From: lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Ideology and Indoctrination
Date: 25 Jan 93 19:00:00 GMT
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona
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In article <1k0tpu$5mp@agate.berkeley.edu>, philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson) writes...
>Chris Colby complains that Darwin on Trial reports that
>biologists have been hiding things from the public.   Why not,
>when leading figures have admitted as much on behalf of their
>profession?  It is not I but Stephen Jay Gould who described the
>prevalence of stasis and sudden appearance in the fossil record
>as the "trade secret" of paleontology.  Stephen Stanley has
>written that the doubts of paleontologists about the conformity
>of the fossil record with Darwinist gradualism were for long
>"suppressed."  Most revealing of all, Niles Eldredge confessed in
>print that "We paleontologists have said that the history of life
>supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while 
>really knowing that it does not."  That is a smoking gun indeed.

They have, perhaps, been hiding things from the public in the sense
that they don't make public statements about them (though you've
cited some clear counterexamples), but not in the sense that there
is some kind of organized conspiracy.  People in any profession don't
like to emphasize the weak points in public--how much of mainstream
biblical scholarship makes it from the seminary to the pulpit?
(I'm not defending this practice; I think this is one of the useful
aspects of creationism--to shine a light on perceived weaknesses
in evolution, forcing scientists to either correct their misperceptions
and educate the general public or to work harder at shoring up the
actual weaknesses.)

In a section of your article I've inadvertently deleted, you made
reference to the David Baltimore case.  After doing some reading
on fraud in science, I have to agree that there appear to be some
institutional problems in science which need changing.  (See Robert
Bell's _Impure Science_, published last year by John Wiley & Sons,
for extensive documentation.  A couple of other, older books on the
subject are William Broad and Nicholas Wade's _Betrayers of the
Truth_ and Alexander Kohn's _False Prophets_.)

>Darwinist indoctrination makes its victims incapable of
>understanding that the fundamental problem of biological
>evolution, or creation, is not diversity within the type but the
>origin of complexity. It is pathetic to see advanced biology
>students (or faculty members) say that natural selection does not
>have to be "the least bit creative" to be "the primary mechanism
>responsible for bringing about, from a single common ancestor,
>all of the species on earth  and their phenotypic features." 
>That isn't even reasonable by the standards of Darwinist
>literature, where the creative power of natural selection is
>often extolled hyperbolically.  As Richard Dawkins puts it,
>a single cell has more genetic information than all the volumes
>of an encyclopedia.  If you don't understand that explaining the
>origin of all that information presents a serious problem,
>it is probably because indoctrination in the notion
>that population fluctuation in the peppered moth is the paradigm
>example of evolution in action has a tendency to cloud the mind.

You are not claiming that complexity cannot naturally increase, are
you?  We have abundant evidence to the contrary.  There are the cases
of apparent directed mutation which John Cairns and Barry Hall have
been investigating (which Chris Colby recently alluded to), there
is the whole field of artificial life (with Thomas Ray's Tierra program
showing some interesting things), and there's the non-equilibrium
thermodynamics people (Brooks and Wiley, Prigogine).

Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721