"The Darwinian theory of evolution is the phlogiston of our day, festooned with a myriad and growing number of patches. Evolution is slow and gradual, except when it’s fast. It is dynamic and creates huge changes over time, except when it keeps everything the same for millions of years. It explains both extreme complexity and elegant simplicity. It tells us how birds learned to fly and how some lost that ability. Evolution made cheetahs fast and turtles slow. Some creatures it made big and others small; some gloriously beautiful, and some boringly grey. It forced fish to walk and walking animals to return to the sea. It diverges except when it converges; it produces exquisitely fine-tuned designs except when it produces junk. Evolution is random and without direction except when it moves toward a target. Life under evolution is a cruel battlefield except when it demonstrates altruism. Evolution explains virtues and vice, love and hate, religion and atheism. And it does all this with a growing number of ancillary hypotheses. Modern evolutionary theory is the Rube Goldberg of theoretical constructs. And what is the result of all this speculative ingenuity? Like the defunct theory of phlogiston, it explains everything without explaining anything well. (pp 198-199)"
Matt Leisola, Finnish Research Biologist who lost his faith in evolution.
Just an example of faith overwhellming reason. Being human, it can happen.
Yes. The theory is held essentially on the basis of faith.
Wrong. That is the creationist claim.
A very small percentage of qualified people who hold to the idea of intelligent design do on the basis of incredulity, not evidence.
Matt Leisola is a poster boy of intelligent design, a belief that was put to trial with both side presenting their evidence and arguments, but Intelligent design failed to make the grade.
''A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism is a petition publicized in 2001 by the Discovery Institute, a creationist "think" tank, which attempts to push creationism, in the guise of Intelligent design, into public schools in the United States.[2] The petition expresses denial about the ability of genetic drift and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. It also demands that there should be a more careful examination of Darwinism. The petition was signed by about 700 individuals, with a wide variety of scientific and non-scientific backgrounds when first published. It now contains 984 signatures.[3]
The Dissent is reminiscent of the 1931 anti-relativity book, Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein),[4] which only included one physicist, and can be seen now as "a dying cry from the old guard of science" based primarily on philosophical objections.[1]
The petition states that:
We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. There is scientific dissent from Darwinism. It deserves to be heard.
The petition continues to be used in Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns in an attempt to discredit evolution and bolster claims that intelligent design is scientifically valid by claiming that evolution lacks broad scientific support. However, the language of the statement is misleading. It frames the argument in a way that anyone could agree with it. So long as they don't know the Discovery Institute's true motivations (which is to undermine evolution using deceit and trickery, not to show any kind of genuine fallibility with it), anyone who is open to the idea of scientific inquiry would agree that they should be skeptical of everything, including evolution. If only the writers of the statement (i.e. creationists) were skeptical of their own ideas, which they clearly aren't.
The petition is considered a fallacious Appeal to authority, whereby the creationists at the Discovery Institute are attempting to prove that there is a dissent from "Darwinism" by finding a few creationist scientists to support the statement. The roughly 700 dissenters who originally signed the petition would have represented about 0.063% of the estimated 1,108,100 biological and geological scientists in the US in 1999, except, of course, that three-quarters of the signatories had no academic background in biology.[5][6] (The roughly 150 biologist Darwin Dissenters would hence represent about 0.013% of the US biologists that existed in 1999.) As of 2006, the list was expanded to include non-US scientists. However, the list nonetheless represents less than 0.03% of all research scientists in the world.[7] Despite the increase in absolute number of scientists willing to sign the dissent form, the figures indicate the support from scientists for creationism and intelligent design is steadily decreasing.
Since scientific principles are built on publications in peer-reviewed journals, discussion in open forums, and finally through consensus, the use of a petition should be considered the last resort of a pseudoscience rather than a legitimate scientific dissent from the prevailing consensus.''
