The Fear On Her Face Was Palpable

There is a long article in today's Washington Post that opens with a focus on Caroline Crocker and discusses Darwinian fundamentalism:

A woman in the back of the class raised her hand. Her voice shook with emotion. "If science is the pursuit of truth, why is evolution not questioned?"

"I've heard scientists say people won't understand, so they should be told only one side," Crocker replied.

There was a long moment of silence. Finally the student said, "Isn't that lying to the public?"

Crocker declined to answer the question, but someone else grimly observed, "Won't be the first time."

I went up to this last student after the class. She initially agreed to be identified, but moments later, remembering what Crocker had said about the scientific establishment's intolerance of dissent, she begged me not to publish her name. The fear on her face was palpable. She wanted to be a veterinarian and was convinced that dream would be smashed if powerful scientists learned she had dared to question evolution.

However, the subheading of the article contains this:

Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws.

What? In a news article, not an editorial, the Post can assure us that the critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws? And that is neutral factual reporting? That is precisely what the entire debate is about!

Why stop there? Why not assure us: "Scientists who doubt Darwinian theory because of its flaws are wrong." If the religious critics are wrong, the scientists must be wrong too.

As I read further, I discovered that the writer is hopelessly uninformed. He quotes this from Alan Leshner and provides no counter-balance:

The theory of evolution, Leshner announced to the students, was as firmly established as the theory of gravity. . . . [T]he more science learns, the more the living world looks exactly like what would be expected if evolution were true.

This is obscenely misleading and half of America knows it is. Small wonder the American people doubt evolutionary theory. They know that many in the scientific community are feeding them a pile of misinformation and half-truths.

Consider this from one of America's leading paleontologists, David Raup, who was formerly the curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago:

Darwin's general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one that it is full of gaps, and that we have much to learn. In effect, he was saying that if the record were complete and if we had better knowledge of it we would see the finely graduated chain that he predicted. And this was his main argument for downgrading the evidence from the fossil record. Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information - what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection. (Raup D.M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History: Chicago IL, January 1979, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp.22-29, pp.24-25)

So how can anyone honestly say that the fossil record is exactly what you would expect if macroevolutionary theory were true?

Raup's observations are merely the tip of the iceberg of problems with macroevolutionary theory. For more, look here.