On this page I have assembled dozens of quotes by renowned scientists on the subject of evolution. All quotes on this page are from evolutionists, (of one type or another), and not creationists. These quotes are not taken out of context. As you read them you will realize there is only one way to interpret them.
I was truly amazed when I read many of these quotes. Of course these are not admissions by the authors that creation is correct and evolution is wrong. They merely highlight the fact that the theory of evolution is so flawed that even its proponents can’t gloss over the problems.
We’ll start with quotes about the theory of evolution in general. These are the kind of quotes that usually do not reach the general public. I think most people would be surprised by what the experts are saying within their fields of science. Please take the time to read them all. I promise you, it is time well spent !!
I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science..(1)
Soren Lovtrup
... but if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy. (2).
Stephen Jay Gould
So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty: the used-car business. (3)
Sharon Begley
…in the case of the synthetic theory [of evolution], we hold it, not with a light hand as advocated by T. H. Huxley, but with an ironclad grasp, unwilling to let go, unwilling to explore alternatives..(4)
E. O. Wiley
…contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach. (5)
Michael Denton
We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy. It’s about time we cry: ‘The Emperor has no clothes.’ (6)
Ken Hsu, evolutionist professor at the Geological Institute is Zurich, E.T.H., and former president of the International Association of Sedimentologists
Our theory of evolution has become…one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus "outside of empirical science" but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. (7)
Paul Ehrlich and L. C. Birch
I am opposed to Darwinism….I am convinced that Darwinism, in whatever form, is not in fact a scientific theory, but a pseudo-metaphysical hypothesis decked out in scientific garb. In reality the theory derives its support not from empirical data or logical deductions of a scientific kind but from the circumstance that it happens to be the only doctrine of biological origins that can be conceived with the constricted [worldview] to which a majority of scientists no doubt subscribe. (8) (emphasis added)
Professor Wolfgang Smith, Ph.D. Mathematics from Columbia University, faculty of MIT and UCLA
It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Trueman's Ostrea/Gryphea to Carruther's Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been "debunked." Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive. (9) .
Derek V. Ager
The theories of evolution, with which our studious youth have been deceived, constitute actually a dogma that all the world continues to teach: but each, in his specialty, the zoologist or the botanist, ascertains that none of the explanations furnished is adequate…..[I]t results from this summary, that the theory of evolution is impossible. (10)
Lemoine, P., former president of the Geological Society of France and director of the Natural History Museum in Paris and the editor of the Encyclopedie Francaise
The explanatory doctrines of biological evolution do not stand up to an objective, in-depth criticism. They prove to be either in conflict with reality or else incapable of solving the major problems involved. (11)
French scientist Pierre-Paul Grasse, among the most distinguished of French zoologists
It is now approximately half a century since the neo-Darwinian synthesis was formulated. A great deal of research has been carried on within the paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are limited to the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place. (12)
English biologists Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders
So one is forced to conclude that there is no clear-cut scientific picture of human evolution. (13)
Robert Martin
We conclude—unexpectedly—that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: Its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak. (14)
Jerry Coyne, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago
Although much is known about mutation, it is still largely a ‘black box’ relative to evolution. Novel biochemical functions seem to be rare in evolution, and the basis for their origin is virtually unknown. (15)
University of California geneticist John Endler
Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory was capable of a complete, comprehensive and entirely plausible explanation for all biological phenomena from the origin of life on through all its diverse manifestations up to, and including, the intellect of man. That it is neither fully plausible, nor comprehensive, is deeply troubling. One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. (16)
Michael Denton
Darwin’s evolutionary explanation of the origins of man has been transformed into a modern myth, to the detriment of science and social progress… The secular myths of evolution have had a damaging effect on scientific research, leading to distortion, to needless controversy, and to the gross misuse of science….I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story-telling. (17)
Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, London
The Darwinian theory of descent has not a single fact to confirm it in the realm of nature. It is not the result of scientific research but purely the product of imagination. (18)
Albert Fleishman, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Erlangen University, Germany
Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless. (19)
Professor Louis Bounoure, former president of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum
The world does not explain itself…it is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everthing. (20)
G. Chesterton
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (21) (emphasis added)
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and renowned leader in promoting the concept of evolutionary biology
Despite the fact that no convincing explanation of how random evolutionary processes could have resulted in such an ordered pattern of diversity, the idea of uniform rates of evolution is presented in the literature as if it were an empirical discovery. The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful, that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth-century theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists. (22)
Michael Denton
The vocal proponents of the theory of evolution often treat their theory with religious fervor. It has been treated as more of a faith than a science, as the following quotes testify:
Just as pre-Darwinian biology was carried out by people whose faith was in the Creator and His plan, post-Darwinian biology is being carried out by people whose faith is in, almost, the deity of Darwin. (23)
Colin Patterson
Humanism is the belief that man shapes his own destiny. It is a constructive philosophy, a non-theistic religion, a way of life. (24)
Anonymous, posted by the Humanist Community of San Jose
It is as a religion of science that Darwinism held, and holds men's minds… The modified, but still characteristically Darwinian theory has itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with religious fervor, and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific faith. (25)
Marjorie Grene
…many members of the scientific community espouse views of reality that go beyond the realm of testable scientific observation. The creationists are often correct in their assertion that evolution is presented with the aura of religious certainty rather than scientific tentativeness…. Evolution theory is frequently invoked beyond its explanatory power in both teaching and application. Evolution, or natural selection, is often used as a magic wand to explain a variety of molecular or physiological observations, where there is no apparent selection pressure operating. (27)
