We shouldn’t teach both. The media shouldn’t equate both. If Thomas Jefferson knew we were blurring the line this much between Church and State, he would turn over in his slave.
As for me, I believe in evolution and intelligent design. I think God designed us in his image, but I also think God is a monkey. Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
One way or another, Darwinists meet the question, Is Darwinism true? with an answer that amounts to an assertion of power: ‘Well, it is science, as we define science, and you will have to be content with that’. Some of us are not content with that, because we know that the empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection is somewhere between weak and non-existent. Artificial selection of fruit flies or domestic animals produces limited change within the species, but tells us nothing about how insects and mammals came into existence in the first place. In any case, whatever artificial selection achieves is due to the employment of human intelligence consciously pursuing a goal. The whole point of the blind watchmaker thesis, however, is to establish what material processes can do in the absence of purpose and intelligence. That Darwinist authorities continually overlook this crucial distinction gives us little confidence in their objectivity. Philip E Johnson
Evolution has some clever short-cuts ... without having to start over every time. Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s4e10: Did God Create Evolution? Science 2013
The universe seems to be hardwired to create complexity. ibid.
There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory. Kenneth Miller, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District 2005
Intelligent design is not a testable theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific community. ibid.
Empirical claims of the contemporary American Creation Science or Intelligent Design (ID) theory, which postulates a Creator of nature, are, just as the earlier theological argument from design, based on a mistaken, ‘creationist’ view of human artifacts. Such view attributes functionality and complexity in an artifact to a singular human designer. The attribution aims at supporting an analogy between products of human designers, and the design-like adaptations found in nature, allegedly pointing to a supernatural Designer. The creationist view of artifacts, however, has been in conflict with conclusions of design history and history of technology alike: neither of them sees the functionality and complexity in artifacts as products of design but rather as results of re-design. Ironically, the evolutionary biologists, who fiercely oppose the creationist view of nature in ID proponents and defend the Darwinian understanding of the design-like adaptations as results of natural selection, tend to condone the creationist perspective on human artifacts characteristic for their opponents, and even seems to embrace it – thus forfeiting a crucial argument against the ID theory. Jan Michl, Without a Godlike Designer No Designerlike God, September 2006
Life on our planet has suffered a series of devastating mass extinction events. These have killed off uncountable species, and even threatened to end life on Earth altogether. Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures I: The Great Dying, Professor Richard Fortey, BBC 2013
Is being a survivor a question of having some very special features or nothing more than pure chance? ibid.
We are all the sons and daughters of catastrophe. ibid.
The Greatest Extinction Event in the history of our planet: 250 million years ago. ibid.
Then one day sixty-five million years ago this world came to a sudden end when a ten-kilometre diameter asteroid collided with the Earth. Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures II: Fugitive from the Fire
Big brains would prove to be key to the evolution and success of mammals. ibid.
2.8 million years ago, triggered by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and shifts in its ocean currents, our world began to cool. Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures III: Frozen in Time
One way to cope with the onset of freezing conditions is to go large. ibid.
Another was to get woolly. ibid.
Every survivor we have seen is just one small part of a vast and interconnected tree of life. ibid.
A new era of man-made mass extinction. ibid.
In evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet’s four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. Richard E Leakey
Evolution of the work of a divine creator – this question is at the heart of a struggle that has threatened to tear our nation apart. What About God? PBS 2002
Scopes was fined $100: within four years thirty-seven anti-evolution bills have been introduced in twenty states. ibid.
All the evidence … compels us to accept the evolutionary theory in full. ibid.
I believe it [creationism] = that settles it. ibid.
We think that the smaller digestive system in homo erectus that it was able to evolve because of the shift in diet. Freed-up energy that could then be used to power a larger brain. Professor Peter Wheeler, Liverpool John Moores University
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. Kenneth R Miller
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it’s about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers. Neil deGrasse Tyson
The entire edifice of game theory rests on two theorems: von Neumann’s min-max theorem of 1928 and Nash’s equilibrium theorem of 1950 ... Nash introduced the distinction between cooperative and noncooperative games ... By broadening the concept to include games that involved a mix of cooperation and competition, Nash succeeded in opening the door in applications of game theory to economics, political science, sociology, and, ultimately, evolutionary biology. Sylvia Nasar
More than 8,000,000 animal species live on the planet today – only a special few are armed with extreme weapons. Huge physical appendages growing from their bodies wielded in titanic battles. What gives rise to these enormous structures? Are they more than just instruments of blunt force? And what can their evolution teach us about our own arms race? Natural World, Nature’s Wildest Weapons: Horns, Tusks & Antlers, BBC 2017
Darwin’s beetle, Chile: the males grow up to nine centimetres long; their specially adapted jaws can be half their body length. ibid.
(1) Defence; (2) Competition; (3) Duels. ibid.
Only when animals fight in these ritualised duels do the benefits of extreme weapons outweigh the costs. ibid.
In 1912 the skull and bone fragments of what was thought to be a prehistoric man were discovered in a gravel pit in Sussex in England. What became known as the Piltdown Man was claimed to be one of the most important archaeological finds of all time: but was it genuine or was it a carefully engineered hoax. History’s Greatest Hoaxes s1e6: Piltdown Man, History 2016
In 1915 Charles Dawson claimed to have found three fragments of a second skull called Piltdown 2 at a new site, Sheffield Park, about 2 miles away from the original find. ibid.
South Africa: not one but two new species of hominids; our ancient ancestors have been discovered. First Humans: The Cave Discovery, Channel 4 2017
The scientific theory of evolution explains how lifeforms develop and diversify over generations … It explains how new varieties of lifeform emerge from earlier lifeforms. Irreducible Complexity Cut Down to Size, Youtube 31m 2012
In science, theories don’t get promoted to facts, facts are explained by theories. ibid.
Mutations are simply changes in genetic variation within a population. ibid.
Dramatic change can be achieved one small step at a time. ibid.
Evolution doesn’t work by combining different species at random. ibid.
We can remove parts from an ‘irreducibly complex’ system and still be left with functional parts – parts with secondary functions that benefit the organism in other ways. ibid.
Intelligent Design has been quickly exposed for what it is – creationism. ibid.