On August 4, 2004, an article by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer appeared in a rather obscure peer-reviewed journal entitled The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,1 and it quickly ignited a firestorm of controversy. It argued that the current view of evolution can never hope to explain life as we see it today. The editor of the journal was branded a heretic, and he was then targeted for retaliation and harassment. Not surprisingly, he is no longer the editor of that journal. The Scientific Inquisition, which strives to enforce scientific orthodoxy, probably thought that would be the end of it. Surely no other peer-reviewed journal would ever dare to publish an honest discussion of evolution.
Well, it turns out that the Inquisition was wrong. Another obscure peer-reviewed journal, the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, has published an article by Dr. Joseph A. Kuhn, a surgeon who is affiliated with the Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas.2 The article brings up three main points:
1. There is no significant progress towards coming up with even a plausible Darwinian-style mechanism to explain the origin of life.
2. Cellular systems exhibit irreducible complexity, and thus cannot be explained by any kind of Darwinian-style mechanism.
3. There is no reasonable fossil evidence to indicate that any kind of Darwinian-style mechanism produced the diversity of life we see today. (Here, the author concentrates on the supposed evolution of humans from an apelike ancestor and the supposed evolution of amphibians from a fish ancestor.)
While the article itself is interesting, what I find more interesting is the response of at least one member of the Scientific Inquisition.
Continue reading “More Peer-Reviewed Papers Critical of Evolution”