The Galileo Effect: Science Under Siege

2006-07-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

Want to see how science keeps falsifying evolutionistic predictions? Take a look at CreationSafaris for a running commentary of how scientists keep getting "surprised" by how young the solar system appears, how intricate is the molecular design of life, how genetic sequencing keeps throwing evolutionary trees into disarray, and so on. It's a hoot.

2006-07-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

From CreationSafaris:

Michael Faraday as an elderly man was asked if he had any speculations about the afterlife. He responded, “Speculations? Man, I have none. I am resting on certainties.” Then he quoted II Timothy 1:12, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

2004-04-14T19:23:00.000-07:00

A Return to True Science and Skepticism

Note: this site looks messed up in Opera and I don't know why! Any help would be appreciated.

Tired of self-proclaimed "skeptics" who refuse to examine the facts objectively? This site is a call to return to honest skepticism - examining claims on the basis of the facts, instead of sacrificing basic logic and intellectual integrity to defend falsified paradigms.

The original meaning of skeptic - one who inquires - has been subverted. Today, it simply means "one who denies," often with an irrational fanaticism against any idea that threatens the new religion of naturalistic materialism.

But there are still true skeptics. Are these dissenters right or wrong? Are they Galileos or Goulds? (A "Gould" is a brilliant mind tragically hobbled by religiously held a priori beliefs. This could be true of an atheist or theist.) You decide. But the answer lies in examing the facts, not in preventing them from being published, as has been done to the findings of many scientists unfortunate enough to let their professional integrity trump the received dogma.

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

- astronomer Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers

What is the Galileo Effect?

According to Science Held Hostage (Van Till, Young, Menninga), Galileo didn't get into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church until two of his enemies - who taught the pagan notion of geocentrism in the secular universities - convinced the Pope that geocentrism was a theological issue (until then, the Pope had OK'd Galileo's forthcoming book). What? Didn't learn that in school? That's OK - you're not alone. You've experienced the Galileo Effect, where knowledge is sacrificed on the altar of the prevailing, "scientific" philosophical preference. But not the way you were probably taught; quite the opposite.

I've seen the term "The Galileo Effect" used in the wrong, simplistic, superficial, unskeptical sense by those who think it refers to Galileo versus the Church, science versus religion. Now you know better.

You probably also weren't informed that the myth of the "flat earth" was an atheist invention. Where are those tax dollars going anyway?

Anyway. There are many lessons to be learned from this, to wit:

Opposition to Galileo's findings was initally from the secular scientific establishment defending the current "scientific" paradigm. Having no success in proving him wrong through science, they resorted to censorship through those in power - in Galileo's time, the Catholic Church, but in our time, fanatical editors of peer-reviewed journals.
Scientists today can expect the same treatment - and do receive it - because ...
Scientific endeavour and the Church share a common problem: people.
History does repeat itself.
Even historians need fact-checking. The flat-earth myth is repeated unquestioningly even by those who should know better, such as Daniel Boorstin in his book, The Discoverers.

Hence the Galileo Effect: persecution and censorship of non-majority views in spite of non-trivial supporting data; intense peer pressure to "toe the line"; choosing the underlying paradigm for non-scientific reasons such as funding and philosophy; and the resultant dishonesty and unprofessionalism required to defend that paradigm, at the cost of scientific progress.

"It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all."

- from The Catholic Encyclopedia

Was Galileo thrown into a prison? Tortured? Heh. See the next link for a big surprise:

A Catholic rebuttal of the popular myth.

As we shall see, those who forget history are not only doomed to repeat it, but may be doomed in more specific ways.

The Galileo Effect is multifaceted. The prevailing general ignorance regarding Galileo's enemies in the scientific establishment and their pivotal role in his persecution is another troubling aspect. The corruption and transformation of the incident into a myth for popular consumption - laying all of the blame on the Catholic Church - is yet another. We need to be reminded that the practice of science is not as impassive and objective as most believe, but is, as all human undertakings, riddled with power plays, philosophical preferences, and emotion ...

"Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me. ... I should like to find a genuine loophole."

- mathematician Sir Arthur Eddington, regarding Georges Lemaitre's (somewhat weird) model of an expanding universe

... and, sometimes, just plain carelessness, shoddiness, laziness, and even dishonesty:

He immediately without giving any thought to it he immediately had an excuse. He had a reason for not paying any attention to any wrong results. It just was built into him. He just had worked that way all along and always would. There is no question but [that] he is honest: He believed these things, absolutely...

The article in the link is particularly troubling in its documentation of subconscious dishonesty in science. But what is more troubling is the apparent willingness of "men of science", even today, to sacrifice professional integrity and even human lives in defense of religiously-held dogma.

I offer this page because of my love of science. Paradoxically, I will try to persuade you that science today has not changed as regard the Galileo Effect: although much good has been accomplished, there is still an intolerance that manifests itself in shoddy peer review, lost jobs and grants, and ridicule without sufficient cause.

Without this realization on the part of the scientist and non-scientist, much time and money will be wasted. The greatest minds of our time will be wasted trying to shoehorn stubborn reality into increasingly tenuous theory, as was the sad experience of Sir Arthur Keith, discovering after 40 years that he had been betrayed by Piltdown Man. Today the same scenario may be playing out in the lives and work of scientists the world over: kept on a short leash by current scientific dogma, whether in the fields of biology, astronomy, anthropology, linguistics, and indeed any other specialty directed by the philosophy of evolution, which would be fine as an underlying philosophy for science except for one niggling detail: from the wealth of data accumulated thus far, it doesn't seem to be true.

"[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

The other culprit is, of course, the search for fame, fortune, and funding. And because, as in the case of AIDS research, such dishonesty may cost lives, the many flavors of popular yet suspect "science" must be exposed for what they are.

In doing so I will perhaps have the honor of introducing you to possible Galileo's of our time, and to encourage further serious evaluation (leading to confirmation or debunking) of their work. And, along the way, I hope to be a stepping-stone to persuading you that the best explanation for what we have discovered about reality seems to be Christian theism.

You won't always agree with me or the stuff on this page or the links ...

"but then again ... who does?"

I can only promise you it'll be incredibly interesting ... and that it's incredibly important stuff to be ruminating about.

So ... check out the links ... bon voyage!

Note: The Galileo Effect is not responsible for the material linked to from this site. They are meant for springboards to further discovery, questioning (skepticism!), and research.

Resources

2004-04-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

Cremo Responds to a Critic

From MCremo@compuserve.com Thu Jan 1 00:10:13 1998
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:02:56 -0500
From: "Michael A. Cremo"
Subject: Hidden History, Hidden Agenda
Sender: "Michael A. Cremo"
To: Cliff S _____
Message-id: <199712311803_MC2-2DA8-F4EE@compuserve.com>

Dear Cliff,

The following is my reply to Lepper's review of Hidden History.

It will be published, along with Lepper's review, in my book Forbidden Archeology's Impact, which will be in bookstores this coming spring. Lepper did not reply to my letter.

Sincerely,
Michael A. Cremo

3.1.4.1 Letter to Dr. Bradley T. Lepper, June 1, 1997

I've only recently seen your review of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race. I thank you for acknowledging that the book "makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of the history of archaeology and paleoanthropology." I also thank you for your statement that the authors "are quite right about the conservatism of many archeologists and physical anthropologists" and for your admission that archeologists sometimes dismiss ancient dates for sites "without an examination of the date or even a careful reading of the published claim."

Furthermore, I am grateful to you for listing the articles that are not mentioned in Hidden History's discussion of the Timlin, New York, site. It was a mistake not to include them. They do raise important questions about the artifacts recovered from the site and about the geological interpretation of the age of the site.

Nevertheless, in one of the papers cited by you, Bryan and Schnurrenberger (p. 149) concluded that at least five of the Timlin artifacts were genuine. From new studies of the geology of the site (p. 147), they concluded it was more recent than the original discoverers (Raemsch and Vernon) claimed. Raemsch and Vernon thought the Timlin artifacts were found in glacial till deposits, laid down by glaciers 60 or 70 thousand years ago. According to Bryan and Schnurrenberger, the glacial deposits had been reworked by a stream in early postglacial times. They thought the Timlin artifacts dated to this period. But it seems to me that if the tools were found in reworked glacial deposits, they could have come from those glacial deposits. This is a possibility that must at least be considered.

I now want to offer some comments on the parts of your review that do not accurately reflect the content and purpose of Hidden History. The methodology employed in Hidden History was not borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists. As acknowledged in the introduction to Forbidden Archeology, the major methodological influences on the authors, particularly this author, were recent work in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, as well as the Sanskrit historical literature of India, as interpreted by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, whose translations and commentaries have drawn favorable reviews from Sanskrit scholars and Indologists worldwide.

In my study of Christian creationist books, I found some of higher quality than others. Not many of them, however, were directly related to human origins and antiquity, and those that were did not treat these topics in sufficient depth. They were not, therefore, extensively cited in Hidden History.

Furthermore, I sensed that most Christian creationist work was directed more toward other Christian creationists than to mainstream scientists and scholars. Hidden History's parent book Forbidden Archeology was consciously aimed at mainstream scholars. It was intended to open a genuine scholarly dialogue or debate, and this effort has been successful. The large number of serious reviews the book has received in academic journals is a sign of that. To my knowledge, such journals do not normally give this kind of attention to other kinds of antievolutionary literature.

As might be expected, some mainstream scholars succumbed to the temptation to force this book into familiar categories and responded accordingly; but many resisted that temptation, at least partially, and looked at the book somewhat objectively.

The distinction between Hidden History's parent book (Forbidden Archeology) and ordinary creationist literature has been noted by many scientific reviewers, including Kenneth Feder, whom you cited in your article. Feder wrote in Geoarchaeology (9:338): "While decidedly antievolutionary in perspective, this work is not the ordinary variety of antievolutionism in form, content, or style. In distinction to the usual brand of such writing, the authors use original sources and the book is well written. Further, the overall tone of the work is far superior to that exhibited in ordinary creationist literature."

Hidden History is not simply a "catalog" of "odd 'facts' which appear to conflict with the modern scientific understanding of human evolution." It develops a refined epistemological argument, which you were unable or unwilling to follow. It appears that you, like others, instinctively forced Hidden History into a familiar category (poorly contrived creationist tracts). And then you automatically repeated the customary set of accusations--"catalog of odd facts," "quoting out of context," etc. But these conventional maledictions do not apply to Hidden History, which presents a thorough and systematic survey and critique of evidence relevant to human origins and antiquity. The facts in the book are deployed within the framework of a well-articulated analysis of the quality of archeological and paleoanthropological reporting.

About Hidden History's parent book, Journal of Field Archeology (21: 112) said:

"This volume combines a vast amount of both accepted and controversial evidence from the archeological record with sociological, philosophical, and historical critiques of the scientific method to challenge existing views and expose the suppression of information concerning history and human origins."

And archeologist Tim Murray wrote in British Journal for the History of Science (28: 379) that the book "provides the historian of archeology with a useful compendium of case studies in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge, which can be used to foster debate within archaeology about how to describe the epistemology of one's discipline."

This is not to suggest that the writers of these statements endorsed the book's conclusions; they did not. But it is apparent that they thought the book was something more than a collection of poorly documented odd facts and quotations taken out of context. They could recognize something of the book's epistemological framework and intellectual integrity, whereas you could not.

Hidden History does not quote out of context. Hidden History examines particular cases in considerable detail, with long quotations from original sources. The reasons for the detailed treatment are outlined in Hidden History's parent book (Forbidden Archeology, p. 35): "It would of course be possible to more briefly summarize and paraphrase reports such as these. There are two reasons for not doing so. The first is that paleoanthropological evidence mainly exists in the form of reports . . . and we shall therefore take the trouble to include many selections from such reports, the exact wording of which reveals much. . . . A second consideration is that the particular reports . . . are extremely difficult to obtain. . . . A final consideration is that proponents of evolutionary theory often accuse authors who arrive at nonevolutionary conclusions of 'quoting out of context.' It therefore becomes necessary to quote at length, in order to supply the necessary context."

Admittedly, some of the context may have been lost in abridging the 900-page Forbidden Archeology to the 300-page Hidden History. But the preface I wrote to Hidden History explicitly refers readers desiring more complete context to the unabridged version of the book.

Regarding quoting an author in support of a conclusion the author himself would not have advocated, there is nothing wrong with that if the quotation is accurate and the meaning of the quotation is taken as intended by the author. For example, Richard Leakey reported that the ER 1481 femur, found isolated from other bones, was anatomically modern and about 1.8 million years old (Hidden History, p. 253). It is not wrong for me to cite this information in support of the idea that the femur could have come from an anatomically modern human living in Africa 1.8 million years ago, even though Richard Leakey would probably not entertain this idea himself. Speaking of taking quotes out of context, you yourself are not sinless. You lifted the quote about mechanistic science being a militant ideology from its context, which deals with the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation in China in the first decades of the twentieth century, and presented it as the authors' general indictment of today's science.

What Hidden History (pp. 195-196) actually says is that the Rockefeller Foundation, the board of which included educators like Charles W. Eliot (formerly president of Harvard University), scientists like Dr. Simon Flexner, and industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, wanted to open an independent secular university in China, for the purpose of introducing Western science. This was opposed by both the Chinese government, which wanted control over it, and Christian missionaries in China, worried about an influence detrimental to their own educational activities. To get around this opposition, Eliot suggested opening a hospital and medical school. According to a Foundation official, Eliot thought "there was no better subject than medicine to introduce to China the inductive method of reasoning that lies at the basis of all modern science." He apparently felt that China was being held back by its attachment to traditional Buddhist and Taoist ways of knowledge. The ploy was successful. The Foundation accepted Eliot's idea, as did the Chinese government and the Christian missionary establishment. It was in this context that Hidden History (p. 196) said: "Here mechanistic science shows itself a quiet but nevertheless militant ideology, skillfully promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view toward establishing worldwide intellectual dominance." This particular statement is thus tied to a very specific event in history, and to a very specific group of educators, scientists, and industrialists. To make a case that the statement applies in a more general way to today's entire scientific enterprise might be worth attempting, but that would take a book in itself.

In short, you took out of context a limited statement that was reasonable in terms of its supporting evidence and deliberately gave your readers the misimpression that Hidden History was making an unsupported wild generalization of the kind your readers are properly conditioned to reject. You also took out of its clearly stated context the report of evidence for extreme human antiquity discovered in France, published in American Journal of Science and Arts. This case was included in a chapter containing Hidden History's most extreme anomalies. The chapter introduction (p. 103) clearly stated: "The reports of this extraordinary evidence emanate, with some exceptions, from nonscientific sources. . . . We ourselves are not sure how much importance should be given to this highly anomalous evidence. But we include it for the sake of completeness and to encourage further study." This statement of context is so clear that your omission of it from your disparaging discussion can only be characterized as deliberate and, hence, intellectually dishonest.

