Leading US Magazine Exposes Evolution’s Tall Tales!

The major American magazine The American Spectator in its current issue (December 2000 - January 2001) devotes most of its pages to this theme: what American students often learn in their public schools is just plain wrong. In particular, the teaching of evolution as fact in science texts is singled out and receives 10 pages of coverage in this special edition.

Although none of the four writers apparently accepts a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, they have nevertheless provided a useful public service in compiling a litany of fakes, frauds, and faulty science that still appear in highly used science textbooks that indoctrinate young people in “molecules-to-man” evolution. Many of these texts are college-level, where one would think that the caliber of scholarship would certainly be a notch higher.

Survival of the fakest, not fittest

In a hard-hitting exposé (“Survival of the Fakest”) of evolutionists’ gaffes and quackeries, Dr Jonathan Wells (Ph.D., Biology, U.C. Berkeley) lists seven “pillars of Darwinian theory” that are featured in many science books today (including standard texts that have seen many printings1) yet are patently incorrect, and are KNOWN by the general scientific community to be wrong.

If you attended government schools anywhere in the world, you were probably wrongly taught that the following were facts, as Dr Wells debunks:

• that the famous Miller/Urey experiment of 1953 supposedly produced the building blocks of life in a test tube.

  The truth: Miller/Urey had to have a hydrogen-rich atmosphere for their experiment. Yet for almost 30 years, scientists involved in this field of research have concluded that the early atmosphere of Earth was quite different from this. So while their experiment does not work at all, some texts (e.g. Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts) continue to inform students that the first step to creating life was overcome by Miller and Urey. See also Q&A: Origin of Life.

• that embryos in vertebrates are virtually identical in their early stages, which is evidence of descent from a common evolutionary ancestor.

  The truth: this was an outright fraud first perpetrated over 100 years ago as “science’. Incredibly, the doctored drawings of embryonic similarity have been known to be false for about 100 years, and yet Dr Wells reports that “most current biology textbooks” feature the fake drawings as powerful evidence for evolution. See also Developing Deception.

• That peppered moths in an area of England, which went from being mostly light colored to dark colored in the overall moth population, are evidence for evolution occurring in the present.

  The truth: even putting aside the obvious fact that the moths are still moths and thus no upward evolution could have occurred anyway, the whole episode was staged to begin with!

  Nevertheless, Dr Wells has discovered that the staged photographs of dead moths glued to tree trunks continues to appear in almost all biology texts and is supposed “proof” of evolution working through the mechanism of natural selection.

The emperor’s evolutionary new clothes

In Dr Wells’s article, based on his new book Icons of Evolution, he examines four additional pillars that have also been knocked down (by evolutionists themselves) and yet continue to be paraded in science texts as evidence for macro-evolution. He writes that once “the false ‘evidence’ is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so thin it’s almost invisible.”

Why does the textbook charade continue? Dr Wells suspects “that there’s an agenda other than pure science at work here.” He cites one motivation: adherence to atheism, which is expressed openly by evolutionary fundamentalist Dr Richard Dawkins, whom Wells cites as saying that evolution makes it “possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Others hold to strictly naturalistic (i.e. no room for the supernatural in science) and materialistic view of the universe. Therefore, opines Dr Wells, philosophical, rather than scientific, views are what is motivating the science textbook writers.

Baylor bails out on academic freedom

Another article in the current The American Spectator features a scathing commentary on the decision by the president of Southern Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Texas to succumb to the “mob rule” of evolutionary zealots on his campus and fire the director of the Michael Polyani Center because he dared question evolutionary dogma. The center’s former director, Dr William Dembski2, was hired to investigate the concept of intelligent design in nature. Even though he and the center did not promote Biblical creation at all, the very questioning of evolution made him the victim of intense ridicule and eventual academic censorship by his colleagues (see our related story).

At one point in the heated campus controversy, university president Dr Robert Sloan even remarked that the uproar by Baylor professors “border[ed] on McCarthyism.” And in an April 20 article, Dr Sloan stated that “I believe there are matters of intellectual and academic integrity at stake here … We should not be afraid to ask questions, even if they are politically incorrect.”

Eventually, however, the president’s call for academic freedom apparently lost out to expediency in order to placate his hysterical faculty.3 While this could be (sadly) expected on a secular campus where freedom of expression is often thwarted when evolution is challenged in even a small way, this shameful firing at a professing Baptist university makes it an even sadder episode and reveals the general decay of Christianity in America today.