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)
EVOLUTION AT THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE
by Leonard Magruder
May 16, 2005
Connie Morris, Kansas School Board member, recently told the Associated Press, “I am profoundly disappointed that pro-evolution scientists have chosen to present their case in the shadows. I would have enjoyed hearing what they have to say in a professional, ethical manner.”
The truth of the matter is that the evolutionists don’t have a case.
Based on the assumption that there would be a serious public debate on the issue, I went to some trouble doing research for an article for statements from the biggest names in evolution theory regarding macroevolution. Here is a good example:
The most important statement in the current controversy, and one of the most famous in the literature, is this by one of the greats in evolution theory, the late Stephen J. Gould:
“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with Darwin’s idea of 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.
This is a very damaging statement. But I included a dozen or more other confessions of Darwinian bankruptcy by world-class paleontologists and evolutionists, such as Steven Stanley, George Gaylord Simpson, D’Arcy Thompson, Donald Johanson, Pierre P. Grasse, David Raup, Niles Eldridge, Richard Goldschmidt, Lynn Margulis, John Moore, Donn Rosen, and E. White. They don’t come any bigger, and all confess that there is no evidence for macroevolution.
In response to my article I received this note from Ken Willard, Kansas State Board of Education member, and Central Area Director of the National Association of State Boards of Education:
“Dear Mr. Magruder:
As a member of the Kansas State Board of education...I want to thank you for this excellent letter of support for academic reform. I’ll be looking to see if your letter reaches any Kansas newspapers.”
Mr. Willard apparently thought this might be a contribution to the debate. But the reporters at The Lawrence Journal-World and “The University Daily Kansan do not seem to agree that there is anything to debate. Take their most recent attempt to mislead the public, a front page article, “Christian Agenda Worries Other Faiths,” by Jim Baker. It mentions a teacher at the Zen Center who practices two faiths, Buddhism (Nothingness), and Judaism (Somethingness). He says neither religion says “My religious text tells me that your science is wrong.” A Hindu is quoted as saying he has “deep misgivings” about the idea that a “supernatural consciousness might get equal billing with evolution.” Another person, who is Jewish, fears that the introduction of intelligent design (ID) “heralds the theology of a particular religion being imposed upon all citizens.” These are just three examples of non-Christians expressing anxiety about the possible introduction of intelligent design. But they were all previously set up for such totally irrelevant statements by the shameless propaganda campaign of Journal-World reporters to sell the people of Lawrence on the idea that Intelligent Design is a plot to introduce religion into the schools through science. “A movement to shove science aside for theology,” as one person said. The Journal-World has not only never explained ID to the people, it has actively waged a war to mislead them into thinking that. I once wrote them a letter explaining the difference, but they ignored it. An excerpt:
“On the current debate on evolution, the newspapers of Kansas repeatedly try to fool the public into thinking that scientific creationism and intelligent design are the same. They are not. Besides differing in their presuppositions, they differ in propositional content and method of inquiry. Intelligent design begins with data that scientists observe in the laboratory and nature. Any conclusion of design constitutes an inference from data, not a deduction from religious authority. And intelligent design nowhere attempts to identify the intelligent cause responsible for the design in nature.”
“Here is a simple example of how intelligent design works: Take a piece of chalk and scribble all over a blackboard, meaningless stuff. Now do the same but at some point write your name. All of a sudden what is on the board is meaningful. But notice that nothing has changed physically. The board is the same, the chalk is the same. What is new is “information,” a very mysterious thing. ID theorists find information, for example, in the specific sequence of millions of nucleotides that make up the information in DNA that makes humans. The first cell had to have this information. Where did that come from? This “information problem” is at the heart of the design critique of macroevolution. ID people do not claim it came from God. Even if they did, it is only an inference and does nothing to change the underlying scientific evidence. And although reasonable, you do not have to make that inference. If could have come from aliens.”
The Journal-World is doing a disservice to their readers by omitting that kind of instructive and relevant information. A November 15, 2004, article in the newspaper reported on a nation-wide study that showed that Lawrence may be one of the least religious metropolitan areas in the United States, “ranking 266 from the bottom out of 276 metropolitan areas.” Many people here are not only ignorant of religion, (practicing Buddhism and Judaism at the same time for example), they are scared to death of the idea of God. The Journal-World created a boogey-man of “ID as religion” in order to stifle the debate about any alternative theories.
In addition to the letter I received from Mr. Willard, I had three less open-minded responses from K.U.:
1. “Stop sending me your ignorant and bigoted emails full of absurd religious fanaticism.”
(Mention ID at K.U. and it instantly becomes “religious fanaticism.)
2. “Take me off your list. You are an idiot!!!”
3. from Joshua Rosenau, a graduate student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas:
“A source passed on this e-mail exchange. Note the support that Ken Willard, Board of Ed. member gives to this pile of nonsense...the cheapest sort of creationist quote-mining, combined with the sorts of petty misunderstandings that anyone should be able to see through. As for Willard’s hope that his nonsense would be published in its entirety that is absurd. It would run several pages.”
It is not true that I quoted any Creationist. That is how the evolutionists at K.U., aided by the media, are playing the game, fooling the public into thinking that the issue is between Science and Creationists. Creation Science has not been in the game for ages. It is now scientists against scientists, all within the evolution camp. As for “quote-mining,” Joshua is attempting to imply that quoting scientific authorities who challenge evolution theory is somehow inappropriate.
The simple truth about the current situation is that evolutionists have absolutely nothing to say in response to the criticisms of intelligent design scientists. That is why they boycotted the School Board hearings. In all of the voluminous material that has appeared, for example, in the local Journal-World, not a single piece of scientific evidence on behalf of neo-Darwinism has been offered by K.U. evolutionists. The best they could do is trot out old Dr. Krishtalka with his totally irrelevant and question-begging argument that if we don’t buy his version of evolution we will lose the bioscience industry.
The issue is truth, not business.
For the large collection of statements exposing the collapse of evolution theory referred to above, see my article “Evolution Flim-Flam.” And below are some more quotes corroborating the absence of evidence demonstrating evolutionary histories. While it is true that some of these quotes go back some years, nothing as far as the fossil record has changed.
1. Theodore Delevoryas, in his book on plant fossils, states that the “various groups of plants are without previous phylogenies”[evolutionary histories].
2. C.A. Arnold in his book says, “We have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present.”
3. E. H. Corner surprisingly writes, “I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.”
4. André Lwoff, microbial physiologist, states that the ancestry of the metazoa “is a baffling mystery.”
5. Maersland, in his biology text, wrote, “Not much information is available in regard to the evolutionary origin of the platyhelminthes.”
6. Edwar Baker of Duke University says that the phylogeny of mites and ticks is “obscure.”
7. G. Robson of the British Museum concedes concerning the origin of snails, clams, and squids that the “question is unsettled.”
8. Zoologist E. Dodson says of the ancestry of sea urchins, sand dollars, and star fishes, “the fossil record does not throw light on the origin of the phylum, nor upon its possible relation to other phyla.”
9. H. Smith of New York University admits as regards the vertebrates, “the gap remains unbridged and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination.”
10. J. Norman of the British Museum said of the fishes, “The fossils have provided no evidence as to the origin of fishes.”
11. F.D. Ommanney says the 100-million-year gap between fish and their supposed evolutionary ancestors “will probably never be filled.”
12. A.J. Marshall wrote, “there is no fossil record of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved. (The ability to fly supposedly evolved four times independently: in the birds, the mammal-bats, the insects, and the extinct pterosaur reptiles. Yet not one piece of fossil evidence has surfaced showing the evolution of the flying ability. Forget Archaeopteryx, it’s a bird. Besides, where are the intermediate forms leading up to it?)
13. T. Storer, wrote, “The real origins of the horse are unknown.”
14. Heribert Nilsson, wrote, “It is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleo-biological facts. So complete is the fossil material that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, and they will never be filled.”
15. G.G. Simpson said, "The regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to animals, it is an almost universal phenomenon, as has been long noted by paleontologists.”
16. Jean Rostand, said, “We’re in a worse position than in 1859 (Origins of Species) because we have searched for over a century and we have the impression that the different hypotheses are now exhausted. The world supposed by transformation (gradualism) is phantasmagoric.”
17. E.L. Core wrote, “We don’t know the phylogenetic history of any group of plants and animals.”
18. W.R. Thompson wrote, “What the available data indicates is a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory. “
19. A. Clark, said, ”Throughout the fossil record these major groups remain essentially unchanged...Since we have not the slightest evidence of any intermediate types following the major groups, it is a fair assumption that there never have been any such intergrading types.”
20. D.D. Davis, wrote, “Links are missing just where we most fervently desire them, and it is all too probable that many ‘links’ will continue to be missing.”
21. T.N. George wrote, “The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.”
22. N.D.Newell wrote, “The paleontological break is systematic. It reflects a genuine deficiency of the record not dependent on insufficient collecting or chance factors of sedimentation. The meaning of this morphological isolation of higher categories has long troubled students of the fossil record, and was interpreted by Pre-Darwinian paleontologists as indicative of special creation.”
Is it beginning to dawn on you what a huge fraud we are talking about. I’ll repeat it again: “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.”
The Board had it right in 1999. The coming rejection of Darwinism has nothing to do with any religious incompatibility. It has to do with its scientific inaccuracy and cumulative implausibility. Evolutionary theory, finally forced to confront its anomalies, has arrived at the brink of collapse of its truth claims.
If you think about the quotes above you should be able to see what the real problem is - discontinuity. Science cannot deal with discontinuity, things have to connect together. The discontinuity is there in evolution, and also, for that matter, in quantum physics. And it is real. The true scientist today is one who respects the overwhelming empirical evidence of this discontinuity - and wonders about it. If neo-Darwinism cannot explain it, maybe Intelligent Design can. Stephen J. Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” is a confession of this discontinuity. But nobody is going to believe that one day a bird came out of the egg of a dinosaur. ( Well, close to it.)
K.U. tries to tell you ID is not science. I’m a scientist, trained in scientific method and research design. ID is definitely science. It’s complicated. You have to know probability theory. But it is science. Read Behe's landmark book on ID, Darwin’s Black Box, and tell me that is not science. Media and university must stop spreading that lie also.
And now the Governor has gotten into the act. Said Kathleen Sibelius today, “We need more standards at higher level, not, I think, a dilution of what kids may need to be learning.”
Who is diluting anything? The students of Kansas are about to be liberated from a huge lie. Go look at that magnificent painting of John Brown in the Capitol building and remember how Kansans have always fought against oppression.
It is all so simple. All the School Board of every state in the union has to do is hold up these quotes, or those in my longer article, and ask of evolutionists, “Are you really asking us to hide all this from our students?”
Ironically, for a great metaphor of the incredible hoax that K.U. evolutionists are trying to pull on the students of Kansas, you have but to remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the Wizard steps of out behind the curtain and admits he is a humbug. Time to end this mind-deadening tyranny of dogma.
“Give me liberty or give me death.” I guess that’s “quote-mining,” too.
There are no books in the list below by a Creation scientist. All are standard scientific works related to evolution theory:
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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