Further to “Top psychology mag asks if creationists are sane ,”someone reminded us this morning of something Jonathan Wells, author of The Myth of Junk DNA, has pointed out: When J.B.S. Haldane said that a fossil rabbit found in the Cambrian would prove Darwin’s theory wrong, Darwin’s followers don’t actually believe that. This was accidentally tested.
On September 29, 2009, Dr. Stephen Westrop, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology, gave a free public lecture to pre-refute a scheduled lecture by Steve Meyer at the museum later that evening on the Cambrian Explosion. Westrop concluded by taking exception to J.B.S. Haldane’s claim that finding a fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian would prove Darwin’s theory wrong. If such a fossil were found, Westrop said, paleontologists would simply revise their reconstruction of the history of life. During the Q&A, one student asked him whether any fossil find could falsify Darwin’s theory, and Professor Westrop said “No,” since Darwin’s theory is really about natural selection, which operates on a much shorter time scale than the fossil record.
If finding a mammalian vertebrate fossil in the Cambrian, half a billion years ago, would prompt no serious rethink in paleontology, the belief in Darwinism is actually irrelevant to evidence from nature.
Is that sane?