DARWIN ON TRIAL by Phillip E. Johnson Select Quotations [page numbers refer to the pdf here] |
Click to play: a video trailer for the twentieth anniversary edition of Darwin on Trial in 2011. Visit www.DarwinOnTrial.com. |
Chapter 1: The Legal Setting
When outsiders question whether the theory of evolution is as secure as we have been led to believe, we are firmly told that such questions are out of order. The arguments among the experts are said to be about matters of detail, such as the precise timescale and mechanism of evolutionary transformations.
[p.8]
My purpose is to examine the scientific evidence on its own terms, being careful to distinguish the evidence itself from any religious or philosophical bias that might distort our interpretation of that evidence. I assume that the creation-scientists are biased by their precommitment to Biblical fundamentalism, and I will have very little to say about their position. The question I want to investigate is whether Darwinism is based upon a fair assessment of the scientific evidence, or whether it is another kind of fundamentalism.
[p.10]
Chapter 2: Natural Selection
The fact is that [artificial] selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties a genome is capable of producing, but does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process.
[p.13]
Chapter 4: The Fossil Record
Today it is widely assumed that the existence of fossil remains of numerous extinct species necessarily implies evolution, and most people are unaware that Darwin's most formidable opponents were not clergymen, but fossil experts.
[p.33]
Darwin conceded that the state of the fossil evidence was "the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory," and that it accounted for the fact that "all the most eminent paleontologists ... and all our greatest geologists ... have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species."
[p.34]
In the words of [Stephen J.] Gould*: The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed."
In short, if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution.
[p.37]
[*Stephen J. Gould is a Harvard University biologist and evolutionist.]
If Darwinism enjoys the status of an a priori truth, then the problem presented by the fossil record is how Darwinist evolution always happened in such a manner as to escape detection.
[p.40]
Chapter 6: The Vertebrate Sequence
Physical anthropology - the study of human origins - is a field that throughout its history has been more heavily influenced by subjective factors than almost any other branch of respectable science. From Darwin's time to the present the "descent of man" has been a cultural certainty begging for empirical confirmation, and worldwide fame has been the reward for anyone who could present plausible fossil evidence for missing links. The pressure to find confirmation was so great that it led to one spectacular fraud, Piltdown man - which British Museum officials zealously protected from unfriendly inspection, allowing it to perform forty years of useful service in molding public opinion.
[p.60]
In his book Human Evolution, Lewin reports numerous examples of the subjectivity that is characteristic of human origins research, leading him to conclude that the field is invisibly but constantly influenced by humanity's shifting self-image. In plain English, that means that we see what we expect to see unless we are extremely rigorous in checking our prejudice.
[p.61]
[Solly] Zuckerman's* judgment of the professional standards of physical anthropology was not a generous one: he compared it to parapsychology and remarked that the record of reckless speculation in human origins "is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is yet to be found in this field at all."
[p.61]
[*Solly Zuckerman is a British-based primate expert.]
[Solly Zuckerman's] factual premise was that the variation among ape fossils is sufficiently great that a scientist whose imagination was fired by the desire to find ancestors could easily pick out some features in an ape fossil and decide that they were "pre-human."
[p.61]
The story of human descent from apes is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is the secular equivalent of the story of Adam and Eve, and a matter of immense cultural importance. Propagating the story requires illustrations, museum exhibits, and television reenactments. It also requires a priesthood, in the form of thousands of researchers, teachers, and artists who provide realistic and imaginative detail and carry the story out to the general public. The needs of the public and the profession ensure that confirming evidence will be found, but only an audit performed by persons not committed in advance to the hypothesis under investigation can tell us whether the evidence has any value as confirmation.
[p.62]
The fossils provide much more discouragement than support for Darwinism when they are examined objectively, but objective examination has rarely been the object of Darwinist paleontology. The Darwinist approach has consistently been to find some supporting fossil evidence, claim it as proof for "evolution," and then ignore all the difficulties.
[p.63]
Chapter 7: The Molecuar Evidence
The show of high-tech precision distracts attention from the fact that the molecular clock hypothesis assumes the validity of the common ancestry thesis which it is supposed to confirm.
[p.72]
Chapter 8: Prebiological Evolution
I won't quote figures because exponential numbers are unreal to people who are not used to them, but a metaphor by Fred Hoyle has become famous because it vividly conveys the magnitude of the problem: that a living organism emerged by chance from a prebiotic soup is about as likely as that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Chance assembly is just a naturalistic way of saying "miracle."
