Page 30 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

28 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

Dr. Lewis Thomas, the author of Lives of a Cell:

Biology needs a better word than error for the driving force in evolution....
I cannot make my peace with the randomness doctrine; I cannot abide the
notion of purposelessness and blind chance in nature. And yet I do not
know what to put in its place for the quieting of my mind. 29
Jerry Coyne is of the Chicago University Evolution and Ecology
Department:
We conclude-unexpectedly-that there is little evidence for the neo-
Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence
supporting it are weak. 30
H. S. Lipson, the British physicist:
I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of
its ability to account for any property of living beings (the long neck of the
giraffe, for example). I have therefore tried to see whether biological dis-
coveries over the last thirty years or so fit in with Darwin's theory. I do not
think that they do. To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all. 31
Gregory Alan Pesely is professor of philosophy:
One would immediately reject any lexicographer who tried to define a
word by the same word, or a thinker who merely restated his proposition,
or any other instance of gross redundancy; yet no one seems scandalized
that men of science should be satisfied with a major principle which is no
more than a tautology. 32

Dr. Colin Patterson is an evolutionist paleontologist and curator of
London's Natural History Museum, editor of the museum's journal and
author of the book Evolution:
Now, one of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view-well, let's
call it non-evolutionary-was [that] last year I had a sudden realization. For
over twenty years, I had thought that I was working on evolution in some
way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and
it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there
was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one
can be so misled for so long... So for the last few weeks, I've tried putting a
simple question to various people and groups of people.

The question is this: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution,
any one thing, any one thing that you think is true? Is there one thing you