Is evolution a hoax perpetuated by a conspiracy among scientists?

Some years back, I read an article written by a professing “theistic evolutionist” named Tyler Franke. I would link to some of his posts now but they seem to have been taken down. Fortunately, though, I had responded to some of his arguments online and I have some quotes Franke at that time. Virtually all of the points Franke made were typical strawmen used to attack young-earth creationists. He did make one point, though, that I'd like to leverage now and discuss something I've seen happening in the scientific community regarding creation and evolution.

In an article titled, The Top 10 Signs That You Don't Understand Evolution At All, Franke said, someone doesn't understand evolution if “You think our modern understanding of it rests on a long series of hoaxes perpetuated by scientists.” From that article, Franke explained, Affirmed by the likes of everyone’s favorite nut-job conspiracy theorist meets cartoonist, Jack Chick, this idea is alive and well in evangelical culture. And why shouldn’t it be? Repeatedly assured by young-earth creationist groups that there is “absolutely no evidence for evolution,” what else would explain the theory’s unshakable dominance in the scientific community, courts and public schools besides a vast atheist conspiracy? And so, young-earthers on the Internet commonly parrot blatant falsehoods like “Archaeopteryx was a hoax”... and “Java Man and Peking Man were frauds”.

Let me start with a quick clarification. Evolution is indeed the prevailing opinion within the scientific community – presumably because they feel it's supported by the evidence (but maybe more so because it's the only theory that fits the “natural-explanations-only” paradigm which I'll address in a moment). However, “the theory's unshakable dominance” in the courts and public schools is not because the evidence for it is so overwhelming. It is because any criticism of the theory in a public school is challenged in court as a violation of the so-called “separation of church and state.” To my knowledge, no court has ever tried the evidence for evolution and judged it to be true. Rather, any competing theory – indeed, any criticism of the theory – is simply declared a religious belief and, so, is banned from public schools.

OK, back to the point. I absolutely believe that, if more people understood evolution, fewer people would believe it. The acceptance of evolution by the lay public has been made more successful by intentional deception committed by the scientific community. I wouldn't call it a hoax, per se, because the scientists may actually believe this one interpretation of the evidence. Is it a conspiracy? I'm reluctant to use that word because it is so often associated with people like Jesse Ventura. There is definitely something going on in the scientific community. For the lay public, academia allows untruths and half-truths about evolution to continue to be believed by the masses. I'm not even talking about Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, which Francke mention in his article. I'm talking about modern examples of objectively false information currently believed by the public to be evidence for evolution.

I could talk about the persistent spin that evolution has been declared true by the supreme court but I've already discussed that. Let's see... oh, here's one: Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA is 98% similar? This is often cited as “proof” that humans and chimps are related. But have you ever heard the people who cite this statistic also explain that chimp DNA is 10% longer than human DNA? I'll bet you haven't.

In the book, Anthropology: The Human Challenge, we find the following quote: Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among genomes. Genetic evolution involves much more than simply replacing one base with another. Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s.... [T]he tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans.

The seemingly amazing 98% similarity is achieved only by comparing sections of the DNA and not the entire genome! Of course, the lay public thinks our DNA (the entire genome) is nearly identical to a chimp's. A letter by letter comparison of the entire genome shows human and chimp DNA is only 70-80% similar.

I'll give only one more example of a commonly believed lie. Have you ever heard that 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct? If life evolved from a single cell to everything that exists today, it would sort of make sense there would have been countless species in between. I heard an evolutionist once say in a debate that we see this in the fossil record. What a liar! Did you know there are more identified species living today than there are extinct species found in the fossil record? I'll bet you didn't. The statistic is merely an estimate that makes certain assumptions about how long ago the first life form appeared and how long it takes new species to appear. There are about 1.7 million species that have been named. There are maybe 10,000,000 that are believed to exist but haven't been classified or even discovered. Compare that to only 250,000-500,000 extinct species known only from fossils. There is NO fossil evidence for “billions of species” having lived in the past.

