Raul Leguizamon, M. D., Pathologist, and a professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico.

I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as Bernard Shaw used to say.

Professor Colin Reeves, Coventry University

Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when handwaving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts. However, what we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection’s ability to create complex biological systems – and we still have little more than handwaving as an argument in its favour.

Professor Colin Reeves
Dept of Mathematical Sciences
Coventry University

Edward Peltzer, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)

As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry — and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far. It is only when an intelligent agent (such as a scientist or graduate student) intervenes and “tweaks” the reactions conditions “just right” do we see any progress at all, and even then it is still quite limited and very far from where we need to get. Thus, it is the very chemistry that speaks of a need for something more than just time and chance. And whether that be simply a highly specified set of initial conditions (fine-tuning) or some form of continual guidance until life ultimately emerges is still unknown. But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area.

Edward Peltzer
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)
Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry

Chris Williams, Ph.D., Biochemistry Ohio State University

As a biochemist and software developer who works in genetic and metabolic screening, I am continually amazed by the incredible complexity of life. For example, each of us has a vast ‘computer program’ of six billion DNA bases in every cell that guided our development from a fertilized egg, specifies how to make more than 200 tissue types, and ties all this together in numerous highly functional organ systems. Few people outside of genetics or biochemistry realize that evolutionists still can provide no substantive details at all about the origin of life, and particularly the origin of genetic information in the first self-replicating organism. What genes did it require — or did it even have genes? How much DNA and RNA did it have — or did it even have nucleic acids? How did huge information-rich molecules arise before natural selection? Exactly how did the genetic code linking nucleic acids to amino acid sequence originate? Clearly the origin of life — the foundation of evolution – is still virtually all speculation, and little if no fact.