More than 1,000 highly influential scientists from around the world have gone on record with their doubts about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
They hail from institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Tulane, Rice and Baylor, the National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the British Museum and MIT’s Lincoln Library.
“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” they say in a statement. “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The scientists include the best in molecular biology, biochemistry, biology, entomology, computational quantum chemistry, microbiology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, astrophysics, marine biology, cellular biology, physics and astronomy, math, physics, geology and anthropology, according to Evolution News, an online publication of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the theory of intelligent design.
The Discovery Institute first published its “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” list in The New York Review of Books in 2001 to challenge “false” claims from PBS’ series “Evolution.”
PBS had claimed “virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true.”
But biologist Douglas Axe, director of the Biologic Institute, argued peer pressure is obscuring the truth.
“Because no scientist can show how Darwin’s mechanism can produce the complexity of life, every scientist should be skeptical,” he said. “The fact that most won’t admit to this exposes the unhealthy effect of peer pressure on scientific discourse.”
Originally, Discovery Institute Chairman Bruce Chapman assembled a list of 100 doctorate-level scientists for the statement.
“Realizing that there were likely more scientists worldwide who shared some skepticism of Darwinian evolution and were willing to go on record, the Institute has maintained the list and added to it continually since its inception,” the Evolution News report said.
“The list of signatories now includes 15 scientists from the National Academies of Science in countries including Russia, Czech Republic, Brazil, and the United States, as well as from the Royal Society. Many of the signers are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as the University of Cambridge, London’s Natural History Museum, Moscow State University, Hong Kong University, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in France, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, the Smithsonian, Yale, and Princeton,” it noted.
Marcos Eberlin, Ph.D., founder of the Thomson Mass Spectromety Laboratory and member of the National Academy of Sciences in Brazil, said in the report, “As a biochemist I became skeptical about Darwinism when I was confronted with the extreme intricacy of the genetic code and its many most intelligent strategies to code, decode, and protect its information.”
Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, said scientists “know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others.”
“The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions,” he said. “They’ve never asked scientifically, can random mutation and natural selection generate the information content in living things.”