R. Singleton Jr.
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof. (26) (emphasis added)
L. Harrison Matthews, in his Introduction to The Origin of Species, 1971.
The following quotes deal specifically with the intractable difficulties facing Origin of Life researchers. As we saw in the Origin of 1st Life page, there are so many barriers to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life that it can be considered to be impossible, as is evidenced in these quotes by the experts.
More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in a stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. (28)
Klaus Dose
... the longest genome which could be expected with 95% confidence in 10 billion years corresponds to only 49 amino acid residues. This is much too short to code a living system so evolution to higher forms could not get started. Geological evidence for the "warm little pond" is missing. It is concluded that belief in currently accepted scenarios of spontaneous bio-genesis is based on faith, contrary to conventional wisdom. (29)
Hubert P. Yockey
The claims of chemical evolution are unreal. We are asked to believe that biochemical compounds, biochemical reactions and mechanisms, energy metabolism and storage, specific polymerizations, codes, transcription and translation apparatus, and more, appeared in probiotic waters with the functions they would have in a living thing before there were living things. Chemical evolution has become an end in itself. In many cases it represents contrived or ingenious laboratory syntheses which have no counterpart in abiotic organic chemical synthesis in an acceptable range of probiotic conditions. There is no point in further pursuing this line of investigation to add more biochemicals to the list.
Let it be assumed that the probiotic waters contained all of the material that "chemical evolution" is supposed to have brought about. Then how, and in what form, could life have arisen from such a scattered melange? That question must be answered, if there is an answer, to give meaning and direction to the pursuit of chemical evolution, otherwise that pursuit will continue to be an endless series of laboratory experiments unrelated to the central problem. There has been a good deal of uncritical acceptance of experiments, results, and conclusions which we are all too ready to acknowledge because they support preconceived convictions. . . .
All present approaches to a solution of the problem of the origin of life are either irrelevant or lead into a blind alley. Therein lies the crisis....The various approaches to a solution of the origin of life are examined and found wanting. (30) (emphasis added)
John Keosian
I don't know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the Earth. Astronomers will have a little difficulty at understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so, the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The "others" are a group of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical miracles.
Now imagine 10^50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon. (31)
Sir Fred Hoyle
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which had to have been satisfied to get it going. (32)
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA
….the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area, all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet. (33)
Evolutionists D.E. Green and R.F. Goldberger
The riddle seems to be: How, when no life existed, did substances come into being which today are absolutely essential to living systems yet which can only be formed by those systems? (34)
Harold Blum
….we do not have a thoroughly rational, tested hypothesis about the origin of our species. Indeed, we haven’t even been able to agree upon a biological classification system for primates. Somewhere buried in the creationist arguments may be the right question, one that we have been ignoring because it wasn’t proper to consider it. (35)
J. W. Lane—accomplished physicist and non-creationist, Physics Today 35, 1982
On the Fossil Record page we saw that paleontology/the fossil record, which has long been touted as proof of evolution, is anything but. In fact, the evidence is so contradictory that some evolutionary scientists proposed a whole new theory of evolution, that of punctuated equilibrium (which proposes rapid jumps rather than gradual change), to try to explain away the lack of evidence. The first four quotes below highlight the division among evolutionary biologists caused by the fossil record, the first 3 solidly in favor of the importance of the fossil record, and the fourth fully contradicting them.
