Holy genome, Batman!

In yesterday's post, we learned that the bible predicts that Babylon is the United States, and therefore we're all doomed.  A loyal reader of Skeptophilia read this and responded with an email that said, "I see your End Times prophecies, and raise you God's word showing up in your DNA."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing. The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said?  You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the bible. And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Righty-o.  Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine).  Perhaps what god is saying is something like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science."  Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The God Delusion, you think?

The Texas flood fossils

I get really fed up with the media.

I make a significant point in my Critical Thinking classes that there is no such thing as unbiased media -- that even the decision of what qualifies as news introduces a bias into reporting.  Add to that the slant that every news source has, and it underscores how important it is to take what you see, read, and hear with a big ol' pinch of salt.

But still.  There are times that poor reporting just pisses me off.  Take, for example, the story that appeared on KCEN-TV, out of Temple, Bell County, Texas last week, wherein we find out that a man in Tyler, Texas has found some fossils in his back yard that were deposited during the biblical Great Flood.

Tyler resident Wayne Propst was poking around in his aunt's front yard when he found some fossilized shells.  He cleaned them up with a toothbrush, then called a "fossil expert" named Joe Taylor who confirmed that they were from the time of Noah.

Propst was thrilled.  "From Noah’s flood to my front yard, how much better can it get?...  Now all I got to do is go in front of my aunt's house and pick up something from back when it all began.  I don't even have to search anymore.  What's really interesting to me is we're talking about the largest catastrophe known to man, the flood that engulfed the entire world."

Yes, and we're also talking about an event that left behind no geological evidence whatsoever, and therefore almost certainly never happened.  But don't let that stop you.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Propst's aunt, Sharon Givan, who owns the property where the fossils were found, was equally excited.  "To think that like he says that we have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth.  I mean, how much better could anything be," Givan said.

Which brings up what is, to me, the most troubling thing about the whole Noah's Ark story.  This is supposed to be an edifying tale, right?  About a guy who listened to god and he and his family got saved from destruction?  But what the religious seldom focus on is that according to the bible, everything else on Earth died.  Animals, plants, infants, children, people from other cultures who had no part in what was happening.  It is, honestly, one of the most unpleasant stories in the entire bible (and there's a lot of competition in that regard).

I got in a discussion with a biblical-literalist Christian about this one time.  How, I asked, can you justify the death of little babies because god decided that everyone but Noah's family was too wicked to live?  How can babies be "wicked?"

And she said -- no lie -- "God knew that the babies would grow up to be evil just like their parents, so he killed them to wipe out the evil in the land, root and branch."

Which is one of the most flat-out amoral statements I've ever heard.  Genocide?  Including women, children, and infants?  No problem, as long as god says they deserved it.  My general impression is that a god who operates on that kind of basis would hardly be worthy of worship.

But I digress.

The contents of this story should not really surprise anyone who lives in the United States.  There is still a strong thread of fundamentalism here, especially in the southern states, and young-earth creationism is alive and well (and the fight against teaching it as science in public schools is ongoing).  But why in the hell is it considered news that a guy believes in Noah's Ark?  We don't have news stories with titles like, "Hoboken Woman Still Getting Messages From Magic Unicorn."  (Although I have to admit, I'd read that article.)

The worst part is the last line in the article, which says, and I quote: "For the record, we have not independently verified if the rocks are in fact historic."  Meaning what?  You're gonna send a reporter down to look at the fossils and say, "Okay, they look like they're from the Great Flood to me?"  You haven't radioisotope dated them yourself?  You are unaware that fossils are, in fact, old?

Or that you're considering, heaven forfend, asking an actual fucking paleontologist to weigh in on this?

I know that a lot of media has devolved into clickbait and/or pandering to the whims of whoever wails the loudest, but is it too much to ask that we expect that news sources at least attempt to present real news stories in as unbiased a manner as they can manage?  The media gets away with this bullshit because we as consumers tolerate it.

It's time to demand more from our newspapers, radio and television news, and online media.  When you see or hear a story like "Tyler Man Says He Found Fossils From Noah's Flood," write or call in to let them know that it's unacceptable.  There always will be trash news sources -- I doubt The Daily Mail is going anywhere soon -- but the only way things will change is if we start letting the powers-that-be know that we expect more.