The following paragraph from your review illustrates just how far you are willing to descend into the realm of silliness and triviality: "Cremo and Thompson discuss the three to four million year old fossilized footprints discovered at Laetoli, and note that scholars have observed 'close similarities with the anatomy of the feet of modern humans' (p. 262). Cremo and Thompson conclude that these footprints actually are the tracks of anatomically modern humans, but they offer no explanation for why these individuals were not wearing the shoes which supposedly had been invented more than 296 million years earlier." Hidden History proposes that scientists who hold firmly to orthodox views on human origins often employ ridicule as their weapon of choice when confronted with challenging evidence. I see you are no exception to this rule. The real question is this: how do you explain the occurrence of anatomically modern footprints in rock 4 million years old? The foot bones of the australopithecines, supposedly the only hominids then in existence, could not, according to physical anthropologists such as Russell Tuttle, have made those prints. Regarding the report of the Nevada shoe print, the stimulus for your attempt to ridicule your way out of considering the obvious implications of the Laetoli footprints, it was included in Hidden History's chapter on extreme anomalies, with a very clear statement of its context. And you insisted on taking it out of this context. It was duly acknowledged that reports such as this, from nonscientific publications, leave much to be desired but were included in the book for the sake of completeness and to encourage further study. The photograph you complained about is of value in that it to some degree confirms the existence of the object in question. The report also offers opportunities for pursuing further investigation of this object. It might be possible, for example, to track down the object itself or to find the original microphotographs, said to have been taken by an employee of the Rockefeller Institute in New York.

In addition to blatantly taking the reports of the Nevada shoe print and the above mentioned discoveries in France out of their clearly stated context and improperly suggesting that the "naive" authors were accepting of them to a degree that they were not, you were also unable or unwilling to see how this particular category of reports fit into the overall epistemological argument presented in the book. For your benefit, I shall put it as simply and briefly as I can.

Assuming that there is evidence for extreme human antiquity in the earth's strata, we can make the following predictions. Some of the evidence will be close to conventionally accepted limits for human antiquity and some will far exceed these limits. Some of the evidence will be found by scientists, who will react to it according to their theoretical preconceptions and report it according to their professional standards. Some of the evidence will be found by nonscientists with few theoretical preconceptions and reported in nonscientific literature. It is likely that the evidence that most radically departs from conventionally accepted limits will be reported by nonscientists in nonscientific literature. In terms of this approach, evidence of the kind reported in the chapter on extreme anomalies does have some value in confirming the hypothesis that evidence for extreme human antiquity does exist and has been reported by various categories of researchers, ranging from professional scientists whose findings are published in academic journals to nonscientists whose findings are reported in newspapers and magazines.

You said that just because reports of unusual phenomena were published in a 19th-century journal that happened to have the word "science" in its title is no measure of the reports' "reliability or relevance to modern science." Neither is this, in itself, any measure of their unreliability or irrelevance to modern science.

You have misunderstood and taken out of context Thomas Kuhn's statement that "to reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself." Kuhn did not intend this to mean that any individual who introduces evidence contradicting a reigning paradigm must himself immediately introduce a new paradigm.

If you carefully study Kuhn's entire description of scientific revolutions, you will find the following development. In the beginning of a science there is no reigning paradigm. Individual scientists gather evidence from nature and use it to build competing paradigms. Eventually, one of these may triumph, and at this point a mature science, a research community with a common program, develops. This research community is guided by a single dominant paradigm, through which it structures its research goals and methods. The paradigm does not resolve all questions and problems. If it did, there would be no need for further research. Instead it gives a systematic approach for solving various puzzles suggested by the paradigm. The solving of these puzzles constitutes the activity of normal science. In the course of normal science, it may happen that anomalies begin to accumulate. Some of these may be set aside for future research. Some may be dismissed as irrelevant. But if a sufficient number of anomalies accumulates, anomalies which resist solution by the paradigm or incorporation into it, a crisis develops. As the crisis intensifies, scientists begin to offer and promote new paradigms capable of accommodating the anomalies. If one of these paradigms attracts the attention of a sufficient number of members of the research community, a scientific revolution takes place. The research community learns to see things in a different way. It develops a new set of methods and concerns. Kuhn points out that unless there is a recognizable crisis, provoked by an accumulation of crucial anomalies, there will be no movement to a new paradigm. The first step toward movement to a new paradigm is thus recognition of anomalies, of counterinstances to the current paradigm. In the 1970 edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (pp. 93-94), Kuhn compares scientific revolutions to political revolutions: "Initially it is crisis alone that attenuates the role of political institutions as we have already seen it attenuate the role of paradigms. In increasing numbers individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it. Then, as the crisis deepens, many of these individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework. . . The remainder of this essay aims to demonstrate that the historical study of paradigm change reveals very similar characteristics in the evolution of the sciences."

The purpose of Forbidden Archeology is to confront the community of human evolution researchers with the massive number of unassimilated crucial anomalies in their field, and thus provoke a sense of crisis in at least some small section of this community. This effort has been to some degree successful, but the sense of crisis must be intensified. Only when the sense of crisis becomes intense will researchers give serious consideration to adopting a new paradigm. Kuhn noted (p. 76) that "retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it." In any case, I can assure you that I will be offering a new paradigm in a forthcoming book, as promised in Forbidden Archeology. In my opinion, the occasion demands it.

I suppose we shall have to disagree on whether or not the claims of Carter, Lee, and Steen-McIntyre are supported by sufficiently compelling evidence. But I think your admission that they have been shamefully treated and subjected to unfortunate ad hominem attacks should cause researchers interested in North American archeology to take a second look at their findings, or, perhaps, a first look, and make up their own minds. I also have to disagree with your insistence that evidence that goes against current ideas of human origins must be subjected to a much higher standard of proof than evidence supporting current ideas. I agree with George Carter, who said in his book Earlier Than You Think (1980, p. 318): "When a new idea is advanced, it necessarily challenges the previous idea. . . . The new idea is then attacked, and support of it is required to be of a high order of certainty. The greater the departure from the previous idea, the greater the degree of certainty required, so it is said. I have never been able to accept this. It assumes that the old order was established on high orders of proof, and on examination this is seldom found to be true."

I also agree with Alfred Russell Wallace, cofounder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, who said (Nineteenth Century, vol. 22, p. 679) that "the proper way to treat evidence as to man's antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals, not, as it too often now the case, to ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being impostors or the victims of impostors."

You are correct that even if true the chapter on living ape-men does not directly contribute to the book's thesis that anatomically modern humans existed in the very distant past. But if true the chapter would support the book's general picture of the coexistence of humans and more apelike hominids from the distant past until the present. While evidence of the coexistence of anatomically modern humans with more apelike hominids today does not do any violence to evolutionary theory, their coexistence in the distant past would do some violence to it. And the evidence documented in Hidden History suggests they did coexist in the distant past.

You say that Hidden History offers "a mistaken identification" of a stone tool from Sandia Cave as a Folsom point and cite this as an example of the authors' "ignorance of the basic data of the basic data of archaeology." The identification is, however, not that of the authors, but of the archeologists who took the photograph of the stone tool and published the photograph along with their identification of the stone tool as a Folsom point in an archeological publication of the Smithsonian Institution, duly cited in the permission credits on the copyright page of Hidden History. The tool is shown cemented in the cave breccia. The references you gave in your review (Haynes and Agogino, Preston) also refer to the tools found cemented in the cave breccia as Folsom tools.

I find it somewhat unusual that you faulted Hidden History, a book published in 1994 (as an abridgment of a work published in 1993), for not citing reports published in 1994 and 1995. I suppose the author of any book-length work on any scientific subject could also be accused of not being totally up to date on the latest work in his or her field. But that is the nature of the book writing process. You write a book, it goes to press, and comes out a year later. So automatically the book is going to be a year or two behind the times as soon as it becomes available for sale. In any case, I have already admitted that I should have been aware of the 1977 and 1978 reports on the Timlin site.

Concerning the other reports you have cited (and I do thank you for calling them to my attention), I have the following comments.

Haynes and Agogino think the implements found at Sandia Cave are no more than 14,000 years old. But their report on the Sandia Cave discoveries does not rule out the possibility that the human artifacts found there are perhaps as much as 300,000 years old.

At Sandia Cave two kind of implements were found--Folsom implements and Sandia implements.

The sequence of layers at Sandia Cave were as follow [sic.], from top to bottom. First came a layer of recent dirt and debris (Unit J). Under this was a layer of dripstone (calcium carbonate). This layer of dripstone (Unit I) yielded carbon 14 ages of 19,100 and 24,600 years. Haynes and Agogino found these ages hard to accept and proposed they must be wrong. They proposed that the dripstone had been contaminated with old carbon, and that this had caused the tests to yield ages that were falsely old. But even Haynes and Agogino were mystified by this. They acknowledged that contamination of samples is usually with younger carbon instead of older carbon (p. 26). Furthermore, over 80 percent of the carbon in the samples would have had to have been introduced by contaminants. They admitted that they could see no visible sign of any such contamination, and were reduced to speculating that the old carbon must have come from old carbon dioxide in the air trapped in the cave (p. 27).

Haynes and Agogino (p. 7) said the ages of 19,100 and 24,600 "cannot be correct because of the archaeology and the dating of more reliable materials in the underlying units." In referring to the archaeology, they mean that tools identified as Folsom tools were found under the dripstone. Folsom tools are generally considered to be 10 or 11 thousand years old. Therefore, they reasoned, the carbon 14 dates of the overlying dripstone must be wrong. This is exactly the kind of reasoning that Forbidden Archeology criticizes. As for younger carbon dates on rock and bone below the dripstone being more reliable, this is hard to believe. For one thing, Haynes and Agogino (p. 26) admitted that none of their carbon 14 dates were reliable because they had been obtained by methods now considered obsolete. Furthermore, if they could attribute the ages of 19,100 and 24,600 years for the dripstone to contamination by old carbon (even though no contaminants were visible) they should also be able to attribute the younger ages of other samples to contamination by recent carbon. Below the dripstone, which could be 24,000 years old, was a deposit of cave breccia (Unit H). A bone from this deposit gave a uranium series age of 73,000 years (p. 7). Haynes and Agogino (p. 7) said that "the U-series date cannot be supported archaeologically." As mentioned above, Folsom implements, generally thought to be 10 or 11 thousand years old, were found cemented in the cave breccia of Unit H. Therefore the U-series date must be wrong. One could also propose that the generally accepted upper age limit for Folsom implements is wrong, and that the Folsom implements from Unit H of Sandia Cave are about 70,000 years old.

Haynes and Agogino cited carbon 14 dates of 9,100 years for carbonate rock from the Unit H breccia and 12,830 years for bone fragments. But they have admitted that these dates are unreliable. In other words, the dates could be correct, or they could be falsely old or young. As we have seen, Haynes and Agogino have felt free to adjust the carbon 14 and uranium series dates to fit their conviction that the Folsom implements found in Unit H could not be more than 10 or 11 thousand years old. But there is another way to adjust things. We can accept the carbon 14 date of 24,000 years for the dripstone of Unit I and the uranium series age of 73,000 years for the bone found in the cemented breccia of Unit H. This would mean the Folsom implements of Unit H would be between 24,000 and 73,000 years old. Below Unit H is found another layer of dripstone called Unit G. This dripstone yielded a carbon 14 age of 30,000 or more years. In other words, the Unit G dripstone could be of any age more than 30,000 years. For example, Unit G could be 100,000 years old. Haynes and Agogino concluded this date must be wrong. But it fits into the sequence that we have established. The dripstone of Unit I yielded a radiocarbon date of 24,000 years, bone from the Unit H breccia yielded a uranium series age of 70,000 years, and the radiocarbon date of Unit G could be in excess of that. Below the dripstone of Unit G was another layer of cemented breccia called Unit F. Organic carbon from a cave wall gave a carbon 14 date of 12,000 years, but this could have resulted from contamination by younger carbon. Then comes a gypsum crust (Unit E), followed by another layer of dripstone, Unit D. This lower dripstone gave a carbon 14 age of 32,000 years, but Haynes and Agogino thought it was not correct. Wanting it to be younger, they proposed it had been contaminated with older carbon. The same dripstone yielded a uranium series age of 226,000 years. According to Preston (p. 74), another uranium series test gave an age of 300,000 years. Haynes and Agogino dismissed these ages, and revised the radiocarbon date downward to 27,000 years. I would propose dismissing the radiocarbon age, and keeping the uranium series dates, which fit nicely into the sequence of radiocarbon and uranium series dates that I have established.

Beneath the dripstone of Unit D is a deposit of yellow ocher. When burned, yellow ocher yields a reddish substance used as a cosmetic. Haynes and Agogino suggested the ocher deposits had been mined by early Indians. Beneath the yellow ocher, the original discovers found a loose deposit of rock and dirt (Unit X) containing in some places stone tools of a type different from the Folsom implements found in the upper breccias. They called these stone tools Sandia implements. According to Haynes and Agogino, rodents carried all of these tools down from the upper levels of the cave deposits (Units F and H) starting about 14,000 years ago. To support this hypothesis, the pointed to the presence of rodent bones yielding carbon 14 dates ranging from 8,000 to 14,000 years. If the positions in which they were found in Unit X were their original positions, then the tools would be at least 300,000 years old (if we accept the uranium series date for the overlying Unit D dripstone).

There are several points to consider here. First, Haynes and Agogino (p. vii) admitted that their carbon 14 dates were unreliable: "There is no foolproof method of positively isolating indigenous bone carbon from contaminant carbon in leached bone." So the rodent bones could have been much older than their maximum carbon 14 dates of 14,000 years, and the rodents could thus have moved the tools to their positions in Unit X much earlier than 14,000 years ago.

The effective range of the carbon 14 dating method used by Haynes and Agogino was about 40,000 years. This means that if the rodent bones were 300,000 years old, then even a small amount of contamination would have caused them to yield a carbon 14 date of 40,000 years. More extensive contamination would have brought the ages down even further.

Furthermore, there are some difficulties with the idea that rodents moved the Sandia tools from higher levels in the cave down to positions in and below the ocher deposits at any point in time, whether 14,000 or 300,000 years ago. Only Sandia implements are found in Unit X. None are found in Units F and H, which according to Haynes and Agogino were the most likely source of the Sandia implements. Haynes and Agogino (p. 28) proposed that the Sandia implements were deposited in Unit F between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, before Unit F was consolidated into a hard cave breccia between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago. The Folsom implements would have been deposited in Units F and H during this latter period of consolidation.

But Haynes and Agogino (p. 28) noted a problem: "If Sandia occupation was before Folsom occupation it is surprising that no diagnostic Sandia artifacts were found in the [Unit F] breccias." Preston (p. 75) asked Haynes this question: "How was it possible that all the Sandia points--nineteen of them--were somehow carried by rodents to the bottom layer only?" Rodent tunnels are found in many of the layers, not just the bottom layer. Haynes replied, "Don't think we didn't ask ourselves that same question. It's very, very strange."

Haynes and Agogino also considered the possibility that the Sandia implements were younger than the Folsom implements found in the cave breccias of Units F and H. This means they would have to be from the loose cave debris (Unit J) that started accumulating on the cave floor after 9,000 years ago. But Haynes and Agogino (p. 28) note that this "appears unlikely because no Sandia artifacts are reported from the upper loose debris (Unit J)."

A more reasonable possibility would be that the Sandia artifacts below the yellow ocher are in their original positions and that they were not moved by rodents from the upper levels of the cave. Just because there is evidence that rodents made tunnels into the levels containing the implements does not rule out the possibility that the implements were in their original positions. That the Sandia implements were found only in and beneath the ocher argues for them being in their original positions. In that case, the implements would be over 300,000 years old, about the same age as the crude stone tools from the Calico, California, site and the advanced stone tools from the Hueyatlaco, Mexico, site.

Here is another reason for suspecting that the Sandia implements were in their original positions, arriving their as a result of human action rather than transport by rodents. The first Sandia implement was found on the level of the cave floor, alongside a hearth made from four stream-rounded cobble stones, charcoal, and a jaw of a large mammal (Haynes and Agogino, figure 6). Haynes and Agogino (p. 28) noted: "Apparently all witnesses considered the point, four rounded cobbles, and a bovid mandible to be in situ and associated with the hearth."

According to Preston, some archaeologists have suggested that the Sandia cave discoveries were all fraudulent. Haynes and others disagreed. Of course, if the discoveries were fraudulent, that would be significant. We would have another case, in addition to Piltdown, in which professional scientists manufactured evidence in support of their own theories. To me, however, the most likely interpretation of the Sandia evidence is that you have Folsom implements in Units F and H that could be anywhere from 24,000 to 73,000 years old and Sandia implements in Unit X that are at least 300,000 years old.

Taylor's report on the Calico site is a review of published literature and does not give any new evidence. Taylor (p. 7) admitted that the age of the artifact-bearing sediments at Calico is "in excess of 100,000 years and perhaps as much as 200,000 years old." He doubted, however, that the objects found in these sediments are the result of human work. In this regard, Taylor cited a report by Payen, which analyzed the Calico artifacts in terms of the Barnes platform angle method. According to Barnes, at least 75 percent of the platform angles should be acute (less than 90 degrees) for the object to be of human manufacture. Payen found that the Calico implements did not satisfy this requirement. But Taylor neglected to mention a later report by Leland W. Patterson, an expert in lithic technology, and his coworkers that appeared in Journal of Field Archeology (vol. 14, pp. 91-106). Patterson and his coauthors (p. 97) reported, "Acute platform angles were found on 94.3% of the Calico flakes with intact platforms . . . The average platform angle of the Calico flakes was 78.7% . . . . This is consistent with the usual products of intentional flaking." A more detailed discussion can be found in Forbidden Archeology (pp. 166-175). Patterson disputed Payen's conclusions and methodology. The paper by Meltzer, Adovasio, and Dillehay the Pedra Furada site in Brazil raises questions about the evidence for a human occupation there at 30,000 years. The original discoverers reported hearths with charcoal at levels of this age, along with stone tools. Meltzer, Adovasio, and Dillehay expressed some doubts about the charcoal (was it from wildfires rather than hearths?) and the stone tools (were they really of human manufacture?). The original discoverers have, of course, already given attention to such doubts. Meltzer, Adovasio, and Dillehay (pp. 695-696) themselves acknowledged that they "are not experts on the data and evidence recovered from Pedra Furada" and that they did not "expect our opinions will be shared by our colleagues (even those who viewed the site with us)." I would not therefore characterize their report as a refutation of the claims of the original discoverers.

Regarding the report of Julig, Mahaney, and Storck on the Sheguiandah, it is, as the title indicates, a very brief preliminary study. The original investigators, T. E. Lee and J. T. Sanford, found stone tools in deposits they characterized as glacial till. This would give them considerable antiquity. Other investigators have challenged the identification of the Sheguiandah deposits as till. But the preliminary studies of Julig, Mahaney, and Storck (p. 111) revealed that "the so-called 'till' deposits are clearly non-sorted and may be till or colluvium." They noted that "of the 27 samples analyzed from the so-called 'till' deposits and underlying sediments, 20 exhibit curves which are characteristic of nonsorted sediment such as till or colluvium." Furthermore, Julig, Mahaney, and Storck stated that "crescentic gouges. . . which are widely considered to be the effect of transport by continental ice, were . . . observed on grains of several samples." So your suggestion that their report clearly contradicts the earlier work of Lee and Sanford is mistaken. In fact, the report tends to confirm the judgments of Lee and Sanford.

Returning to general methodology, you accuse the authors of being "selectively credulous to an astonishing degree." You find it objectionable that we "accept without question the testimony of 19th-century goldminers and quarrymen, but treat with extreme skepticism (or outright derision) the observations of 20th-century archaeologists." Of course, we did not accept without question the testimony of anyone. But I can understand how you could have gotten an impression of selective credulity. Missing from Hidden History's discussion of epistemological principles is the following paragraph from Forbidden Archeology (p. 25), which may help you understand something about the methods we employed in evaluating reports:

"In discussing anomalous and accepted reports . . . we have tended to stress the merits of the anomalous reports, and we have tended to point out the deficiencies of the accepted reports. It could be argued that this indicates bias on our part. Actually, however, our objective is to show the qualitative equivalence of the two bodies of material by demonstrating that there are good reasons to accept much of the rejected material, and also good reasons to reject much of the accepted material. It should also be pointed out that we have not suppressed evidence indicating the weaknesses of anomalous findings. In fact, we extensively discuss reports that are highly critical of these findings, and give our readers the opportunity to form their own opinions."

In a final flourish of rancor, you hurl at Hidden History a veritable barrage of curses, practically exhausting the fundamentalist Darwinian's stock of clichés, calling the book a "sloppy rehashing of canards, hoaxes, red herrings, half truths and fantasies." But others have passed a different final judgment. In their review article about the unabridged version of Hidden History, historian of science David Oldroyd and his graduate student Jo Wodak wrote in Social Studies of Science (26: 107): "So has Forbidden Archeology made any contribution at all to the literature on palaeoanthropology? Our answer is a guarded 'yes', for two reasons. First, while the authors go in for overkill in terms of swamping the reader with detail . . . much of the historical material they resurrect has not been scrutinized in such detail before. Second, . . . Cremo and Thompson do raise a central problematic regarding the lack of certainty in scientific 'truth' claims."

Earlier in the same review article (p. 196) they noted: "It must be acknowledged that Forbidden Archeology brings to attention many interesting issues that have not received much consideration from historians; and the authors' detailed examination of the early literature is certainly stimulating and raises questions of considerable interest, both historically and from the prospective of practitioners of sociology of scientific knowledge."

Regarding Ian Tattersall's book, the following quote from Wodak and Oldroyd is perhaps relevant: "If scientists have lost sight of the idea of Tertiary Man, perhaps historians bear some responsibility. Certainly some pre-FA histories of palaeoanthropology, such as Peter Bowlers, say little about the kind of evidence adduced by C&T, and the same may be said of some texts published since 1993, such as Ian Tattersalls recent book. So perhaps the rejection of Tertiary Homo sapiens, like other scientific determinations, is a social construction in which historians of science have participated."

Anyone who is really interested in learning the complete story of how we know what we think we know about human origins and antiquity cannot afford to ignore Hidden History or, better yet, Forbidden Archeology.

In the end, I cannot judge you too harshly. After all, like many of your generation, you probably grew up believing in Darwinism and were conditioned to regard such belief as one of the characteristics of scientific and intellectual respectability. You were also conditioned to regard opposition to Darwinism as a symptom of religious intolerance or irrational credulity, deserving of righteous contempt. Given all that, your fundamentalist reaction to Hidden History is understandable. Even so, I detect in your review some signs that you may someday rise to the platform of virtuous scientific impartiality to which you now pretend.

2004-04-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Review of

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

by Michael Denton

This is the text of the somewhat hurried review I dashed off to Amazon. - C.S.

A molecular biologist refutes evolutionism.
(I was astonished to find Mr. Denton described as an agnostic. If this is true, this book is even more amazing for its intellectual honesty.)

A molecular biologist, Mr. Denton marshals various facts mitigating against the theory of evolution. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is its "big picture" approach to refuting evolution - arguing for the existence of distinct classes of organisms by asking hard questions about homology, embryonic development, amino acid design, and, of course, the bugbear of evolution and origins science - DNA.

Although published before Behe's wonderfully controversial "Darwin's Black Box", Denton examines several black boxes - the astonishing complexity of avian feathers, the incorporation of the Page-Handley slot in avian wings, the specialized breathing system of birds; hard questions about supposed transitional forms such as Archaeopteryx; the mind-boggling, inexplicably different migration pathways of cells in metamorphosizing insects; the much-touted but misleading "horse series"; and so on. As one reads through this amazing dissection of these subjects, the disturbing (and sad) thought arises: Why aren't these questions being asked in public, as it were? Why do the textbooks and museums present such poorly understood (and sometimes outrightly false) material as fact? Why aren't more scientists thinking as critically? It's tragic that these questions are not raised in biology classes to sharpen and stimulate young (?) minds but that the "doctrines" he questions are routinely presented as gospel. Sometimes we can have too much faith, it seems.

Perhaps what the reader will find most fascinating is the revelation that the evolutionary classification scheme falls on its face even at the molecular level - the very area in which it had hoped to triumph. Science now has a quantitative method of measuring supposed ancestral relationships - percentage sequence difference comparison of amino acid and DNA - and that method shows amphibians to be just as far away from fish (ancestrally) as humans are (to pick just one example), an unwelcome finding apparently raising much ire in the evolutionary community.

The sheer amount of misinformation contained in tirades against this book only attests to the religious nature of the adherents of evolution. The constant refusal, however, of evolution's defenders to meet Denton's challenges head-on with objective and undisputed facts should encourage other scientists to "come out of the closet" with their own doubts - if for nothing more than a love for science.

2004-04-06T19:48:00.000-07:00

Review of

Nature's Destiny

by Michael Denton

This is the text of the review I dashed off to Amazon. - C.S.

It is a tragic demonstration of what Cremo, in "Forbidden Archeology," politely calls the "knowledge filter" of science, that evolutionists can take the time to read the 428 pages of this book and completely miss the whole point. To claim that Denton has been "converted" to evolutionism is either a serious misreading or deliberate misrepresentation. Perhaps the following, from the conclusion of "Nature's Destiny," will suffice to demonstrate:

"All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology--that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact."(p. 389)

Can Denton's stance be any more clearer than this? Perhaps. He does say that "to get from a single cell to Homo Sapiens has taken about 4 billion years". Likewise, he seems to assume that evolution is responsible for the diversity and complexity of life, albeit directed by information built into the first cell, by whom or what he does not say. However, he offers little to support the notion that the origin of this first cell (and its wondrous DNA) was "in some way programmed into the laws of nature ... it has to be admitted that at present, despite an enormous effort, we still have no idea how this occurred ..."

He goes on to mention the various theories currently offered, unfortunately with a less critical eye than he should. Even the poor example of snowflakes as a highly ordered state analogous to the molecules of life is thrown a bone. This seems strange in light of the still unanswered challenges presented in his previous book, but it is an example of why evolutionism has survived-- the compartmentalization of science, whereby each scientist, assuming evolution to be proven outside his own field of expertise, discards or explains away his own contradictory findings (the "knowledge filter" again). We will have to be content with such excellent volumes on the subject as "Forbidden Archeology","The Origin of Species Revisited", and Lubenow's "Bones of Contention". However, this does not detract from the main thrust: the overwhelming evidence of design, inexplicable by "natural" evolution.

Another flaw is his requiring that "evidence for believing that the world is prefabricated to the end of life" must somehow contradict his own notion of "special creation." Even supposing this were true, he errs in forgetting that the creation of the first cell (to use his evolutionary view) or DNA, or indeed the left-handedness of life's proteins, are in themselves worthy of being considered supernatural acts, in that they do not naturally follow from the (strangely fortituous) laws of nature in the same way as the origin of the heavier elements. He neglects to address the still unresolved (and fatal) problems regarding the early atmosphere, crucial to the origins question. In distancing himself from his perception of "creationism," he exhibits similar forgetfulness when he claims that his argument is consistent with naturalistic science--"that the cosmos ... can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason." But surely he does not mean to include abiogenesis and the fitness of the universe for life. Instead, one gets the impression that he is trying to be charitable to his fundamentalist Darwinian colleagues.

What Denton does do well is take us on a marvelous tour of how finely-tuned the universe is to allow us to exist. He does this in far greater detail than most other books of this kind. He covers such "coincidences" as the many fortituous (and anomolous) properties of water, independent yet working together to support life; the fine-tuning of physical constants; suspicious dovetailing of nuclear resonances; the fitness of carbon and other elements for life; the complexity and inexplicability of DNA and proteins; etc. As we read about the ingenuity employed at the molecular level for the sending of nerve signals, manipulation of electrons, conveyance of oxygen, and so on, and the many such contrivances that are essential for life, we are struck by the overwhelming, mind-boggling complexity of it all, and the sneaking suspicion that much is taken on faith in evolutionistic circles. And we see immediately that it cannot be an informed faith based on any scientific evidence, but rather a wishful, forced belief that such nanomachines could have arisen by chance. By the time we have recovered from our revelations about water and carbon, how wonderfully fit they are for our existence, by the time we are finished reading about proteins and the cell, it seems an impossibility that life, being so complex as it is, could have arisen at all, even if it were created by some supernatural being; for this being would have to be possessed of an intellect that beggars our minds. We are used to thinking of cells as simple blobs of protoplasmic jelly, as did Darwin; not so. Now we can understand wny the intricate requirements of life are usually glossed over in popularized treatments on evolution: either the knowledge was not available then, or the inclusion of it would have made evolution impossible, even ridiculous, to defend.

However, details even creationists take for granted are scrutinized, leaving us with a sense of awe (or gnashing of teeth): the fitness of the visual spectrum for vision; the design of the hand; our body dimensions and bipedal gait, allowing us to use fire and thus develop technology; our capacity for language; and so on. In doing so he shows us that the "chance" so casually spoken of in evolutionism quickly diminishes to absurdity upon open-minded examination of our cosmos; and that, indeed, we were meant to discover this fact.

This compilation of smoking guns makes for an always fascinating, always interesting read, bound to raise much ire in evolutionistic circles. Perhaps a better title would have been "Denton's Dangerous Idea." Apologies to many sci-fi writers should be forthcoming, as he demonstrates that many concepts of otherworldly life can be entertained only in our naivete.

Another review posted in response to fundamentalist Darwinist "reviews" of the book.

There are those who need to believe in Darwinism and there are those who do not. The first group will go to any length to misinform and misrepresent (as can be evidenced by the many claims that Denton has "converted" to evolutionism while ignoring his central point: that recent scientific discoveries point to the existence of a Designer), because Darwinism must be true for their worldview to hold. The second group, consisting of openminded theists and nontheists, is free to go wherever the facts may lead.

The attacks are characteristic of fanaticism: claiming that Denton's book is a religious tract and supposing that settles the matter. This is similar to Dawkins' personal attacks on Richard Milton's highly recommended "Shattering the Myths of Evolution," where Dawkins froths at the mouth labeling Milton as a "creationist in disguise." But are Fred Hoyle, Paul Davies, etc. religious creationists? Why such tactics in response to scientific observations? The answer is clear from Denton's book.

Fundamentalist Darwinians have a deep-seated psychological need to see the universe as a mere product of chance, devoid of supernaturalism. Not understanding the implications of quantum physics, they believe that science will someday support their view. All opposing viewpoints and data must therefore be wrong. However, since the opposing views are based on factual data, ad hominem attacks and misinformation are the only available defenses left (see Milton's discussion of the "howler monkeys" of the current dogma).

Denton's book, while flawed, overwhelmingly exposes the narrowmindedness of this view, by showing us how improbable it is. For all the rantings of Darwinists, it is interesting that his factual points that show this are just ignored. Has Denton converted to evolutionism, a faith he showed defunct in his previous book? An objective reading shows that this is not the case. "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" underlined the ludicrousness of believing that evolution happened by chance, and called for a new theory that explained such developments as the avian lung. Such a theory would incorporate some notion of design, since Darwinism had proved irrelevant. His second book, while not providing that theory, ups the ante, providing more evidence of the "Galileo Effect."

Since his field is molecular biology, "Nature's Destiny" assumes many things about scientific knowledge, many of which are in dispute, such as the geological time scale. (For an excellent nontheist discussion of this problem, and many others, see Milton's book.) But the thrust of his argument is that, even assuming evolution occurs, it must have been directed. He believes, however, that the direction was inevitable given the designed initial conditions; therein lies the flaw. There would, in actuality, have been many points in our alleged history where intelligent intervention was needed: abiogenesis, for one; the origin of species, but another. However, this does not detract from the rest of the argument; it merely confuses those who are "true believers" in Darwinism, and therefore not disposed to consider his views and points more carefully. Why is the universe so hospitable to us, even though the chances of finding a planet like ours is virtually zero (Hugh Ross)? This question is studiously ignored, but that is the heart of the book. If you would be a champion of evolutionism, that is the dragon to be slain. If you already believe that dinosaurs can be buried at the alleged soil deposition rate of 0.1 mm a year, you could believe in such chances, too, I suppose. But I do not have that much faith.

2004-04-04T18:53:00.000-07:00

Arrogance in Archeology

This excerpt from Cremo's Forbidden Archeology, p. 198, is but one of many illustrations of counterproductive conservatism in science, specifically in the field of archaeology. His book is a veritable treasure trove of such evidences of the frequent refusal of scientists to consider data hostile to the preferred paradigm in an objective and professional manner, even when the quality and quantity of the evidence is overwhelming.

"The following arguments in favor of this theory were published in the popular science magazine, Discover, in June of 1987: "at excavated Clovis sites, conclusive evidence for artifacts made by other peoples has been found above but not below the level with Clovis tools; and there are no irrefutable human remains with irrefutable pre-Clovis dates anywhere in the New World south of the former Canadian ice sheet. Mind you, there are dozens of claims of sites with pre-Clovis human evidence, but all are marred by serious questions about whether the material used for radiocarbon dating was contaminated by older carbon, or whether the dated material was really associated with human remains, or whether the tools supposedly made by hand were just naturally shaped rocks. In contrast, the evidence for Clovis is undeniable, widely distributed, and accepted by archaeologists" (Diamond ~987, pp.84, 86).

"To put this theory into perspective, we should note that before World War II, anthropological authorities insisted that human beings first entered America 4,000 years ago. Their initial reaction to the Clovis hunter theory was summed up by the anthropologist John Alsoszatai-Petheo (1986, pp.18-19): "For... decades, American archaeologists would labor under the view of man's relative recency in the New World, while the mere mention of the possibility of greater antiquity was tantamount to professional suicide. Given this orientation, it is not surprising that when the evidence of the antiquity of man in America was finally reported from Folsom, Clovis, and other High Plains sites, it was rejected out of hand by established authorities despite the clear nature of the evidence at multiple locations, uncovered by different researchers, and seen and attested to by a large variety of professional visitor/observers. . . . The mind set of conservatives of the day left no room for acceptance."

"Alsoszatai-Petheo argued that the history of the rejection of the Folsom and Clovis discoveries is now being repeated as conservative archeologists of the present day staunchly reject evidence for pre-Clovis man in America."

(Emphasis mine.)

See Cremo's reply to a critic here.

2004-04-03T16:20:00.000-08:00

Science vs. Evolution

Who will win?

Biology's Black Boxes: Darwin Debunked

Molecular Machines (from ARN)

Non-theists Attack Evolution

Evolutionists Doubt Evolution

The Mechanisms of Evolution: Intimidation and Censorship

The Mechanisms of Evolution: Blissful Ignorance

Anomalies Unexplained by Evolutionism

Evolutionists Panic

Darwinism & Natural Selection in Action

What are the true consequences and implications of Darwinism and the "survival of the fittest?" Tragically, it was Hitler and Stalin - and others - who understood the logical implications.

"Sometime in April [of 1999] me and V will get revenge and will kick natural selection up a few notches."

- Columbine killer Eric Harris

G. K. Chesterton writes of these rational madmen in Orthodoxy.

Darwinism and the Nazi race holocaust

Columbine killer and his elitist "natural selection"

Columbine killer wore his guiding light on his T-shirt

“In civilized societies, the basic principle that killing is wrong has been accepted universally. But the 20th century recorded enormous massacres by the Communists - 20 million in the Soviet Union, 60 million in China, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in South Vietnam, and many more in other countries as well.”

- Nguyen Cao Quyen, a former judge in Vietnam, jailed for eleven years after the unification of Vietnam under the Communists

Why the US fought in Vietnam ... and what the Communists accomplished after America left

2004-03-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

Evolutionists Panic

I wrote this in response to a newspaper article about the National Academy of Sciences producing a campaign complete with glossy, colorful, helpful materials to encourage high school teachers to teach evolution, as they were apparently being derelict in this duty.

"The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a philosophical necessity. ... Most modern biologists, having viewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing."

- Evolutionist and "Nobel prize-winning biologist of Harvard University, Dr. George Wald", as cited in The Facts on Creation vs. Evolution, Ankerberg and Weldon 15-16, 1993.

To: National Academy of Sciences

Re: Directive to continue indoctrination

I was so glad to read about the upcoming effort to "help" teachers to knuckle under to our desires regarding evolution, although I was somewhat troubled to read that "Many science teachers have been reluctant to teach this central idea," and that they "assume evolution has nothing to do with what we learn about biology today." Are they catching on? This must be investigated.

Someone once said that if a lie is repeated often enough, it will be believed. Of course, we are not lying as such, but we do need to divert attention from the utter confusion that currently reigns in our field, until we can find that ever-so-elusive resolution. This is especially important since our most prominent spokespersons have repeatedly claimed that there is general agreement on the most important points. We must present a united front or risk exposure of the discord in our ranks. The weeding out of the dangerously growing number of these dissenting voices can continue only under the cover of complete unity.

The compartmentalization of the sciences has helped greatly toward this end, and should persist. This is what has enabled each of our fellow scientists to assume that evolution has been proven in other fields, although they may regard the evidence in their own fields as anomalous.

We must also continue to confuse macroevolution - still (unfortunately) largely unexplained apart from those "just-so" stories the public (fortunately) seems to be satisfied with - with microevolution, which even creationists accept (precisely because this flavor, unlike macroevolution, is backed up by proof and observation, yet is so sadly lacking in the explanatory power we need). In the meantime, we must continue to present creationist belief as a monolithic system that insists on a young earth and so on, ignoring those such as Hugh Ross. However, we should be careful not to stray into other areas of scientific inquiry which tend to validate their views! The danger of this cannot be overestimated. We would do well to steer inquiry away from the problems of origins, chemistry, fossil evidence, molecular biology, information theory, and logic, for example. Be wary of invitations to debate experts in these areas!

Although we have not yet solved the problem of inadverdently turning schoolchildren into moral dunces, the "fully compatible with religion" pablum must, regrettably, be continued. As long as Sir Arthur Keith's observation that "evolutionism was basic in all Nazi thought, from beginning to end" is largely unpublicized, we stand a good chance of slipping the implications past the adults as well.

Remember that science must be subverted and even perverted to serve the greater good of ridding us of superstition and opposition. Keep churning out those books and colorful brochures en masse, and we will carry the day.

Your affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

2004-03-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

Evolutionists on Evolution

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.

"It is therefore of immediate concern to both biologist and layman that Darwinism is under attack.The theory ... that undermined 19th-century religion has virtually become a religion itself and in its turn is being threatened by fresh ideas. The attacks are certainly not limited to those of the creationists and religious fundamentalists who deny Darwinism for political and moral reasons. The main thrust of the criticism comes from within science itself. ...

"What is even more surprising is that these doubts are arising simultaneously from several independent branches of science. With a growth in the appreciation of the philosophy of science ... has come a doubt about whether Darwinism is, strictly speaking, scientific. ... From within biology, the doubts have come from scientists in half a dozen separate fields. ..."

- B. Leith, The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism 10-11, 1982

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.

Some Publications by Noncreationist Scientists Dissatisfied with Evolutionism

Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (1987)
Holbrook, Evolution and the Humanities (1986)
Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985)
Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (1985)
Ho and Saunders, Beyond Neo-Darwinism (1984)
Sermonti and Fondi, Dopo Darwin: Critica all' Evoluzionismo (1980)
Grasse, The Evolution of Living Organisms (trans. 1977)

(W.R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, 4 (1991), Thomas Nelson Inc.)

2004-03-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

Scientific Censorship and Evolution

============================================

The article below was commissioned in February 1995 by the
British weekly newspaper,"Times Higher Education Supplement"
to appear in March 1995. It has been censored because it
challenges, scientifically, the empirical foundations of the
neo-Darwinist theory of evolution.

The article was "spiked" by the THES Following a campaign against
it by Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University.

In the interests of freedom of speech, and so that such attempts
at censorship cannot succeed, I am placing the article in the
public domain without copyright restriction and am posting it as
widely as possible on the Internet. I also attach a copy of my
letter to the editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement
saying why I believe this article should be published.

I believe there is an issue of scientific censorship involved here
that affects us all equally -- even if you disagree with the conclusions
in my article.

Please feel free to copy, distribute, re-post or reproduce the
article in its entirety, together with this introductory note, as
much as you wish.
============================================
Auriol Stevens
Editor
Times Higher Education Supplement
Admiral House
66-68 East Smithfield
London E1 9XY

16 March 1995

Dear Ms Stevens,

I know that my article on the decline of the neo-Darwinist theory
of evolution has caused some controversy and is bound, if
published, to cause even more. May I draw your attention to two
points that I believe are important?

The first is that it has been said, by some scientists, that I am
a secret creationist opposed to neo-Darwinism for religious
reasons. I am not a creationist and my criticisms of the neo-
Darwinist mechanism are purely scientific objections -- as any
reading of the article itself clearly shows.

The second point is far more important. I believe that the great
strength of science and the scientific method is its openness to
debate. Science is strong because errors are exposed through the
process of open argument and counter-argument. Science does not
need vigilante scientists to guard the gates against heretics.
If the heresy is true it will become accepted. If false, it will
be shown to be false, by rational discourse.

In his "The Open Society and its Enemies" Sir Karl Popper says
that the great value of the scientific method is that it saves us
from "The tyranny of opinion". If neo-Darwinists can counter the
evidence I present, let them do so. If they seek to prevent my
writing being published because they don't like it, then it is
not just I that fall victim to the "tyranny of opinion", it is
all of us.

If this article were about any other subject -- finance,
politics, the economy -- I know it would be welcomed as well-
written and thought-provoking even if its claims were
controversial. It is only because it is about neo-Darwinism, a
subject on which some biologists feel insecure and ultra-
sensitive, that doubts have been raised about it.

Best wishes

Yours sincerely
Richard Milton

============================================

Neo-Darwinism: time to reconsider
By Richard Milton

It was the dazzling gains made by science and technology in the
nineteenth century through the application of rational analysis
that led people to think of applying reason to other fields.

Following the brilliant success of reason and method in physics
and chemistry -- especially in medicine -- it was natural for
science to seek to apply the same analytical tool to the most
intractable and complex problems: human society and economic
affairs; human psychology; and even the origin and development of
life itself. The result was the great mechanistic philosophies
of the last century: Marxism, Freudianism and Darwinism.

The simplicities and certainties of these systems mirrored the
intellectually well-ordered life of Victorian society with its
authoritarian values and institutionalised prejudices. Now, a
century later, all three systems have run their course, have been
measured by history, and have been ultimately found to be
inadequate tools of explanation.

Unlike Marx and Freud, Darwin himself remains esteemed both
as a highly original thinker and as a careful researcher (his
study of fossil barnacles remains a text book example for
palaeontologists). But the theory that bears his name was
transformed in the early years of this century into the
mechanistic, reductionist theory of neo-Darwinism: the theory
that living creatures are machines whose only goal is genetic
replication -- a matter of chemistry and statistics; or, in the
words of professor Jacques Monod, director of the Pasteur
Institute, a matter only of "chance and necessity". [1]

And while the evidence for evolution itself remains persuasive --
especially the homologies that are found in comparative anatomy
and molecular biology of many different species -- much of the
empirical evidence that was formerly believed to support the
neo-Darwinian mechanism of chance mutation coupled with natural
selection has melted away like snow on a spring morning, through
better observation and more careful analysis.

