Index of Topics
This page contains quotes from well known secular scientists who show that there are serious problems with the philosophy of evolution.
Statements
of Non-Christian Scientists 
The
Barrier of Thermodynamics
Genetic Mysteries
Life from Non Life The Alleged Transitional
Forms
Neo-Catastrophism
verses Uniformitarianism Radiometric
Dating
Communism and
NazismLastly: Some Bible Verses
STATEMENTS OF NON-CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS
Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 192 pp.
"If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?
"This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros.
" Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time." pp. 51-52
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." p. 88
Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, Ltd., 1985), 368 pp.
"Even today we have no way of rigorously estimating the probability or degree of isolation of even one functional protein. It is surely a little premature to claim that random processes could have assembled mosquitoes and elephants when we still have to determine the actual probability of the discovery by chance of one single functional protein molecule." p. 324
"Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid."pp. 329-330
"Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. Numbers in the order of 1015 are of course completely beyond comprehension. Imagine an area about half the size of the USA (one million square miles) covered in a forest of trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile. If each tree contained one hundred thousand leaves the total number of leaves in the forest would be 1015, equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain." p. 330
"The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system; it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G. G. Simpson of approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written." p. 334
"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which--a functional protein or gene--is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy." p. 342
Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 176 pp.
"No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."
"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." p. 148
Hoyle, Sir Fred, The Intelligent Universe (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 256 pp.
"If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon." pp. 20-21
"In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth." p. 23
Mora, Peter T., "The Folly of Probability," in The Origins of Prebiological Systems, ed. Sydney Fox (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 482 pp.
"I believe we developed this practice (i.e., postulating prebiological natural selection) to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of a self-replicating state is zero. When for practical purposes the concept of infinite time and matter has to be invoked, that concept of probability is annulled. By such logic we can prove anything, such as that, no matter how complex, everything will repeat itself, exactly and immeasurably." p. 45
Wald, George, "The Origin of Life," in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1955, 270 pp.)
"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, . . given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once.
"Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the 'impossible' becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles." p. 12
Wickramasinghe, C., Interview in London Daily Express (August 14, 1981), Wickramasinghe is Professor of Applied Math & Astronomy, University College, Cardiff.
"From my earliest training as a scientist, I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be painfully shed.
"Each found that the odds against the spark of life igniting accidentally on Earth were '10 to the power of 40,000.'"
"They did calculations based on the size and age of the universe (15 billion years) and found that the odds against life beginning spontaneously anywhere in space were '10 to the power of 30.'"
"At the moment, I can't find any rational argument to knock down the view which argues for conversion to God.
We used to have an open mind; now we realize that the only logical answer to life is creation--and not accidental random shuffling."
Yockey, Hubert P., "Self-Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 91 (1981), pp. 13-31.
"The calculations presented in this paper show that the origin of a rather accurate genetic code, not necessarily the modern one, is a pons asinorum which must be crossed to pass over the abyss which separates crystallography, high polymer chemistry and physics from biology. The information content of amino acids sequences cannot increase until a genetic code with an adaptor function has appeared. Nothing which even vaguely resembles a code exists in the physico-chemical world. One must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present." p. 26
"A practical man will not believe a scenario which appears to him to have a very small probability if a tossed coin is observed to fall heads ten times consecutively, a practical man will believe it to be two-headed without examining it even though the sequence of all heads is exactly as probable as any other sequence" [Total No. permutations - 1024]. p. 27
"Faith in the infallible and comprehensive doctrines of dialectic materialism plays a crucial role in origin of life scenarios, and especially in exobiology and its ultimate consequence the doctrine of advanced extra-terrestrial civilization. That life must exist somewhere in the solar system on 'suitable planets elsewhere' is widely and tenaciously believed in spite of lack of evidence or even abundant evidence to the contrary." pp. 27-28 Back to Top
The Barrier of Thermodynamics
The two laws of thermodynamics are the most universally applicable and impregnably confirmed of all laws of science. In effect, they specify conservation in quantity and tendency to decline in quality, and so provide what seems to be an impregnable barrier to "upward" evolution. Although evolutionists have tried various ways of getting around this barrier, the fact remains that no case of true upward evolution has ever been observed to occur, nor has any proposed mechanism of evolution ever been found workable, and the thermodynamic barrier provides a good explanation as to why not.
Rifkin, Jeremy, Entropy: A New World View (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 305 pp.
"Now, however, a new world view is about to emerge, one that will eventually replace the Newtonian world machine as the organizing frame of history: the Entropy Law will preside as the ruling paradigm over the next period of history. Albert Einstein said that it is the premier law of all of science: Sir Arthur Eddington referred to it as the supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe. The Entropy Law is the second law of thermodynamics. The first law states that all matter and energy in the universe is constant, that it cannot be created or destroyed. Only its form can change but never its essence. The second law, the Entropy Law, states that matter and energy can only be changed in one direction, that is, from usable to unusable, or from available to unavailable, or from ordered to disordered." p. 6
"There will also be those who will stubbornly refuse to accept the fact that the Entropy Law reigns supreme over all physical reality in the world. They will insist that the entropy process only applies in selective instances and that any attempt to apply it more broadly to society is to engage in the use of metaphor. Quite simply, they are wrong." p. 8
"The Entropy Law says that evolution dissipates the overall available energy for life on this planet. Our concept of evolution is the exact opposite. We believe that evolution somehow magically creates greater overall value and order on earth. Now that the environment we live in is becoming so dissipated and disordered that it is apparent to the naked eye, we are for the first time beginning to have second thoughts about our views on evolution, progress, and the creation of things of material value. More about the implications of this in later sections." p. 55
Smith, Charles J., "Problems with Entropy in Biology," Biosystems, vol. 1 (1975), pp. 259-265.
"The thermodynamicist immediately clarifies the latter question by pointing out that the Second Law classically refers to isolated systems which exchange neither energy nor matter with the environment; biological systems are open and exchange both energy and matter.
" This explanation, however, is not completely satisfying, because it still leaves the problem of how or why the ordering process has arisen (an apparent lowering of the entropy), and a number of scientists have wrestled with this issue.
