http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1684380/posts


Survival of the fakest



Catholic Education Resource Center ^ | Jonathon Wells


Posted on 08/15/2006 6:36:54 PM PDT by xzins



JONATHAN WELLS

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1684380/posts


Survival of the fakest



Catholic Education Resource Center ^ | Jonathon Wells


Posted on 08/15/2006 6:36:54 PM PDT by xzins



JONATHAN WELLS

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 with actual embryos

Catholic Education Resource Center

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1684380/posts


Survival of the fakest



Catholic Education Resource Center ^ | Jonathon Wells


Posted on 08/15/2006 6:36:54 PM PDT by xzins

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1684380/posts


Survival of the fakest



Catholic Education Resource Center ^ | Jonathon Wells


Posted on 08/15/2006 6:36:54 PM PDT by xzins



JONATHAN WELLS

Science now knows that many of the pillars of Darwinian theory are
either false or misleading. Yet biology texts continue to present them
as factual evidence of evolution. What does this imply about their
scientific standards?




If 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. One might find tiny errors,
of course, typos and misprints. And science is always discovering new
things. But I believed - took it as a given - that my science
textbooks represented the best scientific knowledge available at that
time.

It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and development
biology, however, that I noticed what at first I took to be a strange
anomaly. 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. Indeed, the drawings did appear very similar. But I'd been
studying embryos for some time, looking at them under a microscope. And
I knew that the drawings were just plain wrong.

I re-checked all my other textbooks. They all had similar drawings, and
they were all obviously wrong. Not only did they distort the embryos
they pictured; they omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look
very different from one another.

Like most other science students, like most scientists themselves, I
let it pass. 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. 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 with actual embryos. 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."

Worse, this was no recent fraud. Nor was its discovery recent. 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. But none
of them, apparently, have seen fit to correct this almost ubiquitous
misinformation.



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. My search revealed a startling fact however:
Far from being exceptions, such blatant misrepresentations are more
often the rule. In my recent book I call them "Icons of Evolution,"
because so many of them are represented by classic oftrepeated
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.

We all remember them from biology class: the experiment that created
the "building blocks of life" in a tube; the evolutionary "tree,"
rooted in the primordial slime and branching out into animal and plant
life. 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. And,
of course, the Haeckel embryos.

As it happens, all of these examples, as well as many others
purportedly standing as evidence of evolution, turn out to be
incorrect. Not just slightly off. Not just slightly mistaken. On the
subject of Darwinian evolution, the texts contained massive distortions
and even some faked evidence. Nor are we only talking about high-school
textbooks that some might excuse (but shouldn't) for adhering to a
lower standard. 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, coauthored by the president of the National Academy of
Sciences, Bruce Alberts. 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.



Life in a Bottle

Anyone old enough in 1953 to understand the import of the news
remembers how shocking, and to many, exhilarating, it was. Scientists
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey had succeeded in creating "the building
blocks" of life in a flask. 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. As amino acids are the "building blocks" of life, it was thought
just a matter of time before scientists could themselves create living
organisms.

At the time, it appeared a dramatic confirmation of evolutionary
theory. Life wasn't a "miracle." No outside agency or divine
intelligence was necessary. Put the right gasses together, add
electricity, and life is bound to happen. It's a common event. Carl
Sagan could thus confidently predict on PBS that the planets orbiting
those "billlllions and billlllions" of stars out there must be just
teeming with life.

There were problems, however. Scientists were never able to get beyond
the simplest amino acids in their simulated primordial environment, and
the creation of proteins began to seem not a small step or couple of
steps, but a great, perhaps impassable, divide.

The telling blow to the Miller-Urey experiment, however, came in the
1970's, when scientists began to conclude that the Earth's early
atmosphere was nothing like the mixture of gasses used by Miller and
Urey. Instead of being what scientists call a "reducing," or
hydrogen-rich environment, the Earth's early atmosphere probably
consisted of gasses released by volcanoes. Today there is a near
consensus among geochemists on this point. But put those volcanic
gasses in the Miller-Urey apparatus, and the experiment doesn't work
- in other words, no "building blocks" of life.

What do textbooks do with this inconvenient fact? By and large, 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. This includes the above-mentioned Molecular Biology
of the Cell, co-authored by the National Academy of Sciences president,
Bruce Alberts. 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.



Darwin thought "by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of"
his theory came from embryology. Darwin was not an embryologist,
however, so he relied on the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel,
who produced drawings of embryos from various classes of vertebrates to
show that they are virtually identical in their earliest stages, and
become noticeably different only as they develop. It was this pattern
that Darwin found so convincing.

This may be the most egregious of distortions, since biologists have
known for over a century that vertebrate embryos never look as similar
as Haeckel drew them. In some cases, Haeckel used the same woodcut to
print embryos that were supposedly from different classes. In others,
he doctored his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than
they really were. Haeckel's contemporaries repeatedly criticized him
for these misrepresentations, and charges of fraud abounded in his
lifetime. In 1997, British embryologist Michael Richardson and an
international team of experts compared Haeckel's drawings with
photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclusively
that the drawings misrepresent the truth.

The drawings are misleading in another way. Darwin based his inference
of common ancestry on the belief that the earliest stages of embryo
development are the most similar. Haeckel's drawings, however, entirely
omit the earliest stages, which are much different, and start at a more
similar midway point. 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."

Yet some version of Haeckel's drawings can be found in most current
biology textbooks. 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." (I will return below to the question of why it is
only now that Mr. Gould, who has known of these forgeries for decades,
has decided to bring them to widespread attention.)



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. 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."

No one doubts, of course, that a certain amount of descent with
modification occurs within species. 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.

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.
Unfortunately, despite official pronouncements, this prediction has in
some important respects turned out to be wrong.

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. Darwin knew this, and considered it a
serious objection to his theory. But he attributed it to the
imperfection of the fossil record, and he thought that future research
would supply the missing ancestors.

But a century and a half of continued fossil collecting has only
aggravated the problem. Instead of slight differences appearing first,
then greater differences emerging later, the greatest differences
appear right at the start. Some fossil experts describe this as
"top-down evolution," and note that it contradicts the "bottom-up"
pattern predicted by Darwin's theory. Yet most current biology
textbooks don't even mention the Cambrian explosion, much less point
out the challenge it poses for Darwinian evolution.

Then came the evidence from molecular biology. Biologists in the 1970's
began testing Darwin's branchingtree pattern by comparing molecules in
various species. The more similar the molecules in two different
species are, the more closely related they are presumed to be. At first
this approach seemed to confirm Darwin's tree of life. But as
scientists compared more and more molecules, they found that different
molecules yield conflicting results. The branching-tree pattern
inferred from one molecule often contradicts the pattern obtained from
another. Canadian molecular biologist W. Ford Doolittle doesn't think
the problem will go away. 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."
Nevertheless, biology textbooks continue to assure students that
Darwin's Tree of Life is a scientific fact overwhelmingly confirmed by
evidence. Judging from the real fossil and molecular evidence, however,
it is an unsubstantiated hypothesis masquerading as a fact.



Most introductory biology textbooks carry drawings of vertebrate limbs
showing similarities in their bone structures. 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. 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.

Darwin's followers rely on homologies to arrange fossils in branching
trees that supposedly show ancestordescendant relationships. In his
1990 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."

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. They, like all automobiles, are designed by people
working for auto companies. In other words, an outside intelligence. So
although Berra believed he was supporting Darwinian evolution rather
than the pre-Darwinian explanation, he unwittingly showed that the
fossil evidence is compatible with either. Law professor (and critic of
Darwinism) Phillip E. Johnson dubbed this : "Berra's Blunder."

