Sciences Quotation File Part I:
Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design

Stephen J. Gould:

According to the idealized principles of scientific discourse, the arousal of dormant issues should reflect fresh data that give renewed life to abandoned notions. Those outside the current debate may therefore be excused for suspecting that creationists have come up with something new, or that evolutionists have generated some serious internal trouble. But nothing has changed; the creationists have presented not a single new fact or argument. Darrow and Bryan were at least more entertaining than we lesser antagonists today. The rise of creationism is politics, pure and simple; it represents one issue (and by no means the major concern) of the resurgent evangelical right. Arguments that seemed kooky just a decade ago have reentered the mainstream.
--Stephen J. Gould, Evolution as Fact and Theory, essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 253
(see the essay Evolution as Fact and Theory transcribed in toto)

The basic attack of modern creationists falls apart on two general counts before we even reach the supposed factual details of their assault against evolution. First, they play upon a vernacular misunderstanding of the word "theory" to convey the false impression that we evolutionists are covering up the rotten core of our edifice. Second, they misuse a popular philosophy of science to argue that they are behaving scientifically in attacking evolution. Yet the same philosophy demonstrates that their own belief is not science, and that "scientific creationism" is a meaningless and self-contradictory phrase, an example of what Orwell called "newspeak."
--Stephen J. Gould, Evolution as Fact and Theory, essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 253
(see the essay Evolution as Fact and Theory transcribed in toto)

If today you can take a thing like evolution and it make a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. . . . Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
--Stephen Jay Gould, A Visit To Dayton, an essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 278
[This viewpoint could be dismissed as a slippery slope argument, yet, given the trend toward religious extremism that does exist in christianity I find it an exposé of a very real threat. --MN]

I do not believe that nature frustrates us by design, but I rejoice in her intransigence nonetheless.
--Stephen Jay Gould, What If Anything Is A Zebra, essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 365

The world is much more interesting than ideal.
--Stephen Jay Gould, What If Anything Is A Zebra, essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 365

The need to distinguish sturdy facts (pervasive pattern) from shaky factual claim (single cases with dubious documentation) has never been more evident to me than in the current debate between evolutionists and so-called "scientific creationists." The fact of evolution is as sturdy as any claim in science. Its sturdiness resides in a pervasive pattern detected by several disciplines -- for examples, the age of the earth and life as affirmed by astronomy and geology, and the pattern of imperfections in organisms that record a history of physical descent.

Against this pattern, creationists employ a destructive, shotgun approach. They present no testable alternative but fire a volley of rhetorical criticism in the form of unconnected, shaky factual claims -- a pot pourri (literally, a rotten pot, in this case) of nonsense that beguiles many people because it masquerades in the guise of fact and trades upon the false prestige of supposedly pure observation.
--Stephen Jay Gould, Quaggas, Coiled Oysters, And Flimsy Fact, an essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 385

The individual claims are easy enough to refute with a bit of research. Creationist themselves have been forced to retreat from the more embarrassing items. Noted creationist Henry Morris, for example, has often cited the supposed footprints of dinosaurs and humans together in rocks of the Paluxy River of Texas. But creationist Leonard Brand attributes some of the "human" prints to erosion and others to a three-toed dinosaur. He also adds: "We do know that there was a fellow during the Depression who carved tracks."
--Stephen Jay Gould, Quaggas, Coiled Oysters, And Flimsy Fact, an essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pg 384/385

Evolution as Fact and Theory
[First appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981 and reprinted here without permission --MN]

Kirtley Mather, who died last year at age ninety, was a pillar of both science and Christian religion in America and one of my dearest friends. The difference of a half-century in our ages evaporated before our common interests. The most curious thing we shared was a battle we each fought at the same age. For Kirtley had gone to Tennessee with Clarence Darrow to testify for evolution at the Scopes trial of 1925. When I think that we are enmeshed again in the same struggle for one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting conepts in all of sicence, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" -- part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus, creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric); "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science -- that it is not believed to be as infallible as it once was."

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withold provisional assent." I suppose the apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possiblity does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. [1]

Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between fact and theory from the very beginning if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishiments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection -- to explain the mechanism of evolution. He wrote, in Descent of Man: "I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change . . . Hence if I have erred in . . . having exaggerated its [natural selection's] power . . . I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."

Thus Darwin acknowledged the provisional nature of natural selection while affirming the fact of evolution. The fruitful theoretical debate that Darwin initiated has never ceased. From the 1940s throught the 1960s, Darwin's own theory of natural selection did achieve a temporary hegemony that it never enjoyed in his lifetime. But renewed debate characterizes our decade, and, while no biologist questions the importance of natural selection, many now doubt its ubiquity. In particular, many evolutionists argue that substantial amounts of genetic change may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through populations at random. Others are challenging Darwin's linking of natural selection with gradual imperceptible change through all intermediary degrees; they are arguing that most evolutionary events may occur far more rapidly than Darwin envisioned.

Scientists regard debate on fundamental issues of theory as a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement. Science is -- and how else can I say it? -- most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines their implications, and recognizes that old information may be explained in surprisingly new ways. Evolutionary theory is now enjoying this uncommon vigor. Yet amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been led to doubt the fact the evolution has occurred; we are debating how it happened. We are all trying to explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate by conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by falsely suggesting that we now doubt the very phenomenon we are struggling to understand.

Secondly, creationists claim that "the dogma of separate creations," as Darwin characterized it a century ago, is a scientific theory meriting equal time with evolution in high school biology curricula. But a popular viewpoint among philosophers of science belies this creationist argument. Philosopher Karl Popper has argued for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified, is not science.

The entire creationist program includes little more than a rhetorical attempt to falsify evolution by presenting supposed contradictions among its supporters. Their brand of creationism, they claim, is "scientific" because if follows the Popperian model in trying to demolish evolution. Yet Popper's argument must apply in both directions. One does not become a scientist by the simple act of trying to falsify a rival and truly scientific system; one has to present an alternative system that also meets Popper's criterion -- it too must be falsifiable in principle.

"Scientific creationism" is a self-contradictory, nonsense phrase precisely because it cannot be falsified. I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential data could lead creationists to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science. Lest I seem harsh or rhetorical, I quote creatism's leading intellectual, Duane Gish, Ph. D., from his recent [1978] book, Evolution? The Fossils Say No! "By creation we mean the bringing into being by a supernatural Creator of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of sudden, or fiat, creation. We do not know how the Creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. [Gish's italics]

This is why we refer to creation as special cration. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processives used by the Creator." Pray tell, Dr. Gish, in the light of your last sentence, what, then, is "scientific creationism"?

Our confidence that evolution occurred centers upon three general arguments. First, we have abundant, direct, observational evidence of evolution in action, from both field and laboratory. This evidence ranges from countless experiments on change in nearly everything about fruit flies subjected to artificial selection in the laboratory to the famous populations of British moths that became black when industial soot darkened the trees upon which the moths rest. (Moths gain protection from sharp-sighted bird predators by blending into the background.) Creationists have tightened their act. They now argue that God only created "basic kinds," and allowed for limited evolutionary meandering within them. Thus toy poodles and Great Danes come from the dog kind and moths can change color, but nature cannot convert a dog to a cat or a monkey to a man.

The second and third arguments for evolution -- the case for major changes -- do not involve direct observation of evolution in action. They rest upon inference, but are no less secure for that reason. Major evolutionary change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of recorded human history. All historical sciences rest upon inference, and evolution is no different from geology, cosmology, or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes that operated in the past. We must infer them from results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution, documents and artifacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.

The second argument -- that the imperfection of nature reveals evolution -- strikes many people as ironic, for they feel that evolution should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed by some organisms -- the camber of a gull's wing, or butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic leaves so precisely. but perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolutioned by natural selection. Perfection covers the tracks of past history. And past history -- the evidence of descent -- is the mark of evolution.

Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case. Why should all the large native mammals of Australia be marsupials, unless they descended from a common ancestor isolated on this island continent? Marsupials are not "better," or ideally suited for Australia; many have been wiped out by placental mammals imported by man from other continents. This principle of imperfection extends to all historical sciences. When we recognize the etymology of September, October, November, and December (seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth), we know that the year once stared in March, or that two additonal months must have been added to an original calendar of ten months.

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common -- and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution [ref. deleted --MN] -- but they are not entirely wanting as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The "hammer" and "anvil" bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transtion be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleantologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint -- one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Austropithecus afrensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape's of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features -- increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larger body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am -- for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousnad or tens of thousnad of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a gieological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average lifespan for a fossil invertebrate species -- more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the statis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual tarnsformation within lineages, but must arise from the differential success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs, (punctuations and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species lievel, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientist Agree Evolution Is A Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge . . . are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous book published in 1940, that new groups can arise all at once through major mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creaures as "hopeful monsters." (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but Goldschmidt's theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium -- see essays in section 3 [of current volume -MN] and my explicit essay on Goldschmidt in The Panda's Thumb.) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the "punctuated equilibrium hopeful monster theory" and tells his hopeful readers that "it amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in assertng there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to a common ancestor." Duane Gish writes, "According to Goldschmidt, and now apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced." Any evolutionist who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage; yet the only theory that could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationistism -- with God acting in the egg.

I am both angry and amused by the creationists; but mostly I am deeply sad. Sad for many reasons. Sad because so many people who respond to creationist appeals are troubled for the right reason, but venting their anger at the wrong target. It is true that scientists have often been dogmatic and elitist. It is true that we have often allowed the white-coated advertising image to represent us -- "Scientists say that Brand X cures bunions ten times faster . . ." We have not fought it adequately because we derive benefits from appearing as a new priesthood. It is also true that faceless and bureaucratic state power intrudes more and more into our lives and removes choices that should belong to individuals and communities. I can understand that school curricula, imposed from above and without local input, might be seen as one more insult on all these grounds. But the culprit is not, and cannot be, evolution or any other fact of the natural world. Identify and fight your legitimate enemies by all means, but we are not among them.

I am sad because the practical result of this brouhaha will not be expanded coverage to include creationism (that would also make me sad), but the reduction or excision of evolution from high school curricula. Evolution is one of the half dozen "great ideas" developed by science. It speaks to the profound issues of genealogy that fascinate all of us -- the "roots" phenomenon writ large. Where did we come from? Where did life arise? How did it develop? How are organisms related? It forces us to think, ponder, and wonder. Shall we deprive millions of this knowledge and once again teach biology as a set of dull and unconnected facts, without the thread that weaves divese material into a supple unity?

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern among my colleagues. I sense that some of them now wish to mute the healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It provides grist for creationist's mills, they say, even if only by distortion. Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment -- a kind of old-time religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition. For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.
--Stephen J. Gould, Evolution as Fact and Theory, essay from his column and reprinted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, pp 253-262
[1] Since the writing of this essay, advances in the field of Theoretical Physics have developed theories that apples might very well begin to rise tomorrow. These ideas do merit equal time in the classroom. --MN

It is easy to dismiss a crazy thory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation -- and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. Few honest passions are not based upon some valid perception of unity or some anomaly worthy of note. The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.
--Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 235

Great thinkers are never passive before facts. They ask questions of nature; they do not follow her humbly. They have hopes and hunches, and they try hard to construct the world in their light. Hence, great thinkers also make great errors.
--Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 236

Extinction, for most people, carries many of the connotations attrbuted to sex not so long ago -- a rather disreputable business, frequent in occurance, but not to anyone's credit, and certainly not to be discussed in proper in circles. But, like sex, extinction is an ineluctable part of life. It is the ultimate fate of all species, not the lot of unfortunate and ill-designed creatures. It is no sign of failure.
--Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 266

I write this essay to point out that the most prominent of all scientific stories in this mode -- the supposed Dark and Medieval concensus for a flat earth -- is entirely mythological. Moreover, when we trace the invention of this fable in the nineteenth century, we receive a double lesson in the dangers of false taxonomies [...]. for the myth itself only makes sense under a prejudicial view of Western history as an era of darkness between lighted beacons of classical learning and Renaissance revival -- while the nineteenth-century invention of the flat earth, as we shall see, occurred to support another dubious and harmful separation wedded to another legend of historical progress -- the supposed warfare between science and religion.

Classical scholars, of course, had no doubt about the earth's sphericity. Our planet's roundness was central to Aristotle's cosmology and was assumed in Eratothenes' measurement of the earth's circumference in the third century BC. The flat-earth myth argues that this knowledge was then lost when ecclesiastical darkness settled over Europe. For a thousand years of middle time, almost all scholars held that the earth must be flat -- like the floor of a tent, held up by the canopy of the sky, to cite a biblical metaphor read literally. The Renaissance rediscovered classical notions of sphericity, but proof required the bravery of Columbus and other great explorers who should have sailed off the edge, but (beginning with Magellan's expedition) returned home from the opposite direction after going all the way around.

The inspirational, schoolchild version of the myth centers upon Columbus, who supposedly overcame the calumny of assembled clerics at Salamanca to win a chance from Ferdinand and Isabella. Consider this version of the legend, cited by Russell from a book for primary-school children written in 1887, soon after the myth's invention (but little different from accounts that I read as a child in the 1950s):

"But if the world is round," said Columbus, "it is not hell that lies beyond the stormy sea. Over there must lie the eastern strand of Asia, the Cathay of Marco Polo" ... In the hall of the convent there was assembled the imposing company -- shaved monks in gowns ... cardinals in scarlet robes .. "You think the earth is round ... Are you not aware that the holy fathers of the church have condemned this belief ... This theory of yours looks heretical." Columbus might well quake in his boots at the mention of heresy; for there was that new Inquisition just in fine running order, with its elaborate bone-breaking, flesh-pinching, thumb-screwing, hanging, burning, mangling system for heretics.

Dramatic, to be sure, but entirely fictitious. There never was a period of "flat earth darkness" among scholars (regardless of how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus's plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabella's confessor, and, following the defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granada. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet, at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but all assumed the earth's roundness. As a major critique, they argued that columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth's circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had "cooked" his books to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia, and Native Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 40/42

Where then, and why, did the myth of medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Russell's historiographic work gives us a good fix on both times and people. None of the great eighteenth-century anticlerical rationalists -- not Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Benjamin Franklin -- accused the scholastics of believing in a flat earth, though these men were all unsparing in their contempt for medieval versions of Christianity. Washington Irving gave the flat earth story a good boost in his largely fictional history of Columbus, published in 1828 -- but his version did not take hold. The legend grew during the ninetheenth century, but did not enter the crucial domains of schoolboy pap or tour-guide lingo. Russell did an interesting survey of nineteenth-century history texts for secondary schools, and found that very few mentioned the flat earth myth before 1870, but that almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. We can therefore pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat-earth myth to the period between 1860 and 1890.

Those years also featured the spread of an intellectual movement based on the second error of taxonomic categories explored in this essay -- the portrayal of Western history as a perpetual struggle, if not an outright "war," between science and religion, with progress linked to the victory of science and the subsequent retreat of theology. Such movements always need whipping boys and legends to advance their claims. Russell argues that the flat-earth myth achieved its canonical status as a primary homily for the triumph of science under this false dichotomization of Western history. How could a better story for the army of science ever be concocted? Religious darkness destroys Greek knowledge and weaves us into a web of fears, based on dogma and opposed both to rationality and experience. Our ancestors therefore lived in anxiety, restricted by official irrationality, afraid that any challenge could only lead to a fall off the edge of the earth into eternal damnation. A fit tale for an intended purpose, but entirely false because few medieval scholars ever doubted the earth's sphericity.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 42/43

I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth toward the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobirum. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo Sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extending geological longevity.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 50

Our struggle to formulate a humane and accurate idea of human nature focuses on poper positions between the false and sterile poles of nature and nurture. Pure nativism -- as in the Hollywood version of the monster's [Frankenstein's] depravity -- leads to a cruel and inaccurate theory of biological determinism, the source of so much misery and such pervasive suppression of hope in millions belonging to unfavored races, sexes, or social classes. But pure "nurturism" can be just as cruel, and just as wrong -- as in the blame, once heaped upon loving parents in bygone days of rampant Freudianism, for failures in rearing as putative source of mental illness or retardation that we can now identify as genetically based -- for all organs, including brains, are subject to inborn illness.

The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot rake the false form of percentages adding to 100 -- as in "intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture," or "homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned," and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgram (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed (just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality).

The best guide to a proper integration lies in recognizing that nature supplies general ordering rules and predispositions -- often strong to be sure -- while nurture shapes specific manifestations over a wide range of potential outcomes. We make classical "category mistakes" when we attribute too much specificity to nature -- as in the pop sociobiology of supposed genes for complexly social phenomena like rape and racism; or when we view deep structures as purely social constructs -- as in earlier claims that even the most general rules of grammar must be learned contingencies without any univerality across cultures.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 59/60

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview -- nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. On the other hand, a fruitful worldview is the greatest shortcut to insight, and the finest prod for making connections -- in short, the best possible agent for a Peircean Abduction. So much in our material culture is both alluring and dangerous at the same time -- try fast cars and high stakes poker for starters. Why shouldn't a fundamental issue in our intellectual lives possess the same properties?
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 96

I do not know that my view is more correct; I do not even think that "right" and "wrong" are good categories for assessing complex mental models of external reality -- for models in science are judged useful or detrimental, not as true or false.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 96

I shall not hide my preferences and biases. I helped to devise the theory of punctuated equilibrium with Niles Eldrege in 1972. I have cheered from the sidelines [...] as catastrophic theories of mass extinction make their comeback in the virtual proof now available for extreterrestrial impact as the trigger of the Cretaceous-Tertiary dying [...].

I am not a foe of gradual change; I believe that this style of alteration often prevails. But I do think that punctuational change writes nature's primary signature -- and I am convinced that our difficulty in conceptualizing this style of alteration arises from social and psychological bias rather than from any shyness of nature in printing its John Hancock (so conspicuously that the king might read it without his spectacles -- though we poor ordinary mortals often seem blind, however prominent the signature.)
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 135/136

Questions are not neutral; they presuppose a list of assumptions that may be long and complex.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 136

Objectivity is not an unobtainable emptying of mind, but a willingness to abandon a set of preferences -- for or against some view, as Darwin said -- when the world seems to work in a contrary way.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 136

Following Krushchev's revelations that Stalin's less than saintly persona and procedures, the Soviet Union revised its official version of Communist Party history during the twentieth century. I bought a copy of this new edition and immediately turned to the index to learn the latest word on Uncle Joe. I found that he had suffered the worst of all fates: he simply wasn't there. And I thought to myself, Love him or hate him, but how in hell can you tell the story of twentieth-century Russia without him? The keepers of official records had used the primary device of excommunicators, anthematizers, and ostracizers throughout history: there is a fate far worse than death or the rack, and its name is oblivion -- not the acceptable fading of an honored life that passes from general memory as historical records degrade (for nearly all of us must endure this erasure), but the terror of unpersoning, of being present (either in life or in immediate memory) but bypassed as though non-existent.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 187

I shall not, either in this forum or anywhere, resolve the age-old riddle of epistomology: How can we "know" the "realities" of nature? I will, rather, simply end by restating a point well recognized by philosophers and self-critical scientists, but all too often disregarded at our peril. Science does progress toward more adequate understanding of the empirical world, but no pristine, objective reality lies "out there" for us to capture as our technologies improve and our concepts mature. The human mind is both an amazing instrument and a fierce impediment -- and the mind must be interposed between observation and understanding.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 214

How cruel, and how perverse, that we invest the most awesome expertise (and millions of dollars) in the dinosaurs, sparing no knowledge or expense to render every detail, every possible nuance, in the most accurate and realistic manner. I have nothing but praise for the thought and care, the months and years invested in each dinosaur model, the pushing of computer generation into a new realm of utility, the concern for rendering every detail with consumate care, even the tiny bits that few will see and the little sounds that fewer will hear. I think of medieval sculptors who lavished all their skills upon invisible statues on the parapets, for God's view must have been best (internal satisfaction based on personal excellence, in modern translation). How ironic that we permit a movie to do all this so superbly well, and then throw away the story because we think that the public will reject, or fail to comprehend, any complexity beyond a Neanderthal "duh", or a brontosaurian bellow.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 232
[Continued to quote below]

I simply don't believe that films, to be popular at the box office, must be dumbed down to some least common denominator of universal comprehension. Science fiction, in particular, has a long an honorable tradition for exploring philosophically complex issues about time, history, and the meaning of life in a cosmos of such vastness. Truly challenging films, like Kubrick and Clarke's 2001, have made money, won friends, and influenced people -- and even such mass-marketed series as Star Wars, Star Trek, and Planet of the Apes base their themes on the meaty issues traditionally used by the genre as centerpieces of plot lines.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 232

Two factors -- one a prejudice, the other a condition -- generally debar us from appreciating the Victorian aesthetic. First, our smugness about progress leads us to view any contrary vision from the past as barbarous. Thus, when modernism espoused simple geometries with unornamented and functional space, the Victorian love of busy exuberance became a focus of pity and derision. (We might praise an old Japanese house for anticipating modern simplicity, but what could we do with a shelf of curios?) In a sense, this dismissal might be viewed as payback, for the Victorians aggressively depicted their own times as the pinnacle of progress and often treated the past with condescension. In any case, our knee-jerk dismissal of Victoriana is now fading as the preservationist movement wins more converts, and as postmodernism brings eclecticism and and ornament back into architecture and design.

Second, and more important, our image of "Victorian" has not been set by the objects themselves as contructed for their own time, but by their present appearance, usually after a century of neglect and deterioration. The injustice of this situation borders on peversity. I would not, after all, allow my image of "grandfather" to be set by the present state of my Papa Joe's remains at his gravesite. Why, then, do we conceptualize "Victorian" as a ramshackle building with broken steps, creaking floors, and peeling paint -- a set fit only for the Addams family, or the Halloween "haunted house" set up by the local Jaycees.

My first, and keenly revealing, experience with Victoriana as Victorians knew the style, divested of a century's overlay in deterioration, occurred in 1976, when, to celebrate our nation's two hundredth birthday, the Smithsonian Institution opened a replica of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. This wonderful exhibition included plows, pharmaceuticals, implements for house and farm, and above all, machines and engines, all spanking new, freshly painted, and entirely in working order, with all their wheels, whistles, and hisses. I particularly remember a case of ax blades -- all shiny and sharp. And I realized that I had always pictured Victorian tools as rusted and dull -- without ever articulating to myself the obvious point that they must have been gleaming and functional when first made. I am always amazed as the power of a prejudiced assumption (however absurd, and especially when backed by a mental picture) to derail the logical thinking of basically competent people like myself.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 241/242

Primates are visual animals, and we think best in pictorial or geometric terms. Words are an evolutionary afterthought.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 249

Science does tend to be international. We share information, try hard to communicate with each other, and deplore the parochialisms that stymie contact. (How, for example, can my field of paleontology prosper if scientists are not free to collect and study the fossils of their expertise wherever they occur?) We all know numerous stories of warm and continued cooperation between scientists in nations dedicated to blasting each other off the face of the earth. We have to work this way, for knowledge is universal.

Jingoism may do no serious harm, when expressed as boycotts of silk products, unofficial bans on German opera at the Met, or campaigns to change the name of a baseball team from the Cincinatti Reds to the Redlegs (yes, all these happened) -- but science cannot and dare not ban a fact because colleagues in hostile nations discovered the information.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 271

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 299

My parents bought this book [Mein Kampf] before my father left to join the battle. Thoughout my youth, I stared at this volume on my parents' shelves, taking it down now and again -- more to experience the frisson of touching evil than from any desire to read. When my father died a few years ago, and my mother offered me his collection of books, I included this familiar volume, with its blood-red jacket, among the few items that I wanted for my own. To hold the book now, and to quote from it for the first time, gives me an eerie feeling of connectivity with my past, and rekindles my dimmest three-year-old impression of World War II as a fight between my daddy and a bad man named Hitler.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 312

What can be more insane than madness that constructs its own byzantine taxonomy -- or are we just witnessing the orderly mind of the petty bureaucrat applied to human lives rather than office files?
--Stephen J. Gould, on the Wannsee Protocols which set the parameters for the holocaust, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 314

Claptrap and bogus Darwinian formulations have been used to justify every form of social exploitation -- rich over poor, technologically complex over traditional, imperialistic against aborigine, conqueror over defeated in war. Every evolutionist knows this history only too well, and we bear some measure of collective responsibilty for the uncritical fascination that many of us have shown for such unjustified extensions. But most false expropriations of our chief phrase have been undertaken without our knowledge and against our will.

I have known this story all my professional life. I can rattle off lists of such misuses, collectively called "social Darwinism".

[...] Until the fiftieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference piqued my curiosity and led me to read Eichmann's Protocol for the first time, I had not known about the absolute ultimate in all conceivable misappropriation -- and the discovery hit me as a sudden, visceral haymaker, especially since I had steeled myself to supposed unshockability before reading the document. Naturliche Auslese is the standard German translation of Darwin's "natural selection." To think that the key phrase of my professional world lies so perversely violated in the very heart of the chief operative paragraph in the most evil document ever written! What symbol of misuse could be more powerful? Surely this is the literary equivalent of imagining one's daughter shackled in a dungeon operated by sadistic rapists.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 314

Science can supply information as input to a moral decision, but the ethical realm of "oughts" cannot be logically specified by the factual "is" of the natural world -- the only aspect of reality that science can adjudicate. As a scientist, I can refute the stated genetic rationale for Nazi evil and nonsense. But when I stand against Nazi policy, I must do so as everyman -- as a human being. For I win my right to engage moral issues by my membership in Homo sapiens -- a right vested in absolutely every human being who has ever graced this earth, and a responsibility for all who are able.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 318

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from the seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 327

Interesting fallacies are often subtle, often based upon hidden assumptions, unstated and probably unconsciouly held.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 333

Since all discovery emerges from an interaction of mind and nature, thoughtful scientists must scrutinize the man biases that record our socializtion, our moment in political and geographical history, even the limitations (if we hope to comprehend them from within) imposed by a mental machinery jury-rigged in the immensity of evolution.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 345

We are most attuned to obvious biases of a social or political character. We can easily grasp how racism has distorted our view of human diversity, or how creationism once precluded any adequate understanding of life's history. We have been less able to recognize the subtler, but equally constraining, prejudices that arise from more universal properties easily hidden into stories with restricted themes and outcomes. I call this propensity "literary bias."
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 345

Good drama requires spare and purposive action, sensible linking of potential causes with realized effects. Life is much messier; nothing happens most of the time [...]. Millions of Americans (many hotheaded) own rifles (many loaded), but the great majority, thank God, do not go off most of the time. We spend most of real life waiting for Godot, not charging once more unto the breach.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 345

From a loyal and lifelong Eastern urbanite like myself, a New Yorker no less, such observation might elicit the most contemptible form of parochialism -- the silly name calling that elevates one's own insecurity to supposed superiority, and precludes any understanding of differnt styles and terrains. I'll take a good bowl of lentil soup and a nice slice of pie at the county fair any day over much of the tedious, incomprehensible, and self-congratulatory debate that passes for profundity in urban intellctual centers.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 402

Extraction of fossil DNA will not make the traditional paleontology of overt fossils obsolete. First of all, to make the obvious (but not adequately appreciated) philosophical point, DNA code and organism represent disparate biological objects. The gene is not more "basic" than the organism, or closer to the "essence of life," whatever that means. Organisms have DNA codes, and they maintain external forms and behaviors. both are equal and fundamental components of being. DNA does not even build an organism directly, but most work though complex internal environments of embryological development, and external environments of surrounding conditions. We will not know the core and essence of humanity when we complete the human genome project.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 408

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproven and unprovable charade -- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than as disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth. As in any historical science, most predictions refer to an unknown past (technically called "postdictions" in the jargon). For example, every time I collect fossils in Paleozoic rocks [...], I predict that I will not find fossil mammals -- for mammals evolved in the subsequent Triassic period (while young-earth creationists, claiming that God made life in six days of twenty-four hours, should expect to encounter mammals in all strata). If I find fossil mammals, particularly such late-evolving creatures as cows, cats, elephants, and humans, in Paleozoic strata, our evolutionary goose is cooked.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 345

Since creationist-bashing is a noble and necessary pursuit these days, readers may wonder why I am praising such an invocation of God's power to create immutable entities all at once -- especially since Linnaeus substituted this idea for earlier notions of looser definition and mutability. But, as I argued above, the history of science progresses in such a manner -- from theory to theory along a complex surface with a slant toward greater empirical adequacy, not along a straight and narrow path pushed by a gathering snowball of factual accumulation. The conceptual change was surely enormous, but Darwin's invocation of natural selection in steps as a replacement for God all at once did not require any major overhaul in practice. Species are real whether created by God or constructed by natural selection -- and Darwin's conceptual shift, the second unmasking, required little revision in Linnaean methods.
--Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur In A Haystack, pg 423

Fanciful solutions often generate a cascade of additional difficulties. In this case, Morris, a hydraulic engineer by training, and Whitcomb invoke a divine assist to gather the waters into their canopy, but then can't find a natural way to get them down. So they invoke a miracle: God put the water there in the first place; let him then release it.

The simple fact of the matter is that one cannot have any kind of a Genesis Flood without acknowledging the presence of supernatural elements. . . . It is obvious that the opening of the "windows of heaven" in order to allow "the waters that were above the firmament" to fall upon the earth, and the breaking up of "all the fountains of the great deep" were supernatural acts of God.

Since we usually define science, at least in part, as a system of explanation that relies upon invariant natural laws, this charmingly direct invocation of miracles (suspension of natural law) would seem to negate the central claim of the modern creationists' movement -- creationism is not religion but a scientific alternative to evolution; that creationism has been disregarded by scientists because they are a fanatical and dogmatic lot who cannot appreciate new advances; and that creationists must therefore seek legislative redress in their attempts to force a "balanced treatment" for both creationism and evolution in the science classrooms of our public schools.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 127

Support for [Federal Judge William R.] Overton's equation of "creation science" with strident and sectarian fundamentalism comes from two sources. First, the leading creationists themselves released some frank private documents in response to plaintiff's subpoenas. Overton's long list of citations seems to brand the claim for scientific creationism as simple hypocrisy. For example, Paul Ellwanger, the tireless advocate and drafter of the "model bill" that became Arkansas act 590 of 1981, the law challenged by the ACLU, says in a letter to a state legislator that "I view this whole battle as one between God and anti-God forces, though I know there are a large number of evolutionist who believe in God. . . . it behooves Satan to do all he can to thwart our efforts . . ." In another letter, he refers to the "the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already" -- a reasonably clear statement of the creationists' ultimate aim, and an identification of their appeals for "equal time," "the American way of fairness," and "presenting them both and letting the kids decide" as just so much rhetoric.

The scond source of evidence of the bill's unconstitutionality lies in the logic and chracter of creationist arguments themselves.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 128-129

Creationism reveals its nonscientific character in two ways: its central tenets cannot be tested and its peripheral claims, which can be tested, have been proven false. At its core, the creationist account rests on "singularities" -- that is to say on miracles. The creationist God is not the noble clockwinder of Newton and Boyle, who set the laws of nature properly at the beginning of time and then released direct control in full confidence that his initial decisions would require no revision. He is, instead a constant presence, who suspends his own laws when necessary to make the new or destroy the old. Since science can treat only natural phenomena occuring in a context of invariant natural law, the constant invocation of miracles places creationism in another realm.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 129

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. Dogmatic assent to disproved claims is not scientific behavior. Scientists are as stubborn as the rest of us, but they must be able to change their minds.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 131

(Creationist literature is often less charitable to liberal theology than to evolution. As a subject for wrath, nothing matches the enemy within.)
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 131

The very invariance of the universal fossil sequence is the strongest argument against its production in a single gulp. Could exceptionless order possibly arise from a contemporaneous mixture by such dubious process of sorting? Surely, somewhere, at least one courageous trilobite would have paddled on valiantly (as its colleagues succumbed) and found a place in the upper strata. Surely, on some primordial beach, a man would have suffered a heart attack and been washed into the lower strata before intelligence had a chance to plot temporary escape. But if the strata represent vast stretches of sequential time, then invariant order is an expectation, not a problem. No trilobite lies in the upper strata because they all perished 225 million years ago. No man keeps lithified company with a dinosaur, because we were still 60 million years in the future when the last dinosaur perished.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 132

True science and religion are not in conflict. The history of approaches to Noah's flood by scientists who were also professional theologians provide an excellent example of this important truth -- and also illustrate just how long ago "flood geology" was conclusively laid to rest by religious scientists. I have argued that direct invocation of miracles and unwillingness to abandon a false doctrine deprived modern creationists of their self-proclaimed status as scientists. When we examine how the geat scientists-thologians of the past centuries treated the flood, we note that their work is distinguished by both a conscious refusal to admit miraculous events into their explanatory schemes and willingness to abandon preferred hypotheses in the face of geological evidence. They were scientists and religious leaders -- and they show us why modern creationists are not scientists.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 132-133

Flood geology was considered and tested by early-nineteenth-century geologists. They never believed that a single flood had produced all fossil-bearing strata, but they did accept and then disprove a claim that the uppermost contained evidence for a single, catastrophic, worldwide inundation. The science of geology arose in actions that were glaciated during the great ice ages, and glacial deposits are similar to the products of floods. During the 1820s, British geolgists carried out an extensive empirical program to test whether these deposits represented the action of a single flood. The work was led by two ministers, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick (who taught Darwin his geology) and the Reverend William Buckland. Buckland initially decided that all the "superficial gravels" (as these deposits were called) represented a single event, and he published his Reliquiae diluvianae (Relics of the Flood) in 1824. However, Buckland's subsequent field work proved that the superficial gravels were not contemporaneous but represented several different events (multiple ice ages, as we now know). Geology proclaimed no worldwide flood but rather a long sequence of local events. In one of the great statements in the history of science, Sedgwick, who was Buckland's close colleague in both science and theology, publicly abandoned flood geology -- and upheld empirical science -- in his presdidential address to the Geological Society of London in 1831.
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 134

Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation . . .

There is, I think one great negative conclusion now incontestably established -- that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period . . .

We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood . . . In classing together distant unknown formations under one name; in giving them a simultaneous origin, and in determining their date, not by the organic remains we had discovered, but by those we expected hypothetically hereafter to discover, in them; we have given one more example of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of unconnected truths. Reverend Adam Sedgwick, quoted by
--Stephen J. Gould, Sep 1982, The Atlantic Monthly, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 134-135

New species usually arise, not by the slow and steady transformation of entire ancestral populations, but by the splitting off of small populations from an unaltered ancestral stock. The frequency and speed of such speciation is among the hottest topics in evolution theory today, but I think that most of my colleagues would advocate ranges of hundreds or thousands of years for the origin of most species by splitting. This may seeem like a long time in the framework of our lives, but it is a geologic instance, usually represented in the fossil record by a single bedding plane, not a long stratigraphic sequence.
--Stephen J. Gould, Aug 1979 in Natural History, and quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 175

Stephen J. Gould Quotations From Random Sources:

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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
--Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (1941-2002)

Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would... not grow this twig again.
--Stephen J. Gould (1941 - 2002)

My overall impressions are scarcely worth the length of the following sentence, and I will surely not detail the reasons for most of my individual choices herein. But -- and I guess because I primarily write, rather than read, essays -- I was astonished by the single most salient character of the choices considered altogether. I knew that "confessional writing" now enjoys quite a vogue, but I had no idea how pervasive the practice of personal storytelling has become among our finest writers. I can't help asking myself (although all lives are, by definition, interesting, for what else do we have?): why in heaven's name should I care about the travails of X or Y unless some clear generality about human life and nature emerges thereby? I'm glad that trout fishing defined someone's boyhood, and I'm sad that parental dementia now dominates somone's midlife, but what can we do in life but play the hand we are dealt?
--Stephen Jay Gould, introduction, The Best American Essays 2002, pg xv

I struggled with John Sack's account of his contacts with Holocaust deniers and finally included it because, while I disagree with his decision to speak at their meetings, the deniers do remain (unlike the actual perpetrators) within the category of human beings, and I supposed that we therefore need to understand them as well as we can.
--Stephen Jay Gould, introduction, The Best American Essays 2002, pg xvi

Follow your bliss. But never draw to an inside straight.
--Stephen Jay Gould

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories -- and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
--Stephen Jay Gould, and reprinted in Final Solutions, by Richard Lerner, pg 118

If selection is taken as an axiomatic and a priori principle, it is always possible to imagine auxiliary hypotheses -- unproved and by nature unprovable -- to make it work in any special case. . . . Some adaptive value . . . can always be construed or imagined. . . . I think the fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifible and so far from the citeria otherwise applied in "hard" science, has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds. Society and science have been so steeped in the ideas of mechanism, utilitarianism, and the economic concept of free competition, that instead of God, Selection was enthroned as ultimate reality.
--Stephen J. Gould, and reprinted in Final Solutions, by Richard Lerner, pg 118

The operation of an adaptation is its function. . . . We may also follow William in labeling the operation of a useful character not built by selection for its current role as an effect. . . . But what is the unselected, but useful character itself to be called? Indeed it has no recognized name. . . . Its space on the logical chart is currently blank.

[...]

We suggest that such characters, evolved for other usages (of for no function at all), and later "coopted" for their current role, be called exaptations. . . . they are fit for their current role, hence aptus, but they were not designed for it, and are therefore not ad aptus, or pushed twoards fitness. They owe their fitness to features present for other reasons, and are therefore fit (aptus) by reason of (ex) their form, or ex aptus. Mammalian sutures are an exaptation for parturition. . . . The geneeral, static phenomenon of being fit should be called aptation, not adaptation. (The set of aptations existing at any one time consists of two partially overlapping subsets: the subset of adaptations and the subset of exaptations. This also applies to the more inclusive set of aptations existing through time.)
--Stephen J. Gould and Elizabeth Vrba, and reprinted in Final Solutions, by Richard Lerner, pg 121

Niles Eldredge:

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Thus, the central importance of creationism today is its political nature. Creationists travel all over the United States, visiting college campuses and staging "debates" with biologists, geologists, and anthropologists. The creationists nearly always win. The audience is frequently loaded with the already converted and the faithful. And scientists, until recently, have been showing up at the debates ill-prepared for what awaits them. Thinking the creationists are uneducated, Bible-thumping clods, they are soon routed by a steady onslaught of direct attacks on a wide variety of scientific topics. No scientist has an expert's grasp of all the relevant points of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and anthropology. Creationists today -- at least the majority of their spokesmen -- are highly educated, intelligent people. Skilled debaters, they have always done their homework. And they nearly always seem better informed than their opponents, who are reduced too often to a bewildering state of incoherence. As will be all too evident when we examine the creationist position in detail, their arguments are devoid of any real intellectual content. Creationists win debates because of their canny stage presence, and not through clarity of logic or force of evidence. The debates are shows rather than serious considerations of evolution.
--Niles Eldredge, Monkey Business, pg 17/18

It is the nature of things that nothing in science can possibly be the last word. We are truth seekers, yes, but no one has yet invented a way of determining what the truth is when we have it. We merely stick to ideas as long as they seem to work. It is a mild understatement, at the very least, to point out that creationists don't feel this way about their ideas. Scratch a creationist and you find someone who knows in his bones he has the truth.
--Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business, pg 78

. . . creation-science isn't science at all, nor have creationist scientists managed to come up with even a single intellectually compelling, scientifically testable statement about the natural world. At least ninety-five percent af all of their reams of privately published books and pamphlets are devoted to an attack on conventional science -- the prevailing ideas of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Creationists acknowledge that their "science" consists mostly of such attacks; creation-science has precious few ideas of its own, positive ideas that stand on their own, independent of and opposed to, counter opinions of normal science.
--Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business, pg 80

Modern creationists readily accept small-scale evolutionary change and the origin of new species from old: "Of course, if someone insists on defining evolution as 'a change in gene frequency,' then the fly example 'proves evolution.' But it also 'proves creation,' since varying the amounts of already existing genes is what creation is all about" (Parker, Creation: The Facts of Life, p. 83). By the "fly example," Parker meant a case posed to him by an unnamed biologist, where reproductive isolation between populations of a single ancestral species had resulted in the appearance of several new species -- an even more radical case of evolution than the shifting frequencies in the coloration of the British moths.

Biologists are understandably amazed by such statements. Can creationists actually admit that evolution occurs and still stick to their guns and deny that evolution has produced the great diversity of life? In a word -- Yes! This is precisely what they do.
--Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business, pg 114

Skipping back 1.5 million years or so, we find the Australopithecines, whose name means (as creationists fondly point out), "southern ape" -- and automatically in the creationist book, a form of ape, and no member of the human lineage. Assessing zoological relationships on such etymological grounds is rather dubious, to say the least--but the creationists' "it looks like an ape so we call it an ape" judgement greatly insults these remote ancestors and collateral kin of ours. Their brains were advanced both in size and complexity relative to apes' brains. They had upright posture, a bipedal gait, and some of them, at least, fashioned tools in a distinctive style. No apes these -- but primitive hominids looking and acting just about the way you would expect them to so soon after our lineage split off from the line that became the modern great apes.

But it is the fossils of the middle 1.5 million years that I just skipped over that make creationists writhe. Here we have Homo erectus, first known to the world as Pithecantropus erectus ("erect ape man" -- based on specimens from Java). Now known from Africa as well, Homo erectus lived on virtually unchanged for over 1.5 million years (according to some anthropologists) and was, by all appearances, a singularly successful species. They had fire and made elaborate stone tools. And they had a brain size intermediate between the older African fossils and the later, modern-looking specimens. Specimens of Homo erectus do n't look like apes, yet they don't exactly look like us, either. To most of us, Homo erectus looks exactly like an intermediate between ourselves and our more remote ancestors.

What do creationists do with Homo erectus? No problem -- Homo erectus is a fake in the creationist lexicon.
--Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business, pg 127

Earlier I said that creationists are poor scholars at best and at worst have been known to distort the words and works of scientists. Anthropologist Laurie Godfrey (writing in the June 1980 issue of Natural History) has documented many examples of creationists' penchant to twist words and evidence to suit their purpose. I cannot close this discussion of creationist views of the fossil record without documenting this serious charge a bit further.

The ICR's Gary Parker had been among the more blatant offenders. On page 95 of his Creation: The Facts of Life, we read: "Famous paleontologists at Harvard, the American Museum, and even the British Museum say we have not a single example of evolutionary transition at all." This is untrue. A prominent creationist interviewed a number of paleontologists at those institutions and elsewhere (actually, he never did get to Harvard.) I was one of them. Some of us candidly admitted that there are some procedural difficulties in recognizing ancestors and that, yes, the fossil record is rather full of gaps. Nothing new there. This creationist then wrote letters to various newspapers, and even testified at hearings that the paleontologists he interviewed admitted that there are no intermediates in the fossil record. Thus, the lie has been perpetuated by Parker. All of the paleontologists interviewed have told me that they did cite examples of intermediates to the interviewer. The statement is an outright distortion of the willing admission by paleontologists concerned with accuracy that, to be sure, there are gaps in the fossil record. Such is creationist "scholarship."
--Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business, pg 130/131
[ICR is the Institute for Creation Research. -MN]

To progress, science needs conflicting views. The very process of science thrives on disagreement. Without it any science loses its vigor and dies.
--Niles Eldredge, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 294

Isaac Asimov:

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As species reproduced themselves, there would always be small variations among the new generations, variations in size, in strength, in shape, in behaviour, in intelligence, in endurance -- in any of innumerable qualities. So far all would be random. However, some variations would better suit the species to the environment, and on the whole those variations would better survive. They would be "selected" by the influence of their natural environment. Natural selection would not act through intelligence, but the results that followed would be the same as though it did act through intelligence.

In the century and a quarter since that book [On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection] was published, enormous advances have been made in many fields, advances that have served to refine and strengthen Darwin's thesis. The result is that biologists today accept biological evolution as a fact -- even as the central fact of biology -- although there is still vigorous argument over details of its mechanism.
--Isaac Asimov, Beginnings: etc, pg 45/56

In western Germany, [...] along the banks of the small Dussel river is the Neander valley. The German word for valley is Tal, or in more archaic spelling Thal. The region [...] is, therefore, Neandertal, or Neanderthal.

In the Neanderthal, in 1856, workmen were clearing out a limestone cave and came across some bones. This was not an unusual thing to happen and the logical thing to do is to throw the bones away along with the other debris. This was done, but the word got to a professor at a nearby school. He managed to get to the site and salvage about fourteen of the bones, including a skull.

The bones were clearly human, but the skull, in particular, showed some interesting differences from modern man. It had pronounced bony ridges over the eyes, which ordinary human beings didn't have. It also had a backward-sloping forehead, a receding chin, and unusually prominent teeth.

The remains were quickly dubbed Neanderthal man, and the question arose as to whether it was a primitive form of human being and the ancestor, perhaps of modern man. If so, here was human evolution demonstrated.

Naturally, there was strong opposition to such a view. The bones, aside from the skull, were quite human, and the skull itself might merely be that of a deformed human being or of someone suffering from a bone disease. The most prominent scientist to support this view was the anti-evolutionist German biologist Rudolf Virchow (1824-1880)

One very popular suggestion was that the skull was only forty or so years old and was the remains of a Russian soldier who had died during the Russian march into western Europe in 1813 and 1814 in pursuit of Napoleon.

Three years after the discovery, Darwin's book was published and those who were inclined to accept evolution were now eager to interpret Neanderthal man accordingly. In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895), a fierce supporter of Darwin, studied the bones and came out strongly in favor of Neanderthal man being an ancient form of human being ancestral to modern man.

In 1864, another British scientist named Neanderthal man Homo Neanderthalensis, thus putting it into the same genus as Homo sapiens, but assigning it to a different species.

If the discovery of the bones in the Neanderthal cave had been an isolated incident, the argument might have continued forever. In 1886, however, two similar skeletons were found in a cave in Belgium. The skulls featured all the characteristics of Neanderthal man, and it became very difficult to suggest that all three just happened to have the same abnormal bone disease, one that was never found in modern human beings. The pendulum swung in favor of Homo neanderthalensis as ancestral to Homo sapiens, especially when discoveries of still other such skeletons followed.

Even so, for a half century all one had were scattered bones and remants of Neanderthal man. It was not till 1908 that the French paleontologist Marcellin Boule (1861-1942) managed to assemble a complete Neanderthal skeleton from a French cave. It was from his reconstruction of how the skeleton must have looked in life that the popular conception arose of neaderthal man as a short, bandy-legged creature with a repulsive apelike face.

Of course, this was made worse by artists always presenting Neandertahl man as badly needing a shave, while Cro-magnon man is always shown clean shaven, with a sadly noble expression on his face. [...]

As it happened, though, Boule was working with the badly arthiritic and deformed skeleton of an old man. The study of other skeletons of younger individuals in better health that have since appeared makes it seem that Neanderthal was not particularly subhuman. Yes, there are the heavy brow ridges, the large teeth, the protruding mouth region, the receding chin, and the retreating forehead, but on the whole, Neanderthal man stood bolt upright, walked exactly as we do, and showed no important differences from the neck down.

What's more, the Neanderthal brain is as large as ours and perhaps even a little larger, though it is differently proportioned. The Neanderthal brain is smaller in front (hence the retreating forehead) but larger behind. Since the front part of the brain is associated with the more rarefied regions of abstract thought, we might suppose that the Neanderthals were less intelligent than we -- but there is no real evidence of that.

Neanderthal man was apparently shorter than we are, and stockier, with a heavier and stronger musculature, but all the differences do not seem to mean much, biologically. Neanderthal man is now considered to belong to the same species we do, so that the scientific name is now Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, while modern man is Homo sapiens sapiens.
--Isaac Asimov, Beginnings: etc, pg 51/53

In Java, [Marie-Eugene] Dubois began to search. He had amazingly good fortune. In 1891, near a village named Trinil in south-central Java, he came across some teeth and parts of an ancient skull. The skull showed a retreating forehead and eyebrow ridges, like those of Neanderthal man. The portion of the skull that held the brain, was, however, quite small.

The human brain of an adult male weights about 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms), and it has a volume of 88.5 cubic inches (1,450 cubic centimeters). Neanderthal man has a slightly larger brain, with a volume of 91.5 cubic inches (1,500 cubic centimeters). The cavity in the skull located by Dubois had a volume of only 55 cubic inches (900 cubic centimeters). The brain held by such a skull could weigh only about 2 pounds (0.9 kilograms), and it would be only three-fifths the size of an ordinary human brain.

Of course, Dubois might have discovered the skull of a child, but this was apparently not so. When bony ridges develop over the eyes in human beings, they do so in male adults. The eye ridges in women and children of both sexes are nonexistent. Even in Neanderthals, where the ridges are much more pronounced than in modern human beings, the skulls of the young are comparatively smooth. The skull that Dubois discovered, however, had very pronounced bone ridges, and was, therefore, very likely that of an adult.

Still, the brain inside that ancient skull would have been twice as large as the brain of any gorilla now living. The brain was, in other words, intermediate between apes and human beings.
--Isaac Asimov, Beginnings: etc, pg 56

I would seem then that the evolutionary development that made homonids, and eventually human beings, possible, was not a giant brain, or a clever hand, but rather a twist to the spine that made it possible to stand upright. From this, all else may have followed.

Once a hominid stood upright, its forelimbs were completely freed from the task of body support. The forelimbs then were freed for manipulating and inspecting surrounding objects. Any change that made the hands and eyes more suitable for this purpose improved the ability of the organism to survive. It meant longer life and more young to inherit the better and more nimble hands, the longer and opposable thumbs, and the sharper eyes.

The more the hands and eyes were used to handle and to inspect, the more information flooded into the brain. And again, any change that happened to make the brain lager and more complex was therefore useful and encouraged survival. This too, meant longer lives and more young, who iherited the better brains -- which have tripled in size during the time lapse from the australopithecene to the present.
--Isaac Asimov, Beginnings: etc, pg 62/63

(Indeed, every once in a while people argue in this way against the evidence presented in favor of biological evolution. God created the Earth, they say, with all the fossils already in place and with all the other evidence of a long age for the Earth as well. This was done either to fool humanity, out of a malicious sense of humor, or to test people's faith in revelation over observation and reason, of for other trivial un-Godlike motivations. Some who are wedded to the literal words of the opening portion of the Bible might accept this sort of argument, but thinking people, even if sincerely religious, do not.)
--Isaac Asimov, Beginnings: etc, pg 154

It is my profession after all, as exemplified in these essays, to persuade others to believe as I do and to accept my notions of scientific evidence and rational thought. And I cannot do this in good conscience unless I am willing to grant those who disagree with me the same chance to put their persuasive faculties to work.

However, the self-styled Moral Majority is not content to believe and not content to persuade. They rally their people behind them them -- simple, unsophisticated people for the most part -- and are attempting to censor books, movies, television and so on by united action; to cow and terrify schoolteachers and librarians; to bullyrag legislators; and to call the power of the law and the state to enforce their views of the public and to erase all freedom of thought.
--Isaac Asimov, and reprinted in Counting the Eons, pg x

What the creationists call evidence is to point at petty disagreements among thoughtful paleontologists concerning some of the details of the evolutionary mechanism (although, of course, those same paleontologists all accept the fact of evolution itself.)

What the creationists call evidence is various distortions of scientific concepts, distortions that no bright high school student would make.

What the creationists call evidence is quotations from various other creationists whom they call "scientists" on the basis of such things as a degree in engineering; making use of no quotes, moreover, that ever offer any evidence worthy of the name.

Given all this, the creationists are nevertheless driving the teaching of evolution out of the public schools by conducting a reign of terror against it. They are attempting to have laws passed that will force the teaching of creationism. They are trying to determine what is scientifically valid by legal fiat, and once that principle is set, what happens to our liberties?
--Isaac Asimov, and reprinted in Counting the Eons, pg x/xi

If the creationists had their way, this book and many others would be burned, and we would all be compressed into the narrow, narrow bounds of their tiny and unthinking view of the universe.

Well, I for one, refuse to cower before them, refuse to truckle to them, refuse to compromise with them, and intend only to fight them -- in order to preserve my right to think.
--Isaac Asimov, and reprinted in Counting the Eons, pg xi

Some creationists point out that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surely this unanimous craving hints at a great truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.

General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation myths are alike.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 184

General consent, of course, proves nothing: there can be a unanimous beief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg

Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising some morning with nothing particular to do, decides that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.

A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observations and experiments and has survived the critical study of scientists generally.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 185

Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon in every detail by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.

To an extent, the creationists are right here: the details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and about physiology, microbiolgoy, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it is to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him.

Nor is the process finished. It can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 186

The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientist are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great a thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they acccept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and that details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 186

Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to us it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I recieve, is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.

In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder -- that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous would be moving "uphill." According to the creationist argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.

Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity.

Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 187

I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes ago, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory: you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning -- which you had not really read.

What kind of a creator would product [sic] a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiousity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that included the creation and development of life on Earth.

Why?

Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if Human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 189

If their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent?

Why then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? Can it be that evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?

First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: Schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out.

There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance -- even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.

[...]

Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want their "equal time."

In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case.

In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationists, placing myth above reason, refuse to accept the decision and are now calling on the Government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it has equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 190-191

And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with the choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.

This is not entirely because of a traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness -- even an actual fear -- of science that will drive even those who care little for Fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary -- an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.

Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgement, in which you and your fellow believers will be lited into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbeliver writhe forever in torment.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 192

There are nuemrous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster.

Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divrergence of opinon was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries.

In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousand of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to the lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.

In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while German lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China during the Cultural Revolution, turned against western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

Are we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.

We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that remain openly scientific though will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement.
--Isaac Asimov, The "Threat" of Creationism, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981, and reprinted in Science and Creationism, pg 193

Science and Creationism Quotations File:

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Science and Creationism
Ed. Ashley Montagu -1984
ISBN 0-19-503253-5
Dewey # 575 S416

The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for our blessings.
--Garrett Hardin, quoted in Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 3

If people choose to believe that Genesis represents an account of the manner in which the natural world was created, they should be free to do so; they should not, however, be free to impose such creation myths upon others.

Fundamentalists may believe what they choose, but they have no right to insist that their particular views of origins be taught in the public schools. They have no right, first because those views are religious, second because under the guise of "creation science" they clearly desire to smuggle the teaching across the borders guarded by the First Amendment, and third becasue while there can be not the slightest objection to teaching Genesis in our public schools, as a creation myth among many others of a similar kind in courses on anthropology, it is the sheerest humbug to claim that such stories have anything to do with science.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 6-7

It should, of course, be understood that a great deal more than simple cosmological explanation is involved in creation myths, for they usually have deep emotional and individually meaningful significances for the lives of the believers. To such believers their views are not myths but eternal truths, and it is the nature of such truths that they are subject neither to verification nor falscientification. If that is so, it may well be asked, why the present book? The answer to that question is, that since the creationists have claimed their belief to be scientific, and have at times stated that evolution is unscientific, and have gone so far as to term it a religion, it is necessary to set the record straight for readers who may be interested in the truth of the matter.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 7

The "Scientific Creationists" may call themselves so and refer to their manipulations as "creation science," but they are no more scientific than Christian Scientists or Scientologists. A scientist is characterized niether by a willingness to believe or a willingness to disbelieve, nor yet a desire to prove or disprove anything, but by the desire to discover what is, and to do so by observation, experiment, verification, and fascientification. So doing, the scientist expects that others will take the time to check his findings, for it is only by such independent testing that his finds can be verified.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 7

As a scientist, no scientist can be a fundamentalist in his attitude toward truth. Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg

Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one's beliefs.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 8-9

Senator William Keith, a verbose lay minister from Mooringsport, Louisiana, sponsored Senate Bill 89, which found overwhelming support in both House and Senate and was signed into law on July 21, 1981. All that Senator Keith asked was "that creation-science receive balanced treatment" with "evolution-science," that wherever in the schools "evolution-science" is taught, "creation-science" also be taught.

This is, of course, the equivalent of requiring that wherever chemistry is taught alchemy should be given equal time, or wherever psychology is taught phrenology be given balanced treatment, or astrology be given equal time with astronomy.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 9

Science cannot by any stretch of the imagination be referred to as a religion. Religion is a believe in supernaturals. Science deals with the world of nature, the discovery and ordering of the world of facts and their relations, with concepts that have been tested by the facts.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 9

The creationists repeatedly assert that evolution is a theory, and, indeed, not a scientific theory at all because it is unable to predict future developments. Both statements are untrue. Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It once was a theory but today, as a consequence of observation and testing it probably the best authenticated actually know to science. There are theories concerning the mechanisms of evolution, but no competent student doubts the reality of evolution.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 13

In conclusion, on the matter of religion and science, it needs to be said that there is no real incompatibility between the two. There is no incompatibility between a belief in god and the belief that evolution is the means by which all living things have come into being. What is incompatible with science, religion, and civility is the attempt by a narrow fundamentalist sect to impose its particular brand of a creation myth as a substitue or alternative to the findings of science, and to insist on that myth taught as a fact in the schools, to the exclusion of all other religious teachings.
--Ashley Montague, Science and Creationism, introduction, pg 14

The history of science is a history of conflict. No new idea has ever been developed without challenging an old idea.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 18

Censorship and control of scientific expression are objectionable in science not merely because we believe that freedom of expression is a basic human right, but also because such controls stifle the advance of science itself. Science depends on the freedom to criticize the currently accepted theory. to test it by experimentaiton, and to propose a new theory, not without criticism, but without hindrance.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 19

. . . scientists applying for membership in the ICR [Institute for Creation Research] must sign a statement attesting to the literal inerrancy of the Christian Bible. Although the ICR often emphasized that it is the scientific nature of creationist theory which brings scientists to a belief in a supreme being, it is curious that they include a requirement for membership (the inerrancy of the Bible) which effectively excludes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the majority of Christian sects (who do not accept a literal reading of all parts of the Bible) from membership. It is clear that the ICR, which is the most respected of creationist groups in its attempts to appear scientifically legitimate, is essentially an organization composed solely of Christian Fundamentalists.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 22

Just exactly why does one expect the rocks to have "very large ages?" What is there about the character of a creator which would lead one to infer that he would, as [Henry] Morris says, have put this 50 million percent error in the material of the earth? The only refuge of the creationist is a device know as the "appearance of age." He must postulate that a creator, for reasons of his own, made the universe look much older than it actually is, thereby denying us any opportunity to gather actual facts about the age of the planet. This argument allows one to dismiss any scientific evidence as simply an act of deception on the part of the creator. The argument can be used for results in other areas of science as well. The stars in the sky look the way they do not because there are distant galaxies and stars, but because the creator created streams of photons emanating from nonexistent objects. He created an "apparent" universe. This line of reasoning is, of course, nondisprovable, because a deceptive creator would by definitions be capable of nearly anything! But the argument, ultimately, denies science itself. It suggests that the physical universe is a colossal joke played on us by a prankster who will remain forever beyond our reach. The "appearance of age" argument is a complete retreat from scientific argument into the realm of nontestable mysticism. It is the ultimate admission of scientific defeat.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 38-39

Incredibly, when one actually looks into the details of the "methods" the scientific creations suggest as a reasonable gauge for the age of the earth, the result that emerges is a consistent confirmation of prevailing scientific conclusions. Now, once again, one has to ask some difficult questions about those who are willing to advance such arguments to the general public. Did the "scientists" of the Institute for Creation Research really fail to look into any work done on the subject of meteoric dust accumulation done during the last 20 years? And now that the error has been pointed out, may we expect that these arguments will disappear from their popular writings? I doubt it. The least that can be asked of a scientist is that he never use evidence which he knows to be in error to support a scientific argument. A scientist may often argue for an idea which does not seem well supported by the evidence and occasionally will eventually be proven right as more work is done and older observations are challenged. But he will never knowingly use an incorrect "fact" to support an idea, even if that idea is something he fervently believes in. Why? Because there is no greater scientific crime than a knowing deception. And a scientist who is discovered to have falsified a result will find his career to be over in remarkably short time In this case, one cannot say that the scientific creationst has falsified a result . . . in fact, he has produced no results at all (which is characteristic of "creation-science") but has argued his point of view based on the work of others. The problem here is that the creationist has data which he knows to be in error merely to support his ideas, He has allowed himself to present his readers and listeners with "false facts" because he believes that they will advance his arguments, his cause. And one is left to wonder that the motives, the thoughts, the consciences of those who are willing to do all of this in what they consider to be the service of God.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 45

The insistence that the fossil record does not document evolution is a bold one and is calculated to win public attention if the scientific community is too uninterested to respond in kind. The fact of the matter is that the fossil record not only documents evolution, but that it was the fossil record itself which forced natural scientists to abandon their idea of the fixity of species and look instead for a plausible mechanism of change, a mechanism of evolution.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 48

The fossil record not only demonstrates evolution in extravagant detail, but it dashes all claims of the scientific creationists concerning the origin of living organisms.

For example, the supposed "explosion appearance" of all living phyla at one point in the fossil record (the Cambrian period, from 450 to 600 million years ago) is in fact a hideous distortion of the actual nature of that record. Although there is agreement that the first examples of vertebrates, crustaceans, molluscs, and echinoderms are found in the Cambrian, their actual appearances in that geological period cover some 100 million years. I find very little justifcation for claiming that one event follows sudddenly upon the heels of another if they are separated by 100 million years!
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 49

As a general summary, the creationists have failed in their attack on evolution in two principal ways. First, they have failed to deal with the enormous amount of evidence which supports the general notion of evolution: the fact that living things on the earth were different in the past, and that as time led to the present, the kinds of animals and plants on this planet changed (evolved) into those we see today. Second, and most important, they have failed to provide anything which even resembles an alternative theory of natural history. Proclaiming "creation" every time we are puzzled by the mechanism of evolution is not the same thing as providing an alternative theory.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 55

The practioners of scientific creationism have not, as they contend, discovered flood geology and simultaneous creation and a young earth as the result of scientific evidence. Rather, as Henry Morris so clearly indicates, they have found the Bible first, come to these conclusions as a matter of faith, and then tried to force ideas back into a secular framework, as Morris says, "regardless of any scientific or chronological problems." The religious character, indeed the character of a particular religious sect, is part and parcel of scientific creationism.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 56

The scientific nature of evolution, like all scientific theories, does not exclude a creator. Indeed, the "fairness" argument for the inclusion of an admittedly religious viewpoint requires intentional misrepresentation of the nature of the theory of biological evolution! It contrives to estalish a false duality between the idea of a creator and biological evolution, and constantly encourages students to choose between these intentionally misrepresented extremes. Such a process misrepresents both creation and evolution. Further, it is a great mistake to suggest that there are only two points of view on the ultimate question of "origins." Which theistic view must be considered? Henry Morris's? Mine? Fred Hoyle's? For this reason, all religious aspects of the question of origins are quite properly left out of the scientific curriculum. What must remain as science are the factual conclusions of geology, chemistry, biology, and astronomy: The universe is a vast and ancient place. We know little of its ultimate origins, but we can clearly state that our species was not always here.
--Kenneth R. Miller, The Mislabelled Debate, Science and Creationism, pg 61

Controversies rarely concern what they purport to concern, If they did, they would be readily resolved. [...]

The assumption that evolutionism and creationism are comparable and competitive scientific theories is false. The controversy is, in fact, due to the promulgation of religious belief -- creationism -- as a scientific idea. Thus, the controversy results not from scientific issues, but from a confusion between science and religion. Only when this confusion is generally recognized will the controvery be resolved.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 64

Before one can evaluate the comparative scientific merits of evolution and of creationism, one must first answer the question, what is a scientific theory? A survey of the literature on the history, philosophy and sociology of science reveals that there are at least four fundamental categories of criteria by which theories are judged. [...]

(1) Logical Criteria: it must be
(1.a) a simple, unifying idea that postulates nothing unnecessary ("Occam's Razor");
(1.b) logically consistent internally;
(1.c) logically falsifiable (i.e., cases must exist in which the theory could be imagined to be invalid);
(1.d) clearly limited by explicity stated boundary conditions so that it is clear whether or not any particular data are or are not relevant to the verification or falscientification of the theory.
(2) Empirical Criteria: a theory must
(2.a) be empirically testable itself or lead to predictions or retrodictions that are testable;
(2.b) actually make verified predictions and/or retrodictions;
(2.c) concern reproducible results;
(2.d) provide criteria for the interpretation of data as facts, artifacts, anomalies, or as irrelevant.
(3) Sociological Criteria: a theory must
(3.a) resolve recognized problems, paradoxes, and or anomalies irresolvable on the basis of preexisting scientific theories;
(3.b) pose a new set of scientific problems upon which scientists may work;
(3.c) posit a "paradigm" or problem-solving model by which these new problems may be expected to be resolved;
(3.d) provide definitions of concepts or operations beneficial to the problem-solving abilities of other scientists.
(4) Historical Criteria: a theory must
(4.a) meet or surpass all of the criteria set by its predecssors or demonstrate that any abandoned criteria are artifactual;
(4.b) be able to accrue the epistemological status acquired by previous theories through their history of testing -- or, put another way, be able to explain all of the data gathered under previous relevant theories in terms either of fact or artifact (no anomalies allowed);
(4.c) be consistent with all preexisting ancillary theories that already have established scientific validity.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 65-68
[This material was cut down and reformatted on extraction. Despite that, context was maintained. --MN]

. . . a theory must be limited by boundary conditions or else there will be no criteria for determining whether or not an particular observations or experiment should or should not be explainable by the theory. In fact, if a theory is totally unbounded, then it is not possible to imagine any observation that is irrelvant to verifying the theory. And, if a theory cannot be falsified, it cannot be self-corrected. Yet self-correctability is precisely the characteristic that gives scientific theories their epistomological power: a theory that is incorrect or incomplete can, by attempts to falsify it, reveal its faults or limitations and so be corrected or extended.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 66

