Making a Monkey Out of Darwin
"You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."
As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.
He is quoted above for two reasons.
First is House passage of a "cap-and-trade" climate-change bill. Depending on which scientists you believe, the dire consequences of global warming are inconvenient truths—or a fearmongering scheme to siphon off the wealth of individuals and empower bureaucrats.
The second is publication of The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by Eugene G. Windchy, a splendid little book that begins with Huxley's lament.
That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.
"Karl Marx loved Darwinism," writes Windchy. "To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution."
"Darwin suits my purpose," Marx wrote.
Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.
"Although born to a Catholic family Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire."
Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.
Historian Jacques Barzun believes Darwinism brought on World War I: "Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens—all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate."
Yet a theory can produce evil—and still be true.
And here Windchy does his best demolition work.
Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a "completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection."
"All my originality ... will be smashed," wailed Darwin when he got Wallace's manuscript.
Darwin also lied in The Origin of Species about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.
Darwin's examples of natural selection—such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive—have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?
Windchy goes on to relate such scientific hoaxes as "Nebraska Man"—an anthropoid ape ancestor to man, whose tooth turned out to belong to a wild pig—and Piltdown Man, the missing link between monkey and man.
Discovered in England in 1912, Piltdown Man was a sensation until exposed by a 1950's investigator as the skull of a Medieval Englishman attached to the jaw of an Asian ape whose teeth had been filed down to look human and whose bones had been stained to look old.
Yet three English scientists were knighted for Piltdown Man.
Other myths are demolished. Bird feathers do not come from the scales of reptiles. There are no gills in human embryos.
For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.
"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists," admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.
Darwin ruled out such "miracles."
And Darwinists still have not explained the origin of life, nor have they been able to produce life from non-life.
The most delicious chapter is Windchy's exposure of the Scopes Monkey Trial and Hollywood's Bible-mocking movie Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow.
The trial was a hoked-up scam to garner publicity for Dayton, Tenn. Scopes never taught evolution and never took the stand. His students were tutored to commit perjury. And William Jennings Bryan held his own against the atheist Darrow in the transcript of the trial.
In 1981, Gould had this advice for beleaguered Darwinists:
"Perhaps we should all lie low and rally round the flag of strict Darwinism ... a kind of old-time religion on our part."
Exactly. Darwinism is not science. It is faith. Always was.
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Pat here in a short column ties together several things that need to be untied. First, as Pat admits, "Yet a theory can produce evil--and still be true." And Darwinism, or at least a modest application of micro-evolution (change at or below the species level), has produced many medical breakthroughs in understanding how humans and other organisms function, and will do so even more in the future. One need only look at research into lactose intolerance (most Northern Europeans don't have it) and malaria (most Africans and some Italians developed a resistance to it, but also a tendency to sickle-cell anemia).
Even most Fundamentalist Christians who oppose macro-evolution (at or above the level of species) accept micro-evolution.
Second, as to macro-evolution, this theory is much more complex, and I must admit that I seem to be one of the few agnostics on the matter. It is, after all, a *theory*. Maybe if the government wouldn't tax me so much I might be able to conduct a thorough investigation.
There's also a problem with macro-evolution advocates: As Pat said, they all, it seems (or at least the major ones we hear about), look on it as a substitute religion, instead of just a scientific theory. Richard Dawkins (an atheists who keeps his *Christian* first name) calls anyone who opposes him an idiot, and insists that parents who don't accept evolution have their children taken away. Christopher Hitchens (an atheist who keep's his *Christian* first name) says the same thing; although Hitchens himself isn't a scientist, many books on evolution cite him on the blurbs on their back covers (for example, "Why Evolution Is True," by Jerry A. Coyne).
If evolutionists were more modest and took time to explain things to the lesser breeds without the law of evolution, they might get further.
3. As to public policy, the real reason the elites in America and Europe promote evolution is to brainwash children against their parents' faiths -- in public schools, many private and parochial schools, colleges, and universities.
Yet Christian Fundamentalists avoided the Darwinian political crimes of the Nazis and Communists that Pat notes. (Although, in practice, Stalin and his biological henchman Lysenko were Lamarckians.)