Marxist, Freudian and neo-Darwinist systems of thought ultimately
failed for the same reason; that they sought to use mechanistic
reductionism to explain and predict systems that we now know are
complexity-related, and cannot be explained as the sum of their
parts.

In the case of neo-Darwinism, it was not the mysteries of the
mind or of the economy that were explained. It was the origin of
the first single-celled organism in the primeval oceans, and its
development into the plant and animal kingdoms of today by a
strictly blind process of chance genetic mutation working with
natural selection.

In the first five decades of this century -- the heyday of the
theory -- zoologists, palaeontologists and comparative anatomists
assembled the impressive exhibits that generations of school
children have seen in Natural History Museums the world over: the
evolution of the horse family; the fossils that illustrate the
transition from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal; and the
discovery of astonishing extinct species such as "Archaeopteryx",
apparently half-reptile, half-bird.

Over successive decades, these exhibits have been first disputed,
then downgraded, and finally shunted off to obscure museum
basements, as further research has shown them to be flawed or
misconceived.

Anyone educated in a western country in the last forty years will
recall being shown a chart of the evolution of the horse from
"Eohippus", a small dog-like creature in the Eocene period 50
million years ago, to "Mesohippus", a sheep-sized animal of 30
million years ago, eventually to "Dinohippus", the size of a
Shetland pony.

This chart was drawn in 1950 by Harvard's professor of
palaeontology George Simpson, to accompany his standard text
book, "Horses", which encapsulated all the research done by the
American Museum of Natural History in the previous half century.

Simpson plainly believed that his evidence was incontrovertible
because he wrote, 'The history of the horse family is still one
of the clearest and most convincing for showing that organisms
really have evolved. . . There really is no point nowadays in
continuing to collect and to study fossils simply to determine
whether or not evolution is a fact. The question has been
decisively answered in the affirmative.' [2]

Yet shortly after this affirmation, Simpson admits in passing
that the chart he has drawn contains major gaps that he has not
included: a gap before "Eohippus" and its unknown ancestors, for
example, and another gap after "Eohippus" and before its supposed
descendant "Mesohippus". [3] What is it, scientifically, that
connects these isolated species on the famous chart if it is not
fossil remains? And how could such unconnected examples
demonstrate either genetic mutation or natural selection?

Even though, today, the bones themselves have been relegated to
the basement, the famous chart with its unproven continuity still
appears in museum displays and handbooks, text books,
encyclopaedias and lectures.

The remarkable "Archaeopteryx" also seems at first glance to bear
out the neo-Darwinian concept of birds having evolved from small
reptiles (the candidate most favoured by neo-Darwinists is a
small agile dinosaur called a Coelosaur, and this is the
explanation offered by most text books and museums.) Actually,
such a descent is impossible because coelosaurs, in common with
most other dinosaurs, did not posses collar bones while
"Archaeopteryx", like all birds, has a modified collar bone to
support its pectoral muscles. [4] Again, how can an isolated
fossil, however remarkable, provide evidence of beneficial
mutation or natural selection?

Neo-Darwinists were quick to claim that modern discoveries of
molecular biology supported their theory. They said, for
example, that if you analyse the DNA, the genetic blueprint, of
plants and animals you find how closely or distantly they are
related. That studying DNA sequences enables you to draw up the
precise family tree of all living things and show how they are
related by common ancestry.

This is a very important claim and central to the theory. If
true, it would mean that animals neo-Darwinists say are closely
related, such as two reptiles, would have greater similarity in
their DNA than animals that are not so closely related, such as a
reptile and a bird.

In 1981, molecular biologists working under Dr Morris
Goodman at Ann Arbor University decided to test this hypothesis.
They took the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles -- a snake
and a crocodile -- which are said by Darwinists to be closely
related, and the haemoglobin DNA of a bird, in this case a
farmyard chicken.

They found that the two animals who had _least_ DNA sequences in
common were the two reptiles, the snake and the crocodile. They
had only around 5% of DNA sequences in common -- only one
twentieth of their haemoglobin DNA. The two creatures whose DNA
was closest were the crocodile and the chicken, where there were
17.5% of sequences in common -- nearly one fifth. The actual DNA
similarities were the _reverse_ of that predicted by neo-
Darwinism. [5]

Even more baffling is the fact that radically different genetic
coding can give rise to animals that look outwardly very similar
and exhibit similar behaviour, while creatures that look and
behave completely differently can have much in common
genetically. There are, for instance, more than 3,000 species of
frogs, all of which look superficially the same. But there is a
greater variation of DNA between them than there is between the
bat and the blue whale.

Further, if neo-Darwinist evolutionary ideas of gradual genetic
change were true, then one would expect to find that simple
organisms have simple DNA and complex organisms have complex DNA.
In some cases, this is true. The simple nematode worm is a
favourite subject of laboratory study because its DNA contains a
mere 1,000 nucleotide bases. At the other end of the complexity
scale, humans have 23 chromosomes which in total contain 3,000
million nucleotide bases.

Unfortunately, this promisingly Darwinian progression is
contradicted by many counter examples. While human DNA is
contained in 23 pairs of chromosomes, the humble goldfish has
more than twice as many, at 47. The even humbler garden snail --
not much more than a glob of slime in a shell -- has 27
chromosomes. Some species of rose bush have 56 chromosomes.

So the simple fact is that DNA analysis does _not_ confirm neo-
Darwinist theory. In the laboratory, DNA analysis falsifies neo-
Darwinist theory.

An even more damaging blow to the theory was the discovery that
the very centrepiece of neo-Darwinism, Darwin's original
conception of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest,
is fatally flawed.

The problem is: how can biologists (or anyone else) tell what
characteristics constitute the animal or plant's 'fitness' to
survive? How can you tell which are the fit animals and plants?

The answer is that the only way to define the fit is by means of
a post-hoc rationalisation -- the fit must be "those who
survived". While the only way to characterise uniquely those who
survive is as "the fit". The central proposition of the
Darwinian argument turns out to be an empty tautology.

C.H. Waddington, professor of biology at Edinburgh University
wrote; "Natural selection, which was at first considered as
though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or
observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be
a tautology, a statement of an inevitable although previously
unrecognised relation. It states that the fittest individuals in
a population (defined as those who leave the most offspring) will
leave most offspring. Once the statement is made, its truth is
apparent." [6]

George Simpson, professor of paleontology at Harvard, sought to
restore content to the idea of natural selection by saying; "If
genetically red-haired parents have, on average, a larger
proportion of children than blondes or brunettes, then evolution
will be in the direction of red hair. If genetically left-handed
people have more children, evolution will be towards left-
handedness. The characteristics themselves do not directly
matter at all. All that matters is who leaves more descendants
over the generations. Natural selection favours fitness only if
you define fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact
geneticists do define it that way, which maybe confusing to
others. To a geneticist, fitness has nothing to do with health,
strength, good looks, or anything but effectiveness in breeding."

Notice the words; "The characteristics themselves do not directly
matter at all." This innocent phrase fatally undermines Darwin's
original key conception: that each animal's special physical
characteristics are what makes it fit to survive: the giraffe's
long neck, the eagle's keen eye, or the cheetah's 60 mile-an-hour
sprint.

Simpson's reformulation means all this must be dropped: it is not
the characteristics that directly matter -- it is the animals'
capacity to reproduce themselves. The race is not to the swift,
after all, but merely to the prolific. So how can neo-Darwinism
explain the enormous diversity of characteristics?

Not only are neo-Darwinist ideas falsified by empirical research,
but other puzzling and extraordinary findings have come to light
in recent decades, suggesting that evolution is not blind but
rather is in some unknown way _directed_. The experiments of
Cairns at Harvard and Hall at Rochester University suggest that
microorganisms can mutate in a way that is beneficial. [8]

Experiments with tobacco plants and flax demonstrate genetic
change through the effects of fertilisers alone. [9] Experiments
with sea squirts and salamanders as long ago as the 1920s
appeared to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. [10] Moreover, as Sir Fred Hoyle has pointed
out, Fossil micro-organisms have been found in meteorites,
indicating that life is universal -- not a lucky break in the
primeval soup. This view is shared by Sir Francis Crick, co-
discoverer of the function of DNA [11]

In the light of discoveries of this kind, the received wisdom of
neo-Darwinism is no longer received so uncritically. A new
generation of biologists is subjecting the theory to the cold
light of empirical investigation and finding it inadequate;
scientists like Dr Rupert Sheldrake, Dr Brian Goodwin, professor
of biology at the Open University and Dr Peter Saunders,
professor of mathematics at King's College London.

Not surprisingly, the work of this new generation is heresy to
the old. When Rupert Sheldrake's book "A New Science of Life"
with its revolutionary theory of morphic resonance was published
in 1981, the editor of "Nature" magazine, John Maddox, ran an
editorial calling for the book to be burned -- a sure sign that
Sheldrake is onto something important, many will think. [12, 13]

The current mood in biology was summed up recently by Sheldrake
as, 'Rather like working in Russia under Brehznev. Many
biologists have one set of beliefs at work, their official
beliefs, and another set, their real beliefs, which they can
speak openly about only among friends. They may treat living
things as mechanical in the laboratory but when they go home they
don't treat their families as inanimate machines.'

It is a strange aspect of science in the twentieth century that
while physics has had to submit to the indignity of a principle
of uncertainty and physicists have become accustomed to such
strange entities as matter-waves and virtual particles, many of
their colleagues down the corridor in biology seem not to have
noticed the revolution of quantum electrodynamics. As far as
many biologists are concerned, matter is made of billiard balls
which collide with Newtonian certainty, and they carry on
building molecular models out of coloured table-tennis balls.

One of the twentieth century's most distinguished scientists and
Nobel laureates, physicist Max Planck, observed that; 'A new
scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually
die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'

It may be another decade or more before such a new generation
grows up and restores intellectual rigour to the study of
evolutionary biology.

========================================

Richard Milton is a science writer and journalist. He is the
author of "The Facts of Life" (Transworld/Corgi, London, 1993) a
critical review of neo-Darwinism and "Forbidden Science" (Fourth
Estate, London, 1994) a critical analysis of censorship and
intolerance in science.

========================================

Alternative Science : Challenging the
Myths of the Scientific Establishment
by Richard Milton
#W5765 Book - Softcover - 264 pages $14.95

========================================

References

[1] Monod, Jacques, 1972 edn. Chance and Necessity. William
Collins. Glasgow.

[2] Simpson, George G. 1951. Horses. Oxford University Press.

[3] Simpson, George G. 1951. Horses. Oxford University Press.

[4] Norman, David. 1985. Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs. Salamander
Books. London.

[5] Patterson, Colin, presentation to the American Natural
History Museum, 5 November 1981.

[6] Waddington, C.H., 1960, Evolutionary Adaptation in Tax
Vol. 1, pp 381-402.

[7] Simpson, George G. 1964, This View of Life, Harcourt Brace
and World. New York.

[8] Cairns, J., J. Overbaugh, S. Miller. 1988. The origin of
mutants. In Nature 335: 142-145.

Hall, Barry G. Sept. 1990. Spontaneous point mutations that
occur more often when advantageous than when neutral. In
Genetics Vol. 126, pp. 5-16.

[9] Durrant, Alan. 1958. Environmental conditioning of flax. in
Nature, Vol. 81, p. 928-929.

Hill, J. 1965. Environmental induction of heritable changes
in Nicotiana rustica. in Nature, Vol. 207, pp. 732-734.

Cullis, C.A. 1977. Molecular aspects of the environmental
induction of heritable changes in Flax. in Heredity.
Vol. 38, p. 129-154.

[10] See Koestler, Arthur. 1978. The Case of the Midwife Toad.
Hutchinson. London, for an account of the experiments of
Paul Kammerer at the Vienna Institute for Experimental
Biology 1903-1926.

[11] Hoyle, F. 1983. The Intelligent Universe. Michael Joseph.
London.

See also, Crick, Francis, 1981. Life Itself. Macdonald.
London.

[12] Sheldrake, Rupert, 1988 edn. A New Science of Life, Paladin
London.

[13] Nature 1981, Vol. 293, pp 245-246.

[14] Milton, Richard, 1993 edn., The Facts of Life: Shattering
the myths of Darwinism, Transworld/Corgi, London.

[15] Milton, Richard, 1995 edn., Forbidden Science: Exposing
the Secrets of Suppressed Research, Fourth Estate, London.

"Perfectly exact physics is not so very exact, just as
holy men are not so very holy."
========================================
Richard Milton |
10 Pembury Road |
Tonbridge, Kent TN9 2HX |
United Kingdom |
Tel/Fax: 0732 353427 |
richard@milton.win-uk.net | Wilhelm Reich
========================================

2004-03-06T13:05:00.000-08:00

Access Research Network
Michael J. Behe Files

Molecular Machines:
Experimental Support for the Design Inference

Michael J. Behe

A Series of Eyes

How do we see? In the 19th century the anatomy of the eye was known in great detail and the sophisticated mechanisms it employs to deliver an accurate picture of the outside world astounded everyone who was familiar with them. Scientists of the 19th century correctly observed that if a person were so unfortunate as to be missing one of the eye's many integrated features, such as the lens, or iris, or ocular muscles, the inevitable result would be a severe loss of vision or outright blindness. Thus it was concluded that the eye could only function if it were nearly intact.

As Charles Darwin was considering possible objections to his theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species he discussed the problem of the eye in a section of the book appropriately entitled "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication." He realized that if in one generation an organ of the complexity of the eye suddenly appeared, the event would be tantamount to a miracle. Somehow, for Darwinian evolution to be believable, the difficulty that the public had in envisioning the gradual formation of complex organs had to be removed.

Darwin succeeded brilliantly, not by actually describing a real pathway that evolution might have used in constructing the eye, but rather by pointing to a variety of animals that were known to have eyes of various constructions, ranging from a simple light sensitive spot to the complex vertebrate camera eye, and suggesting that the evolution of the human eye might have involved similar organs as intermediates.

But the question remains, how do we see? Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked. When discussing the eye Darwin dismissed the question of its ultimate mechanism1 :

How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated.

He had an excellent reason for declining to answer the question: 19th century science had not progressed to the point where the matter could even be approached. The question of how the eye works--that is, what happens when a photon of light first impinges on the retina--simply could not be answered at that time. As a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanism of life could be answered at that time. How do animal muscles cause movement? How does photosynthesis work? How is energy extracted from food? How does the body fight infection? Nobody knew.

Calvinism

Now, it appears to be a characteristic of the human mind that when it is unconstrained by knowledge of the mechanisms of a process, then it seems easy to imagine simple steps leading from non-function to function. A happy example of this is seen in the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Little boy Calvin is always having adventures in the company of his tiger Hobbes by jumping in a box and traveling back in time, or grabbing a toy ray gun and "transmogrifying" himself into various animal shapes, or again using a box as a duplicator and making copies of himself to deal with worldly powers such as his mom and his teachers. A small child such as Calvin finds it easy to imagine that a box just might be able to fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin does not know how airplanes work.

