The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.

J C wrote: »

... by extrapolating from the number who privately confess their doubts to me.:)

J C wrote: »

They are not just privately telling me ... but many are expressing their doubts openly and publicly:-

Here are just a few quotes openly expressing doubts about both Darwin and Spontaneous Evolution ... and there are literally thousands more of them:-:)

Barry Gale Science Historian at Darwin College, Cambridge University

"Though often brilliantly and ingeniously composed, his (Darwin's) argument was based, in many instances, on new and often unsubstantiated hypotheses, sometimes fuzzy analogies and metaphors, the repudiation of competing explanations, and a frequent plea to complexity and general ignorance, rather than compelling, clearly incontrovertible evidence in its own support; and it is clear that Darwin knew this." Evolution Without Evidence (1982) p.101

Henry Gee (b. 1962) Senior Editor of Nature

"The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent." In Search of Deep Time (2001) p. 23

"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story -- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific." In Search of Deep Time (2001) p.116-7

"All the evidence for the hominid lineage between about 10 and 5 million years ago -- several thousand generations of living creatures -- can be fitted into a small box." In Search of Deep Time (2001) p.202

In the place of traditional biology, Gee offers the field of cladistics, "a way of looking at the world in terms of the pattern that evolution creates, rather than the process that creates the pattern."

"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether." Nature July 12 2001 p. 131

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) Former Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. Ask anyone to name the most familiar of all evolutionary series and you will almost surely receive, as an answer: horses, of course...Modern horses are not only depleted relative to horses of the past; on a larger scale, all major lineages of the Perissodactyla (the larger mammalian group that includes horses) are pitiful remnants of former copious success. Modern horses, in other words, are failures within a failure -- about the worst possible exemplars of evolutionary progress, whatever such a term might mean." Full House (1996) p. 57-71

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?” Paleobiology January 1980 p.127

"Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study." The Panda's Thumb 1980 pp.180-2

... and here are further words of wisdom ... and scientific authority on the complex functional specificity of genetic information from a former Atheist and Evolutionist:-
John C Sanford (b.1950)

"Most DNA sequences are poly-functional and so must also be poly-constrained. This means that DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained). For example, imagine a sentence which has a very specific message in its normal form but with an equally coherent message when read backwards. Now let's suppose that it also has a third message when reading every other letter, and a forth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained. We know that misspellings in a normal sentence will not normally improve the message, but at least this would be possible. However, a poly-constrained message is fascinating, in that it cannot be improved. It can only degenerate. Any misspellings which might possible improve the normal sentence will be disruptive to the other levels of information. Any change at all will diminish total information with absolute certainty.

There is abundant evidence that most DNA sequences are poly-functional, and are, therefore, poly-constrained. This fact has been extensively demonstrated by Trifonov (1989). For example, most human coding sequences encode for two different RNAs that read in opposite directions (i.e., both DNA strands are transcribed Yelin et al., 2003). Some sequences encode for different proteins, depending on where translation is initiated and where the reading frame begins (i.e., read-through proteins). Some sequences encode for different proteins based upon alternate mRNA splicing. Some sequences serve multiple functions simultaneously (i.e., as a protein-coding sequence and as an internal transcriptional promoter). Some sequences encode for both a protein coding region and a protein-binding region. All elements and origins of replication can be found within functional promoters and within exons. Basically all DNA sequences are constrained by isochore requirements (regional GC content), “word” content (species-specific profiles of di-, tri- and tetra-nucleotide frequencies), and nucleosome binding sites (because all DNA must condense). Selective condensation is clearly implicated in gene regulation and selective nucleosome binding is controlled by specific DNA sequence patterns that must permeate the entire genome. Lastly, probably all sequences also affect general spacing and DNA folding/architecture, which is clearly sequence dependent. To explain the incredible amount of information which must somehow be packed into the genome (given the extreme complexity of life), we really have to assume that there are even higher levels of organization and information encrypted within the genome. For example, we know there is another whole level of organization at the epigenetic level (Gibbs, 2003). There also appears to be extensive, sequence-dependent, three-dimensional organization within chromosomes and with the whole nucleus (Manuelidis, 1990; Gardiner, 1995; Flam, 1994). Trifonov (1989) has shown that probably all DNA sequences in the genome encrypt multiple codes (up to 12)." Genetic Entropy 2008 p.131-2

"The poly-constrained nature of DNA serves as strong evidence that higher genomes cannot evolve via mutation/selection except on a trivial level. " Genetic Entropy 2008 p.133