Nils Heribert Nilsson

Nils Heribert-Nilsson - sometimes Nils Heribert Nilsson or just Heribert Nilsson was - according to some creationists - a "noted Swedish geneticist and Professor of Botany at the University of Lund in Sweden.  In addition, Nilsson was Director of the Swedish Botanical Institute. "

In real life, Nils Heribert-Nilsson was a Swedish botanist and geneticist, who did research mainly in the taxonomy of willow trees. From 1934 to 1948 he was Professor of Botany at the University of Lund in Southern Sweden, and in 1943 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the organization who awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. However, today he is mainly known because creationists love to quote a couple of sentences from his magnum opus, Synthetische Artbildung from 1953.

Why creationists like Nilsson
Quotes of Nilsson bounce around the creatiosphere. Here are just a few examples of creationists quoting Heribert-Nilsson to "prove" their case:

Possibilities For Original Kinds?

Bible Study Manuals

This quote is rehashed by Creation Ministries: Gladiator—an ‘extinct’ insect is found alive

The footnote to this quote gives us an insight into the Creationist's mind: The phrase translated from the original German doesn't appear in Creation 1(2):5, 1978 - nor is it true: pp. 1139 - 1240 give a summary of Nilsson's work in English! There is no original German text which had to be translated - this is an invention by an unknown creationist (perhaps David Catchpoole, author of Creation Ministries' article): He spotted the incongruence of an English sentence in an obviously German book, and - instead of checking the original source - just invented a solution to this problem.

Confessions of Evolutionists (Harun Yahya)

Reasons to quote Heribert Nilsson
For a creationist, the reasons to quote Heribert Nilsson are obvious: He was a professor at a university who wrote something contesting evolution. And the creationist doesn't have to look through the great volumes of work Heribert Nilsson produced. All the creationist needs to do is just has to copy and paste (or memorize) the snippets which can be found in the texts of other creationists.

It's doubtful that any of those who quote Nilsson today has ever even seen a copy of the two volumes of Synthetische Artbildung.

The spelling errors in the reference section of the pamphlets quoting Heribert Nilsson indicate that these were copied without any further knowledge of the author and his works, perhaps from photocopies of the same arguments written in pre-internet times.

Reasons not to quote Heribert Nilsson
The reasons for not quoting Heribert Nilsson in the discussion of evolution are manifold. They range from the obvious to the more subtle:


 * Generally you shouldn't quote anyone whose work you don't know beyond the actual quote.
 * The older the quote, the more important the scientist has to be to justify the quotation (the converse of this sentence is not true). Creationists try to sidestep this problem by inflating the importance of Nilsson: in their texts, he becomes well-known, or at least noted, and the number of his professional positions seems to be increased in each copied text. This is necessary because the quotes are more than sixty years old - and Nilsson was in his seventies when he wrote the quoted book, so his time as an active scientist was pretty much over.
 * If you read the book - or at least a summary by someone who actually has done so - you'll find that Nilsson subscribes to some outrageous (and very outdated) ideas, e.g., that enzymes are genes.
 * A subtle point: In the 1920s, various national schools of the understanding of biology developed. Oftentimes, scientists saw their research backed and co-opted by their countries' governments for nationalistic purposes, and they often happily obliged. Nazi Germany's embrace of racial theory is one of the most notorious examples, but French biologists continued to defend Lamarckism well into the 20th century, and a case can be made that the Piltdown Man hoax was the result of a desire by British biologists to prove that early humans had settled Britain (there was a notable dearth of hominid fossils on the British Isles). So, if you find a book written in German in 1953 by a Swedish author, one should look further into the matter before embracing it without better knowledge. For instance, Nilsson proposes some elements of Hans Hörbiger's absolutely nutty Welteislehre as the geological setting for his theories.

A critique of the book
A certain Joel Hedgpeth wrote a critique of Nilsson's book in 1954:

Emication
According to Conservapedia, Nilsson was "not a creation scientist but was a founder of an evolutionary hypothesis called emication". At Conservapedia, emication is defined as follows:

An evolutionary theory? Here is the last paragraph of the scathing review of Nilsson's book by in the Quarterly Review of Biology:

Swedish Botanical Institute
Amusingly, the only hits at Google for "Swedish Botanical Institute" are creationist websites (except for the article you are reading now) which state that Nils Heribert Nilsson was director of said institute. It seems to be safe to say, at least, that Mr. Nilsson was not director of "The Swedish Botanical Institute", but a "Swedish institute" - namely the Department of Botany (Swedish: Botaniska Institutionen) at the University of Lund, which is, indeed, in Sweden.