The author of the piece, republished at Snopes from The Conversation, also says snide things about ID figures.
The author’s handling of data is quite sloppy. For example, he writes:
In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.
Paul Braterman, “Why Creationism Bears All the Hallmarks of a Conspiracy Theory” at Snopes (February 4, 2021)
The way the paragraph quoted above is written would lead the reader to believe that the link offered (which leads to a 2019 Gallup Poll) will confirm the prevalence of beliefs about the origin of living creatures in general and about Noah’s Flood.
Now, yer news hound (O’Leary for News) has followed polling on these issues over the years. And that doesn’t sound right, as Gallup’s by now familiar question covers only human origins and does not mention Adam and Eve. I checked. Sure enough, my memory is correct. Braterman is riffing. One is not supposed to riff when reporting this kind of material.
How did he decide, in any event, that creationism is a conspiracy theory?
Haeckel’s name appears on the Answers in Genesis website 92 times. He is also the subject of a lengthy chapter in Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution; Science or Myth?. This book, which even has its own high school study guide, was what first convinced me, back in 2013, that creationism was a conspiracy theory.
It is a splendid example of creationist tactics, using long-rectified shortcomings (such as those in early studies on Darwinian evolution in peppered moths, in response to changing colours following reduced pollution) to imply that the entire science is fraudulent. Wells has a real PhD in biology, a PhD acquired with the specific goal of “destroying Darwinism” – meaning evolution science – from the inside.
Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative thinktank which promotes creationism under the banner of “Intelligent Design”, and is also linked to other conspiracy theories, such as claims that the consensus on climate change is bogus, and that last November’s US presidential election was stolen.
Paul Braterman, “Why Creationism Bears All the Hallmarks of a Conspiracy Theory” at Snopes (February 4, 2021)
For the record, Jay Richards does not say that the consensus on climate change is “bogus” but that, in the context of the March for Science, scientists can be as prone to herd instincts as anyone else. There is plenty of evidence for that.
While we are here, the article on the “stolen” election, republished at the Discovery Institute site from American Thinker should be read in the context of a recent Time Magazine article on the “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” (February 4, 2021). Just what happened will take some while to straighten out but people who suspected that something was afoot were actually right.
And, as a matter of fact, Jonathan Wells found plenty of nonsense about evolution in textbooks used in schools in 2000. Enough for a book the size of Icons of Evolution, where he actually charts it for the reader.
Having worked in textbook publishing, I am well aware of how rubbish can get dropkicked from one edition to the next if no one intervenes. When Wells came back to the question in 2017 in Zombie Science, he found that much of it still persisted.
Curiously, Snopes admits, regarding the piece from The Conversation, “This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.”
So… they can get away with publishing this kind of thing because they did not check it out?
That is further evidence that Snopes is going downhill fast as a rumor squelching site.
But then, didn’t they get into a ridiculous flap a while back, “fact checking” — of all things — the Babylon Bee?
Snopes has fact-checked whether Democrats demanded that “Brett Kavanaugh submit to a DNA test to prove he’s not actually Hitler.” It’s fact-checked whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly “guessed ‘free’ on TV show ‘The Price is Right,’” and whether Ilhan Omar actually asked, “If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?” Perhaps my favorite (non-political) fact check was of the Bee’s “report” that VeggieTales had introduced a new character named “Cannabis Carl.” If you peruse Snopes’s many, many Babylon Bee fact-checks, you’ll find it’s quite diligent in policing hits on progressive politicians and far less concerned about the Bee’s many satirical swipes at Trump.
David French, “Hands Off the Babylon Bee” at National Review (July 30, 2019)
You’d think there were no more actual rumors in the world for Snopes to take on.
When people suffer from a self-important sense of mission, they often become self-parodies and that seems to be happening to Snopes.
Note: Elon Musk had some fun recently trolling The Onion by proclaiming
Have you read @TheBabylonBee? It’s great!!
Woooooooow
The first entry alone points out his ignorance of both religion (Christian), what people believe, and what creationists believe.
Snopes and Politifact and similar sites are insignificant and not worth worrying about. The tech giants make their own decisions about what to censor, or more precisely WHO to censor. Content isn’t nearly as important as caste. Those decisions aren’t based on a few privately run sites.
Paul Braterman is as dishonest and biased as they come. He could be the subject of a fact-check site.
News, This is strawman tactic scapegoating, namecalling and targetting for stigmatisation using conspiracy theorising as the latest scarlet brand. The truth on Mr Wells’ excellent book is, he exposed a pattern of shoddy indoctrination using poor evidence, grossly exaggerated claims and outright fraud — Haeckel, I am looking at you — for generations. Indoctrination of students who are by and large expecting to be soundly taught in schools, only to find they are being misled by an obviously broken education system. THAT is the thing Snopes should have exposed. Shooting at the unwelcome messenger is a sign, not a good one. Thanks for further confirming that Snopes and other fact checkers are themselves unreliable, this stunt is of the ilk of Wikipedia, which is duly red lined. KF
Denyse mentions the tendency to let things slide through in textbooks. I’ve learned that lesson forcefully this year. Before 2020, my courseware was considered as an optional accessory for the textbooks. This year, with lockdown lunacy, courseware has suddenly become a VITAL COMPONENT of teaching. Thousands of students are actually using it FOR A GRADE. Dozens of content quibbles and code failures were sitting there for 5 years without anyone noticing them. Now they MATTER, so I’ve been hearing about them and dealing with them. (On the other side, the books are selling much better now BECAUSE they include courseware, so I’ll end up with more royalty money next year.)
