into one daughter cell and the other 
into the other daughter cell. If we were unable to recognize homologues, we would not he able to ensure that 
each daughter cell received one and only one member of each pair The cell solves this problem by pairing up 
homologous chromosomes during an extended prophase. The spindle apparatus then separates members of the 
homologous chromosome pairs, just as it separates sister chromatids during mitosis. But there is one 
complication. As in mitosis, cells entering meiosis have already replicated their chromosomes. Therefore, two 
nuclear divisions without an intervening chromosome replication are necessary to produce haploid gametes or 
spores. Meiosis is, then, a two-division process that produces four cells from each original parent cell. The two 
divisions are known as meiosis I and meiosis II." (Tamarin R.H., "Principles of Genetics," International Edition, 
[1996], McGraw-Hill: New York NY, Seventh Edition, 2002, pp.55-56)

5/03/02
"Ironically, one of the few hypotheses championed by Ridley that is readily amenable to experimental testing-
Alexey Kondrashov's theory of the origin of sex-has recently indeed been tested, and found wanting. 
Kondrashov suggested that sex evolved to shuffle deleterious mutations, thereby facilitating the survival of 
individuals with relatively few mutations and the selective elimination of individuals with many. The theory 
requires that overall mutation rates in sexual species should therefore exceed the critical one-per-genome-per-
generation threshold. However, a recent empirical study of mutation rates found that a substantial proportion of 
sexual species do not meet this criterion." (Berry A., "Mitigating mutations." Review of "The Cooperative Gene," 
by Mark Ridley, Simon & Schuster/Weidenfeld, 2001, Nature, Vol. 412, 26 July 2001, pp.379-380, p.380)

6/03/02
"The phrases `selfish genes' and `inclusive fitness' have the misleading implication that proximal causes are less 
interesting and less important than evolutionary ones. But my understanding of why an eighteen-year old girl in 
Bangkok, working as a streetwalker, sends her earnings to the parents who sold her into prostitution is not 
enhanced very much by being told that she does so to maximize the reproductive fitness of those who share her 
genes." (Kagan J., "Three Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1998, pp.189-190)

6/03/02
"Today the competitive nature of industrialized societies favors excessive self-interest over loyalty, and some 
scientists, helped by clever journalists, imply that we need not feel excessive shame or guilt over these 
narcissistic urges, for the same behaviors are observed every day in the animal kingdom. ... Even though second 
marriages with stepchildren exist in no species but our own, some evolutionary scholars have suggested that the 
abuse of stepchildren is partly due to our evolutionary past. The behavior of bees is most often cited as evidence 
for a broadly based urge to be kind only to those who share our genes. These writers ignore the fact that the vast 
majority of stepchildren are treated with affection. More important, these writers are unperturbed by the fact that 
the relation between an adult and a stepchild has no analogue in monkeys, chimps, or gorillas. The more correct 
Darwinian inference for this social fact is that humans are qualitatively different from their ancestors, for they are 
the only primate to give benevolent care to juveniles who are not genetically related to them. The logic of 
evolutionary psychology-that what exists was probably biologically advantageous at some point in our primate 
history-cannot explain the small number of cases of stepchild abuse, any more than it can explain other 
infrequent human phenomena such as sky diving, masochism, suicide, and hyper activity." (Kagan J., "Three 
Seductive Ideas," Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1998, p.189)

6/03/02
"Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is really an update on Samuel Butler's old adage from the turn of the 
century that 'the hen is merely the egg's way of ensuring another egg'. According to Dawkins genes use bodies 
as temporary residences in the long-term battle for survival, and any action selected (on the part of an individual, 
family, or group) will be one which enhances the gene's chances of survival. This idea is little more than verbal 
sleight of hand-a clever restatement of the fact that closely related creatures will help one another-and it is 
misleading in two ways. First it implies that selection can act on single genes in isolation. This seems a ludicrous 
oversimplification in view of what is understood about gene interaction and the 'cogency' of the genetic 
compliment of a creature. Second it overlooks the fact that in the majority of creatures selection acts on the entire 
creature, not on single component parts. How can a single organism acting as a 'prison' for tens of thousands of 
'selfish' genes satisfy all their urges at once? And, if all their urges coincide, then why talk of selfish genes at all, 
why not stick to whole organisms?" (Leith B., "The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about 
Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, pp.57-58)

7/03/02
"For millions or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have 
always fluctuated and still do. It is a fact that microbiologists can see in their cultures species of bacteria 
oscillating around an intermediate form, but this does not mean that two phenomena, which are quite distinct, 
should be confused; the variation of the genetic code because of a DNA copy error, and evolution. To vary and 
to evolve are two different things; this can never be sufficiently emphasized, and we will try to prove that this 
proposition is correct later in the book. Bacteria, which are both the first and the most simple living beings to 
have appeared, are excellent subject material for genetic and biochemical study, but they are of little evolutionary 
value." (Grasse P.-P., "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation," Academic 
Press: New York NY, 1977, p.6)

8/03/02
"The simplistic predictions of neo-Darwinism have not been fulfilled by the growing body of observations of 
natural selection. Natural selection is extremely difficult to pin down and measure, and what measurements there 
are suggest that it is less powerful-or at least much less predictable -than was previously expected. Neutralism, 
the idea that a high proportion of gene variation may have little influence on survival, appears to be a tenable 
alternative in many, if not most, cases of observed variation. It could be that the whole approach to the study of 
adaptation has so far been at fault and that the neo-Darwinian obsession with demonstrating selection has been 
misguided. A study of the factors limiting evolution, such as inheritance, or developmental pathways, or simple 
architectural or engineering considerations, may prove more fruitful than a continued search for the 'driving 
force'. It may even turn out that selection is simply uninteresting; not right, or wrong, but merely unilluminating." 
(Leith B., "The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism," Collins: London, 1982, p.58)

9/03/02
"This is also a book about God ... or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking 
embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the 
universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the 
more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or 
end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do." (Sagan C., "Introduction," to Hawking S.W., "A Brief History of 
Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes," [1988], Bantam: London, 1991, reprint, pp.x-xi. Ellipses in original)

9/03/02
"At the time of Darwin's historic voyage, most scientists-and nonscientists as well-still believed in the theory of 
"special creation." According to this idea, the many different kinds of living organisms were each created (or 
otherwise came into existence) in their present form. ... Particularly important in the genesis of Darwin's ideas 
were the plants and animals he observed during a stay of some five weeks in the Galapagos Islands, an 
archipelago that lies in equatorial waters some 950 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador ... There he made two 
important observations. First, he noted that the plants and animals found on the islands, although distinctive, 
were similar to those on the nearby South American mainland. If each kind of plant and animal had been created 
separately and was unchangeable as was then generally believed, why did the plants and animals of the 
Galapagos not resemble those of Africa, for example, rather than those of South America? Or indeed, why were 
they not utterly unique, unlike organisms anywhere else on Earth? Second, people familiar with the islands 
pointed out variations that occurred from island to island in such organisms as the giant tortoises, after which 
the islands were named (galapagos is a Spanish word for "tortoise"). Sailors who took these tortoises on board 
and kept them as sources of fresh meat on their voyages could generally tell which island any particular tortoise 
had come from ... If the Galapagos tortoises had been specially created, why did they not all look alike?" (Raven 
P.H., Evert R.F. & Eichhorn S.E., "Biology of Plants," [1971], W.H. Freeman & Co/Worth: New York NY, Sixth 
Edition, 1999, p.236)

9/03/02
"There are some striking examples in the laws of nuclear physics of numerical accidents that seem to conspire to 
make the universe habitable. The strength of the attractive nuclear forces is just sufficient to overcome the 
electrical repulsion between the positive charges in the nuclei of ordinary atoms such as oxygen or iron. But the 
nuclear forces are not quite strong enough to bind together two protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a bound system 
which would be called a diproton if it existed. If the nuclear forces had been slightly stronger than they are, the 
diproton would exist and almost all the hydrogen in the universe would have been combined into diprotons and 
heavier nuclei. Hydrogen would be a rare element, and stars like the sun, which live for a long time by the slow 
burning of hydrogen in their cores, could not exist. On the other hand, if the nuclear forces had been 
substantially weaker than they are, hydrogen could not burn at all and there would be no heavy elements. If, as 
seems likely, the evolution of life requires a star like the sun, supplying energy at a constant rate for billions of 
years, then the strength of nuclear forces had to lie within a rather narrow range to make life possible." (Dyson 
F.J., "Disturbing the Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, p.250)

9/03/02
"It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the 
level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and 
chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an 
observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where 
mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting 
that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help 
thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" 
in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along 
by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices 
between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the 
processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between 
quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons." (Dyson F.J., "Disturbing the 
Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, p.245)

9/03/02
"A similar but independent numerical accident appears in connection with the weak interaction by which 
hydrogen actually burns in the sun. The weak interaction is millions of times weaker than the nuclear force. It is 
just weak enough so that the hydrogen in the sun burns at a slow and steady rate. If the weak interaction were 
much stronger or much weaker, any forms of life dependent on sunlike stars would again be in difficulties." 
(Dyson F.J., "Disturbing the Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, p.250)

10/03/02
"... recent theoretical modeling of the dynamics of solar systems suggest that a large gaseous planet occupying 
the same position as Jupiter does in our own solar system confers dynamical stability to the whole planetary 
system, ensuring that the orbits of the other smaller planets are stable over billions of years and ... because as 
planetary scientist George Wetherill points out, "without a large planet positioned precisely where Jupiter is, the 
earth would have been struck a thousand times more frequently in the past by comets and meteors and other 
interplanetary debris." [Wetherill G.W., "How Special is Jupiter?" Nature Vol. 373, 1995, p.470] Wetherill 
continues that if it were not for Jupiter "we wouldn't be around to study the origin of the solar system." ["Our 
Friend Jove," Discover, July 1993, p.15]." (Denton, M.J., "Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology 
Reveal Purpose in the Universe," Free Press: New York NY, 1998, p.96)

10/03/02
"It is true that we emerged in the universe by chance, but the idea of chance is itself only a cover for our 
ignorance. I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its 
architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming." 
(Dyson F.J., "Disturbing the Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, p.250)

10/03/02
"The age in which we live is often characterised as an age of unbelief. What is meant by such a description is 
specifically the rejection of belief in matters such as miracles, divine revelation, the realm of the supernatural and 
the existence of an afterlife lived in heaven. These are all Christian ideas and so unbelief is also the conscious 
rejection of a specifically Christian way of looking at the world. But to engage in such a rejection is to enter an 
unknown world. The Christian faith has played an important part in shaping the world that we know. The core 
beliefs of Christianity have helped to shape many of the values that the West has taken as axiomatic in 
understanding what it means to be human. To reject the basis for those values is either to reject the values 
themselves or to seek a new foundation for many of those same ideas. For much of our century it has been 
assumed by an emerging secular tradition that an appeal to reason alone will be sufficient to create the basis for a 
new civilisation - a new world order. But just as a new world order (based on liberal, democratic and capitalist 
structures) seems to be triumphant, new doubts are emerging. These doubts enable us to look afresh at our 
beliefs and hopes. Against all expectations, the question of religious belief is back on the agenda. This new 
questioning reveals that unbelief is not the same thing as no belief. It is becoming increasingly clear that we all 
believe something. The question is not whether we believe so much as what we believe and why we believe it. 
The recognition that we all have beliefs raises the additional question of what it is that shapes the framework of 
our belief." (Robinson M., "The Faith of the Unbeliever," Monarch: Crowborough UK, 1994, p.7)

10/03/02
"The Origin of Species was truly radical for its time; not only did it challenge prevailing scientific views, it 
also shook the deepest roots of Western culture. Darwin's view of life contrasted sharply with the conventional 
paradigm of an Earth only a few thousand years old, populated by unchanging forms of life that had been 
individually made during the single week in which the Creator formed the entire universe. Darwin's book 
challenged a worldview that had been taught for centuries." (Campbell, Neil A. [Department of Botany and Plant 
Sciences, University of California, Riverside], Reece J.B. & Mitchell L.G., "Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: 
Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, pp.414-415)

11/03/02
"The Universal Ancestor. The genetic annealing model is an attempt to develop a consistent general picture of 
the universal ancestor, and it almost succeeds at this. The ancestor cannot have been a particular organism, a 
single organismal lineage. It was communal (13, 22), a loosely knit, diverse conglomeration of primitive cells that 
evolved as a unit, and it eventually developed to a stage where it broke into several distinct communities, which 
in their turn become the three primary lines of descent. The primary lines, however, were not conventional 
lineages. Each represented a progressive consolidation of the corresponding community into a smaller number of 
more complex cell types, which ultimately developed into the ancestor(s) of that organismal domain. The 
universal ancestor is not an entity, not a thing. It is a process characteristic of a particular evolutionary stage." 
(Woese C., "The universal ancestor," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 95, Issue 12, 
June 9, 1998, pp.6854-6859, p.6858)

12/03/02
"THE COSMOS IS ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE." (Sagan C., "Cosmos," [1980], Macdonald: 
London, 1981, reprint, p.4. Emphasis in original)

12/03/02
"To 'tame' chance means to break down the very improbable into less improbable small components arranged in 
series. No matter how improbable it is that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always possible 
to conceive of a series of infinitesimally graded intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale 
change may be, smaller changes are less improbable. And provided we postulate a sufficiently large series of 
sufficiently finely graded intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else, without invoking 
astronomical improbabilities." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, 
pp.317-318)

12/03/02
"Straw man. Another way to stack the deck against the opposition is to draw a false picture of the opposing 
argument. Then it is easy to say, "This should be rejected because this (exaggerated and distorted) picture of it is 
wrong." The name of the fallacy comes from the idea that if you set up a straw man, he is easier to knock down 
than a real man. And that is exactly the way this fallacy works: set 'em up and knock 'em down. It is argument by 
caricature. It avoids dealing with the real issues by changing the opposition's views. `Creationists believe that 
the earth was created in 4004 B.C.' ... a distorted image of the opposing view is given. Some creationists hold to 
an old earth, and some who believe in a young earth don't hold to 4004 B.C. The real issue is that the earth was 
created, not exactly when." (Geisler, Norman L.* [President, Southern Evangelical Seminary, Charlotte, North 
Carolina] & Brooks, Ronald M. [President, X-press Ministries], "Come, Let Us Reason: An Introduction to 
Logical Thinking," Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 1990, p.101)

14/03/02
"There is a fifth respect in which mutation might have been nonrandom. We can imagine (just) a form of 
mutation that was systematically biased in the direction of improving the animal's adaptedness to its life. But 
although we can imagine it, nobody has ever come close to suggesting any means by which this bias could come 
about. It is only in this fifth respect, the 'mutationist' respect, that the true, real-life Darwinian insists that 
mutation is random. Mutation is not systematically biased in the direction of adaptive improvement, and no 
mechanism is known (to put the point mildly) that could guide mutation in directions that are non-random in this 
fifth sense. Mutation is random with respect to adaptive advantage, although it is non-random in all sorts of 
other respects. It is selection, and only selection, that directs evolution in directions that are nonrandom with 
respect to advantage." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.312. 
Emphasis in original)

14/03/02
"It means that, theoretically, evolution can jump, in a single generation, from any point in Biomorph Land to any 
other. Not just any point on one plane, but any point in the entire nine-dimensional hypervolume. If, for instance, 
you should want to jump in one fell swoop from the insect to the fox ... we are embarking on another of those 
astronomical calculations. ... Jumping could theoretically get you the prize faster - in single hop. But because of 
the astronomical odds against success, series of small steps, each one building on the accumulated success of 
previous steps, is the only feasible way. ... If the mutational jump we are considering is a very large one, the 
number of possible destinations of that jump is astronomically large. And because, as we saw ... the number of 
different ways of being dead is so much greater than the number of different ways of being alive, the chances are 
very high that a big random jump in genetic space will end in death. Even a small random jump in genetic space is 
pretty likely to end in death. But the smaller the jump the less likely death is, and the more likely is it that the jump 
will result in improvement." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.71-
73)

15/03/02
"We can now see how Darwin's success was wonderfully compounded of his virtues and vices. His wide but co-
ordinated interests, his systematic inquiries, and his private fortune, were all indispensable ingredients. But so 
also were his intellectual opportunism, his willingness or at least ability to confound theoretical issues and 
conceal the confusion from his indiscriminating readers by loose writing or, shall we say, by making a mystery 
wherever it was wanted." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, p.63)

15/03/02
"Lynn Margulis says: `Some smart Englishmen in the early part of this century recognised that Mendel had a 
very good set of rules for the stability of change through generations; those are called the rules of genetics. 
They also realised that Darwin had a very good explanation of the change in organisms through time. So they 
developed an imaginative scheme called neo-Darwinism to connect Mendel's stability with Darwin's change and 
they made up an incredible superstructure and attributed the sources of variation to what they called heritable 
mutations, ie random mutations in the genes heritable in the next generation.' In radical disagreement, Margulis 
attributes the main source of evolutionary change to symbiosis. `I believe that neo-Darwinism is a kind of 20th-
century aberration and that it will disappear just as plasmogenesis, phlogiston theory and many other ideas in 
science have disappeared.'" (Editorial, "Margulis has successfully challenged the neo-Darwinians," Times Higher 
Education Supplement, 03 July 1998 http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.asp?id=52425&state_value=Archive)

17/03/02
"THE trunk of the tree of life-the so-called `universal ancestor' from which all later life forms branched-may be a 
tangled thicket instead of a single stem, says an American evolutionary biologist. If true, this would dramatically 
change the way biologists view the early history of life on Earth. Biologists have assumed that if they learnt 
enough about evolutionary history, they could trace the evolutionary tree from one ancestor to another all the 
way back to the first living cells. Most believe the earliest organisms were much like bacteria or archaeans-single-
celled organisms similar to bacteria-or had characteristics of both. But this genealogy breaks down if you follow 
it back more than 3 billion years, says Carl Woese of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. `The 
phylogenetic tree does not have its root in anything we would call an organism by today's standards,' he says. .... 
This genetic fluidity, Woese says, may have been so extensive that the universal ancestor of modern life forms 
was not a single organism but a loose community of protocells that swapped genetic material so frequently that 
they evolved together. The three main branches of life probably emerged as subsets of this community, whose 
genetic makeup gradually became more rigid and less open to lateral transfer as evolution favoured sets of genes 
that had become adapted to one another. If Woese is right, researchers may need to rethink the history of life. 
Different parts of an organism's genome may have different evolutionary histories." (Holmes B., `Free for-all,' 
New Scientist, Vol. 158, No. 2140, 27 June 1998, p.17)