A good example from the biological world of complex changes appearing to be simple is the belief in spontaneous generation. One of the chief proponents of the theory of spontaneous generation during the middle of the 19th century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that 19th century microscopes provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a "simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon," 2 not much different from a piece of microscopic Jello. Thus it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life could easily be produced from inanimate material. In 1859, the year of the publication of The Origin of Species, an exploratory vessel, H.M.S. Cyclops, dredged up some curious looking mud from the sea bottom. Eventually Haeckel came to observe the mud and thought that it closely resembled some cells he had seen under a microscope. Excitedly he brought this to the attention of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's great friend and defender. Huxley, too, became convinced that it was Urschleim (that is, protoplasm), the progenitor of life itself, and Huxley named the mud Bathybius Haeckelii after the eminent proponent of abiogenesis.

The mud failed to grow. In later years, with the development of new biochemical techniques and improved microscopes, the complexity of the cell was revealed. The "simple lumps" were shown to contain thousands of different types of organic molecules, proteins, and nucleic acids, many discrete subcellular structures, specialized compartments for specialized processes, and an extremely complicated architecture. Looking back from the perspective of our time, the episode of Bathybius Haeckelii seems silly or downright embarrassing, but it shouldn't. Haeckel and Huxley were behaving naturally, like Calvin: since they were unaware of the complexity of cells, they found it easy to believe that cells could originate from simple mud.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age. In science there is even a whimsical term for a machine or structure or process that does something, but the actual mechanism by which it accomplishes its task is unknown: it is called a 'black box.' In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

Ernst Mayr, the prominent biologist, historian, and guiding force behind the neo-Darwinian synthesis, has pointed out that 3 :

Any scientific revolution has to accept all sorts of black boxes, for if one had to wait until all black boxes are opened, one would never have any conceptual advances.

That is true. But in earlier days when black boxes were finally opened science, and sometimes the whole world, appeared to change. Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken.

Proteins

In order to understand the molecular basis of life it is necessary to understand how things called "proteins" work. Although most people think of protein" as something you eat, one of the major food groups, when they reside in the body of an uneaten animal or plant proteins serve a different purpose. Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life. For example, the first of many steps necessary for the conversion of sugar to biologically-usable forms of energy is carried out by a protein called hexokinase. Skin is made in large measure of a protein called collagen. When light impinges on your retina it interacts first with a protein called rhodopsin. As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions. However, in general a given protein can perform only one or a few functions: rhodopsin cannot form skin and collagen cannot interact usefully with light. Therefore a typical cell contains thousands and thousands of different types of proteins to perform the many tasks necessary for life, much like a carpenter's workshop might contain many different kinds of tools for various carpentry work.

What do these versatile tools look like? The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids. Although the protein chain can consist of anywhere from about 50 to about 1,000 amino acid links, each position can only contain one of twenty different amino acids. In this way they are much like words: words can come in various lengths but they are made up from a discrete set of 26 letters. Now, a protein in a cell does not float around like a floppy chain; rather, it folds up into a very precise structure which can be quite different for different types of proteins. When all is said and done two different amino sequences--two different proteins--can be folded to structures as specific as and different from each other as a three-eighths inch wrench and a jigsaw. And like the household tools, if the shape of the proteins is significantly warped then they fail to do their jobs.

The Eyesight of Man

In general, biological processes on the molecular level are performed by networks of proteins, each member of which carries out a particular task in a chain.

Let us return to the question, how do we see? Although to Darwin the primary event of vision was a black box, through the efforts of many biochemists an answer to the question of sight is at hand. 4 When light strikes the retina a photon is absorbed by an organic molecule called 11-cis-retinal, causing it to rearrange within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in shape of retinal forces a corresponding change in shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which it is tightly bound. As a consequence of the protein's metamorphosis, the behavior of the protein changes in a very specific way. The altered protein can now interact with another protein called transducin. Before associating with rhodopsin, transducin is tightly bound to a small organic molecule called GDP, but when it binds to rhodopsin the GDP dissociates itself from transducin and a molecule called GTP, which is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP, binds to transducin.

The exchange of GTP for GDP in the transducinrhodopsin complex alters its behavior. GTP-transducinrhodopsin binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When bound by rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cleave a molecule called cGMP. Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the action of the phosphodiesterase lowers the concentration of cGMP. Activating the phosphodiesterase can be likened to pulling the plug in a bathtub, lowering the level of water.

A second membrane protein which binds cGMP, called an ion channel, can be thought of as a special gateway regulating the number of sodium ions in the cell. The ion channel normally allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump proteins keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the concentration of cGMP is reduced from its normal value through cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, many channels close, resulting in a reduced cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions. This causes an imbalance of charges across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain: the result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

If the biochemistry of vision were limited to the reactions listed above, the cell would quickly deplete its supply of 11-cis-retinal and cGMP while also becoming depleted of sodium ions. Thus a system is required to limit the signal that is generated and restore the cell to its original state; there are several mechanisms which do this. Normally, in the dark, the ion channel, in addition to sodium ions, also allows calcium ions to enter the cell; calcium is pumped back out by a different protein in order to maintain a constant intracellular calcium concentration. However, when cGMP levels fall, shutting down the ion channel and decreasing the sodium ion concentration, calcium ion concentration is also decreased. The phosphodiesterase enzyme, which destroys cGMP, is greatly slowed down at lower calcium concentration. Additionally, a protein called guanylate cyclase begins to resynthesize cGMP when calcium levels start to fall. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, metarhodopsin II is chemically modified by an enzyme called rhodopsin kinase, which places a phosphate group on its substrate. The modified rhodopsin is then bound by a protein dubbed arrestin, which prevents the rhodopsin from further activating transducin. Thus the cell contains mechanisms to limit the amplified signal started by a single photon.

Trans-retinal eventually falls off of the rhodopsin molecule and must be reconverted to 11-cis-retinal and again bound by opsin to regenerate rhodopsin for another visual cycle. To accomplish this trans-retinal is first chemically modified by an enzyme to transretinol, a form containing two more hydrogen atoms. A second enzyme then isomerizes the molecule to 11-cis-retinol. Finally, a third enzyme removes the previouslyadded hydrogen atoms to form 11-cis-retinal, and the cycle is complete.

To Explain Life

Although many details of the biochemistry of vision have not been cited here, the overview just seven is meant to demonstrate that, ultimately, this is what it means to 'explain' vision. This is the level of explanation that Biological science eventually must aim for. In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated. The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon such as sight, or digestion, or immunity, must include a molecular explanation. It is no longer sufficient, now that the black box of vision has been opened, for an 'evolutionary explanation' of that power to invoke only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the 19th century and as most popularizers of evolution continue to do today. Anatomy is, quite simply, irrelevant. So is the fossil record. It does not matter whether or not the fossil record is consistent with evolutionary theory, any more than it mattered in physics that Newton's theory was consistent with everyday experience. The fossil record has nothing to tell us about, say, whether or how the interactions of 11-cis-retinal with rhodopsin, transducin, and phosphodiesterase could have developed step-by-step. Neither do the patterns of biogeography matter, or of population genetics, or the explanations that evolutionary theory has given for rudimentary organs or species abundance.

"How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated," said Darwin in the 19th century. But both phenomena have attracted the interest of modern biochemistry. The story of the slow paralysis of research on life's origin is quite interesting, but space precludes its retelling here. Suffice it to say that at present the field of originoflife studies has dissolved into a cacophony of conflicting models, each unconvincing, seriously incomplete, and incompatible with competing models. In private even most evolutionary biologists will admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life. 5

The purpose of this paper is to show that the same problems which beset origin-of-life research also bedevil efforts to show how virtually any complex biochemical system came about. Biochemistry has revealed a molecular world which stoutly resists explanation by the same theory that has long been applied at the level of the whole organism. Neither of Darwin's black boxes--the origin of life or the origin of vision or other complex biochemical systems--has been accounted for by his theory.

Irreducible Complexity

In The Origin of Species Darwin stated 6 :

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

A system which meets Darwin's criterion is one which exhibits irreducible complexity. By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional. Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on. It is almost universally conceded that such a sudden event would be irreconcilable with the gradualism Darwin envisioned. At this point, however, 'irreducibly complex' is just a term, whose power resides mostly in its definition. We must now ask if any real thing is in fact irreducibly complex, and, if so, then are any irreducibly complex things also biological systems.

Consider the humble mousetrap (Figure 1). The mousetraps that my family uses in our home to deal with unwelcome rodents consist of a number of parts. There are: (1) a flat wooden platform to act as a base; (2) a metal hammer, which does the actual job of crushing the little mouse; (3) a wire spring with extended ends to press against the platform and the hammer when the trap is charged; (4) a sensitive catch which releases when slight pressure is applied; and (5) a metal bar which holds the hammer back when the trap is charged and connects to the catch. There are also assorted staples and screws to hold the system together.

Figure 1. A household mousetrap. The working parts of the trap are labeled. If any of the parts are missing the trap does not function.

If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function. In other words, the simple little mousetrap has no ability to trap a mouse until several separate parts are all assembled.

Because the mousetrap is necessarily composed of several parts, it is irreducibly complex. Thus, irreducibly complex systems exist.

Molecular Machines

Now, are any biochemical systems irreducibly complex? Yes, it turns out that many are.

Earlier we discussed proteins. In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines. Like the picture tube, wires, metal bolts and screws that comprise a television set, many proteins are part of structures that only function when virtually all of the components have been assembled. A good example of this is a cilium. 7

Figure 2a. Animation of a Cilium

Cilia are hairlike organelles on the surfaces of many animal and lower plant cells that serve to move fluid over the cell's surface or to "row" single cells through a fluid. In humans, for example, epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract each have about 200 cilia that beat in synchrony to sweep mucus towards the throat for elimination. A cilium consists of a membrane-coated bundle of fibers called an axoneme. An axoneme contains a ring of 9 double microtubules surrounding two central single microtubules. Each outer doublet consists of a ring of 13 filaments (subfiber A) fused to an assembly of 10 filaments (subfiber B). The filaments of the microtubules are composed of two proteins called alpha and beta tubulin. The 11 microtubules forming an axoneme are held together by three types of connectors: subfibers A are joined to the central microtubules by radial spokes; adjacent outer doublets are joined by linkers that consist of a highly elastic protein called nexin; and the central microtubules are joined by a connecting bridge. Finally, every subfiber A bears two arms, an inner arm and an outer arm, both containing the protein dynein.

But how does a cilium work? Experiments have indicated that ciliary motion results from the chemically-powered "walking" of the dynein arms on one microtubule up the neighboring subfiber B of a second microtubule so that the two microtubules slide past each other (Figure 2a and b). However, the protein cross-links between microtubules in an intact cilium prevent neighboring microtubules from sliding past each other by more than a short distance. These cross-links, therefore, convert the dynein-induced sliding motion to a bending motion of the entire axoneme.

Figure 2b. Schematic drawing of part of a cilium. The power stroke of the motor protein, dynein, attached to one microtubule, against subfiber B of a neighboring microtubule causes the fibers to slide past each other. The flexible linker protein, nexin, converts the sliding motion to a bending motion.

Now, let us sit back, review the workings of the cilium, and consider what it implies. Cilia are composed of at least a half dozen proteins: alpha-tubulin, beta-tubulin, dynein, nexin, spoke protein, and a central bridge protein. These combine to perform one task, ciliary motion, and all of these proteins must be present for the cilium to function. If the tubulins are absent, then there are no filaments to slide; if the dynein is missing, then the cilium remains rigid and motionless; if nexin or the other connecting proteins are missing, then the axoneme falls apart when the filaments slide.

What we see in the cilium, then, is not just profound complexity, but also irreducible complexity on the molecular scale. Recall that by "irreducible complexity" we mean an apparatus that requires several distinct components for the whole to work. My mousetrap must have a base, hammer, spring, catch, and holding bar, all working together, in order to function. Similarly, the cilium, as it is constituted, must have the sliding filaments, connecting proteins, and motor proteins for function to occur. In the absence of any one of those components, the apparatus is useless.

The components of cilia are single molecules. This means that there are no more black boxes to invoke; the complexity of the cilium is final, fundamental. And just as scientists, when they began to learn the complexities of the cell, realized how silly it was to think that life arose spontaneously in a single step or a few steps from ocean mud, so too we now realize that the complex cilium can not be reached in a single step or a few steps. But since the complexity of the cilium is irreducible, then it can not have functional precursors. Since the irreducibly complex cilium can not have functional precursors it can not be produced by natural selection, which requires a continuum of function to work. Natural selection is powerless when there is no function to select. We can go further and say that, if the cilium can not be produced by natural selection, then the cilium was designed.

The Study of "Molecular Evolution"

Other examples of irreducible complexity abound, including aspects of protein transport, blood clotting, closed circular DNA, electron transport, the bacterial flagellum, telomeres, photosynthesis, transcription regulation, and much more. Examples of irreducible complexity can be found on virtually every page of a biochemistry textbook. But if these things cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution, how has the scientific community regarded these phenomena of the past forty years? A good place to look for an answer to that question is in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. JME is a journal that was begun specifically to deal with the topic of how evolution occurs on the molecular level. It has high scientific standards, and is edited by prominent figures in the field. In a recent issue of JME there were published eleven articles; of these, all eleven were concerned simply with the analysis of protein or DNA sequences. None of the papers discussed detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures. In the past ten years JME has published 886 papers. Of these, 95 discussed the chemical synthesis of molecules thought to be necessary for the origin of life, 44 proposed mathematical models to improve sequence analysis, 20 concerned the evolutionary implications of current structures, and 719 were analyses of protein or polynucleotide sequences. There were zero papers discussing detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures. This is not a peculiarity of JME. No papers are to be found that discuss detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature, Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology or, to my knowledge, any journal whatsoever.

Sequence comparisons overwhelmingly dominate the literature of molecular evolution. But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked. Thus in this area science is mute. This means that when we infer that complex biochemical systems were designed, we are contradicting no experimental result, we are in conflict with no theoretical study. No experiments needs to be questioned, but the interpretation of all experiments must now be reexamined, just as the results of experiments that were consistent with a Newtonian view of the universe had to be reinterpreted when the waveparticle duality of matter was discerned.

Conclusion

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural. But this seems to me to be both bad logic and bad science. Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted. Rather, it is an effort to make true statements about physical reality. It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed. This fact immediately suggested a singular event--that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event--the creation, the beginning of the universe. The prominent physicist A.S. Eddington probably spoke for many physicists in voicing his disgust with such a notion 8 :

Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me, as I think it must be to most; and even those who would welcome a proof of the intervention of a Creator will probably consider that a single windingup at some remote epoch is not really the kind of relation between God and his world that brings satisfaction to the mind.

