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The below are a very small sampling of some quotes taken from
peer reviewed journals and other evolutionist writings. 
In nearly all cases, the authors do believe in the general concept of evolution,
and yet are pointing out weaknesses with the theory!

"A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts on both sides of each question..." - Charles Darwin

 

Life from Non-Life

Weakness:  Chemical Origin of Life Has Not Even Been Demonstrated To Be Possible!

Hoyle, Sir Fred, The Intelligent Universe (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 256 pp.

pp. 20-21

"If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon."

p. 23
"In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth."

Weakness:  No Transitional Fossils, particularly in huge systematic gaps, not just species to species!

"Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the
geological record." - Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st Edition, 1859.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, over one hundred years after Darwin first published On The Origin of Species, massive gaps in the fossil record persisted.  The gaps were not just between what were believed to be closely related species, but more troublesome for gradualists, included large systematic gaps such as the Cambrian explosion, the transition from invertebrates to vertebrates, and marine vertebrates (fish) to amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.  The plant kingdom had similar difficulties.  These gaps were widely known in academic circles but rarely discussed openly.

Hence in 1972, Niles Eldridge and Harvard's late Stephen J. Gould, (a Marxist), neither of whom were questioning the general concept of evolution, proposed what is referred to as punctuated equilibrium, that in essence said that evolution was mostly unobservable (i.e. did not usually happen), but that when it did it happened so fast that it left no evidence!

Why did Gould propose this fundamentally un-testable idea?  It was precisely in an attempt to craft a different (non-Darwinian) theory of evolution (albeit still driven by natural selection), that better fit observable data, or more correctly, the lack of data, commonly referred to as the "gaps in the fossil record"!  To quote the late Gould in a 1977 issue of Natural History, “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology — we fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favoured account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.  In short, there was no evidence Harvard's Gould could use to support evolution, so he carefully crafted an alternative theory that didn't require evidence at all!

Weakness:  Major Structures Have No Known Ancestry!

From Online edition of Scientific American, March 2003 issue...

Hence in 1972, Niles Eldridge and Harvard's late Stephen J. Gould, (a Marxist), neither of whom were questioning the general concept of evolution, proposed what is referred to as punctuated equilibrium, that in essence said that evolution was mostly unobservable (i.e. did not usually happen), but that when it did it happened so fast that it left no evidence!

Why did Gould propose this fundamentally un-testable idea?  It was precisely in an attempt to craft a different (non-Darwinian) theory of evolution (albeit still driven by natural selection), that better fit observable data, or more correctly, the lack of data, commonly referred to as the "gaps in the fossil record"!  To quote the late Gould in a 1977 issue of Natural History, “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology — we fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favoured account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.  In short, there was no evidence Harvard's Gould could use to support evolution, so he carefully crafted an alternative theory that didn't require evidence at all!

Weakness:  Major Structures Have No Known Ancestry!

From Online edition of Scientific American, March 2003 issue...

"The origin of feathers is a specific instance of the much more general question or the origin of evolutionary novelties-- structures that have no clear antecedents in ancestral animals and no clear related structures (homologues) in contemporary relatives. Although evolutionary theory provides a robust explanation for the appearance of minor variations in the size and shape of creatures and their component parts, it does not yet give as much guidance for understanding the emergence of entirely new structures, including digits, limbs, eyes and feathers."

Weakness:  Haeckels Embryos Were Fraudulent!

Stephen Jay Gould, Atheist-Marxist-Evolutionist

[The German scientist, Wilhelm His] "...accused Haeckel of shocking dishonesty in repeating the same picture several times to show the similarity among vertebrates at early embryonic stages in several plates of [Haeckel's book]." [emphasis added]

(Note:  Until his recent death, Stephen J. Gould was one of the most outspoken proponents of evolution, specifically the punctuated equilibrium variety.)

Weakness:  The Assumed Early Atmosphere in Miller Urey was Wrong!

Gribbin, John, "Carbon Dioxide, Ammonia—And Life," New Scientist, vol. 94 (May 13, 1982), pp. 413-416.

p. 413

"Pick up an encyclopedia and look up the section on the Earth’s atmosphere. It will probably tell you that the primeval atmosphere of our planet was dominated by methane, and that this hydrogen-rich gas was necessary for the formation of the first complex organic molecules, the precursors of life. But an increasing number of geophysicists, biologists and climatologists would take issue with the encyclopedias on both these claims. These scientists would base their objections on modern evidence provided by other planets, by the effects of volcanic eruptions and other strands from a broad spectrum of scientific research."

p. 413

"This picture captured the popular imagination, and the story of life emerging in the seas or pools of a planet swathed in an atmosphere of methane and ammonia soon became part of the scientific folklore that ‘every school child knows.’"

p. 416

"All we have to do now is rewrite all those textbooks and ensure that ‘every school child knows’ what the best theory of the evolution of the Earth’s atmosphere and the origins of life is today: that life developed in the pools on the surface of a planet with carbon-dioxide atmosphere bearing only a trace of ammonia, perhaps itself the product of chemical reactions in the desert sands."

Weakness:  The Assumed Early Atmosphere in Miller Urey was Wrong - Part 2!

Anonymous, "New Evidence on Evolution of Early Atmosphere and Life," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 63 (November 1982), pp. 1328-1330.

p. 1328

"Recent photochemical calculations by atmospheric researchers at Langley were presented at an international scientific conference last fall. They state that, at the time complex organic molecules (the precursors of living systems) were first formed from atmospheric gases the earth’s atmosphere was not composed primarily of methane, ammonia and hydrogen as was previously supposed. Instead it was composed of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor, all resulting from volcanic activity."

p. 1329

"Ultraviolet radiation on the earth from the young sun may have been up to 100,000 times greater than today."

p. 1329

"In the case of our calculated oxygen levels, one bit of evidence from the early geological record supports our conclusion. It was puzzling, but the geologists know from their analyses of the oldest known rocks that the oxygen level of the early atmosphere had to be much higher than previously calculated. Analyses of these rocks, estimated to be more than 3.5 billion years old, found oxidized iron in amounts that called for atmospheric oxygen levels to be at least 110 times greater and perhaps up to one billion times greater than otherwise accepted."

p. 1329

"How could life have formed and evolved in such a hostile environment? According to our calculations, there was virtually no ozone in the early atmosphere to protect against ultraviolet radiation levels that were much greater than they are today. It clearly should have affected the evolution of life on earth."

Weakness:  The Assumed Early Atmosphere in Miller Urey was Wrong - Part 3!

Clemmey, Harry, and Nick Badham, "Oxygen in the Precambrian Atmosphere: An Evaluation of the Geological Evidence," Geology, vol. 10 (March 1982), pp. 141-146.

p. 141

"Abstract. Geologic evidence often presented in favor of an early anoxic atmosphere is both contentious and ambiguous…. Recent biological and interplanetary studies seem to favor an early oxidized atmosphere rich in CO2 and possibly containing free molecular oxygen. The existence of early red beds, sea and groundwater sulphate, oxidized terrestrial and sea-floor weathering crusts, and the distribution of ferric iron in sedimentary rocks are geological observations and inferences compatible with the biological and planetary predictions. It is suggested that from the time of the earliest dated rocks at 3.7 b.y. ago, Earth had an oxygenic atmosphere."

p. 145

"For the past fifty years or more, speculation and experimentation have fueled the notion of an early Earth with an anoxic and possibly reducing atmosphere and coupled this to arguments concerning the origin of life…General acceptance of this model has raised it to the level of dogma, and it permeates much of earth science thinking. However recent advances in many fields and new ideas on the origin of life have thrown serious doubts on the anoxic model and may have removed the need for it."

Weakness:  Even RNA Life Doesn't Explain It and Isn't Consistent With What is Seen Today!

Orgel, Leslie E., "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), pp. 77-83.

p. 78

"It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means."

p. 78

"We proposed that RNA might well have come first and established what is now called the RNA world…. This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: a capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of protein synthesis."

p. 83

"The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life, emerged may not be revealed in the near future."

Weakness:  Explanatory Power is Weak...There Are More Questions than Answers!

Dose, Professor Dr. Klaus, "The Origin of Life; More Questions than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 13, no. 4 (1988), pp. 348-356. Dose is Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Johannes Gutenberg University, West Germany.

p. 348

"Abstract. More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."

p. 348

"Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in modern cells came into existence."

p. 349

"It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate, a stage in which hypothetical arguments often dominate over facts based on experimentation or observation."

p. 352

"In spite of many attempts, there have been no breakthroughs during the past 30 years to help to explain the origin of chirality in living cells."

Weakness:  DNA Chirality Is A Necessity but Remains A Mystery!

Cohen, Jon, "Getting All Turned Around Over the Origins of Life on Earth," Science, vol. 267 (March 3, 1995), pp. 1265-1266.

p. 1265

"Why do the sugar molecules in DNA and RNA twist to the right in all known organisms? Similarly, all of the amino acids from which proteins are formed twist to the left. The reason these molecules have such uniform handedness, or ‘chirality,’ is not known, but there is no shortage of theories on the subject. And, as was clear at a recent meeting on the topic in Los Angeles, there is also no shortage of passion, which is understandable, because the question of homochirality speaks to the mother of all scientific mysteries: the origin of life."

p. 1265

"The meeting participants did agree on one thing: Homochirality—the total predominance of one chiral form, or ‘enantiomer’—is necessary for present-day life because the cellular machinery that has evolved to keep organisms alive and replicating, from microorganisms to humans, is built around the fact that genetic material veers right and amino acids veer left."

p. 1265

"One division came over a question that resembles the chicken-or-the-egg riddle: What came first, homochirality or life? Organic chemist William Bonner, professor emeritus at Stanford University, argued that homochirality must have preceded life."

p. 1265

"Bonner argued that homochirality is essential for life because without it, genetic material could not copy itself. Specifically, studies have shown that the two complementary strands of genetic material that make up DNA cannot bind with each other if they are in a ‘racemic’ mixture, a state in which there is an equilibrium of left-handed and right-handed enantiomers."

Weakness:  Pathways of Evolutionary Development in Chemical Origin of Life Remain Unexplained and Even Unimaginable!

Dyson, Freeman, "Honoring Dirac," Science, vol. 185 (September 27, 1974), pp. 1160-1161. Dyson was at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

p. 1161

"The problems of reconstructing possible pathways of prebiotic evolution in the absence of any kind of fossil evidence are indeed formidable. Successful attack on these problems will require, on the one hand, the boldness to imagine and create new concepts describing the organization of not-yet-living populations of molecules and, on the other hand, the humility to learn the hard way, by laborious experiment, which molecular pathways are consistent with the stubborn facts of chemistry. We are still at the very beginning of the quest for understanding of the origin of life. We do not yet have even a rough picture of the nature of the obstacles that prebiotic evolution has had to overcome. We do not have a well-defined set of criteria by which to judge whether any given theory of the origin of life is adequate."

Weakness - There is No Evidence of Gradualistic Evolution

Gould, Stephen Jay, "An Early Start," Natural History, vol. 87 (February 1978), pp. 10-24.

p. 10

"Early in November, an announcement of the discovery of some fossil prokaryotes from South Africa pushed the antiquity of life back to 3.4 billion years."

p. 10

"If true monerans were alive 3.4 billion years ago, then the common ancestor of monerans and … ‘methanogens’ must be considerably more ancient. Since the oldest dated rocks, the Isua Supracrustals of West Greenland, are 3.8 billion years old, we are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the earth’s surface and the origin of life."

p. 24

"Life apparently arose about as soon as the earth became cool enough to support it."

p. 24

"Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history."

p. 24

"The history of life, as I read it, is a series of long stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and set up the next stable era…. My favorite metaphor is a world of occasional pulses, driving recalcitrant systems from one stable state to the next."

Weakness - Fossil Record Gaps!

Martin, Robert D., "Primate origins:  plugging the gaps", Nature, Vol 363, 20 May 1993. , p 225.

"The fossil record of primate evolution is obviously incomplete, despite major continuing achievements by field paleontologists.  But how large are the gaps?  Do we merely need to bridge over a few spaces here and there, or are there in fact yawning chasms?  Our effectiveness in sampling past primate species has major implications for interpretations of primate evolution based on the known fossil record...."

Martin goes on to discuss that with primates, only 3.8% of assumed species in the last 65 million years have been found!  When only 'modern' primates are examined, the number drops to 3.4% !

p. 233

It is clear that there are still many uncertainties regarding the course and timing of early primate evolution...Limited sampling of the fossil record, combined with the fragmentary nature of most of the fossils concerned, also explains why interpretations of primate evolution have been subject to repeated, often extensive revision.  In the face of major gaps in the fossil record, far-reaching interpretation of fragmentary fossil remains can easily lead to misinterpretation of phylogenetic relationships.

(For more info from this article, including a graphic depicting the low sample rate, see the Oct 3, 2003 newsletter here.)

Weakness - Facts Do Not Support Evolutionary Development of Cells!

Green, David E., and Robert F. Goldberger, Molecular Insights into the Living Process (New York: Academic Press, 1967), 420 pp.

p. 403

"The popular conception of primitive cells as the starting point for the origin of the species is really erroneous. There was nothing functionally primitive about such cells. They contained basically the same biochemical equipment as do their modern counterparts.

"How, then, did the precursor cell arise? The only unequivocal rejoinder to this question is that we do not know."

pp. 406-7

"Although seven steps are shown, leading from atoms to ecosystems, there is one step that far outweighs the others in enormity: the step from macromolecules to cells. All the others can be accounted for on theoretical grounds—if not correctly, at least elegantly. However, the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet."

Weakness - How did the Genetic Code Arise?

Haskins, Caryl P., "Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970," American Scientist, vol. 59 (May/June 1971), p. 298-307.

p. 305

"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier than that, how life itself originated on earth remain for the future to resolve, though dim and narrow pencils of illumination already play over them. The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery…. Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation."

Weakness:  Molecules to Cells Not Explainable

Hofstadter, Douglas R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 777 pp.

p. 548

"A natural and fundamental question to ask on learning of these incredibly interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: ‘How did they ever get started in the first place?’ It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages—but a bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond one’s power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. They all run aground on this most central of all central questions: ‘How did the Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosomes and RNA molecules), originate?’ For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer. And perhaps, experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer—at least for a while."

Weakness:  DNA/RNA/Enzymes/Catalysts Can't Be Made Even in the Lab - Much Less in a Hostile Pre-biotic "Soup"

Horgan, John, "In the Beginning," Scientific American, vol. 264 (February 1991), pp. 117-125.

p. 118

"None of these approaches has gained enough support to qualify as a new paradigm. On the other hand, none has been ruled out. That bothers Miller who is known as both a rigorous experimentalist and a bit of a curmudgeon. Some theories, he asserts, do not merit serious attention. He calls the organic-matter-from-space concept ‘a loser,’ the vent hypothesis ‘garbage’ and the pyrite theory ‘paper chemistry.’ Such work, he grumbles, perpetuates the reputation of the origin-of-life field as being on the fringe of science and not worthy of serious pursuit."

p. 119

"DNA cannot do its work, including forming more DNA, without the help of catalytic proteins, or enzymes. In short, proteins cannot form without DNA, but neither can DNA form without proteins."

p. 119

"But as researchers continue to examine the RNA-world concept closely, more problems emerge. How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones."

p. 125

"About a decade ago Orgel and Crick managed to provoke the public and their colleagues by speculating that the seeds of life were sent to the earth in a spaceship by intelligent beings living on another planet. Orgel says the proposal, which is known as directed panspermia, was ‘sort of a joke.’"

p. 125

"Miller, who after almost four decades is still in hard pursuit of life’s biggest secret, agrees that the field needs a dramatic finding to constrain the rampant speculation."

p. 125

"Does he ever entertain the possibility that genesis was a miracle not reproducible by mere humans? Not at all, Miller replies. ‘I think we just haven’t learned the right tricks yet,’ he says."

Weakness:  Genetic Code Origin as Obscure as Origin of Life Itself

Maddox, John, "The Genesis Code by Numbers," Nature, vol. 367 (January 13, 1994), p. 111.

"It was already clear that the genetic code is not merely an abstraction but the embodiment of life’s mechanisms; the consecutive triplets of nucleotides in DNA (called codons) are inherited but they also guide the construction of proteins.

"So it is disappointing that the origin of the genetic code is still as obscure as the origin of life itself."

Weakness:  Evolution Doesn't Explain The Origin of INFORMATION in the Genetic Code!

Morowitz, Harold J., "The Six Million-Dollar Man," Science News (July 31, 1976), p. 73.

"High school textbooks used to make a big point about the materials that make up the human body being worth about 97 cents. Yale molecular biologist, Harold J. Morowitz … got out a biochemical company’s catalog and added up the cost of the synthesized materials, such as hemoglobin … and came up with … a six million-dollar man ($6,000,015.44) to be exact).

"Professor Morowitz’s calculations … drive home a more important point, however—that ‘information is more expensive than matter.’ What the biochemical companies offer is simply the highest ‘informational’ (most organized) state of materials commercially available. And even these are mostly taken from living animals; if synthesis of all the compounds offered had been done from basic elements, their cost might be as high as $6 billion.

"The logical extreme of the exercise, obviously, is that science is nowhere near getting close to synthesizing a human. Just to take the next step of organization—the organelle level—would cost perhaps $6 trillion."

Weakness:  Almost Every Major Step of Evolution is Unknown!

Scott, Andrew, "Update on Genesis," New Scientist, vol. 106 (May 2, 1985), pp. 30-33.

p. 30

"Take some matter, heat while stirring and wait. That is the modern version of Genesis. The ‘fundamental’ forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are presumed to have done the rest…. But how much of this neat tale is firmly established, and how much remains hopeful speculation? In truth, the mechanism of almost every major step, from chemical precursors up to the first recognizable cells, is the subject of either controversy or complete bewilderment."

p. 31

"We are grappling with a classic ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma. Nucleic acids are required to make proteins, whereas proteins are needed to make nucleic acids and also to allow them to direct the process of protein manufacture itself."

p. 32

"The emergence of the gene-protein link, an absolutely vital stage on the way up from lifeless atoms to ourselves, is still shrouded in almost complete mystery."

p. 33

"In their more public pronouncements, researchers interested in the origin of life sometimes behave a bit like the creationist opponents they so despise—glossing over the great mysteries that remain unsolved and pretending they have firm answers that they have not really got…. We still know very little about how our genesis came about, and to provide a more satisfactory account than we have at present remains one of science’s great challenges."

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation!

Anonymous, "Hoyle on Evolution," Nature, vol. 294 (November 12, 1981), p. 105.

"The essence of his argument last week was that the information content of the higher forms of life is represented by the number 1040,000— representing the specificity with which some 2000 genes, each of which might be chosen from 1020 nucleotide sequences of the appropriate length, might be defined. Evolutionary processes would, Hoyle said, require several Hubble times to yield such a result. The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that ‘a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.’

"Of adherents of biological evolution, Hoyle said he was at a loss to understand ‘biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.’"

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation - Part 2!

Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 192 pp.

p. 51-2

"If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?

"This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros.

"… Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense…. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time."

p. 88

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation - Part 3!

Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, Ltd., 1985), 368 pp.

p. 324

"Even today we have no way of rigorously estimating the probability or degree of isolation of even one functional protein. It is surely a little premature to claim that random processes could have assembled mosquitoes and elephants when we still have to determine the actual probability of the discovery by chance of one single functional protein molecule."

p. 329-30

"Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid."

p. 330

"Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. Numbers in the order of 1015 are of course completely beyond comprehension. Imagine an area about half the size of the USA (one million square miles) covered in a forest of trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile. If each tree contained one hundred thousand leaves the total number of leaves in the forest would be 1015, equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain."

p. 334

"The capacity of DNA to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system; it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G. G. Simpson of approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written."

p. 342

"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy.

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation - Part 4!

Erbrich, Paul. "On the Probability of the Emergence of a Protein with a Particular Function," Acta Biotheoretica, vol. 34 (1985), pp. 53-80.

p. 77

"Why then does the scientific theory of evolution hold on to the concept of chance to the degree it does? I suspect it is the fact that there is no alternative whatsoever which could explain the fact of universal evolution, at least in principle, and be formulated within the framework of natural science. If no alternative should be forthcoming, if chance remains overtaxed, then the conclusion seems inevitable that evolution and therefore living beings cannot be grasped by natural science to the same extent as non-living things—not because organisms are so complex, but because the explaining mechanism is fundamentally inadequate."

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation - Part 5!

Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, "Where Microbes Boldly Went," New Scientist, vol. 91 (August 13, 1991), pp. 412-415.

p. 415

"Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the Earth. It is easy to show that the two thousand or so enzymes that span the whole of life could not have evolved on the Earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be less than 1 in 1040,000."

Weakness:  Statistical Absurdity of Random Information Formation - Part 6!

Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 176 pp.

p. 148

"No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."

"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it…. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

 

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