"Bertalanffy called the relation between irreversible thermodynamics and information theory one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in biology. I would go further and include the problem of meaning and value." p. 259
Huxley, Julian, Evolution in Action (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 182 pp.
"A proportion of favorable 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 understatement--after all, that only means one step every two thousand 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 a thousand strains to get one favorable mutation; a million strains (a thousand squared) to get one containing two favorable 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 favorable 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 500 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 working of natural selection and the properties of living substance which make natural selection inevitable!" pp. 45-46
Stravropoulos, George P., Letter-to-the-Editor, re. Weisskopf, "The Frontiers and Limits of Science," as published in July 1977 issue of American Scientist, vol. 65 (November-December 1977), pp. 674-676.
"He makes it appear as though crystals and highly ordered organic molecules belong to the same class, when in fact they do not. When a crystal is broken up, the smaller crystals are physically and chemically identical to the original. This is never observed with (organic) molecules; when the original molecule is split up, lesser molecules appear, and part of the original information is lost. To ignore such fundamental differences in an effort to arrive at some general overview or law is to create a false overview, a pseudolaw.
" To say that 'there is an obvious tendency of nature from disorder to order and organization' and to advance this idea to a 'fourth law' is to misunderstand completely and to compromise all of thermodynamics.
" Yet, under ordinary conditions, no complex organic molecule can ever form spontaneously but will rather disintegrate, in agreement with the second law. Indeed, the more complex it is, the more unstable it is, and the more assured, sooner or later, is its disintegration. Photosynthesis and all life processes, and life itself, despite confused or deliberately confusing language, cannot yet be understood in terms of thermodynamics or any other exact science.
"The thrust of Dr. Weisskopf's argument that order appears in a cooling body runs against his statement that the flow of heat from the sun to the Earth resulted in photosynthesis and the development of 'highly hierarchical' forms of organic matter on earth. For one thing, why only Earth? Why has Mars failed the test? And for another, the sun cools and Earth necessarily warms up (if we consider only the 'sun-Earth system') and therefore it is the sun that should be drawing toward order, Earth toward disorder." p. 674 Back to Top
Genetic Mysteries
Many geneticists are exploring the mysteries of the DNA-RNA complex and the activities of the many genes involved in molecular biology. It does seem that the whole subject becomes more complex--even more chaotic--with increasing understanding.
Jones, Steve, The Language of Genes (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 272 pp.
"Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers, they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance. What sex is, why it evolved and how it works are the biggest unsolved problems in biology. Sex must be important as it is so expensive. If some creatures can manage with just females, so that every individual produces copies of herself, why do so many bother with males? A female who gave them up might be able to produce twice as many daughters as before; and they would carry all her genes. Instead, a sexual female wastes time, first in finding a mate and then in producing sons who carry only half of her inheritance. We are still not certain why males exist; and why, if we must have them at all, nature needs so many. Surely, one or two would be enough to impregnate all the females but, with few exceptions, the ratio of males to females remain stubbornly equal throughout the living world." p. 84
Takahata, N., "A Genetic Perspective on the Origin and History of Humans," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 26 (1995), pp. 343-372.
"Hypotheses about the origin of Homo sapiens, genetic differentiation among human populations, and changes in population size are quantified. None of the hypotheses seems compatible with the observed DNA variation." p. 343
"Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination." p. 344
Yam, Philip, "Talking Trash," Scientific American, vol. 272 (March 1995)
"What's in a word? Several nucleotides, some researchers might say. By applying statistical methods developed by linguists, investigators have found that 'junk' parts of the genomes of many organisms may be expressing a language. These regions have traditionally been regarded as useless accumulations of material from millions of years of evolution. 'The feeling is,' says Boston University physicist H. Eugene Stanley, 'that there's something going on in the noncoding region.'"
"Junk DNA got its name because the nucleotides there (the fundamental pieces of DNA, combined into so-called base pairs) do not encode instructions for making proteins, the basis for life. In fact, the vast majority of genetic material in organisms from bacteria to mammals consists of noncoding DNA segments, which are interspersed with the coding parts. In humans, about 97 percent of the genome is junk."
"Over the past 10 years, biologists began to suspect that this feature is not entirely trivial." p. 24
Boxer, Sarah, ed., "On the Rescue Gene and the Origin of Species," Discover, vol. 8 (August 1987)
"By definition, a new species arises when it splits off from a parent species. But a species is a species only if it doesn't interbreed with other species, including the one from which it arose. The critical question in species formation is how the barrier to reproduction is erected and maintained. As it turns out, the species barrier is a two-layered defense. There are pre-mating mechanisms--behavioral, ecological, and physical differences that make it difficult for two species to mate. If that line of defense fails, second-line, post-mating mechanisms ensure that the progeny of the barrier-crashers are either rendered sterile (like mules) or they die before reaching maturity." p. 6
"The rescue gene turned out to be strange indeed. While it weakened the general health of the flies that carried it, it gave life to their hybrid progeny. However, the gene didn't completely break through the species barrier; it couldn't render the males fertile. 'The flies live,' says Hutter, 'but they're sterile.' Which raises a troublesome question: If the parents that carry it don't benefit from it, and offspring that inherit it can't pass it on, how could the gene possibly have evolved?" p. 7
Cohen, Jon, "Getting All Turned Around Over the Origins of Life on Earth," Science, vol. 267 (March 3, 1995), pp. 1265-1266.
"Why do the sugar molecules in DNA and RNA twist to the right in all known organisms? Similarly, all of the amino acids from which proteins are formed twist to the left. The reason these molecules have such uniform handedness, or 'chirality,' is not known, but there is no shortage of theories on the subject. And, as was clear at a recent meeting on the topic in Los Angeles, there is also no shortage of passion, which is understandable, because the question of homochirality speaks to the mother of all scientific mysteries: the origin of life." p. 1265
"The meeting participants did agree on one thing: Homochirality--the total predominance of one chiral form, or 'enantiomer'--is necessary for present-day life because the cellular machinery that has evolved to keep organisms alive and replicating, from microorganisms to humans, is built around the fact that genetic material veers right and amino acids veer left." p. 1265
"One division came over a question that resembles the chicken-or-the-egg riddle: What came first, homochirality or life? Organic chemist William Bonner, professor emeritus at Stanford University, argued that homochirality must have preceded life." p. 1265
"Bonner argued that homochirality is essential for life because without it, genetic material could not copy itself. Specifically, studies have shown that the two complementary strands of genetic material that make up DNA cannot bind with each other if they are in a 'racemic' mixture, a state in which there is an equilibrium of left-handed and right-handed enantiomers."p. 1265
Dose, Professor Dr. Klaus, "The Origin of Life; More Questions than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 13, no. 4 (1988), pp. 348-356. Dose is Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Johannes Gutenberg University, West Germany.
