Okay, okay, it should have read: “Supposed creationist inventions” would require time travel
Further to: A classic in citation bluffing (defending dying orthodoxy), a friend kindly writes to say that citation bluffer Gary Hurd also falsely claimed in 2005 that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution is a creationist invention. In reality, the distinction was made in the 1930s by Neo-Darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky and has been widely used by Darwinists ever since.
See, for example,
When engaging in debates, every once in a while I hear the claim that Darwin-critics also invented terms like “microevolution” or “macroevolution.” For example, Jonathan Wells reports, “In 2005, Darwinist Gary Hurd claimed that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution was just a creationist fabrication. … Hurd wrote to the Kansas State Board of Education: “…’macro’ and ‘micro’ evolution … have no meaning outside of creationist polemics.” (Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, pgs. 55-56). This is also a Darwinian urban legend, for such terms have been used regularly in the scientific literature. Indeed, textbooks commonly teach this terminology, including two of the textbooks I used in college when learning about evolutionary biology.
The glossary of my college introductory biology text, Campbell’s Biology (4th Ed.) states: “macroevolution: Evolutionary change on a grand scale, encompassing the origin of novel designs, evolutionary trends, adaptive radiation, and mass extinction.” Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology, a text I used for an upper-division evolutionary biology course, states, “In Chapters 2h3 through 25, we will analyze the principles of MACROEVOLUTION, that is, the origin and diversification of higher taxa.” (pg. 447, emphasis in original). Similarly, these textbooks respectively define “microevolution” as “a change in the gene pool of a population over a succession of generations” and “slight, short-term evolutionary changes within species.” Clearly Darwin-skeptics did not invent these terms.
Other scientific texts use the terms. In his 1989 McGraw Hill textbook, Macroevolutionary Dynamics, Niles Eldredge admits that “[m]ost families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors.” (pg. 22) Similarly, Steven M. Stanley titles one of his books, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 version), where he notes that, “[t]he known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.” (pg. 39) More.
So creationists invented time travel and just went back and changed all that?
Unfortunately, the bad news is, today, evidence-based objections attract suspicion. Achievement means representing persuasively what the cool people believe—even if those very same cool people are about to be indicted for perjury. (That would just show how uncool the justice system is, but maybe it will be fixed later.)
For who bluffer Hurd is, go here.
He is just the neutral source you had hoped to hear from, right?
We’ll be hearing plenty more in the same vein from Darwin’s spokesfolks, be sure of it. Darwinism trumps accuracy.
Follow UD News at Twitter!