Evolution a proven fact? LOL

by Rex B13 30 Replies latest jw friends

  • Rex B13
    Rex B13

    Some Interesting Quotes from Evolutionists

    "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as student...have been debunked."
    Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology, Imperial College, London), "The Nature of the Fossil Record", Proceedings of the Geological Association, Vol. 87(2), 1976, pp 132-133

    "Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded ...ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."
    Dr. David Raup (Curator, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago), "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology", Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50(1), 1979, p. 25

    "...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustrations of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly would have included them...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils...I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.
    Personal letter from Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, to L. Sunderland

    "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process to study."
    Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), Natural History, Vol. 86(5), May 1977, p. 14

    "...if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record."
    Lord Solly Zuckerman, M.A.,M.D.,D.Sc., (Anatomy) in Beyond the Ivory Tower, Taplinger Pub. Co., New York, 1970, p. 64

    The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling that explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hardheaded pragmatism."
    J. E. O'Rourke, 'Pragmatism versus materialism in stratigraphy', American Journal of Science, vol. 276, Jan. 1976, p. 47

    "In conventional interpretation of K- Ar age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily attributed to excess or loss of argon."
    A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), 'K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia'. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979, p. 974

    "A five million year old piece of bone that was thought to be the collarbone of a human like creature is actually part of a dolphin rib...The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."
    Dr. Tim White (anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley), as quoted by Ian Anderson in New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199

    "In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it."
    H. S. Lipson, FRS (Professor of Physics, Univ. of Manchester, UK), 'A physicist looks at evolution', Physics Bulletin, vol. 31, 1980, p. 138

    "Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."
    Prof. Louis Bounoure (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17

    "I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."
    Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    "Once we see that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends are in every respect deliberate,...it is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect...the idealized limit of God.
    Sir Fred Hoyle (English Astronomer, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University) and Chandra Wickramasingne (Professor of Astronomy and Applied Mathematics at University College, Cardiff) in Evolution From Space, Dent, London, 1981

    "To suppose that the eye...could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
    Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, p. 133

    "The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models; hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts."
    Richard Dickerson, Ph.D. (Physical Chemistry) (Professor, California Institute of Technology) Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life", Scientific American, Sept. 1978, p. 70

    "To insist...that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts.
    Pierre Paul Grasse (past-President, French Acadamie des sciences) Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, New York, 1977, p. 107

    "In general, dates in the 'correct ball park' are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are discrepancies fully explained."
    R. L. Mauger, Ph.D. (Geology)(Associate Professor East Carolina University), "K-Ar Ages of Biotite From Tuffs In Eocene Rocks of the Green River, Washakie and Uinta Basins", Contributions to Geology, Wyoming University, Vol. 15(1), 1977, p. 37

    "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
    Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol. 6(1), January 1980, p. 127

    "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."
    Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'Evolution's erratic pace'. Natural History, vol. LXXXVI(5), May 1977, p. 14

    "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record."
    David B. Kitts, Ph.D. (Zoology), (School of Geology and Geophysics, Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma USA) 'Paleontology and evolutionary theory'. Evolution, vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467

    "The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table...the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmentary and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present."
    John Reader (photo-journalist and author of Missing Links), 'Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?' New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p. 802

    The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that ta tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein'.
    Sir Fred Hoyle (English astronomer, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University), as quoted in 'Hoyle on Evolution'. Nature, vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105

    "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctualionist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation."
    Mark Ridley (Zoologist, Oxford University), 'Who doubts evolution?' New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831

    "The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgement, is overwhelming. The belief that there is 'something behind it all' is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists."
    Paul Davies, 'The Christian perspective of a scientist'. New Scientists, 2 June 1983, p. 638

    "Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."
    Professor Whitten (Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia), 1980 Assembly Week address

  • dreamer
    dreamer

    Hi Rex,

    It is interesting that all your quotes are from 1970 - 1984 (with one exception!). Do you have any quotes from scientists who are currently active in this area of research?