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. Darwinian biologists have proposed two
mechanisms: developmental pathways and genetic programs. According to
the first, homologous features arise from similar cells and processes
in the embryo; according to the second, homologous features are
programmed by similar genes.

But biologists have known for a hundred years that homologous
structures are often not produced by similar developmental pathways.
And they have known for thirty years that they are often not produced
by similar genes, either. So there is no empirically demonstrated
mechanism to establish that homologies are due to common ancestry
rather than common design.

Without a mechanism, modern Darwinists have simply defined homology to
mean similarity due to common ancestry. 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."

This is a classic case of circular reasoning. Darwin saw evolution as a
theory, and homology as its evidence. Darwin's followers assume
evolution is independently established, and homology is its result. 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.

Philosophers of biology have been criticizing this approach for
decades. 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. 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. Dogmatic endeavors of
this kind must eventually leave the realm of science." So how do the
textbooks treat this controversy? Once again, they ignore it. 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. And they call this "science."


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. The best he could
do in The Origin of Species was give "one or two imaginary
illustrations."

In the 1950's, however, British physician Bernard Kettlewell provided
what seemed to be conclusive evidence of natural selection. During the
previous century, peppered moths in England had gone from being
predominantly light-colored to being predominantly dark-colored. 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.

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. As
expected, birds ate more light moths in the polluted woodland, and more
dark moths in the unpolluted one. In an article written for Scientific
American, Kettlewell called this "Darwin's missing evidence." 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.

In the 1980's, however, researchers discovered evidence that the
official story was flawed - including the pertinent fact that
peppered moths don't normally rest on tree trunks. Instead, they fly by
night and apparently hide under upper branches during the day. By
releasing moths onto nearby tree trunks in daylight, Kettlewell had
created an artificial situation that does not exist in nature. Many
biologists now consider his results invalid, and some even question
whether natural selection was responsible for the observed changes.

So where did all those textbook photos of peppered moths on tree trunks
come from? They were all staged. To expedite things, some photographers
even glued dead moths to trees. Of course, the people who staged them
before the 1980's thought they were accurately representing the true
situation, but we now know they were mistaken. Yet a glance at almost
any current biology textbook reveals that they are all still being used
as evidence for natural selection.

In 1999, a Canadian textbook-writer justified the practice: "You have
to look at the audience. How convoluted do you want to make it for a
first time learner?" Bob Ritter was quoted as saying in the April 1999
Alberta Report Newsmagazine. High school students "are still very
concrete in the way they learn," continued Ritter. "We want to get
across the idea of selective adaptation. Later on, they can look at the
work critically."

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. His experience illustrates how
insidious the icons of evolution really are, since they mislead experts
as well as novices.


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. Beagle . When the Beagle visited the Galapagos Islands in
1835, Darwin collected specimens of the local wildlife, including some
finches.

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. In the 1970'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 hard-tocrack seeds. The change, though
significant, was small; yet some Darwinists claim it explains how finch
species originated in the first place.

A 1999 booklet published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
describes Darwin's finches as "a particularly compelling example" of
the origin of species. The booklet cites the Grants' work, and explains
how "a single year of drought on the islands can drive evolutionary
changes in the finches." The booklet also calculates that "if droughts
occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch
might arise in only about 200 years."

But the booklet fails to point out that the finches' beaks returned to
normal after the rains returned. No net evolution occurred. In fact,
several finch species now appear to be merging through hybridization,
rather than diverging through natural selection as Darwin's theory
requires.

Withholding evidence in order to give the impression that Darwin's
finches confirm evolutionary theory borders on scientific misconduct.
According to Harvard biologist Louis Guenin (writing in Nature in
1999), U.S. securities laws provide "our richest source of experiential
guidance" in defining what constitutes scientific misconduct. 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. As Berkeley law
professor Phillip E. Johnson wrote in The Wall 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."

