Stephen E. Jones

Creation/Evolution Quotes: Unclassified quotes: May 2006

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The following are quotes added to my Unclassified Quotes database in May 2006. The date format is dd/mm/yy. See copyright conditions at end.

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1/05/2006
"We said at the end of the previous chapter that, with our present knowledge of the DNA - RNA - protein 
process it becomes easy to see ourselves and all other living things, as descended from the earliest-known 
life forms. What is not so easy to see is how those forms came into being. A cool examination of the 
process, as it operates today throughout all life, forces the observation that it is a remarkably clever, but at 
the same time most curious, way of creating living organisms. If an unusually imaginative and informed 
biochemist were to start with a bunch of raw chemicals and try to invent a way for them to organize 
themselves into protoplasm, would it ever cross that scientist's mind that this way was the way? Not 
likely. How life's blueprint is assembled and then turned into tissue is one of the most startling and bizarre 
processes that one could possibly dream of. How on earth did it get going? If the full story of evolution is 
ever to be told, that question must be answered - or at least a good attempt must be made to answer it." 
(Edey M.A. & Johanson D.C., "Blueprints: Solving The Mystery of Evolution," Little, Brown & Co: Boston 
MA, 1989, pp.281-282. Emphasis original) 

1/05/2006
"A genetic map made today for a gorilla or a human would show a Sahara of emptiness: thousands of genes, 
millions of triplets whose meaning is utterly incomprehensible. Human chromosomes have long repetitive 
sequences of base pairs that remind one of stuck keys on a teleprinter; they seem to make no sense at all. 
They are called `junk' genes. The question: are they really junk or is their function not understood? Some 
other questions from this spaghetti bowl of ignorance for which answers are only just beginning to emerge: 
where does a specific gene start? Where does it stop? How many base pairs does a gene consist of? What 
is its relationship to genes next to it? Do they affect each other? If so, how? What about genes a little farther 
apart. or even very far apart? Does it take one gene to accomplish something or does it take dozens? What 
turns a gene on? What turns it off? Do genes regulate genes? Are those regulator genes regulated by yet 
other genes? All those questions become relevant as the crushing complexity of higher organisms becomes 
apparent. It takes a mass of instructions to assemble the materials for as simple a thing as a single cotter pin. 
to make the stamping machine that will shape it, to position the metal, to stamp out the pin, to store it on a 
shelf, and then take it off the shelf just as the axle comes down the assembly line and the wheel is put on. 
We could say that the juxtaposition of wheel and axle is the trigger that stimulates the presentation of the 
cotter pin at just the moment that it is needed. We could say that a cotter-pin-delivery gene has been 
activated, which triggers off an insertion-in-the-hole gene-the hole itself, of course, having been bored in 
the axle on instructions of still another gene that is part of a whole axle-producing complex of instructions 
being carried out in another part of the factory. Two entire instruction manuals must coordinate exactly. As 
a final fillip, when the cotter pin is actually in the hole bored for it, there must be an instruction to bend its 
ends so that it won't fall out and the wheel drop off. In these terms the human factory becomes not one 
assembly line but thousands of them, each sensitive to the needs of others, each programmed to turn on at 
the proper signal and turn off again at another signal. " (Edey M.A. & Johanson D.C., "Blueprints: Solving 
The Mystery of Evolution," Little, Brown & Co: Boston MA, 1989, pp.276-277. Emphasis original) 

1/05/2006
"Left to themselves most chemical reactions of importance in biology would proceed so slowly that life 
would be impossible. The food we eat would be useless to us because its chemical components and energy 
could not be released fast enough to keep us alive. Enzymes speed these processes up enormously. In total 
there are perhaps 2,000 such enzymes, and their structures are basically the same across the whole of the 
living world-an enzyme from a bacterium can be used in the cell of a man. The chance of finding each 
individual enzyme by stringing together amino acid beads at random is again like the Rubik cube being 
solved by a blindfolded person. Although the chance of finding all the enzymes, 2,000 of them, by random 
processes is not nearly as small as the chance of finding the whole 200,000 proteins on which life depends, 
the chance is still exceedingly minute. Call it x to 1 against. If you started to write x out in longhand form, 
beginning with the digit 1 and adding zeros, you would have a few hours of work ahead - 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 
000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 
000 ... and so on for about forty pages, some 40,000 zeros in all. It is about the same as the chance of throwing 
an uninterrupted sequence of 50,000 sixes with unbiased dice! This is a crucial statistic, because it seems that 
without these 2,000 enzymes being formed in exactly the correct way, complex living organisms simply could 
not operate." (Hoyle, F., "The Intelligent Universe," Michael Joseph: London 1983, pp.15-16. Emphasis 
original)

1/05/2006
"Although the probability of the random origin of `just' these 2,000 enzymes is minuscule, there are many 
scientists who do not see this calculation as dismissing the idea that life arose by chance. Like all statistics, 
probabilities of this type are open to different interpretations. One important point which has to be 
established is the context in which we are talking. Were there many ways in which life could have evolved? 
The argument I have used above would be weakened if the origin of life as it is found on Earth happened to 
be just one highly improbable event taken out of a vast number of potentially similar events. ... Could it be 
that this was what the origin of life was like? The odds of finding life with our basic form of chemistry might 
be exceedingly small, but could there not be ... a vast number of other kinds of biology, which we know 
nothing about, each with its own very small chance of becoming established on a planet like the Earth? I 
think not. The reason why this question must be answered negatively, and why we must therefore abandon 
this way of avoiding the startling conclusion that life cannot have arisen by chance, is that the chemical 
reactions catalyzed by the 2,000 enzymes are fundamental to the basic chemistry of the carbon atom itself. 
Despite its complexity, our biochemistry may well be the simplest form possible Take, for example, sugars, 
the main energy source of life. These are built up from the two commonest molecules in the Universe, the 
molecules of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Thus the enzymes we use to unlock the energy content of 
sugars are engaged in processes which are central to the chemical content of the whole Universe. Hence 
there is nothing hole-in-the corner about our terrestrial system. There are not vast billions of other equally 
likely systems. Indeed it is to be doubted whether there is even one other system that operates so 
fundamentally on molecules composed of the commonest atoms in the Universe, the atoms of carbon, 
oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen." (Hoyle, F., "The Intelligent Universe," Michael Joseph: London 1983, 
pp.17-18. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Could our modern synthetic theory of evolution be wrong, as were its predecessors, evolution through the 
inheritance of acquired characters (Lamarck) and instant new species by mutations (De Vries)? What will 
scientists say a hundred years from now about Neodarwinism, the current theory? I have my doubts about 
one point in the concept. Of course, that isn't bad; it is how science progresses. Someone doubts an 
accepted point, and other scientists, being fundamentally conservative about the things they have learned, 
immediately pounce on the doubter (providing the point he brings up can be taken seriously). Eventually 
this leads to one of two situations, both of them good for science: either the doubter is proven wrong or he 
is proven right. If he is wrong, much will have been learned in marshaling the facts required to settle the 
question. If he is right, whole new areas of understanding may have been opened. My particular doubt has 
been published (Salisbury, 1969), scientists have taken their shots at it (Smith, 1969), and it has been 
defended (Spetner, 1970)." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," 
The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"The Origin of Variability The problem is the origin of variability. Both Lamarck and De Vries put forth 
their theories to account for this. Darwin was fully aware of the seriousness of the problem, and he retreated 
with misgivings to Lamarck's ideas. The modern theory emphasizes the importance of genetic 
recombinations but ultimately rests upon mutations as the source of the variability acted upon by natural 
selection. This is where I run into problems. ... Gene frequencies do change in populations as a result of 
selection pressures. This has been observed in the field and duplicated in the laboratory. ... But will changes 
in gene frequencies in response to selection pressures account for evolution in the broadest sense: life 
originating in the ancient soupy seas and developing over eons of time until the earth is covered with 
flowering plants and thinking men? Only if there is a continual source of new genes for selection to act 
upon. If, somewhere back in the dim reaches of time, a cell evolved the process of photo-synthesis, it is 
because, according to the present theory, the proper genes and their enzymes were there for selection to act 
upon. Could random changes in the nucleotide sequences of DNA (mutations) provide these genes and 
ultimately the enzymes? At the moment, I doubt it, and my reasons for doubting are based upon discoveries 
during the past 20 years that have indicated to us how really complex living systems are. We have known 
for a long time that man's body is an intricate and complex machine. Now we know that the cell itself is far 
more complex than we had imagined. It includes thousands of functioning enzymes, each one of them a 
complex machine itself. Furthermore, each enzyme comes into being in response to a gene, a strand of DNA. 
The information content of the gene (its complexity) must be as great as that of the enzyme that it controls. 
One might begin (as I did) to get the intuitive feeling that genes and enzymes are too complex to originate by 
randomly changing nucleotide sequences." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory 
of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"How Many Genes Could Exist? It is possible to get a numerical idea of the complexity of genes and 
enzymes by considering the possible number that could exist. This is easy. Proteins (enzymes) consist of 20 
different kinds of amino acids. If the 'protein' consisted of only one amino acid, then there could be 20 kinds; 
if two amino acids, then each of the first 20 could combine with any of another 20, so there could be 20 x 20 = 
400 kinds. Each time we add an amino acid link to the chain we have 20 possibilities to choose from, and so 
we multiply by 20. If there are 10 amino acids in the chain, then there can be 2010 (20 multiplied by itself 10 
times = 204.8 trillion) kinds of amino acid chains. The same thing applies to language, which, in a general 
sense, is any form of information consisting of individual information bits. In the English language, we can 
imagine that there might be 30 different characters (26 capital letters, a space, quotation marks, a colon, and a 
period, for example). Choosing from these characters, we can write the following sentence from Shakespeare: 
`THIS ABOVE ALL: TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE.' Could we write this sentence by allowing monkeys to 
pound typewriters randomly or by blowing up a printshop and then searching for the sentence among the 
bits of type on the street? Let's build small computers instead. Each one occupies a volume of 1 l, and all are 
connected. They cover all the earth to a depth of 2 km. Each one changes a character in a sequence of 45 
characters and compares the result with the sentence above. It does this a trillion times each second, and no 
two computers ever duplicate their efforts. To try more sentences, we cover 1020 identical planets to a 
depth of 2 km with such computers, still programming them so that no two ever duplicate the same sequence 
of characters. Now we let the computers on all these planets run for four billion years, the time required to 
form all possible 45 character-sequences (`sentences'), using 30 characters: 1.3 x 1067 sequences. One of 
these will be our Shakespearean sentence-- causing the proper red light to come on! Of course, the light 
could have come on during the first second of the billion-year period or during the last, but to try all 
possible combinations requires all the computers on all the planets and all the time. Such an example helps 
one realize that 1067 is a truly large number." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic 
Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354.
Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Yet it is small compared to the possible numbers of genes and enzymes. A medium protein might include 
about 300 amino acids. The DNA gene controlling this would have about 1,000 nucleotides in its chain. 
Since there are four kinds of nucleotides in a DNA chain, one consisting of 1,000 links could exist in 41000 
different forms. Using a little algebra (logarithms), we can see that 41,000 = 10600. Ten multiplied by itself 
600 times gives the figure 1 followed by 600 zeroes! This number is completely beyond our comprehension. 
Assume, for example, a cubic universe with dimensions of 20 billion (2 x 1010) light-years on each side. In 
angstroms, the smallest unit used by scientists, this becomes about 1039 A on a side, with a volume of 
`only' 10117 A3. Since our DNA chain requires over half a million A3 of space, imagine how many 
universes it would take to accommodate 10600 DNA chains!" (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern 
Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, 
p.354)

1/05/2006
"A Mechanism of Chemical Evolution Norman Horowitz (1945) proposed a mechanism of chemical 
evolution of metabolic systems. Imagine that the primeval ocean contained virtually all of the common 
precursors for life processes: sugars, amino acids, fats, nucleotides, etc. Imagine that a cell containing a 
reproducing DNA chain had come into being and that this could control the synthesis of specific enzymes; 
that is, that life had come into being. But imagine this to be a highly heterotrophic form of life, able to 
synthesize none of the precursors required for its existence but obtaining them all from the primeval ocean. 
Our original cell will multiply until this ocean is overpopulated and the food supply limited. The fittest cell 
will then survive; namely, one that contains an enzyme capable of converting a molecule present in rich 
abundance into one that has become depleted by the excessive population. Here is natural selection at the 
enzyme level. As each precursor becomes limiting, there is a selection pressure favoring any enzyme that 
can synthesize the molecule in short supply. Eventually the metabolic systems of living things might be 
built up this way until a completely autotrophic, photoynthesizing plant comes into being-- provided that 
there will be genes and their enzymes for the selection process to act upon." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts 
About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 
1971, pp.335-338, p.354. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Say that the gene comes into being by mutations consisting of random rearrangements in the nucleotide 
chains, as suggested by Neodarwinism. What are the chances that a suitable gene can be produced? 
Imagine a primeval ocean uniformly 2 km deep over the entire earth, containing DNA molecules at a 
concentration of about 0.001 M (about 700 grams of DNA per liter of ocean water). Each double-stranded 
DNA molecule has 1,000 nucleotide pairs and reproduces itself one million times per second. Each time it 
reproduces, it mutates by changing one nucleotide pair in the sequence. To make the calculation easier, we'll 
assume that no two DNA molecules are ever alike. In four billion years, 7.74 x 1084 different kinds of DNA 
molecules will be produced. These are not nearly enough, so we will allow it to happen on 1020 similar 
planets, producing 7.74 x 1084 (say 1085) different molecules. If we are trying to get one DNA molecule for 
natural selection to act upon-- and only one will be suitable-- then the chances of producing it under these 
conditions are 1085/10600, or 1 in 10515. Say instead that 10100 different kinds of molecules would each 
be suitable for our act of natural selection. Still only one molecule out of every 10500 would be acceptable; 
and, after four billion years on 1020 planets, 10415 of the first 10500 possibilities remain to be 
synthesized. So the chances are still unimaginably small that a proper DNA molecule will appear-- and if it 
does, the problem comes up again the next time a precursor becomes limiting!" (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts 
About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 
1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"How can we solve the problem? We can reduce its magnitude, perhaps, but only because I may have 
exaggerated things in the above example. It may be that some enzymes require 300 amino acids, all arranged 
in a specific order if they are to be active, but we don't really know of any good examples-- which isn't 
saying much, considering how little we know about enzyme activity and the arrangement of amino acids. If 
most of the amino acids in an enzyme were superfluous-- that is, if only a few of the amino acids actually 
were necessary for the active site-- then the problem might be easier to deal with. Henry Quastler (1964), in 
worrying about these matters, calculated that the active site might require only two amino acids and that 
seven amino acids should be sufficient in any case. If only two amino acids are required, then one out of 
every 400 combinations ought to be suitable for any reaction; if seven, then one out of every billion. If this 
were true, then the gene is not so unique after all, and random mutations might be an adequate mechanism. 
This answer seems too simple. If only two amino acids produce an active site, there can only be 400 kinds of 
active sites, and every protein would be covered by many, if not most, of them. But enzymes are highly 
specific, containing as a rule only one active site. This suggests that most amino acid sequences are without 
catalytic activity. If only a small percentage of amino acid sequences are active, although there is a legion of 
active sites (implied by all the reactions in the myriad life forms), then the number of amino acids in the 
minimal sequence must be quite high-- perhaps 15 or 16. Actually, we have determined the structure of a few 
enzymes, and it does not appear that the sequence numbers for an active site are small. In lysozyme, for 
example, the substrate binds to the enzyme through at least six hydrogen bonds and more than 40 somewhat 
weaker contacts (Chipman and Sharon, 1969). Because there is much to learn about enzymes, this is 
probably the best area to watch for a solution to my doubts. So far, however, the enzyme chemist has not 
provided us with much comforting information." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic 
Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"Religious Convictions Aside... We are entitled to think about another solution: an intelligent Creator of 
life. We can try to write Shakespeare by piling computers on top of each other and letting them rearrange 
letters of the language, but a much better way is to let Shakespeare apply his intelligence to the job. Could 
God apply his intelligence to the ordering of nucleotides in DNA chains, providing the genes for selection 
to act upon? Certainly, if He exists. I believe in such a God for reasons quite independent of the discussion 
here. But scientifically this solution is not satisfying, because it does not (to me, at least) suggest 
reasonable scientific tests; indeed, it might even lead to a complacent loss of desire to use science in the 
first place. The idea may be an important part of my personal life, but so far I see no suitable way to make it a 
part of my scientific life. Perhaps the mutations upon which natural selection acts are not really random at 
all. Perhaps there is some feedback from the environment to enzymes and genes, directing the mutation 
process. Here at least is an idea that might be tested." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern 
Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, 
p.354. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Questions About Mutation An argument that I encounter is that the theory of mutations has been 
demonstrated, so my doubts are in vain. I am not convinced. Most textbooks (for example, Stebbins, 1966) 
suggest that, while the vast majority of mutations may be bad, some are good-- perhaps `one in a thousand.' 
The number is pretty much a wild guess, but there are some experimental data suggesting that it could be 
close. Apparently potentially adaptive (`good') mutations have appeared after irradiating corn or some 
microorganism. Still I'm not convinced. My doubts are confined to occasions when we must produce a gene 
de novo, as in the example given above. This gene had to have certain capabilities because a certain 
precursor was limiting. In many other cases, genes might arise by slight changes in preexisting genes, 
improving slightly the activity of the controlled enzyme. This could account for a lot of apparently good 
mutations that don't fit my example. Or perhaps a good gene has mutated to become deleterious. It might 
mutate back to the original, producing an apparently good mutation." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the 
Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-
338, p.354. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Most examples cited to prove the modern synthetic theory of evolution don't depend upon mutations at all. 
The peppered moths of England are often mentioned. Before the Industrial Revolution, most were a mottled 
gray color similar to the lichen-covered bark of English trees. As these trees became covered with soot, the 
moths became black-- a protective coloration against predators. This is a marvelous example of a change in 
population gene frequency in response to selection pressures, but the black moths were known to be 
present before the Industrial Revolution (albeit in very small numbers). Nor am I convinced by the oft-cited 
answers to the work of Wilhelm Johanssen (1903). Johanssen's bean plants were not changed by selection 
after the first few generations, but the protein and oil contents of corn plants were changed for many 
generations (Hopkins, 1899). This says nothing about mutations for protein and oil content. It merely says 
that the bean plants had already been highly selected before Johanssen used them and that the corn plants 
had not been so selected. It also says that protein and oil contents may depend upon a large number of 
genes and that many generations are required to `collect' these in single individuals. It is a fine 
demonstration of selection changing gene frequencies, but it has nothing to do with the question that 
bothers me." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American 
Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"Some Further Doubts Doubting can get to be a bit of a habit-- as it should be with more students of 
science. I feel that the doubts expressed above are based on solid grounds, but I have other doubts 
remaining more at the intuitive level. Here are a few, for what they are worth: Surely our ideas about the 
origin of life will have to change radically with the passage of time. Not only is the gene itself a problem: 
think of the systems that would have to come into being to produce a living cell! It's nice to talk about 
replicating DNA molecules arising in the soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the 
presence of suitable enzymes. Furthermore, DNA by itself accomplishes nothing. Its only reason for 
existence is the information that it carries and that is used in the production of a protein enzyme. At the 
moment, the link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for 
its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. 
Yet selection acts only upon phenotypes and not upon genes. At this level, the phenotype is the enzyme 
itself. How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for 
replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one 
unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment." 
(Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology 
Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"Some enzymes are known to be incredibly complex. Phosphofructokinase in glycolysis is promoted by 
ADP and inhibited by citrate and ATP-even though ATP is a normal substrate. These inhibitions and 
promotions accurately regulate the rate of glycolysis in relation to oxygen concentrations. They do so 
because of secondary (allosteric) sites on the enzyme that influence the primary active site. This is pretty 
fancy engineering." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The
American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"Consider something as complex as the photosynthetic apparatus. We can shine light on a mixture of 
chlorophyll, water, and carbon dioxide to our heart's content, but nothing happens. We need chlorophyll 
attached to a suitable protein in a granum embedded in the stroma and with all the necessary enzymes for 
the entire photosynthetic process. Are there halfway steps along the way to this, each with a selective value 
of its own? This is the restriction that Darwinism and Neodarwinism place upon us. No step in evolution can 
last unless it has value." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The 
American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354)

1/05/2006
"And how many times in our evolution of photosynthesis, respiration, etc., do we encounter the problem of 
a required enzyme, that does not exist at all, as in the example above? How many shiny new genes are 
required to produce the phloem transport system or a wing or an eye? Are there really intermediate steps 
with selection value along the way to these final forms?" (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern 
Synthetic Theory of Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, 
p.354)

1/05/2006
"Organisms are really complex. Counting the number of nucleotide pairs, the nucleus of a man contains 
about 109 bits of genetic information. Written in normal-sized type, this would fill about 1,000 normal-sized, 
bound volumes. We are learning that much of the genetic information in a nucleus is redundant (repeated). 
If 90% is redundant, then the `formula of a man' could be written in 100 volumes. Could we really write those 
100 volumes in a mere four billion years by rearranging nucleotides and selecting? Peas are apparently even 
more complex than men. They have 1011 information bits per nucleus. Perhaps this is because they are 
nutritionally much more complex; they must synthesize their own basic foodstuffs from water, carbon 
dioxide, minerals, and the energy of light. But the really complex production of life is the human brain. Will 
Neodarwinism account for its origins?" (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of 
Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354. Emphasis original)

1/05/2006
"My last doubt concerns so-called parallel evolution. In the angiosperms the same features of flower 
structure have apparently appeared independently several times in unrelated evolutionary lines. Indeed, the 
problem is so severe that no satisfactory classification scheme for flowering plants has yet been devised. 
Even something as complex as the eye has appeared several times; for example, in the squid, the vertebrates, 
and the arthropods. It's bad enough accounting for the origin of such things once, but the thought of 
producing them several times according to the modern synthetic theory makes my head swim. So there are 
my doubts. Shoot me down if you can." (Salisbury, F.B., "Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of 
Evolution," The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 33, September 1971, pp.335-338, p.354) 

1/05/2006
"I admire, as all biologists must, the immense scientific labours of Charles Darwin and his lifelong, single-
hearted devotion to his theory of evolution. I agree that although, as he himself readily admitted, he did not 
invent the doctrine of organic evolution, or even the idea of natural selection, his arguments, and especially 
the arguments in The Origin of Species, convinced the world that he had discovered the true explanation 
of biological diversity, and had shown how the intricate adaptations of living things develop by a simple, 
inevitable process which even the most simple minded and unlearned can understand. But I am not satisfied 
that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial." 
(Thompson, W.R., "Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," 
1872, Sixth edition, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1967, reprint, p.vii)

1/05/2006
"I have said that it was mainly The Origin of Species that converted the majority of men to the 
evolutionary doctrine. Sir Arthur Keith emphatically agreed. 'No book,' he said, 'has appeared to replace it; 
The Origin of Species is still the book which contains the most complete demonstration that the law of 
evolution is true.' [Keith, A., "Introduction," to Darwin C., "The Origin of Species," 1872, Sixth edition, J.M. 
Dent & Sons: London, 1928, reprint, p.xvi] But the more strongly we insist on this point, the more necessary 
it is to scrutinize the proofs given in the Origin. Of course, we may be induced to accept a statement that 
is true, by agreements that are fallacious or inadequate. Still, no one would seriously maintain that it is good 
to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. If arguments fail to resist analysis, assent should be withheld, 
and a wholesale conversion due to unsound argument must be regarded as deplorable." (Thompson, W.R., 
"Introduction," to Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," 1872, Sixth edition, 
J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1967, reprint, pp.vii-viii) 

2/05/2006
"THE colourful scales on a butterfly's wings evolved from humble origins - the tiny hairs on flies and other 
insects. Biologists have long suspected that scales on butterfly wings evolved from these `sensory bristles', 
because they attach to the body through similar socket structures. To test this at a genetic level, Sean 
Carroll of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and his colleagues looked at a bristle gene called 
achaete-scute in fruit flies. Butterflies also carry this gene. The team showed that in the buckeye butterfly 
Precis coenia, the gene switched on in socket and scale cells at the beginning of wing development 
(Current Biology, vol 8, p 807). `This fits well with how we think evolution makes something novel,' says 
Carroll. `It co-opts structures it already has and starts innovating.'" ("How brilliant butterflies took off," New 
Scientist, 4 July 1998, p.25 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15921414.900.html) 

