Scientist Flubs and Flops, #6

 

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• "Natural selection can explain much about why species are the way they are, but it does not necessarily offer a specific explanation for human intellectual powers, much less any sort of basis for confidence in the reliability of science." -- Biologist Austin L. Hughes, "The Folly of Scientistm."
• "Natural selection has been shown to have occurred (for example, among populations of Darwin's finches), but there is no evidence that it accumulates over longer periods of time to produce speciation in the Darwinian sense." Cambridge University biology professor K. D. Bennett,  Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life , page 75. 
• "Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." -- Botanist Hugo de Vries, "The Mutation Theory. Volume II, page 609. 
• "Natural Selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher." -- Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man."
• " 'Natural Selection,' simply and by itself, is potent  to explain the maintenance or the further extension and  development of favorable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterward become." -- Biologist St. George Mivart, "On The Genesis of Species," Chapter II, 1871 (link). 
• "Rather than emerging gradually, a few at a time, the evidence presented in these four papers suggests the occurrence of punctuated bursts. At every major phylogenetic node that was examined, the appearance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of novel homology groups was detected. Evolution by bursts is, of course, not expected if natural selection is the main driver....The fossil record depicts the appearance of the first angiosperms as a sudden event, with no clear progenitors...The nodes at the origin of the angiosperms are certainly striking in terms of the total number of novel genes that seem to have appeared in a short space of time....It seems that vast numbers of existing genes are jettisoned and replaced by entirely different ones. Such processes would represent a radical overhaul in the genetic composition of organisms. How this might be accomplished is another mystery." --"The Origin of Novel Genes,"  Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London.
•  "It  seems  doubtful  whether  any  organ  having  the function  of  a foot  or  of  a hand  could  be  changed  by  a gradual process  into  a wing,  without  passing  through  an  intermediate state,  in  which  it  would  be  inefficient  for  either  purpose ; — and such  a change  would  be  immediately  detrimental,  and  could  not be  effected  by  natural  selection."  --Joseph John Murphy, biology scholar, author of a massive biology tome   (link).
• "It is well known that the instincts of animals are as innumerable as they are marvelous. They have in common the characteristic that they allow the creature to act spontaneously, without reasoned thought, without hesitation or groping, and to attain the desired end with a certainty with which neither reason, nor training, nor impulse, can compare....Now the origin of instincts is no more explicable by natural selection or by the influence of the environment than the formation of species."  Gustave Geley, physician and mind researcher (link).