Nonetheless, the Big Bang hypothesis was embraced by physics and over the years has proven to be a very fruitful paradigm. The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion. In the present day, as biochemistry multiplies examples of fantastically complex molecular systems, systems which discourage even an attempt to explain how they may have arisen, we should take a lesson from physics. The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.

In concluding, it is important to realize that we are not inferring design from what we do not know, but from what we do know. We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box. A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

This paper was originally presented in the Summer of 1994 at the meeting ofthe C.S. Lewis Society, Cambridge University.

References

Darwin, Charles (1872) Origin of Species 6th ed (1988), p.151, New York University Press, New York.return to text
Farley, John (1979) The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin, 2nd ed, p.73, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.return to text
Mayr, Ernst (1991) One Long Argument, p. 146, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.return to text
Devlin, Thomas M. (1992) Textbook of Biochemistry, pp.938954, WileyLiss, New York.return to text
University of Washington rhetorician John Angus Campbell has observed that "huge edifices of ideas such as positivism never really die. Thinking people gradually abandon them and even ridicule them among themselves, but keep the persuasively useful parts to scare away the uninformed." "The Comic Frame and the Rhetoric of Science: Epistemology and Ethics in Darwin's Origin," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 24, pp.2750 (1994). This certainly applies to the way the scientific community handles questions on the origin of life.return to text
Darwin, p.154.return to text
Voet, D. & Voet, J.G. (1990) Biochemistry, pp.11321139, John Wiley & Sons, New York.return to text
Cited in Jaki, Stanley L. (1980) Cosmos and Creator, pp.56, Gateway Editions, Chicago.return to text

Mike Behe received a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from Drexel University in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. After doing postdoctoral work at the National institutes of Health he became assistant professor of Chemistry at the City University of New York/Queens College.
In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, where he is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.
Mike is married to the former Celeste LaTassa. They are members of St. Theresa Parish in Hellertown, PA, where they are raising their six children: Grace, age 10; Benedict, 9; Clare, 7; Leo, 5; Rose, 3; and Vincent, 1.
Look for Dr. Behe's new book published by the Free Press, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.

[ Michael J. Behe Resource Page ] [ ARN Home Page ]

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2004-03-05T22:13:00.000-08:00

The Mechanisms of Evolution : Blissful Ignorance

From Cremo's new book, Forbidden Archeology's Impact. Note that this is the same phenomenon seen on "reviews" of non-Darwinist books at Amazon.com: fundamentalist Darwinists commenting on the content of books they have never dared to read.

"While I have not read Forbidden Archeology, I have encountered people who have on the web before and, if their recitations are in any way accurate, I think this tells me all I need to know about your book."

- Dr. Phil Nicholls, Darwinist fundamentalist, p.502

"While I haven't read the book and can't comment intelligently on the bulk of its contents, I've seen excerpts. ... [FA] doesn't do anything to challenge the fact that organisms, human or otherwise, have evolved."

- Brett J. Vickers, p. 506. Note: FA is 828 pages long.

"It looks like most of the detractors haven't read the book. Could someone please explain to me how anyone can pose a valid criticism of a book they haven't read?"

- Dean T. Miller, p. 508

2004-03-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

The (True) Mechanisms of Evolution:

Intimidation and Censorship

From Cremo's book, Forbidden Archeology's Impact. Hope this helps clear up how science is "really" done in this field. I hope to have a page listing scientists who have been discriminated against because they dared challenge the high priesthood of evolution. Any info on this would be appreciated. Meanwhile, a sample of evolutionist bigotry:

Dawkins fancies himself the Grand Inquisitor

Some of these quotes have to do with NBC's airing of Mysterious Origins of Man (MOM), which included material about the many fossil finds that falsify evolution. Although MOM included topics that might rightly be classified as pseudoscience, it is the material that contradicts evolution that has put an arachnid up the alimentary canal of Darwin's devotees.

Keep in mind that Darwin was a theology student who didn't even understand the Biblical teaching of creation!

"This kind of claptrap needs a response to NBC, its affiliates, and the program's sponsors. ... We're working on sponsors now. Anyone record the show who can provide a sponsor list?"

- letter to Nat'l Assoc. of Science Writers from Jere H. Lipps, paleontologist at U. of Calif. at Berkeley, 2/27/96. FA, p. 483

"If you are worried about science in America, tell your local NBC station, NBC, and its various sponsors that you object to the portrayal of this program as science. America must get smart and we can make a difference!

"Mysterious Origins ... and similar programs are a very definite black mark on NBC, its affiliates, the programs' [sic.] sponsors, and its producers to represent them as science. [Lipps goes on to list the sponsors of the program.] ... As science the program is garbage, but no one I know wanted the program banned from the airways, least of all me, who finds it a wonderful example of pseudoscience."

- letter to various newsgroups from Lipps, 5/30/96. FA, p. 517

"At the very least NBC should be required to make substantial prime-time apologies to their viewing audience for a sufficient period of time [!] so that the audience clearly gets the message that they were duped. [Does this mindset sound familiar?] In addition, NBC should perhaps be fined sufficiently so that a major fund for public service education [I wonder who will screen the content ...] can be established."

- letter to various people and newsgroups from Lipps, 6/21/96. FA, p. 533

"Perhaps Kellogg's would join with me and other scientists [sic.] in promoting intelligent science presentations and representations in the media. ... How about it? Ask your scientists if they might be interested. They really do know the difference between science and non-science, I assure you, or Kellogg would be in deeper trouble on lots of other issues."

- letter to Kellogg, a sponsor, from Dr. Lipps. Does the word "oily" come to mind? Cremo comments: "Dr. Lipps seems very determined to make sure that the American television-viewing public never again sees a television program that criticizes the theory of evolution.". FA, p. 498

"Christopher Wood: Anybody know who the sponsors are? I would like to get an early start : boycotting them. There's always the off chance that some of them will : pull their sponsorship.

"Terry Lacy: Might be nice to add something like "Does your sponsorship of the broadcast imply an endorsement of the same intellectual dishonesty? Can the public assume that your firm engages in same? [!]" Maybe someone could set up a 'sponsors of fraud' web page, listing the names."

- letter to various origins newsgroups from August Matthusen, 5/31/96. FA, p. 519. Cremo responds:

"What is really interesting about messages like the above is their depiction of 'how science works.' The response to unwanted ideas and evidence is not counterevidence and intellectual refutation, but boycotts and intimidation."

- Cremo's comment on the above letter. FA, p. 520

"It's all a bunch of hooey, and my recommendation is to stay away."

- B.D., Yale University. FA, p. 492

"You should be banned from the airwaves."

- J.J., ALCI. FA, p. 492

"Jim Rogers (March 6) ... I am *appalled* that NBC would air something so shoddy and misleading in a documentary format aimed at the general populace. ... [The producers] *owe* it to their audience to present some balance, instead of giving a two-minute summary of the "other side" from the producer's own biased perspective.

"Etherman (March 6) I've noticed that PBS specials on dinosaurs, origins of man, etc. never present opposing views. ...

"Jim Rogers (March 7) How many times must evolution be defended from anti-scientific creationists?

"Etherman (March 8) Are you suggesting that evolution is sacred and should not be questioned? My, how unscientific of you!"

- FA, p. 494

"Daniel D. Scripture: But it [MOM] ain't science. It is just a sideshow, fun for the ignorant (because it is only plausible to the ignorant).

"Angus Mann: Weeeelllll. I have been watching the postings on this newsgroup for a while and if it is a 'sideshow for the ignorant,' then why have we all got so worked up about it? Curious. Because it goes against the beliefs and findings of so many archaeologists?"

- FA, p. 495

[more to come?]

Cremo responds:

"Ten or twenty years ago the campaign of intimidation waged by Lipps and other fundamentalist Darwinians in the scientific community would have been sufficient to keep NBC from airing the program again or force NBC to let a fundamentalist Darwinian commentator dictate to the public how they should see the show. ...

"The campaign of intimidation waged by Lipps and his cohort is a real demonstration of how fundamentalist Darwinian science (as opposed to most other science) works. Darwinism is an ideology that fundamentalist Darwinians uphold by unscientific means (after all, what is so scientific about trying to intimidate a television network into taking a show off the air?).

"Darwinism is not a concept that can be demonstrated by ordinary scientific means. [See "Evolutionists on Evolution" for quotes by evolutionists attesting to this.] It is simply an article of faith. And adherents of this faith think that they have a right to impose it upon everyone and silence anyone who speaks against it. ... [They] would like to have a monopoly on access to the thinking of the general public. Fortunately, they do not have it and I hope they never will..[sic.]"

Darwinist censorship rears its ugly, intolerant head once again:

Legal philosopher Brian Leiter of the University of Texas is a self-proclaimed disciple of Nietzsche who fiercely champions a Darwinian materialist vision of the world from his weblog, The Leiter Reports. Having a blog on which to hold forth about the rights and wrongs of the world without the benefit of an editor doesn't make Leiter unique or particularly noteworthy, but one of his other sidelines does. Leiter is the author of The Philosophical Gourmet Report which ranks graduate philosophy programs "in the English-speaking world." His rankings are respected and followed. Accordingly, Leiter is a powerful figure in the academy who is invited to speak by peers who may find him personally objectionable but too important to offend or ignore. The respect for his rankings has perhaps caused him to place a correspondingly high value on his opinion in other matters, which is the only explanation for the story I'm about to tell. ...

One doesn't need to work very hard to read between the lines. Leiter seems to be threatening VanDyke's career if he should dare to set foot in the academy. The tone of his post makes clear that he means this student editor of the Harvard Law Review harm. Leiter's statement is the equivalent of an academic temper tantrum and is likely to backfire. The attack by a high-powered academic on an intellectually open law student is not the stuff of which great reputations are made. Leiter's peers, some of whom may actually have believed all the hype about academic freedom, will probably wonder just how this sort of proposed blacklisting squares with long-cherished ideals.

Francis Beckwith, who has been the object of attacks by Leiter before, is shocked the University of Texas professor would respond to a student's work so uncharitably. Beckwith expresses appreciation for Leiter's scholarly work, but adds, "Leiter's apparent intention to employ his own celebrity and academic stature to crush a young man's spirit and his future job prospects in the legal academy, and to do so by means of blacklisting and mean-spirited McCarthyesque intimidation tactics, is absolutely unjustified."

2004-03-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

Non-theists Attack Evolution

Although I don't share their religious views, Cremo & Thompson have produced an astounding compilation of anomalous evidence in support of their belief in the antiquity of man, i.e. evidence of the presence of man millions of years before he should have arrived on the evolutionary scene. (I interpret the data differently, of course; I believe radiometric dating is terribly flawed.) It is a well-documented, well-researched look at how scientists are able to ignore data that contradict their cherished personal beliefs.

The main point that must be gleaned is that Darwinism never gained popularity by virtue of scientific observation; rather, it was a systematic glossing over of horrendous obstacles in the form of contradictory data and theoretical conundrums rooted in a philosophical "need" for naturalistic explanations that drove its acceptance.

Forbidden Archeology home page

Exclusive! Cremo responds to a critic

Michael Denton is another molecular biologist - an agnostic at the time of writing Nature's Destiny and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.

My reviews of Nature's Destiny

My review of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

2004-03-01T12:36:00.000-08:00

Biology's Black Boxes: Darwin Debunked

"The rotary nature of the flagellum has been recognized for about 25 years. During that time not a single paper has been published in the biochemical literature even attempting to show how such a machine might have developed by natural selection. Darwin's theory is completely barren when it comes to explaining the origin of the flagellum or any other complex biochemical system."

"It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues."

- Michael Behe, Assoc. Prof. Biochem., Lehigh U.

For many years, evolutionists have been getting away with overly simplistic "explanations" for the origins and complexity of life. Darwin's "eye sequence" is a good example of the hand-waving that has been passed off as "science" in the past but must needs be discarded now. What Lubenow has dubbed the "magic wand" of evolutionists may finally be broken with the advent of molecular biology and its revelations about what Behe calls the "irreducible complexity" of biological structures and processes. Claims that such complexity as the blood clotting cascade and the bacterial flagellum with its "outboard motor" were produced by chance must now be laid to rest as intellectually and conceptually indefensible - science must march on. But will that stop the evolutionistic faithful?

More importantly, that insufferable cartoon in the Smithsonian purporting to explain the origins of life may finally be retired. However, as it took the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago over twenty years to finally correct their incorrect Neandertal display, we may have quite a wait until science wins the day.

Molecular Machines at Behe's page

Lots of great articles on Science vs. Evolution

2004-02-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

The HIV-AIDS Mistake?

"I am a virologist, and this is pure virology. Does he think I woke up one morning and said to myself "let's play silly buggers, and put it about that HIV didn't really exist." Of course not. No doctor could possibly rebut it without the help of a top-rate virologist. If a Duesberg tried, I'd pay attention ..."

- Dr. Stefan Lanka, "Dr. Lanka Chats With Dr. Harris"

Sorry if the quote doesn't make much sense out of context, but I found it so funny I had to share it here. Follow the link for the context, although you may need the help of a top-rate virologist before long.

The only thing more amazing than Duesberg's claim - that HIV is in fact harmless, and that drug use (and AZT treatment) rather than HIV may be the cause of AIDS - is the apparent amount of support for it. Of course, in the face of all the hysteria, it's not easy to keep in mind that the number of AIDS cases has been artificially inflated.

Artificially inflated? Yup.

"The seemingly close correlation between AIDS and HIV is largely an artifact of the misleading definition of AIDS used by the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control. AIDS is a syndrome defined by the presence of one or more of 30 independent diseases - when accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV."

(Charles A. Thomas Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip E. Johnson, "What Causes AIDS? It's an Open Question", "Reason" Magazine, June, 1994, Pages 18-23.)

Here's something that should raise your eyebrows:

"The test for the existence of antibodies against AIDS-associated virus is not diagnostic for AIDS and AIDS-like diseases. Negative test results do not exclude the possibility of contact or infection with the AIDS-associated virus. Positive test results do not prove that someone has an AIDS or pre-AIDS disease status nor that he will acquire it."

- from leaflet accompanying an AIDS test kit

So ... what exactly does this test do?

Oh, well. Who needs the scientific method, anyhow? Sometimes it's so troublesome and icky. You heartless brute, you want all those people in the AIDS industry to starve? (And that's quite a lot of people.)

But if the critics of "HIV-science" are correct, many lives could be saved by relatively simple measures - staying off recreational drugs and refusing to take AZT.