2/05/2006
"Is there any other feature, common to all living things, which appears unusual? In our original paper Orgel 
and I suggested that the element molybdenum appeared to be more abundant in living things than one 
might have expected from its natural abundance in the rocks. Several people pointed out that while 
molybdenum was rather rare in rocks, it was much more common in sea water. To this Orgel replied that 
while this was true of today's oceans, it seemed unlikely that molybdenum was present in such amounts in 
the prebiotic ocean, since the greater reducing conditions at that time might have made its salts rather 
soluble. Even if Orgel's argument is accepted it must be conceded that the support it gives to Directed 
Panspermia is rather feeble. Even if there was rather little molybdenum in the prebiotic ocean, the early 
organisms may have learned to concentrate it within themselves in some way." (Crick, F.H.C., "Life Itself: Its 
Origin and Nature," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1981, pp.143-144)

2/05/2006
"Perhaps a better approach might be to ask what special features we might hope to see in the fossil record if 
Directed Panspermia had indeed occurred. The main difference would be that microorganisms should appear 
here suddenly, without any evidence for prebiotic systems or very primitive organisms. We might also 
expect that not one but several types of microorganisms would appear which, although distantly related, 
would be rather distinct. In particular, it might be difficult to trace intermediate ancestral forms, since these 
would only have existed on the sender planet, not on Earth. Of these distinct forms we should not be 
surprised to find one which resembled the blue-green algae, since this has independently been suggested as 
a good candidate for an effective primitive organism. Now, it is perhaps remarkable that these are all features 
of the early fossil record or of the early evolutionary trees deduced from the study of present-day molecules. 
The earlier fossils, so far, do indeed resemble the blue-green algae. They date to a relatively early time in the 
life of the earth, so early that one is surprised to find them fully formed at that stage. Attempts to trace back 
molecular family trees seem, at the present time, to lead back to several distinct families which appear rather 
distant from each other. Thus, at the very least one can say that this evidence does not contradict Directed 
Panspermia but supports it to some extent." (Crick F.H.C., "Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature," Simon & 
Schuster: New York NY, 1981, p.144)

2/05/2006 
"Research has identified many dietary essentials, in addition to the familiar one, iron, to be harmful, if not 
deadly, in certain amounts. Such elements as chromium, molybdenum, selenium, and vanadium, for example, 
are essential for building proteins, and proteins serve as life's molecular `factories.' Yet each of these 
elements is toxic in any but the `just right' amount. A finely-tuned balance of such elements in organisms' 
external environment also proves necessary but risky. Molybdenum, for instance, though it can be harmful 
plays a crucial and unique role in `nitrogen fixation,' the process by which nitrogen from the atmosphere 
attaches to chemicals that can be assimilated by plants. This particular process, without which land life 
cannot exist, is impossible unless a certain `right amount' of molybdenum resides in the soil. For many years, 
we have recognized the devastating effects of iron deficiency or iron overabundance in the diet of humans 
and advanced animals. Year by year, however, the list of lethal yet essential substances grows. Currently 
that list includes arsenic, boron, chlorine, cobalt, copper, fluorine, iodine, manganese, nickel, phosphorus, 
potassium, sulfur, tin, and zinc, in addition to the four mentioned above. At the same time, our astronomy 
research reveals that the earth's crust differs significantly from the crusts of other solar system bodies. One 
difference lies in the relative abundance of various life-essential elements. Earth's crust contains `just right' 
quantities of all the elements necessary for the existence and sustenance of advanced land life. This finding 
can be viewed as a remarkable (more accurately, an impossible) coincidence or as a wondrous indicator of 
design." (Ross, H.N., "Vital Poisons," Connections 1999, Vol. 1, No. 3, Reasons to Believe. http://www.reasons.org/resources/connections/1999v1n3/index.shtml) 

2/05/2006
"The evolutionary trends in the number and kinds of repeated structures are so pronounced that the 
paleontologist Samuel Williston declared in 1914, "it is [also] a law in evolution that the parts in an organism 
tend toward reduction in number, with the fewer parts greatly specialized in function." [Williston, S.W., 
"Water Reptiles of the Past and Present," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, 1914] Williston was 
studying ancient marine reptiles. He noted that in the course of evolution, earlier groups tended to have 
large numbers of similar serially reiterated parts, but that later groups exhibited reduced numbers and 
specialized forms of these structures. Furthermore, the specialized pattern rarely reverted to the more general 
form. One interesting case is that when digits first evolved in tetrapods, there were as many as eight digits 
per foot. But among these eight, there were no more than five types, which eventually reduced to five digits 
that were specialized, or further reduced, in later species. Laws in biology are few, and those dared to be 
articulated are almost certain to be broken by some organisms. Yet Williston's Law is a useful observation 
that seems to pertain to trends in more than just the ancient marine reptiles he was writing about. The trend 
appears to be that once expanded in number, serial homologs became specialized in function and reduced in 
number. The specialization of vertebral, tooth, and digit morphology in vertebrates, and of legs and wings in 
arthropods, was in fact generally accompanied by a reduction in the number of these repeated structures. " 
(Carroll, S.B., "Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo," W.W. Norton & Co: New 
York NY, 2005, pp.31,33) 

2/05/2006
"Underlying British natural theology from its inception was the fundamental intuition that the order of the 
universe is inexplicable apart from a designing intelligence. Now order is a slippery concept. Order can 
signify marks of intelligence as epitomized in contrivances. But order can also signify the systematic 
outworking of lawlike regularities. For instance, the watchmaker analogy for which William Paley is so 
famous conceives of the order in nature in terms of contrivance. The watchmaker analogy was common coin 
among eighteenth-century natural theologians. William Derham popularized it in his Boyle Lectures of 1711-
1712, and it was known to Robert Boyle even before that. According to Paley, if we find a watch in a field, 
the watch's adaptation of parts to telling time ensures that it is the product of an intelligence. So too, the 
marvelous adaptations of means to ends in organisms ensure that organisms are the product of an 
intelligence. Thus from its inception British natural theology conceived of order in terms of contrivance. 
But order can also be conceived in terms of lawlike regularities. The laws of nature, and in particular 
Newton's laws, could as well be regarded as instances of order in the world. From its inception British 
natural theology therefore also conceived of order in terms of natural law. These dual notions of contrivance 
and natural law were to have an uneasy alliance within British natural theology, with natural law in the end 
swallowing up contrivance. Even in the watchmaker analogy we see the seeds for a conflict between 
contrivance and natural law. Once a watch is manufactured and set in operation, natural laws govern its 
behavior. The structure of the watch is a matter of contrivance. But once that structure is in place, the 
dynamics of the watch are controlled by natural laws. But take this reasoning a step further. The structure of 
the watch itself is attributable to the dynamics of certain watchmakers, watchmakers busily at work putting 
their watches together. What is to prevent the dynamics of those watchmakers in turn from being 
characterized by natural laws? Short of things just popping into existence, anything that has a history within 
the nexus of cause and effect presumably operates in accord with natural laws. Now if the putative 
contrivances of nature could themselves be explained in terms of natural laws, then the only instance of 
order for which British natural theology would need to invoke a designer is the natural laws themselves. But 
then the watchmaker analogy falls flat, for natural laws are not themselves contrivances. What's more, it is 
no longer clear what need there is for a designer since designers by definition design artifacts/contrivances, 
not abstracted lawlike regularities. A designer who is merely a law-giver always ends up being dispensable, 
for the laws of nature always have an integrity of their own and can thus just as well be treated as brute 
facts (as opposed to edicts o. a clandestine law-giver). Here we see the course by which British natural 
theology died. When during the heyday of British natural theology in the late eighteenth century William 
Paley and Thomas Reid fashioned their design arguments in terms of contrivance, their arguments fell on 
eager ears. By the time the authors of the Bridgewater treatises recycled the same arguments for their 
readers in the 1830s and `played endlessly on the theme of God's wisdom and goodness deduced from 
nature,' their arguments fell on deaf ears. By the 1830s the action in natural theology among the British 
Intelligentsia was no longer in contrivance but in natural law. It's therefore not surprising that the eight 
Bridgewater treatises should quickly be dubbed the `Bilgewater treatises.'" (Dembski W.A., "Intelligent 
Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1999, pp.74-76. 
Emphasis original 

3/05/2006
"Was Darwin led to his philosophical outlook partly as a response to Fitzroy's dogmatic insistence upon the 
argument from design? We have no evidence that Darwin, aboard the Beagle, was anything but a good 
Christian. The doubts and rejection came later. Midway through the voyage, he wrote to a friend: `I often 
conjecture what will become of me; my wishes certainly would make me a country clergyman.' And he even 
coauthored with Fitzroy an appeal for the support of Pacific missionary work entitled, `The Moral State of 
Tahiti.' But the seeds of doubt must have been sown in quiet hours of contemplation aboard the Beagle. 
And think of Darwin's position on board-dining every day for five years with an authoritarian captain whom 
he could not rebuke, whose politics and bearing stood against all his beliefs, and whom, basically, he did 
not like. Who knows what `silent alchemy' might have worked upon Darwin's brain during five years of 
insistent harangue. Fitzroy may well have been far more important than finches, at least for inspiring the 
materialistic and antitheistic tone of Darwin's philosophy and evolutionary theory. Fitzroy, at least, blamed 
himself as his mind became unhinged in later life. He began to see himself as the unwitting agent of Darwin's 
heresy (indeed, I am suggesting that this may be true in a more literal sense than Fitzroy ever imagined). He 
developed a burning desire to expiate his guilt and to reassert the Bible's supremacy. At the famous British 
Association Meeting of 1860 (where Huxley creamed Bishop `Soapy Sam' Wilberforce), the unbalanced 
Fitzroy stalked about, holding a Bible above his head and shouting, `The Book, The Book.' Five years later, 
he slit his throat." (Gould S.J., "Darwin's Sea Change, or Five Years at the Captain's Table," in "Ever Since 
Darwin," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.33) 

3/05/2006
"What is Deep Blue's secret? Grand master Yasser Seirawan put it most succinctly: `The machine has no fear.' He 
did not just mean the obvious, that silicon cannot quake. He meant something deeper: because of its fantastic 
capacity to see all possible combinations some distance into the future, the machine, once it determines that its 
own position is safe, can take the kind of attacking chances no human would. The omniscient have no fear. In 
Game 1, Blue took what grand master Robert Byrne called `crazy chances.' On-site expert commentators labeled 
one move `insane.' It wasn't. It was exactly right. Here's what happened. Late in the game, Blue's king was under 
savage attack by Kasparov. Any human player under such assault by a world champion would be staring at his 
own king trying to figure out how to get away. Instead, Blue ignored the threat and quite nonchalantly went 
hunting for lowly pawns at the other end of the board. In fact, at the point of maximum peril, Blue expended two 
moves-many have died giving Kasparov even one-to snap one pawn. It was as if, at Gettysburg, General Meade 
had sent his soldiers out for a bit of apple picking moments before Pickett's charge because he had calculated 
that they could get back to their positions with a half-second to spare. In humans, that is called sangfroid. And if 
you don't have any sang, you can be very froid. But then again if Meade had known absolutely-by calculating 
the precise trajectories of all the bullets and all the bayonets and all the cannons in Pickett's division-the time of 
arrival of the enemy, he could indeed, without fear, have ordered his men to pick apples. Which is exactly what 
Deep Blue did. It had calculated every possible combination of Kasparov's available moves and determined with 
absolute certainty that it could return from its pawn-picking expedition and destroy Kasparov exactly one move 
before Kasparov could destroy it. Which it did. It takes more than nerves of steel to do that. It takes a silicon 
brain. No human can achieve absolute certainty because no human can be sure to have seen everything. Deep 
Blue can. Now, it cannot see everything forever-just everything within its horizon, which for Deep Blue means 
everything that can happen within the next 10 or 15 moves or so." (Krauthammer, C., "Deep Blue Funk, Time, 
South Pacific edition, February 26, 1996, pp.70-71) 

4/05/2006
"A little calculation demonstrates how incredibly improbable the results of natural selection can be when 
enough time is available. Following Professor Muller, we can ask what would have been the odds against a 
higher animal, such as a horse, being produced by chance alone: that is to say by the accidental 
accumulation of the necessary favourable mutations, without the intervention of selection. To calculate 
these odds, we need to estimate two quantities the proportion of favourable mutations to useless or harmful 
ones; and the total number of mutational steps, or successive favourable mutations, needed for the 
production of a horse from some simple microscopic ancestor. A proportion of favourable mutations of one 
in a thousand does not sound much, but is probably generous, since so many mutations are lethal, 
preventing the organism living at all, and the great majority of the rest throw the machinery slightly out of 
gear. And a total of a million mutational steps sounds a great deal, but is probably an under-estimate after 
all, that only means one step every 2,000 years during biological time as a whole. However, let us take these 
figures as being reasonable estimates. With this proportion, but without any selection, we should clearly 
have to breed 1,000 strains to get one with one favourable mutation; a million strains (a thousand squared) 
to get one containing two favourable mutations; and so on, up to a thousand to the millionth power to get 
one containing a million. Of course, this could not really happen, but it is a useful way of visualizing the 
fantastic odds against getting a number of favourable mutations in one strain through pure chance alone. A 
thousand to the millionth power, when written out, becomes the figure 1 with three million noughts after it: 
and that would take three large volumes of about five hundred pages each, just to print! Actually this is a 
meaninglessly large figure, but it shows what a degree of improbability natural selection has to surmount, 
and can circumvent. One with three million noughts after it is the measure of the unlikeliness of a horse the 
odds against it happening at all. No one would bet on anything so improbable happening; and yet it has 
happened. It has happened, thanks to the workings of natural selection and the properties of living 
substance which make natural selection inevitable." (Huxley, J.S., "Evolution in Action," [1953], Penguin: 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1963, reprint, pp.49-51) 

4/05/2006
"The improvement of the [horse] limbs involved three consecutive steps. In the browsers, living in moister 
conditions, stabilization was reached at about the same time as that of tooth-pattern, nearly twenty-five 
million years ago. The stabilized browser foot was three-toed, all three toes with hooves, but with the main 
stress on the enlarged middle toe, the two small side-toes merely helping to spread the weight. In the early 
grazers, the first further step was the evolution of a remarkable spring mechanism involving the tendons of 
the still further enlarged middle toe, which gave the animals a greater turn of speed on their hard open 
plains. But this involved the risk of sprains and dislocations, and the side-toes were retained, though a little 
further reduced, as checks or buffers against this risk. Finally, in the line which led to the living forms, a 
second tendon was developed to act as an anti-sprain check mechanism : with this, the need for side-toes 
was over, and they became further reduced, to survive as the vestigial splint bones of the modern species." 
(Huxley, J.S., "Evolution in Action," [1953], Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1963, reprint, p.61) 

4/05/2006
"Degeneration of [horse] useless structures proceeds at a slower rate than the evolution of useful 
ones, so while the check mechanism was perfected five or six million years ago, and remained stable 
after that, the slow reduction of the side-toes continued for a few million years more. Some of the three-
toed grazers survived for some time side by side with the one-toed forms before finally becoming 
extinct during the Ice Age. Various browsing horses survived virtually unchanged until the last of them 
underwent extinction early in the Pliocene. As machines for a browsing way of life, they had reached 
the limit of their possibilities even before the grazing horses branched off; and their stable phase lasted 
for nearly two-fifths of their evolutionary career. The grazers started their special transformation later: 
but even so they reached their stable phase at least two or three million years ago." (Huxley, J.S., 
"Evolution in Action," [1953], Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1963, reprint, p.62) 

5/05/2006
"Some sorts of behaviour patterns even seem to involve what appears to be a form of interspecies altruism. 
Anyone who has watched the spider-hunting wasps at work is forced to ask with zoologist Garrett Hardin 
`why under Darwinian principles doesn't the spider try to escape its nemesis the wasp?' [Hardin, G., " Steps 
to Biology," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco, 1968, p 105] Naturalists since the time of Henri Fabre have 
speculated over the same point. William S. Bristow describes the wasp Pompilus plumbeus hunting the 
spider Arctosa perita: `An Arctosa was put in a tube of diameter similar to that of her burrow. A 
Pompillus was then transferred to the same tube. Surely the spider would leap at the wasp and destroy it? 
No, at the first touch of the vibrating antennae a forward lunge by the spider was checked and she stayed 
still with her legs crossed and entwined round her cephalothorax in a completely unnatural pose whilst the 
wasp curled its abdomen round to inflict a sting beneath her in the region of her sternum, thus a paralysis 
caused by what I can only describe as fear was replaced by a paralysis caused by poison.' [Bristow, W.S., 
"The World of Spiders," Collins: London, 1958, p.177]. Petrunkevitch, a world authority on spiders, 
describes the giant wasp Pepsis marginata hunting the tarantula Cyrtopholis portoricae in similar terms: 
`It is a classic example of what looks like intelligence pitted against instinct, the victim although fully able to 
defend itself, submits unwittingly to its destruction.' [Petrunkevitch, A., "The Spider and the Wasp," 
Scientific American, 187(2), 1952, pp.20-23, p.21].What possible survival value, one wonders, could accrue 
to the spider by such curiously altruistic behaviour? And it is not just one or two species of spiders that fall 
so easily to the wasps; practically every group of spiders is preyed on by a particular species of spider 
hunting wasp." (Denton M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, p.222) 

5/05/2006
"When we look at those of the so called scientific revolutions that most frequently mentioned, we find that 
they are identified with the names Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg; 
in other words, with one exception, all of them are revolutions in the physical Sciences. ... I am taking a new 
look at the Darwinian revolution of 1859, perhaps the most fundamental of all intellectual revolutions in the 
history of mankind. It not only eliminated man's anthropocentrism, but affected every metaphysical and 
ethical concept, if consistently applied." (Mayr, E.W., "The Nature of the Darwinian Revolution," Science, 
Vol. 176, 2 June 1972, pp.981-989, p.981) 

6/05/2006
"Nobody knows exactly how or where life began. It is an article of faith amongst modern biologists that life, 
or at least our kind of life, originated on earth as a result of the blind processes of physics and chemistry. A 
few dissident scientists believe that this is an unnecessarily parochial view, and that life may well have 
originated elsewhere in space before the earth was born. `Seeds of life', in the form of simple microorganisms 
or their spores, could then have colonized the earth soon after its origin. Those who believe in such a 
process, however (or at least most of them), still believe that life must originally have begun thanks to the 
actions of blind physics and chemistry in a suitable location somewhere in the universe." (Scott A., "The 
Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1986, p.184)

6/05/2006
"We should not be too dogmatic about things we can never know for certain. Some people think life was 
created by some superior being, or force or principle known by such names as `God' or `Allah'. Such beliefs, 
of course, merely replace the problem of the origin of life with the problem of the origin of God. Some people 
think that there is infinitely more richness and complexity to the physical universe than we are aware of. 
They suggest there might be unseen dimensions and other hidden spaces and processes which are as 
invisible to us as the earth and the sky and the stars are to a micro-organism inhabiting some dark 
hydrothermal vent on the floor of the deepest ocean. Without knowledge of these secrets, they contend, we 
can never fully explain either our origin or the true essence of our being." (Scott A., "The Creation of Life: 
Past, Future, Alien," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1986, p.184)

6/05/2006
"Elementary textbooks of biology relate a simplistic tale about the origin of life on earth which may be true, 
or partly true, but may be quite false. They describe a prebiotic world in which a rich mix of simple chemicals 
was formed and underwent reactions which produced the chemical building blocks of life today. They tell of 
short chains of nucleic acids forming spontaneously, and then becoming able to encourage their own 
replication in a manner similar to the replication of DNA today. If such nucleic acids did form spontaneously 
on the early earth, and were able to encourage their own replication, then evolution guided by natural 
selection would have begun. These primeval nucleic acids would have been the first things able to make 
other things which are very similar to themselves, but usually slightly different. The first letters in the code 
of life would have become linked together. Undirected mutations in the first self-replicating nucleic acids 
would have allowed new, more efficient, nucleic acids to evolve. Some of these might have been `more 
efficient' because they encouraged other components of the primordial world to cluster around the nucleic 
acids and form the earliest simple `cells'. At some point, of course, some of the nucleic acids would have 
become capable of the great `trick' of encouraging specific protein molecules to form. Nucleic acids would 
have begun to encode proteins, and, with the awesome catalytic powers of the proteins available, life would 
have really been on its way. It is an appealingly simple tale. Many think it is far too simple to be taken 
seriously. Some suggest alternative scenarios in which modern life evolved from completely different 
beginnings, in which the nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA played no immediate part. Some suggest that 
the earliest living (or at least evolving) things were not composed of organic chemicals, but were composed 
of inorganic minerals which eventually gave rise to the organic chemicals which displaced them." (Scott A., 
"The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1986, pp.184-185)

6/05/2006
"This is not the place to enter into a deep analysis of the mystery of the origin of life. ... For our present 
purposes it should be sufficient for me to say that I am not able to reveal to you how life began, because I 
do not know for sure, and neither does anyone else. Scientists have developed a few plausible ideas on the 
subject, and quite a few less plausible ones. The attempts to recreate the chemistry involved in life's origin 
are at a very early stage and have met with no really dramatic and convincing successes. It will be some 
time, at least, before we can describe the precise chemistry of life's origin with the same confidence as we 
can describe the chemistry which sustains life today. That is no disgrace. It is difficult to describe with 
precision events which occurred at least 4,000 million years ago when nobody was around to witness them. 
(Scott A., "The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1986, p.185-186) 

7/05/2006
"In practice, however, evolution of the whole population in all of its traits is seldom reversed. The reason is 
simple. The heredity of most species of organisms is based not on a single locus but on thousands or tens 
of thousands of loci, many of which are represented in the population by more than just one or two alleles. 
Try to imagine most or all of this huge assemblage of allele systems being allowed to undergo various 
complicated changes in relative frequency, then reversing themselves and returning, all in concert, back to 
the starting point. Such an event is extremely unlikely. Even without the aid of this particular argument from 
genetics, biologists long ago recognized that evolution very seldom if ever reverses itself to any significant 
extent. This generalization is called DOLLO'S LAW, after Louis Dollo, a Belgian paleontologist who first 
derived it from his studies of fossils. Actually, Dollo's Law is not a true law in the sense of physics and 
chemistry, but rather a strong inference based on empirical evidence from the fossil record combined with 
some persuasive theoretical deductions from population genetics. Even so, it has some far-reaching 
implications. A well-known application of the law is that once a major anatomical structure has been lost or 
transformed into another structure, it can never be regained in its original form. The hind legs of seals, for 
example, which evolved into flippers as part of a marine adaptation in the remote past, can never return 
(Wilson, E.O., et al., "Life on Earth," [1973], Sinauer Associates: Sunderland MA, 1975, reprint, p.772.
Emphasis original) 

7/05/2006
"Louis Dollo, the great Belgian paleontologist who died in 1931, established a much misunderstood principle 
"the irreversibility of evolution" (also known as Dollo's law). Some ill-informed scientists think that Dollo 
advocated a mysterious directing force, driving evolution forward, never permitting a backward peek. And 
they rank him among the non-Darwinians who feel that natural selection cannot be the cause of nature's 
order. In fact, Dollo was a Darwinian interested in the subject of convergent evolution-the repeated 
development of similar adaptations in different lineages. Elementary probability theory, he argued, virtually 
guarantees that convergence can never yield anything close to perfect resemblance. Organisms cannot 
erase their past. Two lineages may develop remarkable, superficial similarities as adaptations to a common 
mode of life. But organisms contain so many complex and independent parts that the chance of all evolving 
twice toward exactly the same result is effectively nil. Evolution is irreversible; signs of ancestry are always 
preserved; convergence, however impressive, is always superficial.." (Gould, S.J., "Double Trouble," in 
"The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.35) 

7/05/2006
"Consider my candidate for the most astounding convergence of all: the ichthyosaur. This sea-going reptile 
with terrestrial ancestors converged so strongly on fishes that it actually evolved a dorsal fin and tail in just 
the right place and with just the right hydrological design. These structures are all the more remarkable 
because they evolved from nothing-the ancestral terrestrial reptile had no hump on its back or blade on its 
tail." (Gould, S.J., "Double Trouble," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], 
Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, p.35)

7/05/2006
"Thus, for example, Dollo's law of reversibility (see Gould, 1970b) only restates the general principles of 
mathematical probability for the specific case of temporal changes based on large numbers of relatively 
independent components. And Williston's law of reduction and specialization in modular segments may 
only record a structural constraint in random systems, thus following the same principles as my previous 
argument about the expanding right tail of complexity for life's totality. Suppose that, in overall frequency 
within the arthropod clade, modular species (with large numbers of similar segments) and tagmatized [fusion 
of segments] species (with fewer fused and specialized groupings of former segments) always enjoy equal 
status in the sense that 50 percent of habitats favor one design, and 50 percent the other. (I am, of course, 
only presenting an abstract `thought experiment,' not an operational possibility for research. Niches don't 
exist independent of species.) But suppose also that, for structural reasons, modular designs can evolve 
toward tagmatization, but tagmatized species cannot revert to their original modularity-an entirely 
reasonable assumption under Dollo's law (founded upon the basic statements of probability theory) and 
generalities of biological development. Then, even though tagmatization enjoys no general selective 
advantage over modularity, a powerful trend to tagmatization must pervade the clade's history, ultimately 
running to completion when the last modular species dies or transforms." (Gould, S.J., "The Structure of 
Evolutionary Theory," Belknap: Cambridge MA, 2002, Fifth printing, pp.901-902) 

