Who said Darwinists weren’t a barrel of laughs?

Check out Jeffrey K. McKee’s book The Riddled Chain. McKee, as you might recall, stood in the way of Bryan Leonard completing his dissertation work at Ohio State University (blogged here). As Jonathan Wells noted in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, “Bryan Leonard is a high school teacher who for the past few years has been working on a Ph.D. in science education. His dissertation research focused on these questions: When students are taught the scientific data both supporting and challenging macroevolution, do they maintain their beliefs over time? What empirical, cognitive, and /or social factors influence students’ beliefs? . . . Although Leonard had gone through normal procedures and received proper approval to conduct research, OSU professors Brian McEnnis, Steve Rissing, and Jeffrey McKee accused Leonard of ‘unethical’ conduct, primarily on the grounds that his research was predicated on ‘a fundamental flaw: there was no valid scientific data challenging macroevolution.’ Leonard’s research, they claimed, involved ‘deliberate miseducation of these students, a practice we regard as unethical.’” (pp. 189-190)

Regarding Leonard’s graduate thesis advisors, Glenn Needhman and Robert Disilvestro, McKee wrote in an e-mail:

“DiSilvestro, Needham have become viewed as parasitic ticks hiding in the university’s scalp, who just got exposed by a close shave. I learned in Boy Scouts to twist the ticks when taking them out, so their heads don’t get embedded in the skin. Others prefer burning them off. What fate awaits OSU’s ticks remains to be seen.”

A colleague of mine collected a number of interesting quotes from McKee’s book, especially on the relation between evolution and materialism.

“But humans are really no less marvelous than other living species with whom we share a long and complex evolutionary history. All existing life forms endured a struggle for existence and evolved seemingly inspired adaptations. We are just another product of nature, yet we humans uniquely stride on two legs, carrying aloft a curious brain with which we can probe our origins and dare to foresee the future.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 1)

“We understand some key principles, rooted in Darwinian biology, but sometimes the simple means of evolutionary progress do not seem to offer a full explanation of our biological gifts. How could an aimless evolutionary process, patching together random biological novelties and oddities through trial and error, lead to Homo sapiens?”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 1)

“Only a few sparse fossils from the distant past, and keen observations of life on earth today, can spur the scientific imagination toward testable hypotheses of how evolution led to the menagerie populating the planet today-and how we were afforded the luxury of questioning our place in nature. Yet even with the fragmentary fossil evidence we have, our understanding is limited only by our imaginations.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 2)

“One can only dream of the grandest biological experiment: restarting the earth at the inception of life and watching the evolutionary story play itself out. One wonders how our history and prehistory might differ if we were to start again. Would birds and baboons alike ultimately find a place on the planet after billions of years of evolution from the simplest of living organisms? Would our place in nature be the same, or would humans even have any place in nature at all? Most likely not. Initial life forms would have evolved into an equally astonishing array of creatures, to be sure, being aimlessly self-propelled through a torturous evolutionary history with no particular destiny. It is unlikely that life was destined to have included us. This is because the evolution of life is subject to fates wantonly dictated by three ubiquitous and mischievous forces: chance, coincidence, and chaos.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 2)

“I really should not be here. It is not that I have no right to be here in Ohio or anywhere else, but that I probably should not be anywhere at all. Biological principles made me what I am, but my good fortune in being present on earth is the highly unlikely consequence of a long series of chance events. Indeed, chance itself may be considered as a key biological principle.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 2)

“Some would call it fate; others may invoke manifest destiny. I prefer to look at it more scientifically, in which case, at least statistically speaking, the events leading to my birth were the culmination of nothing more than dumb luck-a product of chance.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 3)

“As we go back generation after generation, the probabilities of coming up with exactly me become diminishingly small. Certainly my ancestors hoped that their lineage would carry on, but the precise way in which things happened would have been well beyond their prognostication. One chance event led to another and, for better or worse, here I am.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), (pg. 4).)

