"This view of phylo-development introduces a major insight into the Origin of Species and where Darwin went wrong. Phylo-development holds that the observed phyletic trend is downward, from the topmost taxonomic categories to the lowest-species. Species have their origin in higher taxonomic levels of the lineage and also in sister species. Species signal that the lineage has arrived at the end of the line. Because speciation is so rampant today, however, Darwin assumed, and his followers followed suit, that species are and always have been the beginning of phyletic lineages. They all assumed that species are the origin of lineages, which then supposedly rise to higher taxonomic levels; i. e., that phyletic lineages evolve upwards. Not so. Such upward trends have never been observed, and never will be according to the developmental perspective because lineages develop from the top down." Robert F. DeHaan "Natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures." George Mivart in On the Genesis of Species "Is it conceivable that the young of any animal was ever saved from destruction by accidentally sucking a drop of scarcely nutritious fluid from an accidentally hypertrophied cutaneous gland of it's mother?" George Mivart in On the Genesis of Species "...it was inevitable that a great crowd of half-educated men and shallow thinkers should accept with eagerness the theory of 'Natural selection'." George Mivart in On the Genesis of Species " I find no convincing evidence that atoms or molecules spontaneously form into all the necessary building blocks (amino acids, purines, pyrimidines, sugars, etc.) of living organisms, nor that those building blocks have innate properties that would cause them to form the informational molecules that are essential to life." Gordon C. Mills "To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. These classical evolutionary theories are a gross oversimplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they are swallowed so uncritically and readily, and for such a long time, by so many scientists without a murmur of protest." Sir Ernst Chain Today it is still commonly claimed that Darwin's natural selection is the evolutionary mechanism par excellence However, this assertion is not based on any factual evidence, for nobody has ever demonstrated that natural selection can bring about anything but events that are trivial from an evolutionary perspective. Soren Lovtrup in Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth "These features in the fossil record - sudden appearance and stability (or stasis) - are not what one would expect from mutation and natural selection." Robert C. Newman "One of the crumbling citadels of orthodoxy ... is the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (which also goes by the name of 'synthetic theory'). Arthur Koestler in Janus "The educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection - quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology. Arthur Koestler in Janus "The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave the most offspring are those which leave the most offspring. It is a tautology." C.H. Waddington in The Strategy of the Genes "This situation, where scientific men rally to the defense of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science." Sir A. Hardy in The Living Stream "Reject Darwinism and there is, in effect, no scientific theory of evolution." Michael Denton in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis "As to the claim... that the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism (the interplay of chance mutations with environmental pressure) has solved all basic problems, I hold it to be absurd and bordering at times on the unconscionable....As to the origin of life and especially of consciousness, they are today no less irreducible to physics than they were in Darwin's time." Stanley Jaki "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternative is available to take it's place." T.S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions "Darwinism is not so much a theory, as a sub-section of some theory as yet unformulated." Gordon Rattray Taylor in The Great Evolution Mystery "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have been satisfied to get it going." Francis Crick "Subspecies are actually, therefore, neither incipient species nor models for the origin of species. They are more or less diversified blind alleys within the species. The decisive step in evolution, the first step toward macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary method than that of sheer accumulation of micromutations." R. B. Goldschmidt in The Material Basis of Evolution "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species "I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations-...-were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation." Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species "For millions of years species remain unchanged in the fossil record, and they then abruptly disappear, to be replaced by something that is substantially different but clearly related". Steven J. Gould "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of transitional forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." Steven J. Gould in The Panda's Thumb "If neo-Darwinian theory is true, why should the Cambrian contain a greater number of body plans that exist today, particularly with such low species diversity?" R. Lewin "The problem of the origin of life has turned out to be much more difficult that I, and most other people, envisioned." -Stanley Miller "Attempts to detect adaptive evolution at the molecular level have met with little success." -Paul Sharp "The conflict has arisen through a misunderstanding. Some have supposed that by 'creation' was necessarily meant either primary, that is, absolute creation, or, at least, some supernatural action; they have therefore opposed the dogma of 'creation' in the imagined interest of physical science. Others have supposed that by 'evolution' was necessarily meant a denial of Divine action, a negation of the providence of God. They have therefore combated the theory of 'evolution' in the imagined interest of religion. It appears plain, then, that Christian thinkers are perfectly free to accept the general evolution theory." George Mivart in On the Genesis of Species "The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Galileo Galilei "The Bible is not a textbook of natural history and could not be treated as such by a mind seeking only to discover the truth. Science has a right to investigate these questions without reference to either politics or to religion." Louis Agassiz "Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they 'understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion'." Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis

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Another list of great quotes


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