George C. Williams Quotes
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
Williams, George C. "A Conversation with George C. Williams." Interview by Frans Roes. Human Ethology Bulletin, vol. 13, no. 3, 1998, pp. 9-14.
This quotation illustrates the bizarre logic used by some war enthusiasts once Darwin’s evolutionary principles received wide distribution. Kellogg explains their notion. The absurdity is that there is nothing that characterizes the soldiers who lived differentially from the soldiers who died. The survivors of a bomb if any are random or determined by position and not intellect, courage, strength or any other trait that might be used selectively. See Kellogg’s explanation {631167}.
The Pope went on to state that Evolution was consistent with Roman Catholic doctrine, changing a position that had been taken by the Catholic Church and many fundamental protestant denominations. A few actually still reject evolution even after all the evidence and proof of the basic Darwinian theses. There is nothing in evolution that per se denies the existence of God or even that God created the universe and the mechanism of evolution. That is why the Catholic Church and so many Protestant Churches, Judaism, Buddhists, and so many other religions have no theological problem with evolution. Those religious groups who have difficulty with evolution are those fundamentalists (Protestants, Jewish and Muslims) who believe in the literal truth of Holy Scripture. They also assume that God designed each particular plant or animal species. Other religions hold that it was God who created the mechanism of evolution and that is how all the species developed and are developing today. Some religious evolutionists believe that evolution is God’s mechanism for perfecting man.
Here the Governor makes a very common error of people who do not have scientific training. They believe that a Scientific Theory is an assertion that has not yet been proven. That is not the way scientists use the term. The Theory of Relativity, Theory of Quantum Mechanics and Theory of Evolution all scientifically refer to a major set of scientific statements and relationships that have been proven over and over again, together with many corollaries and deductions. It is an established, experimentally proven body of knowledge that is still producing additional hypotheses that then need to be proven or refuted. The scientific THEORY is as high as it gets on the scientific scale of proof. The word “theory” used in science is not one fact, but a large set of related facts and their proofs. What the Governor refers to, scientists call hypotheses or speculations. There have been many more proofs of evolution -–many thousands of them—than proofs of Relativity which is actually harder to prove and only has a few thousand proofs. More important, not one person has ever been able to prove scientifically that any of the assertions of evolution are false. Some religions have no difficulty with evolution (Roman Catholics for example) and a few do (fundamentalist Protestants for example). Governor Huckabee was also a fundamentalist Protestant minister. Even the Federal courts have held that the objections and so called “refutations” and alternatives to evolution are religious and not scientific, and hence may not be taught as science in public schools. Non evolution (like creationism) is a religious and cultural notion and should be studied as that.
This is a very important quotation in the history of science. Note that he has the concept of evolution and mutation before Darwin published his his Origin of Species. Darwin had probably come to these conclusions at the time that Lawrence gave this lecture. And of course Darwin had a much broader concept and much data to back it up. But this was one of the great insights in science.
George Christopher Williams was an American evolutionary biologist.