"Abstract. More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance." p. 384
"Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in modern cells came into existence." p. 348
"It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate, a stage in which hypothetical arguments often dominate over facts based on experimentation or observation." p. 349
"In spite of many attempts, there have been no breakthroughs during the past 30 years to help to explain the origin of chirality in living cells." p. 352
Dyson, Freeman, "Honoring Dirac," Science, vol. 185 (September 27, 1974), pp. 1160-1161. Dyson was at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
"The problems of reconstructing possible pathways of prebiotic evolution in the absence of any kind of fossil evidence are indeed formidable. Successful attack on these problems will require, on the one hand, the boldness to imagine and create new concepts describing the organization of not-yet-living populations of molecules and, on the other hand, the humility to learn the hard way, by laborious experiment, which molecular pathways are consistent with the stubborn facts of chemistry. We are still at the very beginning of the quest for understanding of the origin of life. We do not yet have even a rough picture of the nature of the obstacles that prebiotic evolution has had to overcome. We do not have a well-defined set of criteria by which to judge whether any given theory of the origin of life is adequate." p. 1161
Gould, Stephen Jay, "An Early Start," Natural History, vol. 87 (February 1978), pp. 10-24.
"Early in November, an announcement of the discovery of some fossil prokaryotes from South Africa pushed the antiquity of life back to 3.4 billion years." p. 10
"If true monerans were alive 3.4 billion years ago, then the common ancestor of monerans and 'methanogens' must be considerably more ancient. Since the oldest dated rocks, the Isua Supracrustals of West Greenland, are 3.8 billion years old, we are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the earth's surface and the origin of life." p. 10
"Life apparently arose about as soon as the earth became cool enough to support it." p. 24
"Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life's history." p. 24
"The history of life, as I read it, is a series of long stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and set up the next stable era. My favorite metaphor is a world of occasional pulses, driving recalcitrant systems from one stable state to the next." p. 24
Haskins, Caryl P., "Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970," American Scientist, vol. 59 (May/June 1971), p. 298-307.
"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve, though dim and narrow pencils of illumination already play over them. The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery. Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation." p. 305
Hofstadter, Douglas R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 777 pp.
"A natural and fundamental question to ask on learning of these incredibly interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: 'How did they ever get started in the first place?' It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages--but a bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond one's power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. They all run aground on this most central of all central questions: 'How did the Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosomes and RNA molecules), originate?' For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer. And perhaps, experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer--at least for a while." p. 548
Maddox, John, "The Genesis Code by Numbers," Nature, vol. 367 (January 13, 1994)
"It was already clear that the genetic code is not merely an abstraction but the embodiment of life's mechanisms; the consecutive triplets of nucleotides in DNA (called codons) are inherited but they also guide the construction of proteins.
"So it is disappointing that the origin of the genetic code is still as obscure as the origin of life itself." p. 111
Morowitz, Harold J., "The Six Million-Dollar Man," Science News (July 31, 1976)
"High school textbooks used to make a big point about the materials that make up the human body being worth about 97 cents. Yale molecular biologist, Harold J. Morowitz got out a biochemical company's catalog and added up the cost of the synthesized materials, such as hemoglobin and came up with a six million-dollar man ($6,000,015.44) to be exact).
"Professor Morowitz's calculations drive home a more important point, however--that 'information is more expensive than matter.' What the biochemical companies offer is simply the highest 'informational' (most organized) state of materials commercially available. And even these are mostly taken from living animals; if synthesis of all the compounds offered had been done from basic elements, their cost might be as high as $6 billion.
"The logical extreme of the exercise, obviously, is that science is nowhere near getting close to synthesizing a human. Just to take the next step of organization--the organelle level--would cost perhaps $6 trillion." p. 73 Back to Top
Life from Non-Life
Evolutionists have come up with various proposals as to how life may have evolved from non-living chemicals. However, this is not happening now, and they have been utterly unable to synthesize life in the laboratory, so all such ideas are outside the scope of science. In this area, everything is speculation, and evolutionists are forced to assume that some imaginary primitive replicating molecule evolved by some unknown process in an imaginary primeval soup under assumed electrical phenomena in a non-existent ancient atmosphere.
Orgel, Leslie E., "Darwinism at the Very Beginning of Life," New Scientist, vol. 94 (April 15, 1982), pp. 149-152. Orgel is at UCSD, one of the top biochemists in the world and of special repute in origin-of-life studies.
"We do not yet understand even the general features of the origin of the genetic code. The origin of the genetic code is the most baffling aspect of the problem of the origins of life, and a major conceptual or experimental breakthrough may be needed before we can make any substantial progress." p. 151
"Since the time of Louis Pasteur, the origin of optical activity in biological systems has attracted a great deal of attention. Two very different questions must be answered. First, why do all amino acids in proteins or all nucleotides in nucleic acids have the same handedness? Secondly, why are the animo acids all left-handed (L-) and the nucleotides all right-handed (D-)? We do not know the answer to either question, but we can make a number of plausible suggestions." p. 151
Orgel, Leslie E., "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), pp. 77-83.
"It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means." p. 78
"We proposed that RNA might well have come first and established what is now called the RNA world. This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: a capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of protein synthesis." p. 78
"The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life, emerged may not be revealed in the near future." p. 83
Yockey, Hubert P., "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 67 (1977), pp. 377-398.
