Our special quote of the day is from a Professor of Biology at Harvard University, Dr. George Wald.
"When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation (evolution). There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds (personal reasons); therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance."
- George Wald, winner of the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize in Science, in Lindsay, Dennis, "The Dinosaur Dilemma," Christ for the Nations, Vol. 35, No. 8, November 1982, pp. 4-5, 14.
5 comments:
I really love this quote. I think it's brilliant.
This is a falsified quote, not Wald's actual words. You need to read the article for yourself (Scientific American, '54.)
If this is a falsified quote why didn't you paste the "actual" quote? I think you are spending too much time on that "Talk Origins" website. Thanks for taking a look at my site.
Joe
And in fact they have part of the article on talk-origins. This quote from Wald's '54 Scientific American article seems to be the source of your paraphrase of Wald's words. He has been talking about Pasteur's experiments (and others) which demonstrated that living creatures did not arise spontaneously from things like sterile broth:
"We tell this story to beginning students in biology as though it represented a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity". It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a hypothesis of spontaneous generation. What the controversy reviewed above showed to be untenable is only the belief that living organisms arise spontaneously under present conditions. We have now to face a somewhat different problem: how organisms may have arisen spontaneously under different conditions in some former period, granted that they do so no longer."
It would still be better to read the whole article, partly because if you think Wald's words are important enough to quote, it seems reasonable to try to understand what he was actually taling about.
(Wald's '54 article was also reprinted in a Scientific American publication called "Life: Origin and Evolution", edited by Folsome.)
(I'm not sure this went through so I will repost.)
Hi, Joe.
You posted my comments in the comment section, but you still have the falsified quote (paraphrase labelled as a quote) in your actual blog post.
It is not right to put words into Wald's mouth that he didn't actually say. It seems to me that you need to either change the quote to the correct version, or add a note to your blog post that it's a paraphrase by some author, not Wald's actual words, or at least add a comment that you are not positive that the quote is accurate until you check for yourself. If you aren't going to do one of those, why not? What's your justification for not fixing it?
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