Survival of the Fakest
Wells, Jonathan
t you had asked me during my years studying science at Berkeley whether or not I believed what I read in my science textbooks, I would have responded much as any of my fellow students: puzzled...
...The American Spectator 9 December 2000 / January 2 o o i lhell fishes evolved from a common ancestor...
...One textbook quotes Gould, who openly declares that humans are not created, but are merely fortuitous twigs on a "contingent" (i.e...
...Darwin's folDarwinist "homology" arguments (top) are a classic case of circular reasoning...
...Instead of slight 21 The American Spectator 9 December 2000 / January 2oor differences appearing first, then greater differences emerging later, the greatest differences appear right ~ : . ~ at the star, t...
...Beagle...
...At the time, it appeared a dramatic confirmation of evolutionary theory...
...The fossil record shows the major groups of animals appearing fully formed at about the same time in a "Cambrian explosion," rather than diverging from a common ancestor...
...But he attributed it to the imperfection of the fossil record, and he thought that future research would supply the missing ancestors...
...yet some Darwinists claim it explains how finch species originated in the first place...
...Put the right gasses together, add electricity, and life is bound to happen...
...In others, he doctored his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than they really were...
...From Biology, 5th Edition, by Raven ~ Johnson, published by McGraw-Hill...
...The growing body of scientific evidence contradicting Darwinian claims is steadfastly ignored...
...Withholding evidence in order to give the impression that Darwin's finches confirm evolutionary theory borders on scientific misconduct...
...According to the news media, only religious fundamentalists question Darwinian evolution...
...It has been known, for instance, for over one hundred years that Haeckel's drawings depicting the similarities of vertebrate embryos were faked...
...Also guilty are some of the most prestigious and widely used college texts, such as Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology, and the latest edition of the graduate-level textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Bruce Alberts...
...So although Berra believed he was supporting Darwinian evolution rather than the pre-DarDecember 2ooo ~January 200z 9 TheAmericanSpectator 22 winian explanation, he unwittingly showed that the fossil evidence is compatible with either...
...This theory does have the virtue of making a prediction: If all living things are gradually modified descendants of one or a few original forms, then the history of life should resemble a branching tree...
...t you had asked me during my years studying science at Berkeley whether or not I believed what I read in my science textbooks, I would have responded much as any of my fellow students: puzzled that such a question would be asked in the first place...
...Finn ;" . d i appears nonplused by the dogmatism of his col- ~J league...
...Now, although Behe supports the idea that some features of living things are best explained by intelligent design, he is not a "creationist" as that word is normally used...
...The misbosom of the establishment--the halls of the American Association for the W hat's this...
...Shouldn't this be a part of our children's curriculum...
...Judging from the real fossil and molecular evidence, however, it is an unsubstantiated hypothesis masquerading as a fact...
...One might find tiny errors, of course, typos and misprints...
...Not just slightly mistaken...
...December 2oo0 / January 2oo z 9 TheAmericon Spectator 26 When biochemist Michael B ehe pointed out in The New York Times last year that the embryo "evidence" for evolution was faked, Harvard Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould admitted that he had known this for decades (as noted above)-but accused Behe of being a "creationist" for pointing it out...
...Darwinian biologists have proposed two mechanisms: developmental pathways and genetic programs...
...Most of us assume that what we hear from scientists is comparatively trustworthy...
...While he scarcely mentioned the topic in The Origin of Species, Darwin later wrote extensively about it in The Descent of Man...
...Absolutely TOM BETHELL is a regular contributor to The American Spectator...
...And science is always discovering new things...
...in molecular and cell biology from UC-Berkeley and has published widely in academic journals...
...As expected, birds ate more light moths in the polluted woodland, and more dark moths in the unpolluted one...
...In The Origin of Species, however, Darwin argued that the best explanation for homology is descent with modification, and he considered it evidence for his theory...
...The change, though significant, was small...
...Haeckel's contemporaries repeatedly criticized him for 20 December ~ooo ~January 2ooz " TheAmericanSpectator these misrepresentations, and charges of fraud abounded in his lifetime...
...It wasn't until 1912 that amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson announced that he had fotlhd what Darwinists were looking for, in a gravel pit at Piltdown, England...
...Here is Chester Finn, gadfly of the public education elite, firmly ensconced in the AdvancementofScience...
...Instead, they are simply fed the latest speculation as though it were a fact...
...He is author of the recently released Icons of Evolution (Regnery...
...Kansas received an F-minus, for "removing all references to evolution...
...In this way the data are constantly reviewed and hypotheses become widely accepted theories...
...National Academy of Sciences describes Darwin's finches as "a particularly compelling example" of the origin of species...
...So how do we explain such a pervasive and long-standing distortion of the specific facts used to support evolutionary theory...
...As it happens, all of these examples, as well as many others purportedly standing as evidence of evolution, turn out to be incorrect...
...tt documents the manyfalse and misleading claims about evolution that are taught in almost all standard high school and college biology books...
...Once again, they ignore it...
...Some fossil experts ~: describe this as top-down evolution," and ~ / ~ note that it contradicts the bottom-ll.p ~ k ~ ~ i : pattern predicted by Darwin's theory...
...N representations and omissions I've examined here are just a small sampling...
...Yet a glance at ahnost any current biology textbook reveals that they are still being used as evidence for natural selection...
...the evolutionary"tree," rooted in the primordial slime and branching out into animal and plant life...
...Biology students and the general public are rarely informed of the d e e p - j 1 ~ , 1 seated uncertainty about human origins that is reflected in these statements by scientific experts...
...You get a better picture if you glue the moth to the tree," says Scott...
...Yet some version of Haeekel's drawings can be found in most current biology textbooks...
...Bob Ritter was quoted as saying in the April 1999 Alberta Report Newsmagazine...
...It's time to clear away the lies that obstruct popular discussion of evolution, and insist that theories conform to the evidence...
...And they have known for thirty years that thee;are often not produced by similar genes, either...
...Your life wouldn't be as rich if you didn't understand the concept of evolution...
...educators .[ i e 0 t 0 o to California, North and South Carolina, F's for North Dakota, Ohio, Wyoming, and teachin 0 oft iutien, |0m The speakers include two emeritus professors, Lawrence Lemer of Cal State Long Beach and Paul Gross of the University of Vir~- ginia, as well as the seemingly ~;r omnipresent exponent-of evolutionary enlightenment, Eugenic Scott, who explains that evolution is "like Mozart...
...To test this hypothesis experimentally, Kettlewell released light and dark moths onto nearby tree trunks in polluted and unpolluted woodlands, then watched as birds ate the more conspicuous moths...
...In 1997 , British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team of experts compared Haeekel's drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclusively that the drawings misrepresent the truth...
...according to the second, homologous features are programmed by similar genes...
...But they are still used in textbooks as evidence that humans and 27...
...Of course, the awareness that the human body is part of nature was around long before Darwin...
...Dawson had found part of a human skull and part of an apelike lower jaw with two teeth...
...Darwin's followers rely on homologies to arrange fossils in branching trees that supposedly show ancestor-descendant relationships...
...This is a classic ease of circular reasoning...
...A 1999 booklet published by the U.S...
...Instead of being what scientists call a "reducing," or hydrogen-rich environment, the Earth's early atmosphere probably consisted ofgasses released by volcanoes...
...In 1997, however, my interest in the embryo drawings was revived when British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleagues published the result of their study comparing the textbook drawings JONATHAN WELLS holds a Ph.D...
...But Berra forgot to consider a crucial, and obvious, point: Corvettes, so far as anyone has yet been able to determine, don't give birth to little Corvettes...
...Peppered moths soon became the classic example of natural selection in action, and the story is still retold in most introductory biology textbooks, accompanied by photographs of the moths on tree trunks...
...There were problems, however...
...According to Darwin, a dog's tendency to imagine hidden agency in things moved by the wind "would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods...
...Sure they might sometimes get it wrong, but the beauty of science is that it's empirically testable...
...In the 195o's, however, British physician Bernard Kettlewell course, the people who staged them before the 198o's thought they were accurately representing the true situation, but we now know they were mistaken...
...Darwin was not an embryologist, however, so he relied on the work of Gernlan biologist Ernst Haeckel, who produced drawings of embryos from ing blocks" of life...
...IP~ not, came the answer...
...This may be the most egregious of distortions, since biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos never look as similar as Haeekel drew them...
...By releasing moths onto nearby tree trunks in daylight, Kettlewell had created an artificial situation that does not exist in nature...
...Worse, this was no recent fraud...
...How convoluted do you want to make it for a first time learner...
...In some eases, Haeckel used the same woodcut to print embryos that were supposedly from different classes...
...Nor are we only talking about high-school textbooks that some might excuse (but shouldn't) for adhering to a lower standard...