"Certain old untenable ideas have served only to confuse the solution of the problem. Negentropy is not a concept because entropy cannot be negative. The role that negentropy has played in previous discussions is replaced by 'complexity' as defined in information theory." p. 377
"Attempts to relate the idea of 'order' in a crystal with biological organization or specificity must be regarded as a play on words which cannot stand careful scrutiny." p. 380
"An uninvited guest at any discussion of the origin of life and of evolution from the materialistic reductionist point of view, is the role of thermodynamic entropy and the 'heat death' of the universe which it predicts." p. 380
"The 'warm little pond' scenario was invented ad hoc to serve as a materialistic reductionist explanation of the origin of life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will remain ad hoc until such evidence is found. One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written." p. 396
Anonymous,"Hoyle on Evolution," Nature, vol. 294 (November 12, 1981)
"The essence of his argument last week was that the information content of the higher forms of life is represented by the number 1040,000--representing the specificity with which some 2000 genes, each of which might be chosen from 1020 nucleotide sequences of the appropriate length, might be defined. Evolutionary processes would, Hoyle said, require several Hubble times to yield such a result. The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that 'a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.'
"Of adherents of biological evolution, Hoyle said he was at a loss to understand 'biologists' widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.'" p. 105 Back to Top
The Alleged Transitional Forms
If evolution had really taken place in the past, three ought to be multitudes of transitional forms preserved in the rocks. Instead, evolutionists have been able to cite only a handful of candidates out of the billions of known fossils. These are mainly the lungfishes, the mammal-like reptiles, the archaeopteryx, the horses, and--more recently--the so-called walking whales.
When these are examined more closely, however, they don't fill the bill at all. Either they are out of place in geologic time or they are separate kinds in their own right or both.
Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, Ltd., 1985), 368 pp.
"Since Darwin's time the search for missing links in the fossil record has continued on an ever-increasing scale. So vast has been the expansion of paleontological activity over the past one hundred years that probably 99.9% of all paleontological work has been carried out since 1860. Only a small fraction of the hundred thousand or so fossil species known today were known to Darwin. But virtually all the new fossil species discovered since Darwin's time have either been closely related to known forms or, like the Poganophoras, strange unique types of unknown affinity." pp. 160-161
"The systematic status and biological affinity of a fossil organism is far more difficult to establish than in the case of a living form, and can never be established with any degree of certainty. To begin with, ninety-nine per cent of the biology of any organism resides in its soft anatomy, which is inaccessible in a fossil." p. 177
"The possibility that the mammal-like reptiles were completely reptilian in terms of their anatomy and physiology cannot be excluded. The only evidence we have regarding their soft biology is their cranial endocasts and these suggest that, as far as their central nervous systems were concerned, they were entirely reptilian." p. 180
"Further, there is always the possibility that groups, such as the mammal-like reptiles which have left no living representative, might have possessed features in their soft biology completely different from any known reptile or mammal which would eliminate them completely as potential mammalian ancestors, just as the discovery of the living coelacanth revealed features in its soft anatomy which were unexpected and cast doubt on the ancestral status of its rhipidistian relatives." p. 182
"On the other hand, the fact that, when estimates are made of the percentage of living forms found as fossils, the percentage turns out to be surprisingly high, suggesting that the fossil record may not be as bad as it often maintained. Of the 329 living families of terrestrial vertebrates 261 or 79.1% have been found as fossils and, when birds (which are poorly fossilized) are excluded, the percentage rises to 87.8%." p. 189
"However, as more protein sequences began to accumulate during the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent that the molecules were not going to provide any evidence of sequential arrangements in nature, but were rather going to reaffirm the traditional view that the system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which all direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent. Moreover, the divisions turned out to be more mathematically perfect than even most die-hard typologists would have predicted." pp. 277-278
Gibbons, Ann, "New Feathered Fossil Brings Dinosaurs and Birds Closer," Science, vol. 274 (November1, 1996), pp. 720-721.
"But confirming whether the impressions are feathers, scales, or something else may prove to be difficult." p. 720
" the Chinese fossil is too recent--121 million years old--for the dinosaur to have given rise to the 150-million-year-old Jurassic bird, Archaeopteryx." p. 270
"But these ideas on the evolution of feathers are, well, for the birds, according to University of North Carolina ornithologist Alan Feduccia, the best-known critic of the theory that dinosaurs gave rise to birds. He sees no proof that the dinosaur had feathers and doubts that any will be forthcoming. Feathered wings were 'the most complex appendage produced by vertebrates,' he says; it's implausible that an animal would have developed feathers if it did not fly." p. 270
Olson, Storrs L., and Alan Feduccia, "Flight Capability and the Pectoral Girdle of Archaeopteryx," Nature, vol. 278 (March 15, 1979), pp. 247-248.
"In conclusion, the robust furcula of Archaeopteryx would have provided a suitable point of origin for a well developed pectoralis muscle. Furthermore, the supracoracoideus muscle, and hence an ossified sternum, is not necessary to effect the recovery stroke of the wing. Thus the main evidence for Archaeopteryx having been a terrestrial, cursorial predator is invalidated. There is nothing in the structure of the pectoral girdle of Archaeopteryx that would preclude its having been a powered flier." p. 248
Berg, Christine, "How Did the Australopithecines Walk? A Biomechanical Study of the Hip and Thigh of Australopithecus Afarensis," Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 26 (April 1994), pp. 259-273. Berg is at the Natural History Museum in Paris, France.
"The present results lead to the conclusion that the bipedalism of the Australopithecus must have differed from that of Homo. Not only did Australopithecus have less ability to maintain hip and knee extension during the walk, but also probably moved the pelvis and lower limb differently. It seems that the australopithecine walk differed significantly from that of humans, involving a sort of waddling gait, with large rotary movements of the pelvis and shoulders around the vertebral column. Such a walk, likely required a greater energetic cost than does human bipedalism. The stride length and frequency of australopithecines, and consequently their speed, should have differed from that of Homo in contrast to some recent hypotheses of dynamic similarity among hominids. A previous paper has suggested that the pelvic proportions of Australopithecus could provide some arguments for an arboreal locomotion. The results of the present study suggest amplification of this opinion." p. 271
Gould, Stephen Jay, "Empire of the Apes," Natural History, vol. 96 (May 1987), pp. 20-25.
"The oldest human fossils are less than 4 million years old, and we do not know which branch on the copious bush of apes budded off the twig that led to our lineage. (In fact, except for the link of Asian Sivapithecus to the modern orangutan, we cannot trace any fossil ape to any living species. Paleontologists have abandoned the once popular notion that Ramapithecus might be a source of human ancestry.) Thus, sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution--the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all." p. 24
Ager, Derek V., The New Catastrophism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 231 pp.
"Probably the most convincing proof of the local rapidity of terrestrial sedimentation is provided by the presence in the coal measures of trees still in position of life." p. 47
" we cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed and that at other times there were long breaks in sedimentation, though it looks both uniform and continuous." p. 49
"One of the most remarkable geological sights I have ever seen was at Mikulov in Czechoslovakia where an excavation in Danubian loess shows the remains of literally dozens of mammoths." p. 52
"I suppose I had better mention the concept of a divine creator, but personally I do not find that particular hypothesis useful and I am tempted to ask about the cosmic accident that created Him (presumably before the 'big bangs' that started the universe). And what did He do before He created the world and mankind?" p. 149 Back to Top
Neo-Catastrophism versus Uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism--the maxim that "the present is the key to the past" has been the governing principle in historical geology ever since the days of Hutton and Lyell, serving also as the key factor in the rise of Darwinian evolutionism. Originating as a reaction to the Biblical catastrophism implied by the global flood of Genesis, it assumed that present geologic processes acting over vast ages of time are sufficient to explain the development of all the geological features of the earth's sedimentary crust.
Modern geologists are now realizing that this approach does not work, and so they are developing what is called "neo-catastrophism," or "episodicity." This system postulates intermittent regional--or even global--catastrophes, accompanied by mass extinctions (the "punctuations" in the "stasis" of modern biologists and paleontologists), all within the standard uniformitarian framework of billions of years. They are still insistent that Biblical catastrophism must be rejected, but it is more obvious all the time that the hard facts of geology do correlate with one worldwide hydraulic cataclysm in the not-too-distant past.
Ager, Derek V., The New Catastrophism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 231 pp. p xi
"On that side, too, were the obviously untenable views of bible-oriented fanatics, obsessed with myths such as Noah's flood, and of classicists thinking of Nemesis. That is why I think it necessary to include the following 'disclaimer': in view of the misuse that my words have been put to in the past, I wish to say that nothing in this book should be taken out of context and thought in any way to support the views of the 'creationists' (who I refuse to call 'scientific')."
"My thesis is that in all branches of geology there has been a return to ideas of rare violent happenings and episodicity. So the past, as now interpreted by many geologists, is not what it used to be. It has certainly changed a great deal from what I learned about it in those far-off days when I was a student." p. xii
"I must emphasize that I am concerned with the whole history of the earth and its life and in particular with the dangerous doctrine of uniformitarianism." p. xvi
"This is not the old-fashioned catastrophism of Noah's flood and huge conflagrations. I do not think the bible-oriented fundamentalists are worth honouring with an answer to their nonsense. No scientist could be content with one very ancient reference of doubtful authorship" p. xix
"So there was never anything gradual or continuous about igneous activity, either volcanic or plutonic and here surely, I am entitled to use the term 'catastrophism.' In modern times it has certainly always been catastrophic for those people living in the vicinity." p. 163
"I am sorry if I appear to be neurotic about this, especially as Velikovsky seems to be on the side of the catastrophists, but I do not want to be associated in any way with such nonsense. This, together with the writings of the Californian 'creationists' are the reason for my disclaimer at the beginning of this book." p. 180
"Always it comes back to the extinction of the dinosaurs. I must admit to being a little tired of those stupid great beasts, though they are the best recruiting sergeants for our subject among young people (including myself). Their importance, in my view, is grossly exaggerated." p. 186
Davies, Gordon L. H., "Bangs Replace Whimpers," review of The New Catastrophism, by Derek Ager (Cambridge University Press, 1993, 231 pp.), Nature, vol. 365 (September 9, 1993)
"Now all is changed. We are rewriting geohistory. Where once we saw a smooth conveyor belt, we now see a stepped escalator. Upon that escalator the treads are long periods of relative quiescence when little happens. The risers are episodes of relatively sudden change when the landscape and its inhabitants are translated into some fresh state. Even the most staid of modern geologists are invoking sedimentary surges, explosive phases of organic evolution, volcanic blackouts, continental collisions and terrifying meteoroid impacts. We live in an age of neocatastrophism." p. 115
"As a vastly experienced field-observer (at the time of his writing he had plied his hammer to the face of 57 countries) he takes us from a Norwegian landslip to pillow-lavas in New Zealand and from Arizona's meteor crater to the flysch of Hokkaido. And everywhere the message is the same. We are on an escalator, not a conveyor belt." p. 115 Back to Top
Radiometric Dating
The dating of geologic ages and events in terms of years rather than stage of evolution depends on a handful of radiometric techniques--especially the decay of uranium into lead. Also of importance are the potassium/argon method, the rubidium/strontium method, the fission-track method and a few others of less importance. These are widely trumpeted as proving the billion-year order of magnitude age of the earth and of the evolutionary process.
Not so widely known, however, are the many untestable assumptions in these methods (e.g., isolated system, constant decay rate, initial conditions) as well as the fact that most such measurements give inconsistent results and are never published. The bottom line is that no radiometrically determined date obtained by these methods is valid. Simply by changing the assumptions, all actual radiometric dates can be brought down to essentially zero.
Boyle, R. W., "Some Geochemical Considerations on Lead Isotope Dating of Lead Deposits," Economic Geology, vol. 54, no. 1 (January/February 1959), pp. 130-135.
"The ratio of the lead isotopes in deposits deriving their lead from such rocks [i.e., Precambrian granites] is, therefore, neither a measure of the age of the deposits nor the age of the sedimentary host rocks but is rather a function of the complex geochemical processes through which the lead may have passed." p. 133
"From these examples it is readily apparent that the amount of accumulated radiogenic lead contributed to a deposit is the deciding factor in age determinations and must be known before any age can be assigned to a deposit." p. 135
Brooks, C., D. E. James, and S. R. Hart, "Ancient Lithosphere: Its Role in Young Continental Volcanism," Science, vol. 193 (September 17, 1976), pp. 1086-1094.
"One serious consequence of the mantle isochron model is that crystallization ages determined on basic igneous rocks by the Rb-Sr whole-rock technique can be greater than the true age by many hundreds of millions of years. This problem of inherited age is more serious for younger rocks, and there are well-documented instances of conflicts between stratigraphic age and Rb-Sr in the literature." p. 1093
Catanzaro, E. J., and J. L. Kulp, "Discordant Zircons from the Little Belt (Montana), Beartooth (Montana) and Santa Catalina (Arizona) Mountains," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 28 (January 1964), pp. 87-124.
"The common occurrence of discordant results in isotopic geochronometry presents an intriguing and complicated problem. It has become obvious that many mineral samples used in age determinations have not been closed systems throughout their histories. The interpretation of isotopic ages ultimately requires knowledge of the processes which can cause alteration of the isotopic ratios." p. 87
Engels, Joan C., "Effects of Sample Purity on Discordant Mineral Ages Found in K-Ar Dating," Journal of Geology, vol. 79 (September 1971), pp. 609-616.
"It is now well known that K-Ar ages obtained from different minerals in a single rock may be strikingly discordant." p. 609
"Discordances between mineral K-Ar ages in a single rock sample are common, and if these minerals are mutual contaminants, purity levels must be carefully established in order to avoid mixed, meaningless ages." p. 615
Evernden, J. F., D. E. Savage, G. H. Curtis, and G. T. James, "Potassium-Argon Dates and the Cenozoic Mammalian Chronology of North America," American Journal of Science, vol. 262 (February 1964), pp. 145-198.
"The materials used in this study were welded tuffs, extrusive flows of various lithologies, and pyroclastic non-welded vitric and crystal vitric tuffs. These materials were not used indiscriminately, however; a point that cannot be stressed too strongly. Careful evaluation of each sample and careful sample preparation is the cardinal rule." p. 154
"Processes of rock alteration may render a volcanic rock useless for potassium-argon dating. Devitrification of glass results in a microcrystalline aggregate that is apparently too fine-grained to retain argon at low temperatures. We have analyzed several devitrified glasses of known age, and all have yielded ages that are too young. Some gave virtually zero ages although the geological evidence suggested that devitrification took place shortly after the formation of the deposit." p. 154
"For dating purposes the sample must be virtually unaffected by weathering or post-depositional chemical alteration [applies to 'whole-rock' analyses of basic fine-grained flows]." p. 155
Table 4--[Gives 7 'ages' of Hawaiian basalt.
Age Scatter: 0 to 3.34 (106). Avg. age taken at 250,000 years.] p. 157
"Vertebrate paleontologists have relied upon 'stage-of-evolution' as the criterion for determining the chronologic relationships of faunas. Before the establishment of physical dates, evolutionary progression was the best method for dating fossiliferous strata." p. 166
Faure, G., and J. L. Powell, Strontium Isotope Geology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972).
"It is readily apparent that these rocks [i.e., the Pahrump diabase from the Panamint Mountains in California] scatter widely on the isochron diagram. Dates ranging from 1.09 to 34 billion years could be calculated for individual specimens. Dates in excess of the age of the earth (4.6 x 109 years) are obviously not acceptable. A possible explanation for the scatter of points on the isochron diagram is that these rocks may have been variously enriched in radiogenic 87Sr which might have been derived from the adjacent granite and gneiss during Mesozoic metamorphism. These results indicate that even total-rock systems may be open during metamorphism and may have their isotopic systems changed, making it impossible to determine their geologic age." p. 102
"All of the above conclusions regarding the suitability for dating of rocks and minerals apply only when the rocks or their minerals have not been altered by chemical weathering at or near the surface of the Earth. Because most rocks that are used for dating are usually collected from outcrops, the effects of chemical weathering on the 87Rb-87Sr decay scheme may be important." p. 102
Gentry, Robert V., et al., "Radiohalos in Coalified Wood: New Evidence Relating to the Time of Uranium Introduction and Coalification," Science, vol. 194 (October 15, 1976), pp. 315-318.
"Abstract. The discovery of embryonic halos around uranium-rich sites that exhibit very high 238U/206Pb ratios suggests that uranium introduction may have occurred far more recently than previously supposed. The discovery of 210PO Halos derived from uranium daughters, some elliptical in shape, further suggests that uranium-daughter infiltration occurred prior to coalification when the radionuclide transport rate was relatively high and the matrix still plastically deformable." p. 315
"Such extraordinary values admit the possibility that both the initial U infiltration and coalification could possibly have occurred with the past several thousand years." pp. 316-317
"Since it seems clear that the U radiocenters formed during the initial introduction of U and if this were as long ago as the Triassic or Jurassic are generally thought to be, then there should be evident not only fully developed, but overexposed U halos as well." p. 317
"If remobilization is not the explanation, then these ratios raise some crucial questions about the validity of present concepts regarding the antiquity of these geological formations and about the time required for coalification." p. 317
Hayatsu, A., "K-Ar Isochron Age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia," Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16 (April 1979), pp. 973-975.
"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." p. 974
Jueneman, Frederic B., "Secular Catastrophism," Industrial Research and Development (June 1982)
"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years, based on radiodecay rates of uranium and thorium. Such 'confirmation' may be short-lived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man.
"The mechanism for resetting such nuclear clocks is not clear, but knowledge has never really stood in our way in the quest for ignorance. Meanwhile, such prehistoric 'creatures' as Nessie from Loch Ness or Champ from Lake Champlain, as well as others, may not be avatars at all, but survivors from the last catastrophe.
"Even as we." p. 21
Macdougall, J. D., "Fission-Track Dating," Scientific American, vol. 235 (December 1976), pp.
114-122. Macdougall was Associate Professor of Geological Research, Scripps Institute, UCSD.
"Uranium 238 is the only significant producer of tracks in terrestrial rocks and in natural and man-made glasses." p. 115
"The fourth assumption presupposes that the concentration of uranium in any specimen has remained constant over the specimen's lifetime. A combination of elevated temperatures and ground-water percolation can leach away a proportion of the uranium present in rock crystals. The mobility of the uranium is such that as one part of a rock formation is being impoverished another part can become abnormally enriched. Such changes can also take place at relatively low temperatures." p. 118
"The spontaneous-track densities in the calcite crystals [growing in the marrow cavities of old bones, among them the fossil bones of the genus Australopithecus unearthed in the limestone caves of South Africa] proved to be much lower than we had expected, suggesting that the fossil bones were by no means as old as other evidence indicated. It appears that exposure to ambient temperatures over a period of a million years or so is enough to anneal existing fission tracks in calcite and thereby give rise to anomalously young age determinations." p. 119
Stansfield, William D., The Science of Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 614 pp. Stansfield was at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"Several methods have been devised for estimating the age of the earth and its layers of rocks. These methods rely heavily on the assumption of uniformitarianism, i.e., natural processes have proceeded at relatively constant rates throughout the earth's history." p. 80
"It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological 'clock.'" p. 84 Back to Top
Communism and Nazism
Among the most bitter fruits of evolutionism are the unspeakably cruel systems fathered by Karl Marx (followed by Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.) and by Adolf Hitler (who was building on the ideas of Nietzsche and Haeckel and others). It is arguable whether communism (with its anarchist and socialist cousins) or Nazism (with Mussolini's fascism and similar dictatorships) have produced the greater amounts of death and suffering in the world, but both were and are vile and deadly.
It is very significant, therefore, that both Marx and Hitler, with all their respective forbears, associates and successors, were doctrinaire evolutionists, trying to build their respective societies on evolutionary premises. There is abundant documentation of this assessment and, in fact, few would even question it.
Bergman, Jerry, "Eugenics and the Development of Nazi Race Policy," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 44 (June 1992), pp. 109-123. Bergman is a Professor of Science at Northwest Technical College in Archbold, Ohio. He holds two doctorates in psychology and biology.
"Abstract. A central government policy of the Hitler administration was the breeding of a 'superior race.' This required, at the very least, preventing the 'inferior races' from mixing with 'superior' ones in order to reduce contamination of the latter's gene pool. The 'superior race' belief is based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin's original 'survival of the fittest' theory. A review of the writings of Hitler and contemporary German biologists finds that Darwin's theory and writings had a major influence upon Nazi policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by selective breeding, using the same techniques that farmers used to breed a superior strain of cattle. In the formulation of his racial policies, he relied heavily upon the Darwinian evolution model, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel. They culminated in the 'final solution,' the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged were 'inferior races.'" p. 109
Cartmill, Matt, David R. Pilbeam, and Glynn Isaac, "One Hundred Years of Paleoanthropology," American Scientist, vol. 74 (July/August 1986), pp. 410-420.
"The nonscientific influence was the Holocaust. The military collapse of Germany and the unveiling of the death camps prompted a universal revulsion of the intelligentsia against the intellectual traditions that had contributed to Nazi ideology, foremost among them the notion of a hierarchical subordination of human populations. That notion, which had underlain most earlier thinking about human evolution, was extirpated from anthropological thought after World War II and replaced with a firm faith in the unity, continuity, and equality of the Family of Man." p. 148
Gasmann, Daniel, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (New York: American Elsevier, 1971), 208 pp.
"Along with his social Darwinist followers, [Haeckel] set about to demonstrate the 'aristocratic' and non-democratic character of the laws of nature. Up to his death in 1919, Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed-bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany's major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism." pp. xvii
"[Hitler] stressed and singled out the idea of biological evolution as the most forceful weapon against traditional religion and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to the teaching of evolution. For Hitler, evolution was the hallmark of modern science and culture, and he defended its veracity as tenaciously as Haeckel." p. 168
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), 422 pp.
"From the 'Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for life' [i.e., Darwin's subtitle to Origin of Species], it was a short step to the preservation of favoured individuals, classes or nations--and from their preservation to their glorification. Social Darwinism has often been understood in this sense: as a philosophy, exalting competition, power and violence over convention, ethics and religion. Thus it has become a portmanteau of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and dictatorship, of the cults of the hero, the superman, and the master race." pp. 343-344
"Recent expressions of this philosophy, such as [Hitler's] Mein Kampf, are, unhappily, too familiar to require exposition here. And it is by an obvious process of analogy and education that they are said to derive from Darwinism. Nietzsche predicted that this would be the consequence if the Darwinian theory gained general acceptance." p. 344
"There was truth in Engels' eulogy on Marx: 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.' What they both celebrated was the internal rhythm and course of life, the one the life of nature, the other of society, that proceeded by fixed laws, undistracted by the will of God or men. There were no catastrophes in history as there were none in nature. There were no inexplicable acts, no violations of the natural order. God was as powerless as individual men to interfere with the internal, self-adjusting dialectic of change and development." pp. 348-349
Hoffman, Peter, Hitler's Personal Security (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 321 pp.
"Hitler believed in struggle as a Darwinian principle of human life that forced every people to try to dominate all others; without struggle they would rot and perish. Even in his own defeat in April 1945 Hitler expressed his faith in the survival of the stronger and declared the Slavic peoples to have proven themselves the stronger." p. 264
Hsü, Kenneth J., "Sedimentary Petrology and Biologic Evolution," Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, vol. 56 (September 1986), pp. 729-732.
"Darwin all but ignored the fossil record, complaining about the imperfections of the geologic record. He and his followers wrote the history of life on the basis of what they thought the history should be. The Darwinistic dictum of variation/adaption/natural selection/speciation has been supposed to be the rule in the history of life. This method of writing history is very much like attempting to develop a history of the antique by studying sociology, psychology, and political science of the present world." p. 729
"Haeckelian Darwinism found its terroristic expression in national socialism. For Hitler, evolution was the hallmark of modern science and his 'views of history, politics, religion, Christianity, nature, eugenics, science, art, and evolution, coincide for the most part with those of Haeckel.' In the biological theory of Darwin, Hitler found his most powerful weapon against traditional values.