Some data may be interpreted as factual (that is they fall within the boundary conditions specified by the theory and verify its predictions or retrodictions); some may be artifactual (that is, the result of secondary of accidental influence lying outside the boundaries set for the validity of the theory); some are anomalous (that is, demonstrably valid within the bounds of the theory, but also at odds with prediction or retrodictions made by the theory); some are irreproducible and so, invalid; and some are irrelevant since they address the theory not at all.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 66

A theory must also make verified predictions and retrodictions to validate itself. It is possible otherwise to imagine theories that make predicitons and retrodictions all of which are falsified. A theory whose predictions and retrodictions are falsified, either by the prior existence of relevant data or the subsequent discovery of relevant data, cannot be considered a valid theory. It is in need of correction or extension. And, of course, a theory based upon irreproducible results is, in effect, invalidated by the very fact that the results cannot be reproduced; for either the boundary conditions governing the collection of the data have to been properly set, or the original data may have been due simply to coincidence rather than any mechanism proposed by the theory.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 67

An idea that does not resolve any recognized scientific problems cannot be called a scientific theory. It can have no effect upon the research activity of scientists.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 67

"Scientific" or "special" creationists themselves recognise as valid the four categories of criteria [for generating a theory] listed above. Part of the present controversy stems from disagreements over the interpretation of these criteria and their application to evolutionism or creationism. As far as I hve been able to determine, neither creationists nor evolutionists have attempted to apply these criteria in a formal manner to creationism. Thus, it has never been established that "scientific" or "special" creation is, in fact, a scientific alternative to evolutionism as the creationists claim.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 68

While the process of theory evolution has been little studied, it appears to have the following characteristics: a problem is propounded; numerous ideas for resolving the problem are formulated; each possible resolution is evaluated against logical critera and preexisting data concerning it; this process of idea generation and evaluation continues until a possible solution having the requisite historical and logical characterisitics is found; then the implications of the idea are stated and systematically tested. At this point, one has an hypothesis. If the hypothesis passes empirical testing and has viable sociological characteristics, then it will become an acceptable theory.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 69

One must therefore employ great care in evaluating problems to see them for what they are -- otherwise one risks raising artifactual problems instead of valid and resolvable ones.

The "scientific creationists" have, unfortunately, fallen prey to exactly this folly. They have interpreted all problems of all classes to be theory problem requiring the abandonment of evolutionism in favor of creationism. Harold Slushr, Duane Gish, Thomas Barnes, M. E. Clark, and A. E. Wilder-Smith, for example, have written technical critiques of radiometric dating, the age of the universe, evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, and experiments relating to the origins of life. They raise many problems for evolution, but I have failed to find a single instance in any of the cited works of a theory problem. Thus, even if one accepts all of the problems creationists raise as valid ones -- though many are demonstrably artifactual -- the existence of these problems does not invalidate evolution as a scientific theory. On the contrary, it demonstrates just how vibrant the tradition of research in evolutionary sciences is. For, if one examines the creationist literature closely, one finds that in no instance have they raised as not already been stated in the evolutionary literature itself. Attention to footnotes, where the creationists use them, clearly demonstrates that to attack evolution, they have had to resort to the evolutionists' own critiques of themselves.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 70-71

Far from denying that evolution has problems, evolutionists have been even more critical than creationists of the theory. Indeed, two evolutionists, Stebbins and Ayala, have just completed their own reviews of the problems faced by evolutionary theory and have concluded that while many problems do exist, none are of the sort that require abandonment of the theory or invention of a new one to replace it. What is needed, they have concluded, is more research. Even the briefest glance at almost any scientific journal will demonstrate that the evolutionists are carrying out that research.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 71

The problem to be addressed here reduces to this: if creationism is to be considered a valid scientific alternative to evolution, then it must also demonstrate itself to be free of theory problems and equivalently or better qualified as a theory according to the same logical, empirircal, sociological, and historical criteria by which evolutions has been judged. crsts have simpley assumed that creationism meets these criteria. They have never demonstrated that it does.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 72

Science, then, is irrelevant to creationism since the mechanism being proposed by the creationists to explain the history of life on earth is neither imaginable nor observable.

The scientific-historical view of creationism is, however, rather different. One might, for example, consider Genesis I-II to be not a revelation, but a statement of retrodictions concerning the origin and development of life on earth. It would then be reasonable to ask: (2.b) have these retrodicitons been verified by scientific research? Once again, the answer is no. Morris has listed 23 major geological retrodictions made in Genesis I-II that are, by his own admission, contradicted by empirical research. Creationism, in other words, has been falsified. Morris, however contends that it is the Bible that falsifies the geological observations, rather than the other way around, for he explicitly states that "no geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." Clearly, then, there is no limit on the data applicable to testing creationism (2.c), since no data are appplicable. It follows that creationism obviously has no need to, and does not, provide criteria for evaluating as fact, artifact, or anomaly, since all data are irrelevant. In consequence, statements by "scientific" creationists that creationism is a "better theory" than evolution because it fits the data better are utter nonsense. On the one hand, there are no imaginable data that could not be explained by a Creator; while on the other hand, creationists state that data are irrelevant to testing creationism in any case. Thus, creationism fails the empirical tests for a scientific theory.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 74

. . . I have not been able to find any evidence whatsoever that creationists are engaged n experimental research concerning creationism. While they are more than happy to point out problems associated with evolutionary theory, they do not contribute to the scientific resolution of those problems.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 75

Creationism also fails sociological evalution because it does not provide a set of scientifically useful definitions or concepts (3.d). The Creator, Himself, is undefinable and His existence subject only to proof by revelation, but not by reason. In consequence, the mechanism by which the Creator created is also undefinable, as [Duane] Gish has stated. Thus, the concept of "creation" is itself undefined and has absolutely no explanatory value to scientists. To quote T. H. Huxley, "the hypothesis of special creation is, in my judgement, a mere specious mask for our ignorance."
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 75

Not surprisingly, creationism also fails to the histrocial criteria required by a scientific theory. In the first place, since "scientific" creationisms is being espoused as an alternative to evolutionary theory, one must ask whether it meets or surpasses all of the historical criteria set forth in previous theories of the origin and development of life (4.a) Clearly not: any good history of biology or geology explains the many ways in which creationism has failed to account for the data discovered by these sciences during the past century. Creationism is not a new explanation -- it is older than evolution --- and therefore it has had more than ample time to prove its utility as a scientific explanation. It has failed. To bring it forth again at this late date, without modification and in the absence of demonstrated scientific need, is unwarranted.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 76

G. M. Price, a widely cited proponent of geological catstrophism has written:

That many (but minor) scientific objections can be raised against this interpretation {Biblical catastrophism}, cannot be regarded as entirely precluding this as the true explanation of the facts of the rocks. It would be quite unreasonable to ask us to explain in detail just how everything took place, both in the way of the formation of the strata and in the recovery of the world by the subsequent redistribution of mankind and animals over the earth.

Yet creationists insist that evolution be able to explain, in detail, just how these events occurred, and evolutionists are attempting to do so. It seems that creationists employ a double standard with regard to criteri [sic] only to draw attention away from their own failures.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 76-77

As Walter Lammerts, one of the organizers of modern "scientific creationism," once stated, "Our aim is a rather audacious one, namely the complete reevaluation of science from the theistic viewpoint." Such a reevalution is necessary for the creationists because they deny, among other long-established theories, explanations of radioactive decay, the constancy of the speed of light, and equilibirium thermodynamics (which can be used to date the age of the universe, the earth or the fossils in it); explanations of sedimentation, fossilization, and geological change (which are used to understand the geological record); chemical affinity and reaction rates (which are used to demonstrate that chemicals do combine into ordered aggregates spontaneously), etc. The list is almost infinite. In short, the creationists have set themselves up, not only against evolution, but against accepted interpretations of major aspects of every science.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 77

Philosophers of science and of religion have documented a wide range of differences between scientific and religious explanations. Briefly, the two sorts of explanations are characterized as follows. Scientific theories are (1) comprised of contingent or tentative knowledge which is (2) organized to be operationally useful for (3) solving problems concerning particular aspects of nature that exist in the here and now. Scientific explanations may not have recourse to final causes and may only be secondary ones. Because scientific knowledge is contingent, and because the causes invoked can never be be final ones, science must promote (5) skeptical consideration of (6) alternative explanations that (7) are evaluated against one another on the basis of empirical and logical tests. Religious beliefs are usually characterized very differently. Religious beliefs are (1) comprised of absolute knowledge ("Truth") (2) concerning values and morals that (3) direct universal aspects of human existance and (4) emphasize the supernatural, either in time (e.g., afterlife) or in space (e.g., Heaven). Religious explanations are stated in terms of a final cause (i.e., some sort of god). Because religious beliefs are absolute, and because they are based upon supernatural (and thus unobservable) causes, religion promotes (5) faith in (6) an orthodox doctrine that is (7) established by reliance upon authority (e.g, a holy man, a sacred text, or a revelation).
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg

Creationism cannot exist separate from a belief in a universal, omnipotent, supernatural Creator. Otherwise, there is no mechanism by which to explain the Creation. The Creator is, in addition, a final cause as Gish, Morris, A. E. Wilder-Smith, and Kofahl and Segraves make abundantly clear in their creationist texts. Employing a final cause in an explanation automatically disqualifies it as scientific explanation and qualifies it as a religious one.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 79

Clearly, the creationists' persistent attacks upon evolution as being "purely atheistic, materialistic, and mechanistic" and excluding "an explanation based on theism" can only be motivated by religious rather than scientific concerns. They are invoking historical and scientific arguments not in the interest of furthering historical or scientific knowledge in its operational sense, but rather to prevent the authoritative basis of their religion from being undermined. In consequence, creationists are conc erned foremost with a religious issue. Scientific issues are only a peripheral means to their end.
--Robert Root-Bernstein, On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 81

A very interesting question is whether the world scientific community should be regarded as a world religion or faith. This is, perhaps, only a matter of sematics, for the world scientific community has both many similarities to a world religion, but also very important differences. It has, in the first place a very distinctive ethic of its own, which I am almost tempted to call "the four fold way," as it has four essential components. The first is a high value on curiosity, which not all cultures possess. The second is a high value on veracity -- that is not telling lies -- which many other cultures also do not possess. The one thing that can get a scientist excommunicated from the scientific community is to be caught deliberately falsifying his results -- that is, in telling lies. Error is often pardonable, but lying is the sin that cannot be forgiven. The third ethical principle is the high value on the testing of images of the world against the external world that they are supposed to map. Mere internal consistency is not enough, for there may be views of the world which are internally consistent, but which are, nevertheless, not true, in the sense that the real world does not conform to them. There are many methods of testing. Experiment is an important method where it is appropriate, though only perhaps a third to a half of the testing activities of science consist of experiment. Careful observation and recording, couple with systematic analysis, is another important method, such as we have in celestial mechanics and in national economic statistics. Comparative studies of systems which are alike in many respect but differ in others is another important methods; for instance, in medical reserch and the social sciences. Underlying all these, however, is a profound belief that the real world will speak for itself if it is asked the right questions.

The fourth principle of scientific ethics is abstention from threat, embodied in the principle that people should be persuaded only by evidence and never by threat. This, of course, is in striking opposition to the ethics of many religious organizations and of all political organizations. The politicization of science, however, such as we saw it, for instance, in the Lysneko period in the Soviet Union, and on a much smaller scale in the antievoltuionary movements in the United States, is always very damaging.

[...]

Although science is certainly a subculture and a phylum, characteristics which it shares with the world religions, it differs sufficiently from the religious subcultures that it is an abuse of words to call it a "religion." It is not very much like a church, for it has no congregations. The members of the subculture consist almost entirely of "priests" and "priests in training." Its "churches" are classrooms and laboratories; its altars, the laboratory benches. It even has its mandalas, such as the periodic table of elements, which are now found on classroom walls in every country of the world. It has no sacred books, apart from laboratory manuals. It has no pope, though it has professors who behave a little like bishops. The saints perhaps are the Nobel Prize winners. Charisma and discipleship exist, though they are somewhat frowned upon. The renunciation of threat also involves the renunciation of authority.

