"The age of the earth is now established beyond any reasonable doubt as very great, yet in the United States millions of Fundamentalists still stoutly defend the naive view that it is relatively short, an opinion deduced from reading the Christian Bible too literally. They also usually deny that animals and plants have evolved and changed radically over such long periods, although this is equally well established. This gives one little confidence that what they have to say about the process of natural selection is likely to be unbiased, since their views are predetermined by a slavish adherence to religious dogmas." --- Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), p. 261-2)
"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.
"Darwin's theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist..." --- Dr. Richard Dawkins Department of Zoology, Oxford University, UK), The necessity of Darwinism. New Scientist, vol.94, 15 April 1982, p.130.
One of the more ironic aspects in the current upsurge in creationism is that is coincides almost exactly with the first major activity in evolutionary theory in nearly fifty years. (1982 jm) Evolution itself has been attracting a great deal of attention from a wide assortment of biologists, and current healthy controversy in which evolutionary biology is now embroiled has spilled over into the media even without the added cachet of creationist attacks. Superficially, it looks as if we know less now about how evolution works than we did, say, even ten years ago. This is because, as recently at a decade ago, there was something approaching unanimity in the evolutionary ranks. Today, though chaos is too strong a word, there is definitely dissent in the ranks. Few biologists agree as completely and complacently as they did a short time ago. Creationists have seen this and are quick to react. Their basic conclusion is that evolutionary biologists can't even agree among themselves, so who would want their dangerous and ill-supported notions taught as "fact" in public schools?
What this charge amounts to, of course, is that evolutionary biologists-- geneticists, developmental biologists, systemasists, and paleontologists stand guilty... of doing science. On the contrary, research in evolutionary biology today is actually a textbook case of how it is that science is supposed to operate.... The Monkey Business, Niles Eldredge, 1982, p. 52
"As will be all too evident, when we examine the creationists' 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."
"To the extent that creationism is science, of course, it is merely bad science. Mostly, it isn't science at all." (p21)
"Creationists seek to dilute the science curriculum with the equivalent of medical quackery." (p22)
"Students ought to know that the evidence for evolution has been scrupulously scrutinized daily by thousands of biologists for well over a hundred years -- and no one yet has called a press conference trumpeting his new proof that evolution had NOT occurred. Evolution is as well-established a scientific notion as gravity. A student ought to know that." (p23)
"For 'creation-science' isn't science at all nor have creation 'scientists' managed to come up with a single intellectually compelling, scientifically testable statement about the natural world." (p80) -- The Monkey Business, Niles Eldredge, 1982
From: Blanche Nonken
To: Dave Ragland
Subj: Help with incomplete text
DR> APES UP FROM?, DONALD JOHANSON, "At any rate, DR> modern gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring DR> out of nowhere, as it were. They are here DR> today; they have no yesterday...., LUCY, p.363"...unless one is able to find faint foreshadowings of it in the dryopithecids. Pilbeam assumes that the relationship exists, and has so indicated in a chart he has constructed -- although he does leave a huge gap in it, and makes no attempt to link any specific dryopithecid with any living ape. He contents himself with the observation that dryopithecids are primitive apes with certain things in common, things that they do not have in common with a second group of Miocene apes that he has also succeeded in sorting out and lumping together: the ramampithecids, named after the aforementioned Ramapithecus.
What is the distinction? It is a simple but overwhelmingly important one. With the exception of their premolars, which are apelike, all of the ramapithecids have peculiar unapelike teeth: Big molars, heavy enamel, small canines. They foreshadow hominids. The dryopithecids, with apelike teeth, foreshadow modern apes."
"LUCY The Beginnings of Humankind" Donald Johanson & Maitland Edey, Copyright 1981
"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 contains no transitional forms. The punctuations occur at the level of speices; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transtions within major groups." From Evolution as Fact and Theory, Discover, May, 1981.
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