“You are lucky to be here, for a plethora of senarios could have played out over the years. Every human being, as well as every monkey, bird, and insect, is the uniquely improbable result of past combinations of genetic material. It is that specific improbability that of every individual that makes each of us unique, and gives evolution something to work with. Not only is the probability of your own individual existence very tenuous, but your species-our species, Homo sapiens-is also a fluke of familial descendants. We are lucky to be here and we are exceptionally lucky to be able to think and read and write about our good fortune. Babbons, pigeons, and cave crickets were not afforded the same modicum of cerebral capabilities, no matter how unique and well-adapted they may be. And they were bred by the same basic principles that led to us. We are just, as Thomas Henry Huxley described us in 1854, an “aberrant modification” of an evolutionary theme. Now this may be a bit disconcerting to some people. Sentient beings, sapient human beings, have always thought that there was something inevitable about them. Even devout Darwinian evolutionists tend to put our own immodest species at the top branch of the evolutionary tree, as if we were somewhat better and more evolved than other living species. But, as we shall see throughout this book, chance has played a role in putting every living thing at the top of the present evolutionary tree.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 4)

“By embracing the powers of chance, rather than balking at the use of the word, scientists may find that some very interesting things can happen by chance, including the evolution of the human species.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 5)

“As it turns out, discerning the difference between mere coincidence and important causation is not only difficult but is severely hampered by the fragmentary nature of the fossil record.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 9)

“Evolving systems undergoing natural selection are so strongly affected by the nature of the plants and animals present at the beginning of any time we consider that they are intrinsically chaotic.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 13)

“HUMAN EVOLUTION has been the product of many forces that together made us neither inevitable nor probable. The links of the human evolutionary chain were riddled with chance, coincidence, and chaos, and we cannot fit the links together without a full appreciation if these factors.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 18)

“Even out in the field, with nothing in sight but African countryside, the contrast between life then and now becomes quite stark as a jumbo jet streaks across the sky. The jet is carrying one of the more peculiar products of evolution, descendants of the apelike prehumans who battled against long odds for existence when the caves of South Africa filled with sand and bones so long ago. What a difference just a few million years can make since the world first witnessed this odd, upright creature.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 22)

“The processes and mechanisms of biological evolution, as we understand them today, started to become apparent only in the mid-eighteenth century, when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution through natural selection.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 23).

“As biologists, as evolutionists, and even as paleoanthropologists, we hold the following truths to be self-evident: evolution is a fact, and evolution is a theory.” (Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 25)

“Evolution is a fact. By definition, evolution simply means change through time, and change is observable.” (Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 25)

“Could humans and chimpanzees have performed the same evolutionary trick of divergent speciation from a common ancestor? These questions fall into the realm of theory, for such events cannot be directly observed. This theory of the evolutionary origin of species, like any theory, cannot be absolutely proved. Theories, from the ‘hard’ sciences such as physics to the “soft” sciences such as sociology, can never attain absolute proof, which exists only in pure mathematics. And even there it can be argued that the conclusions are somewhat suspect. Certainly in the difficult science of evolutionary biology, proof is rather elusive.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pgs. 26-27)

“Evolutionary links to the past are missing only in detail.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 27)

“First of all, modern evolutionists have a small problem with the term natural selection. It is ingrained in our lexicon, so we accept the term and use it liberally. But it is a touch misleading. Selection has a teleological connotation of design or plan, as if a human hand (or some other consciously driven hand) is guiding the process. But in evolution there are no designs; there are only consequences. Natural selection merely ensures nothing more than the coincidence of the survival of survivors; if a being can carry on in a given environment long enough to reproduce and make more like itself, then so be it. There is no external selecting entity, just an intrinsic force with no particular direction beyond survival and reproduction, Darwin himself eventually realized that natural selection was a misleading term and suggested instead natural preservation. But the die was cast, and the name stuck.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 29)

“We now know that the origins of variation, in the form of genetic mutations, are due to chance. We also know that those few mutations which add survival value must coincide with a suitable environment. Part of the success of evolution is thus mere coincidence. The evolutionary process that then ensues is unpredictable, and in modern parlance could be considered to be chaotic. Nature thus “selects” more than just a survivor. It blindly determines contingencies for the future path of evolution-it sets the initial conditions. Even under the relentless guidance of natural selection, the more whimsical and undirected forces of evolution can then dictate the course of things to come. The unlikely becomes what is likely to happen, and the seemingly probable becomes less so. The infallible drive toward greater fitness takes a strange turn, and natural selection seems to falter. A butterfly flaps its wings, a startled impala escapes a stalking leopard, and the course of evolution changes forever. Surprising things happen due to the niggling, mischievous, capricious nature of three very important components of evolution: chance, coincidence, and chaos. You and I are among their products.”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 32)

“Thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future. –Thomas Henry Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature”

(Jeffrey K. McKee [Professor of Anthropology, Ohio State University], “The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution,” (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pg. 252)