*Vladimir (Nikolai) Lenin (1870-1924) and *Josef Stalin (1879-1953). Lenin was an ardent evolutionist who, in 1918, violently overthrew the Russian government and founded the Soviet Union.

According to *Yaroslavsky, a close friend of his, at an early age, while attending a Christian Orthodox school, Stalin began to read *Darwin and became an atheist (*E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, 1940, pp. 8-9). Stalin was head of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. During those years, he was responsible for the death of millions of Russians who refused to yield to his slave-state tactics. The Soviet Union under Stalin was an outstanding example of Darwinist principles extended to an entire nation.

*Austin H. Clark (1880-1954), an ardent evolutionist, was on the staff of the Smithsonian Institute from 1908 to 1950 and a member of several important scientific organizations. A prominent scientist, he authored several books and about 600 scientific articles. But, after years of honestly trying to deal with the fact that there is no evidence of cross-species change, in 1930 he wrote an astounding book, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis. In it, he cited fact after fact, disproving the possibility that major types of plants and animals could have evolved from one another. The book was breathtaking and could not be answered by any evolutionist. His alternate proposal, zoogenesis, was that every major type of plant and animal must have evolved—not from one another—but directly from dirt and water! (*A.H. Clark, The New Evolution: Zoogenesis, 1930, pp. 211, 100, 189, 196, 114). The evolutionary world was stunned into silence; for he was an expert who knew all the reasons why trans-species evolution was impossible.

*Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958). The same year that *Clark wrote his book (1930), Goldschmidt gave up also. An earnest evolutionist, he had dedicated his life to proving it by applying X-rays and chemicals to fruit flies at the University of California, Berkeley, and producing large numbers of mutations in them. After 25 exhausting years, in which he had worked with more generations of fruit flies than humans and their ape ancestors are conjectured to have lived on our planet, Goldschmidt decided that he must figure out a different way that cross-species evolution could occur. For the next ten years, as he continued his fruit fly research, he gathered additional evidence of the foolishness of evolutionary theory;—and, in 1940, wrote his book, The Material Basis of Evolution, in which he exploded point after point in the ammunition box of the theory. He literally tore it to pieces (*Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried, 1974, p. 152). No evolutionist could answer him. Like them, he was a confirmed evolutionist atheist, but he was honestly facing the facts. After soundly destroying their theory, he announced his new concept: a megaevolution in which one life form suddenly emerged completely out of a different one! He called them “hopeful monsters.” One day a fish laid some eggs, and some of them turned into a frog; a snake laid an egg, and a bird hatched from it! Goldschmidt asked for even bigger miracles than A.H. Clark had proposed! (*Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process, 1979, p. 159).

Source: Evolution Handbook