7/05/2006
"Reversals are likewise common in evolution. The fossil record of elephants, for example, shows that the 
general trend toward greater size was reversed in several lines that evolved dwarf species, and reversals in 
the structure of the teeth accompanied the change in body size in each instance (Maglio 1972). Quite often a 
complex character may degenerate and return to its original state; thus winglessness in insects can be either 
a primitive condition as in silverfish (Thysanura) or a derived condition as in lice, fleas, and the many 
wingless species in almost every insect order that has evolved from winged ancestors. To be sure, there is a 
degree of irreversibility in evolution, as expressed by DOLLO'S LAW, which states that complex structures, 
once lost, are unlikely to be regained in their original form. However, the structure of the eye in snakes is 
different enough from thatof other vertebrates to suggest that it evolved to a new complex state from a 
reduced condition in a burrowing ancestor (Porter 1972). Of the several molars possessed by primitive 
Carnivora, the cats (Felidae) retain only the first, but in the lynx the second molar has reappeared (Kurten 
1963). Thus some lost structures may indeed be regained." (Futuyma D.J., "Evolutionary Biology," [1979], 
Sinauer Associates: Sunderland MA, Second Edition, 1986, pp.297-298. Emphasis original) 

7/05/2006
"One of the most striking discoveries of the last half-century has been that, despite the fact that animals 
differ greatly in appearance, common principles control their development from a single fertilized egg. They 
even have in common many master genes - genes that control many aspects of development. One can 
almost imagine Drosophila fruit flies saying to one another that they are amazed at how similar humans are 
to them. Indeed, many of the genes that have been identified as controllers of vertebrate development were 
originally discovered in these flies. It's a key point that when and where genes are expressed determines 
how animals develop. The control regions of the genes (switches that change an existing pattern of gene 
activity into a new pattern of gene activity) are crucial, as Carroll makes clear, and one gene can have many 
control regions. (For example, in the fruit fly, there is a group of genes - known as the pair-rule genes - that 
express proteins in seven stripes along the body axis of the embryo [see illustration on next page]; each of 
these genes has seven discrete control regions, and each region specifies one stripe.) It is thus unsurprising 
that 95 percent of the genes that code for proteins are similar in humans and mice. Evolution of control 
regions has made us human - and different from our primate ancestors. " (Wolpert, L., "Clever Tinkering." 
Review of  "Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal 
Kingdom," by Sean B. Carroll, W.W. Norton, 2005. American Scientist, September-October 2005)

7/05/2006
"The earliest complex animals, fossils of which were found in the Burgess Shale, appear to have arisen about 
500 million years ago, over a period of some 15 million years. Evidence from evo devo shows that all the 
genes for building those complex animals existed long before that morphological explosion. The dominance 
of arthropods at the time of the explosion may have been due both to Williston's law and to the power of 
Hox genes to specify differences between the body segments that formed different appendages at specific 
positions along the body. But how, asks Carroll, did the number of distinct appendage types increase? His 
answer is that the relative shifting of Hox genes could have provided the mechanism. That still leaves a big 
problem - how did arthropod appendages such as limbs and wings evolve? An answer lies, he says, in the 
origin and modification of the ancestral biramous (forked) limb. But even if the origin of the limb can be 
explained, wings are even more difficult. One answer is that they evolved from the gills on the limbs of 
aquatic ancestors. But this conclusion raises a key, and much neglected, problem that even Carroll does not 
properly explore. If evolution proceeds in small steps, what were the intermediate stages in the evolution of 
wings from gills, and what was the selective advantage of each of those forms? How could the intermediate 
structures have been an advantage before the animal could fly? One possibility is that they played a role in 
thermoregulation, but there is no good evidence for that hypothesis. This is a general problem in evo devo, 
and Darwin fully understood the difficulties it poses." (Wolpert, L., "Clever Tinkering." Review of  "Endless 
Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom," by Sean B. 
Carroll, W.W. Norton, 2005. American Scientist, September-October 2005)

7/05/2006
"A related problem is how to explain the evolution of the autopod - the digits - from fins. One possibility is 
that the autopod is merely a distal extension of the mechanism that gives rise to more proximal elements, 
such as the humerus, radius and ulna. A much more difficult problem is raised in the evolution of 
development itself. Gastrulation (during which an embryo forms its innermost, middle and outer layers) 
occurs in the early development of all animals and has evolved in a variety of ways related to later 
development; it is at present not possible to account for the intermediate forms or their advantage to the 
animal. Although evolution, as François Jacob pointed out, tinkers with what is there, rather than inventing 
something new, these problems remain unsolved." (Wolpert, L., "Clever Tinkering." Review of  "Endless 
Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom," by Sean B. 
Carroll, W.W. Norton, 2005. American Scientist, September-October 2005) 

7/05/2006
"Carroll explains the basic tool kit for development that all animals share, placing particular emphasis on 
Drosophila. He introduces both Hox genes, which are considered master genes, and widely used 
intercellular signaling molecules such as the proteins specified by hedgehog genes. It is striking how few 
signaling molecules animals use in development. This is because the same molecules can be employed again 
and again, as cells will respond differently according to their genetic constitution and developmental 
history. Carroll doesn't give much attention to the fact that a cell has a positional identity (based on the 
position it occupied on the axis of the body of the early embryo) or to how that positional identity is 
acquired. Nor does he delve into how a cell senses its position and figures out how to act according to its 
genetic constitution and developmental history, thereby differentiating to give any imaginable pattern. 
Consider that a change in a single Hox master gene can convert the antenna of the fly into a leg. There is 
evidence that cells in the leg and those in the antenna have the same positional identity. It is somewhat 
embarrassing that we still do not know how the change in that particular Hox gene controls the response of 
all those unknown downstream genes to make a leg rather than an antenna. And this downstream target 
problem is present for all Hox genes. " (Wolpert, L., "Clever Tinkering." Review of  "Endless Forms Most 
Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom," by Sean B. Carroll, W.W. 
Norton, 2005. American Scientist, September-October 2005)

7/05/2006
"The great physicist Richard Feinberg loved to warn beginning scientists, `The first principle is that you 
must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.' ... Bruno Müller-Hill teaches the same maxim: 
`First you fool yourself, then you fool others.' ... The German biologist Bruno Muller-Hill tells a memorable 
story to illustrate his thesis that `self-deception plays an astonishing role in science in spite of all the 
scientists' worship of truth': When I was a student in a German gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a 
lesson that I have not forgotten.... One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school 
yard to show us a certain planet and its moons. So we stood in a long line, about forty of us. I was standing 
at the end of the line, since I was one of the smallest students. The teacher asked the first student whether 
he could see the planet. No, he had difficulties, because he was nearsighted. The teacher showed him how 
to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet, and the moons. Others had no difficulty; 
they saw them right away. The students saw, after a while, what they were supposed to see. Then the 
student standing just before me-his name was Harter-announced that he could not see anything. `You idiot,' 
shouted the teacher, `you have to adjust the lenses.' The student did that and said after a while, `I do not 
see anything, it is all black:' The teacher then looked through the telescope himself. After some seconds he 
looked up with a strange expression on his face. And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope 
was nonfunctioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens. Indeed, no one could see anything through it. 
('Science, Truth and Other Values,' Quarterly Review of Biology 68, no. 3 [September 1993]: 399-407) 
Müller-Hill reports that one of the docile students became a professor of philosophy and director of a 
German TV station. `This might be expected,' he wickedly comments. But another became a professor of 
physics, and a third a professor of botany. The honest Harter had to leave school and go to work in a 
factory. If in later life he was ever tempted to question any of the pronouncements of his more illustrious 
classmates, I am sure he was firmly told not to meddle in matters beyond his understanding. One might 
derive from this story a satirical `Harter's Precept' to put alongside Parkinson's Law (bureaucracy expands to 
the limit of the available resources) and the Peter Principle (one rises in a hierarchy up to one's level of 
incompetence). Harter's Precept says that the way to advance in academic life is to learn to see what you are 
supposed to see, whether it is there or not. As Sam Rayburn used to explain to new members of Congress, 
you've got to go along to get along. Richard Hamilton's The Social Misconstruction of Reality 
indicatesindicates that many social scientists seem to have guided their careers by the light of Harter's 
Precept. ... Hamilton concludes with an analysis of how major scholarly errors get made and perpetuated: 
theorists fall in love with their theories, the appearance of scholarship can often pass for the reality, and 
clever charlatans ... can evade the scrutiny of specialists and appeal directly to those who are all too willing 
to deceive themselves. Above all, there is the wisdom of Harter's Precept. Revealing that the lens cap is still 
on the telescope isn't necessarily good for one's career." (Johnson, P.E., "Harter's Precept." Review of "The 
Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community," Yale University 
Press, 1996." In "Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture," InterVarsity 
Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, pp.157-158, 160)

7/05/2006
"Yet no matter how convincing such disproofs might appear, no matter how contradictory and unreal much 
of the Darwinian framework might now seem to anyone not committed to its defence, as philosophers of 
science like Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have pointed out, it is impossible to falsify theories by reference to 
the facts or indeed by any sort of rational or empirical argument. The history of science amply testifies to 
what Kuhn has termed the `priority of the paradigm' and provides many fascinating examples of the 
extraordinary lengths to which members of the scientific community will go to defend a theory just as long 
as it holds sufficient intrinsic appeal. The defence by medieval astronomers of the Ptolemaic theory the 
heavens, and by the eighteenth-century chemists of the phlogiston theory of combustion, provide classic 
examples. ... For the sceptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is 
not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly 
reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the 
sceptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to 
a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one 
thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, 
specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a 
complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the 
Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!" (Denton, M.J., 
"Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, pp.348, 350) 

8/05/2006
"I have read your book [Origin of Species] with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly, 
parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow, because I think 
them utterly false and grievously mischievous. You have deserted-after a start in that tram-road of all 
solid physical truth-the true method of induction, and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop 
Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon 
assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and 
arrangement of philosophical induction? As to your grand principle-natural selection-what is it but a 
secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts!" (Sedgwick, A., Letter to C. Darwin, 
December 24, 1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New 
York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, p.43. Emphasis original)

8/05/2006
"You write of `natural selection' as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent. 'Tis but a 
consequence of the presupposed development, and the subsequent battle for life. This view of nature you 
have stated admirably, though admitted by all naturalists and denied by no one of common sense. We all 
admit development as a fact of history: but how came it about? Here, in language, and still more in logic, we 
are point-blank at issue." (Sedgwick, A., Letter to C. Darwin, December 24, 1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life 
and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, p.44)

8/05/2006
"Take the case of the bee-cells. If your development produced the successive modification of the bee and 
its cells (which no mortal can prove), final cause would stand good as the directing cause under which the 
successive generations acted and gradually improved." (Sedgwick, A., Letter to C. Darwin, December 24, 
1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 
1959, reprint, p.44)

8/05/2006
"Passages in your book, like that to which I have alluded (and there are others almost as bad), greatly 
shocked my moral taste. I think, in speculating on organic descent, you over-state the evidence of 
geology ; and that you under-state it while you are talking of the broken links of your natural pedigree : 
but my paper is nearly done, and I must go to my lecture-room. Lastly, then, I greatly dislike the concluding 
chapter-not as a summary, for in that light it appears good-but I dislike it from the tone of triumphant 
confidence in which you appeal to the rising generation (in a tone I. condemned in the author of the 
'Vestiges') and prophesy of things not yet in the womb of time, nor (if we are to trust the accumulated 
experience of human sense and the inferences of its logic) ever likely to be found anywhere but in the fertile 
womb of man's imagination." (Sedgwick, A., Letter to C. Darwin, December 24, 1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The 
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, pp.44-45)

8/05/2006
"And now to say a word about a son of a monkey and an old friend of yours : I am better, far better, than I 
was last year. I have been lecturing three days a week (formerly I gave six a week) without much fatigue, but 
I find by the loss of activity and memory, and of all productive powers, that my bodily frame is sinking 
slowly towards the earth. But I have visions of the future. They are as much a part of myself as my stomach 
and my heart, and these visions are to have their antitype in solid fruition of what is best and greatest. But 
on one condition only-that I humbly accept God's revelation of Himself both in his works and in His word, 
and do my best to act in conformity with that knowledge which He only can give me, and He only can 
sustain me in doing. If you and I do all this we shall meet in heaven." (Sedgwick, A., Letter to C. Darwin, 
December 24, 1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New 
York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, p.45)

8/05/2006
"Professor Sedgwick treated this part of the `Origin of Species' very differently, as might have been 
expected from his vehement objection to Evolution in general. In the article in the Spectator of March 24, 
1860, already noticed, Sedgwick wrote : `We know the complicated organic phenomena of the Mesozoic (or 
Oolitic) period. It defies the trasmutationist at every step. Oh! but the document, says Darwin, is a fragment; 
I will interpolate long periods to account for all the changes. I say, in reply, if you deny my conclusion, 
grounded on positive evidence, I toss back your conclusion, derived from negative evidence,-the inflated 
cushion on which you try to bolster up the defects of your hypothesis.'" (Darwin, C.R., Letter to Thomas 
Davidson, April 30, 1861, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: 
New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, p.161)

9/05/2006
"In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the 
foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental 
power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." (Darwin, 
C.R., "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection," 1872, Sixth edition, Senate: London, 1994, 
p.428)

9/05/2006
"Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker- even Freud or Marx 
- this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see 
ourselves on the planet." (Desmond, A.J. & Moore, J.R., "Darwin," [1991], Penguin: London, 1992, reprint, 
p.xix) 

9/05/2006
"THE APPEARANCE slightly more than a century ago, in 1859, of Darwin's On the Origin of Species 
marked a turning point in the intellectual history of mankind. Darwin ushered in a new understanding of 
man and his place in the universe. After him the fateful idea that all things change, that they evolve, has 
become one of the cornerstones on which the thinking of civilized man is based. " (Dobzhansky, T.G., 
"Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species," [1962], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 
1969, Twelfth printing, p.1. Emphasis original) 

9/05/2006
"There are more prosaic examples involving human initiation of special conditions. For instance, 
researchers recently introduced genes for bioluminescence into the tobacco mosaic virus [Joshi, R.L., Joshi, 
V. & Ow, D.W., "BSMV genome mediated expression of a foreign gene in dicot and monocot plant cells," 
EMBO J , Vol. 9, No. 9, September 1990, pp.2663-2669]. That was a deliberate, designed, initiating 
intervention. That combination did not and, we may suppose, might never have arisen by natural means. But 
once the initiating was complete, the subsequent generations, complete with bioluminescence, arose by 
perfectly ordinary reproductive means, and their possession of genes for bioluminescence did not violate 
any laws, scream `design,' or anything of the sort. The initiating event did exhibit design directly visible to 
anyone observing it (test tubes, labs smocks, grant applications, coffee pots), but nothing past that point 
did." (Ratzsch, D.L.*, "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," in Dembski, W.A.*, ed., "Mere Creation: 
Science, Faith & Intelligent Design," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, p.291)

9/05/2006
"By 1960 the reputation of the design argument, and of Paley, had been in free fall for a hundred years, and 
everyone with the smallest tincture of education `knew' by then that the theistic argument from design is 
beneath contempt, and that Paley was a fool or hypocrite or both. Only someone who has tried in recent 
decades, as I have, to convince silly undergraduates of the merits of Paley's classic book, can appreciate the 
absolute impossibility of that task. Paley was a Christian and (worse) a clergyman, he was on the opposite 
side to Darwin, and anyway (most important of all) he lost: that is `all they know, and all they need to 
know' of his matter. But that attitude is really just part of the silliness of such people. And, as it happens, it 
has met with the punishment which it all along deserved. For in the last thirty years, Paley has had his 
revenge on Darwinism for more than a century of undeserved contempt. The explanation of adaptation by 
reference to the purposes of intelligent and powerful agents has come back into its own. And its 
reinstatement has turned out to require only some comparatively minor changes to the theology involved." 
(Stove, D.C., "Paley's Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York 
NY, 1995, pp.264-265. Emphasis original) 

9/05/2006
"It is not in the least surprising that Dawkins should feel a profound intellectual sympathy with Paley's great 
book. It would be astounding if the opposite were the case. For he is a theist himself, as I have pointed out 
... He agrees with Paley that the adaptations of organisms are due to the purposive agency (more 
specifically, the selfish and manipulative agency) of beings far more intelligent and powerful than humans or 
any other organisms. Dawkins has some disagreements with Paley, of course; but this really is a matter of 
course. When did two theists ever agree on all points? For example, Paley believed in the benevolence of 
God. ... Dawkins, on the other hand, as we saw ... ascribes to the gods of his religion a ruthlessly selfish 
character. Then, Paley, being a Christian, believed ... in "The Unity of God"; whereas Dawkins is a 
polytheist, as any adherent of the gene religion must be. But after all, the precise number of the gods is a 
comparatively minor point. Let it be one, or three, or 30,000 (as Hesiod computed), or a number rather larger 
than that (as gene religionists believe). The great, the fundamental point of religion is, rather, and always 
has been, the existence of purposive beings of more than human intelligence and power. And as to that, 
Dawkins and Paley are in agreement." (Stove, D.C., "Paley's Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian 
Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, p.266. Emphasis original) 

9/05/2006
"Dawkins' enthusiasm for Paley, and for putting purpose back into the explanation of adaptation, great as it 
is, is thrown completely into the shade by that of his mentor, [George C.] Williams. In Adaptation and 
Natural Selection[Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1974], there are literally hundreds of sentences, 
and sentences which contain the very essence of the book too, which it would puzzle any reader to say 
whether they are more reminiscent of The Selfish Gene or of Paley's Natural Theology. And the reason 
is (as I have indicated) that in ascribing adaptation to divine purposes, those two books are one; while The 
Selfish Gene owes most of its intellectual substance to Williams' book. Williams has a pet aversion, which 
he is always returning to castigate. This is, the failure of many of his fellow Darwinians to distinguish 
between the function of an organ, structure, process or whatever, and mere effects which it may have. 
A stock example (though not one Williams uses) concerns the heart. A heart, whenever and only when it 
circulates blood, also makes a certain sound. But the function of the heart's beating is to circulate blood; 
not to make a sound, which is merely an effect of the heart's beating. A function or adaptation is something 
which `is produced by design, and not by happenstance.' [p.261] In particular, Williams insists, it is not 
enough to prove that something is an adaptation, that it is beneficial to the organisms which possess it. 
`The demonstration of benefit is neither necessary nor sufficient in the demonstration of function .... It is 
both necessary and sufficient to show that the process is designed to serve the function.' [p.209] `[T]he 
demonstration of effects, good or bad, proves nothing. To prove adaptation one must demonstrate a 
functional design.' p.212] Could Paley himself have said fairer than all this?" (Stove, D.C., "Paley's 
Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, pp.267-268. 
Emphasis Stove's)

9/05/2006
"Here are some more passages which are fully representative of Williams' book [Williams, G.C., "Adaptation 
and Natural Selection," Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1974], in that they point equally to the 
Paleyan explanation of adaptation by super-human purposeful agents, and to the present-day identification 
of those agents with genes. `[E]very adaptation is calculated to maximize the reproductive success of the 
individual, relative to other individuals ...' [p.160] An adaptation is `a mechanism designed to promote the 
success of the individual organism, as measured by the extent to which it contributes genes to later 
generations of the population of which it is a member.' [pp.96-97] `Each part of the animal is organized for 
some function tributary to the ultimate goal of the survival of its own genes.' [p.256]" (Stove, D.C., 
"Paley's Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, 
pp.267-268. Emphasis Stove's)

9/05/2006
"Williams once or twice writes as though the purposes which bring about adaptation are purposes of 
individual organisms. For example, `the goal of the fox is to contribute as heavily as possible to the next 
generation of a fox population.' [Williams, G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection," Princeton University 
Press: Princeton NJ, 1974, p.68] But this is no more than an occasional façon de parler. The book as a 
whole leaves us in no doubt that it is not organisms, but genes, which design or calculate or organize 
adaptations. Foxes, seals, etc., are not designers: they are designed. `[S]eals were designed to reproduce 
themselves, not their species.' [p.189] `[T]he real goal of development is the same as that of all other 
adaptations, the continuance of the dependent germ plasm.' [p.44] `[T]he organism chooses its own 
effective environment from a broad spectrum of possibilities. That choice is precisely calculated to 
enhance the reproductive prospects of the underlying genes. The succession of somatic machinery and 
selected niches are tools and tactics forthe strategy of genes.' [p.70] Could Dawkins himself have said 
fairer than all this?' " (Stove, D.C., "Paley's Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian Fairytales," 
Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, pp.268-269. Emphasis Stove's)

9/05/2006
"The passages I have now quoted from Adaptation and Natural Selection [Williams, G.C., "Adaptation 
and Natural Selection," Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1974] are only a small fraction of those 
which could be quoted to the same effect. But they are probably enough to satisfy the reader that Williams 
is indeed engaged in explaining adaptation by the purposes of agents of super-human intelligence and 
power. Could you, or any other organism, calculate precisely how to enhance the reproductive 
prospects of the genes of an ancestor of the bird dropping spider, and then actually enhance them? No; 
but certain genes can, and they did. In short Williams, like Dawkins, differs from Paley only about the 
number of the gods responsible for adaptation, and about their moral quality: not about their existence, 
purposiveness, intelligence, or power. " (Stove, D.C., "Paley's Revenge, or Purpose Regained," in Darwinian 
Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, p.269. Emphasis Stove's)

9/05/2006
"How, ultimately, does one ascertain the function of a biological mechanism? In this book I have assumed, 
as is customary, that functional design is something that can be intuitively comprehended by an 
investigator and convincingly communicated to others. " (Williams, G.C., "Adaptation and Natural 
Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], Princeton University Press: Princeton 
NJ, 1996, reprint, p.260)

9/05/2006
"Perhaps the main reason why biologists have not adopted a formal system for determining functional 
relationships is that many of the problems are so readily solved intuitively. We do not need weighty 
abstractions to help us decide that the eye is a visual mechanism. Also there are many helpful parallels 
between natural and artificial mechanisms, and it is so convenient as to be inevitable that parallel 
terminology be used. The close analogy between the lens of a camera and the lens of an eye make the term 
lens appropriate for both. From the teleonomist's point of view it is most important that these 
terminological transfers be made only when there is a real functional analogy between what man's reasoning 
(and trial and error) can produce and what natural selection can produce. One should never imply that an 
effect is a function unless he can show that it is produced by design and not by happenstance." (Williams, 
G.C., "Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought," [1966], 
Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1996, reprint, p.261. Emphasis original) 

10/05/2006
"Evolution is the proposition that all organisms on earth, past, present, and future, are descended from a 
common ancestor that lived at least 3.5 billion years ago, the age of the oldest fossil bacteria yet reliably 
identified. Darwin (1859), saving the word `evolved' for his last sentence, used the phrase `descent with 
modification' for the biological phenomenon we call `evolution' today. In his only diagram in On the Origin 
of Species, Darwin depicted the results of his process of `descent with modification' as a historical, 
branching pattern. New branches arise from old; from time to time, innovations are developed (largely via his 
proposed mechanism of natural selection) and are passed along to descendants. The pattern of branching 
and modification, Darwin saw, automatically leads to another sort of pattern, in which the similarities of 
organisms are nested in a complex fashion. A hierarchical array of evolutionary novelties - homologies - 
automatically results from the simple process of branching and descent with modification. This pattern, in 
fact, is the most important prediction about the way the biological world is structured that arises from the 
scientific hypothesis of `evolution.'" (Eldredge, N., "Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, & 
Adaptive Peaks," McGraw-Hill: New York NY, 1989, p.1. Emphasis original)

10/05/2006
"Perhaps Simpson's most important contribution to evolutionary theory was his recognition that there are 
gaps in the fossil record, gaps that in many cases may reflect the very nature of evolutionary processes at 
least as much as deficiencies in the formation, preservation, recovery and study of fossils. ... Simpson 
suggested-as had Dobzhansky (1941) briefly before him; indeed, the theme goes back to Darwin-that the 
gaps perceived between low-level taxonomic groups such as species and genera almost always reflect the 
artifact of such geologically induced gaps. But, he went on, gaps between families and taxa of even higher 
rank could not be so easily explained as the mere artifacts of a poor fossil record. Most families, orders, 
classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms 
smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors. " (Eldredge, N., 
"Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, & Adaptive Peaks," McGraw-Hill: New York NY, 1989, 
p.22)

10/05/2006
"Whales and bats, for example, appear in the Eocene; while the earliest known members of each order are 
some what primitive vis-ŕ-vis later whales and bats, respectively, nonetheless those first known fossils are 
recognizably members of those orders: they are most definitely not intermediate forms between some group 
of ancestral mammals and the whales or bats. But the crucial point to Simpson's argument was this: Whereas 
the gaps between species and genera involve sufficiently minor amounts of anatomical change so that 
typical patterns of rather abrupt appearance of descendants necessitates no modification of standard neo-
Darwinian theory, the gaps between higher taxa are another matter. If, Simpson argued, we invoke gradual 
adaptive modification at rates customarily observed between species and genera to explain the evolutionary 
origins of whales and bats, we would require scores, and in some cases even hundreds, of millions of years. 
Clearly this is impossible: both bats and whales were derived from ground-dwelling placental mammals, two 
ancestral taxa that could not themselves have arisen much before the end of the Cretaceous, or even the 
Paleocene - perhaps as few as a scant 10 million years before the earliest known bats and whales had lived. 
It seemed obvious to Simpson that some special combination of evolutionary factors is implicated in the 
origin of taxa of higher categorical rank. And that special set of factors combine to produce evolutionary 
change at very high rates indeed. Theory led Simpson to conclude that the gaps between higher taxa must 
reflect unusually high rates of evolutionary change." (Eldredge, N., "Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, 
Niches, & Adaptive Peaks," McGraw-Hill: New York NY, 1989, p.23)

10/05/2006
"Simpson developed a model, quantum evolution, to characterize the causal pathways that enable a 
population or species (Simpson did not discriminate between the two very closely) to change from one 
adaptive peak to another. His term `quantum' was borrowed from its use in physics, where atoms abruptly 
jump from one energy level to the next, reflecting the orbital position of electrons. Simpson felt that, in view 
of the very high rates of anatomical transformation implied by the paleontological gaps between closely 
related taxa of high categorical rank, small populations must be involved in the transition between two 
adaptive peaks." (Eldredge, N., "Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, & Adaptive Peaks," 
McGraw-Hill: New York NY, 1989, pp.23-24. Emphasis original)

10/05/2006
"Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe: the cosmic, biological, and human 
or cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous. Life is a 
product of the evolution of inorganic nature, and man is a product of the evolution of life. In a sense, the 
discovery of evolution reinstates man in the station from which he was demoted by Copernicus: man is 
again the center of the stage-at least of the planetary, and quite possibly of the cosmic, one. Most important 
of all, the stage and the actor not only have evolved but are evolving." (Dobzhansky, T.G., "Changing 
Man," Science, Vol. 155, 27 January 1967, p..409)

10/05/2006
"Neither of the two fundamental axioms of Darwin's macroevolutionary theory - the concept of the 
continuity of nature, that is the idea of a functional continuum of all life forms linking all species together 
and ultimately leading back to a primeval cell, and the belief that all the adaptive design of life has resulted 
from a blind random process - have been validated by one single empirical discovery or scientific advance 
since 1859. Despite more than a century of intensive effort on the part of evolutionary biologists, the major 
objections raised by Darwins's critics such as Agassiz, Pictet, Bronn and Richard Owen have not been met. 
The mind must still fill up the `large blanks' that Darwin acknowledged in his letter to Asa Gray." (Denton 
M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, p.345) 

11/05/2006
"Darwinism, as a set of ideas, is sufficiently broad and variously defined to include a multitude of truths and 
sins. Darwin himself disavowed many interpretations made in his name ... The version known as the `modern 
synthesis' or `Neo-Darwinism' ... is, I think, fairly characterized in its essentials by Robson and Richards. Its 
foundation rests upon two major premises: (1) Point mutations (micromutations) are the ultimate source of 
variability. Evolutionary change is a process of gradual allelic substitution within a population. Events at 
broader scale, from the origin of new species to long-ranging evolutionary trends, represent the same 
process, extended in time and effectlarge numbers of allelic substitutions incorporated sequentially over 
long periods of time. In short, gradualism, continuity and evolutionary change by the transformation of 
populations. (2) Genetic variation is raw material only. Natural selection directs evolutionary change. Rates 
and directions of change are controlled by selection with little constraint exerted by raw material (slow rates 
are due to weak selection, not insufficient variation). All genetic change is adaptive (though some 
phenotypic effects, due to pleiotropy, etc., may not be). In short, selection leading to adaptation." (Gould, 
S.J., "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?," Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980, 
pp.119-130, pp.119-120)

12/05/2006
"Clearly, if the universe is growing bigger, it must have been smaller in the past. We can imagine running the 
great cosmic movie backwards until all the galaxies are squashed together. This compressed state 
corresponds to the time of the big bang, and in a certain sense the expansion of the universe can be 
considered as a vestige of that initial explosion. Today it is normal for cosmologists to claim that the 
universe began with the big bang. This weighty conclusion follows if you trace the expansion back in 
time to some idealized point of origin at which all the matter of the universe is concentrated in one place. 
Such a state of infinite density represents an infinite gravitational field and infinite spacetime curvature -i.e., 
a singularity. The big-bang singularity is similar to the situation at the center of a black hole that I described 
in the previous chapter, but lying in the past rather than the future. As it is not possible to extend space and 
time through such a singularity, it follows that the big bang must be the origin of time itself. People, 
especially journalists who get angry about scientists explaining everything, often ask: What happened 
before the big bang? If this theory is correct, the answer is simple: nothing. If time itself began with the 
big bang, there was no `before' for anything to happen in. Although the concept of time being abruptly 
`switched on' at some singular first event is a hard one to grasp, it is by no means new. Already in the fifth 
century, Augustine proclaimed that: `The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.' 
[Augustine, "Confessions," Pine-Coffin, R.S., Penguin: Baltimore MD, 1961, p.294] Keen to counter jibes 
about what God was doing before he made the universe, Augustine placed God outside of time altogether, 
making him the creator of time itself. ... the idea of time coming into being with the universe therefore fits 
very naturally into Christian theology. ... we shall see that recent ideas in quantum physics have changed 
our picture of the origin of time somewhat, but the essential conclusion remains the same: time did not exist 
before the big bang." (Davies, P.C.W., "About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution", Penguin Books: 
London, 1995, pp.131-132. Emphasis original) 

12/05/2006
"David Schramm of Fermilab and the University of Chicago likes to call these three lines of evidence-the red 
shift of galaxies, the microwave background, and the abundance of elements-the pillars on which the big 
bang theory stands. ... He is an indefatigable booster of the bag bang-and of his own role in refining the 
calculations of light-element abundances. After I arrived at the symposium in Sweden, Schramm sat me 
down and went over the evidence for the big bang in great detail. `The big bang is in fantastic shape,' he 
said. `We have the basic framework. We just need to fill in the gaps.' ... Schramm delivered much the same 
message to his fellow cosmologists at the Nobel symposium. He kept proclaiming that cosmology was in a 
`golden age.' His chamber of commerce enthusiasm seemed to grate on some of his colleagues; after all, one 
does not become a cosmologist to fill in the details left by the pioneers. ... Toward the end of the meeting in 
Sweden, Hawking, Schramm, and all the other cosmologists piled into a bus and drove to a nearby village to 
hear a concert. ... Doubts had infiltrated the scientific priesthood, however. In the moments before the 
concert began, I overheard a conversation between David Schramm and Neil Turok, a young British 
physicist. Turok confided to Schramm that he was so concerned about the intractability of questions related 
to dark matter and the distribution of galaxies that he was thinking of quitting cosmology and entering 
another field. `Who says we have any right to understand the universe, anyway?' Turok asked plaintively. 
Schramm shook his big head. The basic framework of cosmology, the big bang theory, was absolutely 
sound, he whispered insistently, as the orchestra began warming up; cosmologists just needed to tie up a 
few loose ends. `Things will sort themselves out,' Schramm said. Turok seemed to find Schramm's words 
comforting, but he probably should have been alarmed. What if Schramm was right? What if cosmologists 
already had, in the big bang theory, the major answer to the puzzle of the universe? What if all that remained 
was tying up loose ends, those that could be tied up? Given this possibility, it is no wonder that `strong' 
scientists such as Hawking have vaulted past the big bang theory into postempirical science. What else can 
someone so creative and ambitious do?" (Horgan, J., "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge 
in the Twilight of the Scientific Age," [1996], Little, Brown & Co: London, 1997, pp.97-98) 

12/05/2006
"Nowadays, however, the most popular version of the argument from design involves the exquisite fine tuning of 
the laws or regularities of nature. The fundamental constants of physics--the speed of light, the gravitational 
constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces--must apparently have values that fall within an 
extremely narrow range for life to be so much as possible. If these values had been even minutely different (if, for 
example, the gravitational constant had been different in even the most minuscule degree) habitable planets 
would not have developed and life (at least life at all like ours) would not have been possible. This suggests or 
makes plausible the thought that the world was designed or created by a Designer who intended the existence of 
living creatures and eventually rational, intelligent, morally significant creatures. Like its 17th and 18th century 
predecessors, this version of the argument is probabilistic rather than deductive: given the nature of the world, it 
is likely that it was fashioned by an intelligent Designer. The premises don't entail the conclusion, but are 
supposed to give you some reason to accept it. Dennett's rejoinder to the argument is that possibly, `there has 
been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one 
among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity.' And given infinitely many universes, Dennett 
thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out; as it 
happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the 
development of intelligent life (where else?). Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps 
not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in 
Tombstone, or Dodge City? `Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git 
four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of 
universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that 
possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only 
aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb 
galoot.' Dennett's reply shows at most ('at most', because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully 
coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its 
conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a probabilistic argument, 
not one that is deductive valid. Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, 
you can't refute it just by pointing out that it isn't deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for 
evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn't entail that it ever took place, but only makes 
that fact likely. You might as well reject the evidence for the earth's being round by pointing out that there are 
possible worlds in which we have all the evidence we do have for the earth's being round, but in fact the earth 
is flat. Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it. " (Plantinga, A., 
"Darwin, Mind and Meaning." Review of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel C. Dennett, Simon & Schuster, 
1996. Books and Culture, May/June 1996. Emphasis original)

12/05/2006
"Falsification may be based on faulty observation. A man who claims he saw a white crow could be 
mistaken or even lying. As long as observations of black crows continue, it can be taken in two ways: as 
confirmations of `all crows are black,' or disconfirmations of `some crows are not black.' Popper recognized, 
but dismissed as unimportant, that every falsification of a conjecture is simultaneously a confirmation of an 
opposite conjecture, and every confirming instance of a conjecture is a falsification of an opposite 
conjecture." (Gardner, M., "A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper," in "Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? : 
Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and 
Pseudoscientific Topics," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, 2003,pp.13) 

12/05/2006
"The MWI should not be confused with a more recent concept of a multiverse proposed by Andrei Linde, a 
Russian physicist now at Stanford University, as well as by a few other cosmologists such as England's 
Martin Rees. This multiverse is essentially a response to the anthropic argument that there must be a 
Creator because our universe has so many basic physical constants so finely tuned that, if any one deviated 
by a tiny fraction, stars and planets could not form-let alone life appear on a planet. The implication is that 
such fine tuning implies an intelligent tuner. Linde's multiverse goes like this. Every now and then, whatever 
that means, a quantum fluctuation precipitates a Big Bang. A universe with its own space-time springs into 
existence with randomly selected values for its constants. In most of these universes those values will not 
permit the formation of stars and life. They simply drift aimlessly down their rivers of time. However, in a 
very small set of universes the constants will be just right to allow creatures like you and me to evolve. We 
are here not because of any overhead intelligent planning but simply because we happen by chance to be in 
one of the universes properly tuned to allow life to get started." (Gardner, M., "Are Universes Thicker than 
Blackberries?," in "Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? : Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, 
Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics," W.W. Norton & Co: New 
York NY, 2003, pp.6-7) 

12/05/2006
"We come now to a third kind of multiverse, by far the wildest of the three. It has been set forth not by a 
scientist but by a peculiar philosopher, now at Princeton University, named David Lewis. In his best-known 
book, The Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986), and other writings, Lewis seriously maintains that every 
logically possible universe-that is, one with no logical contradictions such as square circles-is somewhere 
out there. The notion of logical possible worlds, by the way, goes back to Leibniz's Theodicy. He speculated 
that God considered all logically possible worlds, then created the one He deemed best for His purposes. 
Both the MWI and Lewis's possible worlds allow time travel into the past. You need never encounter the 
paradox of killing yourself, yet you are still alive, because as soon as you enter your past the universe splits 
into a new one in which you and your duplicate coexist. Most of Lewis's worlds do not contain any replicas 
of you, but if they do they can be as weird as you please. You can't, of course, simultaneously have five 
fingers on each hand and seven on each hand because that would be logically contradictory. But you could 
have a hundred fingers, and a dozen arms, or seven heads. Any world you can think of without 
contradiction is real. Can pigs fly? Certainly. There is nothing contradictory about pigs with wings. In an 
infinity of possible worlds there are lands of Oz, Greek gods on Mount Olympus, anything you can imagine. 
Every novel is a possible world. Somewhere millions of Ahabs are chasing whales. Somewhere millions of 
Huckleberry Finns are floating down rivers. Every kind of universe exists if it is logically consistent. David 
Lewis's mad multiverse was anticipated by hordes of science-fiction writers long before the MWI of QM 
came from Everett's brain. " (Gardner, M., "Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries?," in "Are Universes 
Thicker Than Blackberries? : Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other 
Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics," W.W. Norton & Co: New York NY, 2003, p.7) 

12/05/2006
"Fredric Brown, in What Mad Universe (1950), described Lewis's multiverse this way: There are, then, an 
infinite number of coexistent universes. `They include this one and the one you came from. They are 
equally real, and equally true. But do you conceive what an infinity of universes means, Keith Winton?' 
`Well-yes and no.' `It means that, out of infinity, all conceivable universes exist. `There is, for instance, a 
universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you-or the equivalent of you-are wearing 
brown shoes instead of black ones. `There are an infinite number of permutations of that variation, such as 
one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger and one in which you have purple horns and-' 
`But are they all me?' Mekky said, `No, none of them is you-any more than the Keith Winton in this universe 
is you. I should not have used that pronoun. They are separate individual entities. As the Keith Winton 
here is; in this particular variation there is a wide physical difference-no resemblance, in fact.' Keith said 
thoughtfully, `If there are infinite universes, then all possible combinations must exist. Then, somewhere, 
everything must be true.' `And there are an infinite number of universes, of course, in which we don't exist 
at all-that is, no creatures similar to us exist at all. In which the human race doesn't exist at all. There are an 
infinite number of universes, for instance, in which flowers are the predominant form of life-or in which no 
form of life has ever developed or will develop. `And infinite universes in which the states of existence are 
such that we would have no words or thoughts to describe them or to imagine them.'" (Gardner, M., "Are 
Universes Thicker than Blackberries?," in "Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Gödel, 
Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics," W.W. 
Norton & Co: New York NY, 2003, p.6) 

12/05/2006
"This reification, thing-ization, of preferred constructions is a fallacy when it leads to mistakes in 
argument. Philosophers may do as they choose in deciding what things are `real' and what are not. But when 
they carry over their reifications into other fields, then they are asking for unnecessary trouble. The history 
of science, of affairs, even of mathematics has been troubled for generations uncounted by demands for 
`real definitions,' assertions that something is because it must be, denegations of whole areas of inquiry as 
unreal and wicked. Reification, then, is the `hypostatizing' of entities, that is, the making of abstractions into 
substances. It is the assumption that child exists (in a Platonic heaven) over and above Peter, Hazel, 
Ethel. It is not necessary to make this assumption even if language suggests it. Universals, such as `redness' 
and `child,' can be interpreted in a way that makes no philosophical claims as to whether or not the 
constructions they name refer to entities in the real world." (Fearnside W.W. & Holther W.B., "Fallacy: The 
Counterfeit of Argument," Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1959, Eleventh printing, pp.42-43. 
Emphasis original) 

12/05/2006
"The fallacy of hypostatization consists in regarding an abstract word as if it were a concrete one. Whereas 
concrete words designate particular objects or attributes of objects, such as red and ball, abstract words 
designate general qualities, such as redness, roundness, virtue. It is a peculiarity of abstract terms that they 
can be used without reference to subjects that possess the attributes they designate. Although abstractions 
are a useful feature of language and thought, enabling us to discuss ideas like beauty or goodness, they carry 
potential dangers. We may make the mistake of assuming that, like concrete words, they name specific 
individual entities - that, for example, in addition to there being in the world such things as red balls and 
virtuous people, there are also separate entities such as redness, roundness, and virtue." (Engel, S.M., "With 
Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies," St. Martin's Press: New York NY, Fourth edition, 
1990, p.89. Emphasis original)

12/05/2006
"The process at work in hypostatization is similar to personification. To personify is to ascribe to things 
or animals properties that only human beings possess. It is to speak of things or creatures that are not 
persons as if they were persons. For example, we personify if we complain of the `cruelty of weasels' 
because weasels being innocent creatures, cannot be considered either kind or cruel." (Engel, S.M., "With 
Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies," St. Martin's Press: New York NY, Fourth edition, 
1990, p.89. Emphasis original) 

13/05/2006
"Francis Crick, Leslie Orgel and others have also pointed to a few other features of modern biochemistry 
which might support the idea that life on earth is derived from the living things of somewhere else. For 
example, living things on earth use molybdenum - a very rare element on earth - to assist certain key enzyme 
reactions in ways which other more common elements might manage just as easily. So does this indicate that 
our ancestors lived on planets rich in molybdenum, in orbit around molybdenum-containing stars which we 
might be able to identify by sophisticated spectroscopy? Most scientists find this argument rather 
unconvincing, but it deserves a mention." (Scott, A., "The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien," Basil 
Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1986, p.134) 

13/05/2006
"There are, however, other elements which, though occurring very rarely indeed, measured in parts per 
million or per hundred million - may have been absolutely essential to originate life. This is because their 
bonding characteristics (such as, for instance, those of the transition elements, including iron) form an 
essential part of many widespread enzyme systems. ... However necessary they may be, they are found 
sufficiently well distributed in primitive Earth and, for that matter, on any primitive planet, for them to be 
found in any form of evolving life. For instance, such rare elements as vanadium, molybdenum and niobium, 
are necessary for the essential respiratory pigments in certain tunicates, sea squirts, who are rather distant 
relations of ours. Such trace elements, as they are called, are essential to the growth of nutritious plants and 
their absence would doom the stock feeding on these plants to various forms of deficiency disease. The 
fact, however, that such elements are necessary for the highly sophisticated biochemistry of living things 
today does not mean that they need necessarily have taken part in the earlier stages of life. It might well turn 
out, for instance, that niobium and vanadium are in this category, though iron is certainly not." (Bernal, J.D., 
"The Origin of Life," [1967], Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1973, Third impression, pp.48-49) 

13/05/2006
"MY DEAR HUXLEY-Your note contained magnificent news, and thank you heartily for sending it me. Von 
Baer weighs down with a vengeance all the virulence of [the `Edinburgh' reviewer] and weak arguments of 
Agassiz. If you write to Von Baer, for heaven's sake tell him that we should think one nod of approbation on 
our side, of the greatest value; and if he does write anything, beg him to send us a copy, for I would try and 
get it translated and published in the Athenaeum and in `Silliman' to touch up Agassiz..... Have you seen 
Agassiz's weak metaphysical and theological attack on the `Origin' in the last `Silliman' ?  I would send it 
you, but apprehend it would be less trouble for you to look at it in London than return it to me. R. Wagner 
has sent me a German pamphlet, giving an abstract of Agassiz's `Essay on Classification,' ... He won't go 
very "dangerous lengths," but thinks the truth lies half-way between Agassiz and the `Origin.' As he goes 
thus far he will, nolens volens, have to go further. He says he is going to reviewme in [his] yearly Report. 
My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel-i. e. the devil's gospel." (Darwin, C.R., Letter to 
T. H. Huxley, August 8, 1860, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic 
Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, pp.123-124) 

13/05/2006
"There have been two kinds of experimental work in this area, mostly directed towards `our' kinds of 
chemicals. In such work, success, identifying such pre-life, is defined as the achieving of one of our 
kinds of molecule. If other possible life-starting molecules appear they are not `noticed'. As we saw earlier, it 
has been shown that there is much possible diversity, but there is also some convergence on to particular 
families of chemical reactions. Laboratories concerned to achieve synthesis of `our' living chemistry by 
heroic methods (not by duplicating possible `natural' early seas or substrates) have made various kinds of 
nucleic acids, but not yet the 3-5-phosphate-ribose or deoxyribose (RNA or DNA) that we know and love. A 
few of these `failures', however, could make the same kinds of double helices that DNA has - though not 
using the same component molecules - and could in principle go on to be a hereditary message, different 
from the one we use. We don't yet know whether Earthly life's current DNA/RNA system is the only one 
that really works, or whether it is the best system so far that has won over all the other attempts at pre-
life, or whether it is simply the system that by chance happened to appear on Earth and went on to be our 
heredity, even though many other systems could have done the same if they'd got their noses in front early 
on. We may know more about this question, soon. Better analysis of what happened on Mars (assuming 
that anything is found to analyse) or Europa or any other of Jupiter's moons with water will give us examples 
of chemical systems that have self-complicated. They are cosmic laboratories practising origin-of-life 
experiments." (Cohen, J. & Stewart, I., "What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial 
Life," [2002], Ebury Press: London, 2004, reprint, p.223. Emphasis original) 

13/05/2006
"The eye is a box-camera in which a lens near the front throws an image on to a sensitive screen at the back; 
in some mammals the focus can be altered by changing the shape or position of the lens. The screen at the 
back, the retina, is an extremely complex structure consisting of a number of layers of cells - nerve cells and 
their fibres, blood vessels, and supporting cells, the enormous number of closely packed receptors lying 
not, as would be expected, on the surface but beneath the other layers; their fibres ascend to the surface 
over which they run to meet and together form the optic nerve. The outer layers are so transparent that the 
light passes through them with little loss. It is interesting to note that among the invertebrates the eye of the 
cephalopods - the octopuses, squids and cuttles - is very similar in structure, but the receptors are where 
they logically ought to be, on the surface of the retina, yet it does not follow that the eyes of these creatures 
are more efficient than those of the mammals. The vertebrate arrangement is efficient because it avoids 
transmitting all the information received by coding it at once before sending it to the brain. The stimulation 
of the retina is, however, only the beginning, for sight depends upon what the brain makes of the messages 
it receives from the retina. And indeed, sight without experience and memory is a very unreliable sense." 
(Matthews, L.H., "The Life of Mammals," Universe Books: New York NY, 1970, Vol. 1, pp.201-202) 

13/05/2006
"Given these troubling issues, it is no wonder that many scientists whom I interviewed for this book seemed 
gripped by a profound unease. But their malaise, I will argue, has another, much more immediate cause. If 
one believes in science, one must accept the possibility-even the probability- that the great era of scientific 
discovery is over. By science I mean not applied science, but science at its purest and grandest, the 
primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it. Further research may yield no more 
great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns. ... In trying to understand the 
mood of modern scientists I have found that ideas from literary criticism can serve some purpose after all. In 
his influential 1973 essay, like Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom likened the modern poet to Satan in 
Milton's Paradise Lost. Just as Satan fought to assert his individuality by defying the perfection of God, 
so must the modern poet engage in an Oedipal struggle to define himself or herself in relation to 
Shakespeare, Dante, and other masters. The effort is ultimately futile, Bloom said, because no poet can hope 
to approach, let alone surpass, the perfection of such forebears. Modern poets are all essentially tragic 
figures, latecomers. ... Bloom's `strong poets' accept the perfection of their predecessors and yet strive to 
transcend it through various subterfuges, including a subtle misreading of the predecessors' work; only by 
so doing can modern poets break free of the stultifying influence of the past. There are strong scientists, 
too, those who are seeking to misread and therefore to transcend quantum mechanics or the big bang theory 
or Darwinian evolution. Roger Penrose is a strong scientist. For the most part, he and others of his ilk have 
only one option: to pursue science in a speculative, postempirical mode that I call ironic science. Ironic 
science resembles literary criticism in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting, 
which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on the truth. It cannot achieve empirically 
verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic description of reality. 
The most common strategy of the strong scientist is to point to all the shortcomings of current scientific 
knowledge, to all the questions left unanswered. But the questions tend to be ones that may never be 
definitively answered given the limits of human science. How, exactly, was the universe created? Could our 
universe be just one of an infinite number of universes? Could quarks and electrons be composed of still 
smaller particles, ad infinitum? What does quantum mechanics really mean?... Biology has its own slew of 
insoluble riddles. How, exactly, did life begin on earth? Just how inevitable was life's origin and its 
subsequent history? The practitioner of ironic science enjoys one obvious advantage over the strong poet: 
the appetite of the reading public for scientific `revolutions:' As empirical science ossifies, journalists such 
as myself, who feed society's hunger, will come under more pressure to tout theories that supposedly 
transcend quantum mechanics or the big bang theory or natural selection. Journalists are, after all, largely 
responsible for the popular impression that fields such as chaos and complexity represent genuinely new 
sciences superior to the stodgy old reductionist methods of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin." (Horgan, J., 
"The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age," [1996], Little, 
Brown & Co: London, 1997, p.7) (Horgan J., "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the 
Twilight of the Scientific Age," [1996], Little, Brown & Co: London, 1997, pp.7-8. Emphasis original.) 

