Evolution Coverage Missed Real Story

FoxNews. com ^ | September 30, 2002 | John G. West, Jr.

[Phaedrus]

More than 40 years ago, the film "Inherit the Wind" presented the controversy over the teaching of evolution as a battle between stick-figure fundamentalists who defend a literal reading of Genesis and saintly scientists who simply want to teach the facts of biology. Ever since, journalists have tended to depict almost any battle over evolution in the schools as if it were a replay of "Inherit the Wind"--even if it's not.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Is it not rather a conclusion rather than an assumption?

[r9etb]

Is it not rather a conclusion rather than an assumption?

It's an assumption.

Conclusions require proof. Atheists are hot to say that there's no proof (of the sort they'd accept) that God exists. By the same token, however, they must also admit that there is no proof that God does not exist.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There's also no proof that the Flute Playing Locust doesn't exist.

[r9etb]

You're already backpedaling. Now you see why it's an assumption, not a conclusion.

[jjm2111]

I have a question for the creationists:

Do you believe that God created the world in the exact way the bible mentions (seven days - seven 24 hour periods, stuff magically happening, etc. etc.) or do you believe that God created the world but did it along evoloutionary patterns (millions of years for fish to turn into frogs into reptiles, etc.)?

Just Curious.

[Doctor Stochastic]

No. It's a conclusion based on lack of evidence. It may be correct or incorrect, but a conclusion nevertheless.

The lack of evidence for the Flute Playing Locust (or Dagon or Yog Sothoth for that matter) is not evidence for their existence. Absence of evidence really is evidence of absence. This applies to all hypothesized deities including the Aesir.

[f.Christian]

Review by Richard Milton
When, a dozen years ago, I first published my view that Darwinism is scientifically flawed, I immediately encountered a kind of opponent who was to become very familiar to me over the next decade. I mean the kind who (quite sincerely) believes that anyone who challenges the conventional Darwinist view must be someone who is simply ignorant of the scientific facts. Such an opponent thus sets out to cure the ignorance he meets by the simple expedient of rehashing over and over again the tenets of the received wisdom, as found in the pages of Nature and Scientific American.

These guardians of Darwinian truth find it literally impossible to believe that anyone could actually have conducted some research and analysis that has led them to conclude rationally that Darwinism is scientifically flawed and think that -- like an Englishman abroad -- if only they shout a little louder, the dimwit foreigner might finally get the Darwinist message.

Michael Brass is such an upholder of the received wisdom on Darwinism, and his book, The Antiquity of Man, is just such a rehashing of that received wisdom. There is nothing new here. No new facts, no new scientific discoveries, not even a new interpretation or new analysis, merely the repetition of all the same old stuff that anyone who has ever spent time in a dentist's waiting room, leafing through old copies of National Geographic, is already thoroughly familiar with.

But in his book, Brass is not merely sounding off about anti-Darwinists in general -- he has some specific targets in his sights. From the outset he attacks scientific creationists for their views and he singles out the book 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson.

As I'm not a creationist, and I don't have any religious beliefs, I don't intend to try to speak for Cremo, Thompson or anyone else, and I'm sure they are well able to look after themselves. But I am concerned, as a secular critic of the scientific content of Darwinism, that writers like Brass are getting away with obscuring the real scientific issues under the guise of 'debunking' what they pretend is merely 'creationist propaganda', a pretext that enables them to continue to dodge engaging in real scientific debate.

I've read Cremo and Thomson's book. I didn't find any religious propaganda or creationist messages, but I did find a mountain of carefully compiled scientific observations and reports that uniformly tend to undermine the conventional view that people like Brass hold so tightly and are unwilling even to debate openly and honestly. Certainly there are a few geological and palaeontological observations in Forbidden Archaeology that I found weak or questionable. That is hardly surprising since the book is 1000 pages long and contains thousands of references.

What a book like Forbidden Archaeology shows, in my view, is that if even a half (or even a tenth) of the objections raised by its authors are valid scientific objections, then Darwinism is a theory that is in deep, irremediable trouble. And the best that Brass can do in the way of rebuttal is to question a handful of their cases as unproven or badly chosen. His preferred method of rebuttal in almost all cases is that described earlier: he simply recites again, more loudly, the accepted Darwinist view.