[p.77]
Why not consider the possibility that life is what it so evidently seems to be, the product of creative intelligence? Science would not come to an end, because the task would remain of deciphering the languages in which genetic information is communicated, and in general finding out how the whole system works. What scientists would lose is not an inspiring research program, but the illusion of total mastery of nature. They would have to face the possibility that beyond the natural world there is a further reality which transcends science.
[p.82]
Chapter 9: The Rules of Science
I am not interested in any claims that are based upon a literal reading of the Bible, nor do I understand the concept of creation as narrowly as Duane Gish does. If an omnipotent Creator exists He might have created things instantaneously in a single week or through gradual evolution over billions of years. He might have employed means wholly inaccessible to science, or mechanisms that are at least in part understandable through scientific investigation. The essential point of creation has nothing to do with the timing or the mechanism the Creator chose to employ, but with the element of design or purpose. In the broadest sense, a "creationist" is simply a person who believes that the world (and especially mankind) was designed, and exists for a purpose. With the issue defined that way, the question becomes: Is mainstream science opposed to the possibility that the natural world was designed by a Creator for a purpose? If so, on what basis?
[p.84]
Naturalism assumes the entire realm of nature to be a closed system of material causes and effects, which cannot be influenced by anything from "outside." Naturalism does not explicitly deny the mere existence of God, but it does deny that a supernatural being could in any way influence natural events, such as evolution, or communicate with natural creatures like ourselves .... A God who can never do anything that makes a difference, and of whom we can have no reliable knowledge, is of no importance to us.
[p.85]
Darwinists know that the mutation-selection mechanism can produce wings, eyes, and brains not because the mechanism can be observed to do anything of the kind, but because their guiding philosophy assures them that no other power is available to do the job. The absence from the cosmos of any Creator is therefore the essential starting point for Darwinism.
[p.86]
The conflict arises because creation by Darwinist evolution is hardly more observable than supernatural creation by God .... As an explanation for how complex organisms came into existence in the first place, it is pure philosophy.
[p.86]
Without Darwinism, scientific naturalism would have no creation story.
[p.86]
Kuhn described experimental evidence showing that ordinary people tend to see what they have been trained to see, and fail to see what they know ought not to be present. The finest scientists are no exception; on the contrary, because they are dependent upon inferences and upon observations that are difficult to make, they are particularly prone to paradigm-influenced misperception.
[p.90]
.... the pervasive pattern of stasis in the fossil record long went unrecognized because to Darwinists it was not worth describing in print. The problem of tunnel vision is not something that can be expected to go away as science becomes more sophisticated. On the contrary, as essential funding is brought more and more under centralized governmental control, researchers have no alternative but to concentrate upon the agenda set by the paradigm.
[p.90]
It is easy to see why scientific naturalism is an attractive philosophy for scientists. It gives science a virtual monopoly on the production of knowledge, and it assures scientists that no important questions are in principle beyond scientific investigation. The important question, however, is whether this philosophical viewpoint is merely an understandable professional prejudice or whether it is the objectively valid way of understanding the world. That is the real issue behind the push to make naturalistic evolution a fundamental tenet of society, to which everyone must be converted.
[p.91]
Chapter 10: Darwinist Religion
Darwinist evolution is an imaginative story about who we are and where we came from, which is to say it is a creation myth. As such it is an obvious starting point for speculation about how we ought to live and what we ought to value. A creationist appropriately starts with God's creation and God's will for man. A scientific naturalist just as appropriately starts with evolution and with man as a product of nature.
[p.97]
Chapter 11: Darwinist Education
To Darwinists, fully naturalistic evolution is a fact to be learned, not an opinion to be questioned. A student may silently disbelieve, but neither students nor teachers may discuss the grounds for disbelief in class, where other students might be infected.
[p.105]
Chapter 12: Science and Pseudoscience
Progress is made not by searching the world for confirming examples, which can always be found, but by searching out the falsifying evidence that reveals the need for a new and better explanation.
[p.109]
Darwin himself established the tradition of explaining away the fossil record, of citing selective breeding as verification without acknowledging its limitations, and of blurring the critical distinction between minor variations and major innovations.
[p.111]
The descent to pseudoscience was completed with the triumph of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and achieved its apotheosis at the centennial celebration of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1959 in Chicago. By this time Darwinism was not just a theory of biology, but the most important element in a religion of scientific naturalism, with its own ethical agenda and plan for salvation through social and genetic engineering.
[p.112]
"Finally, the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era."
