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Lynn Margulis stood up to the blasts of Darwin’s Awesome Big Noise machine

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As most readers know, pioneer evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis died this week, at 73. She was one of the few who most of the time refused to worship Darwin, and – as Casey Luskin quotes in this appreciation of her life’s work, talked honestly about the scam and the academic complicity with it that Darwinism has become:

We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary process. But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric. Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement. One mutation confers resistance to malaria but also makes happy blood cells into the deficient oxygen carriers of sickle cell anemics. Another converts a gorgeous newborn into a cystic fibrosis patient or a victim of early onset diabetes. One mutation causes a flighty red-eyed fruit fly to fail to take wing. Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambigious evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation. Then how do new species come into being? How do cauliflowers descend from tiny, wild Mediterranean cabbagelike plants, or pigs from wild boars?” (Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species, p. 29 (Basic Books, 2003).)

– Casey Luskin, “Lynn Margulis, “Acclaimed Biologist and Critic of Neo-Darwinism, RIP”, Evolution News & Views, November 23, 2011

Earlier this year, she insisted to Discover Magazine:

This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create…. [N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify and organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

It’s no small thing to have stood so firm for so long against Darwin’s Noise Machine, inflated by every third rate don, TV hair model, union-rules teacher, and trendy reverend across the Western world.

Even the great Karl Popper didn’t end up having the guts. He caved, but then recanted his surrender shortly before his death.

Lynn Margulis, you had guts as well as brains: Requiescat in pacem aeternam, et lux perpetua luceat eae… But who will be the next Lynn Margulis?

Comments
I am also. Netflix has several videos available for streaming that cover the points that Margulis made in greater detail. It's really astonishing to me, given the amount of evidence, that the vast majority of people just accept the official explanation.Bruce David
November 27, 2011
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Margulis was also a 9/11 Truther (as am I): http://911blogger.com/news/2011-11-23/lynn-margulis-1938-2011Bilbo I
November 25, 2011
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What about James A. Shapiro?melvinvines
November 24, 2011
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