In “Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The Parallels” (Evolution News & Views, September 8, 2011) , David Klinghoffer points out,
Darwinism is, again borrowing Meigs’s expression, “self-confirming.” Once posited, it tells a story that accommodates any observation. This is the brilliance of paranoia. Though Meigs cites Marxism and fundamentalist creationism as parallels, Darwinism offers one just as apt. Whatever nature brings forth can be squeezed to fit the effectively unfalsifiable Darwinian mold, which always turns out to predict, in retrospect, whatever is found.
You may recall P.Z. Myers’s assertion on this theme to our associate Jonathan M. in their Glasgow encounter. Arguing about homology and the evolution of developmental pathways, Myers explained his way of thinking: “I wish I could get that one thought into these guys’ heads: evolutionary theory predicts differences as well as similarities.” In other words, Casey Luskin notes, it predicts everything and nothing.
If you get into an argument with someone like Myers, he is not, in Philip Zelikow’s words, “really able to listen to you.” Every time you hear a Darwin activist repeat the formula that “ID is creationism,” that it “denies evolution” or “denies science,” that it is an argument from ignorance or incredulity or from the observation that life is “too complex” to explain in Darwinian terms, you can only throw up your hands and suppose it’s because he’s got a tape running in his head, looping back again and again, that feeds him these lines.
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