Why Do You Keep Boring Us with Darwinism?

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 5/19/08 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

I’ve written several columns about my skepticism regarding Darwinism. Each time I do I receive snooty comments attesting to my stupidity and my ignorance. The Darwinists never seem to want to discuss any of the points I have tried to make, just to ridicule the very thought that there may be some kind of guiding intelligence behind the structures, the amounts of information, the complexities, the fine balance and the mysteries of life and our universe.

If anything is subject to ridicule, it is the answer that the world’s leading proponent and defender of Darwinian dogma, Richard Dawkins, gave to Ben Stein when Stein asked him about the origin of life.

[Coyoteman]

Darwinism in the mind of Hitler killed my father in WWII and millions of others who were considered ‘inferior’ in the struggle (mein kampf) for the survival of the ‘fittest’. Whatever your views about Darwins racist ideology, Hitler loved it as to others who view the survival of the fittest ideology as the basis of their political views.

The source of social Darwinism (and the term "survival of the fittest") was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer and the tradition of Protestant nonconformism going back to Hobbes via Malthus. Spencer's ideas of evolution were Lamarckian. The only real connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism is the name. Source

[GladesGuru]

Have you considered that just maybe, many are not going to seriesly consider another Hugh post in the ongoing battle between the “evos and the crevos?”

[Philly Nomad]

But that has nothing to do with the truthfulness of Darwin.

If you want to disprove Darwin, get in the lab and find the data.

[alloysteel]

Darwinism ranks right up there with global warming as part of the new mythology, which presumes to use the guise of “science” to cover its obvious huge gaps in deductive logic, reasoning that the existence of one set of circumstances must necessarily apply to another similar set of circumstances. But in jumping from one position to what is supposed to be its logical procession of reasoning, there are just too many things that must be taken on faith alone. Why, for example, should there be more CO2 in the atmosphere, and at the same time, the oceans and atmospheres are warmer? The same dichotomy appears with trying to explain the rise of two similar but different species from a common anscestor. This may in fact happen, but maybe not by the mechanism that the Darwinists insist it must. Simply “natural selection” by “survival of the fittest” is not sufficient.

Which comes back to some agency directing “intelligent design”. For some reason, this concept scares the bat crap out of the devout Darwinists, who insist it “can’t happen that way”. To them, it threatens the ascendency of mankind.

Which means, a LOT of what they believe is in fact based on a lie. And maybe, if some of it is a lie, it is ALL a lie.

Nobody is more wretched or pathetic than a True Believer who has lost the basis of core beliefs.

[tacticalogic]

Which comes back to some agency directing “intelligent design”. For some reason, this concept scares the bat crap out of the devout Darwinists, who insist it “can’t happen that way”.

Well then, prove them wrong and be done with it.

[ml/nj]

Look. I believe evolution is a crock. But so is the notion that Darwinism was the "underpinning," as you say, of Nazism. This puts you firmly in the moonbat category so far as I am concerned, and any arguments you put forward would only embarrass thinking people who believe Darwinian evolution is a flawed concept. You would best keep your ideas to yourself.

ML/NJ

[alloysteel]

How do you prove a negative? This is on the order of being asked, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

There is just no good way to answer that question.

Which means, the question is being framed wrongly.

First, is to determine if the wife in question is in fact BEING beaten. Logic dictates that if this is in fact happening, there should be circumstantial evidence of the damage being caused by the beating. Sometimes, allegations of beatings are just that.

If this evidence seems to be supportive of the conclusion that a beating took place, THEN we look at HOW the beating was inflicted. What are the likely means by which this may have occurred? Was the series of observed injuries self-inflicted, was it because of some accident of time or place that resulted in the injuries, was it administered by a person known to the victim, or was it a a total stranger that showed up and for no reason known to the victim, assaulted and injured the victim?

Forensics is an interesting activity, almost more an art and based on intuition than it is rooted in real science. The science is only there to go back and rationalize the flash of inspiration that showed the potential connection.