...N :~i...
...Biologists in the 197o's began testing Darwin's branching-tree pattern by comparing molecules in various species...
...Haeckel's drawings, however, entirely omit the earliest stages, which are much different, and start at a more similar midway point...
...They are good propaganda, however...
...Politicians might distort or shave the truth to support a preconceived agenda, but scientists, we are told, deal with facts...
...We all remember them from biology class: the experiment that created the "building blocks of life" in a tube...
...Though the finches had little in fact to do with Darwin's development of evolutionary theory, they have attracted considerable attention from modern evolutionary biologists as further evidence of natural selection...
...The same subjectivity that prepared the way for Piltdown continues to plague human-origins research...
...In my recent book I call them "Icons of Evolution," because so many of them are represented by classic oft-repeated illustrations which, like the Haeckel drawings, have served their pedagogical purpose only too well --fixing basic misinformation about evolutionary theory in the public's mind...
...Today there is a near consensus among geochemists on this point...
...No one doubts, of course, that a certain amount of descent with modification occurs within species...
...But you can't then use homology as evidence for evolution except by reasoning in a circle: Similarity due to common ancestry demonstrates common ancestry...
...Maybe scientists "have failed to find the 'true tree,'" he wrote in 1999, "not because their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree...
...No outside agency or divine intelligence was necessary...
...Nothing a Little Glue Can't Fix: The Peppered Moths provided what seemed to be conclusive evidence of natural selection...
...the evolutionists are asked...
...the pigmentation camouflaged them as the tree trunks they rested on became discolored by pollution...
...Stephen Jay Gould, one of evolutionary theory's most vocal proponents, recently wrote that we should be "astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks...
...In an article written for Scientific American, Kettlewell called this "Darwin's missing evidence...
...accidental) tree of life...
...My evidence is the more or less explicit materialist message woven into many textbook accounts...
...He is delivering a public paddling to those recalcitrant school boards who have not been eager enough instilling liberal orthodoxy-- seat as in this case, evolution--in their pupils...
...So there is no empirically demonstrated mechanism to establish that homologies are due to common ancestry rather than common design...
...The booklet also calculates that "if droughts occur about once every lo years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about zoo years7 But the booklet fails to point out that the finches' beaks returned to normal after the rains returned...
...I will return below to the question of why it is only now that Mr...
...When the Beagle visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835 , Darwin collected specimens of the local wildlife, including some finches...
...Nor was its discovery recent...
...Although Neanderthals had already been found, they were not then considered ancestral to humans, so Darwin had no fossil evidence for his view...
...Philosophers of biology have been criticizing this approach for decades...
...Most modern biology textbooks do not even mention Piltdown...
...As amino acids are the "building blocks" of proteins, and proteins are the "building blocks" of life, it was thought just a matter of time before scientists could themselves create living organisms...
...They all had similar drawings, and they were all obviously wrong...
...In 1996 , American Museum of Natural History Curator Ian Tattersall acknowledged that "in paleoanthropology, the patterns we perceive are . 2 " ~ : - ~ , as likely to result from our unconscious mindsets as from the evidence itself...
...ltkOS a back troversies...
...In a lot of subjects," he interjects, "we do like students to be taught the conrevealing exchange...
...Scott jumps in with more disinformation: "[N]o one would doubt," she says, "that embryos are more similar than the mature bodies...
...From Biology, 5th Edition, by Raven ~ Johnson, McGraw-Hill...
...But a century and a half of continued fossil collecting has only aggravated the problem...
...We are so convinced that our explanation is true that we no longer see any need to distinguish it from the situation we were trying to explain...
...Not only did they distort the embryos they pictured...
...securities laws provide "our richest source of experiential guidance" in defining what constitutes scientific misconduct...
...I suspect that there's an agenda other than pure science at work here...
...So how do the textbooks treat this controversy...
...in cell and development biology, however, that I noticed what at first I took to be a strange anomaly...
...The telling blow to the Miller Urey experiment, however, came in the 197o's, when scientists began to conclude that the Earth's early atmosphere was nothing like the mixture ofgasses used by Miller and Urey...
...But none oftheIn, apparently, have seen fit to correct this almost ubiquitous misinformation...
...And, of course, the Haeckel embryos...
...the Kansas school board had simply refused to tell students that Darwin's theory explains all major features of living things, for which it deserves credit...
...The embryo drawings that appear in most every high school and college textbook are either reproductions of, or based on, a famous series of drawings by the 19th century German biologist and fervent Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, and they have been known to scholars of Darwin and evolutionary theory to be forgeries for over a hundred years...
...The best he could do in The Origin of S#ecies was give "one or two imaginary illustrations...
...Apparently, the "later" can be much later...
...When University of Chicago Professor Jerry Coyne learned the truth in 1998 , he was well into his career as an evolutionary biologist...
...In other words, an outside intelligence...
...They were all staged...
...And so it was, in this case --though the correction took over forty years...
...Why does Gould, who knows Haeckel's drawings were faked, dismiss Behe as a creationist for criticizing them...
...Then there were the similar bone structures of, say, a bird's wing and a man's hand, the peppered moths, and Darwin's finches...
...Futuyma, Gould, and Dawkins have a right to their phi- losophy...
...We have no time to teach [students] the conflicts," admonishes Gross...
...Unfortunately, despite official pronouncements, this prediction has in some important respects turned out to be wrong...
...Piltdown Man was a forgery...
...Perhaps, but is it good science...
...The American Spectator 9 December 2000 I January 2ooz with actual embryos...
...But I'd been studying embryos for some time, looking at them under a microscope...
...In 1999, a Canadian textbook-writer justified the practice: "You have to look at the audience...
...In science, all theories--including Darwinian evolution- must be tested against the evidence...
...It was this pattern that Darwin found so convincing...
...It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D...
...As Richardson himself was quoted in the prestigious journal Science: "It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology...
...Darwin, however, needed evidence to confirm his conjecture...
...And I knew that the drawings were just plain wrong...
...On the subject of Darwinian evolution, the texts contained massive dis19 tortions and even some faked evidence...
...Embryologist William Ballard wrote in 1976 that it is "only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence," by "bending the facts of nature," that one can argue that the early stages of vertebrates "are more alike than their adults...
...Gould, who has known of these forgeries for decades, has decided to bring them to widespread attention...
...Still thinking this an exceptional circumstance, I became curious to see if I could find other mistakes in the standard biology texts dealing with evolution...
...Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species: "I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings" that lived in the distant past...
...The booklet cites the Grants' work, and explains how"a single year of&ought on the islands can drive evolutionary changes in the finches...
...According to Harvard biologist Louis Guenin (writing in Nature in 1999), U.S...
...And the speculation is typically illustrated with fanciful drawings of cave men, or pictures of human actors wearing heavy make-up...
...In the 197o's , Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues noted a 5 percent increase in beak size after a severe drought, because the finches were left with only hard4o-crack seeds...
...Perhaps Danvinian evolution has taken on a significance in our culture that has ]i~e to do with its scientific value, whatever that may be...
...An indication of this was seen in the nearly universal and censorious reaction to the Kansas School Board's decision to a]]ow room for dissent in the standard teaching of evolution (much of which, as we have just seen, is plain wrong...
...Like materialistic philosophers since ancient Greece, Darwin believed that human beings are nothing more than animals...
...Faked Embryos Darwin thought "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of'' his theory came from embryology...
...The jaw had been chemically treated to make it look like a fossil, and its teeth had been deliberately filed down to make them look human...
...Nevertheless, biology textbooks continue to assure students that Darwin's Tree of Life is a scientific fact overwhelmingly confirmed by evidence...
...But Darwin was claiming much more...
...Since Gould knows that the real embryological evidence contradicts the faked drawings in biology textbooks, why doesn't he take a more active role in cleaning up science education...
...For too long the debate about evolution has assumed "facts" that aren't tme...
...But Darwin's theory claims to account for the origin of new species--in fact, for every species since the first cells emerged from the primordial ooze...
...I re-checked all my other textbooks...
...Dogmatic endeavors of this kind must eventually leave the realm of science...
...To expedite things, some photographers even glued dead moths to trees...
...Most textbooks also go on to tell students that origin-of-life researchers have found a wealth of other evidence to explain how life originated spontaneously--but they don't tell students that the researchers themselves now acknowledge that the explanation still eludes them...
...It's a common event...
...Later on, they can look at the work critically...
...Carl Sagan could thus confidently predict on PBS that the planets orbiting those "biIIlllions and billIlIions" of stars out there nmst be just teeming with life...
...Clark suggested that "paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science...
...Not true, by the way...
...Not just slightly off...
...In fact, the opposite is sometimes true: The embryos of different kinds of sea urchin, to give one example, vary dramatically, though their mature forms closely resemble one another...
