My wife having brought back from the USA a new haul of books that I had ordered and sent to my son's address in Colorado to save postage to Australia, I have decided to restart my quote of the day (although I may not be able to post a new quote every day).
[Graphic: Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), John Alroy, University of California, Santa Barbara]
Here is the first one by the great American geneticist and Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was sceptical of Darwinism in general and natural selection in particular, in which he questions whether "natural selection [is] an agency capable of bringing about progressive changes ...?" and since "The origin of these types ... not the preservation of certain of them after they have appeared" is "the essential phenomenon of evolution," therefore "`the struggle for existence' and `the survival of the fittest' may express only a sort of truism or metaphor, and have nothing to do with the origination of new types out of antecedent ones" (my emphasis):
"Of course no mutationist would deny that a new type must be able to survive and perpetuate itself if it is to take part in evolution; but this might be said to be only a commonplace. A mutationist might well insist that the essential part of Darwin's theory of natural selection is not survival, but Darwin's postulate that the individual variations, everywhere present, furnish the raw materials for evolution. This the mutationist would deny. In what sense, then, have the catchwords `competition' and `the survival of the fittest' come to be generally regarded as the essential features of natural selection? Do these terms mean, for instance, that natural selection is an active agent in evolution, which in itself brings about progressive changes; or do they mean only that it acts as a sieve for the materials that present themselves as variations? If we think of evolution as an active process, is natural selection an agency capable of bringing about progressive changes, or does it not rather direct attention away from the real phenomenon, and offer at most only an explanation of the presence of certain types and the absence of others at any one period of geological history? The origin of these types-the real creative steps-not the preservation of certain of them after they have appeared, might rather be regarded as the essential phenomenon of evolution. If so, `the struggle for existence' and `the survival of the fittest' may express only a sort of truism or metaphor, and have nothing to do with the origination of new types out of antecedent ones. These contrasts may be brought out more clearly by a statement of the converse situations. Suppose evolution had come about as a series of direct adaptive responses to the environment. In such a case natural selection would become practically meaningless, although the statement that this would lead to the survival of the fittest would still hold." (Morgan, T.H., "The Scientific Basis of Evolution," [1932], W.W. Norton: New York NY, Second Edition, 1935, pp.109-110).
Somehow it doesn't quite fit the Darwinist propaganda machine's image that a great biologist, who held the "professorship in experimental zoology at Columbia University" and later was "head [of] the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology" from 1928-1942, who "was able to demonstrate that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity" which "formed the basis of the modern science of genetics," for which "he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933," being "the first person awarded the Prize for genetics," could nevertheless "reject... Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection acting on small, constantly-produced variations" (Thomas Hunt Morgan, Wikipedia)!
Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol).
Genesis 15:7-18. 7He also said to him, "I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." 8But Abram said, "O Sovereign LORD, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" 9So the LORD said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." 10Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. 11Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. 12As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." 17When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates-
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