From Apes to Humans

Darwin's theory really comes into its own when it is applied to human
origins. While he scarcely mentioned the topic in The Origin of
Species, Darwin later wrote extensively about it in The Descent of Man.
"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 religion. 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."

Of course, the awareness that the human body is part of nature was
around long before Darwin. But Darwin was claiming much more. Like
materialistic philosophers since ancient Greece, Darwin believed that
human beings are nothing more than animals.

Darwin, however, needed evidence to confirm his conjecture. Although
Neanderthals had already been found, they were not then considered
ancestral to humans, so Darwin had no fossil evidence for his view. It
wasn't until 1912 that amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson announced
that he had found what Darwinists were looking for, in a gravel pit at
Piltdown, England.

Dawson had found part of a human skull and part of an apelike lower jaw
with two teeth. 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. 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. Piltdown Man was a
forgery.

Most modern biology textbooks do not even mention Piltdown. When
critics of Darwinism bring it up, they are usually told that the
incident merely proves that science is self-correcting. And so it was,
in this case - though the correction took over forty years. 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.

The same subjectivity that prepared the way for Piltdown continues to
plague human-origins research. 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 pre-existing narrative structures." In 1996,
American Museum of Natural History Curator Ian Tattersall acknowledged
that "in paleoanthropology, the patterns we perceive are as likely to
result from our unconscious mindsets as from the evidence itself."
Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark echoed this view
in 1997 when he wrote: "We select among alternative sets of research
conclusions in accordance with our biases and preconceptions." Clark
suggested that "paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of
science."

Biology students and the general public are rarely informed of the
deep-seated uncertainty about human origins that is reflected in these
statements by scientific experts. Instead, they are simply fed the
latest speculation as though it were a fact. And the speculation is
typically illustrated with fanciful drawings of cave men, or pictures
of human actors wearing heavy make-up.



What's Going on Here?

Most of us assume that what we hear from scientists is comparatively
trustworthy. Politicians might distort or shave the truth to support a
preconceived agenda, but scientists, we are told, deal with facts. Sure
they might sometimes get it wrong, but the beauty of science is that
it's empirically testable. If a theory is wrong, this will be
discovered by other scientists performing independent experiments
either to replicate or disprove their results. In this way the data are
constantly reviewed and hypotheses become widely accepted theories. So
how do we explain such a pervasive and long-standing distortion of the
specific facts used to support evolutionary theory?

Perhaps Darwinian evolution has taken on a significance in our culture
that has little 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 allow room for
dissent in the standard teaching of evolution (much of which, as we
have just seen, is plain wrong).

According to the news media, only religious fundamentalists question
Darwinian evolution. People who criticize Darwinism, we are told, want
to bomb science back to the Stone Age and replace it with the Bible.
The growing body of scientific evidence contradicting Darwinian claims
is steadfastly ignored. When biochemist Michael Behe 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.

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. Behe is a molecular
biologist whose scientific work has convinced him that Darwinian theory
doesn't conform to observation and experimental evidence. Why does
Gould, who knows Haeckel's drawings were faked, dismiss Behe as a
creationist for criticizing them?

I suspect that there's an agenda other than pure science at work here.
My evidence is the more or less explicit materialist message woven into
many textbook accounts. Futuyma's Evolutionary 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." One textbook quotes Gould, who openly declares that
humans are not created, but are merely fortuitous twigs on a
"contingent" (i.e. accidental) tree of life. 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."

These are obviously philosophical rather than scientific views.
Futuyma, Gould, and Dawkins have a right to their philosophy. But they
do not have the right to teach it as though it were science. In
science, all theories - including Darwinian evolution - must be
tested against the evidence.

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? The misrepresentations and
omissions I've examined here are just a small sampling. There are many
more. For too long the debate about evolution has assumed "facts" that
aren't true. It's time to clear away the lies that obstruct popular
discussion of evolution, and insist that theories conform to the
evidence. In other words, it's time to do science as it's supposed to
be done.