    IMHO, in recent years, advances in molecular biology and genetics have opened up a whole new avenue of exploration. This has apparantly shown evidence for common ancestory between apes and humans. Try looking here: http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html

    I am not an evolutionist by any means, but I do appreciate the work that biologists do. I believe that it is foolish to bury ones head in the past where there was a lack of evidence, and refuse to acknowledge recent advances in scientific understanding.

    Who knows, they may actually 'prove' that a creation event must have occured!

    Dreamer

  • Amazing
    Amazing

    Hi Rex B13: I enjoyed your post, but there are, as you may realize, many here on this board who will cite problems with your sources and the conclusions one might draw from these non-contextual quotes.

    Darwin: I do not currently have any of Darwin's works at hand to check the references, but I suspect that some of the quotes you have made may be lifted out of context. For example, Darwin's comment about the 'eye' is highly suspecious.

    Evolution is a proven 'fact' and still a 'theory.' The recent genome project and DNA mapping that was completed has proven useful in tracing back DNA chains to early humanoid ancestors. Any reputable scientist would be hard pressed to debate the data.

    What is a Theory?: Many, but not all, pro-creationists seem to confuse the difference between 'theory', 'speculation', 'conjecture', 'hypothesis' and 'facts' and 'physical laws'. Let me give two easy examples using another physical 'fact' that is still very much a 'theory', and a social 'fact' that is also very much 'theory':

    Electricity and Electro-magnetism is not really understood by science. What we have are really electro-magnetic theory, that is a 'working premise' upon which 'physical laws' are defined, and then placed into working models. The models function according to 'theory' and according to defined 'laws'. The results are 'proven facts' upon which we have abundant evidence in the form of lighting, power, controls, devices, motors, and the very power that runs the PC you use. Yet, it is all built upon a 'theory' that has yet to be fully understood, proven, or defined.

    Civil Laws: The USA Constitution is built upon an important legal 'theory' that all human rights are self-evident, including, but not limited to, equality of all people. The federal government is bound, therefore, by a constitution that presumes all rights belong to the people. Thus, the government is only permitted "limited" authority and scope to make laws based on that 'theory.' Yet, no one can "prove" factually that humans have any rights or equality. Why? because such a social 'theory' is merely a 'concept' from which we build a society that functions. Other societies and civil systems function on other working 'theories' such as all rights belonging to the King or the State. The King or State then 'grants rights' as it sees fit to its subjects or people. In both examples we witness working 'law' and 'theory' functioning side-by-side.

    Evolution: This is a working 'theory' yes, but one that is used by hard scientific data upon which modern medical and biological laws get defined and established, and upon which we can put into practice working models and obtain useful results. Hence, my above mention of DNA and genome and how these are built upon evolutionary 'theory' and proven useful.

    Finally: As you get into this topic you are going to run head-to-head with many who are far more versed and knowledgeable in biology and evolution than me. You will find, for example, that AlanF is going to closely examine your quoted material and challenge you with tough arguments and facts. Be prepared for the ride of your life. - Amazing

  • JanH
    JanH

    DubDub/Rex,

    Have you ever looked up and read those quotations in context? I bet you haven't.

    Incidentally, some of the same examples of fraud and misquotations can be found in the WTS Creation book. Jumped from the frying pan into the fire, eh, little fundie?

    - Jan
    --
    Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [Ambrose Bierce, The Devil´s Dictionary, 1911]

  • Amazing
    Amazing

    Hi JanH: I meant to mention you along with AlanF in my above comments to Rex. I am not surprised to see you commenting to this. Right away I saw a problem with the quote from Darwin about the 'eyes' evolving. So, I will sit back and see how you, and AlanF and others work with Rex. Thanks. - Amazing

  • Cygnus
    Cygnus

    Here's just one example of a quote being taken out of context and appearing to support your anti-evolution agenda.

    Quoted text: "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctualionist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." Mark Ridley (Zoologist, Oxford University), 'Who doubts evolution?' New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831

    The fact is, in that issue of New Scientist, Ridley "criticized the creationists for misconstructing this debate over the mechanism of evolution as if it were a debate over the fact of evolution. Here are Ridley's own words...