13/05/2006
"reification ... (Lat. res thing + facere to make) n. the turning of something into a thing or object; the error 
which consists in treating as a `thing' something which is not one. Hypostatization, treating an abstract 
entity as if it were concrete, is a case in point. The use of this word normally reveals an influence from 
Hegelian-Marxist theory. It owes its currency to Georg Lukacs's History and Class-Consciousness. (Marx 
did not use the word, but the concept of `commodity fetishism' is in Das Kapital, vol. L) In one sense of the 
word, reification occurs when something (an object or a human being) is treated, in theory or in practice, as 
an object or a marketable commodity. In a related sense of the word, reification occurs when something that 
depends on human decision and action, for instance an institution or a social practice, is treated as if it 
cannot be so affected, but somehow has an independent existence of its own, like an external object. Lukacs 
used this concept in his rejection of sociology. In his view, sociology is conceived as the inquiry into an 
objectively existing social reality - that is, sociology reifies it. The word has come to be used rather loosely 
in certain types of social and political discourse, as a general expression of disapproval." (Mautner, T., "The 
Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, p.479)

13/05/2006
"reification To reify is to treat as a thing. To describe philosophers as reifying is usually to charge that 
they are misled by verbal form into thinking simply because some noun has a use, there must be something 
to which it refers. Thus Platonists are charged with reifying numbers or universals, and people are supposed 
to have improperly reified great varieties of things, including sets, infinite collections, finite things, 
sensations, physical objects, the future, the past, the possible, or the will of the people. The charge is itself 
not entirely transparent, and the fault these philosophies commit may more helpfully be put as treating 
things of one type as if they were things of another." (Blackburn, S., "The Oxford Dictionary of 
Philosophy," [1994], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1996, reprint, p.335) 

13/05/2006
The accuracy of replication If the replication process were exact, no new variants would arise, and 
evolution would slow down and stop. The in vitro experiments work only because enzyme replication of 
RNA is not exact. However, evolution would also be impossible if the replication process were too 
inaccurate. Thus although an occasional error in replication, or mutation, may lead to an improvement in 
adaptation, most will lead to deterioration. Hence, too high an error rate will lead to loss of adaptation. I now 
try to make this idea quantitative. How accurate must replication be if adaptation is to be maintained? ... 
Equation 2.13 [Q ~ r/R] gives the critical value of Q, the accuracy of replication, if the adapted sequence, S, 
is to be maintained by selection against the deterioration caused by mutation. If the replication rate of the 
mutants is only slightly less than that of the optimal S sequence (i.e. weak selection), then the accuracy Q 
must be high, because the mutant particles compete with S for resources. What if mutants replicate slowly: 
in the extreme case, suppose they do not replicate at all? It does not follow that any degree of accuracy, 
however low, will be sufficient. Thus S particles will not be immortal: there will be some rate of destruction, 
or `death rate', even in the absence of competition from non-S particles. On average, each S particle must, 
during its life, produce one perfect S copy. Hence if the average number of copies per S particle before it is 
destroyed is R, then Q > 1/R is necessary. The critical accuracy, then, depends both on the success of non-
S copies, and, if non-S particles have a low replication rate, on the average number of copies produced by an 
S particle during its lifetime. In practice, it seems unlikely that evolution would be possible if Q < 1/2. The 
practical implication of this is that it places a limit on the size of the genome, for any given replication 
accuracy. Thus consider a genome of n nucleotides, and let the probability that an error is made in 
replication be u per nucleotide. Then Q = (1 - u)n = e-nu. Hence the maintenance of adaptation requires, 
very approximately, that nu < 1. Three very different error rates exist: the rate for replication in the absence 
of enzymes, which may have occurred during the origin of life; the rate for replication of RNA, which does 
not involve a `proof-reading' stage; and the rate for the replication of DNA, with proof-reading. The values 
are, very approximately, as follows:

			error rate (u)
non-enzymic replication	1/10 - 1/100
RNA replication		10-3 - 10-4
DNA replication		10-9 - 10-10

The requirement that nu < 1 then explains the fact that the genome of RNA viruses is never greater than 
about 104 bases, and of higher organisms no greater than 109 bases. It also raises an important difficulty 
for theories of the origin of life. The genome could not become greater than 100 bases in the absence of 
specific replication enzymes, yet a genome of less than 100 bases could hardly code for such an enzyme: for 
further discussion of this problem, see Eigen et al. (1981), and Maynard Smith and Szathmary (1995). 
(Maynard Smith, J., "Evolutionary Genetics," [1988], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1998, Second 
edition, 2000, reprint, pp.20-24. Emphasis original) 

13/05/2006
"When we observe a certain behavioral, physiological, or morphological response, two general kinds of 
questions arise. So-called proximate questions concern mechanisms operating in ecological time. For 
instance, what environmental stimuli, if any, trigger the response, and what internal mechanisms of the 
organism underlie the response? Proximate questions about a biological clock, for example, would be 
concerned with its structure and function, how it synchronizes an organism's activities with seasonal 
changes, as well as the genetic mechanisms that specify the clock's development. In contrast, so-called 
ultimate questions are evolutionary ones: Why did natural selection favor a particular clock mechanism 
and not a different one? Hypotheses that address ultimate questions propose that the response maximized 
fitness (survival and reproductive success) in some particular way." (Campbell, N.A., Reece, J.B. & Mitchell, 
L.G., "Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, p.1049. Emphasis original) 

13/05/2006
"The early attempts to teach speech to chimpanzees had faltered because of the animals' extreme physical 
difficulty in forming human sounds. Much greater progress was made when Allen and Beatrice Gardner of 
the University of Nevada taught American Sign Language to their chimpanzee Washoe. Washoe and her 
imitators readily acquired large vocabularies of the sign language and, even more significantly, would string 
the signs together in what appeared to be sentences. Particularly evocative was the apes' reported use of 
the signs in apposite novel combinations. Washoe was said to have spontaneously made the signs for 
`drink' and `fruit' on seeing a watermelon. Gorilla Koko reportedly described a zebra as a `white tiger.' By the 
1970s the signing apes had become a flourishing subfield of psychological research. Then came a serious 
crisis in the form of an ape named Nim Chimpsky, in honor of the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Nim's 
trainer, psychologist Herbert Terrace, found he learned signs just like the other chimps, and started using 
them in strings. But were the strings of signs proper sentences or just a routine that the crafty ape had 
learned would induce some appropriate action in its human entourage? Certain features in Nim's linguistic 
development threw Terrace into a crisis of doubt. Unlike children of his age, Nim suddenly plateaued in his 
rate of acquisition of new vocabulary. Unlike children, he rarely initiated conversation. He would string 
signs together, but his sentences were lacking in syntactic rigor: Nim's longest recorded utterance was the 
sixteen-sign declarative pronouncement, `Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange 
give me you.' Terrace was eventually forced to decide that Chimpsky, and indeed the other pointing 
pongids, were not using the signs in a way characteristic of true language. Rather, they were probably 
making monkeys out of their teachers by imitating or Clever Hansing them. Nim's linguistic behavior was 
more like that of a highly intelligent, trained dog than of the human children he so much resembled in other 
ways." (Broad, W. & Wade, N., "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," Simon 
and Schuster: New York NY, 1982, pp.111-112) 

13/05/2006
"However, it is frequently asked, Is evolution a fact or a hypothesis? So stated, the question is meaningless 
and misleading. The enterprise of science is founded on the hope that all rational beings who investigate 
and ponder the same evidence, derived ultimately from sense impressions ('facts'), will be led to draw from 
this evidence the same conclusions. The evidence of biology means to most people familiar with it that the 
world of life, including man, is a product of an evolutionary development. ... Nobody beheld the sight of 
man's ancestors giving rise to men, or of the ancestral horses transforming themselves into modern horses. 
We cannot re-enact these transformations in our laboratories. Evolutionary changes of this magnitude 
(sometimes called macro-evolution) take time intervals of much greater orders than the span of human life; 
they are accordingly not facts observed but events inferred from observed facts. In Lamarck's and Darwin's 
times evolution was a hypothesis; in our day it is proven. Another proven hypothesis is that the earth 
executes a complete revolution on its axis once every twenty-four hours. When a hypothesis has been 
thoroughly verified, we may take it as a safe guide in our thinking and working activities." (Dobzhansky, 
T.G., "Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species," [1962], Yale University Press: New Haven 
CT, 1969, Twelfth printing, pp.4-5) 

13/05/2006
"However, it is frequently asked, Is evolution a fact or a hypothesis? So stated, the question is meaningless 
and misleading. The enterprise of science is founded on the hope that all rational beings who investigate 
and ponder the same evidence, derived ultimately from sense impressions ('facts'), will be led to draw from 
this evidence the same conclusions. The evidence of biology means to most people familiar with it that the 
world of life, including man, is a product of an evolutionary development. But there are still a few persons 
not ignorant of the evidence who insist that evolution is a `mere' hypothesis, which they reject in favor of 
special creation (is special creation not another hypothesis?).Those who are not satisfied that the existing 
evidence makes acceptance of the evolutionary origin of the living world inevitable are entitled to hold their 
opinions. The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work 
merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created 
every biological species separately in the state we observe them but made them in a way calculated to lead 
us to the conclusion that they are products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to 
argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God appalling 
deviousness." (Dobzhansky, T.G., "Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species," [1962], Yale 
University Press: New Haven CT, 1969, Twelfth printing, pp.4-5) 

13/05/2006
"A note of disquiet, however, is found in all editions of Origin. Darwin plainly states that use and disuse 
of parts is a substantial mechanism of evolution, right along with natural selection. As so many opponents 
of neo-Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pointed out, Darwin's introduction to 
Origin ends with the statement, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but 
not the exclusive, means of modification" (p. 4). What indeed were Darwin's mechanisms of evolution in 
addition to natural selection, and what were their relationships to adaptive evolution? ... 2. Sexual selection. 
This mechanism was less rigorous than natural selection but was basically nonadaptive or maladaptive. 
Darwin in Descent of Man (1871) provided several examples of characters disadvantageous or 
nonadaptive in the general struggle for existence and concluded that "not one of the external differences 
between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him" (1: 248-49). Darwin believed that sexual 
selection was the only mechanism that could adequately explain the existence of such nonadaptive 
characters. Natural selection prevented sexual selection from leading to highly disadvantageous 
characters." " (Provine, W.B., "Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology," University of Chicago Press: 
Chicago IL, 1986, pp.209-210)

13/05/2006
We live in a world of stunning biological complexity. Molecules of all varieties join in a metabolic dance to 
make cells. Cells interact with cells to form organisms; organisms interact with organisms to form 
ecosystems, economies, societies. Where did this grand architecture come from? For more than a century, 
the only theory that science has offered to explain how this order arose is natural selection. As Darwin 
taught us, the order of the biological world evolves as natural selection sifts among random mutations for 
the rare, useful forms. In this view of the history of life, organisms are cobbled-together contraptions 
wrought by selection, the silent and opportunistic tinkerer. Science has left us as unaccountably improbable 
accidents against the cold, immense backdrop of space and time. Thirty years of research have convinced 
me that this dominant view of biology is incomplete. As I will argue in this book, natural selection is 
important, but it has not labored alone to craft the fine architectures of the biosphere, from cell to organism 
to ecosystem. Another source self-organization-is the root source of order." (Kauffman, S.A., "At Home in 
the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self- Organization and Complexity," [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, 
reprint, p.vii) 

14/05/2006
"For those who are studying the origin of life, the question is no longer whether life could have originated 
by chemical processes involving nonbiological components. The question instead has become which of 
many pathways might have been followed to produce the first cells." ("Science and Creationism: A View 
from the National Academy of Sciences," National Academy Press: Washington DC, Second Edition, 1999, 
p.6)

14/05/2006
"The machinery of life Molecular machines are the basis of life. DNA, a long molecule that encodes the 
blueprints to create an organism, may be life's information storage medium, but it needs a bevy of machines 
to read and translate that information into action. The cell's nanometer-scale machines are mostly protein 
molecules, although a few are made from RNA, and they are capable of surprisingly complex manipulations. 
They perform almost all the important active tasks in the cell: metabolism, reproduction, response to 
changes in the environment, and so forth. They are incredibly sophisticated, and they, not their manmade 
counterparts, represent the pinnacle of nanotechnology. Yet scientists have no general theory for their 
assembly or operation. The basic physical principles are individually well understood; what is lacking is a 
framework that combines the elegance of abstraction with the power of prediction." (Phillips, R. & Quake, 
S.R., "The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, p.38. Emphasis original)

14/05/2006
"How much can one molecule do? Consider, for example, ATP (adenosine triphosphate) synthase. This 
macromolecular assembly, only about 10 nanometers on a side, is an essential part of the cellular factory that 
produces ATP, the universal energy currency of life. We will not get into the details of the biological role of 
ATP synthase in the cell, but consider merely what it is capable of doing in isolation: It is a rotary motor. In 
the presence of a proton gradient, this remarkable machine turns a spindle as it adds phosphate groups to 
molecules of adenosine diphosphate to produce ATP. And every day .... the cells in your body perform this 
phosphate-addition reaction to produce roughly your body weight in ATP molecules. But that is not all: 
ATP synthase can run in reverse. It can consume ATP, and with each ATP molecule that is hydrolyzed, the 
central shaft of ATP synthase turns by 120 degrees, directly converting chemical to mechanical energy. 
That reverse operation was explicitly demonstrated through a series of elegant experiments in which a 
molecular propeller was attached to the shaft and then imaged with optical microscopy... The propeller 
rotated in the presence of ATP, with absolute thermodynamic efficiencies of up to 90%. Despite the 
tremendous strides made in nanotechnology, no device of similar functionality can yet be fabricated with 
inorganic materials. Furthermore, many questions remain about the basic principles by which molecular 
machines such as ATP synthase convert chemical energy to mechanical forces." (Phillips, R. & Quake, S.R., 
"The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, p.38)

14/05/2006
"Working in a noisy environment As noted in our introductory remarks, molecular machines operate at 
energies and lengths common to a host of different processes. In addition to being intriguing, that regime 
adds to the challenge of analyzing the cell's machines. Figure 2 shows how thermal, chemical, mechanical, 
and electrostatic energies scale with the size of an associated object, and illustrates the confluence of 
energies. As the characteristic size approaches that of biological macromolecules, all the energies converge. 
The convergence is remarkable, since the energies range over 20 orders of magnitude as object size scales 
from subatomic to macroscopic; its existence is an opportunity for complex physical phenomena and 
processes that are evidently utilized by life. Broadly speaking, the interplay between thermal and 
deterministic forces is what gives rise to the rich behavior of molecular machines. For example, thermal 
effects permit such processes as diffusion, conformational changes, the dissolution of hydrogen bonds, and 
the wandering of charges from their molecular hosts. Those processes, in turn, often serve as the basis of 
macromolecular functions ranging from copying and reading DNA to the motor action of molecules, such as 
myosin, that power our muscles. It is surely one of the triumphs of evolution that Nature discovered how to 
make highly accurate machines in such a noisy environment. One marvelous example is DNA polymerase, a 
molecular copying machine only 13 nanometers in size, capable of copying DNA molecules with an intrinsic 
error rate approaching one part per million. Much remains to be understood about the general principles 
behind such impressive fidelity, especially as it is achieved in the violent thermal environment of a test tube 
or a cell." (Phillips, R. & Quake, S.R., "The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, 
p.38. Emphasis original)

14/05/2006
"Molecular machines need to be accurate in the face of noise, but they can also use fluctuations as an 
essential part of their function. As an example, consider restriction enzymes - proteins that recognize and cut 
specific DNA sequences. Those enzymes are extremely efficient at searching through a genome consisting 
of millions, sometimes even billions, of base pairs to find and bind to their recognition sequences. The rates 
at which they accomplish their tasks are inconsistent with simple one-dimensional diffusion along the DNA 
molecule or strictly three-dimensional diffusion and binding to the DNA target site. Instead, restriction 
enzymes take advantage of the entropic forces that cause long DNA molecules to fold into a compact coil. 
They hop from one strand to another, which speeds up the search process relative to 1D diffusion." 
(Phillips, R. & Quake, S.R., "The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, p.38)

14/05/2006
" One of the most pleasing examples of biological collective action is revealed by the machines of the so-
called central dogma. The term refers to the set of processes whereby DNA is copied (replication), genes are 
read and turned into messenger RNA (transcription), and finally, messenger RNA is turned into the 
corresponding protein by ribosomes (translation). Such processes involve multiple layers of orchestration 
that range from the assembly of macromolecular complexes to the simultaneous action of multiple machines 
to the collective manner in which cells may undertake the processes. Figure 3 shows the machines of the 
central dogma in bacteria engaged in the processes of transcription and translation simultaneously." 
(Phillips, R. & Quake, S.R., "The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, p.38)

14/05/2006
"Understanding collective effects in the cell will require merging two philosophical viewpoints. The first is 
that life is like a computer program: An infrastructure of machines carries out arbitrary instructions that are 
encoded into DNA software. The second viewpoint is purely physical: Life arises from a mixing together of 
chemicals that follow basic physical principles to self-assemble into an organism. Presumably, the repertoire 
of available behaviors is more limited in the latter. The two viewpoints are complementary, not incompatible: 
Either one could best describe cell behavior, depending on the particular situation." (Phillips, R. & Quake, 
S.R., "The Biological Frontier of Physics," Physics Today, May 2006, p.38)

15/05/2006
"In organic evolution we find that in spite of general upward progress, all grades of living creatures, 
advanced, primitive, and degenerate, manage to exist perfectly well side by side." (Huxley, J.S., "Religion 
Without Revelation," [1957], The New American Library, Mentor: New York NY, Revised edition, 1958, 
p.124) 

15/05/2006
"There is surprisingly little discussion of consciousness as such, rather, materialists see consciousness as a 
special `problem' for a materialist theory of mind. That is, they want to find a way to `handle' consciousness, 
given their materialism. The pattern that these discussions almost invariably seem to take is the following. A 
philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind. He does this from the deep assumption that some 
version of the materialist theory of the mind must be the correct one-after all, do we not know from the 
discoveries of science that there is really nothing in the universe but physical particles and fields of forces 
acting on physical particles? And surely it must be possible to give an account of human beings in a way 
that is consistent and coherent with our account of nature generally. And surely, does it not follow from 
that that our account of human beings must be thoroughgoing materialism? So the philosopher sets out to 
give a materialist account of the mind. He then encounters difficulties. It always seems that he is leaving 
something out. The general pattern of discussion is that criticisms of the materialist theory usually take a 
more or less technical form, but in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection, and 
the deeper objection can be put quite simply: The theory in question has left out the mind; it has left out 
some essential feature of the mind, such as consciousness - or `qualia' or semantic content. One sees this 
pattern over and over. A materialist thesis is advanced. But the thesis encounters difficulties; the difficulties 
take different forms, but they are always manifestations of an underlying deeper difficulty, namely, the 
thesis in question denies obvious facts that we all know about our own minds. And this leads to ever more 
frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who 
insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some 
new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters 
new difficulties, only the new difficulties are not so new-they are really the same old difficulties. If we were 
to think of the philosophy of mind over the past fifty years as a single individual, we would say of that 
person that he is a compulsive neurotic, and his neurosis takes the form of repeating the same pattern of 
behavior over and over." (Searle, J.R., "The Rediscovery of the Mind," MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1992, 
pp.29-30) 

15/05/2006
"In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to 
record catastrophes: rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out ... . To circumvent this 
literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is 
extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The 
catastrophists were the hard-nosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists. 
Secondly, Lyell's `uniformity' is a hodgepodge of claims. One is a methodological statement that must be 
accepted by any scientist, catastrophist and uniformitarian alike. Others are substantive notions that have 
since been tested and abandoned. Lyell gave them a common name and pulled a consummate fast one: he 
tried to slip the substantive claim by with an argument that the methodological proposition had to be 
accepted, lest `we see the ancient spirit of speculation revived, and a desire manifested to cut, rather than 
patiently to untie, the Gordian knot.'" (Gould, S.J., "Uniformity and Catastrophe," in "Ever Since Darwin: 
Reflections in Natural History," [1978], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.150) 

15/05/2006
"I prefer heroes of flesh, blood, and fallibility, not of tinseled cardboard. Bretz is inscribed on my ledger 
because he stood against a firm, highly restrictive dogma that never had made any sense: the emperor had 
been naked for a century. Charles Lyell, the godfather of geological gradualism, had pulled a fast one in 
establishing the doctrine of imperceptible change. He had argued, quite rightly, that geologists must invoke 
the invariance (uniformity) of natural law through time in order to study the past scientifically. He then 
applied the same term-uniformity-to an empirical claim about rates of processes, arguing that change must 
be slow, steady, and gradual, and that big results can only arise as the accumulation of small changes. But 
the uniformity of law does not preclude natural catastrophes, particularly on a local scale. Perhaps some 
invariant laws operate to produce infrequent episodes of sudden, profound change." (Gould, S.J., "The 
Great Scablands Debate," in "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History," [1980], Penguin: 
London, 1990, reprint, p.168. Emphasis original) 

15/05/2006
"All revisionists agree on a central point: Lyell united under the common rubric of uniformity two different 
kinds of claims-a set of methodological statements about proper scientific procedure, and a group of 
substantive beliefs about how the world really works. The methodological principles were universally 
acclaimed by scientists, and embraced warmly by all geologists; the substantive claims were controversial 
and, in some cases, accepted by few other geologists. Lyell then pulled a fast one-perhaps the neatest trick 
of rhetoric, measured by subsequent success, in the entire history of science. He labeled all these different 
meanings as `uniformity,' and argued that since all working scientists must embrace the methodological 
principles, the substantive claims must be true as well. Like wily Odysseus clinging to the sheep's 
underside, the dubious substantive meanings of uniformity sneaked into geological orthodoxy-past an 
undiscerning Cyclops, blinded with Lyell's rhetoric-by holding fast to the methodological principles that all 
scientists accepted." (Gould, S.J., "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of 
Geological Time," Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1987, p.118-119)

15/05/2006
"Anyone with the slightest understanding of reward in science knows in his bones that accepted names and 
terms define status and priority-for actual history is soon forgotten. (Charles Lyell surely pulled the greatest 
`fast one' in the history of science when he subsumed acceptable parts of both catastrophism-the doctrine 
of periodic destruction by cataclysms-and his own excessively gradualistic and ahistorical world view under 
his favored name `uniformitarianism,' with victory as the father of geology as his reward.)" (Gould, S.J., "The 
Power of Narrative," in "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas," [1987], Penguin: London, 
1990, reprint, p.85) 

15/05/2006
"Science may differ from other intellectual activity in its focus upon the construction and operation of 
natural objects. But scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only 
from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could 
ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all 
the curious tools of inference that mind permitsfrom metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful 
imagination that C.S. Peirce called `abduction.' Prevailing culture is not always the enemy identified by 
whiggish history-in this case the theological restrictions on time that led early geologists to miracle-
mongering in the catastrophist mode. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain-as in Darwin's translation 
of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection (Schweber, 
1977). In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable 
embedding. It is important that we, as working scientists, combat these myths of our profession as 
something superior and apart. The myths may serve us well in the short and narrow as rationale for a 
lobbying strategy-give us the funding and leave us alone, for we know what we're doing and you don't 
understand anyway. But science can only be harmed in the long run by its self-proclaimed separation as a 
priesthood guarding a sacred rite called the scientific method. Science is accessible to all thinking people 
because it applies universal tools of intellect to its distinctive material. The understanding of science-one 
need hardly repeat the litany-becomes ever more crucial in a world of biotechnology, computers, and 
bombs." (Gould, S.J., "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological 
Time," Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1987, pp.6-7. Emphasis original) 

15/05/2006
"Despite the difficulties involved, however, reconciling science and faith remains a popular project, 
especially among academics nearing the end of their careers. Apparently, the urge to take on the Big 
Problem becomes irresistible to those who have dedicated a lifetime to staring down a microscope at fruit 
flies or mastering the subjunctive in Aramaic. Many scientists enter the fray from evolutionary biology, the 
branch of science that conflicts most directly with religion. Their books often try to harmonise the two by 
declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen Jay Gould's phrase, 'non-overlapping 
magisteria'. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion 
to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse's book is an astonishing contribution to 
this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould's tame view 
that religion and science are distinct but complementary, Ruse, a philosopher and historian of science, 
maintains that at least one form of science (Darwinism) and one form of religion (Christianity) are mutually 
reinforcing. They are reconcilable, he asserts, because virtually every tenet of conservative Christianity, 
including original sin, the immortality of the soul and moral choice, is immanent within Darwinism and an 
inevitable result of the evolutionary process. Religion and science are, to Ruse, merely two sides of the same 
coin. Thus he feels able to answer a resounding 'no' to his main question: 'whether being a Darwinian stops 
you from being a Christian'. ... Despite such gymnastics, Ruse's attempt at a reconciliation ultimately fails 
not surprisingly, given that it requires us to accept a version of Darwinism so extreme that it has practically 
no adherents, and a form of Christianity that would appal most theologians and churchgoers." (Coyne, J., 
"Intergalactic Jesus." Review of  "Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and 
Religion," by Michael Ruse, Cambridge University Press, 2001. London Review of Books. Vol. 24, No. 
9, 23 May 2002) 

15/05/2006
Proverbs 18:17 (NIV): "The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him."

