Evolution

A piece of anti-evolution inanity pt1

ArgusEyes — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 10:04:31 GMT

One-two punch. Really quick and precise.

First up in the retard corner. Bryan Fischer:

http://www.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost.aspx?id=2147511115

As J.B.S. Haldane famously observed, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

If computational processes are determined wholly by the motion of electrons in circuits, then I have no reason to suppose that it could ever solve a sum and hence I have no reason for supposing the computer to be composed of electrons in circuits.

First Law of Thermodynamics. This law (note: not a theory but a scientific law) teaches us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. In other words, an honest scientist will tell you that there is nothing in the observable universe that can explain either the origin of energy or matter. By logical extension, then, matter and energy had to come into being by some force outside the universe.

What this means, then, is that science simply has no explanation for the most basic question that could possibly be asked: why is there something rather than nothing?

Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates have an answer to this question; evolutionists do not.

Theism in a nutshell. “You don’t know, therefore God”. If course, that’s not an answer. That was the same answer to “where did disease come from”, “where did lightning come from”, “how does the sun move across the sky”. It was wrong then. How much do we want to bet on it being wrong this time? To state that “we don’t know” means “we know” is a logical impossibility.

Also, the premises are unsound. Take what we thought we “knew” about science a hundred years ago. People were actually reticent to go into the field of physics since they thought that we knew everything we needed to know, only technology was getting in the way of us progressing. That was before quantum physics came to the fore. Oh! How ignorant we are at all stages of our humanity!

Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law (note: not a theory but a law) teaches us that in every chemical or heat reaction, there is a loss of energy that never again is available for another heat reaction. This is why things break down if left to themselves, and why scientists tell us that the universe is headed toward a heat death.

This law teaches us, then, that the universe is headed toward increasing randomness and decay.

But what does the theory of evolution teach us? The exact opposite, that the universe is headed toward increasing complexity and order. You put up a scientific theory against my scientific law, I'm going to settle for the law every time, thank you very much.

My, aren’t we smarmy! A commenter made a really good comment here.

“Obviously in individual systems order can increase - have you ever made a bed? Congratulations, you added order to a system but did not violate the laws of physics.”

If babies can grow up, become adults, give birth to other babies, which will do the same. Then your point is full of it.

Fossils. Realize that the fossil record is the only tangible, physical evidence for the theory of evolution that exists. The fossil record is it. There is absolutely nothing else Darwinians have they can show you.

As Yale University's Carl Dunbar says, "Fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms."

But if Darwin's theory is correct, that increasingly complex life forms developed in tiny little incremental and transitional steps, then the fossil record should by littered with an enormous number of transitional fossils.

Darwin himself said, "The number of intermediate and transitional links must have been inconceivably great."

But, sadly for Darwinians, after 150 years of digging in dirt all around the world, there are still no transitional fossils at all, not one!

I’m going to stop him there since that last line is complete bull.

Oh, but they’re not transitional because you don’t think they are. Hey, there has never been a sane Christian since I define all Christians as definitionally insane. Ha! I win!

Also, forget fossils. Really. We don’t need em’! The evidence from genetics is more than enough to back evolution as being true…

Genes. The only mechanism — don't miss this — the only mechanism evolutionists have to explain the development of increasingly complex life forms is genetic mutation. Mutations alter DNA, and these alterations can be passed on to descendants.

Oh for fucks sake.

The problem: naturally occurring genetic mutations are invariably harmful if not fatal to the organism. Rather than improve an organism's capacity to survive, they invariably weaken it. That's why the phrase we most often use to refer to genetic mutations is "birth defects."

If scientists are some day able to engineer beneficial genetic mutations in the lab, that will simply prove our point: we told you it takes intelligence and design.

Now tell me, what happens to an organism whose ability to survive is diminished? It’s hardly likely to foster a successful line of children is it? If good mutations are filtered (necessarily) then I don’t care if only 1% of mutations are good. Over time, they are more likely to be ‘picked’ by natural selection.

Forget about “engineering” beneficial mutations in the lab. They’ve just left bacteria to its own devices and watched it:

The E. coli long-term evolution experiment is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially nearly identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988.[1] The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010.

Since the experiment's inception, Lenski and his colleagues have reported a wide array of genetic changes; some evolutionary adaptations have occurred in all 12 populations, while others have only appeared in one or a few populations. One particularly striking adaption was the evolution of a strain of E. coli that was able to grow on citric acid in the growth media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

Evolution in this sense is a fact of nature. It happens. Get over it.

Methinks he is like a weasel

ArgusEyes — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:36:14 GMT

The ability of creationists to fall over themselves to demonstrate pugnaciousness at an elegant analogy for evolution is never better demonstrated than in the case of Dawkin’s weasel example. You can watch this YouTube video from his excellent blind watchmaker documentary to get an idea of what the weasel program is (at about six minutes in).

Now, if you were a creationist who is intent upon being awkward, then you could make these criticisms perhaps:

Yet I believe that Dawkins and his defenders misunderstand the weasel program. The weasel model argues strongly for the inference to teleology/design, not for undirected evolution.

My reasons:

1) Dawkins inadvertently and inescapably uses a model of design. The computer itself, the program, the endpoint are all designed by minds. Even the random letter generator is a meticulously designed program. But the essence of Darwin's theory is that there is no goal-directedness, no design, in evolution. So why would Dawkins use a model that is entirely designed? The reason is obvious: he has no choice. Design permeates nature.

2) The teleology in Darkins' weasel program is particularly in the target. The teleology permeates the system, but the crucial teleology is the adaptation- the match between the 'random' process and the environment.

http://egnorance.blogspot.com/2011/07/thoughts-on-dawkins-weasel-program.html

Yes, this is from Egnor’s new blog, and he goes for that low-hanging fruit. The fact that a computer is, bum bum buuuuum… Designed! Surely not!

Yes a computer is a creation of man it is also a calculating machine and can thus be used to simulate things. Let’s look at a simple example. Take a natural process such as the formation of crystals, or the falling of an object due to gravity. If you’re the type of theist who thinks that got is directly doing all of these things then go away – because I can’t convince you of anything. However, if you think that there are natural laws in the universe then the fact that we can write simulations of these processes on a computer does not tell us anything about the processes other than we can simulate them. A computer is designed. This does not mean that we are “using a model of design” when we write a program on it. That is foolishness. A designed nature of a computer does not influence the programs running on it, which can be self-contained universes if we wish to make them so.

I am a software developer, and I have written my own weasel program. It’s a nice exercise but if I wanted to, I could create a proper evolutionary algorithm which would not be targeted towards anything. It would probably have a fitness measurement, but we could leave it to run in perpetuity to create all sorts of creatures in the memory of the machine. Egnor is being purposefully pompous in his questioning tone above. Does he not get the simple demonstrative nature of the weasel program? Open you ears and learn something for once Egnor.

Michael Egnor has questions for atheists

ArgusEyes — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:13:24 GMT

So Michael Egnor writes a piece over at Evolution News and Views entitled “What Do New Atheists Actually Believe?”. He has some questions to ask atheists and he wants us to answer. By the way, the website does not have commenting and I can find no email address for Michael Egnor after a few minutes of googling so one has to wonder just how much he wants our answers but I’ll give you my answers Michael.

1) Why is there anything?

Because “nothing” is inherently unstable. The universe doesn’t seem to like “nothing”. Even the most featureless spot of empty space is a bubbling cosmic cauldron of particles coming into existence and leaving existence. However, if I answered “gravity” to a question of “why do things fall”, then I would probably get a retort of “why is there gravity”. I am going to head this inevitable line of questioning off at the pass Dr. Egnor. I do not have the explanation for why nothing is unstable we are supremely ignorant of the workings of the universe. I recognise this ignorance for what it is and acknowledge it, you cling to the ignorance and use it to justify your magical explanation. The religious always like to pretend that they have the answer to the why. They don’t.

2) What caused the Universe?

Quantum fluctuations are the best current provisional explanation for the origin of matter, leading to the expansion of the universe. I have no doubt that we will laugh at this theory in a hundred years time but it is the only current example of matter coming from nothing. There are no other examples of matter coming from nothing.

3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?

No idea. See the answer to question one sans the scientific explanation at the beginning.

4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?

Pass. I do not have the time to study Aristotle at the moment.

5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?

I don’t know where this is going. The question seems to be “why does each person have their own experience of the world”? Because our minds differ. No two minds are exactly the same and are also affected by our environment, this leads to differing interpretations of the world. Is this not obvious?

6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?

