By Geoff Metcalf The book examines the growing body of scientific evidence that validates
the beliefs of the majority of Americans who, polls claim, do not believe in
Darwin's theory of evolution. Among the issues he tackles are: the lack of
transitional forms in the fossil record, the impossibility of mutations
serving as evolutionary building blocks, the lack of evidence for "ape-men"
and the mathematic impossibility of life beginning by itself.
So persuasive is Perloff's book that actor Jack Lemmon, who played the
legendary pro-evolution attorney Clarence Darrow in the 1999 TV-movie
"Inherit the Wind," said, "My congratulations to Mr. Perloff for an
outstanding piece of work."
Perloff was interviewed by WND reporter Geoff Metcalf.
Question: James, the subtitle of your book is "The relentless myth
of Darwinism." I use a line that states, "Some people don't like facts that
contradict their preconceived opinions." Isn't that really what your book is
all about?
Answer: Right. Well, unfortunately, Darwinism is being taught as a
fact today in schools. It is being taught as though it is as provable as the
law of gravity, even though Charles Darwin himself called it "grievously too
hypothetical."
Q: What sparked you to get into this?
A: It is the state of America and the decline it has had. If you
look at America compared to 40 years ago -- who ever heard of weapon
detectors at school entrances, and illegal drugs, what were they? They were
confined to a small subculture in America. Look at the divorce rate, the
teen suicide rate, and we all know what happened at Columbine High School
could not have happened 40 years ago.
We are in a different culture, and the real question is, what is at the
root of the decline?
Most of us who are conservative or Christian would agree it is related to
a loss of faith, a growing disrespect for traditional moral values. And
where do those come from?
Certainly they come from the Bible for us in Western society. And what
caused disrespect for the Bible and moral values? I don't think it is an
oversimplification to say it was the widespread acceptance and teaching of
Darwinian evolution. Darwinism said that man was not created by God, but
evolved from fish and apes, and that life itself was not created by God, but
was created simply by chance, from chemicals in an ancient ocean.
When evolution is taught as fact in schools, it makes God seem irrelevant
in the minds of children. Julian Huxley, probably the most outspoken
evolutionist of the 20th century, said, "Darwinism removed the whole idea of
God from the sphere of rational discussion."
Geoff, I am a former atheist -- a flaming atheist at one time. I used to
make obscene jokes about God and Jesus Christ. I was not raised religiously,
but I had an open mind.
Once I heard evolutionary teaching in school, I concluded the whole Bible
was a myth. I know my experience was not unique.
This is a quote from Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, who is a bitter
critic today of biblical Christianity: "As were many persons from Alabama, I
was a born-again Christian. When I was 15, I entered the Southern Baptist
church with great fervor. I left at 17 when I got to the University of
Alabama and heard about evolutionary theory."
That pretty much sums up what happened to my baby boom generation.
Q: This isn't just a creationist rebuttal of Darwinism. I learned
a great many things reading your book. The fossil record does not support
Darwinism does it?
A: No.
Q: You quote this zoologist who defrauded generations by actually
forging drawings. I remember seeing those drawings in high school.
A: Right. Ernst Haeckel was the man who created those drawings.
Most of us have seen those drawings in biology textbooks in school. They
show developing human embryos next to developing animal embryos, and the
human embryos and the animal embryos look virtually indistinguishable. This
was said to prove we share a common ancestry with those animals.
Well, what most people don't know is, those pictures were fakes. At Jena
University, which is where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five
professors, and was convicted by a university court for making those
pictures. His deceit was thoroughly exposed in a book called "Haeckel's
Frauds and Forgery," published way back in 1915.
They quoted many leading authorities of the day. F. Keibel of Freiburg
University said, "It clearly appears Haeckel freely invented embryos or
reproduced the illustrations of others in a substantially changed form." In
spite of conviction for fraud, and in spite of his exposure, Western
educators continued to show these pictures in biology textbooks as proof of
the theory of evolution.
This matter was finally resolved by Dr. Michael Richardson. He's an
embryologist at Saint George's Medical school in London. He found there is
no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel's claims by
systematically comparing human and other fetuses during development. So he
assembled a scientific team that did just that. They photographed the
growing embryos of 39 different species.