15/05/2006
"It is significant, I genuinely believe, that Darwin opened his first notebook on the "species question" in 1837. 
In January of that year Edward Blyth ventured the beginning of a second paper in which there is comment upon 
the principle of natural selection. In fact, from 1835 to 1837 there is sporadic discussion upon subjects of an 
evolutionary cast in The Magazine of natural History.  We now come, however, to the crux of the discussion: 
is it possible to trace in the Origin of Species or in the trial essays that preceded it any direct evidence of the 
influence of Edward Blyth? The answer will affirm the truth of the connection be between Blyth and Darwin, but 
the clues upon which this assertion is based have to be mustered with care. If it had not been for the publication 
of the Foundations of the Origin of Species in 1909 it is unlikely that the dim outlines of the carefully hidden 
trail would ever have been perceived. This trail begins to be discernible in the Darwin notebook of 1836 with the 
curious word `inosculate.' It is a word which never has had a wide circulation and which is not to be found in 
Darwin's vocabulary before this time. Twice in a single paragraph this word, which means to adjoin, or pass into, 
is used in connection with evolutionary jottings and speculations. Moreover, these speculations, as will become 
evident a little later, have a direct bearing upon problems presented in the various Blyth papers. Here I am 
concerned only to point out that a rare and odd word not hitherto current in Darwin's vocabulary suddenly 
appears coincidentally with its use in the papers of Edward Blyth. In the Origin it survives to make one 
fleeting appearance as `osculant.' Taken in conjunction with other evidence, the rare and mildly archaic character 
of this word suggests that Darwin acquired it from his reading of Blyth." (Eiseley L.C., "Charles Darwin, Edward 
Blyth, and the Theory of Natural Selection," in "Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X," E.P. Dutton: New York NY, 
1979, pp.53-54) @

15/05/2006
"In Blyth's paper of 1835 occurs a statement concerning Ancon sheep. A little later in the same paragraph 
occurs a list of odd mutations, including `donkey-footed swine, tailless cats, back-feathered, five-toed, and 
rumpless fowls, together with many sorts of dogs....' This odd little concentration of mutative types is duplicated 
in almost the same order in Darwin's essay of 1844. Like Blyth, Darwin is discussing `sports' or hereditary 
monsters. Like him, Darwin mentions Ancon sheep, rumpless fowls, and tailless cats. It is true that the solid 
ungular swine and five-toed fowls have disappeared; but they occur in later pages of Darwin's essay. They have 
merely been dispersed. In the matter of claws, two pages farther on we encounter the phrase, `breeds, 
characterized by an extra limb or claw as in certain fowls and dogs.' In the Origin this curious sequence has 
vanished, though the Ancon sheep is still mentioned. Blyth, in his discussion of food and its effects on animals, 
comments that `herbivorous quadrupeds which browse the scanty vegetation on mountains are invariably much 
smaller than their brethren which crop the luxuriant produce of the plains....' Darwin in turn holds that `external 
conditions will doubtless influence and modify the results of the most careful selection; it has been found 
impossible to prevent certain breeds of cattle from degenerating on mountain pastures....' Blyth, in his 
discussion of hybridity, recognized dominance (i.e., prepotency) and the possibility of the re-emergence of 
suppressed characteristics in the third generation. In the essay of 1844 Darwin once again expresses similar 
views. The use and disuse concept is brought into play by Blyth in his discussion of domestic forms where `an 
animal...supplied regularly with ...abundance of foods without the trouble and exertion of having to seek for 
it...becomes, in consequence, bulky and lazy ... while the muscles of ... locomotion ... become rigid and 
comparatively powerless, or are not developed to their full size .' Darwin in his second essay devotes a section 
to this subject and comes once more to similar conclusions, which are re-expressed in the Origin. Blyth 
devotes considerable attention to protective coloration and the utilitarian advantages gained by such devices in 
the struggle for existence. In the course of this discussion Blyth, in his paper of 1835, quoted from Mudie's 
Feathered Tribes of the British Islands the metaphor `grouse are brown heather.' In the Origin Darwin 
utilizes the same device, picturing `the red grouse the color of heather.' Further on in the same section, and this 
time in his own words, Blyth speaks of the ptarmigan as `snow in winter.' In the same section in Darwin `the 
alpine ptarmigan [is] white in winter.' The discussion of protective coloration is more extended in Blyth, but his 
and Darwin's views of it are the same. Blyth has a vivid description of the relation of the falcon to its prey. He 
dwells at length upon the bird's great powers of sight. In the corresponding Darwinian passage hawks are 
mentioned as `guided by eyesight to their prey .' Like Blyth, Darwin then dwells upon the pruning effect 
exercised by these carnivorous birds in keeping the cryptic coloration of small mammals and ground-dwelling 
birds, such as grouse, uniform and constant through natural selection. The variant animal is unable to conceal 
itself successfully and is thus more subject to destruction. Although Darwin's treatment of the idea is not as 
lengthy as Blyth's, the descriptive material cited above is powerfully suggestive of a direct connection, 
particularly when it is taken in conjunction with the other evidence I have been at some pains to assemble [`such 
as Blyth's reference to the variation manifested in the beaks of finchlike birds']. Turning to Blyth's paper of 1837, 
it will be recalled that in discussing his localizing principle he touched upon the homing instinct in animals. 
During the course of his discussion Blyth asserted this capacity was `not wholly absent from the human 
constitution.' He referred to the Australian aborigines and other savages as being subject to this `intuitive 
impulse.' Although Darwin almost totally avoided reference to man in the Origin it is of interest to note that 
the homing instinct in man receives attention in both of the trial essays. It is mentioned briefly in the first essay 
and twice in the second. Here the Australian savage reappears. The instinctive shamming of death is also 
mentioned by Blyth as characteristic of certain animals. Once more Darwin treats of it briefly but critically in the 
essay of 1842 and again in the lengthier essay of 1844. When Blyth's papers are subjected to extended and 
minute analysis there is no doubt that a few additional items pointing toward a connection between the two men 
might be established.  Even making some allowance for accidental use of the same sources, the effect is 
cumulative and, in the present writer's view, unexplainable by chance. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that 
Blyth's restrictions on divarication beyond the species level troubled Darwin and that he was forced to spend 
considerable time and ingenuity in finding his way around this barrier. After an investigation of this effort, it will 
be possible to see more clearly than heretofore why Darwin approached the subject of variation in wild nature 
with such timidity." (Eiseley, L.C., "Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the Theory of Natural Selection," in 
"Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X," E.P. Dutton: New York NY, 1979, pp.60-62, 241n. References omitted) 

15/05/2006
"We thus have two distinct and opposed views as to the origin of domesticated races. According to the 
first they have been produced mainly by the action of selection applied to a plentiful stock of variations. 
According to the second they art the result of appropriate crosses combined with pedigree breeding and 
other devices. If the second view is correct, the success of the breeder has been due to a procedure not fully 
represented in nature and the analogy between Artificial and Natural Selection breaks down. If we disregard 
the question of mutation-rate, as mutations are perhaps liable to turn up with equal frequency in nature and 
under domestication, the issue can be narrowed down to the question-is there as much opportunity for 
crossing in nature as there is in the practice of stock-raising : If the numerous crosses made by man are the 
source of the fresh steps in the development of domesticated breeds, and fresh steps in the development of 
domesticated breeds, and there is nothing comparable in nature, we think the analogy must break down." 
(Robson, G.C. & Richards, O.W., "The Variation of Animals in Nature," Longmans, Green & Co: London, 
1936, p.190) 

16/05/2006
"As I feel that the opportunities which I enjoyed of studying the Natural History of the different countries we 
visited, have been wholly due to Captain FitzRoy, I hope I may here be permitted to repeat my expression of 
gratitude to him; and to add that, during the five years we were together, I received from him the most cordial 
friendship and steady assistance. Both to Captain FitzRoy and to all the Officers of the Beagle... I shall ever feel 
most thankful for the undeviating kindness with which I was treated during our long voyage. ... I must take this 
opportunity of returning my sincere thanks to Mr. Bynoe, the surgeon of the Beagle, for his very kind attention 
to me when I was ill at Valparaiso." (Darwin, C.R., "The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches Into the 
Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World," 
[1909], Modern Library: New York NY, 2001, reprint, p.xxv) 

16/05/2006
"Scientists wonder about what happens in an oscillating universe at the cusps, at the transition from 
contraction to expansion. Some think that the laws of nature are then randomly reshuffled, that the kind of 
physics and chemistry that orders this universe represent only one of an infinite range of possible natural 
laws. It is easy to see that only a very restricted range of laws of nature are consistent with galaxies and 
stars, planets, life and intelligence. If the laws of nature are unpredictably reassorted at the cusps, then it is 
only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a 
universe consistent with us. ... The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps. If the 
universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been so 
weak that, for any given initial expansion. the universe would not have held together. Once the universe 
stumble, upon such a gravitational law, it flies apart and has no further opportunity to experience another 
oscillation and another cusp and another set of laws of nature. Thus we can deduce from the fact that the 
universe exists either a finite age, or a severe restriction on the kinds of laws of nature permitted in each 
oscillation. If the laws of physics are not randomly reshuffled at the cusps, there must be a regularity, a set 
of rules, that determines which laws are permissible and which are not. Such a set of rules would comprise a 
new physics standing over the existing physics. Our language is impoverished; there seems to be no 
suitable name for such a new physics. Both `paraphysics' and `metaphysics' have been preempted by other 
rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities. Perhaps `transphysics' would do." (Sagan, 
C.E., "Cosmos," [1980], Macdonald: London, 1981, reprint, p.260. Emphasis original) 

16/05/2006
"Where it is in his own interest, every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows. Where he 
has no alternative, he submits to the yoke of communal servitude. Yet given a full chance to act in his own 
interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering his brother, 
his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an `altruist' and watch a `hypocrite' bleed." (Ghiselin, M., "The 
Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex," University of California Press: Berkeley CA, 1974, p.247, in 
Ridley, Matt, "The Origins of Virtue," Viking: London, 1996, p.68) 

17/05/2006
"Even as recently as the nineteenth century when all the major morphological discontinuities of nature had 
been described and classified, the question as to whether there was a distinct break between life and the 
inorganic world was controversial. The existence of a definite discontinuity was only finally established 
after the revolutionary discoveries of molecular biology in the early 1950s. Before then it was still possible to 
hope that perhaps advances in science would reveal a number of intermediates between chemistry and the 
cell. The possibility existed, for example, that certain viruses would prove to be intermediate between the 
physical and biological worlds. The hope that increased biochemical knowledge would bridge the gap was 
specifically expressed by many authorities in the 1920s and 30s. But, as in so many other fields of biology, 
the search for continuity, for empirical entities to bridge the divisions of nature, proved futile. Instead of 
revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of the cell might have occurred, 
molecular biology has served only to emphasize the enormity of the gap. We now know not only of the 
existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic 
and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-
biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to 
conceive." (Denton, M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, pp.249-250)

17/05/2006
"Is the Milky Way Galaxy like planet Earth, with towns and cities dotting the landscape? Or is Earth more 
like a lonely island in a vast galactic ocean, with life- bearing planets and especially intelligent life separated 
by vast distances? On the surface, the most obvious evidence bearing on these questions is the fact that 
our home world and host star seem so ordinary. Nicolas Copernicus shattered the prevailing notion that 
Earth was seated at the center of creation. Succeeding generations of astronomers steadily reinforced the 
Copernican view as they discovered the true nature of stars, the remote location of our home world within 
our Galaxy, and the existence of galaxies far, far beyond our own. So pervasive is this view that in the world 
of modern science, it is almost considered heresy to assert any special qualities to our solar system, our 
planet, or even ourselves. With an estimated 200 billion stars in the Galaxy and interstellar space filled with 
the molecules necessary for life, many scientists and laymen naturally conclude that we could not be alone-
we must share our Galaxy with hundreds, thousands, or perhaps millions of other civilizations. But on closer 
examination, this simple logic falls apart. Recent studies in a variety of scientific fields suggest that life must 
pass through a series of bottlenecks on the road to intelligence. On Earth, a long sequence of improbable 
events transpired in just the right way to bring forth our existence, as if we had won a million-dollar lottery a 
million times in a row. Contrary to the prevailing belief, maybe we are special. Maybe humanity stands alone 
on a fertile island in the largely sterile waters of the galactic ocean." (Naeye, R., "OK, Where Are They?," 
Astronomy, Vol. 24, No. 7, July 1996, pp.36-43, p.38)

17/05/2006
"Scientists who ponder this deep question are limited by the fact they have only one example of life to 
study: life on Earth. Science-fiction writers have envisioned an amazing variety of life-forms totally unlike 
any on our planet. But sci-fi writers are limited only by their imaginations, not by physical reality. Life as we 
know it, from astronomy aficionados to the lowest bacteria, shares several fundamental characteristics, and 
most scientists think these will be common to all life in the universe."  (Naeye, R., "OK, Where Are They?," 
Astronomy, Vol. 24, No. 7, July 1996, pp.36-43, p.38)

17/05/2006
"Extraterrestrials could be in our solar system right now, with cloaking technology that hides them from our 
view while they patiently wait for us to mature. When scientists are confronted by multiple explanations for 
a phenomenon, they generally apply Occam's razor: Accept the simplest explanation with the fewest 
assumptions and reject the more fantastic and convoluted explanations. Perhaps the Galaxy is bustling with 
life and civilizations. But the simplest explanation, given the evidence in hand, points in the direction that we 
share the Galaxy with few others, or none at all. ... it seems prudent to conclude that we are alone in a vast 
cosmic ocean, that in one important sense, we ourselves are special in that we go against the Copernican 
grain. If so, humanity represents matter and energy evolved to its highest level; whereby a tiny part of the 
universe on a small rock orbiting an average star in the outskirts of an ordinary spiral galaxy has brought 
itself to a state of consciousness that can ponder the questions of how the universe, and life itself, began, 
and what it all means." (Naeye R., "OK, Where Are They?," Astronomy, July 1996, Vol. 24, No. 7, p.43) 

17/05/2006
"At the present state of our knowledge, the origin of life remains a deep mystery. That is not to say, of 
course, that it will always be so. Undoubtedly the physical and chemical processes that led to the 
emergence of life from non-life were immensely complicated, and it is no surprise that we find such 
processes hard to model mathematically or to duplicate in the laboratory. In the face of this basic obstacle, 
one can distinguish between three philosophical positions concerning the origin of life: (i) it was a miracle; 
(ii) it was a stupendously improbable accident; and (iii) it was an inevitable consequence of the outworking 
of the laws of physics and chemistry, given the right conditions. I wish to state at the outset that I shall 
argue strongly for (iii), which seems to be the position adopted by most of the SETI scientists." (Davies, 
P.C.W., "Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life," Penguin: 
London, 1995, p.14) 

17/05/2006
"J. Arthur Thomson ... felt constrained to devote a considerable part of his work to presentation of proofs of 
the truth of evolution. This would be a waste of time now. Ample proof has been repeatedly presented and 
is available to anyone who really wants to know the truth. It is a human peculiarity, occasionally endearing 
but more often maddening, that no amount of proof suffices to convince those who simply do not want to 
know or to accept the truth. Reiteration for the sake of these wishful thinkers would be futile, and reiteration 
for those who do want to know the truth is quite unnecessary because they already know it or can easily 
find it in earlier works. In the present study the factual truth of organic evolution is taken as established and 
the enquiry goes on from there." (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.4-5) 

17/05/2006
"But if humans can make new varieties of plants and animals, must not nature do so also? This related 
process is called natural selection. That life has changed fundamentally over the aeons is entirely clear from 
the alterations we have made in the beasts and vegetables during the short tenure of humans on Earth, and 
from the fossil evidence. The fossil record speaks to us unambiguously of creatures that once were present 
in enormous numbers and that have now vanished utterly. Far more species have become extinct in the 
history of the Earth than exist today; they are the terminated experiments of evolution. The genetic changes 
induced by domestication have occurred very rapidly. The rabbit was not domesticated until early medieval 
times ...; coffee in the fifteenth century; the sugar beet in the nineteenth century; and the mink is still in the 
earliest stages of domestication. In less than ten thousand years, domestication has increased the weight of 
wool grown by sheep from less than one kilogram of rough hairs to ten or twenty kilograms of uniform, fine 
down; or the volume of milk given by cattle during a lactation period from a few hundred to a million cubic 
centimeters. If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must 
natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity 
the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory." (Sagan, C.E., "Cosmos," [1980], Macdonald: London, 
1981, reprint, pp.27-28) 

17/05/2006
"What does it take to become a whale, to live at the other end of the scale from a virus? Now, we know. 
Whales, like all mammals, breathe air and give milk. When did they take to the water and what were they 
before they made the move? Their new life involved more than a change of medium. They grew, to a 
hundred and fifty tons in the case of the blue whale (which is to humans as we are to mice). The skull and 
neck became shorter and the nose moved backwards. The ear closed and sound now passes through a layer 
of fat. Legs evolved into fins, with extra bones in the back to match. Beneath the skin were other changes. 
The deepest diver can make it to four hundred feet without artificial aids and holds his breath for a few 
minutes to do so. The sperm whale dives to a mile and more, and can stay under for two hours. The change 
is in its chemistry rather than its lungs. Whale muscles contain large amounts of myoglobin, a protein that 
pulls oxygen from the blood. Their oxygen is kept not as a gas, but as a chemical com pound. This in turn 
allows the lungs to collapse at depth as a defence against the bends (nitrogen bubbles in the blood) as the 
animal comes to the surface." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated," 
Doubleday: London, 1999, p.17) 

17/05/2006
"Most of the fossils suggest that the distant ancestors of whales were hyena-like beasts called 
mesonychids, scavengers for carrion and hunters of fish. They underwent a radical change of habit. The 
Simla Hills of Northern India, with their mountain climate, were a holiday haven for the British rulers of the 
Raj. There, several thousand feet above sea-level, was found a fifty-three-million-year-old jawbone from 
Himalayacetus, the first known ancestor of today's whales. The fossil came from a beast that seems to 
have spent time both in fresh water and in a long-lost sea. A fifty-million-year-old skull discovered in the 
Kala Chitta Hills of Pakistan came from an animal further on the way to whaledom. Pakicetus, as it was 
called, lacks the fatty earplugs of its descendants. Its days were passed between land and water, with an 
inner ear midway between those of whales and of land animals, allowing it to hear both in the air and 
beneath the surface. Those oldest whales lived in a vanished ocean, the Tethys Sea, now replaced by India 
and Pakistan, its floor thrust into the skies to build the highest peaks in the world. Only later did their 
descendants escape to fill the seven seas. A younger version, found in Egypt, was christened 
Ambulocetus natans (the swimming walking-whale) after its large back legs, with seven-inch toes. 
Ambulocetus was about the size of a sea-lion, with a long tail quite different from a whale's flukes. 
Another relative, from three million years later, has its limbs reduced by a third. Yet another version, 
Basilosaurus (whose name reflects its first designation as a `king lizard', regal indeed at seventy feet) 
lived about forty-five million years ago. It had small but perfectly formed rear limbs projecting a few inches 
from its body. With these fossils, almost all the steps from land animal to leviathan have been found." 
(Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, pp.17-18) 

17/05/2006
"The mammals of today hint at how the first whales leapt into the waves. Many can, with more or less 
embarrassment, make their way in water. Dogs paddle, humans do the breaststroke, seals swim better still. 
Modern whales do the job so well that they cannot walk on land. The feet of Ambulocetus put it between 
wind and water, in the otter league, with back feet bigger than those in front. It swam better than any dog 
and may have been as good as a sea-otter, as it moved not just with kicks of its rear legs but by flexing its 
spine. This was a large step towards the whales, which do the same with the help of an evolutionary 
novelty, a pair of giant flukes." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated," 
Doubleday: London, 1999, p.18) 

17/05/2006
"Whales do not, it must be said, look much like any other animal. Fossils may tie them to the ungulates, but 
they seem quite distinct from any extant member of the group. The genes tell a different story. The DNA 
responsible for the proteins in milk and in blood-clots shows whales to be closely related to hippopotami. 
The molecular tree of hoofed mammals sprang from a common root sixty-five million (rather than sixty) years 
ago. Like that of immunodeficiency viruses it is bushy, which makes it hard to sort out where the branches 
leading to horses, rhinos and the others split off. Nevertheless, the marriage of hippopotamus with whale is 
clear. The molecular clock, its rate set by the bones that fill the rocks, points at an ancestor common to 
whales and hippos some fifty-five million years ago, just before Himalayacetus, the earliest known fossil 
whale. Whales and hippos may not much resemble each other nowadays, but retain some hints of kinship. 
Hippos spend their time in the water and on land; and some early whales did the same. Young hippos swim 
before they can walk, and hippos and whales each nurse their young underwater as they squeak and squeal 
through river or sea. Both are hairless, neither can sweat and their males each keep their testicles inside the 
body rather than in a convenient bag. Although genes hint that the animal most like a whale is a 
hippopotamus, there is no manifest link between that ponderous river-dweller and those swift predators, the 
mesonychids. New fossils, though, show the mesonychids to be descendants of an ancestor shared with 
whales, rather than on the direct whale line." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species 
Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.21) 

17/05/2006
"The virus and the whale each tell a story of how descent with modification leads, in time, to new forms of 
life. Each, in its disproportionate way, affirms the truth of evolution. Although much is obscure, it is 
impossible to entertain any doubt, after a century of the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement, 
that the view which most naturalists once entertained - namely that each species has been independently 
created - is erroneous. To deny the truth on grounds of faith alone debases both science and religion. The 
point was made by Galileo himself. Summoned to explain his views and their conflict with Scripture, he 
argued that the Church had no choice but to agree with the discoveries of science. It would, he said, be `a 
terrible detriment for the souls if people found themselves convinced by proof of something that it was 
made a sin to believe'. Creationists have not yet faced that fact." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The 
Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, pp.21-22) 

17/05/2006
"No biologist can work without the theory of evolution. Like Galileo's notion of a solar system with the sun 
at its centre, Darwin's long argument makes sense of their subject. Ideas of origin were once, like Moby 
Dick, allegories. They helped to comprehend not the structure but the meaning of the Universe. Some still 
hope to find symbolic significance in Darwinism. They will not: but his work turned the study of life into a 
science rather than a collection of unrelated anecdotes." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of 
Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.22)