A life of fear

One of the things that strikes me about religious extremism is the fact that it always seems to be predicated on fear.  The one commonality between all of the various kinds of extremism is a perception that you're constantly at risk.  From the evil members of other religions (not to mention the non-religious, who are evil by default).  From the forces of darkness, Satan and the demons and what-have you.  And not least from god himself, who (in that worldview) is always perceived as a vicious and spiteful micromanager, needing for you to slip only once in order to have a pretext for condemning you for eternity.

When I left religion, thirty-odd years ago, the first thing I noticed (after a brief period of fretting that I'd made a huge mistake) was that I was no longer perpetually terrified of making a mistake.  And far from the perception by many religious -- that once you take the strictures of religion away, you'd become a selfish, willful, amoral jerk -- I found that I was much more aware that I was responsible myself for my own behavior.  So the loss of religion, for me, not only dispelled the irrational fear of retribution by an invisible judge, it made me more aware that we all have to take care of each other, and make this life we're living as good as possible, because we're not going to some kind of eternal reward or punishment after we die.

It's all now.  Waste this, and it's gone.

And the fear that permeates the fringes of religion colors everything.  In that view, there is no action that is unimportant.  Anything you do can leave you open to censure -- or worse, being influenced by the Evil One.

And as an example of this, take this warning from a blogger who calls himself "The Last Hiker" about the dangers of adult coloring books.

Why coloring books, you might ask?  Because many of them contain mandalas, which in the opinion of "The Last Hiker," provide an ingress for Satan:

A mandala is used in tantric Buddhism as an aid to meditation. They meditate on the image until they are saturated by it. They believe that you can merge with the deity by meditating on the mandala... Focusing on mandalas is a spiritual practice where you merge with “deities”–this practice opens the door to demons.

No Christian would put one in their house and sit and stare at it for an hour, chanting the sacred word! 

But if the enemy can get a Christian to stare at a mandala because they are coloring it, he can have them absentmindedly focus their attention on the image and they will unknowingly open up their subconscious to this image in almost the same way.

So in his view, mandalas aren't just attractive geometric designs.  They're portals for evil.  Presumably, even if you just bought the coloring book because you thought it was pretty, it'd still work the same way.  Motivation and foreknowledge doesn't matter.  All that matters is that you're in danger.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

He goes on to lay out the problem clearly, and suggests a solution:

So my question when it comes to the whole adult coloring books is this– 

Is it really about coloring? 

Or is it about spiritual hosts of wickedness sneaking mandalas into our homes and into our subconscious minds? 

Is it really about recreation or is it New Age evangelism? 

I can color all I want. 

But if I do, I am going to get a big fat coloring book of Bible stories.

Well, for me, it would be about coloring and recreation, because I don't believe in New Age occultism any more than I believe in Christianity.   But I wouldn't expect him to see that.

Nor would I expect him to see that considering the bloodthirsty nature of a lot of bible stories, you'd need a great many scarlet crayons to color them accurately.  Personally, I like the mandalas a lot better.  They don't require you to smite unbelievers or stone people to death or believe stories about god sending bears to eat children because they'd teased a prophet about his bald head.

What impresses me most, though, is the deep-seated fear that people like "The Last Hiker" must walk around in.  There's an evil being who is waiting for any opportunity to weasel his way in and steal your soul.  Something as innocent as a coloring book could be enough.  And on the other side -- and it's doubtful whether the other side is any better -- is a deity who has a list of thousands of rules, the breaking of any one of which could doom you for eternity.

It's a wonder these people can face getting out of their beds in the morning.

I made the decision thirty years ago to take a chance on the free air of reason, and the knowledge that there's no Cosmic Good Guy who'll make things right in the end, nor a Cosmic Bad Guy for me to blame my bad behavior on.  We're all responsible, here and now, for what we do.

And I'll take that responsibility in trade for perpetual fear any day.

Paris attacks redux

There's a fundamental rule I follow: if I make a statement, and people I trust take exception to it, I try to listen.

That happened today.  My earlier post (which I will take down as soon as this is posted) resulted in so many people whose opinions I respect taking exception that I have spent most of the day re-analyzing my thoughts regarding the terrorist attacks on Paris, who is responsible, and what our attitude should be toward Islam, ISIS, and the Middle East.

First:  I was beyond angry this morning.  I don't get that way often.  This is not meant as an excuse, merely a statement of fact.  In the grip of high emotion, it's all too easy to let yourself be carried away, to let logic, rationality, and compassion be swept off in a red haze of rage against people who could perpetrate such acts.

But on reading what people have written, both as comments on my blog, on Facebook, and in personal emails, here are a few things I have gleaned.

1. Blaming an ideology for the actions of a few is lazy thinking to the point where it is indistinguishable from being wrong.  No adherent to a religion, or any other belief system, follows it 100%.  If there are immoral commands in the ideology, and a person follows them, it is the person who is making the immoral choice, and theirs is the responsibility.
2. The situation in the Middle East is far too complex to place root causes for ISIS (or anything else) on one thing.  I should know better; I teach the Single-Cause Fallacy in my Critical Thinking classes.  The Middle East wouldn't be the miasma of poverty and oppression it currently is if it weren't for multiple causes -- not only fundamentalist Islam, but western colonialism, greed for oil, greed on the parts of the rich people in the Middle East itself who are desperate to quell dissent and stay in power (yes, I'm referring to the Saudi royal family here).  To lay it all at the feet of Islam is simplistic.  Once again, i.e., wrong.
3. It is probably impossible to do what I set out to do -- to tease apart the belief system from its adherents.  In leveling blame against Islam, I was coming dangerously close to aiming blame at all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, law-abiding and lawless alike.  I object like hell when someone does that sort of thing to me -- "all liberals believe X, aren't they stupid?" -- and here I was doing it myself.  What's the biblical quote about casting the beam out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from someone else's?
4. Shutting down the rights of Muslims who are already peaceful residents (and/or citizens) of the United States, or any other secular democracy, is the road to becoming the same kind of oppressive dictatorship we rail against.  
5. I really shouldn't write blog posts when I'm furious.

I'm left with questions.  How do we stop the transmission of the ideology of hatred?  How can we eradicate such blind, senseless violence from the world, without becoming blindly violent ourselves? How can we criticize beliefs and ideas without it sliding into denying the freedom of speech and religious observance to the believers?

I wish I knew the answers.  Hell, if I did, I'd run for president.

In any case: thank you to all who took the time to respond thoughtfully, even those who were angered by what I said.  To be a true skeptic means to be willing to admit when you're wrong -- or at least, when you have cause for serious uncertainty.  And about the Paris attacks, at the moment I have no answers, just a deep sense of grief that such things could happen in the world.

Allahu akbar!... or maybe not.

Once again, the fervently religious of our world have shown themselves capable of following the Red Queen's dictum of holding several contradictory thoughts in their heads at once.  In this case, it's Egyptian Muslims, who have jailed yet another person for "blasphemy" and "criticizing Islam."

The radical Muslim element in Egypt has been quick to speak out against the sentence.  It was too lenient, they say -- the man should have been executed.

It's a little perplexing how these folks, and their spiritual brethren the Fundamentalist Christians, can't see the contradiction implicit in their stance.  On the one hand, they are continuously chanting, singing, and shouting from the rooftops about how God is Great and All-Powerful and Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omni-Various-Other-Stuff, and on the other hand they are so terrified that a brief passage written by a guy on Facebook will destroy Allah's kingdom on earth that they are ready to hang him from the nearest flagpole.

[image courtesy of photographer David Lisbona and the Wikimedia Commons]

The same was true of the witch-hunters in the 17th century, who seemed to believe that the unshakable, self-evident, rock-solid truth of god's word was under serious threat from illiterate, eccentric little old ladies.

Come on, people.  You can't have it both ways.  Either god is powerful, or he's not.  If he's powerful, you have no reason to persecute people for bad-mouthing him; presumably god is capable of handling his own battles, and doesn't need patriarchal, humorless, puritanical bastards like the Shari'a judges to deal with his enemies.  If he's not so powerful -- if, in fact, his revealed truth could be demolished by a couple of paragraphs of mild criticism -- then I have to wonder why you think he's worthy of worship.  Either way, both can't be true simultaneously.

Oh, wait, perhaps there's a third option?  Maybe all of this stuff was made up by power-hungry patriarchs to keep the power structure intact, the money flowing in, and the women in line, and in actuality there is no god!  Gotta wonder.

In any case, you also have to wonder why so few people are willing to stand up and say this. Lots of folks are willing to address the human rights aspects (torturing and executing people isn't nice) but very few people are willing to deal with the larger issue, which is that these people are morally bankrupt.  A religion or a system of ethics which is based upon coercion (mental or physical), is simply an excuse for the powerful to remain powerful.  It isn't true, it isn't worthy of respect, and it isn't a reflection of the divine.  It is simply an embodiment of all that is bad about human nature -- the desire to dominate solely because we're in a position where we can.

It's the same with a lot of the issues between the Christians and politicians these days, isn't it?  You hear from people who aren't happy that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage that heterosexual marriage is "under attack".  The ranting you hear from the pulpits seems to claim that now that gay marriage is legal, all of these straight people are going to run right out and tie the knot with someone of the same sex, and that will open the door for heaven knows what.  In a year or two we'll probably have people marrying various marine invertebrates.  You know, if you think that sexual preference is really that fluid, you have to question why your god would have made it that way.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that if your worldview is based upon fear, then any amount of rationality won't get in the way of your adopting moronic stances to shore up your beliefs.

Of course, some people believe that there's god's evil twin, Satan or Lucifer or whatever, who is actively trying to corrupt people by using others to spread wrong belief.  Even if you think that's true, however, isn't it still supposedly the case that god is stronger than Satan, and correct beliefs are inherently more attractive and virtuous than incorrect ones?  If so, then once again, what the hell are you so worried about?

So once more, we have the devoutly religious of the world adopting a stance which is so patently ridiculous that if it were fiction, no one would believe it was plausible; and most of the world's political leaders doing nothing but tsk-tsking in their direction for "not being nice."  It would be wonderful if one, just one, of them would stand up and say, "You know what, Egyptian leaders?  We are no longer in the Middle Ages.  We stopped burning witches three hundred years ago.  That's because doing that sort of thing was based upon stupid, backward superstition.  Grow up, you idiotic bastards, and join the 21st century.  If criticism is really such a threat to your beliefs, it probably means that your beliefs are simply wrong."

But no one will, of course.

Single causes and simplistic thinking

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia called me out a couple of days ago for a statement I made in the post "Tribal mentality," regarding the tendency some people have to romanticize (or at least, to avoid criticizing) beliefs of other cultures.  Here's the passage he objected to:

At its extreme, this tendency to take a kid-gloves attitude toward culture is what results in charges of Islamophobia or (worse) racism any time someone criticizes the latest depravity perpetrated by Muslim extremists. Yes, it is their right to adhere to their religion. No, that does not make it right for them to behead non-Muslims, hang gays, subjugate women, and sell children into slavery. And the fact that most of their leaders have refused to take a stand against this horrifying inhumanity makes them, and the ideology they use to justify it, complicit in it.

He responded, in part, as follows:

ISIS is engaged in civil wars, and 99% of their victims are also Muslim.  Surely, Muslims on the whole are not in favor of slaughtering other Muslims...  (P)ointing at Islamic ideology as the culprit, rather than a complex set of political forces, just seems way too "Fox-Newsish" for a sophisticated blog like yours.  If Islam was inherently incompatible with pluralistic democratic values, then countries like Turkey couldn't exist.  The Islamic masses in Egypt rose up in a mass exercise of democratic revolution in 2012... only to be slapped down by a US-backed secular dictatorship.  There's just so much going on, with so many different factors...  I look at the 6 million Muslims living in the US and peacefully contributing... to blame it all on "their ideology," to say their beliefs are to blame for, among other things, the US-backed Saudi regime.... it just seems unfair.

Which certainly made me give some serious thought to what I'd written, and even more so, to what I think about ideology vis-à-vis responsibility for immoral actions.

Of course, in (at the very least) one sense, he is right; by attributing to "Islamic ideology" the atrocities of ISIS, and the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and many other Muslim countries, I avoided one fallacy by leaping headlong into another.  To wit: the single-cause fallacy, which is considering complex events to have a simple cause.  (Commonly-cited examples are "The American Civil War was caused by slavery" and "World War I was caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.")