At a purely scientific level, the Fundamentalists also avoided the theory of the "multiregional" origins of humans, meaning the races evolved in different areas, which was widely believed as recently as 50 years ago by such folks as respected Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Modern genetics proves, instead, the "out of Africa" theory, that all humans have a common ancestor.
The Fundamentalists believed that all humans were offspring of Adam, and so all deserving of respect as children of God. So whatever the Fundies believed about science, they were right about the most important thing: that there are just men, not sub-humans and uebermenschen. (Unfortunately, nowadays the Fundies are obsessed with America invading the Middle East to incite God to Armageddon, thus getting them raptured from their cars.)
Finally, the real battle for those of us on the Right is not to bring "creationism" into the public schools, but to abolish the public schools and to end or reduce tax funding of all colleges and universities, which nowadays are anti-intellectual citadels of intolerance.
If Darwinians really believe their theories are superior, they should be the first to reject the crutch of coerced tax subsidies.
Privatization of all education would mean educational Darwinism: competing theories battling it out in the classroom, with parents, with students, and in the marketplace of ideas. Let the fittest theories survive.
Many scientists are quite simply evangelists for materialism, determinism and atheism. They make giant leaps of faith (of which they ironically accuse anyone who believes in God, creation or miracles) when they jump from scientific facts--such as: there is a fossil record, there are missing links all along the way, etc.--to their full-blown theories of naturalistic evolution. It would be shocking to hear a scientist say: "the theory of evolution is full of holes, but because we believe in (i.e. have FAITH in) naturalism and atheism, we cannot form any other theory, despite its flaws." That would be honest on their part. It is honesty that I fear will not be heard in any significant way from the current scientific community.
What will never happen, at least in the next decades, is scientists giving a frank and honest account of the facts, with the acknowledgement that naturalistic evolution is but one possible theory as to how life as we know it came to exist.
Most teachers parrot the evolutionary gospel because the scientists give them no room to doubt this "inerrant truth" they so loudly and confidently proclaim. Of course, many teachers are practical atheists or liberal humanists, so the theory does not grate against their personal credo.
Isn't it delicious that the American left embraces three of Hitler's own personal beliefs: Vegetarianism, Darwinism and gun control? I remember the popular bumper sticker from the early '90's which featured a photo of Hitler with his hand raised in the Nazi salute and the caption, "All in favor of gun control raise your hand".
Obama is changing the face of "progressivism" in America to strict fascism and his useful idiots are totally ignorant of how much of their nonsensical belief system is fascist.
I once listened to a lecture series on early human history by a famous university teacher and scientist, and came away understanding that evolutionism is a faith with no real evidence to back it up, based on enormous non-sequitors and on pre-suppostitions with which evidence is forced to comply. Just because two-fossils, dated millions of years apart, look similar to each other, does not prove family relationship.
The extinct Tasmanian Tiger looked just like a dog. I could dig one up and conclude that it was a close ancestor to modern dogs. In the dinosaur age, there were reptilian sea creatures which looked almost identical to dolphins, porpoises, whales, and sharks.
Politics, on the other hand, at least in it's modern form, is the opposite of Darwinism, in that the least fit flourish, and the fittest cannot survive, this proving Darwinism either wrong or not comprehensive enough to explain the real world.
Oh no, Pat. You're a great guy but you don't really believe the anti-evolution schtick do you? The Catholic Church accepts evolution. If evolution isn't true then it must follow that tens of thousands of scientists are involved in a conspiracy to suppress the truth. I wouldn't bet my house on that possibility. It's not just fossils, it's genetics and a few other disciplines.
RE: Ed Roberts comment ....Mr Roberts you forgot to mention the other tenet of the religion of Hitler worship: the anti-smoking fanaticism adopted by the bourgeoisie of modern Amerika.
Biological evolution is thoroughly documented by sound evidence.
It is not a political issue except to those who want to make it so. It was not a political or atheistic scheme hatched by Darwin. He worried that the evidence he found was not in line with the Genesis account of creation. Origin of Species is filled with evidence and careful reasoning.
Our conceptions of physical reality must conform to the evidence we find. The Church in the time of Galileo argued that the earth is the stationery center of the universe. The Church suppressed Galileo's findings in astronomy for that reason. But today Galileo's observations are recognized as sound science.
Science reaches conclusions based on evidence. Beliefs which are not scientific are often the result of wishful thinking. They usually begin with conclusions for which evidence must be found.
"Our conceptions of physical reality must conform to the evidence we find. The Church in the time of Galileo argued that the earth is the stationery center of the universe."
Yes, but evidence is of many kinds. If an old man says the hearth was the center of his family's home and a younger man measures the distance from bathroom to corner and finds the drawing room the geograpgical center, we tend to call the old man a liar when in fact he was not. Galileo was a very arrogant man, most graduate students of Mathematics today could not prove or disprove his assertions,all those planets and galaxies moving in unison, the complicated study of perspectives, etc.)and in the end, in many ways the earth remains the center of our universe. I am convinced the Galileo(truth) vs Church(superstition) is a chimera and a game that kids engage in to justify their sinful lives.
I'm not sure what the point of this article was.
As my Orthodox Christian priest - a man with formal university training in science and engineering - told me years ago in response to my question about evolution: the Church is never afraid of science and no scientific discoveries have ever or shall ever present a threat to faith or the Church's teachings.
I like this statement from above:
"Politics, on the other hand, at least in it’s modern form, is the opposite of Darwinism, in that the least fit flourish, and the fittest cannot survive, this proving Darwinism either wrong or not comprehensive enough to explain the real world."
Very true!
I would add: contrary to much hand-wringing from right-wingers that we supposedly live in an era of outsize scientism and rationalism, nothing could be further from the truth. We live in a POLITICAL era where facts and laws are trumpped by propoganda and political will. In vurtually every facet of our lives: international relations, domestic government, academics, journalism, and, increasingly, home life.
We now have world increasingly devoid of both rationalism and faith. Nihilism is a word that comes to mind.
Eagle,
" the Church is never afraid of science and no scientific discoveries have ever or shall ever present a threat to faith or the Church’s teachings."
Of course this is true and most of the original discoveries in science regarding genetics, astronomy and science in general were from the intellectual centers and the monastic communities within the Church. But the wedge has been driven by advertisement and dishonesty and so as you acurately describe the current situation,"We live in a POLITICAL era where facts are trumpped by propoganda and political will."
The Church Fathers had no problem in treating Genesis as affirming the Divine origin of the world, life and man, but not as a scientific document. The exclusive and frequently idiosyncratic interpretation of scripture taught by many Protestants, often leads to idiosyncratic results, such as Young Earth Creationism, which requires fanciful interpretations of very strong evidence about the great age of the Earth and of life.
It is well confirmed that evolution occured and is occuring, and natural selection, mediated by the gene system, also operates.
Buchanan is right to point out that many have made political use of evolutionary notions, and gone beyond the lessons of the theory to draw social policy implications. These applications are often unwarranted, and often contradict one another.
The question is whether behind all of this there is a Divine hand (another metaphor) at work, and if so, what that implies. Many Catolics and Orthodox Christians are able to recognize the probable validity of the science, and reconcile that with a belief in Divine creation. This rssult seems a lot sounder than affirming that the dinosaurs coexisted with the Flintstones and other forbears.
A Russian Orthodox view, though my no means an official or universal one: Alexander Men on the Creation.
#14 Thanks Grumpy. They hated him even then and finally killed him. Fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.
#6: No, Jack, the Catholic Church does not accept evolution. Some of the Modernists in control of the Vatican, among them John Paul II, accept evolution. The accepted it as private individuals, not as dogma of the Church. No pope has spoken ex cathedra that evolution has been proven.
#8: And that's what it is, Michael, a well established theory, but with no evidence, yet.
#9: Do us a favor, Polemicscat, give us all of the sound evidence which proves evolution. Also, would you give us the absolute evidence that the earth is not the center of the universe. Provide us with the absolute evidence that the earth rotates on its axis; and that it revolves around the sun. Galileo never did; and neither did Copernicus. They merely theorized it did. At least Copernicus was prudent, he did not insist that his theory proved a fact; whilst Mr. Braggadocio Galilei did.
@13: Grumpy Old Man declared: "It is well confirmed that evolution occured and is occuring, and natural selection, mediated by the gene system, also operates." Would you please give us evidence of this confirmation of evolution?
According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, there is no contradiction between Divine Revelation and science, because both are from God. True science is the handmaid of Religion. Science and the scientific method are means of arriving at the truth, and Religion is Truth. The greatest scientists have been Christians; a majority of outstanding leaders in science were Catholics, and many were priests. Only the shallow dabblers in scinece absurdly pretend that there is a conflict. The apparent conflicts arise from false interpretations, as when one takes for scientific truth what is false or not proved, or accepts as a doctrine of faith something not taught by the Church, i.e., Evolution (the transformation of a lesser life form into a different and more complex or superior life form, e.g., the ape into a man).
A human example of natural selection is the high frequency of lactose tolerance--ability of adults to digest milk--in population that just happen to rely on dairy foods to a large extent.
It is also clear, for example, that disease-causing microorganisms evolve quite rapidly, to resist antibiotics, and generally become less virulent as they develop.
Domesticated animals evolve toward tractability--from bees that sting less aggressively to dogs that are far less fearful of people and aggressive toward them than the related wolf, for example.
I'm no natural historian, but the examples go on and on. Nowadays information is developing very rapidly even at the genetic level.
As for "ape into man," that misstates the current understanding. Apes and men have a common ancestral species, from which they evolved separately. The degree of similarity in the genome has now been assessed.
#16 - No one claims that the Catholic Church has defined evolution as a dogma. The phrase about the Catholic Church accepting evolution simply means that Catholics, subject to certain conditions, are free to entertain the theory of evolution to the extent they think it is backed up scientifically. The main conditions are that evolution, whatever its mechanism, takes place within the providence of God and that the human race has only one pair of first parents. The first condition arises from faith itself, but the second appears to be both provable and proven by science.
Grumpy Old Man:
Dogs were bred for many purposes for centuries. I'm not sure that's a good example of evolution, since it doesn't occur in a natural setting and is the result of a higher intelligence intervening. If you are saying that animals get more docile over time due to long-term association with humans, and this happens on it's own, that's interesting and I would like to know more about it, but it seems far fetched.
I'm not sure whether development of lactose tolerance, or of resistance to certain diseases, should really be called evolution, even in those cases where it occurs only in certain ethnic groups. It seems we may be using a non-sequitor when we think that way. It's not that I'm opposed to the idea that evolution can occur, it's just that we are making a huge leap when we go from development of resistances to diseases to slow changes happening over millions of years which lead to one species developing into another.
Also, I thought that just about all humans of all ethnicities could tolerate milk, and that lactose intolerance was actually a deficiency of metabolism, not evidence of evolution.
This whole topic is rather fascinating, but I stay away from it due to it's susceptibility to atheistic manipulation. I would love to study it if the anti-christian types would just shut up and let the rest of us study the subject in peace, and ditto for creationists.
I think John Seiler laid it out nicely in the first comment, and others have as well. There's clearly evolution at work in nature within species. The variety of dogs, as mentioned, is a great example, even though the human hand has accelerated that process.
I tend to shy away from fierce discussions about the origins of the human species. Anyone pretending to know precisely how that has happened is either lying to you, selling you something or needs bizarre assurances to underpin their "faith". I have read many theories along with minor evidence that suggests paths of species evolution. They are neither highly developed nor totally preposterous. Neither is it against God, since obviously all truth leads us to Him.
Meng, I really enjoy your comments. I think you are taking things too literally or rigidly here though. Clearly, the earth revolves around the sun as the sun is the center of our solar system, by definition, just as the moon revolves around the earth, and the earth rotates around its own axis. It is clear that scientists know very little about the "universe", either in its present state or its origins, but let's admit what we do know around ourselves. Apples fall from trees and hit the ground, not the other way around. But I cannot "prove" it as you say.
One of these days, parents will sit their children down and explain to them that, in the backward 20th and early 21st centuries, people actually thought [giggle] that we descended from pre-apine creatures, and that, through a series of chance mutations, amoebas and other lower life forms eventually became Harvard professors. None of this was actually documented, but it was taught with dogmatic rigor in all the government schools, as well as private ones.
