| Blast from the Past |
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Blast from the PastA comment from a scientist of Darwin’s day reminds us that it was predominantly the scientists, rather than the theologians, who at first opposed Darwinism.16 June 2006Early in 2004, the Ducal1 Natural History Museum of Braunschweig (Brunswick), Germany, celebrated 250 years of its existence. In acknowledgment of this, the German newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung ran a weekly series, with historical articles featuring selected years out of that quarter-millennium. One of these, on 29 March, featured the year 1859, when Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. Blasius on Darwin’s Origin: I have also seldom read a scientific book which makes such wide-ranging conclusions with so few facts supporting them. The issue reprinted an 1859 interview/discussion with Professor Johann H. Blasius, then the museum’s director, about Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The following is the translation.
[Interviewer] Dr Blasius, what is your first impression of Darwin’s book? [Dr Blasius] I have seldom been so quick to buy a book. I must add to that, though, that I have also seldom read a scientific book which makes such wide-ranging conclusions with so few facts supporting them. You hold the evolutionary theory to be unfounded? Yes, Darwin wants to show that Arten [types, kinds, species] come from other Arten. I regard this as somewhat of a highhanded hypothesis, because he argues using unproven possibilities, without even naming a single example of the origin of a particular species. So in your opinion Arten are immutable?2 Not only according to my opinion. Zoologists who engage in empirical research would generally regard as valid only that which can be observed in an experiment or in free-living nature. And what one observes there is that the offspring of a plant or animal inevitably resembles the parents, i.e. they belong to the same Art. The immovability of the boundaries of the Arten is, for most of us, a law of nature.
Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species by Means of Batural Selection; Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life Which facts could convince you of Darwin’s evolution theory? I will only believe in it when such transmutations [as Darwin says have taken place in the remote past—i.e. fish to amphibians, etc. — Ed] can be indisputably demonstrated, either in the realm of paleontology [fossils] or in free-living organisms. Nearly 150 years later, we are still waiting for such transmutations to be demonstrated. As we have shown previously, one species can ‘split’ its gene pool such that there are now two types that can no longer interbreed. So by the modern definition of species, a new species has arisen.3 But this takes place within the existing genetic information of that original population, i.e. nothing new is added. Just as a genetically rich ‘mongrel’ dog population can be ‘thinned out’ into genetically poorer varieties/breeds, so the original ‘dog kind’ would have given rise to wolves, coyotes and dingos in a non-evolutionary, downhill process. (Evolution from frog to prince requires expanding gene pools, not contracting ones.) But we have yet to observe the type of change that could demonstrate the feasibility of even a tiny step up the ladder leading from microbes to microbiologists.
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