Miller has an extremely condescending opinion toward Americans if he thinks they are too stupid to understand he is talking about "evolution" when he asks if humans "developed from earlier species of animals"It isn't a matter of stupidity, it's a matter of valid polling techniques. The purpose of the phrasing is to rule out any immediate non-rational response to the word "evolution". If you really want some psychological studies on the effects of phrasing on memory recall (and the accuracy of those memories) then I can post some later today. But basically the issue is that certain words have varying connotations depending on who you ask, so if you can accurately rephrase the word into some non-connotative phrase then you are more likely to get a more accurate return from your sample.
"..But basically the issue is that certain words have varying connotations depending on who you ask.." ~ droptone
Exactly.
So You Want to be an Anti-Darwinian
Varieties of Opposition to Darwinism
Copyright © 1998 by John Wilkins
[Last Update: December 21, 1998]
Summary
MMany different people oppose some or all aspects of Darwin's thinking, or the views that have arisen since and go by the term "Darwinism". This essay distinguishes and names the major varieties of anti-Darwinism. It does not attempt to defend or reject any views, just to provide a map to the conceptual territory.
Caution to the Reader
Every one of these viewpoints, although it has a name and often a number of defenders, is only a notional position, and is not held by anyone as bluntly as stated here. People can and do hold a variety of these positions and see no conflict with each other or Darwinism. Just because someone flies a banner doesn't mean there's an army underneath it or a war to fight. The world of science is not a formal logical system, and schools of thought do not resolve most of the time into exclusive camps. Or to put it another way, borders on maps are often arbitrary.
Introduction
If you wish to disagree with Darwin, it is important to know what aspect of Darwin's thinking, and more importantly of modern evolutionary theory, you are disputing. Many opponents of Darwinism seem to think that because one disagrees with, say, the role of natural selection in evolution, that one automatically disagrees with the idea of evolution itself. Creationists especially seem to slide from "disagrees with some aspect of synthetic Darwinism" to "rejects evolution". One of the more dishonest versions of this tactic lies in the use of comments made in one context (for example, Colin Patterson's talk on the relevance of cladistic methods to reconstruct evolutionary trees in the Symposia on Systematics at the American Museum of Natural History) in an entirely different context (the supposed rejection by Patterson of Darwinism in total, despite his having written a book on evolution accepting Darwinian theory [1], see Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites' FAQ).
What Darwinism actually is, is of course at issue. It is a term that has many different meanings, depending on the field in which it is being discussed [2]. In, say, artificial life research, Darwinism tends to mean natural selection (in the form of what are called "genetic algorithms"). In systematics it means the reconstruction of ancestral forms and historical sequences of species. In bacteriological research it means the evolution of drug-resistant strains by selection. In organismic biology it means the evolution of new forms of life. In genetics it means the so-called "central dogma" of the inability of information about the state of the body to be reverse transcribed back into the genes, because that view was first proposed by an arch-Darwinian, August Weismann, in the 1880s. And in fact, all of these are just tendencies that vary according to where the researchers are, who you are reading, and the period in which those people lived. "Darwinism" according to Wallace in 1890 [3] is very different to Darwinism according to Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins.
So, to overcome this confusion of meanings and to ensure that both notional Darwinians and anti-Darwinians alike know what it is they accept and what they object to, this essay covers the varieties of anti-Darwinism, including opposition to transmutationism, common descent, undirected variation, randomness, selection, Weismannism, and monism.
Theses of Darwinism [snip] Click here to continue: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/anti-darwin.html
Precisely. Are we supposed to believe that the following two poll questions:
1. Do you think it would be a good idea for the government to give each American taxpayer a $300 refund?, and
2. Do you support President Bush's special $300 tax refund?
would get the same answers?
Of course not -- liberal Democrats would reflexively oppose the latter even if it were $300,000.