There are many, many other other examples of these types of “factoids” that are either blatant lies or grossly misunderstood. For some more examples, click the “Lies evolutionists tell” tag on this page. Yet lay people believe them and repeat them to support their belief in evolution. What's worse though – far worse, in fact – is the coordinated effort within the scientific community to squelch any research that might challenge evolution.

Since evolution is not real, it really has no impact on any part of science. Evolutionary biologists talk a lot about evolution and hash out their theory in peer reviewed papers but none of their work has anything to do with science. All other scientists are able to do their work just fine without ever thinking about evolution. If everything we think we know about evolution turned out to be wrong, no one else would change a single thing about the research they're doing right now. It makes me a little curious about why they so zealously defend a theory that contributes so little to science.

The first reason is because they have a commitment to naturalism. Scientific American admits to a natural bias. In an article containing 15 half-truths and strawmen aimed at confusing the public, they said this:

A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

You'll have to ignore the irony for a moment – like, how can I observe or test this tenet of science? My point in quoting this is to show how mainstream science has disqualified, a priori, a miraculous creation as a possible explanation of the universe. Not because they've carefully studied the evidence for creation and are more persuaded by the arguments for evolution. No, it's because of their tenet - an opinion, belief, or principle that is held as absolute truth – that says they will only ever consider a natural explanation for anything.

Ben Stein made a movie several years ago called, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where he detailed some of the systematic discrimination in the scientific community against creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design. This has always been the case and I've observed it for decades.

From one Answers in Genesis article, we find the following quote:

In the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most journals. He asked if Science had “a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters.” Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, “It is true that we are not likely to publish creationist letters.”

In 2004, Smithsonian editor, Richard Sternberg dared to allow a paper favoring intelligent design to be published. In his account of the “controversy” he said, Because Dr. Meyer’s article presented scientific evidence for intelligent design in biology, I faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a hostile work environment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History that was designed to force me out as a Research Associate there. These actions were taken by federal government employees acting in concert with an outside advocacy group, the National Center for Science Education. Efforts were also made to get me fired from my job as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Very early in my blogging career, I wrote about the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution firing a researcher solely because he was a creationist. In a Boston.com article about the case, Woods Hole, studies how aquatic animals respond to chemical contaminants by examining '. . . mechanisms from a comparative/evolutionary perspective.' Did you catch that? “from an evolutionary perspective.” Anyway, Hahn, the senior scientist as Woods Hole is quoted as saying, This position is incompatible with the work as proposed to NIH and with my own vision of how it should be carried out and interpreted. In other words, Woods Hole only ever considers the evidence from an evolutionary perspective and is not interested in hiring someone who interprets the evidence any other way.

More recently, Bob Enyart, a radio talk-show host and creationist, offered Jack Horner, a paleontologist, a $20,000 grant if Horner would just give permission to test a t-rex fossil for carbon-14. After much hemming and hawing, Horner refused saying, Your group is a group of creationists and... and... and... the spin they could get off of it, doing it, is not gonna help us.

Does anyone remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza had a job interview, but at the end of the interview he wasn’t sure if he’d been offered the job or not? The hiring manager was going to be out for a week so George had the idea that he would just show up at the office while the manager was gone and say he’d been hired. Whenever the manager returned, it would be hard to deny his employment because he would already be “ensconced.” It finally dawned on me that evolutionists have been using this same tactic for years. Think about it: scientists present questionable evidence for evolution, they convince the public that evolution is true, we later discover the same evidence doesn't really support the theory, scientists quietly dismiss the evidence, and the public continues believing in evolution. Evolution is “ensconced.” It's brilliant. It's the Constanza Tactic!

I've heard a thousand times that science goes wherever the evidence leads but that's just another lie. Devout evolutionists refuse to consider any evidence that goes against their precious theory. They organize groups like NCSE to make sure nothing critical of evolution is ever spoken in public schools. If a teacher so much as says, “we should critically examine evolution,” he is branded a creationists and slapped with a lawsuit. Any scientist who is even suspected of being sympathetic to creationism is at risk of losing his job. Is it a conspiracy? Well, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then maybe it is a duck.