Q: What did Richardson find?
A: He said, "This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud.
It is shocking to find that someone once thought to be a great scientist was
deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. What Haeckel did was to take a
human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and pig and all the
others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't! These
are fakes."
Q: We have all seen these pictures of evolution -- ape to ape to
Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon man to homo sapiens. You have some observations and
state there is a shocking lack of evidence regarding the ape-man theory.
A: First of all, the amount of physical evidence is lacking.
Lyall Watson wrote in Science Digest that "... the fossils that decorate our
family tree are so scarce, there are more scientists than specimens. ..."
And he writes, "The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we
have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a
single coffin."
Q: What about all the work that Leakey did?
A: My book discusses australopithecines, but probably a good
place to begin discussing apemen is with the Piltdown Man, which was
evolution's greatest showcase for 40 years.
What it consisted of, Geoff, was just an orangutan jaw that someone
stained to look old. They filed down the teeth on it to make it more human
looking. It succeeded in fooling Britains' leading scientists, Arthur Smith
Woodward, the British Museum geologist, to Arthur Keith, the anatomist, to
Grafton Eliot Smith, neurologist. They were led by evolutionary
preconceptions into believing this was an ape-man.
Or take the case of Nebraska man, which was a single tooth shown to Henry
Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. He
said it belonged to an ape-man. He showed it to two specialists on teeth at
the American Museum of Natural History, and they confirmed it was from an
ape-man. Many others did the same. But it turned out when they did further
digging at the site in Nebraska, that it actually came from a peccary, which
is a relative of the pig. This happened again and again in the study of
fossils. People were proved to be wrong when led by preconceptions.
Q: Was this an effort to manufacture evidence to support their
preconceived theory?
A: Whoever made the Piltdown man fraud was certainly trying to do
that. A lot of these people were, I think, just honestly led by their
misconceptions.
Q: Yeah, but that was one case of fraud. There were a whole bunch
of others.
A: Actually, the most recent case of apparent fossil fraud was
the archaepraptor. It's not in my book because it is so recent, but the
archaepraptor was promoted in National Geographic as the missing link
between dinosaurs and birds. And National Geographic even had a picture in
the magazine's November issue showing a baby T-rex with feathers on it, and
the fossil was put on display at their Explorers Hall.
Turns out the fossil is a fake. It is a bird fossil put together with
parts of a dinosaur fossil. Storrs Olson, curator of birds at the National
Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, said, "National Geographic has
reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated
tabloid journalism. It became clear to me that National Geographic is not
interested in anything other than the prevailing dogma that birds evolved
from dinosaurs. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been
among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one
of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age." These problems with hoaxes
have been going on for a long time.
Q: What about the scientific stuff like carbon dating and
radiometric techniques?
A: That kind of takes us off of Darwin's theory and moves us into
a whole different field. However, we do have a chapter on that in my book on
carbon dating and evidence for an "old earth."
Q: One of the key things you note, regarding the assumption there
is a natural progression from ape to man, is that the evidence is lacking.
A: The whole fossil record itself of animal life does not support
Darwin's theory. He recognized this himself in his own time. Here's what he
said: "The number of intermediate and transitional links between all living
and extinct species must have been inconceivably great if this theory be
true."
Now, he didn't find those fossils in his own day, and he assumed they
would show up, but they haven't. Steven J. Gould of Harvard, certainly a
leading evolutionist, went on record a few years ago as saying the absence
of transitional forms is the trade secret of paleontology. Colin Patterson,
the director of the British Museum of Natural History says, "Gould and the
American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no
transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied myself
with the problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. I
will lay it on the line: There is not one such fossil for which one can make
a watertight argument."
What should be seen out there in the fossil record are animals
progressing through their various stages of development. We just don't see
it. It doesn't matter if we're talking about fish, which suddenly appear in
the fossil record. You have invertebrates, and you have vertebrates; you
have no intermediate transitional fossils between them. And actually, since
all animals appear complete when first seen in the fossil record, and they
are not in transitional stages, then the Bible is right -- animals were
created by God whole.
Q: You mention also that mutations are almost universally
destructive.