Science does not have a formal creed, but it does have discipline, or at least a collection of disciplines, theoretically imposed by the nature of the real world, and even sociologically tending to come from below rather than from above. We may define a discipline indeed as a subculture within which a young person can get promoted for pointing out that that an older person has fallen into error. Science is indeed a culture of critique and selection, essentially evolutionary in its model rather than authoritative. Science is an ecosystem; it is not an organism. I have sometimes teased the American Association for the Advancement of Science by comparing it with the National Council of Churches. It is certainly ecumenical with its 280 affiliated societies, none of which talk to each other very much. It also has an ethical mission of protecting the integrity and liberty of the scientific community and of helping individual scientists who get into trouble by practicing the scientific ethic. But these are cultural resemblances shared by other social subcultures like music and the arts -- which should not blind us to the fundamental differences.
--Kenneth E. Boulding, Toward an Evolutionary Theology, Science and Creationism, pg 146-149

In dealing with something as large and complex as the universe as it spreads out through space and time, scientists need to remember that they should be agnostic and that their language should exhibit a geater humility than it frequently does. I thought the creationists indeed rather improved the biology texts in California by making them a little more humble. It would be nice if the creationists could be a little more humble too!
--Kenneth E. Boulding, Toward an Evolutionary Theology, Science and Creationism, pg 153

The record of the past, even of the fairly immediate past, is extremely imperfect. The record is not only a very small sample of the reality, but is a highly biased sample, biased by durability, for only durable records survive, Hence, we are trying to piece together an enormous pattern, most of which is missing. Any pattern that we think we perceive has a quite strong presumption that it might be wrong.
--Kenneth E. Boulding, Toward an Evolutionary Theology, Science and Creationism, pg 153

Neverthelesss, if the creationists make the scientists a little more humble, particularly in their teaching, and induce them to give more emphasis to the tentative character of any propositions about the past and to emphasize that science deals with evidence, not truth, something good will have been accomplished. If the scientists can make the creationists a little more humble, it might be a more diffucult but even greater achievement. It is a curious paradox that it is the business of both science and religion to seek and not to be afraid of finding, and yet not to be too cocksure about what either thinks it has found.
--Kenneth E. Boulding, Toward an Evolutionary Theology, Science and Creationism, pg 158

There is a paradox in the present Mexican standoff between scientists and scientific creationists. Bible supporters want Genesis taught because (they say) it is scientific; evolutionists want waterproof hypothesese excluded because (they feel) they are intellectually immoral. Small wonder for confusion.
--Garrett Hardin, -- Marketing Deception as Truth, Science and Creationism, pg 166

Actually, all of the argument given here could be included in public schools and with considerable educational benefit. That such material is not included has many explanations. The principle one is no doubt this: It is always easier to teach facts than arguments. It is particularly difficult to examine for an understanding of arguments. Teachers -- some of them -- are lazy. So are some students. Classes -- most of them -- are large; this militates against teaching subtle arguments. A pluralistic society like ours makes it easier to run away from a controversy than to deal with it fairly and openly.
--Garrett Hardin, -- Marketing Deception as Truth, Science and Creationism, pg 166

Our social world is a chaotic one. It is understandable that many sincere people should seek emotional refuge in a waterproof hypothesis like that of instantaneous creation. Broadening the support for Darwin's view depends not so much on accumulating more scientific evidence as it does in getting more people to understand the nature of science itself.
--Garrett Hardin, -- Marketing Deception as Truth, Science and Creationism, pg 166

The primary tactic of the scientific creationists is to find controversy, disagreement, and weakness in evolutionary theory -- by no means a difficult task. Having demonstrated problems with various aspects of evolutionary theory (some fabricated, some real), the creationists then conclude that we must accept the Judeo-Christians biblical account of creation as the only possible, logical alternative. Thus scientific creationism proceeds by constructing an artifical dichotomy between two models -- evolution and creation -- both incorrectly represented as monolithic.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 170

Actually, various evolutionary explanations are possible, and numerous models, both Darwinian and non-Darwinian, have been posed. They have in common the notion that the earth's life forms are related by common ancestry, whether or not they have since achieved reproductive isolation. Evolutionists agree that the evidence supports this premise of genetic continuity, although as scientists they do not rule out the logical possibility that life could have arisen independently on more than one occasion on the earth or in the universe.

Creationism, on the other hand, is based on the idea that reproductive isolation often signals the absence of common ancestry. Given genetic discontinuity, numerous creation-based explanations are nevertheless possible; witness the global diversity of creation myths. Ignoring this diversity, however scientific creationists begin with one specific and detailed explanation of the universe and require its acceptance on faith as a prerequisite of membership in their various research organizations. The Statement of the Creation Research Society begins: "The Bible is the written word of God, and because we believe it to be inspired throughout, all of its assertions are historically and scientifically true in all of the original autographs." The scientific creationists do not pose and test alternative creation models. Doing science is not the business of scientific creationists; destroying the public credibilty of evolution is the real goal. "New evidence," the press is told, reveals "major weaknesses" in evolution. Oddly, the controversies within evolutionary biology amounts to discovering that evolutionary biologists are guilty of doing science -- posing, testing, and debating alternative explanations.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 170-171

Gould and his colleagues are widely cited by creationists in their effort to estabish that the fossil record documents "no transition." To creationists this is taken to mean that there are no evolutionary links between "created kinds." But Gould, Eldredge and Stanley are talking about the failure of the fossil record to document fine-scale transitions between pairs of species, and its dramatic documentation of rapid evolutionary bursts involving multiple speciation events -- so-called adaptive radiations. They are not talking about any failure of the fossil record to document the existence of intermediate forms (to the contrary, there are so many intermediates for many well-preserved taxa that it is notoriously difficult to identify true ancestors even when the fossil record is very complete). Nor are Gould, Eldredge, and Stanley talking about any failure of the fossil record to document large-scale trends, which do exist, however jerky they may be. Furthermore, fine-scale transitions are not absent from the fossil record but are merely underrepresented. Eldredge, Gould, and Stanley reason that this is the unsurprising consequence of known mechanisms of speciation. Additionally, certain ecological conditions may favor speciation and rapid evolution, so new taxa may appear abruptly in the fossil record in association with adaptive radiation. Since creationists acknowledge that fine-scale transitions (including those resulting in reproductive isolation) exist, and since the fossil record clearly documents large-scale "transitions," it would seem that the creationists have no case. Indeed, they do not. Their case is an artifact of misrepresentation to the lay public of exactly what the fossil record fails to document.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 177-178

Despite the attempts of scientific creationists to play up the signs of controversy among evolutionists, there is actually widespread agreement in scientific circles that the evidence overwhelmingly supports evolutionism. Confirmation has sometimes taken unexpected forms, as in the high correlation between the degree of biochemical difference between pairs of species and the amount of paleontological time since their apparent separation.

There is agreement that the pattern of origin of taxa in the paleontological record strongly supports genetic continuity and, therefore, evolution. The punctuationalists' concept of evolution stasis has been misused by creationists to argue against such a pattern, but evolutionary stasis contradicts only strict gradualism, not evolution. The fact is, the genus Homo does not occur in the Mesozoic alongside the brontosaurus, as the creationists claim; if it did, we would indeed have to question our evolutionary assumptions.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 178

The current debate is complicated because the concept of natural selection embraced by Darwinians has changed with the introduction of population genetics. Steven Stanley's concept of species selection (the differential survival of species) is part of natural selection as formulated by Darwin and some modern biologists, but not as formulated by population geneticists focusing on selection operating within populations. Therefore, when Eldredge, Gould, and Stanley proclaim natural selection to be an inadequate explanation of macroevolutionary change, it is important to realize that they are talking about natural selection as mathematized, reformulated, and restricted to populational variation by population geneticists in the 1930s.

When a creationist such as Parker describes the putatitve failure of natural selection, however, it is to an audience that simplistically equates natural selection with evolution -- an audience that does not know the difference between natural selection and species selection.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 178-179

"It is so utterly infuriating to find oneself quoted, consciously incorrectly, by creationists," Gould has said. "None of this controversy within evolutionary theory should give any comfort, not the slightest iota, to any creationist." Yet the scientific creationists, by misrepresenting the ongoing work of evolutionists, have helped the antievolutionary cause to gain more momentum than ever before in the twentieth century. Scientific creationists are widely viewed as learned scholars with impressive credentials, and more and more people are being persuaded that staggering evidence is on their side. Many scientists are baffled that such poor science can be so easily swallowed, and that creation is being taught as science in some schools around the country. Scientific creationism may be poor science, but it is powerful politics. And politically, it may succeed.
--Laurie R. Godfrey, The Art of Distortion, Science and Creationism, pg 179

One of the characteristic features of the fossil record which Gish and his colleagues continually draw to our attention and which I also accept -- and I quote myself here -- is that "the fossil record tells us that evolution always takes place somewhere else." What I meant by that is that in any succession of rocks containing fossils of, say, fishes, it will be found that as one follows the sucession, the fossils will become more advanced, but there will be no evidence directly linking the stages. There is a break in continuity. Geologists know this from their experience in the field.
--L. Beverly Halstead, Evolution -- The Fossils Say Yes!, Science and Creationism, pg 250

One has to decide if the Creator was incompetent or had a strange sense of humour. And the curious thing about Genesis is that if you consider that man is perfect, then why on earth did God, when he instituted the covenant with Abraham, require the removal of bits of this perfection? Why did He insist that the male should have the foreskin cut off?
--L. Beverly Halstead, Evolution -- The Fossils Say Yes!, Science and Creationism, pg 253

Another creationist argument against evolution is that it is not falsifiable, as a body of knowledge must be in order to be considered a science. Counsel might have added that the discovery of fossil mammal in rock strata 500 million years old would immediately falsify the principle of evolution.
--Roy A. Gallant, To Hell With Evolution, Science and Creationism, pg 293

The geochemist makes two basic assumptions about a rock sample to be dated: (1) that there was no daughter product present when the rock was formed; and (2) that neither parent nor daugher product has been added to or removed since the rock was formed.

Gish maintains that there is no direct way of determining the age of any rock. Whie he admits that the presently used method of measuring the ratio of parent to daughter product in a given rock sample is accurate, he claims that the two basic assumptions are in error. Without knowing the original ratio when the rock was formed, he maintains, even the most accurate measurement of the ratio today can tell us nothing about the rock's age.

"Complete nonsense!" replies Gould. "We can know the original ratio of uranium to lead, for example, because dating can be done on crystals into which no lead atoms could be originally fitted when the crystals formed. Therefore all lead now wedged into the crystals must be a product of radioactive decay."

Geochemists readily admit that in certain cases daughter product was present originally, but they have ways of reliably estimating the amount present and compensating for it. They also point out that the main source of inaccuracy in radioactive dating is loss or gain of parent or daughter product with time. But this possibility can be guarded against by cross-checking the results of one dating method with the results of other methods. If all are in good agreeemnt then the age estimate is considered reliable.
--Roy A. Gallant, To Hell With Evolution, Science and Creationism, pg 297-298

In Victorian Britain, Darwin's ideas had a somewhat mixed reception. Many people recoiled from everything that he wanted to claim, refusing to have any truck whatsoever with filthy evolutionism. However, among the intelligentsia -- scientists obviously, but extending right across the spectrum even to liberal clergymen -- evolution per se was acceptable and accepted. Long before Darwin's Origin was published, the English had come to realize that a literal reading of Genesis -- six days of creation, short time-span for Earth (about 6000 years, as calculated from the geneologies of the Bible), universal flood -- was simply not tenable. The empirical facts speak against such a reading. Hence, the idea of evolution, binding and explaining so many different aspects of the organic world, was welcomed with enthusiasm.
--Michael Ruse, A Philosopher's Day in Court, Science and Creationism, pg 312

Following brief opening statements in which both sides laid out their main claims (the ACLU was against Act 590 and Arkansas was for it!), we got down to business. Our [plaintiff's] first witness was the Methodist bishop of Arkansas, who said he was all in favour of religion but not in schools. This was a theme to be repeated again and again. No one is more upset by the Creationists movement that orthodox American churchmen, Christian and Jews. They hold the First Amendment separation of church and state very dear. So many of their ancestors came to freedom in American, driven from Europe because of religious persecution.

Hence, orthodox churchmen do not want religion -- any religion -- taught in schools. In such a mingling of church and state, we see the road leading to such religiously torn countries as Northern Ireland. Moreover, the churchmen loathe Creationism. They do not view it as the only true form of religion. Rather they see it as a perverted blashphemy. God did not give us our reason just to have us hide our heads in the arid, comforting sands of Genesis. The Bible is not a work of science, and to pretend otherwise is to lose its true meaning. The Holy Writ is the story of God, man, and the relationship between the two. What does God expect of us? What promise does He hold out for us in the future? The Bible is a work of spiritual and moral significance.
--Michael Ruse, A Philosopher's Day in Court, Science and Creationism, pg 327-328

What is there to be said in retrospect, and also prospectively in loooking forward?

First, as I have said, personally I found the Arkansas trial a very rewarding experience. To stand in defense of the nobility of science, along with Gilkey, Dalrylmple, and the Arkansas teachers, was a once-in-a-lifetime privilege. Several professional colleagues have since criticized me for participating, arguing that one cannot really make philosophical points clearly in a courtroom: one has to ignore all sorts of subtleties and distinctions. But without in any way conceding that I had to compromise, let me say simply that when the discipline of Socrates, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre can no longer get up and defend right from wrong, then indeed it has collapsed ignobly and become irrelevant.
--Michael Ruse, A Philosopher's Day in Court, Science and Creationism, pg 336-337

. . . I took particular satisfaction in doing something for America. At a personal level, many of my best friends are Americans, I was a student for some years at a U.S. college, and American publishers and journals have taken up my ideas and put them before the public. At a general level, for all the faults (and they are there), only a fool or a knave would deny the worth of American democracy -- for the whole world, as well as for America itself. Going to Arkansas was partial payment of a large debt.
--[Canadian philosopher] Michael Ruse, A Philosopher's Day in Court, Science and Creationism, pg 337

The statute's very concept of "balanced treatment" derives from, and therefore appeals to, the idea of journalistic fairness taught in the nation's "Schools of Communication." Are there not, after all, "two sides to every question?" Unfortunately that concept, which is shallow enough when dealing with persons holding a post-Enlightenment world view, ill equips a reporter to get at the truth when confronted with persons who do not. Creationists, you see, do not believe that there is or can be a distinction between the sacred and the secular. All ideas to them are religious ideas. Hence they do not hold themselves to the arbitration of facts, evidence, and logic; they reject the metaphysics of science even while claiming its cultural authority.
--Gene Lyons, Repealing the Enlightment, Science and Creationism, pg 345

Creationism is no more science than is astrology or palmreading; it is William Jennings Bryan's know-nothingism in a lab coat.
--Gene Lyons, Repealing the Enlightment, Science and Creationism, pg 345

Arkansans in general are probably no more ignorant than the American public at large, but all the ignoramuses do agree. Political tradition here pardons a legislator who votes on symbolic issues to soothe the prejudices of the mouth-breathing element in the dirt-road churches. Arkansas is more than 90 percent Protestant, the hard-shell sects predominate, and ambitious youth yearn to be television evangelists as others wish to emulate Reggie Jackson or Donny Osmond. No sense, runs the usual logic, in stirring people up; the federal courts can take care of it. Then everybody can whoop it up in the next campaign about meddlin' judges thwarting the will of the people, can get reelected, and can continue to work on the truly important business of democracy, like exempting farm equipment from the sales tax or allowing the poultry industry to load as many chickens as can be jammed into a semi-trailer regardless of highway weight limits.