- Julian Huxley, 1959 [p112]
As the creation myth of scientific naturalism, Darwinism plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism. For that reason, the scientific organizations are devoted to protecting Darwinism rather than testing it, and the rules of scientific investigation have been shaped to help them succeed.
[p.114]
[The rule that scientists may not falsify an element of Darwinism until and unless they can provide an acceptable substitute] is necessary because advocates of naturalism must at all times have a complete theory at their disposal to prevent any rival philosophy from establishing a foothold. Darwinists took the wrong view of science because they were infected with the craving to be right. Their scientific colleagues have allowed them to get away with pseudoscientific practices primarily because most scientists do not understand that there is a difference between the scientific method of inquiry, as articulated by [Karl] Popper, and the philosophical program of scientific naturalism.
[p.115]
Falsification is not a defeat for science, but a liberation. It removes the dead weight of prejudice, and thereby frees us to look for the truth.
[p.115]
Research Notes (Chapter 6)
This argument revealingly supports one of [Solly] Zuckerman's main points, which was that attempts to place the fossils in an evolutionary sequence "depend .... partly on guesswork, and partly on some preconceived conception of the course of hominid evolution." The Australopithecines possessed incipient characters, more visible to some eyes than to others, which might have developed into human features and which also might not have done so. If the fossil creatures were "on the way to becoming human," then the same was undoubtedly true of the disputed "incipient characters," but if they weren't then the characters were probably insignificant. The description of what the fossils were is influenced decisively by the preconception about what they were going to become.
[p.136]
Zuckerman attributed the success of the Piltdown forgery to the fact that anthropologists deluded themselves in thinking that they could "diagnose with the unaided eye what they imagined were hominid characters in bones and teeth." He concluded that "The trouble is that they still do. Once committed to what their or someone else's eyes have told them, everything else has to accord with the diagnosis."
[p.136]
Focus on Darwinism: An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson Some excerpts from the transcript of the video. (Watch the full video on the Documentaries page here.) |
Q. How does a lawyer's perspective help in evaluating scientific theories?
A. What a lawyer brings to this [debate], or an academic lawyer who is philosophically oriented, is a nose for the assumptions, the patterns of thinking, the things that as members of a particular professional culture, the people just take for granted and never question. For example, one of those things is the creative power of natural selection. If you ask these people: "how do you know that mutation and selection, the Darwinian mechanisms, have the power to create complex organs", the answer they give will be some variation on "well, everybody knows that, that's common knowledge, we settled that long ago." All of these things that say: "we've just decided not to think about that, but simply assume it." So that's what a lawyer brings to this - is the ability to recognize things like that and bring them out in the open.
And that's of course why the outsider is so unpopular with the insiders, because the outsider is saying: "look, here's where you went wrong. This is the assumption you made that was never established, and that because you couldn't establish it, you agreed to treat it as a fact among yourselves, and then to use your authority to prevent anybody from criticizing it."
Well naturally a professional group doesn't want to hear that, and so they hate outsiders, as they probably should I suppose, because they blow the whistle on this. The other thing to be said about outsiders is that every one of the great authorities of Darwinism, from Charles Darwin and T.H.Huxley at the beginning, through Dobzhansky, Simpson, Julian Huxley a generation ago, to Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins and so on today, is that every one of those authorities wrote books for the general public, they addressed the general public, and not a single one of them ever said "this evidence is inaccessible to you, don't try to figure it out because you can't understand it." The implied premise of all the books was: it's easily understood and anyone who isn't completely prejudiced or ignorant can see that's it's obviously true. So I like to think of myself as the reader for whom all those books were intended and I'm speaking back to the authors and explaining to them what they overlooked, that in fact their books are not convincing because they're assuming at the beginning of the inquiry the point that they claim to have demonstrated at the end and so there's a thinking flaw. So instead of responding to that, actually they say "oh why don't you shut up and leave us alone so we can continue to get away with this.'"
Q. If Darwininian theory is such a poor theory why don't more scientists reject it?
A. There are two reasons why more scientists don't reject it. One is that if they did they would lose all their prestige within science, they would never get another research grant, and if they didn't have academic tenure they'd get fired. There is a system of thought control over this, which is extremely rigid, it's worth your professional life. That's another reason why an outsider has to be the one to challenge this. So that's reason number one. There's an enforcement mechanism and even senior people are frightened about it, and they'll tell you, if you get them aside where they don't think they're being overheard.
The second reason is ideological. The great problem is that if Darwinism isn't true, Science doesn't know what is true .... Science doesn't like to have no answer. They will prefer to stick with an inadequate paradigm or general theory rather than to say "well we just don't know what it is," because then they don't have any place to start proposing experiments, drafting proposals for research grants and so on. So they'll stick with the false theory if the only alternative is no theory at all, and that's the situation that they're in.
