Alleged scientific opposition to evolution

The most spectacular recent example is a 2007 supplemental textbook for high-school biology classes, misleadingly entitled Explore Evolution: the Arguments for and Against Neo-Darwinism. The book is produced by the Discovery Institute, authored by a collection of prominent ‘intelligent design’ proponents who are actually a collection of young-earth and old-earth creationists committed to Biblical inerrancy, and published by a creationist so strict that he still believes in species fixity. Despite this, the terms ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ are avoided, and instead wellworn and long-refuted creationist objections to evolution are presented as being the arguments of ‘critics’ of evolution. The ‘critics’ listed in these sorts of citation collections end up, on investigation, being a wild hodgepodge. A great many of them are mainstream scientists who fully accept descent with modification, but are being misquoted or misinterpreted. This sort of distortion has been dealt with elsewhere (see The Quote Mine Project, www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/project.html). Some of the critics are actually creationists/intelligent design proponents, but their cited works are portrayed as if they are authoritative, secular research. Instead, they are typically books published by trade and religious presses, conference proceedings, publications in philosophy or social science venues, web articles, and other publications short of actual peer-reviewed biological research. The ‘authorities’ that creationists most adore are non-creationist scientists who nevertheless reject evolution. Such figures are rarer than cold fusion proponents, but nevertheless exist. A somewhat notorious case was the famous iconoclastic physicist Fred Hoyle and his student (later colleague) Chandra Wickramasinghe. In the 1970s, during important work on cosmic dust spectra, they became convinced the dust included not just organic molecules but full bacteria — a highly ambitious conclusion which met with widespread scepticism. Reacting against the ‘dogmatism’ of the scientific community, the pair went on to argue that the origin of life and major evolutionary changes were impossible because such events were as likely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 747 by chance. This analogy, endlessly repeated by creationists ever since, was a spectacularly egregious mischaracterization of evolution, which is a gradual, stepwise process, and nothing at all like random, all-at-once chance assembly. Immune to correction and counterevidence, the pair went on to propose that life and major evolutionary events must have been seeded by genes and microbes that rained down on Earth from interstellar space, that various recent disease epidemics were the product of viruses from space, and, since evolution didn’t work and major transitions were impossible, the feathers on the famous dinosaur/bird transitional fossil Archaeopteryx must have been faked. In 1981, Wickramasinghe testified as an expert witness in McLean v. Arkansas in defence of a state law requiring equal time for ‘creation science’ in biology classrooms. Wickramasinghe is still at it, for example in suggesting that SARS came from space, but expressed mild regret about the creation science and Archaeopteryx episodes in his recent autobiography. A few other figures are regularly invoked by creationists. Christian Schwabe is a biochemist who believes that minor incongruencies in molecular phylogenies mean that common ancestry is false, and maintains instead that species have somehow originated billions of times independently Alleged scientific opposition to evolution