17/03/02
"A laudatory review of Weiner's book (The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time) 
appeared in the Times book review section a week later. Like Weiner's essay, it began by commenting on 
the astonishing persistence of biblical creationism among persons who appear to be otherwise perfectly 
reasonable. The reviewer attributed this to a lack of knowledge of the overwhelming proof of evolution which 
scientists have discovered. ... The Weiner article and book review illustrate what I would call the `official 
caricature' of the creation-evolution debate, a distortion that is either explicit or implicit in nearly all media and 
textbook treatments of the subject. According to the caricature, `evolution' is a simple, unitary process that one 
can see in operation today and that is also supported unequivocally by all the fossil evidence. Everyone accepts 
the truth of evolution except a disturbingly large group of biblical fundamentalists, who insist that the earth is no 
more than ten thousand years old and the fossil beds were laid down in Noah's flood. These baffling persons 
either are uninformed about the evidence or perhaps choose to disregard it as a temptation placed before us by 
God to test our faith in Genesis. There is no conceivable intellectual basis for their dissent, because the evidence 
for evolution is absolutely conclusive." (Johnson P.E., "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in 
Science, Law and Education," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1995, pp.72-73)

17/03/02
"The molecular processes underlying protein synthesis seem inexplicably complex. Although we can describe 
many of them, they do not make conceptual sense in the way that DNA transcription, DNA repair, and DNA 
replication do. As we have seen, protein synthesis in present-day organisms centers on the ribosome, which 
consists of proteins arranged around a core of rRNA molecules. Why should rRNA molecules exist at all, and 
how did they come to play such a dominant part in the structure and function of the ribosome? ... The complexity 
of a process with so many interacting components has made many biologists despair of ever understanding the 
pathway by which protein synthesis evolved." (Alberts B., et al., "Molecular Biology of the Cell," [1983], 
Garland: New York NY, Third Edition, 1994, p.241)

17/03/02
"The kind of proof that the RNA world hypothesis really needs is the creation of an RNA molecule that can 
replicate either itself or another RNA molecule, the kind of self-replicating ribozyme that really could have 
performed the roles of both DNA and enzymes in early life. Unfortunately, this has not yet happened. Ribozymes 
have been created that perform different aspects of that function, but not one that performs all of them. 'Three 
key features of an RNA replicase currently reside in three different ribozymes and reactions', say Bartel and 
Unrau. 'One efficiently catalyses the proper chemistry, another uses nucleoside triphosphates [the individual 
units of RNA] in a templated fashion, and the third recognises an RNA duplex without regard for sequence. To 
prove the replicase assumption of the RNA world hypothesis, these features must be united into a single 
ribozyme'. Bartel and Unrau managed to produce a ribozyme that goes some way towards this goal. In a paper in 
Nature in 1998 (395, 260), they reported that they had created an RNA molecule with the ability to catalyse 
the formation of a glycosidic bond joining a ribose sugar to a base (uracil)
to make a nucleotide, the main building block of DNA and RNA. Nevertheless, the construction of a self-
replicating RNA molecule, even if possible, is still a long way off." (Evans, J., "It's alive - isn't it?," Chemistry 
in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.45. 
http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2000/evans_may00.htm)

17/03/02
"The molecular processes underlying protein synthesis seem inexplicably complex. Although we can describe 
many of them, they do not make conceptual sense in the way that DNA transcription, DNA repair, and DNA 
replication do. As we have seen, protein synthesis in present-day organisms centers on the ribosome, which 
consists of proteins arranged around a core of rRNA molecules. Why should rRNA molecules exist at all, and 
how did they come to play such a dominant part in the structure and function of the ribosome? ... The complexity 
of a process with so many interacting components has made many biologists despair of ever understanding the 
pathway by which protein synthesis evolved." (Alberts B., et al., "Molecular Biology of the Cell," [1983], 
Garland: New York NY, Third Edition, 1994, p.241)

19/03/02
"THE trunk of the tree of life-the so-called `universal ancestor' from which all later life forms branched-may be a 
tangled thicket instead of a single stem, says an American evolutionary biologist. If true, this would dramatically 
change the way biologists view the early history of life on Earth. Biologists have assumed that if they learnt 
enough about evolutionary history, they could trace the evolutionary tree from one ancestor to another all the 
way back to the first living cells. Most believe the earliest organisms were much like bacteria or archaeans-single-
celled organisms similar to bacteria-or had characteristics of both. But this genealogy breaks down if you follow 
it back more than 3 billion years, says Carl Woese of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. `The 
phylogenetic tree does not have its root in anything we would call an organism by today's standards,' he says. .... 
This genetic fluidity, Woese says, may have been so extensive that the universal ancestor of modern life forms 
was not a single organism but a loose community of protocells that swapped genetic material so frequently that 
they evolved together. The three main branches of life probably emerged as subsets of this community, whose 
genetic makeup gradually became more rigid and less open to lateral transfer as evolution favoured sets of genes 
that had become adapted to one another. If Woese is right, researchers may need to rethink the history of life. 
Different parts of an organism's genome may have different evolutionary histories." (Holmes B., `Free for-all,' 
New Scientist, Vol. 158, No. 2140, 27 June 1998, p.17)

20/03/02
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 
into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, 
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." 
(Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection," John Murray: London, Sixth Edition, 1872, 
Reprinted, 1882, p.429)

21/03/02
"In Judeo-Christian culture, the Old Testament account of creation fortified the idea that species were 
individually designed and permanent. In the 1700s, biology in Europe and America was dominated by natural 
theology, a philosophy dedicated to discovering the Creator's plan by studying nature. Natural theologians saw 
the adaptations of organisms as evidence that the Creator had designed each and every species for a particular 
purpose. A major objective of natural theology was to classify species in order to reveal the steps of the scale of 
life that God had created." (Campbell, Neil A. [Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, 
Riverside], Reece J.B. & Mitchell L.G., "Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 
1999, pp.414-415)

21/03/02
"But there are other theories that are most definitely not versions of Darwinism, theories that go flatly against the 
very spirit of Darwinism. These rival theories are the subject of this chapter. They include various versions of 
what is called Lamarckism; also other points of view such as 'neutralism', 'mutationism' and creationism which 
have, from time to time, been advanced as alternatives to Darwinian selection. The obvious way to decide 
between rival theories is to examine the evidence. ... In short, divine creation, whether instantaneous or in the 
form of guided evolution, joins the list of other theories we have considered in this chapter." (Dawkins R., "The 
Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, pp.287, 316-317)

21/03/02
"Many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from 
the fossil record, are, however, baseless. The reason for this lies in the scale of geological time that scientists 
deal with, which is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils of creatures we hail as our 
ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a 
fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure. 
Any story we tell against the compass of geological time which links these fossils in sequences of cause and 
effect - or ancestry and descent - is, therefore, only ours to make. We invent these stories, after the fact, 
to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in 
Evolution," Fourth Estate: London, 2000, pp.1-2. Emphasis in original)

21/03/02
"Fossils are never found with labels or certificates of authenticity. You can never know that the fossil 
bone you might dig up in Africa belonged to your direct ancestor, or anyone else's. The attribution of ancestry 
does not come from the fossil; it can come only from us. Fossils are mute: their silence gives us unlimited licence 
to tell their stories for them, which usually take the form of chains of ancestry and descent. These stories are like 
history, of events leading to other events; of succession and defeats; change and stability. Such tales are 
sustained more in our minds than in reality, and are informed and conditioned by our own prejudices - which will 
tell us not what really happened, but what we think happened. If there are 'missing links', only our 
imaginations can reconstruct them." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution," Fourth Estate: 
London, 2000, p.2. Emphasis in original)

22/03/02
"Deep Time lifts the lid on decades of misconception about the history of life. In this subversive book, Henry 
Gee tells you that everything you thought you knew about evolution is wrong. For a long time, popular scientists 
have told us that by looking at a fossilised bone we could tell whether it belonged to our ancestors. This is not 
true. A fossil cannot answer scientific questions of ascent and descent. Following this logic, Henry Gee shows 
us that the stories we have told ourselves about the history of life are pure imagination. They are stories that 
flatter our prejudices about our place in nature. Real scientists have put aside such popular bedtime stories about 
ancestry for decades." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution," Fourth Estate: London, 
2000, front inside cover)

24/03/02
"But apart from telling you that Deep Time is long, conventional accounts never consider the implications of the 
scale of Deep Time for the way we think about evolution. If, as McPhee says, Deep Time implies intervals more or 
less incomprehensible to humans, we are entitled to ask whether it is valid to tell stories about evolution 
according to the conventions of narrative or drama. If it is not, then every story we tell in which causes are linked 
with effects, and ancestors are linked with descendants, becomes questionable: we can no longer use Deep Time 
as a backdrop for the stories we tell ourselves about evolution, and how and why we came to be who we are." 
(Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution," Fourth Estate: London, 2000, pp.3-4)

24/03/02
"Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually 
everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong. It is wrong because we want to think of the history of 
life as a story, but that is precisely what we cannot do. This tension - between Deep Time and the everyday scale 
of time - is the theme of this book. What we need is an antidote to the historical approach to the history of life; a 
kind of 'anti-history' that recognises the special properties of Deep Time." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the 
Revolution in Evolution," Fourth Estate: London, 2000, p.4)

24/03/02
"If we can never know for certain that any fossil we unearth is our direct ancestor, it is similarly invalid to pluck a 
string of fossils from Deep Time, arrange these fossils in chronological order, and assert that this arrangement 
represents a sequence of evolutionary ancestry and descent. As Stephen jay Gould' has demonstrated, such 
misleading tales are part of popular iconography: everyone has seen pictures in which a sequence of fossil 
hominids - members of the human family of species - are arranged in an orderly procession from primitive forms 
up to modern Man. To complicate matters further, such sequences are justified after the fact by tales of 
inevitable, progressive improvement. For example, the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by 
improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological 
achievements such as fire, the manufacture of tools and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. 
They can never be tested by experiment, so they are unscientific. They rely for their acceptability not on 
scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of their presentation. (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the 
Revolution in Evolution," Fourth Estate: London, 2000, p.5)

24/03/02
"Testability is a central feature of the activity we call science. Some have sought a kind of special dispensation 
for palaeontology as a 'historical' science, that it be admitted to the high table of science even though 
palaeontologists cannot, classically, do the kinds of experiments other scientists take for granted. You cannot go 
back in time to watch the dinosaurs become extinct, or fishes crawl from the slime to become amphibians. More 
pointedly, you cannot, as Stephen jay Gould discussed in his book Wonderful Life, go back in time to see what 
other things might have happened instead, had circumstances been slightly different. What if the asteroid had 
missed the Earth, sparing the dinosaurs? What would have happened if the fishes decided to stay underwater 
after all? In either case, would we be here? We cannot see what nature would have done had she been able to 
rerun the tape of evolution. Were we able to witness such a rerun, would the outcome have been different from 
what we see, as Gould argues, or very much the same?' In strict, scientific terms, such questions are meaningless. 
The problem is that what we see before us is the result of a once-only experiment in history. Because it happened 
only once, it is not accessible to the reproducibility scientists usually require. This is not possible in 
palaeontology except in our imaginations." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution," Fourth 
Estate: London, 2000, pp.7-8)

25/03/02
"There really is no point nowadays in continuing to collect and to study fossils simply to determine whether or 
not evolution is a fact. The question has been decisively answered in the affirmative. There are still those who 
deny this, of course - there are still some who deny that the earth is round. It is no use gathering more evidence 
to persuade these doubters, because the evidence already in hand has convinced everyone who ever really 
studied it. Anyone who cannot or will not accept or attempt to understand this evidence is not likely to have the 
will or the ability to evaluate new facts of the same sort." (Simpson G.G., "Horses: The Story of the Horse Family 
in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of History," [1951], The Natural History Library, 
Doubleday & Co: Garden City NY, 1961, reprint, pp.224-225)

26/03/02
"The facts of astronomy include some other numerical accidents that work to our advantage. For example, the 
universe is built on such a scale that the average distance between stars in an average galaxy like ours is about 
twenty million million miles, an extravagantly large distance by human standards. If a scientist asserts that the 
stars at these immense distances have a decisive effect on the possibility of human existence, he will be 
suspected of being a believer in astrology. But it happens to be true that we could not have survived if the 
average distance between stars were only two million million miles instead of twenty. If the distances had been 
smaller by a factor of ten, there would have been a high probability that another star, at some time during the four 
billion years that the earth has existed, would have passed by the sun close enough to disrupt with its 
gravitational field the orbits of the planets. To destroy life on earth, it would not be necessary to pull the earth 
out of the solar system. It would be sufficient to pull the earth into a moderately eccentric elliptical orbit." (Dyson 
F.J., "Disturbing the Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, pp.250-251)

26/03/02
"Universalism is an ideal in science, but one with serious limitations in practice. The elites that pervade all 
branches of science may have a legitimate basis, but there is also a strong illegitimate component in scientific 
elitism that is the direct antagonist to universalism. Members of the elite are sheltered from the scrutiny that is 
supposedly applied without fear or favor to all scientists. Immunity from scrutiny constitutes a severe blind spot 
in the peer review and referee systems. Moreover, the random element built into these two systems, deriving from 
a lack of consensus as to what constitutes good science, severely limits their ability to accept radical new ideas 
and to reject bad or fraudulent science. Peer review and refereeing are at best coarse screens, not the infallible, 
fine discrimination systems that scientists often portray them to be. They separate wheat from chaff on a better 
than random basis but still allow a considerable measure of chaff to enter along with the wheat. A system that 
has serious difficulty in consistently recognizing good science is unlikely to be invariably successful in detecting 
fraud, and in practice, frauds are almost never detected in this way." (Broad W. & Wade N., "Betrayers of the 
Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," Simon and Schuster: New York NY, 1982, p.106)

27/03/02
"All the rich diversity of organic chemistry depends on a delicate balance between electrical and quantum-
mechanical forces. The balance exists only because the laws of physics include an "exclusion principle" which 
forbids two electrons to occupy the same state. If the laws were changed so that electrons no longer excluded 
each other, none of our essential chemistry would survive. There are many other lucky accidents in atomic 
physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as a liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form 
complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules. I conclude 
from the existence of these accidents of physics and astronomy that the universe is an unexpectedly hospitable 
place for living creatures to make their home in." (Dyson F.J., "Disturbing the Universe," Harper & Row: New 
York NY, 1979, p.251)

28/03/02
"We had earlier found two levels on which mind manifests itself in the description of nature. On the level of 
subatomic physics, the observer is inextricably involved in the definition of the objects of his observations. On 
the level of direct human experience, we are aware of our own minds, and we find it convenient to believe that 
other human beings and animals have minds not altogether unlike our own. Now we have found a third level to 
add to these two. The peculiar harmony between the structure of the universe and the needs of life and 
intelligence is a third manifestation of the importance of mind in the scheme of things." (Dyson F.J., "Disturbing 
the Universe," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1979, pp.251-252)

28/03/02
"But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown 
to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with 
generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the 
science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of 
the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, 
bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes 
between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from 
prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms." (Linton 
A.H., "Scant search for the Maker." Review of "The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism," 
Freeman, 2001, by Niles Eldredge. The Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 April 2001)

28/03/02
"The author rejects the creationists' arguments for order and design in nature but the extreme complexity of 
structure and function in all living things cannot be disregarded. The biochemical complexity of cascades of 
enzymes required to perform a single function in the cell is mind-boggling, and for a structure or function to be 
selected it must be functionally complete. The formation of amino acids from ammonia and methane under 
extremes of pressure and temperature is quoted, but this synthesis is nothing compared with the complexity of a 
single protein enzyme, let alone a series of highly specialised enzymes functioning in a cascade sequence. Such 
irreducibly complex systems are of no selective value unless they are complete. The author naively states that `all 
biochemical steps leading to the formation of the first organism... have yet to be deciphered.'" (Linton A.H., 
"Scant search for the Maker." Review of "The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism," Freeman, 
2001, by Niles Eldredge. The Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 April 2001)

28/03/02
"It is frustrating indeed to come to the end of our story and to have to admit that we have little idea as to exactly 
how, when, where, or why our extraordinary consciousness was acquired. However much we tend to be 
obsessed by them, our cognitive capacities, epitomized by our linguistic abilities, do indeed mark us off distinctly 
from all of the millions of other creatures on the planet. But the latent ability to form and manipulate mental 
symbols is clearly not the predestined result of an inexorable process over the aeons, even if the foundations for 
it were established over a long human evolutionary past. Rather, its acquisition was an emergent event that was 
probably rather minor in terms of physical or genetic innovation, that was comparatively sudden, and that came 
very late in our evolutionary history. This event of events is, alas, probably undetectable from the bones and 
teeth that reveal our fossil history; and the archaeological record, as we've seen, is incomplete, highly selective, 
and but a dim mirror of the behavior of our forebears. But although the initial probability that all the components 
needed for modern human consciousness would come together precisely as they did was undoubtedly 
minuscule in statistical terms, so was the probability of any of the millions of specific outcomes of the 
evolutionary process. Viewed this way, the event itself is far less remarkable than its end product." (Tattersall I., 
"Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness," Harcourt Brace & Co: New York NY, 1998, p.233. 
Emphasis in original)

28/03/02
"Ever since the notion of evolution was co-opted to refer to the process that Darwin had originally called 
"descent with modification", evolutionary biologists have been in a hopeless muddle over what they have 
actually managed to explain. It does not help to be told that evolution is a fact if we are given no clear or 
consistent indication of what that fact is supposed to be." (Ingold T., "Swept away by the current." Review of 
"River out of Eden," Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995, by Richard Dawkins. The Times Higher Education 
Supplement, 16 June 1995)
[top]

April
1/04/02
"Micro-evolution involves mainly changes within potentially continuous populations, and there is little doubt 
that its materials are those revealed by genetic experimentation. Macro-evolution involves the rise and 
divergence of discontinuous groups, and it is still debatable whether it differs in kind or only in degree from 
microevolution. If the two proved to be basically different, the innumerable studies of micro-evolution would 
become relatively unimportant and would have minor value in the study of evolution as a whole." (Simpson G.G., 
"Tempo and Mode in Evolution," [1944], Columbia University Press: New York NY, Third Printing, 1949, p.97)

1/04/02
"Evolution, with whatever general trends it may have entailed, was a by-product of the maintenance of 
adaptation. At the end of a million years an organism would almost always be somewhat different in appearance 
from what it was at the beginning, but in the important respect it would still be exactly the same; it would still 
show the uniquely biological property of adaptation, and it would still be precisely adjusted to its particular 
circumstances. I regard it as unfortunate that the theory of natural selection was first developed as an 
explanation for evolutionary change. It is much more important as an explanation for the maintenance of 
adaptation." (Williams G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary 
Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.54)

2/04/02
"WITH Darwin we are now in a position to claim that private vices have been public benefits. So much may be 
true in the short run. But in the long run we have to cast up a different account. Darwin's mixed theory, his 
double standard of explanation, has fathered a numerous litter of mixed theories. An illegitimate progeny of 
double standards has swarmed from his evolutionary statements and populated every field of the science of life." 
(Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, p.67)

2/04/02
"The notebooks prove that Darwin was interested in philosophy and aware of its implications. He knew that the 
primary feature distinguishing his theory from all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising 
philosophical materialism. Other evolutionists spoke of vital forces, directed history, organic striving, and the 
essential irreducibilty of mind-a panoply of concepts that traditional Christianity could accept in compromise, for 
they permitted a Christian God to work by evolution instead of creation. Darwin spoke only of random variation 
and natural selection. In the notebooks Darwin resolutely applied his materialistic theory of evolution to all 
phenomena of life, including what he termed `the citadel itself' - the human mind. And if mind has no real 
existence beyond the brain, can God be anything more than an illusion invented by an illusion? In one of his 
transmutation notebooks, he wrote: `Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist!...'" (Gould S.J., 
"Darwin's Delay," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, 
pp.24-25. Ellipses Gould's)

4/04/02
"Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism, 
if not in the sources of science itself, in the ethic upon which knowledge is founded, and which by free choice 
makes knowledge the supreme value-the measure and warrant for all other values? An ethic which bases moral 
responsibility upon the very freedom of that axiomatic choice. Accepted as the foundation for social and political 
institutions, hence as the measure of their authenticity, their value, only the ethic of knowledge could lead to 
socialism. It prescribes institutions dedicated to the defense, the extension, the enrichment of the transcendent 
kingdom of ideas, of knowledge, and of creation-a kingdom which is within man, where progressively freed both 
from material constraints and from the deceitful servitudes of animism, he could at last live authentically, 
protected by institutions which, seeing in him the subject of the kingdom and at the same time its creator, could 
be designed to serve him in his unique and precious essence. A utopia. Perhaps. But it is not an incoherent 
dream. It is an idea that owes its force to its logical coherence alone. It is the conclusion to which the search for 
authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the 
universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor 
is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose." (Monod J., "Chance and 
Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology," [1971], Penguin: London, 1997, reprint, 
p.180)

4/04/02
"The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of 
effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. ... This closedness 
means that the continuum of historical happenings cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, 
transcendent powers and that therefore there is no "miracle" in this sense of the word. Such a miracle would be 
an event whose cause did not lie within history. While, for example, the Old Testament narrative speaks of an 
interference by God in history, historical science cannot demonstrate such an act of God, but merely perceives 
that there are those who believe in it. To be sure, as historical science, it may not assert that such a faith is an 
illusion and that God has not acted in history. But it itself as science cannot perceive such an act and reckon on 
the basis of it; it can only leave every man free to determine whether he wants to see an act of God in a historical 
event that it itself understands in terms of that event's immanent historical causes. It is in accordance with such a 
method as this that the science of history goes to work on all historical documents. And there cannot be any 
exceptions in the case of biblical texts if the latter are at all to be understood historically." (Bultmann R., 
"Exegesis Without Presuppositions?," in "Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann," [1960], 
Fontana: London, 1964, reprint, p.344)

5/04/02
"However all these problems may be resolved, and whichever cosmological model proves correct, there is not 
much of comfort in any of this. It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to 
the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to 
the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. As I write this I happen to be in an 
aeroplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the earth 
looks very soft and comfortable-fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching 
straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an 
overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an 
unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more 
the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." (Weinberg S., "The First Three Minutes: 
A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe," [1977], Flamingo: London, 1983, reprint, pp.148-149)

5/04/02
"The idea of continuity in nature occurs in many places in the history of human thought. _Natura non facit 
saltum_-nature makes no jumps-was a guiding motto for generations of evolutionists and protoevolutionists. But 
Darwin encountered it in a sharp and interesting form, posed as an alternative of terrible import: nature makes no 
jumps, but God does. Therefore, if we want to know whether something that interests us is of natural origin or 
supernatural, we must ask: did it arise gradually out of that which came before, or suddenly without any evident 
natural cause? ... In other words, sometime in his Cambridge years, 1827-30, Darwin took cognizance of the 
proposition that in order to show some thing is of natural origin it must be shown that it evolved gradually from 
its precursors, otherwise its origins are supernatural." (Gruber H.E., "Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of 
Scientific Creativity," together with Barrett P.H., "Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks," Wildwood 
House: London, 1974, pp.125-126)

5/04/02
"Similar difficulties of measurement arise with mutation and migration. When a gene replicates, there is a chance 
of the order of 1 in 100 million that a particular base will be miscopied. It is possible to measure these 
astonishingly low rates of error in very special circumstances in some microorganisms. It is also clear from the 
theory that rates of this order are sufficient to provide the raw material of evolution. But in most natural 
situations, mutation rates cannot be measured. Finally, consider migration. Suppose that a species is subdivided 
into a number of populations, and we wish to know how far the evolution of any one population is influenced by 
immigration from the others. Theory shows that if a population receives on the average one migrant from outside 
in each generation, this can have a decisive effect. Yet in practice we could not hope to measure such a low rate 
of migration. Thus we have three processes which we believe to determine the course of evolution, and we have 
a mathematical theory which tells us that these processes can produce their effects at levels we cannot usually 
hope to measure directly. It is as if we had a theory of electromagnetism but no means of measuring electric 
current or magnetic force." (Maynard Smith J., "The Limitations of Evolution Theory," in Duncan R. & Weston-
Smith M., eds., "The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Unknown," 
[1977], Pergamon: Oxford UK, 1978, reprint, p.236)

6/04/02
"Palaeontology read as history is additionally unscientific because, without testable hypotheses, its statements 
rely for their justification on authority, as if its practitioners had privileged access to absolute truth - 'truth which 
can be known' ... Whether you believe the conventional wisdom that, for example, our own species Homo 
sapiens descended in seamless continuity from the pre-existing species, Homo erectus, depends not on the 
evidence, for the fossil evidence is mute, but on whether the presentation of the evidence conforms to your 
prejudices, or on whether you choose to defer to the authority of the presenter. The assumption of authority is 
profoundly, mischievously and dangerously unscientific. It conflicts with how we are taught science from our 
earliest years: that the scientific method should be rigorously democratic, that statements from authorities in a 
field should be as subject to scrutiny as those emanating from the most humble sources, even a novice. Nobody 
should be afraid to ask a silly question." (Gee H., "Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution," Fourth 
Estate: London, 2000, p.8)

6/04/02
"Perhaps the most remarkable (and also the most perplexing) thing about the fossil record is its beginning. 
Fossils first appear in appreciable numbers in rocks of the Lower Cambrian age, deposited about 600 million years 
ago. Rocks of older (Pre-Cambrian) age are almost completely unfossiliferous, although a few traces of ancient 
organisms have been recorded from them. The difference between the two groups of rocks is every bit as great as 
this suggests: a palaeontologist may search promising-looking Pre-Cambrian strata for a lifetime and find nothing 
(and many have done just this); but once he rises up into the Cambrian, in come the fossils - a great variety of 
forms, well-preserved, world-wide in extent, and relatively common. This is the first feature of the oldest common 
fossils and it comes as a shock to the evolutionist. For instead of appearing gradually, with demonstrably orderly 
development and sequence - they come in with what amounts to a geological bang. They are not the oldest 
fossils - but they are the oldest common fossils. Those which precede them (which we shall discuss shortly) 
amount to a mere handful of forms in comparison, and show no direct ancestral relationship to them." (Rhodes 
F.H.T., "The Evolution of Life," [1962], Penguin: Baltimore MD, 1963, reprint, pp.77-78)

9/04/02
"EVOLUTION IS GRADUAL, OCCURS IN SPURTS, OR IS A COMBINATION OF BOTH PROCESSES Biologists 
have long recognized that the fossil record lacks many transitional forms; that is, the starting points and end 
points are present, but the intermediate stages in the evolution from one species to another are absent. This fact 
has traditionally been blamed on the incompleteness of the fossil record. Biologists have attempted to fill in the 
missing parts, much as a writer might fill in the middle of a novel when the beginning and end are already there. 
Recently, however, many biologists have begun to question whether the fossil record really is incomplete. The 
theory of punctuated equilibrium proposes that the fossil record accurately reflects evolution as it occurs, with 
long periods of stasis (no change in a species)" (Solomon E.P., Berg L.R. & Martin D.W., "Biology," [1985], 
Harcourt Brace: Orlando FL, Third Edition, 1993, p.434)

9/04/02
"MEIOSIS, THE SPLITTING of chromosome pairs in the formation of sex cells, represents one of the great 
triumphs of good engineering in biology. Sexual reproduction cannot work unless eggs and sperm each contain 
precisely half the genetic information of normal body cells. The union of two halves by fertilization restores the 
full amount of genetic in formation, while the mixing of genes from two parents in each offspring also supplies the 
variability that Darwinian processes require. This halving, or "reduction division," occurs during meiosis when 
the chromosomes line up in pairs and pull apart, one member of each pair moving to each of the sex cells. Our 
admiration for the precision of meiosis can only increase when we learn that cells of some ferns contain more 
than 600 pairs of chromosomes and that, in most cases, meiosis splits each pair without error." (Gould S.J., "Dr. 
Down's Syndrome," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: London, 
1990, reprint, p.133)

11/04/02
"Although Darwin titled his monumental book On the Origin of Species, he was never really able to 
explain how species might originate." (Raven P.H., Evert R.F. & Eichhorn S.E., "Biology of Plants," [1971], W.H. 
Freeman & Co/Worth: New York NY, Sixth Edition, 1999, p.248)

11/04/02
"Theologians worry away at the `problem of evil' ... On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and 
selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless 
good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no 
intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to 
get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The 
universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, 
no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: `For 
Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.' DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we 
dance to its music." (Dawkins. R., "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life," Phoenix: London, 1996, pp.154-
155. Emphasis original)

12/04/02
"Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1941. He moved to England at the age of eight when his father, 
an official in the colonial agricultural civil service in Nyasaland, now Malawi, inherited a farm just outside Oxford. 
A white colonial upbringing in Africa was followed by boarding schools in England. He first encountered 
Darwin's work at the age of 16 and was initially sceptical of it: `I did not really believe that it was big enough to 
do the job of explaining everything. It took a while to realise that it was. It was understanding Darwin that finally 
destroyed my belief in God.'" (Patel K., "Going the whole hog," The Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 
April 1995. http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.asp?id=41504&state_value=Archive)

13/04/02
"No coherent attempt to account for the origin of adaptations other than the theory of natural selection and the 
theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics have ever been proposed. Whether or not these theories are 
adequate for the purpose just stated is a real issue." (Dobzhansky T.G., "Genetics and the Origin of Species," 
Columbia University Press: New York NY, [1937], 1982, reprint, p.150)

14/04/02
"Darwin maintained that evolution has no direction; it does not lead inevitably to higher things. Organisms 
become better adapted to their local environments, and that is all. The "degeneracy" of a parasite is as perfect as 
the gait of a gazelle. Third, Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature. 
Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous 
results of neuronal complexity." (Gould S.J., "Prologue," in "Ever Since Darwin," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, 
reprint, p.13)

14/04/02
"Darwin's book ["On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects 
(1862)"] is a compendium of these contrivances, the botanical equivalent of a bestiary. And, like the medieval 
bestiaries, it is designed to instruct. The message is paradoxical but profound. Orchids manufacture their intricate 
devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God 
had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of 
parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged 
from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers." (Gould S.J., 
"The Panda's Thumb," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: London, 
1990, reprint, p.20)

14/04/02
"Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design - nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf 
by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for 
evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions 
are the proof of evolution-paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by 
history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in 
defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least 
sense." (Gould S.J., "The Panda's Thumb," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], 
Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.20)

14/04/02
"Fitzroy's idee fixe, at least in later life, was the "argument from design," the belief that God's benevolence 
(indeed his very existence) can be inferred from the perfection of organic structure. Darwin, on the other hand, 
accepted the idea of excellent design but proposed a natural explanation that could not have been more contrary 
to Fitzroy's conviction. Darwin developed an evolutionary theory based on chance variation and natural 
selection imposed by an external environment: a rigidly materialistic (and basically atheistic) version of evolution 
(see essay 1). Many other evolutionary theories of the nineteenth century were far more congenial to Fitzroy's 
type of Christianity. Religious leaders, for example, had far less trouble with common proposals for innate 
perfecting tendencies than with Darwin's uncompromisingly mechanical view." (Gould S.J., "Darwin's Sea 
Change, or Five Years at the Captain's Table," in "Ever Since Darwin," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, 
pp.32-33)

14/04/02
"Yet-continuing the theme of the last two essays and bringing this trilogy to a close - perfection works as well for 
the creationist as the evolutionist. Did not the Psalmist proclaim: `The heavens declare the glory of God; and the 
firmament showeth his handiwork'? The last two essays argued that imperfection carries the day for evolution." 
(Gould S.J., "Double Trouble," in "The Panda's Thumb," [1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.34)

14/04/02
"SINCE MAN CREATED God in his own image, the doctrine of special creation has never failed to explain those 
adaptations that we understand intuitively. How can we doubt that animals are exquisitely designed for their 
appointed roles when we watch a lioness hunt, a horse run, or a hippo wallow? The theory of natural selection 
would never have replaced the doctrine of divine creation if evident, admirable design pervaded all organisms. 
Charles Darwin understood this, and he focused on features that would be out of place in a world constructed by 
perfect wisdom. Why, for example, should a sensible designer create only on Australia a suite of marsupials to fill 
the same roles that placental mammals occupy on all other continents? Darwin even wrote an entire book on 
orchids to argue that the structures evolved to insure fertilization by insects are jerrybuilt of available parts used 
by ancestors for other purposes. Orchids are Rube Goldberg machines; a perfect engineer would certainly have 
come up with something better." (Gould S.J., "Organic Wisdom, or Why Should a Fly Eat Its Mother from 
Inside," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.91)

14/04/02
"One question may possibly have dwelt in the reader's mind during the perusal of these observations, namely, 
Why should not the Deity have given to the animal the faculty of vision at once? Why this circuitous 
perception; the ministry of so many means? an element provided for the purpose; reflected from opaque 
substances, refracted through transparent ones; and both according to precise laws: then, a complex organ, an 
intricate and artificial apparatus, in order, by the operation of this element, and in conformity with the restrictions 
of these laws, to produce an image upon a membrane communicating with the brains Wherefore all this? Why 
make the difficulty in order only to surmount it? If to perceive objects by some other mode than that of touch, or 
objects which lay out of the reach of that sense, were the thing purposed, could not a simple volition of the 
Creator have communicated the capacity? Why resort to contrivance, where power is omnipotent? Contrivance, 
by its very definition and nature, is the refuge of imperfection. To have recourse to expedients, implies difficulty, 
impediment, restraint, defect of power. This question belongs to the other senses, as well as to sight; to the 
general functions of animal life, as nutrition, secretion, respiration; to the economy of vegetables; and indeed to 
almost all the operations of nature. The question therefore is of very wide extent; and, amongst other answers 
which may be given to it, beside reasons of which probably we are ignorant, one answer is this. It is only by the 
display of contrivance, that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity, could be testified to his 
rational creatures. This is the scale by which we ascend to all the knowledge of our Creator which we possess, so 
far as it depends upon the phenomena, or the works of nature. Take away this, and you take await from us every 
subject of observation, and ground of reasoning; I mean as our rational faculties are formed at present. Whatever 
is done, God could have done, without the intervention of instruments or means: but it is in the construction of 
instruments, in the choice and adaptation of means, that a creative intelligence is seen. It is this which 
constitutes the order and beauty of the universe. God, therefore, has been pleased to prescribe limits to his own 
power, and to work his ends within those limits. (Paley W., "Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and 
Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature," [1802], St. Thomas Press: Houston TX, 1972, 
reprint, pp.28-29. Emphasis in original)

14/04/02
"Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient to our long retreat from an initial belief in our 
own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average 
galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us 
the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied." (Gould S.J., "Uniformity and 
Catastrophe," in "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, 
p.147)

14/04/02
"Darwin's theory uses the same invisible hand, but formed into a fist as a battering ram to eliminate Paley's God 
from nature. The very features that Paley used to infer not only God's existence, but also his goodness, are, for 
Darwin, but spin-offs of the only real action in nature-the endless struggle among organisms for reproductive 
success, and the endless hecatombs of failure." (Gould S.J., "Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand," in 
"Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History," Jonathan Cape: London, 1993, pp.149-150)

14/04/02
"Before Copernicus and Newton, we thought we lived at the hub of the universe. Before Darwin, we thought that 
a benevolent God had created us. Before Freud, we imagined ourselves as rational creatures (surely one of the 
least modest statements in intellectual history)." (Gould S.J., "So Cleverly Kind an Animal," in "Ever Since 
Darwin: Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.267)

14/04/02
"Our task should by now be clear. We have to embark upon the track of the absolute zero of creative 
involvement in the creation, the absolute zero of intervention. ... This is where we begin. The only faith we need 
for the journey is the belief that everything can be understood and, ultimately, that there is nothing to 
explain." (Atkins P.W., "Creation Revisited", [1992], Penguin Books: London, 1994, reprint, p.7. Emphasis in 
original)


15/04/02
"In the natural world, there are many pattern-assembly systems for which there is no simple explanation. There 
are useful scientific explanations for these complex systems, but the final patterns that they produce are so 
heterogeneous that they cannot effectively be reduced to smaller or less intricate predecessor components. As I 
will argue in Chapters 7 and 8, these patterns are, in a fundamental sense, irreducibly complex, and our particular 
model of the generation of the human figure is an example of a pattern-assembly system that irreducibly 
complex." (Katz M.J., "Templets and the Explanation of Complex Patterns," Cambridge University Press: 
Cambridge UK, 1986, pp.26-27)