There is a system of thought control over this, which is extremely rigid, it's worth your professional life.
A. Well, "Creation" in the sense I would be using it in answering that question means that whatever process it was that brought life or the major body plans (or whatever) into existence was intelligent, that is, it involved a pre-existing intelligence. So Creation in this sense doesn't mean literal Genesis or anything, it means that broader concept of a pre-existing, purposeful intelligence acting to bring about the existence of life-forms. That is unacceptable not because the evidence is against the proposition that it happened, but because it suggests the existence of something outside of Science. You see, science might be able to find out something about when the process happened or even how it happened, but the author of the process would be something removed from the ken of Science, so something that couldn't be fully understood or controlled through the scientific method.
And the scientific method as it's developed in our culture is imperialistic. It must conquer everything. So anything that is in principle outside its purview cannot have any real existence .... that's why particle physicists like Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking and others are proposing a "theory of everything" you see, because everything is within the ken of scientific theory and if it isn't, they refuse to recognize its existence. So that's why Creation is simply forbidden. It's a thought crime even to mention it.
Q. Does the California Science Framework allow criticism of Darwinian theory in the classroom?
A. Both at the high school and at the University level the scientific culture, the rulers of science, are determined to exclude anyone who raises those questions from the entire ambit of science. They are determined to keep the solution to those questions, "where did we come from?", you know, "what was the creative process?" within their domain and to exclude from that domain anyone who raises the philosophical questions. And thus, you know, even an established science professor who does that will find that they are the subject of disciplinary action, of boycotts of some kind, and a massive peer disapproval, which is in itself a tremendous force to correct somebody and to bring them into line. Scientists tell me all the time how afraid they are of incurring that kind of disapproval, because you see, in science peer approval is what the process is all about, that's how you get recognition, how you get research grants, how you get jobs, how you get everything that the career provides. So there's that thought control enforcement, and it's very effective.
In the science classroom if somebody says "well maybe these theories of the origin of Life just aren't true and things didn't happen that way at all" the axe falls. Then that's when action is taken to make sure that students are protected from hearing a thought that might unsettle their minds, that might unsettle their certainty that Naturalism is the whole truth.
A. There is a lot of feeling among intellectuals and even among judges that academic freedom and freedom of speech stops at this issue, that Naturalism is sacrosanct, really that's what it is, it's Darwinism as a manifestation of metaphysical Naturalism. And that freedom of speech just does not apply to this issue. Oh, in the home it's OK, you see. Or in church you could say things, but out in public where it might make a difference .... in the science classroom if somebody says "well maybe these theories of the origin of Life just aren't true and things didn't happen that way at all" the axe falls. Then that's when action is taken to make sure that students are protected from hearing a thought that might unsettle their minds, that might unsettle their certainty that Naturalism is the whole truth.
So I think this is the biggest free speech area of our culture at the moment, and I'm afraid a lot of educating of the judiciary has got to be done, and of the legal profession to wake them up to this, because they still think (many of them, many do understand this) but many judges and lawyers still think that the great need is to protect the independence of Science from some Biblical dogmatism. But that is the issue of a century ago. The issue of today is: how are we to limit the authoritarian aspects of the scientific culture, which in fact controls the educational institutions, which in fact is the only channel of information to the elite media, to the television networks, to newspapers like the New York Times? And that it has such a strong, effective authoritarian propaganda hold on the society. They're the "college of cardinals" in our culture, that needs to have its power limited by constitutional means.
Anyone that tries to challenge [Darwinian evolution theory] will find out how many informal mechanisms there are, in the media, in the educational institutions, and everywhere, to prevent honest disagreement on this subject from being heard."
Q. Does the uncritical teaching of Darwinism constitute the establishment of a secular religion?
A. Yes it does .... Their view is that that supernatural creator, God, does nothing but cause trouble, you see. It's an authority figure who tells us that we can't do everything that we want to do; who tells us that everything is not within our control and knowledge .... We don't want to have anything like that, that tells us there are limits on what we can do or accomplish. And so we want to get rid of that Creator, and the way to do that is to convince ourselves, and eventually everybody's children that we are the products of, in George Gaylord Simpson's words, a purposeless material process that cared nothing for us, that cares nothing about what we do. So you know, it's all consistent with the general platform of 'liberation', sexual and otherwise, that is so deeply desired by many of the cultural leaders of our society.