West: Unfortunately, the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years, including Anders Breivik in 2011, a Norwegian mass murderer cited as a role model by the Buffalo shooter. Other shooters smitten by Darwinian evolution have included the Columbine High School shooters in 1999, Finnish shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen in 2007, the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter in 2009, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter in 2019.
Culture
Michael Egnor muses on some shaky arguments for abortion
Egnor: “if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body, then all pregnant women are chromosomal mosaics. That is, they are organisms that have two sets of genomes. Chromosome mosaicism is a rare disorder and is not synonymous with pregnancy.”
Richard Weikart on the non-religious racism that anti-racists ignore
Weikart: While researching my book, Darwinian Racism, I examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently oppose Christianity.
Casey Luskin asks: Can claims about punctuated equilibrium accommodate the scientific data?
Luskin: Punctuated equilibrium compresses the vast majority of evolutionary change into small populations that lived during shorter segments of time, allowing too few opportunities for novel, beneficial traits to arise.
Is belief in evolution “right-wing?”
Yes, that sounds like clickbait but it is apparently a discussion at Twitter.
Breaking: Twitter accepts Musk’s Share offer buyout plan
Breitbart, as I just saw: After a two-week battle against opposition from the platform’s board members, self-declared free speech absolutist Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the richest man in the world, has succeeded in his bid to buy Twitter. In a press release, the Twitter board announced that they had Read More…
Darwin wrote a book about orchids — and it was better received than Origin of Species
Shedinger: Unlike with the Origin, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Reviewers were extremely impressed with Darwin’s detailed documentation of the variety of contrivances in orchids. But much to Darwin’s dismay, they did not see this as evidence of natural selection.
Few want to hear this but … Darwinism made racism science
For reasons familiar to anyone who follows human psychology, our group was supposed to be the smartest. We were told to be nice to the others anyway. They couldn’t help their stupidity, nor could we. That was the view smart people had. Stupid Fundamentalists, by contrast, still believed in Adam and Eve…
Weird story: Darwin prof targets Discovery Institute
Take the term “Darwinism,” for instance. Dave claims “Darwinism” is “outdated” and “dishonest”: But isn’t Darwinism the Darwinist’s proudest boast? Didn’t even Lynn Margulis have to go along with it?
Wokeness: Darwin wails but it hardly matters now
Some day, the Darwinians will discover freedom of religion. In the meantime, let them find out what no freedom feels like. It will sharpen their instincts.
Is Christianity Today twisting the Bible to fit Darwinian evolution?
Gilson: Christianity Today is supposed to be the voice of evangelical Christianity. Here, though, it has totally capitulated to a naturalized view of human origins. It’s giving in to a view that many evangelicals reject for good scientific reasons. Note: Gilson ends by recommending skeptic Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin (2021) instead.
Eye evolution as a series of miracles of the Darwinian religion
Surely the best approach is to see these convenient cascades of functional machinery as the miracle stories of Darwinism. They are not subject to criticism as to their probability, which is why no Darwinian need take such criticism seriously.
People who doubt “evolution” are more likely to be racist?
Reader’s comment on the study: The principle that isolation breeds prejudice against the “other” is a truism. And you could find evidence supporting this truism from very different groups. If you surveyed attitude of ivory tower types you’d find similar prejudiced against conservative religious groups you’d find similar discriminatory attitudes. Why? Because those evolutionary secular academic types who accept human evolution have very little contact with conservative religious people.
As evolutionary biologists slowly kill off Darwinism… hacking down the Tree of Life, even…
Species merging. Julie Berwald: What I didn’t know then was that, even as I ambivalently placed the overhead film on the projector, the concept of the tree of life had begun to wilt. Four decades on, it’s morphed entirely.
Casey Luskin and Hank Hanegraff on Adam and Eve
From the podcast intro: Hank and Dr. Luskin discuss why so many Christians are so quick to abandon the belief of a historical Adam and Eve, theistic evolution, evolutionary creationism, the argument that human genetic diversity can’t be explained by an original Adam and Eve and more.