VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
(Vietnam vet contact: General Carl Schneider (ret.) Korea, Vietnam
dukesch@aol.com, 480-595-7668)
STUDENTS! DON’T LET THEM FLIM-FLAM YOU!
“LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD” EDITORS SCREEN OUT ALL SCIENTIFIC DEFENSE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN WHILE K.U. CO-CONSPIRATORS RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
While on the surface editors at the Lawrence Journal-World appear to be allowing both sides of the evolution issue to be heard, in actual fact they are screening out any defense for intelligent design submitted by true scientists. Below are two letters in a row written by Leonard Magruder, a retired professor and scientist, rejected by the paper.
Following the two letters we will lay out for you just how huge the holes in evolution theory really are. This is where the debate begins, not with intelligent design, that follows as a possible solution. The debate begins with the clear demonstration that neo-Darwinism is widely known by a huge and growing number of world-class scientists as being in deep trouble.
Letters to the Editor
Lawrence Journal-World
Lawrence, Ks.
Dear Editor:
Leonard Krishtalka, in lesson three of his article, “Tsunami’s How and Why” tells us that the ‘how’ of science must be kept separate from the ‘why’ of religion. This is “a primary lesson we should apply to the evolution -creationism issue or to any other attempt to pit knowledge against faith,” says the director of the K.U. Museum of Natural History.
The fact is, ‘how’ and ‘why’ are inextricably entwined across the scientific spectrum. The world’s greatest scientists, men like Einstein, Hawkins, Schrodinger, Bohn, and Heisenberg, all of them, when they came to the edge of their scientific facts, felt free to speculate further, and wrote important books of a philosophical, even religious nature rooted in scientific facts. Beyond the ‘how,’ they wanted to know ‘why.’
Take this statement by the world-class evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” That is his view regarding the question of ‘why’ made after looking at the ‘how.’
On the other hand, Anthony Flew, one of the world’s leading philosophers and atheists, now believes in God based on his examination of the scientific arguments of intelligent design. He concludes from the ‘how’ of intelligent design that the ‘why’ is that some ‘super-intelligence’ must have created the universe.
I suspect that anyone who wants us to separate ‘how’ from ‘why’ just doesn’t want us to think. That is how wooly stuff like evolution gets pulled over our heads.
Leonard Magruder
***
Dear Editor:
It looks like “Journal-World” reporters are once again trying to flim-flam the public on evolution. Their repeated use of the device, ‘creationism/intelligent design,’ is clearly an effort to condition the public into thinking the two are the same. They are not.
Scientific creationism presupposes a supernatural agent, God, and the scientific accuracy of the biblical account of creation. It treats the opening chapter of Genesis as a scientific text and thus argues for such things as a literal six-day creation, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve, and a catastrophic world-wide flood. It attempts to match the data of nature to the biblical account. This reliance on narrowly held prior assumptions is what destroys its claim to be a scientific theory.
Intelligent design, on the other hand, starts with the data of nature and from there is able to show, though the specialized scientific tools it has developed, than an intelligent cause, which it does not specify, is responsible for some facts of nature. It relies on widely accepted scientific principles, largely probability analysis, which ensure its legitimacy as a scientific theory.
Contrary to what the media tries to sell the public, intelligent design is totally free from any religious entanglement. True, there can be an inference from the findings to a supernatural being, but that is also often done from the discovery of the Big Bang and the Anthropic principle. An inference in no way discredits the underlying science.
Leonard Magruder
Sometime during the last evolution controversy in Kansas, the President of the K.U. Student Senate sent out a request for ideas as to how to spend a large Senate surplus. In a 21-page letter to him, Mr. Magruder reviewed all of the scientific problems with evolution theory and proposed the money be spent on a national symposium on these issues as well as the new concept of intelligent design. Neither the Senate president, nor any of the administration that received copies, bothered to even acknowledge the letter. The famous K.U. coma.
Since Ohio was wrestling with the same issues at that time the letter was sent to the President of the Ohio School Board, who wrote back that she had ordered copies for each Board member, Ohio became the first state to require students to learn about scientific criticisms of neo-Darwinism, including intelligent design. The following is a selection from that letter:
“Let’s review in this letter some of the problems that old line biologists, with the help of the media, are trying to keep covered up. For openers, in a recent lead article in the “American Spectator,” Dr. Jonathan Wells, a PhD in molecular and cell biology from the University of California - Berkeley, shows where almost all of the textbooks used in high schools and colleges have for decades repeated material as scientific fact which were discredited by scientists themselves decades ago, material which is crucial to the case for evolution being true.
“One of these icons is the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, which continues to appear in textbooks as proof that life evolved from lifeless matter. All scientists today view this experiment as fatally flawed and the whole idea at a dead end. Another well known evolutionary icon still being presented as scientific fact is the Darwinian “tree of life,” according to which all modern species evolved gradually from a universal common ancestor. But the fossil record, according to Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps the world’s foremost evolutionist, shows that the major groups of animals appeared all at once, fully formed, with no evidence of earlier ancestry.
“Another icon is the set of drawings by Ernest Haeckel showing similarities in vertebrate embryos that supposedly point to common ancestry. Scientists have known for over a century that Haeckel faked the similarities. Gould, in one of his books, describes being taught this in school 50 years after it had been discarded by science. Other icons that still appear in biology textbooks in spite of long since having been debunked include the evolution of the horse, the elephant, Darwin’s finches, the pepper moth, and the arguments for ‘homology.’
Writes Wells, “Contemporary biology textbooks contain massive distortions and even faked evidence.” And at the end of his article he gives you a list of the 10 most widely used biology texts all of which contain these claims that were debunked decades ago.
Science demands continuity, cause-and-effect relationships. It cannot explain discontinuities, things that appear out of nothing. But things appearing out of nothing seem to occur in at least three places in the natural world, the Big Bang, between lifeless matter and life, and between animals and humans.
But things also appear out of nothing in the fossil record. The continuity-in-evolution theory is in the minds of evolutionists. It is not in the real world. It is something they would like to prove but cannot, and this is the overwhelming fact that needs to be shared with students.
As David Kitt, professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, recently said, “Evolution is what evolutionists hope will be true, and they hope it in spite of the fossil record.”
Microevolution refers to the fact that there are all kinds of, for example, dogs, variation within species. Macroevolution is the distinct Darwinian idea that dogs can evolve, for example, into cats.
Stephen Jay Gould, professor of paleontology at Harvard and a preeminent figure in evolution theory wrote in Paleobiology, “That theory [macroevolution] as a general proposition is effectively dead despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.” Later in Natural History, he wrote, “Most species exhibit no directed change during their tenure on Earth, nor does a species arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestry. It appears all at once and fully formed.” In a later article in the same journal he wrote, “All paleontologists [scientists who study fossils] know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms. Transition between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” He then wrote that the lack of fossil evidence for macroevolution is the “trade secret of paleontology”. Well, its time to get this little trade secret out into the open and into the minds of every student in Kansas, in fact, the nation.
This is just the beginning.
Dr. Steven Stanley, professor of paleontology at Johns Hopkins University, writes, “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of gradual evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic [Darwinian] model can be valid. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional species cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of material. The gaps are real and they will never be filled.”
And now add this. Wrote George Gaylord Simpson, perhaps this century’s greatest evolutionist, who preceded Gould at Harvard, “This is true of all 32 orders of mammals. In no case is an approximately continuous sequence of one order to another known. The break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculation. The absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals. It is an almost universal phenomenon and has long been noted by paleontologists.” (Noted to each other, perhaps, but not in the textbooks they write for the schools, which, as Wells says, portray all kinds of transitions, illustrated, but totally imaginary and fabricated. This is what Gould means by “textbook orthodoxy,” a euphemism for lies.)