"The rising tides of modern creationism may have been inspired by a reaction against the philosophy of social Darwinism. But creationists are barking up the wrong tree. We have plenty of evidence in the geological record for the Darwinian theory of common descent. The root of the evil is not the postulate of evolution, but the Darwinian emphasis on natural selection as a consequence of biotic interactions." p. 730
Posner, G. L, and J. Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 364 pp.
"In Munich, meanwhile, Joseph was taking courses in anthropology and paleontology, as well as medicine. Probably it was a combination of the political climate and that his real interest in genetics and evolution happened to coincide with the developing concept that some human beings afflicted by disorders were unfit to reproduce, even to live. His consummate ambition was to succeed in this fashionable new field of evolutionary research." p. 9
[Joseph Mengele, the "angel of death" at Auschwitz, noted for his gruesome experiments on humans at Auschwitz, was a respectable German medical student in the 1930's.]
Proctor, Robert N., "Science and Nazism," review of Murderous Science, by Benno Müller-Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 208 pp.), Science, vol. 241 (August 5, 1988), pp. 730-731.
"The thesis of the work is that 'human genetics played a crucial role in the atrocities committed by the Nazis.'
"Evidence for this claim is powerful, and disturbing. Eugene Fischer, for example, as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (1927-1942), supervised the training of SS physicians and helped to administer the sterilization of German-Negro half-breeds in the Rhineland." p. 730
"Much of this book reads as a catalog of horrors. We read how scholars at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research scrambled to obtain the brains of murdered mentally ill (for purposes of dissection), and how the German Association for Scientific Research (DFG) provided support for Otmar von Verschuer, Fisher's successor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, to have his assistant, Josef Mengele, prepare and ship eyes, blood, and other body parts back to Berlin for analysis." p. 730
"Müller-Hill stresses that Nazi racial policy was the work of trained scholars, not ignorant fanatics: how else are we to interpret the fact that 7 out of 14 participants at the notorious Wannsee conference (outlining plans for the 'final solution') possessed doctorates or that leading German psychiatrists were mobilized with hardly a single protest to exterminate German's mentally ill? That ideology, according to Müller-Hill, was that 'there is a biological basis for the diversity of Mankind.' Anthropologists and psychiatrists were able to give 'a scientific gloss and tidiness' to the Nazi regime and its activities." p. 730
"What is slowly becoming clear is that scientists and physicians played a much greater role in the construction of Nazi policy than has heretofore been recognized; new efforts will no doubt continue to shed light on this darker, hidden Chapter in the history of science." pp. 730-731
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874), 797 pp.
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." p. 178 [Was this Hitler's favorite citation from Darwin?]
Darwin, Charles, Life and Letters, I, Letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, p. 316, cited in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959)
"I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." p. 343
Lewin, Roger, Bones of Contention (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 348 pp.
"Racism, as we would characterize it today, was explicit in the writings of virtually all the major anthropologists of the first decades of this century, simply because it was the generally accepted world view. The language of the epic tale so often employed by Arthur Keith, Grafton Elliot Smith, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and their contemporaries fitted perfectly an imperialistic view of the world, in which Caucasians were the most revered product of a grand evolutionary march to nobility." p. 307
"So it was that several threads of argument were woven together to form a theoretical fabric whose pattern matched closely the ethos of the Edwardian world. If the white races were economically and territorially dominant in the world, it was surely the natural outcome of natural processes. The slow pace of evolutionary change, the long separation between the races, the inimical environment of the tropics--all combined to produce a graded series of races, rising from the Australian aborigines at the bottom, through the black races and the Mongols, and reaching the Caucasians at the apex." p. 308
Lenczowski, John, "The Treason of the Intellectuals: Higher Education, the Culture War and the Threat to U.S. National Security," Policy Counsel (Fall 1996), pp. 35-52. Lenczowski is Former Director of European and Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, 1983-1987.
"Throughout that war, we were confronted with the phenomenon of the 'Treason of the Intellectuals,' where large segments of our intelligentsia collaborated intellectually and politically with our enemies. The treason took several forms, whose effects were to aid the political and ideological dimensions of the Soviet and international communist cold war against us." pp. 35-36
"Ultimately, it was not just a war between us here and them over there. It was a war between two visions of society, two philosophies of life. It was a moral conflict between truth and falsehood at two different levels." p. 36
"The question is: Where did these debilitating and dangerous policies come from? What is it that generates the treason of the intellectuals?
"The answer, I submit, is our educational system, and in particular, our elite universities, which are the most subversive institutions in American society today--more than the media, more than the movies, more than all the other influences.
"Because the rot starts in the head, and only then it spreads throughout the body.
"Parents can work hard to educate their children to be patriots and morally upright citizens. But four years of college of the kind I experienced--where I was surrounded by a culture of drugs, sexual libertinism, political radicalism and little homework--can destroy the efforts of the best parents in America. Add to that a few years of graduate school and the counter-cultural influence can prove to be irremediable." pp. 41-42
"In one fell swoop, through these various premises, the intellectuals deny the existence of God; they deny that God made human life a series of moral choices; and they assert that they, through the supremacy of their human reason, and not God, are the creative intelligence of this world." p. 44
"But I would guess that 95 percent of the social scientists in America's elite universities--or could it be 99 percent?--would not sign the Declaration of Independence if they were honest about it. They simply do not believe in the first paragraph. They do not believe that rights come from any Creator. And thus, they cannot believe in the fundamental tenet of American democracy: majority rule with minority rights. Because unless rights come from a higher authority, one with the capability to endow rights unconditionally, the majority can always attach conditions to rights or deny them to whichever minority group it chooses to victimize." p. 45 Back to Top
The foregoing quotations are only a small gleaning from the book That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, by Dr. Henry M. Morris (Large format hardback; 487 pages; CDROM included, and is available at the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, CA) The main headings for each section are also by Dr. Morris.
ICR Research Page Some technical stuff for scientists interested in more study.
Faculty The highly "degreed" faculty at the ICR graduate school.
Romans 1:18-22
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
Acts 17:24-28
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us; For in him we live, and move, and have our being.
John 3:16-19
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Back to Top
Edited by Greg Robertson
