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Some Gould quotes:
“The anatomical transition from reptiles to mammals is particularly well
documented in the key anatomical change of jaw articulation to hearing
bones. Only one bone, called the dentary, builds the mammalian jaw, while
reptiles retain several small bones in the rear portion of the jaw. We can
trace, through a lovely sequence of intermediates, the reduction of these
small reptilian bones, and their eventual disappearance or exclusion from
the jaw, including the remarkable passage of the reptilian articulation
bones into the mammalian middle ear (where they became our malleus and
incus, or hammer and anvil). We have even found the transitional form that
creationists often proclaim inconceivable in theory — for how can jawbones
become ear bones if intermediaries must live with an unhinged jaw before the
new joint forms? The transitional species maintains a double jaw joint, with
both the old articulation of reptiles (quadrate to articular bones) and the
new connection of mammals (squamosal to dentary) already in place! Thus, one
joint could be lost, with passage of its bones into the ear, while the other
articulation continued to guarantee a properly hinged jaw. Still, our
creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument,
refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional
forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us
with admittedly frequent examples of absence.”
— "Hooking Leviathan by Its Past," Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in
Natural History, New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1997, pp. 360-361.
“Scientific claims must be testable; we must, in principal, be able to
envision a set of observations that would render them false. Miracles cannot
be judged by this criterion, as Whitcomb and Morris have admitted. But is
all creationists writing merely about untestable singularities? Are
arguments never made in proper scientific form? Creationists do offer some
testable statements, and these are amenable to scientific analysis. Why,
then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because
these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.”
— "Genesis vs. Geology," Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 130-131.
“Two organisms may maintain the same feature because both inherited it from
a common ancestor. These are homologous similarities, and they indicate
‘propinquity of dissent,’ to use Darwin's words. Forelimbs of people,
porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most
textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of
the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have
built such desperate structures from the same parts. Therefore, the parts
existed before the particular set of structures now housing them: they were,
in short, inherited from a common ancestor.”
— "Inside a Sponge's Cell," The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural
History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980, p. 248.
“Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of
ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God
had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he
would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other
purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged
from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved
from ordinary flowers.”
— "The Panda's Thumb," The Panda's Thumb, New York: W. W. Norton, 1980, p.
20.
Larry Woolf;General Atomics;6995 Flanders Dr.;MS 78-107;San Diego CA
92121-2975; Ph:858-526-8575;FAX:858-526-8568; www.ga.com; www.sci-ed-ga.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Clark
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: Evolution/Creation debate
I agree with Daniel. I am what might be best described as a
fundamentalist Christian. I believe that the Bible is meant to be taken
as truth (although not in the scientific sense). But, I also look at
the evidence and find a very old earth. As my good friend Fritz
Schaefer told me once: When I get to heaven, God may say to me, "When I
said seven days, I meant seven days." Until then, I think the earth is
very old, and so creation seems to have taken a very long time.
Where does that leave me on the question of evolution? My best guess is
it might have happened that way, but in my limited knowledge, the
evidence doesn't look at all as strong as the biologists would have me
believe. I'm not even sure that the question can be answered by the
methods of science. After all, how would one go about showing that the
theory of evolution (life starting as some muck in the primordial soup
and continuing up the ladder to us) is wrong? In the statistical sense,
what would be the null hypothesis? And what if you show the null
hypothesis to be more likely than evolution?
The evolutionists require a tremendous amount of faith to come to
accept the doctrine of macroevolution, and still have the problem of
"what makes something alive?"
The biologists take the "theory" of evolution more as a "model" than a
true explanation. And when taken in that light, it becomes as good a
model as creationism. After all, how many times do you hear the
biologists say that a creature is the way as if it were designed that
way? (Example: The elephant has very large ears so it can cool itself
better. That sounds like a design decision to me.)