Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Jonathan Wells remembers Tom Bethell (1936–2021), an early Darwin doubter in media

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Bethell practiced journalism when it meant telling people what the establishment did not want them to know:

In 2016, Discovery Institute published a book by Tom titled Darwin’s House of Cards. The book includes penetrating criticisms of Darwinian evolution. But what I find most captivating about the book are Tom’s anecdotes about, and interviews with, prominent figures in the evolution debates. One of them was Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, who famously wrote in 1974 that evolutionary theory contains no testable laws and is thus metaphysics rather than science.

Tom also interviewed American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) paleontologists Normal Platnick and Gareth Nelson. Nelson had written in 1969: “The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence… has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”

Another of Tom’s interviews was with Colin Patterson, a paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History. In 1981, Patterson had stirred up a hornets’ nest by rhetorically asking an audience at the AMNH, “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing, that is true?” Darwinists subsequently denied that Patterson had ever said that, but a creationist in the audience had taped the talk.

Jonathan Wells, “Our Friend, Tom Bethell” at Evolution News and Science Today

One wonders who’ll replace him.

See also: Tom Bethell (1936–2021), remembered by his editors Readers will recall that we saluted Tom Bethell, on his passing as one of the earliest Darwin skeptics. Now some of his many editors weigh in.

and

Farewell to Tom Bethell (1936–2021), one of the earliest modern Darwin skeptics.

Comments
Peace & Joy. Dr. Bethell has moved on to a well deserved rest. I had hoped he would release another book or 2 before that rest, but hopefully someone else will take up the banner. What passes for my "library" remains a jumbled mess, but I will take the time now to rescue his books from that mess, and get them back on a proper bookshelf. There is so much crap out there, and so little truly worth saving to read again. His is of course worth re-reading.mahuna
March 16, 2021
March
03
Mar
16
16
2021
03:36 PM
3
03
36
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply