"Here's your stone!" awards page

These awards are given to those who purposely try to mislead young (and old) people into believing a lie.  Jesus said...

Many known lies are told in the name of science.  Most of them to draw people away from a belief in God and make believers doubt God's word.  We thought it would be appropriate to award the "Millstone" to those who deserve it.  So with that short introduction, let's get to it.

Life in a Bottle   

Anyone old enough in 1953 to understand the   import of the news remembers how shocking, and to many,   exhilarating, it was. Scientists Stanley Miller and Harold   Urey had succeeded in creating “the building blocks” of   life in a flask. Mimicking what were believed to be the   natural conditions of the early Earth’s atmosphere, and then sending an electric spark through it, Miller and Urey had   formed simple amino acids. As amino acids are the “building blocks” of life, it was thought just a matter of time before scientists could themselves create living organisms.   At the time, it appeared a dramatic confirmation of evolutionary theory. Life wasn’t a “miracle.” No outside agency or divine intelligence was necessary. Put the right   gasses together, add electricity, and life is bound to happen.   It’s a common event. Carl Sagan could thus confidently   predict on PBS that the planets orbiting those “billlllions and billlllions” of stars out there must be just teeming with life.  

There were problems, however. Scientists were   never able to get beyond the simplest amino acids in their simulated primordial environment, and the creation of proteins began to seem not a small step or couple of steps, but a great, perhaps impassable, divide. The telling blow to the Miller-Urey experiment, however, came in the 1970’s, when scientists began to conclude that the Earth’s early atmosphere was nothing like the mixture of gasses used by Miller and Urey. Instead of being what scientists call a “reducing,” or hydrogen-rich environment, the Earth’s early atmosphere probably consisted of gasses released by volcanoes. Today there is a near consensus among geochemists on this point. But put those volcanic gasses in the Miller-Urey apparatus, and the experiment doesn’t work – in other words, no “building blocks” of life.

What do textbooks do with this inconvenient fact? By and large, they ignore it and continue to use the Miller-Urey experiment to convince students that scientists have demonstrated an important first step in the origin of life. This includes the above-mentioned Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by the National Academy of Sciences president, Bruce Alberts. Most textbooks also go on to tell students that origin-of-life researchers have found a wealth of other evidence to explain how life originated spontaneously – but they don’t tell students that the researchers themselves now acknowledge that the explanation still eludes them.   

Come on down Bruce Alperts!  Here's your Stone!

Faked Embryos

Darwin thought “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of” his theory came from embryology. Darwin was not an embryologist, however, so he relied on the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who produced drawings of embryos from various classes of vertebrates to show that they are virtually identical in their earliest stages, and become noticeably different only as they develop. It was this pattern that Darwin found so convincing.

This may be the most egregious of distortions, since biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos never look as similar as Haeckel drew them. In some cases, Haeckel used the same woodcut to print embryos that were supposedly from different classes. In others, he doctored his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than they really were. Haeckel’s contemporaries repeatedly criticized him for these misrepresentations, and charges of fraud abounded in his lifetime. In 1997, British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team of experts compared Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclusively that the drawings misrepresent the truth.

The drawings are misleading in another way. Darwin based his inference of common ancestry on the belief that the earliest stages of embryo development are the most similar. Haeckel’s drawings, however, entirely omit the earliest stages, which are much different, and start at a more similar midway point. Embryologist William Ballard wrote in 1976 that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the early stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.” Yet some version of Haeckel’s drawings can be found in most current biology textbooks. Stephen Jay Gould, one of evolutionary theory’s most vocal proponents, recently wrote that we should be “astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.”  

Article originally appeared in The American Spectator - December 2000 / January 2001

 Come on down Ernst Haeckel and Bruce Alperts! 

Here's your Stones!