Loosening Darwin's Grip

Citizen Magazine ^ | March 2003 | Clem Boyd

[Ichneumon]

When did evolutionists abandon belief in spontaneous generation?

When will creationists abandon misleading straw men arguments?

Abiogensis is not "spontaneous generation" in the 18th century sense, nor does it somehow make your "when will my brick and mortar evolve" any less invalid.

Do you want to discuss the issues, or do you want to play rhetorical games? Last chance to discuss things like an adult.

[Dataman]

I gave myself away?

You and retro revealed a big missing link in your education. I don't consider it my responsibility to explain every little term to you that you don't understand. If you don't know what a monad is then just say so.

[Ichneumon]

"It is time for defenders of Darwin to engage in serious dialogue and debate with their scientific critics," said Jed Macosko, a research molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Science can’t grow where institutional gatekeepers try to prevent new challengers from being heard."

This is poppycock, as you well know. There are no "institutional gatekeepers" -- if you want to challenge a theory, go for it. Get published in any scientific journal, if your work is up to their standards, or even publish your own "alternative" journal. If your ideas have any merits it'll gain converts. If not, well...

But classrooms full of schoolkids are *not* the proper forum for you to throw your fringe ideas around in.

[Dataman]

If evolutionists were intellectually honest, they wouldn't be evolutionists. Can we expect nothing but the truth from the group who can scientifically manufacture a village from a pig's tooth?

[f.Christian]

This is used in engineering a lot !




"There are three kinds of people" ...




... # 1 --- they make (( good )) things (( science )happen !

... # 2 --- they (( evolutionists )) don't know what happened ! !

... # 3 --- they (( butchers // hacks // LOSERS )) ...

will never know (( brain damaged // Truth -- reality impaired ))--- what happened ! ! !

[Junior]

A monad is just what I said it was. "An indivisible metaphysical entity, especially one having an autonomous life. A single unit or entity." Look it up. Okay, Mr. Holier-than-thou, what does this have to do with evolution?

[Ichneumon]

I think Remedy put you two to bed rather nicely in #90.

Truly, you folks are legends in your own minds.

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue." -Gilbert K. Chesterton

Chemist Henry "Fritz" Schaefer of the University of Georgia, a five-time Nobel nominee, commented, "Some defenders of Darwinism embrace standards of evidence for evolution that as scientists they would never accept in other circumstances."

Oh look, a classic example of the fallacy of "argument by authority". Schaefer is entitled to his opinion, of course, but since you don't give any hint of his alleged reasons for saying so, nor any examples of the alleged "different standards", you're just insisting that we take his word for it because, by gosh, he's a smart guy and thus he couldn't be wrong.

Nice try, but we have higher standards of debate around here.

Worse, Schaefer is clearly outside his field -- he's probably a very good chemist, but a glance at some of his papers show that he's an inorganic chemist, which places him even farther away from any direct work with biology than even an organic chemist would be. That's no guarantee that he doesn't know evolutionary biology well enough to comment on it as well, but I've spent the last 30 minutes reading through some of his essays on the subject, and he's clearly *not* familiar with the actual evidence and research which has been done in the field over the past few decades. And he gets even some of the basic stuff wrong, such as when he says, "The major feature of the fossil record is stasis, long periods in which new species do not appear." Um, no, sorry Dr. Schaeffer, but that's incorrect. New species appear (and old ones disappear) continuously through the fossil record. What's often static is the state of a *given* species during its tenure on Earth, which is another thing entirely. If Schaeffer can't get the easy stuff right, I'm not real confident about his ability to be right on the bigger issues. He's clearly outside of his field of expertise.

And he's got, shall we say, a bit of a personal bias: "The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it!' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." -- Henry "Fritz" Schaefer. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but don't try to pretend that this is a purely objective scientist without his own evangelical views to possibly color his outlook.

Furthermore, some other quotes by him may not be as comforting to your position, such as, "I want to emphasize here that a belief in the complete truthfulness of the Bible need not carry with it a wooden or unnaturally literalistic understanding of every verse.", or "In this context, my personal opinion is that the universe is probably 15–20 billion years old." -- hmm Schaefer clearly agrees with modern cosmology, which causes a problem for the original article in this thread, which insists on teaching schoolkids that, "The Earth is young — in the range of 10,000 years or so."

[Ichneumon]

What is my definiton of life? Anything that has 3 or more monads.

Oh, so now you'd have us believe that you're both a Christian creationist *and* a subscriber to the shamanistic/Hindu belief in monads?

Yeah, right, pull the other one now.

If your're not going to discuss things seriously, why bother at all?

Folks, Dataman just outed himself as a troll.

[Ichneumon]

Creation science is defined by the following six tenets, taken together:

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

[longshadow]

high-fiving Luddite placemarker

[Remedy]

>>>Head bone connected to the monkey bone found two miles away.<<<

LOL., ain't it the truth. There is no length to which they will not go, to persuade Mr & Ms. Monkey that their progeny will gradually come to worship macroevo.

With memes, all that is conceivable is transmittable and therefore transmutable.

[Doctor Stochastic]

And a Monad should not be confused with an Atom or a Molecule. From the Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

[js1138]

Like I said, some of you get it.

Get what? Science makes inferences. Always has. Always will. Some people believe O.J. is innocent. Some people can't make the inference of evolution.

[William Terrell]

Now that's quite an impressive list. Matter of fact it looks similar to the dance I did for the CEO of a company when I entered hex 00 into address 00CE instead of hex FF, cancelling a lengthy and expensive process that was running on an IBM 360 model 20.

Of course only a career -ologist could make heads or tails of it. It obviously to the untrained eye is a list of conclusions. I'm sure the poor "creationists" were very much overwhelmed.

I'm sure you confused them thoroughly but what do the -ologists against the theory, and are in this line of work, say about it? I know there are plenty. There are enough articles posted just out here that tell that. I'm sure they just folded right up and recanted when presented with the list, right?

This is not to mention that the transitional calls were certainly made by -ologists with the conviction that evolution is true and thereby looking for the faintest sign. And it seems much too short to build the entire assumption of a material reality on.

So, what did those anti-evolution -ologists say about it, again?

[Lady Eileen]

.......bump.....thanks for the post.

[Junior]

He may simply be a follower of Madame Blavatsky.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker for a thread I thought had died.

[Dataman]

Okay, Mr. Holier-than-thou, what does this have to do with evolution?

Ok, Mr Ad Hominem. What does my definition of life have to do with evolution?

[Dataman]

What is my definiton of life? Anything that has 3 or more monads.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

It was fun watching you guys scramble to find out what a monad was. Since you had to scramble to look it up -- and some got it wrong-- it is a fair assumption that you haven't had a college-level exposure to philosophy. If you haven't had any college philosophy, it is a fair assumption that you haven't attended college.

[Dataman]

Get what?

OK, maybe you don't get it.

Since you used the murder analogy, I thought you understood the difference between the repeatable and the unpredictable. Perhaps I was wrong?