The creationoids will have a ball with this.
Well of course they will! This is indisputable proof that the entire work "supporting" the so-called "theory" of evolution is all a lie; it's nothing but a sham aimed at destroying our faith in God and turning us into Nazis/Communists/heathens/barbarians/homosexuals.
Why look at the facts when you can point to one case of fraud?
Yawn. Just add it to the list, which is already very long.
One does not need to be a creationist to have deep reservations about the "just so stories" that pepper the basically unfalsifiable patchwork of mythologies that go under the name of darwinism. Add to these all of the long discredited "icons" that still appear in biology texts, and one needs a lot of faith to continue to take this theory as a given.
http://www.alienryderflex.com/evolution/IconsOfEvolution.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895262002/qid=1108847002/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9066210-1931033 Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong
by Jonathan Wells, Jody F. Sjogren
The author retraces the reasoning of proponents of evolution from Darwin to the present to show what he sees as their empirically false, and frequently faked conclusions. He contends that these conclusions are presented to the public so many times and in so many ways that they become irrefutable "icons." The information conveyed by these icons is never questioned and is in fact promoted with tax dollars in many contexts. Wells is a postdoctoral biologist (with Ph.D.s from both Yale and the U. of California at Berkeley) who is currently affiliated with the Discovery Institute, Seattle, Washington)
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/072197-2.shtml EVOLUTION Posted on July 21, 1997
Some people have asked why I'm less persuaded these days by natural selection as the driving force behind evolution. The short answer is that the evidence for its being so just isn't there, and the numbers don't work: even with the age of the Earth stretched to the maximum that can be postulated to give natural selection a chance, it just hasn't got the innovative power to produce the things we see. The main reason for continuing to cling to it, it seems to me, is at root just as "religious" as literal Biblical fundamentalism: It's the only explanation that the mechanistic/materialist school has to offer.
The only one, that is, while it persists with its dogma of gradualist uniformatarianism--i.e. that the only processes permissible to think about as operating in the past are those observed today.
But the Catastrophist view, which seems to be regaining respectability after being overruled in the 19th century, avoids the extremism of both camps. Its basic tenet is that the diversity of life originated rapidly in a series of massive, cataclysmic events occurring on a global scale--for which abundant evidence exists, but is ignored. Natural selection comes into play afterward, winnowing out the less fit and reducing overall diversity, which is again what the fossil record shows. This would explain why the profusions of expected ancestral and transitional forms don't seem to be there. And what is the mechanism that generates all this variety? That's the unacceptable part: the answer just at the present seems to be, nobody really knows.
EVOLUTION Posted on May 9, 1997
Several people have responded to my comment in the last BB about being less persuaded by orthodox Darwinian evolution than I was when I wrote THE REVEALED WORD OF GOD, included in MM&E, and asked if it means I'm a Creationist. No, it doesn't--there seems little doubt that life in the past was different from life these days, so evolution of some kind evidently happens. But I'm no longer convinced that natural selection accounts for it. No doubt selection happens and has its effects, but, it seems, marginally. Wind and water might shape the surface details of landscapes, but deeper processes are necessary to explain mountain building and continent moving. An astounding book that goes into a whole science of ways in which complex systems can spontaneously order themselves and remain stable, not through selection but in spite of it, is Stuart A. Kauffman's THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (709 pp., Oxford University Press, New York, 1993).
Having said that, I ought to add that I don't have any problem with Creationism--as I see it properly defined. Scientists and much of the media treat the term as synonymous with "Biblical literalist," a needlessly narrow sense, seemingly adopted for the sole purpose of setting it up to be attacked. A broader view would see it simply as not ruling out the possibility of some kind of guiding intelligence at work behind the complexities that we see, which is not at all incompatible with creation over an extended time, i.e. evolution. Excluding it on principle seems every bit as dogmatic to me as anything the other side is accused of. The spirit of true science is simply to follow the evidence wherever it leads, not select and twist it to fit any preconceived notions. Isaac Newton didn't have any difficulty reconciling his religion with his science. You couldn't ask for a better precedent than that.
Two books that started me rethinking my ideas on the subject were:
Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, by Michael Denton (Adler & Adler, 1986)
Darwin On Trial, by Phillip E. Johnson (Regnery Gateway, 1991)
Phil Johnson is a law professor at Berkeley. What, one might ask, are the credentials of someone like that to judge a subject of science? Well, when it comes to examining the evidence, assumptions, and logic of the case being argued, quite a lot.
If I could quote Wm. F. Buckley, as he referred to statements made by former Justice William O. Douglas: "If false analogies were horses, sententious idiots might ride