The last word on the credibility and course of evolution lies with the paleontologist. (36)
Gavin de Beer
Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its cause and mechanisms… That is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution. (37)
Pierre-Paul Grasse
The fossil record affords an opportunity to choose between evolutionary and creationist models for the origin of the earth and its life forms. (38)
B.F. Glenister and B.J. Witzke
In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation. (39)
Dr. Mark Ridley, Oxford zoologist
A lot of evolutionists would be quite surprised by the final statement above! The true evidence of the fossil record has been called the "trade secret of paleontology" (50). The following quotes highlight the actual facts of the fossil record:
... The facts of greatest general importance are the following: When a new phylum, class, or order appears [in the fossil record], there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions.. . . Moreover, within the slowly evolving series, like the famous horse series, the decisive steps are abrupt, without transition:...(40)
R. B. Goldschmidt
The almost universal absence of fully documented transitions between species (a key creationist argument) has recently been underlined by scientists like Eldredge and Gould. Unfortunately, the biological processes involved in their own punctuated equilibria model are not yet all that clear, and anti-evolutionists can and have made effective use of these problems to undermine their opponents' arguments. (41)
M.R. Johnson
Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so. (42)
E. R. Leach
Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is
the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. (43)
David B. Kitts
The fossil record is of little use in providing direct evidence of the pathways of descent of the phyla or of invertebrate classes. Each phylum with a fossil record had already evolved its characteristic body plan when it first appeared, so far as we can tell from the fossil remains, and no phylum is connected to any other via intermediate fossil types. Indeed, none of the invertebrate classes can be connected with another class by series of intermediates. (44) (emphasis added)
J. W. Valentine
All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms? (45)
Gerald T. Todd
The theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which has gone in and out of fashion since the 19th century and is now back in vogue, leads the scientists who subscribe to it to imagine that dinosaurs were highly mobile and very active, like birds today, and that they even had feathers....Unfortunately the bird theory requires "fixing" too often to inspire confidence…The theory linking dinosaurs to birds is a pleasant fantasy that some scientists like because it provides a direct entry into a past that we otherwise can only guess about. But unless more convincing evidence is uncovered, we must reject it and move forward to the next best idea. (46)
Larry D. Martin
At the higher level of evolutionary transition between basic morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble, though it remains the "official" position of most Western evolutionists. Smooth intermediates between Bauplane are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count). (47)
S. J. Could and Niles Eldredge
Where information regarding transitional forms is most eagerly sought, it is least likely to be available. We have no intermediate fossils between rhipidistian fish and early amphibians or between primitive insectivores and bats; only a single species, Archaeopteryx lithographica represents the transition between dinosaurs and birds. On the other hand, certain genera of fish, amphibians, and reptiles are known from thousands upon thousands of fossils from every continent.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that vertebrate paleontologists did not support the prevailing view of slow, progressive evolution but tended to elaborate theories involving saltation, orthogenesis, or other vitalistic hypothesis. Most of the evidence provided by the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic interpretation, as pointed out by Eldredge and Gould (1972), Gould and Eldredge (1977), Gould (1985), and Stanley (1979,1982). (48)
R. L. Carroll
Of course there are many gaps in the synapsid fossil record, with intermediate forms between the various known groups almost invariably unknown. . . .Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another…The apparent rate of morphological change in the main lineages of the mammal-like reptiles varies. The sudden appearance of new higher taxa, families and even orders, immediately after a mass extinction, with all the features more or less developed, implies a very rapid evolution. (49)
T. S. Kemp
The extreme rarity of transitional forms is the trade secret of paleontology…The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology and paleontology at Harvard
The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change….all paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. (51)
Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing? (52)
Stephen Jay Gould
All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. (53)
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches: the rest is inference however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils…yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study. (54)
Stephen J. Gould
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…(55) (emphasis added)
David Raup
…the record of the rocks is decidedly against evolutionists. (56)
Famous Canadian geologist William Dawson
There is no clear-cut and inexorable pathway from ape to human being. (57)
The fossil record has been elastic enough, the expectations sufficiently robust, to accommodate almost any story. (58)
David Pilbeam
…in the present state of our knowledge, I do not believe it is possible to fit the known hominid fossils into a reliable pattern. (59)
Mary Leakey
The human fossil record is no exception to the general rule that the main lesson to be learned from paleontology is that evolution always takes place somewhere else. (60)
J.S. Jones and S. Rouhani
I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book (Evolution). If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them….Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils…I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. (61)
Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, London
It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student…have now been debunked…The point emerges that, if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find—over and over again—not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another. (62)
Dr. D.V. Ager, former president of the British Geological Association
The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition, and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid. (63)
Paleontologist Stephen Stanley of Johns Hopkins University
The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, but it has spawned a science because it is distinguished by two factors which inflate its apparent relevance far beyond its merits. First, the fossils hint at the ancestry of a supremely self-important animal—ourselves. Secondly, the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present… But ever since Darwin’s work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestors would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. (64) (emphasis added)
John Reader, author of “Missing Links”
A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the over-simplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found—yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks. (65)
David Raup, paleontologist
A truly unbiased look at the evidence makes it difficult to imagine that a supreme being was not involved in our origin, as these quotes attest:
We can’t understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural. (66)
Allan Sandage, astronomer
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron….The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. (67)
Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist.
It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. (68) (emphasis added)
(try saying that is taken out of context !!)
Stephen Hawking
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. (69)
Sir Fred Hoyle, astrophysicist
This is one of my favorites:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (70)
Robert Jastrow, astronomer, Founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute
For me, this final quote, made over fifty years ago, says it all:
When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation (evolution). There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds (personal reasons), therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance. (71) (emphasis added)
Dr. George Wald
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