The whole thing will appear in hindsight like a fanatical fad.
At present, with some losing faith in the religion of Darwinism (and its various reformations), the Old Believers are becoming increasingly strident in their mockery of real religion.
Go Pat go!
I think Brother Andre Marie is right. The whole claim does look rather ridiculous when you stand back and look at it. I also wonder how much of the so-called evidence for evolution really is just that, and how much of it is taken out of context, falsified, misinterpreted, fabricated, etc. After all, many people believe in the 'global warming' hoax, yet another topic manipulated for nefarious purposes, and really just a secular version of millennialist end-time religion.
#18: Then, the best way to phrase the statement is that the Catholic Church allows for free discussion of evolution under the two stipulations that you mentioned, and demanded by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis. But the statement that the Catholic Church accepts evolution is truly misleading, because it doesn't. Let's be clear about the matter.
#17: Lactose tolerance is the general rule among humans, but how does that prove evolution? Intolerance is the exception. Disease causing micro-organisms adapt to a hostile environment caused by antibiotics. Viruses and toxic bacteria don't evolve to resist the antibiotic. A pneumococci bacterium, no matter the stages of adaptation to antibiotics is still a pneumococci bacterium. Domestication of animals is not evolution. I reject your common genome theory for the ape and the human. That seems to be coming straight out of National Geographic, which has offered no hard evidence of a common genome. It is merely an exotic theory. You've got to show me the hard evidence, which you haven't done. Geneticists point to the fact that genetic mutations are usually harmful, e.g., sickle cell anemia; club foot, vestigial wings in fruit flies, etc. Geneticists have learned also, that there is a genetic barrier which no plant or animal species can penetrate. Animal breeders and plant hybridists can manipulate particular species for particular purposes, but they cannot make a rose into a daisy or into a redwood tree; nor can a horse breeder produce a new species of animal. In other words, there is variety within species, but that's as far as it goes. This is a law of nature and seems to me to be one reason why macro-evolution is a fraud.
I love how lay evolutionist talk with such confidence about the "fact" of evolution. But when pressed the best they can do is point to the variety of dogs and a relatively common lactose tolerance as their "ace in the hole."
I've heard some convincing arguments for and against evolution. But as a layman with limited education in science I would never presume to state categorically that Evolution is a Fact. True believers in Evolution, with scant scientific education, are always good for a few laughs.
"As for “ape into man,” that misstates the current understanding. Apes and men have a common ancestral species, from which they evolved separately. The degree of similarity in the genome has now been assessed."
So you would expect us to take an even more fanciful view of the powers of evolution. Man descended from a rat or an opossum, rather than an Ape? Yeah, that is much more convincing.
There is a basic problem consisting of three parts: 1) religious people who know nothing of science but insist on pontificating against "Darwinism" as if it were simply an ideology, 2) scientists who know nothing of philosophy, theology, or the human race apart from biology, but insist on pontificating about the origins of the universe, life, human consciousness as if they had any idea even of what the problems are, and 3) people who know little or nothing of either religion and philosophy or of science but have no difficulty in pontificating on both. After spending some years in the study of evolutionary theory, I do not know what is the truth, and I certainly do not believe I know the truth. What I do conclude is that evolutionary theory today a) is the most inclusive and predictive explanation of how species adapt to environments and that b) hardly any competent person who has looked at the "Neo-Darwinist synthesis" has come away without being persuaded of its significance, and that c) evolutionary theory tends more to confirm than to refute the Christian view of human existence, and d) is very compatible with what might be called "deep" conservatism. Of course we do not have to take seriously any of the Darwinists' ill informed and misguided twaddle about the existence of God or the purpose of human life, but neither are we forced to accept the pre-scientific notions of primitive Jews or Christian theologians ignorant of science.
I have been rereading Augustine's City of God, a work filled with brilliance and profundity but also with an ignorant narrow-mindedness about what is observable in Creation that would have disgusted Aristotle and his students. Orthodox Christian theologians are correct about all the most important things of the universe; therefore, a little patient humility about the study of the less important mechanical details might be in order.