16/04/02
"I have no metaphysical necessity driving me to propose the miraculous action of the evident finger of God as a 
scientific hypothesis. In my world view, all natural forces and events are fully contingent on the free choice of 
the sovereign God. Thus, neither an adequate nor an inadequate "neo-Darwinism (as mechanism) holds any 
terrors. But that is not what the data looks like. And I feel no metaphysical necessity to exclude the evident finger 
of God."
(Wilcox D.L.,  "Tamed Tornadoes," in Buell J. & Hearn V., eds.,
"Darwinism: Science or Philosophy?" Foundation for Thought and
Ethics: Richardson TX, 1994, p.215.
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/fte/darwinism/chapter13b.html)

16/04/02
"Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a 
great one, but that is not all it is. The creationists who oppose it so bitterly are right about one thing: Darwin's 
dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated 
apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves. ... The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one 
of us (all creatures great and small) and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight-that God is, like Santa 
Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either 
be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether." (Dennett D.C., "Darwin's 
Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, p.18)

17/04/02
"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections 
are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles." (Watson J.D., "Molecular 
Biology of the Gene," W.A. Benjamin: Menlo Park CA, Second Edition, 1970, p.2)

17/04/02
"From time to time, evolutionists re-examine a classic experimental study and find, to their horror, that it is flawed 
or downright wrong. .... Until now, however, the prize horse in our stable of examples has been the evolution of 
'industrial melanism' in the peppered moth, Biston betularia, presented by most teachers and textbooks as 
the paradigm of natural selection and evolution occurring within a human lifetime. ... Depressingly, Majerus 
shows that this classic example is in bad shape, and, while not yet ready for the glue factory, needs serious 
attention. ... Majerus notes that the most serious problem is that B. betularia probably does not rest on tree 
trunks -exactly two moths have been seen in such a position in more than 40 years of intensive search. The 
natural resting spots are, in fact, a mystery. This alone invalidates Kettlewell's release-recapture experiments, as 
moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks, where they are highly visible to bird predators. 
(Kettlewell also released his moths during the day, while they normally choose resting places at night.) The story 
is further eroded by noting that the resurgence of typica occurred well before lichens recolonized the polluted 
trees, and that a parallel increase and decrease of the melanic form also occurred in industrial areas of the United 
States, where there was no change in the abundance of the lichens that supposedly play such an important role. 
Finally, the results of Kettlewell's behavioural experiments were not replicated in later studies: moths have no 
tendency to choose matching backgrounds. Majerus finds many other flaws in the work, but they are too 
numerous to list here. ... My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it 
was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve." (Coyne J.A., "Not black and white," 
review of Majerus M.E.N., "Melanism: Evolution in Action," Oxford University Press, 1998, Nature, Vol. 
396, 5 November 1998, pp.35-36, p.35)

17/04/02
"The peppered moth remains one of the best examples of evolution in action. But as in so many other cases, the 
real story is turning out to be more complicated than the biologists first thought." (Cherfas J., "Exploding the 
myth of the melanic moth," New Scientist, Vol. 112, 25 December 1986/1 January 1987, p.25)

18/04/02
"Do you recognize this picture? Ask this question of any class of biology students, and almost all of them will 
respond positively. Moreover, most of them will be able to tell you that it depicts the classic example of natural 
selection in action: namely, the evolution of industrial melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia). 
Many students will even be able to recount the basic story: that more than a century ago, darkly pigmented 
peppered moths were rare in England. Typical moths were light in color and were well camouflaged by the pale 
lichens on the tree trunks on which they rested during the day. During the industrial revolution, many of the 
lichens died off as a direct result of sulfur dioxide in air pollution, and the trees become coated with industrial 
soot. Over this period, the numbers of light moths declined and the darker forms became common. The cause of 
this change in the classic example is argued to be bird-mediated predation. That is, in polluted areas, the light 
coloring was disadvantageous because it made the moths conspicuous. Hence, the light moths were readily 
detected and eaten by birds, whereas the dark moths were protected because of their newfound crypsis. The 
familiarity of this example to students, in addition to its presence in almost all biological textbooks, is proof 
enough of its importance. ... Majerus acknowledges the difficulties with the classic example and details the major 
elements in the story, some of which are seriously flawed. For example, peppered moths do not actually rest 
exposed on the trunks of trees. The resting place is not known, but Majerus concludes that the most likely 
resting place is on the underside of branches, below branch/trunk joins and on foliate twigs. This has major 
implications for the classic example; among other things, it calls into question the findings of the bird predation 
experiments, which form the backbone of the classic explanation." (Millar C. & Lambert D., "Industrial melanism - 
a classic example of another kind?," BioScience, Vol. 48, No. 12, December 1999, p.1021)

18/04/02
"A natural experiment of a similar kind which is constantly cited, is the study of the peppered moth, Biston 
betularia, by H.B. Kettlewell. It resembles the lichen on trees so closely as to be almost invisible when resting 
on a lichened tree. About 1848, a black form materialised, named carbonaria, which was easily spotted by birds 
and hence eaten. The mutation kept recurring, however. But the smokes of the industrial revolution killed the 
grey lichens and blackened the trees, giving the black form an advantage and handicapping the grey form. By 
1900 the black form, which had constituted only one per cent of the population in the mid-nineteenth century, 
comprised 99 per cent. Recently, owing to the Clean Air Acts, the drift has been reversed and in some areas the 
grey form in reasserting itself. This has been called 'the most striking example of evolutionary change actually 
witnessed'. And even 'Darwin's missing evidence'. Subsequently more than seventy other varieties of moth were 
found to have darkened and the same is true of industrial areas in Europe, the US and Canada. But popular 
accounts of this phenomenon say nothing of the many reservations Kettlewell expressed. In particular, it is not 
clear why the disadvantageous form is not eliminated completely in a century, which is what Darwin would have 
expected. And why are the proportions surviving quite different in different species? Odder still, dark mutants 
appeared among ladybirds and spiders, even among ladybirds that are distasteful to birds in any case." (Taylor 
G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," [1983], Abacus: London, 1984, reprint, pp.33-34)

18/04/02
"Who then was this Goldschmidt whom so many reviled in ignorance? First of all-and this must be a general 
principle for objects of intense ridicule-he could not have been a minor or second-rate thinker, for such scientists 
are not worth the emotional energy devoted to Goldschmidt's intellectual persecution. No one likes to waste time 
on a nonentity." (Gould S.J., "The Uses of Heresy: An Introduction to Richard Goldschmidt's The Material Basis 
of Evolution," in Goldschmidt R.B., "The Material Basis of Evolution," [1940], Yale University Press: New Haven 
CT, 1982, reprint, p.xiv)

19/04/02
"A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our 
thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and 
if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own 
credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound-a proof that there are no such 
things as proofs- which is nonsense. Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by 
Professor Haldane: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no 
reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed 
of atoms." (Haldane J.B.S., "Possible Worlds," Chatto & Windus, 1932, p.209) But Naturalism, even if it is not 
purely materialistic, seems to me to involve the same difficulty, though in a somewhat less obvious form. It 
discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer 
support Naturalism itself." (Lewis C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," [1947], Fontana: London, 1960, Revised 
edition, 1963, reprint, pp.18-19. Ellipses Lewis')

19/04/02
"It is necessary first to admit of a major and fundamental area of agreement with the creationists. I personally do 
not see how the concept of evolution can be made consistent with that of creation by a personal god, or indeed 
any sort of god. ... The late Professor J.B.S. Haldane put the issue more bluntly: `My practise as a scientist is 
atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere 
with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional 
career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I 
should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.'" (Halstead L.B., "Evolution-The Fossils Say 
Yes!," in Montagu A., ed., "Science and Creationism", Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1984, pp.240-241)

19/04/02
"Proponents of the RNA world scenario have received flak not just from chemists but from biologists too. If life 
began with RNA replication, you would expect the necessary replication machinery to be very ancient, and 
therefore common to all extant life. However, genetic analysis reveals that the genes coding for RNA replication 
differ markedly in the three domains of life, suggesting that RNA replication was refined some time after 
the common ancestor lived." (Davies P.C.W., "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life," Penguin: 
Ringwood VIC, Australia, 1998, p.100. Emphasis in original)

19/04/02
"The action of natural selection can be studied experimentally only in exceptionally favorable objects and under 
favorable circumstances. No major evolutionary change is noticeable in most species of organisms within a 
human lifetime, hence the supposition that species have become what they are now through evolution by natural 
selection can be at best no more than a very probable inference. It is obviously impossible to reproduce in the 
laboratory under controlled conditions the evolution of, for example, the horse tribe or of the anthropoid apes. 
Moreover the work on natural selection is of necessity confined mainly to experiments in which the environment 
of the organism is modified artificially, and the resulting changes in the genetic make-up of the populations are 
recorded. A modification of environment is sometimes brought about unintentionally by man; the effects of such 
a modification on the free-living organisms may furnish valuable, though mostly indirect, information on 
selection. Skeptics may contend that if the change in the environmentis wrought directly or indirectly by man, the 
resulting selection is no longer `natural.'" (Dobzhansky, T.G., "Genetics and the Origin of Species," [1937], 
Columbia University Press: New York NY, 1982, reprint, pp.151-152)

19/04/02
"At this point in our discussion I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are 
discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small 
mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of the 
gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, 
ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of 
echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, enidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary 
chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given." 
(Goldschmidt R.B., "The Material Basis of Evolution," [1940], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1982, reprint, 
pp.6-7)

22/04/02
"Was the law broken? It is a sterile stratagem to insert miracles to bridge the unknown. Soluble problems often 
seem to be baffling to begin with. Who would have thought a thousand years ago that the size of an atom or the 
age of the Earth would ever be discovered? Poor Dr. Watson was always being baffled by Sherlock Holmes' 
cases - as we all are by a good conjuring show. It is silly to say that because we cannot see a natural explanation 
for a phenomenon then we must look for a supernatural explanation. (It is usually silly anyway.) With so many 
past scientific puzzles now cleared up there have to be very clear reasons not to presume natural causes. Let us 
not say that the law was broken." (Cairns-Smith A.G., "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective 
Story," [1985], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, reprint, p.6)

23/04/02
"In fact, if any confirmation of Darwinism were needed, it has turned up in examples of natural selection that have 
taken place before the eyes of mankind (now that mankind knows what to watch for). A notable example occurred 
in Darwin's native land. In England, it seems, the peppered moth exists in two varieties, a light and a dark. In 
Darwin's time, the white variety was predominant because it was less prominently visible against the light 
lichencovered bark of the trees it frequented. It was saved by this 'protective colouration' more often than the 
clearly visible, dark Variety from those animals who would feed on it. In modern, industrialized England, however, 
soot has killed the lichen cover and blackened the-tree bark. Now it is the dark variety that is less visible against 
the bark and therefore protected. It is the dark variety that is now predominant - through the action of natural 
selection." (Asimov I., "Asimov's Guide to Science: The Biological Sciences," [1960], Penguin: Hartmondsworth, 
Middlesex, Vol. 2, 1978, reprint, p.314)

23/04/02
"Alternatively camouflage might be the important factor, as has always been popularly assumed. As the air grew 
cleaner the background lightness would have increased until birds could no longer spot the lighter form. The 
matter, however, is difficult to resolve. Clarke and his colleagues do not think that there has been any great 
change in the state of the lichens that are supposed to be hiding the moths. This suggests that bird vision is not 
the only important aspect of selection. The real difficulty is that we do not know where the birds actually spend 
the hours of daylight. Clarke thinks that they do not hide among the lichens on trees and walls, at least in his 
area. In 95 years he has found only two specimens in that situation, and none elsewhere, so their normal hiding 
place remains a mystery. Industrial melanism has been reversed as industrial pollution has been decreased that 
much is clear. Exactly how the changes in the peppered moth are brought about will require more work." (Cherfas 
J., "Clean air revives the peppered moth," New Scientist, Vol. 109, No. 1489, 2 January 1986, p.17)

23/04/02
"In spite of the apparent ease with which the many-universes theory can account for what would otherwise be 
considered remarkable feature of the universe, the theory faces a number of serious objections. Not least of these 
is Ockham's razor: one must introduce a vast (indeed infinite) complexity to explain the regularities of just one 
universe. This "blunderbuss" approach to explaining the specialness of our universe is scientifically 
questionable. Another problem is that the theory can explain only those aspect of nature that are relevant to the 
existence of conscious life, otherwise there is no selection mechanism. Many of the best examples of design, 
such as the ingenuity and unity of particle physics, have little obvious connection with biology." (Davies 
P.C.W., "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Science," in Templeton J.M., ed., "Evidence of Purpose: Scientists 
Discover the Creator," Continuum: New York NY, 1994, pp.52-53)

24/04/02
"Perhaps the most unexpected support, though, came from Leonard Horner, Lyell's ageing father-in-law, who in 
1861 had succeeded Phillips as president of the Geological Society. Putting aside his geological interests, Horner 
had turned his attention to the Bible, and in particular Ussher's date for the creation of the world. He had become 
convinced that the main reason people still believed that man and the world were of recent origin was because 
they assumed that the date of 4004 BC was actually part of the Bible. By now hardly anyone remembered that it 
was the work of Ussher. ... In February 1861, instead of delivering the usual treatise on geology, he surprised the 
members of the Geological Society by devoting a large part of his presidential address to a critique of the Bible, 
and in particular, Ussher's marginal dates. ... `To remove any inaccuracy in notes accompanying the authorized 
version of our Bible is surely an imperative duty. The retention of the marginal note in question is by no means a 
matter of indifference: it is untrue, and therefore it is mischievous.' When he heard about the lecture, Darwin was 
amazed. Despite having spent two years at Cambridge training for Holy Orders, he had no idea the date was 
Ussher's. 'How curious about the Bible! I declare I had fancied that the date was somehow in the Bible,' he wrote 
to Horner ..." (Gorst M., "Aeons: The Search for the Beginning of Time," Fourth Estate: London, 2001, pp.161-
162)


24/04/02
"In 1998, for the first time, scientists obtained measurements of all the parameters required to find the universe's 
age. The search, it seems, may have reached its end. The fact that there was a search at all, though, is due to 
Christianity. Two thousand years ago, the idea that the world might have a starting point was inconceivable. 
Almost all ancient civilisations believed that the universe had existed for ever. From ancient Babylon to early 
India, the prevailing belief was in an eternal world. Nearly always this concept was combined with the idea of 
recurring cycles. Instead of having a beginning, time was thought to consist of endless eras, repeated over and 
over again for eternity. ... A similar view was held in ancient Greece. ... Throughout the ancient world there was 
just one civilisation that didn't subscribe to this cyclic vision of eternity. Jewish scripture, with its story of the 
Creation, stated clearly that the world had a beginning, a first day when God created the heaven and the earth. By 
the end of the first century AD, Christianity had adopted this Jewish history as its own ..." (Gorst M., "Aeons: 
The Search for the Beginning of Time," Fourth Estate: London, 2001, pp.3-4)

25/04/02
"The 1998 NAS members perhaps provide a more immaculate sample of the elite than Leuba's starred entries did. 
Congress created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, and after naming its first members Congress 
empowered them and their successors to choose all later members. Its current membership of 1,800 remains the 
closest thing to peerage in American science. And their responses validate Leuba's prediction of the beliefs of 
topflight scientists generations from his time. Disbelief among NAS members responding to our survey exceeded 
90 percent. The increase may simply reflect that they are more elite than Leuba's "greater" scientists, but this 
interpretation would also please Leuba. NAS biologists are the most skeptical, with 95 percent of our 
respondents evincing atheism and agnosticism." (Larson E.J. & Witham L., "Scientists and Religion in America," 
Scientific American, Vol. 281, No. 3, September 1999, pp.78-83, p.80)  
25/04/02
"The NAS is mindful of its obligation to serve the public, but it can be a delicate course to maneuver. Disbelief 
and belief have often become a major public relations issue for science in religious America. ... Yet, to its credit, in 
1998 the NAS issued a report proudly promoting the teaching of evolution in public school. `Whether God exists 
or not is a question about which science is neutral,' the report cautiously begins, before launching its broadside 
of scientific arguments against religious objections to teaching evolution. But the irony is remarkable: a group of 
specialists who are nearly all nonbelievers-and who believe that science compels such a conclusion-told the 
public that `science is neutral' on the God question." (Larson E.J. & Witham L., "Scientists and Religion in 
America," Scientific American, Vol. 281, No. 3, September 1999, pp.78-83, p.81)

26/04/02
"There is no denying, at this point, that Darwin's idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart 
of everything in sight. The question is: what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes 
through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the 
traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but good riddance to the rest of them. ... 
The truly dangerous aspect of Darwin's idea is its seductiveness. ... A meme that occurs in many guises in the 
world's folklore is the tale of the initially terrifying friend mistaken for an enemy. "Beauty and the Beast" is one of 
the best-known species of this story. Balancing it is "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." Now, which meme do you 
want to use to express your judgment of Darwinism? Is it truly a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Then reject it and 
fight on, ever more vigilant against the seductions of Darwin's idea, which is truly dangerous. " (Dennett D.C., 
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, p.521)

26/04/02
"We live in a darwinian world. For many evolutionary biologists the everextending grand evolutionary synthesis 
promulgated in the 1930s and 1940s offers adequate explanations and serves as a consistent generator of testable 
hypotheses. For Stephen Jay Gould it is but a foundation, wholly inadequate to be a framework within which to 
build." (Wake D.B., "A few words about evolution: Building a hierarchical framework on the foundations of 
darwinism". Review of "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory," by Stephen Jay Gould, Belknap, 2002. 
Nature, Vol. 416, 25 April 2002, pp.787-788)

26/04/02
"We can regard DNA as the book of the cell - a string of words (genes)
which are themselves made up of individual letters (monomers). Proteins are the same words translated into 
another language with its own alphabet. Each translated word is invested with meaning, but none tells a story on 
its own. The alphabet of proteins has just twenty characters, and they are all molecules called amino adds. When 
each amino acid is appended to the character string that will become a protein, a molecule of water is constructed 
from unwanted atoms in the linking unit. The alphabets of RNA and DNA are even more rudimentary: they 
contain four characters each, and three of them are common to both - the languages are almost identical. But the 
characters themselves are elaborate ones, with a substructure every bit as complex as Chinese or Japanese 
characters. To account for life on Earth, the first task is therefore to explain where the alphabets came from and 
how they might have been joined up into words. Progressing from words to a book is a puzzle of another order, 
and we can presently only marvel at how the words assembled themselves into stories of such stunning richness 
and diversity." (Ball P., "H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, 
p.208)

26/04/02 "JUPITER ... appears to have been Earth's guardian angel: it has protected our fragile, life-bearing globe 
from a deadly barrage of comets. George Wetherill, a planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution of 
Washington, D.C., reached this conclusion after simulating the birth of solar systems on a desktop computer. ... 
Wetherill's simulations suggest that Jupiter flung trillions of comets out of our solar system within the first billion 
years after the sun formed, and that the planet is continuing to eject them today at a lower but steady rate. In 
systems lacking Jupiter size planets, however, the small inner worlds are relentlessly bombarded. Without a full-
size Jupiter, Wetherill estimates, Earth would have been struck by comets at least 1,000 times more often, and 
catastrophic impacts of the kind that probably exterminated the dinosaurs would have occurred every 100,000 
years or so instead of every 100 million. It may well be that if Jupiter weren't there, we wouldn't be here either,' 
says Wetherill. `Higher organisms require significant amounts of time to evolve. If this were happening every 
100,000 years, you would hardly have a chance to evolve very much before you got wiped out again. I think 
there's a good chance we wouldn't be around to study the origin of the solar system." ("Our Friend Jove," 
Discover, Vol. 14, No. 7, July 1993, p.15)

28/04/02
"Of course changes observed in populations may be of very different orders of magnitude, from those induced in 
a herd of domestic animals by the introduction of a new sire to phylogenetic changes leading to the origin of new 
classes of organisms. The former are obviously trifling in scale compared with the latter, and it may not be 
convenient to have all of them subsumed under the name "evolution." Experience seems to show, however, that 
there is no way toward an understanding of the mechanisms of macro- evolutionary changes, which require time 
on a geological scale, other than through a full comprehension of the micro-evolutionary processes observable 
within the span of a human lifetime and often controlled by man's will. For this reason we are compelled at the 
present level of knowledge reluctantly to put a sign of equality between the mechanisms of macro- and micro-
evolution, and, proceeding on this assumption, to push our investigations as far ahead as this working 
hypothesis will permit." (Dobzhansky T.G., "Genetics and the Origin of Species," Columbia University Press: 
New York NY, [1937], 1982, reprint, p.12)

29/04/02
"What I don't like about the many universes theory is that it seems
like another case of ad hoc or miraculous solutions. Invoking an infinite number of other universes just to explain 
the apparent contrivances of the one we see is pretty drastic, and in stark conflict with Occam's razor (according 
to which science should prefer explanations with the least number of assumptions). I think it's much more 
satisfactory from a scientific point of view to try to understand why things are the way they are in this universe 
and not to invent invisible universes to do the job."
(Davies P.C.W., "Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life," Penguin: 
London, 1995, pp.79-80)

29/04/02
"One might equally explain the course of biological evolution through openness to change, just because as we 
look back we see that there has been so much change. In point of fact, we believe that biological change is 
anomalous rather than normal. Reproduction proceeds by duplication of existing genes, with considerable 
safeguards against errors in duplication, so that organisms on the whole breed true; the challenge is much more 
to explain variation and novelty than faithful heredity and stasis. The particular course that evolution has taken 
is a by-product of mutation, competition, environmental change, natural selection, genetic drift, and the 
like, not the result of any direct natural tendency for biological entities to change. Similarly, that science has 
adopted new ideas in no way demonstrates that the adoption of new ideas is somehow fundamentally natural to 
science. Indeed, to assert that science is open to new things is to fly in the face of the evidence; and it even 
contradicts other common beliefs about science." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific 
Method," [1992], University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL, 1994, p.73. Emphasis in original).

29/04/02
"To make sense of the tension between innovation and conservatism in science, more helpful than the banal 
distinction between what is known and what is not known is the discrimination of three categories: the known, 
the known unknown, and the unknown unknown. ... The unknown unknown comprises what we do not even 
suspect. Indeed, were it not for history, we would not even believe that the unknown unknown exists. We learn 
the prevailing paradigm, and thereby not only what is known but also what is believed to remain not understood. 
The conventional wisdom is blind to its own inadequacy, to the fact that, sooner or later, it will be found to be 
wrong, in one way or another. (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method," [1992], 
University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL, 1994, pp.73-74)

29/04/02
"So one can comprehend that innovators in science routinely encounter resistance if their ideas are sufficiently 
original; almost invariably, if those ideas contradict significant parts of the conventional wisdom; the more 
strongly, if novel methods are also involved; and, of course, more emphatically if the innovator is relatively 
unknown or an outsider to the relevant specialty. The list of discoveries resisted (only to be eventually accepted) 
is long indeed, and the names read nowadays like an honor roll ... It is simply the case that human beings, be they 
scientists or something else, do not take kindly to having their beliefs contradicted. Admittedly, discovery in 
science is given lip service as desirable, and scientists strain to achieve it: but what they aim for is discovery 
within the prevailing paradigm only. The genuinely novel arises unbidden and unforeseen out of the realm of the 
unknown unknown. Often it comes at the hands of a maverick or an outsider who is not hampered by the 
disciplinary blinders of the specialists, and inevitably it encounters incredulity, to some degree or other, at least 
at first. Science is open to new things only so long as they are not too new." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific 
Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method," [1992], University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL, 
1994, pp.75-76. Emphasis in original)

30/04/02
"Another weakness of the anthropic argument is that it seems the very antithesis of Occam's razor, according to 
which the most plausible of a possible set of explanations is that which contains the simplest ideas and least 
number of assumptions. To invoke an infinity of other universes just to explain one is surely carrying excess 
baggage to cosmic extremes, not to mention the fact that all but a minute proportion of these other universes go 
unobserved (except by God perhaps)." (Davies, P.C.W., "God and the New Physics," Penguin: London, 1990, 
reprint, p.173)
[top]

May
1/05/02
"Mutation is a basic physiological process which is studied experimentally, with the aid of physical and chemical 
methods. On the other hand, it is manifestly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory the evolution of man from 
the australopithecine, or of the modern horse from an Eohippus, or of a land vertebrate from a fishlike ancestor. 
These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land 
vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to 
the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, 
which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. ... Experimental evolution deals of necessity with only 
the simplest levels of the evolutionary process, sometimes called microevolution." (Dobzhansky T., "On 
Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology," Part I, "Biology," American Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 
5, December 1957, p.388)

1/05/02
"In 1953 Harold Urey and Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago showed that amino acids can be made by 
energetic processes taking place within a mixture of simple gases. They passed electrical discharges through a 
mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour, and found small but significant quantities of relatively 
complex organic molecules in the solution formed when the water vapour cooled and condensed. These included 
the simplest amino acids, organic adds and urea. The experiment indicated that delicate chemistry is not needed 
to make such compounds we might expect them to appear in a prebiotic sea struck by lightning under an 
atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. But the Earth's early atmosphere wasn't like this; in particular, 
most of the nitrogen was present as elemental nitrogen gas, not ammonia. Similar experiments with a mixture of 
methane, water, nitrogen and only small amounts of ammonia do, however, also generate ten of the twenty amino 
acids found in natural proteins. With the addition of hydrogen sulphide, the two natural sulphur-containing 
amino adds can be formed too. Which is all very well, except that the primitive atmosphere probably wasn't like 
this either: it is more likely to have been composed mostly of nitrogen and carbon monoxide and/or carbon 
dioxide. Spark discharge experiments that use carbon monoxide or dioxide as the source of carbon don't do half 
as well - the mixture that results contains little more than a single character of the protein alphabet, and the 
simplest one at that." (Ball P., "H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, 
reprint, p.209)

2/05/02
"sophism. A sophism is a type of fallacy that is not just an error of reasoning, or an invalid argument, but a kind 
of tactic of argumentation used unfairly to try to get the best of a speech partner. ... For an example of a sophism, 
see the entry 'straw man fallacy'." (Walton D.N., in Honderic T., ed., "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," 
Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1995, p.839)

4/05/02
"How did man get his brain? Many years ago Charles Darwin's great contemporary, and co-discoverer with him 
of the principle of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, propounded that simple question. It is a question 
which has bothered evolutionists ever since, and when Darwin received his copy of an article Wallace had 
written on this subject he was obviously shaken. It is recorded that he wrote in anguish across the paper, "No!" 
and underlined the "No" three times heavily in a rising fervor of objection. Today the question asked by Wallace 
and never satisfactorily answered by Darwin has returned to haunt us." (Eiseley L.C., "The Immense Journey," 
[1946], Vintage: New York NY, 1957, reprint, p.79)

4/05/02
"We are now in a position to define the uniqueness of human evolution. The essential character of man as a 
dominant organism is conceptual thought. And conceptual thought could have arisen only in a multicellular 
animal, an animal with bilateral symmetry, head and blood system, a vertebrate as against a mollusc or an 
arthropod, land vertebrate among vertebrates, a a mammal among land vertebrates. Finally, it could have arisen 
only in a mammalian line which was gregarious, which produced one young at a birth instead of several, and 
which had recently, become terrestrial after a long period of arboreal life. There is only one group of animals 
which fulfils these conditions-a terrestrial offshoot of the higher Primates. Thus not merely has conceptual 
thought been evolved only in man: it could not have been evolved except in man. There is but one path of 
unlimited progress through the evolutionary maze. The course of human evolution is as unique as its result. It is 
unique not in the trivial sense of being a different course from that of any other organism, but in the profounder 
sense of being the only path that could have achieved the essential characters of man. Conceptual thought on 
this planet is inevitably associated with a particular type of Primate body and Primate brain." (Huxley J.S., "The 
Uniqueness of Man," in "The Uniqueness of Man," Chatto & Windus: London, 1941, Third Impression, pp.15-
16)

9/05/02
"Darwin often, and correctly, harped on the claim that evolution could only be gradual (at best, you might say). 
As Dawkins (1986a, p. 145) says, "For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was 
not evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution." (Dennett D.C., "Darwin's Dangerous 
Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, p.290)

10/05/02
"More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human (Figure 1 a). The flagellar 
filament (propeller) is a 10 um-long, thin, rigid, cork screw-shaped structure, with a helical period of about 2 um. 
The filament is connected to the hook by two junctional proteins. Named according to its shape, the flexible hook 
acts as a universal joint permitting the filament and motor to rotate about different axes. The filament, junction, 
hook, and drive shaft all appear to have a common helical design. The remaining flagellar parts are rings. The L 
and P rings are believed to act as a bushing through which the rotating drive shaft passes. These two rings are 
anchored in the outer membrane and peptidoglycan, respectively. ... In the periplasm, the drive shaft inserts in a 
socket just above the S ring. The M ring is a 25 nm disk, which traverses the cell's inner membrane. Extending 
into the cytoplasm from the extended M ring is the C ring, a 45 nm annulus. A ring of about 10 membrane 
particles known as studs surround each flagellar motor. These probably sit in the L-shaped shelf made by the M 
and C rings." (DeRosier, D.J., "The Turn of the Screw: The Bacterial Flagellar Motor," Cell, Vol. 93, 
April 3, 1998, pp.17-20, p.17)

10/05/02
"If the origin of the protein alphabet is a headache, making the elaborate characters of the nucleic-acid alphabet 
is something of a nightmare. Nonetheless, all of them have been made one way or another by the reaction of 
chemical substances that might, if you're an optimist, have existed on the early Earth. One component of all the 
nucleic-acid characters is a sugar molecule which can be created by dishing out rough treatment to 
formaldehyde. Another component is a so-called nucleic-acid base. There are four types of these in DNA, and 
four in RNA - they are like the crucial brushmarks that distinguish otherwise identical characters. The nucleic-
acid bases can be fashioned from reactions involving hydrogen cyanide or a small molecule called 
cyanoacetylene. But all of these syntheses require indelicate loading of the dice, for example by using 
concentrations of the reactants greater than could have been mustered on the early Earth. (Ball P., 
"H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.209-210)

11/05/02
"Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging 
convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, 
a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that 
priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments are very 
different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I 
discover) is that they are all untrue. If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look 
at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will 
observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale 
of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being 
so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma." (Chesterton G.K., "Orthodoxy," 
[1908], Fontana: London, 1961, reprint, pp.142-143)

1/05/02
"A rather large irony overshadows Steven Pinker's career-and all of evolutionary psychology. Pinker in particular 
and evolutionary psychologists in general are deeply indebted to the linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, who 
like Pinker is an MIT professor, pioneered the genetic, modular approach to the mind pursued by evolutionary 
psychologists. ... when I discussed the issue with him, Chomsky insisted that his doubts about neo-Darwinism 
are purely scientific. He accepted that natural selection probably played some role in the evolution of language 
and other human attributes. But given the enormous gap between human cognitive capacities and those of other 
animals, he thought that science could say little about how or why those capacities evolved. Darwin's theory 
essentially says that there is `a naturalistic explanation for things,' Chomsky elaborated. Anyone who does not 
believe in `divine intervention' accepts as much. The difficulty lies in determining what the correct naturalistic 
explanation is. Natural selection is `a factor in determining the distribution of traits and properties 
within these constraints. A factor, not the factor.'" (Horgan J., "The Undiscovered Mind: How the 
Brain Defies Explanation," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, pp.177-178. Emphasis in original)

11/05/02
"One rarely noted aspect of peer review is that, by and large and on the average but especially with the most 
brilliant ideas, the reviewers are less qualified than the authors of the research proposals. For one thing, each 
proposal is reviewed by as many as half a dozen peers, and their average competence is, solely for that 
reason, likely to be lower than that of the author of the proposal: there are fewer brilliant people than there 
are competent ones, and there are fewer very competent ones than there are moderately competent ones, in any 
human activity. Further, the best scientists are also those whose time is most in demand and who will not be able 
to respond to all the requests made to them to review ideas, proposals, papers, books, and so on; and so the 
burden of doing the peer reviewing trickles down toward those who have more time but less talent. In addition, of 
course, whoever has evolved a proposal is likely-precisely for that reason-to know more about the specific 
details of that particular problem than anybody else in the world." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth 
of the Scientific Method," [1992], University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL, 1994, reprint, pp.118-119. 
Emphasis in original)

11/05/02
"It seems to be not farfetched to compare the current state of science (and more generally that of academe) to the 
situation of the Church at the time of the Reformation, which has been described in the following way by De 
Lamar Jensen: `Until the middle years...the actual number of clergy [read scientists] increased, but then a 
decline set in. Even before the outbreak of the...revolt, their prestige and influence were already waning. Whether 
justified or not, the general population's growing disrespect for the clergy [read scientists], especially the 
monks [read researcher-scholars], tended to weaken some of the bonds of the Christian [read 
scientific] community and make the church [read scientific institutions] as a whole more 
vulnerable to criticism and attack. It had not been above criticism in earlier ages, but now it was becoming the 
practice rather than the exception to blame the institution as a whole, along with individual members of it, for 
infractions...of law and...ethics. As...abuses increased, the recognition and condemnation of those abuses 
mounted proportionally. To compensate for their declining prestige, many clergymen [read scientists] 
became even more avaricious [asking for ever lower teaching loads, higher salaries, freedom to consult and to 
found business enterprises; ignoring conflicts of interest], and the growing chasm between the priesthood [read 
scientists] and the laity, and between the higher and lower clergy [read administrators and practicing 
scientists], widened.' The Reformation was no revolution against religion itself; rather, was spurred by 
disenchantment with the people who officially professed it but in practice behaved badly. Just so is modern 
society disenchanted not with science itself but with the practices of some of those whole profession it is. ... Just 
as in the Reformation, society is not now in the mood to distinguish between the human failings of individuals 
and the activities of the institution. .... To understand must not be to excuse, or the wider society will rightly 
conclude that the institution is less concerned with its ideals and responsibilities than with the short-term welfare 
of its present members." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method," [1992], 
University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago IL, 1994, pp.83-84. Parentheses and Emphasis in original). 
12/05/02
"As more facts accumulate, the logical and `intuitive' value of different interpretations changes and finally a 
consensus is reached about the truth of the matter. But this textbook myth has no congruence with reality. Long 
before there is any direct evidence, scientific workers have brought to the issue deep-seated prejudices; the more 
important the issue and the more ambiguous the evidence, the more important are the prejudices, and the greater 
the likelihood that two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable schools will appear. Even when seemingly 
incontrovertible evidence appears to decide the matter, the conflict is not necessarily resolved, for a slight 
redefinition of the issues results in a continuation of the struggle. It is part of the dialectic of science that the 
apparent solution of a problem usually reveals that we have not asked the right question in the first place, or that 
a much more difficult and intractable problem lies just below the surface that has been so triumphantly cleared 
away. And in the process of redefinition of the issues, the old parties remain, sometimes under new rubrics, but 
always with old points of view. This must be the case because schools of thought about unresolved problems do 
not derive from idiosyncratic intuitions but on deep ideological biases reflecting social and intellectual world 
views. A priori assumptions about the truth of particular unresolved questions are simply special cases of 
general prejudices. Attitudes about the kind and amount of genetic variation in populations, like all attitudes 
about unresolved scientific issues, reflect and are consistent with the intellectual histories of their proponents. 
People see new problems mirrored in a glass that has been molded by their solutions to old problems. A 
scientist's present view of difficult questions is chiefly influenced by the history of his intellectual and 
ideological development up to the present moment, and the resolution of current difficulties will in turn 
precondition his view of future problems." (Lewontin R.C., "The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change," 
Columbia University Press: New York NY, 1974, p.29)

14/05/02
"Reconstructing the chemical origin of life is just one hurdle after another. Even if you can dream up barely 
plausible schemes for making the building blocks of life's principal biomolecules, joining them up is an awful 
business. ... Even making the links isn't the end of the matter, because water can and will sever these links in a 
reaction called hydrolysis ('splitting with water'). That's a problem, then, if you're supposing that the chemistry of 
life took place in ancient seas or lagoons. And it gets worse. Linking up two amino acids has the complication 
that it spits out a molecule of water, and this means that the more water there is around, the more hydrolysis will 
dominate over link forging. So even if chains of amino adds - the ancestors of proteins, like words that have not 
yet acquired meaning - could be formed, would they survive for long enough to take on meaning, to start forming 
sentences? Says Chris Chyba, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, `Proteins are necessary for all 
life on Earth, but how could these molecules have formed in the seas of prebiotic Earth, since water acts not to 
link amino acids together but rather to split them apart? ... Water-based life must therefore fight a constant battle 
against destruction.' (Chyba C., "The stuff of life: why water?" Planetary Report, May/June 1998, in Ball P., 
"H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.210)  
17/05/02
"For nucleic acids, the problem of hydrolysis may be even more severe. In particular, the sugar rings that form a 
crucial part of the nucleic-acid alphabet are hydrolysed relatively quickly in water. In other words, although water 
is surely the environment in which life began, that contingency comes with plenty of problems of its own." (Ball 
P., "H2O: A Biography of Water," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.210)