    'The argument is about the actual historical pattern of evolution; but outsiders, seeing a controversy unfolding, have imagined that it is about the truth of evolution --- whether evolution occured [sic] at all. This is a terrible mistake, and it springs, I believe, from the false idea that the fossil record provides an important part of the evidence that evolution took place. In fact, evolution is proven by a totally separate set of arguments, and the present debate within paleontology does not impinge at all on the evidence that supports evolution... a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.'"

    (taken from http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ken_saladin/saladin-gish2/saladin2.html and http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/elsberry/evobio/evc/sc_misq/_mridley.html)

    Now, Rex, Ridley is not saying that the fossil record _disproves_ evolution. He says that it is not the better evidence for evolution.

    I am rather certain that tbe bulk of the rest of your quotes (chock full of elipses chopping sentences apart I might add, making them awfully suspect) are similar in nature.

  • Amazing
    Amazing

    Hi Dreamer: Good comments. You noted,

    IMHO, in recent years, advances in molecular biology and genetics have opened up a whole new avenue of exploration. This has apparantly shown evidence for common ancestory between apes and humans. Try looking here: http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html

    I looked at the site you mention. Also 'Talk Origins' is an excellent site. - Amazing

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    What a laughable bunch of misquotes and misrepresentations from the most braindead Fundie cutter/paster on the board! Some of these quotes were shown long ago to be gross distortions.

    You quoted this one:

    "To suppose that the eye...could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, p. 133

    The misrepresentation is of the word "seems". Here is what Darwin actually wrote:

    To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

    In other words, what Darwin wrote was that, while comprehension of how the eye could have evolved seems difficult, that is only due to the limitations of "common sense", and that his theory could still account for it.

    You prove yet again, Rex, that Fundy Creationists are unabashed liars.

    AlanF

  • Amazing
    Amazing

    Hi AlanF: You see my initial comments above to Rex B13 are somewhat like a pin-prick to give Rex a tiny sample of the slege-hammer that awaits him. And, as always, you came through with flying colors. - Amazing

  • JanH
    JanH

    DubDub/Rex,

    Your list says nothing about evolution, but a lot about the gross dishonesty and fraud you and your fellow creationists typically use to "prove" your fantasies. By carefully taking words out of context, and by using false authorities (like the exentric astronomer Hoyle, who knew about as much about Darwinian evolution as the average plumber) and trusting their readers to be totally ignorant about the difference between knowing how evolution happened and knowing that it happened, creationists demonstrate that to them, it's perfectly legitimate to lie for their God.

    Two more examples should suffice.

    Dr Patterson's statement has been passed around in cretinist pamphlets for quite some time. What he said in a private letter concerned systematics only, and it is disingenious to apply it to evolution as a whole. I suspect your source (at least indirectly) is the Australian Creation Science Foundation's "Revised Quote Book". "Revised", of course, because a number of earlier quotations were proven direct inventions and fraud.

    See the article "Patterson Misquoted" at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html for full context, and also Dr Patterson's own response,

    An even older chestnut, used by particularly dishonest creationists for decades (perhaps longer) demonstrates beyond doubt how unscrupulous you charlatans are in taking statements out of context to make them mean even the exact opposite of what the author intended. This is the quote as you use it, incidentally exactly like it is used by the Watchtower Society in the Creation book:

    "To suppose that the eye...could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, p. 133 (sic)

    If we look up Darwin's words in context, we see exactly what point Darwin was trying to make:
    "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory." (The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1859, p 133)
    As we can see from the full quotation, Darwin considered the idea that the eye could evolve to be exactly like the idea that the earth revolved around the sun. What Darwin meant, was that intuitively both ideas seemed absurd, but by reason and facts we can see that is indeed the truth. Nobody reading your fruadulent misquotation will get that idea.

    You are a liar and a fraud, DubDub, but we have known that for a long time.

    - Jan
    --
    Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [Ambrose Bierce, The Devil´s Dictionary, 1911]

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit