The Night Before Christmas 1776
Posted on 12/23/2002 7:26:26 AM PST by Deadeye Division
Heir spends family fortune to discredit evolution theory
12/23/02
Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer Reporter
If you can't imagine how an ultra-conservative California savings and loan heir could be linked to the shaping of Ohio's new science standards, you probably have never heard of Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson.
For years, the reclusive philanthropist and evangelical Christian has channeled millions from his family's fortune to a variety of causes designed to discredit and defeat Darwin's evolution theory that living things share common ancestors but have changed over time.
Some of those millions have gone to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the nation's best-known, best-organized and best-funded proponent of intelligent design - the concept that living things have been "designed" by some purposeful but unknown being because they are too complex to have occurred by chance.
Critics of Discovery use Ahmanson's funding as a club to pummel the institute.
Discovery, despite criticism from some of the nation's top Darwinists, had a prominent role in this year's origins debate in Ohio. Discovery President Bruce Chapman, who founded the institute in 1990, meets those blows with a mixture of anger and amusement.
"I think the materialists had better get some better material," said Chapman, who founded Discovery in 1990 after serving as director of the U.S. Census Bureau and as an assistant to former President Ronald Reagan. "A lot of our foes are pretty ruthless. They'd like us to go away, but what they're reduced to is slurs against the people giving us grants."
If 2002 was any indication, the Discovery Institute isn't going away anytime soon. Senior fellows from the institute were invited to sit elbow-to-elbow with evolutionists at high-profile debates involving intelligent design this summer in Columbus and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The issue has captured the public's imagination and landed the institute on the front-page of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as on CNN.
Some believe Discovery scored its biggest victory earlier this month when Ohio adopted science standards that require students to examine criticisms of biological evolution. The Ohio Board of Education explicitly stated it wasn't pushing intelligent design, but Discovery fellows hailed the new standards as a historic victory, a triumph of democracy and academic freedom over the rigid edicts of the science establishment.
But the institute, which has a $2.5 million annual budget, has plenty of work not connected to intelligent design, including public transportation, technology, Social Security reform and the environment.
"I was very much impressed by both the range and the quality of their work," said University of Washington Professor Herbert Ellison, who served on the institute's advisory board. "Their ideas and opinions have had considerable impact in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, and across the country and abroad."
Still, Discovery's most visible impact has been with intelligent design. Often derided as stealth creationism, the concept has shown some legs in the ageless argument about the origin and development of life on Earth.
Through its Center for Science and Culture, Discovery has tried to position itself as a scientific rather than creationist player.
Instead of embracing biblical literalists who believe God created the Earth in six days or that Adam and Eve shared the planet with dinosaurs, Discovery has offered up reputable scholars with impressive academic pedigrees, including Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, Baylor University mathematician William Dembski and University of California-Berkeley molecular and cell biologist Jonathan Wells.
Behe's "Darwin's Black Box," which theorizes evolution cannot explain the complexity of cells, and Wells' "Icons of Evolution," which argues that evolution textbooks are filled with mistakes, are two of the movement's defining books.
"An important thing about them is the big-tent approach," Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, a leading Darwin defender, said. "Within the guts of the movement, you can find rather nasty arguments between the Biblical literalists and the intelligent-design advocates. They [intelligent-design supporters] say, 'We might disagree on things like the age of the Earth and the fossil record, but we have a common enemy.' "
To some of those enemies, that's a distinction without a difference.
Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist and director of the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education, noted wryly that Discovery recently shortened the name of its "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" to "Center for Science and Culture" to make itself sound more "scientific." She said the name change doesn't mask the fact that the institute's contributions to science have been nearly nil.
"They weren't being taken seriously as a science organization," Scott said.
Scott and others say the institute's efforts to be accepted as a serious player are also being undercut by the source of its money.
Ahmanson, whose family made billions in the savings and loan business, was associated at times with Christian Reconstruction, a radical faction of the Religious Right that sought to replace American democracy with a theocracy based on biblical law and under the "dominion" of Christians. For years, the Orange County multimillionaire served on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, the movement's think tank.
Ahmanson gave Discovery $1.5 million to help start its Center for Science and Culture. Fieldstead & Co., which is owned by Ahmanson and his wife, Roberta, has pledged $2.8 million through 2003 to support the institute's work.
Discovery Institute adviser Phillip Johnson, arguably the nation's best-known anti-evolutionist, dedicated his 1997 book, "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," to "Howard and Roberta." Johnson said his relationship with Discovery is limited.
"I'm very loosely connected," he said during an October visit to Northeast Ohio. "I don't direct it and I don't take any money from them."
Discovery also received $350,000 from the Tennessee-based Maclellan Foundation. Foundation officials were quoted publicly as saying the grant was to help researchers prove that "evolution was not the process by which we were created."
Ahmanson rarely grants interviews, and calls to him and to Maclellan Foundation executive director Tom McCallie were not returned. Chapman said linking the institute to the radical Christian Right is a ploy not unlike the red-baiting antics of former U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
He also said evolutionists have put Discovery in a classic catch-22: The institute is frozen out from publicly funded research grants and excluded from science publications, and then criticized for its lack of "serious" research in peer-reviewed journals.
So Discovery fellows have followed the lead of an unlikely role model who also drew heat for publishing his findings in a book rather than scientific journals.
"They criticized Charles Darwin for the same thing," Chapman said.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
sstephens@plaind.com, 216-999-4827
While not material to the core of your thesis your misuse of the word "affected" detracts from the overall argument since the obvious word should be "effected."
Problem with using that is that references to his atheism were taken out from the publication at the insistence of his wife.
This is so very tedious. You are wrong again, gore. Amazingly (if typically) all you had to do to avoid error was to click on my link and read the first few lines! Emphasis added, in red:
Partial credit: You are correct that editions of Darwin's autobiography previous to Barlow's were expurgated, and I believe (off the top of my head) that you are correct in the particular passage (ending with, "And this is a damnable doctrine.") that you cite in this regard. You are also correct that this was at the request of Darwin's wife, Emma. She actually made a notation to the effect on her husband's manuscript, and Darwin's son, Francis, who originally published the autobiography, honored his mother's request wrt this passage. All the details can be found in the notes at the end of the linked page.
Actually, what Darwin said was that his theory was itself perfect (survival of the fittest) but unfit for application to mankind within a societal framework because of the inherent flaw of compassion - man would not only allow the defective to breed, he would encourage it by providing for those who could not or would not provide for themselves and they would then proceed to reproduce apace, bringing ever more of their kind until, at last, all would fail. But, that was a problem for the future and a fruitful field for his cousin, Francis Galton (Social Evolution).
Culling the herd still works for all craetures when ruthlessly applied, there is no reason to think it wouldn't work for men.
The fatal flaw in this approach is who gets to determine what is desirable?
That's right. One would be better off believing nothing, than believing in evolution. :)
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true
Yes. Darwin did eventually abandon his belief in Christianity. He details the gradual process whereby this occured. (Many scholars believe that it was not so gradual as all that, and more directly attributable to the deaths of Darwin's father, and especially the horrible death of his daughter Annie, but Darwin does in any case acknowledge that connection.)
This passage does you no good. "Non-Christian" does not equal "atheist". Indeed Darwin himself makes the distinction, treating his belief in Christianity versus his belief in theism as distinct matters.
A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time.
Same problem. Darwin's being aware of the problem of theodicy, and reflecting on it, does not make him an "atheist."
That Darwin was totally dishonest about his religious views in public, there is tons of evidence:
Now this is much better. Leaving aside your tiresome and fanatical hyperbole (e.g. totally dishonest) I don't dispute the general point at all. Darwin is probably best described as a "free thinker," but unlike many of that ilk he was genuinely reluctant to oppress others with his own doubts, or to upset more orthodox friends and family members. And, yes, he also concealed his views (with judicious exceptions) for "political" reasons, as well as out of general aversion to controversy.
A good while back I posted an article that related Darwin's response, in a particular instance late in his life, to more outspoken and agressive "free thinkers". It provides, IMHO, a very illuminating glimpse into Darwin's views and tendencies concerning such matters:
The "gentle squire of Down" (Charles Darwin) & the day the Pinko Atheists came to lunch
BTW, I can't help but point out that, if Darwin had beat people over the head with his religious skepticism, you would doubtless be pissing and moaning about that too.
The Night Before Christmas 1776
That's ethnic/genetic cleansing. How can nature perfect something through such horrific practice? There is something deeply wrong with the idea of "evolution" by dumping prototypes with the "bathwater" of unwanted genes.
While not material to the core of your thesis your misuse of the word "affected" detracts from the overall argument since the obvious word should be "effected."
Like you I am often horrified at the misuse of affected for effected and vice versa as well as other similar sounding words such as principal and principle. However, in this instance I meant affected in the sense that 'tweaking' an old species would be the way to create a new one.
If you consider Darwin's calling himself agnostic instead of an atheist in your quote in Post# 67 it does not seem that it is sufficient. In fact in the link you provide in this post to The Gentle Squire of Down it says:
They lit cigarettes and Darwin, completely out of character, pitched in. "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" In his dotage, forty years since his covert notebook days, he finally dragged the issue into the open. He preferred the word agnostic, he said. "'Agnostic' was but 'Atheist' writ respectable,"
Clearly from the above, to Darwin the difference between atheist and agnostic was not one of difference in belief, but a difference in how much noise one made about it. So I do not think that my calling him an atheist in spite of his calling himself an agnostic is incorrect.
BTW, I can't help but point out that, if Darwin had beat people over the head with his religious skepticism, you would doubtless be pissing and moaning about that too.
Again you seem to confirm that we do not disagree on the facts, but on their meaning. As the quotes on Post #72 show he deliberately hid his atheism from the public. I call this dishonest. It really shows the principle of 'the ends justifies the means' (as does your sentence). I think such lying is inexcusable. That you and Darwin consider such lying to be justified shows again that truth is not the agenda of evolution and evolutionists. The promotion of atheistic materialism is the agenda of Darwinism and the means to do it need not involve the truth.
You could not even wait till midnight to declare Christmas to be over?
Just because you don't like the process does NOT mean that isn't the way the world works. I suggest you spend a little time actually observing nature (either in the woods or via. cable nature channels). "Mother Nature" IS "red of fang and claw".
Also, your understanding of the evolutionary process is flawed--SUCCESSFUL mutations survive--only unsuccessful ones get "pruned". Is this a wasteful process?? Yes. Unfortunately, that IS the way it works.
It's not that I do not like it, it is just that it does not work that way from where I am seeing it, period. I choose an axiom, you choose yours. Don't impose your crap, I wont impose my own bath water.
But I guess your heart is into final solutions, so be it.
No such pruning occurs. D'ambricour proved that there is a mechanism that allows "chance" mutations to follow a strange attractor. Just as a tree grows branches by chance but in a coherent way because of the strange attractor, so do the "mutations". Why this strange attractor is programmed we do not know, but what it tells is that the "undesirables" should not get pruned, except in extreme cases, because they are just as capable as desirables to branch off into something better. "Nature" just does not throw the baby away with the bathwater.
It's not that I do not like it, it is just that it does not work that way from where I am seeing it, period.
Jumping in here, hoping to clarify...
Leaving evolution aside for the moment, are you denying the phenomena of super-fecundity: that, in nearly every species, many more (often vastly more) offspring are produced than will eventually themselves reproduce?
4 -2 does not equal 6 no matter how much rhetoric and pseudo-scientific nonsense you and other evolutionists say. You do not create anything by destroying things, you do not create new genes, functions and abilities by destroying them. Evolution has been a joke since the word go.
Balderdash--the "strange attractor" is natural selection. The "program" is the particular "universe" of survival/anti-survival stressors that the current generation of a species is exposed to. "Nature" throws away MOST of the "babies" on a daily basis. Only a minority of species individuals born survive to breed.
Ah, the ignorant fool bleats again. GENES don't get destroyed--they get CHANGED. Species individuals get destroyed in the process of natural selection. The GENE MODIFICATIONS are random, the stressors of natural selection are anything BUT random.
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