Yes, I agree with Dr. Fleming. One should attempt to speak about that which he knows or is interested in and wonders about. Of course there have been orchestrated lies against the Church and Science for years, creating a false dichotomy between truth and science. The Pontifical Academy is alwayss a good place to start when conducting research into these various controversies and facets of science and understanding. For those who like the qualifications, they probably have more Nobel Prize winners than any in these scientific matters.
The Pontifical Academy of Science from
" Pope Pius XI in the Motu Proprio which brought about its re-foundation in 1936:
"Amongst the many consolations with which divine Goodness has wished to make happy the years of our Pontificate, I am happy to place that of our having being able to see not a few of those who dedicate themselves to the studies of the sciences mature their attitude and their intellectual approach towards religion. Science, when it is real cognition, is never in contrast with the truth of the Christian faith. Indeed, as is well known to those who study the history of science, it must be recognized on the one hand that the Roman Pontiffs and the Catholic Church have always fostered the research of the learned in the experimental field as well, and on the other hand that such research has opened up the way to the defense of the deposit of supernatural truths entrusted to the Church....We promise again that it is our strongly-held intention, that the 'Pontifical Academicians' through their work and our Institution, work ever more and ever more effectively for the progress of the sciences. Of them we do not ask anything else, since in this praiseworthy intent and this noble work in that service in favor of the truth that we expect of them." (Pius XI)
Nobel Prize Members since 1900
During its various decades of activity, the Academy has had a number of Nobel Prize winners amongst its members, many of whom were appointed Academicians before they received this prestigious international award. These include:
Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry, 1908)
Guglielmo Marconi (Physics, 1909)
Alexis Carrel (Physiology, 1912)
Max von Laue (Physics, 1914)
Max Planck (Physics, 1918)
Niels Bohr (Physics, 1922)
Werner Heisenberg (Physics, 1932)
Paul Dirac (Physics, 1933)
Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933)
Peter J.W. Debye (Chemistry, 1936)
Otto Hahn (Chemistry, 1944)
Sir Alexander Fleming (Physiology, 1945)
Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee (Physics, 1957)
Joshua Lederberg (Physiology, 1958)
Rudolf Mössbauer (Physics, 1961)
Max F. Perutz (Chemistry, 1962)
John Carew Eccles (Physiology, 1963)
Charles H. Townes (Physics, 1964)
Manfred Eigen and George Porter (Chemistry, 1967)
Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall W. Nirenberg (Physiology, 1968)
Christian de Duve (Physiology, 1974)
George Emil Palade (Physiology, 1974)
David Baltimore (Physiology, 1975)
Aage Bohr (Physics, 1975)
Abdus Salam (Physics, 1979)
Paul Berg (Chemistry, 1980)
Kai Siegbahn (Physics, 1981)
Sune Bergstrom (Physiology, 1982)
Carlo Rubbia (Physics, 1984)
Klaus von Klitzing (Physics, 1985)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (Physiology, 1986)
John C. Polanyi (Chemistry, 1986)
Yuan Tseh Lee (Chemistry, 1986)
Jean-Marie Lehn (Chemistry, 1987)
Joseph E. Murray (Physiology, 1990)
Gary S. Becker (Economics, 1992)
Paul J. Crutzen and Mario J. Molina (Chemistry, 1995)
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Physics, 1997)
Ahmed H. Zewail (Chemistry, 1999)
Günter Blobel (Physiology, 1999)
Ryoji Noyori (Chemistry, 2001)
Aaron Ciechanover (Chemistry, 2004)
Other eminent Academicians include Padre Agostino Gemelli (1878-1959), founder of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and President of the Academy after its re-foundation until 1959, and Mons. Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), one of the fathers of contemporary cosmology who held the office of President from 1960 to 1966, and Brazilian neuroscientist Carlos Chagas Filho.
There are a couple of other aspects of evolution that need to be clarified.
1) Darwin used the term "natural selection" to differentiate it from the "artificial selection" that people use when breeding plants and animals to bring about offspring with exaggerated characteristics. By natural selection he simply meant that animals and plants, left to reproduce without human intervention, would be affected by natural factors that would cause offspring to be naturally selected to survive or not depending on their individual differences and their environment.
2) "Survival of the fittest" was an expression that Darwin used to describe the process that occurs during natural selection. One example of it would be that the fastest running rabbit escapes a predator and thereby lives to perpetuate the species. He never meant that survival of the fittest was a good rule for human beings to follow. He neither condemned it nor praised it as a process.
#28 - "Natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" definitely need to be clarified and qualified as neither is without problems. How, for example, can it be asserted, as atheistic Darwinists would assert, that man is simply another product of natural evolution and at the same time assert that man's own activities are somehow unnatural? You can't have it both ways. Christian anthropology sees man as the special creation of God with an immortal soul and supernatural destiny - whatever may have been the natural antecedents of the human body.
Survival of the fittest is a tautology with no evidence available for fitness to survive other than survival itself. Before concluding that speed is an important fitness to survive marker for rabbits, you would have to have controlled tests to compare the survival rate of fast rabbits with those, for example, which don't venture far from their burrows, or those which don't move and depend on camouflage. But the biggest challenge to survival of the fittest by natural selection is the now commonly held scientific opinion that mass extinctions caused by catastrophes openned up new evolutionary vistas for species which held only small niches in the old order. Scholars point to four or five such events, caused by such things as large meteor strikes or super volcanic eruptions. There is no way that any species could evolve fitness to survive a one in a million or one in a hundred million year event. Survival would be not a matter of pre-evolved fitness but of sheer luck - or dare we say Divine Providence?
#16 "Provide us with the absolute evidence that the earth rotates on its axis; and that it revolves around the sun."
(I believe I said "sound evidence," not "absolute evidence.")
Rather than attempting to go through an extensive amount of elementary physics, I will just say that if the earth does not rotate on its axis, that means that all the objects we see in a night sky (including the sun and all the stars and galaxies) must orbit the earth in a period of twenty-four hours. This is not absolute evidence but it is sound evidence that the earth rotates on its axis.
@28: You said, "By natural selection he simply meant that animals and plants, left to reproduce without human intervention, would be affected by natural factors that would cause offspring to be naturally selected to survive or not depending on their individual differences and their environment." Michael Denton, himself an evolutionist, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, states the fact "that nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature, let alone having been responsible for the creation of a new species." Since the random mechanism of natural selection is the driving force behind the whole of evolution, it would be, as Darwin admitted, a "relatively slow process." Therefore, there is the matter of sufficient lengths of time to allow for the enormous changes that must occur via "natural selection". Denton offers the problem, thus: "Consider the evolution of A into B through a number of mutational intermediates, ie A --> I1 -- I2 --I3 -- I4 -- I5 ---------In --> B [all within a finite time frame]. Each new advantageous mutation [and remember, most mutations are not advantageous] or innovation, ie A --> I1, I1 --> I2, must first occur, and then spread by interebreeding to all the members of the species and the rate at which this occurs, the substitution rate, depends on a number of factors, including mutatin rate, generation time and total population number. Unless the advantageous mutation rate, the substitution rate and dthe total number of advantageous mutations are known, then it is simply impossible to assess whether the Transition A --> B could have possibly occurred by natural selection in the time available. Unfortunately [Darwin's Origin of Species] provides no quantitative evidence of this kind to show that any one major evolutionary transformation would in fact have been possible in the manner envisaged by Darwin." Now, add to this the innumerable intermediate forms that would have had to come into existence in the process of transforming from A --> B, the fossil record is glaringly absent of these forms, of even one species.
I stand corrected, concerning my use of the term "absolute evidence" and your term "sound evidence". Your argument relative to the "rotation" of the earth on its axis, seems to rests upon an unproven presupposition. You presuppose that the earth revolves around the sun, because the other alternative, the sun and stars moving around the earth must seem impossible. Yet, is there any scientific proof that the latter is not the reality?
#31 "Your argument relative to the “rotation” of the earth on its axis, seems to rests upon an unproven presupposition. You presuppose that the earth revolves around the sun, because the other alternative, the sun and stars moving around the earth must seem impossible. Yet, is there any scientific proof that the latter is not the reality?"
