Quotes About Science

Darwin's picture of the history of life "contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.

Indeed, Walcott's discovery turned Darwin's anticipated bottom-up—or small changes first, big changes later—pattern on its head.

Neither wanted to claim that these discoveries "proved" the existence of God. They cautioned that science cannot "prove" anything with absolute certainty.

The relative suddenness of the Cambrian explosion, even on the earlier measure of its duration, had already raised serious questions about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism; consequently, it had also raised questions about whether a Darwinian understanding of the history of life could be reconciled with the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record.

that there are no biological forms left to discover. He means, rather, that we have good reason to conclude that such discoveries will not alter the largely discontinuous pattern that has emerged.

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance

Darwin read Lyell's magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, on the voyage of the Beagle and employed its principles of reasoning in On the Origin of Species. The subtitle of Lyell's Principles

renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, announced that he had repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evidence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule.6

As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin's tree of life "upside down.

Methodological naturalism asserts that , to qualify as scientific, a theory must explain all phenomena by reference to purely physical or material--that is, non-intelligent or non-purposive--causes or processes.

Since the most exquisitely delicate structures, as well as embryonic phases of growth of the most perishable nature, have been preserved from very early deposits, we have no right to infer the disappearance of types because their absence disproves some favorite [i.e., Darwinian] theory."25

Those who rejected it wholesale, as Agassiz did, consigned themselves to increasing irrelevance. AGASSIZ

All this notwithstanding, I have long been aware of strong reasons for doubting that mutation and selection can add enough new information of the right kind to account for large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovations—the various information revolutions that have occurred after the origin of life.

The term "Cambrian explosion" was to become common coin, because Walcott's site suggested the geologically abrupt appearance of a menagerie of animals as various as any found in the gaudiest science fiction. During this explosion of fauna, representatives of about twenty of the roughly twenty-seven total phyla present in the known fossil record made their first appearance on earth (see Fig. 2.5).

As science advanced in the late nineteenth century, it increasingly excluded appeals to divine action or divine ideas as a way of explaining phenomena in the natural world. This practice came to be codified in a principle known as methodological naturalism. According to this principle, scientists should accept as a working assumption that all features of the natural world can be explained by material causes without recourse to purposive intelligence, mind, or conscious agency. Proponents

host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or "microevolutionary," change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovation

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. Yet today's public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students.

Agassiz trained an army of able young naturalists who took his method to other universities, and they in turn passed them on to their students, themselves future professors.38

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

Despite the scope of his synthesis, there was one set of facts that troubled Darwin—something he conceded his theory couldn't adequately explain, at least at present. Darwin was puzzled by a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the geologically sudden appearance of animal life in a remote period of geologic history, a period that at first was commonly called the Silurian, but later came to be known as the Cambrian.

Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin's theory

Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, "Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain."2

Donald Goellnicht. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1984

This development dates from no earlier than the start of the 19th century, when the West's conception of its superiority shifted from its religion – Christianity – to its science. At issue here was not so much technological achievements, since the bulk of these were