17/05/02
"Since the ultra[Darwinist]s are fundamentalists at heart, and since fundamentalists generally try to stigmatize 
their opponents by depicting them as apostates from the one true way, may I state for the record that I (along 
with all other Darwinian pluralists) do not deny either the existence and central importance of adaptation, or the 
production of adaptation by natural selection. Yes, eyes are for seeing and feet are for moving. And, yes again, I 
know of no scientific mechanism other than natural selection with the proven power to build structures of such 
eminently workable design." (Gould S.J., "Darwinian Fundamentalism," New York Review of Books, June 12, 
1997. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151)

18/05/02
"One of the most remarkable motile appendages in all of nature is the bacterial flagellum, an appendage strikingly 
dissimilar to the flagella of eukaryotic cells, both structurally and functionally. A flagellated bacterium is shown 
in Figure 21-34. Unlike eukaryotic appendages, bacterial flagella are not membrane-bounded and are therefore 
extracellular structures. As Figure 21-35a and b illustrates, the bacterial flagellum is a spiral filament, usually 
about 15 um in diameter and about 10-20 um long. The filament is attached to a hook, which is, in turn, connected 
by a rod to four ringlike structures in the base. The rod penetrates the outer membrane, the peptidoglycan wall, 
and the inner (plasma) membrane. Two of the rings are anchored in the outer membrane, and two in the plasma 
membrane. The two rings in the plasma membrane are called the S (stator) ring and the M (motor) ring (Figure 21-
35c). ... . It is now quite clear, however, that the flagellum actually rotates as a rigid, helical structure, driven by a 
rotary "motor" at the base of each filament. The S ring in the plasma membrane is anchored to the peptidoglycan 
layer and is regarded as the nonrotating stator, as the name suggests. The M ring in the plasma membrane 
rotates against the S ring and is in effect the motor that drives the flagellum. (see Figure 21-35c). Requiring as it 
does the structural equivalents of a rotor, a stator, and rotary bearings, such a mechanism was originally 
considered highly unlikely, and is certainly without precedent in the biological world. But a series of ingenious 
experiments provided conclusive evidence for just such a propeller-like rotary drive." (Becker W.M., Reece J.B. & 
Poenie M.F., "The World of the Cell," [1996], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Third Edition, 1999, reprint, 
pp.706-707)

18/05/02
"Compounding the problem was the additional challenge, to all evolutionary theories both directed and 
undirected, that at a gross morphological level the organic world appears to be markedly discontinuous. There 
are innumerable examples of complex organs and adaptations which are not led up to by any known or even, in 
some cases, conceivable series of feasible intermediates. In the case, for example, of the flight feather of a bird, 
the amniotic egg, the bacterial flagellum, the avian lung, no convincing explanation of how they could have 
evolved gradually has ever been provided. The morphological discontinuities and especially organs or 
adaptations of extreme complexity, exhibiting what Michael Behe terms `irreducible complexity,' have, ever since 
Darwin, provided ammunition for special creationists who have claimed that these "morphological gaps" could 
not have been closed gradually by natural evolutionary processes and that they represent prima facie evidence 
for Divine intervention in the course of nature." (Denton M.J., "Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology 
Reveal Purpose in the Universe," Free Press: New York NY, 1998, pp.274-275)

18/05/02
"The most that we can say is that some lineages have become more complex in the course of time. Complexity is 
hard to define or to measure, but there is surely some sense in which elephants and oak trees are more complex 
than bacteria, and bacteria than the first replicating molecules. Our thesis is that the increase has depended on a 
small number of major transitions in the way in which genetic information is transmitted between generations. 
Some of these transitions were unique: for example, the origin of the eukaryotes from the prokaryotes, of meiotic 
sex, and of the genetic code itself. Other transitions, such as the origin of multicellularity, and of animal societies, 
have occurred several times independently. There is no reason to regard the unique transitions as the inevitable 
result of some general law: one can imagine that life might have got stuck at the prokaryote or at the protist stage 
of evolution." (Maynard Smith J. & Szathmary E., "The Major Transitions in Evolution," W.H. Freeman: Oxford 
UK, 1995, p.3)

19/05/02
"A belief in evolution by natural selection is widely held, but even among scientists it is often held more as a 
matter of faith than of reason." (Glynn I., "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind," 
[1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, p.6)

20/05/02
"But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of man's creation. Whether man's physical 
system is or is not derived, by natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not inform us. 
As the command `Let the earth bring forth living creatures ` (Gen. 1:24)
does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural generation, so the forming of man `of the dust of 
the ground' (Gen. 2:7) does not in itself determine whether the creation of man's body was mediate or immediate. 
We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute the same relation which the multiplied bread 
and fish sustained to the five loaves and two fishes (Mat. 14: 19), or which the wine sustained to the water which 
was transformed at Cana (John 2:7-10), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original oil in the O.T. miracle 
(2 K. 4:14). The `dust, ` before the breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust." (Strong A.H., 
"Systematic Theology," [1907], Judson Press: Valley Forge PA, 1967, reprint, p.465)

24/05/02
"Soon after the publication of The Origin of Species, nearly all biologists acknowledged the basic facts of 
the evolutionary history of life, but the significance of natural selection and other evolutionary processes are still 
subject to serious scientific debate. In fact, there is currently more controversy regarding the mechanisms of 
evolution than at any time since the early years of the twentieth century. Alternative theories have been 
proposed to explain nearly all aspects of evolution, from the role of natural selection within populations to the 
largest-scale patterns and processes of evolution in plants and animals over the past 500 million years. Why 
should such a widely accepted concept in an extensively studied discipline still face such fundamental problems? 
One of the major reasons is that studies of modern populations and evidence from the fossil record give the 
impression of very different patterns and rates of evolution." (Carroll R.L., "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate 
Evolution," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1997, pp.1-2)

26/05/02
"The current (synthetic) theory of evolution has been criticized on the grounds that it implies that 
macroevolutionary processes (speciation and morphological diversification) are gradual. The extent to which 
macroevolution is gradual or punctuational remains to be ascertained. Macroevolutionary processes are 
underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with the synthetic theory of evolution. But 
microevolutionary principles are compatible with both gradualism and punctualism; therefore, logically they 
entail neither. Thus, macroevolution and microevolution are decoupled in the important sense that 
macroevolutionary patterns cannot be deduced from microevolutionary principles." (Stebbins G.L. & Ayala F.J., 
"Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?" Science, Vol. 213, 28 August 1981, pp.967-971, p.967)

27/05/02
"Can the microevolutionary processes studied by population geneticists account for macroevolutionary 
phenomena or do we need to postulate new kinds of genetic processes? The large morphological (phenotypic) 
changes observed in evolutionary history, and the rapidity with which they appear in the geological record, is 
one major matter of concern. Another issue is stasis-the apparent Persistence of species, with little or no 
morphological change, for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. The apparent dilemma is that 
microevolutionary processes apparently yield small but Continuous changes, while macroevolution as seen by 
punctualists occurs by large and rapid bursts of change followed by long periods without change. Forty years 
ago Goldschmidt argued that the incompatibility is real: `The decisive step in evolution, the first step towards 
macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary method than that of sheer 
accumulation of micromutations'" (Stebbins G.L. & Ayala F.J., "Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?" 
Science, Vol. 213, 28 August 1981, pp.967-971, p.969)

28/05/02
"The point is that what makes us distinctive in the animal world is our stupendous capacity to learn. It is what 
has long enabled us to change with changing conditions. People who think that because aggression and greed 
are so widespread we must be doomed by our genes to have these qualities, are closing their eyes to what it 
means to be a learning species."
(Fisher M.P., "Recent Revolutions in Anthropology," Franklin Watts: New York NY, 1986, p.15)

28/05/02
"We have no need to postulate gods who hand down commandments to us, because we can understand ethics 
as a natural phenomenon that arises in the course of the evolution of social, intelligent, long-lived mammals who 
possess the capacity to recognize each other and to remember the past behaviour of others. ... Since Darwin, 
there has been a widely supported scientific theory that offers an explanation of the origin of ethics. ... Once we 
admit that Darwin was right when he argued that human ethics evolved from the social instincts that we inherited 
from our non-human ancestors, we can put aside the hypothesis of a divine origin for ethics. " (Singer P., 
"Introduction," in Singer P., ed., "Ethics," Oxford Readers, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1994, pp.5-6)

29/05/02
"I agree with Maynard Smith (1969) that `The main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive 
complexity i.e. to explain the same set of facts which Paley used as evidence of a Creator,' I suppose people like 
me might be labeled neo-Paleyists, or perhaps `transformed Paleyists.' We concur with Paley that adaptive 
complexity demands a very special kind of explanation either a Designer as Paley taught, or something such as 
natural selection that does the job of a designer Indeed, adaptive complexity is probable the best diagnostic of 
the presence of life itself." (Dawkins R., "Universal Darwinism", in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: The 
Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy," Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, p.203)

29/05/02
"From time to time I shall need an example of an undisputed adaptation, and the time-honored eye will serve the 
purpose as well as ever (Paley, 1828; Darwin, 1859; any fundamentalist tract). "As far as the examination of the 
instrument goes; there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope 
was made for assisting it. They are made upon the same principles; both being adjusted to the laws by which the 
transmission and refraction of rays of light are regulated"(Paley 1828, V. 1, p. 17). If a similar instrument were 
found upon another planet, some special explanation would be called for. Either there is a God, or, if we are going 
to explain the universe in terms of blind physical forces, those blind physical forces are going to have to be 
deployed in a very peculiar way. The same is not true of non-living objects, such as the moon or the solar system 
... . Paley's instincts here were right." (Dawkins R., "Universal Darwinism," in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: 
The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy," Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, 
p.204)

29/05/02
"A complex thing is a statistically improbable thing, something with a very low a priori likelihood of coming into 
being. The number of possible ways of arranging the 10^27 atoms of a human body is obviously inconceivably 
large. Of these possible ways only very few would be recognized as a human body. But this is not. by itself, the 
point. Any existing configuration of atoms is, a posteriori, unique as `improbable,' with hindsight, as any other 
The point is that, of all possible ways of arranging those 10^27 atoms only a tiny minority would constitute 
anything remotely resembling a machine that worked to keep itself in being, and to reproduce its kind. Living 
things are not just statistically improbable in the trivial sense of hindsight; their statistical improbability is limited 
by the a priori constraints of design. They are adaptively complex." (Dawkins R., "Universal Darwinism," 
in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy," 
Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, pp.203-204. Emphasis in original)

30/05/02
"But the order of the Universe is not an assumption; it's an observed fact. We detect the light from distant 
quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same ten billion light years away as here. The spectra 
of those quasars are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are present there as here, and 
because the same laws of quantum mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another follows familiar 
Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and binary pulsar spin-downs reveal general relativity in the depths of 
space. We could have lived in a Universe with different laws in every province, but we do not. This fact 
cannot but elicit feelings of reverence and awe." (Sagan C., "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in 
the Dark," [1996], Headline: London, 1997, reprint, p.260. Emphasis in original)

30/05/02
"In 1277 Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, issued a condemnation several theses derived from Aristotelianism-
that God could not allow any form of planetary motion other than circular, that He could not make a vacuum, and 
many more. The condemnation of 1277 helped inspire a form of theology known as voluntarism, which admitted 
no limitations on God's power. It regarded natural law not as Forms inherent within nature but as divine 
commands imposed from outside nature. Voluntarism insisted that the structure of the universe - indeed, 
its very existence - is not rationally necessary but is contingent upon the free and transcendent will of God." 
(Pearcey N.R.* & Thaxton C.B.*, "The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy," Crossway 
Books: Wheaton IL, 1994, p.31. Emphasis in original)

30/05/02
"Needless to say, the conflict between punctualism and gradualism is not the only macroevolutionary issue that 
cannot be decided by logical inference from microevolutionary principles. Consider, for example, the question of 
rates of morphological evolution. Three groups of crossopterygian fishes flourished during the Devonian. The 
lungfishes (Dipnoi) changed little for hundreds of millions of years and remain as relics. The coelacanths became 
highly successful in the open ocean until the Cretaceous, then declined and stagnated, leaving only the relictual 
Latimeria. The rhipidistians, in contrast, evolved Into the amphibians, reptiles, and, finally, birds and 
mammals. Models to explain divergent rates of morphological evolution must incorporate factors other than 
microevolutionary principles, including rates of speciation and the environmental and biotic conditions that may 
account for successions of morphological change in some but not other lineages." (Stebbins G.L. & Ayala F.J., 
"Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?" Science, Vol. 213, 28 August 1981, pp.967-971, p.971)

30/05/02
"Distinctive macroevolutionary theories and models have been advanced concerning such issues as rates of 
morphological evolution, patterns of species extinctions, and historical factors regulating taxonomic diversity. As 
long as these theories and models are compatible with the theories and laws of population biology, the decision 
as to which one among alternative hypotheses is correct cannot be reached by recourse to microevolutionary 
principles. Such a decision must rather be based on appropriate tests with the use of macroevolutionary 
evidence. Thus, macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study and, in this epistemologically very 
important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution."
(Stebbins G.L. & Ayala F.J., "Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?" Science, Vol. 213, 28 August 
1981, pp.967-971, p.971)

30/05/02
"We might have lived in a Universe in which nothing could be understood by a few simple laws, in which Nature 
was complex beyond our abilities to understand, in which laws that apply on Earth are invalid on Mars, or in a 
distant quasar. But the evidence - not the preconceptions, the evidence - proves otherwise. Luckily for us, we 
live in a Universe in which much can be 'reduced' to a small number of comparatively simple laws of Nature. 
Otherwise we might have lacked the intellectual capacity and grasp to comprehend the world." (Sagan C., "The 
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," [1996], Headline: London, 1997, reprint, pp.260-261)

30/05/02
"A transparent pebble, polished by the sea, might act as a lens, focusing a real image. The fact that it is an 
efficient optical device is not particularly interesting because, unlike an eye or a telescope. it is too simple. We do 
not feel the need to invoke anything remotely resembling the concept of design. The eye and the telescope have 
many parts, all coadapted and working together to achieve the same functional end. The polished pebble has far 
fewer coadapted features: the coincidence of transparency, high refractive index and mechanical forces that 
polish the surface in a curved shape. The odds against such a threefold coincidence are not particularly great. No 
special explanation is called for." (Dawkins R., "Universal Darwinism", in Ruse M., ed., "But is it Science?: The 
Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy", Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 1996, pp.204-
205)

31/05/02
"Here I am in a Boston restaurant with an accomplished physicist who matter-of-factly assures me that his new 
book will revolutionise science. Not just parts of science, but everything from the theory of evolution to the very 
nature of space and time. ... My dining companion is Stephen Wolfram, physicist extraordinaire. ... In 1988, he 
released his Mathematica software, having set up his own company to develop and sell it to scientists 
and engineers. .... For the past 11 years, he has continued to be his company's hands-on chief executive while 
privately pursuing a research programme. He has controversially chosen not take the usual route of writing up 
his work in papers submitted to fellow academics for peer review, but to publish it himself in a 1,197-page tome, 
A New Kind of Science, written for a lay audience as well as for scientists." (Farmelo G., "Is this man 
bigger than Newton and Darwin?" Review of "A New Kind of Science," by Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media, 
2002. Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2002. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2002/05/15/ecfwolf15.xml)

31/05/02
"Biologists argue that the complex patterns found in living things - their shape and their markings - are simply the 
result of evolution by natural selection. But Wolfram reckons that too much weight has been put on this idea, 
because `no one knows how such complicated stuff emerged out of evolution'. His answer is that nature uses 
simple computer programs easily to produce complex patterns and shapes of organisms, and then may use 
natural selection to choose the ones that confer the ability to survive in their environments. `I've come to have 
some sympathy with creationists,' he comments as he cuts up his steak. `Natural selection isn't everything, after 
all.'" (Farmelo G., "Is this man bigger than Newton and Darwin?" Review of "A New Kind of Science," by 
Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media, 2002. Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2002. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2002/05/15/ecfwolf15.xml)
[top]

June
1/06/02
"It is the habit of some evolutionists to sneer at such a line of argument and to inquire why an omnipotent God 
should be obliged to create so many animals on the same general plan. Such statements seem to assume that God 
could not or would not create individuals with common points of similarity and with their bodies built on the 
same general scheme, but that if He created at all He must have created every separate individual species of plant 
and animal with no points of similarity with other species! We might with justice reply to such an objection with 
the question as to why He should not create them similar? As a matter of fact, however, would not a world order 
in which every species was different from every other species be far harder to attribute to one God than the world 
order with its similarities such as we see around us?" (Hamilton F.E.*, "The Basis of Evolutionary Faith: A 
Critique of the Theory of Evolution," James Clarke & Co: London, 1931, pp.149-150)

2/06/02
"In 1862 J.D. Hooker, the botanist, challenged Darwin's claim that natural selection was in any sense a creative 
agency. Hooker's letter is lost, but from Darwin's replies it is clear that he said something like this: "Your theory 
of evolution by natural selection implies that if every organism had survived and produced offspring, then every 
kind of plant and animal that exists and has ever existed would have been produced without any natural selection 
at all (as well, of course, as myriads of others). In other words all the characters present in all organisms were the 
necessary consequences of the earliest and most primitive organism." Darwin had never thought of this before. 
For a few anxious days, he realized that Paley could not be disposed of as easily as he had imagined. He "was 
fairly pitched head over heels with astonishment." Yet to Hooker's claim that "every single difference which we 
see might have occurred without any selection," he could only go on to say: "I do and have always fully 
agreed." Thus, accepting Hooker's argument, Darwin was, forced towards the view that the earliest organisms, 
though apparently so small and simple, were really so gigantically complex that they contained the potentiality of 
producing all the other organisms that would ever exist on earth. It followed, therefore, that if true the theory of 
evolution would not abolish Paley's argument from design, but would reinforce it a hundredfold. No wonder 
Darwin was disturbed. He had sought to escape from God: now he found his old Enemy waiting for him in a new 
hiding place." (Clark R.E.D.*, "Darwin: Before & After: An Examination and Assessment," [1948], Paternoster: 
London, 1966, reprint, pp.88-89)


2/06/02
"The differences between quantum speciation and conventional geographical speciation are as follows. ... 
Quantum speciation is rapid, requiring only a few generations. ... The ancestors of new species do not include a 
large proportion of the populations belonging to the preexisting one, and may consist of only one or a few 
individuals. Conventional speciation is a process of splitting, quantum speciation is a budding process. ... 
Conventional speciation in its entirety is either guided by or is a byproduct of natural selection. Quantum 
speciation usually and perhaps always including one or more stochastic or chance events." (Dobzhansky T.G., 
Ayala F.J., Stebbins G.L. & Valentine J.W., "Evolution," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1977, pp.198-
199)

2/06/02
"To the majority of educated people in the western world, my starting position about the origin of life is probably 
less acceptable than the idea of evolution by natural selection. Yet as a basis for trying to understand the nature 
of minds it is just as important. For if there is a supernatural element in the origin of life, a clue to the 
understanding of the mind might lie in that earlier mystery. If the origin of life can be explained without invoking 
any supernatural processes, it seems more profitable to look elsewhere for clues to an understanding of the 
mind." (Glynn I., "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind," [1999], Phoenix: London, 
2000, reprint, p.6)

2/06/02
"Although Darwin's theory sought to deal with evolution over all time scales, almost all of his evidence was 
drawn from the modern biota. In the absence of adequate evidence from fossils, he simply extrapolated the 
patterns and processes that he could study in living organisms to the uncounted millions of years of the history 
of life. This is most clearly shown by the only illustration that appeared in the first edition of The Origin of 
Species .... Darwin used this figure twice in successive paragraphs, first to illustrate the pattern of evolution over 
tens to hundreds of thousands of generations within individual populations and species, and later to show the 
pattern of change over millions and hundreds of millions of generations. He argued that both the patterns and 
processes of evolution were essentially identical over these vastly different time scales. Although many 
biologists and popular textbooks since the time of Darwin have perpetuated this concept of the history of life, 
other scientists have argued that neither the patterns nor the processes of evolution that can be studied in living 
populations are adequate to explain the conspicuous differences in morphology, physiology, and way of life of 
the major groups of microorganisms, plants, and animals, or the major patterns and different rates of evolution 
observed in the fossil record." (Carroll R.L., "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution," Cambridge 
University Press: Cambridge UK, 1997, p.2)

3/06/02
"In such a problem as the spontaneous origin of life we have no way of assessing probabilities beforehand, or 
even of deciding what we mean by a trial. The origin of a living organism is undoubtedly a stepwise 
phenomenon, each step with its own probability and its own conditions of trial. Of one thing we can be sure, 
however: whatever constitutes a trial, more such trials occur the longer the interval of time. The important point is 
that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However 
improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly 
happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be 
enough. Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion 
years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, 
the `impossible' becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to 
wait: time itself performs the miracles." (Wald G., "The origin of life," Scientific American, Vol. 191, No. 2, August 
1954, pp.45-53, pp.47-48)

3/06/02
"Many evolutionists have found sociobiology to be both repugnant and politically dangerous The two groups 
of evolutionists are now embraced in bitter conflict. ... Next we examine how the critics argue against 
sociobiology. Their arguments are virtually identical to arguments creationists make against evolution. Except 
these are made by evolutionists against other evolutionists. The critics argue that human sociobiology has 
`grave effects' and `political clout,' that it is `potentially damaging to the cause of social justice.' ... Because of the 
serious political effects the critics plead for a higher standard of evidence. ... Besides political arguments there are 
also emotional arguments. ... Gould tries to rebut sociobiology. He concludes his argument with an emotional 
appeal to meaning, hope, and essence. ... Critics of sociobiology also use moral arguments. The critic derives a 
prediction about behavior based on sociobiology. The critic then points out that the predicted behavior is 
grossly contrary to our common moral sense. The critic concludes that sociobiology must therefore be in error. 
Kitcher uses such an argument involving rape and another involving overpopulation. There are also scientific 
arguments. Critics of sociobiology argue that it is unfalsifiable. ... Some critics make the serious charge that 
sociobiology is not testable, and simultaneously acknowledge that evolutionary theory has the same fault. ... 
Kitcher points out that evolutionists have been applying a double standard. ... For every argument evolutionists 
make against sociobiology, there is a parallel argument that creationists make against evolution. (ReMine W.J.*, 
"The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory," St. Paul Science: Saint Paul MN, 1993, pp.159-161)

3/06/02
"As neuroscientists keep subdividing the brain, one question looms ever larger: How does the brain coordinate 
and integrate the workings of its highly specialized parts to create the apparent unity of perception and thought 
that constitutes the mind? The Harvard neuroscientist David Hubel, whose experiments with Torsten Wiesel 
helped to create the current crisis in neuroscience, stated at the end of his book Eye, Brain and Vision: `This 
surprising tendency for attributes such as form, color, and movement to be handled by separate structures in the 
brain immediately raises the question of how all the information is finally assembled, say for perceiving a 
bouncing red ball. It obviously must be assembled somewhere, if only at the motor nerves that subserve the 
action of catching. Where it's assembled, and how, we have no idea.' This conundrum is sometimes called the 
binding problem. I would like to propose another term: the Humpty Dumpty dilemma. It plagues not only 
neuroscience but also evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence-and indeed all fields that 
divide the mind into a collection of relatively discrete `modules:' `intelligences,' `instincts,' or `computational 
devices' Like a precocious eight-year-old tinkering with a radio, mind-scientists excel at taking the brain apart, but 
they have no idea how to put it back together again." (Horgan J., "The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain 
Defies Explanation," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, p.23)

3/06/02
"The adversary system is essential to science, as it is to law. ... Theories should be considered guilty-that is, 
wrong or dubious-until their correctness is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Critics should therefore be 
allowed to cast doubt on a theory by introducing a contradictory hypothesis that may be equally dubious. 
Moreover, the fact that competent scientists adhere to such different, contradictory paradigms is grounds for 
skepticism toward all the paradigms." (Horgan J., "The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain Defies Explanation," 
[1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, pp.8-9)

5/06/02
"The popular idea that life could have arisen spontaneously on Earth dates back to experiments that caught the 
public imagination earlier this century. If you stir up simple nonorganic molecules like water, ammonia, methane, 
carbon dioxide and hydrogen cyanide with almost any form of intense energy, ultraviolet light for instance, some 
of the molecules reassemble themselves into amino acids, a result demonstrated about thirty years ago by 
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. The amino acids, the individual building blocks of proteins can therefore be 
produced by natural means. But this is far from proving that life could have evolved in this way. No one has 
shown that the correct arrangements of amino acids, like the orderings in enzymes, can be produced by this 
method. No evidence for this huge jump in complexity has ever been found, nor in my opinion will it be. 
Nevertheless, many scientists have made this leap-from the formation of individual amino acids to the random 
formation of whole chains of amino acids like enzymes-in spite of the obviously huge odds against such an event 
having ever taken place on the Earth, and this quite unjustified conclusion has stuck. In a popular lecture I once 
unflatteringly described the thinking of these scientists as a "junkyard mentality". As this reference became 
widely and not quite accurately quoted I will repeat it here. A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a 
Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance 
that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be 
negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe." (Hoyle F., "The 
Intelligent Universe," Michael Joseph: London, 1983, pp.18-19)

5/06/02
"The most graphic demonstration of the inadequacy of Darwin's hypothesis of the constancy of evolutionary 
patterns over all time scales can be seen by comparing his hypothetical representation of the patterns of 
evolution for both very short and very long periods of time with the patterns of evolution that have since been 
reconstructed on the basis of the fossil record of multicellular plants and animals over the past 500 million years 
(Figs. 1.2-1.4). The diagram used by Darwin to illustrate evolution both at the level of populations and species 
and over the vast expanse of geological time is characterized by gradual and continuous change. Most 
populations within species, or families with in orders, diverge progressively. Some lineages continue with little 
change, but most eventually become extinct. The entire adaptive space is occupied by the groups diagramed, and 
the rate of change, indicated by the slope of the lines, remains fairly constant. The patterns established from the 
fossil record of the major groups of vascular plants, vertebrates, and nonvertebrate metazoans are conspicuously 
different. There are relatively few major lineages, all of which are very distinct from one an other. Gaps between 
the lineages indicate that adaptive space is not fully occupied. Instead of showing gradual and continuous 
change through time, the major lineages appear suddenly in the fossil record, already exhibiting many of the 
features by which their modern representatives are recognized. It must be assumed that evolution occurs much 
more rapidly between groups than within groups. For most of their evolutionary history, 
fundamental aspects of the anatomy and way of life of these lineages do not change significantly. Very few 
intermediates between groups are known from the fossil record." (Carroll R.L., "Patterns and Processes of 
Vertebrate Evolution," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1997, pp.2,4. Emphasis in original)

5/06/02
"Darwin's case is notorious. In his autobiographical sketch, contemporary with the sixth edition of The Origin 
of Species, he said of himself that he 'worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected 
facts on a wholesale scale'; but later in the same work he said that he could not resist forming a hypothesis on 
every subject, and he gave away his true opinions (as opposed to the opinions which he felt became him) in 
letters to Henry Fawcett and H.W. Bates. ... To Fawcett he wrote (18 September 1861): 'About thirty years ago 
there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember someone saying 
that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd 
it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.' 
To Bates (22 November 1860): 'I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist.'" (Medawar 
P.B., "Pluto's Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought," 
[1982], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1983, reprint, p.80)

5/06/02
"For most of their evolutionary history, fundamental aspects of the anatomy and way of life of these lineages do 
not change significantly. Very few intermediates between groups are known from the fossil record. This pattern is 
most conspicuous for the major groups of nonvertebrate metazoans ... over a very short time in the Early 
Cambrian, they underwent an explosive radiation. Over a period of approximately 5 million years, they gave rise to 
all the major groups alive today, as well as a smaller number of extinct groups (Bowring et al. 1993). By 525 million 
years ago, all of the living phyla and most of their constituent classes had diverged. Sponges, arthropods, 
primitive chordates, echinoderms, bryozoans, brachiopods, molluscs, annelids, and so on were all recognizable 
by this time. Among the molluscs, all the modern classes scaphopods, gastropods, monoplacophorans, and 
pelecypods - were known by the end of the Lower Cambrian. ... In all the major lineages, the earliest known 
members had already achieved the basic body plan of their living descendants. ... Few fossils are yet known of 
plausible intermediates between the invertebrate phyla, and there is no evidence for the gradual evolution of the 
major features by which the individual phyla or classes are characterized." (Carroll, R.L., "Patterns and Processes 
of Vertebrate Evolution," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1997, pp.2,4)

7/06/02
"The simplistic accounts of human sociobiology now flooding popular literature embody this overextended 
version of zoocentrism. Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory 
have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and 
evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent 
architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It 
fragments organisms into "traits," explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is 
a product of natural selection operating "for" the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view 
specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic 
determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and 
unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) 
people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual." (Gould S.J., "Our Natural Place," in 
"Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History," [1983], Penguin: London, 1986, reprint, 
pp.242-243)

8/06/02
"And perhaps most fundamentally, why is there something rather than nothing? The universe started out from 
the formless miasma of the Big Bang. And ever since then it's been governed by an inexorable tendency toward 
disorder, dissolution, and decay, as described by the second law of thermodynamics. Yet the universe has also 
managed to bring forth structure on every scale: galaxies, stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. 
How? Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally powerful compulsion for order, structure, and 
organization? And if so, how can both processes he going on at once?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The 
Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, reprint, pp.10-11)

8/06/02
"What is a mind? How does a three-pound lump of ordinary matter, the brain, give rise to such ineffable qualities 
as feeling, thought, purpose, and awareness?" (Waldrop M.M., "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge 
of Order and Chaos," Penguin: London, [1992], 1994, reprint, p.10)

8/06/02
"We shall note, for example, in Section II that the early developmental stages of most sciences have been 
characterized by continual competition between a number of distinct views of nature, each partially derived from, 
and all roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific observation and method. What differentiated these 
various schools was not one or another failure of method - they were all "scientific" - but what we shall come to 
call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Observation and experience 
can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they 
cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of 
personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific 
community at a given time." (Kuhn T.S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," [1962], University of Chicago 
Press: Chicago IL, Second Edition, 1970, p.4)

8/06/02
"It is fashionable at the moment to decry the anthropocentric attitudes of our ancestors, to emphasize that we are 
one kind of animal among many, and to remind ourselves that our world is not the centre of the universe and that 
it was not created for our dominion. Such comments may be salutary, but the fact remains that the human brain is 
the most complex object we are aware of in the universe, and not the least of its many remarkable achievements is 
the partial elucidation of its own working." (Glynn I., "An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the 
Mind," [1999], Phoenix: London, 2000, reprint, pp.6-7).

8/06/02
"In this section, we discuss whether the origin of language can be explained by natural selection. Our treatment 
follows rather closely that of Pinker & Bloom (1990). We start from the presumption that natural selection is the 
only plausible explanation for adaptive design. What other explanation could there be? Following the famous 
paper by Gould & Lewontin (1979), one could suppose that language is a spandrel: that is, an unselected 
byproduct of design for some other purpose. More specifically, language could be a modified or an unmodified 
spandrel. If the claim is only that language is a modified version of a structure that once served some other 
function, the answer is an (almost trivial) yes: the claim is true of most complex structures. But if language is 
modified, then natural selection was the modifying force." (Maynard Smith J. & Szathmary E., "The Major 
Transitions in Evolution," W.H. Freeman: Oxford UK, 1995, p.290)

8/06/02
"As we have seen, language cannot have come cheap. Not only are several areas of the brain specialised for 
understanding and producing speech, but the whole of our vocal apparatus had to be evolved. This meant 
complex changes in the neck, mouth and throat that compromised other functions; making drinking and breathing 
at the same time impossible and increasing the risk of choking. Why were these costly and potentially dangerous 
modifications ever made? What made them worth it? This question forces us into a difficult situation. As several 
authors have pointed out (Deacon 1997; Dunbar 1996; Pinker 1994) it appears that either we must understand 
what selective advantage language gave early hominids, or we must abandon hopes of a Darwinian explanation. 
This is not a happy choice - if indeed it is a choice." (Blackmore S.J., "The Meme Machine," [1999], Oxford 
University Press: Oxford UK, 2000, reprint, pp.91-92).

9/06/02
"The central illusion of evolution lies in making a wide array of contradictory mechanisms look like a seamless 
whole. There is no single evolutionary mechanism-there are countless. Evolutionary theory is a smorgasbord: a 
vast buffet of disjointed and conflicting mechanisms waiting to be chosen by the theorist. For any given 
question, the theorist invokes only those mechanisms that look most satisfying. Yet, the next question elicits a 
different response, with other mechanisms invoked and neglected. Evolutionary theory has no coherent 
structure. It is amorphous. It is malleable and can readily adjust to disparate patterns of data. Evolution 
accommodates data like fog accommodates landscape. In fact evolutionary theory fails to clearly predict 
anything about life that is actually true." (ReMine W.J.*, "The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message 
Theory," St. Paul Science: Saint Paul MN, 1993, p.24)

10/06/02
"Vague Terms and Shifting Definitions Make sure people don't mislead you by using vague terms that 
can suddenly take on a new meaning. In the creation-evolution debate, the key terms that are subject to 
manipulation are science and evolution. Everybody is in favor of science, and everybody also 
believes in evolution - when that term is defined broadly enough! But science has more than one 
definition, and so does evolution. Watch out for `bait and switch' tactics, by which you are led to agree 
with a harmless definition and then the term is used in a very different sense. Here's an example of how you can 
be deceived: `You believe in dog breeding, don't you? Well, did you know that dog breeding is an example of 
evolution? Now that you know that, and have seen all those breeds of dogs for yourself, you realize that you 
actually do believe in evolution, don't you? Good. That's enough for today. Later on we'll tell you more 
about what evolution means.' (It's going to mean that all living things are the accidental products of a 
purposeless universe.)
This is not a `straw man' example, by the way. Selective breeding of animals is a process guided by intelligence, 
and it produces only variations within the species; yet Darwinists from Charles Darwin himself to the more recent 
Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick have cited it as a powerful example of `evolution.' If somebody asks, `Do you 
believe in evolution?' the right reply is not `Yes' or `No.' It is: `Precisely what do you mean by evolution?' 
My experience has been that the first definition I get will be so broad as to be indisputable - like `There has been 
change in the course of life's history.' Later on a much more precise and controversial definition- like the one by 
the National Association of Biology Teachers I quoted in chapter one - will be substituted without notice. That 
one word evolution can mean something so tiny it hardly matters, or so big it explains the whole history 
of the universe. Keep your baloney detector trained on that word. If it moves, zap it!" (Johnson, P.E.*, "Defeating 
Darwinism by Opening Minds," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1997, pp.44-45. Emphasis original)

12/06/02
"A number of microbiologists, geneticists, theoretical biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are 
saying there is more to life than Darwinism. They do not reject Darwin's contribution; they simply want to move 
beyond it. I call them the `postdarwinians.' Neither Lynn Margulis nor any other postdarwinian denies the true 
ubiquity of natural selection in evolution. Their disagreement is with the very sweeping nature of the Darwinian 
argument, the fact that in the end it doesn't explain much, and the emerging evidence that Darwinism alone may 
not be sufficient to explain all we see. The vital questions the postdarwinians raise are: What are the limits to 
natural selection? What can't evolution make? And if blind natural selection has limits, what else is operating 
within or beyond evolution as we understand it?" (Kelly K., "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines", 
[1994], Fourth Estate: London, 1995, reprint, p.471)

12/06/02
"No one was more sensitive to the weaknesses of Darwinian theory than Darwin himself. As an example of 
trouble, Darwin volunteered the astounding multifaceted sophistication of the human eye. (Every critic of Darwin 
since has also used his example.) The exquisite design of interacting lens, iris, retina, etc., seems to defy the 
plausibility of Darwin's `slight, incremental' chance improvements. As Darwin wrote to his American friend Asa 
Gray, `About the weak points I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.' The difficulty Gray had was 
imagining how any portion of an unfinished eye, a retina without lens or vice versa, would be useful to its 
possessor. Since nature cannot hoard innovations (`Hey, this will come in handy in the Cretaceous!'), every 
stage in development must be immediately useful and viable. Breakthroughs have to work the first time. Even 
clever humans can't design in such a consistently demanding manner. Therefore nature appears superhuman in 
its ability to create." (Kelly K., "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines", [1994], Fourth Estate: London, 
1995, reprint, pp.472-473)

14/06/02
Popper resolves this dilemma essentially by an appeal to good common sense, for if we did seek the impossible 
and yet continue to reinterpret any evidence threatening our hypothesis, we should quickly make a nonsense of 
scientific method. We must, therefore, as an article of method, set out our hypotheses as clearly and 
unambiguously as possible, so that they may be rigorously tested by attempts at refutation; a clear and precise 
hypothesis will be more readily falsifiable than a vague one.

14/06/02
"This is an important point for Popper because it leads him to his own criterion of demarcation between science 
and non- or pseudo-science. To be scientific, a hypothesis must be logically falsifiable. That is, there must be - at 
least in principle - some sort of conceivable observation statement that would contradict the hypothesis. ... This 
distinction inevitably leads the falsificationist into sensitive areas. Popper himself, for example, has claimed that 
Freud's psychoanalysis is not a science precisely because its theories can explain everything that an individual 
can possibly do or experience. The point here is that a genuine scientific theory does just the opposite: by 
making only limited claims about the world it actually excludes most of what could possibly occur, and is 
itself excluded if what it excludes occurs. A similar situation obtains with Marx's theory of history, although 
critics might argue that it is less a question of unfalsifiability than of its having been falsified and yet retained. Its 
adherents, they say, cling on to the theory by constant (methodological)
modification, so that for them at least it has not been falsified." (Richards S., "Philosophy and Sociology of 
Science: An Introduction," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, Second Edition, 1987, pp.54-55. Emphasis in original)

14/06/02
"The idea of progress, of which more will be said, is closely connected with that of improvement in social 
conditions, for progress in man himself is imperceptible. It is an idea which has come into popularity in the last 
century-probably as a consequence of the evolutionary philosophies which followed on Darwin's evolutionary 
biology. In the religious cosmos of 1840 every man had the priceless possession of a unique and eternal soul, 
and to fit this for eternity was his prime duty. He had no direct concern with posterity, each one of which had to 
work out his individual salvation. But as the belief in God and immortality grew more shadowy, man saw himself 
not as unique and eternal, but as transient and of no importance save as a cell in the evolving tree of life. 
Humanity had evolved from the amoeba and would evolve to some greater thing than man. The biological 
function of the individual was to promote this evolution by concerning himself with building a better world for 
posterity. (Sherwood Taylor F., "The Century of Science," Readers Union: London, Second Edition, 1942, pp.263-
264)

16/06/02
"Perhaps the most far-reaching effect of this revival of catastrophist thinking has been the dawning realization 
that mass extinction makes a nonsense of natural selection as a 'creative' force. David Raup of Chicago's Field 
Museum has calculated that in the half-dozen major extinctions, up to ninety-six per cent of all life forms were 
destroyed. `Now if only four per cent of living things managed to survive such cataclysms, the question of 
fitness is largely irrelevant. It is much more a question of chance. Instead of survival of the fittest, you get the 
survival of the luckiest.'" (Hitching F., "The Neck of the Giraffe: Or Where Darwin Went Wrong," Pan: London, 
1982, p.166. Emphasis in original)

16/06/02
"Science is commonly taken to connote fact or certainty. Thus the ubiquitous phrase in advertisements, 
`Scientific tests have shown ....' ... Consider also the unqualified claim by many contemporary scientists and 
science writers that evolution is a fact, not a theory: in other words, when science speaks fact, no one has a right 
to doubt. One need only keep one's eyes open to find such usage in abundance, in scholarly as well as in 
popular writing." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method," [1992], University of 
Illinois Press: Urbana & Chicago IL, 1994, reprint, p.63)

17/06/02
"The extinction of widespread species is favored by stresses not normally experienced by the species. Most 
plants and animals have evolved defenses against the normal vicissitudes of their environment. Although 
individual organisms live Only a short time, successful species live long enough to have experienced-and 
survived-1,000-Year and even 100,000-year events. But a stress that has never been experienced by a 
species can cause extinction. .... The larger extinction events occur at average intervals of tens of millions of 
years, whereas during most shorter time intervals, extinction is negligible. Because Darwinian evolution depends 
on the continuous pressure of natural selection, organisms cannot adapt to conditions they experience only 
rarely." (Raup D.M., "Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?," [1991], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1993, 
reprint, p.183. Emphasis in original)

17/06/02
"Following the extinction of dinosaurs and large marine reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous period, mammals 
diversified rapidly. This led in time to Homo sapiens, our own species." (Raup D.M., "Extinction: Bad 
Genes or Bad Luck?," [1991], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1993, reprint, p.30)

17/06/02
"On January 18, 1836, while still in Australia, he [Darwin] made an entry in his diary which shows him reflecting 
on the following matters: that the fauna of Australia is so unusual; that, as everywhere else in the world, the 
adaptation of each organ to its function and each organism to its circumstances is so beautiful; and that, in spite 
of the differences, there are striking similarities between creatures to be found in widely separated places. These 
reflections tempt him to conclude that there must have been separate creations, that there must have been one 
Creator ... `January 18, 1836, New South Wales: "A little time before this I had been lying on a sunny bank & was 
reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World. An 
unbeliever in everything beyond his own reason might exclaim, 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at 
work; their object, however, has been the same & certainly the end in each case is complete.'" Whilst thus 
thinking, I observed the conical pitfall of a Lion-Ant: a fly fell in & immediately disappeared; then came a large 
but unwary Ant. His struggles to escape being very violent, the little jets of sand described by Kirby (Vol. 1. p. 
425) were promptly directed against him. His fate, however, was better than that of the fly's. With out doubt the 
predaecious Larva belongs to the same genus but to a different species from the European kind-Now what would 
the Disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple & yet so artificial a 
contrivance? It cannot be thought so. The one hand has surely worked throughout the universe.'" (Gruber H.E., 
"Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity," together with Gruber H.E. & Barrett P.H., 
"Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks," Wildwood House: London, 1974, pp.132, 438)

17/06/02
"The [Genesis 1] account of Creation is unique in ancient literature. It undoubtedly reflects an advanced 
monotheistic point of view, with a sequence of creative phases so rational that modern science cannot improve 
on it, given the same language and the same range of ideas in which to state its conclusions. In fact, modern 
scientific cosmogonies show a disconcerting tendency to be short-lived and it may be seriously doubted 
whether science has yet caught up with the Biblical story." (Albright W.F. [late Professor of Bible and Ancient 
Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University, USA], "The Old Testament and Archaeology", in Alleman H.C. 
& Flack E.E., eds., "Old Testament Commentary", Presbyterian & Reformed: Philadelphia PA, 1948, p.135, in 
Ramm B.L., "The Christian View of Science and Scripture," [1955] Paternoster: Exeter, Devon UK, 1967, reprint, 
p.120)

17/06/02
"What makes birds so successful and at the same time so lovely? Feathers, that's what. Without feathers, birds 
wouldn't exist. Feathers keep birds' bodies warm, holding in their body heat. And feathers are what allow them to 
flit and soar in the air, to flash and glow with breathtaking colors. ... Birds may be large or small, airborne or 
earthbound. But what ever their life-style, their feathers are their secret of success. Feathers are perfectly 
designed for what they do. They are light but strong, flexible yet tough. The fluffy feathers that insulate and 
protect the ostrich's body weigh a tenth of what a fur covering would. This allows the ostrich to run like the 
wind, even though it has only two legs." (Patent D.H. & Munoz W., "Feathers," Cobblehill/Dutton: New York 
NY, 1992, pp.7-8)

17/06/02
"The two-lens nature of the trilobite eye is common in modern optical design and is called a doublet. But the 
shape of the upper lens is unlike any now in use either in nature or in man-made optics. Levi-Setti, with training 
and experience in optics, was able to recognize, however, that the shape of the upper lens of the trilobite eye is 
identical to designs independently published in the seventeenth century by Huygens and by Descartes. This 
lens shape was devised to minimize spherical aberration. The Huygens and Descartes designs were apparently 
never used, because other lenses were available to serve the same purpose. The lower lens was the trilobites' 
idea. Levi-Setti was able to show that the doublet is necessary to avoid spherical aberration under water-
something the seventeenth-century designers were not concerned with. My point is that, even early in the 
Phanerozoic, organisms had evolved highly sophisticated systems-in this case, systems that in human terms 
would require a highly trained and imaginative optical engineer. Were trilobite eyes more effective than those of 
modern crabs or shrimps? We cannot answer this, because we cannot observe living trilobites. We can say only 
that there is no evidence that the eyes of the modern crab are better." (Raup D.M., "Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad 
Luck?," [1991], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1993, reprint, pp.34-35)

17/06/02
"SUPPOSE, in the next place, that the person, who found the watch, should, after some time, discover, that, in 
addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of 
producing, in the course of its movement, another watch like itself (the thing is conceivable;) that it contained 
within it a mechanism, a system of parts, a mould for instance, or a complex adjustment of laths, files, and other 
tools, evidently and separately calculated for this purpose; let us inquire, what effect ought such a discovery to 
have upon his former conclusion? I. The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and 
his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver. Whether he regarded the object of the contrivance, the 
distinct apparatus, the intricate, yet in many parts intelligible, mechanism by which it was carried on, he would 
perceive, in this new observation, nothing but an additional reason for doing what he had already done; for 
referring the construction of the watch to design, and to supreme art." (Paley W., "Natural Theology: or, 
Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature," [1802], St. 
Thomas Press: Houston, TX, 1972, reprint, p.7)

17/06/02
"The Pax-6 gene of mammals is interchangeable with the equivalent Pax-6 gene of Drosophila. The experiment of 
getting Pax-6 switched on in tissues not normally expressing Pax-6 can be done using either the fly's own Pax-6 
gene or one taken from a mouse. Either way, the results are quite startling - eyes are produced on several unusual 
parts of the fly's body, such as legs and wings. Insect eyes and mammalian eyes are constructed in different 
ways. The insect eye is a many-sided compound eye in which each 'eyelet' and its lens can be said to be 
equivalent to the single mammalian eye. So what should we be expecting from our gene-swopping experiments? 
We might guess that the Pax-6 of Drosophila produces patches of compound eye wherever Pax-6 is operating. 
But what of the Pax master gene from a mouse? Will it produce an insect or mouse eye when turned 'on' in 
different Drosophila tissues? The answer is that it produces a Drosophila compound eye on legs, wings, halteres 
and antennae. Moreover the antenna eyes generate the same electric impulses as the normal eyes showing that 
they are functional. Eyes cannot be induced in any tissue; the foreign eye master gene has to be active at the 
appropriate stage of insect development. Nevertheless, the mouse Pax-6 can successfully interact with the 
estimated 2,500 target genes lying dormant in many different Drosophila organs. Pax-6 genes exist in such diverse 
species as amphibians, squid worms and planariums, as well as mammals and insects. Some of these have also 
been shown capable of inducing extra eyes in Drosophila. What these experiments tell us is that Pax-6 really can 
be considered a master control gene that has been conserved over a huge distance of evolutionary time, 
probably predating the Cambrian epoch of 550 million years ago. " (Dover G.A., "Dear Mr Darwin: Letters on the 
Evolution of Life and Human Nature," [1999], University of California Press: Berkeley CA, 2000, reprint, p.171)

19/06/02
"It is true that the mechanism applied to higher organisms is incredibly complex and the only question that may 
remain is whether there would have been time for it in the 4.5 aeons since the origin of life on Earth. Even such a 
basic mechanism as photo synthesis, which of necessity must have come near the beginning, involves 
mechanisms in the chloroplasts themselves requiring the formation of dozens of specific enzymes." (Bernal J.D., 
"The Origin of Life," [1967], Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1973, Third Impression, p.137)

19/06/02
"Why are feathers so light? Feathers are made of a tough, flexible material called keratin. The feather itself is not 
living, so it doesn't need blood vessels, nerves, and other living tissues. A feather may look solid, but it isn't. The 
spine that runs down the center, called the shaft, is hollow. Strengthening material runs across the hollow core in 
just a few places, like steps on a ladder. The vane (the two halves of the feather that spread out from the shaft) is 
made up of thousands of slender branches, called barbs. The barbs angle toward the feather's tip. Each barb in 
turn has very tiny parallel branches of its own on each side, called barbules. Because it is made up of slender 
parts with spaces between, a feather is as much air as matter. ... Contour feathers cover the outer surface of the 
bird, giving it a sleek outline. Bird wings are made up mostly of contour feathers that are specially modified for 
flight. ... Contour feathers are smooth and have a solid-looking vane because of the structure of their barbules. 
Altogether, a contour feather can have a million stiff, flat barbules. The barbules that originate along the edges of 
the barbs toward the tip of the feather carry microscopic hooks. The barbules on the other side of a barb, facing 
toward the base of the feather, have rounded ridges. The hooks on the barbules of one barb catch on the barbule 
ridges of the barb next to it, holding the barbs together in zipperlike fashion. Since each barb has hundreds of 
barbules on each side, the interlocking barbules create a solid-looking surface. If you pull gently along the barbs 
of a contour feather, they will move back and forth as the barbule hooks slide along the ridges. You can even 
bend and twist the feather this way and that and the barbules will still hold together. But if you run your fingers 
hard enough along the vane from tip to base, the hooks will let go, and gaps will occur, making the feather look 
ragged. If you stroke the feather gently from the base toward the tip, however, the hooks will catch again, and the 
"solidness" of the vane will reappear." (Patent D.H. & Munoz W., "Feathers," Cobblehill/Dutton: New York NY, 
1992, pp.10-12)

19/06/02
"In the Middle Ages the religious life of the citizen was considered to be his most important function, and it was 
quite plainly the duty of the State to see that its citizens held the opinions which the rulers of the State believed 
to be the true ones. The idea of toleration of opinions commended itself but little, as long as religious opinions 
were strongly held; for it seemed criminal to permit men to teach doctrines which might lead to the eternal 
damnation of those who accepted them. In the nineteenth century toleration was the fashion, and, with few 
exceptions, civilised States did not attempt to dictate the opinions of their subjects . This happy state of affairs 
has, in recent years, begun to recede' for several of the most powerful States have not only renounced toleration, 
but have adopted methods of which Rome at its least tolerant never dreamed. The methods of controlled 
education and propaganda have been employed to ensure that their subjects shall have enormous enthusiasm 
for their rulers and no loyalties which might conflict with this. As rulers are necessarily imperfect and the results 
of their government at best very partially satisfactory, this enthusiasm can only be obtained by a system of lies, 
so all-embracing and voluminous as to create an atmosphere through which only the keenest mind can envisage 
the factual truth. Propaganda need not necessarily consist of lies, but it is likely to do so, for there is no need to 
advertise the truth, except when there is an attempt to suppress it. Why is our modern world so plentifully fed 
with lies-so that, all the evening long, dozens of paid liars are making the ether tremble with their calumnies? 
There is nothing new about lies: the reason for their so extensive use is to be found, first in the scientific means 
now available for spreading them, secondly in the fact that their moral stigma has departed." (Sherwood Taylor 
F.., "The Century of Science," Readers Union: London, Second Edition, 1942, pp.265-266)

21/06/02
"For the first time, perhaps, in twenty-five centuries truth is being assailed in principle. A hundred years ago, 
what were believed to be spiritual truths were felt to be intensely important and inviolable. ... As the century 
progressed the attitude changed, and in the eighties and nineties there rose a quasi-moral feeling about the 
sanctity of scientific truth. In this century, the meaning of scientific truth has been more carefully analysed and in 
absence of serious attempts to misrepresent the facts of science, the high moral feeling has largely disappeared, 
and there remains the simple knowledge that if science is to prove productive, scientific facts must be accurately 
stated and must be free from the influence of emotional prejudice. "Spiritual truth," has fared far otherwise. The 
first stage in its downfall was the increasing weakness of religious sanctions. Theology gave way to psychology 
and anthropology. The learned no longer asked themselves which religion was the true one; but, believing in 
none, they recorded all and studied them as biological products. For a time their attitude was that religious beliefs 
were interesting, but that since they had no scientific basis, their truth or falsity was outside the area of learned 
discussion. The next stage was a portentous revival of the age-old principle that beliefs had power. The 
totalitarians learnt that it was true that faith would remove mountains, and they set to work to create a faith which 
should be a gigantic reservoir of political power. The idea of instilling ideas by deliberate propaganda became 
familiar in the war of 1914-18. In the years following it, we became accustomed to the psycho-analytic doctrine 
that our non-factual mental content - emotions, prejudices, tastes, judgments and so forth-is conditioned by our 
environment, and the notion of the existence of any absolute truth became correspondingly weakened. ... Where 
1840 had spiritual truths, 1940 has ideologies, none of which can be, compellingly shown to have a higher degree 
of validity than the others. And what trumpery ideologies they are -in essence no more than "We are very 
splendid people and we must endure any sacrifices to uphold the regime typified by the particularly splendid Mr. 
X." As every X is but a human being and every regime but a human creation, neither of them is likely to be super-
excellent and if the ideology is to be believed with that passion which will render it effective, it will need to be 
supported by thumping lies." (Sherwood Taylor F., "The Century of Science," Readers Union: London, Second 
Edition, 1942, pp.266-267)

21/06/02
"In that case, it is no longer possible to view the storm around the Origin of Species merely as a battle 
over evolution-man's "descent from the monkeys" or the literal truth of Genesis-much less as the victory of 
unprejudiced inquirers into Nature's secrets over the forces of bigotry and darkness. It appears, rather, as a major 
incident, though neither the first nor the last, in the dispute between the believers in consciousness and the 
believers in mechanical action; the believers in purpose and the believers in pure chance. The so-called warfare 
between science and religion thus comes to be seen as the warfare between two philosophies and perhaps two 
faiths." (Barzun J., "Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," [1941], Doubleday Anchor: Garden City NY, 
Second Edition, 1958, p.37)

21/06/02
"Our faith in the idea of evolution depends on our reluctance to accept the antagonistic doctrine of special 
creation, because this view of creation is foreign to our belief in the continuity of law and order." (More L.T., 
"The Dogma of Evolution," Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1925, Second Printing, p.304)