Right or wrong? If wrong, stop Duesberg. Stop me from wasting web space. But if right, the biggest medical hoax of the century is being perpetrated right now... and people are paying with their lives.

Back to Galileos links ...

2004-02-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

Galileos of Our Time?

"Yet another part of the current medical landscape that the Duesberg affair illuminates is political and ideological. What does the orthodox scientific establishment do to a scientist whose work and views are out of step with majority opinion? Apparently, in some cases, cut off his funding. "

- Richard Horton, editor of "Lancet", in May 23rd issue of the "New York Review of Books"

"Anybody with an ounce of common sense must have realised that a virus cannot have been barely detectable for the first 10 years of its existence, then suddenly turn out to be "hyperactive" after all. The answer to this conundrum is quite simple: AIDS science is not science at all, just empty posturing as such. ..."

"The evidence of 100,000 papers on HIV and AIDS should indeed be massive; unfortunately (or rather, mercifully) not one of them contains any direct evidence for the existence of HIV nor of its components."

- Dr. Stefan Lanka, "Dr. Lanka Chats With Dr. Harris"

Of course, many if not all of the scientists, scholars, and writers, and, yes, even lawyers featured on this page - my apologies to Phillip Johnson, I couldn't resist - deserve to be considered as possible Galileos of our time, willing to run the risk of being pilloried for the possibility of greater scientific discovery.

These are individuals who have gone against the prevailing grain for, as far as I can discern, reasons of professional and intellectual integrity, sometimes reaping scorn, persecution, harassment, financial hardship, and censorship. Unfortunately, any claims that opposition to their work is orchestrated by those who are benefitting financially from the non-advancement of their theories ... are wholly believable (and, it appears, well-documented). Only time will tell if their theories are correct, but they deserve a fair hearing in the courts of science - for their sakes and ours. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that continental drift, h. pylorii and prions were ideas that were ridiculed by virtually the entire scientific establishment. The scientists who proposed these concepts were accorded pariah status by their peers.

First up: something's fishy in AIDS research. We've all seen the pictures, but ... is it really of the HIV retrovirus?

Intro to HIV-AIDS myth(?)

Reward for missing HIV

Peter Duesbuerg, a world-renowned virologist, believes HIV exists, but not that it causes AIDS:

Peter Duesberg: the HIV-AIDS myth?

AIDS-Myth articles at Sumeria

Alive and Well site

Rethinking AIDS

Dogman: A great resource for reappraising AIDS

AIDS Myth Exposed forum

Dr. Burzynski's antineoplaston therapy for cancer:

Burzynski Patient Group ... worked for them?

Dr. Burzynski a quack?

Complaint to Janet Reno

And, finally ... despite mounting scientific evidence, many scientists such as Richard Dawkins still cling to their belief in evolution. Will science one day be able to explain how irreducibly complex molecular machines such as bacterial flagella arose through natural evolutionary processes? Will the laws of physics spontaneously change to allow the undirected formation of life? Will their faith in miraculous natural forces be one day rewarded, in a stunning revelation when they will be finally vindicated for sacrificing their scientific integrity?

Not bloody likely.

2004-02-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

Review of

Cracking the Bible Code

by Jeffrey Satinover

This is the text of the somewhat hurried review I dashed off to Amazon. - C.S.

Satinover's book, introducing us to the Bible/Torah Codes, is a well-written weavework of, as he sees it, related areas of research such as Jewish religious tradition and history, cryptology, computing, statistics, lunar month computations, the ninth of Ab, and even quantum physics.

In his book, he also addresses the problem of the many amateur "debunkers" who find "codes" in other texts - and who do not use the same rigorous methodology or standards employed by researchers such as Witztum or Diaconis. It is fascinating to see reviews by people who claim to have read his book but still do not understand that the Torah Codes phenomenon is not just about skipping letters to see what you can find. Any text - and, perhaps, a thousand monkeys with ELS software - can yield ELSs in the basic sense, but what is unique about the Torah Codes is the statistical strangeness as described in Satinover's book, the stringent methodology employed, and the fact that the ELS features in the Torah were not uncovered after the fact, but actually predicted beforehand. Perhaps a re-reading of this book is in order before you start loading in the Hebrew translation of "Great Expectations."

For example, one researcher predicted the AHRN cluster just because it seemed suspicious that Aaron was not mentioned in a passage where he was of prime importance, except in the context of "sons of Aaron." Another is the prediction that they would find the names of all the fruit trees indigenous to Israel in the passage about the Garden of Eden, where no names of trees are given. This is a different kind of ELS phenomenon altogether. Finding ELSs about assassinations and such in texts after the fact, picking and choosing results, etc. are not fair game in serious (Torah) ELS research.

Satinover agrees that efforts at confirmation or debunking should continue, but trivial stuff like the "Moby Dick" codes should not undermine the real work - at least until such "examples" meet the same levels of proof, which seems unlikely.

As a sort of bonus, there is the added mystery of the Jewish lunar calculations, which, according to his tables, are of an accuracy within 2 parts in a million (did I remember that right?) when compared with modern satellite figures. Why did the Jews ignore the results used by the other cultures around them, and how did they arrive at their own amazingly accurate number? Satinover presents to us the arcane knowledge involved, steeped in Jewish tradition, that boggles the mind.

Research continues, but my own feeling about it, after reading this book, is - surrender. You can now put away your toy "ELS analyses" of "War and Peace" and "Earth in the Balance." The Torah Codes are real. Now what are you going to do about it?

2004-02-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

Reality Breaking Through? The Torah Codes

"Here's how I got involved in the whole thing. [My cousin] went to Israel for a mathematics conference. There he met an old friend from college: Daniel Michaelson from UCLA - a confirmed atheist. Lo and behold, he sees that Daniel Michaelson is now wearing a yarmulke. So, my cousin goes over to him and said, 'Danny, is that you? What happened to you?'

"He says, 'Well, they showed me the codes.' Everyone in mathematics in Israel knew what 'the codes' were, apparently. ..."

- Harold Gans, senior cryptologist in DoD, as told in "Cracking the Bible Code"

The phenomenon of the Torah Codes - improbable statistical features found only in the Bible, specifically in the Books of Moses, the first five books in the Old Testament, the Torah - is causing sleepless nights for first-class mathematicians the world over. Also known as ELS (equidistant letter sequences), the most disturbing (or exciting) aspect is the virtual impossibility of producing such a code today, let alone thousands of years ago. In fact, the discovery of ELS was only possible with the advent of computers.

"The phenomenon is real; what it means is up to the individual."

- Professor David Kazhdan, chairman of Harvard's Dept. of Mathematics,
1996 newspaper interview, as cited in "Cracking the Bible Code"

No attempts at refutation have succeeded to date, less rigorous (and, in hindsight, perhaps facetious) versions such as the "War and Peace" "discoveries" notwithstanding. These attempts, along with the history of ELS, are considered in the best treatment of the Bible Codes phenomenon to date, by Satinover (who, as a young man, discussed physics with Richard Feynman), although his attempts to explain the codes in light of quantum theory seems a little over the top.

"Indeed, even as I write, a semisecret project examining the codes is under way at one of the world's major academic centers. Involved in it are some of the world's most eminent names in mathematics, computer science, and statistics. Most of the participants in this project are skeptics grown irritated -- some even angry -- at the worldwide and rapidly growing interest the codes are attracting. Their aim is once and for all to lay such absurd propositions to rest by demonstrating a flaw at the heart of the research. That this flaw has not yet been found is for them serious evidence of nothing: The unreality of the codes is self-evident in principle to many ... But some of the outstanding intellects behind the project are not skeptics; and a small number of some of the very most outstanding scientists have become convinced from long study that the codes quite possibly are just what they seem."

- J. Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code, 9 (1997)

Intro to the Torah Codes at Aish

BBC page with links to both sides of the debate

Doron Witzum's site, where Brendan McKay's scientifically sloppy "refutations" are carefully and calmly ripped to shreds, in embarrassing detail

My review of Satinover's Cracking the Bible Code

2004-01-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

Cosmology & Physics: Whodunits

"Commonsense would suggest that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology..."

- Fred Hoyle

Carl Sagan once calculated that perhaps hundreds of planets had conditions suitable for life. (And I believed him, of course.) Today, however, we know that he did not take many important factors into account - Hugh Ross lists at least 40. By Ross's reckoning, not even one planet (ours included) should be expected to have life.

Even worse, the Anthropic Principle, manifested, for example, in the finely-tuned physical constants such as the balance between positive and negative charge, prods the thoughtful skeptic to ask: could there be a Designer, after all?

Intro to Fine Tuning of the Universe

Fine Tuning of Physical Constants ("Old-Earth")

Anthropic Principle ("Young-Earth")

No Life in the Universe

Something for Everybody (to Disagree With?)

Incidentally, according to Satinover (who is not a quantum physicist - not yet, anyway), quantum physics says that atomic decay is caused by "nothing in the physical universe", that is to say, there is absolutely no physical cause whatsoever - it just happens, as it were, on a whim. (Read his chapter notes before responding to this one, please.)

I suspect this is a valid claim because of Heinz Pagels's irrational, desperate assertion that not even God knows which particle will decay next. I guess he had a different concept of omniscience.

Although I would be perfectly content if the current Big Bang theory were true, I don't recall whether the matter of discordant red shifts and interacting galaxies has been settled. Does this deserve further study? Or is Arp's interpretation of the data flawed? Is he a Galileo or a Gould? (A "Gould" is characterized by an otherwise brilliant mind tragically hobbled by preferred a priori beliefs. This could be true of an atheist or theist.)

The Steady State model - which allows that the universe is infinitely old - seems a desperate attempt to avoid a point of creation. However, some anomalies that are problematic for Big Bang theory still need to be explained. For example, the COBE results do show ripples in the background radiation, thus addressing the "Smoothness Problem," but there are still questions to be answered, such as the source of those inhomogeneities.

And what about those Megawalls?

Redshift Anomalies?

A complaint from Burbidge

An Arp page: peculiar galaxies

The answer to Arp?

Another answer to Arp?

The discovery of apparent large-scale structure to the universe - "Great Walls" of galaxies (megawalls) and 100-million-light-year "bubbles" of galaxies and voids - is currently unexplained by the Big Bang theory. Of course, as yet, the cause of the Big Bang itself is unexplained, and is indeed closed to our investigation past 10e-43 seconds, as is the initial clumping of matter, overcoming the tremendous, radial, outward force of the explosion, to form stars, planets, and so on. Inflation theory notwithstanding.

And what about that "Great Attractor"?

Megawalls Across the Cosmos

Anomalies: Pushing Evolutionism Over the Brink

"You never need think you can turn over any old falsehoods without a terrible squirming of the horrid little population that dwells under it."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Anomalies that have been studiously ignored or unsuccessfully debunked that confound the current textbook version of history. Many of these are documented in Forbidden Archeology, and are quite well known conundrums in the extra-evolutionistic world. Fact or fraud?

The Kensington Runestone

Archaeological Anomalies of North America

In addition, Out-Of-Place Artifacts (OOPArts - search for it!) such as

The Ica Stones and

The dinosaur figurines of Acambaro (and other dino art)

More dinosaur art

Some OOPArts

tell us that our current version of prehistory is hopelessly sanitized for evolutionist/materialist consumption.

Other potential problems for the accepted view of prehistory include:

Japan's underwater ruins at Yonaguni

More Yonaguni

Yonaguni and "Bimini Road"

Ancient man not so dumb after all?

2003-12-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

Testimonials

Some testimonials from my previous site. Many more were lost when Gear-something messed up my guestbook. Names abbreviated for privacy, since these were posted a while ago.

I don't see a guestbook thingy here at blogspot ... until then, go here to say hi.

A.C. - 10/01/99 08:50:33

Comments:

I haven't the slightest clue what led me to our website last night, but it sparked an interest that kept me up the whole night learning as much as I possibly could. I can honestly say, this information has already begun changing my life. A.C.

R. L. - 10/31/98 05:13:03

Comments:

oops...first ones a dud. I'm excited at the prospect that there may be validation to the concept of an all powerfull God. I am even tempted to get my own Bible Code CD Rom. I'd check every 666th letter. (the number of the beast) I've read some of the critics of the Code, and their scoffing seems hollow somehow.

B.K. - 02/27/98 01:21:03

Comments:

Well done! Although I have only skimmed the site and haven't read most of the articles, I am impressed with the variety of topics covered on this one page. I also like the variety in your "suggested readings" list. I'll be back:-)

DJC - 01/08/98 02:02:03

Comments:

wow, man, you're getting into heavy theological and almost epistemological stuff... good man! glad to see that your grey matter is being put to good use, and that you're learning a lot.. now on your quest of truth, what have you found that addresses the onundrumatic tension between gospel and culture? see http:// www.aamdomain.com/cac/

2003-12-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

Email me at

turinshroud at hotmail.com

The Galileo Effect: Science Under Siege

A Return to True Science and Skepticism

What is the Galileo Effect?

Pages

Resources

Cremo Responds to a Critic

From MCremo@compuserve.com Thu Jan 1 00:10:13 1998 Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:02:56 -0500 From: "Michael A. Cremo" Subject: Hidden History, Hidden Agenda Sender: "Michael A. Cremo" To: Cliff S _____ Message-id: <199712311803_MC2-2DA8-F4EE@compuserve.com>

Review of

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Review of

Nature's Destiny

Arrogance in Archeology

Science vs. Evolution

Who will win?

Darwinism & Natural Selection in Action

Other Problems for Evolution

Language

Evolutionists Panic

Evolutionists on Evolution

Scientific Censorship and Evolution

Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference

A Series of Eyes

Calvinism

Proteins

The Eyesight of Man

To Explain Life

Irreducible Complexity

Molecular Machines

The Study of "Molecular Evolution"

Conclusion

References

The Mechanisms of Evolution : Blissful Ignorance

The (True) Mechanisms of Evolution:

Intimidation and Censorship

Darwinist censorship rears its ugly, intolerant head once again:

Non-theists Attack Evolution

Biology's Black Boxes: Darwin Debunked

The HIV-AIDS Mistake?

Galileos of Our Time?

Cracking the Bible Code

Reality Breaking Through? The Torah Codes

Cosmology & Physics: Whodunits

Anomalies: Pushing Evolutionism Over the Brink

Testimonials

From MCremo@compuserve.com Thu Jan 1 00:10:13 1998
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:02:56 -0500
From: "Michael A. Cremo"
Subject: Hidden History, Hidden Agenda
Sender: "Michael A. Cremo"
To: Cliff S _____
Message-id: <199712311803_MC2-2DA8-F4EE@compuserve.com>

Molecular Machines:
Experimental Support for the Design Inference