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