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DarwinTalk.com Evolution Debate and Public Discussion Forum |
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moses's_bulldog Labrador
Joined: 08 Jun 2005
   Posts: 312
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Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 7:53 pm Post subject: My favorite quotes from evolutionists |
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"When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: "It happened." Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd." - Simon Conway Morris (palaeontologist, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK), "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell, Vol. 100, pp.1-11, January 7, 2000, p.11
"So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty: the used-car business."
-Sharon Begley, "Science Contra Darwin," Newsweek, April 8, 1985, p. 80.
"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." - Francis Crick ( Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology and Medicine), "What Mad Pursuit," 1990, p.138.
"If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species." (Niles Eldredge, "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p14).
"All scholarly subjects seem to go through cycles, from periods when most of the answers seem to be known to periods when no one is sure that even the questions are right. Such is the case for evolutionary biology. Twenty years ago Mayr, in his Animal Species and Evolution, seemed to have shown that if evolution is a jigsaw puzzle, then at least all the edge pieces were in place. But today we are less confident and the whole subject is in the most exciting ferment. Evolution is both troubled from without by the nagging insistencies of antiscientists and nagged from within by the troubling complexities of genetic and developmental mechanisms and new questions about the central mystery-speciation itself. In looking over recent literature in and around the field of evolutionary theory, I am struck by the necessity to reexamine the simpler foundations of the subject, to distinguish carefully between what we know and what we merely think we know. The first and strongest of our critics to be answered should be ourselves." - K.S. Thomson, "The Meanings of Evolution," American Scientist, Vol. 70, September-October 1982, p. 529
"In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." Mark Ridley, 'Who doubts evolution?', New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831
"...I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation." - E.J.H. Corner, Prof of Botany, Cambridge University, England. E.J. H. Corner, “Evolution” in Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (eds.), Contemporary Botanical Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97
LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN (paleonthropologist of Birmingham University in England), "We then move right off the register of objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to the faithful anything is possible - and where the ardent believer is sometimes able to believe several contradictory things at the same time." BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER, New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970, p. 19.
"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". Henry Gee (evolutionist), “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.
“We cannot even show convincingly how galaxies, stars, planets, and life arose in the present universe.” Michael Rowan-Robinson, “Review of the Accidental Universe,” New Scientist, Vol. 97, 20 January 1983, p. 186.
“... most every prediction by theorists about planetary formation has been wrong.” Scott Tremaine, as quoted by Richard A. Kerr who was proposing a new planetary formation model, “Jupiters Like Our Own Await Planet Hunters,” Science, Vol. 295, 25 January 2002, p. 605.
“We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.” Carlos Frenk, as quoted by Robert Irion, “Surveys Scour the Cosmic Deep,” Science, Vol. 303, 19 March 2004, p. 1750.
The fact is, the doctrine of uniformitarianism is no more ‘proved’ than some of the early ideas of world-wide cataclysms have been disproved." - Edgar B. Heylmun: "Should We Teach Uniformitarianism!", Journal of Geological Education, Vol. 19, January 1971, p. 35 |
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Cubist Pit Bull
Joined: 13 Jan 2004
    Posts: 353
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Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:54 am Post subject: |
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Moses' Bulldog engages, here, in a time-honored Creationist activity; namely, quote-mining. For those who are not familiar with the term, "quote-mining" refers to the practice of painstakingly extracting a few words out of a text in such a way as to make the original author appear to be saying something completely different from what he actually did say.
| Mark Ridley, in the article 'Who doubts evolution?', New Scientist, vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831 wrote: | | In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation. |
Indeed Mark Ridley did write, in that New Scientist article, that "no real evolutionist... uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation". That's true as far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't address the question of what evidence is used to support evolution, if not the fossil record? Fortunately, Ridley himself was not so reticent. In that same article, Ridley went on to write:
| Mark Ridley wrote: | | So what is the evidence that species have evolved? There have traditionally been three kinds of evidence, and it is these, not the "fossil evidence", that the critics should be thinking about. The three arguments are from the observed evolution of species, from biogeography, and from the hierarchical structure of taxonomy. |
So the reason that the fossil record isn't used to support evolution is simple: There is much better evidence than that.
| E.J. H. Corner, 'Evolution' in Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (eds.), Contemporary Botanical Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97 wrote: | | ...I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. |
It is worth noting that this is the same E.J. Corner who, in a 1964 book The Life of Plants,, wrote:
| E.J. Corner wrote: | | Living seaweeds are the modern actors of the old drama. Two or three thousand million years ago, crowded plankton cells were pushed against bedrock and forced to change or die. They changed and became seaweeds. |
Does this sound like a person who thinks evolution is bogus, or does it sound like a person whose words have been egregiously misquoted in such a way as to make it appear as if he thinks evolution is bogus? The case for "egregiously misquoted" grows even stronger if one looks at the words of the original text which surround those words that MB presented in his post:
| E.J. Corner wrote: | | The theory of evolution is not merely the theory of the origin of species, but the only explanation of the fact that organisms can be classified into this hierarchy of natural affinity. Much evidence can be adduced in favour of the theory of evolution - from biology, bio-geography and palaeontology, but I still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell of the theory of evolution. |
The blue words are those which Moses' Bulldog quoted. Seeing them here, in their proper context, should dispel any notion that Corner meant what MB clearly wants you to think he meant.
I see no reason to continue; if you don't think these two examples are clear evidence that Moses' Bulldog is a quote-miner, hence inexcusably deceitful, more proof will do no good. Moses' Bulldog should be ashamed of the deceit he has perpetrated here; he won't. He should be concerned that his deceit breaks the Ninth Commandment, i.e. "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness", and that God has a lake of fire waiting for deceivers; but again, he won't. He is a disgrace and a deceiver. |
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Arthwollipot Moderator
Joined: 26 Feb 2003
     Posts: 1009 Location: Australia
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SLP Ferret
Joined: 01 Mar 2003
     Posts: 105
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Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 11:23 am Post subject: |
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Weird - I recently saw the exact two posts that moses made here at ARN.
What a coincidence... |
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Arthwollipot Moderator
Joined: 26 Feb 2003
     Posts: 1009 Location: Australia
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Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 2:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Yeah - moses is a drive-by. The difference between him and your average drive-by spammer is that moses occasionally comes back, like a bad pizza. |
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Coragyps Moderator
Joined: 31 Dec 2003
    Posts: 497 Location: West Texas, USA
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Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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He drove by Internet Infidels, too.
Yaaaawnnn. |
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