Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

An Evening With Darwin in New York

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

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.”

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.”

…the phenomena showcased in Darwin and most textbooks…are of no relevance to the question, “Where do the higher animal groups come from?”

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 “inferences”) 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.”

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.”

It’s too bad that this brief article can’t be included as a supplementary chapter in junior high and high school biology textbooks.

Comments

And that is why MZ Peyers (The Foghorn Leghorn of Darwinian Mysticism) is considered an Atheistic Fundamentalist who is blinded by his philosophical bias... and therefore should not be given any credence whatsoever. :)

Scott
April 6, 2006
April
04
Apr
6
06
2006
06:34 AM
6
06
34
AM
PDT
PZ would say the odds of 'X' happening via evolution are 100% because it happened, right? Of course that's begging the question, but he doesn't care. Asked another way.... What are the odds that next weeks lotto numbers will be the correct ones? According to PZ I can't lose. Whoo Hoo!! Doh!Lurker
April 5, 2006
April
04
Apr
5
05
2006
03:57 PM
3
03
57
PM
PDT
At the risk of making an utter fool of myself and asking a question that gets answered on the first day of class in Biology 101, I've always been curious about how these random mutations got passed along in the gene pool to become universal traits? Wouldn't they have to originate as dominant traits? What are the odds of that? And wouldn't the offspring have at best a 50% chance of inheriting them? How many offspring carrying a trait--and how many generations--would it take for that trait to become universal? Brown eyes are dominant in humans, but even after hundreds of thousands of years of people passing along their dominate genes for brown eyes, blue eyed people are born everyday. Of course, there's no "natural selection" process weeding out the blue-eyed people, that I know of. But still, the sheer improbability of a random mutation becoming a universal component of an organism's genetic code seems like the plot of a science fiction story where the author asks us to suspend disbelief. Caveat--I am a blue-eyed science fiction writer.kathy
April 5, 2006
April
04
Apr
5
05
2006
02:43 PM
2
02
43
PM
PDT
It is always entertaining when scientists argue political decision making processes. An ongoing exhibit in a publicly funded museum whose expense is difficult to justify scientifically must have an easy political justification. The separation of Church and State is exactly such a justification. Without a sovereign Creator as a figurehead, creator-theocracies are impossible to establish. The Darwin Exhibit is given as proof that only Evolution Theory is worthy of such a position. But all governments can be considered theocracies - the only question is: what do they worship? Giving ultimate policy-making authority to a rationalization like natural selection (even democracy) is exactly what brought us into the Cold War, which still haunts and darkens our days. There are have been other theocracies established all over the world, but they did not worship any God of Love. Rather, they followed a doctrine of hatred, revenge and destruction. The praxis (fruit) of these are evident. Let us not forget that the National Socialist party was such a theocracy, with Nietzsche as its messiah. Survival-of-the-fittest has always been the darling deity of politics. It provides the easy rationale for short-term decisions that benefit the ambitions of an elite. These decisions always have (must have) dire consequences for everyone else. So, viewing the Darwin Exhibit as a political (rather than scientific) exhibit makes it easy to see why evolution is taught to children - it is political propaganda of the most effective kind.bigtalktheory
April 5, 2006
April
04
Apr
5
05
2006
01:51 PM
1
01
51
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply