02-12-2019
Lindsay Elizabeth
Earlier this month, an online petition voicing scientific opposition to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution reached more than 1,000 signatures, pointing to an increased consensus among the scientific community.
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The statement, “
A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism,” is a short statement that reads: “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 are 1,043 scientists on the ‘A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism’ list. It passed the 1,000 mark this month,” said Sarah Chaffee, a program officer for the Discovery Institute, according to
The College Fix.
The statement, released by the Discovery Institute in 2001 by those who question Neo-Darwinism, has been signed by scientists from “the US National Academy of Sciences, Russian, Hungarian and Czech National Academies, as well as from universities such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and others.”
The statement has specific requirements for signatures. In order to sign the document, one must obtain a “Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine,” in addition to agreeing with the assertions it makes.
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The website explains that it is important for there to be such a statement because of the mass media effort to force the belief in Darwinism as truth.
“The Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement exists to correct the public record by showing that there are scientists who support an open examination of the evidence relating to modern Darwinian theory and who question whether Neo-Darwinism can satisfactorily explain the complexity and diversity of the natural world,” it notes.
“In recent years there has been a concerted effort on the part of some supporters of modern Darwinian theory to deny the existence of scientific critics of Neo-Darwinism and to discourage open discussion of the scientific evidence for and against Neo-Darwinism,” explains the
FAQ page.
David Klinghoffer, a Discovery Institute Senior Fellow, said that the signers “have all risked their careers or reputations in signing” the statement.
“Such is the power of groupthink,” he
wrote in an Evolution News article. “The scientific mainstream will punish you if they can, and the media is wedded to its narrative that ‘the scientists’ are all in agreement and only ‘poets,’ ‘lawyers,’ and other ‘daft rubes’ doubt Darwinian theory. In fact, I’m currently seeking to place an awesome manuscript by a scientist at an Ivy League university with the guts to give his reasons for rejecting Darwinism. The problem is that, as yet, nobody has the guts to publish it.”
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It’s also crucial to point out that the signing of the document does not necessarily mean the scientists believe in “alternative theories such as self-organization, structuralism, or intelligent design,” but simply points towards “skepticism about modern Darwinian theories central claim that natural selection acting on random mutations is the driving force behind the complexity of life.”
If you want to learn more about the “Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” list you can find more information
here.
Over 1,000 Scientists Openly Dissent From Evolution Theory
Over 1,000 doctoral scientists from around the world have
signed a “Dissent” statement expressing skepticism about Darwin’s evolution theory, sparking fresh controversy over an idea that is at the core of many people’s worldview. The significant announcement, made last month, has been all but ignored by the establishment media. But it is making waves nevertheless.
The dissenting scientists all united around one simple statement. “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” the Ph.D.s said. “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. There is scientific dissent from Darwinism. It deserves to be heard.”
The growing rebellion among scientists from a broad range of scientific disciplines suggests the science may not be as settled as evolution theorists claim, according to analysts. Despite enormous risks to their careers and reputations, the number of experts willing to speak out about their skepticism of Darwin’s theory is growing quickly.
And many of the scientists speaking out about this are prominent and highly respected. More than a dozen of the signatories, for instance, are members of various national academies of science, including those in the United States, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other nations, as well as the Royal Society.
More than a few come from America's most prestigious universities such as Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Yale. Others come from prestigious foreign universities and research institutions such as the University of Cambridge, London’s Natural History Museum, Moscow State University, Hong Kong University, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in France, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and more.
The experts speaking out also represent a broad array of scientific disciplines and fields. These include molecular biology, biochemistry, biology, entomology, computational quantum chemistry, microbiology, psychiatry, behavioral sciences, astrophysics, marine biology, cellular biology, physics, astronomy, math, geology, anthropology, and many more. Many medical doctors are raising questions, too.
“As a biochemist I became skeptical about Darwinism when I was confronted with the extreme intricacy of the genetic code and its many most intelligent strategies to code, decode, and protect its information,” explained Dr. Marcos Eberlin, founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and a member of the Brazilian National Academy of Sciences.
Among the prestigious scientists who have signed the statement are evolutionary biologist and textbook author Dr. Stanley Salthe; quantum chemist Henry Schaefer at the University of Georgia; U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell; American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow Lyle Jensen; Russian Academy of Natural Sciences embryologist Lev Beloussov; and geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, editor emeritus of
Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum and discoverer of genetic recombination in antibiotic-producing Penicillium and Streptomyces.
The project, known as “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism,” was first launched by the Discovery Institute in 2001. It was started in response to the demonstrably false claim by the tax-funded Public Broadcasting System (PBS) that “virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true.” Obviously, that is not true. So Discovery Institute bought advertisements proving it in the
New York Review of Books and other venues.
Since then, the number of public dissenters has grown tenfold. Indeed, many prominent scientists now dispute the evolution theory. A recent documentary that appeared on Netflix,
Is Genesis History?, features myriad Ph.D. scientists outlining their arguments against evolution and in favor of biblical creation.
This writer attended
a conference in Turkey recently that brought together respected scientists from all over the world and from all different religions who argued that the evolution theory was a “hoax.” These included prestigious American scientists who have worked for NASA and leading U.S. universities. It also included Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Mormons, and more.
The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which advocates for Intelligent Design, is still growing its list of well over 1,000 Ph.D. scientists who dissent from Neo-Darwinism and its central tenet — the notion that random mutations and natural selection can generate the massive amount of genetic information present in living organisms. Indeed, critics of the evolution theory say there has never been a documented example of a mutation adding genetic information rather than destroying it.
Neurosurgery Professor Dr. Michael Egnor at State University of New York, Stony Brook, argued that scientists “know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others.” “The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions,” he explained. “They’ve never asked scientifically, can random mutation and natural selection generate the information content in living things.”
And the institute believes that the 1,000 plus scientists who have signed the statement represent the tip of a massive iceberg. “While that number surely represents a scientific minority, it also no doubt vastly understates the number of Darwin-doubting PhD scientists,” wrote Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer at
Evolution News.
“When it comes to evolution, persecution is an all too well known fact of academic life. Endorsing Darwinian evolution is the safe careerist move, while questioning it can easily mean the end of your career,” added Klinghoffer. “So for every signer of the Dissent list, there is some multiplier’s worth of private skeptics in science, acting self-protectively. That is beyond reasonable doubt.”
Indeed, the growing willingness of leading scientists to speak out with their doubts about Darwin’s theory of evolution is especially noteworthy because it comes in the face of increased persecution of dissenters.
In 2017, for example, California State University at Northridge (CSUN)
fired a Christian scientist after he published explosive evidence indirectly contradicting the theory in a peer-reviewed journal. Basically, Mark Armitage, a microscopist, found soft tissue in a dinosaur bone that was supposed to be around “65 million years old,” strongly indicating that the dinosaur in question died much more recently. The university paid him almost $400,000 in a settlement.
More than a few scientists have argued that peer pressure and fear are preventing an honest examination of the subject. “Because no scientist can show how Darwin’s mechanism can produce the complexity of life, every scientist should be skeptical,” said biologist Douglas Axe, director of the Biologic Institute. “The fact that most won’t admit to this exposes the unhealthy effect of peer pressure on scientific discourse.”
Meanwhile, as more and more scientists speak out, Americans largely continue to reject the evolution theory as well, and
interest in the question is surging. Despite the theory being taught to generations of American children in government schools as if it were a fact,
recent polls show about half of Americans still believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible's Book of Genesis. In short, they believe that God created humans within fewer than 10,000 years. Only a minority — fewer than 15 percent — believe that godless evolution explains the origin of man, which is what is taught to children at government schools.
“Where there’s a genuine controversy, as there is about Darwinian theory, anyone in search of truth has no choice but to weigh the evidence for himself,” observed the Discovery Institute’s Klinghoffer. "The observation that, beyond doubt, thousands of scientists are skeptical, and that a thousand of them publicly call for further ‘careful examination’ of the question, is one reason every thoughtful adult owes it to herself to consider the evidence without just passively swallowing the majority view.”
Beyond the scientific aspects, there are also profound implications of the theory. One reason religious humanists such as public-education founding father John Dewey latched on to it so fervently is because it allowed them to exclude the existence of a Creator. America's Founding Fathers held as a “self-evident” “truth” that man was created, and endowed by that Creator with certain rights. Humanists such as Dewey and his cohorts, who designed the modern public-school system, rejected that — along with the concept of unalienable, God-given rights that governments exist to protect.
Regardless of what one thinks about the evolution theory, it is still a theory. To force Americans who disagree with this controversial theory to fund its propagation in taxpayer-funded government schools — especially when no alternative is even allowed to be mentioned, and when the implications are so huge — is immoral and wrong. Parents and taxpayers should take a lesson from these courageous scientists and speak out.
Image: screenshot form YouTube video
Alex Newman is a contributor to The New American
, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.
https://dissentfromdarwin.org/
International Scientific Conference Deems Evolution A "Hoax"