We get an early glimpse of Brass's fundamentalist stance on the evidence claimed to support Darwinism such as dating of fossils. On page 38 he presents a table of two kinds of fossil dating. He labels the first as 'relative dating' and the second, radiometric dating by the potassium-argon method, he calls 'absolute dating'. Now, as his degrees are in history and archaeology, it is perfectly possible that Brass is completely unaware of the important scientific error he is making in describing radiometric dating of fossils as 'absolute' dating, and is merely taking it on trust from his physicist colleagues that his belief is correct -- as most scientists do. But the fact remains that the words 'absolute dating' can never be used in connection with the radiometric dating of fossils of any kind. (For background to dating fossils, see 'Shattering the myths of Darwinism' chapters 3, 4, and 5.)

To be fair, I should add that Brass is far from being the only professional scientist who is confused about this question. Most Darwinists are. Even Gavin de Beer, director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote in the museum's Guide to Evolution, first published in 1970, that the rocks forming the geological column and the fossils in them had been directly dated by radiometric methods -- a claim which is scientific nonsense and based solely on ignorance of the real facts.

In the same passage, Brass tries to make his claims for the potassium-argon method seem credible by pointing out that '0.01% of all natural potassium is radiopotassium.' To the uninitiated, this rarity must make the method seem special. But Brass forgets to mention that the substance this radioactive potassium turns into, the end product that is measured, is argon-40. Argon is the twelfth most abundant element on earth, and more than 99 per cent of it is argon-40. And there is no physical or chemical way to tell whether a given sample of argon-40 is the residue of radioactive potassium or was present in the rocks when they formed.

There are many other places where Brass shows he has swallowed Darwinist urban scientific myths hook, line and sinker. On the very first page of his introduction he repeats the commonly-made claim that Darwinian evolution is supported by observed speciation, when the true scientific facts are that there is not a single real case of observed Darwinian speciation (the cases listed in the talk-origin "FAQ" being entirely bogus [more information available here]).

Whenever he encounters scientific evidence that he is unable to rebut, Brass appeals to authorities who, in his mind, are so grand as to be unimpeachable. Yet these 'authorities' and their words often turn out on closer inspection to have no more substance than Brass himself.

For example, the work of zoologist Solly Zuckermann, has long been a thorn in the side of Darwinists because Zuckermann conducted a study which concluded that Australopithecines (like 'Lucy') were predominantly ape-like and not human-like creatures and thus not ancestral to humans. Brass dismisses the work of Zuckermann, one of Britain's most distinguished zoologists, by reference to a quote from Jim Foley. Who is Jim Foley? He is the author of the talk-origins "FAQ" on human origins, which is as badly-researched and bogus as the rest of the talk-origins "FAQs" [more information available here].

In writing this book, Michael Brass has put on his arms and armour, chosen a cause about which he feels passionately, selected a battleground and engaged those he perceives as the enemies of science. Unfortunately, his armour doesn't fit him, his weapons are blunt, his passionate cause is already lost and, worst of all, he has chosen the wrong battle. For instead of attacking the real enemies of science -- the brain-dead pedlars of urban scientific myths -- he is attacking the few people who are making an honest attempt to question a theory that is long past its sell-by date.

This book is designed to bring aid and comfort to the excrement-hurling howler monkeys that infest Internet groups such as talk-origins, by reaffirming once more the oft-told Darwinist tale of human origins. It does not advance the cause of scientific investigation nor, despite its title, does it shed any light on the antiquity of mankind.

Richard Milton is the author of Shattering the Myths of Darwinism and 'Alternative Science'.

[f.Christian]

National Review's List of the Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century (85)
Author Info:
Russell Kirk
1918-1994
To understand the historic import of this book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, it is perhaps helpful to note that a year after it came out, Lionel Trilling, in his book The Liberal Imagination, would maintain that :

[I]n the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.... It is
the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...[only]...irritable mental gestures
which seem to resemble ideas.

Though the sentiment is obviously inane, Mr. Trilling's hubris, and that of liberals in general, was perhaps understandable in light of the fact that he wrote at the precise midpoint of the long liberal interregnum that prevailed from the presidency of Herbert Hoover (1928) until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The position of Left intellectuals of that day seems somehow reminiscent of the famed little old lady who told a physics lecturer that all he had said about the heliocentric universe was rubbish because :

'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.'

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'

'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

Trilling and company, perched on the middle tortoise, assumed it must be tortoises all the way up and down. As Russell Kirk amply demonstrated, they were as wrong as she.

Mr. Kirk begins his survey of Anglo-American conservative thought (he is even credited with bestowing upon this philosophy the term conservative) by defining what it generally consists of :

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few portentous phrases;
he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals. Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma,
and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time. As a working premise,
nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions.
Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a
spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.
[...] I think there are six canons of conservative thought--

(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links
great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. [...]

