Creationism - National Center for Science Education

jobs are going except to those who worship at the Darwin shrine.” “Faith,” taunts Lunn,
“is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links unseen.” A prime example of
the “unreasonableness” of evolution is the lack of transitional forms:
[I]f Darwinism is true we should expect to find that the world was full of transitorial forms; but the world is
full of fixed types, and the five thousand years of recorded history are eloquent in their witness, not to
transitorial forms fading into each other, but to the stability of type. [Quoted in Field 1941; P. Zimmerman
1972; Graebner 1932]
Haldane also debated creationists Douglas Dewar and L. Merson Davies in a
written exchange of six letters from each side published as Is Evolution a Myth? (Dewar,
Davies, and Haldane 1949). Davies, a British lieutenant-colonel, was also a
paleontologist, specializing in foraminifera, and a Fellow in several British scientific
societies.
Dewar, the first secretary of the Evolution Protest Movement, and later its
president, was a former auditor general of India. While in the civil service he became an
expert on Indian birds. Dewar was an evolutionist until shortly before the founding of the
EPM in 1932. In 1909 Dewar co-authored a book The Making of Species in which he
said: “We would emphasize that it is not Darwinism we are attacking, but that which is
erroneously called Neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is a pathological outgrowth on
Darwinism.” Field (1931) says that Theodore Roosevelt, an enthusuastic naturalist,
specially commended this book. In 1931, however, Dewar published Difficulties of the
Evolution Theory, and followed this with several more creationist books. In Man: A
Special Creation (1936), he complained that evolution had captured the press, which
refused to publish any attacks on evolution, or even the slightest criticism. More
Difficulties of the Evolution Theory (1938) was a reply to Morley Davies’ book Evolution
and Its Modern Critics, itself a response to Dewar’s 1931 book.
Dewar’s The Transformist Illusion came out in 1957, the year he died, though he
had written it in 1948 (adding some material in 1951). Modern creationists consider this
book especially authoritative. Dewar packs the standard creation-science arguments with
quotes and scientific references. There are no biblical references.
Dewar participated in another written debate against H.S. Shelton. Edited by
Lunn, who also wrote the introduction, this was published in 1947 as Is Evolution
Proved?. Lunn also debated the well-known Freethought advocate and anti-religious
campaigner Joseph McCabe. A report of Dewar’s side of this debate appeared as A
Challenge to Evolutionists (1937). According to Field (1941), McCabe “threatened legal
proceedings if his part of the debate were published.” McCabe apparently also debated
Price; a book titled Is Evolution True? (date unknown) lists both as authors.
THE LULL: 1940S-1950S
Another Seventh-day Adventist, Cyril Courville, refuted the “recapitulation
theory” in a book of that title (1941) and in articles in journals such as the Bulletin of
Deluge Geology. Courville was a neurology professor at Loma Linda University, and
founder and director of the Cajal Neuropathology Laboratory in Los Angeles; he has
been described by his medical colleagues as the “world’s greatest neuropathologist.” The
recapitulation theory is the idea, popularized by Darwin’s German advocate Haeckel, that