More Conspiracy Theories from ID Proponents

Friends,

This is amazing! From Philip Johnson,

The claim that evolutionary science has discovered and verified a mechanism which can account for the origin of biological information and complexity by involving only natural (unintelligent) causes is supported by an immense extrapolation from limited evidence of minor, cyclical variations in fundamentally stable species. The current leading textbook example of the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism involves a species of finch on an island in the Galapagos chain. Two scientists named Grant published a famous study of variations of the beaks of these birds, later popularized in a book titled The Beak of the Finch, by journalist Jonathan Weiner.

The Grants had been measuring finch beaks over many years. In 1977 a drought killed most of the finches, and the survivors had beaks slightly larger than before. The probable explanation was that larger-beaked birds had an advantage in being able to eat the last tough seeds that remained. A few years later the rains returned, and the average beak size went back to normal. No new organs appeared and there was no directional change of any kind, just a back-and-forth cycle from small beaks to slightly larger beaks and back to small. Nonetheless, that is the most impressive example of natural selection actually observed making changes that Darwinists have been able to substantiate after nearly a century and a half of searching for evidence that the mechanism of random variation with differential survival has the transformative power that it would need to have to accomplish everything that the textbooks ascribe to it.

To make the story look better, the National Academy of Sciences improved on some the facts in its 1998 booklet on Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version of the story omits the beaks’ return to normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a “new species of finch” might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards increased beak size continued indefinitely. When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in court, you know they are having trouble fitting their evidence to the theory they want to support.

This is an eye-opening paper. I’ll be interested do see if any of my evolutionary friends have any spin for this. I’m sure they do! Can’t want to read it! It is yet one more piece of evidence that the scientific establishment has something to fear by the truth being told and taught. Funny how stories like these are not more mainstream.

jerry