Blast from the Past:
Museum director Dr Johann Blasius v Darwin
A 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.
by Carl Wieland
16 June 2006
Early 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.
Headline:
Director Blasius: ‘Evolution Is Only A Hypothesis.’
[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 Natural 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.
Giving up on reality
According to biology professor Dr Scott Minnich,1
the evolutionist researcher Dr Richard Lenski bred bacteria for more than 20,000
generations with all sorts of selective environments in the hope of getting a spontaneous
increase in complexity—i.e. real evolution in the lab. He showed that they
adapted to their environment, but the experiment failed to demonstrate the emergence
of true novelty or spontaneous complexity. The bacteria were not only still bacteria,
they were the same types of bacteria. So, says Minnich, he decided to work on digital
organisms instead—computer simulations, which gave him the result he wanted
in 15,000 generations. The lesson is clear: the real world of biology is very different
from the carefully set up and manipulated world of electronic on-screen simulations.
Reference
- Minnich, S., Paradigm of Design: the Bacterial Flagellum DVD,
Focus on Origins series, 2003. Return to text.
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Related article
References
- German herzoglich, presumably established under the auspices
of the local duke (Herzog). Return to text.
- I.e. no transformation from one basic kind of species to another
quite different kind is possible. I’m sure that Blasius would have had no
problem with ‘technical speciation’ (using the modern definition of
species which was developed years after his time) in which the splitting off of
two types of salmon (that can no longer interbreed) from the one parent group can
take place with no added information. Search <www.creationontheweb.org>
under ‘speciation’. Return to text.
- Catchpoole, D. and Wieland, C., Speedy
species surprise, Creation 23(2):13–15, 2001.
Return to text.
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