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A chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the darwinian theory of evolution. his reason: the major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as darwin's theory predicts. when this conclusion upsets american scientists, he wryly comments: "in china we can criticize darwin but not the government. in america you can criticize the government but not darwin."
-Phillip E. Johnson
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A Chinese Paleontologist Lectures Around The World

Phillip E. Johnson
A chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the darwinian theory of evolution. his reason: the major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as darwin's theory predicts. when this conclusion upsets american scientists, he wryly comments: "in china we can criticize darwin but not the government. in america you can criticize the government but not darwin."
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Country Animal Theory Of Evolution

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I'm even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. like you can major in the mating habits of the australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies... okay, get a journalism major. okay, education major, journalism major. right. philosophy major, right. archeology major. i don't know, whatever it is. major in ballroom dance, of course. it doesn't replace work. how about a major in film studies? how about a major in black studies? how about a major in women studies? how about a major in home ec? oops, sorry! no such thing.
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Neo-darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-darwinian straitjacket. such questions include, for example, 'how do new structures arise in evolution?' 'why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'how did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' the importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.
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In china we can criticize darwin but not the government. in america you can criticize the government but not darwin.
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Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. but this is not what the paleontologist finds. instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.
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Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.
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