“The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.”

— William A. Dembski

Is Intelligent Design Testable — A Response to Eugenie Scott
2011-01-24
The Golden Spiral
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2667/Default.aspx
2011-10-23
responding to Eugenie Scott's 2001-01-18 lecture at U.C. Berkeley, "Icons of Creationism: The New Anti-Evolutionism and Science"
2000s

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William A. Dembski 27

American intelligent design advocate 1960

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“Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

2000s

“According to the most influential twentieth-century philosopher of science, Karl Popper, a theory is scientific only in so far as it is falsifiable, and should be given up as soon as it has been falsified. By this standard, the theories of Darwin and Einstein should never have been accepted.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Science's Irrational Origins (p. 22)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Darwinism: The Imperialism of Biology?, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, 31 October 2007, 2008-02-26 http://expelledthemovie.com/blog/page/3/,

“The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

First response to the following remark by EDGE: It seems to me that Darwin is much better known in England than in the United States. Books about Darwin sell well and people debate the subjects. Here in America what passes for intellectual life doesn't necessarily include reading and having an appreciation of Darwin.
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

“The raising of the status of Darwinian theory to a self-evident axiom has had the consequence that the very real problems and objections with which Darwin so painfully laboured in the Origin have become entirely invisible. Crucial problems such as the absence of connecting links or the difficulty of envisaging intermediate forms are virtually never discussed and the creation of even the most complex of adaptations is put down to natural selection without a ripple of doubt.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 77

“Adams was content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow Darwin's evidences.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Darwin's racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution…. However, after much research, I do concede that you won't find anything in Darwin's writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

“There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 288)

“In the next five years, molecular Darwinism—the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level—will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

" Measure of Design: A Conversation About the Past, Present & Future of Darwinism & Design http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-06-060-i#ixzz2elFILC9O|The" Touchstone, volume 17, issue 6, pages 60-65, at page 64 (July/August 2004).
2000s

“The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene’s eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface to Second Edition (1989)
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

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