Philosophical onanism. As a programmer and scientist I feel a special kind of loathing towards meaningless garbage like this. What the hell is he talking about? Am I the stupid one? Since I cannot answer the question, let me rant about philosophers and academics. Basically, philosophers should get honest jobs such as hamburger cook. I’ve always noticed trends in similar between theists and philosophers the urge to capitalise on not knowing, to spread doubt and confusion so that we cannot assuredly define terms and come to conclusions about things. The aim is the same; to satiate the desire in the human being philosophising to see wonder and mysticism in life. Name for me the essential difference between this definition of Metaphysical solipsism and religion:

Metaphysical solipsism is the "strongest" variety of solipsism. Based on a philosophy of idealism, the metaphysical solipsist maintains that he is the whole of reality and that the external world and other persons are representations of that self having no independent existence. Few, if any, have taken this position beyond hypothetical discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

Bollocks.

About academics. There is an irritating trend in many academics to use language which is as obtuse as possible, perhaps in the way that a programmer might obfuscate code in order to increase job security. Academics like I have descried like the sociologist drummer I knew at university, would inevitably be concatenating prepared phrases like “post-modern”, “hetero-normatively”, etc. I heard a great academic blurb on the Dennis Prager show from David Horowitz’s book “one party classroom”. I can’t find it on the web so I will instead point you all to George Orwell’s best essay “politics and the English language”

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Orwell states that good writing is like a window. Transparent.

7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)

Moral law is an artefact of nature. We observer many aspects of our moral behaviour in our animal cousins such as the great apes. They have many of the same social conventions as we do and they have moral behaviour. The verdict is in; that we evolved from apelike ancestors so we inherit the moral systems too. Religions come in and create rules that encapsulate the morality we already had as well as introducing some but wherever you look you will see morality dependent upon the context in which you are viewing it. Take the variety of customs of human society from cannibalism to sepuku. These are things that we would abhor in the context of western societies and yet they exist in other societies. Man and woman is a mixture of nature and nurture.

The religious like to state that the word of God is absolute. But that is a claim that is 180 degrees from reality. If the word of God is absolute then why do we have so many different denominations of Christianity? Why the differing degrees of liberality in a religious worshipper? When you look at the world you see differing moral systems all over the place. When you squint, and lower the resolution at which you look at the world, then you see broad similarities, but morality is a complex equation.

8) Why is there evil?

Evil, like religion, is an outcome of human psychology which in turn is an outcome of our physical brain structure from our physical development. The discussion of why humans are the way they are is so large that I don’t know if I can summarise it here. Hatred of the other, the lack of human understanding, the imposition of our views on others, the restriction of liberty. Let alone that what is evil differs from one person to the next. I think a major cause of human evil is the victim complex, when people think of themselves as victims then they can do tremendously evil things because they have convinced that they are entitled to do so. Take a situation in which evil has occurred and you can find psychological explanations for it. No magic is required.

Liberal Fascism at Pharyngula

ArgusEyes — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:44:03 GMT

My favourite blog is by a person I largely can’t stand. P.Z. Meyer’s Pharyngula has a post on a recent bloggingheads.tv kerfuffle.

“I've always rather liked Bloggingheads — at least the idea of it, with one-on-one discussions between interesting people. It flops in execution often, since some of the participants wouldn't recognize reason and evidence if it walked up and slapped them in the face with a large and pungent haddock (the right-winger political discussions are unwatchable, and it's always had this problem of giving people like Jonah Goldberg a platform), but their Science Saturday has been generally good. I don't always agree with the people they have on, but at least they're interesting and provocative. And Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer have been superstars of the format.”

Yes, the reason it “flops in execution often” is that it allows people on with differing views to P.Z. Meyers. The very same flop in execution applies to freedom of speech.

However, those of us who are adults can handle opposing viewpoints without throwing tantrums, and may possibly admit that what Meyers considers a flaw is really the biggest strength of freedom of speech.

bloggingheads.tv is a website that offers many views, although I can’t stand creationism I enjoy watching stuff like this and no doubt I would have enjoyed watching Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer too. However, they have pulled out of Bloggingheads because of the presence of creationist babble that was “insufficiently opposed” oh the horror! My first thoughts when I head this is that Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer are childish fools. Is depriving the site of their own opinion in order to curtail future creationist content a mature approach to the problem? If anything, this will give credence to the common creationist claim that they are “expelled” wherever they go.

I think that a creationist love fest is funny to watch, and my hackles certainly don’t get raised at the existence of such a thing.

Not even mentioning that science is a lot more decidable than political opinion is. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism. I recommend that Meyers should pick up a copy if he wants to understand how his “liberal” belief system is not so liberal anymore. As should be apparent by this ridiculous post of his.