(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity,
egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. [...]

(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts
at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. [...]

(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress.
Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased.

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite,
for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide
checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it
is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual
renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency
of Providential social forces.

He contrasts these core beliefs with those of conservatism's opponents on the Left, the radicals of all stripes, who believe in :

(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive
legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity
toward violence and sin.

(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social
welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and a variety of anti-Christian systems
are offered as substitutes.

(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed
radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for
centralization and consolidation.

(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals;
and collectivist radicals hack at the institution of private property root and branch.

Thus, the playing field. He then goes on to an erudite, idiosyncratic and altogether beguiling discussion of the chain of men who have defended conservative ideas and resisted radical impulses from Edmund Burke, the sine qua non of the Right, to T.S. Eliot, the great poet and critic. Among the others whose thought he surveys are : John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph, John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Orsestes Brownson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Their styles, their particular concerns, their errors, their failures, their successes all vary widely, but the core principles that they seek to vindicate remain, unchanging. Pluck Edmund Burke from the mists of time and plop him down on Meet the Press this Sunday and he'd voice the same concerns about our society as he voiced about his own in the 18th Century. On the other hand, put Karl Marx on the Today Show and even Katie Couric would tear him apart. The enemies and the fetid ideologies that the conservative mind had to contend with were ever changing, a vast array of utopian daydreams discarded one after another by a Left that never admits the error of its ways, but merely moves on to the next destructive iteration of radicalism, secure in the delusion that this next attempt will achieve a "perfect" society, right here on Earth, while instead leaving piles of corpses in its blood-soaked wake.

It seems certain that the Left will never bring itself to reckon with the conservative critique of the whole liberal impulse, but after Russell Kirk's book, no one can honestly argue that such a critique does not exist. The very endurance and continuing relevance of conservative ideas suggests that, in fact, when the intellectual history of the West is written, it will be conservatism that is found to have been the most powerful philosophical tradition that our culture created. Whether that history is written by a free and decent human being may well depend though on the ultimate success of the conservative mind.

(Reviewed:05-Feb-02)

Grade: (A+)

Buy The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot from Amazon.com

[r9etb]

Do you believe that God created the world in the exact way the bible mentions

I'm not a "creationist" in the perjorative sense the term is often tossed out on these threads.

Some people really do believe the seven 24-hour periods, basing this assumption on the fact that the English translations say "day," and "days" are 24 hours long.

As for me, I'll simply defer to the views of people I trust, and who can read the original Hebrew: the term translated as "day" is probably better understood in the sense of a period of time (e.g., "... in my day, we didn't have light....")

I am a "creationist" in the sense that I believe God does express His will in time and space; that he did (somehow) create the Universe and life on Earth; and that we are in some sense part of His plan.

As for the origins of life, etc., the debate is interesting but to me ultimately inconsequential as to the more important truth of God's existence -- of which I'm convinced for a variety of reasons.

Other people are less sanguine on the matter. This might be either for reasons of personal concern (i.e., a fear that the truth of evolution disproves God); or because evolution is (rightly) seen as an effective counter-argument to the evangelism of others. Of the two concerns, I suspect the first is the more common, whether or not the "6-day" types admit it.

[dark_lord]

Atheists are hot to say that there's no proof (of the sort they'd accept) that God exists. By the same token, however, they must also admit that there is no proof that God does not exist.

Which outlines the difference between agnostics and atheists. Agnostics, when asked if God exists, say they do not know - because they see no proof they find acceptable either way. Atheism is actually a "religion", simply because they believe that God does not exist, while they lack proof that God does not exist. Thus they take it on faith - thus, atheism is a religion.

Note, however, that many people are ignorant and call themselves atheists when they are really agnostics.

[Lurking Libertarian]

The layering of the rocks hasn't changed much in thousands of years...so what!

Because in 1958, your article said that the absence of any pre-Cambrian fossils was a real problem for Darwinism. Since 1958, lots of pre-Cambrian fossils have been found. That's what.

[f.Christian]

from the above...

"What a book like Forbidden Archaeology shows, in my view, is that if even a half (or even a tenth) of the objections raised by its authors are valid scientific objections, then Darwinism is a theory that is in deep, irremediable trouble. And the best that Brass can do in the way of rebuttal is to question a handful of their cases as unproven or badly chosen. His preferred method of rebuttal in almost all cases is that described earlier: he simply recites again, more loudly, the accepted Darwinist view."

