Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
Creationists are never hostile. What seems like hostility is in fact amusement on their part. At least, that's what they say...
I see. That's why they call their insults 'jokes' and say evos need to get a sense of humor. They're all really just lovable jokesters, like Don Rickles.
Then again, the evidence indicates otherwise. At least they're consistent in their denial of evidence they don't like.
Your Bible supports Darwin? This I gotta see!
My Bible? Where did I say anything of the kind? Go back and read my posts and try to do it without filtering it through your Fundie lens.
You maintain you read and understand the Bible better than all those other religious people who read it and have no problem with evolution. So I repeat, why don't you take it up with them. Your preaching is boring.
If you knew how I grew up and i suppose, where, you'd laugh at the miracle that I became a Christian. Most people who knew me before were actually scared at the intensity of the before and after change ...
"Females are equivalent to deities" Placemarker. Booyah!
Sexual selection is a demonstration of survival of the fittest, just in this case fitness is having a particularly attractive red crest.
This is also not true:
. . . if speciation occurs without sufficient, environmental, natural selection pressure (creating a survival benefit for certain mutations), those critics who maintain that the theory of evolution is flawed have huge traction for their contention.
Natural selection is not the only mechanism for evolution. Genetic drift is a well-known process in which the frequency of alleles changes based upon chance variations in reproduction. Genetic drift can wipe out both negative and positive mutations before they are fixed. Additionally, it can propagate neutral mutations. Many of the differences between similar species are rather inconsequential--five stripes instead of three, a song that ends in a trill instead of several repetitive notes, a brown belly instead of a white one. When two populations of a species become separated by some barrier genetic drift can cause the populations to diverge and eventually they will become different species.
"Evos are never hostile. What seems like hostility is in fact amusement on their part. At least, that's what they say... That's why they call their insults 'jokes' and say evos need to get a sense of humor. They're all really just lovable jokesters, like Don Rickles.
Then again, the evidence indicates otherwise. At least they're consistent in their denial of evidence they don't like."
What is interesting is that the character and emotional tenor of nonEvos is a factor for Evos.
Give me a break. And then the next thing that would happen is either Jesus gets kicked out of the Godhead because his words were used to justify the torture and murder of millions, or God would suddenly annihilate as God and anti-God (in your scenario Jesus, whose teachings inspired genocide) collide.
You want to argue that murdering totalitarian communists weren't influenced by Darwin, I'm sure the Lord will hear you out.
I'm sure he knows totalitarian murderers will rationalize their actions by twisting whatever source they can, whether it's a science book or the Bible.
"No, collectivism is not murderous."
Murder is the logical outcome of collectivism. Stalin, Hitler, Mao... their common bond was collectivism, not evolution.
"What is murderous is the foundation of Evolution that paved the way for Marxism."
Evolution has no relationship to the ideology of Marxism. Evolution is a scientific theory about how populations of biological organisms change over time. Cooperation is an evolved trait.
"and neither could Stalin, who tried to mate men and apes in a lab experiment in the twenties!"
Thereby demonstrating he knew nothing about evolution. That's why he had people advocating Darwinian evolutionary theory killed.
It seems odd to me that you would be surprised by concepts that were discussed to death in the 1800s.
The rightness or wrongness of these concepts is not my point. I am simply amazed that you would persist in posting here without doing some reading first. I read these threads for well over a year before jumping in, and I had college courses in the history of the evolution controversy.
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