Darwinism

Transcript of St. Edwards Speech MP3 of Seguin-Gazzette Question Stand by for a transcript of the Lamar speech (at the Texas Association of Scientists ceremony) which I’m given to understand makes the St. Edwards speech look rather tame. My take on the St. Edwards speech is it paints Pianka as an alarmist crackpot, and nothing else, confirming my first impression of him trying to be a poster boy for “Keep Austin Weird”. The guy rags on about microbes taking over and putting us in our place. Uh, like duh. Microbes have us for dinner in the end in any case. All Pianka is saying is that they should have us for lunch instead of dinner. The microbes appear to be Read More ›

The Gazette-Enterprise The very same day TAS declared its stance, Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry, expressed disdain over what Pianka calls his “doomsday talk.” Walt called the scientist’s viewpoints “abhorrent” and likened them to Hitler’s “hate-filled Third Reich.” While some have described Pianka’s words as hyperbole, the governor’s office’s distaste was plainspoken. “Professor Pianka’s gleeful embracing of the destruction of 90 percent of the earth’s population as a necessary and worthy event is abhorrent, as is his notion that human life holds no more value than that of a lizard, bison or rhinoceros,” Walt said.

While reading about Pianka I noticed one statement related to Intelligent Design that has been overlooked amidst the furor:

“Although [Ebola Zaire] Kills 9 out of 10 people, outbreaks have so far been unable to become epidemics because they are currently spread only by direct physical contact with infected blood. However, a closely-related virus that kills monkeys, Ebola Reston, is airborne, and it is only a matter of time until Ebola Zaire evolves the capacity to be airborne.” – Pianka

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Interesting Reading

I think Russia is primed and ready to get a dose of ID. 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, what are the attitudes about naturalistic evolution today?

Russia: Creationism Finds Support Among Young
A poll conducted by the Yuri Levada Center last September showed that only 26 percent of those surveyed supported the theory of evolution, while 49 percent of respondents said they believed man was created by God.

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The following text and image were sent to me by colleague and fellow Darwin-doubter Stu Harris. It’s well known that people tend to look like or take on the visage of their pets, pop heroes and spiritual mentors. Daniel Dennett is apparently not immune to this process. Over the years he has more and more taken on the countenance of his guru Charles Darwin. Below is a recent picture of Dennett set against two of Darwin. Astounding isn’t it? Could this be a form of mimicry that protects Darwinians in some way? Could it be that the iconic image of Darwin shields one from intellectual attacks by normally rational members of the scientific community, thus promoting the survival of the Read More ›

Keith Burgess-Jackson at AnalPhilosopher has this to say about militant anti-religious atheists and their treatment of ID as a pernicious threat to be kept out of public school classrooms at all costs:

Leftist Hostility to Religion

Michael Ruse, like me, is (1) a philosopher, (2) a Darwinist, (3) an atheist, and (4) a respecter of religion. Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Brian Leiter, who hate religion and despise the religious, are vilifying him for it. See here and here. Leiter calls theists “theocrats,” as if, given the chance, they would impose their religious beliefs on everyone. In fact, it is Leiter and his ilk who would impose their leftist beliefs on everyone. (Read Leiter for a few days. You’ll see what a totalitarian he is.) I am far more concerned about the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Leiter acquiring power than I am about Christians (for example) acquiring power. Read More ›

http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Feb06/r021406

Researchers who speculate about human origins have come up with three main scenarios for how we ended up with our unique traits, Zhang said. The first possibility is that we acquired completely new genes that other apes don’t have. Another is that some of our genes have taken on different functions through mutation.

It’s also possible that we humans lost some genes along the way, and those losses provided opportunities for changes that otherwise could not have occurred. Read More ›

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/311/5764/1068b

Mesozoic mammals have been thought to have been small, nocturnal, and confined to a few niches on land until the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Most are recorded by isolated jaw fragments or teeth. Ji et al. (p. 1123; see the cover and the Perspective by Martin) now describe a Jurassic mammal from China that breaks this mold. The fossil is well preserved, and impressions of fur can be seen on its body and scales on a broad tail (similar to a beaver overall). The animal was fairly large, approaching not quite half a meter in length, and the shape of its limbs suggest that it was adapted for swimming and burrowing. The combination of both primitive and derived features in this early mammal, and the demonstration that mammals had occupied aquatic habitats by this time, expands the evolutionary innovations of early mammals.

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One thing that has always irked me is that rarely on this site do we find any critics of ID attempting to challenge the tools/methods of ID directly. For example, one could claim that “CSI isn’t a reliable indicator of intelligence” or “the explanatory filter breaks down under certain conditions” or “ID regularly produces false positives under x conditions” or “Irreducible Complexity can indeed be overcome via a Direct Pathway” and then show why and/or how. Instead, arguments are almost always made against the implications or we’re arguing over the interpretation of various data. Perhaps these challenges are not made because it’s so difficult to make sustainable arguments in this regard but I’d like to at least see people try. As such, I decided to make a topic on this myself with the last challenge to ID as the subject: “Irreducible Complexity can indeed be overcome via a Direct Pathway” Read More ›

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=697

Behe covers several sections in detail but here is the overall summary at the end:

The Court’s reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; the incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself; a failure to differentiate evolution from Darwinism; and strawman arguments against ID. The Court has accepted the most tendentious and shopworn excuses for Darwinism with great charity and impatiently dismissed arguments for design. Read More ›

http://www.greer-heard.com

http://www.umc.pitt.edu:591/m/FMPro?-db=ma&-lay=a&-format=d.html&id=2297&-Find

Schwartz hearkens back to earlier theories that suggest that the Darwinian model of evolution as continual and gradual adaptation to the environment glosses over gaps in the fossil record by assuming the intervening fossils simply have not been found yet. Rather, Schwartz argues, they have not been found because they don’t exist, since evolution is not necessarily gradual but often sudden, dramatic expressions of change that began on the cellular level because of radical environmental stressors-like extreme heat, cold, or crowding-years earlier. Read More ›

Michael Ruse: Darwinist talks with Points about ID and evolution in the classroom

03:36 PM CST on Sunday, January 29, 2006

Do you think there is anything at all to the intelligent design argument from irreducible complexity?

No. I think it’s “creationism lite” tarted up to look like science to get around the constitutional separation of church and state. Read More ›

Here’s a revealing quote from Neil Greenspan about the evolution of complexity: In fact, there is no evidence of any kind to indicate that the magnitude of a system’s complexity poses any sort of barrier to an origin through evolution, as opposed to an origin through design by an intelligent agent. (source) Let me suggest that the reason Greenspan can find no evidence for the magnitude of complexity posing a barrier to its evolution is that evolutionists have never provided actual evidence for evolution producing biological complexity. Instead, they’ve only provided handwaving imaginative fairytales — what Franklin Harold and James Shapiro call “wishful speculations.” Since these are enough to settle evolution, how could there be evidence against?