Bias, Suppression, and Intimidation in the Science Lab

Drug companies do not have to report on all of the evidence or experimentation regarding new drugs they want to market. This means that they can merely report on the one positive test out of the 50 negative trials. However, this kind of biased, unbalanced reporting can be used to “prove” the value of any drug!

Is this same bias endemic to other areas of the scientific enterprise? Evidently! Foundations and governmental bodies pour millions, even billions, into research universities, not to find the truth, but to prove evolution. Meanwhile, I am not aware of any such money funding studies to prove ID or creationism.

What will be the inevitable result of such an imbalance in experimentation? Researchers will inevitably “find” what they are looking for!

However, it is not even as simple as this profound imbalance. Intimidation has also become the standard in suppressing unwanted findings. Bruce Malone gives one example of what happened when someone contradicted the establishment orthodoxy pertaining to the dating of the dinosaurs:

·       Mark Armitage, the discoverer of the osteocytes in the triceratops horn, and instructor at a microscopy lab at California State University… showed his students the material. They returned to their Earth science departments excited to share the inconsistency of these finds (which contradicted the evolutionary teaching they were being taught) with their geology, anthropology, and paleontology professors. The result – Armitage was fired from his job within days of his paper being published in July 2013. This was in spite of years of stellar performance and excellent reviews setting up and running the university’s microscopy lab. (Brilliant, 23)

Many such incidents suggest that such repression of divergent voices is standard operating procedure – enough to make even the most gullible suspect of what is currently marketed.

Evolution and the Continuing Saga of Silencing any Opposition

Can we trust the “findings” and the proclamations of the scientific community? Not if it is dominated by fear and repression! Here is a good example of what happened to a scientist who published findings that didn’t agree with the party line:

• Soft unfossilized tissue continues to be found in a wide variety of fossilized dinosaur remains. One of the latest is a stretchy film membrane containing unfossilized osteocytes (bone cells) found inside a triceratops horn in 2012. The paper reporting this find was published in a peer reviewed journal called Science Direct, Volume 115, Issue 6, July 2013, pages 603-608. These unfossilized tissues are made of fragile protein molecules which under the best conditions…have total degeneration projected at less than 30,000 years. (Bruce Malone, Search for the Truth, Vol.6, Number 4, Fall 2013)

Of course, such a finding calls into question the orthodoxy of the evolutionary establishment, requiring a re-dating of both the dinosaur and the rock level – millions of years old, according to this orthodoxy.

We might hope that the establishment would welcome these multiple finds, however unorthodox they might be, and re-adjust their theory accordingly. Instead,

• [Mark] Armitage [California State University] was fired from his job within days of his paper being published…This was in spite of years of stellar performance and excellent reviews setting up and running the university’s microscopy lab.

How then can a rational person trust the establishment’s pro-evolution pronouncements? On the one hand, these elites control hiring and firing to such an extent that only their (unnaturally) selected few can make authoritative pronouncements. On the other, they receive all of the research money. Result – scientific monopolies might produce convincing propaganda, but they don’t make for good and trustworthy science.

Why the Fossil Record is so Damning of the Theory of Evolution

 

(This relief of a stegasaurus rex was photographed on a 10th century AD temple at Angkor Wat. Seems like flesh-and-blood Dinosaurs were known to the Khmers.)

People ask me, “How do the evolutionists respond to the quotations you provide from other evolutionists claiming that the fossil record fails to provide evidence of macro-evolution?” Many call me a “liar” or claim that I am taking the quotes out of context – I’m “quote-mining.” However, never once have any of my opponents provided a context that undermines the weight of the quotation.

The more civilized challenge usually comes in this form: “Well, even if the fossil record fails to prove evolution, there are other lines of evidence that do!” However, this retort fails to grapple with the seriousness of their problem. It is not simply that the fossil record fails to support the claims of evolution, this evidence actually undermines these claims.

Let me give an example. If I claim that I went to Walmart on Saturday and bought a set of kitchen furniture, but there is not record of such a purchase, I don’t appear on their security system cameras, and Walmart claims that they don’t even sell such a set, my claims not only fail to receive the necessary support. They are actually contradicted by the evidence. My claim, then, that I have other supporting evidences becomes highly doubtful. Besides, it is contradicted by the Walmart evidence.

Evolutionary biologist Donald Prothero (Occidental College) also admitted this problem:

·        For the first decade after [Stephen Jay Gould’s] paper [on punctuated equilibrium] was published, it was the most controversial and hotly argued idea in all of paleontology. Soon the great debate among paleontologists boiled down to just a few central points, which Gould and Eldredge (1977) nicely summarized on the fifth anniversary of the paper’s release. The first major discovery was that stasis [species remaining unchanged], was much more prevalent in the fossil record than had been previously supposed. Many paleontologists came forward and pointed out that the geological literature was one vast monument to stasis with relatively few cases where anyone had observed gradual evolution…As Gould put it, it was the “dirty little secret” hidden in the paleontological closet. Most paleontologists were trained to focus on gradual evolution as the only pattern of interest, and ignored stasis as “not evolutionary change” and therefore uninteresting, to be overlooked or minimized. Once Eldredge and Gould had pointed out that stasis was equally important (“stasis is data” in Gould’s words), paleontologists all over the world saw that stasis was the general pattern, and that gradualism was rare—and that is still the consensus 40 years later. – (“Darwin’s Legacy,” eSkeptic , February 15, 2012)

Precisely where the fossil record should have revealed evidence for Darwinian gradualism, it failed to do so, according to Prothero:

·        In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates. No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate. Rather than answers, we have more questions.

In light of this now common-place revelation, we have to remain skeptical of claims that evidence for evolution is to be found in other fields. My claim of a purchase should have been found in Walmart’s record of sales.

Now add to this the embarrassment that the fossil record repeatedly shows us that thousands of fully formed species suddenly appeared in the record without any antecedent (ancestral) forms. It’s as if I claimed that I just bought my kitchen set from a Walmarts, which had burned down ten years earlier.