Posted on 03/31/2007 1:09:59 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
DARWIN THEORY IS PROVED TRUE!
That headline is from the New York Times. Have you seen similar headlines? I have. Many. "New Fossil Find Bolsters Evolution"... "DNA Proves Camels took to the Seas"... "Darwin Vindicated: Top Scientist evolves Yeast into Yeast", and so on.
I have seen many such headlines in the media, in the last few years alone. But this is, to the best of my knowledge, the original "Darwin Proved True" headline. One can say, in a sense, that all subsequent "Darwin Proved True" articles evolved from this one, the common ancestor of them all, dated (by carbon dating) to Sept 22, 1912.
This is an important fossil find. You will note the similarities to modern-day "Darwin Proved True!" reports, clearly indicating common descent with little modification. The ingredients of a fine modern "Darwin Proved True" tale are all here, of course - the waffling, the exaggeration, the impressive buzz-words, the fantastical embellishments, the self-contradictions, the fairytales. Such as...
A race of ape-like and speechless man, inhabiting England hundreds of thousands of years ago, when they had for their neighbors the mastodon and other animals now extinct is the missing link in the chain in man's evolution, which leading scientists say they have discovered in what is generally described as "the Sussex skull." To this Dr. Woodward proposes to give the name of "eoanthropus," or "man of dawn."
Yes sir, upon this fairytale, the New York Times put the headline "DARWIN THEORY PROVED TRUE", even though the article ends with the lines
There is, he thinks, a point of doubt as to the jawbone. It was not found in the same place as the skull, and he holds it possible that it does not belong to the skull. It is unquestionable apelike and it is not impossible that further examination may show that it does not fit the skull at all.
In other words, it is all nonsense, but nevertheless, DARWIN PROVED TRUE!! And thus began the classic genre of reporting on evolutionary matters, a trend which continues to this day.
This is an important archeological find, of special interest to participants and spectators of the ever-entertaining Darwin wars. But in case you are not familiar with this news article (you should be), I'll tell you what the punchline is. Scroll down to the end of the article...
And this great discovery, upon which it was announced that "DARWIN THEORY PROVED TRUE"! is also affectionally known as...
PILTDOWN MAN !
Before you reply to this, ponder carefully this quote from Scott "Dilbert" Adams:
I should add that the first person to explain that science continuously revises itself -- and that’s what makes it so great! -- has no free will.
Guess the NYT hasn't really changed that much. Still can't get things right.
Great find.
It's brought up not to discredit science but evolutionary claims of certainty.
That is one line of evidence, but not the one that interests biologists.
Are you saying that a murderer who wipes the murder weapon of his fingerprints and places it in the hands of the victim should go free because some evidence was fabricated?
How about the oldest surviving Christian manuscript, The Gospel of Thomas? Shouldn't it have precedence over mere copies?
Excuse me..but aren't we doing that right now, this very second, without consequence?
Not that I have found yet - only science is being questioned, not religious dogma.
Well go right ahead and question away....I'll be sure to call out the guards to drop you from a belltower a soon as I can get my trusty time machine working.
I'm betting that there were millions and millions of Christians who, from the first day of it's discovery, believed absolutely that it was a hoax. Just because science finally agreed with them doesn't mean that they believed because of scientists.
Note that I don't have anything against science or scientists. Just bad science. Unfortunately much of evolutionary theory is just bad science.
Precisely. In their eagerness to prove a Godless world, they resort to the same type of myths that pagan cultures did. How far is believing in a half man/half horse from believing that bears turn into whales? How far is believing in a half man/half goat from believing that apes turned into men? Not very far and both are just as likely.
Just tell me what you expect me to say and I'll consider it.
Like I said, if that’s your idea of what reason is, I’m glad you avoid it.
This would not be an adequate dissuasion to someone who reaches the same conclusion and chooses to act upon it.
Dude...that's projection.
What is the best evidence thaPiltdown is a fraud? Tampering is certainly reason to disregard it as evidence FOR evolution, but by itself, tampering does not make it a fraud. What does make it a fraud? In any forensic case there are multiple lines of argument.
It's a fraud because it's untrue, it's false, it's a sham, it's not what it was purported to be. It's demonstrably false. Within the context of science, it's proven that the jawbone was from an orangutan and that the skull was from a human and that they were treated to appear old.
I know you have a point you're desperately trying to make, but I'm still not sure what it is.
That's pretty close to my point. The only relevant arguments come from science.
That depends on what your definition of "relevant" is. I find religious teaching about the origin of man and life more relevant than evolutionary teaching.
In the case of the Piltdown fraud, if I would have lived at the time of it's discovery I may have said, "Hmmm...interesting. They found a skull and a jaw in different areas. The skull, they say, is human, the jaw is apelike." I would have accepted the evidence for what it was. I may have even accepted the evolutionist claim that they were from the same creature.
But what I would not have accepted would have been the explanation of evolutionists. THAT explanation is the real hoax.
Imagine my surprise.
>>you can disprove a theory but you can't prove one.
BUMP<<
Well, you can sometimes disprove the basis of a belief but in the end the believer can ignore the facts if they choose.
For example some people still believe the earth is flat or that the earth is the center of the solar system or the center of the universe. There is clear evidence that disprove these but people can believe any way.
There is another, more gripping mythological construct with which the Greeks amused themselves, which I will describe. And this construct is not merely analogous to certain darwinian stories, it is exactly equivalent to them. This fairytale also finds its way - despite considerable resistance - into other disciplines that have been infested with a measure of rubber science; but among the darwinians, this fairytale is put forth, expounded, developed, and encouraged, with little or no resistance, forethought, or afterthought.
I mean the Puppet story. You know, story that goes like this: you are just a puppet of something else. You don't determine what you do; something else does. You think you do, but something else is doing the thinking for you. In the greek myths, the gods would, now and then, help mankind out, usually to further their own purposes. Men at times are portrayed as puppets of the gods, but the truth is, that even the gods were mere puppets of the Muses, or of Fate, or whatever.
So it is with all puppetry theories. In many parts of asia today, the puppet story of man is the common man's anthropology. It is the view of the man in the street. The noodle-seller, the cab driver, the lady at the hair salon, the loan-shark, the prostitute. Ask them and they'll tell you that they are a puppet of some nebulous power: be it fate, luck, karma. Now, why would people be so eager to believe such a thing, especially when it is contradicted by all the daily experiences of all the men and women that ever lived on earth? More to the point, why do so-called educated and enlightened people not only believe it, but promote it, and insist that you believe it too? And here I mean people who are not asian pagans, witchdoctors, or animists, but happen to be university professors, darwinians, sociobiologists, psychologists, and even physicists.
The only thing that changes from one puppet theory to the next, are the hobgoblins that are supposed to be controlling your thoughts, making you do what you do, and feel what you feel. In the rubber sciences, a shift from one hobgoblin to another is called progress. There was great progress when scientific socialism discovered the real hobgoblin that made people believe in older hobgoblins like astrology. And that was: all your thoughts and all your actions are determined by your economic class, and maybe a few other social factors. And then the Freudian hobgoblin: whatever you think, do, feel, or say, and whatever attitudes you have, are caused by unfortunate experiments with feces deep in your childhood past. German-style monism produced the hobgoblin beyond all others. Yes, there are hobgoblins that seem to determine everything about you, but the hobgoblins themselves are determined by the Uber-hobgoblin, called the "ALL", the sum total of all the physical laws, known and unknown, in the universe.
But of course no other rubber science ever produced as fertile a puppetry theory as darwinism. For in darwinism, all the other hobgoblins were dethroned - it was truly a spectacular revolution, and truly great progress in rubber science. For now we learn why it is that you think you like beer. No doubt you think you do, but that is an illusion which helped the evolutionary fitness of your ape-man ancestors. You see, a long, long time ago, when your grand-parents were knuckle-dragging apes, some of them had a sense for alcohol. Now, being rich in calories, alcohol is a most valuable commodity in times of starvation. So when there was no food about, no barley or hops, your primitive ancestors roamed the plains looking for deposits of fine German pilsner. The ones that had a better sense for it survived to leave more offspring. And presto, that is the real reason why you "like" beer. [Btw I'm not joking about this story].
Haeckel's ideas about man amount to one big puppet theory. He was, after all, not only a darwinian, but a monist and some kind of proto-nazi too. So he had many powerful fate-determining hobgoblins to deal with. But that was a long time ago. The most forceful puppet theorist today is of course Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins assures us that he's found the puppet master: the selfish gene, the "total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances". Later he amended his puppet theory by introducing another hobgoblin, an invisble one called the "meme".
And so darwinism has pointed out the hobgoblins that make us do whatever we do. We have mathematical abilities? It's because natural selection preferred those who could better throw pebbles at birds. Intelligence? Consciousness? War? Peace? Selfishness? Altruism? It doesn't matter what, there's a darwinian hobgoblin that makes it happen.
What is the result of all this progress in puppetry? Just as the vile habit of constantly enclosing words like truth, proof and knowledge in quotation marks serves to sap human communication from cognitive acheivment, puppetry theories serve to sap human actions from causal achievment, nothing more.
placemarker
It is truly reprehensible, direspectful and all too literal of you (maybe even sexist) to have left out any mention of the Philosophical Mother of the cerebral cortex "revolution", none other than the ancient and sacred Mother Enlightenment!...(peace be upon her Asian roots that were later colored with the French/European style.)
The Virgin Enlightenment's sacred doctrine: The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be understood through the use of reason alone;
Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt;
Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth; authority is not to be preferred over experience;
All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered;
Human history is largely a history of progress;
Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities;
Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the physical and human worlds.
Let no man question her...let all true believers bow down at her feet and worship.
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