18/05/2006
"One of the sadistic pleasures to be had from the defunct age of selfish-genery was to witness the mental 
loops of its proponents as they tried to extricate themselves from the illogical cul-de-sacs of their own 
devising. In his writings, Richard Dawkins' pseudo-'paradox of the organism' was the climactic apotheosis of 
a belief in his own rhetorical devices which forced him to suspend all scientific rationale and modesty. The 
argument is as follows and, in the interests of fairness, I quote directly: `the organism should, by rights, be 
torn apart by its competing replicators', yet `the organism functions as such a convincingly unified whole 
that biologists in general have not seen there is a paradox at all!'. The genes get around this little problem by 
deciding on a minimum shared list of `desiderata' of what to do: `They all 'agree' over what is the optimum 
state of every aspect of phenotype, all agree on the correct wing length, leg colour ... etc.' [Dawkins, R., 
"Parasites, desiderata lists and the paradox of the organism," Parasitology, Vol. 100, No.S, 1991, pp.S63-
S73]. This Dawkinsesque loop now begs the question: which is the unit of selection? Is it the selfish gene or 
the organism (the collective love-in of happy, hippy desiderata lists)?" (Dover, G.A., "Looping the 
evolutionary loop." Review of "The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language," by 
John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, Oxford University Press, 1999. Nature, Vol. 399, 20 May 1999, 
pp.217-218, p.217) 

18/05/2006
"I shall not be saying: `If you look at the behaviour of baboons you will find it to be selfish; therefore the 
chances are that human behaviour is selfish also'. The logic of my `Chicago gangster' argument is quite 
different. It is this. Humans and baboons have evolved by natural selection. If you look at the way natural 
selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. 
Therefore we must expect that when we go and look at the behaviour of baboons, humans, and all other 
living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is wrong, if we observe that 
human behaviour is truly altruistic, then we shall be faced with something puzzling, something that needs 
explaining." (Dawkins, R., "The Selfish Gene," [1976], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1989, New 
edition, pp.4-5. Emphasis original) 

18/05/2006
"In a letter to a friend, Charles Darwin once referred to the apparently sudden appearance of the 
angiosperms in the fossil record as "an abominable mystery" In the early fossil-bearing strata, about 400 
million years old, one finds simple vascular plants, such as rhyniophytes and trimerophytes. Then there is a 
Devonian and Carboniferous proliferation of ferns, lycophytes, sphenophytes, and progymnosperms, which 
were dominant until about 300 million years ago. The early seed plants first appeared in the Late Devonian 
period and led to the gymnosperm-dominated Mesozoic floras. Finally, early in the Cretaceous period, and at 
least 130 million years ago ..., angiosperms appear in the fossil record, gradually achieving worldwide 
dominance in the vegetation by about 90 million years ago. By about 75 million years ago; many modern 
families and some modern genera of this phylum already existed ... ." (Raven, P.H., Evert, R.F. & Eichhorn, 
S.E., "Biology of Plants," [1971], W.H. Freeman and Co/Worth Publishers: New York NY, Sixth Edition, 1999, 
p.518)

18/05/2006
"Since the time of Darwin, scientists have attempted to understand the ancestry of the angiosperms. One 
approach has been to search for their possible ancestors in the fossil record. In this effort, particular 
emphasis has been placed on assessing the ease with which the ovule-bearing structures of various 
gymnosperms could be transformed into a carpel. Recently, phylogenetic analyses (cladistics) based on 
fossil, morphological, and molecular data have revitalized attempts to define the major natural groups of 
seed plants and to understand their interrelationships. The most striking result from recent phylogenetic 
analyses is the support that they have provided for earlier ideas that the Bennettitales ... and 
gnetophytes ... are the seed plants most closely related to angiosperms. The term "anthophytes" (not to 
be confused with the use of the term Anthophyta here to refer to angiosperms) has been proposed to refer 
collectively to the Bennettitales, gnetophytes, and angiosperms. It emphasizes the shared possession of 
flowerlike reproductive structures by these three groups of seed plant. Two contrasting hypotheses have 
been proposed for the phylogenetic relationships among anthophytes. One hypothesis proposes that the 
gnetophytes are monophyletic, and the derived similarities that Gnetum ... and Welwitschia ... share 
with angiosperms are interpreted as examples of convergent evolution .... The second hypothesis considers 
the gnetophytes to be paraphyletic, with Gnetum and Welwitschia as sister groups to angiosperms .... 
The latter hypothesis interprets the derived similarities of Gnetum, Welwitschia, and angiosperms to be 
homologous. It is significant that the Bennettitales and gnetophytes first appear in the fossil record in the 
Triassic period, about 225 million years ago. This seems to place some constraints on the possible earliest 
date of the appearance of the angiosperms-that is, on the possibility that they could have arisen any earlier." 
(Raven, P.H., Evert, R.F. & Eichhorn, S.E., "Biology of Plants," [1971], W.H. Freeman and Co/Worth 
Publishers: New York NY, Sixth Edition, 1999, pp.518-519) 

18/05/2006
"The unique characteristics of the angiosperms include flowers, closed carpels, double fertilization leading 
to endosperm formation, a three-nucleate microgametophyte and an eight-nucleate megagametophyte, 
stamens with two pairs of pollen sacs, and the presence of sieve tubes and companion cells in the phloem ... 
. These similarities clearly indicate that the members of this phylum were derived from a single common 
ancestor. This common ancestor of the angiosperms ultimately would have been derived from a seed plant 
that lacked flowers, closed carpels, and fruits. The earliest known, clearly identifiable fossils of angiosperms 
are flowers and pollen grains up to 130 million years old, from the Early Cretaceous period ... . There are 
intriguing suggestions that much older fossils-up to 200 million years old-may have had some, but perhaps 
not all, of the characteristic features of angiosperms. Currently the interpretation of these fossils is 
enigmatic, and it appears most likely that the phylum did in fact originate in the Early Cretaceous (or perhaps 
uppermost Jurassic) period." " (Raven, P.H., Evert, R.F. & Eichhorn, S.E., "Biology of Plants," [1971], W.H. 
Freeman and Co/Worth Publishers: New York NY, Sixth Edition, 1999, p.519) 

19/05/2006
"The main objection to the argument from design involving complexity is that many systems which display 
complex order and structure can, in fact, be explained as the end result of perfectly ordinary natural 
processes. This does not, of course, prove that all ordered systems have arisen naturally, but it makes us 
cautious about inferring the existence of a designer purely on the rather superficial grounds that something 
looks too complicated to have arisen by chance. One must also have some understanding of the processes 
whereby complex order can develop. The classic conflict between these opposing philosophies came with 
Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of the Species. The exquisite organization of living creatures 
seems to offer the best possible demonstration of a supernatural designer, yet the evidence of biology and 
geology provide an adequate explanation for the extraordinary characteristics of biological organisms. 
Evolution of biological order by mutation and natural selection is now accepted virtually unanimously by 
scientists and theologians alike. [Falsehood or Truism & Argument from Authority] Though Darwin's 
original theory is by no means established in its entirety, the basic principles and mechanisms of evolution 
are no longer seriously in doubt. The essential feature of Darwinian evolution is its accidental nature. 
Mutations occur by blind chance, and as a result of these purely random alterations in the characteristics of 
the organisms nature is provided with a wide range of options from which to select on the basis of 
suitability and advantage. In this way, complex organized structures can arise from the accumulation of vast 
numbers of small accidents. The corresponding increase in order (fall in entropy) occasioned by this trend is 
more than paid for by the much greater number of damaging mutations which are weeded out by natural 
selection. There is thus no conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. Today's beautifully fashioned 
creatures sit atop a family tree festooned with genetic disasters." (Davies, P.C.W., "God and the New 
Physics," Penguin: London, 1990, reprint, pp.165-166. Emphasis original9) 

19/05/2006
"The conclusion must be that the presence of order in a system, however remarkable and complex it might be, is in 
itself no guarantee that a designer is necessary. Order can, and does, occur spontaneously. These observations 
still, however, leave open a vital issue. Though the spontaneous appearance of order will not conflict with the 
second law ofthermodynamics so long as compensatory disorder is generated elsewhere, it is clear that no order 
at all could exist unless the universe as a whole started out with a considerable stock of negative entropy. If total 
disorder always increases, in accordance with the second law, then the universe must, it seems, have been 
created in an orderly condition. Does this not provide strong evidence in favour of a creator-designer? After all, 
even if natural processes can generate localized order unaided, a fund of negative entropy is still needed to drive 
those processes in the first place. True, this could only constitute evidence of a designer-by-proxy, a creator who 
winds up the machine and then lets it crank out whatever structures it will, but even that strategy would involve 
supernatural dexterity of an astonishing degree, for the following reason. Entropy, or disorder, is closely related 
to the concepts of probability and arrangement. A high-entropy, or disordered system, is one that can be 
achieved in a large variety of ways. ... It follows that ordered (low-entropy) states are highly improbable and 
unstable. They require the careful cooperation of vast numbers of individual molecules. In disordered (high-
entropy) states, all the molecules can move about randomly without regard for the others. Now if you were asked 
to pick an arrangement of molecules at random, it is overwhelmingly likely that you would choose one that 
corresponds to maximum entropy, simply because there are vastly more possible disorderly arrangements than 
orderly ones. It is rather like the monkey who tinkers at random on a piano. The chances of his playing a well-
known tune rather than a chaotic sequence of notes is minute. A mathematical investigation shows that order is 
exponentially sensitive to rearrangements. That is to say, the probability of a random choice leading to an 
ordered state declines exponentially with the degree of negative entropy. ... The exponential factor implies that 
the odds against randomly-generated order increase astronomically. For example, the probability of a litre of air 
rushing spontaneously to one end of a box is of the order 10^10^20 to one, where the number 10^10^20 stands 
for one followed by 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeros! Such figures indicate the extreme care with which low-
entropy states must be selected from the vast array of possible states. Translated into a cosmological context, 
the conundrum is this. If the universe is simply an accident, the odds against it containing any appreciable order 
are ludicrously small. If the big bang was just a random event, then the probability seems overwhelming (a 
colossal understatement) that the emerging cosmic material would be in thermodynamic equilibrium at maximum 
entropy with zero order. As this was clearly not the case, it appears hard to escape the conclusion that the actual 
state of the universe has been `chosen' or selected somehow from the huge number of available states, all but an 
infinitesimal fraction of which are totally disordered. And if such an exceedingly improbable initial state was 
selected, there surely had to be a selector or designer to `choose' it? A useful image here is that of a creator 
equipped with a pin. Before him is a vast `shopping list' of universes, each characterized by their initial state. If 
the creator picks a universe by sticking in a pin at random, there is an overwhelming probability that the choice 
will be a highly disordered cosmos with no appreciable structure or organization. Indeed, to find an ordered 
universe, the creator would have to scout a selection of `models' that is so vast its number could not be written 
down on a sheet of paper as big as the entire observable universe. The mystery of how the universe got into its 
low-entropy state has exercised the imagination of several generations of physicists and cosmologists, many of 
whom have been reluctant to appeal to divine selection." (Davies, P.C.W., "God and the New Physics," Penguin: 
London, 1990, reprint, pp.166-168. Emphasis original) 

19/05/2006
"One alternative method for how an RNA sequence of this length could have been produced on the early 
Earth has been suggested by James Ferris at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, US. Ferris 
has performed experiments showing that RNA sequences of up to 50 nucleotides in length can be formed 
using a type of clay known as montmorillonite (a hydrated aluminosilicate) as both a template and catalyst 
for linking the nucleotides together. ... Ferris has shown that when a solution of activated nucleotides 
(where the energy needed for them to link together is already provided in the form of a phosphate bond) is 
washed over montmorillonite clay, the nucleotides bind to the clay particles, eventually forming chains of 
RNA up to 14 nucleotides in length. As more nucleotides are washed over the clay surface, these chains can 
extend to up to 50 nucleotides in length. Furthermore, the clay doesn't just catalyse the formation of RNA 
strands, it also acts as a template for them, dictating the sequence of the nucleotide units. Ferris says he still 
isn't sure how the clay does this, although he and his team are doing experiments at the moment to try to 
find the answer, but he argues that the fact that it does is of great importance. The reason for this is that 
there wouldn't have been enough organic material on the early Earth to create all possible RNA sequences, 
therefore by directing the nature of the products formed the clay ensured that only a specific set of RNA 
sequences, some with catalytic ability, would have built up in the seas of the early Earth. At some point, 
Ferris believes, a sequence that could catalyse its own replication was created, either directly from the clay 
or after interacting with other ribozymes. Thus the RNA world would have been born. Once again, however, 
despite its intellectual appeal, this scenario still has a number of problems. One is that although Ferris gives 
his nucleotides all the energy they need to link together, in the form of phosphate bonds, there is no 
evidence that such bonds can form abiotically." (Evans, J., "It's alive isn't it?," Chemistry in Britain, 
Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47, p.46) 

19/05/2006
"Some Highlights of Plant Phylogeny The fossil record chronicles four major periods of plant evolution, 
which are also evident in the diversity of modern plants ... . Each period was an adaptive radiation that 
followed the evolution of structures that opened new opportunities on the land. The first period of 
evolution was associated with the origin of plants from their aquatic ancestors, a group of green algae 
known as charophytes, during the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic era, about 475 million years ago. The 
first terrestrial adaptations included spores toughened by sporopollenin and jacketed gametangia that 
protected gametes and embryos. " (Campbell, N.A., Reece, J.B. & Mitchell, L.G., "Biology," [1987], 
Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, pp.548-549. Emphasis original) 

19/05/2006
"Classification of Plants Plant biologists use the term division for the major plant groups within the plant 
kingdom. This taxonomic category corresponds to phylum, the highest unit of classification within the animal 
kingdom. Divisions, like phyla, are further subdivided into classes, orders, families, and genera." (Campbell, N.A., 
Reece, J.B. & Mitchell, L.G., "Biology," [1987], Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park CA, Fifth Edition, 1999, p.549. 
Emphasis original) 

19/05/2006
The Life Cycle of Flowering Plants Includes a Unique Double Fertilization Process Flowering plants have an 
alternation of generations in which the sporophyte generation is clearly dominant and the gametophyte 
generation is reduced in size to only a few cells ... . Like the gymnosperms and certain other vascular plants, 
flowering plants are heterosporous and produce two kinds of spores, microspores and megaspores. Each ovule 
within an ovary contains a megasporocyte (megaspore mother cell) that undergoes meiosis, producing four 
haploid megaspores. Three of these disintegrate; one divides mitotically and develops into a female 
gametophyte, which is also called an embryo sac. The embryo sac contains eight haploid nuclei, including one 
egg and two polar nuclei. The egg and the polar nuclei are directly involved in fertilization. The anther contains 
microsporocytes (microspore mother cells) that each undergo meiosis to form four haploid microspores. Each 
microspore develops into a male gametophyte, which is also called a pollen grain. Pollen is transferred to the 
stigma of the carpel and, if compatible, germinates and grows a thin pollen tube down the style and into the 
ovary. A cell within the pollen grain divides to form two nonflagellated male gametes, called pollen grain sperm 
nuclei, or simply sperm nuclei. Both sperm nuclei are involved in the fertilization process. Something happens 
during sexual reproduction in flowering plants that does not occur anywhere else in the living world. When the 
sperm nuclei enter the embryo sac, both of them participate in fertilization. One sperm nucleus fuses with the 
egg, forming a zygote that will grow by mitosis and develop into a plant embryo in the seed. The second sperm 
nucleus fuses with the two haploid polar nuclei, forming a triploid (3n) cell that grows by mitosis and develops 
into endosperm in the seed. This process, involving two separate cell fusions, is called double fertilization and 
is, with one exception [a gymnosperm, Ephedra nevadensis], unique to flowering plants." (Solomon, E.P., 
Berg, L.R., Martin, D.W. & Villee, C.A., "Biology," [1985], Harcourt Brace: Orlando FL, Third Edition, 1993, 
pp.588-589. Emphasis original) 

19/05/2006
"Angiosperms The flowering plants (division Anthophyta) differ from all other seed plants in that their 
ovules are enclosed within the tissue of the parent sporophyte in structures called carpels ... . The pollen 
grains of the flowering plants reach a specialized portion of the carpel, the stigma, and then germinate; thus 
pollination in the plants of this division is indirect. Pollen tubes that emerge from the pollen grains grow 
down through the tissue of the carpel, reaching the ovule and ultimately the egg. This contrasts with the 
gymnosperms, in which the ovules are directly exposed to the air, at least at the time of pollination. The 
pollen reaches them directly or falls in their vicinity. Because of their enclosed ovules and seeds, the 
flowering plants are called angiosperms, a name derived from the Greek words angion, or `vessel,' and 
sperma. The `vessel,' or carpel, ultimately matures into a fruit that encloses the mature ovules, or seeds. 
The fruit itself has become an important unit of dispersal in the flowering plants ... Angiosperms are 
characterized primarily by features of their reproductive system. The unique structure known as the carpel 
encloses the ovules and matures into the fruit. Since the ovules are enclosed, pollination is indirect. The 
angiosperms, although they too have seeds, could not have evolved directly from any of the living 
divisions of gymnosperms; they differ in too many important ways. However, we would classify the 
ancestor of the angiosperms as a gymnosperm it we knew what it was-it must have formed seeds and had 
naked ovules. The form of enclosure of the seeds is what defines an angiosperm, and seeds must originally 
have been present-and naked-for this form of enclosure to have evolved." (Raven, P.H. & Johnson, G.B., 
"Biology," [1986], Wm. C. Brown: Dubuque IA, Third Edition, 1995, p.677)

20/05/2006
"My critics are sure to criticise my competence to discuss the problems at issue, since books on this topic 
are usually written by zoologists, palaeontologists, geneticists or other like biological specialists. But 
obviously the problem long ago transcended all these fields, singly or combined, and all these are out of 
their depth, too, in any far ranging discussion of the features of evolution. ... 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) 

20/05/2006
"The lady protests too much, methinks." (Shakespeare, W., "Hamlet," Act III, Scene II.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/hamlet.3.2.html)
 
20/05/2006
"Angiosperms were the last major plant group to evolve, appearing first in the early Cretaceous and 
considerably abundant and variable by the late Cretaceous. Among other features, they share unique flower 
structures that enable insects or birds to pollinate many of them, and they also bear unique seeds that are 
often adapted to dispersal by other animals. The adaptive advantage of pollination by animals is the simple 
one of ensuring cross-fertilization with other members of the same species by using a relatively small 
amount of pollen, compared to the large amounts of pollen necessary in random wind pollination. As a 
result, angiosperm flowers, derived from leaves modified into petals, sepals, and related structures, are 
among the most intricate and attractive organs that plants ever developed ... . They have size, color, and 
odor differences that can attract specific animal pollinators-an advantage that can spread so rapidly that 
even some closely related plants have evolved flowers that can discriminate among pollinators, while 
pollinators have `coevolved' mechanisms to feed on specific flowers ... ." (Strickberger, M.W., "Evolution," 
Jones and Bartlett Publishers: Sudbury MA, Third edition, 2000, p.308) 

21/05/2006
"This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might he illustrated in 
many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the 
faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind-
the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had 
Christianity the most flaming vices, hut it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed 
inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. ... And then in a 
quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind 
another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled 
to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented 
his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. one explanation (as has been already admitted) 
would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. 
Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are 
growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that 
he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a 
dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is 
really the ordinary thing, at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane 
and all its critics that are mad-in various ways." (Chesterton, G.K., "Orthodoxy," [1908], Fontana: London, 
1961, reprint, pp.83,89) 

21/05/2006
"An important shortcoming of Darwin's work was that he gave no reason why new variations were always 
arising in a species. Many people pointed this out, among them Bishop Wilberforce. The Bishop is usually 
remembered for asking that great champion of evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley, in the course of a debate in 
Oxford in 1860, whether it was `through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a 
monkey?'. But Wilberforce is commonly underrated; he had something more important, if less amusing, to 
ask. He wanted to be shown that: `there is actively at work in nature, co-ordinate with the law of competition 
and with the existence of such favourable variations, a power of accumulating such favourable variations 
through successive descents.'" (Brown, R.H., "The Wisdom of Science: It's Relevance to Culture and 
Religion," [1986], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1991, reprint, p.64)

21/05/2006
"In so far as science has afforded us any alternative perspective to that of religion we may conveniently call 
it `scientific materialism'. In this view, as Jacques Monod [Monod, J., "Chance and Necessity," Collins: 
Glasgow, 1972] makes only too clear, reason, observation and experiment are seen as the only trustworthy 
authorities and scientific knowledge is no longer expected to defer to belief. In the view of scientific 
materialism God is an unnecessary hypothesis and the idea that there is a God who intervenes in the world 
is patently absurd; a religion which invokes an interventionist God is seen as a losing cause which no 
longer speaks to the world in a language which it can understand and which, in due course, will become as 
obsolete as magic." (Brown, R.H., "The Wisdom of Science: It's Relevance to Culture and Religion," [1986], 
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1991, reprint, pp.148-149) 

21/05/2006
"Too much of what we still hear in the Christian Churches, and too much of what they ask us to believe - 
certainly too much of what they ask us to say that we believe - is rooted in that old picture. The most 
obvious example is the concept of Divine intervention in the world, apparently by magic, a concept which 
was plausible at a time when the majority of natural phenomena, even rainbows, could not be explained by 
the science of the time. Furthermore there was no reason in those days to assume that God would be limited 
by the earthly laws of nature, for the very good reason that everything beyond the orbit of the Moon was 
believed to be literally 'super-natural'. In such a context it is not surprising that mystery should be 
interpreted as magic, the essence of magic being that an action is apparently brought about by compelling 
nature and not by understanding it. That is, of course, what we find in the stories of miracles in the Bible 
where water is magically transformed into wine and, again, in those doctrines which invoke a belief in 
magical events such as Virgin birth and bodily resurrection - doctrines to which people are still expected to 
give public assent when they recite the creeds of our major Christian Churches. Quite clearly the whole idea 
of supernatural intervention in the physical world, which pervades the traditional presentation of the 
Christian message, belongs to an obsolete world-view and is hopelessly at odds with the world-view of 
modern science." (Brown, R.H., "The Wisdom of Science: It's Relevance to Culture and Religion," [1986], 
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1991, reprint, pp.148-149. Emphasis original) 

21/05/2006
"The present Universe began about 13-15 billion years ago, but it was a long time before the Solar System 
arose. Four and a half billion years ago, in a Universe that would look quite familiar to us and which had 
already existed for perhaps 10 billion years, a mass of gas and dust became detached from a larger cloud in a 
spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.Within about a hundred thousand years, this mass collapsed under its 
own gravity into a disc. In the centre of this swirling mass of gas and dust, a star that became our Sun 
condensed. If the disc had been larger or spinning more rapidly, it would have formed a double or triple star 
system; such as constitute about 80 per cent of all stars. However our disc was just the right size to make 
one rather than two stars. A little material was left over, from which the planets formed over the next 100 
million years. The primitive disc, called the solar nebula, consisted mainly (98 per cent) of gas (hydrogen and 
helium), plus about two per cent of elements heavier than helium, which form the remainder of the Periodic 
Table of the chemical elements. These elements (called 'metals' by astronomers to the annoyance of 
chemists) are formed by nuclear reactions inside stars and are dispersed as the star dies or explodes. It takes 
several billion years by these slow processes to make up the two per cent that we and the planets are made 
of. So rocky planets that are made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, aluminium, iron and the rest can only arise 
in a 'mature' Universe." (Taylor, S.R., "The Solar System: An Environment For Life?," in Walter, M., ed., et al., 
"To Mars and Beyond: Search for the Origins of Life," Art Exhibitions Australia: Sydney & National 
Museum of Australia: Canberra, Australia, 2001, p.58) 

21/05/2006
"Whilst the fact of evolution is accepted by every biologist, the mode in which it has occurred and the 
mechanism by which it has been brought about are still disputable. The only two 'theories of evolution' 
which have gained any general currency, those of Lamarck and of Darwin, rest on a most insecure basis; the 
validity of the assumptions on which they rest has seldom been seriously examined, and they do not 
interest most of the younger zoologists. It is because I feel that recent advances in zoology have made 
possible a real investigation of these postulates that I am devoting my address to them." (Watson, D.M.S., 
"Adaptation," Nature, Vol. 124, No. 3119, August 10, 1929, pp.231-234, p.231) 

23/05/2006
"It should not, however, be overlooked that certain rather strongly marked variations, which no one would 
rank as mere individual differences, frequently recur owing to a similar organisation being similarly acted 
on,-of which fact numerous instances could be given with our domestic productions. In such cases, if the 
varying individual did not actually transmit to its offspring its newly acquired character, it would 
undoubtedly transmit to them, as long as the existing conditions remained the same, a still stronger 
tendency to vary in the same manner. There can also be little doubt that the tendency to vary in the same 
manner has often been so strong that all the individuals of the same species have been similarly modified 
without the aid of any form of selection." (Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural 
Selection," 1872, Sixth edition, Senate: London, 1994, reprint, p.72) 

