Making a Monkey out of Darwin: A Rebuttal (part 2)

"Although born to a Catholic family Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France.

Yes, he was such a Darwinist that he didn’t really mention it anywhere.

Historian Jacques Barzun believes Darwinism brought on World War I: "Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens -- all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate."

If you followed that, then explain it to me in non crazy talk.

Yet a theory can produce evil -- and still be true.

Like nuclear physics – when do we get to blame Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Lise Meitner? Or, maybe, humans have always fought each other? Nah, that’s crazy talk.

And here Windchy does his best demolition work.

Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a "completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection."

"All my originality ... will be smashed," wailed Darwin when he got Wallace's manuscript.

The idea that Darwin stole his theory from Wallace is a historically illiterate falsity. There is no truth in it. Darwin sat on his theory for a very long time and ran the risk of being snubbed to the post by Wallace so they presented their ideas around the same time. You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Darwin's examples of natural selection -- such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive -- have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

Giraffes eat bushes and grass as well as leaves from trees. Has this guy ever seen a nature documentary? His ridiculous strawman about there being a cut-off for the length that a giraffes neck needs to be is ridiculous, are all trees the same height? No. Ergo, a shorter neck gets less food and a longer one gets more, ergo advantage, ergo natural selection can choose it.

Discovered in England in 1912, Piltdown Man was a sensation until exposed by a 1950s investigator as the skull of a Medieval Englishman attached to the jaw of an Asian ape whose teeth had been filed down to look human and whose bones had been stained to look old.

Yet three English scientists were knighted for Piltdown Man.

Therefore evolution is false.

For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.

Complete inversion of the truth.

And Darwinists still have not explained the origin of life, nor have they been able to produce life from non-life.

Sounds like a child doesn’t it? Scientists haven’t answered everything yet, whilst your made up myths have explained exactly zero. Also evolution is not abiogenesis and I stifle the biggest yawn in the world.

The most delicious chapter is Windchy's exposure of the Scopes Monkey Trial and Hollywood's Bible-mocking movie "Inherit the Wind," starring Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow.

The trial was a hoked-up scam to garner publicity for Dayton, Tenn. Scopes never taught evolution and never took the stand. His students were tutored to commit perjury. And William Jennings Bryan held his own against the atheist Darrow in the transcript of the trial.

In 1981, Gould had this advice for beleaguered Darwinists:

"Perhaps we should all lie low and rally round the flag of strict Darwinism ... a kind of old-time religion on our part."

Exactly. Darwinism is not science. It is faith. Always was.

Some bullshit about a film only loosely based on reality, a quote mine and the faith card and we’re finally done. Phew.

When you see a “…” in a creationist quote, you can pretty much rely on the fact that you’re being lied to. Here is the fully quote from Stephen Gould:

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern among my colleagues.  I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by distortion.  Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment — a kind of old-time religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition.  For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a unified front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.

So he says the opposite to how it is being construed by Buchanan. I know how these things can work though, because I have messed up quotes before. He has passed on a quote that another has sent him without looking it over, it can happen to any of us.

The last line is standard, the creationists aim to being us down to their level by conflating evolutionary theory with faith. It speaks to the fact that they know their position is less tenable so they’re trying to drag us down to their level. Nice try but sloppy B.S. like this continues to render creationism the laughing stock of anyone but the most faithful who will gobble this up.

Also see “Pat Buchanan makes a monkey of himself about evolution” and “Old fossil "disproves" Darwin!”.

Posted under: Evolution, Skepticism, Science
Posted on: Thursday, July 09, 2009 7:24 PM
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Comments

  1. Posted by: Mith on 7/10/2009 4:33 AM
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    *sigh*

    Alright, I am sick of this. I really am.

    Allow me to address any creationists out there. As a fellow Christian...just let me tell you...thank you.

    Thank you for fucking it up. Thank you for fucking up our religion to the point that we actually care about this petty bullshit. No seriously. Go look in a mirror and really, think to yourself, how much of a great improvement that you've made to Christianity. Help the sick? Give to the needy? Spread the faith of God? Bring the message of Jesus Christ so that all might be saved?

    Np. You didn't. In fact, your essay is nothing more than a pathetic attempt at supporting your fragile faith. It doesn't matter. Yes, I said it. Evolution doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't matter if God used a fucking magic wand or used evolution to create life as we see it today.

    Why? Because that isn't the point of God. What does God want us to do? Tell the truth. Help others. Love others. SAVE THEM. What have you done? Your essay has done none of this. Let's face it, your faith isn't really faith as we Christians like to aspire to. It's materialistic. You only believe in God and his Son because the Bible told you to. You don't worship the creator of heaven and Earth; you worship the works of long dead men who worshiped the Creator. You've let it twist your mind and it's turned you into this sorry excuse for a Christian who would go out and denounce a man who is simply reporting the truth of God's world.

    You're heresy is apalling. How dare you go to a man and do him wrong for discovering God's miracles for the sake of your own peace of mind. Do you have the gull to claim that a mere pissant like satan has sullied the work of the Father? That God would allow that twisted snake to defile our home?

    No. He hasn't nor will he. Who has sullied our home? We have. We lie, we cheat, we kill, we steal, and we are selfish. Satan may offer us a choice--he may even tempt us...but who makes the choice? We do. And the more we accept that we are the ones liable, despite what satan whispers to us, the better we will be.

    Satan didn't invent evolution...and if he did, you've done exactly what he would want; he's turned you into a hateful old patch of weed that wants to choke the actual message of God; love for thy god and thy fellow man.

    I ask you, why do scientists agree on this? Science isn't about finding what answers we want; it's about finding THE answer. In essence, these men and women are exploring God's world. Just because they discover something that doesn't match up with our books doesn't mean God doesn't exist. And to claim that honest and well intended discoveries of our gifted home is nothing short of blasphemy against God and a sin against your fellow man.

    There may be atheists who wish to use science against you--and you know what? So what? Are you so threatened by a self righteous fool who has allowed his ego to place himself before the beliefs of others that you would lower himself and our faith to their level? Worse still, you don't even challenge the person...you challenge their tools. You challenge the thing that is innocent and truthful because it makes you uncomfortable. So you reject it like satan's word, yet ironically falling deeper into his grasp.

    But you will fail--your are failing. Your god--the Bible, is not powerful enough to stand against the truth of God, despite the good intents of the book. And by striking down at science, by doing it injustice, you have insulted our creator. But even if your claims were true, you have fallen to the sin of weakness. You have allowed what you percieve as petty lies to stain the faithful.

    So I urge you, let go of your master and embrace the Lord. Embrace him by embracing his teachings--his true teachings, not the meaningless squable about creation and its workings. For while it may be important to learn them, they are nothing compared to the morality that God has passed down unto his creations.



  2. Posted by: ArgusEyes on 7/10/2009 5:13 PM
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    Good stuff Mith.
  3. Posted by: Azzy on 7/27/2009 5:41 AM
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    As a real scientist I like to see sources not just "yes it is, no its not. Windchy points out Darwin was too timid to put forth his crack pot theory. In science it matters who publishes, but in an ethical manner. Your arguments are not rebuttals, they are non-referenced nonsense. As mentioned, God could have made the world with 1 pebble. There are 2 stories of creation in the bible to prove they were STORIES not absolute facts. The big bang is absolute nonsense, where did the rocks come from? Energy the God haters rant, but no answer for where the energy came from. Has not God made the wisdom of man folly??? Prepare for the last day instead of attacking your intellectual superiors.
  4. Posted by: Azzy on 7/27/2009 5:58 AM
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    Here is someone who studied the question a dozen years, can you say oog oog???

    "I researched the book for 12 years," Davies told the Welsh newspaper Western Mail. "At the beginning, I believed Darwin was a genius. By the time the book was finished, I had long since realized that it was Wallace who was the genius and Darwin, 14 years his senior, who was the plodder."

    2009 WorldNetDaily

    According to author Roy Davies, former head of factual programming for BBC Wales, new evidence demonstrates that Charles Darwin stole his theory of evolution from a Welsh scientist working in Indonesia.

    And according to Australia's Northern Territory News, Davies' publisher is launching a campaign to have the Australian city of Darwin renamed after the Welshman.

    http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=66517

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