Evolutionnews.org has a post and a link to discovery.org where you can find a PDF file of a great article from Crisis magazine, “An Evening With Darwin in New York,†by George Sim Johnston. It concerns the much-celebrated Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.
Here are a few excerpts:
The show tells us that Darwin’s theory helps us to “understand†the fossil record. This is odd, because the exhibit’s curator, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, has written extensively about how Darwin’s idea of gradual evolution has never been supported by the fossils and certainly doesn’t explain them.
Eldredge writes in another book… “Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction [the existence of close transitional forms] was wrong.â€Â
Much of the rest of the exhibit is devoted to illustrating “evolution in action.  [But] all the exhibit can show [is] “variation†in action. It’s also all that Darwin is able to show in the Origin. … After reading the Origin with more care than most of his contemporaries, the geologist Charles Lyell wrote to Darwin that it was an interesting theory, but that in future editions he might want to “here and there insert an actual case.â€Â
…the phenomena showcased in Darwin and most textbooks…are of no relevance to the question, “Where do the higher animal groups come from?â€Â
Everything we know about DNA points to the fact that it programs a species to remain what it is. … Darwinists can make up stories (they call them “inferencesâ€Â) about how random beneficial mutations, which alone are highly improbable, can accumulate in an organized manner to bring about genuine evolutionary advances… But Grasse (who was no creationist) dismisses such narratives as “daydreams.â€Â
Natural selection simply eliminates what doesn’t work. That’s all it can do. But the destruction of the unfit does not explain the origin of the fit. As biologist Hans Driesch pointed out long ago, to say that natural selection “creates†anything is a bit like answering the question, “Why are there leaves on the tree?†with, “Because the gardener didn’t prune them away.†Or, as Arnold Lunn put it, it’s like calling the Nazi air strikes creative because they left standing Westminster Abbey.
There has always been an informed minority of skeptics about Darwin, which makes nonsense of the show’s claim that his theory is “unchallenged.â€Â
It’s too bad that this brief article can’t be included as a supplementary chapter in junior high and high school biology textbooks.