Almost eight years after I explicitly damned the practice as misrepresentative, mischievous and sectarian, not to say unscientific, the Discovery Institute and Jonathan Wells are STILL abusing my book Deep Time (sold in the US as In Search Of Deep Time, lousy title, I know, not my fault).

Back in October ‘01 I set out my objections to Creationist misuse of my book in an official document put out by the National Center for Science Education, at their request (you can find it here – just scroll down to page 22). I hope the NCSE won’t mind my reprinting the passages in question. You can find them below the fold. After eight years I find I can endorse all of it with the possible exception of the first sentence of point 4.

10/15/2001

The Discovery Institute’s Viewers Guide to the PBS Evolution series claims in several places (for example, on page 11) that the series ‘leave(s) viewers with the misleading impression that the evidence for human evolution is much stronger than it really is.’ The Guide attempts to discredit the scientific implications of the human fossil record by quoting (on pages 11, 40, 47, 88, and 111) passages from the 1999 book In Search of Deep Time by Dr. Henry Gee, who is also Senior Editor, Biological Sciences, for the journal Nature. Dr. Gee has sent us the following comments:

1. The Discovery Institute has used unauthorized, selective quotations from my book IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME to support their outdated, mistaken views.

2. Darwinian evolution by natural selection is taken as a given in IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, and this is made clear several times e.g. on p5 (paperback edition) I write that “if it is fair to assume that all life on Earth shares a common evolutionary origin…” and then go on to make clear that this is the assumption I am making throughout the book. For the Discovery Institute to quote from my book without reference to this is mischievous.

3. That it is impossible to trace direct lineages of ancestry and descent from the fossil record should be self-evident. Ancestors must exist, of course — but we can never attribute ancestry to any particular fossil we might find. Just try this thought experiment — let’s say you find a fossil of a hominid, an ancient member of the human family. You can recognize various attributes that suggest kinship to humanity, but you would never know whether this particular fossil represented your lineal ancestor – even if that were actually the case. The reason is that fossils are never buried with their birth certificates. Again, this is a logical constraint that must apply even if evolution were true — which is not in doubt, because if we didn’t have ancestors, then we wouldn’t be here. Neither does this mean that fossils exhibiting transitional structures do not exist, nor that it is impossible to reconstruct what happened in evolution. Unfortunately, many paleontologists believe that ancestor/descendent lineages can be traced from the fossil record, and my book is intended to debunk this view. However, this disagreement is hardly evidence of some great scientific coverup — religious fundamentalists such as the DI — who live by dictatorial fiat — fail to understand that scientific disagreement is a mark of health rather than decay. However, the point of IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, ironically, is that old-style, traditional evolutionary biology — the type that feels it must tell a story, and is therefore more appealing to news reporters and makers of documentaries — is unscientific.

4. I am a religious person and I believe in God. I find the militant atheism of some evolutionary biologists ill-reasoned and childish, and most importantly unscientific — crucially, faith should not be subject to scientific justification. But the converse also holds true — science should not need to be validated by the narrow dogma of faith. As such, I regard the opinions of the Discovery Institute as regressive, repressive, divisive, sectarian and probably unrepresentative of views held by people of faith generally. In addition, the use by creationists of selective, unauthorized quotations, possibly with intent to mislead the public undermines their position as self-appointed guardians of public values and morals.

5. The above views are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my colleagues at NATURE or any opinion or policy of the NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP.