[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

It was one part of her opinion column. She did not use it to make a case against evolution. She used it in her opinion column to say that Darwinists are censors and afraid of debate. I think this thread proves her point quite sufficiently.

Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory. I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol.

[Alacarte]

"It was one part of her opinion column."

Sorry I have no idea what this is about, please paste refernce text from now on. I'm too lazy to find it in the older posts :)

"Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory. I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol."

I work on jets, but I've never seen the kitty-hawk. Does that make me under-qualified?

What on earth does reading darwin have to do with understanding evolution? Pretty much everything darwin said has either been modified or expounded upon.

[CobaltBlue]

The bear wasn't "part of Darwin's original theory." He was tossing ideas out. This is something that real scientists do, they toss ideas around. It's called "brainstorming."

People who were never allowed to have original ideas because they are only allowed to believe that magic books have all the answers probably don't never learned how to brainstorm. Which is a shame.

[Ichneumon]

She used it in her opinion column to say that Darwinists are censors and afraid of debate. I think this thread proves her point quite sufficiently.

Oh, sure, because "Darwinists" aren't debating here, and are trying to "censor" posts, eh? ROFL! You clearly haven't been reading the same thread I have...

Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory.

BECAUSE IT WASN'T.

Nor is it proper of you to fault anyone for not having read a FIRST EDITION of Darwin's book, since *that's* the only copy it was present in. Furthermore, you are MISREPRESENTING what Darwin actually wrote.

In another post you falsely claim that: "Darwin theorized that the whale evolved from the black bear." Even leaving aside your confusion over the difference between "hypothesizing" and "theorizing", Darwin did *not* even *suggest* that whales evolved from bears.

Instead, as the passage in full makes quite clear, he was arguing that due to their habit of feeding in streams in Darwin's day, over future eons evolutionary pressures *could* conceivably shape bears into an aquatic animal more like a whale than a bear, and that perhaps whales had come similarly come about from some *other* (non-bear) land creature which fed in the water in the distant past:

" In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."
-- Charles Darwin, 1859

Again, Darwin was clearly *not* arguing that modern whales came from black bears. He was using the *present* behavior of black bears and their possible *future* evolution to make a point about the processes which could have given rise to *present-day* whales from *ancient* land animals.

I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol.

I agree, but that's just how the creationists like to do things, apparently.