...My search revealed a startling fact however: Far from being exceptions, such blatant misrepresentations are more often the rule...
...Indeed, tile drawings did appear very similar...
...But put those volcanic gasses in the Miller-Urey apparatus, and the experiment doesn't work-- in other words, no "buildlarge, they ignore it and continue to use the Miller-Urey experiment to convince students that scientists have demonstrated an important first step in the origin of life...
...Darwin knew this, and considered it a serious objection to his theory...
...Biologists before Darwin had noticed this sort of similarity and called it "homology," and they attributed it to construction on a common archetype or design...
...At first, this approach seemed to confirm Darwin's tree of life...
...Life in a Bottle Anyone old enough in 1953 to nnders|and the import of the news remembers how shocking, and to many, exhilarating, it was...
...In fact, when the false "evidence" is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so thin it's almost invisible...
...There are many more...
...Of Darwin was convinced that in the course of evolution, "Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification," but he had no direct evidence of this...
...They, like all automobiles, are designed by people working for auto companies...
...People who criticize Darwinism, we are told, want to bomb science back to the Stone Age and replace it with the Bible...
...Scientists were never able to get beyond the simplest amino acids in their simulated primordial environlnent, and the creation of proteins began to seem not a small step or couple of steps, but a great, perhaps impassable, divide...
...Without a mechanism, modern Darwinists have simply redefined homology to mean similarity due to common ancestry...
...According to paleoanthropologist Misia Landau, theories of human origins "far exceed what can be inferred from the study of fossils alone and in fact place a heavy burden of interpretation on the fossil record--a burden which is relieved by placing fossils into preexisting narrative structures...
...This includes the abovementioned Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by the National Academy of Sciences president, Bruce Alberts...
...It wasn't until forty years later that a team of scientists proved that the Piltdown skull, though perhaps thousands of years old, belonged to a modern human, while the jaw fragment was more recent, and belonged to a modern orangutan...
...But as scientists compared more and more molecules, they found that different molecules yield conflicting results...
...But the journal- ,~ ntists and ists failed to report this t~ The evolutionists a r 4 ~ let io Wash- asked about Jonathan Wells's new book, which 0m0t6 t h e ence, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States," and the audience--mostly sympathetic media and professional educators-are given a report grading the states: A's for others...
...The branching-tree pattern inferred from one molecule often contradicts the pattern obtained from another...
...So they remain in textbooks, even though no reputable scientists would stand behind them, and our children are taught misinformation in the name of a "higher truth," because as the main speakers at the seminar knew, as every educated person knows, evolution must be true...
...Darwin based his inference of common ancestry on the belief that the earliest stages of embryo development are the most similar...
...The drawings are misleading in another way...
...We want to get across the idea of selective adaptation...
...lowers assume evolution is independently established, and homology is its result...
...By and various classes of vertebrates to show that they are virtually identical in their earliest stages, and become noticeably different only as they develop...
...From Apes to Humans Darwin's theory really comes into its own when it is applied to human origins...
...Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark echoed 1 this view in 1997 when he wrote: "We select among alternative sets of research conclusions in accordance with our b i a s e s ~ and preconceptions...
...Yet ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ , ~ ~ ' ~ ~ ~ ~ : - most current biology textbooks don't even mention the Cambrian explosion, much less point out the challenge it poses for "w Darwinian evolution...
...And they call this "science...
...The lesson of Berra's Blunder is that we need to specify a natural mechanism before we can scientifically exclude designed construction as the cause of homology...
...But I believed--took it as a given-that my science textbooks represented the best scientific knowledge available at that time...
...According to Ernst Mayr, one of the principal architects of modern neo-Darwinism: "After 1859 there has been only one definition of homologous that makes biological sense: Attributes of two organisms are homologous when they are derived from an equivalent characteristic of the common ancestor...
...In other words, it's time to do science as it's supposed to be done...
...According to the first, homologous features arise from similar cells and processes in the embryo...
...The sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail...
...Law professor (and critic of Darwinism) Phillip E. Johnson dubbed this "Berra's Blunder...
...His experience illustrates how insidious the icons of evolution really are, since they mislead experts as well as novices...
...Life wasn't a "miracle...
...What about the moths on the trees...
...they omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look very different from one another...
...As Ronald Brady wrote in 1985: "By making our explanation into the definition of the condition to be explained, we express not scientific hypothesis but belief...
...Beaks and Birds: Darwin's [inches In the 198o's , however, researchers discovered evidence that 23 The American Spectator 9 December 2000 / January 2ooi A quarter of a century before Darwin published The Origin of Species, he was formulating his ideas as a naturalist aboard the British survey ship H.M.S...
...Darwin saw evolution as a theory, and homology as its evidence...
...This is a reference to the famous photographs from the 195o's--now also known to be faked--that supposedly demonstrated why dark moths became more widespread in industrial England...
...So where did all those textbook photos of peppered moths on tree trunks come from...
...These are obviously philosophical rather than scientific views...
...As Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson wrote in the Wail Street Journal in 1999: "When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble...
...But a stock promoter who tells his clients that a particular stock can be expected tO double in value in twenty years because it went up 5 percent in 1998, while concealing the fact that the same stock declined 5 percent in 1999, might well be charged with fraud...
...Ira theory is wrong, this will be discovered by other scientists performing independent experiments either to replicate or disprove their results...
...He believed that the differences among modern species arose primarily through natural selection, or survival of the fittest, and he described the whole process as "descent with modification...
...In fact, several finch species now appear to be merging through hybridization, rather than diverging through natural selection as Darwin's theory requires...
...In his 199o book, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, biologist Tim Berra compared the fossil record to a series of Corvette models: "If you compare a 1953 and a 1954 Corvette, side by side, then a 1954 and a 1955 model, and so on, the descent with modification is overwhelmingly obvious...
...Futuyma's Evolutionan2 Biology is characteristic of this, informing students that "it was Darwin's theory of evolution," together with Marx's theory of history and Freud's theory of human nature, "that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism" that has since been "the stage of most Western thought...
...The more similar the molecules in two different species are, the more closely related they are presumed to be...
...During the previous century, peppered moths in England had gone from being predominantly ]ighbcolored to being predominantly dark-colored...
...When critics of Darwinism bring it up, they are usually told that the incident merely proves that science is self-correcting...
...It didn't immediately affect my work, and I assumed that while the texts had somehow gotten this particular issue wrong, it was the exception to the rule...
...Canadian molecular biologist W. Ford Doolittle doesn't think the problem will go away...
...Blatent distortion (below): Human embyros never have gills--not even rudimentary ones...
...The textbook I was using prominently featured drawings of vertebrate embryos--fish, chickens, humans, etc.-where similarities were presented as evidence for descent from a common ancestor...
...Instead, they fly by night and apparently hide under upper branches during the day...
...It was thought that the change occurred because dark moths are better camouflaged on pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus less likely to be eaten by predatory birds...
...Like most other science students, like most scientists themselves, I let it pass...
...Scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey had succeeded in creating "the building blocks of life" in a flask...
...the official story was flawed--including the pertinent fact that peppered moths don't normally rest on tree trunks...
...But the more interesting lesson to be learned from Piltdown is that scientists, like everyone else, can be fooled into seeing what they want to see...
...High school students "are still very concrete in the way they learn," continued Ritter...
...In fact, they give students the impression that it makes sense to define homology in terms of common ancestry and then turn around and use it as evidence for common ancestry...
...Mimicking what were believed to be the natural conditions of the early Earth's atmosphere, and then sending an electric spark through it, Miller and Urey had formed simple amino acids...
...My object," he explained, "is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties"-- even morality and reliDecember 2000 / January 200I 9 The American Spectator 24 gion...
...Oxford Darwinist Richard Dawkins, though not writing in a textbook, puts it even more bluntly: "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist...
...Apparently, but as the moths don't naturally rest on tree trunks, the photos are of zero scientific value...
...What do textbooks do with this inconvenient fact...
...No net evolution occurred...
...But they do not have the right to teach it as though it were science...
...Behe is a molecular biologist whose scientific work has convinced him that Darwinian theory doesn't conform to observation and experimental evidence...
...At the "press opportunity" in the lunch hour the speakers are asked to comment on the growing scientific-not religious--body of knowledge that questions dogmatic Darwinian evolutionary theory...
...But biologists have known for a hundred years that homologous structures are often not produced by similar developmental pathways...
...They All Look Alike: Homology in Vertebrate Limbs Most introductory biology textbooks carry drawings of vertebrate limbs showing similarities in their bone structures...
...Many biologists now consider his results invalid, and some even question whether natural selection was responsible for the observed changes...
...Then came the evidence from molecular biology...
...The "seminar" is entitled "Good SciGood sciee...
Vol. 33 • December 2000 • No. 10