Natural Selection: A Machine for Making Almost Impossible Things

ArgusEyes — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:08:21 GMT

Taken from a lecture by professor Steve Jones called "Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right".
http://royalsociety.org/event.asp?id=4140

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

ArgusEyes — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:24:17 GMT

"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!”.

Making a Monkey out of Darwin: A Rebuttal

ArgusEyes — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:21:52 GMT

Well, this one's going to be fun.

Patrick Buchanan has written a piece for RealClearPolitics.com called “Making a Monkey Out of Darwin”. It’s a knee-slapping rip-roaring fun ride down lame off-the-shelf creationist claims alley. In short, the claims are:

“Darwinism” inspired Karl Marx
“Darwinism” inspired Hitler
“Darwinism” inspired eugenics
“Darwinism” caused world war 1!? (That’s a new one to me)
The neck of the Giraffe
Nebraska Man
Piltdown Man
The fossil record is rubbish
Stephen J. Gould fossil quote
Darwinism doesn’t explain how life started
“Darwinism” is a religion

Well, isn't that original? Let’s get dug in.

"You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."

Right, science as a procedure has created innovation that has completely changed the way we live. However, the people who do the work are humans and humans are flawed, a particular scientist will cling to his or her theory despite reasonable evidence that it is wrong because of his or her personal pride and cognitive dissonance. But, in the long term the theories are gradually refined or thrown out. The scientific method is backing a theory with evidence and submitting it to peer review, it is the best method that humans have derived for finding the truth. It’s a messy process but life is not as simple as wishing making and magical thinking. I don’t believe that a sustainable farce for an extended period of time is likely in the scientific community.

As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

He is quoted above for two reasons.

First is House passage of a "cap-and-trade" climate-change bill. Depending on which scientists you believe, the dire consequences of global warming are inconvenient truths -- or a fearmongering scheme to siphon off the wealth of individuals and empower bureaucrats.

I am a very light global warming skeptic, I say “light” because as I mentioned above, I don’t think that a prolonged farce is possible in science so I make criticisms very very reservedly. However, I believe that in the global warming issue, there are two groups to the left and right who have emotional reasons for embracing or denying the theory based upon their own belief systems and how much it can advance or recede their agenda. It is a sure golden goose to those who believe in greater governmental control and environmentalists (many times the same people) and people who are the opposite – who believe in smaller government and who oppose the other side consider it to be a thorn in their side.

That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.

"Karl Marx loved Darwinism," writes Windchy. "To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution."

"Darwin suits my purpose," Marx wrote.

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.

I should address the endless reference to “Darwinism”. Some evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins use this word often, others don’t like it. I am one of the latter. What does it mean? To put “ism” on the end of something is to make it a belief system of the first word, this no always accurate (I.E. “feminism” is not a belief system of the “feminine” – they often despise traditional femininity) but Darwinism would be a belief system of Darwin, which man or woman who accepts the theory of evolution would accept it as a reasonable term that they base their views on Darwin's? You might as well call me a “Newtonist” or a “Einsteinist”. We accept the body of work of these great people but we do not center our belief systems around them. A good example of a legitimate use of the term would be “Christian” or “Christianity”, the form is different but the idea is to base one’s life on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Darwinism is not an appropriate term in our modern times.

As for the substance of the above quote, I have a certain kind of distaste for such mud-slinging. To assume the superiority of one’s own race or group is a “Darwinist” inspired meme is it? I disagree, I would content that this is a fundamental facet of human nature. Does something like evolution or “Darwinism” lend a patina of scientific credibility to such ideas? Probably. Buchanan states in his article that a theory can be true and yet inspire evil ideas, true, then what is the point of his article? Because he seems to flit between stating that "Darwinism" is false to stating that it has caused evil (even if it may be true), I think he is trying to fling enough mud to make some of it stick.

I have decided to wrap this up as a "part 1" for now.

The state of Mississippi fronts the next attack on evolution

ArgusEyes — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:36:51 GMT

I heard of this story via Pharyngula, the state of Mississippi is the latest front in the attack on evolution by taking up the previously tried (and failed) tactics of adding disclaimers to any textbook that includes the teaching of evolution. This is stated in House Bill 25 under section 1 to take effect after July 1, 2009. The bill itself states:

SECTION 1. The State Board of Education shall require every textbook that includes the teaching of evolution in its contents to include the following language on the inside front cover of the textbook: