The source of most of the material on
this page will be W.R. Bird's excellent book, The
Origin of Species Revisited. Although many
Christians have managed to fit belief in the correctness
of the theory of evolution into their theistic view, this
mental contortion is not only unnecessary, it serves
neither the interests of scientific investigation nor of
any search for truth, as can be seen from these quotes.
There are many more quotes available, but
I have chosen a representative few. This page is still under construction, so some quotes are still unattributed.
| General
Complaints |
|
|
| "The overriding
supremacy of the myth has created a widespread
illusion that the theory of evolution was
all but proved 100 years ago and that all
subsequent biological research --
paleontological, zoological and ... genetics and
molecular biology -- has provided ever-increasing
evidence for Darwinian ideas. Nothing could
be further from the truth...." |
[Denton]142 |
|
| "The theories
of evolution, with which our studious youth have
been deceived, constitute actually a dogma
that all the world continues to teach: but
each, in his specialty, the zoologist or
botanist, ascertains that none of the
explanations furnished is adequate.... [I]t
results from this summary, that the theory of
evolution, is impossible." |
[Lemoine, pres. of Geolog. Soc. of
France, director of Nat. Hist. Mus. in Paris, ed.
of Encycl. Francaise]151 |
|
| Paleontology |
|
|
| "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."[]58 |
|
|
| "I fully agree
with your comments on the lack of direct
illustration of evolutionary transitions in my
book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I
would certainly have included them. ... I
will lay it on the line -- there is not one
such fossil for which one could make a
watertight argument. ... Is Archaeopteryx the
ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no:
there is no way of answering the question. It is
easy enough to make up stories of how one form
gave rise to another ... But such stories are
not part of science, for there is no way of
putting them to the test." |
[Patterson]59 |
|
| "Evolution
requires intermediate forms between species and
paleontology does not provide them." |
[Kitts]59 |
|
| "It is, indeed,
a very curious state of affairs, I think, that
paleontologists have been insisting that their
record is consistent with slow, steady, gradual
evolution where I think that privately,
they've known for over a hundred years that
such is not the case. ..." |
[Eldredge, advocating PE]147 |
|
| "... the
paleontological record supports no such
interpretation. There has been no steady
progress in the higher development of
organic design. We have had, instead, vast
stretches of little or no change and one
evolutionary burst that created the
entire system." [1] |
|
|
| "In spite of
these examples ... most new species, genera,
and families and ... nearly all new categories
above the level of families appear in the record
suddenly and are not led up to by
known, gradual, completely continuous
transitional sequences." [2]47 |
|
|
| "Well, we are
now about 120 years after Darwin and the
knowledge of the fossil records has been greatly
expanded. ... [I]ronically, we have even
fewer examples of evolutionary transition
than we had in Darwin's time ..." [3]48 |
|
|
| "As is now well
known, most fossil species appear
instantaneously in the record, persist for
some millions of years virtually unchanged,
only to disappear abruptly ..." [4]51 |
|
|
| "And it is not
always clear, in fact it's rarely clear, that the
descendants were actually better adapted than
their predecessors. In other words, biological
improvement is hard to find ..." [5]51 |
|
|
| "Most orders,
classes, and phyla appear abruptly and
commonly have already acquired all the characters
that distinguish them."[6]52 |
|
|
| "This
'explosion' of advanced life forms, an event that
apparently occurred within a period of only[!]
ten or twenty million years, has puzzled
paleontologists for more than a
century."[7]53 |
|
|
| Plants |
|
|
| "It is true
that some phases of the record show, especially
along certain lines, successions of forms so
closely knit as to make it hard to resist the
conclusion that they do indeed represent [some
evolutionary series], but it is also true, and
in a much more real way, that the record not
only has gaps in many places, but that these are often
just where the absences of reliable positive
information is most frustrating and disturbing."[Good]60 |
|
|
| Invertebrates |
|
|
| "It
must be significant that nearly all the
evolutionary stories I learned as a student ... have
now been 'debunked'. Similarly, my own
experience of more than twenty years looking for
evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic
Brachiopoda has proved them equally
elusive." |
[Ager, Imperial College,
paleontologist]61 |
|
| Fishes |
|
|
| "Whatever
ideas authorities may have on the subject, the
lungfishes, like every other major group of
fishes that I know, have their origins firmly
based in nothing." |
[White, former president of Linnean
Society]61 |
|
| Amphibians |
|
|
| "[The]
transition between the Paleozoic amphibians and
the 'modernized' forms is almost completely a
blank."[Romer]62 |
|
|
| Birds |
|
|
| "Under construction |
|
|
| Mammals |
|
|
| "Other
explosions, such as Cambrian trilobites or
Tertiary mammals, are much more obvious. The
latter are particularly interesting because they
lay doggo for well over 100 million years before
putting in their successful takeover bid.
..."[8]55 |
|
|
| Primates |
|
|
| "Modern
gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees spring
out of nowhere, as it were. They are here
today; they have no yesterday."[9]55 |
|
|
| "In spite of
recent findings, the time and place of origin of
order Primates remains shrouded in
mystery."[Simons]63 |
|
|
| "[The]
transition from insectivore to primate is not
documented by fossils."[Kelso]63 |
|
|
| "... no scientist could
logically dispute the proposition that man,
without having been involved in any act of divine
creation, evolved from some ape-like creature in
a very short space of time -- speaking in
geological terms -- without leaving any
fossil traces of the steps of the
transformation."[Zuckerman]63 |
|
|
| "Unfortunately, the fossil
record for hominids ... and pongids is almost
totally blank between four and eight million
years ago -- an irresistible tabula rasa
on which to inscribe belief, preconception, and
personal opinion."[Zihlman &
Lowenstein]63 |
|
|
| Information
Content |
|
|
| "[T]he eye to this day
gives me a cold shudder"[Darwin]73 |
|
|
| "I remember well the time
when the thought of the eye made me cold all
over, but I have got over this stage of the
complaint, and now small trifling particulars of
structure often make me very uncomfortable. The
sight of a feather in a peacock's tail,
whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick."[Darwin]75 |
|
|
| "How then are we to account
for the evolution of such a complicated organ as
the eye? ... If even the slightest thing is
wrong -- if the retina is missing, or the
lens opaque, or the dimensions in error -- the
eye ... is consequently useless. Since it must be
either perfect, or perfectly useless,
how could it have evolved by small, successive,
Darwinian steps?" |
[Hardin]73 |
|
| "The curious thing,
however, is that in their distribution the eyes
of the invertebrates form no series of
contiguity and succession. Without obvious
phylogenic sequence, their occurrence seems haphazard
..." |
[Duke-Elder,
"in his classic 15-volume work on
opthamology"]74 |
|
| Evolution as
Anti-Science |
|
|
| "Evolution is a fairy
tale for grown-ups. The theory has helped nothing
in the progress of science. It is useless."
|
-
Dr. Louise Bounoure, Dir. of Research at the
National Center of Scientific Research, France.
Cited in The Facts on Creation vs. Evolution,
Ankerberg & Weldon, 25 (1993) [Ank26] |
|
| The "dead
hand of Darwinism" has "weighed heavily
on [scientific] progress for over one hundred
years." |
-
Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith, The Creation of Life:
A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution (1970),
244-45. As cited by Ankerberg.[Ank25] |
|
| "This
situation, where scientific men rally to the
defense of a doctrine they are unable to
define scientifically, much less demonstrate
with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain
its credit with the public by the supression of
criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is
abnormal and undesirable in
science." |
-
Dr. W.R. Thompson, "noted entomologist, in
his introduction to the centenary edition of
Darwin's Origin of Species, [observing]
that Darwinism has had a wasteful influence in
numerous scientific disciplines including
genetics, biology, classification, and
embryology." As cited by Ankerberg.[Ank25] |
|
| "The final
results of all my investigation and study, namely
that the idea of evolution, tested by experiments
in speciation and allied sciences, always
leads to incredible contradictions and confusing
conseqeuences, on account of which the
evolution theory ought to be entirely
abandoned, will no doubt enrage many; and
even more so my conclusion that the evolution
theory can by no means be regarded as an
innocuous natural philosophy, but that it is a serious
obstruction to biological research. It
obstructs -- as has been repeatedly shown -- the
attainment of consistent results, even from
uniform experimental material. For everything
must ultimately be forced to fit this
speculative theory." |
-
Dr. Heribert Lars-Nilsson, "after 40 years
of scientific research" attempting to
validate evolutionary theory, Synthetische
Artbildung Lund Sweden (1953), 11. As cited
by Ankerberg. |
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| |
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|
(W.R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited,
4 (1991), Thomas Nelson Inc.)