Continuing, Richard Goldschmidt, professor of geology at the University of California at Berkeley, writes, “Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never had any proof. There may be wide discrepancies within species (microevolution), but the gaps with between the species (macroevolution) cannot be bridged.”
And still more.
Wrote D’Arcy Thompson in one of the great classics of biology On Growth and Form, “Evolution has not taught us how birds descended from reptiles, mammals from earlier quadrupeds, quadrupeds from fishes or vertebrates from invertebrates. To seek the stepping stones between the gaps is to seek in vain, forever.”
And more.
From the Bulletin of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, “Species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. It is rarely clear that the descendants were actually better than their predecessors… biological improvement is hard to find.”
I just don’t see how we can keep this stuff from the kiddies any longer. Because we know that evolutionists are honorable men, we know that all the above will be included in the new biology classes.
Now let’s really go crazy. Said Donald J. Johanson (discoverer of Lucy), “Modern gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today, they have no yesterday.” On the evolution of reptiles, University of California paleontologist R.A. Simpson points out, “There is no proof from the fossil record.” Says Boston University biologist Paul Weiss, “The first and most important steps of animal evolution are even more obscure than those of plant evolution.” Said the dean of French zoologists, Pierre-P. Grasse, “We are in the dark concerning the origins of insects.” Said E. White, world-class authority on lungfishes, “The lungfish, like every other group of fish that I know, have their origins firmly based on nothing.” Said David Raup, professor of geology at the University of Chicago, “The origins of the higher categories are shrouded in mystery; they appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms.”
And now, unbelievably –
Said professor of paleontology Steven Stanley at Johns Hopkins University, “The known fossil record fails to document a single morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model of Darwinism can be correct. Doubts about gradualistic evolution have been for long years suppressed.” Said Niles Eldridge, prominent evolutionist and colleague of Gould, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life [the fossils] supports the story of gradual adaptive change, all the while knowing that it does not.”
What the hell is going on here?
Phillip E. Johnson, in his book, Darwin on Trial, has probably asked the defining question: “How could a deception of this magnitude possibly have been perpetrated by the whole body of a respected science dedicated almost by definition to the pursuit of truth?”
The truth of the matter is that the number of prominent scientists around the world who have proclaimed their loss of faith in macroevolution is huge and growing, and that their collective weight is absolutely formidable. But the media and the university are hiding this fact from the public in one of the great cover-ups of American history.
Yes, there are such things to consider as stratomorphic intermediates species, such as Pikaia among the chordates, Archaeopteryx among the birds, Pakicitus among the whales, and a few more. But then, where are the transitional forms leading up to them and away from them?
The true situation as regards evolution today is probably best summed up by the noted entomologist W.R. Thompson in his introduction to the centenary edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species: “This situation where scientific men rally to the defense of a doctrine they are unable to defend scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigor, attempting to maintain its credibility with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science.”
The following problems have proven utterly intractable, not only for the mutation-selection mechanism, but also for any other undirected natural process proposed to date: the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of multicellular life, the origin of sexuality, the absence of the transitional forms in the fossil record, the biological Big Bang that occurred in the Cambrian era, the development of complex organ systems, and the development of irreducibly complex molecular machines.
Wrote Niles Eldridge, “Each new generation, it seems, produces a few young paleontologists eager to document examples of evolutionary change in their fossils… of the gradual progressive sort. The fossils, rather than exhibiting the expected pattern, just seem to persist virtually unchanged. This extraordinary conservatism looks to the paleontologist keen on finding evolutionary change as if no evolution has occurred. These studies are considered ‘failures’ and are not even published. Paleontologists see stasis [no change] as ‘no results’ rather than a contradiction of the prediction of gradual progressive evolutionary change.”
To bury disconfirming evidence is the height of scientific dishonesty, right up there with all the lies in our high school textbooks.
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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