[dark_lord]

Any science has to operate under the assumption that to a greater or lesser degree, data is true. Otherwise, it can't go anywhere.

True. However, the data must be checkable. If a scientist says, "Oh, I ran this experiment and produced these neat results, here is the data; but my technique is secret so I won't reveal how I generated the data - intellectual property, I'm applying for a patent you understand..." -- well that's not acceptable to science. Data that cannot be independently generated, checked, and verified is not data that can be declared "true". Therefore, directly to your point - there is data and data, and only verifiable data is data that can be "assumed" to be true.

[f.Christian]

from the above...

'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.'

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'

'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

Trilling and company, perched on the middle tortoise, assumed it must be tortoises all the way up and down. As Russell Kirk amply demonstrated, they were as wrong as she.

[r9etb]

No. It's a conclusion based on lack of evidence.

That's merely an assumption that there's no evidence. Or, more precisely, no evidence that you'll accept.

But believers will tell you that this is not true: there is evidence, because God makes Himself known to us.

So now it comes down to this: I have sufficient evidence to conclude that God exists, because God has "introduced" Himself to me. Non-believers don't buy it -- but that's their problem, not mine.

[f.Christian]

The Mentality of Evolution

There seems to be a cart before the horse attitude i.e. evolution has occurred, that's a fact ( it is never stated who proved this fact ), therefore we just need to twist the evidence until it fits our pre-conceptions. Of course, science is supposed to look at the evidence, and then derive the theory, but as Karl Popper admitted, the theory of evolution has never been a scientific theory due to its lack of testability, so normal scientific standards do not and have never applied to the theory of evolution. It has always been an emotional issue and not a scientific one - on all sides it must be stated in fairness. The main difference is that the worshippers of mechanistic reductionist Newtonian materialism try to pretend they are objective, when in reality most of them are not. The following extract from Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial puts it quite nicely:-

It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate attention to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micro mutations postulated by Neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words of Richard Dawkins, "virtually all the mutations studied in genetics laboratories which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists wouldn't notice them are deleterious to the animals possessing them." But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term project of producing a complex organ.

The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micro mutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.

... link!

[Doctor Stochastic]

Non-believers don't buy it -- but that's their problem, not mine.

Which doesn't distinguish the validity of your beliefs from those who consider you to be a non-believer. But that's your problem, not theirs.

[r9etb]

Note, however, that many people are ignorant and call themselves atheists when they are really agnostics.

I'll grant that. But it goes both ways: there are people who call themselves agnostics, but who invariably argue from the atheist perspective.

It reminds me of the passage in Matthew:

"What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work today in the vineyard.' " 'I will not,' he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. "Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, 'I will, sir,' but he did not go.

"Which of the two did what his father wanted?" "The first," they answered. (Matt 21:27-31)

As for the "honest agnostics," my personal experience leads me to believe that most of them are neither atheist, nor truly agnostic -- they believe that God exists, but prefer to pretend that God is irrelevant.

True agnosticism is unstable (to borrow a term from control theory). The slightest nudge sends the true agnostic plummeting toward one side or the other, and only through real exertion can he reassume his precarious perch.

[antidisestablishment]

Come on. If half the scepticism heaped on ID were directed toward evolution, it would no longer be an issue.

There's scientific disagreement about the underlying theory of gravity; why isn't Georgia insisting that that controversy be included in the curriculum?

I would guess that if the schools refused to allow any mention of scientific disagreement about the theory of gravity, it would become an issue.

True scientists should applaud competing theories. And they should not be afraid to differentiate between law, theory and hypothesis.

[dark_lord]

As for the "honest agnostics," my personal experience leads me to believe that most of them are neither atheist, nor truly agnostic -- they believe that God exists, but prefer to pretend that God is irrelevant. True agnosticism is unstable (to borrow a term from control theory). The slightest nudge sends the true agnostic plummeting toward one side or the other, and only through real exertion can he reassume his precarious perch.

Nope. You're wrong. I'll just assert it. I know that from personal experience. I grew up "unchurched" and was agnostic during my early years. Being skeptical and rational by nature I chose to examine the evidence. (Joined MENSA for a while also, so I am reasonably bright. Quit because their level of neurotics seemed higher than usual - at least in the chapter I was in at that time.) Anyway, eventually the "preponderance of the evidence" convinced me that Christianity was the way to go. And I am a Christian. But it takes a lot more than a "nudge" to convince me of anything, and that is true for many agnostics.

The thing you have to understand about agnostics, is that they already are willing to admit they don't know. Which means they are open to argument - unlike atheists, whose minds are already made up.