If the reader detects bitterness, that is an error of tone. Traditionally, and Arkansas legislature in session is a spectacle more diverting than any circus, and best of all, it is free. The lawmakers hit Little Rock every two years from such rustic venues as Oil Trough, Smackover, and Hogeye like so many sailors just off a six-month cruise. Any curious citizen may venture of an evening to the saloons where the fun lovers among them congegrate, and there be treated to a carnival of boozing, lurching, and panting such as one rarely sees so far from salt water. But there have been no fistfights on the floor this year, spitoons have given way to discreetly handled styrofoam cups. And ironists lament that the diverting spectacles of old are probably gone for good.
--Gene Lyons, Repealing the Enlightment, Science and Creationism, pg 346-347

James Watson:

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Rascism is not implicit to eugenics -- good genes, the one eugenics seeks to promote, can in principle belong to people of any race. Starting with Galton, however, whose account of his African expediton had confirmed prejdices about "inferior races," the prominent practitioners of eugenics tended to be racists who used eugenics to provide a "scientific" justification for racist vews. Henry Goddard, of Kallikak family fame, conducted IQ tests on immigrants at Ellis Island in 1913 and found as many as 80 percent of potential new Americans to be certifiably feebleminded. The IQ tests he carried out during World War I for the U.S. Army reached a similar conclusion: 45 percent of foreign-born draftees had a mental age of less than eight (only 21 percent of native-born draftees fell into this category). That the tests were biased -- they were, after all, carried out in English -- was not taken to be relevant: racists had the amunition they required, and eugenics would be pressed into the service of the cause.
--James Watson, DNA: The Secret of Life, pg 28

In 1939, with the war under way, the Nazis introduced euthanasia. Sterilization proved to be too much trouble. And why waste the food? The inmates of asylums were categorized as "useless eaters." Questionnaires were distributed among the mental hospitals where panels of experts were instructed to mark them with a cross in the cases of patients whose lives they deemed "not worth lving." Seventy-five thousand came back so marked, and the technology of mass murder -- the gas chamber -- was duly developed. Subsequently, the Nazis expanded the definition of "not worth lving" to include whole ethnic groups, among them the Gypsies and, in particular, the Jews. What came to be called the Holocaust was the culmination of Nazi eugenics.
--James Watson, DNA: The Secret of Life, pg 32

Intelligent Design Quotations File:

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It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.
--U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in his ruling of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

We find that ID fails on three different levels... They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
--U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in his ruling of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

An objective observer would know that ID and teaching about 'gaps' and 'problems' in evolution theory are Creationist, Religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism.
--U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in his ruling of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

The history of the intelligent design movement ("IDM") and the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board acted in adopting the challenged ID policy...

As noted, such opposition grew out of a religious tradition, Christian Fundamentalism that began as part of evangelical Protestantism's response to, among other things, Charles Darwin's exposition of the theory of evolution as a scientific explanation for the diversity of species.
--U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in his ruling of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

Intelligent design has no positive content, that it's just warmed-over creationist arguments against evolution and not accepted by mainstream science.
--U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in his ruling of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

[The ruling] makes it clear that [Jones] wants his place in history as the judge who issued a definitive decision about intelligent design. This is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur.
--John West, associate director of the institute's Center for Science and Culture, and one of the losers in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District, 20 Dec 2005

Random Evolution Quotations File:

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All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.
--William Jennings Bryan, perhaps hyperbolicly, and quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 96

Same-sex marriage, abortion are symptoms of the cause of rejecting a Supreme Being, taught through evolution.
--Pat Bullock, missions director for the Heart of Kansas Southern Baptist Association, quoted in an Associated Press article about an anti-evolution movement in Kansas in Feb 2005

Tying evolution to speculation about the origin of life is a favorite tactic of creationists, whether they wear Sunday robes or white lab coats. The object is to create a conflict in people's minds between the science of evolution and the existence of God.

But Darwin's book was entitled On the Origin of Species, not "On the Origin of Life."
--Stan Cox, AlterNet, 21 Dec 2005

When it comes to evolution, the science is solid, but the politics are very tricky.
--Stan Cox, AlterNet, 21 Dec 2005

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes delight in proving their falseness.
--Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, and quoted in the anthology Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, pg 385

A simple statement that "X increases the fitness of those that perfom it" explains nothng: it is strictly tautologous, for improving fitness is what every sociobiological explanation implicitly assumes. What we need to know -- and this is the heart of any sociobiological explanation -- is: How does it increase fitness?

It is the transparent failure to answer this question that has left so many sociobiologists open to criticsms of "Just-So" story-telling and unscientific practice. Since we necessarily have to rely on comparative observations rather than experimental manipultaion when tackling evolutionary problems, we are particularly exposed to this kind of accusation. The only way to avoid it is to provide as watertight a case as is possible by showing that proximate problems of survival or reproduction are in fact resolved when individuals behave in a specified way, and that efficient solutions to these problems will result in increased contributions to the species' future gene pool. This will not always be easy, but, unless it can be done, sociobiological explanations will always be open to skeptical doubts, particularly where these doubts are fuelled by poltical or religious conviction.
--Robin Dunbar, and reprinted in Final Solutions, by Richard Lerner, pg 119

We do not know how the creator created, {or} what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe [Emphasis by original author]. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the Creator.
--Duane Gish, creationism proponent, quoted in On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 73

Stephen Jay Gould states that creationists claim creation is a scientific theory. This is a false accusation. Creationists have repeatedly stated that neither creation nor evolution is a scientific theory (and each is equally religious).
--Duane Gish, in a letter to Discover Magazine, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 355

Readers may choose their own villain in the story we have told. Like us, some will find the greatest culpability in the scientific community itself, for the large-scale failure to pay attention to the teaching of science in the high schools. Others will blame the textbook authors and publisher for pursuing sales rather than quality. Some will attach blame to the politicians who exploited anti-evolution sentiment to get into, or remain, in office . . . But whatever the lesson one wishes to draw from the history of biology textbooks since the Scopes trial, we think the story itself is worth knowing. That the textbooks could have downgraded their treatment of evolution with almost nobody noticing is the greatest tragedy of all.
--J.V. Grabiner & P.C. Miller, 1974 quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 309

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform theselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. [...] Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
--Thomas Henry Huxley, quoted in The Panda's Thumb, pg 236

Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
--Thomas Henry Huxley, quoted in The Panda's Thumb, pg 244

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
--Thomas Henry Huxley, quoted in The Panda's Thumb, pg 244

Any time religion gets involved in science religion comes off looking like a bunch of nerds. . . . The Book of Genesis told who created the world and why it was created and science tells us how it was done.
--Reverend C.O. Magee, Presbyterian minster and member of the Little Rock School Board, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 359

The wonder is not that there are gaps, but that the fossil record is as complete and compelling as it is. While there are gaps they are no more significant than occasional patches of unpaved road in a highway, the highway being sufficiently continous to go where it is supposed to go.
--William V. Mayer, University of Colorado and diretor of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 296-297

Turn this argument around. What evidence exists that Earth is less than ten thousand years old? To provide some validity to their young-Earth argument, the creationists have to disregard the fossil record, disregard all dating mechanisms, and dispute an entire cosmology. The creationists have an exceptionally hard time covering up, discrediting, or ignoring the wide variety of data that tell the age of Earth.
--William V. Mayer, University of Colorado and diretor of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 298

Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States may be an ass, but he at least doesn't believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale.
--H.L. Mencken, on the Scopes Monkey Trial, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 96

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that is wife is beautiful and his children smart.
--H.L. Mencken, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 343

A gorilla, true enough, cannot write poetry and neither can it grasp such a concept as that of Americanization or that of relativity, but . . . in some ways, indeed, it is measurably more clever than many men. It cannot be fooled as easily; it does not waste so much time doing useless things. If it desires, for example, to get a banana, hung out of reach, it proceeds to the business with a singleness of purpose and a fertility of resource that, in a traffic policeman, would seem almost pathological. There are no fundmentalists among the primates. They believe nothing that is not demonstrable. When the confront a fact they recognize it instantly, and turn it to their uses with admirable readiness. There are liars among them, but no idealists.
--H.L. Mencken, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 353

The main trouble with catastrophist theories is that there is no way of subjecting them to empirical test . . . There seems to be no restraint on imagination or speculation when catastrophism is espoused, and this is one reason why it has been in such poor repute for over one hundred years. And yet catastrophism, as we have seen, is necessary {because uniformatarian theories do not explain everything}. It is not necessary to speculate, however, since the Biblical record has provided a clear description of the causes, nature, and results of true catastrophism: the Noachic flood . . . We cannot verify it experimentally, of course, any more than any of the various other theories of catastrophism {e.g., Velikovsky}, but we do not need experimental verification; God has recorded it in His Word, and that should be sufficient.
--H. M. Morris, Director of the Institute for Creation Research, quoted in On Defining a Scientific Theory, Science and Creationism, pg 73

The two-model approach of the creationists is simply a contrived dualism which has no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose. . . . Application of the two models . . . dictates that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism and is, therefore creation science "evidence".
--Federal Judge William R. Overton, in overturning Arkansas Act 590 circa 1981, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 291

The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quote irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
--Federal Judge William R. Overton, in overturning Arkansas Act 590 circa 1981, quoted Science and Creationism, pg 291

The court would never criticize or discredit any person's testimony based on his or her relgious beliefs. While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion he choose, he cannot properly describe the methodology used as scientific if he starts with a conclusion and refuses to change it, regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation.
--Federal Judge William R. Overton, in overturning Arkansas Act 590 circa 1981, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 352

If creation is, in fact, science and not religion, as the defendants claim, it is difficult to see how the teaching of such a science could "neutralize" the religious nature of evolution.

Assuming for the purpose of argument, however, that evolution is a religion or religious tenet, the remedy is to stop the teaching of evolution, not establish another religion in opposition to it. Yet is is clearly established in the case law, and perhaps also in common sense, that evolution is not a relgion and that teaching evolution does not violate the establishment clause.
--Federal Judge William R. Overton, in overturning Arkansas Act 590 circa 1981, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 362

The tragedy, in my view, is the unwillingness of enough qualified experts to brand the creationists for the incompetents they are -- in biology, hydrology, paleontology, and many other areas, including biblical scholarship and exegesis.
--John W. Patterson, professor of materials science and engineering, Iowa State University, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 298

Man stands alone in the universe, a unique procduct of a long, unconscious, impersonal, material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no-one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny.
--Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, former Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Harvard University, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 254

Admittedly, under the Judeo-Christian scientific tradition God is identified as the author of Natural Law, and having created us in his image, He has given us the opportunity to fathom His Law. But he reamins aloof from Nature and refrains from capriciously intervening with its operation. It is possible to be a devout jew or Christian and believe in miracles, i.e., in divine interferences with or contraventions of Natural Law, or even to believe literally in the biblical account of creation, but it is not possible to hold such beliefs and, at the same time, lay claim to be a scientist. Thus in view of the present state of knowlege reached by the life sciences, the very term "scientific creationism" is an oxymoron.
--Gunther S. Stent, Nemesis of Sociobiology, Science and Creationism, pg 136-137

If the teachings of natural theology are liable to be refuted or corrected by progress in knowledge, it is legitimate to suppose, not that science is irreligious, but that these teachings are superstitious; and whatever evils result from the discoveries of science are attributable to the rashness of the theologian, and not to the supposed irreligious tendencies of science.
--Chauncey Wright, 1865, and quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 15

Look, sir! I'm not a martyr or anything! But I just can't teach that stuff. I'm not a scientist. I'm a science educator. I'm like a traffic cop, directing ideas down from scientist to schoolchildren. My pupils respect me. All teachers are like parents in a way. How can I go into my classroom, spreading ideas that I know to be wrong? My students will despise me, and I'll not be able to live with myself.
--An unnamed teacher testifying in the Arkansas Act 590 trial, quoted in Science and Creationism, pg 335

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Sciences Quotation File Part I: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design

Stephen J. Gould:

Stephen J. Gould Quotations From Random Sources:

Niles Eldredge:

Isaac Asimov:

Science and Creationism Quotations File:

James Watson:

Intelligent Design Quotations File:

Random Evolution Quotations File:

Sciences Quotation File Part I:
Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design