23/05/2006
"In a nutshell, where Darwinism claims that all heritable variations are due to chance, `Lamarckism' claims 
that changes evoked by the environment - such as the swelling of muscles on doing heavy work - can 
become inherited. This is known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. ... Darwin himself, as a matter 
of fact, was inclined to believe that such inheritance occurred and cited the reported case of a man who had 
lost his fingers and bred sons without fingers. He said that `the tendency to vary is so strong that all the 
individuals of the same species have been similarly modified without the aid of any form of selection' (my 
italics) [Darwin C.R., "The Origin of Species," 1872, Sixth edition, Senate: London, 1994, reprint, p.72]. It was 
the neo-Darwinians, such as Haldane, Huxley, Fisher and Sewall Wright who, in the 1930s, made such an 
issue of the matter, backed by men like Simpson, Mayr, and Dobzhansky - all figures we shall meet later - 
and did so in terms so sweeping as to make a sceptic suspect they had an uneasy conscience. For instance, 
Professor C.D. Darlington of Oxford called it `an evil theory' and said that to impugn Darwin's theory was 
`ignorance and effrontery'. Harvard's Professor Bernard Davis is even more categoric. `Except for those 
sceptics who are willing to discard rationality,' he says crushingly, `Darwin's theory has now become 
Darwin's law.'" (Taylor, G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, p.36) 

23/05/2006
"Scientific theories are the product of the age in which they are conceived. They are usually in need of 
amplification and modification in the light of fresh intuitions. Thus Copernicus' view of the universe has 
been modified by Einstein's new insights. Euclidean geometry is modified by the new disciplines of 
topology. Quantum physics has modified mechanistic models of matter. And so one would expect scientists 
to regard Darwinism - or should I say neo-Darwinism. - as a theory. They don't, it seems, in the case of 
natural selection. Here many appear to have raised a theory to the status of a dogma, that is, a statement of 
belief that cannot be questioned without impiety. Rattray Taylor quotes, for example, Professor C.D. 
Darlington of Oxford, who said that to impugn Darwin's theory was `ignorance and effrontery' and Professor 
Bernard David who wrote: 'Except for those sceptics who are willing to discard rationality, Darwin's theory 
has become Darwin's law.' [Taylor, G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, 
p.36] Lesser people often use more pejorative language. (Montefiore, H., "The Probability of God," SCM: 
London, 1985, p.75) 

23/05/2006
"When such emotion is aroused, it is appropriate to look for its cause. Professor Mary Hesse writes: `It is 
quite clear that for the general public educated in Western society, scientific accounts of the origin and 
destiny of the world and of the status of human beings within it, have replaced the traditional mythical 
accounts given in various forms in all religions, including in particular biblical religion. In other words, 
whatever other significance scientific theory has, it certainly has the status of cosmological myth in our 
society, as can be seen in the way "origins" are taught in schools, and in the popularity of media 
presentations of fundamental science, both of physics and biology.' [Hesse, M., "Cosmology as Myth," 
Concilium, June 1983, p.51] If Professor Hesse is right, the story of how natural selection works in 
evolution forms one of the basic `myths' which influence the imagination and affect the assumptions of the 
secular age in which we live. It therefore has a natural appeal to those nurtured on rationalism rather than 
religion. As William Temple wrote: `It is obvious that for some students at least the impulse towards 
acceptance of "natural selection" as the one and only mode of evolution came from a mechanistic habit of 
mind and a desire at all costs to dispense with providential "design".' [Temple, W. , "Nature Man and God," 
Macmillan, 1934, p.288] (Montefiore, H., "The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, pp.75-76) 

23/05/2006
"It is easy enough to believe that selection favours certain modifications once they are established, and that 
it disfavours others. The whole question is: how do such precisely adapted modifications arise? The 
geneticists say: pure luck. Their opponents say: in response to a demand. The geneticists say: no one has 
ever demonstrated the inheritance of acquired characteristics unequivocally. But then no one has 
demonstrated that adaptive modifications arise by chance. They have been shown to arise, and to be 
favoured by selection, but how they arise is as much a mystery as ever. Brutal treatment of the genetic 
material will produce abnormal and defective forms. Prolonged selection will favour the development of small 
modifications. But the origin of complex modifications remains a mystery. ... In short, despite the attempts of 
the geneticists to treat the battle as won, actually the question remains wide open. The great paleontologist 
H.F. Osborn summed the matter up as long ago as 1895 when he said: `If acquired variations are transmitted 
there must be some unknown principle in heredity; if they are not, there must be some unknown factor in 
evolution.'" (Taylor, G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, p.38. 
Emphasis original)

24/05/2006
"These new discoveries reinforce the message from our own system. Nothing resembling our Solar System 
has been discovered. The conditions that existed to make our set of planets are not easily reproduced 
elsewhere. Indeed, no two planets in the Solar System are alike. Likewise, the 80-odd moons are also odd 
characters that defy efforts to put them into pigeonholes. So it should have come as no surprise that when 
nature tried elsewhere to build planets the end result was different. We are left with the conclusion that 
attempts to find some general formulae for recreating the detail of the Solar System are likely to be on the 
wrong track. Local accidents have predominated over general theories, just as some overlooked detail of the 
landscape may ruin the course of a battle that was planned according to the best principles of military 
strategy." (Taylor, S.R., "The Solar System: An Environment For Life?," in Walter, M., ed., et al., "To Mars 
and Beyond: Search for the Origins of Life," Art Exhibitions Australia: Sydney & National Museum of 
Australia: Canberra, Australia, 2001, p.67)

24/05/2006
"In his beautifully written book, The Creation, the Oxford physical chemist Peter Atkins ... asks what the 
minimum necessary physical conditions are, what is the minimum amount of design work that a very lazy 
Creator would have to do, in order to see to it that the universe and, later, elephants and other complex 
things, would one day come into existence. The answer, from his point of view as a physical scientist, is that 
the Creator could be infinitely lazy. The fundamental original units that we need to postulate, in order to 
understand the coming into existence of everything, either consist of literally nothing (according to some 
physicists), or (according to other physicists) they are units of the utmost simplicity, far too simple to need 
anything so grand as deliberate Creation." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 
1991, reprint, p.14) 

25/05/2006
"Special Pleading: `having it both ways' ... One-sided pleading becomes special pleading when you 
`have it both ways.' You find the reasons where your advantage lies, but refuse to apply the same principle 
to yourself that you apply to others. Salesmen, lawyers, debaters are not the only people ever guilty of 
rationalizing in this way. Scientists, educators, statesmen -in fact anybody who has something to gain or 
who has merely warmed to his argument-can be found on occasion ignoring or twisting the facts to his own 
advantage." (Fearnside W.W. & Holther W.B., "Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument," Prentice-Hall: 
Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1959, 25th Printing, p.108. Emphasis original)

25/05/2006
"Lip Service All of us are more or less restrained by the taboos current in our particular society, in our 
culture. Perhaps this is fortunate since it promotes the stability of social institutions and makes for cultural 
unity. At any rate, the pressure which society exerts to make individuals conform to its beliefs and ideals is 
generally sufficient to prevent all but occasional individuals from openly repudiating the prevailing notions. 
... Consequently, individuals who find themselves opposed to some cultural norm often see the wisdom of 
giving lip service to it. In fact, a person may render lip service to an accepted ideal of his group without even 
realizing that he is constrained in his belief. For instance, an individual may support an ideal such as racial 
equality without ever questioning the depth of his belief until one day he is called upon to put it into public 
practice. Sometimes lip service is a smoke screen consciously created, as with the person who proclaims his 
support of sexual taboos which he clandestinely violates. Such a person has made the passage from 
cowardly lip service to flagrant hypocrisy. It is not a difficult passage. As is the case with much faulty 
reasoning, lip service often goes unnoticed because it is so hidden in verbiage that the announced ideal and 
the inconsistent behavior are not exposed to sharp contrast. Or time may obscure the fact that an 
individual's deeds do not match his words. " (Fearnside W.W. & Holther W.B., "Fallacy: The Counterfeit of 
Argument," Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1959, 25th Printing, pp.108-109. Emphasis original) 

25/05/2006
"But as much as we would like to take a unified view of nature, we keep encountering a stubborn duality in 
the role of intelligent life in the universe, as both subject and student. We see this even at the deepest level 
of modern physics. In quantum mechanics the state of any system is described by a mathematical object 
known as the wave function. According to the interpretation of quantum mechanics worked out in 
Copenhagen in the early 1930s, the rules for calculating the wave function are of a very different character 
from the principles used to interpret it. ... The Copenhagen interpretation holds that when we measure any 
quantity, such as position or momentum, we are intervening in a way that causes an unpredictable change in 
the wave function, resulting in a wave function for which the measured quantity has some definite value, in 
a manner that cannot be described by the deterministic Schrödinger equation. ... Measurement is thus 
regarded as something intrinsically different from anything else in nature. And although opinions differ, it is 
hard to identify anything special that qualifies some process to be called a measurement, except its effect on 
a conscious mind." (Weinberg, S., "Life in the Universe," Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 4, October 
1994, Special Issue, pp.22-27, pp.25-26)

25/05/2006
"These mysteries are heightened when we reflect how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial 
conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it 
would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values. The best known 
of these quantities is the energy of one of the excited states of the carbon 12 nucleus. There is an essential 
step in the chain of nuclear reactions that build up heavy elements in stars. In this step, two helium nuclei 
join together to form the unstable nucleus of beryllium 8, which sometimes before fissioning absorbs 
another helium nucleus, forming carbon 12 in this excited state. The carbon 12 nucleus then emits a photon 
and decays into the stable state of lowest energy. In subsequent nuclear reactions carbon is built up into 
oxygen and nitrogen and the other heavy elements necessary for life. But the capture of helium by beryllium 
8 is a resonant process, whose reaction rate is a sharply peaked function of the energies of the nuclei 
involved. If the energy of the excited state of carbon 12 were just a little higher, the rate of its formation 
would be much less, so that almost all the beryllium 8 nuclei would fission into helium nuclei before carbon 
could be formed. The universe would then consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, without the 
ingredients for life." (Weinberg, S., "Life in the Universe," Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 4, October 
1994, Special Issue, pp.22-27, p.27)

25/05/2006
"Opinions differ as to the degree to which the constants of nature must be fine-tuned to make life necessary. 
... But one constant does seem to require an incredible fine-tuning: it is the vacuum energy, or cosmological 
constant, mentioned in connection with inflationary cosmologies. Although we cannot calculate this 
quantity, we can calculate some contributions to it (such as the energy of quantum fluctuations in the 
gravitational field that have wavelengths no shorter than about 10-^33 centimeter). These contributions 
come out about 120 orders of magnitude larger than the maximum value allowed by our observations of the 
present rate of cosmic expansion. If the various contributions to the vacuum energy did not nearly cancel, 
then, depending on the value of the total vacuum energy, the universe either would go through a complete 
cycle of expansion and contraction before life could arise or would expand so rapidly that no galaxies or 
stars could form. Thus, the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different 
contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places." (Weinberg, S., "Life in the 
Universe," Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 4, October 1994, Special Issue, pp.22-27, p.27)

25/05/2006
"Dawkins, in order to make clear the great difference between the Paleyan explanation of adaptation and 
his own Darwinian one, writes (for example) as follows. "Natural selection ... has no purpose in mind. It has 
no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all." 
[Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," W.W Norton & Co: New York NY, 1986, p.5] These statements 
(though excessively repetitive) are all true. But alas, they are trivial. For they would still all be true, if we were 
to put for their subject, instead of "natural selection," "artificial selection." Artificial selection has no 
purpose in mind. (Cattle breeders have, though.) Artificial selection has no mind. It does not plan for the 
future (though wheat geneticists do). But no one would be tempted to infer, from these truisms, that 
purposeful intelligent agents play no part in bringing about artificial selection! In fact the truth of the 
statements just quoted from Dawkins is a trivial consequence of his having chosen an abstract phrase, 
"natural selection," as their grammatical subject. In the same way, we could say, with equal truth, that (for 
example) "business competition" has no mind, or that "warfare" does not plan for the future. But it would be 
an exceptionally gross error, to infer from these trivial truths, that the purposes and intelligence of 
businessmen are not among the causes which determine the success or failure of firms, or that the 
purposes and intelligence of soldiers are not among the causes that decide which army loses and which 
wins. The question is not, then, whether natural selection is purposeful. The answer to that question is 
trivially, no; just as it is for artificial selection, business competition, or warfare. Breeders, businessmen, and 
soldiers, however, certainly are purposeful and intelligent ... " (Stove, D.C., "Paley's Revenge, or Purpose 
Regained," in Darwinian Fairytales," Encounter Books: New York NY, 1995, p.271. Emphasis original) 

25/05/2006
"To illustrate the difference between scientific and religious`levels of understanding', Mr Haught asked a 
simple question. What causes a kettle to boil? One could answer, he said, that it is the rapid vibration of 
water molecules. Or that it is because one has asked one's spouse to switch on the stove. Or that it is 
`because I want a cup of tea.' None of these explanations conflicts with the others. In the same way, belief in 
evolution is compatible with religious faith: an omnipotent God could have created a universe in which life 
subsequently evolved. It makes no sense, argued the professor, to confuse the study of molecular 
movements by bringing in the `I want tea' explanation." ("Life is a cup of tea," The Economist, October 6, 
2005. http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4488706) 

27/05/2006
"Milton, some say, was the last man to know everything (or to know enough about most things to discuss 
them with authority). Darwin was the last biologist who could claim that. His mind was, he said, `a machine 
for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts'. The hundreds of books and papers referred to in 
the manuscript of which The Origin was to be a `sketch' include The Cottage Gardener and Country 
Gentleman's Companion, the India Sporting Review and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal 
Society of London. Charles Darwin wrote to scores of people, expert and amateur, in search of information, 
and wove their lore into his case. Nobody could do that now. So great is today's knowledge that there are 
no Miltons even of biology, no one who has sufficient command of the field to debate it with any colleague, 
from whatever sphere. To understand evolution involves interests so disparate that it is impossible to 
embrace them all. That is the joy - and the tragedy - of modern science." (Jones, J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: 
The Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.xxii) 

27/05/2006
"When I first read The Selfish Gene - it was not in '76, it was a few years later - I was struck by the very first 
paragraph, and by one of the chief sentences in it ... `We are survival machines, robot machines, blindly 
programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.' ... When I read the book it changed my life. ... 
And I also thought, on rereading the book, that the late Steve Gould was really right when he called Richard and 
me Darwinian fundamentalists. And I want to say what a Darwinian fundamentalist is. A Darwinian 
fundamentalist is one who recognizes that either you shun Darwinian evolution altogether, or you turn the 
traditional universe upside down and you accept that mind, meaning, and purpose are not the cause but the fairly 
recent effects of the mechanistic mill of Darwinian algorithms. It is the unexceptioned view that mind, meaning, 
and purpose are not the original driving engines, but recent effects that marks, I think, the true Darwinian 
fundamentalist. And Dawkins insists, and I agree wholeheartedly, that there aren't any good compromise 
positions. Many have tried to find a compromise position, which salvages something of the traditional right-side-
up view, where meaning and purpose rain down from on high. It cannot be done. And the recognition that it 
cannot be done is I would say, the mark of sane Darwinian fundamentalism." (Dennett, D.C., The Selfish Gene: 
Thirty Years On," Edge, 16 March 2006. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/selfish06/selfish06_index.html)

27/05/2006
"The basic element of all life of any kind is the cell. However it came into being, the cell is a chemical 
laboratory of immense complexity. Professor W. H. Thorpe writes: `The cell itself could not possibly 
function without the cell membranes which contain and selectively isolate the working parts of this 
laboratory. Biologists have long hoped to find a really `primitive cell' illustrative of the stages between the 
supposed primitive acellular life and life as we know it now. But there seems little doubt today that there are 
no primitive cells living on the earth. All the cells that we know are of fantastic complexity. I believe that no 
biologist or physicist has yet been able to propose even the outlines of a theory as to how such a cell might 
have been `evolved'. Monod himself sees that the evolution of even the simplest cell `presents herculean 
problems'. [Thorpe, W.H., "Purpose in a World of Chance," OUP, 1979, p.21]." (Montefiore, H., "The 
Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, p.64)

27/05/2006
"The primaeval bacterium, it is generally agreed, lived in an atmosphere which was without oxygen, and 
derived its energy from anaerobic fermentation. A great leap forward in evolution occurred when cells could 
use directly solar radiation as their energy source. Photosynthesis evolved, a process which is dependent 
on cholorophyll and through which carbohydrate is synthesized from water and carbon dioxide and from it 
(as by products) oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The structure of chlorophyll is somewhat complex, 
and its biosynthesis requires a number of different enzymes. Two distinct chemical systems are involved to 
produce this complex structure, which has been the foundation of most living creatures for three billion 
years. In one of these systems an enzyme is required to produce its components, and in the other another 
enzyme to put together the structure. (An enzyme is a complex molecule made of amino acids in a particular 
order to produce a three dimensional structure, and which acts as a catalyst by facilitating chemical 
reactions between particular substances.) One of the more remarkable results of photosynthesis has been to 
alter the Earth's atmosphere by the release of oxygen so that in due time the air was oxygen-based. 
Chlorophyll is green, and so produced blue green algae (an early form of bacteria). The fact that the natural 
world today is predominantly green shows the prevalence of chlorophyll systems some three billion years 
later... Scientists have theorized about how chlorophyll evolved and photosynthesis developed. [Rao, K.K., 
Hall, D.O. & Cammack, R., "The photosynthetic apparatus," Gutfreund, H.,ed., "Biochemical Evolution," 
CUP, 1981, pp.150ff] They may be able to explain how this mechanism evolved, but, as Gordon Rattray 
Taylor has written: `Unless there was some inner necessity, some built-in primordial disposition to 
consolidate into such a pattern, it is past belief that anything so intricate and idiosyncratic should appear.' 
[Rattray Taylor, G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," Secker & Warburg, 1983, p.207]." (Montefiore, H., 
"The Probability of God," SCM: London, 1985, p.64) 

27/05/2006
"What is life? How can we define it? Many definitions have been proposed, but perhaps the best criterion 
of life is its capacity for self-repair. With few exceptions, living material is maintained by constant effort. It 
tends to break down and has to be repaired. ... The efficiency with which organisms restore the original plan, 
when damage has occurred, has so impressed many observers that they have concluded that some exterior, 
vitalistic force was needed to explain the phenomenon. ... But one conclusion we can draw: such 
maintenance requires a source of energy. It is a point which, until recently, biologists have tended to ignore. 
It was not enough, therefore, for chance to bring about the formation of a replicating molecule or molecular 
system Right from the start, there must also have been an energy source Clearly this poses a problem. Two 
major innovations had to occur simultaneously. As Professor S. Granick of the Rockefeller University has 
put it, the first organism must have been a primitive energy conversion unit." (Taylor, G.R., "The Great 
Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, pp.203-204) 

27/05/2006
"Now, in the last analysis, the energy on which all life runs is that of light - sunlight. Sometimes it is 
extracted directly, sometimes indirectly. Those organisms incapable of photosynthesis - as the tapping 
of light energy is called - must live parasitically on photosynthesising plants. The earth is flooded with 
a vast spectrum of ether vibrations, mostly emanating from the sun, from mile-long radio waves down 
to gamma rays 10,000 billion times shorter. In this spectrum there is only a narrow 'window' of 
vibrations which are visible to man and which we call light- those lying between 380 and 1,100 
millimicrons in length. Atmospheric absorption mops up almost all the remainder. Now, by happy 
chance (if Darwin is right) living things have evolved pigments which resonate to wavelengths 
precisely within that band, and this is true both as regards vision and as regards energy. And this 
circumstance, so Professor George Wald of Harvard maintains, must be true throughout the universe. 
`There cannot be a planet on which photosynthesis or vision occurs in the far infra-red or far ultra-
violet because these radiations are not appropriate to perform these functions,' he says. One might add 
that for organisms living in the sea - as the first life-forms did - the 'window' is even narrower, since the 
water filters out most of the red end of the spectrum and, as you go deeper, finally all except the blue. 
Moreover, the shorter wavelengths - the ultraviolet rays - carry so much energy that they unzip the 
long-chain molecules of proteins and nucleic acids, thus making life impossible. Hence an atmosphere 
which filters out such wavelengths is necessary before life can emerge. So it is fortunate that our sun 
radiates most of its energy in this essential band, and that earth slowly developed an atmosphere which 
would filter out the ultra-violet. In short, as you can see, the conditions favourable to the emergence of 
life are quite stringent. In contradiction to those who maintain that there are countless inhabited 
planets, it may be the case that Earth is one of the very few planets where conditions are suitable." 
(Taylor, G.R., "The Great Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, p.204) 

27/05/2006
"There is no need for me to go into the incredibly complicated chemistry of photosynthesis, which involves 
whole sequences of chemical reactions and is still not completely understood, despite intensive efforts. 
There is, however, one rather intriguing point. Photosynthesis depends on a substance known as 
chlorophyll. It exists in four slightly different forms, but all are based on a ring-like atomic structure formed 
by four chemical units known as pyrroles. In the middle of the ring is found an atom of magnesium. The four 
varieties of chlorophyll differ only in the make-up of the tail which is attached to the ring. Curiously enough 
- and the significance of this is not clear haemoglobin, which transports oxygen within the body from lungs 
to muscles, is also based on the pyrrole ring, though in this case it embraces an iron atom, not an atom of 
magnesium. Furthermore, several enzymes and Vitamin B12 also embody this peculiar chemical 
conformation, which is found in practically all living cells. Until chemical evolution had produced this highly 
specialised structure, photosynthesis was not possible. Now, the chemistry involved in synthesising the 
pyrrole ring has very recently been elucidated by a team working in the Chemical Laboratory at Cambridge. 
It turns out that there are two distinct chemical systems at work, each with its own enzyme. One builds the 
components, the other forms them into a ring. So here again we have an improbable coincidence. The 
formation by chance of one enzyme without the other would have been useless. Each complements the 
other. ... Where does all this leave us with respect to Darwinism? ... it is very hard to swallow the idea that 
chance - or rather a long series of chances - built up such an extremely elaborate mechanism as 
photosynthesis, a mechanism which depends on substances far more complex than the raw materials which 
it transforms. Unless there was some inner necessity, some built-in primordial disposition to consolidate into 
such a pattern, it is past belief that anything so intricate and idiosyncratic should appear." (Taylor, G.R., 
"The Great Evolution Mystery," Harper & Row: New York NY, 1983, pp.205-207) 

27/05/2006
"Charles Darwin contended more than a century ago that all modern species diverged from a more limited set 
of ancestral groups, which themselves evolved from still fewer progenitors and so on back to the beginning 
of life. In principle, then, the relationships among all living and extinct organisms could be represented as a 
single genealogical tree. Most contemporary researchers agree. Many would even argue that the general 
features of this tree are already known, all the way down to the root - a solitary cell, termed life's last 
universal common ancestor, that lived roughly 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. The consensus view did not come 
easily but has been widely accepted for more than a decade. Yet ill winds are blowing. To everyone's 
surprise, discoveries made in the past few years have begun to cast serious doubt on some aspects of the 
tree, especially on the depiction of the relationships near the root. ... as DNA sequences of complete 
genomes have become increasingly available, my group and others have noted patterns that are 
disturbingly at odds with the prevailing beliefs. ... The most reasonable explanation for these various 
contrarian results is that the pattern of evolution is not as linear and treelike as Darwin imagined it. ... there 
would never have been a single cell that could be called the last universal common ancestor. ... Some 
biologists find these notions confusing and discouraging. It is as if we have failed at the task that Darwin 
set for us: delineating the unique structure of the tree of life. " (Doolittle W.F., "Uprooting the Tree of Life," 
Scientific American, Vol. 282, No. 2, February 2000, pp.90-95, pp.90,93,95. 
http://www.bios.niu.edu/duvall/bios439/Per25_2006.pdf)

27/05/2006
"The import of the fact of evolution depends on how far evolution extends, and here there are two crucial 
points: does it extend from the inorganic into the organic, and does it extend from the lower animals to man? 
In The Origin of Species Darwin implies that life did not arise naturally from nonliving matter, for in the 
very last sentence he wrote, `...life...having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into 
one ....' (The words by the Creator were inserted in the second edition and are one of many gradual 
concessions made to critics of that book.) Later, however, Darwin conjectured (he did not consider this 
scientific) that life will be found to be `a consequence of some general law''-that is, to be a result of natural 
processes rather than divine intervention. He referred to this at least three times in letters unpublished until 
after his death, the one from which I have quoted being the last letter he ever wrote (28 March 1882 to G. C. 
Wallich; Darwin died three weeks later)." (Simpson, G.G., "The World into Which Darwin Led Us," Science, 
Vol. 131, 1 April 1960, pp.966-974, p.969)

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