When people don’t like the facts, they cry “conspiracy” to shut down the conversation.
as to this quote from the article:
Really??? I don’t know how many times I have been called names, i.e. ‘demonized’, by Darwinists, but it is certainly far more often than I have ever retaliated in kind.
Moreover, what evidence is there for evolution that he is talking about ‘creationists’ supposedly ‘undermining’? Darwinists simply have no evidence whatsoever that Darwinian processes can create a single protein molecule, much less do they have any evidence that Darwinian processes can create a creature, (i.e. humans), composed of over a billion, trillion, interacting protein molecules. i.e. They simply have no evidence for the dreaded ‘creationist to undermine!
The probability of Darwinian processes finding a protein fold, not even an entire functional protein mind you, is in and of itself prohibitive. Douglas Axe found that only “about 1 in 10^77 sequences produce the stably folded structure”,,,
1 in 10^77 dwarfs the total number of organisms (10^40) that have existed on earth and therefore renders Darwinian explanations untenable. As Stephen Meyer explains, “every replication event in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth would not generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process (corresponding to the total number of organisms — 10^40 — that have ever existed on earth), thus, turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched.
Evolutionists themselves admit that only 10^43 trials are available during the entire history of life on earth for Darwinian processes to find a functional protein. As Cornelius Hunter explains, “Even evolutionists have had to admit that evolution could only have a maximum of 10^43 such experiments. It is important to understand how tiny this number is compared to 10^70. 10^43 is not more than half of 10^70. It is not even close to half. 10^43 is an astronomically tiny sliver of 10^70. Furthermore, the estimate of 10^43 is, itself, entirely unrealistic. For instance, it assumes the entire history of the Earth is available, rather than the limited time window that evolution actually would have had. Even more importantly, it assumes the pre existence of bacteria and, yes, proteins.”
Recent work in quantum criticality has further confirmed the rarity of proteins. In the following 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
Quantum criticality is simply inexplicable for Darwinists. As this follow-up paper stated, “There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,”
Moreover, even if we granted Darwinists the existence of proteins, it is still of no help to Darwinists. Darwinists believe that genes/proteins have basically unlimited plasticity in their ability to search for new functional sequences in sequence space. Yet, genes/proteins are instead found to be highly constrained in their ability to search ‘sequence space’ in order to try to find new functional sequences.
As Günter Bechly, Brian Miller and David Berlinski explain, “Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has shown that random searches in sequence space that start from known functional sequences are no more likely to enter regions in sequence space with new protein folds than searches that start from random sequences. The reason for this is clear: random searches are overwhelmingly more likely to go off into a non-folding, non-functional abyss than they are to find a novel protein fold.”
Doug Axe and Ann Gauger have done experimental work exploring just how constrained genes-proteins are in their ability to search sequence space. Their work found that, “Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied.”
Likewise, Michael Behe has found the probability of proteins finding new protein-protein binding sites, in order to accomplish new molecular functions, is prohibitive. As Behe states in his book ‘The Edge of Evolution”,, “the likelihood of developing two binding sites in a protein complex would be the square of the probability for getting one: a double CCC, 10^20 times 10^20, which is 10^40. There have likely been fewer than 10^40 cells in the world in the last 4 billion years, so the odds are against a single event of this variety in the history of life. It is biologically unreasonable.”
Since Darwinian processes have to explain the origin of far more than a single protein-protein binding site, then the probabilities against Darwinian evolution quickly escalate into astronomical proportions. As Bruce Alberts explained, “we now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules.”
Thus, since “developing two binding sites in a protein complex would be the square of the probability for getting one: a double CCC, 10^20 times 10^20, which is 10^40”, then getting protein-protein binding sites for 10 protein molecules in order to accomplish a major process in a cell would be, conservatively, on the order of 1 in 10^200. For comparison, there are held to be only 10^80 subatomic particles in the entire universe.
To say Darwinian processes are inadequate to explain the complexity we find in life is a severe understatement. As Jay Homnick wrote, “Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.””,,,
Thus in conclusion, it is not as if Darwinists have any evidence for the dreaded creationists to undermine. Darwinists simply have no evidence whatsoever that Darwinian processes are capable of creating a single protein, much less creating the entire biosphere.
And that is certainly not a ‘conspiracy theory. It is merely an rigorous and honest assessment of the empirical evidence that we now have in hand.
Unfortunately, rigorous honesty towards the empirical evidence seems to be in very limited supply among die-hard Darwinists who simply refuse to ever honestly consider the fact that their beloved theory may not be true.
Music:
how is creationism a conspiracy ?
we creationists believe, that sophisticated, fully autonomous, self-navigating, flying systems DO NOT self-design. Engineers/Designers/Creators/ are needed. ALWAYS. No Darwinist ever demonstrated that it is otherwise. All what Darwinists have are their very absurd, conspiracy-like just-so-stories.
In 21st century, Darwin’s evolution theory and its clone ‘modern synthesis’ looks to me like a conspiracy theory (a hoax). Perhaps 150 years ago, Darwin’s theory made sense to early science… but today ? What is wrong with all these smart ( Darwinian) scientists ? It is look like a huge conspiracy …
PS: Darwinists are so ridiculous… creationism is a conspiracy, but Darwinists developed a theory that can’t explain the origin of most abundant biological entity on Earth – viruses. Darwinists are the biggest conspirators…