Up to now, the hard science that is needed to PROVE or DISPROVE the “Darwinist” view of evolution has never been produced. Therefore, the question must still be considered open and subject to continuous review, as additional data becomes available.

Burden of proof, anyone?

[allmendream]

Why? Because it is a productive theory to Science.

Journal of Human Evolution
Journal of Molecular Evolution
Genes and Development
Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
Genome Biology
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Infection, Genetics and Evolution

All journals filled with articles full of productive work based upon a productive theory. That is why Science keeps “bothering” with it.

[tacticalogic]

Burden of proof, anyone?

So far we seem to be operating under the premise that sufficient perjoratives will eventually constitute proof.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

It is in the topics ‘Religion’ and ‘Science’ which seems appropriate to me.
.

[alloysteel]

Perjoratives work well in the court of public opinion and in political campaigns. Unfortunately, there is a mistaken notion that this kind of tactics and logic work equally well in peer reviews. This failing is by no means limited to theories of evolution, by the way. People being what they are, which is kind of like adrenalin-charged porcupines, they inflict the pre-emptive argument BEFORE the counter-thesis is set up.

Never gets to the Hegelian dialectic.

Half-truths, like half-bricks, are much easier to pick up and hurl, inflicting perhaps less damage overall, but are not available for any constructive purpose.

[tacticalogic]

People being what they are, which is kind of like adrenalin-charged porcupines, they inflict the pre-emptive argument BEFORE the counter-thesis is set up.

If they're not careful, people are going to be so tired of listening to them they'll prejudice the counter-thesis before it ever gets presented. Unless they know there never will be one, in which case they have nothing to lose.

[Oztrich Boy]

Scripture tells us that man is prideful and does not want to acknowledge God - Darwinist macro-evolution demonstrates this.

And when anti-Darwinists bring up the Scripture argument in the second paragraph it is obvious that the political "fairness" argument is a smokescreen to force educational institutions to give credence to the views held by a religious minority.

[mjp]

Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that Darwin’s theory and publications had a major influence upon Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains. In the formulation of their racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily upon Darwinism, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel.

[Caramelgal]

Why Do You Keep Boring Us with Darwinism Religion?

[LetTruthBeTold]

I would have to agree with your thought and add that it also has created a society that does not value human life as a greater life form that has dominion over every living thing and the elements of this great creation, we are just equals to it all.

[grayhog]

I’m not sure how everything got here, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t Darwinism — as in millions of mutations over millions of years leading to human life.

My understanding is that Darwin could only prove evolution within species - the beaks of the finches getting longer or shorter during feast or famine etc... He used that to make the big leap to evolution between species.

Statistically, there should be tens of thousands of accidental mutation species that are the in-between species that didn’t quite work out for every species that now exists. The problem is, there is no fossil evidence of these in-between species. Just lots of fossils of those species that exist or did exist. Seems a little odd that we find hundreds of thousands of fossils of fully developed species, but not any that I’ve heard of the in betweens. In my mind, that leaves Darwinism just as a theory - an idea still awaiting proof.

[ConservaTexan]

Brief and to the point. Well said. Bravo!

[Manfred the Wonder Dawg]

A Christian will see everything through the lens of the Scriptures. Same as a heathen will see everything though a lens of disbelief.

[freespirited]

Not only was Darwinism the underpinning for Nazism and Soviet Communism, it is the underpinning for modern liberalism and socialism

Darwinism, or more accurately, the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, is the underpinning of modern biology. It is unclear to me why you feel necessary to link it to Nazism and Soviet Communism; my impression from the beginning of your piece was that you are interested in the truth of evolution. Surely you would agree that the truth of an idea is unrelated to whether evil persons abuse it.

That said, I do not believe your statement about Nazism and Communism to be true. It is common to hear such assertions, but I am sure that the Holocaust would have happened even if Darwin had never written a word.

The Soviets practiced ridiculous deviations from modern biology for decades. Devotees of modern evolutionary thinking they were not. Fortunately, that period of lunacy is behind them.

Ben Stein is under the erroneous belief that evolutionary theory is about the origin of life. It is not. It is about change in the gene pool of populations over time.