The earth rotating on its axis and the earth revolving around the sun are really two different issues. My comment in #30 was addressing only the issue of the earth rotating on its axis, the point being that the law of inertia would not permit all of the heavenly bodies to orbit the earth in twenty four hours. Therefore, the earth must be rotating on its axis.
That is not really related to the question of the earth orbiting the sun. The earth's orbit around the sun takes a year which the law of inertia would permit.
@32: again, my apologies, substitute rotates for revolves. How does the law of inertia not permit the sun from revolving around the earth? We'll forget the stars at this point.
Species unknown today are found in the fossil record, while those we recognize are glaringly absent in the same strata. How did they get there? On the one hand, evolutionists believe one species evolved into other species over great spans of time. Since this process has never been directly observed or duplicated, a great leap of faith is required to embrace it as fact and not speculation. On the other, creationists believe all life was created by God as the Bible dictates. Since this was not directly observed, a great leap of faith is required. The real significance of the Scopes trial is that one of these faiths and dogmas was given credibility to the exclusion of the other, as though one alone were indeed ‘fact’. The meaning of this is central to an understanding of our era.
@34: I agree with your assertion about those who believe in evolution: it is unscientific and does take a great leap of faith -- like believing in a fairy tale. However, I disagree with you that those who believe that God created all life have taken the same kind of leap. True faith is reasonable. If Jesus Christ is Who He said He was: the Son of God, i.e., the incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity (God revealing God); if the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ to continue His redemptive work and to preserve and teach the revealed truths given to it by Him; if the Catholic Church teaches that the canonical books of the Bible are divinely inspired; if the Catholic Church teaches that God is almighty, all knowing, all present, then it is no leap of faith to assent to these teachings or to believe that He is more than capable of bringing into existence out of nothing our earth and the universe within which it exists and the life living on it. It is a matter of reasonable faith, and it is a gift from God. Pray for it.
J Meng @35. I wasn't looking for a debate. Both rely on faith was all I was saying. My faith rests on Christ and the inspired scriptures. But 'prove it' as they say. I'm reminded of the old bumper sticker: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." The court, however, sidded with another faith-based belief, as though it were not faith-based, but fact-based. That was my point. The court decided what we should believe.
Frank Miller
“evolutionary theory tends more to confirm than to refute the Christian view of human existence”
Mr. Fleming, could you expand on this statement a little? How does evolutionary theory confirm the Christian view of human existence in any way?
Modern ideologies--Marxist, Boasian, existentialist, Lockean--treat human nature as a blank slate on which they can write any tomfoolery they like. Marriage, property, hierarchy, morality--all can be dispensed with. Sociobiology tells us this is not so, that man is pretty much what Christianity has taught all along. In haste.
I'd rather be made in the image of God any day of the week than be some sort of super-smart ape. The myth perpetuated by the left is that we're animals so it's OK to murder our unborn, or even consider entire populations as sub-human. The end result is some silver-tongued demagogue will round up those pesky Christians and place them in FEMA internment camps for re-education.
It's what socialists do, be they the nationalist or the soviet sort.
Based upon observable facts, evolution, operating through natural selection, was offered as an explanation for the diversity of species. This is wholly different from the question of how life began here to begin with. Those who posit that it spontaneously arose from the environment do so without a shred of evidence. Nor has anyone ever created life from non-life. Unlike evolutionary theory, there are no observable facts to support it. Therefore, it is based upon an unprovable presumption. That is, the presumption that there is no God. Atheism is the only foundation for such a theory.
How something that exists lives, moves, endures and adapts is for biology, physics and chemistry. How life arose from non-life, or why something exists instead of nothing is above these fields of study and proper to meta-physics and philosophy. Theology although consistent with these facts begins with a Divine revelation. St. Thomas believed that revelation is solely for our benefit because although all of these differnt fields of study are part of one truth, most people would not have the time or the capacity to integrate them consistently as is demonstrated by the current confusion. "The myth perpetuated by the left is that we’re (just) animals" The myth perpetuated by some puritans and heretics is that men should be angels. Surely we are something a little more and a little less than either of these two assertions.