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TheMysteriousStranger  2008-01-06 11:45:55 AM

Bevets quote mine: Give science a fact and it is invincible. But no one can guess more wildly than a scientist, when he has no compass but his imagination, and no purpose but to get away from God. Darwin uses the phrase "we may well suppose" 800 times and wins for himself a high place among the unconscious humorists by his efforts to explain things that are not true. Mr. Bryan on Evolution Reader's Digest August 1925

I don't doubt this quote, after all Bryan was a creationist politician. The Gutenberg text for the Origin of Species. I used Firefox's search tool for the phrase "we may well suppose".

The number of occurrences is zero.

Indeed the number of occurrences for "well suppose" is zero as well. I sent the text to a program to count how many times the character sequence (case insensitive) "suppose" occurred. This search would also find any word with those seven letters like supposed, supposedly, etc. The program found 130. Not all of them refer to Darwin's supposing. The last match was "Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced?" which clearly is referring to a supposed creation and not supposed evolution.

Maybe Bevets will say that Darwin used the phrase elsewhere 800 times. But that seems unlikely given that Darwin did not use it once in Origin. Bevets has a clear way of proving such a claim: Every one of Darwin's books and articles are now online along with numerous letters, manuscripts, etc. Provide a work with 800 uses of the phrase. (Do not I don't think it would be very fair if Bevets tried combing ever single word Darwin ever wrote though I doubt that even that would do it.)

Indeed if Bevets had any intellectual honesty and curiosity he would have checked before putting up the Bryan quote.

But the problem does not stop there. Even if Bryan (or rather the guy who Bryan used) was right, one could ask "so what?"

Darwin died 125 years ago. Evolutionary biology does not depend on anything that Darwin wrote.

But it is even worse then that. One sign of not understanding science is to quote scientists using such language. They use such language because science at its core is nondogmatic. To rephrase what Doctor McCoy once said to Mr. Spock, I trust the guesses of scientists over most other peoples' facts. This kind of language the creationists object to is common even when the conclusion is well supported.

That concludes today's example of why quoting should never be used to demonstrate a truth about the universe. Quoting can be literary, but it can't tell us what is. There is no surer sign of quackery then arguing about the nature of the material world via quotation.

I expect that Bevets will put a note in his page that what Bryan said was factually wrong along with acknowledgment of this post with a link to it. (And be sure to put in the #[whatever it will turn out to be] to link directly to this post.)

 

 

A Monograph of the Cirripedia  
Darwin

assume 8
believe 112
could 68
estimate 0
if 72
infer 142
imagine 8
may 118
might 21
perhaps 43
possible 21
possibly 6
presume 13
seem 65
speculate 0
suppose 21
suspect 23
theoretical 0

741
132795
.0056

Origin of Species  
Darwin

assume 34
believe 243
could 253
estimate 12
if 443
infer 86
imagine 10
may 589
might 211
perhaps 80 
possible 77
possibly 30
presume 8
seem 175
speculate 5
suppose 152 
suspect 25
theoretical 4

2437 
 189,094 
.0129

Physiological Theory of Fermentation
Pasteur

assume 5
believe 14
could 29
estimate 3
if 69
infer 5
imagine 4 
may 135
might 38
perhaps 6
possible 33
possibly 0
presume 0
seem 23
speculate 0
suppose 10
suspect 2
theoretical 4

380
35674
.0107

Special Relativity  
Einstein

assume 17
believe 4
could 22
estimate 1
if 131
infer 2
imagine 3
may 19
might 16
perhaps 1
possible 21
possibly 0
presume 0
seem 14
speculate 0
suppose 20
suspect 1
theoretical 2

274
33406 
.0082

 

Readers of Mr. Darwin's works cannot have failed to notice how freely he dealt in fancies and mere suggested possibilities. "It is not altogether incredible" Mr. Darwin would urge, or "it is quite conceivable," etc., when putting his notions before the public. It has been estimated that no fewer than 800 phrases in the subjunctive mood (such as "Let us assume," or "We may well suppose," etc.) are to be found between the covers of Darwin's "Origin of Species" alone. In other words, Mr. Darwin did not hesitate to base his ideas about the "Origin of Species" upon some 800 things which he could not prove to be true. As a reviewer (whose capacity both Darwin and Huxley admitted) wrote of that work: "We are asked to believe all these maybes happening on an enormous scale, in order that we may believe the final Darwinian 'maybe' as to the origin of species. ... There is little direct evidence that any of these maybes actually have been" (North British Review, July 1867, p.313).

It would have been quite unnecessary for anyone to point this out had not Darwin been giving out his speculations in the name of science. It was Darwin's habit of confusing the provable with the unprovable which constituted, to my mind his unforgivable offense against science.    The Bible and Modern Science  (1925)  p.21-2  L Merson Davies M.A., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.I., F.G.S.

 

Experience seems to show us this process eliminating less fit species, and so giving larger opportunity to the more fit. But this is not at all the same thing as creating new ones. Still less does it justify the assumption that this process alone, blindly working as the essential principle of a mindless abstraction called Nature, is sufficient to account for the development through countless aeons, of all the elaborate apparatus of life.

How far has this been scientifically proved? Darwin himself did not claim it. His reiterated phrase was "We may well suppose." It occurs, as has been said, "over 800 times in his two principal works." Supposition is not proof.    Ambrose J. Wilson  "What Charles Darwin Really Found"  Princeton Theological Review  (1928)  p.516

http://books.google.com/books?id=_Oo2AAAAMAAJ&dq=%22we+may+well+suppose%22+800+times&lr=

Inspiration Or Evolution By William Bell Riley Published 1926


http://books.google.com/books?id=q3wTAAAAIAAJ&q=%22we+may+well+suppose%22+800+times&dq=%22we+may+well+suppose%22+800+times&lr=&pgis=1



http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4280/


Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is probably the least-scientific ‘science’ book ever written. It is loaded with conjecture. Darwin used words like ‘perhaps’, ‘we may well suppose’, etc. over 800 times.     Intelligent Design—‘A War on Science’ says the BBC
Russell Grigg and Jonathan Sarfati


http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/misc.education.science/msg00312.html


"It has been estimated that no fewer than 800 phrases in the subjunctive mood (such as `Let us assume,' or `We may well suppose,' etc.) are to be found between the covers of Darwin's Origin of Species alone."—L. Merson Davies [British scientist], Modern Science (1953)  p. 7

 

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