A: Right. This is really important, because Darwin's theory dies
on this alone. Evolution says fish became men over a long period of time. So
where did the fish get the genes to become man? Darwin's theory says that
fish developed these little legs over a long period of time of yearning to
come on land. But a fish couldn't develop legs or anything else unless they
first had the genes for them.
Q: Wait a minute. What about that Madagascar fish?
A: Well, that was the Coelacanth, which they said was extinct for
70 million years. They said it was a transitional form between fish and
amphibians. But then 70 million years later, in the 1930s, one was caught
off the coast of Madagascar, and we have caught about 200 since then.
Examination has proven it is not an intermediate form. It has no amphibian
characteristics. It is 100 percent fish.
Q: You note in the book that Darwin didn't know about genetics,
but thought -- incorrectly -- that animals could just adapt in an unlimited
way. Modern evolutionists say fish must have mutated the genes to become
men. What about that?
A: Dr. Lee Spetner of Johns Hopkins University wrote a book
called "Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory about Evolution."
Spetner spent years studying mutations at John Hopkins on the molecular
level, and he said: "In all the reading I have done in the life sciences
literature, I have never found a mutation that added information. All
mutations studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic
information and not increase it."
If we look at the living world around us, it consists of billions of
pieces of genetic information. According to evolution, life started as a
single cell, so mutations must have engineered every feature of life on
earth. But we now know that mutations always delete information from
the genetic code. Richard Dawkins, probably the most outspoken Darwinist in
Britain, was asked if he could name one example of a mutation creating new
information. He couldn't come up with one example. Mutations are harmful.
They cause sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome. They never
give you an improvement over the normal man or organism.
Q: What about humans and chimps? Genetically, aren't they
something like 99 percent identical? Doesn't that suggest some common
ancestry?
A: The 98-99 percent similarity is actually not based on
comparison of the genetic code of chimpanzees and human DNA. Human DNA has
about 3 billion of its 4 nucleotides, which are the alphabet of the genetic
code. Only a small percentage of those sequences have been identified. The
claim of 98 percent is based on a process called DNA hybridization. I don't
want to get too technical, but it consists of splitting some human DNA into
single strands. They found they could rather conformably make it form a
double strand with chimp DNA. And they infer from that the 98-99 percent
similarity. But let me say this -- since men and chimps look so similar, it
wouldn't be surprising that the DNA, which dictates their physical
appearance, would also turn out to be somewhat similar. I would expect human
DNA to be more similar to chimp DNA than to whale DNA on the same ground
that you would expect two software programs for word processing to be more
similar than a spreadsheet application.
Q: Wait a minute. That response about the chimp DNA just doesn't
ring true. In your book, you are critical of people accepting Darwinism
despite all the facts that are contradictory to evolution. Yet in response
to the question about 98 percent similarity between chimp and human DNA, you
seem to scoff at that as being insignificant. I think it's kind of
significant.
A: I'm saying the figure is more arbitrary than people are led to
believe. It is not based on actual observation of the DNA code sequences.
But let me say this about similarities:
Darwinists make an assumption that similarities prove ancestry. Now,
there is some logic to that. If you look a group of siblings and they
resemble each other and they resemble their parents, we conclude that
similarities result from inheritance. But Darwin stretched the conclusion.
He'd look at a man and a tiger and he'd say the man has four limbs; the
tiger has four limbs. The man has two eyes; the tiger has two eyes. They
both have ears, a heart and so on. And he would conclude that the man and
the tiger therefore have a common parent. But is that true? Do similarities
always prove relationships? Animals need four limbs to efficiently walk,
just as cars require four wheels to be efficiently driven. Similarities do
not always result from a genealogical relationship. They also result from
the necessities of intelligent design.
Q: Scientists will contend that evolution is a fact. Has anyone
ever actually evolved anything?
A: It has never happened. In fact, no one has ever actually
changed one species into another. Geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan who won the
Nobel Prize for his work on heredity wrote, "Within the period of human
history, we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one
species into another if we apply the most rigid and extreme tests used to
distinguish wild species."
Colin Patterson, the director of the British Museum of Natural History,
said, "No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural
selection. No one has gotten near it."
Author James Perloff's latest book, "Tornado in a Junkyard," convincingly
argues that no solid evidence exists for macroevolution -- the conversion of
one animal type into another.