There's a lot more to the chaos in the Middle East than Islamic ideology; there's tribal factionalism, the history of exploitation and colonialism by western Europe and the United States, and the have/have not distribution of oil wealth, to name three.  It is facile to say, simply, "Those evil Muslims!" and be done with it.

The Islamic recitation of faith [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, I have to ask the question: to what extent does ideology bear the blame for some of the evil done in its name?  And by extension, do the peaceful adherents of a religion -- for example, the six million Muslims in the United States that my friend referenced -- also share some of the responsibility?

And it's not Islam alone, of course.  Christianity has much to answer for, as well, and I'm not just talking about events in the distant past such as the Inquisition and the Crusades.  The current upsurge of anti-gay legislation in several countries in Africa, some of which calls for the death penalty, is largely the result of American fundamentalists encouraging and financing such measures.  Do the stay-at-home members of the Christian churches from which these "missionaries" come bear some of the blame, if for no other reason because of their silence?

Does Christian ideology as a whole?

Now, I know that because of the huge variety of beliefs within Christianity (and Islam as well), to talk about a "Christian ideology" is a little ridiculous.  You have to wonder whether, for example, a Pentecostal and a Unitarian Universalist would agree on anything beyond "God exists."  But as my friend also pointed out, there are passages in the Christian Bible that are as horrific as anything the Qu'ran has to offer; stoning to death for minor offenses, men being struck dead right and left for damn near every reason you can think of, not to mention a prophet who called in bears to tear apart 42 children who had teased him about being bald and a man who offered his daughters to be raped by a mob rather than inconvenience a couple of angels (who, presumably, could have taken care of themselves).  It's why I find it wryly amusing when I hear people say that they believe that every biblical passage is word-for-word true, and that they live their lives according to a literal interpretation of the biblical commands.  If they did so, they'd be in jail.

But to return to my original question; does an ideology, or its law-abiding followers, bear some of the blame for what the true believers do?  At the very least, for not speaking out more fervently against the deeds done in the name of their religion?

It's not a question that admits of easy answers.  I'm torn between feeling certain that the most basic truth is that you are only responsible for what you yourself do, and having the nagging thought that remaining silent in the face of depravity is itself an immoral act.  After all, one of the criticisms leveled against Americans by many Muslims in the Middle East is that we stand by silently and allow our leaders to continue pursuing exploitative and unjust actions.  How is their holding America, and all Americans, responsible for what some Americans have done in the Middle East any different from our holding Islam, and all Muslims, responsible for the actions of ISIS and the shari'a judges in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

I don't know.  But the moral ambiguity inherent in these sorts of situations should push us all to consider not only our acts, but our refusal to act, as carefully as we know how.  And we should all be less hesitant to repudiate the individuals who would use our religions, ethnicities, and nationalities to perpetrate evil in the world.

What the fruit flies actually say

It's common practice to use quotes from experts to support an argument.  I do it, in nearly every post. But the problem is that if you are only looking at a clipped quote from a larger piece, you may not be getting the whole story.

And sometimes the person using the quote intends exactly that.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, in the goofy creationist website Pathlights -- more specifically, on the page entitled "Fruit Flies Speak Up!"  In this bizarre little piece, the author claims that fruit fly research conclusively disproves evolution, because "After decades of study, without immediately killing or sterilizing them, 400 different mutational features have been identified in fruit flies.  But none of these changes the fruit fly to a different species."

Drosophila melanogaster [image courtesy of photographer André Karwath and the Wikimedia Commons]

Notwithstanding that the author evidently doesn't understand even the rudiments of evolutionary biology, what interested me more was the collection of quotes he used to support his point.  Some of them, for obvious reasons, came from creationist writings:

• Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (1971)
• Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (1982)
• Gordon R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (1983)
• Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984)
• "Evolutionists Still Looking for a `Good Accident,'" Battle Cry, July-August, 1990

So far, nothing too surprising here.  Of the other quotes, the first thing that jumped out at me was that the ones from scientists and thinkers of high repute were all old.  Like, really old.  There was a quote from Richard Goldschmidt from 1952, ones from Maurice Caullery and Theodosius Dobzhansky from 1964.  What, you can't find any quotes under fifty years old from reputable scientists to support your contention?

I wonder why that is.

And even those old quotes are misinterpreted or taken out of context.  For example, let's look at the Dobzhansky quotes.  If Theodosius Dobzhansky actually said something that shot down evolution, it would be astonishing; he was one of the founders of the modern evolutionary model, and in fact his most famous quote is, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."  So let's see what quotes the author did choose.  Here's the first one:

The clear-cut mutants of Drosophila, with which so much of the classical research in genetics were done, are almost without exception inferior to wild-type flies in viability, fertility, longevity.  (Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964))  

Well, duh.  The scientists who conducted the experiments were doing artificial selection -- i.e., selecting the mutant strains because they were interested in the phenotypic expression of the mutation.  Put a different way, they were not selecting the flies for fitness, which is what happens in natural settings.  Just as artificial selection in dogs has resulted in breeds with poorer fitness than "wild-type" dogs -- predisposition to diseases like hip dysplasia being a well-studied example -- there is no evolutionary biologist in the world who would expect that what is being done in labs that study Drosophila is going to produce populations with higher fitness than the wild-type flies that have been naturally selected for survival for millennia.

Here's the second quote:

Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs.  Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, and in the body reduce the wings, eyes, bristles, legs.  Many mutants are, in fact lethal to their possessors.  Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority, and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization in the normal environments are unknown.  (Theodosius Dobzhansky, Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955))

The author of the site is using this to claim that mutations are always bad, but read Dobzhansky's quote and you will find him using words like most, more or less, usually, many, a minority.  Read critically, you will see that Dobzhansky clearly knew about neutral variation, which are traits that confer neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to the individual.

In fact, let's look at a different Dobzhansky quote, that demonstrates the point rather clearly:

The data reported in the present article have a bearing on the problem of selection, even though they involve no selection experiments in the usual sense of the term.  Some of the chromosomes obtained through crossing over between the three ancestral wild chromosomes have properties very dif- ferent from the latter.  It is, therefore, possible to “select” products of recombination of the gene complexes that deviate greatly from the ancestral types, being completely outside the limits of variability of these ancestors.  (from "The Genetics of Natural Populations," Genetics, May 1946)

Dobzhansky was no doubter of evolutionary theory.  He simply knew enough about genetics to understand that artificially-induced, artificially-selected mutations were unlikely to improve fitness, and that much of the variation you see in nature is due to recombination.

Most interesting is a quote from Jeremy Rifkin's book Algeny.  Rifkin himself is an economist and social activist, so right away you have to wonder why his word on evolutionary genetics should be authoritative.  But here it is:

Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly.  Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them.  For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948. 

In the first experiment, the fly was selected for a decrease in bristles and, in the second experiment, for an increase in bristles.  Starting with a parent stock averaging 36 bristles, it is possible after thirty generations to lower the average to 25 bristles, "but then the line became sterile and died out."  In the second experiment, the average number of bristles were increased from 36 to 56; then sterility set in.  Mayr concluded with the following observation: Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability...  The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness.  This plagues virtually every breeding experiment.  (Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (1983))

Once again, we have the same three problems; confusing artificial with natural selection, ignoring the effects of recombination on variation, and using words like "most frequent."  And it must be said that when Algeny was published, it was roundly trashed by the scientific community.  Stephen Jay Gould reviewed it thusly:

I regard Algeny as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Among books promoted as serious intellectual statements by important thinkers, I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work.  Damned shame, too, because the deep issue is troubling and I do not disagree with Rifkin's basic pleas for respecting the integrity of evolutionary lineages.  But devious means compromise good ends, and we shall have to save Rifkin's humane conclusion from his own lamentable tactics.  (Discover, January 1985)

Ouch.  Given Gould's stature in the scientific community, I think that puts Rifkin and Algeny into perspective.

So the original post on Pathlights was disingenuous at best.  Illustrating the unsurprising point that if you cherry-pick your quotes, you can support damn near anything.  Which, ironically, is exactly what the fundamentalists do with their own favorite source, the bible -- insisting that we interpret literally the creation story and Noah's ark and prohibitions against homosexuality, while simultaneously ignoring things like the kosher laws and rules spelling out how you can beat your slaves and mandates to stone disobedient children.

No particular shock, I suppose, that they do the same thing to other sources.  But it does call into serious question their intellectual honesty, doesn't it?